The woman began walking down the curved dirt path, marked in many places by the tires of his van and, recently, the four wheels of his uncle’s car. The previous day’s rain had molded the red earth into small mud balls that clung to the tires. And now, in the clearer day, the reddish earth still gave off an ancient smell and worms were strewn all over it, burrowing and leaving trails on the path. As a child he’d taken pleasure in crushing worms under his feet after bouts of rainfall, and sometimes he and his friends, especially the gosling-stealing Ejike, would store the worms in transparent polythene bags and watch them writhe in the airless, enclosed space.
She came wearing open-toed slippers, whose plastic straps as well as her feet were caked with dust. A small purse dangled over her bosom, held around her neck by a fabric lace. As she walked up, her feet stamping the dirt, he wiped his hand on the wall by his door. He stepped back into the house and looked around in haste. He noticed for the first time the big yarn of cobwebs that stretched across the ceiling of the sitting room, reminding him that so much time had passed since his father, who had maintained a high level of cleanliness, died.
“Good afternoon, sir,” the woman said, genuflecting slightly.
“Good afternoon, my sister.”
The woman set down the groundnut tray, reached for a side pocket on her skirt, and brought out a handkerchief that was soaked through and spotted with shades of brown dirt. With it she wiped her forehead.
“How much, how much is—”
“Groundnut?”
My host thought he caught a slight tremble in the woman’s voice—the way people influenced by the bias of their own minds misjudge the actions of others. I listened as he did, but I did not hear any tremor in her voice. She sounded absolutely composed to me.
“Yes, groundnut,” he said, nodding. Fluid rushed up his throat, leaving a peppery taste in his mouth. His discomposure came from the strange familiarity of her voice, which, although he could not ascertain the source of the familiarity, drew him to her.
The woman pointed to a small canned-tomato tin in which groundnuts were stacked and said, “Five naira for one small cup. The big one is ten naira.”
“The ten-naira one.”
The woman shook her head. “So, Oga, you bring me here so you fit buy only ordinary ten-naira groundnut? Ah, abeg add some more na.” Then she laughed.
He felt the sensation in his throat yet again. He first felt it during the period of his mourning. He did not know that it was a kind of sickness related to indigestion which flares in the pit of the stomach of a person who is bereaved or in a state of extreme anxiety. I had seen it many times, most recently in the body of my former host, Ejinkeonye Isigadi, while he was fighting in the Biafran War nearly forty years before.
“Okay, give me two of the big ones,” he said.
“Er-he, thank you, Oga.”
The woman bent to scoop groundnuts into the larger tin, and then emptied it into a small colorless polythene bag. She was pouring the second scoop into the same bag when he said, “I no want only groundnut.”
“Er?” She dropped her head.
She did not immediately look at him, but he fixed his eyes on her. He let his eyes linger over her face, which was rough and covered with signs of privation. Some encrusted layers of dirt covered her face like patches of extra flesh, somewhat redefining it. Yet beneath these layers, he could see that she possessed striking good looks. When she laughed, her dimples deepened and her mouth formed into a pout. There was a mole above her mouth, but he did not look much at it or at her cracked lips, which she continuously licked to give them a glossy texture. Down on her chest, though, was where his eyes rested: on the ponderous breasts that appeared separated by ample space. They were round and full and pushed against her clothes, even though he could see the signs of restraint—her brassiere straps—sticking out on both sides of her shoulders.
“Ina anu kwa Igbo?” he said, and when she nodded, he turned fully to the language of the eloquent fathers. “I want you to come stay with me a little. I am feeling lonely.”
“So you don’t want groundnut?”
He shook his head. “No, not only groundnut. I want to talk to you, too.”
He helped her straighten up, and as she rose, he locked his mouth with hers. Agbatta-Alumalu, although he feared that she would resist him, his urge had been so strong that it had overcome his inner voice of reason. He drew back and saw her stunned and unresisting. He even saw a glint of joy in her eyes, and he pressed harder. He drew closer to her and said, “I want you to come inside with me.”
“Isi gi ni?” she said, laughing even more. “You are a strange man.”
