Secrets: a Novel, page 5
She said, “It is curious how food played an important role in our relationship. You gave me food and I gave you my self. Pots of honey, a bar of chocolate, a morsel of this or that. And what did I do? I served you a young woman’s soul, mine, in exchange for these edibles. Very tragic! Or is that how things are between men and women, men providing for women’s easy-to-meet necessities, and in exchange receiving the women’s souls?”
“Damn you,” I cursed, my voice sounding as if it originated underwater. I got up, and came closer to touching her than at any other time since seeing her. Could I bring myself to hit her or throw her out of my apartment? I cursed because I didn’t know how else to defend myself against these preposterous generalizations about men and women. Eventually I got back to my side of the table and seated myself before my plate, but hadn’t the will to eat.
“I won’t eat alone,” she said.
We ate, she faster and faster, and as she did so she spoke, chanting every single word with the slowness of a sorceress uttering potent incantations. “We’ve come, Timir and I, to bury our father,” she said.
I extended my condolences.
“But there’s another reason why I am here.”
As she took her penultimate mouthful she choked on her breath, and coughed. I wondered if I should give her a slap on the back. There was a rush of sudden anxiety in her throat, her hands reaching for her Eve’s apple, which she massaged gently. I sat tight, waiting.
“What did your housekeeper put in the food?” she asked.
I made a search-me gesture, and as I did so I noticed a smudge the size of a shilling on her left cheek. Apparently I mistook the smudge for a shadow her nose cast. Now she was scratching the very spot. I remembered then how my mother had once described Sholoongo as having the look of a predator, the blood-and-raw-gut appetite of a wolf, the sweet sting of a honeybee, the cunning of a fox, and the deviousness of a hyena.
“I’m here for a few days,” she said. “Can you put me up?”
I greeted the news with the full compliment of a genuine smile. I thought of my mother; I thought of what my father might say; I thought of what Talaado might think; I thought of Nonno.
She went on, “I am here to bear a baby.”
She had the clearheadedness to reveal in few words what it was she wanted very badly, and I envied her. I envied her how everything was there, the poetry, the pathos, the rhetoric of breeding. After all, whereas I had difficulty working out how I was going to say no to her request to stay with me, she had moved on. She was here to have a child? How? Unable to determine my role in her desire to bear a baby, I asked, “In what way may I be of assistance?”
“I want you to be the father of my child,” she said.
“Why me?” I asked, and flinched at the thought of what she might say. In my imagination I heard a voice charged with a mix of bitterness and sarcasm. The answer came out pat: For the genius in your gender, my handsome genie!
“The reasons are too manifold to go into now,” she said. Then a mean look spread across her face.
I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I asked, “Where is Timir?”
“He has been wearing his out-of-the-closet colors lately.”
Her meaning evaded me. “What are they, the colors?”
“He is an active member of the American gay movement.”
“Is he here to set up a branch?” I asked.
Crocodiles have tears to shed, Sholoongo had none. “He’s come to buy a woman, preferably one with an infant and who, out of gratitude for his wealth and his American passport, is prepared to slave for him and his artsy boyfriend in San Francisco in a threesome setup.”
The telephone rang. My wristwatch confirmed my own suspicions: I was decidedly late for work. As it was, I was delighted to get away. I spoke to my secretary at my firm and dictated a couple of brief messages.
I said to Sholoongo, “I am off and will see you later.”
And I fled.
My hand has an atavistic memory of a script with mysterious loops and curves. I trace these, my thumb rubbing against my index finger as I write this imaginary script. I do so whenever I cannot concentrate on my self-allotted workload in my office. Drawing helps me to minimize the tension within me. Now and then I do the cross of Lorraine, and at some point join the top strokes to the bottom ones. This way faces emerge, of owls with eyes forever shut, or fishes with their mouths open and feeding. My father is the artist in the family, capable of depicting what others are unable to imagine. I am not much of an artist, I am a computer freak, and that is my business and primary concern. I run my own business, and have some fifteen people working for me. My office is in the annex, and I have an efficient deputy-director, a former lover, named Qalin. We all rely on her.
