only that he had reached the point where a woman was ready to sacrifice everything for him. He was not thinking about the little girl; nor later, on those rare occasions when he happened to be at home and in a quick glance caught her eyes in the front hall mirror, and maybe even saw something in them of the loneliness that belongs only to people, adults or children, trapped in an empty room, not even then did he think about her. This was all part of the contract; the tea, too. In the kitchen, after my mother and her brother left it, as my mouth was cleaning the tiny elongated glasses in which they had drunk their schnapps and, in the front hall, the unintentional killer was pulling on the detective gloves and clenching the umbrella under the arm of the trench coat, I noticed a spot of blood on the chair where my mother had been sitting. Because I didn’t know if it was a polka dot from her dress or an actual stain, maybe because I didn’t want to know, I sat down on it and waited for my mother to return.
When she opened the kitchen door, paned in a heavy yellowish glass through which you could see the outlines of people and objects on the other side, so I was sure that my mother and her brother knew about my eavesdropping but in their self-absorption forgot they should tell me to go away, she was the same as before. Slightly out of breath, slightly tousled hair, but still with the same pencil-drawn shoulders as always, with dark shading on just one side. It occurred to me we could even be related by blood, that this woman in front of me could even be my mother, but, fortunately, that was impossible. I leaned over, as my father had once leaned over long ago, who had tried, quite unsuccessfully of course, to get away from her, and picked my toy up from the floor, pushed the chair in so the housekeeper wouldn’t have to, and ran upstairs.
* * *
I will not deny there’s been a lot of water under the bridge since I last put it in somewhere, and the pressure was mounting. It’s also possible of course that last time I did not do a good job of it. The girl – who could not have been more than seventeen, maybe sixteen even, and you know what girls that age taste like: watermelon, warm, soft and wet – she and I were hiding behind a movie projector. It was an outdoor cinema, and since I was focusing too much on her trousers, I was not really following the movie. Before it all started, before the girl, whose face I don’t remember but then she probably doesn’t remember mine either, signalled to me that she knew a hiding place where we would be covered in darkness – not total darkness, because she probably would not have done it if it was total darkness – I heard they were going to show a Yugoslavian movie. When her trousers were down at her knees, I saw a man on a horse. And when she sighed and I knew she liked it and had done it before, and would certainly do it again, some black bloke with soft features was digging into an old lady’s wall. This same old lady was somehow connected to the other bloke, who had been riding the horse on the prairie. Like you’d expect in a cowboy movie, lots of guns were going off, and then mine went off too. At the same moment I put my hand over the watermelon’s mouth, probably more to keep myself quiet than her, but she wriggled out of my hold – I do not know what else to call the position we were in, one leg tightly around another as we kept checking to make sure nobody saw us. She ran off into the dark, away from the jumpy screen, and when I tried to follow her with my eyes, at least to see what she looked like from behind, she did not leave any cloud of dust behind her like there was behind the horse’s tail in the movie.
Obviously I had been too rough; obviously I was too much into it and that scared her. Or at the last minute she decided she really should not be doing this, that it was the last time and she would never do it again. In any case, I was almost crippled down there, not because I expected so much from that watermelon, but because there had been a whole lot of water under the bridge since my previous love-making too. That is what it’s like in Ouaga, or should I say that is what it’s like in Ouaga if you live on the street. Every twelve miles or so somebody takes pity on you, like that girl did behind the movie projector. Who knows, maybe she had a fight with her ex, or maybe she just liked the way I smelled. That is what women say in this city. They chase after this or that man because they like the way he smells, although basically they too are doomed to waiting. They think the ideal man is a man with a lorry. It used to be that men went off to hunt in the forest, but today they order lorries from Europe. Even if what they get from the Lebanese dealer is some beat-up hunk of metal, they hammer it, smooth it out, rewax it. I know because I have done it. Morning to night I used to bang cheap cars together. When I looked at the sun and the sun looked at me, my head would spin like I was going crazy. But it spins even more when I think about how I could not put it in right. How I just put it in somewhere in the folds of our trousers and then stupidly sprayed the both of us.
When the girl disappeared into the night with her trousers half down and my penis throbbing in pain, I don’t know why but I thought of a lorry lying in the road. Nobody can pick it up, not the police and not the army; only the birds can. And the natural enemies of beautiful women. That is how they see it, I think, though my watermelon was not one of the most beautiful ones. Despite the darkness between us, I could see her all the same. Malik would probably say, Big for nothing! It was the only English sentence he knew by heart. But at least Malik knew how to get things moving in the right direction; he never had to go through any dry season. Sometimes he would say his English sentence with such enthusiasm that women thought he must be from Nigeria. It might not be true that all Nigerians are in the Mafia, but it is true that most of the Nigerians in Ouaga have money, and for Ouaga women that is what counts. The smell of money. I think that’s what the Yugoslavian movie with the horse and the black bloke was mainly about. The black bloke digs and digs in the old lady’s flat, and meanwhile she tells him a story about saddles with no cowboys in them. There were two brothers and a woman, although I do not really get the point of that Yugoslavian-Macedonian triangle. Here we have polygamy for things like that, but now I’m just making it up because I didn’t see how the movie ended. The boys told me later that the black bloke gets on an aeroplane with some white girl and you just know he is going to put it in her.
I pulled up my trousers and went over to them. They were smoking 57s and laughing their heads off in front of the jumpy screen. Most of them cannot read the subtitles so they make up stories as it goes along. A day or two later they are still telling them to each other. In tattered overalls, even more tattered than the movie screen, as they crawl beneath the corpses of cars or take engines apart. When I was a teenager I wanted to be just like them – they looked like adults to me, with their big rags tucked in their pockets, or wearing jeans which they always put one pair over another mainly to hide their scrawny lion-fleeing legs. Banging cars together, waxing, screwing on pipes end to end – in reality that was all more of a side business; the main stuff came later, at night. So when I was opening up that watermelon, I was just doing what they did. I copied their movements, pulled down my trousers just like they did, and even the words I whispered in the watermelon’s ear were the same as their words. The whole time I was somebody else, and it was not until I sat down on one of the benches around the movie screen that it dawned on me: I wanted to be somewhere else – not here. I stared at the screen. The names of the actors and a few other blokes scrolled across it, then suddenly the picture gave a jump and went out. The official part of the show was over, although for me it had not even started. I realized that it was not so much the girl I wanted, but her warmth, her moistness, her softness. I wanted to touch something other than banged-out metal. For a few weeks I had been one of the links in the long chain of car repair – a trivial, sun-blackened link; now suddenly I did not know anymore how long I could stand it.
I suddenly found myself missing Malik, missing his slightly clunky smile, his slightly clunky albino appearance. If he had been there I would have bought him a beer, and in exchange he would have driven me around the city all night on his motorbike. He called it the naked moto. He pinched it somewhere and stripped its skin off so the previous owner would not recognize it. If he was riding by himself he would usually lie down on the seat with his face forward and try to pump the last atoms of horsepower from the engine. Sometimes the naked moto could even run on fumes, but Malik was nowhere around at the moment. I filled my nostrils with the aroma of the cigarette the boy on my left was smoking; then I leaned forward with my hands on my thighs and stood up. Since I did not know what to do with myself, I stared into the dark for a while, then turned my back to the screen. Somebody – I do not know
