Secrets: a Novel, page 32
How very perverse of me to have felt closer to Nonno now than to anyone else at any other time. Yet I hated the man, hated him viscerally, and wouldn’t have hesitated to plunge a knife in him for all his sins the moment we finished this lovemaking charade. Mark you, there was a part of me that was in awe of his powers of articulation. He said, “All that death does is to deny you the opportunity to reinvent your life as you live it. Because dying, you cease to dream.” I couldn’t be sure if I was misquoting him or if I was quoting somebody else, Timir. “You must be content with others’ dreams, visions which are not continued in you.” Would his death bring about a discontinuity?
Yawning with the soporific desires of a man having his siesta’s share of daydreams, Nonno put forth a question. “Is living truth or is death?”
Not that I was overwhelmed with a terrible unhappiness. But I was not certain which would please me more, a dead Nonno or a living one.
His erection expanded, reaching out into all the perimeters of my open palm. I felt encroached upon, my whole body felt invaded. I choked, as though I had him in my mouth. There was something like a rattling sound in my throat, a cluster of sounds, worries wanting to be born.
If there was continuity in the sense I now understood it, then truth was to be discovered in Nonno’s erection. I thought of monuments and of statues in windswept squares, statues brown with bird droppings, gory with gouged-out eye sockets. I thought of all the betrayals of history, all the treacheries. Thought that in memory of women very few mementos of stone were erected, no minarets. That most statues resembled phalluses, a child’s drawing exercises of male representations. How absurd: to continue in the truth of Nonno’s erection!
“I hurt badly!” he said.
I let go of his erection. “Where do you hurt?”
“I hurt in the eyes,” he said. “Summer one moment, and on its heels a sudden winter, with frostbite more bitter than any the world has known.” He was limp, that was what he was. After such a labored erection, such lifelessness. I wondered if there was anything I could do for him.
“Touch me!” he said.
“Where?” I asked.
“Wake me!”
I obliged. His eyes opened with the gentlest of smiles. But why was it that his eyes didn’t appear to me as if they were the principal source of his pains? I had other worldly preoccupations, wishing that I could stand on my feet, put on my clothes in haste, and leave. But I just couldn’t. I felt I was to witness an event of extraordinary significance.
True to the drill of my female body, I required time to unwind, reminding myself of the telltale aloneness of a womb in wait. A womb is a curse! A woman is a womb, a woman is a curse, the sensing of an ominous crisis coming to a head. I was faced with the usual dilemma, my heart wanting one thing, my mind another. I felt as if the woman in me didn’t know what she wanted, and as if the person in me didn’t wish to have anything to do with Nonno.
“How come you hurt in the eyes?” I asked.
“We go back a long way, my eyes and I,” he said.
“You do? How so?”
“We go back to my teens,” he said, “when I was growing up in the city of Berbera in the north and learning to be a Koranic scholar. We go back, my eyes and I, to a specific day during the dusky moments in which my destiny placed a curse on itself.”
“A curse?”
“A malediction as devastating as the impulse of my youth,” he said. “I had to flee a communal rage, flee southwards. I ended up here on the Shabelle’s riverbank. There were deaths. I had to take certain vows, which if I broke, would mean further curses, maybe partial blindness!”
Attracted though I was to the tale and its teller, I wasn’t able to follow it. In view of the seriousness of the matter, I deemed it part of my honor-bound obligation to cover my nakedness. I was not sure if the angels said to eavesdrop on the last words of the dying would mind seeing me the way I was, a woman with a body so much out of shape. Never mind the sins that Nonno and I had just committed in flagrant disobedience of the Islamic creed.
He opened his eyes a tiny fraction as he said, “I felt terribly humbled by the curse, I felt terribly humbled by the fact that I had the choice to shun it, provided I kept true to the vow. That I would never again dabble in magic.”
I realized how little I knew of Nonno’s past. I realized that the little I knew was not of much help. I had heard it said, among the villagers in the midst of whom he lived, that he had influence over birds, whom he could gather at will. I had heard it circulated that he spoke to the birds in their respective tongues, like King Solomon before him.
