know, I think...’
I started feeling hot, like I was plugged into 220 volts, or like somebody had hung me upside down in the sun. If my skin was white, as white as hers or her son’s, I would probably not get freckles but blisters. As it was, my eyes merely bulged out of their sockets.
‘God, you’re adorable,’ she said, and laughed my Auntie’s laugh. ‘Do you really think I’m going to let you wash me?’
It was like that one in her bag was laughing at me too. Like he curled his lips and then suddenly turned around and stuck his arse in my face. Fuck. I would slice it off him if I could. And I would also slice off those delicate shoulders, those thighs and that belly stuffed with European shit – Coca-Cola, chewing gum, hamburgers and I do not know what else. Because that photo does not tell you the entire story; if you don’t know about such things you would not even notice that the dude has a problem. But I knew about them and my dick swelled up. She was not even undressed but there it was already. ‘Your son is a queerboy, isn’t he?’ I blurted out in a moment of inspiration.
I thought she would say something different. Like ‘go fuck yourself’ or ‘you have got to be kidding’. When she admitted it right away, I was stunned. I just stood in that bathroom, pressed against the ceramic tiles, and tried to keep my eyes focused on her back. If at that moment I had taken the sponge she held out to me and started massaging her sensitive skin with tender strokes – she’s the one who said it was sensitive – then this thing now would not be happening to us. Basically, for the first time in the entire history of my short life, I would have touched white skin. And if I had touched her on the back I would have touched something else too. But now it all turned to scheisse. I will probably never eat chocolate with seventy per cent cocoa or wear a gold watch, at least not in the country where that Nigerian who forgot about my Auntie works up and down from one end to the other. More than once I heard her crying at night behind that gauzy sheet. When she realized my eyes were open, that I was listening, she said, go to sleep, Ismael, go to sleep, it has nothing to do with you. But if it had nothing to do with me, then how did I end up now with this woman in a five-star hotel?
‘Well, what did you think? That I would have a nap, give you a massage, then magnanimously stick it in you? And do not give me that shit that black men have no feelings, that we all live in tribal communities...’
I would have kept going if she had not just sat down on the floor, right on the ceramic tiles. Her back wasn’t in the mirror anymore, not even her half-tousled hair, let alone those stars sprinkled across her back. If I took a step or two away, I would still have seen them sparkling. But I stood very close, so close I had no choice but to sit on the floor too. I wrapped my legs and arms around her belly from behind. She did not move; she did not show that she knew where such an embrace would lead. I pressed my legs a little harder, held her waist a little tighter, and listened to see if maybe she had stopped breathing. And since I still did not hear anything, I thought it best if I held my breath in too. That’s sort of how it was with us. Complicated, I tell you.
* * *
In my own city I would rise at the crack of dawn. I loved the electrified morning sky that descended on the houses, the backs of cyclists, the sidewalks the cyclists were riding on. I was doing things that didn’t require me to go anywhere. I mean, I went from the house to the garden with a cup of Japanese tea and watched the birds, who were sometimes scared off by a passing train, or sometimes just by me going back into the house, but I never had to stand in front of a mirror. To get dressed, put on makeup, go to work.
After graduating from the academy I went to England, to the Brighton School of Art, and was soon working in my own studio. In those days people looked at me as if I fell out of the sky. My parents, especially, expected me to follow a more traditional path: to work for Labod or some other garment manufacturer. Mura or something. My mother projected all her unfulfilled dreams on me. To appease her, I took a job at a factory whose name it’s best I don’t mention. For a month, two months, three, I crouched in a foetal position over the women who worked there, whom I called into my office for a talk and whose wages I was forced by circumstances to lower, until one day one of them took her clothes off in front of me right in the office. I looked away and was already reading the director’s letter in my mind, where he noted that I possess definite artistic talent but no organizational skills at all, or rather, no sense of teamwork.
After that minor scandal it made no sense for me to stay there. One morning I decided to use my savings to rent a studio flat – in England it’s called a ‘studio’, in our country a ‘bachelor’ – and started working. I started by hand-printing a few scarves and selling them to Mama’s friends. Until one of them realized she wanted an armchair printed in eucalyptus leaves. And even before I had a clear idea of what eucalyptus might look like, even before I embarked on this journey of long, slender leaves, which I printed in a shade of red on a dark lilac background, which later became my trademark, I was getting more serious commissions. Not from Mura or Labod, of course – I was too fiery for them – but from a shop in London I worked with during my year of postgraduate study. But that had been a happy time, so happy that, especially when I look back on it, maybe it never happened.
In my studio I worked, slept, ate, and made love. And when in the morning my lovers woke up on top of me, next to me, under me, I would draw their bodies on paper in my mind. Some were eucalyptuses, but really, only some of them; others were ferns, with broad, fluttery, dark-green leaves that covered the entire surface of my body. Birch leaves gave me the greatest trouble, believe it or not, although my favourite were the bougainvillea blossoms. I discovered them fairly late, if memory serves, not until my last months at the Brighton school. I was living with a lady who kept food for her eighteen-year-old cat in the fridge next to the dinner leftovers. From time to time her relatives came to see her and they’d get a close-up look at the Yugoslavian miracle. More often, black men came to see her. I bumped into one of these men one afternoon on the staircase. He was wearing tight jeans and a polo shirt. Outside the summer was dazzling but we were surrounded by darkness. It was one of those staircases with a winding bannister. Although there was enough room for us to quickly say hello and go around each other, he pressed me against the wall. It felt like he put his dark hand inside me, carved something out of me, then pulled his hand out again palm down. It didn’t last long, it couldn’t – the lady appeared at the door and was calling out his name. Her voice rolled down the steps toward us, and a second later the man was at the top of the staircase.
Outside, when I stepped into the summer glare, tears started flowing. What the lady was doing with them, or what they were doing with her, remained a mystery to me even long after I returned home. But I saw the man pottering around the flat a few times; I suppose he came into my room, too, washed the windows, hoovered, made the bed, if I hadn’t done it in my morning rush, and then went out again. He remained a man without a name, the man in tight jeans, which hung off his backside. If, although it’s unlikely since the light in the stairwell never did work, but even so, if somebody had turned the light on, the man might well have vanished. His face was dark and his hand, which reached somewhere near my heart, was as dark as a tropical night. Later, whenever I saw laundry hanging idle in the sun, I thought of him. Because of the contrast, I mean, between the flickering air and the motionless pieces of cloth pasted on it.
It was about fifteen or twenty years before I moved from the studio into my parents’ house, and from fashion textiles to interior design. I found my niche designing textiles. That sounds simple but it wasn’t. Orders from shops in London, Paris, and Hong Kong started coming in only after I had shed a little blood. Especially in my private life – isn’t that what people call it? When I was young we didn’t divide life into public and private, as though living in some novel. Which is also probably why I put my table next to the window that looked into the garden and upholstered the antique chair with one of my cushions. Sometimes when I looked from the birds in the branches over to the glass door on the left I could catch the blue pouring inside. Toward my feet and then up the wall. It was from the electrified sky, I suppose,
