behind me, but I didn’t turn around. In the long, narrow room where I was temporarily staying, the only thing waiting for me was a mattress full of bedbugs. And above it, a poster of Pamela Anderson. I had paid a lot for it, but as I walked back from town with my hands in my pockets and kicking up stones in front of me, I decided to take it down. I decided that time had run out on us, me and Pamela. There was nothing original about our life together; it was just a copy of something we thought we were supposed to live. Later, back in the room, I stood the bedbugs on end and fell asleep on a plastic mat. If anybody was looking down at me from the sky, they would think I was a lorry lying in the road, which neither the army nor the police could pick up, though maybe the birds could, flying over my head and soothing the sun in my mind.
* * *
After the embrace on the bathroom floor, we each looked in different directions. His hands were just below my breasts, along the line where the flesh starts to curve and rises into the air. How to describe this embrace? Initially, it was about compassion; I know that. Compassion for my slightly sagging figure and my lips with too much lipstick. The lipstick, in fact, I had partly licked off, some of it the wind had taken, and the rest had seeped into my pores. That’s what I was thinking about, that’s all I was thinking about, when I was looking in my own direction. He probably thought I was thinking about my son, the queerboy, as he called him, but I had already thought about him too much anyway.
I grabbed hold of the edge of the sink. The most sensible thing, I thought, would be to stand up, for us both to stand up and bring this mute scene to an end, but he pulled me back down. His arms tightened, his veins bulged, and it was not until I indicated that we could also stay as we were that they returned to the normal rhythm of his circulation. In fact, I don’t really know how it is with the body – when, exactly, does it start to decline, when does it surrender to that cold blast of wind, not asking, not hoping anymore, that things might change for the better? The only comfort is the here and now, which becomes the best you’ve got. That’s also why I understood that our sitting here on the bathroom floor was half-caricature: an old woman with a young man behind her. I wanted to at least turn around, look him in the face and ask his name. And after he told me his name, I would ask him to tell me the names of his mother and brothers and sisters. He seemed too alone to have anyone, to have anything, but you never know.
Like I didn’t know who it was I was marrying when I got married. In a long satin gown, which had a scorpion drawn on it but only at the groin. So I played by the rules. Which is why I divorced by the rules. As far as I was concerned. As far as my ex-husband was concerned, I left because I couldn’t do without. A woman like me should be content with physical intimacy, tenderness, comradeship, closeness, and other such rubbish. If anyone should have left because the passion had gone out of our marriage, it should have been him. One afternoon, as the sun fell at a right angle into the room and I was packing my and my son’s things, I suppose he had an inkling of, but could never imagine, the horror I felt at the thought of having to live the rest of my life with him in his navy blue sweater and corduroy jeans. Later he branded me a whore, although I had only let one man into my life, while he, in the twenty years since we divorced, fathered three other children all out of wedlock.
Despite everything, I tried to turn my face toward him, a man whose name I didn’t know. Nor did it seem like he meant to tell it to me. So there on the floor of the bathroom we were as people without names. If I suddenly got lost, I don’t know how he would call out to me. Tubabu? White lady? No, that was too impersonal for people who have slept in the same bed, touched elbows, know each other’s scent. When he was taking off his T-shirt, when he showed me his dark nipples and even the start of the pubic hair around his genitals, probably without even knowing it, that was when I last thought about my son. I mean really thought about him. For a moment I wished this man with the arms of a car mechanic, arms that could encircle the world in a single embrace, was still a child, but also still a man, my son. And that I could shut my eyes and forget the whole of my former life.
As I was leaving that room where the sun fell in longitudinal, right-angled lines – I remember it clearly, and also my husband’s navy blue sweater, which by the way is one reason he got along so well with my mother – I could foresee my future: my husband would condemn me for leaving because I’d supposedly fallen in love with someone else; in his view, I was abandoning my son, too, destroying one family in hopes of creating another. But my son, in my husband’s forecast, of course, would blame me not so much for that as for the fact that I couldn’t hold on to any man. He wouldn’t want to know, or would only pretend he didn’t, what they did with me or what I did with them; he would only want his father. His wilted, prematurely aged image, shown in the photograph the young man found in my bag in the hotel room, would thus be a story of overspreading his earliest memories of a shattered family.
He pressed himself to me as tightly as he could, his naked belly against my back, and if in the background day was beginning to dawn, in that region there was only darkness. I laughed – what relief to feel this mass of pulsating flesh so close to me. His circulation was probably not what it should have been. Or what it was when he was sitting on the roof of the empty house. Not a lot of people lived inside it, he said later, after we stood up, after our bodies recovered from all the closeness, but you could see the entire world from its roof. It was most beautiful, he thought, during the harmattan season, when the farmers clear land to prepare new fields for cultivation. The animals run from the fire, and if you’re lucky, in the evening hours you see burning birds as they try to escape the flames. They hover for a while like phoenixes, until eventually the fire sucks them in. But before he started spewing out such sentences, I turned toward him in utter seriousness and caressed his face with my fingers.
I was about to ask him where that nearly empty house was located, in which a man and a woman lived, a couple, though it was still nearly empty, and how it got that way and what burnt grass smelled like, but then I bit my lip and felt the residue of the lipstick that had seeped into my pores clinging to the back of a tooth. I licked my lips and, as I was already at it, thought I might as well go into the cavity of his mouth, too. But when I finally got up the nerve, he swayed back, from his shoulders and neck. His skin, too, I thought, went grey, and because it went grey, he had obviously not been expecting this. And why should he? You sit down on a bathroom floor out of compassion, behind a body in decline, which after a brief silence turns toward you and tries to kiss you. For a while he just stared, not at me but somewhere in the distance, and then with his gleaming hand touched me on that spot where, like a ship run aground, I rested the weight of my entire body. If the same motion had been made by the man in the corduroy jeans on which the sun beamed down that afternoon, everything would now be different. But because he did not make that motion, things are as they are.
* * *
Now this is true. I often used to think about how things looked from above. Ouagadougou, for instance. Although I have never flown in the sky, I have seen millions of lights in my dreams. Most of them paraffin lamps. When women, the kind of women my Mama once was, would sit in the road and start heating up the oil. In the meantime, they would peel the red skin off the potatoes and laugh. I see them curling their upper lips and showing their gums. In Ouaga, there are two kinds of women – the ones who leave for the market at the crack of dawn and the ones who don’t carry stuff on their heads until it gets dark. My Mama did not do either. She would sit under the bridge and pick her teeth. Whenever I started crying, she would take a fistful of earth mixed with dust and other filth and shove it in my mouth. Once I got a big piece of plastic caught in my throat but I happily swallowed it down, digested it, and later passed it.
In my dreams I never land. But if I fly too long, my body starts getting cold. My internal organs start failing one after the other, the way the paraffin lamps come on in the evening. Sometimes I go almost to the end, but often I stop somewhere at the lungs. If I really did ever go right to the end, I am not sure if I would wake up again. Or if the women with the crackling fire, in which they gingerly place chunks of sweet potato, would be able to wake me up. I survived my mama, and if I survived her, and not only her but all those bridges we slept under, then I have to survive my own
