‘She has been busy with her work. She too doesn’t want to eat grass and sand.’
‘You think you are funny, abi? Anyway, Arinola told me that Rotimi has been admitted to hospital. How is her body now?’
‘She has been discharged.’
‘Hmmm, may God watch over her.’ She said the words with no passion, as if she were praying for someone she didn’t know or care about.
I stared at passers-by so I didn’t have to look at her. ‘Amen.’
She sniffed, then sighed. I knew I wouldn’t like whatever she was about to say. I was familiar with her sniff-and-sigh move, it was an age-old tactic, one she made to fortify herself when she was about to make demands that I would be reluctant to bend to.
‘Why are you looking away?’ she said. ‘Look at me, look at my face. The reason why I have said you should come to see me, even though you might have killed my son for all I know . . .’ she sniffed. ‘Still, if the world sees how your life is starting to look like a madman’s property, they will say that is Amope’s son whose life is coming apart like an old rag. So I cannot keep silent even if you will say my mouth stinks. I will say my piece. Can you hear me?’
‘I’m listening, Ma.’
‘You see, it seems that your wife is destined to have Abiku children. You this boy, don’t roll your eyes at me – you think I can’t see you? You think I have gone blind?’ She smacked the back of my hand. ‘If you live to be a thousand years, you will not be old enough to look at me like that. When all I am saying is for your own good! When everything I have done since you were born is for your own good!’
‘Moomi, what do you want from me now? Please, just finish saying what you are saying.’
‘There is this girl, you may even know her.’ She shook her head ‘No, she is not your mate at all, you can’t know her. She is just out of secondary school. She is a good girl, her eyes are not open yet, you know, like these girls of nowadays.’
‘And?’ I could feel a throbbing in my forehead, like the beginnings of a bad headache.
‘God does what pleases Him – who knows, maybe this girl will be able to bear children for you, children who will live. I’m not saying Yejide is a bad person, but you can’t fight destiny. And the way things have played out since you married that Yejide woman, I don’t think she is destined to have children in this world. She has tried hard-o, even a blind person can see how hard she has tried. But only a few people can win in a fight against their destiny. I have lived long enough to know that.’
‘You want me to marry this girl that you have found?’ I turned away from her. Across the street, a man was gluing election campaign posters to a lamp post.
‘Will you not have children in your life? What will you do if this Rotimi dies?’
‘Rotimi is going to live.’ I wasn’t trying to convince her. I believed it like it was a fact. The sun rose in the east, four plus four equalled eight, my Rotimi would live.
‘See, even if Rotimi lives, just one child? All your life, one single child?’
‘You want me to marry another wife, again?’ The man across the street stepped away from the lamp post, examined the green poster, nodded, then moved to the next lamp post. The poster he’d put up was green and white, and from where I sat, I could make out ‘Hope 93’.
‘It is not by force. If you don’t want to marry her, we can arrange something. Just get her pregnant.’ She slapped the back of one hand into the palm of the other hand. ‘Wisdom cannot become so scarce in this world to the point where we have to travel to heaven before we find some.’
‘Lai lai, Moomi. Never ever.’
‘Don’t be so quick to say no. I know you are thinking of what happened to Funmi, but . . .’
When she mentioned Funmi’s name, I stopped hearing her words. I could only see her mouth move.
She tapped my shoulder. ‘Akin? Can’t you hear me? Won’t you say anything?’
I cupped my forehead with one hand, tapped my feet in tune to the throbbing rhythm in my head. ‘Moomi, as if you have not destroyed my life enough.’
Her mouth dropped open. ‘Akinyele, what nonsense are you saying?’
‘Don’t involve yourself in this matter any more, ema da soro mi mo, do you hear me?’
‘Are you sick? What have I said that –?’
I stood up. ‘Don’t call me for this kind of discussion again. Never again. Lai lai.’
‘Me? Abi, you don’t know who you are talking to ni? Akin? Akinyele? Abi, you are walking away, Akin? Come back here. Akin, I’m still talking to you. Are you not the one I am calling? See this boy. Akinyele!’
I didn’t look back.
37
The few times my father told me about his love for my mother, he would end by saying, Yejide, oro ife bi adanwo ni. He used the saying as if it were the only part of all he had said that was worth remembering. I got the impression that he believed it was the lesson he had learned from my mother’s life and her death, the wisdom that he had to pass on to me: Yejide, love is like a test. I never understood exactly what the implication of the saying was supposed to be. I didn’t bother to ask him because I suspected that his explanation would involve his usual descriptions of how much my mother had suffered because of me. By the time I was a teenager, I was able to tune out his horrifying descriptions of how much she bled, but I never got over the way he looked at me when he talked about her death, as if he was evaluating me, trying to decide if I was worth what he had lost.
I would hear the saying many times from other people over the years and still never quite know what they meant each time. So love is like a test, but in what sense? To what end? Who was carrying out the test? But I think I did believe that love had immense power to unearth all that was good in us, refine us and reveal to us the better versions of ourselves. And though I knew Akin had played me for a fool, for a while I still believed that he loved me and that the only thing left for him to do was the right thing, the good thing. I thought it was a matter of time before he would look me in the eye and apologise.
