Secrets: a Novel, page 29
Taking care not to make any noise, I knocked on Nonno’s door. No answer. When I pushed the door open a little I could see that he was lying in bed, sheets covering him. I pulled the door to. I switched off the lights in the room, although I didn’t know to what purpose. After all, the old man may have decided to let go, now that he had saved the honor of his household. Restless and unable to sleep, I moved in the bungalow, quiet as a cat in search of a place where no other of its kind would insist on sharing the food with it.
I fell asleep at about four to the hooting of an owl.
Chapter Eleven
Half awake, I rubbed the veins of my wrist. I hurt.
The room was a little too dark. I imagined seeing dark figures, one of them with a discal face like an owl’s. I saw a long line of termites crawling out of the powdered hideout of their penchant for destruction. I watched these “white ants” as they carried on their foreheads the evidence of what was to them a considerable booty, each ant quickpaced as a warrior returning home with the medal of his gain. I listened for the susurration of white death, thinking what it must be like to a termite, forever busy tearing apart, eating into the foundations which others had built. For a couple of minutes I busied my mind with other matters. I was under a mental stress. I felt a sudden gnawing at my bowels.
Now I lay on my back in utter discomfort. I was unable to massage the stiffness out of my right shoulder. The ache would not be soothed, neither would the knots of my muscular discomfort be smoothed. In all likelihood my muscles had twisted themselves out of shape while I tossed and turned in the turmoil of my brief sleep. All the veins leading to my neck pained. To locate the source of my physical agony, I explored my body, touching here and there. There were bumps on my skin, maybe insect bites. Had the ants joined me in my bed, and got under the sheets? I itched! I touched the areas of my body which had sustained so many bites the night before. And my eyes opened. Fully.
I put the lights on. Nonno was not in bed any longer. I contemplated a parade of white ants forming a never-ending line. They were busily eating their way into the timber legs of the bed I had lain on, performing their duty with dedicated industriousness. It was not long, I feared, before they got to me. I itched all over, a couple of the ants traveling to and fro across my person and over it. They bit me in the most impossible of spots, corners, nooks and crannies of my person I couldn’t get to even with the help of a back-scratcher. The white ants left me with a physical and mental unease: mental because they made me think of the mindless havoc currently being visited on the nation. (I reminded myself that if I were an ant, I would do other than what they were doing. But then, I would behave in the same way, wouldn’t I, and commit unheard-of atrocities and unpardonable roguery if I were one the vigilantes, or besotted with the idea of power like the ambitious cowboy politicians? I would rather I destroyed what I wasn’t allowed to take, like the vigilantes!) The ants marked my body with polygonal and polyhedral messages I couldn’t decipher. Exploring further, I touched what felt like fresh eruptions of eczema, at which my fingers pulled. I held the folds of eczema-induced loose skin, as if in the palm of my memory. The night itched. The night miaowed. The night hooted a doomsday call, dark as an owl’s face is round. I must have gone back to sleep for a couple of hours, because when I woke up, the morning had dawned. Itchy and very irritable, I scratched my scrotum with renewed vigor, my vengeance.
I suffered a severe bout of flatulence. As if it might help, I altered my position, my body half raising itself. Now it sent forth an issue of warm wind, its odor of a rotten ugliness. This put me in mind of a corpse decomposing in a swamp. I was overwhelmed by a feeling of beleaguerment. I thought, do I contain an iota of humanness worth saving?
There I was, helpless, dumbfounded, tyrannized — the summation, the symbol of many a Somali in a worse condition than I was. I wasn’t what I had always believed myself to be, a man able to locate his truth in half truth, and able to live with the contradictions. But I was ahead of myself: showering before I showered, shaving before I shaved, shuffling into my clothes to drive in a westerly direction and park the car in front of the compound in which Gacme-xume lived.
My eyes were moist: drops of vapor distilled from the morning’s phosphorescence. Miragelike in reflection, the memories of the previous day’s sorrow gathered in a state of utter disorder, like the hem of a funeral robe coming undone!
