Prince of Monkeys

by Nnamdi Ehirim

  Enugu was a smaller and less populated area than Lagos, which had rowdy bus stops polluted with the smoke and soot of thousands of yellow danfo buses with clearly defined, almost mathematical daily routes; like a pendulum, the buses had constant initial and final positions, and any change in the initial position would lead to a proportional change in its final position. Enugu had buses that simply scurried back and forth in search of passengers, each according to its own chaos theory, and if a bus started in a slightly different position, a search for passengers could completely change its trajectory.

  The lecturers at the university taught fundamental mathematics and physics as well as introductions to computer languages and the rest, but I learned from Tessy the most. She was always eager to share the lessons of her previous year’s experience, and I was more eager to listen.

  “If you want to survive in this school, always give tax to whomever tax is due” was her advice for my first day. “Fear whomever fear is due, and honor whomever honor is due. Don’t owe anybody anything except goodwill and respect. Siiimple. And you know why you should write that down on your brain like Scripture?” Before I could offer an answer, she replied, “Because it is Scripture—Romans chapter thirteen, verses seven and eight.”

  When she noticed I had started going around with some of my new course-mates, she told me on our way home, “Always try as much as possible to walk on your own—that way nobody can tie you down to a particular clique, and you can fit into any kind of group at any time, like water flowing from stream to river. Siiimple.”

  When we were walking together to catch a bus home after lectures and some girls at the university shouted “Big girl Tessy,” she whispered, “‘Big boy’ or ‘big girl’ is not a nickname, it is a title. Nobody calls you a ‘big’ unless you earn it. Shiiikena.”

  “What did you do to earn yours?” I asked naturally.

  “Ogini kwa? Who killed Adol Igbokwe and anointed you my father who can question me? You must be a hopeless goat. A condemned Christmas goat is what you are. Did you eat your grass this morning?” Her advice dried up for a while after that, but eventually, she picked up again.

  Between the business and the banter of learning and loafing, there were the terrible crowds of students hurriedly moving to and from everywhere. Terrible because in each concern-creased and often panic-possessed face I remembered the terror of the people trying to escape the carnage at the front of the Shrine so many months ago. I could never avoid it in such a big university, so I had little to do but accept that I was destined to live a haunted life.

  Tessy’s ugly friend came around often, and with time I learned to call her by her name, Tobenna. With even more time, I began to enjoy her company. She was in a state of delight always, having no regard for bad moods or ill twists of fate, whether in her life or in others’. “Why feel special over nothing? One person cannot have a monopoly on suffering,” Tobenna said whenever Tessy complained about her test results being too low or not having enough money. “Everyone has their problems. There is as much to go around for everyone created as there are eyes and noses.”

  The only possible consequence to Tobenna’s day, whether as perfect as white clouds in dark skies or as turbulent as the imminent storm behind the clouds, was a bowl of lightly oiled and heavily fished abacha, gossip, her joy of all moments and quick-fix solution to all problems. Tobenna was a smooth talker, slick as catfish, and for that reason alone, Tessy and I would end up at her one-room apartment every day after classes to share abacha and any other business, in that order.

  My going along to Tobenna’s was her only argument against her schoolmates who had been convinced she was a lesbian. She was the only one in her row of flats who never came out to play ludo, cook outside with the others, talk about pornography or some other variation of physical exertion, and did not have boys over for the weekends: concisely, a freak of nature. The fact that she preferred Ankara dresses to jeans and miniskirts did not testify in her favor, but she was hardly to blame, considering her “comfortable-but-not-rich” upbringing, as she always echoed. Even Tessy made jokes about her fashion, despite the fact neither Uncle Adol nor Aunt Kosiso would ever allow Tessy to dress in the manner she suggested to Tobenna. Tobenna knew it but never pushed the fact. That was the way they were: Both understood when to be crass and when to show candor. Their friendship was like that of the shore and the sea—not even the sailor whose life depended on their synchronization could separate the prisoner from the captive.