I start on a Lorraine, with memories of Sholoongo’s odor overwhelming me time and again, fastidiously flatulent, like the odious belch of palm oil. I am wondering whether to go for a walk, if only to clear my lungs of the terrible belch, as I ring my secretary for messages. Among the callers is Timir. He has been and gone, promising to return, maybe tomorrow. Would I like her to call his hotel? No. Even so, I won’t deny that a part of me is eager to call Timir and talk to him, if only to find out the truth about Sholoongo’s motives. Why me?
With the air conditioner in my office humming in the background, my hand traces out more strokes in a Lorraine and obtains a set of interlaced pinnate patterns: of leaves of a tamarind tree, its foliage immaculately green, soft to touch in the way feathers are, and having a similar influence on the beholder. The afternoon sun loses its harsher edge and more of its rage. Somewhere in the grooves of the design I am able to work out the shape of a lamp, forever lit, burning!
In my memory I am a child. Sholoongo’s father, I know, is with a woman, on a bed whose sheets haven’t been changed for days, in a room whose windows haven’t been opened for almost a week, the two giving each other a whale of a week’s honeymoon, the weft and warp of their bodies so interwoven you couldn’t tell which leg or arm belonged to whom, except you might be able to see the difference if you concentrated on the hirsuteness of the male’s, and even then you would be mistaken, for Madoobe hadn’t a single hair on his chest and legs and had the habit of shaving his beard and pubic hair. He is with a Yemeni woman who is darker than he, and he is dark all right. Because I cannot tell who is on top, who is the one covered all over with stiffish hair, I go closer. I am eight years of age, a frequent voyeur. I got into trouble more than thrice with my own parents, who caught me spying on them. But not Madoobe, Sholoongo’s father.
Timir and Sholoongo are in their room, having it off without ever letting on. My only evidence is Timir’s say-so, after I overheard him say that he would not “give it to her anymore.” Give what? I surprised them one late afternoon, and instead of choosing to remain unseen and staying quiet in the safety of a voyeur’s secret place, I decided to show myself.
“Would you like it too?” she asked.
That was not how it all began!
On another day I rummaged in her satchel and in her pockets in search of evidence of witchery. Finding none, I invited her and Timir for a swim at Nonno’s. I made certain we took our dip in the spot of the river where we were likely to irritate a crocodile into enraged action. My idea was that if, as was rumored, she were capable of exchanging her human form for that of an animal, what better way to prove it than to risk her life? Alas, we did not meet any danger. I tried to catch her out again and again, but to no avail.
All three of us, on another occasion, went out for a walk in Nonno’s woods. I took them up the route where packs of hyena were said to prowl. We waited, again to no avail. There is not much fun sitting it out in the dark, stiff with fright, your heart beating faster than Fausto Coppi’s when breaking a world record.
Now, years later, a couple of hours after having lunch with Sholoongo in my apartment, I give a start when the telephone rings. I don’t answer, because I don’t wish to talk to my mother, to Timir if he is the one phoning, to Talaado if she is the one, or to Sholoongo. When the telephone bell ceases sounding its long, rather drawn out scaremonger’s alarms, I take a worried look at the drawing in front of me: a parrot, and in its beak a young moon.
I didn’t get back to my place until late. But I called my mother’s retail business before she closed for the day and made peace with her. I didn’t divulge Sholoongo’s whereabouts. Nor did I tell Talaado about her even after I picked her up on our way to see a film with a confusing story line, something I put down to my own state of mind. And when my friend and I were at a drive-in sandwich joint and she inquired why I was in such a quiet mood, my answer was evasive.
My apartment was quiet when I reentered it, the lights out. As far as I could tell, my guest was asleep in the spare bedroom, whose door, I sensed, was pushed shut. I moved about in the dark and then lay in my room, unable to sleep, torn by the conflicting demands on a man in my situation. I fell asleep to the hooting of an owl, wishing me and all the other insomniacs in my neighborhood a good night.
