The woman lay by him and clutched him, but he faced the wall. As his heartbeat relaxed and his sweat dried, he began to feel different. He thought back to earlier in the day, how he’d sat there at the woman’s table. What he saw now, Egbunu, was different. Different! He saw the spots on the woman’s face, one peeled so that it had scabbed. He thought of the woman’s missing teeth and what looked like a scar above her cleavage. He thought of the dirtiness of her nails, how she’d pick the mucus of her eyes with them. He thought of the dark pit of the woman’s stomach as they lay to make love and the fortress of her vagina. He drew away and stepped out of the bed, opened the window and, looking up, recalled Ndali’s body. He remembered the day she insisted he suck at her vagina and the revulsion of feeling that had seized him then.
When he turned back into the room, the woman had covered herself with the bedsheet. Resentment rose within him. For a reason neither he nor I, his chi, could determine, he found that he hated her. He sat on the chair and finished the malt, which he’d drunk halfway.
“Will you go home?” he said.
“Er?” she said, sitting up.
He regarded her, her ugliness more pronounced, and he convulsed with regret.
“I said, do you want to sleep here? I just want to know.”
“Eh, are you sending me away?” she said, her voice almost breaking.
“No, no, I’m saying if you want to go.”
She shook her head. “So you have gotten what you want, and now asking me to go home?”
He gazed at her without words, surprised at his own sudden cruelty.
“O di nma,” the girl said, and snapped her fingers.
He watched her strap the brassiere back on, the line on her back almost unapparent, the plump of unremarkable flesh. Inwardly, he felt violated in a way he could not explain. Was it that he had known another woman and now Ndali would be defiled in his eyes? The fear rose with a mixture of anger. He closed his eyes and did not know when the woman finished dressing. The sound of the door broke him out of his reverie. He stamped to his feet, but she was out. He chased after her in the dark, barefoot, shirtless, his room unlocked, calling her name: “Chidinma, Chidinma, wait, wait.” But she did not wait. She went on, sobbing, saying nothing.
He returned and sat down, only the smell of the woman left in the room. He did not know what to feel, remorse for how callously he’d treated the woman or anger at his own mysterious violation. He waited for an hour or so to pass, and then he rang the woman, but she did not answer. He sent a message that he was sorry. She wrote back: neva, neva in yr cum 2 my shop again! Neva in yr life!! god punish you!!!
He quaked in his seat as a possessive thought of violence perched on his mind, carried on the black wings of contempt. He deleted the woman’s number, and that was it. That night, while he was asleep, two vagabond spirits broke into the house, fighting. They came through the wall, unaware they had crossed a human barrier. Chukwu, I must say that things like this happen quite frequently, but most of them are not worthy of recollection. But this particular incident moved me, for I could relate it to my host’s situation.
One of the spirits was the chi of a man who had taken the wife of another man. The other spirit was the ghost of the woman’s former husband. The chi was saying how exhausted he was, having been trying to fight off this ghost for years. “Why don’t you just go to rest?” it said. “How can I be at rest when your host cheated me of not just my wife but my life, too?” the revenant said. “But you should rest. Go to Alandiichie, return back in another life, and take back what was yours,” the chi replied. “No, I want justice now. Now. Now. Tell your host to keep his hands off Ngozi. Or I will not let him alone. I will continue to haunt his dreams, attempt to possess him, cause him hallucinations until justice is done.” “Well,” the chi replied, “if you let it be, Ala and Chukwu will execute justice on your behalf. But you have taken it upon yourself to handle…” Their conversation continued as I gestured at them to get out, and they, barely giving me and my host a look, returned back into the darkness through the wall. I did not know why I witnessed this—perhaps it was you who allowed me to see it as a warning to do more to dissuade my host from his pursuit of the elusive, a situation that could potentially cause him to become an akaliogoli, a vagabond spirit, without a home in the heavenlies or on earth.
