Dangerous Love

by Ben Okri

  ‘I didn’t like the idea of the hero wanting to commit suicide.’

  ‘The world should not make people want to do that.’

  ‘He was young, and too much of a visionary, and people of the world are trapped in social roles.’

  ‘I like the title.’

  ‘It’s from Walt Whitman.’

  ‘Weep not, child.’

  ‘Let none of us weep.’

  Omovo paused. His eyes narrowed. He continued.

  ‘Weeping doesn’t really do anything. It only cleanses us and prepares us for more weeping. Meanwhile the mad world goes on. Wicked things go on happening. The world has forgotten how to love. The gods don’t respond to weeping any more.’

  ‘Do you know the gods, Omovo?’

  ‘They are here. Somewhere.’

  ‘What book are you reading now?’

  ‘A collection of short stories by a Russian writer called Chekhov.’

  ‘Are you enjoying them?’

  ‘Yes. They are strange. At first they seem ordinary. But the writer notices everything and he makes no judgements. He makes his characters so real that I see them here in Alaba. But I got a bit tired of “A boring tale”. Maybe it’s the title. Maybe I didn’t understand it.’

  And so their innocent conversation turned into an exploration. There was no strain. Each time they met they always had something to talk about. The swell of their feelings always provided some excuse or another for meeting in the backyard. And whatever grew between them grew in the midst of the grime, the overcrowding, and the wretched sanitation of the compound. Ifeyiwa began to go to his compound more than she needed. She washed clothes there more often than she had done. She fetched more water than they could use. And every errand she made had to involve a call at Omovo’s compound. It became necessary for her to see him, and to know that he existed.

  He became her contact with what was loveable. Her feelings for him grew into a yearning that dominated her days. She sometimes had dreams in which she made love to him. For her he became a spiritual husband, one that she could only embrace in her dreams and fantasies. It got to the point that when her husband forced her into having sex she could only survive the experience by imagining that it was really Omovo who was on top of her. But when she saw Omovo afterwards she felt ashamed of her imaginings. And then she bore the ordeals with her husband by thinking about death till he was finished. She would then make sure that she avoided Omovo for a day or two. And when she did see him it was with a deep unhappiness, and a deep joy. She began to see him as an escape from reality.

  She sensed in his eyes the possibilities of the love that had been denied her. She was fascinated by the despair and the brightness of his paintings. She liked the way he stared into the distance, the way he seemed to enter another realm, when an idea possessed him. She liked the way his face lit up in moments of fervour. It could be said that her love grew also from the private images she had of him. One such image was of Omovo standing in front of his canvas, a brush in one hand, clothes mottled with paint, his eyes staring into another dimension of reality. Another one was of Omovo returning wearily from work, his face pale with dust, sweat, and exhaustion. When she saw him like that she had the desire to bathe the tiredness from his limbs. But when he went to his room, had a bath, slept, and reappeared in the compound she never failed to be quickened by his look of a wise child, and by the radiance of his sleepy charm. He reminded her of a child that is lost but not frightened. He sometimes reminded her of her brother who had drowned.

  Their affection grew in an atmosphere of risk. It was probably the risk that made it sweeter. They began to extend their meetings from the backyard to the streets. They would arrange to meet at an appointed place. Sometimes when she was returning from an errand she would find him coming towards her. They would take long walks together. They walked down bushpaths, dirt tracks, streets without names. They passed huts devastated by the rains. Children, with their heads covered in sand, played and cried on the roads. And even the dirt littering the streets, the rotting fruits and vegetables, and the carcasses of dead animals at the roadsides, became part of the enchantment of their walks. Ifeyiwa thought often of those moments they spent together. They walked through scenes of unbearable poverty, their faces lit up by the sun. She would tell him about some of her fears. He would tell her stories, he would talk about his ideas, his visions, his torments. They talked mostly about unhappy things. And yet Ifeyiwa mostly remembered the joy of those days, with every moment vibrant and golden.