  The city of Enugu, like the radiance of the yellow sun, reflected the innate passions of the soul but was never really alluring unless in its full, bright golden beam of barefaced ambition, which was typical of every Igbo man. The warm yellow that lay at the heart of the Biafran flag, fashioned into a rising sun, still defined its people a generation later, and so did the ideal it represented: a brighter tomorrow.

  What had troubled me the most ever since I’d been in Enugu was that I was not sure if I was ready for tomorrow when I had not even let go of the past I had in Lagos. It was difficult enough fighting the evil spirits in my head when Uncle Adol came home with a new and improved VCR for Christmas, and everyone gathered around to watch The Silence of the Lambs, the film that had been the talk of the university, with its final scenes of the disenchanting Buffalo Bill teasing the earnest Clarice Starling, reminding me of the evening in front of the Afrika Shrine, the last night I saw Zeenat, and each one of Clarice’s nimble steps resembled the ghost of Zeenat escaping my mind to haunt me in Technicolor.

  That night, she escaped the world of Technicolor and sneaked into my arms, and for one just one more time her confidence was my pride, her smile my motivation. The first time I was ever with Zeenat, her body was my playground, and I was a lost child in frantic search of all the joy I could stuff into my heart before heading home. But that night it was an entire world, defenseless and in anarchy of all her efforts of self-control, yearning to be conquered. Our creation of world order was a noisy event, even though we barely spoke any words. Our sounds were in their raw form, undefinable by the words of any language: sounds of laughter and tears, capturing both joy and pain at interchanging junctures. I was much too grateful for the present to show greed by guessing about our future.

  I remember hoping the night had not been a dream just before I opened my eyes. When I did, Tessy, made visible only by the moonlight coming in through the window, was sitting at the edge of the bed.

  “You wet the bed,” she whispered. “And with the way you behave, somebody would think your prick can’t stand and your yansh can’t shit.”

  She began to giggle, which heightened my confusion even more, until I felt around the bedsheet and discovered an unreasonably large portion of damp stickiness. “Ihechi, breathe easy,” she added. “Don’t be uptight all the time. Make a jamboree out of life from time to time.” And when I thought she was going to laugh even louder, she stood up and got new sheets from a box in the corner of the room. I scurried into the bathroom to change out of my sticky embarrassment, and when I returned, she was laying the new sheets to the bed while Effy, who had woken up, stood weary-eyed, making incoherent grumbles. Then they both got on the bed and fell asleep as quickly as bloated drunks.

  I waited for Tessy’s jokes the next day, but nothing was forthcoming, not on the next day or even the day after. Almost two weeks had passed by when one morning, on our way to school, she asked, “What’s her name?”

  Even though the question was from a dialogue of cordial silence, I knew exactly what she was referring to the moment the words left her mouth, but still I feigned ignorance as I considered the lie to tell.

  “The girl who made you dream, what’s her name?”

  I understood there was meant to be a level of trust, as she had shared my troubles with me, but I also understood that however kind-hearted women might be, it was their nature to understand the irrational and pick problems with the rational. If for any reason I repaid her trust with lies and she doubted my next
words, I would lose her friendship in a world where I did not have enough loyalties to spare.

  So I began explaining to her how once I had been in love. How I knew it was love because no other word could justify what I felt for Zeenat. I had tried so many times to describe the way I felt with different words that would toss and turn Tessy if I ever suffered her to pay attention. And it had more to do with my shyness than anything else. I started with “friendship” but became the first to admit that Zeenat and I had matured beyond that. But with the way we’d started, it was not so difficult to venture under the safer umbrella of the word.

  At some point I had toyed with the idea that I was probably just “attracted” to Zeenat, but that barely made any sense. I could not even say that she was beautiful, because beauty signifies unanimous perfection. But I could say, with the cleanest of conscience, how much I adored her pretty face—I slowed down when we walked sometimes, so I could fall a bit behind her or walk slightly ahead then look back at her, so I could catch a glimpse of her from different angles, and the way her eyes narrowed into a squint, and how her mouth shaped into a full smile whenever she saw me, or how she threw her head back when she laughed, and even though she did not always look at me when talking to me, I cherished the moments she looked me straight in the eye.