She’d used a word for “strange” that was not commonly used in the language of the old fathers as spoken in Umuahia but which he often heard used in the big market in Enugu.
“Are you from Enugu?”
“Yes! How did you know?”
“Where in Enugu?”
“Obollo-Afor.”
He shook his head.
She turned from him briskly, and folded her hands together. “You really are strange,” she said. “Do you even know if I have a boyfriend?”
But he did not speak. He put her tray on the dining table, on the edge of which was dried chicken shit. As he put his hands around her and gently pulled her close to him, she whispered, “So this is what you really want?” When he said it was, she struck his hand lightly and laughed as he undid her blouse.
Chukwu, I had by this time known my host for many years. But I could not recognize him that day. He acted like one possessed, unrecognizable even to himself. Where had he, a hermit who yielded little to the world outside his own, found the courage to ask a woman to lie with him? Where did he—who until his uncle suggested he get a woman had thought little of women—find the courage to undress a woman he just met? I did not know. What I knew was that with this uncharacteristic bravado, he stripped the woman’s gown off her.
She held his hand with a hard grip for a long time and covered her mouth with her other hand, silently laughing to herself. They came into his room, and as he closed the door behind them, his heart pounding more quickly, she said, “Look, I am dirty.” But he barely acknowledged those words. He focused on his own slightly quivering hands as they pulled down her underpants. When he was done, he said, “It doesn’t matter, Mommy.” Then he pulled her into the bed in which his father had died, consumed by a kind of passion that bore close affinity with rage. That passion etched itself in the curious changes that appeared in the woman’s facial expressions: one time of delight; one time of anguish, in which she gnashed her teeth; one time of exhilaration that culminated in a small laugh; one time in a shock that held her mouth in a perplexing O shape; one time of a restless peace in which the eyes are closed as if in a pleasant, exhausted sleep. These passed across her visage in succession until the very last moment, when he began to suddenly wither. He barely heard her saying, “Pull out, abeg,” before falling beside her, his expiration complete.
The act itself is hard to describe. They spoke no words but mourned, gasped, sighed, gnashed their teeth. The things in the room spoke in their stead: the bed uttered a mournful cry, and the sheets seemed to engage in a slow, considered speech like a child singing a rhyme. It all happened with the grace of a festival—so quickly, so suddenly, so vigorously, yet so tenderly. And in the end, of all the expressions that had passed over her face, only joy remained. He lay beside her, touched her lips, and rubbed her head until she laughed. The terrors that had lurked in his heart were gone in this moment. He sat up, a drop of sweat falling slowly down his back, unable to grasp the full expression of what he was feeling. He could see in her a certain kind of gratitude, for now she took his hand and held it firmly, so hard that he squirmed silently. Then she began to speak. She spoke about him with an unusual depth of mind, as if she’d known him for a long time. She said that although he acted strange, something in her spirit assured her that he was a “good” man. A good man, she e
mphasized again and again. “There aren’t many like that in this world anymore,” she said, and even though he was now drained and exhausted and half asleep, he could feel the resignation in her voice. Then it seemed that she raised her head and looked down at his penis and saw that long after it had emptied itself on the bedsheet it was still hard. She gasped. “You are still erect? Anwuo nu mu o!”
He tried to speak, but he only mustered a babble.
“Ehen, I see you are falling asleep so quickly,” she said.
He nodded, embarrassed by his sudden, unexpected exhaustion.
“I will go so you can sleep.” She picked up her brassiere and started to put it over her breasts, something the venerable mothers would not have used, for they either covered their breasts with clothes knotted at the back or left them bare, or, sometimes, merely covered them with uli.
“Okay, but please come tomorrow,” he said.
She turned to him. “Why? You don’t even know, or ask, if I have a boyfriend.”
His mind awakened to the thought, but his eyes remained heavy. He mumbled incoherently words she could not hear but which I heard to be the baffling statement: “If you come, so do come again.”
“You see, you can’t even talk anymore. I will go. But what is your name, at least?”
“Chinonso,” he said.
“Chi-non-so. Good name. I am Motu, you hear?” She clapped her hands. “I am your new girlfriend. I will return tomorrow, around this time. Good night.”
