It was not too sure now whether the ardent young man standing before it was Khady’s husband or a stranger called Lamine, or why exactly it had to remember everything that came out of that mouth with the hot, almost feverish breath, and it felt tempted — at rare, very brief moments — to flush itself clean and return to its previous state, where nothing was demanded of it except to avoid getting involved in anything to do with real life.
Khady memorized, then, at nightfall, lying in the courtyard, filed away the new pieces of information in order of importance.
What had to be kept continually in mind was this: the journey could take months, even years, as it had for a neighbor of Lamine’s who’d only reached Europe (what “Europe” was exactly, where it was situated, she put off until later to find out) five whole years after leaving home.
This too: it was imperative to buy a passport. Lamine had reliable connections for getting one.
And then: the boy now refused to go by sea from this coast.
The journey would be longer, much longer, but it would go through the desert and arrive at a certain place where you had to climb to get into Europe.
And then, and then: Lamine had said many times — his suddenly mulish, inscrutable, smooth face shining with sweat — that he didn’t mind dying if that was the price of pursuing his aim, but to go on living as he had done up till now, that he refused to do.
Although Khady spontaneously blotted out everything to do with the boy’s earlier life, although she tried not to listen to anything she thought inessential, whatever was likely to upset or embarrass her, even, inexplicably, to fill her with a muted sadness, as if her own earliest memories were being revived rather than his, she couldn’t help retaining the fact that a stepmother — his father’s new wife after his mother’s death — had for years beaten Lamine so hard he’d almost gone mad.
He pulled up his T-shirt to show her the pinkish, slightly puffy marks on his back.
He’d gone to the lycée and failed the baccalaureate twice.
But he wanted badly to go on studying, he dreamed of becoming an engineer. (What did that mean? Khady wondered despite herself, trying hard not to get interested.)
When after a few days she made to remove the cloth protecting her calf, it was stuck so hard to the wound that she had to wrench it off, causing such pain that she couldn’t help crying out.
She wrapped a strip of clean cloth tightly around it.
She limped from one corner of the courtyard to another, trying to habituate herself to the hindrance, to train her body to cope with the slower pace and constant pain, until they became a part of her that she could forget or ignore by relegating it to the status of other merely circumstantial matters, like the painful stories of Lamine’s past, that served no useful purpose but merely risked deflecting and slowing down the still budding, precarious development of her thinking by insinuating into it elements of turmoil and uncontrollable suffering.
She similarly let her eyes flit across the faces of the people who arrived ever more numerous each day in the courtyard — and her look, she knew, was neutral, cold, and a permanent discouragement to anyone attempting conversation, not because she was afraid of being asked something (she had no fear of that) but because her mind panicked at the mere possibility of hearing about painful, complicated lives and being told at great length about things she found difficult to understand since she lacked the principles for interpreting matters in life that others seemed to possess as a matter of course.
One day the boy took her through narrow, sandy streets to a barber shop where a woman in the back took photos of her.
A few days later he came back with a worn, creased, blue booklet that he gave Khady, telling her she was now called Bintou Thiam.
His eyes had a look of pride, triumph, and self-assurance that put Khady slightly on guard.
She had a passing feeling that she was becoming feeble again and subject to the decisions, knowledge, and inscrutable intentions of others. Through sheer weariness she was briefly tempted to accept this subordination, to stop thinking about anything and to let her mind once again drift in the milky flow of its dreams.
Feeling a little disgusted, she pulled herself together.
She thanked the boy with a nod.
She felt terrible shooting pains in her calf that made it hard for her to think straight.
But though still determined not to discuss money unless he did, she couldn’t ignore the issue, nor the fact that Lamine had bought a passport for her and was behaving as if it were obvious that she had no money, or that one way or another she’d pay later — that worried her to the point that she sometimes wished he’d disappear, vanish from her life.
But she was becoming attached to his eager features, his adolescent voice.
She surprised herself by looking at him with pleasure, almost with tender amusement, when, hopping about the courtyard like the delicate birds with long spindly legs that she remembered seeing as a child on the beach (although she thought she couldn’t now remember what they were called, she could see that everything had a name even if she didn’t know it, and realized with embarrassment she’d once believed that only those things whose names she knew possessed one), he moved from one group to another, busying himself with a spirited, childlike innocence that inspired confidence.
He was possessed of a particular intuition.
She was beginning to grow impatient, but never for a moment thought to complain about it, when he announced they’d be leaving the next day. It was as if — she thought — he’d guessed that without realizing it she was starting to get bored, and had decided it was a bad thing: but why?
What could that matter to him?
Oh, she certainly felt affection for the boy.
That night, in the darkness of the courtyard where they were lying, she felt him moving close to her, hesitantly, as if unsure of her reaction.
She didn’t rebuff him; rather, she encouraged him by turning toward him.
She pulled her batik up and, carefully rolling the banknotes in them, slipped her panties off and laid her head on them.
It was years since she’d made love: not once since her husband’s death.
She carefully stroked the boy’s heavily scarred back and was surprised at the same time by the extreme lightness of his body and by the almost excessive gentleness and delicacy (because she could barely feel he was there) with which he moved within her. Almost as a reflex, recalled by the sensation of a body on top of hers, even one so different from her husband’s compact, heavy frame, there came back to her the prayers to be got with child which she’d never ceased murmuring at the time and which had prevented her having an orgasm by distracting her from the necessary concentration on her own pleasure.
She vehemently chased all such prayers away.
She was filled with a kind of well-being, a sort of physical comfort — nothing more pointed than that, nothing at all like what her sisters-in-law giggled and sighed about between themselves — but it made Khady feel happy and grateful to the boy.
As he pulled away from her he inadvertently bumped against her calf.
An explosion of pain tore through Khady.
She was panting and almost fainted.
She could hear Lamine murmuring anxiously in her ear and — suffering so much that she felt surprised, almost detached, a stranger to a self that was in such violent pain — she said to herself, Who ever cared about me the way he does, this lad, and so young too! I’m lucky, I’m really lucky …
Before dawn they clambered onto an open-bed truck where so many people were already huddling that it seemed impossible for Khady to find any room for herself.