The First Wife

by Paulina Chiziane

  “You took advantage of the fact that I was drunk.”

  “You cried for me like a child. You called me, and Lu persuaded me to go to you.”

  “But …!”

  “You were sending out all the signals, I could see it in your eyes. You were the perfect example of a dried-up flower in the desert. The way you sat down, your smile, your gestures, all closely reflected the absence of affection in your life. It’s not fair what your husband is doing to you.”

  I look at the man with some irritation. Why is he telling me all this? What’s he trying to say? Lovers take advantage of the weakness of couples and destroy the homes of their mistresses. Is that the case? I don’t know why, but I sense some truth in his words.

  “How can you say you admire me?”

  “I know a lot of things about you. I admire your courage. You’re a rare example. I think all women should unite with each other against the tyranny of men. If I were a woman, I’d do that. And that’s where your strength lies. Instead of waging war, you’re here side by side with your rival. You’ve got spunk, woman.”

  “But it isn’t easy.”

  “You’re not replacing one tyranny with another. Don’t treat these women badly. Like you, they’re shattered and searching for life. They deserve your support and your forgiveness. What’s more, they’re younger and even more star-crossed than you. Teach them to love and to forgive.”

  “What are your feelings for Lu? Love?”

  “No, of course not. I just feel sympathy for her. She’s a good girl. I admire her.”

  “Are you married?”

  “I was married and I lost my wife because of my own madness. She left, in the arms of another man.”

  “So what part does Luísa play in your life?”

  He tells me. He met her on a cold, rainy night.

  “I was coming from a nightclub when I saw a woman in her nightdress in the cold night air,” he tells me. “I slowed down. I stopped and looked. The poor thing was barefoot and disheveled, and her belly was huge, that of a woman in an advanced stage of pregnancy. At first, I thought she was one of those many mentally ill people one sees wandering along the street. I opened the door of my car and invited her in. Then, I saw that her arms and face were covered in wounds, and that she was bleeding. I asked her why she was in such a state. She didn’t answer. She cried. It was obvious she had been beaten up and banished from home by her husband at that late hour and in that state. I asked her where she wanted to go. She said she had nowhere to go. I took her to a guesthouse and paid for a room where she spent the night. The next day, I went to see how she was. They told me she had gone to the maternity hospital. She gave birth prematurely, because of the beating she had suffered, the shock and the anguish. I helped with her child’s delivery, Rami. His name is Victor. Lu insisted on giving him my name as a way of thanking me. If I hadn’t helped her at that moment, the child would have been born out on that road, in the cold of the night.”

  “That can’t be. My Tony would never do something like that.”

  “Ask Lu. She’ll tell you how your troglodyte of a husband would get drunk, beat her up when she was pregnant, and shut her away in a room and deprive her of food. And she never did anything to upset things because she depended on him to eat, to exist.”

  “He never did that to me! I can’t believe it.”

  “You are the queen, the first wife! There are things a man does to his mistresses that he never does to his spouse. I’m sorry, Rami, but that husband of yours is nothing more than a son of a bitch … He’s got that grandiose title of chief of police, but he’s no more than a common criminal. A man who doesn’t respect his own child in its mother’s womb doesn’t deserve to be called anything else. You people should give him a good kick in the pants to feel better. Instead of correcting his behavior, you submit yourselves, take it all on the chin, and what’s more, fight each other to the death because of him.”

  “Why did you help Lu?”

  “Because of the strength of my own remorse. I was also a tyrant for most of my life. I beat my wife during the last month of her pregnancy. She was rushed to the maternity clinic and lost her son, the only son she would ever give me. We already had two little girls. I yearned for a boy and I lost him. I killed him. Because of my own stupidity. Dear God, how I regret it! Hardly had she come out of the hospital than she went back to her parents’ home and never came back to me, and quite rightly so. She married another man and is happy, to make my punishment even worse. I’m on my own, I haven’t settled down again, but one day I shall marry again. I love Lu so much, I’m so fond of her, but she prefers Tony, who has made her his third-class concubine.”

