confidential. We both, it seemed, belonged to the world of brighty-lit streets, sparkling bathrooms, and cut flowers in vases. I might have added pets on leashes, too, only I wasn’t sure about this anymore. Maybe pets, at least for this Arab, were part of some now-unimaginable world. Later, when I’d been a few times in this or some other supermarket in Ouaga, when I wasn’t preoccupied by Ismael’s arms, I discovered the hierarchical structure of the employees: business was run exclusively by Arabs and carried out exclusively by blacks.
The belly behind the counter gave a sudden leap. No, he doesn’t do that. Doesn’t slice bread and spread butter on it. When I was a child we’d sprinkle minced nettle on top, too, but it wasn’t my childhood unfolding here, but my sunset.
‘Let’s go somewhere else,’ Ismael whispered to me.
Somewhere we can eat our fill. If at that moment I was sitting by a plastic table, on a plastic chair, in the hotel, right after swimming and just as I was about to turn my eyes toward the tree and then, farther, toward the hotel wall, which allowed the life of the street to enter only through aestheticized gaps, I could not have wished for a gentler bow from a man who, despite the air conditioning and the perfumed space, despite all the sterileness emanating from that space, smelled of cars, of dust from the street, and so represented the negation of the Cartesian, rational, sophisticated world. And I myself, when I put the shopping basket back on the stack and pushed my way past queues of other hungry Cartesians – the fact that only representatives of the light-skinned race can allow themselves the luxury of a supermarket in Africa is, after all, hardly in dispute, and if Africans do show up in one it’s because they have just run out of some expensive soap or powdered milk – I had now stepped out of it. If I had renounced the pillows on the sofa, renounced the view of the garden, renounced my own father, I could renounce this as well. Outside, in the wide-open light, where it was different from earlier, different from when we went in, where you could sense a kind of muffled hue, something between brick and gold, between calm and quiet, though it was possibly all due to the wind, which weaved around our ankles and then higher and higher, I took off my striped H&M jacket and draped it on Ismael’s shoulders. That would make it clearer who we were and where we were going. Now he no longer walked behind me; his shadow was no longer overlapping mine only halfway, but fully. Somewhere below his waist I also glimpsed the edge of a newspaper in his hand. Then we walked on, in silence and in sunlight.
* * *
My father was my first love, despite everything. A small, elegant man, who raised his hat to every female acquaintance. His arm in the air burnt bridges, removed earrings, undid the side zips on skirts. So it’s all the more peculiar that he never made any of them a child. He had only me, or more to the point, I had only him. He supported me when I opened my studio and when I left my husband. He did not oppose either of these actions, but I also knew he did not approve of them. His lips remained sealed; they only unsealed when one day from somewhere I brought a black man home. At first he just hid in the house, as if he was looking for something and had even forgotten that I was sitting with a black man at the solid-wood dining table drinking tea. While the water for the teapot was heating up, I wondered whether I shouldn’t tell my father about that encounter on the stairs. But he wouldn’t have understood, nor probably would the black man, who had picked up the cup, not by the handle, but with his entire hand and was slowly lifting it to his lips.
By then, my mother was long dead. She had floated away with her brassieres. Literally. One winter afternoon she carried the things she had sewn on her sewing machine down into the pool. We should have cleaned it, but nobody could be bothered since the grime was penetrating deeper and deeper. I don’t know where everyone was, I don’t know where I was, when my mother walked down the steps into the sludgy water. Lotuses were floating on top, and moss had overgrown the sides of the pool. Later I made wallpaper on that theme, a whole series of wallpapers in a shade of green. Some of my customers told me that when they entered the salon they felt like they were under water. And in fact we were – my mother and I, I mean. I found her lying on the surface with her face turned toward the bottom. I dropped the things in my hands and ran to the pool. Even now I don’t know how I understood in a moment that the floating hair and scattered brassieres signified the end. Of everything. Not just eavesdropping at the door when my mother’s brother came for a visit, sniffing the leather gloves in the hallway, and so on, but also the end of things from my later, grown-up years. If I remember correctly, even my father, for a few moments back then, stopped greeting female acquaintances with his hat in the air.
I was the one who then got the house with the garden and the pool. I was trying to explain to the black man how this had happened. We had known each other an eternity but it never went further than lying in the grass, nibbling on triangle sandwiches, and in moments of confusion interlocking our fingers. Looking back, I can’t even remember his face; I just know he had very dark, almost papery skin and a penis that was slightly crooked, but my father thought I was going to have a child with him. One, two, three children, and then people would be laughing at us. He was a member of the League of Communists and maybe in some newspaper from the sixties had even seen a yellow-suited Mrs Tito holding a skinny black boy in her lap, but the image didn’t stick in his memory. When the black man left, leaving the cup separated from its saucer, my father showed himself. Sometimes he slept at our place, mine and my son’s, out of habit, certainly – this, after all, was the family home – but also to keep an eye on me. Then he’d appear in the doorway bareheaded, with a slight droop in his shoulders, but still elegant. He wouldn’t say ‘I’m going for a walk’ or anything like that; he’d just stand there. Maybe he was thinking he should have incinerated my mother’s water-swollen body after all, instead of leaving it and hoping that putting it on view for a few days might help dry it out. Nothing changed; my mother remained as she had been. Big, indomitable, with her white, too white, skin, which now was literally mixed with water.
I touched the earlobe and then the earring. My hand, on its own, forced its way to the edge of the hole where the back of the iron or gold penetrates the flesh. I didn’t want to be the first to speak, and my father, too, was clearly at a loss.
‘We should call somebody to clean the pool,’ he finally said.
That, in fact, was my son’s job, by mutual agreement. But for a good while now I had not been able to count on him. He would shut himself in his room, lie on the bed with the headphones over his ears, and stare at the ceiling. If I had told my father to go call him so we could have a talk, he would have done it. But the double reproach against me would be too great. The black man was enough, and the way he brought the cup to his lips. I really did want to tell him everything, the story of my mother’s body in the pool, even the story of the just-opened salons, and most of all the story of how he had pulled something out of me that day on the stairs, but it didn’t seem like he’d be too interested. He had come here from London on business. That was it, that was as far as he would allow me. No more interlocking hands; the grass, too, was left far behind us. I stood up, started putting things away – the sugar bowl, the napkins, the big glass platter with a cake gleaming on top of it, and then suddenly my father struck his cane on the floor. The chandelier, the big, lavish chandelier from the nineteenth century, an heirloom I suppose, though I couldn’t say for sure from which side of the family, began to sway. The sound of the crystal travelled from my father to me and back again to my father. I knew what he wanted to say. That the house was mine, that’s a fact, but if only out of respect for my mother’s memory, I shouldn’t be bringing unusual individuals into it.
That’s how he talked, my elderly, bashful father, who, before undoing a woman’s side zip, would kiss her on the neck and all the way down to the shoulder. He made love in a way that escapes the present age. But all the same, I don’t know why my mother escaped him. Why she went deeper and deeper into the pool, despite not knowing how to swim. In fact, I don’t know why we even had it. The swimming pool, I mean, with the lotus blossoms. But I arrived after it. First there was water and then everything else.
I didn’t want to show my father he had hurt me. Not only by not knowing how to behave in front of a person whose skin was a different colour, but because he had let me be the first to find my mother and her floating brassieres. If anybody knew why she did it, he did. If she did it because of me, because she had no use for me, because I had not filled