  She also couldn’t forget a particular night when her husband went on shouting at her and beat her up. When he went out she was filled with an uncontrollable anger and bitterness. She contemplated killing herself. Then she decided that she was going to walk three hundred miles home to her village. She left the house, having packed her things, with this insane intention. But at the bus stop she ran into Omovo and after she had cried on his shoulder and told him of her anguish, he persuaded her to stay and to think more carefully about her chosen act. They went on a long walk. He carried her bag. Then afterwards she went home. She was grateful to him for having saved her from herself. She liked to think he had also saved her for himself. The secret and dangerous love for him grew more careless. Her mind was trapped in a maze of desires, of pain, of compromises and of love. But she felt she could find happiness and could feel more complete.

  In between these heightened moments, however, were hours and hours of a dreary life. In the mornings she cleaned the bathroom, fetched water for her husband to bath with, made his food, swept the room, washed the plates. When her husband had gone to town she bathed, ate, went to the market and stayed at the shop selling his provisions. When she could find the time she read a novel, or a magazine, or she obligingly plaited the hair of one of the compound women.

  She was revolted by the decay of life about her. The women around seemed to age so quickly. They bore many children and struggled to feed and clothe them. They quarrelled endlessly about all manner of small things. They became embroiled in petty compound intrigues. The hot afternoons poured through their lives and made them look much older than they actually were. They became flabby-breasted, weary, absent-minded, and servile. She didn’t want to be like them. She didn’t want to have poorly dressed miserable children crying at her feet. She was quietly proud of her education and took pains to maintain herself, to keep herself youthful against the merciless passing of time. Her pride isolated her, and made her an outsider.

  Seeing that her life was drifting away, and that she had no girls of her age to talk to, she managed to persuade her husband to allow her to take up evening classes. She knew that getting a job was completely out of the question. He finally agreed mainly because she nagged him about it, and he interpreted this as a warming of her spirit towards him, but also because it would give him the edge over his mates. (At a drinking session later he boasted, saying ‘Ah-ah, my wife attends evening classes, you know. Can your wife even read the newspaper sef?’) She enrolled for a secretarial course which included typing, accountancy and shorthand. But when, after a week’s trial, she began to return later than expected, he began to worry. One night, as he sat in the room, brooding, waiting for her, he found himself imagining all sorts of things. He imagined her getting up to funny things with the teachers. Driven by an excess of insecurity he got dressed and went to the school to spy on her. The school consisted of a small, uncompleted wooden hut. It was incredibly stuffy inside. There were no fans. The electricity had been seized and classes were conducted by the light of hurricane lamps. He was confronted with a multitude of ghetto people, young men and women, who were being adroitly cheated in their intense hunger for knowledge, for some meagre skill, for certificates with which they could get jobs. They were crammed in classes that were short of just about everything – desks, chairs, blackboards, teachers, typewriters and books. And what he saw convinced him. He found Ifeyiwa laughing with a group of boys and girls. Her face shone with sweat. Her eyes were anim
ated. She was possessed of a brightness and a sociability that he had never seen before. His heart was lacerated by the fact that she seemed more natural with her age group than with him. More than that there was the feeling that once she left his company she became another person, she changed into something inaccessible to him. Overcome with a fit of jealousy he stormed into the midst of the chattering young men and women, seized Ifeyiwa by the arm, and dragged her home. He forbade her to return to the evening classes again.

  Desperation filled her daily. Her patience and her quietness began to turn sour. Her mind began to work strangely. She started to have fantasies of murdering her husband. Her fantasies became so intense that her mind began to frighten her. Then she began to have dreams in which her husband turned into a hairy monster who shut her away in a cave. In one such dream she got hold of a knife and managed to kill him, and she laughed till darkness came over her. Then she woke up and found that her husband had been shaking her. He looked at her with strange eyes and asked why she had been laughing in her sleep. The contrast horrified her. But she mumbled something, turned over on her side, and pretended that she had fallen back into sleep. After that night she took to sleeping on the floor. A few days later her husband fell ill and she convinced herself that she had somehow poisoned him by a deviousness of which she wasn’t conscious. She developed a morbid suspicion of decay, and of punishment and of visitations. She was plagued with dreams of rats and suffocating forests. She began to see herself as a purveyor of sadness.