  Now, I could tell I loved Zeenat, because I once heard the litmus test for love was if you could consider risking your life for a person. I could tell that what I felt for her was more than friendship, more than attraction, more than fondness, more than lust, and more than care. I had heard the most awkward comments over the years, good and bad, blessings and curses, from all sorts of people. They could never understand what we shared, but I could not blame them; a leaf not connected to the branch cannot partake of the fullness of the roots.

  Then I explained how Zeenat had died, leaving me in the desolation of blind hope. I did not look up once to check for Tessy’s reaction, even when I heard her sniffle and choke on her quiet tears.

  And although she did not know to ask, I told her about the great Mendaus. How he was a troublemaker and liked to change things. He just didn’t think he should go to school and get a job, like normal members of society, and he had his reasons—the unemployment rate was about seventy percent, and in his class of twenty-five at school, he was far from the top thirty percent, so even if he did manage to scale through university, it was statistically proved that he would be jobless by default. He believed if he made himself enough of a nuisance to the authorities now to effect change in the system, he could save himself from becoming a permanent nuisance to society. Though it was distorted logic, I lauded his foresight.

  I told Tessy about everyone—my mother and my father, Pastor’s son, and even Atonye—and the shitty fact that they were now all forced away from me, gone, fading memories. As if our emotions were drawn out on a children’s library globe, Tessy and I kept drifting along a straight line in opposite directions—I, toward despair and she, toward empathy—till we reunited on the other side of the globe at a common point called unhappiness. And as with all reunions between two lost travelers on a similar journey, the sight of one brought hope to the other, like a lighthouse in the storm. And it was at this common point that we conceived, for the first time, an impression of genuine friendship, allowing tolerance to sprout from the solid rocks of unhappiness. On the branches of tolerance grow the most unusual gestures. There was no way I could understand the magnitude of Tessy’s gesture when she declared, “Ihechi, breathe easy, after school today I’ll take you to Madame Messalina. Madame Messalina has a solution for everything.”

  The gates of the house were imperial—in height, strength, and beauty—rising high above the gates on either side, and crowned above its prongs was a large golden sign embossed in the black wrought iron: XANADU. From behind the bars of the gate, I could see the house tower in greater majesty. Its grounds were vast with fruit trees, especially almonds, spread all around. The house was a marvel, rising to three floors, crowned with two domes at each end, and every inch of wall across the face of the building covered with marble or stained glass.

  Tessy motioned for me to follow her as a crevice in the gray sky let out a spark of lightning amid the clouds. Her long-limbed frame swayed from side to side like the wild almond trees littering the compound as she moved in the rain, skipping over the little puddles of water. Right before the house, in a circled garden, was a statue of a woman in a long flowing dress with her arms raised to the sky. The headstone below the statue read:

  Madame Messalina,

  Kuhbla Khan of Nigeria.

  I had asked Tessy about Madame Messalina just short of a hundred times since her first mention in the morning. She would start to explain, stutter, and then stop, so I still had no clue, but if what I saw was anything to go by, I knew the speechless awe Madame Messalina commanded as she—for there was no mistaking her when you saw her—walked out onto the second-floor balcony above us.

  “How do you rate his lingam?” she cooed loudly, tilting her head upward and putting her hands on her hips in an obnoxious pose.

  “But he’s just my cousin, Ma,” Tessy replied as they exchanged even more obnoxious grins and glances.

  “Nonsense!” Madame Messalina exclaimed. “You’re so young and pretty. A lingam anywhere is a lingam everywhere. I’ll be with you downstairs in a wink.” Tessy started to move inside and waved me on casually, as if we had not just witnessed such blatant display of gibberish chatter from a supposedly normal adult.

