back, I can’t even remember his face; I just know he had very dark, almost papery skin and a penis that was slightly crooked, but my father thought I was going to have a child with him. One, two, three children, and then people would be laughing at us. He was a member of the League of Communists and maybe in some newspaper from the sixties had even seen a yellow-suited Mrs Tito holding a skinny black boy in her lap, but the image didn’t stick in his memory. When the black man left, leaving the cup separated from its saucer, my father showed himself. Sometimes he slept at our place, mine and my son’s, out of habit, certainly – this, after all, was the family home – but also to keep an eye on me. Then he’d appear in the doorway bareheaded, with a slight droop in his shoulders, but still elegant. He wouldn’t say ‘I’m going for a walk’ or anything like that; he’d just stand there. Maybe he was thinking he should have incinerated my mother’s water-swollen body after all, instead of leaving it and hoping that putting it on view for a few days might help dry it out. Nothing changed; my mother remained as she had been. Big, indomitable, with her white, too white, skin, which now was literally mixed with water.
I touched the earlobe and then the earring. My hand, on its own, forced its way to the edge of the hole where the back of the iron or gold penetrates the flesh. I didn’t want to be the first to speak, and my father, too, was clearly at a loss.
‘We should call somebody to clean the pool,’ he finally said.
That, in fact, was my son’s job, by mutual agreement. But for a good while now I had not been able to count on him. He would shut himself in his room, lie on the bed with the headphones over his ears, and stare at the ceiling. If I had told my father to go call him so we could have a talk, he would have done it. But the double reproach against me would be too great. The black man was enough, and the way he brought the cup to his lips. I really did want to tell him everything, the story of my mother’s body in the pool, even the story of the just-opened salons, and most of all the story of how he had pulled something out of me that day on the stairs, but it didn’t seem like he’d be too interested. He had come here from London on business. That was it, that was as far as he would allow me. No more interlocking hands; the grass, too, was left far behind us. I stood up, started putting things away – the sugar bowl, the napkins, the big glass platter with a cake gleaming on top of it, and then suddenly my father struck his cane on the floor. The chandelier, the big, lavish chandelier from the nineteenth century, an heirloom I suppose, though I couldn’t say for sure from which side of the family, began to sway. The sound of the crystal travelled from my father to me and back again to my father. I knew what he wanted to say. That the house was mine, that’s a fact, but if only out of respect for my mother’s memory, I shouldn’t be bringing unusual individuals into it.
That’s how he talked, my elderly, bashful father, who, before undoing a woman’s side zip, would kiss her on the neck and all the way down to the shoulder. He made love in a way that escapes the present age. But all the same, I don’t know why my mother escaped him. Why she went deeper and deeper into the pool, despite not knowing how to swim. In fact, I don’t know why we even had it. The swimming pool, I mean, with the lotus blossoms. But I arrived after it. First there was water and then everything else.
I didn’t want to show my father he had hurt me. Not only by not knowing how to behave in front of a person whose skin was a different colour, but because he had let me be the first to find my mother and her floating brassieres. If anybody knew why she did it, he did. If she did it because of me, because she had no use for me, because I had not filled that space for her which should have been filled from the start but wasn’t, then my father must have suspected it. But at the scene of the crime he stood there as if it affected him least of all. His absent gaze swam through the water, just as now he was staring absently at the cup in my hand. We stood opposite each other, father and daughter unconnected by blood, with the now no longer swaying chandelier hanging between us. I hid behind my hair, hid even further inside myself, and went to the place where he had been playing his game earlier – that he was busy, maybe even a little deaf, and didn’t know I had a visitor.
I left the things on the counter, including the gleaming cake, and went out. For a short walk. By the time I returned, maybe my son would have taken off the headphones and stopped staring at a point on the ceiling. If he didn’t want to go to university, maybe he could help me with my business. There was, for example, a wedding set – dress hanger, photo album, and sachet of lavender, all in the same colour – which he had come up with himself. But when, in a surge of delight, I tried to hug him, he pushed me away.
In the park, the grass beckoned me to sit in it. I loved things like that, how the light reflects off the ground. I used to think my basic colour was metallic blue; even customers told me that that was where I was at my best, but it’s not true. It’s green. Exactly the kind of green it was on the day I waded into the swimming pool to pull my mother out. Even though it was all over, even though she only rarely, even in my childhood, ran her fingers through my hair. She preferred shutting herself in the kitchen with her brother, or in the sewing room with her brassieres. In the end those brassieres came to nothing. I pulled her by her dress, by her swollen fingers, and because she was too heavy, too stuffed with her unfulfilled life, I went to get a cane. In the meantime my father arrived; he used his hand, not to lift his hat, but to cover his mouth. I remember it clearly. An adult, elegant man, who could make poignant love to women, stands, elderly, next to the swimming pool, holds his hand over his mouth and does not move. I wanted to scream at him and knock his teeth out with the cane. This is the saddest scene in my life. It flooded me with homesickness for love, for old things, for the chandelier from the nineteenth century. But I didn’t strike him, at least not with the cane; maybe I did later with my unusual acquaintances. I merely dipped the cane in the water and used it to guide my mother’s corpse to the edge of the pool.
* * *
I couldn’t help looking at him. As he ate, bent over the plastic plate. He took me to a place he only went to once in a while. I could tell that from how he entered the restaurant. But it was nothing special. Walls painted a dirty blue, two benches on the side, a freezer in the far corner that was constantly being opened and closed, and behind the woman taking orders – ginger, bissap, bissap, ginger – the outline of a curtained window. I felt like everybody was looking at us, though nobody said anything. They spoke only with their eyes, and my eyes spoke back. And why not? Should I be like other elderly people who sit in remote villages and gaze into the fire and at certain rare moments think their life could have encompassed something other than simply what it is now? Or like the elderly lady who watches people’s faces through the window of a café, people too preoccupied to return her look? All my life I had lived the way other people wanted me to live, my mother, my father, my son, my ex-husband, my customers; all my life I had been the person they wanted to see. I could remember periods of my life lived through as somebody else, so now I had no need to pretend. So all those men sitting at that low table, and the woman by the window – I was able to return their gaze.
Ismael chose and I paid. This was the unspoken agreement between us. I knew he didn’t have any money, but it wasn’t about that. If he listened to my story, if he chose a sauce for me and walked beside me on the road, I could give him something in return. He hadn’t told me much about himself, other than his name, of course. In the bathroom he had mumbled something about living under a bridge and a lorry that had run over somebody, but I didn’t want to force anything out of him. When the time came, he’d tell me.
The sauce was steaming hot, too hot for me. The girl, who stood right next to our bench, started giggling when she saw I didn’t know how to eat tô, kneaded balls of dough soaked in sesame sauce. Ismael darted her a quick glance, and I thought that would be enough to make her leave, but because she was still standing there almost as if frozen, from youthful mischief I guess, Ismael’s hand made contact before she could get out of the way. She turned serious at once, started collecting the plates from the table, and then disappeared somewhere in the background. I imagine she went to a big plastic bucket filled with plastic plates. We continued in near silence, without needless commentary, without forks or knives, away