So, I waited for him to come to me.
When Dotun had come into our bedroom just after Sesan was diagnosed with sickle-cell disease and told me that he was sorry Akin hadn’t found a solution to his impotence, it was obvious that Dotun thought I already knew that half of Akin’s trips to Lagos were made because he had to see the urologist at LUTH. The truth was that I knew nothing about the urologist, the drugs that had been prescribed, or the procedures Akin had undergone. But that night, because when life laughs at you, you laugh and pretend you are in on the joke, I nodded along with Dotun and tried to act as if I had been smart enough to figure things out by myself. But it was obvious before he left our room that Dotun too had realised that my marriage had been built around a lie.
In spite of it all, I was convinced that Akin loved me. And because love was supposed to be the test that brought out the best in us, I told myself that my husband would soon come to me and explain himself. I channelled my energy into keeping my son alive, but all the while I was waiting for Akin to come to me.
After he caught me in bed with his brother, I was sure Akin would confront me, apologise, share the struggles he’d managed to keep hidden from me and beg me to stay with him. It was hard to accept that he intended to keep up his deceit for the rest of our lives. Even after I moved out of our bedroom and stopped talking to him, I was sure that I knew who he really was and I believed that man was still there beneath all the deception and pretence. The man I thought I knew was not the kind of person who would have let me go to my grave while still deceiving me.
At some point during the weeks before Rotimi’s first sickle-cell crisis, I came to accept that Akin would have spent the rest of our lives lying to me if he had found a way to get away with it. As I drove away from the Wesley Guild Hospital after Rotimi was admitted there for the first time, I wondered how Akin could have asked me to stay with her in the ward. Did he not see that I was tired of all those doctors offering bad news
, good news, grim silences, reassurances, and a hand on the shoulder to deliver more good news, bad news? Through Olamide and Sesan to Rotimi, I had been dangled from the edge of a precipice and I was now so weary that I wanted to be dropped.
By the time she was discharged and they came home together, I looked at Akin differently. I did not see him as someone who had changed, but as a man I had never known. I doubted the love I had once been so sure of and concluded that he had married me because he thought I was gullible.
A week before the presidential elections, I decided it was time to confront him. He was with Rotimi in the sitting room, watching the two candidates debate with each other on television. I saw no reason to wait until the end of the debate before starting the conversation; after all, I had spent almost three years waiting for him to come to me. On some level, I felt I had to strike when he did not expect it and give him no room to prevaricate. I sat in an armchair directly opposite him because it was a vantage point. I wanted to watch the emotions play out on his face and judge his reactions to my ambush.
‘So, Akin, is it true that you can’t . . . that you can’t . . . Are you impotent?’
I wish I could say he respected me enough to answer my question directly when I finally confronted him. He smiled and leaned back in his chair until he was staring at the ceiling. He did not say anything for a long time.
I waited, watching as Rotimi climbed into his lap. On the television, the moderator was talking about the impact of the IMF’s structural adjustment policy on Nigerian society.
‘When did Dotun tell you?’ Akin finally asked, pulling Rotimi closer to himself.
‘Just before he told me that you asked him to seduce me.’
There was no steam in our words as we spoke – no passion, no heat. We could have been discussing the rain that had fallen all morning. As Akin crossed and uncrossed his legs, I thought about the road we had walked until we arrived at the point where we sat opposite each other in our sitting room and discussed his impotence for the first time without displaying much emotion.
I thought about Funmi. I remembered how Akin had been so sure I wasn’t pregnant, even before the doctors told me I had pseudocyesis.
Akin pinched his nose. ‘What are you going to do now?’
I almost smiled. Not much had changed about him. It was almost comforting to see that he was still avoiding the truth by responding to queries with his own questions.
‘You have not answered my question,’ I said. ‘Akin, is it true?’
He covered his face with both hands as though he could not bear my gaze. I was not moved because I was consumed with a desire to hear him confess.
‘Akinyele, why are you covering your face? Look at me and answer my question.’
I felt no pity for him as he slid his hands from his face and wrapped them around his neck as though he wanted to strangle himself. How could I? After all, he had looked me in the eye during the first year of our marriage when he said each penis was different, told me that some got hard, that others never did. He had said it casually, slipped it into the conversation so it sounded like one of the things men told their virginal wives about sex. I was amazed by the way he did not even need to tell lies in order to deceive me.
‘Yejide, why do you want me to tell you what you already know?’
What did I know? I knew that I was once as invested in his lies as he was, probably more than he was – I imagine he at least admitted the truth to himself. I could not do that until Dotun had spoken the words. Akin was supposed to be the love of my life. Before I had children, he was my salvation from being alone in the world; I could not allow him to be flawed. So I bit my tongue when customers talked about sex and I let him hold my hand when he told the doctor our sex life was absolutely normal. I told myself I was respecting my husband. I convinced myself that my silence meant I was a good wife. But the biggest lies are often the ones we tell ourselves. I bit my tongue because I did not want to ask questions. I did not ask questions because I did not want to know the answers. It was convenient to believe my husband was trustworthy; sometimes faith is easier than doubt.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, patting Rotimi’s head.
