She picked up her glass of wine and walked toward me, placing her hand around my neck. “I know a lot of powerful people, and I can lead you through the right corridors,” she added. I took to finger-fiddling. “You look so surprised; don’t you believe me? Do you think I built this house and take care of all the girls out of my pension as a prostitute?”
She burst out in an outrageous laugh, and for a second she was cooing again. “You said it takes a while for you to settle before you meet new people, so go on and have your while. Let Tessy know if you want to play around the house, and she’ll know what to do. By the way, I do have a friend in the civil service who could get a letter to Lagos and be back with a reply within a week, just in case you want to chitchat with your friends. At least that way you could put off the wet dreams, and I could put your lingam to proper use.”
Tessy and I left Madame Messalina’s house before sunset and got to church just in time to meet up with Uncle Adol, Aunty Kosi, and Effy as they walked in for the midweek service. Madame Messalina had her driver take us in her blue Mercedes, but Tessy insisted we get out two streets away from church and complete the journey on foot. After service, the Volvo was filled with inane chatter over Rosa à Gabriel, a Mexican television show that was currently running, so I could not talk with Tessy until after we got home and had dinner.
“What’s a lingam?” I asked Tessy. She was squatting to wash a severely charred pot in a basin of brown soapy water. She gave her usual chuckle, which I now realized was a spawn of Madame Messalina’s obnoxious laughter.
“Don’t be silly, Ihechi. If you did not know what a lingam was, you wouldn’t spend so much time in the bathroom on Saturday mornings,” and she chuckled again, louder this time. “Don’t worry, when you die, you can ask Vātsyāyana why he did not just write The Kama Sutra in simple English.”
“She said she was going to put my lingam to better use.”
“Did you think Madame Messalina would help you with your issues and ask for nothing?” Finally, she seemed as serious as I was. “Oh! So, you want all your bottles full of wine but your girlfriend drunk, okwia?”
“I should sleep with that old woman so she can help me deliver a simple letter? When it’s not like I cannot find my way to the post office again.”
“And have those illiterates use your letter from the depth of your heart to wrap their smoke, ehn? Besides, it’s not like she’s going to sleep with you, oh, maybe she’ll just have you run errands for her and her friends.”
Aunt Kosi came in from the back door with a heap of starched shirts in her arms, and Tessy gave me a stern look that choked my reply. “The way you people always follow one another about, if you weren’t cousins, I would have thought Ihechi was discussing plans to visit us with his father and a crate of hot drinks.” Aunt Kosi bounced her jolly laughter against the walls as she left the kitchen.
“Just tell that woman my lingam is mine to use as I please. I don’t need her, or her major general, or her friends in the civil service who deliver letters.”
“Can’t you see further than your letters? Madame Messalina can help you get on your feet. Ihechi, it’s either you choose to get beaten by the sun or flogged by the rain, or else you will die of hunger under the comfort of this roof.”
“Is that why you sleep with all those old bastards?” I looked into her eyes and saw the frailty in her ignorance. “And Tobenna knows about this, so that’s what both of you disappear in the middle of the night to do? You’re too intelligent to let these people feed you lies, too beautiful to let them take advantage of you.”
“You think you’re any different from the old bastards I sleep with?” The charred pot dropped from Tessy’s hands and clattered onto the floor as she stood up and pushed me away, her hands trembling in rage. “All you men are empty; your words are empty; your hearts are empty. You’ll offer the whole world, but your sense of generosity is so empty that the best you ever give is good intentions. But good intentions never fed me, and good intentions never kept me warm. So yes, call me a whore! But don’t judge me—aren’t we all whores for a better life?”
Aunt Kosi and Effy rushed into the kitchen screaming holy obscenities. Tessy stood glass-eyed, trembling, and in no position to tell a story. I walked out of the kitchen before the explanation was required of me, leaving behind the barrage of questions and Aunt Kosi’s allusions to my Yoruba heritage as the cause of fracas. I went to the bedroom and seethed in the shadows. All forms and shapes were cast on the bare ground outside the window by the half-moon up high, a short crescent, as if the galaxy were smirking mischievously at all that had happened. The night air had a chill, so I clutched the pillow close to my chest and wondered if the moon gave the same demeanor to my family and friends in Lagos. But then it dawned on me that I had no reason to wonder idly when I could write to ask. I fetched pen and paper and wrote under the moonlight:
Dear Mendaus,
It’s been about five months already since I left Lagos and about five months I’ve been planning to write with some explanation. But I’ve only just learned tonight that actions are the plainest truths and explanations often confuse more than they could ever hope to enlighten.
So these are the actions as they happened: After the bonfire at the Shrine, my mother panicked and sent me off the next day to Enugu. I’m staying with my father’s family now. My uncle has no care in the world for anything other than simple stuff; my aunt is more tribalist and naive than I ever thought possible; and as for my cousins, I think one is a prostitute and the other is a priest-in-waiting.
