Since I have been staying with your family, I let my eyebrows grow out. And I don’t draw anymore. Sometimes I lie on the mattress in the morning and wait for all of this to end. For somebody to come and tell me you have returned, or that you are gone for good, because you never were, because people like you simply do not exist. When I turn onto my back, your aunt strokes the outer part of my thighs, my stomach – don’t misunderstand me: these are entirely innocent female caresses – and says that things take time in Africa, that I should wait a little longer. But she knows how to do that – how to wait, I mean – I don’t. I’m running out of air.
I wish I could call you on the phone and whisper the same words to you: Ismael, if you only knew... Now, when everything has ended, I wish it would start all over again, that we had the tenderness between us under control. Everything I did, to you, to my father, to my son, has been misunderstood, and now I feel like that writer people yelled at: Did you ever do anything in your life except spin words and prattle on? But you must admit that I could not have foreseen the way the flow of your blood would respond. I knew you were warm, too warm, but I never dreamed that the thing we had would degenerate into anything like this. Me with my table and the view of the garden. I never dreamed that I would come to this point, that the faraway future would become the present. I gambled all my cards; I refused to be like other pensioners in my country. Instead of becoming part of their tacky, vapid fairy-tale world, their desire for certainty, which they feel only because their bones are popping and they don’t know if they’ll still be here tomorrow or will instead wake up on the other side, I strolled through my own gardens.
Again, it’s about accepting responsibility. When things are passing, you come to that. But, because I refused you, because under that Coca-Cola umbrella I rocked back and forth on the bench and told you I didn’t believe our thing would last, did I become a caricature in your eyes? Did I become for you what I was for my son? Even after he entered his twenties, he remained, in his relationship to me, the child he had been in earlier days: a child who by his very nature could not understand that there might well be more than one reason for human behaviour, but all the same a child with the appearance and aggression of a man, which is why I didn’t know how to stand up to his destructive attacks. Even you, Ismael, he would view as nothing but an empty-headed fool. But tell me, with the lips of a god: did I betray him as a mother? In his eyes, I certainly betrayed my husband and all the other men who might have played father to him. The greatest betrayal of all was that in my latter years I found a lover. But the even bigger issue was that for more than half my life I persevered with my drawing. In other words: most of the time, in my thoughts, I was with the eucalyptus leaves on a dark-violet background.
If you only knew, Ismael, that your desire was based on desire for a woman who was useless to you. First of all, I couldn’t open my belly to you; second, I didn’t want to. If you couldn’t have children with me – and that’s what they taught you, isn’t it? – then at least I could take your hand and carry you off to my city. But did you ever ask yourself what was going on with my desire? I almost never talked about it to you, Ismael. My Paris lover would say that my desire for your warm body came from an unsatisfied urge to hunt. Hunt what? Youth, of course; flesh. He had already been there; he already knew. But my Paris lover is just a dim picture. The last time he called, it was from Barbados. He said he moved there with his five-year-old son. He’d been given a great opportunity to teach at the film academy. I didn’t know whether to believe him; from the tone of his voice I could even sense that he’d suffered some terrible setback, a disastrous film or a disastrous marriage, but that was no longer my concern, if it ever was.
I want you to call me again, Ismael. And instead of that ‘Ana, if you only knew...’ I want you to say something else. For example, ‘Ana, I am coming by balloon. Wait for me at such-and-such a time at such-and-such a place, and we will redo Paris together, this time with a happy ending.’ Or maybe, ‘Ana, I understand your human need for freedom. You don’t have to. You don’t have to do anything.’ And when you gave me a free hand, I would tell you my story. Then you would decide if you wanted to enter it or would rather remain outside it.
