Tontine

The sun squeezed Babacar Diop’s head like a too-tight helmet. His throat was dry and his empty stomach heaved with the rise and fall of the boat. He was folded onto himself in a corner, his new jeans rough against his skin, his damp, grey sweatshirt clinging to his big bones.

No one spoke. A big-eyed woman, her hair plaited elaborately for the journey, clasped a sleeping two-year-old to her chest like a shield. She stared blankly at the empty horizon. Her body pressed against Babacar, he could feel her every breath.

Babacar lifted his eyes from the swirling puddle at his feet. The 80 people crammed into the gold-and-green pirogue all wore the same expressionless look, as if their features had already begun to melt into the anonymity they would need on arrival. They barely moved, except to vomit over the side. A few slid prayer beads through their fingers in a wordless cycle that began when they pushed off from the beach in Dakar. The boat was painted with prayers for a safe journey and the spidery script dipped in and out of the waves. Babacar had added “Merci Maman” as the boat lay among the coconut husks and goat droppings on the beach. The red paint had dripped onto the sand, onto his sandals. But he had left those behind and was wearing the new trainers his uncle had given him. They were too tight.

He wondered what his mother was doing now. Was she still sitting on that rock, watching the boats leave, her orange scarf whipping around her head like a scream? Had she gone back to their home in Medina to wash the rice and prepare a fire to cook the evening meal? Was she wondering, like him, how this had happened? Was the question like a knife in her belly too?

Babacar Diop had never been one of those boys who dreamed of moving to Europe. He loved Dakar’s breezy coast, the chaotic Marche Sandaga where he used to hang out with friends selling bootleg CDs, the sandy mazes of the Medina neighbourhood and the cool of the mosque on the beach.

Every Friday, he would dress in his white boubou and stride down the shell-fringed path to the mosque with its four mushroom-shaped turrets. After prayers, he would wander along the sea’s edge, through the discarded fish heads and strands of broken netting, wondering whether he could sneak into a wrestling match at the weekend.

But then his father died from pneumonia in the same crumbling hospital where Babacar, the eldest of five children, was born. Aboubacar Diop’s death at 47 dealt a body blow to his family.

Babacar’s mother cried for days, huddled in a quivering heap on their flowery sofa as relatives came to whisper condolences and sip a soft drink in the tiny living-room with its empty, unplugged fridge. His mother was Aboubacar’s only wife. Aboubacar had always said he could only afford one wife. Then he would add, with a raised eyebrow and small smile, that Hortense would kill him if he took another.

Babacar was 22 when his father died. He worked sometimes as a carpenter in a dark atelier down a narrow street where goats roamed and saws whined. Suddenly, the gangly just-a-man with the huge feet and taut face was the family breadwinner.

The Diops had no ties to Senegal’s government, no uncle or aunt in a position of paper-pushing power to smooth the way to a cushy job. Babacar’s income was erratic. He had grown accustomed to the uncertainty but it became an unaffordable luxury when his father died.

Aboubacar had worked as a chef in the university canteen. It paid well enough for Dakar. His mother cleaned for an Algerian family who lived in a compound of airy homes with a swimming pool. But she was paid very little, despite working eight hours a day, six days a week, ironing children’s clothes, washing, shopping and fighting a losing battle against the fine dust that shrouded Dakar from one end of the year to the other.

“That woman is hard, hard, hard,” his mother would say when she arrived home late again because of some last-minute demand from Madame.

“Does she not know that you have a family waiting at home?” Aboubacar used to bellow. “I am not a person to her,” his mother would say with a shrug, but the gesture sat uneasily with the anger in her eyes.

Babacar stayed at school until he was 16. He knew how much his parents sacrificed and it stuck in his throat that he had never been able to use the algebra, the history and the geography he had been taught. There were none of those jobs for him. But he was good with his hands and his father’s cousin let him hang around his workshop until he had mastered the basics of carpentry.

It wasn’t his dream but Babacar had learned that dreams were not for him. He learned to live quietly, to accept. But it seemed that was not enough. Or it was already too much to expect.

In those first, dark days after his father’s passing, he would wander along the dusty path behind the French army base, his large feet in their plastic flip-flops kicking the loose stones, the edges of his robe gradually turning red from the dust. He would sit on a stone above the sea, watching the egrets pecking at piles of tin cans, bits of food and blue plastic bags, the sun gradually stilling his churning thoughts, the wind whistling through his robe.

The idea of leaving sidled into his mind like a thief. His friend Amadou Cisse told him about his cousin who had made it to Spain and was sending back good money each month. The cousin had travelled to Niger and then crossed the Sahara to get to Morocco. From there, he got on a boat to Spain.

