Prince of Monkeys

by Nnamdi Ehirim

  Good evening, I am whichever shepherd-boy reporter the station had fielded to fell the huff-and-puff Goliath, reporting live from Lagos, the Federal Capital Territory, and this is NTA nine o’clock network news. Today the inspector general of police announced the arrest of Africa Independent Bank chief executive Marcel Asikhia at the bank’s Lagos headquarters over a five-charge case centered on advanced fee fraud . . .

  I already had my eyes on my father when I noticed his jaw drop. The reporter had gone a fair extent into the headline, and a retort from my father was overdue. But for the first time, I watched him sit in icy silence.

  . . . the arrest was the end result of a discreet yearlong investigation carried out by the Nigerian Police Force in conjunction with the United States Secret Service. But rather than celebrate this accomplishment as a milestone victory in the fight against corruption, the inspector general stated that this was just the beginning of a sweep of arrests that would implicate other crooked members of not just Africa Independent Bank but the entire banking sector, emphasizing as he brought his statement to an end that Nigeria had enough to provide for every man’s needs but not every man’s greed . . .

  “Cletus, what’s this all about?” my mother asked in a tone lacking the usual warmth. She picked up the remote control from my father’s side and powered off the television. “Cletus! What is it that man is saying?”

  “Puh-puh-puh-put on that rubbish let us hear word,” he thundered with boiling immediacy. “How else will I know, abi, I am a witch now?”

  He snatched the remote control from her and restored the man on the television as the sole breaker of silence, but now he was giving statistics on the success rates of high school students in the recently released O-levels examination. My parents began talking, but only in whispers. I remained in my chair, tracing my fingers through the thick threading at the hem to disguise my eavesdropping, but still I could barely make out complete sentences, just disjointed phrases when my mother screeched at high-pitched junctures.

  “Didn’t you say you people had a man in the house of assembly . . . But you were not directly involved in that part of the deal . . . Esu onigbowa aye, Esu is the one in control of this world . . . If it is the same Marcel that I met the other night, I know he won’t say pim . . . We don’t have to go anywhere, abi, you did not change your address in your file when we moved . . . But I told you that Adeniran did not look trustworthy, Efifi uwa e i, da ka da ugba apee bo a ru jade—character is smoke, even if it is covered with two hundred baskets, it will ooze out.”

  My father went into his room and came out with black polythene bags and empty suitcases. I fell asleep on the chair in the parlor, watching him and my mother neatly arrange green dollar notes, like cutlery in a cupboard, from the black bags into the suitcases. But not the lush green that signified hope, growth, a lush utopia, or maybe even life itself. Rather, a tattered shade of green that seemed to camouflage a world of treachery behind the darkness of its frayed edges, a green that embodied in its appearance, as much as in its quantity, the sickening nature of excess.

  Any color, whichever, on its own can only be selfish. But in harmonious or disruptive union with others, colors possess and excite the mind, heart, and all feelings. Color is most similar to the unison of souls in romance. The whites and blues and greens of my life thus far, and the myriad of tints and shades of the rainbow that had adorned the fabric of Zeenat’s past, soon came together in an ever emerging beauty describable only by itself yet visible to the curious eye.

  Mendaus and the other boys knew it was out there, but they only teased me about it and did not bother sniffing out its evidence, except Maradona. When Pastor’s son teased, Maradona laughed louder than everybody else and then said something that always implied that Zeenat was beyond me. Whenever she did come to the side of the field during our matches, he dwelled on the ball longer than he usually would, trying tricks he usually would not, even though he pulled them off most of the time. I did not mind, because she cheered only when I was on the ball. Zeenat had lynched both our hearts; I seemed to be moving on to an eternal paradise with her, while Maradona drifted toward damnation.

  With hope fleeting, Maradona desperately began playing it off like she was barely an issue on his mind, paying less attention when she spoke. But I knew from the way he looked at her when he did look, and the way he spoke to her when he did speak, she remained an issue. It was the same way I looked at and spoke to her, which portrayed without reservations all of my feelings toward her.

