A Squatter's Tale, page 13
She put her left arm around me and led me into the house, cooing about how wonderful it was to have a brother so close by. She uncorked a bottle of champagne for me—Moët et Chandon—and set a plate full of grapes and crackers in front of me. Then she ran back to her fridge, skipping like a little girl, and brought me some chocolate cake and ice cream.
‘You’re in trouble today, Obi,’ she said, when I told her I wouldn’t be able to eat everything she was throwing my way.
‘You will eat and eat and eat till your stomach bursts. If your stomach doesn’t burst, I won’t leave you alone!’
The large living room had severe modernist white and black upholstered chairs and side tables and shelves, accentuated by brilliant white walls. Too severe, I thought to myself, like something for display not for use, like a page from a glossy furniture catalogue blown up. Seeing as it must have cost a lot of money, I told her the furniture was very beautiful. She laughed and waved her arms about. I told her the house as a whole was very beautiful, without a doubt the most beautiful house I’d been into in my entire life. Again she went through the same laughing, waving routine. Compliments, I noticed, seriously disturbed her composure.
‘My husband is performing surgery this morning; being married to a doctor is a tough life,’ she said. But from the way she smiled, the way she glowed, I knew it was just talk. She didn’t faintly look like someone having a tough life.
‘He’s always at work, always travelling for conferences,’ she said.
I remarked that she had to find things to do to keep herself occupied in his absence.
‘What I do is to watch soap operas and talk shows, and shop,’ she said, and winked. ‘In fact we’re going shopping as soon as you’ve had your ice cream. I need to buy things for the house and a few clothes. I’ll go and change now so we can leave once you are finished.’
And she skipped away. Through the window I saw a man who looked Asian watering his lawn in one of the identical houses below Ego’s. I saw Mercedes Benzes, Acuras, Infinitis, Lexuses parked on driveways, open garage doors full of things, a man and his dog jogging gently beside the road. I was pleased with myself for knowing someone who lived in this community of the very comfortable, a countryman whose house dwarfed and looked down on the other affluent houses.
Ego came out half an hour later, wearing a jacket of intricate yellow and green patterns and a white T-shirt over brown slacks. Her eyes looked at her clothes and settled on mine, grovelling for compliments. I told her she looked absolutely lovely and she laughed and waved her arms about.
‘There is only one other black family living here. The man is the vice president of a big company in San Francisco, and there are two or three Indians and some Chinese and Koreans. Apart from that the rest are white,’ Ego informed me proudly as we got into her bright red 1994 Honda Accord. ‘We used to be part of Danville, the next town, but we are now a town of our own. We are about six thousand, the whole town, just six thousand. Can you imagine that?’
She laughed and waved her arms from side to side.
‘If you work hard you can come and live in our community after a few years. You’ll be the third black man to live here.’ And she laughed again.
We bought groceries at a smart shopping centre, part of which was still under construction. I told her it was very impressive, she took the compliment as if she had built it herself. The groceries we bought filled the boot of the car.
‘Now let’s get some clothes, the real shopping,’ she said with a mischievous smile.
It emerged, as we drove to the Stoneridge mall, that life was not all a bed of roses for Ego. I asked her where she worked and a cloud passed over her glowing face.
‘I stopped working more than six months ago, and I don’t want to work again in this country,’ she said angrily. ‘As soon as I left the office people would start talking about me. Whenever I entered they would all stop talking and start watching me. As if I were a mad person. If you say something to someone, they would pretend not to have heard you. And I know they always heard everything I said. They just wanted to embarrass me. At a meeting one of them asked me where I was from. I said I was Nigerian and he said where the hell is that? He pretended he had never heard of Nigeria. Another one said it sounded like a place in Mexico, and they all started laughing.’
I fought hard and managed to stop myself from laughing out loud as I could see that for Ego it was no laughing matter. Nigerians, citizens of the largest black nation on earth, always found it difficult to accept that there are people living in this world who haven’t heard of their big country. It is like being told that you don’t exist, and some have even resorted to fist fights in protest.
