by Sefi Atta
“It’s hot in here,” I would say.
“Don’t worry,” she would say.
“The boys should help.”
“Boys? What can boys do?”
“They know how to tease you.”
“Who else can they tease?”
Once, I tried to trick her into a confession. “Don’t you ever feel lonely in here, ma? Isn’t the kitchen the loneliest room?” She looked at me as if I’d offered to strip.
“Enough,” she pleaded. “Enough now.”
I continued to stir her stew, imagining her in a mortuary, on a slab, underskirt hanging out, husband and children saying how nice she was.
Everyone said my mother-in-law was nice. I wouldn’t believe them until I’d heard a true word pass her lips. Her husband was a man who liked his stews prepared the traditional way, meat fried in thick groundnut oil, and he loved his wife so much he wouldn’t eat stews prepared by anyone but her. Forty-five years later, he had bad arteries and her hands were as dry and shriveled as the meat she fried. Francis Abiola Franco, Esquire. The first time we met he asked, “You’re Sunny Taiwo’s daughter?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Good breeding always shows,” he said.
“I’m a horse?” I asked Niyi later.
“He’s a horse,” Niyi said. “An old nag.”
He was one of those Senior Advocates of Nigeria, though he was now out of touch with the Law, and with reality. He asked his sons to dial if he needed to make a phone call. He sat in the back seat of his car, always, even when one of his sons was driving. He stopped speaking to me after I challenged him on a point of law. I disagreed with him just for the sake of it. I didn’t care much for him, but my brothers-in- law, I loved. They would all troop into my house, all four of them looking like Niyi with the same dark skin and thin nose, and I would kiss each of them feeling a rush of libido and motherliness as they greeted me, “Enitan of Africa!” “Obirin Meta! Three times a girl!” “Alaiye Baba! Master of the earth!” It was like welcoming my husband four times over. I didn’t even mind sitting with them as they scratched their groins and christened women’s parts: her foward, her backward, her assets, her giblets. About Sheri: “She’s, em, very talented. Hyuh-Hyuh-Hyuh.”
I knew. They were petrified of women, though they denied it. “Who? Who’s scared of chicks?” they asked.
“Sneaking,” I said. “Lying. Lying on your last breath. Then you cannot even face somebody to say a relationship is over? That is petrified.”
“If you say so. Hyuh-Hyuh-Hyuh,” scratch, scratch, scratch.
Sometimes they brought girlfriends who disappeared by the next visit. Sometimes they played hide-and-seek games with their girlfriends. I once asked, “Are you boys waiting to marry your mother, or what?”
“Of course,” they answered, including Niyi.
“Well, em,” I said. “Don’t you think you should drop your standards a little?”
“No,” they said, except Niyi.
Niyi bullied his brothers the same way he bullied me, but he could easily become vexed in the middle of our playing. Then he would call me aside and warn, “Better watch what you’re saying. Next thing they’ll be calling me woman wrapper.” Wrapper was the cloth women tied around their waists. Woman wrapper was a weak man, controlled by his woman. I thought he was paranoid. I said it was too bad. He was the very person who had encouraged me to be strong at work. He was asking me to fly within specified perimeters. I would have shouting fits about this and he would remain totally silent. He said he wasn’t used to arguing that way. “In our family,” he said, “we don’t raise our voices.”
The Francos were one of those Lagos families, descendants of freed slaves from Brazil, who once formed the cream of Lagos society. They considered themselves well-bred because their great-grandfather, Papa Franco, was educated in England. In his time, Papa Franco acquired a huge estate which survived the slum clearance that wiped out most of the Brazilian Quarter in Lagos. Some of the buildings now looked as if a giant fist had come down from heaven and punched them into the ground. Those that remained standing were rickety with tall shutters and wrought iron balconies. Nothing had been done to improve the drainage system: gutters and pit latrines dating back to colonial times. They were occupied mostly by street traders and market people.
