by Edem Awumey
***
In the evening, in our cell, I would turn over the slop pail and stand up on it. And beyond the bars I was hanging onto, I could see a slice of the sky at the end of which were the moon, there as always, and a few stars scattered on the canvas of the night, like us in the camps and prisons of the country. The night went by that way. I slept little, and the morning always surprised me with its mocking blue hue. Season after season of captivity, punctuated by the death of a prisoner forgotten by his family, who did not come and get the cadaver, his remains left for three days behind the huts before the guards decided to bury him farther in the bush, or the jubilation of a fellow prisoner who had been waiting a week for the visit of a son or a wife, the guards always drunk and chanting obscenities at the top of their lungs. The unchanging emptiness of Koli’s eyes at dawn.
We drifted in a slow agony, our asses glued to the dirt floor of the cell. Inside the barbed wire fence, the sorcerers were dying, scarecrows emptied of their straw by the cruel beaks of the birds of prey under the gloomy gaze of the tall trees above the thickets and yellowed fields. Over our heads, the migration of the birds that I managed not to envy anymore. And sometimes we were visited by a woman, a hooker with lips painted red as in a crime scene. She would go from guard to guard, a Venus with an ass of steel, how else could she handle the fury of the half-dozen enraged guards at the gates of her flesh at the same time? From their cells, the prisoners could hear her yelling at the guards to behave themselves, and we imagined them having to calm down and form a perfectly straight line at her crotch, each one in turn if you please, gentlemen. And in the morning, she would leave, standing very straight, unshakeable. And walking with her to the gate at the entrance of the camp, the head guard would kiss her hand smiling and bowing, “Dear madam, thank you for calming for a time the anger of these cocks exiled far from civilization and any salutary brothels.”
The woman was pretty, with smooth, deep black skin, braided hair, and large eyes in a slightly oblong face with thick, smiling, ravenous lips. She was radiant, unlike the other bodies and skins. The bodies of the sorcerers were all dry wood, skin and bone, limbs disproportionately long in a strange process of growth, chests and heads bowed, and when I described them to my blind companion, he observed, “You mean they remind you of Giacometti’s sculptures?” I answered, “Yes, Koli, here they make Giacometti bodies, thin, pale, with skin like a shadow on the metal of the limbs.” “It’s beautiful work,” said Koli. “You mean the sorcerers?” “Giacometti. Not the sorcerers, I can’t see them.”
And from the sorcerers, we went on to the other silhouettes of the camp, which I described to my friend. The head guard, pudgy and short-legged, and his henchmen, with hardly more meat on their bones than the sorcerers, their lips reddened by alcohol, their faces puffy. There was one who limped, a disjointed puppet. And the head interrogator, the man with the pliers, whom we rarely saw outdoors, tall and classically handsome. And the other prisoners, their unimposing bodies worn down by the years. All this to say that in the end, though gaunt, the most beautiful body was that of Koli Lem, whose hair had whitened uniformly and who was still very straight for all his seventy years, his chin square and strong, his nose regular and his forehead broad and free of wrinkles. On evenings when I didn’t have much to do, I would spend my time appreciating the beauty of that body, and little by little, every line and feature of my friend became imprinted in my memory, and in the plays that I would later write, all the bodies would look like Koli’s, the picture of dignity and noble bearing.
Between the bars of the cell blew a cold, biting wind. Morning came slowly, followed by another night when I would again feast my eyes on Koli with his princely visage. Because everything around us was ugly, the living dead, the yards, the sewer breath of the guards, their spit on the walls and the prisoners, the flights of bats just before nightfall, the brutal relationship with the tortured bodies, all of it ugly, unchanging, tedious. To give my eyes something else to look at, I had only Koli and his face sculpted in iroko wood and displaying a proud serenity that the moonlight could illuminate or dim. That face could reflect life or death, and so that it would not pale on the threshold of death, I had to rub it with my palms and warm it. When we had no more books to read, Koli had to come back to life and tell a story for us as only he could.