ECHETAOBIESIKE, my host returned back to the way he was, a man of conflicting thoughts. He’d floated like some fluid element back into the thing that contained him. He stopped lying in wait near the pharmacy and turned his attention to her house. He would park his car a few stones’ throws away and walk up to the supermarket across from her house. He befriended the shopkeeper. He would buy biscuits and Coke and sit on the lone bench the man placed by the side of the shed, eating and drinking and chatting with the man in his mangled English. From this vantage point, making sure that his sunglasses did not once leave his face, he would first watch her arrive from work with the boy, then watch her husband. On the third day of this new routine, it struck him to ask about the family from the store owner.
“Mr. Obonna?” the man, a Hausa who did not speak the language of the fathers, said.
“Yes, and his wife?”
“Oh, that madam? Me no know plenty about am, oh. She no dey talk at-all, at-all. Just only quiet like say she no get mouth. She dey come here plenty.”
He regarded the shopkeeper as the man scratched the two long scarifications on one side of his face. A man approached the store in shorts, a shirt hanging from his shoulder.
“Well done, oh,” the customer said to my host.
“Well done, my brother.”
“Mallam, Cowbell dey?”
“Which one, na? Tin abi sachet?”
“Sachet. Bring four. Na how much, sef?”
“Tem tem naira. Four na four naira.”
When the man was gone, he asked the trader if he knew anything about Mr. Ogbonna and his son.
“Ah, yes-yes. I sabi them well-well.”
Egbunu, I have told you that my host possessed the gift of good luck. True, many bad things had happened to him, but what his onyeuwa picked in the garden of Chiokike is potent. For how can I explain what he stumbled on by serendipity here? How, Ezeuwa? All he’d done was ask the man the corollary question to the one he’d asked about the family. “Na only that son them get?” To which the man had responded thusly:
“Pickini kwo? Yes, Na only wan pickin. Chinomso, na only one pickin.”
Obasidinelu, my host jumped to his feet. For he had not told this man his name.
“Er, what?”
“The pickin naw,” the man said, astonished at his reaction. “I say him name na Chinomso.”
He stood still now, unable to move his feet. He stared at the man, then in the direction of the house, then back again.
“Oga, wetin happen?”
He shook his head. “Nothing.”
The man, easing up again, began to talk about how “Mr. Obonna” sometimes didn’t take his change after purchasing and how, during Eid-El-Fitr, he brought him a goat. He listened with half his mind carried away. When he rose up and got back in his car, he became aware, as if his consciousness had been renewed, of the information he’d just received. How could it be that she’d named her son after him? How?
Nothing troubled him more than this contemplation. He sat, unable to do anything, helpless. It was a question that menaced him with its deceptive simplicity. For it seemed like it could easily be answered, as if the answer lay on some shelf just above his head. But anytime he attempted to pick it up, he realized it was far away—a place he could not reach by merely stretching his hand. And it was this that troubled him the most. He slept little that night, and when he woke up, he feared he’d lost his mind from the unrelenting examination of his thoughts. He was hungry, shattered, and dismayed, but there he lay, broken in bits. The people from the agricultural university called him two times, then sent a text saying they would no longer be buying feed from him as he wa
s no longer serious about his business. They were the fourth or so regular customers who had abandoned him because he was now rarely at his store.
After he read the message, he snapped. He yelled into the hot day and stood up.
Why am I afraid of her? Why, after all I have done, after all I have done for her? No, she has to talk to me.
He paced the room, carrying the memory of the day she had rejected him in public, crying that she did not know who he was. Today, today, Ndali must give me answers.
He’d spoken so firmly that he was astonished at how emboldened he’d become. He went out to the shared bathroom at the back of the apartment to bathe. In front of it, the wife of one of the neighbors, a Yoruba man who spoke with a feminine voice, sat on a short stool, bent over a bucket, washing clothes. Soap suds were scattered about. The woman was swaddled in a wrappa, which hung over her bosom and was fastened into a knot beneath her hairy armpit. The woman greeted him, and as he passed, the portion of flesh exposed to his eyes annoyed him. He thought of the woman he’d slept with, how his feelings had surprised him. Instead of pleasure, he’d felt disgust, and that had shocked him. As he closed the bathroom door, made of zinc nailed to wood, and piled his clothes over the top, it struck him that what he’d experienced with that woman and his general apathy towards other women was because he still loved Ndali.
