I have yet to meet Geoffrey, who still lives in Accra. But the fact that Aaron always refers to him as ‘Geoffrey’, never ‘Geoff’ or ‘G’, makes me think of him as diffident and kind and slightly stuffy. A boy who felt the pressure of being a cabinet minister’s son and tried his best to behave himself, growing up into the kind of man who rolls his English around in his mouth as plummily as he can.
I strip to my underwear and study myself in the mirror; it is a bronzed sorrel woman with a net of curly hair who looks back, and she does not look Jamaican or Ghanaian or Kenyan or Sudanese – the only firm thing that is sure is that she is black. Mami says only Cubans look like Cubans; put three Cuban girls together – white, black Latina, whatever – and you just see it. It is as if you could take away my colouring and I would be a white Cubana – a white Cubana not being, after all, particularly white.
My eyes are long rather than wide, meagrely lashed and slanted unhurriedly upwards at their corners. In my blood is a bright chain of transfusion; Spaniards, West Africans, indigenous Cubans, even the Turkos – the Cuban Lebanese. My shape is that of a slightly distorted heavy pear; slender, Chabella-like shoulders and a gently rising collarbone cast lines that soften and swell past a high waist to what Amy and I refer to as ‘loot in the boot’ – hips that escape spread fingerspans – then the line returns.
I prod my thigh and, standing on one leg, run my hand down my calf. I sink to the floor, sink to the middle of this slew of things that are supposed to tease out, bejewel, enhance, improve on what I have. I coat my hands with cocoa butter and slowly, slowly start to reconcile myself with my skin, inch by inch. I am scared to touch my stomach, not because it is tender, but because it has begun to swell beyond the point where it can be comfortably rubbed with one hand. If I cup it with both hands the bump might rise to the space I allow it.
When Amy Eleni calls I am fiddling, trying to adjust the V-neck of my black dress so that it falls away from my shoulders and skims the arms left bare by my sleeveless polo neck.
‘Hey, Maja. I’m coming to hear you sing tonight after all,’ she says.
‘Good. How’s Jenny?’
‘I don’t know; we broke up.’
‘Oh?’
‘That’s all you’re getting on the phone. What of Aaron?’
‘He’s . . . tired a lot, and out a lot.’
‘Can I place the first bet on when he’s going to pack the trainee-doctor thing in?’
‘Come on, Amy Eleni.’
‘No, you come on. It’s not like he needs to work. His dad is like, ker-ching.’
Before I can object, she asks, ‘What’s tonight’s theme?’
‘Of make-up, or the café?’
‘Both –’
I tell her: make-up, purple; café, solitude.
‘Solitude?’
Amy Eleni teaches A-level English Language and Literature; she has nothing but murder in her heart for amateur poets. She keeps telling me that most of them don’t read anyone’s poetry but their own, and that’s why they always think they’re doing something new, and why it’s always so appallingly not. I keep telling her that the people in her class are seventeen and eighteen and that she should give them a break. I remind her of her own amateur poetry at seventeen and eighteen and am told ‘Shut up! My poetry was never amateur!’
I hold my tights up to the light. They are laddered after all, and I have to hang up and look for another pair. Mami slips into the room with good-luck kisses for me and an opalescent white gardenia on a coiled green stalk. Before I can thank her she starts jabbing at my polo neck:
‘What is this? Why are you wearing this? That’s such a lovely dress, and you’re spoiling it –’
I am just trying to protect my throat. Before I realise what I’m doing I have taken her hands and pushed them back at her hard, too hard; she stumbles and laughs, astonished. I catch myself and take the flower from her.
‘Chabella,’ I say, ‘I can’t wear this . . .’
Mami throws up her hands. ‘Your brother chose it. I told him it was ugly.’
Tomás, a pencil behind his ear, comes to look at me. ‘What’s wrong with it? Billie Holiday used to wear one, didn’t she? I thought you liked her? Are you off her now?’
I try to put the corsage box back into Mami’s hand, but she skips away, giggling.
‘It’s just that, you know, she’s . . . I can’t explain. She’s . . . well, it’s just not right to wear her flower. And this is not a big-deal occasion. Even if it was a big-deal occasion, it still wouldn’t be right to wear her flower.’
