“Tony,” Saly defends herself, “I serve gizzards. I go to the market and buy a kilo, and prepare peanut curry using chicken gizzards at least once a week. We all eat it, and in fact there’s some left over. What are you saying, Tony? Don’t we have a little dish of gizzards when we eat out at a restaurant?”
“That’s where the big problem lies,” an old man says. “You talk of gizzards. I’m talking about one gizzard. You need to understand the difference between gizzards and gizzard.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Gizzards from a chicken farm are one thing. The gizzard from that chicken that’s been lovingly plucked and dotingly roasted for your husband is something else. That’s the gizzard we’re talking about. Were you never educated by your mothers? Madam,” the old man addressed my mother, “you haven’t educated your daughter. As the first wife, she is the one largely responsible for this anarchy. You’ve got to show her again that the gizzard is sacrosanct. The gizzard and not gizzards.”
My mother cries silently. Her weeping is a song about absence, pain, yearning. About the sister who was killed out on the remote savannah by a leopard because of a chicken gizzard. About the humiliation we have both suffered, two different generations following the same path. I am disgusted. I feel like opening my mouth and letting the whole cat out of the bag, setting everything ablaze and avenging the honor of my mother, who has been so outrageously insulted without any consideration for her age. Suddenly, I glimpse the message of peace in my mother’s eyes. She doesn’t want me to say out loud what has been kept silent.
“These slaughterhouses are an attack on our customs,” another old woman screeches. “Civilization is against our culture. Selling gizzards by the kilo, and to anyone, who ever heard of such a thing? So children eat them, women eat them, that’s why there’s no longer any hierarchy or respect within families, because we’re all eating the same thing.”
We wives look at each other. These people brought us here to humiliate us. To make us bow our heads. But to look down at the ground is to look at the cultivated soil where the cornstalks carry the ears of corn on their backs like infant children. It’s to look at the green rice plantation lighting up the soil with its golden carpets of grain. The ground contains the fields of peanut, of lilies, thistles, violets. The ground contains the ocean, the rivers, and the fields of sugarcane. Pigeons alight upon the ground to conduct their mating ritual. Men walk with their heads raised to the sky, but the earth is the cradle and the sky merely the Milky Way, in eternal flux.
We keep our mouths and our souls closed. Do we by any chance have a right to speak? And no matter how much right we might have, what difference would it make? A woman’s voice is good for lulling children to sleep as night falls. A woman’s word isn’t given any credit. Here in the south, young men who have gone through their initiation learn one lesson: If you confide in a woman, you sell your soul. A woman has a long tongue, a serpent’s tongue. A woman should listen, comply, obey.
Mauá can’t stop herself, she opens her mouth, protests, seizes the word without having been given permission, and says everything that’s on her mind. She comes from a society where women speak in front of men and are heeded. Where women are loved, respected, and where they are queens.
“Have you called us together here just to talk about chicken gizzards? What crime have we committed? As a united family, all we wanted was to offer our man an orgy of love. These are purely matters for the bedroom, and of no interest to the whole family. If we squabbled with each other, we would be upbraided for being jealous. Now that we have come together, why are you criticizing us?”
Mauá’s protest brings the problem back out into the open. Tony has to recount the whole story – very much in his style, and we are mortified, crushed by the shame of it all. He says we insulted him, stark naked as we were. He says we were responsible for negative forces being created against him. Ah, Tony, my love, I’ve lost you. Now you’re my firebrand of a husband, my gorilla, my orangutan husband, who declares his love by hurling rocks and uttering cusswords. The voice you’re cradling my soul with is a whiplash of raucous notes dressed up as a musical score. My feelings die away. I have allowed myself to be shut away because of love inside this iron cage. Eagles hovering above, lend me your wings so that I can fly away and seek a refuge in the horizon’s highest branches. The council of the elders listens to the story of the aborted orgy, it quivers with astonishment and shrieks its disapproval. Ooh! Ah! You are the most shameful women in our land! The very thought of it! They howl as if one, like a chorus of famished wolves baying at the full moon.
