After the warm welcome, Emilienne, surrounded by her nephews, headed into the house, where she found her sister and parents. She sat down next to her father, who was filing his nails with deep concentration.
“Papa! Since when do you trim your own nails? Is your dear, loving wife refusing to carry out her wifely duties to take care of your needs?” Emilienne laughed and gave her father a hug and kiss.
Openda grimaced. His beautifully wrinkled face transformed into a crinkled piece of fabric. His body was still muscular and solid, in contrast to his face, which showed his age. The old man was very well groomed, had his hair dyed every three months, and exercised each morning. For a long time, he had awakened every morning at five to go for a run. But he had stopped the early morning exercise routine in order to sleep later; he could now catch up on the sleep he had missed when he took care of his patients.
To prove to himself that he was still a handsome and energetic man, at times he would charm women whom he picked up hitchhiking on his way home in the evenings. Luckily for his wife, he had never gone further than uttering a few flattering words to those women, who always listened in admiration. “The day I hear that you’re messing around with young girls or even old women in your car, I’ll cut off your peter and your hand too!” his wife had said to him one day in front of their children.
“Save it,” the mother said in response to her daughter. “If I hadn’t been useful to your father, do you think he would have kept me around this long? It’s time he takes care of his old body a little. Those days when he thought he was king are over. Thanks to you kids, I realize that I’ve been a slave to your father my whole life.”
Flopped in her armchair next to her husband, Rondani stretched out. Although she was a lot younger than he, she looked older. In fact, she was quite strong, though her white hair, which she refused to dye black like her husband, was deceiving.
Openda shook his head and smiled at his wife as she took his hand affectionately.
After she’d consoled her youngest son, who was crying for a toy his sister had just snatched away from him, Eva spoke.
“Papa and Mama are getting old.” Then, turning to her sister, she added: “You’re letting yourself go. You’re dressing very badly and you don’t want to see anyone anymore, not even your nephews, whom you used to insist come over to your place every weekend.”
“Your sister is right,” her mother added. “Not long ago, you’d have thrown that dress you’re wearing today in the garbage. Did you notice that there are threads hanging from it every which way and the sleeves are coming undone at the seams? I hope you don’t go to work in that! Before you got here, I was telling your sister that I met a healer at the market this morning. I of course talked to her about the problem you have with your womb, and she would like to try to heal you.”
Emilienne, who up until then hadn’t taken her eyes off of her nephews as she listened to her mother and sister, looked over at her mother, suddenly sad.
“I see that you’ve decided I need looking after. If it’s all right with you, let’s not discuss my womb today.”
“So when do you want to talk about it?” her sister snapped back at her. “We don’t mean to hurt you, you know. You must know that you will never completely fulfill your destiny as a woman until you have children to raise, for those around you to watch grow up. I know it’s going to hurt you when I say that your dead child no longer counts, and in a few years people will have forgotten that you were once a mother like all normal women. Don’t worry; what I am saying doesn’t apply to us, your family. I’m talking about your mother-in-law and society in general. I feel your pain, Emie, and I think that you should shake yourself out of it a bit.”
Patrick, Eva’s youngest son, started yelling at the other end of the room. His mother ran to help him.
“My dear child,” Rondani said softly, “your sister is right. Do you know that, in the elders’ eyes, your husband would not be in the wrong if he brought home a concubine? The day that idea hits him, he won’t ask you for your opinion. Even I would say he were right to do so.”
Having finished filing his nails, Openda looked tenderly at his daughter.
“Mama, you know how hard I’ve tried to cure my so-called illness. And believe me, you are no more affected by it than I; I’m the one who lives with this drama in my body as well as in my head. I know full well that it’s because of my present infertility that I am losing my husband, and God knows it’s the last thing I want to happen.”
Eva retorted dryly:
“Finally you admit that your husband has a mistress; you know, I knew it. Count yourself lucky that you are still together after all the years he’s spent waiting for you to give him a second child. For some time I’d thought that Rékia’s death would make you see the reality; now I see that I was mistaken. You seem rather to be wallowing in your problems. One would even think that you’re behaving defiantly toward your husband. Perhaps you want to know if he really loves you. If that’s the case, it’s a stupid approach, in my opinion. So what if a man loves a woman for herself or for the children she gives him, if he knows how to make her happy? When you finally open your eyes and ears, it will be too late.”
“Easy there, easy,” her father interjected for the first time. “Emilienne’s problem is close to all of our hearts, but let’s know how to talk to her. I know my daughter well, and I know that she is suffering terribly from this.”
