On her way down the steps she paused at Sango’s old room, then with firmer steps she walked into the street.
•
Beatrice was waiting for her taxi under the almond tree when the seven women made straight for her. She saw them coming but could not run for it. They beat her with fists, tore her clothes, scratched her skin till the paint and powder ran with blood and sweat. All the concentrated venom and fury, all the hatred which her open intrusion into their household had awakened – she had it all back in that devastating free-for-all.
‘Come and see Lajide’s mistress!’ The cry was taken up all along Molomo Street, and in some ways it reminded them of the cries of ‘Thief! Thief!’ that had greeted Aina when she emerged from Amusa Sango’s room.
Beatrice screamed for help, but no help came. She fell to her knees and no one raised her. Kekere arrived, carrying a bowl. She dipped her hands into the contents and viciously rubbed them over Beatrice’s eyes. Cayenne pepper! While the other wives held Beatrice down, Kekere rubbed the pepper into her nostrils, mouth, and – on an impulse – into her most private parts. Then and only then did they leave her to writhe and wriggle in shame and humiliation, disgraced, deprived of every vestige of attractiveness that had led their lord and master astray from them. She had received the treatment normally due to ‘the other woman’.
When Lajide heard news of the beating-up he was angry, then miserable. He could not openly declare his support for Beatrice. In some ways he felt she had got her due. But he still loved her. Over and over again, he exclaimed: ‘Women!’ with such an accent that those who knew all the facts felt sorry for him. He went into his bedroom, away from it all.
Somewhere in the compound of Twenty Molomo Street, his wives were chanting and wiggling their hips in triumph.
14
The invitation from Beatrice the Second was at least two weeks old. It had missed its way all round the world and finally found Sango.
‘I shall dress up and just go; that’s what I’ll do,’ Sango murmured while knotting his tie.
His coat lay on the table beside the invitation. He had almost forgotten how nice it felt to be neatly dressed and to smell of talcum powder.
‘Amusa, are you in?’
The question was followed by a knock and Aina came into the room.
‘Aina! Who showed you my place?’
‘You don’t worry about me, so I say let me come and find you.’ She was enjoying his embarrassment.
‘Very kind of you.’
She sat down without being asked, familiarly, possessively. ‘Since I came out of prison, you don’t care to send me anything.’
‘Like what?’ Sango asked, straightening his tie.
‘Twenty years is not for ever, Amusa. I have come out of jail. I didn’t die there —’
‘Come to the point, Aina. You always go round and round. Always. When you want paper for wrapping, you go round. When —’
‘I want you to help me because . . . I am pregnant!’
‘What!’ All the drowsiness vanished from his eyes. Even First Trumpet got out of bed and opened the window. The bed was too narrow for one, but it was the only one in the room and he and Sango used it in turn. When they returned in the early hours of the morning after an all-night vigil at some den, they cared for little else than to crawl in there and remain till morning. This evening, Sango was sacrificing his usual all-night stand for the pleasure of Beatrice’s company. He looked at Aina and said: ‘So you’re pregnant. And you think I am the father —’
‘Since that night at the beach, I have not been feeling well. I didn’t want to come till I was sure.’
‘Enough!’
Sango did not wish to be reminded of that night when he had walked with her in the moonlight, when she had tried to be kind to him because his band had nowhere to go for practice.
‘My mother is prepared to take you to court to claim damages if you refuse to marry me.’ She kept her eyes on him and smiled. ‘Perhaps you’ll let us have about ten pounds to maintain ourselves till the child is born.’
‘At a time like this! And you have the guts to smile. Oh, what a fool I’ve been!’
‘But everybody knows you’re my lover, Amusa; it’s only you that keep making a fuss. What’s in it, after all?’
‘So every time I raise my head in the world, every time I collect a few hard-earned pounds, you, Aina, come and stand in my way – with a new misfortune! Look, do you know this is blackmail? I could take you to the police – they know your record.’
‘I’m not afraid of them. What do I care?’