‘Last week I went for a residents’ meeting on our estate and immediately I entered, someone said something and they started laughing at me,’ Ego went on angrily. ‘I told my husband I would never go to any of those meetings again. If you ask someone a simple question they keep making you repeat yourself, as if they haven’t heard you, when they have heard you perfectly. All I do now is sit at home and watch TV. I registered for a certificate course, but the lecturers spoke so fast I couldn’t hear what they were saying so I stopped attending.’
She went on after a pause, ‘My husband keeps saying that he’s planning to go back to Nigeria to build a hospital and settle there, and just visit this place from time to time, but he keeps putting it off. I pray every day that we will go back soon.’
The interior of the Stoneridge mall cheered Ego up. It was awash with dazzling colours, filled with shoppers and gawkers and signs offering unbelievable deals, bulging with walking, jogging and office clothes, shoes and sunglasses and a hundred kinds of ice creams, chocolates and pizzas. I said it was beautiful, and she laughed and waved her arms about with that implied air of ownership. The mall reminded me of a story I’d heard from Ionesco, my Romanian former co-worker at the warehouses, about a Romanian woman, visiting her daughter in America after the overthrow of the Ceausescus, who burst into tears when she entered a shopping mall in New York. That magnificent symbol of capitalist consumerism, Ionesco said, had proved too much for the poor woman, who had spent a large part of her life in bitter, sluggish queues for meat, milk and bread.
In Nordstrom, all the employees in the women’s department seemed to know Ego well. They greeted us very warmly. I noticed that they knew of her aversion for people who spoke too fast and dragged every word they said to her, sounding as though they all had speech defects. Ego reciprocated with smiles, she laughed, waved her arms about, remembered each person’s first name, even asked after their kids. One lady said it was proving impossible to pull her daughter away from the TV to do her homework. Ego remarked that there was an epidemic of that all over the world, and the women laughed long and hard at the joke. And Ego joined in: she knew this time that they weren’t laughing at her; these were her friends, if only in a loose sense.
The pleasantries finally over, we got down to the serious business of buying clothes. Ego gathered from the display stands a pile of dresses, jackets and slacks taller than me. They all had exotic labels: Liz Claiborne Collection Saharienne, Maxou Printed Palazzo pants, Sigrid Olsen Verandah Collection, though they all looked ordinary enough to me. Then the process of selection began, with me acting as judge. She would take an outfit, go to the fitting room and change into it, come back and model it for me, and then she would anxiously ask my opinion. Invariably I would say it was very nice, but that was never enough.
‘What colour do you think it will go with?’ she would ask, watching my face carefully as though to catch me out if I told a lie. ‘Does it look too dull? Or too bright? Does it look too tight? Is it indecent? Or is it too loose, like a maternity gown? Is it good for evening wear? Or casual wear?’ And on and on it went until I began to think that it would never end, that I would spend the rest of my life in Nordstrom trying to decide which neckline was too high or too low, which pair of slacks was too trendy or too old-fashioned.
Salvation finally came my way when Ego looked at her watch and said she had to rush off because it was almost three o’clock and her husband would be back at four, and she had to get lunch ready. She gathered up the clothes that had passed her stringent tests—two trouser suits, two knitted tops, three slacks—and she added a bottle of Obsession on our way to the cash register. The cashier said it came to six hundred dollars odd, Ego pulled an American Express card out of her purse and slid it across the table, glancing at me with a triumphal smirk. I couldn’t help remarking to myself that less than half of my countrymen earned six hundred dollars in a whole year. I was impressed with what I had seen.
We hurried back to her car so we would get to the house in time. She’d also wanted to go into Macy’s, she said regretfully, but there was no time. America, I thought, might be full of people who spoke too fast and pretended not to know where Nigeria was, but it had huge department stores full of nice things. Ego wanted the nice things but not the stress of transplantation; a perfect world would be one in which she and her husband moved back to Lagos and Nordstrom and Macy’s moved with them.
