La Bastarda

by Trifonia Melibea Obono

  “What’s that on your body? Who did this to you?” she said, shocked. She wanted to take revenge on whoever was responsible. She shouted that nobody messed with her family.

  “I was attacked by an animal, Abuela,” I answered, unable to move from the bed.

  “What animal?” she asked.

  “A lion, I think.”

  “Hija,” she said, sitting next to me, “you’ve spent all afternoon lying to me. You know that I am no fool. Lions don’t live anywhere near our village.”

  “I need to sleep, Abuela. Can we talk later?”

  After my grandmother went to the kitchen, Dina snuck into the room. She hugged me and began to cry, trembling.

  “Was it Linda and Pilar?”

  “Why ask me if you already know?” I answered.

  “I’m going to reveal their secrets too.”

  “No, don’t. Remember what Marcelo said we should do. And get out of here, my grandmother is still awake.”

  “I’ll come for you at midnight, when everyone is asleep. I love you.”

  Just before she turned to leave, we kissed, not realizing that my grandmother was standing in the doorway, right next to the two girls from our quartet.

  Like Marcelo said, there was a tremendous uproar in the village.

  And everything changed.

  PUNISHMENT

  Linda was the first of us to suffer the consequences of our disgrace. Two good-looking businessmen who liked to gamble were often in the village. They were going to demand 500,000 francs from her father for a debt he had incurred and couldn’t pay.

  Instead, the debt was settled as a dowry.

  When his two former gambling mates next came to the village, one week after Dina and I had been discovered, Linda’s father gathered together all his brothers of the tribe in the House of the Word and announced the payment of the debt in exchange for his daughter. All the men agreed.

  I witnessed the sale of Linda and felt guilty. I had confessed in the end that I was a lesbian, just like Dina, and then we exposed the other two girls.

  The second was Dina. How I cried for her! Her sister had died four years after her marriage contract and had left behind three daughters. The widower demanded that the in-laws fulfill Fang tradition. That is to say, because the marriage was so recent, he demanded that they give him one of his dead wife’s sisters to care for her offspring and become his new wife. He couldn’t easily pay another bride price, since, he claimed, the cost of women in the bridal market was rising. Sometimes it reached as high as 1,500 euros (almost a million francs) if counted only in cash, rather than in the goods that the woman’s family could specifically request. He chose Dina to go with him. We didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye. I only found out what had happened two days after she left.

  The third girl, Pilar, wasn’t allowed to leave her house anymore. One month after that terrible night when our secrets were uncovered, the swollenness of her belly was visible. Plácido, who was so in love with her, became depressed because he didn’t know who had gotten her pregnant. He told me that they had only ever slept next to each other and had never made love. Since then, whenever my grandmother and her rival left for the farm, I took advantage of their absence to visit Plácido because he was so upset.

  “Pilar betrayed me,” he cried, lacking the strength even to get out of bed. “Who do you think is the father?”

  Standing in front of his bed and keeping watch so that no one would see me, I didn’t know whether or not I should tell him the truth. It was rumored in the village that Pilar went to practice witchcraft at night with her father, which aroused many suspicions, so that’s what I told Plácido. He was so crazy about her he didn’t believe me. After her pregnancy began to show, I realized some things about Pilar. She hardly spoke to anyone, she rarely left her house, and when she did, she was always accompanied by her father.

  My own sentence arrived two months later. It had been delayed because of my grandfather’s death, from witchcraft, of course, and our household was awaiting the presence of a male: my mother’s only brother.

  During this time, my grandmother hadn’t left me alone even for a second. She was worried that I would continue practicing indecent behavior or would have sex with women. So I abandoned school and games, I didn’t go to the river for water, I even had to sleep in the same bed as her . . . I wanted to die. Finding my father had become impossible. I missed my uncle, who I was also forbidden to see. My voice died out, and my relationship with my grandmother worsened every day. She became obsessed with my hands. If I refused to wash plates, slice bananas, crack peanuts, or even remove a hot pot from the hearth (according to Fang tradition, women’s hands never feel heat; in fact, they must lift pots from the fire without using a cloth to highlight their femininity), she’d fly into a rage and say, “Haven’t you touched worse things with your hands?”