After showering I searched for Nonno. Failing to find him, I looked for Zariba, his housekeeper. At my insistence, she told me that he had gone in his jalopy long before dawn broke, with two men. But she wouldn’t say who the men might be, or where the three of them went. She volunteered that there was some urgency to their departure.
I got into my car, driving as fast as I could, and parked near enough to Gacme-xume’s compound, at a vantage spot where I could spy on the movements of the people entering and leaving the compound. “Spy” is the wrong word, considering that mine was the only vehicle in sight, like a hippo taking a dip in a shallow pond. I was trying to make sense of the patterning of the tasks those entering the compound or exiting performed, confident that I would know if death, cast in the shape of a Yarow, had visited overnight! But there was nothing unusual, nothing suggestive of death, as I watched women tending a fire just built, men brushing their teeth and clearing their systems of the previous night’s residues: of saliva still gluey with sleep, of phlegm blocking their respiratory passages.
I hadn’t been there long when it dawned on me that there was a funereal slowness to the occupants’ bodily gestures, a lethargy to their gait, their postures. Now a fresh group of people arrived: the women with their faces partly hidden from view, the men walking in rows of three, eyes downcast, their silence suggesting sadness, the sudden loss of someone dear. I saw that a couple of men moved briskly. This helped me deduce that they were professional grave-diggers, bringing in a litter on which a corpse might be placed. In fact, one of them was carrying into the compound the standard subeeci-xariir cloth with which the dead body’s bier is covered.
Several of the passersby took an interest in me sitting in a vehicle and watching the people’s movements. One of them had a gun. Because I am averse to gun-wielders, whom I suspect are capable of causing a lot of havoc, I thought paranoiacally that he had looked at me in a threatening way. He exchanged a few words with his unarmed companion before deciding to let me be. I told myself that I had better find a good enough pretext in case anyone walked up to me and asked what I was doing there. But soon enough I abandoned the idea of asking anyone if someone had died, and how. Mark you, I was now worried some of the kids might remember seeing me yesterday or, worse still, one of the neighbors might recognize the vehicle, or my face.
Had Gacme-xume been murdered? Why I was set upon by an onslaught of guilt, if I had been prepared to kill the man myself? How did he meet his death? Was he stabbed with a knife? Did he die a slow, dolorous death? Had a pistol done the job? Or was he taken away for a drive in a car and drowned in the river, his corpse brought out and left in open view of this very street? His family wasn’t likely to insist on a postmortem examination of his body. They would bury him within the same day, before the tropical heat took its toll. No one would question the cause of death unless there was evidence of tampering, of knifewounds or ugly marks on the corpse. Would Gacme-xume’s death be traced to our family, by one route or another, maybe an incident linking him to the theft of a pair of shoes as far back as thirty years? I doubted it.
The early signs of a migraine pounded on the entrance to my forehead. To keep the headache at bay I closed my eyes. When the threat of pain abated, I opened my eyes. I saw a man running after a small boy of about seven. The boy had in his hand a medium-size duffel bag, which I recognized from the night before, being the one Yarow had taken away the cash in. How odd, I thought. The boy being chased, possibly one of the urchins whom I had seen the previous day (he may have been one of Gacme-xume’s children for all I knew), was pleading as he fled the stick the older man running after him was brandishing. The young boy referred to the man as “Uncle.” A closer look at the man revealed an uncanny resemblance to Gacme-xume. Promising he would give up the bag, the boy was pleading not to be beaten. But his thin legs got caught in a thorny mess in the dirt road. As he ran around and around, the thorny mess hampered his speed, for he dragged it along as he escaped. Now he bent down to disengage his leg from the thorny bush. As he took a moment to study the crisscrosses of bleeding spots on his shin, the man was on top of him. He darted out his left hand, grabbed the boy by the wrist, and then whack! I reacted as though I was being hit. I flinched. In fact my right hand rose, as if blocking the cane. But I did not cry. Neither did the little boy. For he held on bravely for a moment to the bag’s strap before finally letting go. Then he stood firm as his body received more blows. The boy then watched the man unzip the bag, look inside, and take out wads of money held together with rubber bands. “Uncle” ran out of stamina, but not of ambition, as he paused to give the boy an ungenerous wad of cash. He said to the boy, “That’s all you and your mother will get from me!” They might have been muggers sharing a poor haul!