Papa Franco’s only son, Niyi’s grandfather, had twenty-six children by three different women who died before him and there had been several documented court cases over his estate. Each faction of Franco occupied separate pews in the Catholic church they attended. Their church reminded me of my mother’s: the incense, white robes, and chants. When the collection tray passed, they gave very little. Oil wealth hadn’t touched their palms and civil service wages were paltry. The Franco men tilted their noses heavenward, the women fanned their cleavages laden with gold and coral beads, their clothes reeked of camphor balls. They had the pride and lack of ambition of a generation that wealth would skip, and ignored each other because they thought it was common to quarrel openly. That was how they settled differences: Aunty Doyin, The Pretty One, locked herself in a room until her father allowed her to marry a Protestant; Niyi’s father stopped speaking to him for a year after he left Franco and Partners; Niyi, himself, would ignore me for days.
The first time this happened, we’d argued over drinks. Drinks. His brothers were visiting and I had just returned from work. As usual, he asked, “Enitan can you get these animals something?”
Niyi claimed he was totally inept inside kitchens. His favorite trick was to feign panic attacks by the door, clutching his throat and keeling over. Normally I humored him, because we had house help, but this evening, I only wanted to stop trembling from the lack of sugar in my blood. I’d spent the day fending off the treasury guys.
“You have hands,” I said.
“My friend,” he said. “Show some respect.”
“Go to hell,” I said.
In my 29 years no man ever told me to show respect. No man ever needed to. I had seen how women respected men and ended up shouldering burdens like one of those people who carried firewood on their heads, with their necks as high as church spires and foreheads crushed. Too many women, I thought, ended up treating domestic frustrations like mild cases of indigestion: shift-shift, prod-prod and then nothing. As far back as my grandmother’s generation we’d been getting degrees and holding careers. My mother’s generation were the pioneer professionals. We, their daughters, were expected to continue. We had no choice in the present recession. But there was a saying, and I’d only ever heard it said by other women, that books were not edible.
It was an overload of duties, I thought, sometimes self-imposed. And the expectation of subordination bothered me most. How could I defer to a man whose naked buttocks I’d seen? touched? Obey him without choking on my humility, like a fish bone down my throat. Then whoever plucked it out would say, “Look. It’s her humility. She choked on it. Now she’s dead.” This may have been my redemption, since my husband needed a wife he could at least pity. Later that night, he called me aside to say, “Why did you have to say that in front of my brothers?”
“Well, why can’t you ever get them drinks for once?” I answered, “Why can’t you go to the kitchen? What will happen if you go? Will a snake bite your leg?”
He did not speak to me for two weeks and I contemplated leaving him for that alone—he could at least have remembered his age, even though I deliberately bumped him and poked my tongue behind his back. But no one I knew had left a man because he sulked, and I wanted a family, and I’d seen how Niyi grieved for his. I knew him down to his breath in the mornings. When we were not quarreling, I liked to watch him writhing to one whiskey- voiced woman or the other, like the one he called Sarah Vaughn. I could not tell one scat from another, but she said just about everything I wasn’t prepared to, using ten words:
Sometimes I love you
Sometimes I hate you
But when I hate you
It’s becau-au-au-au
se I love you
I got pregnant and shortly after had a miscarriage. I was at work when I felt the first contraction. By the time I arrived home, it was too late, I’d passed a blood clot. I cried until I soaked my pillow. Nothing is worse than the loss of a child, even if the child is never born. If a child dies in your care, people understand that you feel responsible. If a child dies within you, they immediately try to absolve you: it is God’s way, there is to be no mourning. You never understand why.
I got pregnant again. This time, the baby grew out of my womb and could have killed me had it not been for one smart doctor. I had to have an emergency operation. The doctor told us my chances of having a child after that were reduced. “But keep trying,” he said. A year later, we still were. Niyi’s relations began to press, “Is everything all right?” They looked at my stomach before looking at my face. Some scolded me outright. “What are you waiting for?” My mother invited me to her vigils; my father offered to send me overseas to see other doctors. I asked why they harassed women this way. We were greater than our wombs, greater than the sum of our body parts. “For God’s sake,” my father said solemnly. “I’m not playing here.”