  5

  Ifeyiwa began kindling a fire on which to cook a fresh pot of soup. Her hands went through practised motions. But her mind was in a crepuscular and dimly remembered landscape. She thought about an item she had read in the newspapers. Her village was still in a state of aggression with the neighbouring village of Ugbofia. The item read: ‘Farms have been ravaged and there have been killings. Stout adults are believed to be standing armed at the village perimeters, guarding it.’ A delegation had been sent to effect a truce. The report concluded by saying that ‘the peace seemed an uneasy one’.

  The two villages were about a mile from one another. The stream that flowed past both villages connected them in many ways. In the past they had intermarried. Then a boundary dispute grew and acquired serious dimensions. They now regarded one another with deep mutual suspicion. The things that connected them also provided elements for discord. Histories were dredged up. One village called the other the descendants of slaves. The other village replied in words just as strong. The forest that separated them, the stream that connected them, the air that they both breathed, became permeated with violence. Ifeyiwa wondered bitterly why there should be any fighting at all.

  Compound women came into the kitchen and tinkered around. Outside, children screamed. A fowl strayed into the kitchen and began clucking. She chased it out. The embers of the fire crackled and she fed it some more twigs. She was woken from her thought by her husband’s voice.

  ‘Ifeyiwa, is my water ready?’

  The voice made her shudder. She stiffened.

  He stood outside the kitchen. When he got no response he stuck his head around the zinc door. Then he came in. She was crouched in a corner, fanning the embers into a flame. She looked up at him, her eyes red with tears. He had a wrapper round his waist and a towel round his neck. He was hairy-chested.

  ‘Ifeyiwa! You are here in the kitchen. So why don’t you answer me?’ he said with all of his mouth, believing that the louder he talked the more commanding he appeared, and the more people listened.

  But Ifeyiwa stayed silent. She blew furiously at the embers till the kitchen became suffused with thick grey smoke. He chuckled, shook his head, and went out towards the bathroom.

  Ifeyiwa went on fanning the fire. The firewood was wet. Smoke rose into her eyes. She coughed and tears poured down her face. Her husband came back and said: ‘Ifi! Ifi! There is another rat in the trap, you hear? When you’ve finished go and remove it before it starts to smell. And after that I want you to go to the shop and take care of things till I arrive, you hear?’

  She remained silent. Then she coughed.

  ‘If you are coughing why don’t you leave the kitchen, eh?’

  Silence.

  ‘Foolish girl. Choke as much as you like, hah!’

  Silence.

  Exasperated, he slammed the zinc door and went into the slime-ridden bathroom.

  When he had gone the fire sprang up. The yellow flames lit up her sweating tear-mingled face. Then she got up, opened the door and went outside to get some fresh air. She sat on a stool and listened to her husband bathing. She looked over the soggy backyard. The place was a clutter of unwashed plates, rusted buckets and babies’ potties. The wall had jagged edges of broken glass on its top as a deterrent to thieves. It was only when she remembered that she was meeting Omovo later in the evening that she smiled. Something kindled within her.

  But later that afternoon Tuwo paid a significant visit to Ifeyiwa’s husband. He knocked on the door and waited. A loud voice from within called:

  ‘Come in if you are good-looking!’

  Tuwo entered. Takpo was sitting on the edge of the bed. Before him, on the small centre table, was a plate of steaming eba and a bowl of vegetable soup. He barely looked up when Tuwo came in.

  ‘Welcome, my townsman. Come and join me in my poor man’s food,’ Takpo said, as he swallowed a handful of eba that could easily have choked a lesser man.

  ‘Thank you, but I have eaten already,’ replied Tuwo, who had some difficulty in preventing his saliva from interfering with the dignity of his refusal. The gusto with which Takpo ate tickled his throat and made him hungry.

