Without looking, I knew he had put his trousers on, almost as quietly as he had taken them off, then turned his back to me and slipped away. He did not wave goodbye, did not say ‘take care of yourself, p’tit’ or ‘I’ll come back tomorrow’; he just vanished, as if nothing ever happened, or as if he had fulfilled his purpose and was now leaving the story. For a while I lay there on the ground, thinking about how a certain period of my life had ended once and for all, the period with Mama; then I cautiously lifted my head and looked at my feet, but in the dark I could not see anything. With my other hand, not the one I had used to touch the stranger, I reached down to my groin and gave it a few more tugs. I did not want to come again, not like this, all alone, or maybe my body was just empty, I am not sure. In any case, I never again experienced such a climax with a man, not even later when I had sexual relations with other boys from the street.
It occurred to me that my mysterious night visitor could have been the angel of my Mama in disguise. That she had finally descended from the other world and come to comfort me. She did not want to leave that comfort only to the headlights on the bridge. She wanted to touch me, but I don’t know why she did not just run her hand through my hair, the way I ran my hand through Ana’s hair at the hotel – why did she have to unbutton my trousers and first unbutton her own? I shook my head, jumped to my feet, stretched my neck and listened to the noise of the cars, until the flickering lights made me sit down again. I decided it would be best to wait until morning. And when I had separated the different shadows in front of me, I would take the water stored in the bottles, wash off first my feet, then my ankles and, at the very end, my hands. I would fill the bottles with sand and pretend they were my family: my non-existent father, or at least my grandfather, who was supposed to protect me in situations like this, my non-existent grandmother, or at least my Auntie, who was supposed to bathe a boy as filthy as me. But because they were scattered all about, each in their own loneliness, I would pick the bottles up and carry them to the street, in the hope that there I would find the stranger’s face.
* * *
‘Are you really serious about that house?’ my father said on the phone. He was trying not to criticize me, but still I could hear in his voice he was offended. If only because I had left without saying goodbye. But things between us always remained unsaid. I couldn’t imagine confronting him, a man who could never confront anything in his life, telling him I couldn’t go on making upholstered furniture, that I needed a break. And most of I all needed someone who would cover me from the inside, like ivy. Who would find a tiny hole and, like an animal, begin to infest me.
Not that he would believe me – my father, I mean. He was always asking if I was hungry; I would shake my head. Did I lack a roof over my head? Again I shook my head. So don’t complain, he would say and in such situations turn his back on me. But now things between us were long-distance. I had slowly begun to lose their outlines. I’m lying; the outlines were still there – what had vanished was the sharpness of his features: the long masculine nose that came to a point; the curved spine, which I guess is why he always walked a little hunched over. In summer, when he got sunburnt, when we both got sunburnt, freckles would appear on his face and down his spine. Whenever someone saw us like that, they thought we were a real father and a real daughter, and maybe it was also because things between us were always an act that I could never confront him. I played the role of the obedient, if somewhat abandoned daughter; he played the role of the pompous father, although now on the phone his hat had gone into the sky, or I had forgotten he ever wore one.
‘Very serious,’ I exhaled into the receiver and at the same time rubbed a finger on the old wood of the counter in the hotel reception. The last time I telephoned, I had left my father a number, and since there had been no word from him for a very long time, I eventually started packing the yellow bag and was intending in a few days to move into a house I was merely renting. My credit card could not have withstood such a dent, and besides, I also had to live. When you move into a dead house, a house as dead as mine was, it’s like starting to live from scratch. It had no electricity, the water had been shut off for a decade, and the roof was half caved in. Some children showed it to me, not the white dog in the rain; after I followed him a while, he vanished in the rain, vanished with the rain, and it was some boys from the street who opened the big, creaking door for me.
‘Don’t ignore me, talk to me. I’d like to know how you came to this pact with yourself in the first place, to go away and leave everything behind – was there something you lacked?...’
‘I felt like I was tired...’ That itself was an admission – of sorts. He too had been resting by degrees, from his life, from my mother, from the legal profession. He had his shadowy movie theatres and the women inside them. I had heard that with one or two he could become incredibly excited. It didn’t stop with the zip on the side; he went further, much further. When he was drunk, at a party – the lawyer without parties doesn’t exist; parties are his hunting ground for clients, he often said – he was known to throw off his immaculately pressed shirt and flex his muscles like some Parsee in the waning years of Anglo-Indian rule. But he never admitted it, not to us who were left behind at such moments. Mama first of all, who cried night after night with her head in a pillow; me next, staring at the wall; and finally his office, with his big antique wooden desk. It never displayed a single photograph of either of us.
