Prince of Monkeys

by Nnamdi Ehirim

  Madame Messalina and Tessy laughed with their heads cocked backward, as they always did; they were probably the only people in the room who knew I was actually still a teenager. Tessy went to meet the major general, and he quieted for the rest of the evening, except when she put her face to his neck and his voice boomed. The rest of the men remained distracted with the other girls, and I remained in the corner. Occasionally, they would snap out of their halcyon and remind each other about less important issues. Madame Messalina caught my gaze from a distance, and she meandered around the room, appropriately apportioning glances of approval and twitches of reprimand to her girls, before finally ending up where I was.

  She whispered into my ear, “I know all this is new to you, but you really can’t ignore all the beauty around the room. Get off the wall and live for the moment.” She sipped on her drink between every few sentences, as I had noticed Tessy do occasionally. “Never forget: Be as generous with hellos as you are with goodbyes, because the only difference between a bride and a widow is time.” She placed her hand on my chest, feeling for my heartbeat, and then ran her fingers down to the buckle of my belt. “But let’s leave the lessons for later; tonight is for hellos, and you, nwoke m, are the bride.”

  With her hands wrapped around my belt buckle, she led me into an adjoining room. It was dark, and she did not bother to light it. Her actions echoed my thoughts in soft caresses of melodious motion, like a backup singer getting in sync with the lead’s harmony. I leaned against the wall for support in the dark and she leaned in to me. I put my hands on her waist and she guided them lower. I licked my lips and she kissed them. And then, deviating from what my fantasy was scripting, she took a solo performance.

  “I love you, too,” I said to her in a hushed tone. She paused for a moment, looking at me, confused, but I was lost for words to explain. In all her years and after all her men, she could not understand that oral consummation was the most intimate form of sex, with every attention to detail being paid to pleasuring your partner’s organ of adoration and none to your selfish cravings, as selflessly intimate as love itself. That was the first night I was with a girl other than Zeenat. It was the first time I tried to picture Zeenat’s face in my mind but found the memory fading.

  Part 3

  1997

  Graduation from university and growing up had a lot of twists. All through our childhood, we dreamed of dressing up in suits from eight in the morning to eight in the evening, working the most important jobs for money, only to mature and realize that what gave us the most happiness was the exact opposite. Our expectations were rarely in tandem with reality. I never would have seen myself exchanging sweat, spit, and semen with a woman my mother’s age. And even if I had envisioned it in a bizarre dream, surely I wouldn’t have seen myself enjoying it time and time again.

  The first time we had sex in her room, Madame Messalina shut the windows and turned off all artificial ventilation so the room was airtight. “Thinking of this moment has had me sweating for two days nonstop,” I complained. “If you don’t put on a fan, I’ll melt in your hands.”

  “That’s why your skin is glowing so much,” she consoled as she pressed her skin against mine underneath the cool sheets.

  “You mean that’s why my skin smells so much.”

  “The smell is a short-term sacrifice for the glow.” Her hands guided mine toward her breasts. “Imagine if you didn’t sweat and all the disgusting things that cause the smells stayed in your body on and on.”

  “So that’s your secret to defy age?”

  “Exactly! I found the fountain of youth, and you know why most people never find it? It’s because they’re looking for a place where they can drink purity and live forever, when really, it’s a place where you forsake all your impurities so you can live forever.”

  “But there’s no forever. We all live and we all die, impurities or not.”

  She wrapped her hand around my lingam and buried it in her warm, wet yoni, pushing into me again and again, ever slowly and ever firmly. “Does this feel like a moment or does this feel like forever?”

  I satisfied Madame Messalina’s needs and she satisfied my curiosities, but we were never an emotional fit. I’m not sure she needed me to be. After our affairs, I collected a thick brown envelope and explored the streets of Enugu. Another twist to life after graduation was that you had to make more deliberate attempts to meet women: know enough current affairs to discuss politics with a lady in line at the bank; dress up enough to look sexy but not so much to appear overly horny or just plain degenerate-won-the-lottery. Guys didn’t just run into girls who had something to say first, like on campus or in Madame Messalina’s house.

  The bookstore in the business district of the city was the closest semblance of a university campus, frequented by a few guys who preferred an easy way out of socializing. Bookshelves climbing the entire height of the room were set up to form spacious rectangular cells that had raffia chairs and tables arranged in the middle. Guys who would not come alive amid the cold and insincere streets of Enugu found the bookstore a more conducive habitat to let their hormones roam, checking out and purchasing literature and music, walking about, occasionally making conversation with a stranger who appeared to share a similar taste, such as Amos Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.

  The lady was returning a paperback copy while I was about to buy one. She was like Eucharia Anunobi in Glamour Girls, everything—from her bright cropped clothes and bold makeup to her dramatic gestures and pop-star demeanor—seeking attention, and her beauty in motion justified all the attention she got. That day she got all of my attention, beginning with a smile and a handshake, then a conversation. She thought Tutuola’s writing was crass, and the thoughts behind it laden with a childish sort of naïveté. I had never read the book but, knowing the history behind it, had respect for the brazen spirit of a man who had no history and fantasy of his own choosing to tell his story for himself. We then battled over the sexes. Chinua Achebe or Buchi Emecheta? Fela Kuti or Sade Adu? We did not find common ground till our interests traveled abroad and we mutually consented to the dream-woven prospect of Whitney Houston and Luther Vandross creating an album together.

