The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives

by Lola Shoneyin

  Woken by Femi’s screaming, Bolanle’s thoughts immediately went to Segi. She sat up and felt the stinging from the nail marks on her shoulders. Her head ached. There was a large tie-dye bloodstain on her pillow and her shoulders were dotted with blood flakes. She sat in front of her dressing-table mirror and examined the back of her head with a compact. If I am not careful, I will die in this house, she thought. She cupped the clump of dried blood that clung to her hair and feathered it into the bin. Then she concealed the gash with a scarf and decided to wait for Baba Segi’s return before leaving her bedroom.

  The pickup ground the gravel and came to a halt at seven twenty-five. Iya Femi and the children rushed to the sliding door. Baba Segi’s movements were slow and uncoordinated as he struggled to climb out of the pickup, followed by Iya Tope, whose face was drained of all emotion. They stumbled through the door to find Iya Segi motionless in her armchair, staring but not seeing. Iya Tope started pulling off her vomit-stained buba before she got to the corridor. Her lips were turned down. She looked as if she’d shed her skin too if she could. Baba Segi flopped onto his armchair like he always did. He let his eyes roll back, and then his head. He stretched out his legs before him and loosened his shoes from his feet. “She is not dead. The doctors say it is food poisoning. She confessed that she drank palm wine yesterday evening. Ah, these young girls!” He sighed. “As for me,” he said, stretching, “I am exhausted!” His head lolled onto the headrest and he immediately began to snore like a wild hog.

  Iya Segi heard the snoring, yet she turned to him with eyes full of relief. All night, she’d sat there wondering if her daughter might go from the hospital to the mortuary. As tradition dictated, she would never have been able to see her daughter’s face again, never touch her fingers, never admire her hair. She was thankful for the news Baba Segi brought so she stood up and dragged herself to her bedroom.

  For the rest of the week, there was no laughter in the Alao household. It was as if the grieving had been prescheduled and therefore impossible to cancel. The older children went to the back of the house and sobbed inconsolably while the younger children moped and sat in the corridor, refusing to wear a thread of clothing. They missed their sister and the fact that she was lying on a hospital bed where they couldn’t see her made it unbearable. They missed Segi’s laughter, her comforting words, the last bites of meat she gave them.

  It was hardest for Akin. They’d slept in the same bedroom for nearly ten years and as he slunk around the house, Segi’s absence swelled by the minute. He imagined that his siblings would soon begin to turn to him and the thought frightened him. He wasn’t sure he could do the things his sister did so masterfully, so he carried his loneliness around with him with no one to turn to for comfort. Iya Tope was trying to run the household, his mother was still not herself and Iya Femi’s bosom welcomed only her own children’s heads. A number of times, Akin knocked quietly on Bolanle’s door but ran away before she opened it.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  NOTE

  GOD HAS TURNED HIS FACE from this house.

  Last night Baba Segi brought news that threw the household into anguish. He told us that Segi’s hair was falling out and that if she as much as brushed her finger against her ear, her hair dropped onto the pillow like the feathers from a fowl steeped in boiling water.

  To the uninformed ear, this might have sounded trivial, but in our house, it fermented the stomach contents of all who heard it. Iya Tope cried out first because she spent much of her time nurturing Segi’s hair. She wailed that she had plaited it since she joined this household. She doesn’t have much to do with her life, you see.

  I went to church after I heard but I was not uplifted. The candlelit altar and the candle-lighting pastor looked ridiculous. The prophet stared at my breasts for so long that I had to tell him not to defile me. It wasn’t until I got home that I realized how much his evil spirit had followed me.

  I sent Taju to Tunde’s office this morning but instead of bringing money to raise my spirits, he returned with a photocopied note:

  Following my mum’s passing, I have decided to accept the position of U.S. rep.

  A big thank-you to those of you who made it to my mum’s funeral at such short notice. For those of you that I didn’t get the chance to say good-bye to, forgive me.