  ‘So how is the wife?’ Tuwo asked after a moment’s silence, suitably toning down the affectation of his speech.

  ‘Emm, she’s fine, she dey.’

  There was another silence. Takpo was not one to talk while eating. He had an excellent appetite and he gulped the food with shameless, concentrated relish. Tuwo took the opportunity to look round the room, even though he was quite well acquainted with it. The room was fairly large. There were three cheap cushion chairs, a centre table, a large bed, an ancient radiogram which looked as if it had not played a sound in many years, and a reading table on which were some of Ifeyiwa’s books and magazines. In a corner of the room there was a full-length mirror which gave distorted reflections. On the walls there were almanacs of their home-town dignitaries and photographs of Takpo and Ifeyiwa. In one of the photographs she sat in a rather stiff pose, unsmiling. Takpo stood beside her, dominant and proud, and he wore a traditional wrapper and a white shirt. There were photographs of Takpo standing, legs apart, in front of his provision store, and of him reading a newspaper. There were mildewed posters of white women drinking Coca-Cola, and faded postcards of various cities in the world.

  When Takpo finished eating he washed his hands, wiped his mouth, and took a long gulp from his glass of stout. He went and sat in a cushion chair. With his fingernails he picked at fibres of meat that had lodged between his teeth.

  ‘So, Tuwo, how are you? Are you still running after all the girls in the area, eh?’ Takpo said eventually, his eyes dilating. Then he chuckled. His face crumpled in mirth.

  Tuwo smiled somewhat chillingly. He might have been contemplating the fact that he had just survived being married to a tough and slightly bearded woman. He had developed a passionate lust for her and married her in spite of all the warnings from his father that ‘she is the kind of man-woman that will scrape your head-o. Before you know it you will be bald.’ On their first night together she ‘humped’ him till it was said that he had a temporary stoop and had to walk around with a walking stick for an entire week. When she pounded yam it was with the same uncontrollable energy, the same symbolic drive, and she wore out three mortars and two beds in their first month. He soon realised his mistake. She was fearfully possessive and domineering. He found himself living under her relentless control. She began to change every aspect of his rout
ines. She went with him everywhere. She was loud, lusty and picked arguments indiscriminately, in the backyard or even at a party. She criticised him mercilessly. They fought for days without end. Her passion for quarrelling was matched only by her passion for sex. In three months every valuable thing he owned was destroyed in fights. Harassed, maddened, and on the perpetual brink of losing his job, Tuwo couldn’t take it any more. One morning in the midst of a new quarrel, Tuwo seized a machete and chased her round the room. He lashed at her with the machete twice and missed both times. Murder raged in his blood. He pursued her out into the compound and chased her down the streets. He was like a madman that day. He didn’t catch her, but he stormed back home and threw her possessions out into the street. That night she came and packed her things in a van. She was heard to utter the ominous curse that one day someone would chase him around with a machete as he had chased her. Then she left his life forever.

  When the storm of that tempestuous passion blew over, Tuwo found a new diversion: he discovered young women. He was always suspected of having had secret affairs with women in the compound, but his preference now was for the younger ones. That may well be the reason why he was always stumbling upon Omovo and Ifeyiwa as they chatted in the backyard. It may also be the reason why he seemed always to be watching Omovo. It had crossed his mind that Omovo was having an affair with the lissom and desirable Ifeyiwa. And he was somewhat envious. He begun to have designs on Ifeyiwa the first day he saw her. But she always ignored him, always seemed to shrink from his contact. He felt that her husband didn’t deserve her because he was too coarse. And Omovo was too young to enjoy her. Besides, Omovo had to be put in his proper place. Since Tuwo had received an early pension from the ministry, and had been planning to go into business, he had nothing better to do with his time.

  His smile became less chilling and more ironic, as if he were amused by a secret joke. ‘Yes,’ he replied at last. ‘The girls are fine. They grow riper every day.’