Jagua Nana

by Cyprian Ekwensi

  ‘You won’ let me reach house, before you start, Brother Fonso.’ This was one reason why she dreaded meeting him. He was always trying to lead her to a righteous life. ‘But I tell you, brodder. One chief in Krinameh wan’ to marry me. An’ he already pay my bride price.’

  ‘So they always do; and when them sleep with you finish, no more talk about marriage.’ He walked faster. ‘Jagua, come out from deceivin’ yousself.’

  If it was money she wanted, the money was there in Onitsha, Brother Fonso told her. For instance, she could remain with him now and try to become one of the Merchant Princesses in the town. Fonso talked about one woman who made a monthly turnover of £10,000. The Merchant Princesses, he boasted, were independent women; and he knew that his sister loved independence. And they were free. They turned their minds to business, not frivolities. They were grown-up women.

  Brother Fonso’s house by the ferry waterside was ill-lighted and musty. Jagua knew that her brother was worth a good deal of money, and in her turn she upbraided him for living so drably. What was the use of making money and not finding time to enjoy it, Jagua asked him. But he was more interested in making the money – first. He was living alone now, he said, because his wife had gone home to her own people to have a baby. He scrambled her a meal, but kept pressing her to stop in Onitsha, not to cross any more with the ferry. She must stop with him and try her hand at trading – in the Onitsha manner. He was sure she would soon pick it up. Jagua suspected Brother Fonso of unhappiness and loneliness, of wanting to detain her for company. Certainly she felt he made the whole thing sound easy. He made no reference to his loneliness but she saw it in his wild-eyed look and in the breath of wind his cry brought.

  She listened to him because he was her brother and she wanted to show him that she was not a ‘useless’ woman. In the morning they went together in search of the Merchant Princesses. Brother Fonso took her to one of them who said she sold £2,000 worth of exercise books a week during the boom period. It was she alone who distributed exercise books to three million schoolchildren. She owned a fleet of lorries which travelled north and east, distributing bicycles, soap and cement. Jagua sat in her shed and listened almost mesmerized. She could find nothing at all unusual in this money-spinning woman who did not know how to write in English. She came away feeling like one who has been offered a new path to salvation.

  When she had seen all that Brother Fonso would show her, she wanted to be one of them. Fonso took her to the secretary of the woman traders who had an office at the market entrance. He looked at Jagua through his heavy-rimmed glasses and told Jagua that she was new and must ‘prove herself’. He could not take her before the white agent who supplied the women with goods, until she had proved herself. To prove herself she must take out goods and pay cash first. Then – if she did well – she would be trusted with credit facilities, and the amount would gradually be increased to a worthwhile sum.

  Jagua consulted with Fonso. With his permission she decided to use the £150 she had and Fonso added another £50 to make it a round £200. The Union Secretary told Jagua that £200 worth of goods would only bring her a profit of £2. There were women taking £10,000 worth of goods, and getting £100 commission. ‘You need not really sell. All you must do is move the goods. Get people to come from the jungles and buy them. It doesn’t matter where they come from. Push the goods to your sub-customers who will then take them deeper inside. Nigeria is a big country, there’s plenty of space. Then, you bring back the cash to us: and take out goods worth more money. And so on. But mark you, you must study the market and know what you can push. You must always buy goods that move. D’you know something?’ He stirred the snuff in his palm with a stick. ‘You don’t even need a shop or a stall to succeed.’ With the stick he scooped the tobacco into a left nostril and inhaled.

  Sitting in her own stall, Jagua was miserable. It rained, and when it was not raining, the customers came, but not to her stall. She saw them in the stalls of the other women traders. Once she saw a dark man holding a canvas bag. She watched him: he walked past her stall to the nearest stall and began counting out money from the canvas bag, waiting while the woman trader in the stall checked it. ‘God, if I kin get lucky like dat woman,’ Jagua thought.