29
Ito Baraka clenches his teeth. He’s experiencing stabs of pain again, pain that rises until it reaches a climax and he sees the faces of the friends whose names he revealed during his interrogation. He can’t stop feeling that what happened to them afterwards is his fault. The pain is infused with shame and remorse. So he drinks.
He remembers that when he had a stomachache as a child, his father would take a long-necked bottle from the cupboard. At the bottom of the liquid in the bottle, there were roots and bark with complicated names. His father would get out a little glass for this sodabi, which could rip out your insides, pour an eighth of a glass, the proper dose, and give it to him. Ito would grumble, but an hour later, the stomachache was gone in a plaintive purr, and he would think, relieved, that this remedy with its obscure roots could cure all ills—indigestion, migraine, angina, diarrhea. But when the real ills of anxiety and distress loomed on the horizon, he had to face the fact that the long-necked bottle could do nothing for them, and his father, powerless, would have to put it back in the cupboard.
Ito knew that the little glass of sodabi could only banish the ills for a while. And later, when the country became unlivable, he drank to keep the frustrations and the leaden sky at bay. You had to stay completely soused, and as soon as you felt the depression and pain coming back, here you go! another little glass of the morphine prescribed by the gods of wisdom, and here you go again! until your gaze was clouded, preventing you from taking the measure of your misfortune in the violence of the streets, like a scene in a movie, a murder or a rape you’d rather not subject yourself to and on which you lower the screen of your eyelashes and eyelids, capitulating in the face of the unbearable. When Ito Baraka started to drink, he would often in his fog see the magician’s fingers of his father pouring the glass of spirits that freed you in no time at all from what was unendurable, the ill expelled with a glug-glug-glug and a burp.
In the evening, Ito Baraka goes down into his basement and drops onto the left side of his sofa, where his bum has hollowed out a nice depression. His bottle of rum is uncorked. Yes, it’s rum or Scotch. To your health! Straight from the bottle. His blood gives that giggle he recognizes. The basement where he’s gone to ground is more and more damp, so he has to warm himself up. He absent-mindedly grabs his antique remote control and turns on his tiny television, which gives a moan and turns off again. He stretches his legs and Kimi Blue comes and sits on his lap, her dark head in the hollow of his neck. Kimi, affectionate and driven by a desperate passion and desire, wants to tell him about her day. A mirage. He rubs his eyes and she disappears. The tattered carpet is a devastated battlefield, the yellow paint on the walls is flaking. Above the TV, two photographs, a smaller one of Kimi and the little boy, and another, fifty by eighty centimetres, of Giacometti’s sculpture The Walking Man, with his long, thin, stiff limbs. He bought it in a junk shop. Because the work reminds him of Koli Lem, with whom he first discussed the Swiss sculptor. In recent days, when he stares at the photograph, he has the impression that the Man is disintegrating more and more, that he’s breaking into tiny pieces that are being swallowed up by the passing of time. But he knows very well it’s just a horrible feeling that arises out of the anxiety hidden beneath his skin.
So he sinks deeper into his sofa and starts drinking again. He lifts his head towards the ceiling, which has been invaded by mould in little blackish stains. In a corner to the left of the TV, his old fridge is gasping. Already, half the rum has been guzzled up. He sets the bottle down in front of the sofa, stands up, leaning on a soft arm, and tries to make out the door to the bathroom. His mudd
led head refuses to give things form and substance. He catches his feet in his scarf, which has fallen on the floor, stumbles, tries to steady himself by grabbing the stem of the floor lamp behind the sofa, and spins around it in a ridiculous waltz.
