and a phase of decline. But I think he must have read that somewhere; he didn’t come up with it himself. His old man was not an albino and even read things. Sometimes at night he would sit on the terrace and if he wasn’t reading he would listen to jazz. ‘Kind of Blue’ and that sort of bollocks. However you look at it, Malik’s old man was not so stupid. I think he even knew what Malik and I were up to, but he never said anything. Well, once he said we were going through that sort of phase and should make the most of life.
Make the most, man. I would rather make the most of that old lady from the market. I tell you, she should have stayed in her hotel and this would not be happening to us. I wouldn’t have to run in the hot sun and Malik wouldn’t be giving me signals to make a move already or he will rip my head off.
I turned to look at her one more time across the avenue. She may have been in the decline phase but she still had decent calves, nicely shaped, somewhat muscular thighs, and her arse did not sag. She was showing it off in a pair of dark three-quarter trousers. White ladies, from what I have been able to see of them, are always doing things like that. Wearing something that knocks you sideways. A low-cut top with a dark-red lacy bra underneath, or a little chain around the ankle. Because of the yellow bag it was not erect yet, which would really have been too much, to have to sneak into some filthy toilet and wank off over somebody like that, but in the end I could not rob her anyway. All the time it was going through my head that after we grabbed that thing off her she would just sit on the ground and start crying. And I hate crying women, like I hate marbles in the eyes and shaky hands. With all their gold rings and credit cards, the only thing they have left is fear. That alone is sometimes enough to make me want to put holes in them. They go out, leave everything at the hotel, take some black dude with them just in case, a local if possible, who just happens to stuff his passport in his pocket, although not necessarily by chance since only Allah knows how much he went through to get that document, which I don’t blame him for at all, and then they watch to see which corner somebody’s going to jump out of. But it was noon and the market was crowded, like it only gets at noon, and that changed everything. So I shook my head one more time to Malik. Yesterday we lost the motorbike and now it’s going to be our heads. And when I get a feeling, or should I say a jab, near a chamber of my heart, that is another sure sign. But Malik did not understand. Like he never understood what ‘Kind of Blue’ was all about. Night after night he would sit with his old man on the terrace but all he would think about was naked chicks and how he was going to stop doing small jobs and start doing big ones.
When the jab was punching me from behind my ribs, so strong I almost blacked out, I made up my mind. I would walk over to the woman and try to start a conversation. Carry your bag, Madame? Are you hot, Madame? Shall we go to the hotel, Madame? They love that sort of sweet stuff. I think Malik’s old man knows that too, how to approach white ladies. I think he must have brought back ‘Kind of Blue’ from over there. For a few months he was on a waiting list for a visa and would hang around the airport in Ouaga, until finally he hid in a wooden crate. After a few days of crouching in the dark without water he realized it was sheer rubbish, as he told me with his legs stretched out and his arms dug in somewhere behind his neck, me nodding the whole time like I knew about it, like I had spent countless heat waves crouched on a scant square metre, so he climbed out and turned himself in to the authorities. Deportation was followed by sitting on the terrace. But that too, how I got on with Malik’s old man, I will talk about some other time. Now the question was how to get that yellow bag in my hands. Nicely. Because knives at the belly is fucked up. I do not want to do that anymore. I have got to give it up, Malik’s titties or not. Let him make the most of them if he wants, I have a new day dawning; I don’t know what or how exactly, maybe I will train as a tailor; I’ve been invited, but I will see. First I need to take care of this marbly-eyed white woman in front of me. To get her over from the other side of the street and then lightly, invisibly, brush against her. If she smells good, I will get myself invited to her hotel – if she does not talk too much. But I do not think she will talk too much.
* * *
How did I know how old he was? Well, I didn’t. I didn’t have a clue who I was dealing with or what he wanted from me. Especially not after he fell asleep. I don’t think he knew either. These people can be unpredictable. Just when you think you understand them they do something unexpected. The cab driver at the airport, for example, instead of driving me to the market took me to meet his family. When I hinted that I had to pee, he waited for me by the road, as if from then on he would be my comforter, lover, and bodyguard. That’s also more or less how he introduced me to his family later, despite meeting me for the first and last time only that day. When I asked where I could wash my hands and pointed to the right, he nodded; when I pointed to the left, he nodded again. For him, there was water in the sky and water beneath the earth. He probably saw cloudy water even in me, which is why, after lots of persuading, fifteen cups of oversweet tea, and endless handshaking – how is your family? how are your children? how is your house? – he ended up dropping me in front of some building named after Gaddafi. Then I lugged my bag past insane drivers stirring up clouds of dust – I had arrived in Ouagadougou right at the start of the dry season, which the tourist brochure said was the best time to visit sub-Saharan Africa; the rainy season meant impassable roads, mosquitoes, regular power outages, and so on – past vendors selling butchered meat on which swarms of flies were grazing, big dark flies with green bellies; past troops of children who were trying to attract attention with empty, rusted tomato-paste tins – eventually I realized the tins were not so much functional but were mainly status symbols – past tall, slender women with dark, shiny skin, who sliced vegetables on their open palms.
Somewhere about halfway to the market, beneath a row of acacia trees, I leaned against the edge of a roadside wall with my bag and lit a cigarette. As I puffed out smoke I realized this was that opposite thing I had desired. To leave the silence I’d been cocooned in the past few months; to leave my relationship with my son, which had destroyed, no, not destroyed, but crumbled something in me. He was about the same age as the young man I would meet a few hours after that cigarette. And last but not least, I desired also, or especially, to leave my relationship with my aged father.
I called him that, though he wasn’t in fact my real father. He and my mother, who also wasn’t my real mother, adopted me when I was about three and a half. One afternoon when they were fed up with waiting, or rather my father was, since my mother was always a calm, quiet, too quiet, woman – when he was fed up with putting it in her soft, white, too white, body with no result. And so they came. Not all that far, really. I was sitting with my legs stretched out in the middle of a big, only half-whitewashed room in the orphanage. Shoeless, in a sort of baggy dress, which in fact had been sewn from remnants of the cloth they used to cover the potatoes in the cellar to keep them from sprouting. I’m not entirely sure what happened to the potatoes later; they probably ended up raw and blackened, with all their attendant outgrowths, in our stomachs, and so clothed us on the inside too. And in fact I don’t remember their faces either, which gazed at me expectantly. I could say that her face was kinder, more promising, than his. But I only see this now, from a distance. Back then I suppose I was lucky that they even crossed the threshold of the orphanage, that they even wanted me. Nobody asked if I wanted them. That’s how times were back then and that’s how it happened.
As I leaned on the wall by the road, at least ten people offered me a lift to the market, but I shook my head at each one in turn. Even before I’d finished my cigarette, one woman, a huge, dark-skinned woman with a great dome of batik cloth on her head, rolled down the car window and with two fingers let me know that what I was doing wasn’t good. That it did not set a good example. I don’t know if I can describe her gesture effectively, but it certainly had an effect on me. My first reaction was to turn red; then I realized I’d have to get used to a man nodding yes when you ask if the bathroom is on the left and doing the same when you point to the right, and I would also have to get used to non-privacy. I suppose that’s what I wanted. I suppose I wanted to cleanse myself of the blue light that filtered into my workroom from the garden. The cushioned chair, the table in the corner, and the view through the window. A static sight where only the birds changed; eventually it started getting on my