  To be honest, I really never minded the boys teasing about Zeenat and me. But it did get to me whenever Maradona became a third character in the joke; his name was like a serpentine presence lurking around the Garden of Eden Zeenat and I had created for ourselves, a presence that had to be expelled. So I began trying to get the boys to stop, first cautiously and then curtly via daily crescendo, until the day I snapped. The boys were laughing over something Pastor’s son had said about making up a trophy called “Zeenat” because all the boys seemed to play for her. I tried to interrupt with a loud “Shut up!” But nobody seemed to notice, so I shouted again, an extended effort that was even more livid than the first.

  “Somebody is burned, because if we really had to play for her, he knows he’d never win,” Maradona said, and everyone laughed louder. A few other boys had started coming closer to find out if we were sharing chicken or something.

  “Shut up! You’re just . . . stupid,” I replied.

  He retorted, “If I’m stupid, your mother is stupid.”

  The crowd was growing. Whispers were getting louder. I had to reply, but my lips were heavy, my eyes heavier. The boys in the crowd noticed and started offering sticks and stones: “Call his mother ashawo” and “Call him a bastard.” I was not sure what either of the words meant, so I cowered.

  “Take it back! Take it back!” I forced out of my quivering lips.

  “Take what back?” We all looked to Zeenat, who was oblivious to the tension she fueled. Before somebody could think up a lie, Pastor’s son offered her the truth. Apparently, he was oblivious to the tension, too. Maradona shoved him off his feet before he could continue.

  “What about ‘my little cigar’?”

  “Little cigar? You people already have stupid names for each other, just like husband and wife,” Maradona quickly added.

  All the boys erupted in laughter, and perhaps a tear rolled down my face. I meant only to punch Maradona on his cheek, like they did in the movies I watched with Zeenat, but Pastor’s son had stood up and reciprocated the shove he had received with even more vigor. Maradona staggered off balance; my punch to the cheek was miscalculated, and I felt my bony fist squish his eye. On days when I think about the moment, I can still taste the vomit that filled my mouth that day as Maradona cried bloody tears until the street vendor had to come and hurry him to a hospital.

  I was not allowed to go to the field for a week. During the time I would usually be playing football, I would stare out the window toward the dirt road that led to Mendaus’s house. But my mind barely wandered toward him or Zeenat. It was my way of steeling myself for the barrage of slaps my father would dispense at the slightest irritation when he came home. It was also during this time that I tried to understand the news about Maradona. After a week of no results, I decided to talk about it with the boys in school, so I brought it up during our break time.

  “What does a bastard mean?” I asked. Mendaus and Pastor’s son were both present in the huddle we formed close to the swings, far away from where the other boys were. Maradona had still not returned to school. Our teacher had announced after assembly the day before that we should all take time out to pray for our classmate Maradona, who was recovering from eye surgery. There was silence for a while.

  “It means when someone is really stupid?” Pastor’s son suggested.

  “It’s something different from that,” I said.

  “No, it’s not. My mummy always says our driver is really stupid, or she
calls him a bastard. So they can’t be too different.”

  “A bastard is someone who does not know his father,” Mendaus said firmly.

  “It’s something different from that, too,” I replied as firmly.

  “How would you know?” Pastor’s son inquired.

  “Because Maradona’s mother came to my house the day after he got injured. She said that Maradona needed surgery. That she did not have any money and Maradona was a bastard, so my father would have to pay for it. So Mendaus can’t be right, because Maradona’s father is a soldier. Everybody knows that. Maybe he would have paid for the surgery if he was around.”

  Mendaus said, “Maybe? Well, have any of you ‘maybe’ seen Maradona’s soldier father, ever?”

  “I haven’t,” Pastor’s son said.

  There was silence for a while. “A bastard is someone who does not know his father. So Maradona ‘probably’ lied,” Mendaus said with an air of finality, and he walked away.

