I waited until the fifth time I saw him to speak with him. When I did, it was to ask him if he lived alone.
His name was Constantine, like the emperor, but I called him Aba for the city where he was born. He did not speak often of Aba, except to say, “A man must go where the money is. Aba will be there when I get back.”
His mother was a fisherperson. She was getting older so no longer went out to sea, but her boats did, and once a month she sent him a basket of fish smoked in her coal oven.
I never saw him shave, but he was always groomed in that way few Nigerian men are, clean and only a little prickly with stubble. He would kiss me all over and my toes would twist with need. When he slid into me, my mouth erupted in a tangy sweetness. He was from the river and so everything about him was full and wide, his nose wide like the ocean, his navel full as the deep blue sea.
HE WORKED AT the wharf. He took the Rapid Transit Bus to Apapa every day, like I did. He did not believe in destiny, God, or the internet, but when I bent my elbows and knees, when I lengthened my torso and stretched like a yogi in compass mode, he believed in me.
I was becoming a grown-up madam of a woman. It was happening like my grandmother once said, “A girl becomes a woman when she finds a man she would do anything for.”
I had found a man. I had taken a loverman for myself. My loverman did not laugh when I tickled. He did not cry when he was spent. He shuddered, like a possessed man at the command of the exorcist, like he was expelling whatsoever joy was trying to lay a hold on him.
My Aba was exacting and exhausting, like all my favorite sad songs, so I rolled around when he asked and played him over and over. I played him like I was a little girl again, sitting at home singing myself sore.
Back then, before our mother disappeared like smoke, before I had any real reason to weep, I would sing sad songs and cry so hard until I was sick with a high fever. My mother never could figure out how I got so sick sitting at home all by myself. But I knew what I was doing. I was sick with longing. I was sick with the curse of sensation, with all the world’s sadness seeking and finding a resting place in my bones and in my marrow. One day, I was just a little girl who sometimes got out her seat in the neighborhood bar to dance, even if no one else was dancing. Then the next day, I was in love, I was a woman.
Did the world end when I lay on top of him? I think it did. The first time my hands traveled down his hips and I found the place where he had taken two bullets to protect his post from smugglers at the border, I placed my fingers on scars the size of a coin and asked Eledua to make the world kinder to men.
Did the world become nothing but a treasure trove when he kissed the back of my thighs? I expect that it did. I had formed a habit; a time-tasking habit of listing all the kinds of happinesses a grown-up in-love woman could feel. Every time I found a type I did not know by taste or a level I had not yet ascended, I shared it with my Aba and he showed me how to get there by myself.
WHAT IS THE morning? How did Oluwa mi make my morning like ten thousand mornings and my nighttime like one unending night? One day, as I was walking to my business place, my bunch of keys in one hand, my letter opener in the other, I watched a woman who had my Aba’s face printed on the white T-shirt that she wore cross over to my side of the street. I stopped to let her walk ahead of me. The back of her T-shirt said
GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN
FEBRUARY 27, 1972–May 22, 2005.
She was one of those bony, shrunken women, and as she said her good-mornings and how have you been to other pedestrians, her thin voice scratched my ears. I walked discreetly behind her for a couple of miles, wondering about the least intrusive way to ask about the shirt she wore. When she arrived at her destination, a store where she sold all types of phones, cell phones and landlines, I waited a few minutes then walked in, acting like a customer in search of a new phone.
She smelled like her store, like sawdust, mothballs, and sunlight. When she replied to my greetings, her smile was weak and brief, her lower lip quivering after it ended. I complained about her prices, but she did not argue. One section of her store was dedicated to phone covers. I walked to that section, picking a case that was both phone case and wallet, neon pink and blue, altogether garish.
I turned to her. “How much will you accept for this case?”
We were no longer alone. A man had walked in, wearing the bright yellow branded T-shirt of the telecommunications company most people in Lagos used. He had placed at the top of one of her display cases a large expanding file folder, and they were looking through a small pile of forms, receipts, and price lists.
“Excuse me?” I said to her again.
“What do you want?” she asked me.
“I want to know how much this is,” I said, holding out the ugly phone cover.
“Do you want to buy that?” she asked.
“Why will you not just tell me how much it is?” I asked.
“Please can you help me drive this woman away,” she said, turning to the man with her. “I do not know what she wants, she has been here almost an hour, she has nothing to buy.”
Time had run away from me like butter running from a hot spoon.
“I’m sorry for wasting your time, I just wanted to ask you a question. Please, who is that man on your shirt? He looks like my boyfriend,” I said very quickly, not giving the man in yellow a chance to throw me out.
The storekeeper laughed for a long time. It was a sad laugh. When she spoke again, it was still to the man in yellow.
“You remember my brother Constantine, the one we hired your company bus for, to take his body to bury in Aba last October?” she asked.
“Yes. The customs officer. The one who died in Yobe,” the man answered.
“Please, he did not die. What is die? My brother was killed. He was shot right here by smugglers.” She slapped the right side of her pelvic bone hard, pointing out where our Constantine was shot.
Ta ta ta.