In forty minutes Ego filled the large dining table with dishes of fresh fish and chicken, trays of salads, rice and farina. Her husband, Ezendu, walked in, with perfect timing, as she was setting the table. He was a tall, enormous man with a strangely shaped head. It was in two parts: the northern region was vast and bare, not even a little wrinkle or a tiny pimple beneath his low-cut hair, which was shiny with pomade, while the tapered southern part was crammed with a broad nose, a wide mouth, a bushy moustache.
‘We were wondering where you had disappeared to,’ he said to me, squeezing my hand. He was one of those people who test your manliness by trying to crush your bones in a handshake. I told him I’d been busy trying to settle down.
‘It gets tougher every day,’ he said. ‘This country makes you a man. You can live in Nigeria all your life and live like a child, never be challenged once, but when you get to America, it begins to test you from the moment you step off the plane. It’s a good thing; it toughens you up.’
I didn’t agree with him that it was a good thing; I didn’t think I needed any more toughening, but I held my peace.
We went together to the dining table. After the first mouthful Ezendu shouted compliments to his wife, who was still bringing in things from the kitchen.
‘Your sister is turning me into a food-dependent man,’ he said to me. ‘These days if I don’t eat her food for six hours I begin to suffer withdrawal symptoms.’
On her way out of the kitchen Ego thanked him very much for his compliment, laughed, waved her arms about, and took a seat facing her husband.
After lunch, Ezendu took charge of me. We went over to a long, softly lit room in a corner of his mansion. It had a long, crammed bar, ageing leather sofas, shelves full of long-playing records, CDs and cassettes and a music centre that covered most of one wall. He produced two glasses and a chilled bottle of champagne from the bar and filled the glasses, then he searched the shelves for a long while, selected a pile of CDs and put one on. The Marvin Gaye classic Let’s do it again came on. He fussed with the remote control buttons until he got the volume and sound quality he wanted.
He began by counselling me. Black Americans, he said with venom, were to be avoided completely. They were lazy, dishonest, dissolute, grasping; in short they had all the vices known to mankind and apparently not one single virtue.
‘Many of our boys get involved with black American women, but that is a dangerous mistake which you must avoid at all costs,’ he said, staring into my eyes to emphasise the point.
I hadn’t slept with a woman for months and was even seriously considering abandoning the only taboo I had where sleeping with women is concerned: i.e. never to go with prostitutes. So I was amused by Ezendu’s advice that I avoid African-American women, but I didn’t say a word. Ezendu wasn’t an easy man to disagree with. He had an absolutist air about him, and I listened with total attention, giving him his due as a fellow countryman who had lived in America for more than twenty years and had made a great deal of money, someone who had earned the right to hand down advice to everyone else and be listened to.
‘Never ever even think of marrying a black American woman. Don’t even dream of it. I have given this advice to many people; some refused to listen and they are paying for it now.’
On the wall directly opposite me was a large poster of Sidney Poitier receiving some award. We were listening to Marvin Gaye on the CD player and the LPs on the shelves whose sleeves I could make out from my seat were all by African-Americans: Ella Fitzgerald, Roberta Flack, Ray Charles. It seemed that these African-Americans—successful actors and musicians—did not merit Ezendu’s condemnation. Or maybe their music and their films were excepted but not their persons.
Ezendu didn’t like white people much either. They were a load of racists, only marginally better than African-Americans.
‘When I was working in LA,’ he said, ‘a white woman was brought in for emergency surgery and I was checking her in with a young white doctor who worked under me. This woman said, right there in front of me, that she hoped they were not going to let me into the room when she was being operated on. I was the best surgeon in that hospital by a mile. And that woman said that in front of a young white doctor who worked for me.’
He paused and his eyes drifted away for a while. He had wanted to kill that woman and had had to struggle to contain himself, Ezendu said, at length. He went outside and smoked cigarettes to calm himself down. But that woman was even better than the hidden type, he said, those ones who pretend to be your friends but their minds were always plotting to undermine you. You had to be on your guard all the time, you had to prove yourself over and over again every day of your life, every minute.
