Swallow, page 13
Our house became a meeting point. We had people who ended up staying for days. We even had two oyinbo men, one after the other. This was just after the Civil War. The first oyinbo man I met one afternoon when I came home from the market. He was sitting under the mango tree and his hair was as long as a woman’s, down to his shoulders. “This one is an oyinbo?” I said. He looked like a pauper. His trousers were covered in dust. I called my neighbor’s daughter, Funke, who knew how to read and write English, but this oyinbo could speak English no better than Funke. His name was Alex. He’d come from Belgium.
“Far from here?” I asked.
“Very,” he said. He’d crossed an ocean.
“Where is it near?” I asked. “Tell me one big place.”
“Germany,” he said.
“I know that place,” I said, “from when I was small and the Congolese soldiers marched through the farming settlements and we sang about Hitler, and my mother sold tobacco to them, and they behaved badly, and they were going to Burma, and they didn’t know when they were coming back.”
We called them “Boma Boys.” Alex was surprised by my story. He said, “The Belgians are in charge in the Congo, you know.”
I asked, “So how come you’re not over there being in charge?”
He said he came to meet Tunde Twinkle. He was a student of “ethnomusicology.”
“Really,” I said.
I could have been a student myself. I was highly intelligent and knew that when students add an -ology to a word, the word sounded more important. I asked why he was studying such a subject. He said he wanted to be a doctor. I said, “Help me cure my back.”
He said he wasn’t that kind of doctor: Oyinbos, you never knew with them. This Alex said Tunde Twinkle sent him to see your father. He was studying music from Austria, “waltz,” and our juju music. They were call-and-response music, he said. A universal concept that everyone understood.
“That’s very good,” I said.
He brought out a record from his load and played it on our gramophone. All I heard was a noise like a cat crying. I could hear no drums. I asked if the bandleader was famous. Alex said yes, the bandleader was very famous. His name was “Strauss.”
I asked Funke to leave when I got tired of listening to the music. I offered Alex roasted corn and he sat under the mango tree, chewing. Your father came home with you and you started crying once you set eyes on Alex. “Egungun! Masquerader!”
“It’s just an oyinbo,” I said, but you wouldn’t stop. You thought it was a mask that Alex was wearing. I almost fell from your grip on my legs. I told your father who Alex was and why he came. Your father took one look at him and walked straight into the house. You were still crying, “Egungun, it’s scary, it’s scary.” Alex was standing under the tree with his mouth open. What a welcome for a stranger. I carried you on my hip and went after your father.
“It’s you he came to look for,” I said.
“I don’t care,” your father said.
“He’s been waiting long,” I said. “Why not talk to him at least?”
“I don’t speak English,” your father said.
“Neither does he,” I said. “Yet he calls himself a student. Ethno something or the other. What am I to do with him?”
Your father was nice to everyone except oyinbos. I grew up seeing oyinbos every week, in my church. They spoke Yoruba and they were more dignified than Alex, but they were oyinbos all the same. I did not hate them or like them.
Your father said, “Tunde Twinkle has already told me about him. He said the man would stay a while. He said the man is writing theories. He said it’s a pity because oyinbos write theories about things they can’t understand, and by the time they finish, you can’t understand either, even if they’re writing about you.”
Like that your father refused to speak to Alex, and like that I was left to talk to Alex, through Funke. Alex stayed a week, sleeping on our floor. I gave him bananas and pineapples. He liked them. He tried fried yam and liked that. He liked fried fish, too. He asked many times about your father. “When will he speak to me?”
I kept answering, “I don’t know.”
He said, “But I have to speak to him. He is such a genius with the talking drum.”
Soon I was saying, “Listen, he’s very tired, you know.” Alex continued to ask, so I finally I told him to his face, “Look here, he doesn’t like oyinbos. He says you are all full of mischief. He says any African who follows you will end up lost.”
Alex looked sad, so I told him a lie. “Don’t worry. I like oyinbos.”
He asked too many questions. Why did I prefer the town if I grew up in the farming settlements? He said the surrounding bush was beautiful.
“What is beautiful about the bush?” I said. “Bush is bush. Half of it is abandoned and the other half has been felled.”
“Nevertheless I’d like to explore it,” he said.
“Do so at your peril,” I said.
He asked about my family. “My father is dead,” I said. “My mother is dead. My aunt, who taught me how to dye cloth, died in the year before my daughter was born. My brothers, three of them are dead.”
He said it was sad that so many in my family were gone. I agreed. “Such is life,” I said. “The generations come and go in cycles. At least I have a child.” He asked why I only had one child. “One is what I have by the grace of God,” I said. He said there were women in his country that wanted no children. “They must be very lazy,” I said.
I’d seen oyinbo women, priests’ wives mostly, and they were always sick with fever. If they had a light load to carry, they handed the load to their husbands. They couldn’t take the heat. Sometimes they fainted, and after they woke up, they wanted water to drink. I’d heard them speak with squeaky voices, skew! skew! Only one I remembered that had a booming voice, and she was married to an Itsekiri man, and she commanded her choir and didn’t tolerate any yawning during practice. The rest, I really couldn’t trust them to handle a serious situation.