  I spun the key chain to my new Peugeot 505 around my index finger and asked for her name and address, one right after the other. She withdrew a little magazine from her bag, then began scribbling just below the frayed edges. I recognized the familiar frowsy fellow gracing its cover page: the browned and curled knots of the Afro tapering down to thin sideburns that reached out for a thick goatee like the fingers of Adam reaching out to the hand of God in Michelangelo’s famous fresco; the glasses frames looked larger but of the same style as when I first met this man almost twenty years ago, although the scar that ran above his right eyebrow was new to me.

  “What’s your take on him?” she asked when she noticed me staring at the cover page. “Is he Mendaus the menace, as the government papers suggest, or Mendaus the messiah, as the people’s papers say?”

  “I know him only as Mendaus Mohammed,” I replied curtly.

  “I don’t know many people who know his second name, not even the government papers.”

  “We grew up sharing smoke, most of the time from the same joint. I tend to have history with a lot of these people in the news.” She smiled, but I kept a straight face; I had perfected my Rick Blaine in Casablanca face a long time ago.

  “Go on, don’t be modest,” she said. “Blow your trumpet, connect with your inner Smokey Miles.”

  “What does Smokey Miles have to do with this?”

  “Smokey Miles . . . the jazz instrumentalist . . . connect the dots.”

  “Smokey Miles wasn’t a jazz instrumentalist, that’s Smokey Robinson.”

  “I’m not stupid. I know Smokey Robinson, he was a pop artist.” She was giggling now.

  “The pop artist was Sugar Robinson,” I argued.

  “Isn’t Sugar Robinson the boxer?” she corrected yet again. “Or is that t
he pretty singer from that movie The Color Purple?”

  “No, biko, that’s Shug Avery.” I had lost my Rick Blaine face and was giggling, too.

  “Wait, so who is Smokey Miles again?”

  “I don’t know. Some jazz instrumentalist is what you said. But what does that have to do with anything?”

  “Oh, yes! You were meant to blow your trumpet like Smokey—Miles, not Robinson.”

  “Carry go with your palaver,” I said, pushing her away gently, but when she made to leave, I held on to her arm. She gave me the magazine with her number on it, and after talking for another half hour, we parted ways.

  I spent the next half hour flipping through Mendaus’s interview in the magazine. The bold quote below his picture on the first page was Mendaus’s typical intellectual jargon, the sort that appealed to the pseudo-intellectual elites who patronized our publishers: “I am an artist with no muse, all I have is myself. I do not seek anyone’s validation; everyone who is worthy is dead. Don’t tear down my symphony because you were brought up on ballads. You don’t have to crown me king, just acknowledge my kingdom.”

  I did not know anyone who could aptly describe the crude affairs of Nigerian politics with art and symphonies except Mendaus, not one person at all who could do so without appearing mad. But Mendaus was not bonkers-and-raving mad; he was subtle-whisperer-of-the-town’s-secrets mad, the type of mad the town rulers feared. And in Nigeria, there were many town secrets and rulers. I searched the article for the fearful secrets he was spewing on the occasion.

  MAGAZINE: What do you think are the prime needs of the eighty million plus Nigerians living below the poverty line in the villages, towns, and even Lagos? Food and water or housing and education, some dare say tribalism?

  MENDAUS: No, not at all. I know hunger and thirst are painful, but food and water can wait. Being homeless isn’t a mother’s dream, but housing can wait, too. Missionaries gave us these things for centuries, and after that philanthropists gave them to us for decades. But what we need more than all of that is leaders, leaders who would walk among the evil for the sake of the greater good, guide the minds of the people, and show them how to uplift themselves.

  MAGAZINE: That’s an interesting perspective. And how close do you think our present leaders are to providing these solutions?

  MENDAUS: We don’t have leaders, we have politicians. Politicians have nothing to offer but words. They are victims of privilege of the system, so why would they want it to change? A revolution is in the hands of the people.

  MAGAZINE: Are you suggesting a civil uprising is indirectly the prime need of the Nigerian people? If the people cannot afford to pay for things with cash, they should pay with blood?

  MENDAUS: Not at all, this is far from a call to arms. It is a call to break free from cults of personality that are stealing our bread and placating us with crumbs, to curb our dependence on Western culture and be brave enough to depart from the twilight of our traditional culture because the only worthy culture is the culture of self-learning. The window of opportunity is open now. Light a fire to illuminate your mind, let the passion of your soul fuel it like dry wood, pass it on to as many torches as are ready, and when the time comes, we shall use this fire to raze the walls of oppression to the ground.