  My e-mail address remains the same so I look forward to hearing from you soon.

  Ever yours,

  Tunde Adeigbe

  I ask you: what is e-mail? And what is a U.S. rep? Ha! God! Is this your face? I could not stop the tears of anger that wet my face. I cried. So there is no Grandma to parade my sons in front of? Ha! Coward! She saw my triumph coming and decided to deny my victory! She begged the devil to spare her my revenge, my gloating, my head-splitting laughter! And my children. My sons! They might as well have been born to Baba Segi. All these years, wasted!

  Ha! Tunde! So you have abandoned me without knowing your sons! Will I ever see you again? Why didn’t you tell me you were going? Is that how small I was in your eyes? Did my spirit not speak to your conscience? How could I have been so stupid?

  I am alone in this world and it is now that I know that I am an orphan. I have no one. Who will I speak to? Who will I walk with? Iya Tope does not want to know me and Iya Segi is mad with grief. Every time I see her, I remember the chicken spitting in the frying pan.

  God, cover me with your spirit. Cover me so my enemies will not laugh at my shame. Send your angels to shield me with their wings. Avenge those who want to persecute your daughter. Rain brimstone and fire on their heads! Do not let the devil smite me in my time of shame!

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  RESULTS

  DR. DIBIA WAS SHORTER than most men but he made up for it with a big book. He had a short Afro and his thick lenses were framed with heavy rectangular rims. When I walked into his office, he asked me to sit down and made me wait for him to finish the page he was reading. “Pardon me,” he said as he inserted a tattered leather bookmark between its pages. Only then did he pick up my file to mouth every word in it.

  “So have you brought the test results?” He stretched out his hand without looking up at me and eagerly tore at the envelope with a steel letter opener.

  While he read, I glanced at his desk. All his stationery was coordinated; the letter opener, the stapler and the staple remover were made from leather and shiny copper. When he’d finished, he summoned a nurse and instructed her to prepare me. I wondered if there was some reason why he avoided my eyes and concluded that he must be bashful. He muttered to himself as I lay waiting behind the white curtain. The nurse must have sensed my uneasiness because she reassured me that I was in good hands. “Dr. Dibia is one of the best in the country,” she said.

  Within a few moments, Dr. Dibia swooped the curtain aside and came at me with latex talons. He mumbled to himself as he prodded and pushed my belly. And when he moved between my legs to examine me internally, he gazed up at the ceiling and cocked his head sideways. It was only when he pressed my stomach down and swiveled his fingers around inside me that he looked inquiringly at my face for wincing and grimacing.

  “Please relax,” he said. “Make your knees flop sideways.” Awkward though the experience was, he was gentle and there was no serious discomfort. When he was satisfied, he asked me to put on my clothes and returned to his table.

  “From my examinations, the results of the scan and the blood tests, I cannot see any immediate reasons why you shouldn’t be able to conceive. You have had one termination?” He lowered his frames and looked me in the eye for the first time. So he wasn’t shy then.

  I nodded. As if his colleague hadn’t already grilled me on the when, where and who, he queried me again. This time I was alone so it was easier. “Nineteen ninety-two. In a small shed. A nurse, I think.”

  “A nurse?” He hit the table with his fist, making everything jump. “Did you hear that, Sister?”

  “Yes, Doctor.” Sister’s voice came from behind the white
curtain, where she was clearing the examination table in preparation for the next patient.

  He looked back to me. “Well, all I can tell you is that you are a very lucky woman. An unqualified person has performed a major procedure on you and you have, seemingly, escaped unscathed.” He looked at me for a few seconds and then softened his gaze abruptly. “Well, now that you are older and no doubt wiser, I hope you won’t subject yourself to such butchery again.” It sounded more like an order than candid advice.

  I was just about to tell him I was in his office because I want to have a baby, not to dispose of one, when the nurse summoned him. “Doctor, I think you should see this.”

