by B. Nyamnjoh
“The fault is with them, the Mimbo men,” Mrs Lovemore defended.“They should learn to treat us with the tender, loving care that made us marry them back in Muzunguland. Nicole has started an agency in Muzunguland with a branch in Sawang called MimZungu-Marriages, with the aim of counselling all those contemplating inter-racial and cross-cultural marriages. Her business isn’t so much to make money as to confront all illusions and delusions with the brutal truth before it is too late. Her motto is: ‘Be Picky: No Rush No Regrets’.”
Mrs Lovemore confessed that not all Muzungu women were ready to pretend the way she was doing with Dr Wiseman Lovemore that they were married. Her choice to stay on with him if that would please and help him pay fewer taxes to the state, despite being psychologically and emotionally divorced was not a common option in relationships between Muzungu women and Mimbo men.
“I’m married to him only on paper, and during this time, I have come to understand that husbands are actually wonderful, if they are not yours,” reiterated Mrs Lovemore.
“Really?” thought Lilly Loveless. She saw passion, intelligence and independence in Mrs Lovemore. Her words and eyes, her entire being, told the story of a woman who knew what she wanted. Wrong were those who drew on her appearance of marriage to conclude this or that about her reality. It crossed Lilly Loveless’ mind that this was not a part of the Lovemore story many outside knew. Not even Bobinga Iroko, ferret as he was, knew this, which was understandable, for she couldn’t imagine Dr Wiseman Lovemore sitting his best friend down to say, ‘Look here my friend, I have been jilted by my Muzunguland wife. My marriage is over.’ Pretence was the order of the day in Mimboland. That much Lilly Loveless had learnt during months of fieldwork.
“You probably have heard the expression ‘Mimboland na Mimboland’,” asked Mrs Lovemore, like a mind reader.
Lilly Loveless nodded, “Many times.”
“The saying sums up everything about this country.”
“I’m beginning to believe that, after several months of fieldwork.”
“Even so, everything Mimboland has come to occupy a special place in my heart.”
“I understand, no throwing the baby out with the bathwater, eh?” reassured Lilly Loveless.
“Mimboland being Mimboland, I did what I did to be where I am today. I don’t want to go into details, which are not very pleasant. I hope you understand.”
Lilly Loveless said she did. She wouldn’t insist on aspects of her story she felt too private to release. Mrs Lovemore had already told her much more than she had anticipated.
“Apart from doing what one must do to survive, you probably are wondering how I’ve survived otherwise.”
Lilly Loveless smiled. “Exactly. What a mind reader you are!”
“I can smell curiosity miles away,” Mrs Lovemore boasted.
“You don’t have to tell me, if you don’t want to,” Lilly Loveless pretended, dying to know.
Mrs Lovemore smiled knowingly.
“There was this friend of mine,” she began. “He is late now. A sensuous lover he was. Subtle and well informed in all he did. He had the most beautiful forearms I’ve ever seen. Delicate, textured. I could become mesmerized looking at them, exploring them day dreamingly with my fingers. Believe it or not, I was particularly attracted to his underarms.”
“Really? Underarm pleasures?”
“No kidding. My face would be drawn there. I’d ravenously bury my nose in his smells of the day and drink and slurp him in.”
Lilly Loveless was tongue tied.
“I told him others could go anywhere but that only I should go there. His company was invaluable, especially when I most needed someone to work stress out of my system.
“When you go into these things, you think the first affair will be the last, but you are wrong. At least, I was. I had travelled abroad for a conference. It was Saturday and we didn’t have a meeting until 10am. By 8am I had finished breakfast at the small family run hotel and, from a low padded bench-like chair against the window in the hotel lobby, was reading a novel I had found on the plane and following the news on the television. Before long, I felt someone sit down next to me. From the cologne, I could tell it was a man. I could feel him staring at me. When I looked up, he asked what I was reading.”
“How convenient.”
