a mother and her nearly thirty-year-old son living in the same house together. Everywhere you hear people railing against homosexual couples, but no one talks about the chauvinistic and racist relations in traditional families. What would supporters of the conservative camp say about my father’s behaviour toward my mother? He took all the money she earned sewing undergarments and scattered it to the winds. Later she had to ask him to give her something for nylons! What would they say about my son, who for several weeks sat in his room burning photographs from his childhood in a metal jug. When the photos ran out, he started in on my exquisite printed pillows. The tree leaf prints from different species burned like nobody’s business. Even later, after he was admitted to the mental hospital and given electro shock therapy, the black mark was still on the ceiling. I didn’t repaint; I didn’t want to touch anything anymore. His shirts, too, I left hanging in the wardrobe. Maybe he’ll return one day and want to find his things just as he left them.
The only thing I did after he left was to occasionally play a CD of his on the CD player. But that gloomy environmental music scared away the birds in the garden. So then I would just lay my head on the worktable and fall asleep. My customers, who’d been calling like mad, eventually stopped.
When my father rang the doorbell one afternoon, saying he wanted to introduce me to his new lady friend, who simply adored my stuff and would love it if I could decorate her flat for her – with silk throw pillows on the sofas, pink printed wallpaper, bedspreads in fiery shades – I knew things had reached the end. That I had to do something, go somewhere. For a moment or two I kept looking back and forth from the computer to the garden through the window, but then things inside me started crumbling, like the dust on African roads during the dry season. The last time I visited him, my son didn’t recognize me. I had brought him a carton of cigarettes and some mango juice. I hoped that after strolling through the park we’d light cigarettes and, like in the old days, in those black-and-white films we watched on Sunday afternoons, with all that elegance and all those women in high heels holding crystal tumblers of whisky, in which the crackling of the ice was barely audible – I suppose these symbolic objects were meant to proclaim their self-confidence, their independence, comparable at times to the self-confidence of men – I hoped we would share a few minutes of silence. But nothing like that happened. He looked through me, like the cab driver did when I asked him left or right. Maybe he was thinking about the water in the sky and beneath the earth, was maybe thinking too about the water that flows through our bodies, through his, especially. If nothing else, he must at least have felt his own body, physical pressure, pain.
My father, for example, did not want to visit him. He said it was all my fault. After everything he had done to us, to my mother especially, he had the nerve to utter such filth. So when his new lady friend was spinning around the house, sighing how wonderful, what fiery colours, what a wonderful investment I would be, and when finally they went out into the garden to look at the place of my inspiration, and even more the place of my loneliness, I locked the garden door behind them. I crept up to the door, as if creeping up behind someone’s back, and with an almost thievish smile on my face turned the key in the lock. At first they didn’t understand what had happened to them; what they felt later doesn’t matter one way or another. Had I given them the chance, they would have probably pressed their faces to the windowpane and with two fingers, like that dark-skinned woman with the head cloth, let me know that what I was doing wasn’t good. That it did not set a good example. That they would deal with me when they got out. But as I said, I don’t know what happened later. Then I just turned off the computer, fluffed the remaining pillows, scrubbed the counter a little too, and left. I locked the door and left.
* * *
There’s a scene from film noir which my father never questioned. The woman, her blouse quickly discarded, is sitting on his lap. Her naked arms embrace his neck; she is kissing him; then he pushes her away and goes to the window. Out of the corner of his eye he still tracks her skin and the scent that emanates from her skin, but for him it’s already too late. A few months ago he would still have forgiven her. A few months ago he would not have uttered that sentence: Il y a bien d’autres choses que toi dans la monde. But for her part, she is sure she has done nothing wrong, that things can be fixed. She does not understand the loneliness that engulfed him when she showed him the doctor’s report.
He has always been alone, he said, but this was a completely new loneliness. More bitter, more painful than before; a loneliness that was like being abandoned.
She slowly got up from the chair and crossed her arms over her breasts. Wearing only her skirt, she was cold, although she knew the chill came not from the room but from inside her. At the same time, she also knew how trite this scene was – her at one end of the room, him at the other. In fact, the only view from the window was the roof of another house, so there was nothing for him to see but himself. There are plenty of other things in this world besides you. Where did he get that sentence anyway? Did he really think they were in some movie? But her hair was not platinum blonde, just ordinary hair held in place by a gold-plated barrette, and his were not the powerful loins of a movie actor, from which he might make a child for her.
But all the same, she asked him again to forgive her. Maybe the doctor made a mistake; maybe nothing he wrote in the report was true. Maybe she isn’t empty inside; maybe he’s the one who’s empty, although she could not say this to him now, undressed as she was, with her exposed shoulders and breasts, her pink nipples erect from the cold; she felt herself becoming even a little embarrassed, that she had put herself in an impossible position, all the more impossible because at this very moment he was gazing out the window and thinking lofty thoughts. Something, she supposed, about how a person is always lonely, alienated, cast into the world. But if you are guaranteed offspring, if you know that this here and now is not all there is, then, presumably, things might be a little easier.
‘What if we adopt?’ she asked, although she’d been thinking about asking something else. Like, was it true that men don’t think of themselves as frivolous, or afraid of loneliness, let alone afraid of losing love? But this was exactly what was happening to him. He was afraid. She could tell by how he pushed her away, stood up, and went to the window. But now, from a distance, she also understood that, mainly, he was blackmailing her. Because they wouldn’t have children, because she could not give him children, he would extract certain privileges for himself. Women. Going out at night to films. And, again, women, and especially her consent, that he could have them whenever he needed. And money, too. What she earned from sewing undergarments would go straight in his pocket.
But all this she could still bear if, in the scene, he would turn and look at her. And kiss her naked breasts and tell her they didn’t have to be so lonely, they could adopt a child.
Instead, he only stepped away from the window, bent over – a painful, unnatural bow, by which he was trying to conceal his hesitation, that despite everything he desired her milk-fragrant skin, her fine hair, which never grew past her shoulders, her slightly pink nipples – and then picked the blouse up from the floor all the same. He told her to get dressed and go make him tea in the kitchen. He spoke French, but in the late afternoons he still had his cup of tea. Sitting on the bench by the table, he still stared blankly in front of himself and wondered how he could overcome alienation. How does he explain to a woman who’s been fighting body and soul for what she ultimately saw as the only good – how does he explain to her that he does not believe it’s possible to eliminate dissonance in the realm of the empirical? What was she trying to say with that unbuttoned blouse? That everything would be different if they made love? That that was how they could reclaim their dignity?
‘There’s a three-year-old girl in the orphanage. I’ve already chosen a name for her. Ana. We’ll call her Ana.’
He lifted his face. He lifted it as if lifting it for the first time. Her skin really did seem mixed with water. Now he was already sorry for that sentence, though not for anything else. But since he had said it in a different language, she had not understood. There would always be an insurmountable barrier of loneliness between them. At first he thought they would overcome it by having a child, but he changed his mind when, in that skirt and blouse, she handed him the doctor’s report. All he had expected from her, nothing more and nothing less, was offspring. And a little lightness too. Like this tea and the