The fat around her hip sounded soft, tender, firm like the sound a cut of meat makes when a meat seller slaps it on his table in the market to convince you of its freshness. She did not hit me, but I felt on my own hips the intense force of her raging.
“This useless government killed him with that stupid job and their useless hospitals with no doctors. Is that how a grown man dies, just like that?” she asked.
It was like I was standing outside my own body, watching it fall from the world’s tallest building.
The man in the yellow shirt walked to the other side of the display case. He placed one arm around the angry shopkeeper.
“Sister, please leave this place. You have upset her so much,” he said to me.
I walked away, even though I had several questions with no one to answer them. I wanted to show her the pictures on my phone. The one with us in the mall, taken by a stranger, the one where we are holding hands going down the escalator. The one with us in his bedroom, the one where he had my blue bra around his head like oversize headphones. The one I took myself, where he was shirtless in his kitchen, frying plantains.
I wanted to show her his teeth marks on my thigh, fresh from that morning. I wanted to show her his seed still caught in the spaces between my own teeth. I could imagine her surprise, or anger, her mouth stretching taut then erupting, flowing with cursewords. I wanted her to feel this same disorientation I was feeling, like my face was filled with air and I was floating about without arms.
I wanted to tell her about all the names my Aba called me—Nkem, Ifunaya, Obidia. I wanted to talk about all the stuff my Aba taught me. Sometimes, when he sat next to me on the bus to Apapa, he would point out all the cars he would have detained for further checking at his duty post at the border.
“Kehinde, look, that red ’88 Honda Accord, why is it getting stopped?” he would ask.
“Too old to be legally imported,” I would say quickly, without even looking at the car. “Personal cars have to be fifteen years old or less.”
Oth
er times, it wasn’t so easy. I did not have the discernment to notice unevenly balanced vehicles suggesting contraband hidden in their undercarriages or number plates much older than the car, suggesting stolen plates. Constantine was a patient teacher, saying everything with a smile.
My sister got her period first, weeks before I did. Our grandmother called her into her room the day she got her first period, and they had a long talk. When I asked Ariyike what they talked about she refused to tell me.
“Don’t worry, it was just her normal Yoruba spiritual nonsense, she will tell you herself when your time comes.”
Six weeks later it was my turn to get the talk from Grandmother. She told us we were twins, therefore the elect of gods. We were to be careful not to get pregnant as teenagers; there is nothing sadder than a young mother of twins, she said. More important, she warned me to be careful when I chose my sexual partners.
“Before you have sex, remember you are Ibeji, you are a disruption that is tolerated only because you are good. We are Ibeji, the benevolent spirits, we bring fortune and good luck. But we are spirits, never forget that. So be careful of malevolent spirits. Do not befriend Anjonu. Abiku and Ibeji will wage war on their family, Ibeji and Emere will pollute the earth, Ibeji and Atunwaye will destroy each other.”
If Constantine had indeed died a full year before I met him in Lagos, did that not make him Atunwaye, one who returns to the earth? Was he now Akuudaaya, one who creates for himself a second life after an abrupt end? I had many questions without answers, big questions pregnant with smaller questions. There was no one I could trust to give me the answers I needed, especially not my grandmother.
What do men want? What do they want from the earth? What do they want from love? I think all men want to live like trees. I think they want to be rooted in the earth, growing indeterminately, first as tall as they want and after that, as wide as their frames can carry. I think men want to die with their leaves green but their trunks hollow. They all want a slow, painless, gentle, suffocating death—not this sorrow, this terror, this fear.
I wandered around the city until it was dark. I had planned to say to my Aba when I saw him again, “You know how they say everyone has a second somewhere in the world? I think I met your second today. Although, I did not technically meet him, I saw a picture of him.”
This is what I was going to say. When I arrived at his apartment, he was standing at his front door, a large suitcase packed, like he was ready for a trip and was just waiting to say goodbye.
“My mother has sent for me,” he said. He did not give me a chance to ask questions.
I looked at his face, his hooded eyes swollen and dry, and I was surprised to find them completely without sadness. He looked resigned, even bored. Instead of all I planned to say, this is what I said:
“Constantine, who is your mother but me? Where are you thinking of going without me?”
I took the suitcase from him, walking into the kitchen. Everything in the kitchen was gone. From the gas stove and the oven mittens hanging above them, to the stack of washed dinner plates drying on the stainless-steel dish rack we had purchased together at the Lagos city mall.
I kicked off my shoes, running into the bedroom. The first time I visited him in this apartment, he asked me to be quiet because his neighbors in the next apartment just had a baby. I had tiptoed theatrically around the house and when that did not make him laugh, I coated my face with cornstarch baby powder and began to mime.
We were in the bedroom. He was sitting on the bed, both feet to the ground. My mime began with this—I believe I began with the basics—getting out of a box, eating invisible food, winning a tug-of-war. He sat there still staring, still saying nothing. Next, I stood with all the weight of my body on my right leg. With my left hand, I mimed knocking on and leaning against a door, waiting for whoever was home to come open up.
“Why don’t you just come sit next to me?” my Aba said eventually.