He staggers forward and touches the frame of the bathroom door, his vision cloudy. The toilet bowl lid is a distant white spot that becomes clearer when he rubs his eyes. He’ll have to kneel before that blurry object, a confessional in which he will let go of his sins and betrayals and all the shit inside him. With the chalk-white oval of the bowl in front of him, his left knee bends. His right arm outstretched, he’s going to manage to lift the lid and lower his head to the yellowish water. His right knee bends in turn and he’s leaning over the bowl. The liquid he expels stings his nose and spatters him. His belly is in revolt, his chest on fire, and his hands grip the edges of the bowl. Long minutes go by with Ito Baraka in the thick mists of vomit. He feels like plunging his head into it. A stream of drool in the corner of his mouth, he rears up and his head butts the raised lid. Nothing comes out of his skull, although he thinks it must have split open. He tries to relax and his joints crack. He observes the viscous liquid frothing against the ceramic and he wants to immerse himself in a tranquil pond of fish and frogs. He relaxes, wants to sink and take root at the bottom of that pond. The telephone rings. He tells himself he won’t have time to take Kimi’s last call, but the ringing continues and he slams the lid closed and tries to stand up. He reels, barely catches himself, and totters to the shelf beside the television where the telephone sits. The ringing phone is a stubborn bitch. Ito Baraka goes to grab the receiver—too late, Kimi is leaving a message, “Hello, big guy! How’s it going? Love you. See you tonight.”
Listening to Kimi Blue’s message, he is surprised to find himself, ridiculously, wanting to cling to life. But, he wonders, until what final night will I be able to keep on going? On the wall of his basement, his son is looking at him, eyes whose limpid innocence terrifies him. He’s cold, an electric current chills his spine. He falls back onto the sofa and tries to warm himself with the rum. It goes down the wrong way and he yelps like a beaten dog because the alcohol burns his larynx. He tells himself that Kimi mustn’t see him in this state, drenched, soiled.
Like the beggar at the corner of his street, Ito Baraka drinks to reinvent brighter days. That’s what he did when Santou, after their last argument, slammed the door, taking the child with her. He applied the same method, nights of drinking that were both sad and exultant. He already felt too weak to keep her from doing it. However, the high lasted only a week, because he was taken by surprise by the absurd hope that Santou would come back with the child. He returned to his deferred play project to convince himself that nothing had stopped, but a few days later, here we go again, another relapse in the lake of brown rum. He shut himself up for a whole week and tried, through an abrupt and cynical return to that Catholic faith instilled by the Franciscan fathers in catechism classes, to pull himself together. He thought of his father with his eyes fixed on the black ink drawings on tracing paper from which his luminous plans for villas emerged.
30
A noise at the door again. Ito Baraka straightens up in his seat. The footsteps go up to the apartment above his. It isn’t Kimi Blue. Soon it will be twilight. Ito Baraka sighs. He sometimes imagines himself and Kimi in romantic and very foolish scenes as young lovers. It’s evening and the young woman has just come home from work, and the drugs are only a bad memory now. On the other side of the door, she’s struggling—click, clack—with the stubborn lock. Ito is sitting on the sofa, he doesn’t want to get up to open the door for her. It amuses him to think of her getting worked up on the other side of the door. But finally, the lock yields, and Kimi enters, furious. She jumps on him and puts up a pretence of pummeling him with her ineffectual fists. Ito grabs her by the waist to escape the pretend knock-out blows, and she screams, “Let go of me!” and bursts out laughing. He squeezes her waist. Caresses and ridiculous adolescent tickling, and she laughs louder and orders him, “Stop! Read me what you wrote today!” He refuses, “No, forget about theatre.” She feigns disappointment, collapses into his arms, and suddenly, she wants him. They fall down onto the dirty carpet, where they make love. That’s a cliché right out of the movies, because love is something Ito Baraka can’t do anymore. When he tries, he immediately gets out of breath and his limbs tremble and knock together, like an old man with veiny fingers sitting on his the toilet in his retirement home treating himself to a suicidal masturbation.
