Dina didn’t understand why I was being sent to Ebian and didn’t want to take all the responsibility for violating the rules of our love quartet.
“You’ve also broken them,” she made me see. She sat up in bed and lay my head in her lap.
“It’s true,” I acknowledged. “But I only love you. I don’t like the others.”
“You made love with them this morning.”
“Yes, but I don’t want to do it again. I just want to be with you.”
“I don’t know. I’m sure it will cause problems. Linda and Pilar won’t accept it. The two of them are in love with me.”
“And you . . . who . . . I mean, who do you love?”
“I didn’t know until today. I love you.”
We spent some time in silence, letting our bodies talk until at last I brought up the subject of my father. She advised me to keep looking for him and suggested that I ask my aunt, the one who lived in Ebian. I promised to do so, and we said goodbye after she gave me a letter for her sisters and their address in Akonibe.
“I’ll visit Marcelo tomorrow and tell him that they’ve forced you to go on a trip,” she said, starting to move away.
“I appreciate it. Tell him I love him.”
“And me?” she asked, smiling.
“I love you too. You know that, right?”
“Of course. I love you just the same.”
At four in the morning, my grandmother brought me into her room. Her husband’s side of the bed was full of his clothes and photographs of when they were both young. Before ordering me to sit down, pick up the pen, and write a letter to her daughter, she covered her husband’s belongings with a protective sheet.
By the light of a forest lantern I began to write. It wasn’t an ordinary letter; I had to translate from Fang into Spanish and make her thoughts clear. The contents of the letter were as follows:
Daughter,
Your marriage is the biggest mistake you’ve made in your whole life. Your husband, so old, and you, so young and beautiful. If it were up to me, you wouldn’t be married to him. But that’s your problem. Your father no longer loves me. He has abandoned the bed we shared since I was fourteen and now only visits that of his young lover. For me, she is nothing more than that, a lover. I say this because that girl doesn’t know him like I do. Only I have spent the best and worst years of his life with him, even back when he still wore shoes. This woman doesn’t know how to take care of him, she doesn’t serve him as God wishes. Fate has punished me. Now I’ve lost my true self. I don’t exist without my husband, who now belongs to another. Your father says that I’m an old hag now that I’ve stopped my monthly bleeding. I write to you because I need money—50,000 francs—to get treatment from a curandera. I am sick. If you don’t send the money and I die, don’t come to my funeral because I will curse you from the world beyond. I am sending Okomo, who is a serious but foolish girl searching for her scoundrel of a father. She doesn’t appreciate all that the tribe has done for her. You understand, I’m sure.
Your loving mother
PS: Abandon your old husband! You can still find another, one who’s rich and young!
After dictating the letter to me, my grandmother ordered me to sit in an old yellowed chair she had placed in front of the enormous mirror that showed her how wrinkled she was. Then she picked up the round bowl where she kept her cosmetics and began to make me up. That wasn’t even the worst part. As she, in her words, “beautified” my face, she reminded me of the obligations of a Fang woman and told me how attractive my mother had been.
“But she got together with your father, that wretch. What a disaster! The man who brought you into this world is so poor. Ha! He doesn’t even have money for food.”
“Where does he live, Abuela?”
“Why do you care? He’s worthless!”
“I’d like to see that for myself.”
“Your elders are always right; your father is a disgrace.”
“Of course, Abuela, of course, my elders are always right,” I answered, hiding my anger and sorrow.
“Do you know what this lingerie cost?” she asked.
“No. How much, Abuelita?”
“Three thousand francs. I bought it in the Akonibe market. I was waiting, hijita, waiting for this moment with such excitement! I was impatient for you to become a woman and start menstruating. You don’t know how I envied Nchama, our neighbor. She has a seventeen-year-old daughter who is already living up to expectations.”
“What expectations, Abuela?” I asked, enduring the knife scraping above my eyebrows. My grandmother always said that I’d find someone to marry me sooner with thinner brows.
“The expectations that all Fang women must fulfill.”
I sighed. After she had shaved away ninety percent of my eyebrows, then came the moment for red lipstick. She mercilessly removed the fuzz growing around my lips with a razor blade. Then she chose the most elegant dress that my aunt had brought from the land of the mitangan just for me, the bastard daughter. It was old, and I knew that in the past it had belonged to her spoiled daughters, girls who didn’t want to work or study and who were said to take drugs. That’s why, she said, my aunt needed to rely on me as the family’s last chance to get some money.
When I set off in the morning, I didn’t follow the route indicated by my grandmother, who had advised me to take a car and, after reaching Ayene, a town located twenty kilometers from our own, to set off alone on foot through the forest for eight hours until I reached my destination. I chose instead to follow Dina’s advice, and I left for the city of Akonibe, disgusted by all the makeup on my face. Makeup that stayed behind in the river closest to our village, despite how cold the water was so early in the morning.
