A Squatter's Tale, page 14
To my astonishment Uncle Happiness arrived with a flourish, swimming inside a huge jumper and skirt made of a hand-woven fabric of black, deep orange and violet designs. He had a stack of CDs and audio tapes under his arm. He bellowed from the door: ‘I know I’m late, God forgive me. My car refused to start, I did everything but the son-of-a-harlot just wouldn’t start. I had given up, I was on my way back to the house to call a taxi, and I said, let me just try the car one more time, and do you know what happened? It started just like that. One try. All the car wanted to do was to make me late; I beg your forgiveness. May God slice off that useless car’s ears.’
His apologies still running, he went round the room hugging everyone there, struggling to keep his CDs from falling on the floor. I hadn’t seen or spoken to him since the day I found out that he had conned me out of two hundred dollars for the forged social security card. When he came to me, he shouted: ‘Obi, my son! You don’t even bother to phone your uncle. I know you are very busy, but try and call once in a while. I worry so much about you.’ Then lowering his voice, he said: ‘This is my new line of business’ (patting his CDs). ‘I play high quality music, African and other types, at important occasions. I will be making lots of money very soon.’
I wondered to myself how many lines of business Uncle Happiness had tried in his twenty-five years in America, how many dead ends he had zoomed into full of hope.
‘Do you know he is my elder sister’s son?’ Happiness asked of everyone in the room before taking leave of me. Ezendu watched him with a look of irritation; others wore smiles of amusement. Happiness established himself behind the stereo set on a table in a corner of the dining area, and soon filled the room with an old soukous tune by Franco. The beat made something inside your head sway involuntarily from side to side, making you gently tipsy. It is difficult to describe how wonderful African music sounds in America. I hadn’t even heard of Franco when I was in Nigeria, but in my five months here, I had acquired, at great cost, an extensive soukous CD collection, in addition to juju and highlife; like a man who had had to travel to a distant land in order to discover his home.
I noticed that even Ezendu moved to the music while checking on everything, a battle commander on a last-minute tour of his defences. Ogbu, Ibeanu and I were seated around the living room on polished chairs, admiring the polished walls in lieu of conversation, Ego and Mrs Ogbu were in the dining area chatting nervously, Ezendu was for the third time re-arranging the wines and liqueurs when the doorbell rang.
Ezendu went to answer it, moving extremely slowly: he didn’t want to appear nervous, but it seemed as if his brain had substantially lost contact with his limbs.
Prime was a tall, spare man with rich brown and grey eyebrows and moustache that pointed in all directions. He wore an old navy blue sweater and faded jeans; his tiny wife, whose head barely reached his shoulders, was draped in a brightly patterned blanket-like top that looked like something from Guatemala, over black jeans.
Ezendu led his guests to where we stood waiting to receive them, his face showing signs of severe injury, as if Prime and his wife had insulted him by being so casually dressed.
The Primes shook hands all round. Vicki, the wife, struggled to pronounce each person’s name the right way, ran her hands over Mrs Ogbu’s boubou, declared that Happiness’s outfit was stunning and enquired from him where she could get a CD of the soukous tune that throbbed from the loudspeakers. My uncle went into a long, uncoordinated story about the CD which Ezendu cut short by steering the Primes to the hors d’oeuvres and drinks tables. Prime carefully picked a few shrimps and a chicken pie after careful examination. His wife opted for fish pepper soup.
‘It’s a bit hot,’ Ego warned her.
‘I think I can handle it,’ Vicki said. We all watched nervously as she stirred the small bowl of pepper soup Ego had served her and put half a spoonful to her lips. Her face tensed with struggle; for a moment I thought she would eject the soup into Ezendu’s worried face, but she somehow got it down, exhaled loudly, shook her head and said, ‘Whoo! This thing packs a punch!’
Everyone laughed with relief.
Ezendu, Ogbu, Ibeanu and I stood around Prime in the centre of the living room; Vicki was showing a lot of interest in Happiness, and she and the other women stood beside him discussing something which brought out a lot of Happiness’s bellowing laughter.
‘John is one of the leading businessmen from Nigeria on the West Coast. He’s heavily involved in international trade,’ Ezendu said to Prime, indicating Ogbu. ‘Mike,’ he said, referring to the accountant, ‘is a highly experienced CPA. His office is on Market Street in the city, and Obi is an economic analyst for many Nigerian companies doing business in the States. We’re all active in the organisation of African immigrants resident in California. John, Mike and I are on the executive committee; Obi is one of the leaders of the youth movement.’
Prime nodded several times, seemingly very impressed. As far as I knew there was no organisation of African immigrants resident in California, and I was surprised to learn that I was an economic analyst, not a security guard. I avoided Ezendu’s eyes and looked at the floor.
‘We are in touch with all the other immigrant organisations here and in other parts of the States,’ Ezendu went on. ‘We hold meetings regularly and we are developing strategies to promote our common interests.’
‘Sounds pretty good,’ Prime said.
‘Most immigrants,’ Ezendu said, ‘are very hard-working and resourceful. As you may know, all over the States there are hundreds of thousands of doctors and engineers and accountants and economists and businessmen originally from Africa and Asia.’