  The doctor excused himself and returned within seconds. “Mrs. Alao, there are some bloodstains on the examination table. Are you by any chance bleeding?” He fluttered his fingers in the direction of my face to indicate that he wasn’t referring to my lower region.

  I was puzzled for a moment but then I reached up and touched the back of my head. It was wet. “I slipped and hit my head on the floor. Hard.” It came out like a question. Even I wouldn’t have believed me.

  The doctor sprang up from his seat and stood over me. “Do you mind if I take a look?”

  I untied the scarf; the smell of stale blood swirled around my face and filled my nostrils.

  “That’s quite a gash you have there. Has it been seen to?”

  “No, it’s just a small—”

  “Believe me, it’s not a small anything.” He returned to his seat. “Nurse will escort you to the A & E department from here. It will need a proper dressing.” There was a glimmer of sympathy in his eyes when he spoke but it disappeared quickly. “Now, back to the matter at hand: I would like your husband to come in for some preliminary tests. Do you think he can make it next Monday?”

  “I’ll tell him,” I said.

  “Good.” Dr. Dibia opened his appointment book and drew zigzags down the page with his finger. “Ten thirty A.M.?”

  “That should be fine.”

  “It is important that he comes. I am sure that he’ll understand that it takes two to make a baby.”

  “He has seven children already.” I could be saucy too.

  “Nevertheless!” He handed me an appointment card. “Right, straight to the A & E with you, Mrs. Alao.” He said it like he didn’t trust me, like he imagined I would run off with a bloodied head scarf.

  The nurse appeared before he’d finished talking and flashed him a reassuring glance.

  The female doctor who treated me was sympathetic. She said the wound was infected and slowly pressed an anti-tetanus injection into my right buttock. Then she carefully shaved the hair around the wound, all the time telling me that she didn’t believe in taking off more hair than was necessary. Given that I was left with only three-quarters of what was on my head when I first sat before her, I wondered what styles she imagined I might comb it into.

  Luckily, the wound didn’t require round-the-head bandaging. She dressed it and held the gauze fast with strips of surgical tape. Dr. Dibia’s nurse returned with a clean scarf. “Anything donated to the charity box has been laundered first,” she said as she handed it to me.

  I left the hospital grounds wondering if modern medicine was making a mockery of my childlessness. I didn’t feel the sense of relief I should have. If there was nothing wrong with me, why was my belly not rounded and taut? Dr. Dibia must have missed something! The doctor at the ultrasound center must have missed something!

  I got to the gate of my parents’ compound to find a heavy-duty padlock hanging from it. There were six new doorbells on the pillar, each one labeled. Another of the landlady’s modern innovations, I thought, wondering how my mother would cope with having to walk out to open the gate every time their bell rang? I pressed the bell that had AKANBI printed on it.

  My father soon appeared dangling a bunch of keys from his forefinger. “Bolanle, it is only eyes that have special powers that see you these days.” His face was smeared with that mellow smile of his and I wondered if he was truly glad to see me or if his cheeriness was gin induced. He normally had at least four shots warming his belly by midmorning.

  “I was here just a few days ago, Baba,” I replied, feigning indignation at his accusation.

  “And before then?” He mockingly held his head back to take a good look at me. “I am not as old as I look, you know.” He liked these games. When we were children, he liked to amuse himself by making us articulate our hatred for things using new words. “I loathe bread and despise onions,” I would say. Lara would follow with “I just don’t like Mama at all,” which made my father fall over laughing. The visitor game was his favorite by far. If he ever missed a visitor while he was out, he would ask us to describe them. Of course, we would rattle on about the obvious features but Baba would ask us if the visitor’s left arm was shorter than the other, or if he had a mole buried in his mustache. Our stammering greatly tickled him. He would tell us to keep our eyes peeled the next time and send us off to buy lollipops. He was the only man who could have coped with Mama; any other would have strangled her or deserted her. He’d long ago come to terms with his emasculation and it seemed he was more at ease without responsibility.

