Nuruddin Farah - Maps

His concluding remark was, “Truth is body.”

I stared at him questioningly. I didn’t understand him.

“Look at a man who is after a woman,” he said. “For example,”

“Yes?”

“The blood warms up, his thing rises, he loses his head, his concentration on any other aspect of life is nil. Watch him sneak into bed with her, spy on him courting her, listen to him tell lies to the woman, his victim — what have we here? A body that rules the mind — I almost said, the man. Religion forbids that we subordinate the ‘thinking’ faculties to that of lust. Why? Because, when one is making love, one doesn’t think about God, at least I don’t. Take a look at lovers together, look at the way they concentrate on each other’s demands, offering to each other bodies of sacrifice. To them, the world does not exist. God doesn’t. They do.”

A congenial smile. A taxi came into view. He waited. I flagged it down. No luck. It was hot and dusty. We stood in the shade of a tree. We were both thirsty and hungry But he was still talking — afraid of silence, I thought, keeping my mind and his busy with ideas so neither would think about Misra’s disappearance.

“Good sex. Bad sex. Adultery is a complicated science in Islam. To prove it, you must swear that a needle, not a camel, a needle, wouldn’t have found sufficient space between the bodies of the man and the woman and that his member was inside her. It’s not enough that the man and the woman were naked or that they were together, alone, in a room, no. It’s very unlslamic to give a man so many lashes on the strength of suspicions. So?”

This time, he looked at me as though I were a latter-day Ayatollah, giving adulterous men sixty or so lashes and stoning adulteresses. In any case, what did the “So!” ending in the ascending tone mean? Possibly, he was making a point, subtly — that I had no evidence that Misra made love to either Uncle Qorrax or Aw-Adan? And neither did Karin have proof? After allowing him time in which he indulged his vanity, I decided to return to the topic of “bodies”, making certain we kept Misra out of it. I said, “What irritates me about the human body is, you just don’t walk into a shop and say to a salesperson, ‘Look, I don’t like my foot, I want it replaced. What’s the cheapest you’ve got?’ You just don’t do that sort ofthing, you cannot.”

He fell for the trap. He said, “But you can. People in industrialized societies have begun making such demands on science.”

“You mean, replace the limb you don’t like any more with its plastic equivalent?” I asked, egging him on.

“You can have the extra fat in your body reduced, your pot-belly removed, your nose altered, you can have lots of things done. You can change most parts.”

“And the cost?”

“Well, you know!”

“Why, it costs more to replace a part than what one has paid for the whole. A part more expensive than the whole?” I argued.

He laughed. “How much did you pay for your body?”

The whole? The part? Uncle then found the tunnel in whose dark corners he had earlier discovered the pathways leading to my subconscious — and the tunnel led us finally to Misra. Had I not said that a part of me had died when I learnt that Misra had betrayed our trust? At last, we hailed a taxi whose driver recognized Uncle. He gave us a lift home.

Salaado asked, “Where’s the car?”

I told her what happened.

“Useless men,” she said and hopped into the same taxi to bring the car home. “The carburettor is flooded, can you imagine?” she was saying to the taxi driver, “and they just lock it up and walk away Useless men.”

Vapour and dust and smoking piston-rings of the taxi.

V

When Salaado returned, I was in my room, busy drawing (how did she put it) spaee-in-space-out-of-space, but was, at that point in time, in a mood to be interrupted — which she did. She looked me over. I wondered why and learnt, to my pleasant surprise, that Riyo and Salaado had met and that she had brought greetings from her. “And where did you meet?”

“She was going out of our house when I saw her.”

I said, “But why didn’t you ask her to wait?”

“Maybe she didn’t want to disturb you.”

There was a set pattern — I visited her and she came to see me only once. Had she heard about Misra’s disappearance and come to hear what news we had of her? “We talked a little,” volunteered Salaado. “Naturally, about you.”

“Yes?”

“She said, for instance, that she finds something elegant, something … er … how did she put it … gallant about your gaze — gentle, formal, sweet, but gallant.”

I said, “It’s very kind of her.”

She said, “I told her about Misra.”

“What do you mean? Do you know any more than we do?”

She shook her head. “No, I meant how she menstruated the first moment she met your stare when you were God knows how many hours old. And I agreed with her that you make women lose their hold on themselves, you disarm them with your look,” she said, and then stopped suddenly like one who wasn’t sure whether to continue or not.

“Riyo says she feels a small girl making passes at a boy not at all interested in her.”

Quick as a flash, I had to think of something that would make her change the subject, or at least go off it. I said, mimicking Hilaal's voice, “Sex, sooner or later.”

After a pause, she was apologetic. “I am sorry to disturb you,” she said.

Much in the same way a polite guest might insinuate the idea that if no one else is having the portion of meat still left in the serving dish …, I said something polite, “No, you’re not.”

She opened the door as if to go out and the odour of the garlic in the champignon provençale entered the room. The scent of the meal was so powerful, we both went and joined him in the kitchen.

At table, Salaado told the story of a schoolmate of hers who once said, in the presence of at least a dozen of his classmates, that he was going to commit suicide. He gave the precise day, date and minute when he would. The boy was in love with a girl, but she wasn’t in love with him. He said goodbye to each and every one of them and begged that they pray for his soul. “A month and a day later guess what happened?”

“The girl committed suicide?”

Salaado shook her head, no.

“He returned home alive?”

“Precisely.”

Hilaal remained silent. So I said, “A coward.”

“You must hear why he returned home alive.”

Hilaal's only contribution, “Why?”

“The boy said, touching his body all over, that what we saw when we looked at him was 'just body'”. His body was here with us, he said, but not his soul. We used to fall silent whenever he joined our groups. Little by little, however, it became apparent that there was something in what he had said — the boy had undergone very noticeable changes. Not only did he appear pale, bloodless, a man with no spine, a man with no fight in him, but there was external bodily evidence that he had changed. In the end, he wore away like the garments he had on. He wore away from underuse of brain and body as well. He’s still alive, all right. In fact, I saw him today, driving back from the hospital. Do you know what he was doing? He was walking the streets of his madness.”

I moistened my lips and felt anxious. Why did she tell us this story? There must be a reason, I thought, remembering the conversation Hilaal and I had had earlier on in the day Then, just in time, I saw my fork dripping with red juice — the beetroot’s. Salaado took in all that and then said, “You are wondering why I’ve told you this horror of a story?”