‘Tired of work, or what?’ Now he could no longer hide his offended feelings. Maybe he had even loosened his necktie, rolled up his sleeves, and didn’t look so elegant now. I was upsetting him, that old man who was never able, never wanted, to admit that people of a different race, a different religion, could be just as worthy of desire. I always wondered what would have happened if I’d brought back from England not a black man, but a black woman. Whether at some point he would have touched her, I mean, touched the side opening on her skirt. If only out of curiosity. The fact that she would be at least half a century younger would present no obstacle to him, even less her being in my mother’s house. My invisible, God-fearing mother, who could walk across a room as if she wasn’t even walking and there was only a wall there and a still life on the wall.
‘You make me tired, you and your women...’ a sentence neither of us will ever forget. I could say that at that moment one of the children who showed me the house walked past and this confused me, but that wasn’t it. It was that for an eternity I had wanted to hurt my father. To pour out all the rage of my mother’s nights on him, and maybe this brief whisper into the telephone – I had whispered that sentence, though no one at the reception desk could understand me – was enough for him to start coughing in response. A convulsive, hacking cough, from the belly. ‘If you want, I’ll call you back,’ I added, and almost put the receiver on the hook.
‘Wait...’ Now it sounded like a request, and I was not accustomed to my father making requests of me. Clearly, the words didn’t come easily to him either, but at such a distance he had no choice. ‘The reason I’m calling is that I just had an operation. On my heart.’
I gasped. My mother had usually been the one who got sick – a uterus cleansing during menopause, stomach cancer, cerebellum damage, an imaginary heart attack – and now it was starting with my father. I should have asked if everything was all right now, but obviously it was or he wouldn’t be calling. ‘The children who showed me the house told me that its former owner also had heart problems. They said he was a minister in the first Burkinabe government, but minister of what, they didn’t know...’
‘Ana, it’s very serious. My head was hurting, and there were a few nights I couldn’t feel my body, the right half, I mean...’
I let the silence linger between us. This is why he took me from the orphanage. Not because my mother wanted to save their marriage, but because he didn’t want to be alone in his old age. She was too weak to keep up with him; he must have known that
even back then, when they were embracing, by the window. For a few years after she died, the women had been enough for him, but then they were no longer able to be enough for him. His helplessness scared them away – who would take care of them, who would hold their hand, if he didn’t, who now couldn’t even feel half his own body?
But I can’t come there, I wanted to scream, I just rented a house, with high ceilings, which keep it cool even in the heat, and outside, on the terrace, there’s bougainvillea growing that’s out of control; really, I can’t. ‘I met someone,’ I said instead of screaming. Given my expulsion from the good daughter role, I might have added, he’s less than half my age and has the tall, slender body of a car mechanic. My father should understand – he of all people should understand. My mother would have turned red, but he was well acquainted with carnal desire; he’d known it countless times, and now there was no reason for him to deny it to me. Even if he was sick and his heart needed me. ‘I met someone, but I’ll come if it gets really bad,’ I repeated, leaning my whole body on the counter.
Evening was coming on and I wanted to go to the house without electricity. Nowhere does evening come the way it does in the desert. The darkness comes over you so suddenly you sit in front of it motionless. It swarms a while through your entire body, then settles in your feet, and all you can do is light a paraffin lamp. The mosquitoes gather in formation around it, and you have to shoo them away with your hand. I looked over at the exit and across the street saw laundry drying in the sun, a lemon tree, and other trees too, and waved to the cab driver that I was coming, just another second and I’d be there. He leaned out the window and smiled. He had a roof over his head, and besides, after I overpaid him for the ride to the rented house, he was going off to a hot meal.
‘No problem, Madame, all will be arranged,’ he said, and because he put it like that, I nodded to him, holding the telephone slightly from my ear.
* * *
I forgot to say how Mama and I later ran away from the village to Ouaga after all. It was not the lorry that took us – that would have been almost impossible; it was a donkey. An entirely ordinary donkey and an entirely ordinary wagon. The man who drove the donkey looked like Baba. I remember the lines around his nose and mouth and, because of the early morning darkness, hardly anything else. I had just soiled myself from all the earth I licked off the ground – a big, angry worm had been growing inside me for a while – when Baba came into our room and said that he dug him up. I knew right away what he was talking about, though Mama didn’t think I did. Her condition for going to Ouaga was that she had to take both her children with her. If she had left them behind in the village, near the shaming post, she could easily be summoned back. And Mama did not want to come back. Not to that room, not to that stench, which in fact was now coming from nowhere else but my arse.
‘I told you not to eat that muck,’ Baba hissed from his shadowed lips and took the bedpan from underneath my body. I think he even glanced inside it. What appeared to his eyes must have been a reddish animal with a lot of little legs, like a centipede. I do not know if he thought that he had just dug up one child from the earth while the other one was pushing his face into it, but that is definitely what I would have thought if I was him. I answered him sweetly, in a whisper, ‘I won’t do it again’ or something like that – and not just because I wanted to break his train of thought, to prevent further questions like, was it me who moved the foetus, dug its flesh up like a hyena, mangled it, and then reburied it? – and a moment later slipped on my shirt sleeve and ragged trousers. Mama slept in her clothes anyway. She had been expecting him, though she did nothing to let on that she was expecting him. That is why I am sure it would have been a big disappointment if Baba had not come.