He drove again to her house and parked his car a few meters from it, on the side of the road opposite the direction from which her car came. He parked under a tree filled with birds tweeting, overlooking a fenced mansion from which the voices of children came in flashes. Then he waited, his eyes on the road, until at sundown he saw her car approaching. He’d thought and rethought things and made up his mind. He’d observed that cars seldom came this way, as the street that curved beyond this one did not give out onto anything beyond itself. It culminated in a dead end. But if there was a car trailing her own, and he could not block the road, then he would simply come out of the vehicle, chase after her car and interfere before she honked at her gate and the gateman opened it.
Egbunu, the moment came like something from his imagination. As soon as he saw her car, he started his car and ran it with a rush forward, then sideways into the path of the oncoming car. The cars almost hit each other, and the cry that arose as a result of this near hit threatened even his own disoriented mind. He sat for a moment to let his heart quieten. Then he got out of the car. He’d seen her, but he had not seen the boy who sat in the back. Now he saw them both, she turning back to the boy to say something. He walked to the front of the two cars and stood still. For a long time, months, ever since he returned, he’d wanted this moment. He felt himself shaking, something erupting along the base of his heart.
The person in the car behind his honked thrice and drove angrily past. But he stood there. Then she came out of the car. She looked at him and he at her. Life seemed to be there in that face, the life he once knew. But it was a face that was hard for him to recognize. Something about it was new, yet much of it was familiar.
“You?” she said, as if inquiring into the nature of his being.
He nodded. “Mommy,” he said.
She stepped back towards the car, bent, and said something to the boy. Then she closed the door and stepped forward beside it.
“You, again? What do you want?”
He shook his head, for Egbunu, he was afraid.
“Mommy, I am sorry for everything. I am sorry. I am sorry. Did you read my letter? Did you read the—”
“Excuse me!” she cried. “Excuse me!” She stepped back, put her hand on her face, and pointed the painted fingers at him. “Why are you after me? Why are you coming to my chemist and my house? What is the meaning of this, eh?”
“Mommy—”
“No, no, stop! Stop it! Don’t call me that, please, I beg you.”
He made to speak again, but she looked back at the car and the boy.
She turned to him again, and with her eyes closed, she said, “Let me tell you, I don’t want to ever see you ever again. What is this? Why are you following—”
“Ndali, listen,” he said, and stepped forward.
“Stop! Stop there!”
So violently had she moved backwards that it alarmed him.
“Don’t you come near me at all. Listen, I beg you in the name of God, leave me alone. I am married now, okay? Go and find another woman, and leave me alone. If you come to my house again, I will arrest you.”
He saw that she had turned back towards the car, and he followed her. He’d come inches from touching her when she faced him again.
“Your son,” he said, panting from the rush. “He has my name.”
In this memorable moment of life, when my host and the woman he loved came inches away from each other, a wagon started to approach the place where the two cars were fixed into a confluence. It was an instinctive moment, brief, like the last-minute glimpse of an assassin by his victim, but fraught with a grace that was imponderable to man. With one unwelcome step he had entered into her field of vision, and his legs had been caught in a loop from which he could not disentangle himself. He saw that she wanted to speak, but then, abruptly, she turned and went back in her car.
The men in the wagon had stopped and started to curse. He returned to his car and pulled it gently into a reverse. Her car coursed through and made for the gate to her house. He watched it disappear, the provoked wagon driver and passengers cursing at him as they passed.