Tomás rolls his eyes and withdraws. Mami stamps her foot. ‘Am I a bad mother?’ she demands.
‘Chabella.’
‘I said, am I a bad mother? Didn’t I always tell you how beautiful you are and what a good singer you are? Who is Billie Holiday, anyway?’
‘Mami! She’s –’
‘Yes, I know. Anyway, you’re better at singing than she is. She just growls. And you’re better looking, too, even if you spoil your dresses with strange tops. So put that flower on.’
I turn to the mirror and comb my hair into an upsweep so that I can clasp it, but Chabella dives at me with the gardenia and fixes it at the back of my head with a hairclip. She puts her hands on my shoulders, her face a little behind mine, and looks at us in the mirror. We smile.
‘When are you going to make up with Papi?’ I ask. I have to ask while her gaze is on me.
‘Is my altar back yet?’ she asks. It is not a rhetorical question; she is not being stubborn, she looks so hopeful. And that’s worse. I close my eyes because I had not expected to be taken by this feeling of steam, angry like a new player in a game where someone has suddenly changed the rules.
The wood-panelled café is low-lit and arranged like a fifties speakeasy, with tables ranged in concentric circles around a makeshift stage with a microphone stand. Chabella’s pretty hair is driven back with minuscule black pins so that it tickles her shoulders from high up, like a long feather. She clasps her hands and looks around, enraptured.
‘They’ll have a spotlight on you, and you’ll look like a princess, except for that purple lipstick,’ she tells me.
Having blown Amy Eleni kisses and pointed out to Chabella those seats that I consider safe for her to sit in, I am the last of our band to arrive in the box room behind the café. Michael is there, tense as ever, waiting with one arm curled around his propped-up saxophone, drinking water in tight swallows that don’t even wet his lips. When he sees me, he nods and smiles, but I know he’s only pleased to see me because now we can start our sound check. Maxwell, dreadlocks swaying in the rush of their own weight, body bumps me, and Sophie, our tall, prettily spoken cellist, gracefully offers her cheek to be kissed. She is from Senegal, and she is, just as Maxwell (who has been trying to ask her out for six months) says, sexy like chocolate.
When we go out to warm up on the stage I am happier than I thought I’d be, my foot tapping as Maxwell’s taps, but it’s always that way when I allow the song to come to me without question. Maxwell’s face is serene as he drums, never airless, never strained. He beats time for himself and Sophie – and for Michael, who sways as his fingers ride his saxophone’s polished stops. They are letting me take my own time, letting me fall in after them, but they know that I’m with them.
Really it’s Michael’s band; he cares most, he’s the one who calls for all-day rehearsals, he’s the one who helps us to understand where we’ve gone wrong when we fail to move together. I joined the band mainly because, after graduating, everyone became anxious that I should find something to do. Papi handed me weekly sheaves of job listings and told me to ‘start my life’. Tomás said, ‘It’s cool that you’re home, but you’re disturbing my growth.’ I kept beating him at Nintendo; he didn’t like it, I knew. Chabella found me a post as an assistant librarian – one of her friends ran the local library. That roused me in a way that Papi and Tomás had been unable to. I screamed at Mami, ‘A books job! Chabella,
are you mad?’
Amy Eleni came by with some cassettes for me; Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan. With no real interest in the answer, I asked her how her teacher training was going. With no real interest in answering, Amy Eleni shrugged and said, ‘It’s going.’ I wanted to defer the future indefinitely, and I sort of wished that Amy Eleni would too. But I listened to the cassettes. And I started singing in a way that I hadn’t before, a kind of singing that made Mami and Tomás say, ‘Waaah, didn’t know you could do that!’ though Papi said nothing.
I sang to Amy Eleni. She didn’t say ‘Waaah’, but she came back with a bunch of ads put out by instrumental groups who wanted singers. I auditioned for Michael’s because his ad was the shortest and the least demanding. He wanted someone to do standards, no particular look or age, and he’d added ‘No divas’.
Michael didn’t seem impressed at any point during the audition, but I thought maybe he’d taken me on because he did an internal ‘Waaah’ at my voice. When we were better friends he told me I was the only one who’d showed up for his auditions. He said, ‘I suppose I offended all the divas.’