Ezendu paused; he looked like a man who had knife wounds that were forever deepening and widening. The contrast between his big beautiful house, his young beautiful wife, his stash of money, all his wonderful possessions and this squalid, comprehensive bitterness was startling. And I wondered: wasn’t his kind of success supposed to free one, at least in part, from that kind of bitterness? When you had fought all those battles and won the big house and the two new cars and the stack of credit cards, could you not see that those you felt were always trying to undermine you were merely being as pathetic as human beings tend to be all over the world and look upon them with some pity, even some compassion? Or perhaps that all the enemies you saw in every corner were merely reflections of your own insecurity and alienation? If success didn’t give you that little bit of confidence, didn’t allow you to let down your guard from time to time, then what was it worth?
After a long silence, Ezendu turned his attention to Nigeria, as if he needed to get away from America. He grilled me minutely about the state of the country when I left it and the news I’d heard by phone from my parents and friends, but it became increasingly clear that he had more current information about Nigeria than I did. His passion was politics, which even when I was in Nigeria was of little more than passing interest to me. After satisfying himself that he had extracted all the information I had about Nigeria, he declared that the country’s political leaders were all morons, a view which is widely held but one which he expressed with more feeling than anyone else I’ve ever met.
‘I’m planning to visit Nigeria soon,’ he said. ‘In fact I’m considering moving there to settle sometime in the future, but I’m going to play an active part in politics even before I go back to settle finally. All these politicians don’t know what they are doing. I can’t wait for a chance to give them a piece of my mind.’
Then he outlined, by speech and energetic gesticulation, a series of political strategies, consisting in the main of ethnic realignments, with which he hoped to transform Nigerian politics. Ezendu’s strategies were so complicated they sounded to me like theories of nuclear physics. The reality I knew was much simpler: a few so-called leaders, waving the ethnic banner, struck deals all the time with whoever happened to hold or want political power and they were handsomely paid for their trouble. Ethnic politics was good business; the ethnic groups were political commodities whose prices changed seasonally, like farm produce. A shrewd politician was one who knew when to hoard and when to sell.
As Ezendu bombarded me with his far-fetched strategies for ethnic fusions and fissions, and scenarios for terrible explosions, I tried to listen and look intelligent, but the heavy lunch and my host’s excellent champagne had dulled my intellect and, much to my subsequent embarrassment, I soon fell asleep.
*
Ezendu forgave me for falling asleep on that occasion, while his political passions were in flow, and I was invited to his beautiful house once a month and drank more of his champagne. One rainy, cold Saturday afternoon in February, expectancy hung like a thick fog in the Ezendus’ living room. At Ezendu’s prompting, a colleague of his at the hospital he worked in had arranged for a local Republican politician, Prime, to call on the Ezendus for drinks. For Ezendu this was meant to be a first step on the ladder to acquiring political influence, maybe even public office.
The white walls of the living room and the severe modernist furniture had been thoroughly polished as though to erase all evidence of human habitation from the house. Two long tables in the dining area were laden: one with spirits, wines, liqueurs and beers, the other with pies, cutlets, kebabs and Nigerian delicacies—bowls of fish and lamb pepper soup whose brown uninteresting appearance concealed the tropical-pepper fires that burnt in them. Ego had sensibly stuck little red signs on the Nigerian dishes that warned: ‘very hot’. Dressed in a dark blue skirt suit and a collarless shirt of thin light blue stripes, she had the look of a powerful corporate attorney on her way to court. Ezendu was turned out in a bold black and white check sports jacket and black trousers. His white shirt was clearly being worn for the first time; his tie had lucid abstract patterns in blue, white and red like a painting by Mondrian. Ezendu’s friend, Ibeanu, a man of dried-stockfish features who worked in a San Francisco firm of accountants, wore a new brown suit. I thought I heard the rustle of the label each time he moved his left arm. Another friend of Ezendu’s, Ogbu, a businessman, nearly as enormous as Ezendu but with a nicer softer face, wore a cream agbada with extravagant gold embroidery and several strings of red beads. His wife was in a boubou of the same cloth as the agbada, also heavily embroidered; she, too, had her own load of beads. I looked unforgivably casual in short sleeves and trousers. No one had told me to dress like someone attending a wedding.