He sat up, his eyes still half closed. I do not know what got into me, but I wanted a wet cuddle, I wanted a wet foreplay. I put my nipple rather unceremoniously into his mouth. He might have been a man in his eighties remembering his first suckle, his tongue active in its pulsing motions, my nipple in, his diaphragm out, and so on and so on. He wouldn’t let go until I began to leak the moisture of my lust. Whereupon he rose.
I lay across him. We formed a cross, his forefinger in me, my cupped hand clutching him. Throwing his head back as if in amusement, he asked, “Could you put your ears close to my chest and tell me what you hear?”
“I can hear streams of water dropping down from a great height,” I said. “Such is the water’s power I foam at the mouth in acknowledgment of its force.”
Miffed, he accused me of speaking falsehoods.
“What did you expect me to hear?” I asked.
His features were bright like loose gravel after a shower in the summer. He said, “I had hoped you would hear a wisdom to the effect that death is in the shift of emphasis!”
“In the what?”
“The shift of emphasis!”
I did not get his meaning. I told him so.
He continued, “I had hoped you would confirm that death is in a whirlpool of an ungathered wreck as well as in the rush of a waterfall. That it is in the vapor of a distilled mirage.”
I wondered if he was repeating to himself speeches from scenes of his involvement with magic. Was he rehearsing his role according to a set pattern of exchanges, as part of a rite of self-redemption?
“One of my teachers used to say,” he said, “that death is not a fire going out, or a glow losing its shine. Rather it is like a lemon peel, now dry and curling at the edges. Another of my revered instructors used to say that death is an egg rotting acridly.”
He hoisted himself on his elbows, pulling my head a little too heavy-handedly towards his erection. He said, “Death is the spartan squeeze of a ripe fruit!”
“Could death be a lock giving?” I asked.
The fact that I joined him in the playfulness, that I was prepared to participate in his definitions, delighted him so! He took my head in his hands and held it. He kissed me on the forehead. We made a most ravenous love. He came in immense bursts, emitting ugly sounds not too dissimilar to the gargles a diesel engine makes first thing in the morning. He wanted an encore, more and more and encore. At some point he got up to go the toilet. It occurred to me then that he was moving with the unhealthy slowness of a man suffering from excessive fatness in his blood.
“What does all this talk about death mean?” I asked.
“A storm has been gusting up within me since your arrival,” he said. “My head has been whirling, my lungs have been overworking themselves in fury. For days now I’ve watched a whirlwind of dust rising up, Kalaman the mad dervish dancing to alien piping from secret flutes. Yours is the forefinger on the hole, you the stirrer of this ill wind, you the author of all this turbulence.”
He seemed riven by an inner pain, driven by the force of what he had to say. His voice worrying in its importunity, he repeated, “A woman forewarned is a woman saved!” Then I heard the buzzing nervousness of a fly too frightened to perch anywhere. Or was it a bee, detained in a glass turned upside down?
I said, “In this fly-buzzing atmosphere of fright and tension, am I the stirrer of the excrement? Or a dispensable victim of a condition? Why are you speaking such threats?”
“I wish you wouldn’t take things personally,” he said.
He lay on his back, his hands serving as a pillow. Had he already fallen asleep? Now was my chance. As I sneaked out of the room, my mind juxtaposed my memory of the Arab shepherd’s tale with another equally fascinating Spanish folk wisdom: One corpse, three living secrets! Retrieving my underpants from the sheets’ tangles, I picked up my brassiere from under the bed. I bent down to recover my hairbrush, repeating the adage to myself: One corpse, three living secrets.
I left as quietly as I had come, afraid that the truth of Nonno’s erection, not to mention his death, might catch up with me sooner than I was prepared to acknowledge.
I itched!
I itched where it was inconvenient to itch, between my legs!
