How Beautiful We Were

by Imbolo Mbue

  I forced a smile.

  “Say something,” Cocody and Uwe whispered, adding to my mortification.

  I widened my eyes at them, hoping they’d read in it: Say what? I’d spent hours fantasizing, but I hadn’t planned for the moment when Malabo would put his cheeks close to mine and ask me to go for a walk with him. I found myself lifted off the ground, unable to touch it again. Float away with him I did, from that moment till the end.

  We were happy, Malabo and I.

  I try not to forget that, but the nature of our last days together threatens to smear all memories of our spirits uniting as one. After that first walk around Kosawa—hand in hand, footsteps synchronized, me beaming—no one could convince me that the days I waited for him to come visit me in my village or for me to visit him in his weren’t worth the torment. I could have waited for ten dry seasons and ten rainy seasons to feel the beat of his heart for one minute. My friends laughed at me. “Sahel finally got the cheekbones of her dreams,” they said. I laughed with them. When it came to Malabo, everything made me happy. Even my friend Lulu’s annoying questions made me happy—Lulu asking me if I really wanted to marry the son of the most unhappy man who ever lived, what if I gave birth to children as unsmiling and despondent as their grandfather, could I imagine how uncomfortable it would be to live in the same hut as someone who grunted whenever you wished him a good day. I’d responded that, of course, I’d considered it all and who wouldn’t want to marry Malabo, the firstborn of the unhappiest man who ever lived? Who wouldn’t want to have his semi-smile directed at her every day? That semi-smile started vanishing when children began dying. By his departure, it was all gone.

  But did it ever glow for me.

  Did it glow that night when he took me into his bedroom, on a day when his parents were at a funeral in one of our brother-villages and Bongo had gone off in order to give Malabo all the space he would need, just as Malabo did when Bongo had a girl. Did it glow when, without his asking, with him merely sitting on his bed and looking at me, his eyes glimmering in readiness, I began undressing, beads of sweat appearing on his forehead as I pulled off item after item, slowly, until I was left with nothing but my body in its bare state, begging for him to stand up and hold it, which he did, rising with hands outstretched, lips parted, his eyes never leaving mine. I did not beg him to lay me on his bed, and he did not me ask if he could—we had talked about it, and laughed about it, how in not too long we’d be married, and once the children started arriving our only chances would be in the darkest hours of the night, under our sheets, as silently as we could, and there’d be so many things we wouldn’t be able to do with them in the bedroom, so we had to do it all now, as often as we could, while we were young and free.

  I’m certain Yaya and Big Papa heard us the night of our wedding, excited as we were to lie side by side on our marital bed with no child yet in sight. Our clothes were on the floor even before the women from my village left, the ones who had carried my belongings on their heads and, with my mother leading the procession, sung and danced from my aunt’s hut to my new family’s hut, where they placed everything I owned in the parlor and pushed Malabo and me into our bedroom and closed the door, laughing and shouting from outside that we’d better not step out until I was pregnant. How happy were we to oblige? At least once I said to Malabo, in between sessions, that we needed to do a better job of being quiet, because we didn’t want to disturb Big Papa’s and Yaya’s sleep, but Malabo laughed and said that Big Papa and Yaya were probably not sleeping, they were most likely doing the same thing we were doing, and that the only reason why we weren’t hearing them was because they’d learned how to do it quietly, after decades of experience. I found it hard to believe this, considering the looks Big Papa gave me in the morning, an acknowledgment that he’d heard me, coupled with something I couldn’t decipher. I wished he hadn’t given me those looks, but it didn’t stop us the following night. Nothing stopped us until I was huge with Thula, and Yaya, one day in the kitchen, said to me that there were certain things a woman had to stop doing for the sake of her child. Nodding, I told her I understood. Malabo protested. He said that his friends had told him that it was not true, that their children had all come out fine, and that the important thing was to know how to maneuver around the fetus, but I told him we needed to do it for Yaya, and he agreed; it hadn’t been easy for us, but we’d done it, though when I was pregnant with Juba I was insatiable, which thoroughly thrilled Malabo.