“I’m an old man! I’m the most polygamous of all polygamists! I’ve never had an experience like that. I’ve never seen such wickedness before. Son, you’re right, you’re absolutely right!”
“But … have you had any bad luck?” Mauá’s uncle asks.
“No, we haven’t noted anything yet,” Tony’s aunt replies, “but it’s bound to happen, one of these days.”
Tony’s nervousness is miraculously quelled. For everyone supports his claims and expresses their future condolences for the succession of misfortunes that is still to befall him. He throws us a mocking but triumphant glance while he wipes the sweat from his face. He feels vindicated. Loved. Ah, Beelzebub! Lend me your fork and your dog’s face to give this crowd a fright, this throng spewing out its superstitions and uttering its profanities!
The women join the chorus of recriminations, of advice, and of all those things they think they know about. And without a second thought, they start talking about a life they hardly know. They grind us firmly into the soil, like ripe papayas under their feet. They tell us about love as if they’d ever received any in life. They abandon the enemy, turn their guns on their allies, and play the men’s game. Ah, what a wretched life! When will women feel solidarity with one another? Generous mothers, they pass on all they have. Crowns of bile and thorns are their legacy as they become dowager queens, as they enthrone a new generation. They crown us the queens of obedience. Miss Submissive, mistresses of fearfulness.
“It’s all your fault, Rami,” one of the aunts says. “You are a bad example to the younger wives. You’re their mother, you should teach them.”
“What are you accusing me of? I’ve always swept his rubbish under the carpet. I’ve kept all his sins to myself. Ask Tony, ask him if I’ve ever been negligent in my care for him. I look after his physical well-being. Not even his feet smell. Do you want proof? Smell them! Ask Tony’s four wives here whether they’ve ever seen a hole or a tear in Tony’s underpants, ask them!”
For obvious but also unknown reasons, I begin to sob convulsively. All the gloom of the heavens has been contained within me. My weeping represents the unveiling of a mystery. I weep freely, because weeping is a woman’s destiny. The tears that fall wash the heavens, wash the moon. They also wash my teeth, my eyes, and my smile. I feel so light and so free!
“I have no complaints about the housework.” Tony comes to my defense. “They look after me and the kids very well. I’ve never heard of any of them being unfaithful, I’m sure of that. But they’re wicked.”
In one thing, Tony is right: We are obedient machines. Perfect. Complete. If we weren’t, we’d be out on the streets, in the moon, enjoying all the pleasures of life. We’re obedient, yes sir, we surely are. That’s why we’re here, gravitating, like satellites, around the sun king.
“Don’t be like Vuyazi,” says one of Tony’s aunts.
“Vuyazi?” we ask, curious.
“Yes, Vuyazi, the non-submissive princess whose face appears on the moon.”
“… ?!”
“There was once a princess. She was born into the nobility, but she had a poverty-stricken heart. Women had always been obliged to obey men. That is nature. But this princess disobeyed her father and her husband, and did only what she wanted. When her husband reprimanded her, she would answer back. When he hit her, she would reply in kind. When she cooked chicken, she would ea
t the gizzard and the thighs, and serve her husband whatever she felt like. When her first daughter was a year old, her husband said: Let’s stop nursing the little girl, and make another child. She refused. She wanted her daughter to be nursed for two years just like the boys were, so that she would grow strong like her. She refused to serve him on bended knee and to clip his pubic hair. Her husband, sick of her disobedience, appealed to the king’s justice, the king being her father. Heavyhearted, the king ordered the dragon to punish her. On a thundery day, the dragon took her up into the sky and stamped her into the moon, and so made her punishment an example for the whole world. When the moon waxes and is full, there’s a woman one can see in the middle of it, a bundle on her head and a baby on her back. It’s Vuyazi, the disobedient princess stamped into the moon. It’s Vuyazi, a statue of salt, calcified high up in the heavens in an inferno of ice. That’s why, every month, the bodies of the world’s women putrefy into open wounds and become impure, weeping tears of blood, in punishment for Vuyazi’s insubordination.
“We are obedient women, you don’t need to stamp us into the moon,” I say peevishly.