  “What? How can she dismiss a man like you? I would have expected everything but that.”

  “Help me. You can help me because she listens to you. Convince her to come to me. You’ll have one rival less, Rami. And she will have a man to herself, who will look after her.”

  “How does she justify rejecting you?”

  “She doesn’t want to give her own children a stepfather. She says that we southern men are very prejudiced, and that we consider a wife with previous children junk, a secondhand wife. I sense that she loves me, but she’s elusive, and prefers being a polygamist’s mistress to suffering the humiliation of being a secondhand wife.”

  “What do you feel for me?”

  “I don’t know what to say. All of a sudden, I saw you as an ally I could count on. But all I want is to marry Lu.”

  “If I had this girl Lu’s luck, I wouldn’t look twice, I’d say yes right away. If what you say is true, I’ll try to help you, both of you. Poor Lu. What happiness can she expect from Tony?”

  We said goodbye as friends. We exchanged kisses to seal our pact. I wake up to the truth. What happened wasn’t the result of alcohol. Nor was it an accident. It was fatal attraction, love at first sight. He looks at me steadily and I avert my gaze downward, concealing a feeling of madness that overwhelms me, and that I can’t even interpret.

  Lu escorts me home. I walk along with a fluid, watery meander, while the sun today is dressed all in fresh blue hues. My soul soars aloft, lifted by invisible wings. The morning breeze whispers love songs in my ears. I arrive home. As I go in, I smell the marvelous scent of all the flowers. The rosebushes in my front garden have put out new shoots. I feel like rolling around like a child, my lawn is a lustrous green. My children jump into my arms. They have been celebrating.

  “At last, Mother,” they shouted, “you’ve left your widow’s retreat, you’ve gone out into the street to live life, refresh yourself, fill your lungs with oxygen, reinvigorate yourself. You always lived indoors like a prisoner, Mother. Why?”

  I’m happy. I’m sad. They can’t even imagine that their mother, who left for a birthday party, isn’t the same person who came back from it. Ah, how this journey has transformed me!

  I begin to spend time at Lu’s house. We share secrets. Vito starts being the mysterious shadow that pursues my own. The moon that gleams through the crack in my window. An excellent polygamous lover, distributing stolen love between us, on a fair, egalitarian scale. I find the situation embarrassing, sometimes sickening. My conscience censures me, but my body is there at the agreed time, utterly dependent on those secret encounters like a heroin addict. Sometimes, I’m afflicted by the fear of being discovered. When Tony finds me, the cover of fidelity will have been gnawed away down to its last thread. Morality is a coin. On one side of it is sin, on the other virtue. Silence and secrets united to keep the world in harmony.

  11

  I need somewhere for my spirit to repose. I need a piece of homeland. But where is my homeland? Where my husband comes from? No, I’m not from there. He tells me I’m not from there, and if his family’s spirits don’t want me there, he can banish me. My umbilical cord was buried where I was born, but tradition has it that I’m not from there either. In my husband’s land, I’m a foreigner. In my parents’ land, I’m merely passing through. I�
��m from nowhere at all. I’m registered nowhere on the map of life, and I have no name. I use this name given me at my marriage, and that can be taken away from me at any time. I’ve borrowed it. I used my father’s name, but this was taken away. I had borrowed it. My soul is my dwelling. But where does my soul live? A woman alone is a speck of dust in space that the wind blows here and there as it busies itself with purifying the world. A shadow with no sun, or soil, or name.

  No, I’m nothing. I don’t exist anywhere.

  Do you think I should embrace polygamy and start shouting hallelujah and praise be the Lord just so I can hang on to a borrowed name? Do you think I should say yes to polygamy just so I can keep this tiny patch of ground under my feet? No, I refuse, my arms are tied too tightly to applaud, and my throat too dry to shout. No, I can’t. I don’t know. I just have no desire to do so.

  Polygamy is a fishing net that has been cast into the sea. In order to catch women of all types. I’ve already been caught. My rivals, my sisters, all of us have been caught. Should we sharpen our teeth, gnaw the net through and escape, or wait for the net to be hauled in, and catch the fisherman? What’s the best solution?