  My desire was, and remains, its own beast, rabid and untamable.

  In those early days of our love, it was no punishment. It was a gift to my husband, this wanting and more wanting, every night. Cocody and Lulu laughed at me whenever I yawned in the middle of the day and told them that we couldn’t stop, it was too hard to stop. They said no woman should have an appetite like mine, that their husbands would send them to Sakani to be given whatever I’d drunk if they somehow discovered that it was possible for a woman to be as desirous as a man. “I hope Malabo isn’t telling Bissau any of these things you guys are doing and giving him ideas,” Cocody said. “I don’t want any trouble with him coming to me in the middle of the night and asking me to open my pot so he can cook some crazy meal in it.” At which Lulu sighed, pressed her tongue against her gap tooth, and said, “My own pot, for two months now, I haven’t felt like taking off the lid. I don’t even want to think about how many cobwebs have accumulated inside it.” Lulu swore that most of my insides had to be male. She said I probably had invisible hair on my chin and a lump on my throat that nobody could see. Cocody had agreed and laughed, ka ka ka oh, and they’d slammed their palms together. In those days I’d laughed with them, because Malabo was around to honor me and my voraciousness, but after he left and never came back, what was there to laugh about?

  * * *

  —

  In the first year after his disappearance, I cried many different kinds of tears. The tears I cried in the morning were different from the ones I cried at night. At night, I thought of our nights together. I thought of my palm on his cheek, his on mine. I thought of how much he loved my breasts. I cried with longing, alone under my sheets. I cried because no one had touched me since the day he last touched me, and to this day, no one has touched me.

  Like every woman who has lost a husband before me, like every woman who will lose a husband after me, I am doomed to aloneness. My days of being cuddled and fondled have come and gone. I hear my mother’s voice in my head from back when I was a child. Like me, she lost a husband, though she was much older than the twenty-nine I was when Malabo left. I hear her say to her friends: I lost the one husband life gave me, I have no right to ask for another one, not when there are other women waiting their turn. I see her friends nodding sadly: what is the point in questioning a broken heart?

  I was eight when my father died and, with my five older sisters married, it was just my mother and me in our hut. It was clear to me that she did not resent her fate—she never complained—but I prayed the Spirit that I would never become like her. Malabo promised never to leave me husbandless. Why would I want to leave this body? he said.

  * * *

  —

  There is an abundance of women like me in Kosawa and throughout the sibling-villages—wives with dead husbands. Men marry us young and die before us, taken away by nature or disobedience to our wisdom. At their deaths, we cry, we dry our eyes, we prepare to spend the rest of our lives taking care of the very young, the sick, and the very old. Desire becomes of the past. We’ll never be afforded the same privilege given to husbands with dead wives. For these men, there will in all certainty be another companion, thanks to the Spirit’s design that our women outnumber their men. For grieving men, there’ll quickly arrive someone younger and willing to take over the mothering of their children, someone eager to add to their lineage. Unless they’re so old that only the grave wants them, they will never know what it’s like to have a body
begging for just a little touch at night. They will never be ashamed to announce that they have found someone to take their wives’ place, because everyone would agree that a man should not be alone.

  You can be alone, the men say to us. You’re a woman, you’re built to endure.

  In that first year after Malabo vanished, I prayed the Spirit to cause another woman’s husband to wander into my bed. Some nights I prayed for a young man who hadn’t yet picked a wife to keep me as a placeholder, take this used-up body and enjoy it until a fresh one came along; even then, he could retain me for the months when his wife was pregnant. I’d do what I hear some women in my position do: meet him deep in the forest, under a tree, with only the birds and beasts watching, or in a barn late at night. I’d let him do to me all the deeds he might not be so bold as to ask his wife to engage in.