  If for some reason I complained and asked what she was referring to, she snapped, “The vagina, for example. How disgusting! There is nothing more disgusting in life than touching that.”

  “But men touch it when they make love to women!” I protested.

  “That’s exactly it!” she answered, furious. “Only men can touch it, not women. Tradition must be respected, and you have violated it with those three indecent girls.”

  She found a boyfriend for me in the village. His name was Pequeño because his nose, eyes, and voice were tiny. He spoke so softly! His hands, meanwhile, were uncommonly large. One morning my grandmother invited him to the house and told me that if I went with him, I could go down to the river and other places as well.

  One afternoon, my mother’s sterile brother returned along with his wife. This reminded everyone once more of the urgent need to impregnate her and made people remember my uncle, the man-woman, whose whereabouts remained unknown.

  My mother’s brother spent most of his time smoking. He loved banga. One afternoon he wanted to go out and fish, and to do so he needed bait.

  “Pequeño will go for the bait, accompanied by my granddaughter,” my grandmother decided.

  The two of us went together to the forest at sunset. I was the only one who said anything. My companion was so nervous I thought he might suffocate. Suddenly he pulled my arms behind my back and jammed his fingers between my legs aggressively. I tried to escape, screaming at him and asking what the hell he thought he was doing. After a struggle, he finally confessed that he was only following my grandmother’s orders.

  “She asked me to find out if you liked men.”

  I returned to the village outraged and crying, without the bait, while Pequeño walked behind me begging for forgiveness. Three days later, my future was decided. My grandmother sent me with my mother’s brother to Asok Abia, a town located a long way from ours, where my father lived.

  When we arrived, I saw the area where the mitangan lived in luxury, separated from where we Fang lived. The fragile dwellings of the locals were built from wood and sheet metal, the floors without even cement, as if they were to be abandoned soon. My new family and I crossed the town on foot. My mother’s brother stayed behind at the economat, a store that offered all kinds of Western products and belonged to the mitangan. There was nothing like it in my village. In their home, I found my uncle’s wife cooking peanut soup, ready to bring to light all the misunderstandings of the past.

  My uncle’s house was just one tiny living room and a bedroom. I was to sleep on a mattress on the floor. The dwellings in the village lacked a long list of basic things, from kitchens (women cooked in the living room or out on the street) to latrines. The largest river of the region, the Asok, ran by the town, and the mitangan used it to fish, swim, and wash in, while their employees used it for drinking water and as a toilet.

  When I asked my aunt why there weren’t more economats in town, she answered, bad-tempered, “Because the mitangan forbid it. They don’t want their neighbors to devote themselves to commerce. They do it for our own good, so we don’t get distracted.”

&n
bsp; “But don’t the mitangan get distracted?” I asked, standing near her cooking fire.

  “They don’t get distracted. They’re white! Their witchcraft is superior to ours. Don’t you know that ‘the white man is the brother of God’?”

  “Well—”

  “I should make you pay for the information I’m giving you!”

  “I need to pay for it? Why?”

  “Because you’re to blame for my unhappiness,” she confessed, weeping. “If only you would tell me where Marcelo is! I need him to get me pregnant. Now, while I’m young, I must have two children. ‘Woman is born to reproduce,’ as the wise Fang proverb says. You agree with me, right? Otherwise, nobody will take care of me when I’m old. And no one in the family will respect me.”

  I didn’t answer, but went outside to look at the trees that were cut down and lying on the outskirts of the village. Five minutes later, my aunt came over to me.

  “Your uncle only comes home to sleep. He works, like all his companions, from six in the morning until six at night.”

  She spoke to me, communicating with her entire body.

