A screaming uterus

I am taking some time while we wait for the traffic to move. This iron box I am sitting in, full of whitewashed faces, back-combed hair, violent red lipsticks, a concoction of perfumes and stale nicotine embedded in the fabric of the seats, feels constrictive. I am in agony. The cramps in my lower belly indicate that my period has already started. Soon, I will begin fidgeting, repeatedly tensing and releasing my ankles and legs. Nothing will soothe me. Pain will take over. I will start sweating cold despite this heatwave; my face will turn pale, and my lips a violet blue you only find in certain flowers. I will begin stuttering, tightly close my eyes, and this will last for about six hours unless I find something: some painkiller or drug. A knife planted in one of my knees or someone punching me repeatedly in the kidneys might even help. Or a cold tiled bathroom floor.

But I am here.

Outside this box that traps me, two women walk past again, two saka, two among a sea of hundreds, holding a large jar of fresh water and two glasses. I did not question that then [I was only thirteen, what did I know], but I wonder now how my granddad, not speaking a word of the language, still looked at me, understood the situation, jumped off the coach, and bought me cool, fresh water. He then managed to steer a whole coach full of tourists to the nearest chemist, miming that I was losing blood [the shame...].

I could see these two women, their faces fully veiled so that only their eyes were visible: bright and unexpectedly green. We had been told not to photograph them. But at thirteen, I followed one for a few steps one day, around the narrow paths inside the bazaar, half convinced she was a spy rather than a woman.

On the other side of the coach, army-green Campagnola-like camionette were parked everywhere, soldiers sitting in the open back, machine rifles upright between their knees. Very cinematic and yet peripheral. The adults whispered about the coup while the women were selling water, and I was folding into myself, negotiating with my screaming uterus. The body always outranks ideology. I felt suspended in one of those moments when you no longer know where blood ends, and sweat begins, when both merge into the salt of the sea. The water in the old harbour looked inviting and, before the painkillers took over, in an almost opium slumber you read about in certain books [where eyes wander, voices grow muffled, and colours brighten unnaturally], I felt safe.

I don’t remember anything about the rest of the day, but I must have felt protected [or totally unaware] in the hands of people I didn’t know, who dragged a drugged version of me around in something close to *Weekend at Bernie’s*. From the outside, perhaps, it would have looked absurd: a limp teenager carried through heat and crowds, propped at times between silver filigrees and bright red fabric, avoiding sweaty carriers of machine guns and the strong smell of fish, as part of a larger procession of tourists following a flag like the souls in the limbo of the Inferno.

But from within that haze, there was no irony. Only surrender.
Only the strange certainty that I was being held, moved, guided, wedged and never abandoned.