It’s a pipe dream, a farce, this relationship Ito Baraka imagines himself in with Kimi. Except for the early days, his life with his ex, Santou, was a long series of arguments. Their quarrels were a daily occurrence. One evening, she screamed, “I married a bird. Each time he comes back from one of his pub crawls, he’s lost a few more feathers! You come back from your drunken nights high as a kite and bury yourself in our basement, and you’re drowning here! You’re a bat, Ito Baraka! I’ve found work as a salesclerk, and a daycare for the kid. I’ll give you a little more time, a few weeks, to come to your senses!”
He again made all the promises he could think of, but a week later, he was fired from his teaching because he was screwing up, not performing well, giving his students half-hearted answers, bored with those dunces whose progress was as slow as the first steam locomotive. And the following winter, when Santou made the decision to leave him, he didn’t oppose it, because he told himself that it was better not to drag his companion and his son down with him. He considered asking for shared custody, but very quickly let that drop, because the judge wouldn’t be able to see how he could take care of the kid. Santou and little Ouyi moved to Toronto, far from the basement that reminded her of the failure and rot of their relationship. Ito Baraka found himself alone holding two sets of keys, and when he met Kimi Blue, he didn’t need to get copies made.
He saw his son two months ago. His last trip to Toronto. After having tea with Santou in a sadly silent apartment, he spent the afternoon with the teenager in a park behind some high buildings of dirty, cracking cement. Later, a fine rain took them by surprise, and they returned to the apartment. Before Ito left, a smiling Santou mentioned that their son was always first in his math class. She had won, Ouyi would not be like his father, an obscure, tortured playwright who swore only by Beckett and Pirandello. On the bus home, Ito Baraka fell into an uneasy sleep with the flask in the inside pocket of his coat. He was awakened later by a knee knocking against his. It belonged to a young traveller beside him, a noisy, fidgety boy with headphones that let through horrible, loud music.
Back in his hole, Ito drank more than usual to celebrate his son’s rescue by the gods of mathematics. He emptied a bottle and a half of his supply of Barbancourt rum that his friend Manuel had sent him from Port-au-Prince. And true to form, his belly reacted. Half doubled over, he managed to reach the bathroom, undid his belt, pulled down his red and white striped underpants and sat down on the toilet, his head between his knees. His hindquarters whistled, setting the tone for the party. He pressed his belly with his folded arms and the noise stopped and gave way to intense pain in his gut. He closed his eyes and tried to make them face that nothingness where everything ends. His trunk, neck, and head leaning forward, he began to sway to the left and then to the right, a choreography that always soothed him. He opened his eyes onto the floor and straightened up slowly, his back against the lid of the throne. The air was foul.
After getting cleaned up, Ito Baraka pulled his clothes up over his bare thighs, and with the most beautiful stoicism, got back up on his feet and, just as miraculously, made it to his work table. A hiccup came to torment him after the diarrhea, and he thought of Léon-Gontran Damas, the poet of French Guiana, whose childhood and past reappeared “in a hiccup shaking my instinct like a cop shaking a hoodlum.” He treated himself to another slug of rum and tried to write a scene.
31
Ito Baraka’s fingers are again numb with cold. The joints have been nicely rolled. Kimi shouldn’t be long. Ito straightens up and closes the notebook. If she were there, he would dictate the next part of his story to her. The bottle of rum is empty. He tries to measure the strength remaining in his stiff muscles and wonders, to what lofty thought he should devote that timid bit of energy. He picks up the notebook, and before his eyes, he sees the film of the last days he spent with Koli Lem.
***
Koli had decided it was time to organize my escape. My getaway. As if, in our situation, it would be child’s play to make a hole in the wall with my hand and just take off. On the other side of the fence, animal traps and ferocious beasts collected anyone in the camp who chanced that adventure, as the guards would remind us. I remember how, one evening, they’d brought back a runaway. They dragged him in by one leg, because the other one was a lump of bloody flesh, severed in mid-thigh by the long metal teeth of an animal trap. They hauled him back and left him to croak behind the huts, a good three days, at the end of which Providence, in the person of the head guard, came to his aid with a bullet in the head. Escape from the camp, repeated Koli, who must have had a plan.