  After the night my parents packed money into the suitcases, unexplainable changes started happening. Unexplainable because neither of my parents thought it necessary to bring me into an understanding of things. On my first attempt at tapping the palm wine, I asked my mother, “Why were you and Daddy packing suitcases the other night?”

  “Because the first thing people do if they want to go on holiday is to pack.”

  I got excited. “When are we traveling? Are we going abroad? Can we go to Argentina?”

  “I don’t know when, I don’t know where,” she said, laughing. “We’ll know when the time is right.”

  “So why pack if we don’t even know when we’re going and where we’re going?”

  “Good question! But I have a better question for you.” Her laughter quieted, and she squatted down to be face-to-face with me. “Do you know the particular time the airplanes in the sky fly past, or do you know exactly where each one is going?”

  “No. Nobody does.”

  “Exactly! And that’s why our suitcases have to be ready. So whenever any airplane lands near here, we can be ready to jump on it. And if we’re lucky enough, it’ll take us somewhere beautiful. Maybe it will even take us to Argentina. But we’ll never know if we’re not packed and ready.”

  I fell for the bait, and after a few minutes of daydreaming about playing football in Argentina, I ran off to inquire more about our holiday plans of my father.

  “Mummy said we would be traveling for holidays. Is it possible for us to go to Argentina?” He coughed out loud echoes of laughter, and I felt comfortable, so I foolishly pressed on. “Is that why you stopped going to work?”

  “What rubbish is this?” I did not predict his mood swing. Neither did I predict the smack on the back of my head that his hand immediately dealt. “Your business in this house is not whether I go to work as long as I put food on the table for you to eat. When I was your age, my father used to leave the house from morning to night every day but never put food on our table. Your only business is to go to school and pass your books.” My mother came in just in time, ignoring the tension, as usual, and changing the topic without the littlest bother in the world.

  If I’d had any wisdom those years, I probably would have curtailed my questions to my mother as well. She lured me with her answers to ask even more. So I kept asking. She would answer me in her own words at first, and then with old proverbs in Yoruba, until she progressed to drawing from the Odu of Ifá, ultimately declaring that I was of sufficient age and curiosity to witness the divinations and direct my concerns to the òrisà. I could have objected, but to sit in the presence of the initiated and commune with the high powers that guided my fate from my birth and ordered my haves and have nots, all while managing to stay enshrouded in a cloak of invisibility, was alluring to me.

  I was not ready. My first divination occurred almost two weeks after she first mentioned it. I realized it was upon me only when I heard her summon me from her studio that Saturday morning. My feet shuffled with hesitation the moment my hands felt the knob of the studio door; although unknowns often yield to the wooing of fear, they are romantically enslaved to the voice of curiosity. I twisted the knob and pushed the door forward in a single motion. The room was emptier than I had ever seen it, the tables and shelves hidden away behind yards of scarlet cloth, and the curtains were lifted over the window. My mother knelt on the floor, wrapped at the breast and all the way below in more scarlet, and had her yellow arms flickering above her head from one side to another like the fiery flames of burning sacrifice that I would live to see in hundreds of later divinations. Her face was marked with white circles that diminished along her neck and across her arms into little spots.

  She began chanting as I knelt opposite her, tucking in my legs from below my knees beneath my lap, as she had. She turned around to face the statues on the table behind her, a tall carving from black wood of a man standing with an exaggerated chest and legs spread. Just beside it was a smaller and browner clay mold of a figure that was woman from the waist above but fish from the waist below. The wooden image was Esu and the other Yemoja, the mother òrisà and mother to all mothers. My mother whistled three times to the right of the statues and three times to their left.

  “Esu Alare na ode orun. Esu the middle man between heaven and earth, I am calling on you, answer your child.” Then she balled up her left fist and smashed it against her open right palm.