I itched at a spot in my crotch. The spot was very hard to get to. Moreover it was impossible to disregard the irritation as I drove my rental car on a narrow so-called highway where you required your full concentration and a lot more if you did not wish to end up in a ditch by the roadside or in the bushes to either side of the carriageway. How I wished I could purge the itching worries out of my thoughts, or give my crotch a good nail-powered scrubbing, to my pointed fingers’ content.
I couldn’t be certain when I began to itch, although I guess it must have been sometime soon after I decided to leave. I think it was then that I registered a quaint sensation, in the attitude of someone getting into scrapes with his own body. It started with suspect moisture, originating somewhere in my sex. It all started in the unlikely form of two irregular blotches of running wetness going down the hairier parts of my crotch, eventually separating into two distinct forks, one following the contours of my right thigh, the other the muscular angles of my left. I had just taken the resolve to leave. There was no point getting caught up in guilt. Besides, I wasn’t acquitting myself well, not putting up a viable resistance to Nonno’s challenges. He was making a fool of me. Was it then that I heard a most peculiar sound, of termites marching and eating their way through the earth’s fundament? Or could it have been a bee behaving in the nervous jitteriness of one caught in a cup turned upside down? It might equally have been the call of a bird, a chirpy, chatty parrotlike bird chanting phrases intended to denigrate me, a parrot repeating phrases like “self-serving bitch,” a Nonno-trained parrot.
“Would you stay awhile if I asked you to?” he said.
I knew I should have, but I said I wouldn’t. After all, I had what I wanted, thanks to my hor-gur, to my stimulated rape, woman to man!
Nonno suggested I lie down beside him “for my own good.”
“The cheek of it all!” I said.
“Please,” he said, “for the sake of the baby.”
“You are an ineffectual bastard,” I said. “I am off. I am going. After all, I’ve got what I came here for, I had you by your sods, and I won’t be persuaded to listen to you any more.”
“For the baby’s sake,” he said. “Stay.”
“Do you never listen?” I challenged him. “You know the proverb, don’t you, that the skin of a frog, no matter how long it remains submerged in the water, will never become soft? You won’t change. You and your obsessions, your predilections for secrets, your penchant for keeping them, pretending as if this is for the general good of society. You know what’s wrong with our people? Where there is no individual justice, there can be no communal justice, certainly no possibility of democracy. You are a murderer, run south. I am from the Ogaden, come south. I am a sinned upon, fed to wolves. Grow up, Ancient Man. Take this my rambling as your first lesson.”
You couldn’t persuade him to let go when he set his mind on something. He said, “It would be inauspicious if you went. I advise you to remain in a horizontal position.”
“Why?”
“Lest you waste it all.”
“You’re losing your senses in your old age,” I said.
“I know what I’m talking about.”
He put me in mind of a Somali tale in which a foolish husband accuses his wife of miscarrying several of their babies because of the downward direction her vagina faces.
“See you some time, Doddo!” I said.
“Have trust in me, young woman,” he warned. “I know what I am talking about.” When I would not pay heed to his counsel, he repeated it in a slightly different way. “Give me the benefit of our combined misgiving.”
His extended hand reached for mine, but I shunned contact with him, moving away. I had no idea what devil had got into me, why I wouldn’t listen to him. I just wanted to be away.
“Bye-bye, old fart,” I jeered.
Then I dripped!
I dripped like a faucet with a slow leak. Then itched much more ferociously than before, a hairy scratch at the inside of my groin, as though an insect had found its way into my clothes. I didn’t know how to put one foot ahead of the other. In my attempt to contain the flow, I held my thighs tighter together. I waddled out of the room, the insides of my thighs rubbing against each other. My thighs, touching, made a sound similar to a duck chewing a rubber ball. I wish I had paid heed to his counsel.
I got to my car and for a good while drove it. I felt as uncomfortable as a person sleeping on a bed another has peed on. I smelt a most venomous odor coming from between my thighs, and wondered if I would drain like a tap, if my womanly sap would flow away into a dead river choked with scrogs.
