He and three others ended up on the steps near us. They wanted water. Alma had cigarettes and could answer in French. I slitted my eyes toward the west and then up in the direction of Lessingsdorf. Now and then she would update me on the subject under discussion and I would say I know, I know, like I had been following, like I understood more French than I could speak. He was pretty quiet, and he was the prettiest of them, slender, with a full mouth, the high cheekbones of all my dreams, and eyes I’d never thought about, large, dark, and not clear.
One of them got up and dusted himself off. Duallo stepped over into my line of vision. His two remaining comrades filled his space, stepping closer to Alma; the duel between them for her that would last only a couple of hours had begun. Some friends from the pitch called to them and they sang back, and they clearly weren’t rejoining the game, which had just stopped, for some reason I didn’t know. One man with legs reminiscent of a caliper stood over the stilled football. The teams talked on, in French, in Wolof, Duallo told me later, slapping themselves, kicking in the dust, hands on hips, several sitting, hands behind them.
Duallo moved us from my inhibited German to his freer English and sat beside me. I could have fainted a million times. He smelled like Aunt Loretta’s cold cream in her dish in front of the mirror on her tiny vanity table as it was in 1966. Here I was, in Berlin, and he smelled like a boy’s crime I had forgotten. There was a spot on Aunt Loretta’s silk scarf. It could only have got there from some unauthorized someone having violated the house and been at her vanity table. It’s true, I’d crept upstairs and I’d run her scarf around me, and it’s true, I’d rubbed her cold cream from the open jar on my hands, and then smelled orange blossom, but I had lied about it when first questioned, until Mom, the Grim Extractor, arrived and the truth fled to her side.
And if I didn’t pick up my end soon or come up with something to say, I was going to lose him. He’d put his shirt back on, flipping it together. Buttoning it up. Like the shutting of an altarpiece. The molded, packed, ribbony upward thrust of his torso was veiled by a much-washed faded gray shirt decorated with little white fish all leaping in the same direction. The orange blossom thrill of being so close to his chest turned into fear and depression that he wasn’t gay, certain knowledge that I was way out of my sexual league, when he stood up and I took in how beautifully formed he was. He hadn’t seemed that tall in the distance or when stretched out on the steps. Maybe it was his long neck. His head tilted down toward me. His mysterious eyes looked across my shoulder in the direction of Alma and his two friends when she suggested we drive to Potsdamerplatz in the rusted VW van one of them had.
Crammed together, talk was general, and I didn’t have to say anything. I just had to be there. Duallo had got in front with the driver. Alma and Contestant Number 1 and I were in the windowless back, comfortable on the carpet amid a mishmash of boxes and buckets and mops. Somehow we ended up not at the Co-op, but on Oranienstrasse, at a table on the street, crowded with alternative types and Turks, headscarves and safety pins and U.S. Army camouflage fatigues marching by. Alma put her chin in her hand and looked at the passing scene as the two contestants rolled into the colloquial French phase of their duel over her. It was an argument about music maybe, she whispered. Musicians, she shrugged, and had some German conversation with the girl behind us about the state of the women’s bathroom in this café.
Duallo turned from the argument and explained that musical loyalties were intense in West Africa. I said I’d never been there. He was three when he first went out there, he said. No, he was born in France. He was French, he said. His mother was from Mali, but she was French, he said. His father was from Paris. His father’s mother had come from the German Cameroons to Paris in the late 1920s. There she met his grandfather, an African nobleman whose title the French government recognized. He died before the war. His grandfather never married his grandmother. His father had had a rough time during the war. Duallo’s father had gone to his father’s country in the 1960s, but he did not feel welcomed there by his father’s family. He went back to a life on the fringes of the capital, in the art and film scenes, an unhappy black Frenchman in Paris. Having several children had not cheered him up. Duallo said he came to Berlin to get away from his father’s bitterness.
He was beautiful and he was exotic and he rested a hand on my back in front of everyone as he got up to go to the toilet. Alma let both contestants know that Contestant Number 2 had lost when she turned with the cigarette he’d given her and asked Contestant Number 1 for a light. I paid the bill. Duallo returned. He was twenty years old. That part of town, Kreuzberg 36, had contempt for big tippers. It was not the custom, but I didn’t care about seeming a bourgeois American. A leftist alternative-scene German working in a tiny döner kebab café was probably the only kind of white person who did see me as bourgeois. Contestant Number 2 had gone obtuse on the sidewalk and wasn’t getting lost. I kissed Alma quickly and Duallo was endearingly correct in his rapid farewell to his friends. Night was still a long ways off.
I could have punched us through the red boxes for tickets, but I didn’t. We rode without paying, on the watch for conductors, from Kottbüser Tor to Bahnhof Zoo, and there had currywurst from a stand on a corner, laughing at the lingerie and sex display windows in the tacky main street. He proposed that from there we walk to Potsdamerplatz. He sang four of his songs along the way. He explained that he believed in positive messages. The songs were in Bambara, his maternal grandmother’s tongue. I was so relieved. His sweet voice was nervous. As we walked, one of those lapis evening skies in Berlin surrounded us. I was thirty years old for a week or so more, but that night I was his age. Hip-person years are the opposite of cat years, which in turn are nowhere near what gay years are like. I would too soon admit to myself that I might not be able to be what Duallo was looking for at twenty years old, but that night extraordinary courage came out in alliance with Vesuvian desire.
* * *
I was in my grove, my bed, and Duallo was in my arms again when we heard over the radio news of the terrible fire in Lisbon. I kissed him and, incredibly, he was still the someone kissing me back. It was time to step up and send that ball, my life, hurtling through space toward the goal. I’d turned thirty-one. I was not his age. I was going to act grown up and look out for him. In the terrifying beginnings of the worldwide AIDS epidemic, Berlin had kept its Isherwood promises to me.
He was beautiful and black, which made me feel that I had one-upped those white boys who had no interest in me. “You’re as vain as Isabella d’Este,” Cello had said back in the bad years, “and all in the same lost cause. There’s no there where you are.” I was too pleased to mind the comparison. My difficult, gifted European cousin who never read anything herself had not considered that I, Negro Underachiever, might know who Isabella d’Este was. Keep coming back, I would learn to chant with the black noncom officers at the end of the AA meetings in Dahlem. It works if you work it.
EIGHT
The witness, an English wine merchant who would owe his life to black slaves, said in his letter that at about three minutes after nine o’clock in the morning, on the first of November, 1755, the earth began to shake. It was All Saints’ Day, his twenty-sixth birthday, and he was opening a bureau in the very bedchamber where he’d been born. He knew immediately what it was, recollecting the fate of Caleo in the Spanish West Indies. He ran upstairs and was soon hanging on to a window from the outside. Tall houses collapsed into narrow streets. He thought he saw all of Lisbon sinking.