I knew then that he would not answer my question directly, not even if I held a machete to his throat.
‘Did you fool Funmi too?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘She was not like you.’
I sighed. ‘You mean she was not foolish?’
‘I only mean she was not a virgin.’
I had nothing left to say to him, so I stood up and left the room. And he did not even bother to ask me to keep his secret – he already knew I would.
The pre-election excitement that had gripped the country caught up with me in spite of myself. In the days that led up to the elections, I found myself humming along to campaign jingles. Iya Bolu had convinced me to register to vote. And I felt an unfamiliar sense of power as the elections approached.
Iya Bolu was at our house by 7 a.m. on the Saturday that we went to the polls. She could hardly sit still and kept asking me to hurry up so we would arrive at the polling station before 8. Akin had already left for Roundabout to vote: he had registered there since it was close to his office. Around 8.30, I tied Rotimi to my back and we set out.
By the time Iya Bolu and I got to the polling station, hundreds of people were already there. After we cast our votes, we sat in the shade of a mango tree and discussed her niece’s upcoming wedding while we waited for the station’s results to be announced. The ceremony was two weeks away, but we planned to leave for Bauchi some days before the wedding was to be held. Iya Bolu wanted to be on the ground to assist her brother’s family with preparations for the event.
When the station’s results were announced by an electoral official, whose spectacles covered half of his face, there was a round of applause and a number of people shouted ‘Congratulations, Nigeria’. I was caught up in the momentary euphoria and shook hands with strangers as though we had survived a long and arduous journey together.
The day I left for Bauchi, I dressed Rotimi up in a sleeveless purple dress while Akin fiddled with the car downstairs. He was on annual leave and had decided to go to Lagos for a couple of days. I did not ask him why he wanted to be in Lagos – I did not want to know. Rotimi’s dress was something Akin had bought because he thought I would be throwing her a party on her birthday. Of course there was no party, but Rotimi liked the dress and every time she wore it she would slide her palms over the lacy bodice and smile.
It took longer than usual to dress her up that morning; she was cranky because I woke her up early so we could leave the house before 6 a.m. After I convinced her to put on her shoes, I sat her on the dressing table and applied compact powder to my face. When I was done, I applied a light coating of talcum powder to her forehead, and she held her face perfectly still as I rubbed it over her skin. Then I sat on a stool and coated my lips with pink lipstick. While I peered into the mirror to make sure I did not have lipstick stains on my teeth, Rotimi leaned forward and pressed a thumb against my upper lip. I watched as she took her hand towards her mouth, expecting her to suck on the thumb, but instead she traced her lower lip, imitating the way I’d worked the lipstick.
‘You are a clever one, aren’t you?’ I said.
She touched my mouth to get more lipstick, her finger soft against my lower lip, its pressure feather-light. When she was done smearing her thumb against her lips, I placed her on my knee so she could look in the mirror, but she barely glanced at it. She twisted until she was facing me, then she tilted her head this way and that beneath my gaze, as though I was the only mirror that mattered to her.
‘You are the fairest of them all,’ I said to the one child whom I had never told stories. My stories and songs felt useless in the face of the disease she was battling, so I never bothered with them. I did not want to tell her tales, I wanted to heal her, save her. And as she pressed her lips together the way I’d done moments before, I wanted to clu
tch her to myself until she somehow went back into my womb, from where she could re-emerge with a new genotype, forever free from the constant threat of pain and disease.
It wasn’t until Rotimi squealed that I realised I was gripping her shoulders and panting. I let go. This was why I did not allow myself to be alone with her too often – because of the thoughts that pushed me over the precipice into a bottomless pit where I flailed as I fell. I fought the sudden urge to lay my head on the dressing table and weep. I took a deep breath and arranged the gold necklace around my daughter’s neck.
I held Rotimi on my knees as we drove to the estate where we used to live to pick up Iya Bolu. She was waiting on the porch with her travelling bag.
‘Can you see your former house?’ she said as she settled in the car. ‘The new family that moved in has destroyed it. Can you see the way the paint is coming off? They haven’t even bothered to repaint it. And the man, he is a randy dog, I tell you.’
Akin drove to Omi Asoro to pick up Linda, his secretary. She was also travelling to Lagos that morning and Akin had offered to give her a ride. When we arrived at Linda’s house, she poked her head through a window and said she would be out within five minutes. While we waited, Akin fiddled with the car’s radio, trying to get a station where the news was on. It was nine days after the elections and no winner had been announced yet.
‘You are looking for updates on this election matter?’ Iya Bolu said to Akin. ‘Like play, like play, it’s almost two weeks now. It’s another Monday already. How can the court give an order to stop the release of the results? Why?’
‘Don’t mind them. The court has no business with this issue and that judge knew that, only the presidential election tribunal has the jurisdiction.’
‘Abi, these soldiers don’t want to leave power, ni?’
‘But I know the military will still hand over,’ Akin said. ‘So much money has been spent on this transition. Are we going to throw it all down the drain?’
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