  On our worst days, Cocody and I cried together in my bedroom.

  Where once we’d been happy to marry best friends who did everything together, now we wept that we’d married best friends who did everything together. In between our tears, we joked that perhaps we should marry each other. One evening, Cocody’s younger cousin Aisha was with us when I said this. She joined us in laughing at the idea, before adding that maybe women marrying each other wasn’t such a bad idea, it might even be the best thing to ever happen to humans. This made Cocody and me laugh hard—Aisha was an adolescent, she could get away with saying such ridiculous things.

  Cocody doesn’t want a man the same way that I do. She wants a man to help her guide her sons, since she has no male kin in Kosawa whom she’s comfortable discussing her sons’ progression to manhood with. She worries about her youngest child, born two months after our husbands went to Bézam and vanished. She and I had both been pregnant at the same time; my child would also be running around the village today if all had gone well, but I thank the Spirit that I alone suffered that loss and my friend was spared. I agree with Cocody that her youngest boy would need a new father to teach him how to grow up to be like the father he never knew, but I have no need for a new father for my children. I have my husband’s family and my cousin Tunis, who, though he too is suffering—who in Kosawa isn’t suffering? who in the world hasn’t just suffered, is suffering at the moment, or soon to suffer?—is still the brother the Spirit never gave me.

  One evening, about a year after Malabo disappeared, Tunis came to check on me and found me sitting alone on the veranda, staring into nothing. He sat next to me and whispered in my ear that he’d heard some men in the big market talking about my buttocks; the men had said that my buttocks looked like a sweet pineapple. I slapped his head in jest, though I wish it were true, so I could go search for the men, pick one of them, bring him to my hut, and unleash my lust.

  With my cousin sitting next to me and making me laugh, I spent little time wondering what happened to Malabo. After Tunis went home, I wondered all night how Malabo had died. If I had a grave to sit on and cry I would do so, to soak up whatever solace is present atop the mound under which a beloved lies. But the dust with which my husband’s flesh was formed has already merged with the Bézam soil. Or maybe a river there took his blood away. Perhaps his burnt bones were long ago blown away by a cruel gust. I’ll never know. I speak to him daily, often when I’m outdoors, hoping that birds flying toward Bézam will take my words with them, and even if my words aren’t what he wishes to hear, the sound of my voice will cause him to be less alone. Perhaps he’s not alone anymore. Perhaps Bongo is with him, brothers for life and in death.

  * * *

  The afternoon we returned from Bézam without Bongo, Thula went straight to Bongo’s bed and curled up under his old clothes. She remained there all day and all night. She did not answer when her friends came and knocked on the door, begging her to open it because they wanted to be with her and comfort her. She did not come out when relatives started arriving to wail with us in the parlor and tell us to be strong. She was not there when my aunts did the unbearable duty of telling Yaya what had happened in Bézam. Thula was not there when we held Yaya’s hands as she was told that Bongo was dead.

  I’d collapsed not from my grief, but from seeing Yaya’s devastation at the news, the way she started shivering and hyperventilating as if life was leaving her. I couldn’t bear to watch; the Spirit has no right to punish a good woman this much in one lifetime.

  Thula wasn’t there when the women revived me and I opened my eyes to see that Yaya was no longer Yaya, just a breathing object awaiting death. Thula remained alone in Bongo’s bedroom, lying on the sheets we hadn’t changed since the day they took him to Bézam. She avoided us, as if her grief and ours were parallel rivers.

  After that first day stuck in a gloomy fog, when I’d gathered whatever strength I could, I sent a message for my cousin Tunis to come help me break down the door to the back room so we could get Thula out—I couldn’t let her stay in there with no food or water. Tunis came over and called out to Thula to please unlock the door so he wouldn’t have to break in. Thula stayed on the bed and ignored us. Tunis found a way to open the door without causing much damage and left. Quietly, I entered the room.

  I found her lying under Bongo’s clothes, her face tear-stained.

