Knots (8 page)

Before long, Cambara needed Raxma's wise admonition, having made the acquaintance of a charmer named Wardi, whom she described as her one and only infatuation ever. As Cambara gushed about him in a midnight phone call from Geneva—Cambara did not ring her mother to share the news until several hours later—her advice took the shape of a warning wrapped, with flair, in an offer that Cambara could not refuse. Not only did she reprove her friend to stay clear of the fellow under whose magic spell she had fallen, but she also agreed that were Cambara to respond positively to her own heart's dictates and choose to disregard her advice, then she could rest assured that this would not upset her at all. She would continue to support her, regardless. She concluded, “Don't be deceived by his honeyed tongue, but if you feel you are in love and therefore a fool, then I am all for you, my sweet.”

Arda, on the contrary, was unflattering in her first comments about Cambara's choice of love, her negative response being instantaneous, visceral, scurrilous, and as insalubrious as a city surrounded by swamps fraught with ill-favored affliction. When Cambara's pleas to talk about it sensibly met with condescending rejection and Arda resorted to making threats that she would have nothing more to do with either of them if Cambara went ahead with this madness, Cambara found a way of bringing their conversation to an end without being terribly rude. But not before Arda had this to say: “How can you be besotted with him when you've barely known the man for a week? I have other plans in place for you, my love. Unfortunately, my plans have no room for a loser like him. Let's be clear about that.”

“It is my life, Mother, and I will do with it what I please, with or without your approval,” Cambara retorted, and hung up the phone.

Raxma met Cambara at the airport, welcoming her back from Geneva with flowers and comforting hugs. Then she had her to dinner that very evening, and, for the first time ever, Cambara embarked, sadly, on mapping out a plan that would alter her life from that time forward, without Arda occupying center stage. Raxma had the privilege of providing what assistance Cambara needed to design the framework, which would facilitate Wardi joining her in Toronto as her spouse. Further input, from a legal point of view, came from Maimouna, whom they consulted shortly thereafter. Meanwhile, convinced that Cambara would come to her senses, what with an ocean separating her from her flame, Arda found herself refusing to negotiate her way out of the tight corner; instead she dug in, unwaveringly adamant that they would see which of them would eat humble pie. The impasse was in place—Arda continuing to help financially and Raxma serving as a link in their indirect contact—until long after Wardi's arrival and almost three months after Cambara's visit to the maternity clinic, when she learned that she was pregnant. Then Arda summoned her to visit, alone. Pushing aside their differences, without either alluding to what had transpired, Arda and Cambara got cracking. They did their window-shopping, their arms linked, and Arda showered Cambara and the unborn baby, sex yet unknown, with gifts galore. Truce holding, Cambara flew back to Toronto, joyous. A fortnight later, Arda summoned Wardi to Ottawa, again alone, to assess his trustworthiness. Pressed to pass her judgment, Arda described him as “crafty, with long-term chicaneries hatching on a back burner.” No one dared tell Arda that Cambara had put his name down as a co-owner of the apartment in which they lived. Dalmar's birth brought Arda fully into the swing of things.

Cambara might have relaxed herself into believing that she was on to good stuff, especially after motherhood and Wardi landing a job with a law firm, thanks to Maimouna, if a curse had not looked upon her with the disfavor: He found other women an eyeful and strayed into other beds. She stepped away from confronting him, at times reasoning that neither would win and that Dalmar, their son, would ultimately be the loser, at others thinking ahead about what Arda might say in her riposte. Then, one day, she left her son, by this time an exuberant, bumbling nine-year-old, in Wardi's care, only to learn barely six hours later that afternoon that Dalmar had drowned in the pool while Wardi was giving Susannah, his host and law partner, a tumble.

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.

After knocking him down with her karate punches, Cambara was at first overwhelmed with a sense of haplessness, not of regret but of indecision. Then euphoria, the excitement of accomplishing a feat of which she had unconsciously dreamt many a night for a long time. When it came to replacing her feeling of remorse, she reminded herself that she had wanted to knock him unconscious one day. In fact, a part of her now wished that Wardi's mistress had been with them and had seen her lover on his knees, begging. This filled Cambara with a considerable sense of elation.

Aware now that their marriage was as good as over, she knew too that there was no possibility of patching things up or salvaging it, no benefit to be gained from displaying kindness to a fool knocked out and wallowing in self-reprimand, no mileage in making rash decisions that would inconvenience her in the end either. Take note: No face-saving ploys, please. The time to dispense with Wardi altogether had come. Only Cambara must do so on a caveat of her own stipulation. What about Zaak? How is she to deal with him? Cambara will have to wait, look at it from many vantage points, and then decide; there is time for that yet, a lot of time.

In her recall, Wardi's misshapen face boasts of swollen eyes moist at the edges, like a Styrofoam cup on which someone has inadvertently trampled. Nor does he dare show his ugly, puffed-up face to anyone, nursing his ego and his physical wounds with a huge sulk, silent, whereas she drives herself to the emergency ward in a hospital in the neighborhood, with her lips as thick as Dunlop tires. The nurse attending to her suggests that she press charges against the wife-beater, but Cambara lies, describing herself as the victim of a mugging. She receives half a dozen stitches, and the doctors discharge her with a warning that, given the viciousness of the cuts, she will do well to look after herself and to call the police if the dangerous man poses any further threat to her.