what was happening in reality was hunger. Even in the hotel room I was thinking about a big chunk of bread slathered in butter, and on the stairs I could hardly wait to step into the street. When Ismael finally appeared, he walked behind me, behind my back, so our shadows only halfway overlapped. People who saw us probably thought we were a boy from the street and an old lady tourist shopping for bracelets on the street. We were all of that and everything else too.
‘Ismael, will you wait for me outside?’
Now that I knew his name it was constantly on my lips. That made me feel safer, closer to him.
‘I am going in.’
I gazed at my reflection in the glass door, at Ismael’s reflection, and at once understood that not only was he willing to continue our story but for my sake would even step from one world into another. Earlier, on the stairs, it occurred to me that the real question wasn’t so much our different skin colours, or even the age difference, the main thing was, we came from different worlds. Ismael was the product of the African street, and also, in places, burnt grass, the harmattan, the harmattan season’s flaming birds, while the supermarket we were about to enter was the personification of camouflaged puritanism, of an imaginary and overrated evolution. I hoped, of course, that one night and half a day would be enough for me to forget where I came from, and even where I was going.
I bent forward slightly, accidentally touching Ismael’s shoulder, and rummaged through a miniature version of the yellow bag. Money, sunglasses, the keys I used to lock my father and his lady friend in the garden, a pack of cotton tissues; everything was still there. And Ismael, meanwhile, with his arched penis was offering me shelter.
When we finally walked into the supermarket, Ismael for a moment – though I might be wrong of course – held his breath. From all the blinding whiteness, from the spray of the air conditioning, from the vigilant looks of the security guards. Bottom to top. They probably did not imagine we were a random, fleeting couple who on the other side of the tree branches could barely take cover in our desire.
‘Choose what you want,’ I said in a lowered voice, as if hiding something, as if I cared about those people who were looking us over.
He nodded and went to the newspaper racks. For a moment I lost sight of him; I picked up a shopping basket next to the checkout and when I turned around his body was bent slightly toward the glass display case and he was peering at one of the covers. It was obvious he was reading. Slowly, with a kind of raptness, he moved his lips; he would clench his fist when he hit a snag and relax his hand when his reading started to flow again. But he never once moved his arms. They hung from his T-shirt like cut-outs, next to his body. It occurred to me that there was something distinctly incongruous in his pose. I shifted my eyes to below his waist, hoping to find the answer to such a coexistence of fervour and remoteness, desire and repulsion, but there was nothing there that might betray him, that might betray us, and tell a story of forbidden love. We were like all the other tourists who shop for bracelets on the street and like all the other boys from the street. Emboldened, I lifted my head, straightened my shoulders, and went to get my chunk of bread slathered in butter. If that was possible, I would ask the man in the white apron. He leaned across the counter and put on a serious face, as though the matter between us was strictly confidential. We both, it seemed, belonged to the world of brighty-lit streets, sparkling bathrooms, and cut flowers in vases. I might have added pets on leashes, too, only I wasn’t sure about this anymore. Maybe pets, at least for this Arab, were part of some now-unimaginable world. Later, when I’d been a few times in this or some other supermarket in Ouaga, when I wasn’t preoccupied by Ismael’s arms, I discovered the hierarchical structure of the employees: business was run exclusively by Arabs and carried out exclusively by blacks.
The belly behind the counter gave a sudden leap. No, he doesn’t do that. Doesn’t slice bread and spread butter on it. When I was a child we’d sprinkle minced nettle on top, too, but it wasn’t my childhood unfolding here, but my sunset.
‘Let’s go somewhere else,’ Ismael whispered to me.
Somewhere we can eat our fill. If at that moment I was sitting by a plastic table, on a plastic chair, in the hotel, right after swimming and just as I was about to turn my eyes toward the tree and then, farther, toward the hotel wall, which allowed the life of the street to enter only through aestheticized gaps, I could not have wished for a gentler bow from a man who, despite the air conditioning and the perfumed space, despite all the sterileness emanating from that space, smelled of cars, of dust from the street, and so represented the negation of the Cartesian, rational, sophisticated world. And I myself, when I put the shopping basket back on the stack and pushed my way past queues of other hungry Cartesians – the fact that only representatives of the light-skinned race can allow themselves the luxury of a supermarket in Africa is, after all, hardly in dispute, and if Africans do show up in one it’s because they have just run out of some expensive soap or powdered milk – I had now stepped out of it. If I had renounced the pillows on the sofa, renounced the view of the garden, renounced my own father, I could renounce this as well. Outside, in the wide-open light, where it was different from earlier, different from when we went in, where you could sense a kind of muffled hue, something between brick and gold, between calm and quiet, though it was possibly all due to the wind, which weaved around our ankles and then higher and higher, I took off my striped H&M jacket and draped it on Ismael’s shoulders. That would make it clearer who we were and where we were going. Now he no longer walked behind me; his shadow was no longer overlapping mine only halfway, but fully. Somewhere below his waist I also glimpsed the edge of a newspaper in his hand. Then we walked on, in silence and in sunlight.
* * *
My father was my first love, despite everything. A small, elegant man, who raised his hat to every female acquaintance. His arm in the air burnt bridges, removed earrings, undid the side zips on skirts. So it’s all the more peculiar that he never made any of them a child. He had only me, or more to the point, I had only him. He supported me when I opened my studio and when I left my husband. He did not oppose either of these actions, but I also knew he did not approve of them. His lips remained sealed; they only unsealed when one day from somewhere I brought a black man home. At first he just hid in the house, as if he was looking for something and had even forgotten that I was sitting with a black man at the solid-wood dining table drinking tea. While the water for the teapot was heating up, I wondered whether I shouldn’t tell my father about that encounter on the stairs. But he wouldn’t have understood, nor probably would the black man, who had picked up the cup, not by the handle, but with his entire hand and was slowly lifting it to his lips.
By then, my mother was long dead. She had floated away with her brassieres. Literally. One winter afternoon she carried the things she had sewn on her sewing machine down into the pool. We should have cleaned it, but nobody could be bothered since the grime was penetrating deeper and deeper. I don’t know where everyone was, I don’t know where I was, when my mother walked down the steps into the sludgy water. Lotuses were floating on top, and moss had overgrown the sides of the pool. Later I made wallpaper on that theme, a whole series of wallpapers in a shade of green. Some of my customers told me that when they entered the salon they felt like they were under water. And in fact we were – my mother and I, I mean. I found her lying on the surface with her face turned toward the bottom. I dropped the things in my hands and ran to the pool. Even now I don’t know how I understood in a moment that the floating hair and scattered brassieres signified the end. Of everything. Not just eavesdropping at the door when my mother’s brother came for a visit, sniffing the leather gloves in the hallway, and so on, but also the end of things from my later, grown-up years. If I remember correctly, even my father, for a few moments back then, stopped greeting female acquaintances with his hat in the air.
I was the one who then got the house with the garden and the pool. I was trying to explain to the black man how this had happened. We had known each other an eternity but it never went further than lying in
