Fary was very, very moving. Her voice was soft, like the lapping of the river against fishermen’s canoes on quiet mornings. Fary’s smile was the dawn, her ass round as dunes in the Lompoul desert. Fary had eyes that were both doe and lioness. At times an earth-shattering tornado, at others an ocean of tranquility. God’s truth, I would have lost Mademba’s friendship to win Fary’s love. Luckily, Fary chose me over Mademba. Luckily, my morethan-brother deferred to me. It was because Fary chose me in front of everyone that Mademba stepped aside.

Relics

“It is difficult to know with precision how things became as they have, to be able to say with some assurance that first it was this and then it led to that and the other, and now here we are. The moments slip through my fingers. Even as I recount them to myself, I can hear echoes of what I am suppressing, of something I’ve forgotten to remember, which then makes the telling so difficult when I don’t wish it to be. But it is possible to say something, and I have an urge to give this account, to give an accounting of the minor dramas I have witnessed and played a part in, and whose endings and beginnings stretch away from me. I don’t think it’s a noble urge. What I mean is, I don’t know a great truth which I ache to impart, nor have I lived an exemplary experience which will illuminate our conditions and our times. Though I have lived, I have lived. It is so different here that it seems as if one life has ended and I am now living another one. So perhaps I should say of myself that once I lived another life elsewhere, but now it is over. Yet I know that the earlier one teems and pulses in rude good health behind me and before me. I have time on my hands. I am in the hands of time, so I might as well account for myself. Sooner or later we have to attend to that.

nineteen

“‘Time is the trouble,’ I said. I no longer experienced my days as linear or purposeful. I was trapped in cyclical domestic time, I tried to explain, where there was no past and no future because the washing-up, cooking, eating, talking, sex, my period, were always on repeat. He made a little speech about how it takes some young women a while to get used to a new baby and the responsibilities of managing a household. I told him I loved the baby; I understood babies and their wildness; it was not the baby that was the trouble. There were adjustments to be made, said the doctor. On he went. I drowned out his voice by picturing the paper knife on his desk plunged into his heart. It was only because killing him was illegal and I did not want to go to prison again that I sat on my hands and allowed him to live. He went on talking and so I did not tell him about wanting to die when the afternoons took forever to get to the night.

sixty-eight

“I had felt that if I moved, if I spoke, if I breathed, everything I valued and everyone I loved would be destroyed. But with my analyst’s belief in me, that suicide vest packed with the explosive that is shame started to loosen. The heaviness in my chest eased, and I drew breath. The weight had not only been despair, it had been rage. Frozen rage. The ice-fire of helplessness that I had finally turned into words, clumsy words, but because they had been spoken to a man who could hear them for me, a glacier shifted, moved by the melt of tears. It’s been said that there are no monuments to rape survivors. The only memorial I can build is this one, fashioned from words.

There is a garden in a suburb of Paris I have never seen. A square wooden table and wrought-iron chairs weathered by decades, lilies bending in the rain. In our bed, you described this garden; for some reason, I wept. It was a place enravishingly familiar, as if I had known it long ago and had held it, always, close in memory. Then I thought it might be a future memory, something awaiting us. But I did not know then it was our last afternoon. The window was open and we could hear the trees.

Places described by a lover are like no other places on earth. To learn a city in this way – boulevards curving, canals, cornices overhead – in the naked embrace, the luxury of listening while your skin is listening. The city slips into your body. And then, if you are fortunate enough to arrive there for the first time with that same lover, or more fortunate still to arrive there after many years with the same lover – then you will enter the place as if in a dream.