Then Uncle, who had a heat-dried unhealthy look about him, saw me. He turned away, his grimace a bit guilt-ridden, his cheeks rimmed with a bristle of stiffness. My eye contact with him inspired in me an ugly sadness. I thought what a small-minded, mean people we were, Somalis, selling one another for wads of valueless currencies. The bag slung across his left side, Uncle moved away, his walk as clumsy as the waddle of a duck. The boy saw me. It struck me that he recognized me from yesterday. He hurried away, after Uncle. I couldn’t tell if he would report me, to Uncle or someone else, or if he was afraid I might be after his booty. He fled, his every step invested with negative energy.
I was having to alter my notions of death. Not only was I capable of stepping out of my own body, but I sensed the intimations of a storm brewing inside of me. I was about to start my engine and drive off, when I saw at least seven goats clustered together in companionable gregariousness. These came out of the compound and, guided by their own sense of nuuro, ambled straight toward a trash bin to the left of where I was parked. One of them rammed into the bin to knock it down, the noise drawing the attention of other passersby. I watched the goats feed on the debris. This consisted of bones with no meat on them and of old shirts with no buttons. There were also ancient shoes, curled up stiffly and sporting huge tears where the buckles had been, shoes as hard as bunions and as deformed in their death as the calluses on the toes of the people who wore them. Apart from the shoes, another item held my attention, a small shoulder bag with ALITALIA printed on its ribs. This had once belonged to me. To get their teeth into it, the goats were goring each other with their horns, the better to have a chance to eat the labels, my name in clear handwriting and in permanent brown ink. Was Gacme-xume murdered by his own brother for the money in these bags? Did the Uncle who had dispossessed the boy of the bag have a hand in the riffraff’s death? Cynical, Somalis say that the shoes of a dead man are more useful than he. Maybe this was the case of a man less useful alive, the riffraff, than an old, worn pair of shoes!
I wanted to get away. I turned the key in the ignition. Again, a sudden storm was upon me. I was momentarily engulfed in an onrush of rising dust, the whole world going up around me in a thunderous scatter of debris, a whirlwind of so very many irreconcilables, a noisy mix of sand and bones and paper.
I sat in the car. I was a storm-beaten, lonely man. I was sad. I was mournful. I grieved, not because Gacme-xume had been murdered, or that his family had traded his worthless life for a handful of cash, something many Somalis would do in an age of material greed and soullessness.
I grieved for my country!
From my vantage point, I decided that my father’s head had something of the shape of a tamarind seed, compact, wholly intact. The idea of him, my love of him, grew tall in the tree of my imagination, healthy, and shady. Half of his face was in the sun, the other half out of it.
I also thought that his features had a durability about them, the blessed marvel of a mortal surviving an earthquake, the earth’s frequent tremors, its fits and starts, meteors aimed at eavesdroppers. In place of sperm, I thought it was the river of his humanity which flowed into my blood, a more precious thing, everlasting in my memory. Though his penis was not bestowed on me as Nonno’s had been on him, his kindness was, my delightful remembrance of what he meant to me as a child, a shaper of life and an artist, coaxing things into being. I wouldn’t have wanted to exchange him for any other man, as my father, thank you! Because his mouth stayed open, his lips forever moving, my father put me in mind of a saltwater fish feeding in springwater. How I loved him, the certainty that was Yaqut! With him, I observed, even the pigeons were alive with excitement, like children at a ciid festivity. Busily pecking at bonbonlike grains, they were enthralled, celebrating my presence at my parents’ house.
