by Mariama Bâ
I told myself what every betrayed woman says: if Modou was milk, it was I who had had all the cream. The rest, well, nothing but water with a vague smell of milk.
But the final decision lay with me. With Modou absent all night (was he already consummating his marriage?), the solitude that lends counsel enabled me to grasp the problem.
Leave? Start again at zero, after living twenty-five years with one man, after having borne twelve children? Did I have enough energy to bear alone the weight of this responsibility, which was both moral and material?
Leave! Draw a clean line through the past. Turn over a page on which not everything was bright, certainly, but at least all was clear. What would now be recorded there would hold no love, confidence, grandeur or hope. I had never known the sordid side of marriage. Don't get to know it! Run from it! When one begins to forgive, there is an avalanche of faults that comes crashing down, and the only thing that remains is to forgive again, to keep on forgiving. Leave, escape from betrayal! Sleep without asking myself any questions, without straining my ear at the slightest noise, waiting for a husband I share.
I counted the abandoned or divorced women of my generation whom I knew.
I knew a few whose remaining beauty had been able to capture a worthy man, a man who added fine bearing to a good situation and who was considered 'better, a hundred times better than his predecessor'. The misery that was the lot of these women was rolled back with the invasion of the new happiness that changed their lives, filled out their cheeks, brightened their eyes. I knew others who had lost all hope of renewal and whom loneliness had very quickly laid underground.
The play of destiny remains impenetrable. The cowries that a female neighbour throws on a fan in front of me do not fill me with optimism, neither when they remain face upwards, showing the black hollow that signifies laughter, nor when the grouping of their white backs seems to say that 'the man in the double trousers' [13] is coming towards me, the promise of wealth. 'The only thing that separates you from them, man and wealth, is the alms of two white and red cola nuts,' adds Farmata, my neighbour.
She insists: 'There is a saying that discord here may be luck elsewhere. Why are you afraid to make the break? A woman is like a ball; once a ball is thrown, no one can predict where it will bounce. You have no control over where it rolls, and even less over who gets it. Often it is grabbed by an unexpected hand '
Instead of listening to the reasoning of my neighbour, a griot woman who dreams of the generous tips due to the go- between, I looked at myself in the mirror. My eyes took in the mirror's eloquence. I had lost my slim figure, as well as ease and quickness of movement. My stomach protruded from beneath the wrapper that hid the calves developed by the impressive number of kilometres walked since the beginning of my existence. Suckling had robbed my breasts of their round firmness. I could not delude myself: youth was deserting my body.
Whereas a woman draws from the passing years the force of her devotion, despite the ageing of her companion, a man, on the other hand, restricts his field of tenderness.
His egoistic eye looks over his partner's shoulder. He compares what he had with what he no longer has, what he has with what he could have.
I had heard of too many misfortunes not to understand my own. There was your own case, Aissatou, the cases of many other women, despised, relegated or exchanged, who were abandoned like a worn-out or out-dated boubou .
To overcome distress when it sits upon you demands strong will. When one thinks that with each passing second one's life is shortened, one must profit intensely from this second; it is the sum of all the lost or harvested seconds that makes for a wasted or a successful life. Brace oneself to check despair and get it into proportion! A nervous breakdown waits around the corner for anyone who lets himself wallow in bitterness. Little by little, it takes over your whole being.
Oh, nervous breakdown! Doctors speak of it in a detached, ironical way, emphasizing that the vital organs are in no way disturbed. You are lucky if they don't tell you that you are wasting their time with the ever-growing list of your illnesses ---your head, throat, chest, heart, liver---that no X-ray can confirm. And yet what atrocious suffering is caused by nervous breakdowns!
And I think of Jacqueline, who suffered from one. Jacqueline, the Ivorian, had disobeyed her Protestant parents and had married Samba Diack, a contemporary of Mawdo Bâ's, a doctor like him, who, on leaving the African School of Medicine and Pharmacy, was posted to Abidjan. Jacqueline often came round to see us, since her husband often visited our household. Coming to Senegal, she found herself in a new world, a world with different reactions, temperament and mentality from that in which she had grown up. In addition, her husband's relatives---always the relatives---were cool towards her because she refused to adopt the Muslim religion and went instead to the Protestant church every Sunday.
