Secrets: a Novel, page 34
“I wish I had been here!” I say.
“A chill tore through my flesh,” he continues.
“Was this before or after Sholoongo?”
Obligingly he answers, “After her visit.”
I wait for him to continue. He goes on, returning to his earlier narration, saying, “There was drumming in my chest, my head duststirring like a dervish doing a whirl of ecstatic dancing. My heart pumped not blood but water, tributaries of worry, arteries of icy water, a flood of curses coursing through my whole body. My knees knocked against each other from the cold within, my feet were swollen with the liquid residing in them. I collapsed, a tent losing support, a sprawl of robes, my legs stiff like the poles of a Bedouin’s dismantled home. Then I fell asleep.”
His face now has a hallowed look. His eye sockets put me in mind of sun-dried prunes, so deep are their depressions. The wrinkles are wide and as irregular as a footpath in a valley. “How do you feel?” I ask.
“Bless the day, for the spring in my gait is returning,” he says. “I would like to get up and walk about a little while I can.” But he doesn’t rise. When I try to help him, he pushes me away. It appears to me that he is behaving like a baby asking for something and then forgetting what he has asked for soon after. I notice a change in his breathing, too, again like a child falling asleep in the middle of play, with no forewarning.
He wakes up with a sudden jerk of the knee. I start. We smile at each other grudgingly. Our hands touch in the way some African communities touch noses when greeting one another. I ask, “Sholoongo? What of her?”
His tongue trembles with the anticipatory horror, I am sure, of remembering what had transpired between Sholoongo and himself. I think of her as a woman who has made each of us inquire into the meaning of truth, and how to distinguish our find from other categories of truth. I think of her as the shaman who has come not to heal but to dispossess us of our secret ill wills. I compare her, wrongheadedly, to one’s idea of the clan: a notion difficult to locate, slippery, contradictory, temperamental, testing one’s capacity to remain patient during one’s trying times.
“Some mysteries are best left alone,” he says.
I give Nonno a no-nonsense look. However, I doubt that he can see it. He has an odd expression, suggesting that one side of his face has been affected by paralysis, the other in full working order. Touching the cheek that has suffered this most sudden paralysis, I try to remember who likened Nonno to a woman. Because he is hard at the center, soft on the peripheries.
I probe further. “What about Sholoongo?”
At his bidding, I help him to gather his robe around the lower part of his body so he may sit up without feeling too exposed. But his hands fuss about in the area of his body, which has often caused him to be wary.
“She slipped into my bed,” he says, “and I let her. I thought to myself that in a world turned upside down, in which brothers are gathering deadly weapons to kill brothers, a world with no sense of morality, a society with no sense of taboos, no knowing where we are ending up and what has become of us — I asked myself, is it worth my while to remain true to my moral sense, when no one is?”
There is a sizzling sound in the background, a fizzy noise, like the distilled water in a car battery coming to a boil.
He goes on, “We had a covenant binding us, Sholoongo and I, from long before she left for the States. The date of the covenant goes back to the period when she was small, really.”
He takes a calming hold of himself, showing more of the brown than the white of his eyes, his pupils tucked in, hidden from my stare. He says, “She arrived shortly after the fog had lodged itself in my sight. I decided to be magnanimous, I decided to be indifferent to her baby-centered obsessions. I did what I had to do. We met and made love in the world of pretend, the world of simulated rape in reverse. The woman taking the man, in a bed not usually associated with him. Why didn’t I turn her out? Because I wished to absolve our family of any nabsi-related ill luck.”
With hardly any light emanating from his eyes, his voice sounds slightly off key, like a tape recorder with weak batteries. It pains me to listen to its jarring lower ranges.
“Sholoongo’s insanity knows no bounds,” I say.
“Where is she now?” he asks.
“She is at my place, packing.”
“What did she look like when you last set eyes on her?”
“She looked awful,” I say.
“I wish she had heeded my counsel,” he says.
I say I don’t understand.
“Maybe it is better that we leave things alone,” he says.
“Nonno, what’re you talking about?”
“Anyhow, one must be kind to those who are less fortunate than oneself,” he says, “if one wishes to enjoy fully the fruits of one’s fortuity.” Do I sense a shine to his smile, an impish grin?
“I’ve wondered if her bodily odors have their origin not in her human ancestry but in an animal one,” I say, remembering the acridity. “She smelt like a wolf when I saw her, awful!”
Hereon his eyes become livid spots, as shapeless as death itself. A part of me begins to wonder if Nonno knows when he might die, and if so would he tell me? But what purpose will my knowing serve? I am in despair, but I do not speak of it. I am silent. I wait anxiously.
He hiccups. I think about omens that are not portentous. Worries invade my tranquillity. Nonno hiccups again and again. I stir agitatedly, not knowing what to do with myself. I rise to my feet, I sit down, I pace about the room.
“Would you like a glass of tamarind drink, chilled?”
He nods his head.
I fetch him a glass of tamarind juice, chilled. Clumsy like a village woman wearing her first high heels, I walk unevenly, my ankles twisting every which way, and aching too. I stretch my hand with the drink out to him. Nonno motions me to let him be. I oblige. He sits upright, taking in more air than his expanded chest expels. He remains in that distended posture without exhaling, then all of a sudden stirs with vigor, only to stay motionless again for an extended period of time. Am I bearing witness to a bird’s wing thrashing the wind to its finalissimo?
