Nuruddin Farah - Knots

On hearing the news of Dalmar’s death, Cambara froze, at first refusing to bring herself to accept it, not even after she identified the corpse at the mortuary. Her heart stopped in reaction to the gravity of what had happened: that he would no longer be in her dreams, living, active as the young are, loving, and seeing her in his dreams. Wardi was to blame; so was she, come to that. She crumbled to her wobbly knees, screaming obscenities, mostly at herself, for entrusting Dalmar into his irresponsible hands. She felt so incapacitated that she disintegrated, her paralysis complete. No “I told you so” from Arda, who was impeccable in her self-restraint, no self-satisfied remarks either.

It was not long before Wardi wore his crafty colors to the courts, cashing in on the deed declaring him the co-owner of her apartment, which he now proposed they sell. From then, he inspired nothing but derision in her, and she showed her aversion toward him in both private and public. When he got physical, hitting her, and walked away from her with a swagger, she struck him more fiercely, paying him in the currency of his aggression and causing him pain where men hurt most, in the whatnots.

The surprise stunt Zaak has pulled on her now prompts further anger, which works its way into her joints and affects her muscular coordination. By turns murderous — when she thinks about Wardi — and mortally offended — when she thinks about what Zaak has said — her body goes rigid at the thought of resorting to violence, something she has done once before, against Wardi, when he struck her in the face. Her temperature rising, her posture becomes that of a kung fu master balling his hands into fists and gearing up to hit back. Scarcely has she talked herself into calming down when the idea of beating Zaak to a pulp dawns on her. She relives in her memory the one and only occasion when she hit back, in anger and in self-defense. It troubles her to imagine what might become of her if she carries out retaliatory measures every time someone upsets her. How can she square her liking to settle arguments through violent means with her claim that she has come to Somalia, among other things, to put a distance between her and Wardi? And to mourn, in peace, while living in a city ravaged by war.

Looking back on it all, Cambara decides that the one fundamental fault in Wardi’s character is that he presumed that just because Cambara was a woman, she was more vulnerable in the event of a fistfight than he was. He discovered to his detriment, however, that fury insinuates itself into the fists of a woman who has been spurned and then struck in the face, with the adrenaline resulting from the spleen so far accumulated turning into brute strength. And with so much suppressed wrath going round, the scorned party might transform the gall gathered in the pit of her pique into brawn as powerful as that of an elephant going amok.

She remembers training in martial arts for years in secret, ever since marrying Zaak, whom she wrongly assumed might one evening have a go at fighting his way into the privacy of her bedroom and then imposing his uncared-for sexual appetite on her. As it turned out, he did no such thing, either because he lacked the necessary pluck and pulled back just in time before pushing his luck with her or because he feared what Arda might do to him if he had. To be sure, there was a great deal of subdued aggression implicit in Zaak’s behavior, but he did not take it out on her; he did so only after he separated from her and married a poor woman whom he could ill-treat with impunity. That Cambara eventually let loose the animal wildness of her bottled-up decade-old rage toward Wardi did not surprise those who knew her full story. That she got the better of Wardi, beating him to near death, was a testament to a spurned woman’s fury mutating her pent-up anger into strength.

He hit her first, punching her unjustifiably hard in the nose and face, cutting her lower lip in the process and making it bleed copiously. Tasting her own blood, she went berserk, and for a moment behaved wildly, striking him fast, fiercely, and with compound interest. She flipped — no doubt about it — and acted as though possessed of a moment’s madness, hers the unfocused gaze of the disoriented. She could not define what occurred, taking hold of her by the throat, as it were, between him striking her, her turning away, and tasting the blood of her cut lower lip. Barely had she apprehended that he had crossed yet another line, smacking her, when she misconstrued what she perceived to be two ants — one crawling up her spine, the other going down the small of her back — which, in reality, were two drops of perspiration of such concentration, not ants. Itching, her fingers searching, she touched the moisture, and then she understood that she had confused an inanimate thing with a living one.

She was concentrating on attending to her bleeding lower lip when he hit her yet again on the back of the head, flooring her, and kicked her some more in the teeth. While she was still down, he informed her that he would be leaving for a long weekend and that when he got back he did not want her to be in the apartment — her own apartment, bought with her mother’s money — because he was selling it and collecting his share. Moreover, she knew where he would go and with whom. She felt frustrated at his attempt to swindle her out of what had been legally hers. So that was where trust got her?

She recalls dabbing at her cut lip and staring at her index and middle fingers now coated with her own blood. After a moment’s reflection, she snapped, seeing in her blood her own failure and the failing of many a woman. She did not like herself one bit. No, she was not jealous that he was off for the weekend with his Canadian mistress. She was angry. And to her, there is a difference between being jealous and being angry, but she was in no mood then to articulate her sentiments. The fool could have gone where he pleased, alone or with someone else; she did not care. He was after all a despicable creature. She was displeased more with herself than she was with him, for having allowed these and many other terrible things to be done to her, or for things to go so badly that she felt hard done by them. Above all, she found it impossible to countenance that her son had drowned in the swimming pool of his legal partner and paramour while they were having it off in the main bedroom, which was in the other extreme of a sprawling house.

The memory of hitting Wardi now intrudes upon her consciousness. She remembers how she struck him with a passion that contained in it a vengeful rage wrapped in contempt, the consequence of a most terrible upset bottled up for a very long time. Did she train secretly in martial arts for several years in preparation for the day when, their embittered relationship having reached a head, she might administer the knockdown blow at short notice? Of course, she wanted him to know that she was no pushover. And what better way to prove this than to give him back his own bitter medicine, humiliate him because he demeaned their oneness, neglected to attend to his son by keeping an eye on him when in the pool. As she laid into him, the image of burying Dalmar, then running into Wardi’s mistress first at the cemetery and later at her home: these gathered in her mind as storms do, culminating in a riotous spleen that deactivated her brain before it exploded in a total breakdown. Maybe this explains it all: why she became dysfunctional, sanctioning the beast in her to take charge.

Dissecting with her now sharp mind the detritus of her rage then, she reasons that maybe she paid him back with higher interest than was his due. She might have killed him if she had not changed her mind at the last minute, stopping just in time, well aware that a knife, however small or dull, is a lethal weapon if one places it in the hand of a mother whose only son drowned in the swimming pool of her husband’s lover. She feels that her rage accrued into a motive, justifying the administering of a fatal blow. In the end, she caused him a lot of pain. Wardi lay motionlessly on his back, his body instantly sown with a copse of bruises, some growing as big as grapes, some assuming the hardness of cacti, some becoming as patulous as malignant pustules soon after, and others ending up as knobbly as the fruits of a baobab tree.