“I turned the book cover for him to see and noticed his long eyelashes. ‘A book about football,’ he exclaimed. ‘I used to play for the national team, and I’ve come here to prepare the Africa Cup for them.’ I could make out his pidgin and a glance at his chest and arms confirmed he was sporty. We continued chatting. I could tell what he was after. I took my thumb out of the book, looked him directly in the eyes and said, ‘I have to go back upstairs before my 10am meeting.’ I gave him my room number, said he was welcome to come up and stood up. He remained seated, reflected and said he would be up. Sure enough, I heard a tap on my door a couple of minutes after I closed it. After some mischievous smiling and mindless banter, we were in each other’s arms, then undressing each other … and more. It’s hard for someone to satisfy a woman the first time he is with her, but it seemed this man was used to satisfying women. He sensed every little unspoken desire.”
“Like a good shop attendant?”
“I guess you could say that,” replied Mrs Lovemore, detecting the mischievousness in the eyes of Lilly Loveless. “When I felt him wanting to come, I took him in my mouth then used my hands. I figured both of us were unprepared and without condoms. Afterwards we rested in each other’s arms. I asked if he was surprised I invited him up right away. He explained that he had hesitated because he didn’t want me to think he was a certain type of person. He said he had foreseen a longer scenario in which he would invite me to dinner first and he suggested we still go for dinner. I explained I already had plans but would be back by 10pm. He said he would tap on my door at 10.30pm.”
“How romantic to be intimate with a perfect stranger at a hotel where no one knows you!” screamed Lilly Loveless, her eyes lost in the distance as her mind fantasized.
“I said I had to dress for my meeting. He dressed and gave me a ‘see you later’ kiss. That evening was magnificent – long drawn out lovemaking during a Bollywood love story on TV – except for our communication problem. He didn’t understand when I asked him to come outside. Unprotected sex!”
“You seldom get it right in these things and situations, however well you rehearse, do you?” Lilly Loveless perfectly understood this all too common a problem.
“In the morning he woke me for my meetings. I suggested he stop by the pharmacy during the day and pick up some condoms if we were to see each other that evening. When I returned to the hotel in the evening, he greeted me in the hallway. I asked about the condoms. He shook his head, indicating he had not done anything about that. So I explained I had plans and went to my room and ordered dinner from room service.”
“It is a terrible experience to be forced to remember an encounter you wanted to forget immediately after, just because the absence of a condom and the force of the heat of the moment propel one to throw caution to the wind for one split second,” said Lilly Loveless.
Mrs Lovemore could sense a partner in crime here. “What was really peculiar is that when I returned to Puttkamerstown, after a couple of days I developed red spots on both hands. I was nervous and started reading and suspected I had got syphilis. The doctor at Mount Rebecca Hospital merely laughed, saying syphilis does not develop overnight. I realized later that the spots must have come just from stress. They never ever came back. I did have an HIV test two weeks later then another six months later. Both were negative. I was so relieved and vowed never again.”
“Never again to have an affair?”
“No, never again to allow such miscommunication and take such risks. I also resolved always to travel with condoms, just in case.
“I was getting ready for the airport, and a colleague at the conference was helping put my suitcases in the trunk o
f a taxi, when he tapped my shoulder and said someone was trying to get my attention. I turned to look. My former football player, his chest filling a third storey window, was waving energetically and wishing me safe travels. I waved back, with a big smile I imagine. I had finished the lost and found book I had been reading and ran it into the receptionist for him. To this day I cannot recall his name, just how he devoured my feet so-o-o-o sensuously.”
Mrs Lovemore finished her ginger drink in one last gulp. Lilly Loveless sipped hers and noted that Mrs Lovemore was a bit flushed. She moved eagerly into another story.
