Prince of Monkeys

by Nnamdi Ehirim

  I took a few steps away from her and flipped through the money Capone had tucked into my palm and confirmed that it was more than enough to take a taxi from anywhere to anywhere in Lagos. I began walking back toward the concrete buildings we had come from, not once looking back at Sodom, leaving the tribally marked girl staring at me in frozen confusion like a pillar of salt.

  There are two types of people. The first people know they are not born with enough; they have a definition of enough, though, and they work, to withered limbs, to attain this defined standard. The second people believe they are not born with enough, even though sometimes they actually are, but more crucially, they have no definition of enough, and so they seek to keep amassing wealth without any sort of discretion, leaving nothing to chance.

  As birds of the same feather nest together, so do people of the same type cluster together. In Lagos, the first types usually were on the mainland, and the second types were across the Third Mainland Bridge, West Africa’s longest, on the islands. The second types are not attuned to grunt work, so they import the first types from the mainland; these imports cannot afford to live on the island proper, so they settle in the outskirts, where land is cheap—Ikate, for example, where Capone and his boys found a hiding place.

  The first types were content but ambitious; the second types were in a never-ending pursuit of a seemingly elusive utopia. These two were the same people on the exterior, but in their minds, they could not have been any further apart. I had been born of the first type, and though I would not realize it till much later, I had become the second type through my association with the major general. Maybe if I had realized it earlier, I would have been better prepared to allay my mother’s temper when I stumbled into the house a couple of hours before dawn, sweaty and exhausted and without the Japanese car in sight. She hooted and tooted for an explanation.

  “Ihechi, these people you’re working for, don’t they have a conscience? Why are they keeping you outside till this time? Are they the first to give work? The people who release their staff at five o’clock, do they have two heads?”

  “Mummy, this has nothing to do with my boss. I had some other things after work that delayed me and took longer than expected.”

  “What rubbish, other things? Is it money? Is it woman? If you die now, money and woman that you’re pursuing would continue as if you never existed. Soldier come, soldier go, barracks go remain.”

  I looked on, captivated by my mother in her theatrical element while she employed the full space of the living room as her stage. I tried to lighten her up. “Ehn, because soldier would leave barracks tomorrow does not mean soldier should not parade for barracks today now.”

  She was having none of it. “What have I done to deserve this? Why has Esu picked me to make a laughingstock of? Ihechi, you’re not the first tribulation I would pray my way out of.”

  “So why do you keep praying to Esu, who never answers you? I know you were afraid for me, and I’m sorry, but it’s okay to be afraid. You don’t have to run away to those logs of wood every time you’re afraid. They’ve only ever torn us apart.”

  “Listen to yourself.” Her voice was irate. “You’ve started talking back at me when I’m talking to you, abi? You’ve been drinking as well? I can hear the smell of the hot drink in your mouth.”

  Perhaps I should have denied her last accusation immediately, but I exhaled onto my palms and placed them close to my nose to detect the pungency of the alcohol on my breath. “Are you not happy to see me here in one piece?” I digressed. “I just want to rest my head properly. You could continue all these questions by morning.”

  “Did your hot drink put you inside an accident?” she continued, her voice beginning to flare in as much concern as anger. “Is that why you came home without the car? How many times will Esu deliver you before you stop all this foolish rubbish?”

  If I had realized that she did not really care about the car, that having me safe and happy around her was more than enough for her, I would have known better than to reply. But I did not know better.

  “I would get you another car. And for the last time, I don’t believe in Esu. Esu is a fraud. The entire notion of Ifá is a fraud.”

  My mother’s face was frozen, the model of a terrifying scream stuck in a particular second in time, like a video hooked on the VCR coil. She tried to forcibly press play on her scream, but she could only rewind and get stuck on that particular second, taking a deep gasp and getting stuck in her scream again. Then she clutched her chest, still gasping for breath as her body slithered to the floor. I caught her just in time to break her fall, resting her body, now as stiff as sorrow, on the cold ground. Her face was stuck midscream, but in her eyes a thousand words were being said by the second, hundreds of synonyms for pain and fear and uncertainty resonating with every blink.

  I ran out to get the car but remembered halfway out the compound that the car was gone, so I ran back in. Halfway in I remembered there was nothing helpful inside the house, so once again I scurried outside, banging on the gates of neighbors and screaming on the street. I could see the night watchmen of the large houses on our street light their lanterns and peep through pigeonholes, but every single one of them shut their pigeonholes and dimmed their lanterns after a few seconds. I sped back into the house, but my mother was gone from the living room floor.

  Spirited away? Ifá doesn’t rapture. Perhaps phantasmagoria, a lucid dream? Yes, that, until loud incantations pierced the silence. The voice, so tender but the tone so severe, guided me through corridors. All the way I stumbled through shadows and echoes, arriving at the door to the room that was my mother’s shrine. Beyond the door, Effy, somehow awoken from sleep, crouched over my mother’s body with the opon Ifá—divination tray—in one hand and iroke Ifá—tapper rod—in the other. The tray and rod were adorned with carved images along with artistic representations of the deities my mother believed determined the comeuppance of every human existence. Effy tapped the end of the rod on the tray with a rhythm that was to invoke the presence of my mother’s òrisà, her ancestors, and Orunmila himself.