No sooner had I entered Kalaman’s flat than I rushed straight into the bathroom. Fortunately it was free. I stood under the shower, fully clothed, the water boiling, jets of it descending upon me every which direction. I scrubbed the itchy segments of my privates with a loofah belonging most probably to Kalaman. I turned off the shower to oil every crevice and cranny of my body, applying Vaseline to the less hairy holes. Deriving not much relief out of these attempts, I considered spraying my body with an insecticide. I decided against the idea, washed and washed, repeating the same process half a dozen times. I dried myself, washing away more and more of the residual stains of Nonno’s emissions.
I oozed. I held my legs closer together and tighter in the uncomfortable posture of a young girl sore from a recent infibulation. None of this was doing my ego any good. The thought that I might still be with child was now bedeviled with serious doubts, the idea slipping away from me like a stolen item returned to its lawful owner. I entertained the barnacle of a paranoiac notion: that such was Nonno’s contempt of me that he emptied into me sperm crawling with insects. What prosaic justice!
Silence in the apartment. I continued to ooze the slime of my accursed discharge, dripping on and on. I went almost insane with self-hate. I was a couple of meters short of the door to my room when the telephone rang, only I couldn’t summon myself out of my sense of awe.
I gained my room at last. There everything smelt of my phlegmy discharge. And to complicate matters, there was a peppery sting to the itching. Wholly naked, I rolled and rolled like a cow having its turn in the hot sand after quenching its thirst. Not that the rolling in the heat of the sand did me any good. Now I was full of self-loathing. I picked up objects with sharp edges, pencils, pens, any items with the shape of a phallus. I scratched and scratched.
Fearful of the approach of an attack of vertigo, I half crouched. I tore madly at my insides, dragging my claws at the walls of my person, my sex. Then I smelt a bizarre odor. This reminded me of menstrual blood. At last I heard a faint, ugly, moist sound, like gum boots getting stuck to the bottom of a swamp.
Had Nonno filled me with self-loathing? Was my body refusing to hold it? The thought that my body was resisting against Nonno’s poison provided me with a short-lived sense of comfort, an instant of respite. Soon enough I saw the shape of my discharge: a spider’s web, etched on the inside of my thighs. I had a number of unsavory thoughts knocking on the door to my brain. No matter, I won’t speak of these!
I busied myself with my packing as soon as I stopped oozing the slime of my mysterious discharge. My back ached, my thighs were glued together with glutinous stuff, my head throbbed with the pain of thinking, I had difficulties moving about, I was finding the whole experience very unpleasant. I thought, What a fool I was not to have paid heed to Nonno!
Then I heard the key turn in the outside door. There were footsteps, first determined, then hesitant, Kalaman wondering if I was in. I allowed a decent interval between the time they entered and the time I let them know that I was in the guest room. A little later, I joined him and Talaado in the kitchen.
They were wrapped in each other’s legs and arms, each fingering the other’s whatevers. I made some appropriate noises before entering the kitchen. They wouldn’t disengage until I was on top of them.
“Is anything amiss?” Kalaman said.
“I itch,” I said.
He wasn’t certain he heard me right. “You what?”
“I itch!” I repeated.
He appeared confused. He looked about himself in distress. He seemed concerned for a moment or two, then shook his head as though he were clearing up the clogs of miscomprehension, obstructions blocking the passages to the center of his brain. He was Nonno’s grandson by upbringing. He said, “Am I permitted to ask an indiscreet question?”
“You may not ask where I itch,” I said.
This did not please him at all. Talaado, for her part, appeared disinterested. She took a seat and looked out of the kitchen door, uninvolved. I hate women who are possessive in that coquettish way. Out of spite, I was being vindictive and was not going to let them enjoy themselves, necking and fingering each other’s elegances when I was feeling miserable. “And I smell!” I said.
“Is it too impolite of me to ask where the lice are?”
“You’re a pompous ass,” I said, “and you know it.”