A black African, she should have been able to fit without difficulty into a black African society, Senegal and the Ivory Coast both having experienced the same colonial power. But Africa is diverse, divided. The same country can change its character and outlook several times over, from north to south or from east to west.
Jacqueline truly wanted to become Senegalese, but the mockery checked all desire in her to co-operate. People called her gnac , 14 and she finally understood the meaning of this nickname that revolted her so.
Her husband, making up for lost time, spent his time chasing slender Senegalese women, as he would say with appreciation, and did not bother to hide his adventures, respecting neither his wife nor his children. His lack of precautions brought to Jacqueline's knowledge the irrefutable proof of his misconduct: love notes, check stubs bearing the names of the payees, bills from restaurants and for hotel rooms. Jacqueline cried; Samba Diack 'lived it up'. Jacqueline lost weight: Samba Diack was still living fast. Jacqueline complained of a disturbing lump in her chest, under her left breast; she said she had the impression that a sharp point had pierced her there and was cutting through her flesh right to her very bones. She fretted. Mawdo listened to her heart: nothing wrong there, he would say. He prescribed some tranquillizers.
Eagerly, Jacqueline took the tablets, tortured by the insidious pain. The bottle empty, she noticed that the lump remained in the same place; she continued to feel the pain just as acutely as ever.
She consulted a doctor from her own country, who ordered an electrocardiogram and various blood tests. Nothing to be learned from the electric reading of the heart, nothing abnormal found in the blood. He too prescribed tranquillizers, big, effervescent tablets that could not allay poor Jacqueline's distress.
She thought of her parents, of their refusal to consent to her marriage. She wrote them a pathetic letter, in which she begged for their forgiveness. They sent their sincere blessing but could do nothing to lighten the strange weight in her chest.
Jacqueline was taken to Fann Hospital on the road to Ouakam, near the university, where medical students do their internship, as they do at the Aristide Le Dantec Hospital. This hospital did not exist at the time Mawdo Bâ and Samba Diack studied at the School of Medicine and Pharmacy. It has many departments, housed either in separate buildings or in adjoining ones to facilitate communication. These buildings, despite their number and size, do not manage to fill up the hospital's vast grounds. On entering it, Jacqueline thought of those gone mad, confined inside. It was necessary to explain to her that the mad ones were in psychiatric care and that here they were called the mentally sick and in any case, were not violent, the violent ones being confined in the psychiatric hospital at Thiaroye. Jacqueline was in a neurology ward, and those of us who went to visit her learned that the hospital also had departments for treating tuberculosis and infectious diseases.
Jacqueline lay prostrate in her bed. Her beautiful but neglected black hair, through which no comb had been run ever since she began consulting doctor after doctor, formed shaggy tufts on her head. When the scarf protecting it slipped out of place, it would uncover the coating of a mi
xture of roots that we poured on her, for we tried everything to draw this sister out of her private hell. And it was your mother,
Aissatou, who went to consult the native medicine men for us and brought
back safara 15 from her visits and directions for the sacrifices you quickly carried out.
Jacqueline's thoughts turned to death. She waited for it, frightened and tormented, her hand on her chest, where the tenacious, invisible lump foiled all the ruses, scoffed maliciously at all the tranquillizers. Jacqueline's room-mate was a French Technical Co-operation teacher of literature, posted to the Lycée Faidherbe in Saint-Louis. The only thing she knew of Saint-Louis, she said, was the bridge that spanned the river. A sore throat, an affliction as sudden as it was violent, had prevented her from taking up her duties and had brought her here, where she was waiting to be repatriated.
I observed her often. Old, for her unmarried status. Thin, angular even, without any charm. Her studies must have been her only form of recreation during her youth.
