on the prairie. Like you’d expect in a cowboy movie, lots of guns were going off, and then mine went off too. At the same moment I put my hand over the watermelon’s mouth, probably more to keep myself quiet than her, but she wriggled out of my hold – I do not know what else to call the position we were in, one leg tightly around another as we kept checking to make sure nobody saw us. She ran off into the dark, away from the jumpy screen, and when I tried to follow her with my eyes, at least to see what she looked like from behind, she did not leave any cloud of dust behind her like there was behind the horse’s tail in the movie.
Obviously I had been too rough; obviously I was too much into it and that scared her. Or at the last minute she decided she really should not be doing this, that it was the last time and she would never do it again. In any case, I was almost crippled down there, not because I expected so much from that watermelon, but because there had been a whole lot of water under the bridge since my previous love-making too. That is what it’s like in Ouaga, or should I say that is what it’s like in Ouaga if you live on the street. Every twelve miles or so somebody takes pity on you, like that girl did behind the movie projector. Who knows, maybe she had a fight with her ex, or maybe she just liked the way I smelled. That is what women say in this city. They chase after this or that man because they like the way he smells, although basically they too are doomed to waiting. They think the ideal man is a man with a lorry. It used to be that men went off to hunt in the forest, but today they order lorries from Europe. Even if what they get from the Lebanese dealer is some beat-up hunk of metal, they hammer it, smooth it out, rewax it. I know because I have done it. Morning to night I used to bang cheap cars together. When I looked at the sun and the sun looked at me, my head would spin like I was going crazy. But it spins even more when I think about how I could not put it in right. How I just put it in somewhere in the folds of our trousers and then stupidly sprayed the both of us.
When the girl disappeared into the night with her trousers half down and my penis throbbing in pain, I don’t know why but I thought of a lorry lying in the road. Nobody can pick it up, not the police and not the army; only the birds can. And the natural enemies of beautiful women. That is how they see it, I think, though my watermelon was not one of the most beautiful ones. Despite the darkness between us, I could see her all the same. Malik would probably say, Big for nothing! It was the only English sentence he knew by heart. But at least Malik knew how to get things moving in the right direction; he never had to go through any dry season. Sometimes he would say his English sentence with such enthusiasm that women thought he must be from Nigeria. It might not be true that all Nigerians are in the Mafia, but it is true that most of the Nigerians in Ouaga have money, and for Ouaga women that is what counts. The smell of money. I think that’s what the Yugoslavian movie with the horse and the black bloke was mainly about. The black bloke digs and digs in the old lady’s flat, and meanwhile she tells him a story about saddles with no cowboys in them. There were two brothers and a woman, although I do not really get the point of that Yugoslavian-Macedonian triangle. Here we have polygamy for things like that, but now I’m just making it up because I didn’t see how the movie ended. The boys told me later that the black bloke gets on an aeroplane with some white girl and you just know he is going to put it in her.
I pulled up my trousers and went over to them. They were smoking 57s and laughing their heads off in front of the jumpy screen. Most of them cannot read the subtitles so they make up stories as it goes along. A day or two later they are still telling them to each other. In tattered overalls, even more tattered than the movie screen, as they crawl beneath the corpses of cars or take engines apart. When I was a teenager I wanted to be just like them – they looked like adults to me, with their big rags tucked in their pockets, or wearing jeans which they always put one pair over another mainly to hide their scrawny lion-fleeing legs. Banging cars together, waxing, screwing on pipes end to end – in reality that was all more of a side business; the main stuff came later, at night. So when I was opening up that watermelon, I was just doing what they did. I copied their movements, pulled down my trousers just like they did, and even the words I whispered in the watermelon’s ear were the same as their words. The whole time I was somebody else, and it was not until I sat down on one of the benches around the movie screen that it dawned on me: I wanted to be somewhere else – not here. I stared at the screen. The names of the actors and a few other blokes scrolled across it, then suddenly the picture gave a jump and went out. The official part of the show was over, although for me it had not even started. I realized that it was not so much the girl I wanted, but her warmth, her moistness, her softness. I wanted to touch something other than banged-out metal. For a few weeks I had been one of the links in the long chain of car repair – a trivial, sun-blackened link; now suddenly I did not know anymore how long I could stand it.
I suddenly found myself missing Malik, missing his slightly clunky smile, his slightly clunky albino appearance. If he had been there I would have bought him a beer, and in exchange he would have driven me around the city all night on his motorbike. He called it the naked moto. He pinched it somewhere and stripped its skin off so the previous owner would not recognize it. If he was riding by himself he would usually lie down on the seat with his face forward and try to pump the last atoms of horsepower from the engine. Sometimes the naked moto could even run on fumes, but Malik was nowhere around at the moment. I filled my nostrils with the aroma of the cigarette the boy on my left was smoking; then I leaned forward with my hands on my thighs and stood up. Since I did not know what to do with myself, I stared into the dark for a while, then turned my back to the screen. Somebody – I do not know who, probably a fellow mechanic – shouted something behind me, but I didn’t turn around. In the long, narrow room where I was temporarily staying, the only thing waiting for me was a mattress full of bedbugs. And above it, a poster of Pamela Anderson. I had paid a lot for it, but as I walked back from town with my hands in my pockets and kicking up stones in front of me, I decided to take it down. I decided that time had run out on us, me and Pamela. There was nothing original about our life together; it was just a copy of something we thought we were supposed to live. Later, back in the room, I stood the bedbugs on end and fell asleep on a plastic mat. If anybody was looking down at me from the sky, they would think I was a lorry lying in the road, which neither the army nor the police could pick up, though maybe the birds could, flying over my head and soothing the sun in my mind.
* * *
After the embrace on the bathroom floor, we each looked in different directions. His hands were just below my breasts, along the line where the flesh starts to curve and rises into the air. How to describe this embrace? Initially, it was about compassion; I know that. Compassion for my slightly sagging figure and my lips with too much lipstick. The lipstick, in fact, I had partly licked off, some of it the wind had taken, and the rest had seeped into my pores. That’s what I was thinking about, that’s all I was thinking about, when I was looking in my own direction. He probably thought I was thinking about my son, the queerboy, as he called him, but I had already thought about him too much anyway.
I grabbed hold of the edge of the sink. The most sensible thing, I thought, would be to stand up, for us both to stand up and bring this mute scene to an end, but he pulled me back down. His arms tightened, his veins bulged, and it was not until I indicated that we could also stay as we were that they returned to the normal rhythm of his circulation. In fact, I don’t really know how it is with the body – when, exactly, does it start to decline, when does it surrender to that cold blast of wind, not asking, not hoping anymore, that things might change for the better? The only comfort is the here and now, which becomes the best you’ve got. That’s also why I understood that our sitting here on the bathroom floor was half-caricature: an old woman with a young man behind her. I wanted to at least turn around, look him in the face and ask his name. And after he told me his name, I would ask him to tell me the names of his mother and brothers and sisters. He seemed too alone to have anyone, to have anything, but you never know.
Like I didn’t know who it was I was marrying when I got married. In a long satin gown, which had a scorpion drawn on it but only at the groin. So I played by the rules. Which is why I divorced by the rules. As far as I was concerned. As far as my ex-husband was concerned, I left because I couldn’t do without. A woman like me should be content with physical intimacy, tenderness, comradeship, closeness, and other such rubbish. If anyone should have left because the passion had gone out of our marriage, it should have been him. One afternoon, as the sun