“I found this tall intriguing man one day looking too intensely at me. I didn’t even look away disapprovingly. I just ignored the advances from a distance, remaining indifferent. Until I couldn’t ignore his weight on top of me as he pressed my back up against the rocks of a beach just outside Sawang, on the way to Nyamandem. I felt we might slide down the cliff at any moment into the sea. I urged him into the car so I could get away from his increasingly aggressive advances. And there, he put his hand between my legs and implored. Had we not been drinking earlier, I could have convinced him to drop me off at the hotel and head home. As it was, I became one more addition to a long string of his identity beads, strung anxiously with women.”
“Good expression,” murmured Lilly Loveless, more to herself as she didn’t want to disturb the flow of the story.
“Later the next evening he explained that the place where we had danced wildly the night before had burnt down during the day. He claimed we were kindred spirits and perhaps, in a way, we were. Both endowed with a terrible and sometimes uncontrollable passion for life,” Mrs Lovemore paused, as if editing out bits of the story she didn’t want to share even with a safe and distant stranger.
“Once, we stopped at Kandastick – a centre for traditional medicine – to get something for a friend of his to stimulate hair growth. I realized later he must have picked up something else there too. I came back from the bathroom and sat at the bar with him to drink my beer that was waiting. As we got back into the car and continued to drive, things became surreal. I still see the round face of a woman selling fruit who looked at us with a big smile, knowing she was looking at two people in love. But you could also tell that the wildness of our togetherness put equal parts of fright in her eyes. Even after he left the hotel room that night, my mind soared. When he picked me up in the morning to take me to the bus station, it continued, from the drugs he put in the beer the night before.”
Lilly Loveless knew right away the dangers involved. “I hope you stopped seeing him thereafter.”
Mrs Lovemore shook her head to mean no.
“Why didn’t I stop seeing him? Indeed I was hooked, on something, and couldn’t draw myself away. I remember calling a friend in Muzunguland for help, after he satisfied himself one night and fell asleep. From the hotel window, I cried out across the ocean. She smiled in her friendly and knowing way and said she saw me going down a steep slope on a bobsled and that if I did not stop I would crash.”
“So why did you continue?”
“I can’t quite explain it.”
“So what saved you?”
“Reaching out to my best friend since high school, who explained that I should never drink with him. And indeed, as long as I respected that rule, I could stay in control. And I resisted him and was able to put an end to things, eventually though painfully.”
“Good.” Lilly Loveless was relieved. She had feared the worst.
“It also helped when he explained that I should see no one else while we were together. Trying to hold onto something by force makes it wither I think. And I felt his statement as an invasion into a space he knew not well. How could he act so wild and free yet make such a demand, and as if he were king? His hypocrisy and domineering ways succeeded in dampening things.”
“Thank God,” said Lilly Loveless, wondering if her kisser bumster of Sunsandland would have assumed similar possessiveness had she let him.
“I needed a little moisture around, you know, because our spirits were indeed too fiery together. I burned the open invitation with his photo he’d given me.” There was relief on Mrs Lovemore’s face, as if she was reliving the relief she felt then.
“I chose not to be around his unfocused energy that could easily become wild and aggressive,” she went on. “I learned to hold a mental mirror when I saw it coming, to send it right back to him, without absorbing any into me. He thinks of himself, of his satisfaction. I could no longer stand his unending raving, his instability, his sadness, his directionless searching.”
“In what way was he directionless?” Lilly Loveless didn’t understand.
“It’s like he couldn’t move beyond being a rebel, or move into ways of doing it differently. He attracts hungry women, like a lantern or street light attracts bugs. But then the night turns to day and the light goes off and the bugs have moved on. He can’t hold them. He knows of love in theory. What does he really know of love in action? He’s too full or empty with insatiable thirst. Is it because he can’t get beyond himself to really love another? Wouldn’t you say he and I are probably alike in our selfishness?”
“I wouldn’t say you are selfish,” Lilly Loveless was taken by surprise. “And I wouldn’t say he comes across as someone steeped in theory either. Was or is he that learned?”
“Oh, yes.”
“I see.” Lilly Loveless was not convinced, but then, she didn’t know the guy in person.