He heard, in his slouched awakening, the sound of the door closing as she left the house. Then she was gone, carrying with her her distinct smell, a fragment of which had stuck on his hands and in his head.
AGBATTA-ALUMALU, the fathers of old say that without light, a person cannot sprout shadows. This woman came as a strange, sudden light that caused shadows to spring from everything else. He fell in love with her. In time, it seemed that with one slingshot, she had silenced his grief—that violent dog that had barked relentlessly in this early night of his life. So strong was their bond that he was mended. Even my relationship with him improved, because a man is truly able to commune with his chi when he is at peace. When I spoke, he heard my voice, and in his will, shadows of my will began to lurk. If he had lived at the time of the old fathers, they would have said of his state that he had affirmed something, and I, his chi, had affirmed, too, as it is wholly true that onye kwe, chi ya e kwe.
No human who experiences such moments would ever want them to end. But sadly, in uwa, things do not always happen in accordance with the expectation of man. I have seen it many times. It was thus no surprise to me that he woke up on the day it all ended as he’d been waking for many mornings, filled with the thoughts of this woman with whom he’d enjoyed four market weeks of bliss (three weeks in the calendar of the White Man). Things had appeared usual for him that morning, as they had been for those twenty-one days, because man is without the powers of prospicience. This, I have come to believe, is mankind’s greatest weakness. If only he could see the faraway as clearly as he can see what is in front of him, or if only he could see the hidden as he can see what is revealed, if only he could hear that which is not spoken as well as what is spoken, he would be saved from a great many calamities. In fact, what is it that would be able to destroy him?
My host spent that Saturday waiting for his lover to come. He did not know that nothing would walk over that path between two rows of farmland, which ran for nearly two kilometers to the main road, that day. He’d sat on the front porch and fixed his eyes on it from early in the morning, but as the day began to wane, things he had never considered rose from some abyss and held court with him. He had not thought to get Motu’s address. He did not know where she lived. When he had asked once, begging to drive her home, she had said that her auntie would punish her severely if she ever found out Motu was keeping a boyfriend. And this had been the extent of his knowledge—that she was a maid from a village in Obollo-Afor, serving her “auntie”—an acquaintance not related to her by blood—in the city. She did not have a phone. He knew nothing else.
That day also passed and another came galloping in like a great baffling carriage with a loud toot and a majestic stride. He rushed to welcome it, almost trembling from the weight of expectation. But when he unlatched the door, the porch was empty. Nothing except the rust of an old carriage and a mocking sound of dry metal. The following day came garmented in the colors of a familiar sky, one that reminded him of the time Motu and he made love in the kitchen and he’d heard for the first time the sound of air emit from a vagina. It was also the first day she took a bath in his house and put on the dress he had bought her: a gown made of sparkling blue ankara material, which she then washed in a bucket in his bathroom and hung on the laundry rope in the yard that was fastened between the guava tree and a stick half buried in the fence. Then they’d had sex, and she had asked him things about poultry. He had found himself telling her so much about his life that he became aware, as if by epiphany, how heavy his history had become. By sundown, he knew she would not come. He lay all day, empty, alone, and stunned, listening to the raindrops fall into the bucket and hit the ground like drumbeats.
Oseburuwa, I myself became worried. It is hard for a chi to watch its host find happiness and lose it again. I listened keenly for this woman, and sometimes, while he worked at the farm or poultry, I’d leave his body and stand on the porch to see if I might see her passing the compound so I could flash it as a thought in his head. But I, too, saw no trace of her. Vain spirits mocked him with dreams of her that night, and he woke the following morning disturbed. They were somewhere, in a temple or an old church, looking at the murals and paintings of saints. He gazed at one image, of a man on a tree, closely, and when he turned, he did not see her. In her place was a falcon. It stared at him with its yellow eyes, its beak half open, its great talons firm on the edge of one of the seats. He did not speak at first, for he knew that it was she. Egbunu, you know that in the dream world, knowledge is not searched after—things are simply known. Thus, he saw that she whom he’d been waiting for had become a bird. As he made to take it, he woke up.
