THE NIGHT BEFORE WE LEFT for the war in France, Fary Thiam said “yes” to me with her eyes, discreetly, surrounded by the girls and boys of our age set. It was a full moon that night, we were twenty years old and we wanted to laugh. We told each other short sweet stories full of innuendo, and riddles too. We weren’t gathered in Mademba’s parents’ compound that evening, as we were four years before. Mademba’s younger brothers and sisters had gotten too old to sleep through our suggestive stories. We were seated on wide mats on the corner of a sandy street in the village, sheltered by the low branches of a mango tree. Fary was more beautiful than ever in a saffron yellow dress that clung to her chest, her waist and hips. In the moonlight, her dress looked pure white. Fary shot me a quick but loaded look that seemed to say, “Get ready, Alfa, something important is going to happen!” Fary took my hand as she had on the night when she chose me when we were sixteen years old, glanced surreptitiously at the middle of my body, then got up and left the group. I waited until she’d disappeared around the corner and I got up as well to follow her from a distance to the small ebony forest, where we weren’t afraid to see the river goddess Mame Coumba Bang because of the desire we felt, my desire to enter the depths of Fary’s body, hers for me to enter it.
I know, I understand why Fary Thiam opened the inside of her body to me before we left for the war, Mademba and I. The inside of Fary’s body was warm, soft, and moist. I had never tasted, with my mouth or with my skin, anything so warm, soft, and moist as the interior of Fary Thiam’s body. The part of my body, my inside-outside, that entered Fary had never received such an enveloping embrace from top to bottom, neither in the hot sand on the shores of the ocean where, flat on my stomach, I had often thrust it for my own pleasure, nor in the secret of river water beneath my soapy hands’ caress. God’s truth, I had never known anything better in my life than the tender moist heat of the inside of Fary’s body, and I know, I understand why she let me taste it though it ruined her family’s honor.
I think Fary began to think for herself before I did. I think she wanted a body as beautiful as mine to know this sweet happiness before disappearing into the war. I know, I understand that Fary wanted to make me a man before I went to offer my beautiful body to the bloody battlefields of war. This is why Fary offered herself to me despite the ancestral prohibition. God’s truth, my body had experienced all sorts of great joys before Fary. I had felt its power in back-to-back wrestling matches, I had pushed it to the edges of its resistance in long races on the beach after swimming across the river. I had sprayed it with seawater beneath a sun as hot as hell, I had quenched it with cold water drawn from the deep wells of Gandiol after swinging a daba in my father’s and Siré Diop’s fields for hours and hours. God’s truth, my body had known the pleasure of reaching the limits of its power, but never had anything been as powerful as Fary’s warm, soft, and moist interior. God’s truth, Fary offered me the most beautiful present a young woman could offer a young man on the eve of his departure for war. To die without knowing all of the pleasures of the body isn’t fair. God’s truth, I know with certainty that Mademba never experienced the pleasure of entering the insides of a woman’s body. I know it, he died even though he wasn’t a man yet. He would have become one if he had known the tender, wet, and soft sweetness of the interior of a woman he loved. Poor, incomplete Mademba.
I know, I understand the other reason Fary Thiam opened the inside of her body to me before we left for the war, Mademba and I. When rumors about the war arrived in the village, Fary understood very well that France and its army would take me from her. She knew, she understood that I would be leaving forever. She knew, she understood that even if I didn’t die at war, I would never return to Gandiol. She knew, she understood that I would settle in Saint-Louis du Senegal with Mademba Diop, that I would want to become a somebody, a Senegalese rifleman for life, with a big pension to make my old father’s final years easier, and to one day reunite with my mother, Penndo Ba. Fary Thiam understood that France would take me from her, whether I lived or died.
That’s the other reason Fary offered me the warm, sweet, and wet insides of her body before I left to make war with the Toubabs, despite the honor of the Thiam family, despite the hatred her father felt for mine.