Dirty Feet - Edem Awumey [5]
I don’t know. I’m going.
You’re going.
I’m going.
How far?
I don’t know. As far as I can go.
You’re going as far as you can go . . .
That’s right.
And how far can you go?
If I knew, I would tell you.
You don’t know where you’re going. But you’re going.
But I’m going.
And how long have you been going?
I don’t remember.
If you knew, would you stop because you’d say to yourself: “I’ve been going for a long time and I don’t know where, and I see this makes no sense?”
Probably. Because it makes no sense.
No sense . . .
But maybe you can try right now to stay where you are.
Where I am . . .
Paris.
6
HE HAD OFTEN wondered why Sidi had chosen Paris. He pondered this, searching for the logic behind this curious choice before recognizing the plain fact that he could find none. The logic eluded him, slipped through his fingers. Paris. It could have been a city on the Atlantic or Mediterranean coast, because in Askia’s mind one of the reasons for leaving the Sahel had been to settle on the coast. Because the gods of the road had pushed them from the interior to the edge of those worlds. He thought that, logically, Sidi should have settled in San Pedro or somewhere higher, in Dakar or maybe Tangiers. It was hard to understand why Sidi had gone any farther.
What exactly had attracted his father to Paris? There was no answer to that question, yet he could still see how Sidi might have made his way to metropolitan France, l’Hexagone. When they had already made it to the coast — Askia was eight years old at the time — his mother would talk of those old tubs that frequently plied the route between the Gulf of Guinea and the shores of the Mediterranean. Once she had mentioned the men who sailed to Marseilles, having managed to hire themselves out on fishing boats whose captains were all too happy to employ such solid, brawny young men, able to winch up a net in no time, haul the big fish to the freezer for storage, and clean the small ones that were to be cooked for the crews. The men were sturdy and versatile too, veritable jacks-of-all-trades: cooks, mechanic’s helpers, welders, maintenance men, and sometimes more. Sometimes lovers of sailors who found relief in their firm, smooth flesh.
Yes, Sidi may have reached Marseilles by following a predictable course, a logical itinerary from the ports of Lomé, Lagos, or Cotonou towards the south of France. And from Marseilles? Would he have then gone up to Paris? Or had he perhaps embarked in the Gulf of Guinea as a stowaway, only to be discovered far offshore and thrown overboard?
He reflected on the choice of Paris and he could see only that Sidi’s case had probably not been so unusual. That from Cordoba to Bilbao, Matera, Rome, or Paris there were thousands of aliens tramping farther north. Some of them travelled great distances, towards Moscow, looking for knowledge in the university named after a Congolese political leader. There was one, Tété-Michel Kpomassie, who had gone even farther, towards Greenland and the lands of the Inuit, back in the seventies, his black feet sinking into the powdered snow up to the intangible limits of his curiosity while the compact people of the polar latitudes watched in amusement. And there were those too who did not go very far, their purpose being to earn enough money in the orchards of Sicily to feed their families, but there were those more frivolous, the sons of Berbers and Arabs, who invaded Andalusia from Tangiers as if to turn it back into Muslim territory as in the days of the Almoravids, when the suras were recited in the homes of Almeria.
Later, when Askia enrolled at the university in the eighties, he kept thinking about those different itineraries but never succeeded in placing Sidi somewhere, in a rural or an urban setting. Sidi evading all detection, pursuing who knew what mirage, driven by some obscure desire. His mother one day conjectured that Sidi had gone to France because he had a distant cousin from Guinea there. The cousin, Camara Laye, worked in a factory, which his mother believed