* * *
He arrived at the crack of dawn with his scribbled-over face. First I heard car doors shutting, the voices of women saying hello, the cry of a baby in the neighbouring yard, the mother’s response, and only then could I see the outline of Malik’s figure in the fog. He didn’t say, ‘Hello, Ana, how are you, how is your family?’, he just walked past me, as though I didn’t exist, as though I wasn’t there in the middle of the yard whispering to the fire and trying to heat the water for the morning bath. The aunt had left in the middle of the night for a distant village; Baba was dozing on the recliner, still dressed in his long tunic, still in sandals. The goats at the edge of the yard were sticking their heads out of the pen. But if I didn’t know they were there I couldn’t have written this. The fog had spread out all around; it covered our legs, so we walked around the yard as if half spirit and only half human. I smiled. Ismael, seeing this scene, would have undoubtedly recited that verse of his, that we are like the snow, which always passes, but Ismael wasn’t here now, he still wasn’t here, somebody else was here instead of him.
After a brief greeting, Malik sat down opposite Baba. I watched them from the corner of my eye, but even if I had turned my whole face to them, I could not have guessed they were father and son.
‘How is your business?’ I heard Baba say. Malik nodded. ‘How is your health?’ Malik again tilted his head forward and sank deeper into his recliner. These were all formalities, which they had to go through and which were denied, forgotten, only when it came to me. As if I was guilty of something, as if I was guilty of mixing my blood with Ismael’s.
‘Where did the car come from?’ I suddenly heard Baba saying.
‘Cotonou.’
‘I know, but from where?’
Malik was silent. I put down the fan I’d been using to try to get air on the embers, straightened the pot of water a little, and sat on a low stool next to the fireplace. I had the urge to run into the room where I slept with the aunt, hunt through my bag for a cigarette, and light it in the yard, but the moment was too serious. If I could have afforded to miss part of their conversation, I would have gone out of the yard and touched the car. Ismael had probably ridden in it; Ismael’s fate had probably culminated in it. And Malik had come to make known his version of the story, or maybe he just wanted to show off his new set of wheels; I didn’t know yet for sure. I craned my neck toward the two men on the terrace, who were wrapped in mist, although the more diffuse the whiteness became, the more they lowered their voices, as if sensing and not yet fully understanding that this was just between them, or at least them and the dead wife, who had been lingering on this terrace for years. Their alliance made me feel like a stranger, banished, like somebody who didn’t belong, who wanted to belong but couldn’t; for a short period I had belonged only to Ismael, and to him but barely. I hugged my knees, as if in memory of that refusal long ago, or maybe because I was still a little cold, and tried to focus on their gestures, their silence, on what was usually decisive when you were drawing. After a long time of straining my eyes, I sensed more than saw from Malik’s unnaturally twisted shape – he was neither lying nor sitting but somehow only hanging sideways on the recliner – that he had something hidden in his left trouser pocket.
‘We are almost almost at da Burkina border when dey catch us. No, not da police. Da ordinary folk.’ Malik was obviously ignoring Baba’s questions and relying on his full attention, which was betraying the old man. His body was bent forward, somewhat rigid, sandals at the side – I had noticed him removing them carefully during the conversation, at which point I could no longer deny that this dark foot was endlessly attractive to me, despite the worn heel, despite the somewhat yellowed, too-long toenails; my eyes then travelled u
p to his thin knees, covered by the tunic, and, further, to his thighs, and I decided at last that there was no sense condemning Baba. It had been so long since his son had visited him, sat down calmly across from him, and started explaining things. And not only that, but something serious had happened, something that went beyond our expectations, although all of us together were trying to find the right tempo for revealing it. ‘Ismael do stupid stupid ting. One of da drivers want a beer and instead dat he reach under da bench, he open da container full of da ice cubes and dere is also da human head.’ I was confused; nothing Malik said was making sense. The only sense I saw was that he was trying to shift the bulk of the blame to Ismael.
