Eve Out of Her Ruins (4 page)

She's always wrapped in fabrics with ugly prints on them. She forgets she's a woman. What she actually is, I don't know.

I don't want her faux leather, her Brazilian soap operas, her feeble dreams. I've always told my parents no. It was actually the first word I said. You don't know how to say yes? my father asked when I was old enough to understand. No, I said. The slap came before I saw it. It was the first one. I must have been four. After that the slaps, like the windows facing walls, like the pictures tacked up, became part of my everyday life.

But I'm walking backwards, away from that life. As it recedes, my father's face, red in anger, looks silly. The burn disappears quickly, but the memory of it doesn't.

A rag of disgust
. It doesn't end there. Every night, sentences keep hammering the landing.

What color is your laugh? I've never seen it. You have two holes to bleed from. You're my little Tom Thumb on your bloody path. I'll follow you to find the traces of our faces.

I'm pissing gold over the towers. They're drowning in twilight and ammonia.

Come with me and I'll be the death of you.

Of course I know it's Saadiq sounding these echoes in the building and setting me a new riddle every night that I refuse to answer.

I don't want to play this game. At night I read the poetry book and I see where his inspiration came from. I don't need his secondhand words.

When I read the book he gave me, the words dance and try to ensnare me. But then I lock up all those thoughts and the book falls out of my hands because of the stone in my heart.

I sleep. I wake up. Mold seeps into my room. The shower next door drips all night. Humidity seeps through the walls. I feel like I'm the one seeping through. I hear my father shoving my mother around. I hear my mother's apathy. Tomorrow her arms will be black and blue. Tomorrow, she'll walk with a waddle. Tomorrow, he'll have sulfurous eyes and he'll smell harsh, like a man.

I'm pissing gold over the towers
, I'm humming in the morning loud enough for him to hear. He looks at me sharply.

One night, he came into my room. I pretended to sleep. He watched me. He stayed a long while.

I don't know what he was thinking about, what was going through his head. Is he still a father? Am I still his child? What would I know?

Since then, I've been leaving my underwear lying around to keep him out. I know that makes him upset and worried. He doesn't know what to make of it.

But this frustration keeps swelling, like a tide. My calmness won't last.

SAAD

The day I say I love you to a man, I'll kill myself, she says with a rising laugh.

The road is also rising. Early one morning, I drag her to bikes I borrowed without asking. I take her to the Virgin Mary monument on the mountainside. Up there, the sky is almost blushing shyly under our gaze. This sky that had seen everything was being demure. That's what I was able to show her: something different from our neighborhood. A view of something other than the dryness of gray nights.

To the west there's the harbor, so calm in the morning that we can't see the least ripple in the water. That's the first miracle: water that could almost be walked on. That's the beginning of our fantasy, the threshold of our dreams. The boats no longer carrying passengers seem to be calling us anyway, telling us to come and glide over the water. Or they spread wings instead of sails and soar into the sky. And the two of us, astonished children, up high. The city's chaotic outlines muted, all greens and blues and oranges, is the second miracle. It looks like the city our grandfathers talk about when men took in the sunrise barefoot on their doorsteps, and listened to smiling passersby and hungry martins in the mango trees. We drank up this sunlight like syrup, they said, before it became burning hot. It started your morning off right, just like a bit of rum in your belly. Of course, that didn't keep us from actually drinking a little rum too, two suns in the body are better than one, wouldn't you say?

Here is your city, I say to her quietly. Right here in my hand.
Have a taste of its salty juice. Look into the eyes of the Citadel. It streaks the sky with its refusal.

Then we mount our stolen, no, borrowed bikes, and we race each other down the steep slopes. She doesn't hold back, of course. She looks at me with a smirk as wide as a frog's and turns her back on me and lets herself go at full speed. I follow her. The wind, already warm, whistles against our cheeks. Her hair is already flying back. She shrieks and laughs all at once. At the bottom, we pedal with all our strength to go back up the lane and down the next one. We're slick, immediately, completely, with sweat.