  “Onigbowa aye, the one in control of the earth,” Effy was shouting as she slipped something between my mother’s lips. I’d had no idea that she could speak Yoruba. “Alare na ode orun, the middleman between heaven and earth.” Then she cast a beaded chain onto the ground and whispered into her fingers as they settled. I could smell the burning flesh of whatever little animal she had sacrificed before I came into the room.

  I tried to get through to my mother, but Effy shoved me back. “Fimile, leave me alone.” Her eyes wielded fire. “Elekun n sunkun, Esu n sun eje; Esu is shedding blood when the owner of the problem is shedding tears.”

  “Don’t you fear God anymore?”

  “Fear God? But I’m not a Christian,” Effy replied.

  “You’re an Igbo girl; you can’t worship a Yoruba deity.”

  “And yet nobody seemed to mind when I used to worship a Jewish deity.”

  “Stop all this nonsense! Your mother’s tummy would be turning, wherever she is.”

  I forced her aside and lifted my mother off the floor, her body looser than when she was in my arms just a few minutes ago. And then slowly, her hanging head turned toward me and her lips parted, whispering, “Ifá be praised.”

  “You’re alive?” I asked in disbelief.

  Effy echoed, much louder, “Ifá be praised!”

  “The last time I was home, he queried me about not getting married yet,” said Tessy. “But when I brought out the bottle of whiskey, we spent the rest of the evening laughing about how silly a question it was to ask. My mother was livid.”

  Since I’d moved into my new flat off Upper Chime Avenue in New Haven at the start of last year, Tessy had made a habit of spending her Saturdays with me. She would first go to Ogbete market to buy all sorts of foodstuffs and condiments, then make her way to my place to prepare the meals that would be packaged in old ice cream tubs and stocked in my freeze
r to cater my stomach through the next week. On occasions when I was just returning from a trip to Lagos, she would also clean out my flat. When she was done, we would spend the rest of the day laughing over interesting updates in each other’s lives or the lives of people we knew. The people we were currently talking about were her parents.

  “If you keep pushing her buttons,” I replied finally, “one day your mother is going to blow up and pestle you into a bloody mess. After all, she has an extra daughter.”

  “Honestly, half the time she looks like she’s going to bust up in a fight at any given moment. But her scarf is my gauge; as long as her scarf is still on her head, I know I’m safe.” It was a classic Aunt Kosi move to remove her scarf from her head and tie it around her waist any time her aggravation was about to transcend into aggression. Tessy was on her feet, striding across the room and gesticulating energetically. I tossed a few roasted peanuts at her head as a tender reprimand. Tessy went on, “And if she ever found out that her extra daughter was now a pagan, all my past sins would be washed away, and I would finally, deservedly, be conferred a saint. Then, if anyone was going to get bloodied with a pestle, it would be Effy.”

  Earlier in the afternoon, I had told Tessy about Effy’s conversion. More than anything else, Tessy appeared ecstatic that Effy, like her, had failed to live up to their mother’s pious expectations of them.

  “I don’t want to be within a fifty-mile radius of your mother when she finds out,” I said.

  “No worries, she might never find out. At least I don’t plan on telling her.” She was now diving at the roasted peanuts I was still tossing at her, trying to catch each one with her mouth. “And bigger secrets have slept under the same roof with her and she never found them out.”

  I knew she was referring to her window-escaping escapades of her university days. I never would have guessed things would change so much, so quickly. Once she’d graduated from university, she had managed to sever her relationship with the major general and had only a cordial one with Madame Messalina. More remarkably, she had used her final payout from the major general to open a large boutique that was bested in stock only by Eastern Shops in the entire Enugu. I knew she made more than enough money to move out on her own, but she still regarded her parents’ reputation, even if not their opinion. A woman living outside her father’s house if single, or outside her husband’s house if married, was unequivocally equated with prostitution and a disgrace to her family.

  “What’s your take on Effy’s conversion?” I asked. “Hate it or love it, your way of thinking is cut from your mother’s cloth, but you don’t seem as worried as she would be. Why?”

  “Money matters? Yes. And maybe I can be uppity about petty things,” she replied as her eyes rolled. “But we know my mother is a chronic overreactor, which I’m far from. I know Effy’s issue is very serious, but what would screaming and skinning her do? Panicking never solved anything in this life.”