  “I forbid you to eat until you tell me where Marcelo is, that cowardly man-woman. Your uncle won’t find out. It will be our secret,” she told me, caressing my face while dictating the rules that would define our coexistence. “In the mitangan neighborhood, the girls work for money. You’re so young and pretty, surely you’ll find something.”

  My aunt wasn’t wrong. In that makeshift town, I discovered that the better-paying jobs were all held by men. Women were limited to cleaning and cooking. And also: prostitution.

  One night I accompanied my uncle to collect his salary from the company’s secretary. He only brought half of it home; the rest remained at the economat to pay off the debts he’d incurred over the course of the month. Some workers barely collected anything; their entire salary was kept by the mitangan to pay off their debts.

  Late one night, my uncle sent me to the economat to buy some alcohol. Outside the residential neighborhood of the mitangan, I saw about fifty women standing around. Most of them were not even twenty years old. All of them needed to bring home money, which they earned in exchange for sex. I spotted Linda. She also saw me, but neither of us dared to greet the other first. In the end, she was the one to break the ice. I felt so guilty about what had happened to her that I could barely look her in the eye. The two of us sat down outside the economat on two white chairs.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked, smiling.

  “I was sent to this horrid town to live with my uncle,” I said without looking up. “My grandmother says that he’ll control me better, and that here he can find a wealthy man to cure me of my lesbianism.”

  “I feel guilty,” she admitted.

  Only then did I look up at her.

  “Pilar and I were very hurt by Dina abandoning us. Both of us loved her, but she preferred you. We were blinded by our pain, and we decided to set a trap. That’s why your grandmother discovered you. I’m sorry.”

  After confessing, she hugged me and we both felt relieved. Then she told me about her life.

  “I fled from that marriage. I couldn’t endure that man Papa sold me to so he could settle his debt.” She cried while she spoke. I stared at her, unable to believe what I was hearing.

  “He raped me and I had nowhere to go. Now I live in the forest with Marcelo, and on the weekends, I come here in search of some money.”

  “And Dina? What happened to her?”

  “Always Dina, huh? She’s also living in the forest, and she misses you. She escaped from her marriage too. Pilar is also there; she gave birth. She and I are together now.”

  I felt sorry for Plácido. He was so in love with Pilar and was desperate to know more details about her, so I asked who the father of her child was. Linda didn’t answer me right away. She scratched her head. She felt uncomfortable, but in the end she told me.

  “The child is by her father.”

  “What?!”

  “You heard me. Her father killed her mother because she discovered him one night, raping Pilar when she was little. Your uncle has helped her so much, both with the baby as well as emotionally. In the village, everyone thinks that she got pregnant by witchcraft, which is why they rejected both her and her daughter.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “It’s all better now,” she said and started to laugh. “When are you coming to the forest to live with us? Dina and your uncle would be very happy.”

  “I’ll come soon. I’ll escape, too, but first I need to find my father.”

  As we talked, I realized how hungry I was, and without thinking, I asked her for some money.

  “My aunt won’t let me eat until I tell her where Marcelo lives.”

  “Don’t tell her. We’re free and happy in the forest, and soon we’ll celebrate the New Year. We’re waiting for you.”

  Linda stood up, and before disappearing she looked back and said, “What’s past is forgotten. If I could go back in time . . . I wouldn’t have acted the way I did. Jealousy got the best of me.”

  “I’m sorry too,” I told her. “Goodbye.”

  THE FOREST

  After the lumber companies arrived in Asok Abia, the town had split in two: the people who’d always been there, the Equatorial Guineans, on one side, and the mitangan and their long-suffering employees on the other. To find my father, I had to cross the river that divided the two communities, cover my head with a cloth, and lower my face so I wouldn’t be recognized by any of my uncle’s coworkers. I saw two girls in the street carrying their younger siblings on their backs. I asked if they knew where my father lived, and they took me to his home.

  I wondered then if I was doing the right thing. In the end, I decided that I needed to know the truth. It was the only way I could stop living in doubt.