EBUBEDIKE, I must not dwell on the thing he did afterwards too much, for it was something too difficult to watch. For my host was devastated by this encounter. The few words Ndali had said to him he carried in the weak sac of his stomach and digested them on the scene, weighing every word. But like a goat, he’d made them into veritable cud. And every night, when his life, which had acquired the restlessness of a pendulum, swung into a standstill, he’d bring up the cud and chew with fresh salivary intensity. But there was one thing that he could not shake off, that could not be chewed or broken down. For it was solid and complete in its composition. He’d seen it in her eyes, and even though he knew that his mind could become overreactive in such situations, he was convinced that what he’d seen in her was contempt.
It is hard to describe what this feeling did to him. He lay in the house for days, surrounded by the ghostlike, disembodied voices of the encounter. He ate little; he spoke to himself. He laughed. He cried. He stepped out wearily at night and ran back into his room again, drinking the rainwater that washed down his face.
I feared, Egbunu, that he was descending into madness. For even more, he was haunted by strange and persistent dreams, many of them of birds—chickens, ducks, falcons, and even hawks. They were dreams that exposed the inflammations of his afflicted mind. He became like a castaway—one rejected by earth and heaven. A living akaliogoli. I feared because I have come to know that the strongest kind of affection often exists in the heart of a man whose love interest is distant from him—the one he cannot have. That is the one his soul longs for with dying breaths, and the sublime dungeon in which his heart is caged. The only way to save him is to introduce a new affection as strong as the one he cannot get. But because no such woman was near, I feared.
His descent into this state continued for days, Egbunu, and one evening, as he sat mumbling to himself that she hated him, he did not realize that his friend had returned.
He was almost thrown into a shock when he heard a loud knock on his door, followed by, “Brother Chinonso, son of the living God!”
He rushed to open it.
25
The Subaltern God
AKWAAKWURU, the great fathers in their unrivaled wisdom used to say that what a man is afraid of, that thing is greater than his chi. This is a hard saying. But it is true that fear is a great phenomenon in the life of a man. As a child, a man’s life is ruled by constant fear. And once a person becomes an adult, fear becomes a permanent part of him. Everything a human being does is ruled by it. It is folly to a
sk, how may one be free from fear? Well, isn’t it fear itself—perhaps the fear of having one’s mind dominated by fear—that causes a person to ask such a question? Man must live by it. Man eats because he fears that if he does not, he will die. Why does he cross the street with caution? Why are that man and his child going to a clinic? Fear. Fear is a subaltern god, the silent controller of the universe of mankind. It might be the most powerful of all human emotions. Gaganaogwu, consider the story of Azuka, the man who killed his brother-in-law in a brawl three hundred and seventy years ago. That man was sentenced to death by the priest of Ala for having taken another man’s life unjustly. My host at the time, Chetaeze Ijekoba, had been one of those who walked him to the forest and hanged him. I had seen through him how this condemned man had been, how even his movement and his voice had been changed by fear, and it was clear that every moment of his life, from the time the judgment was pronounced, had been occupied by the fear of death. A man who persuades himself to live without fear will soon find that he has fled naked into the province of insanity, a place where he is without any acquaintances whatsoever.
When Jamike visited, he found my host consumed with fear—and desire, rage, love, and grief. But most of all, it was fear that, in truth, he would never have Ndali again. Fear, Chukwu! The subaltern god, the tormentor of humanity—that which holds a man on a leash and from which he cannot escape. Let him dart about the house, let him perch on windowsills, let him flap his young white wings as much as he wants, let him call and utter the orchestra of minorities; he cannot escape. For if he flies up, the roof will bring him back, and restore him to his place. Is the man at this point making merry? Is he drinking palm wine at his wedding? Is he receiving the benediction of his parents and the adulation of all his kindred? Is he making love to his wife? Is his wife in labor, and he is awaiting a child to be born? No matter, when he is done—when the party is over, when the wedding guests have all gone, when he has relieved himself and is calm again, when the child has been born and is asleep, fear returns with a presence more forceful than before and reels him back like a falconer does his bird.
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