Without Her (2)
She cast aside her charms for the sake of an intellectual image. That did not bother you. Keeping her by your side was all that mattered. You felt you could defer your yearning, you lust and build on them to a great promise. Oh God! was that why she went with the goalkeeper? because of..Where is his photo? I always wanted that album here and open! That's him. I clipped this from a sports magazine on the eve of their marriage. Tha caption blames a recent defeat on him. Mark this! His physique was more attracting than athletic. Then she made a choice that would not have occurred to you. Of course you knew that women marry for reasons you cannot foretell. They also marry without obvious reasons and, again without you being concerned
You will not redeem her by reminding her of those days of leverage. You think by sitting with her, you and your booted men, in any of your bureaucratic functions, you will redeem her? No sir! Forget it. It is of you that one is bereft. Always going to extremes in you petit prophecies.
She had delivered those exotic and varied speeches from mobile platforms at the students' cafe. Although she had talked seriously, you took the chance of her getting overwhelmed to pore over her body, not her talk. Her most enchanting corporal state revealed itself in the midst of her elocution. She had meant to show you that the world went on the very same way you thought it did not. She did not mean to embarrass you by that. The fate of things to her was so simple and devoid of surprises. It was her view that tales and anecdotes had their delights encapsulated into rubrics of directness and traditions of narration. She used to shoot at you: Talk like Brecht or Kafka and you never get things straightened!Her voice soared while her body, with it's delayed or rather subdued drives, did not seem to fit this very description. She would say,"They are the prophets of the ordinary, those who act according to courses and vicissitudes." She would ask you to "Take for instance.." a phrase she often used, "how those aliens entered our home?"
"It's a big story. They pierced through the tribal pride that took us decades to build and you know how?"
You would cling to your silence, knowing you weren't sure how. Then she would go on:
"O.K. Why did they stay so long? To teach us how to grow cotton? Why did they bring in the railroad? To flush your rural relatives into the alleys of Omdurman? Do you have definitive answers?"
You pondered the matter. Your face wore an affirmative expression. And, as if to commend that, she exclaimed,"Yes exactly! I would not take those twisted answers reiterated by the hypocrites! Forget them. They accepted half-truths or less. The fact is that we were dealt a fatal blow. Those aliens broke something that was deeply ensconced. Cherish was its essence, indeed. it is a simple and painful story."
But, because you had thought she went to extremes on that, you chose to watch, while she pled against what was held incontrovertible in that matter, with a passion that inflamed other passions and postures that concerned you a lot more. That scar did not concern you. The theory of defeat seemed to concern no one, either. It had no impact on the general sense of pride. Nothing made her face switch colors of denouncement like that little refrain she never tired of repeating: 'Even after they departed, we could not cope. Our denial of the scandal had trained us for more denials. We swept into labyrinthine roads, armed with obstinacy-the aggravation of denial. This a neurotic post-colonial reality'
Goodness! Beauty and mind gathered in one.
For thirty years, he was unable to see except through cracks in the husky ordinariness that encompassed him. Then, suddenly, one morning, while crossing the public road, he discovered how talented he was in forging methods of refusing the ordinary. He now wears one of those boots thea bang the ground in pursuit of....me! He, too, is stretched out in some bleeding orbit, turning over his talent in his palms and blowing into them lest they be extinct.
Her's was an opposite transformation. Ordinariness was an axis she had known so well. A cradle that lulled the 'deeply rooted' in her. She leaned on it, sometimes, but mostly overstepped it. Then, it so happened that she lapsed into it, irretrievably.
- Don't try. It won't work.
- ...
- It is useless.
-...
Don't butt the rock! Forget about her distinctions. You know where to get them.
- ....
- Abandon and don't cry. You really cry, eh? Well, if you cry....Are you crazy? I am telling you not to cry.
- ...
- Well, cool down a little. Be in your mind, fellow>
- ....
- Not to this extent. Don't. She won't be back.
- ....
- What the hell is this?
I leaned a little bit to the right to spit out a lump when I say them. They were still knocking the ground. Some of their details slid to float away, making me think...
End
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Photos courtesy of Google.
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