I was through hiding myself. It was pointless. The motorcycle taxis would tell me hello and the ginger juice vendors called me by name. The neighborhood thought I was a new maid. The old one had disappeared the night before my crime, taking with her the pc and 5,000 dollars that Yâyé Bamby had hidden in her dresser, wrapped up in an old bra. Raye told me how angry her aunt had been, so furious that day that the dogs ran off and the hard-of-hearing perked up. Just think: the money a lot attendant cousin from Philadelphia had sent so she could pay for the work on her house still under construction! So, when they saw me coming, they thought everything had gone back to normal, that she’d had the thief locked up and taken her money back. And since I was often crossing the courtyard to hang out the laundry and scour the pots and pans, I could only have been an employee of the house—certainly not a criminal. Tell me, Madame Corre, what better judge is there than the eye of a neighbor? No more worries, no hassles, no glitches. Like everybody else, I could come and go, shout and knock around, burn with desire, and sin.
One evening, coming back from school, Raye handed me a mirror, her face gleaming.
“Those eyes! That smile! That chest! Raise your little finger and every boy in this city is at your knees! Does it really still get your panties in a bunch that you’re a criminal? Even the traffic cops think you’re one of the good girls—they think you’re the nicest one in the neighborhood. You see, you’re absolved, forgiven, you’re wiped clear. The city is waiting for you, with its wild nights and seduction. Friday after classes I’m taking you somewhere. . . On one condition, though: you have to do my trigonometry homework. Tri-go-no-metry! Obviously whoever invented it didn’t have a brain in their skull . . . I’m offering you paradise and you’re not even smiling.”
Raye was like that, she’d harvest the millet too early, like everyone suffering from surplus optimism. We reached an agreement: I’d go to the market and buy fish, eggplant, and ko-bo-kobo to make us a nice konkoyé with palm oil. And, after treating ourselves, we’d put on our finest rags and party down.
When she came home Friday, she found the house in a grave silence, with no fetching aroma to delight her nose. She found me slumped on the couch, my face in my hands.
“What happened . . . ? What are you trying to say? Enunciate, lady. Use your words. Did something happen to Yâyé Bamby?”
I was able to stand up and speak audibly.
“She still hasn’t come back from work.”
“What is it then? Did they rape you again?”
“They found me, Raye.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“The cops.”
“After all these years? Tell me you’re joking! Please be a joke.”
“Before it wouldn’t have mattered, but I have a life again now. Tell them I don’t want to die.”
She sat back down and in her most serious voice said, “OK, I’ll tell them. In the meantime, try to calm yourself. What happened?”
“Well, I was by the yam vendors when I saw him. He was wearing an indigo bomber jacket and big sunglasses. He was standing like fifty meters from me . . . you know, at the corner where the butcher’s and propane store are. . . and he looked at me like I reminded him of an old acquaintance. I acted like I didn’t notice anything. He made no hesitation following me. Following me! Yeah, all the way to the new church, Raye! So my knees shot up to my neck running the whole way here.”
“Come on, flirts are all over this city wearing indigo bombers. I told you, Atou, you have a way of attracting men. This dude didn’t want to arrest you, he wanted to jump your bones. That’s not necessarily unpleasant—saying from experience.”
She couldn’t make me laugh. Out of breath, my ears alert, I was on the lookout for signs of life outside. Kids’ voices shook me with fear and moped motors made the same noise as certain kinds of sirens. “That devil Bassikolo cursed this country! And you, Atou: beware of any man who approaches you.” Even the memory of old Ténin made me think of cops.
Yâyé Bamby, who got in a half-hour later, tried to reassure me.
“He’d have arrested you if he were a cop!”
Raye’s invitation was still on later: nothing was stopping us from being careful.
We couldn’t have made a better decision because Indigo Bomber showed up again. It was Raye who saw him this time, standing on the church steps. Two or three weeks later.
“I believe you now, Atou. There’s nothing—not one thing—reassuring about this guy. He was looking at me from the side of our house. And he had in his left hand something that looked like binoculars,” she stammered in an even more frantic voice than mine the day he followed me.
Yet everything was fine in the next season. At school, Raye didn’t get one bad grade. Yâyé Bamby earned a raise. She celebrated her birthday at a restaurant and let us have avocado vinaigrette, pizza, and champagne. An odd idea dawned on her as she cut the cake.
“You know what we should do Sunday? Let’s tour the city then go to the beach. We’ll go dancing, just to egg on this indigo bomber scarecrow. Arrest us, if he’s really a cop! Want to know what I think? He’s no cop. He’s a prankster. He’s just trying to scare you.”
These words had some sway. There was no more discussion of Indigo Bomber. He vanished from the market, the church steps, my thoughts and nightmares.
“Come on,” Raye said one day after we finished cleaning out that mess of a shed. “I’m taking you somewhere! Don’t bother with makeup: no one recognizes a criminal after they’ve been on the run for three years. Plus you’re well aware Indigo Bomber’s all but evaporated. He figured out we weren’t afraid of him.”
“Let’s get going, girl! You’re right, a real cop would have already shown up.”
A half-hour later we were at the Oxygène, a hideout where my life was about to take a new, more surprising and gut-wrenching turn than the day I killed my father.
“It’s as big and loud as a cruise ship!”
“Totally, Atou! You have to come a bunch of times to get used to it.”
She took me by the hand, I noticed, the way moms do on the first day of school.