  Typical Mendaus. His rise to fame had coincided with my rise to fortune. We had both attained greater heights riding on the shoulders of giants. I started working for the major general about a year before the 1994 presidential election that was meant to see the peaceful transition of power from military regime to civilian rule. I had never known whose side we were on, the military or any one of the civilian groups sharpshooting for power, but it was not my job to know. My job was to serve as the unseen and unheard courier between the major general and his allies. I never knew any of the allies, but that was not my job, either. All I had to do was tuck brown envelopes into newspapers and drop them on tables in hotel lobbies until whoever recognized his consignment came to collect, or picking up briefcases from the landings of empty staircases in multistory buildings.

  All of this occurred after the campaign organization Mendaus was working with—Democracy Union—registered as a political party for the 1994 election, about the same time they were releasing public statements condemning the military, and just before the group’s activities were suspended by the military regime and its most prominent members indefinitely detained in police custody. It was Mendaus, previously unknown to the public eye, who led the protests for their release. It took a week for the military to coerce the detained Democracy Union members to identify the unknown noisemaker and almost a month before the media knew. But all they had was a first name. There was no surname or address or personal detail that could aid the hounding of the rebel, just threats. It was sometime during this period that he was dubbed “Mendaus the menace.”

  The election eventually came and passed as freely and fairly as the watching world had hoped, to the dismay of the foreign press, who had dreamed up Pulitzer-worthy headlines and metaphors for the bloodshed and carnage they predicted. But as we were Nigerians, it was beyond possibility to let any ray of spotlight shining upon us to go unbasked in, and so we entertained the world. A petition was made by some unknowns to have the elections canceled; a court without due jurisdiction dribbled the country’s entire legal practice and upheld the petition, then passed it to the military regime, which—never failing to be the star of the show—annulled the election results with such aplomb that you would think they had strategized the move from the very beginning! And the audience went wild . . . with riots in the streets, searching for blood and fire to quell the bitter betrayal on their tongue. Houses were looted, cars were burned, and government workers were targeted for murder.

  Chaos ensued, and journalists scurried across and within the borders to script the inferno, one level of the Nigerian hell at a time. And as Dante looked to Virgil for guidance through the perilous paths, so did a few journalists take to Mendaus, who had an opinion on every fire lit or smoldered in the name of justice. More than anything else, it was his natural showmanship that fueled his flight to fame. I was watching the BBC via cable when a British presenter covering the riots in Lagos asked Mendaus to describe the riots in one simple word, setting him off on a tirade: “There’s no name to this cause other than justice. If there’s a name, there’s something for the enemy to attack and distort. You give it a name, and they’ll spread lies and misconceptions about that name before truth is done tying its shoelaces. Just live out the cause, and at worst they’ll attack your person, but your cause stays untainted. If there’s a name, it becomes a religion, a cult, then it needs a chief priest, a leader everyone can look to for guidance. Having anyone above equals is brewing egoism and jealousy. Egoism and jealousy mixed together is self-destruction. Without a name, there’s freedom to have a parallel structure where everyone learns from each other. No chief priest, no ego, no self-destruction.” Ironically, this was the speech that earned him the moniker “Mendaus the messiah.”

  On one other occasion, he had strayed off topic during a radio interview, digressing from a critique of the military regime’s tyrannical attitude toward political groups to give an enchanting eulogy of Ken Saro-Wiwa, who had been hanged on the orders of the military government. Mendaus went on to refer to Saro-Wiwa’s Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People as a model political group in the stand against military dictatorship in Africa. Since then, I had followed his articles and interviews with steadfast discipleship, to the major general’s amusement.

  “That Mendaus chap, a lot of what he says is true, and he is bold. He’s like a Rottweiler in a cage, waiting to be unleashed on the thieves in the garden,” he said, and I smiled, my chest swelling with pride on Mendaus’s behalf. “But you know the thing about Rottweilers in a cage, they just assume that the louder their noise, the better their chances are of escaping their cage. And I can’t judge them, because they’re animals with pitiful brains. I only get upset when humans
, people like that Mendaus chap, think like animals with pitiful brains. Barking in the cage gets the Rottweiler shot by the thieves in the garden. And usually, the loudest dog gets shot first.”

  The bubble of pride in my chest popped like a balloon that had strayed too close to the sun. The major general put the truth plainly, without making any extra effort to convince me, resting assured that my disbelief of the truth could not make his words any less true.

  Not much was ever said about the major general’s person, and as soon became the norm, I never asked questions. But since he played a rather significant role in the latter stages of my life, it is only fair that I gather a few sentences to explain him and what we did. He was a power broker and I was his left hand, bearing the shield that protected his image from public scrutiny as his right hand prodded the dagger of power. If he had told me he was much older than he looked, I still would have guessed he was in his mid-forties. In ten years, he had elevated himself from police officer to supplier of retired police arms to warring university confraternities, and then supplier of these battle-tested university confraternity members to local politicians for “canvassing grassroots support,” until he eventually monopolized the distribution chain and was supplying politicians and government appointees across the entire eastern region. There was no way I would have deciphered all of this from the start, but it did not take too long to figure out after I began receiving and sharing his envelopes and briefcases, and attending public functions on his behalf, overhearing people discuss him in whispers, urging each other to seek his support in search of an appointment or to stay wary of him lest he dealt with them like a Mr. So-on-and-so-forth, who was always either dead or out of the public eye.