  I saw a girl who looked just like me in the yard of my supposed father. She looked just like me, but maybe three years younger. I felt happy until I walked into the kitchen that the two girls had pointed out to me. Inside I found a woman who I realized was my father’s wife. To every neighbor who came to visit while I was there, she said, “This is my husband’s daughter. He had her with an unmarried woman from a nearby town.”

  “She is the daughter of an unmarried woman?” they all asked.

  “Yes, the daughter of an unmarried woman! Who knows, maybe my husband had nothing to do with her, seeing as how she wasn’t married . . .”

  That afternoon, the man who my family thought was a scoundrel returned home. I knew someone must have told him about me on his way back to town. As soon as he arrived, with his clothes still filthy, he hugged me and asked after my grandmother.

  “Fine. She’s fine,” I answered, looking at him closely.

  We didn’t look anything alike, at least not physically. His fourteen-year-old daughter did look like me, or we both looked like his sister, he said, the one who lived in Gabon.

  “Does your grandmother know you’re here?”

  “No,” I answered firmly.

  “You shouldn’t have come without her consent. She’ll be angry when you go back.”

  “And if I decide to stay here?”

  “Where?” he asked angrily, stowing his machete underneath one of the five wooden beds in the kitchen. “You can’t stay here,” he declared.

  “Why not? Aren’t you my father?”

  “Yes, but you can’t stay.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I never paid the bride price for your mother, so according to common law you are not my daughter.”

  I swallowed as I tried to digest his response. I just couldn’t believe it. My father rejected me without even blinking an eye while his wife watched him from the other side of the bed. I kept asking questions.

  “Then who is my father? I am seventeen years old, and I’ve never had one. My family is right, you are a scoundrel!”

  The insult infuriated him, but he calmed down after drin
king a glass of malamba that his daughter, the one who looked so much like me, brought him. He took up the conversation again, pointing an accusing figure at me.

  “Look, daughter. Four times I’ve wanted to bring you here, but your mother’s family wouldn’t allow it, saying that I hadn’t paid the bride price. And do you know why they call me a scoundrel? Because I don’t respect the customs that have kept us apart. You can’t stay here because your family would denounce me, and they have the law on their side. Besides, if I took care of you from now on, in the end, your grandfather’s tribe, not my own, would benefit from my efforts. The law is clear in this regard: I am not responsible for you.”

  “You don’t understand,” I said, blinking back tears. “Nobody feels responsible for me. It’s true that my aunts and my uncle help me sometimes, but it’s not enough. They only think of me after they’ve first taken care of their own sons and daughters. What I want is a father. You just don’t understand.”

  But my arguments were of no use. My father sent me back to my mother’s family because I was just a bastarda. So I escaped to the forest to live with my uncle Marcelo, the man-woman, and the other three indecent girls from my village, the only family that life had given me. Dina was overjoyed to see me. Right away, the two of us went deep into the woods to be alone together. The forest was the only refuge for those who had no place in Fang tradition, like me. I’m a bastarda, a Fang woman; I’m a bastarda, daughter of an unmarried Fang woman; I’m a bastarda, a lesbian.

  AFTERWORD

  Abosede George

  Despite my profession as an Africa historian, I have to admit to a degree of ignorance concerning the arts and literature of contemporary Equatorial Guinea, or even its history, which ought to be my forte. Thus, like many readers, Trifonia Melibea Obono’s La Bastarda is my introduction to art and ideas from Equatorial Guinea. Equatorial Guinea, the country that Obono hails from, appears on my consciousness with certain associations: It is a tiny country with a population of under two million covering a mainland and island territories. It is the southernmost of the three African countries named Guinea that I ask students to identify on map quizzes—the other two being Guinea and Guinea Bissau. In recent decades, Equatorial Guinea joined the club of oil-dependent African countries of which my native Nigeria has to be the chairman. Clocking in at thirty-nine years, its head of state, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasago, is the second most long ruling president on the continent and in the world, and he has kept a hold of his office using the usual autocratic techniques.