13

Aromas of coffee and fresh fruit surprise Ito Baraka on his bench. An old lady, who must also be waiting for a train, has come and sat beside him with her breakfast. Ito Baraka wonders in what morning market the old lady has bought her fruit. He remembers that, back home, the fruit merchants were the first ones to set up their stalls at Hanoukopé Market. He sees the market again, with the movie theatre in the middle. It was bounded by a lagoon that every evening sent down on people’s heads an army of disciplined and lethally effective mosquitoes. There were open-air sewage ditches running alongside the houses like veins carrying bad blood under the skin of a stoic, dying man who doesn’t give a damn. There were scrawny trees spreading their bare branches, beetles tickling the naked bums of the hordes of kids in front of the concessions with their bleached wood gates opening onto yards, each one with the indispensable well in the middle, the sole water supply for the tenants of the houses lined up on either side. And in a corner farther away, surrounded by a low, crudely built cinder-block wall, the sanitary facilities, two shower stalls on the greenish ground and a latrine, yes, a single one for the whole concession. So there was always a line of people waiting while you emptied yourself of all your frustrations, and sometimes someone pounding on the door to put pressure on you or clearing their throat to signal their painful presence and ask for a little compassion. Yes, that’s the way it was, and Ito Baraka imagines it’s still that way, the laterite dust and the smell of the gaping sewers hanging over everything like a sinister circus tent, the shine of tin roofs in the sun, the bars on the single window of the two-room apartment his parents rented. Bars, as if they were in prison, trapped in that working-class neighbourhood that at least wasn’t in the slums of the outlying districts, bars that gave them a view of a striated, saturated sky. The sun beat down, making it unbearably hot in the houses, with their low roofs and no ceilings, and the tin nailed directly onto the palm-wood rafters scorched the skin.

That scene was where his mother would be, hawking ice water in the market. At the height of the tropical heat, that might bring in a few small coins. His mother among the wooden stalls and stands of a market along a railway line, “Ési, ési, de l’eau, de l’eau,” a plastic pail hanging from her right hand, and in the pail, a big chunk of ice. At the public tap on the edge of the market, she would pour water over the ice and begin her round, “Ési, ési . . .”

His mother’s dream was that Ito Baraka would get out of what she called their quagmire. He was not unhappy, but his mother, who had her own idea of happiness, had decided his destiny should be different. She thought that school, knowledge, would save him from the margins and give him a place at the centre of the world. That was also the credo hammered home daily by Baka the teacher at the Franciscan school where Ito Baraka began his quest for knowledge. “Learn reading, writing, and arithmetic, succeed, become an accomplished person!” Baka would repeat. Many years later Ito would say to himself that the issue wasn’t mastery of numbers and letters, it was something else. The question to ask yourself was rather this one: “Of what night of the world are you the fruit? The one in which love, in the scent of a woman, gives you wings, or the one that keeps your eyes constantly fixed on nothingness, a hell long ago deserted by Eurydice and everything that has the face of tenderness? How, with what words, do you explain your night?” And it was to flee that confrontation with his hell of the night that Ito Baraka got into the habit of wandering the night streets, hanging around the streetlamps that push back the darkness. Alone or in the company of other insomniacs, he’s a squatter on the streets of night under the light. He wanders aimlessly under the streetlamps, sensing in the sewers beneath his feet the hell populated by rats, and that’s what he refuses to be, a rat crushed by the weight of the city and the centuries. Under a streetlight, he sits down on a bench with cold metal legs, turns the collar of his coat up, and closes his eyes. He closes his eyes and opens wide his depressed rat’s ears, because, in spite of his refusal, that’s what he is, a sinister, sad rat. He closes his eyes under the light and hopes for a miracle. The miracle of a trip through the air outside his complicated, tortured body. But he knows very well that rats don’t fly.

The old lady sitting beside him in the station has finished her meal. She’s wearing a dress of incredible whiteness. Ito Baraka likes white. It reminds him of the floor dusted with corn and millet flour at Abdul’s mill on the corner of a street back home. It also reminds him of pagnes, the wraparounds worn tied around the waist by Voodoo priestesses doing their shopping in Hanoukopé Market. And white is the image of a miraculous peace, which soothes him.

So, to his relatives, Ito Baraka had to leave. And perhaps come back to them again one day, whether they were dead or survivors, palpable or fleeting shadows gathered in an airport lounge to welcome the revenant. His little cousins would be grown up, and his aunts, their mouths toothless and wrinkled in comical expressions, would demand kisses on their withered cheeks. If they hadn’t croaked by then. Like his father, long since dead and buried. But Ito Baraka is one of those who don’t go back. Poor wretches with dead eyes, frozen limbs, and backs plastered to a curb in Manhattan or Rome, their beggar’s caps in their hands. For him, it will soon be the last act, the doctor confirmed it to him in his precise, methodical, rigorously impersonal voice: “Mr Baraka, let’s say a few months at the most, but you never know. Above all, avoid tiring yourself out.”

And now, he examines with a distant eye his life spent on the roads since that night in September twenty years ago when he left the country, the sober goodbye at the airport surrounded by his four brothers and sisters, who encouraged him with little pats on the back, pushing him into the Roman arena for a test of courage. A tear in the corner of his mother’s eye, his father, after hugging him, standing back, apart from the group, already absent, as if he had decided to break the thread between himself and the others, to remove himself from the dim lights of the departure lounge. And one year later, Ito would get a phone call from an uncle: “The old man is dead.” He didn’t remember his father being old and sick, just the man with his body slightly bent from carrying his surveyor’s tripod on worksites or bending over his maps and orders for house plans all day long.