Sour-tempered, she must have put off any passionate advances. It was perhaps her loneliness that had made her seek for a change. A teaching post in Senegal must have corresponded to her dreams of escape. She had come therefore, but all her frustrated dreams, all her disappointed hopes, all her crushed revolt connived to attack her throat, protected by a navy-blue scarf with white dots, which contrasted with the paleness of her chest. The medication with which her throat was painted gave a blueish tint to her thin lips, pinched over their misery. She had big, luminous, blue eyes, the only light, the only point of beauty, the only heavenly grace in her ungracious face. She tapped against her throat; Jacqueline tapped against her chest.
We would laugh at their ways, especially when the patient from the next room came to 'chat', as she said, and would uncover her back for the refreshing caress of the air- conditioner. She suffered from sudden flushes, which burned her terribly at this spot.
Strange and varied manifestations of neuro-vegetative dystonia. Doctors, beware, especially if you are neurologists or psychiatrists. Often, the pains you are told of have their roots in moral torment. Vexations suffered and constant frustrations: these are what accumulate somewhere in the body and choke it.
Jacqueline, who enjoyed life, bravely endured blood test after blood test. Another electrocardiogram, another X-ray of the lungs. An electro-encephalogram was carried out, which revealed traces of her suffering. It then became necessary to do a gaseous electro-encephalography. This is extremely painful, always entailing a lumbar puncture. That day, Jacqueline remained confined to bed, looking more pitiful and haggard than ever before.
Samba Diack was kind and touched by his wife's breakdown.
One fine day, after a month of treatment (intravenous injections and tranquillizers), after a month of investigations, during which her French neighbour had returned to her country, the doctor who was head of the Neurology Department asked to see Jacqueline. She found in front of her a man whom maturity and the nobility of his job had made even more attractive, a man who had not been hardened by constant dealing with the most deplorable of miseries, that of mental alienation. With his sharp eyes, accustomed to judging, he looked into those of Jacqueline in order to discover in her soul the source of the distress disrupting her organism. In a soft, reassuring voice, which in itself was balm to this overstrung being, he explained: 'Madame Diack, I assure you that there is nothing at all wrong with your head. The X-rays have shown nothing, and neither have the blood tests. The problem is that you are depressed, that is ... not happy. You wish the conditions of life were different from what they are in reality, and this is what is torturing you.
Moreover, you had your babies too soon after each other; the body loses its vital juices, which haven't had the time to be replaced. In short, there is nothing endangering your life.
'You must react, go out, give yourself a reason for living. Take courage. Slowly, you will overcome. We will give you a series of shock treatments with curare to relax you. You can leave afterwards.'
The doctor punctuated his words by nodding his head and smiling convincingly, giving Jacqueline much hope. Re-animated, she related the discussion to us and confided that she had left the interview already half-cured. She knew the heart of her illness and would fight against it. She was morally uplifted. She had come a long way, had Jacqueline!
Why did I recall this friend's ordeal? Was it because of its happy ending? Or merely to delay the formulation of the choice I had made, a choice that my reason rejected but that accorded with the immense tenderness I felt towards Modou Fall?
Yes, I was well aware of where the right solution lay, the dignified solution. And, to my family's great surprise, unanimously disapproved of by my children, who were under Daba's influence, I chose to remain. Modou and Mawdo were surprised, could not understand. ...
Forewarned, you, my friend, did not try to dissuade me, respectful of my new choice of life.
I cried every day.
From then on, my life changed. I had prepared myself for equal sharing, according to the precepts of Islam concerning polygamic life. I was left with empty hands.
My children, who disagreed with my decision, sulked. In opposition to me, they represented a majority I had to respect.
'You have not finished suffering,' predicted Daba.
I lived in a vacuum. And Modou avoided me. Attempts by friends and family to bring him back to the fold proved futile. One of the new couple's neighbours explained to me that the 'child' would go 'all a-quiver' each time Modou said my name or showed any desire to see his children. He never came again; his new found happiness gradually swallowed up his memory of us. He forgot about us.