Are we obedient? I’m lying! We have our ways of seeking revenge in tiny, inadmissible ways. The polygamist isn’t a superman, occasionally his fire goes out and we go looking for a spark from the bonfire of a godfather, a male friend, the man who lives next door.
“Love one another just as your husband loves thee,” says Tony’s uncle, striking a pastoral pose. “Give thanks to the Lord who lit up your road ahead, for otherwise you would be single mothers like so many out there in the world. Men are rare. Having a husband is a lucky state in this day and age. This nephew of mine is a pearl in the middle of the desert.”
Mauá’s uncle would like to say something to defend his niece. He assesses the situation and decides to keep his mouth shut. This man’s pockets are still a bottomless pit. When marriage comes to resemble paid employment, it’s better to put up with an irritable husband’s bellyaches in order to guarantee one’s salary at the end of the month.
“Thank you for coming,” Tony says, already smiling. “If I die, you should know then that it was these women who brought disaster upon me.”
The litany of complaints ceases, and there’s silence at last. Now I understand why, in women’s souls, there is only death, the rustle of leaves falling, the babbling of invisible rivers flowing underground, bits of trash bobbing aimlessly in muddy waters. We were beaten down by other women as part of a conspiracy. As a source of strength, we were annihilated by the weakness of other women. No one asked what we felt, what we ate, how we lived. They threw us over a cliff, and we fell headlong and were crushed. They wrapped our bodies in shrouds of bile and vomit. But deep within us there are hearts pulsating in the tropical snow, whose flakes fall from a freezer powered by panels of solar energy.
Why did God make me a woman? If I wasn’t a woman, what would I be? A man? Why be a man? In order to corral women like cattle? To draw up a polygamist’s rota and spend my time going from one bedroom to another? To feel as if I’m lord of the universe when I don’t even have wings to fly? I’m nothing, but that’s fine by me. I’m a sad, embittered creature, but don’t trouble me about it. My God, I’m a woman, I’m a flower, a rose, and my home is surrounded by thorns!
With the meeting over, those present make a dive for the food like goats in front of a pile of hay. They chew the meat and potatoes like industrial crushing machines. I serve them wine from Portugal, and they drink like camels. They get drunk and their voices gain the unpleasantly festive pitch heard in nightclubs.
I gaze at Tony, my firebrand of a husband, my twenty-first-century polygamist. Who will die prematurely, on the road, between one house and another, always hurrying here and there, managing his love affairs. Who eats food prepared by various hands and who will eventually die from poisoning, without ever knowing who is killing him. Who dives into any nook and cranny, like someone fishing for fatal diseases or tilling the soil of his own death. Whose body is always on show like cattle in the pleasure fair.
While the others eat and drink, we go back over the meeting. We deliver our comments on the nightmare. The outcome of the meeting was to attribute even more powers to our man. No one pointed a finger at him or charged him. He was a king. Our prince. He was an emperor emerging from the waters, pristine and resplendent like a sun. He was the gold on high, so mighty and brilliant that even our parents turned against us on the battlefield. I tell them: Girls, we were over the mark! But our revenge wasn’t too wide of the mark, on the contrary, it surpassed our expectations. We made a fascinating discovery that revealed secrets we could never have imagined. It was wonderful to discover a weak Tony, a crazy Tony, who cries like a child and, when frightened by the bogeyman, seeks help from the family. We have, after all, discovered our most potent secret weapon. We can use our nudity to scare him, torture him, make him quiver to his marrow, and in accordance with the degree of his wickedness. We laugh. Mauá gives a sigh of amusement:
“Ah! You southerners!”
I go into a sulk. I always do this when Mauá speaks to me like this. But then I think how right she is. This rabble is a whole dung heap of superstitions.
“We overdid it, don’t you think?” I repeat.
“Not at all!” Mauá says. “That day, I stripped to the rhythm of the drumbeats of my homeland and I was getting my spirit ready to dance the niketche.”
“Niketche?”
“It’s one of our dances, a dance of the Makua,” Mauá explains, “a dance of love that newly initiated girls do in front of everyone, in order to proclaim: We are women. We are ripened like fruit. We are ready for life!”
