The Atlas

DOING HER HAIR

While the roaring gray rain cooled down Madagascar for a minute, she greased her hands, then combed her hair back again, combing the grease in until it shone, leaning forward naked on the bed to watch her progress in the cracked plastic mirror (one of the few items of baggage she'd brought from home). She made a greasy twist down the back of her head, the center one. Then she began to form the others. Leaving the comb in her hair for safekeeping, she inserted the rollers, holding each in with a forefinger until it was securely pinned. So steadily she assembled a long spine of those cylinders along the center ridge of her head like a sort of mo-hawk as the rain slackened and thunder sounded close but not loud, and she commenced combing and twisting around her temples. She was making art as surely as the barefoot craftsman who hammers wood with a wooden mallet, squatting on fresh sawdust. Her fresh head slid forward and back as she peeked in the mirror. She sang. A loud clap of thunder made her laugh. Her gold ring shone dully in the dim light of the hotel room as she pinned the last comb in the back, the whites of her eyes large with concentration in her chocolate face. Now she could embellish herself with the new earrings he'd bought her, she nodding, talking fast, rows of twisted locks curving back around the side of her head. Now she was ready to dance with him at the Discotheque Kali where white shirts and blouses glowed blue in the fluorescent lights just as the tonic water did;, and a man stood behind a pillar, his face the color of blood, his necktie like the blue tongue of a black snake, and he was watching, grinning with hard eyes. Perhaps the man liked her hair. (She was always doing her hair. Sitting on a bed in the Hotel Roger with a towel around her middle, she put her hair up with the same sweet concentration as when she squatted to piss on the sidewalk.) In the Hotel Anjary she did her hair, but did she do it for him who loved her or for the man whose face was the color of blood? She loved to dance but she feared the discos because the robbers owned them; why was it that she must do her hair for robbers? Maybe if she did not make herself more beautiful the blood-faced watcher would not watch her. But he never said anything about the blood-faced watcher to her because she feared the robbers already and he did not want to make her more afraid. In the corner, behind another row of black pillars, beer bottles shone full and empty; behind them, a line of white shirts spanned the wall like skulls. The faces above the shirts were entirely gone in shadow. These were the gangsters who ran the Kali, and the darkness they hid in was the same essence which they manufactured outside, extruding it past their bouncer at the door, past the beggar-boys in carnival masks who waited just outside, past the men who sold brochettes in the street (cautiously wise, she visited only the brochette stand owned by the patron), past the taxis waiting to take her one block for two thousand francs because it was cheaper to pay two thousand* than to go beyond the taxis, where it became dark and lifeless and men stood playing cards on the hood of a parked car, and after them it became truly dark, even darker than in bed when the blackly humid night pressed its hands down on his lungs, because this other darkness was moist with the breathings of robbers.

It was moist; it was raining again. She needed to do her hair.

Dawn found the two of them a green and rolling rainscape, green gestures of vegetation in fog, the dark fingers, beseeching hands and benediction-laden palms of it, looming through the mist in a rattle of insects, trees drinking moisture like green cotton balls, ferns bowing politely, then building green walls inset with stars of darkness. She did her hair. Because she had a toothache, she could eat only soft things, so she gobbled ice cream and cream-filled pastries as the raindrops rushed innumerable as ants in the hole of a dead snake.

She bound her hair around black threads of yarn until she was more impressive than the barefoot girls who walked with entire forests of leafy twigs on their heads; she strung her hair with the rain-strings that stretched down the sides of rocks into moss-lips and corn-hairs and tree-capillaries, drumming and splattering down; her hands became fernclaws bristling with rain. Seeing her, a brown man cinched his awning tighter against the rain. She took a shower and wrapped her wet hair into tight black licorice twists which she made sure of in her cracked mirror. She made it shine more brightly than the whites of her black eyes. She put her lover's hand on it; his fingers followed and loved her hair's soft raw studded coarseness. Now she was almost finished. Running into the rain for her hair's sake, he picked a red kana flower, a blue fasis berry, a red round coffee bean, a yellow blossom with a black center; and she took these things smiling and hunched over her mirror like a woman washing clothes in the river. Now once again she was ready to go dancing with him at the Discotheque Kali.

The taxi crawled across the pitted beige surface of the night which rattled teeth and windows; they went down dark meat- and diesel-smelling streets, and the light from bottles in a bar could not outdo her hair, and they passed the épicerie whose doors were open wide like a whore's legs, and dirty white walls and dirty white dresses glowed in the headlights. The strings of sausages silhouetted like amber beads compared not at all with the boldly twisted segments of her hair which ran suddenly like the rain down the dirty walls of his life behind which occasional lights burned weakly like failures. Men walked into the darkness of her hair like skinny spiders. She would not dance with them; she danced only with him. Her hair kissed him so that his eyes could, not be doomed anymore by the row of shirts like skulls where the big watchers sat. The blood-faced watcher stood behind the pillar. The fluorescent blue swirl of a white miniskirt as a girl danced among girls lured the blood-faced watcher for a time; his mouth was like the lighted aperture in the wall where they sold cigarettes. But then all the watchers at once saw the lover with his very dark girl who nodded her heavy head to the music, drinking beer. They had seen him and her already that night at the robber-infested restaurant whose greasy concrete floor and grease-streaked concrete walls enriched the flies on the tables while beneath bright bare bulbs the gangsters grinned and punched each other's wrists and fat whores laughed and went in and out of the bathroom; the whores sat at the corner table, smiling bright-toothed, their hair braided into darkness; but the hair of the one he danced with was as flowery ricefields under hot purple clouds. A man leaned against the wall by the bathroom, a cap low over his eyes, nodding, smiling to music. A fat whore in denim shouted ah yah yah, slapping her thighs. The belt around her was as big as a railroad track. The music got louder, and she clapped her hands, which were as big as hams, with a deafening booming sound, and then the gangsters came over and asked to be bought drinks. He was wise with her wisdom; he bought them drinks. A whore asked him to buy her dinner and he did, so as a favor she whispered to his braided-haired darling that the robbers planned to stab them that night. That was how it had been in the restaurant. In the Indra the darkness was better for the watchers. The blood-faced watcher came and asked the lover to give him money. As for her with the lovely hair, the others waited for that with their knives. Once they cut it off the rain would stop forever. In the village where everyone was sitting in trees, one last time a tiny waterfall would fill a brown pool that fed bright green ricefields, and then the waterfall would stop.

* In 1993, two thousand Malagasy francs was a little more than U.S. $1.