Dry Season

by Gabriela Babnik

  I looked around the restaurant. I don’t know what I was looking for. My father’s arm, which would know how to defend those two cinematic masters, who nevertheless came from completely different worlds – that was clear to me by then; I remembered seeing Djibril’s photograph somewhere: his arms, his big dark arms crossed over his chest, the left one gently supporting his beard, perhaps right where it was turning grey, and you could definitely sense in his appearance something classical and mature, something bordering on wisdom; he was leaning, meanwhile, on his right arm and bending a little toward a river; although it’s not clear if it is a river or not; all you can see in the background is a row of houses with open windows, possibly Dakar or Paris; a quilted coat with the collar turned up, without that coat, in the middle of the Dakarian, or Parisian, winter, he would be freezing; but more than the cold, something else must be worrying him, which is apparent from the wrinkles just above his eyebrows, some problem he didn’t know how to resolve – but if I couldn’t find my father’s arm, then at least I could find the words of that fledgling literary, sorry, art critic, who swore by – my father pronounced this next phrase in a kind of huff – the realistic literary current, but he couldn’t have sworn even by that if he hadn’t had the material and moral support of his (by then) late sister, that is to say, my mother. Criticism, after all, is essentially a non-profit activity. I imagined – and not just because of my father’s spiteful tone when he was describing this new phenomenon in our family – him reading at least fifty novels a year and then believing in what he wrote, or sitting on the floor in the flat he was given as a gift, between a wall of books and a filthy sofa, and scratching his big balls.

  ‘I’m sorry; I need to use the bathroom,’ I suddenly interrupted him, as I smiled an apology to the invisible children at the table, who were engrossed in gnawing on chicken bones and depositing them on their plates with a clatter, and then in fact I went outside to the street. The key to the hotel room was in my pocket; in the hallway, I had to insert it there, a kind of unconscious gesture, but still not as unconscious as when I tossed my coat over my arm; first, of course, I took it from the back of the chair with a slight twist of my body – as if, when I was entering the restaurant, I had already known what I had to avoid, that I especially had to avoid looking at him, because of the lie, since when I lie to someone I can’t look them in the eye – then I stood up, did in fact toss my coat over my arm, and stormed out. My sudden departure was meant as a small act of revenge on his earlier uncoupling, on the deficit of closeness under the table; these people don’t know how to love, a woman I knew told me once – she, too, had obviously had negative experiences with black men – but at the time I didn’t believe her. Now, in a surge of anger, I was closer to endorsing her generalization.

  I headed for the banks of the Seine, but instead of trying, by the coolness of the river, to figure out what it was that Djibril had been wondering about, with his arms joined in front of him – they were partly why I remembered that black-and-white photograph, why I couldn’t forget it – I felt like a certain famous writer who, in the middle of France in the 1980s first became aware of a feeling that had never come over him in Czechoslovakia, not even in the darkest days of Stalinism – the feeling that he was living in a post-artistic era, in a world where art was simply vanishing, because, indeed, the need for art was vanishing. I brought my face beneath one of the lamps; maybe my father was right. It was better to believe than not believe; it was better to allow for the religious possibility than to look truth in the eye and think that this is all there is. Paris and again Paris. I turned up the collar of my coat, closed my eyes, and tried to summon up my son’s image from childhood, but all I could really think about was the slightly crooked penis of my Paris lover. I knew I would go back to the hotel and, despite his dead and living wives – the intervening Italian didn’t count, just as I too, actually, would never count – undress and wait for him naked in bed.

  * * *

  I never found the face of the man who raped me as a child under the bridge, but I did find Ana. How should I describe her? Almost tall, flat breasts, rarely wears make-up but despite her years is aware of her beauty, backcombed hair, which accentuates her long neck and tender ears with their childishly small lobes. I will talk about the rest of her later. Actually, I do not know if this is how novels begin. I once wrote a couple of novels, horribly long and even more horrible in their content, mainly under the influence of the radio stories Auntie listened to. There they were always talking about abandoned women who, as the narrator would say at the beginning, ‘were dreaming of an ideal marriage or had once enjoyed marital happiness’. Ana was nothing like that. She came to the desert because she wanted to disclose her story to somebody – to all of us, not just me. Maybe she thought that there, in her own country, they would shut their ears at the thing she had done.

  I do not know why and I will probably never find out. She herself told me nothing, or rather, she told me very little. But I was amazed when she started talking about the white dog, saying that it had shown her the house she rented. From this little anecdote I know that Ana is also a woman from my childhood. I remember her as an old woman who sat for days and days underneath a tamarind tree, with her hand in the fur of a dog. In fact, she lived alone with the dog. Nobody thought about her anymore, except, of course, when they tried to use her as a warning to the women of the village, and even less did they think about the meaning of the words she mumbled to herself. I did not pay too much attention to her either; her story meant nothing to me, right up to the day – it was July, I remember, and the mango season was almost over; there was a dampness in the air, a heavy, almost unbearable dampness, which hid beneath the mango leaves and did not let you breathe – when I saw her from the tree.