Sheri suggested I tried fertility drugs. Didn’t I know? Everyone was taking them. They were? I asked. “Of course,” she said. “One year and nothing is happening? Six months, even.”
“Six months!”
She began to name a few women. One who didn’t have children. Another who had two, but both were girls. One who did it to trap a man. Where did they get the drugs? I asked. “Doctors,” she said. Infertility specialists? I asked. Um, she didn’t know, but they treated infertility all the same. Where did the doctors find these drugs? Black market, she said.
Multiple births, laparoscopies, drug cycles. She gave me details, asked if I wanted a telephone number. I only wanted to be left alone, I said. At least my husband had a son of his own. No one could accuse me of ending the Franco lineage.
I never once doubted that I would become a mother. Not once. I just didn’t know when it would happen, and I didn’t want to be a guinea pig until then. Two more years passed and Niyi and I were still trying. I finally agreed to see a gynecologist who specialized in infertility. He made the appointment and I stuffed my head under a pillow as he spoke to the receptionist, but he refused to use a fake name. “It’s not a VD clinic,” he said. We arrived and saw the number of cars parked on the street, walked in and I saw that some of the women were as old as my mother. I was one of the few with a man by her side. The doctor arrived an hour later, chin up, stomach forward. He grunted in response to our greetings. I ducked a little, like the other women. Didn’t even know why.
In no time at all Niyi and I began to quarrel about the fertility regime. It made us feel like mating animals. Every minor event sparked an accusation, and I shrunk to the size of my womb. I stared at other people’s children imagining their soft, sticky hands in mine, worked myself into false morning sickness and cursed out loud when my periods started. Sometimes they didn’t, then I’d be buying pregnancy kits and peeing on the sticks. Soon I convinced myself that it was a punishment; something I’d done, said. I remembered the story of Obatala who once caused women on earth to be barren. I made apologies to her. I remembered also, how I’d opened my mouth once too often and thought that if I said another bad word, had another bad thought, I would remain childless, so I swallowed my voice for penitence.
That was how my thirties found me, in a silent state. I felt as though I’d been running in midair for years. The realization had me laughing at myself. “Satisfied?” I asked myself aloud one morning. When I could hear no answer, I said, “Good.”
I would not delve below that; I preferred to balance my home on a pin than to delve.
The day I got pregnant, I sat on my bathroom floor crying over a stick. “Thank you, God,” I said. “God bless you, God.” I waddled to Niyi, already imagining my stomach big, fell into his arms and his eyes filled with tears.
“I thought we were finished,” he said.
“We are never finished,” I said.
We promised not to argue. This time, my doctor suggested bed rest for three months and I resigned from work because my managing director, the one with the bad sinuses—who once told me I was segsy, very segsy indeed and he would have chazed me but for my sginny legs—he had been looking for an opportunity to move his cousin into my position and refused to approve my request for time off. “Mizeez Frango,” he said. “Our bank can ill-afford an abzent company segretary.” The bank couldn’t afford my lawsuit either, I threatened. This wasn’t a position to let go without a fight. I considered suing for a while, then I gave up on the idea because really, I wanted to be a mother more than I wanted to be a company secretary. I knew this when I would vomit into a toilet bowl in the mornings, look at myself in the mirror and smile. I accepted my father’s offer for partnership instead.
During my first month of bed rest, I read local newspapers I normally didn’t have time to read while I was working. Mostly I read stories in less reputable papers: Woman gives birth to snake. Hundreds flock to vision of Mary on latrine window. I also read the obituary pages: Rest in peace, O glorious mother and wife, died after a brief illness. In loving memory of our father. Here was the real news, I thought. The obituaries were always timely and uncensored, expect when they were hiding deaths from AIDS.
