was packing my and my son’s things, I suppose he had an inkling of, but could never imagine, the horror I felt at the thought of having to live the rest of my life with him in his navy blue sweater and corduroy jeans. Later he branded me a whore, although I had only let one man into my life, while he, in the twenty years since we divorced, fathered three other children all out of wedlock.
Despite everything, I tried to turn my face toward him, a man whose name I didn’t know. Nor did it seem like he meant to tell it to me. So there on the floor of the bathroom we were as people without names. If I suddenly got lost, I don’t know how he would call out to me. Tubabu? White lady? No, that was too impersonal for people who have slept in the same bed, touched elbows, know each other’s scent. When he was taking off his T-shirt, when he showed me his dark nipples and even the start of the pubic hair around his genitals, probably without even knowing it, that was when I last thought about my son. I mean really thought about him. For a moment I wished this man with the arms of a car mechanic, arms that could encircle the world in a single embrace, was still a child, but also still a man, my son. And that I could shut my eyes and forget the whole of my former life.
As I was leaving that room where the sun fell in longitudinal, right-angled lines – I remember it clearly, and also my husband’s navy blue sweater, which by the way is one reason he got along so well with my mother – I could foresee my future: my husband would condemn me for leaving because I’d supposedly fallen in love with someone else; in his view, I was abandoning my son, too, destroying one family in hopes of creating another. But my son, in my husband’s forecast, of course, would blame me not so much for that as for the fact that I couldn’t hold on to any man. He wouldn’t want to know, or would only pretend he didn’t, what they did with me or what I did with them; he would only want his father. His wilted, prematurely aged image, shown in the photograph the young man found in my bag in the hotel room, would thus be a story of overspreading his earliest memories of a shattered family.
He pressed himself to me as tightly as he could, his naked belly against my back, and if in the background day was beginning to dawn, in that region there was only darkness. I laughed – what relief to feel this mass of pulsating flesh so close to me. His circulation was probably not what it should have been. Or what it was when he was sitting on the roof of the empty house. Not a lot of people lived inside it, he said later, after we stood up, after our bodies recovered from all the closeness, but you could see the entire world from its roof. It was most beautiful, he thought, during the harmattan season, when the farmers clear land to prepare new fields for cultivation. The animals run from the fire, and if you’re lucky, in the evening hours you see burning birds as they try to escape the flames. They hover for a while like phoenixes, until eventually the fire sucks them in. But before he started spewing out such sentences, I turned toward him in utter seriousness and caressed his face with my fingers.
I was about to ask him where that nearly empty house was located, in which a man and a woman lived, a couple, though it was still nearly empty, and how it got that way and what burnt grass smelled like, but then I bit my lip and felt the residue of the lipstick that had seeped into my pores clinging to the back of a tooth. I licked my lips and, as I was already at it, thought I might as well go into the cavity of his mouth, too. But when I finally got up the nerve, he swayed back, from his shoulders and neck. His skin, too, I thought, went grey, and because it went grey, he had obviously not been expecting this. And why should he? You sit down on a bathroom floor out of compassion, behind a body in decline, which after a brief silence turns toward you and tries to kiss you. For a while he just stared, not at me but somewhere in the distance, and then with his gleaming hand touched me on that spot where, like a ship run aground, I rested the weight of my entire body. If the same motion had been made by the man in the corduroy jeans on which the sun beamed down that afternoon, everything would now be different. But because he did not make that motion, things are as they are.
* * *
Now this is true. I often used to think about how things looked from above. Ouagadougou, for instance. Although I have never flown in the sky, I have seen millions of lights in my dreams. Most of them paraffin lamps. When women, the kind of women my Mama once was, would sit in the road and start heating up the oil. In the meantime, they would peel the red skin off the potatoes and laugh. I see them curling their upper lips and showing their gums. In Ouaga, there are two kinds of women – the ones who leave for the market at the crack of dawn and the ones who don’t carry stuff on their heads until it gets dark. My Mama did not do either. She would sit under the bridge and pick her teeth. Whenever I started crying, she would take a fistful of earth mixed with dust and other filth and shove it in my mouth. Once I got a big piece of plastic caught in my throat but I happily swallowed it down, digested it, and later passed it.
In my dreams I never land. But if I fly too long, my body starts getting cold. My internal organs start failing one after the other, the way the paraffin lamps come on in the evening. Sometimes I go almost to the end, but often I stop somewhere at the lungs. If I really did ever go right to the end, I am not sure if I would wake up again. Or if the women with the crackling fire, in which they gingerly place chunks of sweet potato, would be able to wake me up. I survived my mama, and if I survived her, and not only her but all those bridges we slept under, then I have to survive my own dreams too. When it gets to the point where my heart starts to beat against the wall really really slowly, that is enough for me to remember what it was like when Mama died. It is true I did not see her body, but that is still no reason for me not to believe it. Not long before they told me that a lorry had run her over – that it was really her, and not one of the night women or morning women – we had grown apart. Or maybe she had grown apart from me, I am not sure. It is possible that I was a burden to her. In our village seven-year-old boys are already responsible for themselves. They bite into green fruit, never meet their mama except in dreams, and eventually get used to her not being around and start paying attention to the things that are around. I do not know if at the same time they also forget that electric shock which makes you shudder when you realize that from now on you are completely alone in the world and there is no point crying since you have to learn how to survive.
What I wouldn’t have given then for a fistful of earth! Just to have somebody show me they wanted to take me home with them, or if not take me home then at least hug me, stroke my hair. But since nobody was around, I started counting trees, houses, people. Numbers drove me crazy. The good side of being completely alone was that I did not have to talk. Not with people and not with spirits. It was the spirits who told me the lorry ran Mama over because she had been standing in the road looking at me. We had been walking side by side, but suddenly space slipped in between us. Too much space for her not to sense it. Mama turned around, out of the blue, on impulse, like the crazy woman she was, and thought for a minute or two about what name to call to me with, but since I did not even have a name she could not call me, and that was when the lorry ran her over. That is the official version. Unofficially, we just went our separate ways, or rather, I was already old enough to choose my side of the road to beg on.
I went and joined the street kids – where else could I have gone? Street kids are children who huddle together at night and sleep under some leaky roof, or not, and during the day give directions to people on motorbikes or in cars on the road. They usually have a wet sponge and compass in their hands. When a car stops at a traffic light they show up like spirits. Some drivers get angry and wave them away with their arm, saying they do not want their windows cleaned, but then they let them do it anyway; others hurl insults at the boys, calling them vermin and little shits who only smear the windscreens on their precious cars; a few of them, however, will drop a coin into the big, too big, childish hand. And I liked them the best. They were usually women. Big, light-coloured women, whose skin smelled of lotion and the soft spray of air-conditioning. When they rolled down the window – I mean, they just pushed a button to do it – their other hand would drop twenty-five francs on the ground. They were always careful, of course, to avoid physical contact.
The money we begged we mostly spent on movies. I liked Indian and Mexican movies the best, where white people swapped miles and miles of spit. Burkinabe movies we saw only from a distance, from trees or on posters, and we got food from the night or day women. I felt respect for these women, not all of them, I mean, but mainly the ones who would first shout at us that we really were vermin and little shits but then would anyway wrap