Which was not the same for Sango. He cared for Beatrice the Second – so much that she must not sully her ears with this nonsense. And there was his mother to think of. He had heard nothing as yet from her. This was a bad situation, whichever way he looked at it. There was no way out.
‘I’ll give you what I can now, Aina. And I beg you to keep away from me – for good! The baby cannot be mine, and you know it! I’m helping you because . . . well, because of memories!’
She took the money – all he had saved – and First Trumpet turned as she was leaving.
‘What are you going to do, Sango?’
‘The child is not mine! Certainly not, and she knows it. If that girl continues to pester me, I shall . . .’
‘Kill her? Then you’ll hang. For such an irresponsible creature, too! The law doesn’t ask about that. At the same time, you cannot afford a second scandal. Your mother, for instance: have you thought of her?’
‘But I have no more money! Something must be done. I know she’ll come again. Someone is behind this scheme!’
‘We’ve got to think it over,’ said First Trumpet. ‘You’d better hurry. You’re getting late for your appointment.’
Sango thought First Trumpet sounded as if he himself were personally affected. He was a good friend.
•
‘Ah – Mr Sango,’ said a grey-haired old man, rising. He was very much a part of the Brazilian-type house, one of the legacies of the early Portuguese invasion of the city. His hand-clasp was crushing for one of his age. Over his shoulder Sango could see large framed diplomas that proclaimed his membership of the Ufemfe society. ‘Sit down and make yourself at home. Beatrice and her mother will soon be here.’
Sango walked on the welcoming carpets with some gravity. This was no rent-grabbing type of house but a real home. He felt uneasy in his stiff collar and bow tie. There was too much starch in his white coat so that it creaked like a rusty door every time he craned his neck to speak to Beatrice’s father. He envied the man in his bright robes and handsome necklet of beads.
‘I’ve been anxious to make your acquaintance since that day when you saved my daughter’s life. She speaks highly of you.’
Sango smiled. ‘She’s a wonderful girl; I’ve never met anybody like her.’
A servant entered, bearing a bowl of kola nuts. He set this down on the little table on which stood decanters and all kinds of drinks.
‘Yes,’ said the old man, offering Sango a nut. ‘She’s a wonderful girl! Just like her two sisters – they’re married now. One married an engineer and the other a lawyer. Beatrice is the youngest and we dote on her. Yes, we do. But we can’t keep her too long. Her fiancé, who is studying medicine at Edinburgh, is pressing for her to join him. It will break our hearts to lose her.’
No words could have torn Sango’s heart into more painful shreds. He lost all hope of ever winning Beatrice. He cursed himself for ever having linked his ambitions with hers.
Beatrice’s mother had a beaming countenance that spelt happiness. She was plump, but her loose blouse and beautiful jewellery gave her a dignity that stirred all Sango’s feelings for a home. She stood for a moment by the large velvet curtains, then came in and shook Sango’s hand, warmly appraising him. At that moment all Sango’s past despondency vanished and was replaced with a new desire: to be one of this proud family.
‘So you are Amusa Sango! Welcome, thrice
welcome!’
But if Sango had hoped to have Beatrice the Second to himself – even for two minutes – he was soon disillusioned. She came in a few moments before the meal was served: a younger edition of her mother – slighter of build, therefore looking taller. Less gold and jewellery about her throat and bare arms, and a haircut like a boy’s. She smiled very sweetly when her eyes met Sango’s but often he caught her in a brown study.
She sat on her father’s right, while Sango sat on her mother’s right and felt honoured but tantalized. They had jolof rice and smoked antelope. Beatrice’s father was one of the few men in the city who believed in bush meat. He criticized the offerings of the butchers’ stalls as ‘tough and stringy’.
‘How do you expect meat to taste good when the cattle walk eight hundred or more miles to the slaughter-house? I have my own hunter!’
He talked about his youth and the days when the Portuguese and the Brazilians, the French and the Dutch, the British and the Germans were fighting for trade supremacy on the West Coast of Africa.