I heard a groan in the springs of the bed, followed by a slight movement at the other corner of the bed. It was Effy. She had been asleep and I had not noticed. I paused in the sway of my slight cursive for a while and watched her watch me. She reminded me of myself so many years ago, a shadow ever present, an observer ever silent. I wished very badly for her to deviate from the perilous path I was just returning from. My muscles tensed as she maintained her fixed gaze on me and I battled the urge to cudgel her head, in my father’s devil-incarnate manner, to bring my point upon her: This world has not the courtesy to ask your opinion on anything, and opinions should be spoken with or without warrant because it is the silent and lifeless that get pissed on. But she stared for a while and then stared some more until her body yawned and returned her head to its pillow. I poured myself into the letter with renewed urgency:
This place is strange to me. It is without all of the sincerity of words and motives, no matter how favorable or not, I was surrounded with in Lagos. Everything I do gives away how different I am, so I don’t need to be told I’m walking on thin ice. I would have preferred if everyone was as cold toward me in their actions as I’m sure they are in thought. At least that way I’d know around whom and to what extent I need to be careful. But instead they are all very warm, so it’s easy to forget I am on ice.
I still think about every one of you I left in Lagos, and more often than convenient, I especially think of Zeenat. Her death finds a new way to haunt me every hour; lonely walks are just as much torture as crowded streets. And it’s only at night that I become familiar with more sensual thoughts of her. Certainly, I know that even if you and I never share a laugh or a story, a beer or a smoke, or another moment in each other’s company, memories of Zeenat are something we will share forever.
Till we see each other next, may the rift between us be bridged by letters, let these words absolve the grievance of my leaving, and let the drops of my oceans of emotion that they capture be proof that my leaving was never anything hateful. Forgive me for all of the suffering I have put you through, but I promise you I did not suffer any less.
Think of me kindly,
Ihechi
I folded the letter four times and slipped it between the pages of one of my school notebooks on the dresser. The next day after school, I headed straight for the post office.
Tessy was right about the post office. I waited endlessly for a reply, returning three ti
mes a week to ask about a letter from Lagos. The only success I managed in that entire endeavor was being able to bang on the clerk’s desk hard enough to awaken the ever slumbering civil servant.
Even after I admitted that Tessy was right, we still saw eye to eye over little after the incident of Madame Messalina’s house. We still went to school together and exchanged our different accents and laughter in conversation, but her accented sentences were not as long and frequent, and her laughter was not as loud and genuine, as before. And I did not follow her around after school, except when she stated we were going to Tobenna’s flat and back without any diversions.
Tobenna still came around occasionally in the dark of the night to lure Tessy out of the house. Tessy still folded naira notes under my pillow when she returned just as before, and I would wonder what home had been torn apart, hinge after hinge, by her footsteps as they danced to the bedroom or parlor or wherever it was she did what she did that required my purchased silence. I was not sure if Tessy thought I would tell on her and genuinely believed her money could assure her peace of mind, or if she was just giving me a share of the spoils.
There were two types of Enugu people: those who intolerably adhered to the traditional past, and those who flung themselves into the open arms of civilization. The men were in their red caps and beads, with the former often feathered, the occasional bald head, which whispered wisdom, and potbelly, which echoed wealth. Or they wore fancy hats hanging loosely from every angle of hip-pop Afro-punks, strangling gold chains, and pointed shoes. The traditional women were glorious in their wrappers with their hair braided or knotted into befitting crowns, while the modern women adjusted their kinky hair into flowing manes, and adjusted their psyches as well, because they walked as confident as lions. While a lot of the young were stuck in a social limbo, the rite of passage into full-fledged adulthood seemed to be that point of decision when you put the fork in the road behind you.
I unwittingly acquiesced to the potbellied ways of the past because my separation from Tessy and consequential loafing around the house made me prey to Uncle Adol’s alcohol-tainted yarns every other evening. After he arrived from work and had his siesta, he would send me to fetch a small bottle of dry gin from the bar a few streets away. Then he would walk to the edge of his veranda and pour out splashes of whiskey on the ground in between the bottom of the staircase and his Volvo for his ancestors to partake, and then he would offer a cap full to Aunt Kosi, who would always refuse, before indulging himself. And as he drank, he would begin his story for the day to whoever did not steer clear of his sight.
The first time I fell victim, he defended strongly his stance on drinking in the sanctity of his home and not irresponsibly at beer parlors, as his father, my grandfather, always did. Many years ago, by the setting of the sun every day on that very same veranda, they—my grandmother, my uncle Adol, and my father, Cletus—would all converge to tell exaggerated stories of how their days went. The boys took turns to go and fetch my grandfather from Mama Nkechi’s inn, the local beer parlor. And if they set out a moment too late, they would come home fatherless, only to have their father knocking away at the front door well after midnight. Each and every one of such nights followed the same procession. Their father would stand at the corner of the room almost theatrically, allowing the flickering flames of the candle on the center table to create a shadow on the wall behind him, enlarged in both size and terror, oblivious to his wife’s silent tears and his children’s absorbing gazes from their bedroom window. Then he would go on a wild display of ranting.