“Check it out. This huge courtyard is called Bagataye: that’s the maquis. They have the best aloko chicken in the city. In the middle is Folto-Falta, that nightclub I told you about. They have the best whisky, best dj, prettiest girls, and so the best fights. On your right is Motel Ziama. That’s where you’ll rent a room the day you meet a guy. Come on . . . The path in front of you leads to the ocean. Watch it, though, there’s sharp rocks and roots the whole way down.”
We came out onto a pretty field of taro and palm trees a meter above the tide, after crossing through a slum occupied by squatters. Chairs and tables were set out in the middle of the grass and a rattan bar was jammed between the left side wall and the parapet. Jumping over the parapet, we landed on a little white sand beach surrounded by rocks. It was called Toes in the Water: the Oxygène’s seaside feature.
“Pleasure and ecstasy! Sodom and Gomorrha! Free license and vice!” Raye laughed. “During the day, everyone’s cool just kissing. The serious stuff goes down after dark.”
My first night out. I told you, Madame Corre, I didn’t know anything about life: not bars, not movies, street fairs, the zoo.
“Three years is the ideal interval: any earlier and you’d be recognized; later, you’ve missed the boat,” Raye whispered as she led me back to the maquis, decorated like it was Christmas, with garlands and string lights. “Thus concludes our tour. Any time of day, you can drink here, dance, eat, and. . . he-he!”
She thought, and I still wonder why, that it was only at eighteen years old that the flame of desire hissed through your body. My stay with Yâyé Bamby had in some way prepared me for my new life. A gilded prison is happier and more instructive than school, and Raye ended up convincing me that any life without weed and cold beer lacked for taste. But I insisted on keeping my virginity. To be a virgin (even if your own father already soiled whatever little jar of honey the good Lord wedged between your thighs) is to cast an eager eye on the world. Reach out a restless hand to its fountains of youth and papaya orchards cinched with snakes.
We were served chicken and fish outside. Raye almost had to yell over the music and shouting. The air was thick with smoke from the grill and the beer flowed freely. After the aloko chicken, we made our way to the club.
Raye ordered some beers and went to find a seat. A young man walked with an unsure gait through the crowd and passed in front of us.
“If that one there cornered me in a bathroom stall, I wouldn’t cry for help.”
Raye followed me on the trail once she was able to stifle her crazy laugh. Our conversation kept on despite the decibel level.
“Does it really eat at you this much?”
“Hey, I’ve waited a long time!”
“You could wait a little longer.”
“No longer than now.”
“Why don’t you jump the next guy you see?”
“I swear I wouldn’t hesitate if I saw the guy in that mauve velvet hat again.”
But I didn’t see the guy in that mauve velvet hat just then: he’d left to go sleep off his hangover in one of the market warehouses or get picked up by the cops. Or, more likely, mortise and tenon with some girl on the beach or in that filthy bed in room 13, which everyone tried to avoid but recluses and gravediggers, drawn to the empty tombs and ruins.
The music was interrupted two more times due to fights.
Then Raye, barely more drunk than me, dragged me down the trail because they’d put on Papa Wemba. Two or three guys circled around us to make fun of our self-conscious walk and fiendish shaking. But the event I was hoping—or waiting—for didn’t come to fruition. In any case not right away.
Ten minutes later, sitting side by side, a Rasta man bent over toward me.
“Hello my same-mother, how are you?” (The Oxygène made me think of a far-away tribe, Madame Corre, with its own customs and argot. You didn’t say friend or brother or sister, but same-mother. And the city? You know what they call the city? The Other Tribe, or sometimes Babylon.) “May I extend an invitation to this young and lovely woman who dances so fine to an Afro-Cuban beat?”
That’s how I met Alfâdio. That’s how my life became what it is today. A skinny boy with an athletic outline, chocolate complexion, a face like Mohamed Ali, the face of a playful kid who knew he’d only ever be liked by his mother. He danced the salsa like a god and that might be what drew me in. He wasn’t wearing a mauve velvet hat but there was an aura of similarity with the young man I’d seen earlier. Maybe it was him.
“I saw you a while ago. With a mauve velvet hat, no?”
“You don’t know all the things that happen to me! Two days ago, a lovely young woman like you saw me on Tayaki beach dressed like a cosmonaut.”
“It was definitely you. This particular young man also had a scar over his left eyebrow.”
“Maybe it was me, then, if he’d been staring at your pretty little tush.”
“What?”
Out of his jacket pocket, not acknowledging my outrage, he produced a mauve velvet hat. “Are you sure? I see you as more of a puncher. You don’t look like Bob Marley, you look like Muhamad Ali.”
“Still a compliment.”
The Folto-Falta was crackling from the music. A wonderful world tour, from jazz to salsa, Congolese rumba to samba, hip-hop to raï. Each harbor had its own rhythm, every station its pulse. I laughed and turned around in the arms of this stranger, not paying too much attention to what he was saying: the words my body wanted to hear, of course, and that knew how to reach me without filtering through my ears. The truth is, I wasn’t drunk, just a little tipsy. He was, but it kind of suited him. All around us, laughing—the same as ours—shoulders and hips and, no doubt, in their burning minds, the same feeling of innocence and freedom. Inside me was a feast; around me, the pulse of a youth bloated with optimism, drunk on carelessness. Everything was new, fascinating, unexpected. I felt feverish, transported, full of tonicity and an enchantment with life. I was wild, strong. I was free.
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