Standing discreetly near the back, the café’s owner watches us with her fingers in her mouth – her eyes are boiling-water blue and she looks as if she might snap if she’s not hearing good sounds. But I’m not ready to try my voice yet; we just test the microphones for static, and I follow the pieced strands of song that Maxwell and Sophie and Michael carelessly let swirl.
Amy Eleni, now contemplatively smoking a cigarette in a silvered holder, has seized Mami and they’re both sitting behind glasses of Bacardi and Coke
(Mami smiles a small and unforgiving smile if I ever refer to the mixture as a ‘Cuba Libre’)
their backs are to the other seats, which are filling with sprawled legs and talk. They’re sitting at the table that falls directly under my gaze. Amy Eleni is wearing purple-tinted shades. Chabella waves and smiles at me; I shake my head sorrowfully at Chabella because this is not one of the tables I told her she could sit at. Amy Eleni is wearing a black hat identical to mine over her smooth, shiny blonde bob. She is swathed from top to toe in black. She is wearing red stilettos, and jiggling her feet with impatience under the table.
I am certain that Amy Eleni’s students fear her. It’s not just that her expression constantly suggests that she’s about to say something extremely harsh. She wears mirrored sunglasses indoors as often as she can get away with it, walks with her shoulders, and snaps her fingers when things aren’t happening fast enough for her. But she doesn’t look like a woman at all; she has all the angular, callous, radiant and uncompromising beauty of a girl who has only just grown into her body and barely has an understanding of what has happened. Her eyes are bright and keen and worrying.
When we were seventeen, she told me that she was gay. I was nonplussed; I kept expecting her to say ‘jokes’. I thought she hadn’t had boyfriends and never confessed to crushes because she had yet to meet a boy brave enough to take her on. I asked her if she was sure, because I hadn’t noticed any struggle inside her, any extra-special looks levelled at girls, or any of the things that lesbians were supposed to do. Amy Eleni was resolutely non-tactile – in our school, friendship was intricately tied in with touch; girls pinged each other’s bra straps and poked each other’s bellies and crowed ‘puppy fat!’, and flicked their skinnier friends in the taut bands between their ribs. That was affection. Amy Eleni dispensed winks and air-kisses. That was distance.
I pointed out Amy Eleni’s no-touching thing as one of the factors that made her not gay. She winced, laughed. ‘It just means that I don’t feel like running around grabbing people. It just means I’m sane,’ she said.
When I told Chabella, she left her wooden spoon in the stew she was stirring, closed her eyes tight and asked me in a near whisper, ‘Are you gay as well?’
‘I don’t think so, Chabella.’
‘All right, because don’t think I don’t know that you’ve been kissing as many boys as you can.’
I half-heartedly denied that, but Mami waved me off.
‘I am very sorry to hear that Amy Eleni is gay. Her life will be harder than yours, you know.’
Chabella gave me a topsy-turvy stone amulet on a piece of clean rope and told me to give it to Amy Eleni. I did, and Amy Eleni said, coldly, ‘What is this, something to make me straight?’
I told her no. That wasn’t Mami’s style.
‘You’re not going to ask me who my first crush was?’ Amy Eleni asked me. She was playing with Chabella’s amulet. I hastily said, ‘No, no.’ Amy Eleni looked at me then, with a soft, auroral reproach that made my heart flip over and made me ashamed of myself and my arrogance and made me want to promise her something that I couldn’t and made me think that I’d gone down in her estimation – all these things at once.
Mami had not always liked Amy Eleni; when she became the second girl after Dominique that I bothered to bring home for dinner, Mami was tense that entire first evening. The table was quiet whenever Amy Eleni lifted her fork to her mouth, and Chabella leant forward a little, as if she wanted to snatch the food out of Amy Eleni’s jaws, as if she didn’t think Amy Eleni should ever know what a good Cuban stew tasted like. Amy Eleni suspected as much, and to me she seemed more polite than I had ever seen her. Throughout the meal she said ‘Delicious’ in varying tones and volumes. With a grin that admitted that she would listen but not understand, Amy Eleni asked Papi about his work, and she told Tomás all that she could remember about the glory days of WWF wrestling. But when Amy Eleni went home, Chabella stopped me as I was going to bed and said sorrowfully, ‘You’ll learn that the white girl is never your friend. She works to a different system. She only pretends to understand.’