15
Aissatou, my dear friend, I've told you that there can be no possible comparison between you and young Nabou. But I also realize that there can be no possible comparison between young Nabou and Binetou. Young Nabou grew up beside her aunt, who had earmarked her as the spouse of her son Mawdo. Used to seeing him, she let herself be drawn towards him, naturally, without any shock. His greying hair did not offend her; she found his thickening features reassuring. And then she loved and still loves Mawdo, even if their interests are not always the same. School had not left a strong mark on young Nabou, preceded and dominated as it was by the strength of character of Aunty Nabou, who, in her rage for vengeance, had left nothing to chance in the education she gave her niece. It was especially while telling folk tales, late at night under the starlit sky, that Aunty Nabou wielded her power over young Nabou's soul: her expressive voice glorified the retributive violence of the warrior; her expressive voice lamented the anxiety of the Loved One, all submissive. She saluted the courage of the reckless; she stigmatized trickery, laziness, calumny; she demanded care of the orphan and respect for old age. Tales with animal characters, nostalgic songs kept young Nabou breathless. And slowly but surely, through the sheer force of repetition, the virtues and greatness of a race took root in this child.
This kind of oral education, easily assimilated, full of charm, has the power to bring out the best in the adult mind, developed in its contact with it. Softness and generosity, docility and politeness, poise and tact, all these qualities made young Nabou pleasant. Mawdo used to call her 'finicky', with a shrug of his shoulders.
And then, young Nabou had a profession. She had no time to worry about her 'state of mind'. In charge of frequent shifts at the 'Repos Mandel' Maternity Home, on the outskirts of the crowded and badly serviced suburban areas, all day and several times over she would go through the same gestures engendering life. Babies passed again and again between her expert hands.
She would come back from work railing at the lack of beds that led to the discharge, too early in her opinion, of the new mothers; worried about the lack of staff, inadequate instruments, medicines. She would say, with deep concern: 'The fragile baby is let loose too quickly into a hygienically unsound social environment.'
She thought of the great rate of infant mortality
, which nights of care and devotion cannot decrease. She thought: What a thrilling adventure it is to turn a baby into a healthy man. But how many mothers are able to accomplish that feat?
In the midst of life, in the midst of poverty, in the midst of ugliness, young Nabou would often triumph with her knowledge and experience; but she sometimes knew heartrending failure; she remained powerless, faced with the force of death.
Young Nabou, responsible and aware, like you, like me! Even though she is not my friend, we often shared the same problems.
She found life hard and, being a fighter, had not the least inclination for frivolities.
As for Binetou, she had grown up in complete liberty in an environment where survival was of the essence. Her mother was more concerned with putting the pot on the boil than with education. Beautiful, lively, kindhearted, intelligent, Binetou had access to many of her friends' well-off families and was sharply aware of what she was sacrificing by her marriage. A victim, she wanted to be the oppressor. Exiled in the world of adults, which was not her own, she wanted her prison gilded.
Demanding, she tormented. Sold, she raised her price daily. What she renounced, those things which before used to be the sap of her life and which she would bitterly enumerate, called for exorbitant compensations, which Modou exhausted himself trying to provide. Echoes of her life would reach me, amplified or muted according to the visitor. The seductive power of mature age, of silvery temples, was unknown to Binetou. And Modou would dye his hair every month. His waistline painfully restrained by old-fashioned trousers, Binetou would never miss a chance of laughing wickedly at him. Modou would leave himself winded trying to imprison youth in its decline, which abandoned him on all sides: the graceless sag of a double chin, the gait hesitant and heavy at the slightest cool breeze. Gracefulness and beauty surrounded him. He was afraid of disappointing, and so that there would be no time for close scrutiny of him, he would create daily celebrations during which the bright young thing would move, an elf with slender arms who with a laugh could make life beautiful or with a pout bring sadness.