were so generous they would sprinkle some crushed peppercorns on top, fried onion or a pinch of salt, too. One of them, who did this every time I showed up at her fire, though I did not show up there all the time since I did not want her to think I had bad manners, no sense of proportion – I chose to be my mama. She had big eyes and very dark skin, so sometimes in all that darkness I could barely find her. Once, when she moved her fire somewhere else, to the other end of the road, and I thought she had gone for good just like my Mama had, without calling to me before she left and saying ‘take care of yourself’ or at least ‘good luck’, my heart almost stopped beating. I felt like it was a dream or, later, when I started going to the cinema, like it was a movie. But then I saw her. She was standing there, among all the other night women, made from ebony and zealously, like someone who feels responsible for her family, who wants things to be good for her family, wrapping chunks of sweet potato in coarse paper. She would tear off a small piece of paper from a big sheet she had on the side, put the oily potato on top of it, sprinkle salt on it, and then wrap it up carefully. I would have to be looking at her from above for her to be more beautiful to me.
At that moment she lifted her face, as if she knew what I was thinking, smiled, although the smile was probably not meant for me so much but could be attributed to the night, the flickering lights around the two of us, the smell of burnt oil, which in us street boys always triggered enormous, insatiable hunger, and said, ‘Ismael, come closer.’ I ran to her as if flying and, in front of that big clay pot, which was throwing starry sparks into the air, nearly flung myself on my knees. Grateful, I guess, that somebody finally decided to call me by my name.
After the ebony woman wrapped a few thick potato chunks up for me, and I, in the darkest possible corner, obviously, so I would not have to share any, gulped it all reverently down, the newspaper was all I had left in my hands. I bent down over the letters, over the printed sentences, but at the last minute remembered that it would not be the taste of salt that stayed on my tongue, but the taste of ink. In our country newspapers are printed in the old, prehistoric way and the last time I licked a front page, I had a horrible, stinging pain. I scrambled to my feet and went over to the ebony woman. I stood right behind her back. For a few long minutes she did not say anything to me, did not even turn around. Maybe she thought I was just a moth and would soon enough fly away. Or she knew it was me and was pretending not to see me unfolding the paper over the lamp and moving my lips. I had learned quite a lot from the conversations of the idle lorry drivers I ran errands for, and from the shouts of newspaper hawkers. After endless pleading and sometimes even stolen bottles of beer they would draw the shapes of different letters on the ground, so that later I carried them around in my head and tried putting them together. I knew, for instance, how to write my name and the name of my mama, the one the lorry ran over. This made it easier for me to imagine her painful death. ‘A’ meant a body standing straight. ‘S’ was the approaching vehicle. ‘I’ depicted how she was about to be crushed. The other letters, which I didn’t know yet, spoke of how she went to join the spirits, from where she would never come back. At least not yet.
The ebony woman finally did turn around and look at me. She said, ‘Ismael, what are you doing? You’re blocking my light.’ I left, since I was not even supposed to be standing there, crumpled up the piece of newspaper and stuck it in my trousers. Walking along the road, past the cars, past houses and people I had registered long ago, I swore to myself that I would learn to make sentences, not just letters and words, but long weaving sentences, and would someday write it all down in the dust, in the ground, in the earth. And when somebody looks down at my writing from above, their heart, from all the beauty of it, will cling to their inner walls and simply stand still.
* * *
One night and half a day were enough for me to be seized with wolfish hunger. As far as I could extract from the receptionist, the hotel did not serve any breakfast, let alone lunch. My first thought was a petrol station, or at least a supermarket, but I suspected Ismael wouldn’t want to come along. I know it sounds pathetic that after nearly thirty-five years of living with emptiness you start thinking you can’t go to a shop by yourself. If there is a shop and if Ismael agrees to continuing our story.
On the stairs I hugged myself, wrapping my arms around my body. If he hadn’t been taking his time, hadn’t been sprawling across the bed, if he had been beside me, he would probably have asked if I was cold. Again I would have shaken my head, all the while thinking, I really have no right. At my age I should just be an observer. I would stay at that same hotel, swim my strokes morning and night, rest in-between, and when I wasn’t resting I would watch through the branches of the trees on the other side of the wall the joined heads of a young couple. Ismael would be walking slightly arched, because of the sun but especially because of desire, trying to conceal his slightly swollen penis, while her body would unconsciously touch his shoulder. I would see them through a gap in the wall, two or three times, and that would have to be enough. With some luck – my luck I mean, not theirs – I would invite them to join me for a glass of wine or milk. They would tell me their story of forbidden love and that would be enough for me. It would have to be.
But what was happening in reality was hunger. Even in the hotel room I was thinking about a big chunk of bread slathered in butter, and on the stairs I could hardly wait to step into the street. When Ismael finally appeared, he walked behind me, behind my back, so our shadows only halfway overlapped. People who saw us probably thought we were a boy from the street and an old lady tourist shopping for bracelets on the street. We were all of that and everything else too.
‘Ismael, will you wait for me outside?’
Now that I knew his name it was constantly on my lips. That made me feel safer, closer to him.
‘I am going in.’
I gazed at my reflection in the glass door, at Ismael’s reflection, and at once understood that not only was he willing to continue our story but for my sake would even step from one world into another. Earlier, on the stairs, it occurred to me that the real question wasn’t so much our different skin colours, or even the age difference, the main thing was, we came from different worlds. Ismael was the product of the African street, and also, in places, burnt grass, the harmattan, the harmattan season’s flaming birds, while the supermarket we were about to enter was the personification of camouflaged puritanism, of an imaginary and overrated evolution. I hoped, of course, that one night and half a day would be enough for me to forget where I came from, and even where I was going.
I bent forward slightly, accidentally touching Ismael’s shoulder, and rummaged through a miniature version of the yellow bag. Money, sunglasses, the keys I used to lock my father and his lady friend in the garden, a pack of cotton tissues; everything was still there. And Ismael, meanwhile, with his arched penis was offering me shelter.
When we finally walked into the supermarket, Ismael for a moment – though I might be wrong of course – held his breath. From all the blinding whiteness, from the spray of the air conditioning, from the vigilant looks of the security guards. Bottom to top. They probably did not imagine we were a random, fleeting couple who on the other side of the tree branches could barely take cover in our desire.
‘Choose what you want,’ I said in a lowered voice, as if hiding something, as if I cared about those people who were looking us over.
He nodded and went to the newspaper racks. For a moment I lost sight of him; I picked up a shopping basket next to the checkout and when I turned around his body was bent slightly toward the glass display case and he was peering at one of the covers. It was obvious he was reading. Slowly, with a kind of raptness, he moved his lips; he would clench his fist when he hit a snag and relax his hand when his reading started to flow again. But he never once moved his arms. They hung from his T-shirt like cut-outs, next to his body. It occurred to me that there was something distinctly incongruous in his pose. I shifted my eyes to below his waist, hoping to find the answer to such a coexistence of fervour and remoteness, desire and repulsion, but there was nothing there that might betray him, that might betray us, and tell a story of forbidden love. We were like all the other tourists who shop for bracelets on the street and like all the other boys from the street. Emboldened, I lifted my head, straightened my shoulders, and went to get my chunk of bread slathered in butter. If that was possible, I would ask the man in the