‘I was a small boy then, and never dreamed of marrying my wife. Now, after fifty-odd years of British rule, we hear talk of self-government.’
He believed in the Realization Party, though people accused it of belonging to the ‘upper classes’. And why not? Was he himself not of the upper classes? When, after a chieftaincy battle, he had fled across the mangrove swamps of the Gulf of Guinea to this city – all the way from Dahomey – had he not himself been a chief over thousands?
‘I believe in the past,’ the old man said, when the meal was over. ‘It is when you know the past that you can appreciate the present. We need something like the Realization Party to preserve our kingship, our music, art and religion!’
‘You have come with your old talk, Papa Beatrice! The young man wants to talk to Beatrice. Let us leave them to play music and talk in their own way.’
Sango’s ears stood open expectantly.
‘Yes, Mama Beatrice, that is right. But this is a thinking young man – that is why I talk in this manner. Is that not so, Mr Sango? Are you tired of my company?’
‘No, no, no! Not in the least. I enjoy listening to our history from a man who has lived through it!’
‘Fine!’ He smiled triumphantly and tapped his snuff-box. ‘In my days when a man went to marry a woman it was a family affair. For instance, this medical student who is engaged to Beatrice. I know his father and mother. They are people who matter. They can offer my daughter security. I am proud to link my name with theirs, and they in turn are flattered. People talk loosely of love! Lovers cannot exist in a vacuum but in a society. This society demands certain things of them . . .’
He went on, harping on his point till Sango became suspicious. This old man was trying to discourage him; but at the end of the evening, he was more resolved than ever to win her, obstacles notwithstanding.
When he got home he wrote to his mother about Beatrice. Then he took the first step towards reinstating himself in a job. He wrote to various government departments – the last thing he had vowed to do in his life. It was all a farce, and when later on the replies came to say there were no vacancies he was not surprised or disappointed. Now he was well and truly up against the city which attracted all types. He had been very smug in his job as crime reporter for the West African Sensation.
•
At night he stood in for other people in their own bands. His motto had become money, money, money. This was the way the people of the city realized themselves. Money. He saw the treachery, intrigue, and show of power involved. Sometimes he earned twenty shillings a night for blowing his trumpet within smelling distance of a wet and stinking drain. He discovered the haunts of the sailors whose ships had anchored off the lagoon for a mere five days.
In these dens the girls were slick with too much of everything: too much lipstick, so that their lips were either caked or too invitingly moist: too much hips, too much of their thighs showing beneath their unfashionable skirts, too much breast bursting the super-tight blouses.
‘But I have to stick it,’ Sango murmured, and tightened his mind against the sordidness of his surroundings. ‘Beatrice the Second must never know my humiliation.’
One evening, in the heat of jiving and jostling a white man slipped in. He was by no means the only white man there for most of the sailors were white, but this stranger had the rare look of a gentleman and was decidedly out of place. Where everyone had on a loud coat-type shirt outside pole-clinging trousers and pin-point shoes, he came in evening dress with the Savile Row cut, and worn in that way peculiar to the well-bred Englishman away from home. He certainly could not be expected to ‘dig’ the others.
With due respect they gave him a seat in an isolated corner, and as he sat down, Sango saw his face: ‘Grunnings!’
A steward came towards him and took his order. When he returned with the drinks and cigarettes, Grunnings pointed at the dance floor. The steward nodded; then went over to a tall girl in red jeans and scarlet lipstick that contrasted rudely with her chocolate skin. He whispered in her ear. Some moments later, she was sitting opposite Grunnings and smoking his cigarettes.
She was such a contrast to the elegant Beatrice the First that Sango could not disguise his shock. What had become of Grunnings’s taste? Had his desire for a bed-partner driven him to the lowest sex-market?
When Grunnings left, Sango learnt that he had come here in search of Beatrice the First. The girl in the red jeans said: ‘Why he come ask me? I be sister of the girl? Me don’ know where she stay!’