‘You were in the car?’ Baba asked, himself a little confused, although he was probably not so much confused as trying to fathom his son’s narrative. He even sat up and placed an arm on the back of the chair. Under ordinary circumstances, he would not have asked Malik questions in the middle of his narration, but these were not ordinary circumstances. The fog-covered yard, the early hour, the car parked outside, a member of the family missing, and what’s more, this white woman by the fireplace, whom they probably didn’t see at all, whom Malik probably hadn’t seen at all when he walked by. She was like the snow which has just now passed, or maybe like blood, which has just now lost its battle and, in the end, left not even a trace. The only thing is – Ismael would say if he was here now, but he wasn’t – the only thing is, that we needed more time to remove it, and the will to destruction had to be stronger.
‘No, no dis one, a different one, a van. You can no pack all da kids in one ordinary Mercedes.’ What I wouldn’t have given for it to have been the same car as in Ismael’s story. We were sitting in the rented house; I was on the chair, my legs crossed, no underwear; Ismael was on the floor, his back against the wall. The Nescafé car, the welder, the basins around the kitchen; he listed them and at every word closed a finger on his open palm; the half-metal sandals of the ebony woman, who took them off when her husband started drinking; the almost silken robe, which she untied and retied a few times before the final goodbye. But her husband probably still loved her, otherwise she would not have shown me the door, Ismael said, almost pensively. Who knows what would have happened if he had stayed with the ebony woman, if she had chosen him over her own man? But this is an old story, an ancient story; besides, in that case we wouldn’t be sitting next to the non-existent goats.
‘Malik, what are you telling me? What kids? What is this container with the ice cubes?’
‘Shit, I can no start da whole ting over from da beginning at all. Two days I drive here, and I no can do no more. Da people have catch Ismael because he have let one of da girls get out. When da container wit da ice cubes have turn over, da human head too, I mean, da girl kick open da door and run. So of course da people see rightway what happen. Dey are not all stupid stupid...’
Baba put up his hand, sharply, firmly, as if trying to stop a boulder or some enormous body that was about to fall on him. ‘I did not come to you, you came to me, so please, show a minimum of respect. Tell your story to the end, then go take a shower. Ana is heating the water up now, and if you are not in any danger, take a moment and shut your eyes.’
Malik looked in my direction. Even without the fog his eyes were kaput, as Ismael would say, empty, glassy, as if he didn’t remember who I was, what I was, as if he didn’t remember his own father and the yard he grew up in, his dead mother, who was watching him from the terrace almost as attentively as I was, but after this momentary distraction his distant shape again turned toward Baba. He moved his recliner even closer to his father, probably not so much because of my presence as from a sense of fear. I realized that Malik was nothing but a frightened child at that moment, babbling words from the bottom of his belly, or maybe he only seemed that way because of his broken French, which in places was mixed with local expressions. ‘Yah, sure. Dey have catch da two drivers; but me, at dat very very moment, I am on da crapper.’
I don’t know; something told me he was lying. Maybe he wasn’t even in that van, that car, the Mercedes, maybe it was just a story people had told him and now he was repeating it after them, or maybe he had even betrayed Ismael deliberately, handed him over to the criminals as punishment for that nocturnal telephone call; in any case, he wasn’t there when whatever happened to Ismael happened, although something serious must have happened for Malik to arrive like this at the crack of dawn, park in the yard, and sit with his father on the terrace, which he had not done in a very long time. I lifted myself from the stool and moved closer to the terrace. From the steam and the soft gurgling sound, I knew the water behind me had started to boil, that flecks of fire were licking the bottom of the clay pot. ‘And what about Ismael? When you were on the crapper?’ I said in a deep, firm voice, which almost reverberated through the space and erased some of that white, to the degree that it hadn’t already erased itself. ‘What happened to Ismael?’
Malik was silent, as if he was aware of the dramaturgy of this story. As if he was aware that he was standing in for somebody, that he had arrived in somebody else’s place. This somebody else, just like the two drivers – at least in the story’s official version; the unofficial version was lying on the back seat of the parked car outside – was given a fiery necklace. Which means: a burning tyre around your neck. You burn to death in your living body. A kind of African mediaeval theatre, a kind of punishment for a crime you didn’t commit, or you committed by not standing firmly enough against it. A person is constantly choosing between a little or nothing, I said back then, in the house, with my legs crossed, no underwear, to Ismael. As for me, you know what I chose; you know that I invented a new life for myself; now it’s your turn. So he had to know what he was getting into when he followed this dim-sighted albino; he had to decide either for his life or against it.