By the end of the second week, and with ideas falling into his mind as if an ancient mouth was constantly spitting into his head, he realized that something had happened and that it was possible he would never see Motu again. It was, Gaganaogwu, an awakening: that a man can find a woman who accepts and loves him, and that one day, she could vanish without cause. The weight of this realization would have brought him down had the universe not lent him a hand that day. For one of the ways a man may be relieved of suffering is by doing something out of the ordinary, something he will always remember. That memorable action forces a stanch on the bleeding wound and helps the sufferer recover.
On that day, he was sitting on the floor in his kitchen, watching the brown chickens, all roosters, grazing alongside the brown hens and chicks and walking about the yard, feeding from mounds of marsh and corn which he’d spread on sacks. From the window, he caught sight of a hawk hovering over the birds, biding its time. He quickly unhooked his catapult from the nail on which it hung on the wall and picked out stones from the small raffia basket by the window. He shook off and blew small red ants off the stones. Then, closing one of his eyes and standing a short distance behind the door to conceal himself, he placed a stone in the rubber pocket of the catapult and held still, his eyes on the hawk. The bird had stopped at some point in midair, then raised itself farther above so the chickens did not see it. Its wingspan then broadened, and in a moment, it plunged towards the compound with stupefying speed. He followed it, and as it attempted to grab a cockerel feeding near the fence, he released the stone.
True, he was adept in this art of stone archery, and he’d been slinging stones since he was a child, but it is hard to understand how he got the bird on its forehead. There was something instinctive about it, something divine in origin. It felt, Chukwu, as if this act itself had been rehearsed many years ago, before he wa
s born, before you assigned me to be his guardian spirit. It was this act that began his fresh healing. For it seemed as if he’d carried out revenge against that primal force with whom he must reckon, that unseen hand that takes away whatsoever he possesses. That voice that seems to say, “Look, he has been happy for so long, it is now time to send him back to that dark place where he belongs.” And from the end of that second week, he began to live again.
Rain poured in the days following with a relentlessness that reminded my host of one year in his childhood, while his mother was still alive, when rain destroyed a neighbor’s house and the family came to take shelter with my host’s family. During these wet days, it was hard for his poultry to come out of the coops into the yard. He, like them, kept away from most things and recoiled into the lone world he’d become accustomed to. Chukwu, he would live like this for the next three months after Motu’s disappearance, avoiding even Elochukwu as much as he could.
IJANGO-IJANGO, the great fathers often say that a child does not die because his mother’s breast is empty of milk. This became true of my host. He soon became used to the loss of Motu and began going out again to execute his daily tasks. It was thus without any expectations that he went out that day at the end of those three months to fuel his van at the filling station near his house, expecting to return home afterwards the way he had left. He stayed on the long line at the petrol station and had finally made it to the pump, stepped out to open his fuel tank for the attendant when he saw a hand waving at him from the line of cars behind. At first, he did not see who it was, for he had to tell the attendant, who had put the nozzle in his tank, that he wanted to buy six hundred naira worth of petrol.
“That is, eight liters. No change. Seventy-five, seventy-five naira.”
“Okay, madam.”
As the woman tapped something on the pump station and the numbers began to roll out, he turned back and saw that it was the woman on the bridge. How, Chukwu, could he have thought that on such an inauspicious and unremarkable day that which he had been looking for for so long would appear again, suddenly, and reveal itself to him of its own accord? Although he kept a close eye on the pump, fearing he could be cheated, because he had heard about how people manipulated them, the shock of this encounter fastened itself to a branch of his mind like a viper. In a mix of haste and anxiety, he pulled over to the side of the station, near a culvert that descended to the street below. No matter which system of time he employed—the system of the fathers, in which four days make up a week, twenty-eight days a month, and thirteen months a year, or the system of the White Man, now commonly used by the children of the great fathers—nine months had passed since that night when he sacrificed two fowls to scare her back to life. As he waited for her, he searched back to all that had happened to him since that encounter. When she parked her car behind his vehicle and stepped out to meet him, he felt the craving that seemed to have disappeared long ago emerge as if it had been merely hidden all this while in the back pocket of his heart like an old coin.
An Orchestra of Minorities Page 4