Sango was touched. Grunnings had actually loved Beatrice the First – more than she knew or cared. His playing acquired a plaintive note, and before dawn he was too exhausted to do more than drag himself into bed. Over and over again, he thanked his stars that in this city he had a friend like First Trumpet. But for him, life as it now was would have been unbearable.
15
The railway platform was crowded with Muslims in robes and turbans who had come to welcome a pilgrim from Mecca. Sango strolled among them, but soon found a remote seat and brought out the telegram. He read it again:
A RELAPSE: COMING TO CITY FOR OPERATION.
It was from his mother and he was afraid this time. When the train arrived, Sango was admitted into the special compartment where she lay. Blue-grey light filtered into the air-conditioned cell, and as the door shut behind him the yelling, chattering and sobbing from the platform was switched out with a click.
‘My son,’ she murmured.
She was very thin, but her skin was well preserved. In her face Sango could see a gentle rebuke in the helpless expression that suffering had given it. He was stimulated tenderly. He realized suddenly the deep bond that existed between him and her; and through her the customs that were of the older generation – like his having to marry Elina. All this flashed through his mind in one revealing moment as he gazed calmly on her face.
‘You are well and strong?’
‘Yes, mother.’
It was all that concerned her. So long as he was well and strong, there was hope. He felt that hope surged through him. His troubles paled before her presence.
‘Elina and her mother came with me. Have you seen them? They are in the third class.’
This was awkward. It meant that his mother was tired of talk and had brought the girl with her to make sure that her son was now safely out of danger from the women of the city.
The stretcher-bearers did not leave them much longer. With care they took her out of the carriage and into the ambulance that waited outside the station. Sango caught a bus to the General Hospital to make sure how she was looked after and how things were fixed for the next few days. A nurse told him he could not go in, but he was satisfied that she was in C.6 and that her bed was screened away from curious eyes.
In the corridor he bumped into a fair-skinned girl chaperoned by an elderly woman.
‘I’m Elina!’
‘You!’ She had grown from the
scraggy, timid girl he had seen in the Eastern Greens into a kind of ‘poster’ girl. No one advertising the Girl Guide Movement or the Women’s this or that service could afford to overlook her. She had an air of calm response and confidence that put one at ease.
Sango explained how it was that he could not take them to his home. They were not used to hotels and restaurants either, and were frightened of the idea of going to eat and talk in public. Finally Sango suggested a seat by the lagoon; they could at least watch the canoes and the ocean liners moving about. At least for people who had been inland all the time the sea had its fascination.
They sat long on those benches talking, and eventually someone mentioned the dreaded word ‘marriage’. Sango looked up sharply and said he was not planning to marry for the next ten years. There was something about Elina which made him feel she just did not ‘belong’.
‘Elina can go into the convent,’ Sango said. ‘The convent in this city is good enough and she’ll learn quite a bit.’
She shook her head. ‘Elina is going nowhere. She’ll look after me and that’s enough. I do not intend to let her out of my sight in this city!’
‘I could stay here for ever watching the lagoon!’ Elina said, and her mother looked at Sango triumphantly. ‘Didn’t I tell you?’ her eyes seemed to say. ‘This city is no good for a girl so young – unless, of course, she has a husband!’
He saw them home. They had arranged to stay with a relation till Sango’s mother got well, and they would go back to the Eastern Greens. Their relation turned out to be a clerk in the Survey Department. With a wife and child he occupied two spacious rooms with a kitchen at the back. The quarters were clean and well planned for clerks in the civil service, but the occupants complained of being remote from the centre of things.
When Sango left them he went immediately to search for Beatrice the Second.
•
The junction of Jide and Molomo Streets was perhaps the most central spot in the whole city. Someone had once said that if you remained long enough in the barber’s shop, you were bound to see the people who mattered in the city. On this morning, Sango sat down and revolved the chair so that he had eyes on the street. It was a dull morning, threatening, but never seeming to rain. The sun was invisible, but the air was cool and crisp without being sticky.
People of the City Page 14