La Bastarda

by Trifonia Melibea Obono

  “Like what?” I asked.

  Little by little, as we talked, I began to understand the details of a story that had begun with the infertility of my grandmother’s only living male child. Three wives had abandoned him already, and, even worse, they had managed to have children with men from neighboring villages. My grandfather had then come to the painful conclusion that it was his son who was sterile, and decided to look for a solution. To do so, he needed to resort to the genes of someone both related and discreet. Marcelo had been chosen for the task in the House of the Word, whose decisions are obeyed as if they were law. I asked if this business of impregnating sisters-in-law was customary.

  “That’s right, it’s custom,” Restituta said, nodding her head and smoothing her hair. She was always fixing it and never left the house unless it was to buy some sort of hair product from one of the shops in town.

  “The women agree to this?”

  The two adults exchanged a complicit glance.

  My uncle tried to instill some discretion in Restituta. “Careful what you tell her. Remember she’s still a child.”

  The unexpected shift in the conversation made me feel increasingly nervous. What am I going to tell my grandfather? I wondered. Marcelo asked me to pass along two messages: first, that the tribe not count on him for this and, second, that they not use the feelings he had for me to torment him and make him feel guilty.

  But how could I say those things to my grandfather? And why wouldn’t my uncle just do what the tribe wanted? I asked him, but he avoided answering me by offering me a plate of vegetables he’d prepared. His hands had been made for the culinary arts, a woman’s task, another thing which angered Barefoot Osá.

  Through clenched teeth, Uncle Marcelo recounted the day he had been kicked off the local football team by order of the House of the Word for not being a “useful” man.

  “I’m sure they already knew about your living situation on the farm,” Restituta said. An irritated look from my uncle silenced her.

  I accepted the offer to eat with them, and we sat down at the table. Between bursts of laughter and taking advantage of Marcelo’s absence—he had gone to the kitchen to fill a jug of water—Restituta, a little tipsy now, confessed that my uncle refused the request because he is a man-woman.

  “But what is a man-woman?” I asked, just as my uncle returned.

  “I told you not to tell the girl things she can’t understand!”

  “All right,” Restituta said, resigned, raising her hands in a show of innocence.

  After finishing the meal, I returned home. My uncle had been affectionate with me and given me some pieces of sugarcane. We agreed that I would visit him the next afternoon before he returned to the forest. I made one last attempt to ask him about my father, but he responded by looking down and reluctantly saying, “Soon,” just like always. Then he added a message for my grandmother: that she and the other women in town stop blaming him, since he had nothing to do with the bad harvests.

  When I got home, my grandmother was standing with one foot inside and the other outside the house, devouring a plate of smoked fish in peanut sauce. She asked me how the visit went. To avoid answering her directly, I first relayed my uncle’s message. Her reaction was immediate.

  “Sit down, Granddaughter, and listen.”

  I obeyed. Unlike her husband, who smothered my attempts to discover my paternal origins with never-ending stories about the adventures of men from our tribe, my grandmother spent most of her time telling me about the restrictions the tribe placed on women, the disgraces of married life, or how shameless my mother had been. But this time she told me that my uncle was a bad influence because he didn’t lead a normal life and that I had to stop visiting him immediately. And if for some reason I found myself in his presence, I had to try and get away however I could.

  She said that the first strange thing people had noticed about him was how he treated the dead. He had brought a jar back from Spain containing the remains of his father’s burnt body.

  “Who knows? Maybe he burned him alive and collected the ashes. What’s worse, he placed the jar in the living room where everyone could see it! Does he have no shame?”

  She looked so sad as she told me this story, with her hands pressed to the sides of her face, that all I wanted to do was run away. I didn’t understand the connection between the ashes of Marcelo’s father and the crops. She explained: In Fang tradition, the dead rested underneath the earth and their deaths were celebrated. But the man-woman hadn’t wanted to hold the necessary ceremonies, and as a result his father’s spirit had appeared to some members of the tribe demanding that tradition be followed.

  “And since his son won’t obey him,” my grandmother continued, “the deceased, from his world, has decided to curse the crops.”

  “And how does that work, Abuela?” I asked, a skeptical look on my face.

  “From the beyond! What’s more, his ghost has reduced the number of fish in the rivers, the number of animals in the forest, the crops! The weather has changed. It no longer rains and the sun doesn’t shine like before. Even your dead mother’s brother, Marcelino, became sterile because of this curse sent by the spirit of your grandfather’s brother.”

  Finally, my grandmother began to discuss the main reason for my visit to that “sanctuary of sin,” as she called my uncle’s home. I doubted whether informing her of what I’d been told would calm her down, but luck saved me. Just then, the son of the village healer appeared in our kitchen, and the two of them started gossiping. I knew it had to be a delicate matter because my grandmother asked me to go with her immediately.

  Both of us wore large popó dresses and sandals on our feet. My grandmother saw that many men were gathered in a bar along the way. Following her lead, I entered the tavern, where we sat on some empty wooden seats. Then she ordered me to go over to Ciriaco, a forty-something-year-old man who had gray hair and was known to be a good worker.