  But it was not to be. Her stall seemed to repel the buyers. She was new, she had to ‘exercise patience’. Fonso told her that a trader must be a patient animal. Jagua found herself quite unable to learn this new quality of patience without glamour. She loved showing herself off, but sitting in the stall gave her no time to preen herself, to strut about the alleyways of Onitsha. She spent her time in the bleaching sun, from morning till six at night, with a meal snatched behind the goods she was selling. It was not her idea of living her life. At night she moaned. Yet when she saw the merchant princesses in the evenings, sitting in the owner’s corner of their limousines, she envied them, and longed to own hers. She told Fonso and he reminded her of the one hundred rungs of the ladder. According to him her foot was scarcely planted on the first rung. He told her to ‘have patience’ but already her stock was exhausted. She was glad Onitsha had given her an insight into the big money business. But she was realistic enough to know that she was not yet equipped to partake of the loot. Though she had lost her money in the first venture she could still go, Jaguaful, down to the riverside in the evenings to watch the canoemen bringing in the day’s catch of the best-tasting fish in Nigeria.

  It was from the beach-side that she caught a glimpse of the ferry launch packed full with Lagos-licensed cars. The wind blew across to where she stood, snatches of a familiar jazz tune from the Tropicana. It must have come from one of the car radios. She saw a young man, Lagos-tailored, talking to a dashingly dressed girl with a heavily made-up face. The two of them must be coming from Lagos, going eastwards. Those two young people seemed to tell her she was in some danger of losing her chic, of becoming more provincial and less Jaguaful. This was the last thing she ever wanted to happen to her. The suppressed desires came rushing to her stimulated imagination.

  She gave the fish-seller a pound note, but it was when she got home she realized she ought to have waited for her change.

  16

  Someone told her once that if she ever left Lagos for one week, no one would remember her. But Jagua soon discovered that leaving Lagos as she had done for more than three months meant – in addition – not recognizing the city on her return, it was changing so fast. The lorry park had been cemented and paved and they had now built a proper entrance and exit but the lorries and the touts and small quick-quick buses were still there. If anything they were flourishing more vigorously.

  A taxi took her back to her lodgings. She was glad she still retained her rooms. Try as she would Lagos still remained her natural habitat. The memory of Chief Ofubara and Krinameh still lingered, but the pressure to go back was already becoming less urgent. This time was perhaps the best hour to come back unnoticed: sunset fading into a short twilight that dazzled the eyes and confused the senses. People were mere forms, hazy and ghostly but identifiable. No one knew just when Jagua got back to her room. She remained for a moment in the room, smelling its mustiness. At last she had reached home. Ogabu was the home of her father and mother; Bagana was Freddie Namme’s home where Uncle Namme lived as Regent; Krinameh was the home of Chief Ofubara who was infatuated with her. Jagua thought of all these places and tried to fit herself into one of them. There was none quite like Lagos and the Tropicana. She opened the windows and without putting on the light, she began to unpack, mainly foodstuffs, yams, oranges, plantains. She would not need to spend her money on expensive Lagos food for some time at least. Back home. She breathed in the air of freedom.

  While she took off her clothes, Michael came in and beamed over her, telling her how well she was looking. He had kept the place remarkably clean in her absence. She examined her body in the mirror as she talked to him. Going east had made her fairer of skin, more rounded on her face, younger looking, more desirable to men,
she hoped; something different from the usual dried-up bones of the Tropicana girls.

  ‘Anybody ask of me?’ She covered her hips with a cloth as she talked to Michael. He was only a boy and she appeared naked before him without any hint of self-consciousness. What always amused her was the way he averted his eyes from her breasts and hips when she confronted him, but she had often caught him stealing very grown-up looks at her from behind.

  ‘One man come here plenty time.’ He rushed downstairs and produced a small notebook. ‘He come here, till he tire. He use to wear long dress and cap. He get money plenty. He never come ’ere before you go home.’

  With the help of a neighbour they were able to decipher the scrawl. ‘Taiwo,’ it read. Jagua immediately remembered him as the man who had taken her to the airport the day Freddie was leaving for Britain.

  ‘Finish, de man who come?’

  ‘Dem too plenty; but dis man get money pass all!’

  Jagua smiled. ‘How you know he get money?’

  ‘I know, Ma. I see de money for him face!’