Suddenly, as she's going at full speed, one of her wheels hits a rut and she loses control. I speed up to try to catch her, already seeing her crashing into the ground, a small pile of metal and flesh, but she falls left onto a patch of grass at the very bottom of the slope. I come to a stop near her, terrified, but she's laughing.

I get off my bike and throw myself on her, pinning her to the grass. I feel her body shaking, whether in laughter or fear I don't know. Her sweat smells good. She isn't wearing much clothing and I can feel all her bones and all the hollows in her flesh. The effect is immediate. I bury my nose in the space between her neck and her shoulder.

Tell me you love me, I say.

She answers: The day I say I love you to a man, I'll kill myself.

She's the one with her arms spread out as on a cross, but I'm the one crucified by her words.

I don't know if she realizes it, but she pulls herself free and gets back on the bike.

Thanks for the trip, she says as she leaves.

The waist of her jeans is slung low, revealing a strip of golden-brown flesh and the black outline of a g-string. Her hair hides her back. I'd have liked to lap her up.

On the way back, the gang grills me. What did I do, what happened, what did she say? They see through my lies and laugh at me. Everybody's done her but you, they say, with some sympathy. But they know that doesn't make a difference, and in the end they leave me alone. With my love, my infanta, my queen.

Nobody knows that it's possible to love like that at seventeen. I swim in the night waters of Eve. I plunge into her murky gaze. I drown in her sludge, in her innocence. I don't care who she is, what she does. I'm the winking navel over her jeans' low waist. I'm the curved heel of her bare foot in her sandals. I'm the memory of her all-too-rare laugh, of her strength, of her willfulness.

I don't see anyone else. The sentences on my walls are no longer written in black but in white, and the pen fills and empties all by itself, in incredible spurts.

EVE

The teacher looks at me with a gritted smile. He's nice to me, but shifty. I know he pays attention to the slightest changes in my eyes, my voice, my silence. Open the smallest gap, and he'll plunge right in. I see him coming and I wait. I need tutoring for my tests. He'll do it.

No need to judge me. I follow my own laws. If you came from Troumaron you'd know that. The only thing that keeps me alive is Savita. When we go out together we whisper so intimately that we can smell the alcohol on each other's breath. Phoenix beer has such a sweet taste this way. A hint of foam outlines the upper edge of her purple lips. Our hands, when they touch, fit together perfectly. We move in the same way, with the same rhythm. No need for us to look to know what the other is thinking.

It started the day Savita found me under a tree in the schoolyard. I hadn't been in class. I must have caught some kind of infection. I was shaking, my teeth were chattering, I was cold. I think I had pissed myself. It happened so quickly that I hadn't been able to do anything. My whole body had rebelled and refused to function. She took off her jacket and put it on my shoulders. She didn't say anything to me, like What's wrong with you? or What did you do? or You were asking for it, she said nothing. She helped me to stand up and we walked back together. She smelled like spice and smog. I know my face was gaunt and my cheeks were blotchy, like children when they've done something wrong.

I told her: I don't want to go back home.

She told me that she couldn't take me home because of her
parents, but she would stay with me until I was ready to leave. We sat by the stream. She didn't seem to notice the sharp odor I had. I don't know when exactly I put my head on her knees and fell asleep. She didn't move at all. When I opened my eyes, I saw her clear eyes above mine.

What is it? I asked.

I'm thinking about what you're going through, she said.

You're wrong, I said, I'm not going through anything. I chose my life.

She answered: That's why you're shivering with cold when it's ninety-five degrees in the shade?

I started to get up angrily, but she held me down. She didn't say anything else.

She wiped my brow. Then she leaned over and kissed me.

The taste of her mouth wasn't at all like those of men. It was so gentle that I closed my eyes and savored it like candied papaya. I inhaled it deep into my mouth.

Outside the purview of men, we became happy, playful, for a few minutes. A warm perfume wafted from her navel. We teetered on tiptoes. It was so strange. We were smiling like drowned souls finally at peace. We danced on a tightrope that stretched from her heart to mine.

Finally, we each went our own way home. But I stayed by the window all night, looking her way, wrapped in her jacket as cinnamon-dark as her skin, and I knew she was doing the same.

