beat against the wall really really slowly, that is enough for me to remember what it was like when Mama died. It is true I did not see her body, but that is still no reason for me not to believe it. Not long before they told me that a lorry had run her over – that it was really her, and not one of the night women or morning women – we had grown apart. Or maybe she had grown apart from me, I am not sure. It is possible that I was a burden to her. In our village seven-year-old boys are already responsible for themselves. They bite into green fruit, never meet their mama except in dreams, and eventually get used to her not being around and start paying attention to the things that are around. I do not know if at the same time they also forget that electric shock which makes you shudder when you realize that from now on you are completely alone in the world and there is no point crying since you have to learn how to survive.
What I wouldn’t have given then for a fistful of earth! Just to have somebody show me they wanted to take me home with them, or if not take me home then at least hug me, stroke my hair. But since nobody was around, I started counting trees, houses, people. Numbers drove me crazy. The good side of being completely alone was that I did not have to talk. Not with people and not with spirits. It was the spirits who told me the lorry ran Mama over because she had been standing in the road looking at me. We had been walking side by side, but suddenly space slipped in between us. Too much space for her not to sense it. Mama turned around, out of the blue, on impulse, like the crazy woman she was, and thought for a minute or two about what name to call to me with, but since I did not even have a name she could not call me, and that was when the lorry ran her over. That is the official version. Unofficially, we just went our separate ways, or rather, I was already old enough to choose my side of the road to beg on.
I went and joined the street kids – where else could I have gone? Street kids are children who huddle together at night and sleep under some leaky roof, or not, and during the day give directions to people on motorbikes or in cars on the road. They usually have a wet sponge and compass in their hands. When a car stops at a traffic light they show up like spirits. Some drivers get angry and wave them away with their arm, saying they do not want their windows cleaned, but then they let them do it anyway; others hurl insults at the boys, calling them vermin and little shits who only smear the windscreens on their precious cars; a few of them, however, will drop a coin into the big, too big, childish hand. And I liked them the best. They were usually women. Big, light-coloured women, whose skin smelled of lotion and the soft spray of air-conditioning. When they rolled down the window – I mean, they just pushed a button to do it – their other hand would drop twenty-five francs on the ground. They were always careful, of course, to avoid physical contact.
The money we begged we mostly spent on movies. I liked Indian and Mexican movies the best, where white people swapped miles and miles of spit. Burkinabe movies we saw only from a distance, from trees or on posters, and we got food from the night or day women. I felt respect for these women, not all of them, I mean, but mainly the ones who would first shout at us that we really were vermin and little shits but then would anyway wrap two or three sweet potato chunks in a piece of newspaper for us. A few were so generous they would sprinkle some crushed peppercorns on top, fried onion or a pinch of salt, too. One of them, who did this every time I showed up at her fire, though I did not show up there all the time since I did not want her to think I had bad manners, no sense of proportion – I chose to be my mama. She had big eyes and very dark skin, so sometimes in all that darkness I could barely find her. Once, when she moved her fire somewhere else, to the other end of the road, and I thought she had gone for good just like my Mama had, without calling to me before she left and saying ‘take care of yourself’ or at least ‘good luck’, my heart almost stopped beating. I felt like it was a dream or, later, when I started going to the cinema, like it was a movie. But then I saw her. She was standing there, among all the other night women, made from ebony and zealously, like someone who feels responsible for her family, who wants things to be good for her family, wrapping chunks of sweet potato in coarse paper. She would tear off a small piece of paper from a big sheet she had on the side, put the oily potato on top of it, sprinkle salt on it, and then wrap it up carefully. I would have to be looking at her from above for her to be more beautiful to me.
At that moment she lifted her face, as if she knew what I was thinking, smiled, although the smile was probably not meant for me so much but could be attributed to the night, the flickering lights around the two of us, the smell of burnt oil, which in us street boys always triggered enormous, insatiable hunger, and said, ‘Ismael, come closer.’ I ran to her as if flying and, in front of that big clay pot, which was throwing starry sparks into the air, nearly flung myself on my knees. Grateful, I guess, that somebody finally decided to call me by my name.
After the ebony woman wrapped a few thick potato chunks up for me, and I, in the darkest possible corner, obviously, so I would not have to share any, gulped it all reverently down, the newspaper was all I had left in my hands. I bent down over the letters, over the printed sentences, but at the last minute remembered that it would not be the taste of salt that stayed on my tongue, but the taste of ink. In our country newspapers are printed in the old, prehistoric way and the last time I licked a front page, I had a horrible, stinging pain. I scrambled to my feet and went over to the ebony woman. I stood right behind her back. For a few long minutes she did not say anything to me, did not even turn around. Maybe she thought I was just a moth and would soon enough fly away. Or she knew it was me and was pretending not to see me unfolding the paper over the lamp and moving my lips. I had learned quite a lot from the conversations of the idle lorry drivers I ran errands for, and from the shouts of newspaper hawkers. After endless pleading and sometimes even stolen bottles of beer they would draw the shapes of different letters on the ground, so that later I carried them around in my head and tried putting them together. I knew, for instance, how to write my name and the name of my mama, the one the lorry ran over. This made it easier for me to imagine her painful death. ‘A’ meant a body standing straight. ‘S’ was the approaching vehicle. ‘I’ depicted how she was about to be crushed. The other letters, which I didn’t know yet, spoke of how she went to join the spirits, from where she would never come back. At least not yet.
The ebony woman finally did turn around and look at me. She said, ‘Ismael, what are you doing? You’re blocking my light.’ I left, since I was not even supposed to be standing there, crumpled up the piece of newspaper and stuck it in my trousers. Walking along the road, past the cars, past houses and people I had registered long ago, I swore to myself that I would learn to make sentences, not just letters and words, but long weaving sentences, and would someday write it all down in the dust, in the ground, in the earth. And when somebody looks down at my writing from above, their heart, from all the beauty of it, will cling to their inner walls and simply stand still.
* * *
One night and half a day were enough for me to be seized with wolfish hunger. As far as I could extract from the receptionist, the hotel did not serve any breakfast, let alone lunch. My first thought was a petrol station, or at least a supermarket, but I suspected Ismael wouldn’t want to come along. I know it sounds pathetic that after nearly thirty-five years of living with emptiness you start thinking you can’t go to a shop by yourself. If there is a shop and if Ismael agrees to continuing our story.
On the stairs I hugged myself, wrapping my arms around my body. If he hadn’t been taking his time, hadn’t been sprawling across the bed, if he had been beside me, he would probably have asked if I was cold. Again I would have shaken my head, all the while thinking, I really have no right. At my age I should just be an observer. I would stay at that same hotel, swim my strokes morning and night, rest in-between, and when I wasn’t resting I would watch through the branches of the trees on the other side of the wall the joined heads of a young couple. Ismael would be walking slightly arched, because of the sun but especially because of desire, trying to conceal his slightly swollen penis, while her body would unconsciously touch his shoulder. I would see them through a gap in the wall, two or three times, and that would have to be enough. With some luck – my luck I mean, not theirs – I would invite them to join me for a glass of wine or milk. They would tell me their story of forbidden love and that would be enough for me. It