I sat next to him and let him ease me out of my clothes. I was nervous and shaking that first time. This was the time before I knew I loved him and before the time I learned that the taste of him was smooth and filling, like coconut water. To distract myself, that first time, I thought about Saint Genesius of Rome, the mime who converted to the Christian faith as he mimed what he had planned as a mockery of the ritual of baptism.
I thought about the way his mind must have had to rearrange itself to accept a new reality. How was it so easy for him to believe that a voice from heaven had spoken to him, reporting his record of sins, washing them with water, declaring him forgiven?
Often, as Constantine wrapped himself around my naked back, I wondered if records were being kept about my sins, and if there were records, how detailed were they? I wondered if there was, somewhere, a long list of all the times I licked his legs, or all the times after the first time and before the next, when I was by myself at home yet feeling aftershocks of how he made my body move.
ON THE DAY I lost him, the room had been emptied before I arrived. The bed was gone, the covers, the sheets, the area rug, all gone. His wardrobe stood emptied of everything but a pair of black shoes, four shirts, and two full sets of his customs officer’s uniforms.
I walked out of the bedroom. He was standing at the door where I had left him, a suitcase in his hands as though I had not just taken it out of them.
“I am going to Aba” was all he said. “I have just spoken to my mother, she needs to see me now.”
The part of me that loved him beyond words, that is my mouth, fell before him, kissing his feet. He did not move, even as I reached up to his knees, kissing and pleading with him to stay. The part of me that would miss him for all time, that is, my hands, rose up to his waist, pulling down his belted jeans. What I found was the quiet of the ocean in the morning, slithering and slim like a baby fish. He did not move away, so I filled myself with him in every way that I could. I filled my heart, I filled my tongue, I filled my womb. I took my calabash to the ocean, but the longing had arrived by boat.
SOMETHING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO LOVE
ARIYIKE
2010
A YEAR AFTER I began co-hosting the Christian-themed radio show at Chill FM 97.5 Lagos, we included a segment where we had famous Christians—pastors and their wives, mostly—telling our listeners their love stories. We called this segment “Letting God Write Your Love Story.” Most of the time, it was the same regurgitated boringness: the couple always met in church or in a university campus fellowship. The Lord Jesus told the man that the woman, usually a one-of-a-kind beauty and from a wealthier family, was to be his wife. The woman, usually much younger, and lacking in any personal, distinctive ambition, prayed to God and received her own sign that the rising gospel star was her husband.
I hated doing those interviews. I wanted more than anything to ask those pastors about their ex-girlfriends, about how many women had refused their advances, about their failures at love. I would have given anything to ask these stunning wives if they truly were attracted to these plain men, if they loved having husbands who were never at home. Ask them what it’s like to fuck a man who believes he hears the voice of God.
I am not a fan of love stories in general. I find the entire subject absurd and contradictory. By the time you decide to make a relationship into a story, the love part is already ending. My favorite books and movies have always been those dealing with anything but love. I remember seeing the movie Dogville with my twin sister and our brothers. I LOVED IT. They slept through it. My sister, Bibike, hated the blunt bleakness of it.
“If I want to think about misery and injustice, I just look outside my window,” she said right after the movie ended. “You know I like my movies entertaining; next time, rent a happy movie like Drumline or Love Don’t Cost a Thing.”
I loved Dogville. Even now, I consider it one of the best movies of all time. I loved the sense of compounding evil evoked throughout the movie and the fact that the townspeople got worse, instead of better.
They were exactly like I have come to realize most people truly are, completely evil and irredeemable.
I THINK PEOPLE who, like my sister, say they can only be entertained by happy love stories are selfish and hypocritical. They want to pretend that only happy stories are real stories. They want to hear a great big love story. It is not, I think, that they care that Mr. So So and Miss Do Do have arrived at happiness and are on the way to love. No, they are taking notes for their own journey. They are inspecting their own lives, comparing it with the stories they hear. They are wondering, when they meet an old couple married forty years, whether their own loves or lives will last that long. It is also that they are unwilling to confront the reality of the world we are all creating together. We all are both heroes and villains, both lovelorn and callous.
“These people are our bread and butter,” my boss, Dexter, always said to me. “Do not antagonize them.”
And he was right, as usual. Our loyal listeners, the ones who had made us so popular, were church people and, like people who only watched romantic comedies and read romance novels, they had come to expect a specific brand of sanguinity from our show.
The month before Dexter announced plans to leave Chill FM to start the first-of-its-kind sports radio station in Lagos, he had introduced his fiancée—a tall, mixed-race European named Cindy—to all of us at the office. Cindy and Erica, the other on-air personality hired the same day I was, became fast friends. Sometimes they stood right outside the sound booth whilst Dexter and I recorded our show, How to Receive from God, sipping from tall foam cups and smiling wide smiles at each other.
It was also the month Dexter and I resumed fucking everywhere we could—in the staff bathroom, in the service elevator, in the rarely used staff director’s personal kitchen. It was a mix of the knowledge that he was on the brink of becoming truly phenomenal in the industry and the idea that I had the ability to hurt someone as beautiful and carefree as Cindy that I found so addictive and intoxicating.
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