I said, ‘And what about Brigitte?’
Mami said, ‘Brigitte was my teacher. You know that.’
The café is full now; shadow-spotted faces encircle me. I close my eyes, and my Cuba comes, and the band is with me and then it lets me go and I am free.
One morning Mami came downstairs wrapped in nothing but a cloth of preternatural white, with strands of her hair swimming around her face, strands of her hair tied with little flags of white cloth. Strips of soft skin showed here and there, where the cloth gaped and made mouths around her shoulder blades, parted in protest at being trussed so tight around her breasts. Because she was pregnant with Tomás, Tomás became part of the outfit too: it was he that made the cloth coast out in front of her and around her; it was he that made the white flow. Papi got up and ran, actually ran, for a camera. Chabella watched him go, and as Papi passed her he caught her hand and twirled her like a giggling top.
Me, I looked up from my Saturday-morning cartoons and I gaped. I was eight; if I had been older I would have been able to admire Mami. I would have been able to apprehend Mami’s white sheet thing as a ‘look’, the way people assess high-fashion catwalks and shut down their instinct to free so they don’t feel any more how terrifying and elemental the shapes and colours are, the fact that people are walking around with cones on their heads and jewellery like chainmail, rouged violently right up to their foreheads, looking like the devil.
Anyway, my Mami looked wild, wilder than animals. She was not made to live in a house or even on the plains, but in the atmosphere. Chabella turned off the TV; I didn’t object.
‘I used to take classes in folk dance,’ she said, slipping a cassette into the sound system. She rewound it, took it out, fiddled with it, turned it over.
‘Your Abuelo Damason used to complain because they were expensive. But then the dance classes stopped with the Revolution because they were un-Cuban; they were too African. And it’s true; I suppose El Jefe was right to be nervous that something was going on with Santeria. Something is going on. Those West Africans brought another country in with them, a whole other country in their heads. After dance classes stopped, you could only get to see people dance out apataki if you knew the roots people, the ones who didn’t have any money, like
dockworkers. They wouldn’t teach me anything. Maybe they knew something about me that I didn’t. It is hard to learn how to be black when people don’t let you.’
Mami pressed ‘play’.
A drumbeat jumped up, collided with another one, and the two chased each other around and around – rhythm. Chabella laughed, gasped, held her belly against Tomás’s kick. ‘He likes that,’ she said, proud. Both of us were shaking our shoulders to the rhythm. Even Papi was stamping as he steadily caught Chabella on film – click, click, click. Inside my head a group of drummers played, swaying in unison with a flourish of hands. Their drums were in their laps, small but with tough heads. The drum talk was threaded through with fast, loud bembe singing, Yoruba patched up with Spanish. I couldn’t understand a word, but I understood that it was a story, and that the way Mami began to dance, she knew which story. Chabella was awkward at first, watching her step, trying to make a pattern, pulling faces as she touched the ground flat-footed and clumsy under the weight of Tomás. But then I saw the song come through her. It came because she didn’t give up. The drums came like
kata-kata-ka
kata-kata-ka
KA-TA
kata-kata-ka
kata-kata-ka
KA-TA
Mami became Yemaya Saramagua, a sure, slow swell in her arms and her hips like water after a long thirst, her arms calling down rain, her hands making secret signs, snatching hearts.
Kata-kata-ka
Kata-kata-ka
KA-TA
Water is an unhappy eye. Alone it lives, wishing it were blind. Look into water; it will look back at you, and it will tremble. Yemaya Saramagua is her father’s eye; she watches the earth for him. Her own eyes, though, are shy. Orisha of water, she could drown the world in a flood if she wanted to, but she has never been in love.
Kata-kata-ka
Oh, now she’s in love!
Kata-kata-ka
She’s in love with Ogun Arere; iron Aguanilli, handsome, strong, so cold that even in the midst of the flame he shrugs his shoulders. She shouldn’t love him, but she can’t help it. Come, come, Ogun Arere, come to your true love. But Ogun rejects her. Still she comes back. He would have to build a mighty dam to keep her love away.
The Opposite House Page 9