She never asked questions. What's left of you after all these trades? She knows. There's a metallic sheen that can't be worn away.

Now I hum every time the teacher walks past me. His hand trembles on my notebook. He's so pitiful. He looks like a suicide about to dive. His features are washed out. When he opens his mouth, a croak comes out. He has to clear his throat to be able to talk. The tutoring sessions are a mess. I snigger. He notices.

I laugh because I'm not beautiful in the least. I still don't understand this power I have. My hair is so wild that all my combs break trying to tame it. The combs are afraid of my hair. The rest of me is a plank, with outlines of shapes and occasional curves, but nothing terribly attractive. My features are bunched up in the middle of my face, which is shaped like a triangle. I look like a comic-strip mouse.

Maybe that's why men set traps for me. Maybe that's why I fall into them.

And Troumaron scorches my stomach, my bowels.

At school, they eventually push us out. Or rather, we each fall one by one to the wayside. Most go there just because, to get away from the bitter breath of the neighborhood. Only the smartest and most desperate ones stay.

And I stay. I slip through the net. I won't be held back.

But the struggle to stay wears me out. Ever since the game with the teacher started, I've been feeling tired. He charges for what he knows. He's worse than the others. At least, it's what he wants to do, even if for now, out of hypocrisy or weakness, he isn't able to tell me straight out what he wants. Everything I learn leaves a wound on my body. That knowledge is painful and hard-won.

When the others figure out his game, they shy away from me. It's a joke to them. I'm all alone. Everyone else is an onlooker. I'm
already feeling naked. I shut my eyes and bear it. I play the game. I'll always be the one a man squints at from far off until his hands find me.

Men's hands take hold of you before having even touched you. Once their thoughts turn toward you, they've already possessed you. Saying no is an insult, because you would be taking away what they've already laid claim to.

Like the hand snaking up my T-shirt, they need me to lift my skin so they can feel my organs, or even stop my heart from beating. Their urges won't be constrained. Soon there'll be nothing left to take but they'll keep going anyway.

But why should I let them?

Out of distress. Out of mystery. Confirming angrily, belligerently, hopelessly, what they're all thinking, over there, outside.

Being. Becoming. Not disappearing in your eyes. Escaping the straitjacket of passivity, of idleness, of failure, of ashen gazes, of leaden days, of sharpened hours, of shadowy lives, of faraway deaths, of gravelly failures, of lingering, of nakedness, of ugliness, of mockery, of laughter, of tears, of moments, of eternity, of shortness, of heaviness, of night, of day, of afternoons, of dawns, of faded Madonnas, of vanished temptresses.

None of that is you.

Escaping all that, evading the hunters, the followers, eschewing the path, eluding the dogs, exchanging forms, executing moltings and metaphors and metamorphoses, educing a silvery trail redolent of females and the night's folds, examining the underbrush leading all the way to the depths of myths and exiting anew, skin scoured and with a bloody step out of your lives, being, becoming, not disappearing.

You are not from here, you tell yourself. You repeat that until everything ends.

CLÉLIO

Midnight burns. Noon burns. Every hour burns. Can't keep myself from burning. Have to break something. I'm standing on the building roof, singing at the top of my voice, I sing blues then rap then rock then séga, but the clouds silence my voice, don't care, another song rises to my throat every time,
krapo kriye
, I'm a toad, I yell into the dawn and yell into the dusk and my voice is hoarse from yelling, standing on the roof, I know I'm yelling until I'm strong enough to jump and because the song's saying the mother sleeps with her eyes open and the mother is the father's slave and the father is the boss's slave and the mother therefore is the slave of another slave and it's worse than everything, how can anyone fight for the slave of another slave?

What about me, what am I? I know I'm not a slave, even if a man and a woman among my ancestors were chained up and saw me through the eons separating us, and told me: You will be free. I'm no slave, but maybe everyone else around me is. Putting one foot in front of the other, crossing a threshold, turning their back on things, that's something they can't do. They made their own chains, so they think they're free.