Chapter Two
A memory of singular significance supersedes all others. This memory is centered around a man in his early seventies, thick-set, with a shock of gray hair. He is wearing a robe dipped in dull red acacia-bark dye and is riding a stallion of sterling handsomeness. At his approach there is pandemonium. The women separate themselves from the men. They ululate. The men rise to their feet in apparent awe of him. He dismounts. A young man leads away his horse.
The old man with the shock of gray hair is given a stool, which he takes. To show the high respect in which he is held, the village barber shaves his hair off. A procession of women arrives, bringing along a high chair. One of the young women offers him the high chair with great deference, as if she were offering herself to him. He mounts the high chair.
There is an undercurrent of tension between the old men and the young men in the community. One of the old men speaks about the queasy times, a young man makes reference to a drought which has killed three-quarters of the community’s livestock. All this while the old man, still on his high chair, his shaven head shiny with a coating of oil, remains silent, as if uninvolved. But his lips are touched with the static charge of his devotions, most likely a rosary in praise of Allah.
As a mark of respect, he is now asked to distribute milk among the members of the gathering, first the young, then, if there is more milk to be had, among the old. He gives half a gourdful of milk each to a group of children. Curiously, the more milk he gives out, the fuller the receptacle becomes, until it spills over. To ensure that not a drop is wasted, the young ones assign several of their number to lick the outside of the milk vessel. Those farthest from it make smacking theatrical sounds with their lips, while those close by go on their knees and work their tongues into the most awkward positions, catching the overflow in any way they can. Otherwise the entire place is in a silence as reverential as that of a sadhu performing a Hindu ritual. “Like a hole,” whispers the young boy who led away the horse, to the girl who offered the high chair to the old man, “that grows larger the more earth you take out of it.”
The sun is setting. There are crocodiles everywhere, crocodiles with wings. There are also snakes engaging wide-hipped dragonflies in a never-ending dialogue of drones. When another lot of youngsters have had sufficient milk, they line up to receive their share of bones with no meat on. On the smooth meatless bones are engraved centuries-old designs. The youths chew the softer end of the bones with no patterns on them. They do this with as much enthusiasm as a thirsty person drinks up, in imagination, all the water in a distant mirage.
The atmosphere is serene. The rituals appear to have been stripped of all pretensions. Then the gathering hears a whimper, which at first it can’t locate. The old man, from his vantage high chair, spots the whimperer, a boy, whom he requests to approach. All silence. The old man asks the youth what’s amiss. The boy shakes his head in sadness, unable to speak. His companion, the girl who earlier offered the high chair, approaches and explains, “He has been very greedy.”
“But why the whimper? Are you in pain?” asks the old man.
Raising her voice to drown her companion’s sobs, the girl says, “He has swallowed his Adam’s apple, mistaking it for a bone with a smooth body with centuries-old cowries engraved.”
Someone asks, “And what is to become of him?”
“From now on,” responds the young girl, “he and I will perforce belong to an outcast clan with whom most Somalis will not intermarry. Because he momentarily swallowed his Adam’s apple, mistaking it for a bone, his failure to restrain himself has cost us most dearly. Our family is assigned an inferior position in the scheme of clan politics.”
The old man ponders in silence for a long while. Being new at the job, he is not sure if it is in his power to replace the boy’s Adam’s apple. But will that set things right, alter the way society treats those whom it considers to be “deviants”? A moment’s lapse, and we are in the land of tragedy, where it no longer makes sense to think of the boy as just a boy, to whom you may suggest that he moderate his intake of food. Why do the rites with which food is associated cause possible damage to society? Why is food important in the way we think of ourselves, some inferior, others superior? We live in tragic times, thought the old man helplessly, when a chance birth can make so much difference to how one is viewed, where a secret ensconced in the recesses of untapped memories assigns one to an inferior or a superior position.