  Inside, the house was littered with girls about Tessy’s age, lying about in the living room, talking in low tones at the dining table, patting at their faces in front of large mirrors. They were all a bit too overdressed to be idly sitting around indoors, some as comfortable as chickens in their outfits while others picked and pulled at their clothes, but all waved or nodded at Tessy. And except Tessy and me, everyone in the room appeared to be of a complexion lost in the gray area of the lightest shade of Negro and the darkest shade of Caucasian. The absurdity twisted my insides; Jaja of Opobo was not murdered so his descendants would mate exclusively with the whites, and for those who couldn’t achieve their Caucasian dream to bleach their Negro reality away. Tessy took a seat on one of the very long couches and started flipping through a magazine she’d picked up on her way in while I ogled on.

  Then I heard the loud coo echo from the staircase: “The bus is ready outside to take you back to your hostels. Make sure you’re all ready to go, the major general was very pleased with the way you treated his friends yesterday, so hopefully there will be more of that.” All the girls got up and started scurrying about with urgency but no apparent purpose. “And don’t forget to say your prayers before leaving,” Madame Messalina continued. “Tessy, nwanyi m, I’m assuming you have something to discuss with me, you can wait till the sun sets before coming to speak to me upstairs.” Madame Messalina began retracing her way back up the stairs before even arriving at the bottom landing; Tessy took her cue and followed her upstairs. When Madame was completely out of sight, the scurrying girls resumed moving about at normal pace.

  When Tessy eventually came downstairs, she said Madame Messalina had asked to see me. She guided me up the first few steps of the landing and allowed me to discover the rest of the way, along the wide curving corridor leading up another flight of stairs and finally onto the balcony, where Madame Messalina waited.

  “What are you afraid of?” she asked as I walked toward her, her voice now more woo than coo. Her skin was just as light as that of the girls who had left on the bus but for a few darkened patches around her cheeks and knuckles. The rest of her body was covered in a flowing white robe.

  “Nothing, I don’t know,” I fumbled. “I just take a while to settle down when I meet new—”

  “That’s not what I mean,” she interrupted. “Usually I would ask ‘What’s your faith?’ or ‘What do you believe in?’ But they say the eyes are the pathway to the soul. Nwoke m, I see fear in your eyes, and fai
th cannot live under the same roof with fear.”

  Her tone was far from firm, but her intent was unflinching, and in that way, she reminded me of my mother. Both were powerful masters of their own worlds, but it also seemed that their own worlds were all they had—except that my mother and Madame Messalina could not be more different. My mother lived like the almond trees that stood guard all over Madame Messalina’s compound. She grew in as many directions as she could and tried to bear as many good fruits to bless the world with as she could. She never worried about how she was going to end, whether she was going to be cut down by her òrisà or allowed to wither away in old age; she just grew. Madame Messalina, on the other hand, was a wily old animal. You could tell from her every gesture that she had once ruled the forest, but she had retired to a cavern and was letting the younglings do her bidding. As a predator, she would care for only those within her flock. Unfortunately, I was not yet certain where I stood, so I did not know if I was to stand on my guard or accept the lure of her cavern. Animals like Madame Messalina never deviated from the script: Predator hunts prey.

  I should have said something smart and assertive, like Mendaus, or replied to her question with a question, like Pastor’s son. But I did what I did best; I thought and thought without actually speaking a word until someone spoke for me, in this case Madame Messalina.

  “Nwoke m, we’re all like a gush of water through our lifetime. If we keep moving in uncertainty, we will find out when our flow comes to an end that we have been everywhere but ended up nowhere, fading away into side gutters and seeping into the soil. But if we have enough conviction, we will make ripples and waves on the sands of time. We will grow into a river and define our own shores.” She paused and moved to take a sip from the wine on the table at the far end of the balcony, and I followed her. “Nwoke m, when Tessy spoke to me about you in the other room, in all honesty, you struck me as water from the side gutters and not the rivers, and nobody likes to drink from the side gutters. Your mother still orders you around, and you have wet dreams when you miss your friends. To think I actually thought you were a man.” She placed her hands on her cheeks in mock exasperation. “But she pleaded, and I do love her very much, so I am going to see if I can save you from yourself. You have one chance to prove to me you are a man. If you don’t, back to the side gutters; but if you do, I can help you define your shores like I’m doing with the girls.”