  Jagua laughed, with her head thrown over her shoulder. She had not finished admiring herself in the mirror. JAGWA. She gave herself the title now, whispering it and summoning up in her mind all the fantastic elegance it was supposed to conjure up. JAGWA. It was like an invocation. She was sure the men would like her much more now. Men, she discovered, found a strange appeal in a woman whom they knew but who had been away on holiday. Again she thought of Freddie and only managed to repress an impulse to go downstairs and ask of him. So Freddie would not be coming to her rooms, crashing into her secret life and starting his jealous quarrels. His jealousy was tough to bear; but Lagos for her also meant Freddie and his quarrels.

  She heard the stirring throbs of jazz from a neighbour’s radio. A new record, too. She must go to the Tropicana. Wonder ’bout dem. Mama Nancy still at Bagana. Wish her all de best. She kin marry Uncle Namme if she choose. Must go to Tropicana to forget de worl’. De trouble wit’ de worl’ is dis: people too take life serious. Life is serious, mark you. I don’ deny that. But you mus’ take life easy sometime. Yes. Mus’ go to Tropicana. Dis night too. I know I only jus’ return, but Brodder Fonso not here to stop me an’ talk all him serious talk about Papa an’ Mama. After all who in de fam’ly suppose to look after dem? De men or de women? Am only a woman. Ah marry an’ loss by name to anodder fam’ly. De man name must remain. Is only 8 o’clock now. Time never pass.

  ‘Jagua? Hel-lo! … Welcome! … You look so well. You enjoy yerself at home? What you bring back to us?’ The girls would want something from her, the hungry sluts. They dug their claw-like fingers into men’s pockets and smoked men’s cigarettes and drank men’s drinks and took men’s money, but they would always dig their hands into their colleagues’ pockets for the odd copper to buy kola nuts to keep them awake and the odd scraps of food to keep them from collapsing. ‘Borrow me your brooch, Esther! Borrow me your shoe, Mary! I wan’ wear am go dance, repairer never return my own. I give am to repair he never come back.’ Tropicana women. She hated them. Yes, they would want her to bring them something; they who had been rooted in Lagos enjoying the limousines and the silky tenor saxes of Jimo Ladi and his Leopards.

  She stored away the food, then she took out her towel and went to the bathroom, but when she knocked a man answered her from the inside and she went instead to the lavatory. The same old bucket, piled high; the floor messed about, so she could see nowhere to put her silver sandals. It was all done by those wretched children upstairs. Why blame them when their mothers did not know any better. Where was the landlord? Where was the Town Council Health Inspector? This inspector was supposed to come here once in a while, and whenever he came he made notes in his black book but nothing ever happened. She would talk seriously to him the next time. The unpleasant side of Lagos life: the flies in the lavatory – big and blue and stubborn – settled on breakfast yam and lunchtime stew (they were invisible in a stew with greens). But Jagua closed her eyes and shut her nostrils with her towel.

  The bathroom was free now, slippery and green, but thank God for the shower. She was through in a few moments. She stretched her hair, oiled her skin and wore her print dress. Something provincial was there in her get-up. She must find out what it was and eliminate it. This was Lagos and she was Jagwa.

  She found the Tropicana much the same: entrance through a hole in the wall. A smile from the proprietor standing dark-haired in his shirtsleeves under a harsh light. She bought a kola-nut from the Hausa hawker who had a pitch inside, near the manager. Jimo Ladi and his Leopards had not begun to play yet, but they were all there on the bandstand. The women smiled at her.

  ‘Jagwa. You return? Welcome! How’s home?’

  They flocked round her and teased her and she was glad. They said she looked young and fine. She told them that ‘one man wan’ to marry me, one Chief!’ And when they expressed surprise, she reeled off the whole story, down to the detail of the reconciliation she had brought about. This story made her feel important. Unlike so many of them, she was not coming to the Tropicana out of necessity, but because it had become a part of her. She knew from the silence on their lips that she had succeeded in putting across that impression. The loudspeaker began to scratch out a tune. The girls went to their tables and sat with eyes trained on the door. But there was one girl who lingered.