He and his family lived in Ouaga, and he only came to see us from time to time. Then his cart would be filled with plastic, batteries, and cheap radios, which the old men would press to their ears and imagine they were listening to news from around the world while we children dreamed, not of sunken treasure, but of the plastic sandals and footballs he might give us on one of his next visits, which is why, in a kind of frenzied daydream, we loaded mangoes into his cart before he went back to the city. That was also why, buried among the mangoes, I had to pinch my leg a few times. I must be dreaming, in the middle of the night like this, rocking my way gently behind a donkey to the edge of reality. The further we got from the village, the more it seemed that my earlier life had never existed, or no matter what had happened, I would easily forget it. I wondered if any of the villagers knew about our plan. Mama digs up the baby, leaves him under a pile of dry leaves and hopes nobody will lie down on it. Then, just as we are about to leave, Baba picks him up, wraps him in a cloth and, completely calm, comes into our room.
That is probably why we did not leave during the night, the way it happens in adventure novels. Although, covered by mangoes, which, from the heat and the pitted roads, kept oozing out a little a sticky orangish substance that the flies attacked like crazy, I felt like Sozaboy being shunned by the villagers. With that stinking baby next to my leg – if it wasn’t the worm, it was something else – I knew it was the end. Not just the end of being tied to the post, but also of the clouds, of gathering in the evening in front of the television, of getting smacked on the head, of climbing in the tree. And what’s most important, it was the end of sticking you-know-what in the hole in the tree, in chickens, in dogs, maybe sometimes even in a goat or cow. Okay, now I have confessed, but there was no point hiding it. Sometimes it happened that the dog nuzzles your leg, and that makes you feel a slight itch in your belly, so you accidentally touch your groin and a moment later your dick is in the dog’s mouth. I don’t know, I never understood why the dog did not bite it off. If there was anybody I was sorry to leave behind, it was him.
I was trying to shift into a more comfortable position, to sit on the unflattened side of my arse, when Mama, perched on the edge of the cart, cleared her throat. I glanced up at her, at her longish chin, her faultless lips and forehead, which widened toward her slightly yellowish hair mixed with dust and dirt. I was not able, did not know how, to tell her that I knew the story of her child, although, especially because of Baba arriving late and the comments that followed, she must have guessed. I shut my eyes and waited for her next move – after all she was the Mama and I was the child – trying to imagine how she had wrenched it out of herself. Not even Baba was there to ease her pains, not even the child’s father was there to support her head. And where was I at that moment? Probably wondering about the movement of the clouds, or maybe I was busy burning the villagers’ hair.
‘I hold in my lap your brodder,’ she said at last. I could hear both relief and fear in her voice. Relief because she had finally torn through the secret between us, and fear because she did not know what would come after her revelation.
‘Dat is why it stink,’ I blurted stupidly, destroying not only the chance for closeness between us now, but all later, all future, chances too.
I knew that from Mama’s silence. If we had been sitting next to each other, if our shoulders had touched and it was still possible to rescue, to make up for, the missed chance, she might have said it out loud – you know, don’t you, that he is dead? And I would have nodded, would have waited a moment, then admitted that the dog showed him to me. That I did not know at first if it was only a foetus or an actual child, but then I saw everything. His eyes, the fully developed fingers and toes, even fingernails, toenails, and eyelashes. You must have had a good look at him, Mama would say and try to hide that I had hurt her earlier with my comment about the child stinking. Do you think he would be as good as you at climbing trees? she would ask, with a slight tilt of her head, and maybe she would even smile. To hide my shame – after all, Mama might have seen me when I was putting my thing in the tree’s soft bark or even when I was burying what by then was only barely a child – I would say, even better, he would be a lot better.
But because she could not find the words to describe to me her pain in the middle of the open savannah, because she could not explain to me why she waited until it was time for him to come, then tore open the skin around her navel with a sharp stone, wrenched the tiny body out of herself, and simply dropped it on the ground, she remained quiet. And because I did not know how to touch her, maybe on her hair, maybe on that part of her where she almost bled out – I would do that at night sometimes, but then she was asleep and did not feel anything – how to tell her that I did care, that I wanted us to stay together even in the city – we completely wasted the opportunity. I felt not only abandoned but exiled. From the edge of the village yard, from the place where I watched the movement of the clouds. I was merely somebody who was hiding his not very happy story beneath a tattered shirt, somebody furtively riding in a cart pulled by a donkey. I noticed that Baba was not using a cane on the animal – as far as I could hear, he never even struck it once; he just talked to it, almost with a kind of tenderness, assuring it that we would be there soon and everything would be all right.
Dry Season Page 12