“Look, Ezinne,” he would tell my grandmother, “the moh-rah-lee-tee of law can be tampered with, but the moh-rah-lee-tee of justice cannot change,” adding emphasis on any word containing more than three syllables. Then, after setting the stage with his unchanging opening statement, he would go on into the night about the “nah-shun-nah-leests” or the “proh-greh-seefs” and how they “mean business” about one thing and “fake it” about the other. When he started speaking in languages nobody else could understand, my grandmother’s silent tears would be transformed into loud intermittent sobs.
“I guess she knew people only started speaking in strange languages when they had been afflicted with terrible madness by wicked witches in the village looking to curse those who had attained wealth far away and refused to return to share the fruits of their labor,” Uncle Adol explained in her defense. In the morning, the bright sunshine would wash away the sins of the night before, as they would all continue life without showing the slightest hint of discord, like servants in a king’s palace.
“He ate so little but had the fattest belly,” Uncle Adol would continue to me, as if oblivious of his own fat belly. “Even his breasts were protruding. And as his breasts grew larger, other women juices—you know, those juices in women that cause them to nag—started growing inside him.” And then he would laugh, almost off his chair, then force a shot of whiskey down my throat. “Sometimes I wondered if our women ancestors had such strong blood that could overcome the gender barrier and cause women juices to start growing in men like my father. What else could explain all those women behaviors in my father?” In an hour we would both be drunk and teary-eyed from laughter.
Soon enough, our bond grew over more bottles of whiskey, and sometimes he would even permit me to offer our ancestors their portion of whiskey before we started drinking. Sometimes Aunt Kosi would bring out roasted cashew nuts on a huge tray for us; she always looked grateful that I had come to rescue her from her husband’s opinions and stories. Uncle Adol told me how he would go off to catechism classes after school while my father worked the chores with their mother for the rest of the day: He had found the Lord Jesus and my grandmother was pleased. She had lofty dreams that her first boy would grow up to become a well-known reverend father who would walk side by side with the white men sharing communion, praying for the sick and doing other great things. And maybe one day she would be recognized as the one who had birthed such a great man of God and be regarded around town as some sort of Virgin Mary.
On the days when there were no catechism classes, my father would go on with the rest of the children of the dirt road to do the troublesome things children usually did. But he did not go out to play much, because unlike his brother, he had neither the temperament nor the spiritual serenity to stomach being taunted as a drunkard’s son, even though almost every other child they knew was a ward of men who either shared or helped sponsor his father’s habits; besides, none of the children in the neighborhood were really much like him.
“We were all paw-paw seed-brained fellows, you know,” Uncle Adol said as he pressed his forefinger to his thumb so I could visualize his point. “Our thoughts of ambition before they went to bed each night were never more than waking up early enough to catch the morning-ripe almond fruits before they hit the ground. On the other hand, your father dreamed of having the prestigious life of a doctor or soldier or even an international drumbeater, like Chris Anyogu from Orlu. Chai! The ladies really loved Chris Anyogu.” Then Uncle Adol went on talking about Chris Anyogu for the next hour, and the fame and prowess of his band and their ballads. While, on a low key, I wondered if it was humanly possible for any man not of Yoruba heritage to attain the tempo of percussions set by the fuji bands of Egbeda.
When there was no money for whiskey, Uncle Adol would settle for bottles of beer, and the stories would continue. Though he and the other children would not understand, Uncle Adol later admitted, my grandmother encouraged her younger son in his wild dreams. “She said it was that kind of thinking that would make him a great man like Nnamdi Azikiwe, who sat down with the white men like an equal and even rubbed the tops of their heads when they laughed over jokes together,” Uncle Adol said, deep in thought, with his eyes to the ground where he splashed his alcohol, as if every word he spoke had been relayed to him by our ancestors. “She gave him one of our father’s empty squadron bottles and told him that any time he had a new dream, he should write it dow
n and bottle it so he would have it forever and never forget the destination he was working toward. So he put his little dream of becoming an international drumbeater down on paper and bottled it. A few weeks later, when he saw a group of soldiers at Mama Nkechi’s inn break up a fight and inflict brisk discipline on the culprits, he dreamed of becoming a high-ranking military official so he could put into people the polite kind of fear that cowards like to refer to as respect. And as soon as the piece of paper floated to the bottom of the bottle, he was already dreaming of becoming an official driver to a white man, so he would be able to get close enough to understand for himself the mysteries behind the color of their skin.”
I laughed, not at my father’s childish ways but at memories of times when I also saw things in only black and white; when I used to think things were either good or bad and my father was only loving or unloving. I laughed because now I understood not just black and white but gray. I understood not just blue and green but turquoise, too. That red was not one color but scarlet, burgundy, carmine, maroon, and rose. And that there was much more to life than what met the eye. It was strange hearing stories about my father that portrayed him as this jukebox of dreams and embodiment of hope, an anathema to the defeated soul I knew him to be. How much of my father did I really know? He fed me, clothed me, put a roof over my head, paid my fees, and spat out his life’s frustration at me. Finish. And I had been comfortable with that all my life. I had never cared to wonder if he was religious or fetish, compliant or rebellious, dream-laden or genius enough to have schemed to be so desolate from the very beginning. And as he had never bothered to share, how was I to avoid falling into the same potholes?
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