‘I hear,’ Prime volunteered, ‘that a lot of the folks in Silicon Valley are of Chinese and Vietnamese descent.’
‘You are exactly right, and there are thousands of doctors from India, Egypt and Nigeria,’ Ezendu added.
‘In fact,’ Ibeanu said, ‘in some hospitals all the doctors are immigrants.’
Throwing a frown at Ibeanu for what he must have thought an ill-considered statement, Ezendu quickly said, ‘I’m not sure Mike is correct. Immigrant doctors are a significant minority, but a minority nonetheless.’
Ibeanu swallowed the rebuke quietly, his eyes full of apology.
‘The entire immigrant population is one hundred per cent conservative,’ Ezendu continued. ‘We work hard—we believe that everybody should—and we have very strong family values. We believe that our natural home is in the Republican Party.’
Ezendu paused to check the effect of what he had said. His forehead was stretched taut by anxiety; the need to know if he was making an impact had doubled the size of his nose. His moustache stood on edge; his lips trembled. Prime’s expression was neutral, as though his mind were preoccupied with matters far away from that room.
‘What I’m trying to say,’ Ezendu went on more strenuously, ‘is that we want to develop close links with the Republican Party, to support it in any way we can. This is a critical period in the history of this country, and we want to make our little contribution to seeing that it moves in the right direction.’
‘Hmm,’ Prime said, nodding slowly, the distant expression still on his face. I noticed that Ogbu looked rather uneasy. He exported containers of California wine to Nigeria and imported Nigerian nurses to work in the US; he was also said to hold a few McDonald franchises. He had a large home in Half Moon Bay and six children, two of whom were in good colleges. I suspected that he wasn’t sure this dabbling in American politics was a good idea. It might have seemed to him like telling a man who has generously given you a roof over your head that you wanted to sleep with his wife.
‘I strongly believe there will be mutual benefits in our working together,’ Ezendu said. ‘We can contribute money and time, and people. And when there are any issues on which we feel strongly, we will let you know.’
‘We have many capable people,’ said Ibeanu trying, I thought, to make up for his earlier gaffe, ‘capable people like Dr Ezendu, who is very influential among all immigrants throughout the country.’
‘Hmm,’ Prime said, ‘excellent.’
But it wasn’t clear what, if anything, was excellent. Prime seemed to want to maintain absolute blankness towards what he was being told. He appeared to belong to that breed of politicians who are neither conservative nor liberal nor even centrist, but who float in a balloon of cautious ambition above all political positions and commitments.
‘I believe Newt Gingrich is an extraordinarily remarkable man,’ Ezendu said. ‘I have followed the Republican revolution in Congress every inch of the way, and I am a fanatical supporter. I think Newt and others are on the verge of changing America forever.’
I thought I detected a subtle frown on Prime’s face at the mention of Gingrich, but Ezendu went on affirming his faith in that revolution and its extraordinarily remarkable helmsman. When he paused, Prime glanced at his watch, said nothing.
‘We are opposed to illegal immigration,’ Ezendu continued, in full swing, ‘I fully support Governor Wilson. There should be a strictly controlled process of immigration. America is not the world’s Father Christmas.’
Prime remained resolutely non-committal, playing it very safe, the way he had earlier on avoided the peppery Nigerian delicacies on offer. The Republican politicians Ezendu was invoking seemed too peppery for Prime’s palate.
What amazed me was for how long, in the face of Prime’s unyielding reticence, Ezendu kept up his pledges of loyalty, his arguments about mutual benefits, his declaration that the Republican Party was the natural home for all immigrants. He was an incredibly thick-skinned suitor blind to a hundred different hints that he wasn’t wanted.
As if the evening wasn’t going badly enough for Ezendu, we were all suddenly drawn by Happiness’s bellows as he left his disc jockey’s table and began dancing to a highlife tune, Sweet Mother. Prime, taking advantage of a pause, quickly detached himself from our group to get a better view of the dance, grateful for the distraction. Ezendu muttered something under his breath; I glanced at him and quickly looked away. His large face emitted a dangerous anger: I wondered how much of that anger was caused by my Uncle Happiness and how much by a country that, after all Ezendu’s years here, still had the capacity to confound him.
Prime and the women formed a ring around Happiness and began clapping to the beat of the music. Happiness threw his trunk left and right and stomped on the floor and rotated his arms above his head like a windmill. I wanted to draw closer, but out of loyalty to Ezendu, I (and Ogbu and Ibeanu) watched from the living room while trying to pretend lack of interest.
Powered by the clapping, by little shouts of encouragement, by the ever-rising tide of the music, Happiness’s dancing grew wilder, the gaping smile on his face wider. He jerked his pelvis forwards and backwards, passionately copulating with air, and then he threw himself forward and landed at the feet of Prime’s wife, who was one of the most enthusiastic spectators. With an unsteady curtsey he asked her for a dance. ‘Oh sure,’ she said, and joined him in the centre of the ring, her blanket top flapping about. Uncle Happiness began to sing in his bellowing tone alongside the highlife singer:
Sweet Mother, I no go forget you
for the suffer wey you suffer for me
If a no sleep, my mother no go sleep
If a no chop, my mother no go chop
She no dey tire o!