‘I have no see him after dat. If I will have play Tarzan, I will no be here right now.’
‘So you didn’t even try?’ Baba said, instead of me.
‘No, Papa. I have no try. I have prefer to save my own arse. And dat I have done wit dose wheels out dere.’
‘How do I know that everything you’re saying is true?’ I asked with tears in my eyes. All I could do, all I knew how to do, was let the powerlessness I felt burst out of me. I was even tempted to sit on the ground and give myself over like a child to violent sobbing until I was completely exhausted. Something, after all, told me that what Malik was saying might just be true, that of all the countless possibilities it had now been Ismael’s turn, and, mainly, that Malik probably didn’t have enough imagination to go beyond the reality. It was instinct and again instinct, the instinct for survival, that saved him. And what didn’t save Ismael?
But then Malik suddenly pulled out that hidden object. ‘It all of it here. If you want it, take it.’ He held out his hand to me, not Baba. Ismael always said that it wasn’t Baba who made him, that it had to be somebody else. He didn’t know who, maybe the priest in the village he and his mama ran away from, maybe even the seven-headed spirits he encountered at the ebony woman’s. And now, with the corner of my eye and with my hand stretched out to Malik, I knew that what Ismael said was true. Despite the scattering fog, given what had happened to Ismael in Malik’s narrative – whether false or true, it didn’t matter; the fact remained that Ismael had been gone for a very long time and, of all of us, Malik was the last to see him – Baba’s face should have been more crushed, his gestures more agitated, but the truth was, he was simply grateful for his son’s return. No matter what Malik had done, no matter what he would still do, he had come out of the belly of the woman Baba loved. There was no dispute about that.
I took the bundle of pages as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Malik didn’t know how to read, but still, he must have suspected that the packet could have a certain value so the first chance he got he slipped it beneath his shirt and waited for the right moment. When Ismael ask
ed him to give the unfinished novel back, he stretched out his palm. Pay me, or I’ll toss it in the sea. He was always a step ahead of him – the first one on the rope in the torture chamber, the first on the street, the first on the stolen motorbike – and Ismael could only hope that one day he would rid himself of his influence. Now, I suppose he’s done that. But Ismael rid himself not only of his hideous shadow, but also of me and Baba and his aunt and the goats in the pens, which were becoming visible now. In their entirety, not just their heads or long legs – only now do I understand why the aunt was so very fond of them, of the goats in their entirety, the goats as unbloodthirsty, unmalevolent creatures. The fog had melted away; morning had risen with a clean, dazzling light; no longer were we like a blood stain somebody tries to remove, but like birds drawn in the air, which nobody can ever again scribble down.
I got up from that table, in that house, but first I uncrossed my legs; I wanted to put my panties on, but Ismael said, no need, why not just come over and sit in his lap, on his warm, slightly swollen penis. I did exactly that. But first I ran my hand across his face, as I do now across a typed-over, scribbled-over piece of paper. I know that a person who’s been lost can hardly be replaced, but what was left unfinished I will finish, what was lost I will try to find again.
* * *
They shaved off my hair, added karité butter to it, and rolled it into a ball, but I didn’t receive even a gram of gold for it, let alone a cow, as is the custom in Burkina at the birth of a newborn. The ritual, which the aunt performed over me, was, after all, meant to cleanse me, to give me new birth. Among other things, it was supposed to make me less desirous of blood. When, counting stars and goats, the woman first said this to me, I pretended for one more second, delayed for one more second, but then I couldn’t anymore. I decided to return. To get on an aeroplane and go back to where I had come from.
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