I looked up from cleaning my face with a white towel to find Dina laughing in front of me. She took off the coat she was wearing and handed it to me, still laughing.
“What are you doing here and why are you laughing?”
She made fun of me and my dress.
“You can barely walk, dressed up like a—what was your grandmother thinking? I guess I’m not surprised. She imagined that over the course of the journey some man would claim you and finally her little granddaughter would support the family.”
“It’s not funny!”
All my efforts to convince Dina that I felt bad were of little use. She laughed at me until her mirth was exhausted. She had gone through the same process herself until her own mother got fed up, realizing that Dina refused to wear makeup. She told me this while we were walking, after she’d given me a good-morning kiss, a pair of pants, and an appropriate shirt for a journey that would take at least ten hours.
It took us about an hour to reach Akonibe, whose only elegant building was a church. On arriving, we ran into the students who were heading home to their villages for the weekend, and among them we found three girls and two boys from Ebian. I joined them after saying goodbye to Dina and agreeing to come back in three days’ time.
I began to miss Dina almost immediately after leaving their family dwelling (made from wood and nipa leaves), where she had introduced me as a friend, although she looked at me as something more. I looked at her just as intensely.
Soon we set off into the forest.
“Through the forest?” I asked my companions.
“Of course!” they answered.
The path, located in the Mbá Sima neighborhood, seemed to be the same one that my grandmother and I took to go to the farm. Dina’s main concern had been for my body to be protected from the brush and for me not to walk alone. She was right. Walking along the path, my new friends and I talked often, and when we were silent, we looked at the birds and wild animals. Every member of the group carried food, but mine was the most prized: the leftover meat from the sheep my grandfather had sacrificed for his saint’s day.
We reached a town called Micoomibee (which means “two mountains”) made up of barely twenty dwellings constructed from nipa leaves and calabó. Only
a few were made from wood and sheet metal. It wasn’t the only village that we found isolated in the middle of the jungle. It was the same with all the villages we passed through: Engongom, Asok Abia, Alum, and, finally, Ebian, which we reached at seven that evening.
On the way, when our food ran out, we ate thanks to small acts of theft. We stole sugarcane, uncooked roots, anything that was edible. Sometimes we’d encounter some woman carrying a basket full of food, and we had only to greet her for her to give us something.
Ebian was in the middle of Easter celebrations, and a mitangan priest had arrived to deliver the word of the Western God. I soon found my aunt’s home, located in the center of the village. Two helpful children offered to accompany me. I felt so tired but at the same time comfortable. Comfortable because, with Dina’s help, I’d gotten rid of the braids my grandmother had made, something my mother’s sister didn’t understand. As soon as I entered her kitchen, full of smoke and with a pair of twins crawling on the floor, she jumped up and hugged me. She spent a few minutes covering me in kisses and saying happily, “At last you’ve become a woman. How time flies! But what happened to your hair?”
Suddenly she began to cry uncontrollably. She assumed that I had just returned from the farm, considering how poorly dressed and dirty I was. None of my aunts let themselves be seen on the street without putting on makeup, dressing up, and flirting.
My hair was unfortunately all we talked about at first. My aunt Marta took my blue backpack and put it away. She walked barefoot in the kitchen, which was as big as she was; she had put on twenty pounds during her pregnancy and breastfeeding. She scarcely paid attention to the twins, experts in disruption.
“Why did you cut your hair?”
“It got in my way, Auntie.”
She became angry.
“A woman is never annoyed by her hair. How are you going to find a boyfriend like this? My word!”
She kept wiping away her tears as I tried to understand their cause. In the end, she confessed she was crying because of me, because of how shameful it was that I hadn’t helped my family eat and live well thanks to the resources that the men who noticed me would offer. She could hardly have imagined that my heart belonged to Dina, who I thought of constantly. It was obvious that my aunt wouldn’t understand my sexual desires, and so, with my arrival, she began to make plans.
“Now that you’re here, I thought that some of the single men in the village might be interested. But you’ve barely got any hair!”
She cried for the loss of my hair while nursing both of her children, each seated on one of her robust thighs. I pretended to pay attention to her, but I was actually more interested in tasting the corn soup she had offered me when I came in. She wanted to know how the family she’d left behind was doing, and meanwhile, she opened my backpack, where she didn’t find what she was looking for: makeup of any kind.
“The whole family is fine. Like always.”
I didn’t know how she knew I was lying.
“You’re sure they’re fine? And my mother?”
“Your mother and your father . . . Like always.”
The uncomfortable question came: whether or not they still slept together. Silence and sighs. I wished at that moment I hadn’t made the journey. But I couldn’t deceive my grandmother, who had justified the trip to her husband by explaining that I was to collect a sack of peanuts, since our land was now a barren wasteland thanks to, as she claimed, the man-woman.
My aunt insisted on hearing the details of the relationship between her mother and father again and again until I confessed: “They don’t sleep together anymore.”