His pelvis moved with a fluidity incredible in such an overweight body. Vicki matched him thrust for thrust, wiggle for wiggle, laughing torrentially; she was having so much fun it seemed to make her cry. Happiness abandoned the pelvic dance and began bending down as though to pick up something from the floor and then straightening up swiftly. Vicki followed his lead but couldn’t match Happiness’s suppleness. They circled around each other with mock wariness, bending down and rising rapidly as they went. Happiness changed the dance yet again. This time he stood on the spot and trembled slowly from head to toe as though he were made of jelly. That was beyond Vicki and she had to content herself with standing in front of him and shaking her body from side to side.
After a long while, perhaps at a furtive signal from her husband, Vicki announced between greedy swallows of air that they had to leave—another appointment to catch.
‘You’re just too much,’ she told Happiness, boxing his shoulder. He answered with a wide grin and a low bow, and continued dancing. The Primes shook hands all round, said they’d had a wonderful time. Ezendu and Ego saw them off while the rest of us continued watching Happiness swaying, shaking and twirling to Sweet Mother, dripping sweat. He must have made a special lengthy tape of the song for each time it seemed about to come to an end it started all over again. I noticed two empty bottles of Piper Sonoma standing beside Happiness’s disc jockey’s table, and I surmised that large quantities of sparkling wine had contributed significantly to his exuberance and fluidity.
With both hands he lifted his right leg and hopped about on the left one, managing at the same time to gently sway from side to side. Then he lifted the left leg and hopped about on the right one. Even when Ezendu, back from seeing off his guests, stood only a few feet away from Happiness and cast embittered eyes at him, Happiness didn’t miss a beat. Instead he called out to his audience breathlessly: ‘Come and join me! Don’t let this wonderful music go to waste, I beg you all in the name of God.’
No one joined him, but he didn’t really need any support. He became a boatman, his arms swinging backwards and forwards as he paddled an imaginary boat, then he bent low from his waist and began to cut grass with an imaginary machete while tapping the floor with his feet in time with the music, then he became a traffic policeman furiously directing traffic.
Uncle Happiness seemed able to turn life’s laws upside down, to defiantly seize a euphoric joy which did not rightly belong to him. There was something enviable about his ability to pluck happiness out of thin air like a conjurer (albeit with the help of sparkling wine), his ability to throw away the cares of this world like used toilet paper. But with time that joy began to show signs of strain. His wide smile began to fade: he was returning to the bleakness of the present. It struck me at that moment that for all the time he had spent in this country, Happiness had, in a sense, never arrived in America. His soul had never learnt (was perhaps incapable of learning) how to exist within the confines of long-term plans, how to follow doggedly the immigrant’s mountainous path to success. His body, thrashing about like a huge, wounded python, seemed trapped in the temperament of a different climate, a land of perpetual sunshine.
He did a sudden pirouette and then flung himself up into the air. He didn’t get very far before returning to earth with a heavy thud that almost made the mansion shiver. He executed another pirouette and threw himself up again, and this time he barely left the floor.
The Monster with Fifty Heads
It rained all through February. On local TV there were nightly stories of floods and power cuts all over the Bay Area; mighty sinkholes appeared behind some of San Francisco’s pretty old houses and threatened to swallow them up. I wore two shirts and two sweaters to work and, bloated under my coat like a corpse, I stuck my face to the windscreen of my little Corolla, peering through fog thick as pap which rearranged the beam of your headlights into rolls of fine gauze blocking your way, through a murky darkness that fell suddenly in the afternoon the way a power cut happened back in Nigeria. Andrew had paid stiff electricity bills in his first winter in America so he was stingy with the heating, and though I slept under a pile of blankets, my nose flowed like a stream and my sides hurt so much that pneumonia was very much on my mind. It was little consolation that this Bay Area winter was child’s play compared to the snow-covered East Coast and Midwest.
Lying under my blankets on my one free day a week, staring through the window of Andrew’s room at long thin grains of falling rain, I missed home more than I thought possible. Robo’s thin-fingered touch, her unhurried, meandering laugh, her brafree jiggling breasts. Lagos—the lagoon, blue and wonderful, the city free of chaos, bad temper and violence, filth and evil smells, the nightclubs filled to the brim with beautiful people, energy and good cheer at full throttle—a Lagos that existed only in my cold, homesick mind. My ageless mother, rippling with strength, leading the women in church in an almost erotic, buttock-shaking dance of thanksgiving to the Lord at the services I attended once in a while. My gorgeous younger sister, Nwaka, going through some of the most confusing years of her life without the counsel of her big bro. Over and over I asked myself: What are you doing here, for God’s sake? Why can’t you just go home and get any kind of job? As if jobs littered the streets of Lagos.
My spirits lifted as the sun began its return in March. Though I could barely afford it, I found a place of my own, positioning myself to take advantage of the possibilities which I once again sensed were in the air all around me.
‘I’m going to miss you,’ Andrew said sheepishly, with a look of mourning, as we were moving my things to my car. Because he had given me a roof over my head for eight months, I didn’t burst out laughing.