  “You are right, Father. I have not been the most dutiful daughter but my life has been filled with uncertainties lately.”

  “Yes, I heard. Your mother was much distressed by it. Such ruthlessness! Such callousness! Wives without the worthiness of wifeliness!” It was never enough to just state something simply. For him, the more syllables the better. And since his wife didn’t seem to appreciate his soliloquies, he spent his big words on his children. He used them during assembly at the school where he’d taught history for twenty-seven years and the look of bewilderment on his colleagues’ faces gave him immeasurable pleasure. It wasn’t that he was much of an intellectual; he just had the peculiar hobby of memorizing words in the Roget’s Thesaurus he’d thumbed three times over.

  I watched Baba battle with the padlock as he spoke. I was glad Mama hadn’t told him I was raped; she wouldn’t have wanted me enjoying that much sympathy. Besides, she would have worried about appearing inadequate, or worse, sloppy. Baba put his arm around me as soon as I stepped into the compound so I wouldn’t squat to greet him. He didn’t like the business of kneeling and prostrating; he said it was ungainly and superficial. He drew me close and whispered into my ear, “Lara is home and a battle is raging. It’s a good thing that you’ve come because I was beginning to think I should escape.”

  We walked indoors, arms linked, and I thought how unfamiliar it felt to be so close to him. The smell of him didn’t conjure any fond memories. Gin had stolen Baba from our childhood and when there wasn’t any, he did what he did best: he escaped.

  I braced myself for Lara’s resentment. Our chance meetings were never pleasant; she tried hard to offend me but I always restrained myself. I felt sorry for Lara. There was a part of me that believed I’d failed her. I should have stuck up for her when Mama ripped her already-fragile confidence to pieces. Mama was at it again now but her voice didn’t have the old potency; it wavered, dipping into deep somberness and then breaking into a high-pitched urgency. Her breathing was uncoordinated and got in the way of the things she wanted to say.

  Lara kissed her teeth when she saw me. “So you decided to summon your favorite and gang up on me.”

  “Actually, they had no idea I was coming. I just dropped in to visit my family and see how my mother was faring. Believe it or not, I didn’t know she’d had a stroke until last week because no one bothered to tell me.” I looked Lara in the eye and as my gaze traveled downward, I saw an unusually rotund midsection. “Are you—”

  “Yes, she is! You see what woe has befallen me? She has allowed that common musician to climb on top of her and pump her full of child.”

  “Is it the fact that he is a musician that bothers you, Mama, or the fact that I am pregnant and not pursuing your dreams? Woe indeed! You’d think I had not
hing better to do.”

  I looked from one woman to the other. Lara had inherited Mama’s venom: by the time she was seventeen, she was taking her on in full-blown shouting matches while I hid in the next room, incapable of calming either temper. They were so alike, determined to get what they wanted at any cost, and stubborn as hell.

  “Lara, that’s no way to talk to your mother.” Baba knew he had to say something to her before her brazenness was ascribed to our gene pool.

  “What mother? She has never been a mother to me! You’d think I was after her husband, the way she’s victimized me. Do this! Study this! Go to university! Only marry a man who does this! When will you stop trying to make me live the life you failed to live? Can’t you just be happy with yours?”

  “I may think about stopping after I have slapped that ungrateful mouth of yours, you imbecile!”

  “Slap it now, Mama.” Lara shifted to the edge of her chair and turned her cheek toward her mother. “Slap it as you have always slapped it. Slap it to your heart’s content! Go on. Slap it! Jump at it! What difference has it ever made?”

  “Iya Bolanle, there will be no need for that!” If there was one thing Baba couldn’t bear, it was what he called gratuitous brutality. Every time Mama beat us when we were younger, Lara and I prayed for him to come to our rescue and ward off Mama’s palm, but he would look away, unable to watch. We fantasized about him standing up to her and warning her never to inflict pain on his children, but it never happened that way. Baba would issue a quiet cautionary word and vanish, leaving his words by the wayside.