Alex had a wife and two children. He showed me a photograph of his family, his wife, a girl and a boy, with the same stringy hair and pointed face. They were ugly. “They look happy,” I said. He wanted to know about the Vespa in the compound. I told him it was mine. I used to ride before I had my child, when I was taking esusu contributions. Now, our esusu group had hired a woman to collect our contributions and we paid her for her services and she rode a motorcycle. I was the first woman in town to ride one. Thankfully, times had changed. It was rare but not impossible to see a woman riding.
You would think Alex would be satisfied, but all he did was ask more questions. He asked about our country’s independence and the Civil War. He wanted to know if we were affected in Makoku. I said, “No, our town is always protected from bad fortune, even from epidemics. Maybe that is why most people here have time for pettiness.” He said even in times of war and sickness people find time for pettiness, and I saw in his eyes that he understood me. “Our Civil War saddened me,” I said.“To think that the oyinbos left and we began to fight each other like that. It was not right. Only children behave that way when their parents leave the house.”
He wanted to know about the old method of cloth dyeing: how to make indigo from elu leaves; how to mold and fire pots; how to prepare cassava tubers into starch. He even asked about my patterns. Poor Funke got tired of translating. “He’s asking all sorts,” she complained. “I can’t keep up.” As for me, I was shocked how long it took to explain the old method of dyeing. If it took so long to explain, I was glad that I’d stopped using it. Then I wondered why no one came from overseas to study what I knew, or to write theories about me. I was envious of your father. Whatever my hands were capable of, music was the one work that people all over the world seemed to appreciate the most.
Alex ended up writing notes though, even about my esusu group, and how we saved money together. On the morning he left, he came with me to the marketplace to buy cloth and almost caused a riot. “This one calls himself an oyinbo?” the other women said. Ragged to his feet, yet he walked around as if he were our landlord. It shocked me. Soon they were calling him as if they knew him very well, “Alex! Alex! Come over here!” They were trying to steal my new customer from me. I fought them off. “Leave him alone!” I said. “I saw him first!”
Really, he was like a goat, but nicer. The first oyinbo I ever spoke to at length. We were picking up his hairs from our floor long after he left. He later sent me a book with photographs of my designs in it. I’d sold them to him at such high premiums I couldn’t believe he’d pay for them, but that book of his made him rich. Yes. It was translated into several languages and sold all over the world. Your father said, “You see? Your precious Alex exploited you.” I said, “Ah, but I exploited him first,” and in the final analysis I, too, was now famous.
Then another oyinbo man came to visit. This one had a round face and afro hair. I arrived home to find him taking photographs of your father. He was calling your father “My brother” and calling me “Ma’am.” He said he was a journalist from America. He did not stay or eat though. I told your father, “At least Alex stayed. At least Alex ate. At least Alex took notes about me.”
Your father said, “You think everyone has time to follow women up and down? Alex had nothing better to do. He and his theories. He was trying to explain what he couldn’t. I have spiritual powers. When I beat messages people take heed. At least this man understands.”
“I don’t care for this oyinbo, ” I said. “I don’t care for him at all. He’s impolite. He doesn’t eat my food.”
“He’s not oyinbo,” your father said. “Can’t you see his skin?”
It was true. This oyinbo was black, blacker than me to be honest, and quite a pretty man if you studied his face.
That was how famous we both were. I was in a book in Belgium and your father ended up in a newspaper in America far away. We were the center of attraction in Makoku, and at least the oyinbos were exciting to meet. The people from our town who came to visit, I knew them all. There was nothing new they could tell me. Half of them were related to your father or me. The pleasant ones brought gifts and left with prayers. “May God bless you with more children,” and such. The difficult ones, like Sister Kunbi, brought gifts, left with prayers and went home to criticize us: “Why are they so lavish? I didn’t care for her fish,” and such. She was so resentful of us, she even went as far as to convince Brother Tade to sell his business and leave town. Makoku was too small a town for them, she said, and therefore, they packed up and moved to Abeokuta. I thought, finally. Finally.
The other visitors, the rubbish people, as I called them, these were the people who came because they wanted to be around your father, or anyone who was well known. Theirs was to eat free food and take gifts, and of these people, one became a big problem in my life.
He was born Taofik. He was the third son of Adigun the hunter, Adigun the hunter who disappeared into the forest for months and returned to the farming settlements to tell children stories of two-headed beasts. Total fibs. This Taofik had no real job. From an early age, all he did was provide women and palm wine to the lorry drivers who passed through town. He was married to a young woman, pretty like so and deaf. She smiled a lot and only Taofik could understand what she was saying, yet he favored another woman, an older woman with legs like a chicken. I couldn’t understand. Taofik knew this older woman lay with men for money, yet Taofik was her shadow. To me, he was a lout to follow such a woman and abandon his pretty wife. He drank a lot of palm wine and, God rest his soul, died when he fell off a palm tree in a stupor. It was terrible. But I had no way of telling that such a fate would befall him. All I knew was Taofik was always in our house. I woke up, he was there. I left for the market and came back, he was there drinking, and when he drank too much, he ran around our compound making noises like a train, “Fakafikifakafi-woo woo!” For that your father never called him Taofik. He called him “Faka-fiki.”