Sometimes I read editorials about the future of democracy. It was over a year since June 12, 1993, the day on which our country’s third transition to democratic rule was to begin. That ended two weeks later when the military government annulled our general election and stepped down. A transitional government lasted three months before there was another coup. This new regime partially restored our constitution; placed a ban on political parties, disbanded both houses of senate and representatives, then instituted something called a constitutional conference to bring about democratic reform.
Not since the Civil War had we seen such resentment. Reading the papers, it was clear that some Yorubas blamed their one-time Civil War allies, the Hausas. But those who were less blind-sided looked to the small but powerful clique of Hausas who sanctioned our nation’s military rulers. The majority of people simply cared about their vote. Pro- democracy groups immediately called for a boycott of the constitutional conference. There were organized protests, which ended in gunfire, and deaths. The National Democratic Coalition was formed. Then the winner of the general elections was arrested and detained when he declared himself president. Oil workers went on strike and this led to petrol shortages. The Nigerian Bar Association, teachers’ unions, university students, joined the protest. Our military government responded by breaking up meetings, detaining students, lawyers, union leaders, ex-politicians, journalists, any individuals they considered enemies of the state. They passed new decrees to strengthen the old ones, seized passports, imposed exit visas on journalists.
Of the pro-democracy activists campaigning, one was my father’s long time client, Peter Mukoro, now editor of a magazine called the Oracle. Over the years, Mukoro had gained a wide readership because of the kind of reports he pursued: exposes on drug rings, oil spills in the Niger Delta, cults and gangs in universities, religious wars in the north, Nigerian prostitution rings in Italy. When Peter Mukoro wrote people read, so, quite often, Peter Mukoro was in trouble. He’d had several law suits against him. My father continued to represent him. Some they lost, some they won, others were pending. Peter Mukoro’s house was burgled twice, although nothing was stolen. Then there was that mysterious fire in his office. After that Mukoro declared himself “the unluckiest man in town” because, even by Lagos standards, his life was “well and truly jinxed.” When he ran an editorial calling for the reinstatement of the general election results he himself was detained. His magazine went underground. He was not formally charged, but his detention was made lawful under Decree Two, that decade-old military decree under which persons suspected of acts prejudicial to state security could be de
tained without charge. Even I felt sorry for him. At least he wasn’t one of those journalists who were government critics until they landed a government job. Mukoro would not work for a state-owned paper. He would not work for anyone with military affiliations.
My father immediately published a statement in the Oracle, saying he would continue to petition until Peter Mukoro’s release. I worried about my father’s safety, given that under Decree Two, any arrest could be justified. These days, my father was going as far as to ask the military regime to step down. I, too, wanted them out, especially after they gunned down protesters during the political unrest. But there were thousands of other ways people were being killed in my country: unseen pot-holes in the roads, fake malaria medicine. People died because they couldn’t afford an intravenous drip. People died because they drank contaminated water. People died from hardship: no water- no light, we called it in Lagos. People died because they got up one morning and realized they were ghettoized, impoverished. 1995 had me giving thanks for the calamities my family and friends had escaped, not protesting against the government. I was almost two months pregnant and thought, like many Nigerians, that my priorities were best kept at home. What I hoped for, at the beginning of the year, was to have my baby in peace.
Niyi handed the latest copy of the Oracle to me.
“Read,” he said.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Your old man,” he said. “He’s talking again.”
He left our bedroom and I read the article. My father had given an interview about recent detentions under Decree Two. He was advocating a national strike. I tossed the magazine on the bed and put some clothes on. Niyi was surprised to see me coming downstairs. He lowered his paper. “You’re going out?”
“Yes. To see my father. Talk some sense into his head.”
“What about bed rest?”
“I’m tired of resting.”
He pulled his paper up by the shoulders. “Be careful.”
I assured him that I would. As I drove to my father’s house, I breathed in deeply. It was a while since I’d been out on my own and during the harmattan season the evenings were cooler. I could see no more than half a mile down the road because of the dusty haze. It shrouded leaves and blew into people’s eyes. Children were still calling conjunctivitis Apollo.