It all came back to me.
I am that child, swimming between the past and the present. All I have to do is close my eyes and it all comes back to me. I remember the smell of the wet earth after the first rain and the dust dancing in the rays of light. I remember the first time I got sick. I must have been six at the time. Fever lashed out at me for a whole week. Heat, sweat and shivers. Shivers, sweat and heat. My first torments date from that period.
The small hours of a morning, in Djibouti, at the beginning of the seventies. My memory always takes me back to that starting point. Today, my memories are less foggy, as I was able to make strenuous efforts to go back in time and put some order into the jumble of my childhood.
Day and night, from the tip of my toes to the tip of my hair, fever attacked me. One day it would make me throw up. The next day I was delirious. I misunderstood the words and the care my parents were giving me. I misjudged what they were doing. Blame it on pain and my tender age. Fever played with my body the way the little girls in the neighbourhood played with their only rag doll.
For six whole days and nights, I shook. I poured out all the water in my body, stretched out on my mat during the day, and then on my little mattress set directly on the floor in the evening. My temperature rose at nightfall. I cried even louder. I called Mama to the rescue. I was impatient, boiling with rage. I hated it when she left me all alone. Under the veranda, my eyes staring at the aluminium roof. I would cry to the point of exhaustion. Finally Mama would come. But I no longer found the slightest comfort in the arms of my mother, Zahra. She didn’t know what to do with me. Do something, quick! 6demanded the little voice that took hold of her during those moments of panic.
Then what? Then she would entrust the little bag of bones and pains I was to whomever would appear before her.
Who? Who?
Quick, quick, implored the little voice.
So she threw me like a vulgar package into my grandmother’s arms,
or into the arms of my paternal aunt Dayibo who was my mother’s age.
or into the lap of a passing maid.
Then into the lap of another woman,
an aunt,
a relative,
or a maid,
or even a neighbour, or some matron who had come to say hello to Grandma.
I was passed like this from arm to arm,
from breast to breast.
But I kept on crying,
from pain,
from anger
out of habit, too.
Dawn would arrive, most often without my knowing it. I would be dropping from exhaustion. I’d sleep a little, sniffling and thrashing about in my sleep. I woke up when the first rays of the sun heated up the aluminium roof. Shivering, I would scream with pain and rage. And wake everybody up.
My mother would jump out of bed and blow her nose at length. Maybe she didn’t want me to catch her crying but I could see the flash of panic in her eyes that I had already surprised onto her face.
Outside, the city was already full of life. I could hear the children of Château-d’Eau, my neighbourhood, leaving for school. They sounded joyful, noisy, naughty. Whereas me, I was lying on my mattress. Feverish. I would start sobbing again. 7
I was waving my fleshless arms around, in vain. Mama was sniffling silently, a flash of panic in her eyes again. She found a way out by throwing me into the arms of the first woman who happened to come by.
Grandma’s arms,
or my paternal aunt’s arms,
or the neighbour’s arms.
Then to another one,
then another.
And the circus would begin all over again.
The little sniffle, the panic, for the flash of an instant.
And I would be passed from arm to arm,
like a bundle of sticks.
Why did Mama hate me so much?
I never dared ask myself that question. Only later did it crawl into my thoughts.
It would lodge in my heart. And hollow out a black hole in it.