Niketche. The dance of the sun and the moon, the dance of the wind and the rain, the dance of creation. A dance that moves and shakes, that heats you up. That makes the body stand still and the soul fly. The girls appear wearing loincloths and beads. They move their bodies with skill, welcoming the awakening of all springtimes. At the first beat of the drum, each one smiles, celebrating the mystery of life as expressed within the niketche. The old recall the love that has passed, the passion that was lived and lost. Unloved women encounter once again, within the space of the dance, the enchanted prince with whom they gallop away hand in hand on the moon’s back. In the young, the urgency for love is awakened, for the niketche is pure sensuality, the queen of all sensuality. When the dance ends, one can hear the sighs of those who have seen it, as if they were stirring from a pleasant dream.
“Tony should celebrate rather than cry. Five wives dancing the niketche for him alone,” Mauá says. “What greater proof of love could he hope for?”
We all smile sadly. We ask each other what the purpose of the meeting was. It was merely to give us a fright. To create more opportunities for him to have affairs, men like variety, we conclude. But we already are a variety, in terms of language, habits, and culture. We’re a sample from north to south, the whole country in one man’s hands. When it comes to love, Tony symbolizes national unity.
We wash the dishes. We talk while also washing our worries. Memory unearths histories of days long gone, histories of life’s cycle. Ju relates events from her childhood. The birth of a girl child is heralded with three drumbeats, that of a boy with five. The birth of a girl is celebrated with a chicken, that of a boy with a cow or a goat. The birth rites of a boy are carried out inside the home, or under the tree of the ancestors, those of a girl are carried out in the open air as the night mist falls. A boy child suckles for two years, a girl for one. Girls learn to use the pestle and to cook, the boys study. A man marries, a woman is married. A man sleeps, a woman is slept. A woman is left a widow, a man is left with one fewer wife.
Lu tells us stories about her village. She says that she learned from other women that a woman lives to please. To please until she dies. When talking about love, it’s important to use a verb of possession: to have. I have a polygamous, drunken, shameless, mad husband. But I have one. The verb “to have” is
magical. It infuses the soul with power and strength. If I say I haven’t, my strength is sapped and my soul emptied. Despair comes. It’s the end. That’s why I please, merely in order to be able to use the verb “to have.”
Everything I’ve done in life has been to please my Tony. What have I gained from it? Solitude. Solitude in love is like being a loose grain of sand that produces no shade. It’s to sleep on a mattress of stars gathered by my own hands. It’s to live in the world’s margin and walk forward on one’s own because one is an uneven number. Like Eve. I’ve never emerged a winner in this struggle, only a loser. But I’m sturdy, hard, I’ve got nerves of steel. I weep not out of weakness but out of rage. I’m going to roll up my sleeves and embark on another fight. I’m going to attack Tony with his own weapon: women. One can’t sleep with all the women in the world, we know that. But I’m going to urge him to have all the women on the planet. All of them! There are already a few strands of white hair on my temples. A sign of maturity and wisdom. That is experience. These four women before me are my weapons and the others yet to come will be my bullets. We’ll see who the winner is!
21
My husband isn’t dead, but he’s become an apparition seen from afar in an erotic film. A shadow that comes, a shadow that goes, that one imagines, dreams of, but that one can never touch. My God, he has turned me into an imaginary widow. I’m nailed to a windblown cross, hung up there on high, I have open wounds on my arms, my breast, in the oven that heats and grows cold without ever cooking anything. Why do I need a husband like this? Why don’t I leave him once and for all?
Leave him? On every street corner, there’s a woman pining for a man. Leave him for whom?
We need a man to give us money. For us to exist. To gain status. To give millions of women let loose in the world some prospects. For many of us, marriage is a job, but without a salary. It’s security. During the days of Operation Production, all the women who had no husband were arrested and deported to reeducation camps, accused of being prostitutes, vagrants, criminals. Everywhere you look there’s sexual harassment of the men who are most well endowed, whether in body or wallet.
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