  I remembered how my mother had panicked and fainted the night I came home without the Japanese car. The same way she had panicked and sent me off to Enugu so many years ago after Zeenat died. Maybe panicking was an adult thing we were not yet privy to but ultimately destined for. Or maybe their apprehension was a consequence of all the tribulations they had endured as a generation, pressures that Tessy’s and my generation never experienced and therefore could never be shaped by. Whatever the case may be, we lived in a different time from our parents. We would never understand them, and they would never understand us, not because understanding was impossible but because both sides of the divide never asked the questions that would make understanding possible, the kind of questions that empathetically inquired opinion and not the kind that brutally enforced it.

  “Madame Messalina says she’s looking for a new lingam because you won’t have her time anymore. I’m not in the position to judge, but I think you should find someone to settle with. You need it more than I do.”

  I shrugged. “It would not matter tonight.” Major General was hosting a grand party later in the evening. It was not celebrating anything in particular, but he could afford it. Tessy had also been invited, although she had declined because the venue was his house, and she had no desire to be ogled in contempt by his wife all night long for her past sins. “There will be much bigger fish in the ocean. Major General has many important friends coming.”

  “Don’t rubbish me. Fish is fish; a bigger fish is simply the fish that is not scared of swallowing other fishes. And all you men would swallow anything in your path to down a pant.”

  I squinted in faux disgust. She read right through it and stuck out her tongue at me. After half an hour of goading, she agreed to drop me off because I knew too well I might not be sober enough to drive myself home after one of Major General’s parties.

  Popularized by the Yoruba moniker of Owambe, this type of party was the big brother to the Gbedu parties of Sodom. Men wore traditional garb with the necessary insignia to indicate their chieftaincy titles. Women wore similar garb, color-coordinated with their spouses, and heavy weights of gold unashamedly borrowed if not proudly possessed. Money was not spent; it was thrown into the air while dancing. Loud music was substituted for live music from dozen-men instrumentalist troupes, and excessive alcohol for excessive food.

  Major General’s house was not as large as Madame Messalina’s, but it was more beautiful, more of a fruition of lavish taste than lavish spending. His garden was filled with decorated tables under a large tent. Trays of food were lined underneath another tent, awaiting the commencement of the buffet, and the aroma of the cow being roasted at the back of the house pervaded the air as the guests began trooping in by sunset.

  If the major general was a grand composer, the lavish house his grand stage, and the party his grand symphony, then I had been handed the duty of conducting the orchestra. My few years in his service had made me aware of his every like and dislike, and I was to ensure that the former prevailed while the latter was confined to the barest minimum.

  “Make sure table seven always has at least two open bottles of champagne,” I barked at one waiter. The major general needed the minister seated at that table drunk by the end of the night, when they were to talk. “Not so much for table five,” I added as the waiter sped off to inform the rest of his colleagues. The major general also needed the chief justice sober enough to overhear the crucial gossip that was scheduled to be discussed loudly at the table beside him by the irrelevant from the office.

  By a cup of wine to midnight, all the guests had departed well merry. The waiters did not need supervision tidying up the garden, so I sat alone at a table, contemplating whether to spend the night or have one of the major general’s drivers take me home. The major general himself was at a table at the far end of the tent with a company of friends. They were the usual suspects: Madame Messalina, Alhaji, and the third man. Alhaji caught my gaze and waved me over. I feared the worst but walked over nonetheless.

  “Aburo!” he hailed as I drew closer. The stench of alcohol on his breath slapped my nose, and I wondered how the rest of the people on the table were coping. “Will you not come and sit on my lap?”

  “Alhaji, that’s Ihechi, not one of your chewing gum boys,” Madame Messalina intervened.

  The third man tapped Major General on the shoulder. “At this rate we will have to make him a coffin to keep him in a sitting position when he dies. If we don’t bury him with a boy on his lap, his spirit will return to hunt our first sons.”

  “Your first sons would be safe from even my spirit if we managed to take over from the military regime. They would be living in between New York and London and would never have to set foot in Nigeria again. And you know spirits cannot apply for visa to enter airplane,” Alhaji replied, laughing louder than everyone else.

  “No one is ever going to take over from the military,” I added, sensing that my opinion would be more tolerated in the present mood of banter. “I would dump all my sons in the military after t
raining them to plot coups from the cradle.”

  “There would be no need for that because the military is planning to begin a transitory process into democratic rule in the next two years,” said the major general. I fell silent, weighing the possibility of his claims. He went on, “It’s what we’ve been scheming to take advantage of for the last few weeks.”

  More silence. Then Madame Messalina said, “We’ll have to set up a political party and contest in elections and all that palaver.”

  “Tonight’s party was for attendance taking. We had discussed this idea with a lot of people, and those interested were meant to confirm their alliance by showing up today. We had a decent turnout.” A decent turnout had included the chief justice, a few serving and past ministers, and more than a dozen traditional rulers. “And that’s why we needed you to pinch that Mendaus chap for us. He would have made a good spearhead for our plans.”

  “Mendaus has ties to some other political group, but I don’t think they’re at all aware of any transitory process.”

  “And that is because when the iroko is being cut down in the forest, it is the wise who would look out for what direction it is falling,” Alhaji replied.