Symmetry

I wonder what your name will be, and what you will be like – blacker than the coffee on the fold-up tray in front of me, no doubt, with the pained, deep, dark African eyes that I’ll look into when I tell you I’ve come to rescue you. Let’s leave this shanty-town, I’ll say, let’s go to a place with public transport and fresh water and be together for the rest of our lives. And you’ll say, in your shaken, accented Portuguese, that I can’t possibly be talking to you, I can’t possibly be serious. So I’ll pull out the two tickets back to Heathrow and grin like a Latino Willy Wonka, and when my gold tooth glints in your famously blaring sun you’ll know that it isn’t some Western wind-up. This is an escape from your bleak, war-torn world. How could you say no?

“What’s in Luanda?” asked Becky, the reception girl at work, the day before I got on the first of three aeroplanes. This was after I explained that it was in Angola, and that Angola was in Africa. I didn’t tell her about you; she might have understood your desires, or the desires of the people behind the beauty pageant I am coming to see you in, but she wouldn’t have understood my desires. So I lied, I said that I had family there, even though she knows I am Brazilian and she chewed her gum all the more vigorously as if this was the logical conclusion to the conversation.

To the English, “abroad” is one place and “foreign” is one nationality. I am sick of them, acting as though they deserve every comfort given to them. As taboo as it is to talk about the last girl I was with, she would scream and go mad if her benefit cheque was so much as one day late, and if it was two, she would march as best she could to the social services office to complain. If I questioned this, she’d scream at how I didn’t understand until she stormed away, exaggerating the limp, and when she came back and apologised, she’d begin to cry.

“It’s hard for me,” she’d say, her face wet with tears. “You don’t know what it’s like, having to stare at the, at it. I’m crippled, Filipe, I’m no good, I’m just no good.”

“You think I’d be with you if you were no good?” I’d ask her every time. She’d shake her head, and then I’d tell her, “You’re beautiful as you are,” until those words sounded like an old song.

“I just want to be able to go swimming again, to run for the bus again, to shop for shoes again. The number of times people have apologised for stepping on my toes, well before I’ve noticed they were even anywhere near my foot, oh, Fil, it’s so horrible.”

After she finished crying, sometimes we’d make love, her prosthetic shin feeling like a bad lie against my too-real flesh, or I’d hold her until she unfastened herself and we fell asleep in the dark, always pitch-black and hiding from one another. One night, curiosity got the better of me, so I felt as tenderly as I could along her sleeping body until I reached what remained of her thigh. There was a neat, smooth bump where her leg had once been. It was fascinating. Nothing was the same after that. But it woke her up, and I couldn’t explain how I felt, so that was the beginning of the end.

She was ashamed, I think. Can you imagine? Living through what she had and being ashamed to be carrying on, having lost a leg. Even if she had understood my attraction, I think she would also be disgusted at what that stump meant to me. It meant she was strong, and it meant that she could continue, and I saw beauty in that that she could not. This beauty pageant isn’t about raising awareness, not for me. I’m already fully aware of what I want.

This seems strange to you, doesn’t it? I know that the Angolans who have to live without a foot or a hand are some of the luckiest of the unfortunate eighty thousand. There’s no shame in surviving what your people have been through. I hope that you have taken the loss of your stride in your stride. I know it isn’t easy for you now, but your denial won’t defeat you before you start, and who can feel ugly when they win the Miss Landmine beauty pageant and a handsome Brazilian boy’s heart all in one day?

So you’ll say goodbye to your family, to your friends, and you’ll marvel at air-travel and champagne and fridge-freezers and everything else I can show you. You’ll hesitate, but you’ll say yes eventually, and you won’t think it’s because you need me, or because you feel lucky to have any male attention. It will be the opposite – you will know that I need your incomplete body next to mine to feel whole myself, and I will hope that perhaps you don’t just long for the silly material things I can give, but love me in return, love the way that I make sure to make you feel.
I want to run a hand along the side of your body and trace the remains of the leg that you almost lost, to console you when you talk about the explosion, the shock, the near-death experience, the survival story, the recovery.

I want to help you accept the experience, to see how you have developed the strength to march on with just one leg.

I want to bring you your crutches with breakfast in the morning, to help you into the bath and out of bed, to show you that, to me, you are more beautiful now than you ever were.

I want to kiss you until you forget that your body was ever symmetrical.