  Polygamy is a solitary howl under the full moon. Living through the early hours of the morning in a state of anxiety or forgetfulness. It is to open one’s breast with one’s hands and cut out one’s heart. To drain it until it becomes as solid and dry as a stone, so you can kill your love and draw out the pain when your husband sleeps with another woman, even while lying next to you. Polygamy is a whole procession of wives, each one bearing a little snack with which to feed the lord. While he tastes each dish, he says: This one’s very salty, this is watery, this one’s no good, this one’s sour, I don’t like this one, because there’s one woman who knows how to cook what he likes. It’s them calling you ugly when you’re beautiful, because there’s always one that’s more beautiful than you. It’s being beaten every day for what you’ve done badly, or what you haven’t done, or what you thought about doing, or what you’re going to think of doing one day.

  Polygamy is an army of children, lots of half brothers and sisters growing up happy, innocent, future reproducers of the ideals of polygamy. Although I don’t accept it, my reality is this. I’m already living in a state of polygamy.

  Polygamy is being a woman and suffering until the cycle of violence begins. Growing old and becoming a mother-in-law, mistreating your daughters-in-law, hiding the mistresses and bastard children of your polygamous sons in your own home, in order to avenge all the bad treatment you suffered at the hands of your own mother-in-law.

  To live in polygamy is to be bewitched by greedy women, who want your husband only for themselves. In the polygamous home, there’s a lot of rivalry, casting of spells, gossip, even poisoning. Living in polygamy involves using subterfuge, techniques of seduction, wizardry, intrigue, competing your whole life with other more beautiful women, wasting your whole life for a little shred of love.

  Polygamy has been the fate of so many women in this world since time immemorial. I know of one people where polygamy wasn’t a tradition: the Makua. These people abandoned their roots and adopted polygamy through the influence of religion. They became Islamic. The menfolk seized their chance and converted immediately. Because polygamy is power, because it’s good to be a patriarch and dominate others. I know one people where there was a tradition of polygamy: mine, in the south of the country. Under the influence of the pope, priests, and saints, it turned its back on polygamy. It became Christian. It vowed to abandon its barbaric custom of marrying many women to become monogamous and celibate. It had the power to do so and renounced it. Practice, however, demonstrated that you can’t become a great patriarch with only one wife. That’s why the men of this group now reclaim their lost status and want to return to their roots. They practice a type of illegal polygamy, an informal arrangement whereby they don’t follow the time-honored rules. One day, they say no to their customs, and yes to Christianity and the law. The next day, they say no where they had said yes before, and yes where they had previously said no. They contradict themselves, but it’s easy to understand why. Polygamy endows them with privileges. To be lord of one’s home is good: a woman to cook, another to wash your feet, one to go for a walk with, another to go to bed with. To keep reproducers for future workers, to tend pastures and cattle, the grain fields, everything, all with the minimum of effort, for the simple reason that one has been born a man.

  At political rallies, we applauded the speeches: Down with polygamy! Down with it! Down with the rites of initiation! Down with them! Down with the culture of backwardness! Down with it! Long live the revolution and the New Man! Viva! After the rally, the leader who made all the popular speeches to the shouts of “Viva” and “Down with” would go and have lunch and put his feet up at the home of a second wife.

  The whole problem stems from our ancestors’ weakness. They allowed the invaders to establish their own models of purity and sanctity. Where there was no polygamy, they introduced it. Where there was, they banned it. They created havoc, the hapless wretches!

  Men always repeat the same story: I’m a man, I’ll marry as many women as I want. And they force women to accept this whim. Okay then. When you think about it, whose fault is all this? Men defend the soil and crops. Women merely preserve them. In the past, men allowed themselves to be defeated by the invaders who imposed their cultures, religions, and systems however they wished. Now they want women to rectify man’s weakness. In the Christian doctrine, women are educated to respect one sole king, one god, one love, one family, why are we expected to accept what even they can’t deny? To deny something doesn’t involve screaming: it’s a question of looking at the law, changing it, challenging religion and introducing changes, saying no to the philosophy of others, reimposing order and reeducating society to return to the time that has passed. I’m talking too much. I’m trying to say that women are orphans. They have a father but don’t have a mother. They have a god but they don’t have a goddess. They’re alone in the world surrounded by fire. Ah, if only we had a goddess in heaven!