Boys, women, men, girls were leaving from the beach every week, their mothers and relatives waving and wailing and praying on the sand. Babacar would watch sometimes. When his father was alive, he never understood why people would risk their lives to reach an island in the middle of nowhere with nothing but dreams built on hearsay. Yes, some were lucky and sent money home. Half-built houses rising along Dakar’s sandy streets testified to their success, taunting those who remained. But Babacar knew that was only part of the story. He remembered Saliou.

Saliou had taken a boat to the Canary Islands. He had been in Babacar’s class, a muscular boy who used to jog along the Corniche in the cool evenings and work out in the “gym” above the beach – little more than a rudimentary bench press, and a few rusty bars for pull-ups. Saliou’s boat broke into pieces in a storm off Tenerife. One of the bodies washed up on a beach and the bad news slowly drifted back like a poisonous cloud to his parents’ small, white, two-roomed house in Medina.

But one day as Babacar watched yet another boat leave, he felt something shift inside, as though his brain was made of those tectonic plates Monsieur Ba had taught him about. As two men heaved the boat through the foamy breakers, a young man stood up, faced the shore, raised his arm and clenched his fist. His words were swept away by the salty wind, so that all that could be heard was a gruff, defiant, animal “Aaaah”. Babacar’s ears thrilled to the sound, his heart leapt at the wild, dramatic gesture. And suddenly, he too wanted to feel the relief of a decision made. He was sick of taking everything that life dealt him. He wanted to be a player, not the one who was being played, by life, death, big men, little men, by everything and everyone.

At home, his mother was in the yard, a curved cipher, her face hidden as she scrubbed the clothes.

“Maman, I have been thinking.”

“About what, my son?” she said, straightening up and adjusting her wrap around her waist.

“Maybe I should take the boat. There is money in Europe. There is nothing here. I will be able to provide for you all.”

His mother’s eyes drilled into his as he spoke. Then she bent to the green basin again. “You are my eldest,” she said after a long pause. “I do not want to give you to the sea.” “But Maman, what can I do here? I cannot do anything, be anything, I can’t …” He paused, took a breath. “I can’t build a life here. I can only exist and wait. I don’t want to wait my whole life for things to get better. I want to act. I need to do something. Otherwise, what am I?”

His mother had stopped scrubbing, her hands lay limp in the foamy water. When she stood, her eyes were red. She lifted her hot, rough, wet hands to his face, grasped it firmly, and brought it to her chest.

“My son, I am sorry. We wanted so much for you to …we hoped … I wish we could, I could …”

She sobbed and Babacar lifted his face to hers. “Maman, it’s okay.”

Of course, he could not leave immediately. Every week, his mother put some cash into a fund set up in their quartier to send the young on their way. Whenever the communal pot or tontine was full, a lottery was held and the winner was given the money to send a son or daughter to Europe.

During the weeks of waiting, Babacar tried to imagine a different life. It was cold in Europe. Would people treat him badly because he was black? Many who returned said life was hard, Europeans were racist. But the die had been cast and he could do nothing but wait. And in a way, this inevitability freed him so that he was happier than he had been for a long time.

Then one day, his mother’s number came up in the tontine. And so he found himself crammed into a 22-metre-long boat with spray soaking through his clothes, numbing his bones, chilling his soul.

They made it to Tenerife, where he splashed from the boat and collapsed on the warm sand, his legs almost useless after seven days at sea. He looked up to meet the horrified gaze of a white couple sunbathing nearby. The woman had long, blonde hair and wore a pink-and-white polka dot bikini. He took in her grimace — part fear, part loathing, part something else he couldn’t quite define but would see again and again — and he lowered his eyes.

He did not raise them again until someone tapped him on the shoulder. He looked up to see a police officer and slowly, gratefully sank into the sand. They kept him in Los Cristianos for a few weeks. They could not repatriate him as he was not carrying any papers. He was flown to Spain, and transferred to another detention centre outside Madrid.  And then they let him go.

They told him to leave the country and pushed him out of the detention centre. He walked 40 miles to Madrid, step by slow uncertain step. Other detainees had told him of a group that would help him. But that first night in Madrid, he found himself in the Retiro Park and was too tired to go on.

Babacar found a bench and lay down. The sun had set and the park was deserted. The short, plump mothers with their well-dressed families were gone. The young lovers in the rowing boats on the lake were gone. The people sipping horchatas under the trees were gone.

The park was his. Around him, the leaves whispered like the sea on the sand.