That’s how it went that night and how it continued to go for several more in the following months. We made love and he forfeited his sleep while I let exhaustion carry me off to that vaporous place smelling of sex, beer, and sweaty hair. And not only hair but down too, since my pubic hair had grown back, and I think more abundantly than normal from what I could see in photos or comparing with friends. It was curly, so its length was measured by thickness, and to me it was a sign of life that I would never have cut, though I allowed him to do it while he kissed me, fascinated, with as much tenderness and respect as when he talked about black writers.
I KNOW I SHOULD wrap this up soon. It seems inevitable now that the verdict will come down on me. I can sense judgment drawing ever closer, as if my ear were to the ground and I could hear the sound of the approaching train. So I’ll move on to the most relevant point for closing the story, but before I do, allow me to include some pages I wrote to Jim. In all seriousness, you don’t deserve access to this part of the story, the most personal part, and I can imagine that none of it really matters to you anyway, even if to fulfill some perverse curiosity. Familiar as you are with the taste of blood, you don’t understand the value of stories. All you crave is to feed again off that human flesh you ripped from a neighbor one day, and in so doing lost the chance of ever being a person again. You’ve been hunting for that taste ever since—a taste for cash, for the protein of banknotes. Skip as many pages as you want. If I transcribe a few of my letters to Jim here it’s only to leave this world hoping one single reader might comprehend. One person’s regard is healing enough for me. You know? I don’t give a hoot about happiness anymore. I used to think that knowing Yoro is safe would suffice; that I could die in peace. But it didn’t happen that way. Now that I know where she is, have touched her, kissed her, saved her, now that I know that she’ll survive not only me but probably you too, I will admit her love made me want to live as long as she is alive. And now I’m sad. Of course I am. But I don’t fight that sadness. Yes, the right to happiness exists. But not the duty. I relinquish my right. Today. Tomorrow. Who knows, maybe tomorrow I’ll be happy again. Or maybe I won’t ever be.
BUT BEFORE I TRANSCRIBE my letters to Jim, let me just give an account of what I am observing right now. The sea isn’t visible from the cabin, but I can see the river. A broad, muddy river. I can see it from the terrace. The friend of mine who built it has good taste and a steady hand. The sun peeks from behind the trellis, but it doesn’t prick, and it creates shadows laced with flowers I’ve never seen anywhere but in Africa. They look like fruit. There’s a baobab just to the side. I remember the legend about this tree. It was so beautiful that the gods punished it by turning it upside down, burying its flowers, its leafy branches, and its treetop. That’s what they did to Yoro for a long time, the most beautiful of them all; she was born and grew in the earth, alongside diamonds and gold. But I pulled her from the ground and placed her straight up. I put her on an airplane and now she’s in safety, far away from you, from this earth made miserable by the hands of foreigners. Yoro is missing the vision I have right now, this Africa whose sacred trees are upside down, but I know she’ll get accustomed to her new earth like I did, another transplanted woman.
Fifteen years in Africa. Who would have thought I would land in this place fifteen years and a handful of days ago, and stay so long? My whole life I thought I would die young, from some manifestation of radiation poisoning, and here I am, writing from illness, that’s true, but my only diagnosis is old age. Dotage, that sickness I never thought I’d experience after all those sleepless nights shrouded in the panic of dying. Suffering now from old age, I write from a hidden cabin looking out over sights that are golden to my eyes, accompanied by the constant buzzing of life, night and day, sounds of animals and at times even plants that crackle as they grow. Of course it had to take place here, where human life began, where despite the exploitation they’re subjected to, the land and its people resist annihilation.
I’m having breakfast and writing here on the terrace. Looking out over a stretch of river that is teeming with hippopotami. If I wanted to disappear, all I’d have to do is walk into the water. But I don’t want to do anything like that right now. Every morning in this beautiful land is another sun. The roots of the trees are strong, deep, and able to hold straight to nourish themselves. The baobab roots help; they sustain the earth with the strength of their flowers that open to subterranean fauna, offering leaves and petals for nests. I remember those joyful days. But who isn’t happy in the spring, even when it feels like winter? Now my tired old body won’t admit any more resurrections.
So here, now you can read some of the pages I wrote to Jim, which made me feel closer to him, at least while I was writing them:
Jim my love, Irrational Number lives on the sixteenth floor of a building in Harlem. Gradually, I got used to staying there and not going out, the same as in our own apartment. He has several reproductions of William Blake’s watercolors on the walls. The one titled Pity hangs just above what is now my bed too, a huge one that overwhelms the size of a so-called marriage bed. Blake painted an androgynous figure on horseback flying through the air, holding a baby and lowering its eyes toward a woman lying on the ground with her arms over her breasts, looking up. Irrational Number interprets the watercolors for me. Not only Blake’s visual or written work, but also the simplest words Blake uses. Blake uses language in a virginal way, allowing himself to be moved by the singular aura each word has the first time you hear it, and conveying—to me, like I imagine he did with his students—that quiver of primordial significance. The piece hanging over our bed, he told me, was inspired by a few verses in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which Blake alludes to from the very title, a word that means mercifulness or compassion. I never wrote out the verses and I can’t transcribe them now by memory, but seeing the watercolor evokes them very precisely. They show a naked baby boy as a symbol of compassion and an angel meant to express horror before everyone’s eyes, until the number of tears shed drowns the wind; but by contrast the voice of whoever is speaking—Macbeth, I imagine—is distressed by having such towering ambition, so excessive a drive, that when he mounts the horse of good intentions, he always ends up falling off the other side.
I don’t think I’d be able to recollect the meaning if it weren’t for hearing the verses when I saw the image, and feeling the empathy in the words, imagining myself a rider trying to flee the rancor and hatred, having seen the eyes of compassion, yearning to carry what is reflected in them to others like new links in a chain of kindheartedness, but I too always leap too far, overreach, and fall off into that territory where nothing I do matters or signifies, that no-man’s-land where one is drained by the sieve of one’s own intentions, regardless of how good one is. Now, for instance, aren’t I giving you too much information, Jim? Should I skip over my amorous adventures with other men? I’ve been talking to you about someone else for weeks now. I think in spilling the details I’m confirming the fact that you can no longer hear me, even though I don’t want to face up to that. Now I can appreciate the need for secrets. Keeping something hidden implies respect. Absolute sincerity is incompatible with life, with love. If only I had the desire to hide things from you, it would mean you’re still alive to me. If someday I feel the need to restrain myself in my writing for fear you might find something out, it’d mean you weren’t dead after all, and I’d leave this diary, throw your impostor’s ashes into the garbage, take a shower, moisturize my skin, and run out to welcome you.