He speaks!
“About your parents,” he says.
“What about them?”
Silent, he takes a sip of the chilled tamarind juice. He tilts his head a little at an angle so he can hold me in his peripheral gaze as he drinks. The position of his head affords me a view of the desert sand of Berbera in his eyes.
“I’ve made it clear to them,” he says, “that despite what has transpired, I love them very, very much, and love you a great deal too. I’ve told them you that are my grandson and legatee, the one to inherit my estate intact.”
He falls quiet to make himself comfortable, his hands raised as though in mock flight, a bird in two minds whether to ride the wind or to humble its excessive demands by having its feet firmly on the ground.
I mean to say, How very grandfatherly of you! But I can’t.
He speaks painfully slowly, all the time tilting his head back slightly, and shaking it in the jumpy gesture of a swimmer emptying residual water out of his ears. “With my vision impaired,” he says, “my hopes of Somalia surviving the disasters are nil. Like me — and I am on my deathbed — she is as good as gone. It is a tragedy that the country which many generations have strived to shape is being destroyed piecemeal right in front of our unseeing eyes. Cursed, I have become blind, because I’ve failed to read the warning signals. Our people have not heeded the signs portending the coming catastrophes. I am as good as gone. Our country is as good as gone. My advice to you is make of your life what you may.”
“We love you too,” I say. I feel the words failing me.
“Here,” he says, giving me a key.
“What does the key open?”
“Wills, testaments, documents, all my wealth,” he says.
The key fits the grooves etched on my palm, identical.
A most weird silence hangs down from the ceiling, at which Nonno’s peripheral sight stares for what it is worth. I say after a long time: “We’ll all miss you terribly.” I speak these words because the silence in which we sit frightens me. Nor can I think of what to say, or whether to remain quiet.
He nods his head vigorously. He then spreads his hands, palms up: a lizard with a belly exposed to the sun. I hear the sleepy rustle of the trees outside. This decides me to accept his death with the magnanimous attitude of a devotee dying, confident that he will live on in me, in my parents, in the memory of those who have loved him, in the trees, in his woods, in his patch of the river, in Hanu, in all those who have been fortunate enough to know him.
He has his naughty boy’s grin in his eyes.
“I read something?” He speaks in a non sequitur, then silence.
“And then it happened?”
He isn’t making it easy for me. Nor can I follow his meaning. Will I ever get to hear of what happened, when, why, and to whom? He will be buried with many of his secrets, his intimations, his judgments. Of what clan, he would be asked, and he would shrug his shoulders and take refuge in a waffle of words. “I can’t bear the thought of generalizing. I am a person, a clan is a mob. Talk to me, sell things to me, I am reasonable. Clans are not.” I wish many of the fighters visiting havoc on people’s lives had been born with the luck to hear him. “If we had many like him, there would be no civil strife,” Talaado said earlier that day. “A hardworking, honest, lovable Nonno. A century will die with him, one’s idea of tolerance, of magnanimity, these will die with him too.”
I abandon my rambling thoughts, and ask, “Tell me what happened, Nonno?”
He tells me the same story. However, the words he employs are not the same. He says, “I heard a tiny explosion in my eyes, no different from a bulb bursting, once it has rendered its thousand hours’ worth of service.”
“And then?”
“And then Sholoongo came to see me,” he says. He adds in a judicious tone of voice, “You came in on me, and I was on my knees, in full praying gear, full of worship. After so much sin, so much vacillation, after wanting to have a taste of everything that life affords the living: I go on my knees, in prostration, humbled to the powers above me.”
“What I am to make of all this?” I say.
He gives thought to my question. He replies, “I reckon that everything has to do with the authority, the wherewithal to manipulate other people’s destinies. In my teens, not humbled then, I was molded of the same clay as a madcap scientist, the sort that is familiar from films or fiction. You know the type? A madcap of a scientist, with too much knowledge for his own good and too little sense, who has the urge to remake the universe in the cast of his rigid formula. Power-hungry, I guessed that by replacing a set of magical codes with some of my own making, I might rule the wind and the birds which ride upon it.”
His body tenses. Has something caught in his throat? Is he choking on an abrupt intake of air? He is having difficulty breathing, and there is a surge of tension in the upper part of his body, like floodwater in a river’s throat. I get up to bend over him. I take his wrist. I measure his pulse as best I can. Everything seems to be in working order.
“Shall I call for a doctor?” I inquire.
“No need.”
“Shall I call a priest?” I ask. “Fetch my parents?”
“No need.”
“How do you feel?” I whisper.
I see a tiny light, no bigger than a pilot, going on in his eyes and then off. His pulse in my grip, his heart races faster, as though it belongs to an athlete chesting the ribbon of triumph.
“I feel weird,” he says, “as if, inside of me, the sharper end of a feather is being scratchily dragged against my heart. I have no pain, though, thank God. I also itch. But then, so did Sholoongo. How bizarre!”
“Would you like me to do anything?” I ask.
“Bless the day,” he says. “No, thank you!”
His head moves, as though in an effort to shake it in disbelief. It jerks. It makes an awkward angle. But before completing the circle, something in Nonno collapses. He dies, his eyes still open, his heart racing in its competitiveness to outrun another heart, that of life.
One corpse. Three secrets.
Nuruddin Farah, Secrets: a Novel
