must have suspected it. But at the scene of the crime he stood there as if it affected him least of all. His absent gaze swam through the water, just as now he was staring absently at the cup in my hand. We stood opposite each other, father and daughter unconnected by blood, with the now no longer swaying chandelier hanging between us. I hid behind my hair, hid even further inside myself, and went to the place where he had been playing his game earlier – that he was busy, maybe even a little deaf, and didn’t know I had a visitor.
I left the things on the counter, including the gleaming cake, and went out. For a short walk. By the time I returned, maybe my son would have taken off the headphones and stopped staring at a point on the ceiling. If he didn’t want to go to university, maybe he could help me with my business. There was, for example, a wedding set – dress hanger, photo album, and sachet of lavender, all in the same colour – which he had come up with himself. But when, in a surge of delight, I tried to hug him, he pushed me away.
In the park, the grass beckoned me to sit in it. I loved things like that, how the light reflects off the ground. I used to think my basic colour was metallic blue; even customers told me that that was where I was at my best, but it’s not true. It’s green. Exactly the kind of green it was on the day I waded into the swimming pool to pull my mother out. Even though it was all over, even though she only rarely, even in my childhood, ran her fingers through my hair. She preferred shutting herself in the kitchen with her brother, or in the sewing room with her brassieres. In the end those brassieres came to nothing. I pulled her by her dress, by her swollen fingers, and because she was too heavy, too stuffed with her unfulfilled life, I went to get a cane. In the meantime my father arrived; he used his hand, not to lift his hat, but to cover his mouth. I remember it clearly. An adult, elegant man, who could make poignant love to women, stands, elderly, next to the swimming pool, holds his hand over his mouth and does not move. I wanted to scream at him and knock his teeth out with the cane. This is the saddest scene in my life. It flooded me with homesickness for love, for old things, for the chandelier from the nineteenth century. But I didn’t strike him, at least not with the cane; maybe I did later with my unusual acquaintances. I merely dipped the cane in the water and used it to guide my mother’s corpse to the edge of the pool.
* * *
I couldn’t help looking at him. As he ate, bent over the plastic plate. He took me to a place he only went to once in a while. I could tell that from how he entered the restaurant. But it was nothing special. Walls painted a dirty blue, two benches on the side, a freezer in the far corner that was constantly being opened and closed, and behind the woman taking orders – ginger, bissap, bissap, ginger – the outline of a curtained window. I felt like everybody was looking at us, though nobody said anything. They spoke only with their eyes, and my eyes spoke back. And why not? Should I be like other elderly people who sit in remote villages and gaze into the fire and at certain rare moments think their life could have encompassed something other than simply what it is now? Or like the elderly lady who watches people’s faces through the window of a café, people too preoccupied to return her look? All my life I had lived the way other people wanted me to live, my mother, my father, my son, my ex-husband, my customers; all my life I had been the person they wanted to see. I could remember periods of my life lived through as somebody else, so now I had no need to pretend. So all those men sitting at that low table, and the woman by the window – I was able to return their gaze.
Ismael chose and I paid. This was the unspoken agreement between us. I knew he didn’t have any money, but it wasn’t about that. If he listened to my story, if he chose a sauce for me and walked beside me on the road, I could give him something in return. He hadn’t told me much about himself, other than his name, of course. In the bathroom he had mumbled something about living under a bridge and a lorry that had run over somebody, but I didn’t want to force anything out of him. When the time came, he’d tell me.
The sauce was steaming hot, too hot for me. The girl, who stood right next to our bench, started giggling when she saw I didn’t know how to eat tô, kneaded balls of dough soaked in sesame sauce. Ismael darted her a quick glance, and I thought that would be enough to make her leave, but because she was still standing there almost as if frozen, from youthful mischief I guess, Ismael’s hand made contact before she could get out of the way. She turned serious at once, started collecting the plates from the table, and then disappeared somewhere in the background. I imagine she went to a big plastic bucket filled with plastic plates. We continued in near silence, without needless commentary, without forks or knives, away from the street, though that was merely for shade. I was glancing toward the exit, carrying tiny bits of food to my mouth, and then stopped. I should have been sitting somewhere else right then. Also on a bench, also in some out-of-the-way place, but with an elderly man across from me, who wouldn’t close his eyes when he ate, and who wouldn’t insist that I open my mouth so he could stick a well-kneaded ball of sauce-drenched dough into it.
I hesitated. Not even my husband at the beginning was this gentle and bold at the same time; not even my son as a child was this playful. But I leaned forward all the same, and I too closed my eyes. The street disappeared, taking with it all those fleeting people who didn’t return my gaze. Then the bracelets on my arm jangled, and because all I could see were golden circles in front of my eyes, it was easy to imagine the path the kneaded food would take as it entered me. I would never have done anything like this at home, I mean let a man two and a half times younger than me, in an overcrowded restaurant, slip food into my mouth that I myself wasn’t able to put inside me, but Ismael was at home here and he was doing it all the same. In front of his own people, despite not being a regular at the restaurant.
I must have blushed as he put it in. From the neck up. It’s true that in these new surroundings I wanted to shed my repulsive snake skin and wanted maybe to shed other words, not my own, the words I used to ensnare customers, but all the same, in one of the concentric circles I saw that even within these dirty blue walls with the window and the woman taking orders in the background I wouldn’t be able to be everything I could be. Because if I was all of it, I’d burn out, evaporate into the air. Like the fleeting motorcyclists on the street. They were there for a while, and then gone. Like the girl who was giggling and showing her dark-blue gums – I’d heard that African girls do that, I mean pierce their gums with sharp metal, which is supposed to make them more attractive to potential suitors – until Ismael’s hand put a stop to her giggling.
My shoulders flinched and I moved out of the way of Ismael’s attempt to put the thing inside me. I know that, to some extent, I don’t feel responsible here for what I do. I can even tell myself I’m living a phantom life, almost like in a novel. The faces that hover at eye level and the plate somewhere below the shoulders of this young man, who is compassionately attending to the old lady across the table, are merely the work of the imagination, of something never realized, something unsated. And even the girl, who isn’t laughing at all anymore, who is simply bending over a washbasin filled with soapy water, is the same as the rest of us. I thought it made sense to get up and check. If I found her in the back and if she was doing what I thought she was doing, then I was right. We all live only the life we want to live. Even me, I ended up here not because my memory was going fuzzy on me, as my father, or my ex-husband or my son would say, but rather because it’s what I wanted. I went to a café one day; I could just as easily have gone to the countryside where people were lighting fires, but I went to a café. Leaning with my elbows on the table, I touched my earlobe. I was born without lobes, but all the same every so often I wear earrings. The waiter stood in front of me asking if I wanted my espresso short or long, just as Ismael was asking me now if I wanted ginger or bissap to drink, when I moved my hand toward the edge of my face. The earring wasn’t there. Emptiness. I took off the other drop earring, and what really annoyed me wasn’t that I’d lost it but that I hadn’t noticed the imbalance in myself.
Without answering, I stood up and ran out, onto the street where people were in motion. But first I had to glance in the rooms at the back, at the giggling girl. I told Ismael I was going to the bathroom; he replied that they didn’t have any bathroom here, the restaurant wasn’t on that level, and if I had to go I should wait until we reached the hotel, although his words held no meaning for me anymore. After I left the café, I mean the restaurant, my only thought was that I had to start everything over, start from the beginning, almost to the point