  Years later, Jagua remembered this particular night. It was the memorable night on which she saw more closely the young woman called Rosa. Rosa had a ready smile and a charming way of speaking. She said she had come to Lagos, from the East. She had nowhere to stay in Lagos. Could Jagua help her? Jagua took pity on her and promised, rashly, to do something. ‘If you come to my place, sometime I kin fin’ somethin’ for you.’ She quickly dismissed Rosa from her mind, but later that evening it flashed through her consciousness that Rosa could well live with her. Rosa could be her companion, in Freddie’s absence. Lagos then, might have a new meaning. Rosa could pay something towards the rent, help with the cooking, washing and cleaning. The idea was worth considering.

  At the moment, Jagua was far too occupied with shaking her hips to Jimo Ladi’s High-life. Everyone was on the dance floor stomping and rocking with complete abandon.

  She walked along the front of the Tropicana, among the taxi drivers and sellers of soap, candles, matches, sardines, toasted corn and peanuts. The lights played with her and she was glad. Glad to have been at the Tropicana. She heard the steady sound of footsteps behind her. Without glancing back she whispered to herself: ‘Dem done start to follow me, awready! Ja-a-gwa!’ The sensation of being followed brought with it a new kind of self-importance. She tried to guess from the rhythm of the steps what kind of a person it was. Not an old man, certainly. The steps were light, but hesitant. When she stopped, the sound ceased. She looked round and saw him: a young man.

  He had one hand in his trousers pocket. ‘Ma’am, I see you for Tropicana.’

  Jagua looked at him, young, arrogant, smart in his open-neck shirt. ‘You see me?’ He could not be older than Freddie Namme, and she thought: ‘Dese young men, dem never use to get money. Only sweet-mouth.’

  ‘I see you for Tropicana, an’ I say, even if I die, I jus’ mus’ speak wit’ you.’

  ‘How? I no understan’ you.’

  ‘I don’ mean to offend you, Madam. I get some plan.’ The hand stuck in the trousers pocket came out in one swift movement. He was holding a small packet and Jagua watched him open it. She drew in her breath.

  ‘Gold?’ she said. ‘Who get de trinket?’ She could hardly control her excitement. The trinkets were worth at least one hundred pounds. She recognized them as a complete set, suitable for use with native costume on special occasions only – funerals, naming ceremonies.

  ‘I only wan’ ten poun’ for de whole. Cash. You kin do what you like wit’ am, I no care. Melt de whole ting down and make new set, if you no like dis one.’

  The chance was not one to be missed. ‘Follow me,’ Jagua
whispered. ‘I no hold de money here. Follow me to mah house.’

  She took him to her room. He sat on the edge of the chair, the young man, nervous. She talked to him while undressing carelessly and then she left the room and went and showered her body with cold water and scented her armpits with something Oriental. When she came back she was wearing only a transparent chemise. She sat on her low carved stool with her little mirror propped between her bare knees, gazing at her wet hair. Her arms and shoulders were bare and she sat with the chemise bunched between her thighs so that the mirror bit into the skin between her knees.

  Jagwa. She raised her arm and ran the comb through the wiry kinks of hair and her breasts swelled into sensuous arcs and her eyes tensed with the pain as the kinks straightened. And the hour was not less than three in the morning, with everywhere a dead quiet, and the light in the room low and sleepy. The young man sat on the nervous edge of the seat, gazing at her killing him off with temptation and he sat tense and said nothing.

  ‘So you say you wan’ ten poun’ for de trinket?’ she murmured, injecting a secretive note of intimacy into her voice. ‘Eh?’

  ‘Yes … er … oh, yes!’

  ‘But you know de whole thin’ don’ worth more than five pound. I only goin’ to give you five pound. Das all I got.’ She smiled up at him, tilting her face upwards to gaze into his eyes. He was nervous. She saw that.

  She rose, put aside the mirror and came and stood near him so that he could see all of her and smell her. She came and put her hands on his ear lobes and stroked them. ‘You good lookin’. You wan’ to cheat poor woman like me. I only goin’ to give you £5.’

  ‘Madam, I been like you so much. Das why I follow you from de Club. I mean, I like you so much. If you wan’ de trinkets …’