That was not funny. Taofik was not responsible and to encourage him was wrong. One morning, I realized he had not gone home in almost two weeks, so I went into the room in which he slept and found him with his bare feet facing me. I shook him and asked him to turn his feet away. He knew that was rude.
“Don’t be angry, my lady,” he said, alert, as if he was never sleeping.
“You’re still sleeping?” I asked. “Are you tired or what?”
“I’m not tired,” he said.
He was always rubbing his red eyes, that man. One thing I learned about drunks, through him, was that they always apologized. As for his calling me “My lady,” it was because he called your father “My lord.” He took off his cap and prostrated to greet us. He over-praised us, hailed us the richest people in the world, which was another thing I learned about drunks — they exaggerated. I asked your father why Taofik was living in our house for so long. “Leave him alone,” your father said. “He is my close friend,” ore mi atata ni.
I tolerated him for another week. Perhaps the man had troubles I knew nothing about. Your father would not tell me anyway. Taofik must have thought I’d accepted him as part of my household. By the end of the week, his chicken-legged woman was visiting him at our house.
I asked her to leave. “I know what you do,” I told her. “You defile young men. You usurp married men for money. I don’t want you around here.”
She looked me up and down. “Who do I usurp? Did I usurp your husband? Men come to me of their own free will, and anyway, you can’t look down on me like that. After all, we are both women.”
I didn’t confirm. She was trying to make my mouth dance, that woman, but there are certain people you don’t lower yourself to. I told Taofik, “I give you until the end of today. I want you out of here by nightfall. She must leave meanwhile.”
He started his usual talk, “My lady, you know how much I respect you...”
I told him, “None of that nonsense. You heard me. Everyone go to your respective homes. This can’t go on.”
God only knows why I felt guilty enough to give him a little something, you know, once the woman had left, to help him find his way. It was just a feeling I had, that he was in need. I went to the mattress under which I kept my money. I could have kept it in a savings bank, but I did not trust savings banks. I could have hidden it elsewhere, but there was nowhere safer than the place I slept. I lifted the mattress and the floor underneath looked as if I’d swept it clean. I started wailing, “My money, my money.”
My contribution for a whole month’s savings was gone. Taofik ran into the room and saw me kneeling by the mattress.
“What, my lady?” he asked.
“My money,” I said. “The bundle I kept here. It’s gone.”
“But it’s not gone,” he said. “My lord gave me the money. I needed it for my friend. She’s sick. She needs money for treatment.”
“Sick with what?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But it’s terminal, and she might go crazy, she says.”
I pointed at the door. “This same woman, who came to my house to abuse me, suddenly she’s dying?”
“Yes,” he said. “She can’t even walk properly. That’s why she needs immediate treatment. It itches her, but she came here to thank me nevertheless.”
“Itches?” I asked.
I was quite naïve and furious. How could an itch cause death? It made no sense to me.
“Yonder,” he said. “That is all I need to say.”
The way he moved his hands, I immediately knew she had a venereal disease.
“Get out,” I said. “She knows how her sickness befell her. As for you and your red eyes, I want you out of here too. As for your lord who brings a person like you to my house, he will tell me why he thinks he can take my month’s work and give it to a drunk and a prostitute.”
Words are like eggs. You drop them and you cannot put them back together again. This was the final thing I learned about drunks: even though they apologized and over-praised people, they secretly wanted respect like everyone else. Taofik went behind my back and told your father what I’d said. That was the beginning of a real division in our house. Whatever quarrels your father and I had had before were minor. He grumbled, I complained, he turned his face away. He never bothered me. This time, he faced me and narrowed his eyes.
“You ask no one to leave this house,” he said. “If I say Faka-fiki can stay here, he can stay.”
Taofik was standing behind him, as though he was innocent, smiling even.
“What is amusing you?” I asked.
“Don’t be angry, my lady,” he said, standing straight. “No need for a fracas.”
I turned to your father, “I want my money back. I don’t care what happened, who asked for what, who took what, who gave what to whom. That man has a house and a wife. Now that chicken-legged woman is visiting him here, saying she’s dying, taking my money and insulting me. I want him out of this house and I want my money back. Back to the beginning as if none of this ever happened.”
Your father smacked his chest. “You will do as I say.”
“That will be difficult,” I said. “How do you know they did not plan this together to trick you? It’s not as if they are pastor and wife.”
“Are you talking to me?” your father said. “Is it me you are talking to in that manner? I’m warning you, Arike, for the last time, do not insult my friends!”