  “Tell him you need a sardine. He should buy you one,” she told me, smiling. “And call him Papa while you’re at it.”

  “Is he my father?” I was overcome with emotion, but it didn’t last long.

  “No, of course not. Well, I don’t know. He was chasing your mother’s skirts for a time.”

  “Then why should I call him Papa?”

  “Because you’re the daughter of all the men in the world; you’re the daughter of an unmarried Fang woman. What you’re going to do is take advantage of being a bastarda, since no man paid the dowry for your mother!”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, confused.

  “You don’t understand how tasty chocolate mixed with malanga leaves and sardines is? You don’t understand the possibility of tasting that sauce? You still don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?”

  “Of course I do, Abuela,” I said, lowering my gaze.

  “That’s what I like to hear.”

  “Of course, Abuelita.”

  I stood up and spent almost a minute distractedly looking for my sandals under the table. Or at least pretending to. I wasn’t really looking for anything. I just didn’t know if I could call a man Papa if he wasn’t my father. I wanted to ask my real father why he’d abandoned me, and if he knew my mother was dead and that I was an orphan. A shove from my grandmother snapped me back to reality. She pushed me toward the group of men, and I almost knocked over their table and all their glasses of malamba.

  The men started to laugh and crack jokes. My grandmother’s insistent gaze pulled from my lips a “Papa, I need a sardine.” All the men fell silent and stared at me, unsure of who I was talking to. My grandmother rescued me from the awkward situation by pointing to Ciriaco.

  “The girl has asked you for a favor,” she explained with a cynical smile.

  The man relented and called me hija. When his drinking buddies asked if he was sure he was my father, he said it didn’t matter, since in the end I was the daughter of an unmarried Fang woman. I was frozen from embarrassment, so m
y grandmother took the sardines and, as soon as she had the can in her hands, we left.

  We barely spoke for the ten minutes it took us to reach the curandera’s house. My grandmother passed the time caressing the can of sardines and pointing out the advantages of being a bastarda. I thought only of my father: where he was and why he didn’t come looking for me. I needed to see him, to kiss him and tell him everything that had happened to me since I was a child. I wanted to tell him that I would go and live with him even if he had no home, no family, no friends; to show him my good grades; and to ask him to come whenever there were celebrations at my school.

  At last we reached the curandera’s residence. She was on her farm, a few paces from her home, treating someone. But as soon as she noticed us, she came to speak to my grandmother. They mostly talked about the thousands of francs my grandmother would have to pay to regain her husband’s sexual interest: 50,000 in total. I sneezed to try and disguise the surprised noise that came out of my mouth. The fright of all that money!

  She was dressed in animal skins cured by the village hunters, her spouses, and local curanderos. She assured us that a method existed—which only she knew—to attract husbands to the conjugal bed from which they’d fled. This news saddened my grandmother, for she didn’t have such a sum.

  “Do you have the money or not? I’m in a hurry. I’m a very busy woman. I’ll tell you one thing: other women have recovered their husbands with the help of my cure.”

  “Well, first tell me what it’s made from.”

  “It involves adding some drops of menstrual blood to your husband’s favorite meal,” she answered, laughing. “But the process will have no effect unless you add some herbs that only I know about. When you manage to get the 50,000 francs, we’ll talk. Many women who have borne bastard children know what my powers can do—like your dead daughter, who gave you this granddaughter who has proven herself incapable of attracting men to the household.”

  “And she’s already been menstruating for some time now,” my grandmother remarked, looking at me accusingly.

  I swallowed painfully, silently enduring their criticism until the curandera finally decided to leave us.

  I was dying to ask my grandmother if she planned to follow her advice, but the joy lighting up her face told me everything I needed to know. She was willing to do anything to have my barefoot grandfather return to her bed.

  What’s so special about him? I wondered as we returned home. I didn’t understand anything or anyone—not even my uncle Marcelo, who, according to my grandmother, was evidently responsible for all the ills befalling the village and our family. I’d heard so many outrageous things about him that I started to doubt his character. I decided to confront him about everything the next day. That way he could explain how he could bring the ashes of his father back from Spain after having burned him. Do they really burn people alive in Spain? What a barbaric country! I thought.

  That night, after we had finished dinner, the entire family moved into the main house, built with wood and panels and divided into three rooms. My grandfather’s two wives each had a bedroom, and the other room was for us ten grandchildren still living at home. Our group also included the second wife’s nephew, who we were forbidden to speak to. Since we didn’t have a separate bedroom, the living room was an improvised space full of old mattresses and sheets smelling of urine. If only I had a father. Surely he would build a bed for his daughter and I could go away with him, I said to myself every night. I couldn’t stop thinking about this idea. I hated our house, with its half-broken windows covered by moth-eaten curtains, and the fights that broke out every day, both among us children and the adults. Everyone relied on their fists to determine who owned what and why.

  Lying underneath a blanket on my mattress, I heard my grandfather calling me from his young second wife’s bedroom. I hurried to him obediently. He was lying down, covered with just a white sheet, while his spouse nagged him to go take a shower. He didn’t pay her any attention.

  “What did the man-woman tell you?” he asked.