  She was clutching to her chest the book Bongo used to read to her, the one about a place called Nubia, that place Bongo loved to talk about: Did we know that in Nubia women were as powerful as men? he liked to say to Malabo and me on the veranda, at which Malabo would give him a blank stare and I’d laugh and ask him to tell me more.

  I knelt by the bed and pleaded with Thula to get out of the room. She turned her face to the wall. I told her we needed to preserve the room in the event Bongo’s spirit wanted to roam there for a while before beginning its journey to be with the ancestors. She ignored me. “You’re too young to sleep here alone,” I said, still kneeling by the bed. No reaction. I told her that as a girl she couldn’t make the back room her bedroom; Bongo could do so because young men can handle the danger of sleeping in a room with a separate entrance. Still no reaction from her. I stood up. Letting go of the tenderness in my voice, I told her I would no longer put up with her insolence; I hadn’t killed her father or her uncle, my patience with her wasn’t going to last forever. Still she made no effort to rise. My cautions turned to threats. “I’ll never let you back in the hut if you don’t come in right now,” I said. I could have been speaking to a rock. Determined to get a response, I yanked her off the bed. It was then I noticed how wet the pillow was, drenched with her tears.

  What could I do? Our parlor was full of women sitting on the floor around Yaya, singing to her in her numb state; I didn’t want to announce to them that Thula was compounding my grief by defying me. So I went into my bedroom and closed the door and window. In the darkness, I sat on the bed and bowed my head. I asked the Spirit to tell me where I’d gone wrong. I wanted to know where all of us, as a people, had gone astray. Surely, our ancestors had committed an offense, and their punishment was being visited upon us, for no hut in Kosawa had been spared this desolation wrought upon us. I wept for Bongo, I cursed Malabo. I wish I didn’t detest my husband for dooming me to a life of being solely responsible for a broken girl and a lost boy and an old woman, all of them laying upon my back their anger and grief, with no one to bear mine but me, because it had to be so.

  I screamed into my pillow. I told Malabo I wish I’d married Neba in my village, the first man who’d asked me to be his wife. I wish I hadn’t told my mother to tell Neba that she couldn’t accept any gifts from him because another man had already requested her permission to marry me. I’d joked and laughed about the lie with my friends, because I believed that I’d someday find a man I wanted who wanted me too; I was confident that waiting for this man would be worthwhile. And he was worthwhile, my husband, my dream, who with a semi-smile brought low the clouds and laid them for me to walk on, who with a single touch left me floating face downward on the stillest
, cleanest water, everything about him so worth the damnation of being born. In our youth and freedom, our exhilaration seemed as if it would last forever. Look where my lie landed me.

  Before drying my eyes and rising, I told Malabo that I hoped his journey from this world to the next would take a hundred eternities so that he would forever be alone, never with us, never with his ancestors. I cursed him for choosing me only to make me pay for his foolhardiness, for loving me only to pass me off to a life I loathe, for giving me everything I ever wanted only to leave me wishing I’d never prayed for the things I got.

  * * *

  —

  For most of the nights since the day Malabo refused to heed my advice and left for Bézam, sleep has lost its battle against my fidgety mind. I pass the hours waiting for the roosters to tell me it’s dawn so I can find respite from my regrets and ruminations. The past is past, and yet I can’t stop thinking that I could have stopped him if I were a better woman, a better wife, a better mother, a more persuasive person.

  I try not to punish myself with such thoughts, but I can’t stop counting all the sorrows that have befallen our family because Malabo did not listen to me. I list them, from the moment I began feeling the pain in my belly though it was too early in my pregnancy for me to feel such pain, to the moment, a week later, when the baby came out and I screamed and closed my eyes because I did not want to see it, to the afternoon when the soldiers arrived with guns and I saw a wickedness worse than I’d ever imagined possible, to the evening we returned to Kosawa from Bézam with Bongo’s death notice.