Presently he turned around. On seeing me, he came forward, his hand outstretched. He was red-eyed, perhaps from lack of sleep. Shaking hands with him, I sensed the intaglio of an open sore on the palm of my right hand. Not that it was a big gash, only a very small superficial cut, its shape matching that of a key. I had no idea how I had come by the sore. However, I had a vague memory of ants gnawing at me. I also remembered feeling a burning sensation when showering earlier.
After a cursory embrace, our shoulders ended up touching. My father said, “I haven’t had as many visitors in a day as I’ve had this morning.” He sounded like a bad actor, mouthing the words of a terribly pedestrian script.
“Has Nonno been to see you too?” I asked.
My father said, “Nonno came quite early in the morning, to bring both good and bad news. He was joined here by Yarow and his sidekick, whose name I couldn’t catch. He had a foreign name and didn’t say a thing.”
There was something lighthearted about his manner, a man no longer bearing a burden. But he restrained himself from fully letting go, his voice sounding like the echo of a foghorn from afar. “How low have we sunk lately,” he said, “to receive the news of a man’s death, and to mark his expiration with celebrations.”
In memory, I was back in the dream of the locusts, the community mindlessly feeding on the insects which had devastated their crops. “How tragically sad!”
I didn’t bother to ask who had died, certain that I knew a lot more than he about how the murder had been organized. At best, my father had received secondhand news from Nonno or Yarow. He did not look happy, only relieved for having been spared, for not having had to bump off the riffraff himself. The phrase “my father” was now weighty, with moral as well as political responsibility bearing on it, notions I might not have linked to the relationship between a biological son and father. What else could I call him? I had known no other father, and been closer to Yaqut than my thumb is to my forefinger.
I followed him to the courtyard where his worktable stood. It had a few tools on it. Looking closely, I detected a hand-on-heart jamboree of a joy: in the tools, so to speak. They appeared rested, in repose, content. Sadness was he, the sun in his eyes at half-mast, a derrick of darkness moving to and fro between the spars of solar reflection. I concluded that Gacme-xume’s death had given him a well-deserved relief. Else why was he in his Friday best, in clothes which smelt of mothballs? His posture suggested that of a villager going to the big city, shoes pinching him because of the recently reinforced heelplates. The hard metal came into crushing contact with the pigeons’ nibblings, leveling them into the cemented floor. I hurt!
There was the faint sound of bells ringing.
I asked my father to explained what happened.
I could hear the wingbeat of his thoughts, a hawk spreading its furtive gaze upon the land below as it climbed the better to survey the scene. He said, “A stone has been lifted . . . !” Then he trailed off, the glitter of his eyes’ mischief fixed on the confetti the pigeons were pecking on. He waited, as if he had spoken the first line of a riddle, the idea being that I should run with it and provide him with the unspoken half.
“. . . and the scorpion killed?”
“With the sting gone . . .”
“. . . the corpse interred!”
“With all evidence removed . . . !”
After a pause, I added, “It’s a wise offspring . . .”
“. . . who has faith in his father . . .”
“. . . whose secrets are, to him, a treasure trove!”
Now the idea of him was no more as evergreen as a tamarind tree, no more was he standing high and tall, or supplying one with the sweetest of shades. He had the appearance of a cactus, with more thorns to its flanks than it had flowers. He changed yet again to assume the shape of a baobab tree, wearing the sad habit of a man whose hair had gone gray overnight, a man resigned to his unhappy fate.
“Perhaps you ought not to know about the riffraff,” he said. Absentmindedly he picked up a wedge-shaped instrument, with which he filed his nails, one at a time.
“Do you know at whose hands he died?” I asked.
“Not Yarow’s,” he said.
“Did Yarow’s companion do him in?”
“No.”
“Who, then?”
“Nonno assures me,” he said, “that he didn’t meet his death at the hands of anyone remotely linked to us. Greed killed him, the greed of those sharing the den of infamy with him — his own brother with the help of his cousins.”
I told him where I had just come from.