Her vigorous nature, inherited from my grandmother, ignited at that moment.
My aunt Marta, who had carefully shaped eyebrows like my grandmother, cursed her father, highlighting all his vulgar ways, especially how he always walked barefoot.
Like me, she couldn’t understand what her mother saw in a man like her father. When she tired of complaining, she read the letter I brought her and was devastated. Her mother felt the same way about her own husband: he was too old for her and too poor.
“She can’t be serious! My mother hates my dear Luis?”
She looked at me, waiting for me to answer. I chose to keep quiet. My aunt insisted, worried because her mother was demanding such an exorbitant amount of money. “What does Mama need so much money for?”
My aunt was so upset that she left her children crying and crawling on the floor while she rocked back and forth waiting for me to confess. But I didn’t give in, so my punishment arrived. She told me that I needed to work to earn money for the duration of my stay. First, so I could buy cosmetics like a normal woman, and second, to raise part of the money my grandmother was asking for. In the end, my grandmother’s schemes to get her barefoot husband back into her bed had turned into a matter for the entire family that demanded a superhuman effort even from me.
“And if the elders say that women should wear braids, you must accept it,” she added, closing my knapsack. “You disobedient child! You’re just like your father, that scoundrel!”
“Do you know where he is?
“Whatever for? He’s a scoundrel!”
“I’d like to see that for myself—”
“Don’t you believe your elders?”
“Of course, of course.”
My elders. It was always the same. When would I become an adult? Never. I had forgotten that in Fang tradition no one ever became an adult because at any moment they might be hit or yelled at by people who were even older than them. Any hope I had placed in my aunt’s knowing my father’s whereabouts was lost that very first day, as soon as I’d arrived, right after eating the whole bowl of corn soup, and before even having a chance to bathe after the journey.
Marta had lost her temper after reading the letter and discovering that her mother wanted so much money. She complained that it always fell on her, never her sisters or brother, to pay for their mother’s expenses; her sisters were off in Gabon, and her brother was idling away in the forest, where he worked for the lumber companies and was always smoking banga.
“First I paid for her syphilis treatment,” she revealed, with her chin resting on the palm of her right hand. “I’m even responsible for paying for her venereal diseases!”
“Grandmother got sick from syphilis?”
“Of course! That’s how she lost her fertility. My mother stopped reproducing very early.”
“But how did she get it? And when? I don’t understand.”
“What do you think? My mother is right to call you a fool. She got it from my father. Barefoot Osá had sex with one of the town whores and caught it from her. I lived through it. That woman was desperately trying to earn the dowry she needed to get divorced, but she got sick and infected all her clients. My father was cured in the hospital, he did it quickly, and that’s why he didn’t suffer any of the side effects, but he never told Mama. Since she didn’t know about it, when she began to get sick, instead of going to the hospital, she consulted the village healer. After bankrupting her, the curandera sent her to the hospital. The sickness was so advanced by then that it left her sterile and menopausal. My father’s solution was to marry another woman because, of course, he needed to have sons.”
While we were talking, my aunt’s husband came into the kitchen. We greeted one another and he sat down beside me. We spent a long time talking until he left for the House of the Word to have dinner. When he was gone, my mother’s sister wanted to know what I thought about him. I told her that he seemed handsome and young, but I was lying. He wasn’t either of those things, but at least I managed to make her smile after an afternoon filled with unpleasant news. She quickly began complaining again.
“Where am I going to find 50,000 francs in this village? The authorities don’t even know about us. Only the missionaries bother to travel all the way here from Akurenam, so they can spread the word of God. And all of them are mitangan, mi hija.”
Then my aunt
asked about the man-woman. She had heard about his banishment from the village.
“He deserves it for being so selfish. He doesn’t want to impregnate my sister-in-law.” She passed judgment on him: “Your uncle was never a normal child. Ever since he was little, he liked women’s things: cooking, cleaning, smiling, and talking too much. Your mother’s home was like a church altar it was so clean!”
“Really?” I wore an expression of complete ignorance.
“All my childhood friends, the prettiest girls of my generation, flirted with him without success. He’s sick. What kind of man in this world doesn’t like women?”
“My uncle, for example.”
“Your uncle is no man!”
I fell silent.
“I’ve heard you two get along well, but I forbid you to see him again.”
“He doesn’t seem like a bad person to me.”
“Your opinion doesn’t count; your elders are always right.”
“So does that mean you’ll listen to Grandmother and leave your husband?” I asked.
“It’s not the same,” she snapped.
“It’s not?”
“Your closeness doesn’t surprise me. He and your mother were always together when they were little. The woman who gave birth to you was surrounded by unnatural people almost her whole life. Your father, for example, never seemed very masculine to me. But I don’t want to keep talking about this. Marcelo has to impregnate my sister-in-law and that’s that.”
I stared at her openmouthed.
La Bastarda Page 4