  If I had already been living in Ouaga, Malik and I would have done the thing together, but I was still living in the village, so I did it on my own. I had heard people in the village saying that dogs can see spirits. Nothing special for that village. Most people there believed that if you rubbed dog spit into your eyes, you too could see faraway cities, the underwater people, spirits. So there was no reason not to believe it. The only thing that baffled me was I did not know how to kill the dog. How to get near the tamarind tree without waking Ana, sorry, the old woman, and take from the dog what was his. But when I was in the priest’s secret room – it was actually his bedroom, which he locked with a big key, which is why I thought of it as a secret room – I found some radio batteries, and the solution came to me on its own. I sprinkled the black powder – carbon I suppose it was, although at the time I did not know that is what you called the soft inside of a battery – onto a mango leaf, onto its long gleaming surface, which I first licked with my tongue, and then I stuck it in a bean ball. There’s probably no need to go into detail. I just had to climb the tree and hope the old woman sleeping beneath it would not wake up too soon. But the scene I encountered, which I had not expected in my wildest dreams, took my breath away. From the tree I had a clear view of the old woman’s exposed armpits – she had placed her arms in the grass like a child – of her braided hair, decorated in places with shells, of the nape of her still slender neck, and it occurred to me that she must have been damn good-looking when she was young, although I admit it, it was a little strange that I should be thinking about such things right then. When my gaze travelled up to her small, childish earlobes, I almost felt sorry for her; there was so much accumulated life-energy in her, yet she was condemned to lying beneath a tree, to this old woman’s role, but a second later my head was again filled with thoughts of faraway cities, spirits, the beautiful women who walked in these cities, and I waved my arm in the air. Luckily, or unluckily, depending on how you look at it, since by then I was no longer sure about the wisdom of my plan, the dog leaped toward the branch I was sitting on and almost ripped off my dangling hand.

  I admit it, I started crying when he gulped down the bean cake. But not so much becau
se of the dog, as because of the old woman. In the village her name was mentioned in connection with dead newborn babies, so I suspected that she must have done something horrible, although nothing more horrible than what my Mama did; the only difference was that my Mama was never caught, while the old woman spent decades apologizing to the tamarind tree. Her crime, then – which, of course, was not just a crime against a new being but against the village community, against the spirits who ruled the community – acquired mythic proportions and every time a woman in the village thought about doing the same thing, the image of the banished old woman beneath the tamarind tree appeared before her eyes and, if her hormones did not betray her too much, she would change her mind. I wiped my tears away and, hanging from the branch, stared at the animal lying in the grass. The dog seemed enormous to me, bigger than ever before. If I had to do again what I did, I would probably stop in the middle of it, run back to where I had come from and, somewhere beneath the moist leaves of the mango tree, gulp down that bean cake myself. But now I had done what I had done, and there was no way back. An invisible hand was guiding me, was making me jump from the tree right next to the dog’s head; the old woman had already opened her eyes, her hand had travelled toward the banished ground, when I took from the dog what had been his and disappeared over the horizon. So she probably could not have seen me. In a different story the old woman would be somebody with dark armpits, a knee-length skirt, and fair skin, would be Ana – Ana, who had just lost her only companion; in this story, however, I disappear behind the tree too fast for her to remember me later. Or maybe she did remember and never told me. Like so many other things she never told me.

  And what about the spit? It was a big disappointment. All I got were grubby, swollen eyes. At night, however, in the priest’s bedroom – he had locked me inside, not knowing that I was hiding under the bed, while he himself disappeared God knows where; some said he was praying in a thicket, others that he was chasing women – I looked through the window and saw water collecting in the mango grove, almost to your shoulders, that is, if you were a grown man and went into it. I pressed myself against the wall, against my imaginary mama, asking for her belly, asking her to open it up to me again, but I was still alone, like on a deserted island. Then bodies started floating past the window. First a baby, almost a child, who looked like Malik. His eyes were shining and he was trying to tell me something with a mouth full of water, but he was carried on by the flood. After him, Ana floated up – only now do I know that it was Ana; then, I saw mainly a woman with very light skin, as light as the worms beneath the bark of the tamarind tree – she hovered a while right next to the window pane and then floated off with her hair.

  When I first saw her on the other side of the road, water collected in my mouth. Non-transparent, almost muddy, with stones on the bottom. I know, things supposedly come and go and, supposedly, we still believe in a circular cycle in Africa, or this was instilled into us from the outside, I do not know for sure, but all the same I did not want to believe it at first. It was not until I buried my face in Ana’s hair, saw close up her ears with the childish lobes, and dug my way into the darkness between her legs, which may have portrayed the darkness of her armpits, that I knew that nobody had ever chopped down that tamarind tree, that it was still standing in our village. Ana was my true dog spit, the key that opened the doors to faraway cities, my ticket to the twentieth floor, which I will probably never reach and look out from as if from a tree. It is too late; I have a bad feeling. Besides, Malik and Julie are keeping me in Cotonou. They say that before I return, I must first finish my sentimental novel. The more I miss Ana, the more I write. But their comments are not funny anymore, if they ever were.