As the newly chosen wise old man, I . . .
It was seven in the morning.
Sholoongo joined me in the kitchen for breakfast. She came in with the quietness of a conspirator the very moment I had throttled the kettle’s singing. I paid her no mind, in fact did not bother to greet her until after I had emptied the coffee from the grinder into a pot for it to brew. She told me, with little ado, that she preferred tea if tea was “in the realm of the possible.” I asked how she liked her tea, and she said, “As dark as you can make it, no milk. No sugar, unless you have Fidow’s honey to hand.”
Then she greeted me, wishing me a “Subax wacan!”
I was fully dressed, hair not as yet combed. She was in a silk kimono with eagle-patterns. The eagles made taking-off motions whenever she lifted her arms, and made descending gestures when she crossed her legs, only for the unwinged birds to feel frustrated when, shortly thereafter, she recrossed her weighty thighs or entwined her fat fingers in an intricate way. As for honey for her tea, I doubted that I had any collected by Fidow, Nonno’s general factotum. I knew I had bought imported honey recently from a supermarket, but not where the jar might be. I opened one cupboard after another, reading the labels on the jars, now Zairois pilipili, now Ethiopian berberre, now Indian curries, ground cinnamon, or nutmeg.
“You can’t find it?”
“Nothing remains hidden forever!”
“Not even secrets?”
“Nothing remains hidden forever without losing its original identity, and no secret is forever a secret: it has to be known by someone who places a value on it, no matter whether it is divulged or not.” I paused, if only to ask myself what I was looking for. Then I wondered to myself why I was engaging in a semiphilosophical argument early in the morning with a woman I barely knew. What was happening to me?
Honey found, but not Fidow’s, we lamented the changing pattern of our neocolonial economies, when we import honey, bottled in jars, from Europe, when we have plenty of the commodity locally available and at a cheaper price, and many Fidows to collect it. I placed the two pots — coffee for me and tea for her — side by side, and poured out hers. I watched her put three spoonfuls of honey in it. Two sips later, she smacked her lips in approval. “I am sorry it is not Fidow’s, but . . . !”
“Did you sleep well?” I asked.
“I heard you come in,” she said.
“But you slept well, and you were comfortable?”
“I woke up several times,” she said, “because I could hear the exchanges of gunfire, some coming from as close as a kilometer away. How long has this been going on?”
“You get used to hearing the sound of automatic weapons,” I said, “and you sleep through it. For several months now, the armed militias have been closing in on Mogadiscio, but Siyad and his men are unimpressed. There are so many irregular armies operating within the city, some of them under former army officers, out to loot. You cannot tell who is shooting at whom.”
“Some kind of gang warfare,” she said.
I wasn’t sure whether to challenge that or to let it ride. At this stage of the strife, almost every act appeared to be informed by the politics of the parties waging a struggle. I let it go as I often have let go foreigners’ throwaway remarks spoken in ignorance, foreigners who held the view that “Somali politics is clan politics.” It would take me years to convince them otherwise. So we sat in silence, like lovers who had a quarrel the previous night, who slept in separate beds, but whom the morning’s sunshine found in no conciliatory mood.
“Were you at all tempted to come into my bed when you got back late last night?” she asked. She sat in her silence, as time sits in the sunlight, marking the passage of time in dust.
To myself I quoted the Somali proverb that, having met once, a penis and a vagina seldom turn down the chance to be reacquainted. I was confident, however, that mine would rather remain dormant than be entertained by hers. Remembering that I had difficulty getting it up the previous evening even with Talaado, I said, “I was not tempted to come to you at all.”
And as though squeamish, I looked away from the extended bulginess of her hips, her folds of navel extensions, and her partly exposed breasts. She had a mole where the breasts parted, at whose singularly long hair she pulled the way some men caress their beards, presumably thinking. I wondered if that lone hair was artificially grown, in an America where sex is an industry supplying on demand what a client needs.