  “O lo daindain mookun oro, one who has the anointed rope to success, wealth, and all the good things. Onen yi a se oiye ko de dupe, bi si gi l’osa gbe eun iaye lo e i. He who does not show appreciation for a good deed done to him is like a thief who has made away with one’s goods. We have come to you with gifts.”

  She lifted the cover of the wooden bowl between us. I had never seen a fish so finely dressed in leaves and pepper as the one inside the bowl. She took the fish and broke off a morsel with a bite, handed it over to me, and I did the same, albeit hesitantly, and then she lifted the rest of it upward.

  “Your son has come to begin his journey with you. Show him the path to follow.” I remember wondering how my interest in our travel plans to Argentina had brought this about.

  We did not see Maradona for a while after the accident. He could not make it back in time for the term’s end, so we could not see him at school. He did not come to the field to play football anymore, so we could not see him there, either. And when we summoned the occasional courage to go knocking at the gate of his house, it never opened up for us. Somehow, we knew he knew we had discovered the situation about his father, even though none of us ever mentioned it. I think we avoided the issue because we were not sure if it was going to be like one of the many awkward incidents we laughed over, or if this particular case would have dire implications on our friendship with Maradona.

  Our trimmed-down group slowly took a new direction. We stopped playing football as much, maybe because we’d stopped winning as much since Maradona left. But it was not altogether removed from our lives: 1986 was a World Cup year, and we had waited four years for this. We had saved money all year and added it up to buy a radio we could use to listen to the games, straining to hear the British commentary over static. We would gather in the television room of Mendaus’s house because it was the quietest place and everything would be as still as a lover’s gaze when we listened. All our minds would focus on the football as it was passed around. It was a fixed star at the center of our universe, and all the players, great and celestial as we imagined them, revolved around and oscillated from it according to the quality of their skill. Even though we all wanted Argentina to come forth victorious, there were mixed feelings when the commentator announced after the final game that the Argentine cultlike leader, Diego Armando Maradona, was leading his team in a victory parade.

  After the World Cup, our radio was relieved of all its football commentary duties and became our karaoke machine. We would gather by four o’clock for the MusikAfrika show, which basically repeated the same songs every day, so it was n
ot difficult to get the hang of the lyrics. The show would start with Sunny Okosun’s “Now or Never,” which would merge into Onyeka Onwenu’s “Ekwe.” It would then pinball between tracks from Chief Osita Osadebe, Oliver De Coque, and Fela Anikulapo Kuti, and when it was a few minutes to five o’clock, as the show was winding down, we would all clear our throats and chorus Nico Mbarga’s “Sweet Mother” when it came on to close the show. For the rest of my life, I would relive those moments in the dark living room when, with reckless abandon of any care in this world, we chanted:

  Sweet mother I no go forget you

  for the suffer wey you suffer for me.

  When I dey cry, my mother go carry me, she go say,

  “My Pikin’ wetin you dey cry ye, ye,

  stop stop, stop stop make you cry again oh no.”

  Mendaus still read as much, maybe even more. Sometimes he rocked back and forth from between the pages of his books and reality, peering at the words for short periods and then jumping into conversation with the rest of us. Other times he would snarl at Pastor’s son and me when we spoke too loudly or tried to barter his attention for gist. Zeenat, on the other hand, was more used to his moods, knowing when and when not to speak. Her presence in our group had become more accepted. She followed us everywhere, talking and laughing much louder than any of us boys did. Her being two years older than the rest of our scrawny lot was much more evident, as she was a clear head taller than Mendaus, Pastor’s son, and me.

  I never brought up the matter of Ifá and the òrisà. There was no oath of secrecy that confined me, and sometimes I even admired the way Pastor’s son spoke about the Holy Spirit, Jesus, and the “power of the resurrection.” My primary school was a Christian mission school, and everybody had to pray in the name of Jesus, and at home all of the street vendors and most of the security men punctuated their sentences with Insha Allah, but my house was the only place I had heard any talk about Ifá.