“He still is anxious when we meet, by accident that is. He cries out with his whole self to hear and know he is loved. I smile and let him know that he is, in a dispassionate way.”
Mrs Lovemore related how good she felt just to be free from this man. “You don’t free yourself from a Dr Wiseman Lovemore just to sacrifice your freedom to someone who wants to suffocate you the way a boa constrictor would.” For a long time, she kept to herself.
Meanwhile, so Mrs Lovemore believed and was keen to make believe, Dr Wiseman Lovemore was painting the town red, jumping from one relationship to another, mostly with students, sometimes with colleagues at work, and once in a while with a bar attendant where he went to drink with his male friends. Mrs Lovemore got to know of things from time to time through gossip or when her husband was too careless to cover his tracks, as was evident from a letter to him by a colleague of his at the university, a lady she knew well. The affair between Dr Wiseman Lovemore and her blossomed when Mrs Lovemore went abroad for a month long creative writing workshop. Again, like with the other letters, Mrs Lovemore preferred to read the letter out to Lilly Loveless:
‘My Dear Wiseman, ‘Good day. This is the first time I have found it necessary to express myself through this medium. I do hope you slept well. In fact I am really sorry for all that happened yester night.
‘Wiseman, what made me stay that long in your house, to the extent of disturbing you that much, was just because I got there and met your kid Pinklie miserable and crying. I was told that you’d left the house and wondered what could have gone wrong. With the awareness that no matter where you go or what happens (except out of town), you “do all to get back home early enough to cuddle your daughter before she goes to bed,” I got really troubled. You may please find out from your nanny how that child had to cry each time I made an attempt to leave.
‘Now, my dear, it was just that feeling of love and belonging that kept me there. All the while I was there (I don’t want to think of the number of hours), I had this premonition which turned out right! I only feel sorry for your toddler. ‘You had told me once: One of those students is very beautiful and it looks like Dr Nosewordy Boiboibambeh wants to go there. I understand how much running around you always do with students each time they show up and you come home late. I am not out to watch your activities, Wiseman. I have just seen your line of appreciation and your scale of preference. You of all people, even to the detriment of your own child when you know your wife isn’t there to look after her.
‘I have
myself to blame. I guess I have given too much, calling it ‘love.’ I hope during your stay in Muzunguland you heard something about ‘child abuse.’ That was the plight of a two-year-old abandoned by an apparently educated and loving father for 12 straight hours. You are simply shameless and this justifies the insults I showered on you. I felt like slapping the lust out of you, but I convinced myself I have no blood relationship with the kid I am protecting. First things should come first and your firsts are clear.
‘I realised I had been relegated to the rear of your thoughts and affection. My attempts to persuade you to drop your ‘student friend’ proved futile. But for the railing, we all would have gone down last night, maybe ended up in hospital. It would have served all of us just right. Madness in its real sense, eh?
‘I thought you would even show some appreciation to my neighbours by joining them in the rain when trying to free your car. My landlord’s brother and a friend were in it while you sought shelter with Marionette, telling her such a thing would not have been a big problem in Muzunguland where the roads are all paved. You are simply ridiculous! I hope you remember vividly how much attention you were giving her not caring how I or my folks felt. And what did you do when the car finally came out? You thanklessly went away. I had to follow you to the car and say: Goodnight Wiseman, I’m really sorry.
‘You have disgraced yourself! No thanks, no word, nothing! What impression have you given them of yourself? Educated indeed! I am scared of you! I guess I need to go to the hospital and have my breasts elongated to satisfy the animal instincts in you. That is probably what Marionette has over me. I thought you had had your fill of students but like my colleague Emmy puts it, ‘Male lecturers always tremble, panic and lick the feet of young girls with elongated tits even though they always go in for those whom the real Mboma from Sawang and Nyamandem feast on.’ You just lived up to expectation. Tell you what, these guys laughed at you, your girlfriend, the attention you gave her while they worked, and above all the stench of alcohol and filth oozing from both of you.