summon me to finally do what we’d come there to do, but he just bent down, picked up the bag from the floor and, as if it was nothing, as if those plastic flowers and that somewhat shabby rug and that silk bedspread were nothing, handed it to me. I held it to my breast as if holding a child. ‘If you are cold, can I give you my shirt?’
I shook my head. I don’t know if he understood me, since the very next moment, in a quick yank, he pulled the thin fabric over his head and stood there like that before me. All I remember is his fur, that thick dark fur, spreading up from his genitals to his belly and almost to his neck. It had never really occurred to me that black men could be hairy, at least not this much.
In this scene, this mute, timid, almost palpitating scene of expectation, in which anything could happen and anything be denied, a third person would have been helpful. But since none was around and since the moment was lasting too long, I leaned over to him and accepted the sweaty T-shirt with two fingers.
‘Please don’t use vous with me.’
‘No?’
Again I shook my head. Surely by now he understood what I meant. My son used to break out laughing. Especially when he was little. Years later he told me that all through his childhood he thought his mother had a mane. A lion’s mane, if you can imagine. And maybe this mane was also why the young black man was stroking my face with his hand. His big warm hand, checking to see if that forehead, those hollows for the eyes, and that nose weren’t just pasted on me. Cut out of cardboard and pasted there. I wanted to tell him that my son was the same age he was so it would be better if he used tu with me, but I found myself, when he turned away from my face, went over to the window and closed the heavy velvet curtains, preferring to stare at his backside. I suppose Madonna needed fifty years to get buttocks like that; I probably won’t manage that even in the next life.
‘The hotel’s not too bad,’ I said, to finally say something. ‘Only the way the receptionist was looking at us...’
He waved his arm as if to say, stop right there, it’s not worth continuing. And when he moved nearer the bed, when his shadow was again thickening over mine, I realized he reminded me of someone. Someone who was no more, but who through him, through those jeans hanging off his backside, through his long fingers, was again inhabiting me. Ever since I left home, scrubbed the floor, fluffed the pillows, pushed the chairs in around the table, and locked the garden door, he had been with me. So this encounter, or rather, this looking at each other in the street, did not happen because I was carrying a yellow bag and he was wearing his warm, too warm, skin and his inside-out buffalo heart, but because we had in fact been pasted together all this time. It was only here, in this landscape without clouds, without tall grass or lions in the grass, that we could unpaste ourselves and stand on opposite sides of the street. Maybe I’m crazy but I believe in such things. But if I am crazy, then the face of this man who carried my bag for me to a nearby hotel, who, after drinking water from the fridge, took off his T-shirt, and then closed the curtains and fell asleep, does not exist at all, and so neither do I.
* * *
Malik wanted us to rob the woman. He pointed her out to me at the market; I mean her yellow bag. When it came to this sort of thing we did not need to talk. Eye contact and a gesture or two were enough. Then like polecats we followed the silhouette, which stopped a little here, a little there, until we came to an open area and all became clear. Malik was always the one in front; I, more often than not, was watching his back. If things were going wrong, I would make somebody trip or try to draw attention to myself. But with this woman, I mean her yellow bag, I knew it would not be easy. She seemed like she was made of cotton and if Malik bumped into her with that heavy body of his, she would just collapse. I did not have the feeling she’d scream or anything like that. But I could imagine her just dropping on the sidewalk and starting to cry. And I hate stuff like that. Malik once told me I was a pussy. He pounded his chest and called me names. ‘You must to be bastard. If you are no bastard, dey will crush you. Dis here is Ouagadougou, dude. Dis here is no your bush.’
Malik’s blather was a lot of nonsense. I had been living in this city long enough to feel like I was born here. Other people my age on the street, I would tell them it happened under a bridge; what bridge I don’t remember exactly, but it was definitely here, in the city. So Malik was more of a bushman than me. But back in the market it was not about that.
Then, I wanted to tell him I really did not feel so much like nicking that woman’s bag, and besides, I thought she was a little too white, a little too soft, like those pillows you see on TV in some white lady’s fucking bedroom or living room – men and women sit on them like they’re dreaming, like that is all they know, all they can think of, and of course they think all us other people also live like them; meanwhile, we other people are only dreaming their dreams – and I was still tired from the night before. I really did not feel so much like running two to four miles in the hot sun, which is what the usual robbery required. Last night, for example, it did not make any sense. And we lost the motorbike too. Malik got stoned before it all started so I doubt he could even see where he was going. Otherwise he probably would not have tried it with that white woman. Her hands were shaking, her eyes went all marbly, like she was going to kick it any minute. I think what scared her most were Malik’s pink lips and the pink blotches on his face, like a star had exploded there. Maybe I’ll talk about his skin disease some other time, but not now; now I have to say something else too: that the white woman – an American, Belgian, Flemish woman, how should I know? – wasn’t there by herself; a black dude was standing next to her. And because of him, that fucker, I told Malik, do not stop the bike, but that is exactly what he did. He rammed it into the dirt, got off and walked over to them, like it was nothing. Like he just wanted to ask for a light. And before they could count to three they had knives at their bellies. We took the dude’s trousers off and frisked his arse, but he didn’t have anything there, not even a thousand francs.
The people walking by looked away like it was none of their business – when the same thing happens to them, no one will give a shit either – and bam, that’s when I got the feeling things would not turn out good for us, that something smelled funny. But last night I let Malik go through with it all the same. And the way he went through it was we ended up with no motorbike and no dough; all we got off the dude was his passport, which we really could not do anything with. All we could do was wait two or three days and then put it into circulation.
And now the same thing could happen here. There’s nothing in that woman’s yellow bag but tissues, a bottle of warm water, and a credit card. And somewhere in the background waits Dude No. 2. A little scrawnier and with his thing dangling, but still a black dude who can run, who wants to run, even with his trousers undone. Because last night, when people were strolling past, the dude with the passport and no dough decided to risk it. The Flemish woman almost passed away, and I can just see her laying into him back at the hotel. Saying what a bastard he is, the biggest arsehole alive. The point being that when he was running off to get help with his trousers undone, I could have sunk my knife into her belly. I did feel her up a little, I admit. Beneath her top, behind her bra, to see if she was hiding anything. But she wasn’t. And the one from the market, too, who is right now in front of us, she has probably done it too. Stuck fifteen, twenty thousand francs behind her bra, but those things of hers are in their last days – kaput is what Malik would call them. His old man once told him, a woman goes through two periods of life: a phase of growth and a phase of decline. But I think he must have read that somewhere; he didn’t come up with it himself. His old man was not an albino and even read things. Sometimes at night he would sit on the terrace and if he wasn’t reading he would listen to jazz. ‘Kind of Blue’ and that sort of bollocks. However you look at it, Malik’s old man was not so stupid. I think he even knew what Malik and I were up to, but he never said anything. Well, once he said we were going through that sort of phase and should make the most of life.
Make the most, man. I would rather make the most of that old lady from the market. I tell you, she should have stayed in her hotel and this would not be happening to us. I wouldn’t have to run in the hot sun and Malik wouldn’t be giving me signals to make a move already or he will rip my head off.
I turned to look at her one more time across the avenue. She may have been in the decline