  I would like to call Ana and tell her things. Not tell her that we are transporting children intended for organs – that is all pure nonsense – but about how my Auntie used to listen to the radio and wish that she too had enjoyed ‘marital happiness’. By the way, it is possible that I started writing those long horrible novels, which had titles like Life Is Hard and Farewell, Cruel World, not just under the influence of Auntie’s radio plays but also under the influence of the different movies I saw at the outdoor cinema. Strong, tanned men were riding through the meadows, descending hills alongside vast rivers, and killing each other in shootouts, while I was dying from boredom in that Sahelian city without the sea, meadows, forests, without anything that could in any way be interesting to me. But then Ana arrived. And disappeared again, like behind the window pane, with her floating hair. If I could meet her just one more time, that’s all, just one more time, I would ask her to tell me the words that came from the mouth of the floating child. I would ask her if he wanted to tell me to rescue him or to let him float on.

  * * *

  I have been here before. I mean, that somebody says to me on the phone ‘Ana, if you only knew’ and leaves the words hanging in the air. Although I doubt the interruption was intentional; the voice sounded desperate. Almost a stranger’s, but still the same warm voice that once, some time ago, entered me with its tongue. Such a long time ago I don’t remember what it tasted like. More recently, the only thing I’ve been asking myself is, should I stay or should I go? Should I go and come back? But then it will no longer be the same. Then our story will no longer be of one piece. And the other thing to consider is my blackmailing father, who, despite believing in God, insists that he created me. An eighty-seven-year-old man who owns a sixty-two-year-old woman, and this in all seriousness. Although: I must have inherited something from him, nevertheless – a feeling for the pornographic in my ripe old age? A desire to loosen up my own ripeness? Not everything is in the genes, although now I suppose I’m getting away from the issue again. Which is? That everything changes, that nothing remains the same, not even for five minutes, not even your name. That’s why this demand for the changeless wedding day is a fairy-tale ruse, a kind of retro-bargain for the knights of the Round Table. A revival of courtly love. You asked me to gamble on the future, but in the future I will be somebody else, or nobody anymore.

  What’s even more probable, of course, is that you will change, Ismael. More than ten times, in a city of provincial rituals, self-congratulation, the stubborn logic of family ties, of petty hirelings and merchants. I used to be one of them, and now I don’t know if I still am. I tried to explain that to you, but you didn’t listen. You tore off into the road like a madman and my feet were hurting too much from the high heels to follow you.

  Ana, if you only knew... I have been here before. Again, with my father; never with my husband. Looking back, I know that that man with the forgotten hat was my first love. Maybe, after all, there is something permanent that I have been clinging to: admiration for this man, despite everything. And now I have almost lost him. Only in my dreams will I say that I sacrificed my father for you. I sacrificed him for something else entirely, maybe for the story. I came here to tell it and I don’t see anything criminal in that. Just as there’s nothing criminal in what you wanted with me. I understand your desire, Ismael, although at the same time I can’t imagine the millions of people who cross the sea in shattered boats to reach old Europe just because they believe that there they will find a better life. Their stories, desires, and hopes are too abstract for me. Besides, I cannot encompass those millions; I can encompass only you, and even then, only partly.

  But again, Ana, if you only knew how my body needed you. That was beyond everything; here I had not yet been. Not with my husband, not with my son. Neither of them did I want to protect the way I wanted to protect you, Ismael. Should I explain? I mentioned somewhere that I saw in your face the presence of a god. You came from a golden age, from a world made sensible through meaning. For you, dreams and reality were one.

  Why am I using the past tense? Not only because it’s been a long time since I felt your tongue in my mouth, not only because of that, but because my very presence has chafed you. And after I created in you the desire, the need, to hold
on to me, to enter my story, I refused you. Maybe it wasn’t just the sandals with the too-high heels that were the problem on that street; maybe I was afraid to look into your empty face. The fear that you would suddenly turn around and look at me – half of your body was still leaning on the edge of the street, toward the van, which you stepped into anyway because you thought you had no choice, that after this refusal you could return only to your own people – the fear, then, that there would be no more meaning to see in your face, at least not meaning that spoke in favour of our brief shared past – that fear inundated everything else. I went too far, and at a moment when I should have gone even further, I turned away. I bear the responsibility, and instead of saying anything, calling out to you, for example, holding my sandals in my hands and for the last time pronouncing your name, I kept silent and waited. Ana, if you only knew that things could have been different, if only I had said I was prepared to import you to my fucked-up city and assume the risks this decision entailed.