Our marriage began to disintegrate when he found out my wanderings weren’t only geographical. For my part, I’d accepted his numerous affairs without batting an eyelid, asking only that he give me the same freedom in return. As a lawyer, Alioune could see my attitude was logical, but as an African male — or a male tout court—he was eaten away by jealousy. Like his father, his grandfather and all his Peulh ancestors before him, he considered polygamy to be natural and polyandry inadmissible. In nature, as he told me one day with a straight face, ewes live together peacefully, but you put two rams in the same field and they’ll fight to the death. ‘Bullshit!’ I retorted. ‘In our species, males are the ones who band together. Maybe because most women are mothers, they don’t need to keep rubbing up against each other, jostling and measuring and competing with each other just to feel they’re alive…’ ‘Oh yeah?’ snarled Alioune. ‘Then how come you’re never around, mother? How come you’re always gallivanting off to the four corners of the earth? Our sons suffer from your absences!’ That hit home, as Alioune had known it would — and as Aziz knows it does now — because of my own mother’s absences. I must admit I’d got into the habit of hiring one or more ‘Lucilles’ to manage the household while I was away. And I worried about the fact that Thierno, then four or five, had started tying his GI-Joes to every chair in the house…Would he tie up his mistresses later on, as Josh Walters had tied me up? Or as I myself had threatened to tie up poor, autistic Matthew Varick?
What are all these ropes about? Subra asks rhetorically, giving Rena her cue.
Oh the incredible refinement of Araki’s smooth, slender, lovely models, artistically bound and strung up in trees to be photographed. He set up this series entitled Sentimental Journey with the utmost care. The girl is horizontally suspended from a branch; ropes circle her breasts and come up in a V around her neck, forming slipknots at her chest, waist and thigh. Her arms are tightly squeezed against her body; her head dangles backwards and downwards; her face is concealed by a black cloth. All the women thus bound and photographed by Araki were consenting, they may even have been content; as usual, no mention is made of the fact that they were also paid. The photos are contemporary echos of kinbaku, an ancient Japanese rite which entailed stringing a woman up in a tree next to a Buddhist temple for the monks’ contemplation. What had the woman done to deserve such treatment? Oh, no, nothing, the monks just wanted to contemplate her, that’s all…with one hand, perhaps. Yes, as they sat there meditating in their solitary cells, listening to the gongs that marked off the hours of the day, they must have derived a certain pleasure from thinking about life’s transience, the crudely material, ephemeral and ultimately meaningless nature of human existence, admirably illustrated by the woman that hung day and night from a tree in front of their window, twisting, wailing, moaning, then falling silent, then starting to rot in the wind and rain as the ropes gradually sawed into her flesh. You can’t fool me: that woman was mommy as well. All tied-up women are mummy.
To get back to Alioune…Subra prods.
In the final years of our marriage, Alioune became jealous of everything. Not just my trips and lovers abroad but my success, my notoriety, my every phone call…Hmm…Don’t want to spoil this lovely Tuscan day by thinking about the dark rain of violence in the eyes of my handsome Senegalese…his fits of rage gradually making me blind and impotent, unable to work…my Canon locked away in its case for months on end…my darkroom deserted…our two sons desperately clinging to two foundering adults…the terror that came into their faces, Thierno’s especially, whenever we raised our voices…my own terror at realising, in the midst of a quarrel, that my adolescent sons in the next room were enduring exactly what I’d endured as an adolescent, and vowed never to inflict on my kids…
The situation worsened with every passing day. Alioune began to drink, and I met the Mr Hyde of his Dr Jekyll. On bad nights, as of the second drink, I could almost see his white teeth turn into fangs and hair sprout from his handsome face. He’d wait for some pretext to come along, then turn and pounce on me, roar at me, crush me beneath the weight of his scorn. Appalled to find myself still vulnerable to the female atavism I most abhorred, that awful paralysis of will which makes us murmur Yes, master when confronted with a male who’s mad with rage or just plain mad — I finally walked out on him. ‘Behave like a Cro-Magnon if you feel like it — but without me.’ That’s when I cut my hair cut short.
Maybe this is as good a time as any to change the subject? Subra suggests.
Right. Mustn’t ever forget that shred of wisdom gleaned long ago on LSD: hell is only one of the countless rooms in the Versailles palace of the brain; you can always close the door on that room and walk into another. I can choose, for instance, to relive the divine love-making of my first years with Alioune. Waking up in the morning, I’d feel his hardened cock against my thigh, he’d slip into me and not move, I’d close my eyes and pretend to be drifting innocently back to sleep whereas in fact I was squeezing him inwardly with all my might, skilfully massaging his sex with the contractions of my own. Then he’d start to move inside me, as gently as in a dream. At first I’d keep my pleasure at bay, purposely remaining above or outside of it, but before long the weakness would become irresistible — a thing I could feel expanding within me, slowly invading my whole body, turning it inside out, and when I came it was like weeping. Afterwards Alioune and I could touch each other in any way at all — I could press my head against the inside of his thigh, for instance, near the top — and we’d be happy just like that. It’s incredible how happy you can be sometimes for no reason at all. Is it possible I’ll never know that kind of happiness again?
Hmm, murmurs Subra. Maybe we shouldn’t hang around in that room, either.
So go back to the night we came home from a party at three in the morning and, having put on a Susanne Abbuehl record, I let Alioune slowly peel off my clothes and carry me to the bed, my loins draped in a scarf of turquoise silk. Giving myself up to Abbuehl’s voice singing e.e. cummings and the warmth pulsing through my body, I released an interminable cry of joy as his tongue caressed the very point of my being and then, after the convulsions, first mine then his then mine again, I remained curled up in the disorder of the sheets as the after-tremors of my body gradually spaced themselves out and subsided, melting into the final poignant chords of somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond…But Alioune, who spoke not a word of English, jolted me out of my reverie by exclaiming, ‘Boy, what syrupy music!’…
Rena finishes dressing, impatient to go down to the kitchen and let Gaia’s chatter deliver her from her demons. When she gets to the landing halfway down the wooden staircase, however, her mobile rings.
‘Alioune! Incredible! I was thinking about you just a minute ago!’
‘Is that so unusual?’
‘No, what’s unusual is for you to call me.’
‘How are things with you?’
Ah, yes. Ritual greetings. Rena loves ritual greetings. The first time Alioune took her to Senegal with him, just before their wedding, she thought people were having her on. ‘Salaamaalekum! — Maalekum Salaam!’ But no, they weren’t. Ritual greetings are taken very seriously in Africa. And now she misses them. Not easy, afterwards, to readjust to the rude and rapid manners of Parisians.