  If polygamy is nature and destiny, then I beg of you, God, order a new Moses to write another Bible, with an Adam and as many Eves as there are stars in the sky. Order some Eves to take turns in grinding the corn, scrubbing, cooking, and massaging and washing Adam’s feet. There’s no point in writing anything about love and sin. In this polygamous world, women are forbidden to be jealous. If jealousy is love, then they are prohibited from loving. Original sin, when they commit it, isn’t in order to feel any pleasure, but only for the purpose of reproduction. It can speak of punishment, pain, suffering, because women understand that type of language only too well. Don’t mention the apple, because it doesn’t exist here. Speak of the banana instead, which makes more sense for this story. Or of the cashew, if you can’t talk about bananas. We’ve got plenty of snakes, except that the ones in our tropical Eden don’t speak. And to you, God, we ask one thing: Free the goddess – if she exists – so that she can show her face even if it’s only for a second. She must be tired of preparing so much sacramental wine, so much communion bread up there in the heavenly kitchen ever since the world began. If there is no goddess – forgive me, God – but with so many women in the world, why don’t you keep a few dozen for yourself?

  What a pleasant system polygamy is! For a man to get married again, the previous spouse has to give her consent and help him choose. What a pity Tony acted on his own and informally, without following the accepted norms, because if he had, I would only have agreed to him marrying women who were uglier and more disaster-prone than myself. Polygamy isn’t about substituting any woman, it’s about having one more. It’s not a question of waiting for one to grow old and then exchanging her for another. It’s not about waiting for one to produce wealth to then pass it on to another. Polygamy doesn’t depend on wealth or poverty. It’s a system, a program. It’s one family with various wives and one man, so it’s a self-contained unit.
In Tony’s case, it’s various families scattered around with only one man. It’s not polygamy by any stretch of the imagination, but a grotesque imitation of a system that’s almost out of control. Polygamy is about sharing love equally, an equality that’s calculated with mathematical precision. It substitutes the male for an assistant in the event of incapacity: a blood brother, a friend, a brother in circumcision. Tony was certainly circumcised. Does he have a brother in circumcision? I don’t know, I’ve never heard him mention one.

  Life is an endless process of metamorphosis. Just take my case. My Christian home became polygamous. I was a faithful spouse who became an adulteress. Adulteress? No, I merely resorted to an informal brand of conjugal assistance, just as this household’s polygamy is informal.

  With regard to women, there are already five of us. There are sixteen children, including those that are still in their mothers’ wombs. Another four and there’ll be twenty. Despite my forty years, I’m going to have another child by way of revenge. The concubines can’t have more children than I, who am the first wife and lady. No concubine in this world is going to steal my status from me, I swear. I’m not entirely sure about this last affirmation. Tony breathes fertility and germinates like pumpkin seeds, multiplying by the dozen like a nest full of mice. If things go on as they are now, Tony will end up having fifty children, with so many beautiful young women being born every day.

  12

  I decide to prepare a little conspiracy against Tony, with my family’s support. I want him to know that where I come from, I’ve got someone who will defend me. I shall first speak to my father and ask him to summon my brothers and my fat aunts. My white-haired uncles must be present to give an aura of wisdom and gravitas to the meeting that will discuss my situation. My priest uncle will be there with his cassock, my doctor brother and my sister, who is a director, my godfather, who is a minister, will also have to be present. I want Tony to feel the weight of my status, at least once in his life. He’s going to know me, he must know the real me. He must be convinced that I’m not just any old woman. Together, we’ll pin him to the wall. He’ll be obliged to give up his concubines or lose me. And if he loses me, I guarantee this: He’ll never find anyone in the world better than me. I am his real wife, before God and men.