Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [93]
I glanced up at the shelf, where my suitcase lay and in which I had kept my tape recorder and camera, my tapes, film, notes, and my diary. It was open and my stuff lay strewn across the top of it.
K’s eyes followed mine and he nodded. “All of it,” he repeated.
At that moment I hated K, not for trying to reclaim what he had given me (that I could understand), but for assuming that he could claim what was mine.
We faced each other in the shimmering light of the flashlight.
Then he said, threatening, “I’m leaving.” But he didn’t move.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Leave if you want.” I covered the back of my neck with my hands and rocked back and forth on my heels, curled up completely against K. And against Mapenga and the lion. And against everything these men had ever done and everything they would ever do. And against everything I had ever done and ever would do. I wanted to get off the island and wash their words and their war and their hatred from my head and I wanted to be incurious and content and conventional. I didn’t care about the tapes, or the film. I didn’t care about K’s story or Mapenga’s bravado. I didn’t care about any of it, because putting their story into words and onto film and tapes had changed nothing. Nothing K and Mapenga had told me, or shown me—and nothing I could ever write about them—could undo the pain of their having been on the planet. Neither could I ever undo what I had wrought.
I said, “I’m sorry.”
“What?”
“You’re right,” I said. “I have nothing to say about you.” I stood up and looked at him. “Nothing.”
I had shaken loose the ghosts of K’s past and he had allowed me into the deepest corners of his closet, not because I am a writer and I wanted to tell his story, but because he had believed himself in love with me and because he had believed that in some very specific way I belonged to him. And in return, I had listened to every word that K had spoken and watched the nuance of his every move, not because I was in love with him, but because I had believed that I wanted to write him into dry pages. It had been an idea based on a lie and on a hope neither of us could fulfill. It had been a broken contract from the start.
An age of quiet spun out in front of us. Even the creatures outside had ceased pulsing and calling, as if the heat of K’s anger had rushed out of the room to the world beyond the veranda and stilled the restive frogs, trilling insects, and crying night birds. Sweat gathered in a little stream under my chin and plopped onto the floor between my feet.
He said softly, “You’re not what I thought you were.”
“No.”
Mambo groaned and pressed himself up against the cage, and a rooster from the laborers’ village gave a high, warning howl, “Ro-o-o-o-ooooo!”
K said, “It doesn’t matter.”
“No,” I said. “It doesn’t.”
Because at that moment it seemed to me that who K and I were mattered less than the fact that we were in this together. Two people in a faint pool of light from a dying flashlight beyond which there was darkness, Mambo, an insomniac cockerel, a great stretch of crocodile-rich water, Mozambique, and Africa. And beyond that, a whole, confused world where people like us were doing exactly what we were doing—trying to patch together enough words to make sense of our lives.
Suddenly K’s face was level with mine—he was kneeling in front of me—and I could see, by the light of the lamp, that he was crying. Two silver trails, like the gleaming path left on cement by a snail, shone down his cheeks. “Sorry,” he said. The tears came out of his eyes in sheets and out of his voice in clouds, making his words blurred and sluggish, like a drunk’s. “Shit, I’m so sorry.”
I said, “Me too.”
A mosquito drifted onto my wrist like a casual piece of fairy dust. I pressed it with my thumb and it left a smudge of blood on my skin. I wondered, vaguely curious, if it was K’s blood, or mine.
“Why do I destroy?” he asked.
I said, “Why do I push people to destruction?”
“Because you’re a woman,” he said.
I said,