  Stuttering, I told him Uncle Marcelo’s message and instantly felt relieved. But Osá wasn’t pleased one bit. He clutched the sheet in rage, and his eyes bulged out of their sockets. I didn’t know if I was allowed to return to bed, so I stayed there watching him. Although his eyes seemed to bore into mine, I knew his mind was elsewhere, in the land of the Fang people, in the heart of that virgin forest where men gave orders and were obeyed without hesitation. He asked me to sit beside him and told me of the latest humiliation that had been inflicted on him by one of my mother’s sisters.

  “This woman full of mad ideas wanted to take you to the land of the mitangan, for you to study, thereby destroying the unity of my family. So I stopped her. I am a man and I make the decisions here.”

  He explained that, instead of me going, my aunt would take one of his second wife’s children, so as to not create an unfair precedent in the family. As he spoke to me, his gaze was lost somewhere beyond that disordered room inhabited by five children of an age to destroy everything and cry at the slightest provocation. He kept talking, explaining that my mother’s sister wanted nothing to do with his second wife, that she cared only about me: “Okomo is a bastarda, that’s why she needs special attention,” she had told him after reproaching him for getting married again, and to a woman who was almost a child herself. Barefoot Osá had been shocked to find that he held so little power over one of his daughters. “That’s what happened to her, having lived in the land of the mitangan she’s developed the same attitude as Marcelo, the man-woman. The elders would call him a múan or molo, which is the same as saying ‘disobedient child,’” he muttered.

  “Even wretches like your father reproduce,” my grandfather continued while I kept silent. “But not my son, no.”

  As he lamented the curse that had befallen him, my grandfather kept insisting on how shameful it would be for the tribe if his oldest son didn’t manage to produce any offspring. It would create a hole in tribal history, and the names of the male ancestors would be forgotten. And even worse: the rumor that his son was sterile (which of course affected his own reputation) had already spread through the village, and only Marcelo could put it to rest by impregnating his daughter-in-law.

  My grandmother, who was listening to her husband’s complaints, began to weep and insult him from her bedroom.

  “Useless, you’re useless!”

  Each time my grandmother criticized my grandfather’s lousy character, his second wife sprang to his defense. And that night, in the blink of an eye, they found themselves in the living room threatening each other with machetes. We used them to work our farm, and Osá normally kept them hidden away in a wardrobe next to my mattress. My grandfather quickly separated the two rivals. Thankfully, the wounds they had inflicted on one another were slight this time. During the brawl, all the boys and girls in the household awoke and started to wail.

  But even with their machetes taken away from them, the argument continued. My grandmother called her husband weak, reminding him that he had been that way since he was young, when he’d been unable to keep my mother’s skirts under control.

  “It’s your fault your daughter got pregnant with a bastard!” she cried, while my grandfather struggled to keep his irritated second wife from attacking her again.

  “It wasn’t only my fault, I did what I could,” my grandfather defended himself, barely covered from the waist down with a sheet that left the gray hairs of his chest visible.

  No longer able to use her machete, my grandmother burst into her rival’s bedroom, grabbed the radio that her own daughters had sent from Gabon, and smashed it to pieces. I watched all of this standing near the door so I could disappear as soon as I saw my chance. She had been wanting to break that radio for a long time and finally managed to do it that night, shouting repeatedly that my grandfather’s second wife wasn’t part of the family.

  It took me a long time to fall asleep despite my exhaustion.
I missed the mother I had never known and the father who had abandoned me. Where could you be, Papa? I wondered, my whole body hidden beneath the blanket.

  Each of the nocturnal animals made their particular noises and the wind blew, but not hard enough to wake the village from its dreams. I took advantage of the quiet to go outside and think. I had the sudden urge to go visit my uncle Marcelo, but I gave up on the idea because of the lateness of the hour. I returned to bed a few minutes later.

  THE INDECENCY CLUB

  I didn’t understand what it meant to be a man. If in the past I thought it was enough to have genitals dangling between one’s legs, now I wasn’t so sure. Because Uncle Marcelo’s were like that, but nobody in the village considered him a man. So would the perfect man be one who fathered children? Of course not, I answered myself. My grandfather had done that, but in my grandmother’s opinion, he couldn’t be considered a man because he had proven himself unable to impose order within his family. Would a man be someone who subdued or dominated others? I didn’t know, and I tossed and turned in bed, unable to fall asleep, until I saw a vision of my mother walking before me. I followed her in silence, without asking about my father.

  The next day my grandmother left for the farm and gave me a task: I was to go into the forest to collect wood, but I wasn’t to have anything to do with Dina and her friends, three girls who went everywhere together cloaked in mystery. With a basket already on her back, she bid me a curt farewell. As she walked away, I stared at her rival, who was leaning in the doorway of her kitchen cradling her youngest child, seven months old, in her arms, and calling my grandmother a crone.

  “Don’t you understand why Osá no longer visits your bed? It’s because you’re an old hag who no longer bleeds! Do you want to give my husband your curse?”

  Unbothered by the two women’s bickering, my grandfather calmly played checkers in the House of the Word. After they finished the first round, he asked for his breakfast. Once I had served him, I left for the nearest forest in search of firewood.