He was quiet for a moment then continued:
“My dear child, I must admit that your sister and mother are right. And I would like to add this: in spite of the level of education women of your generation have achieved and in spite of the high positions they hold across all the professional realms throughout the country, they will earn respect and consideration and be fully happy only when they manage to balance their professional life with their life as a mother and wife. I never met a single woman throughout my long career who was able to overcome her problem of infertility. Sooner or later she feels the effects of the absence of children in her life. Your sister’s children are not your own. Even if it was you who raised them, once they get older, they will go back to their mother. We have seen children, how can I say, repudiate the aunt who had raised them through adulthood, and return to a mother who had shown no maternal love for them when they were born and who was incapable of mothering. Even children who never knew their father feel that unfathomable yearning to find him. Most of those children feel no remorse at leaving their mother to go live with their father. And if worse comes to worst, seeking out the father is not so bad, since the mother knows that the child is not repudiating her and that he needs the love he’s been deprived of for so long. I say all of this just so you understand that you will merely be an aunt to your nephews, no matter how much you love them. What would become of us, your mother and me, if we hadn’t had you? We would be dismal old people abandoned by everyone. And if we had nephews, we would have been a burden on them; we’d have been people they helped merely in order to appease their conscience.”
Openda rolled up the sleeves of his heavy cotton boubou and interlaced his slender fingers. His expressionless gaze wandered aimlessly then fixed on an insect nest on the terrace wall.
“It’s good that you are finally talking to her. Make her understand that children are treasures and a guarantee for aging parents,” Rondani added after some time.
“Really, you’ve got to be kidding,” Eva said. “If I understand what you’re saying, you had us thinking about who would take care of you when you got old. I wonder if we would have been a treasure and a guarantee for you if I weren’t married to a successful businessman and if Emilienne weren’t in such a good professional situation. I bet we would have been useless children!”
“You’ve misunderstood Mama’s words,” Emilienne said. “You know that it is not our respective situations that interest her. Listening to the three of you, on the other hand, I am coming to understand that a woman must procreate, or she will lose
her social and family identity. You are not wrong; that is exactly what is happening right here, right now. You do love me, yet you deplore the fact that I am not exactly like all of you. I will not go as far as to say that you are ashamed of me, although . . .”
“My child, what are you getting at?” her mother whispered, her eyes filled with tears.
“My sweet child,” her father added, “you know that nothing in the world would keep us from loving you.”
“Right, you love me, and I bet you would love me more if I had three or five children. How could I blame you for that! It seems that, even today, a woman can earn her entire family’s respect and consideration only if she is a mother. We’ve all seen plenty of young destitute women prostituting themselves so they can feed their kids, and they don’t leave those kids in their parents’ care. The overwhelming majority of those parents are incapable of providing their grandchildren with a proper education. In indigent families, those unplanned children aren’t properly nourished or cared for, and then we’re surprised to see a rise in the infant mortality rate or a rise in the number of juvenile deaths. One of my employees at twenty-four years of age has six children, for whom she sacrifices body and soul, as they say. All of her worries, her ambition, and her desires, revolve around the comfort she must provide for her kids. Who is thinking about her life? She herself isn’t even thinking about it. It isn’t only the smiles that have disappeared from the faces of sterile women; there are so many mothers who no longer know how to laugh. Do you know the reason for this sadness that we see already in children and, later, in adults who have become parents? That widespread sadness relates to the problems and traumas that women experience during pregnancy. Children born under those conditions often have serious personality disorders that sometimes affect them their entire life. Add to that the poor conditions in which they are brought up, because obviously no one is taking care of them. And the minute we talk about it, people respond by saying that the African has no psychological problems because he lives in a large extended family. As if the family circle can cure a man of his profound distress. Those are the same people who are surprised and worried by the problems of the youth who will be the men and women of tomorrow. I am not trying to justify my infertility, I just want to make you realize that motherhood and children do not ensure absolute happiness.”
Six pairs of eyes beamed at her in admiration. Emilienne had rendered them speechless. Eva was the first to find her words.
“What do we have to do with all of those broad theories? You will never be in the situation of those women you’ve just described. I don’t think that you’ve been marked since you were in our mother’s womb. You won’t hide your yearning to have children from anyone here. And you should know that a woman’s success is limited neither to her diplomas nor to her professional situation. Your intimate life, meaning, your marriage and your children, come first, or at least are equally important. When your private life is a failure, wealth and professional success lose their importance. I know I am not telling you anything new, but we had to remind you of this today. Now! I’m going home. My husband gets back from the United States tomorrow. Gather your toys, children, and say good-bye to your aunt and grandparents.”
With an infernal noise, the little ones gathered up their cars, airplanes, and dolls. After hugging and kissing Rondani, Openda, and Emilienne good-bye, they went out in single file, the eldest in front and the youngest in his mother’s arms.
Outside, the ash blue clouds set against the golden sun, with its rays bordering the sky, formed a magnificent scene worthy of the brushstrokes of a surrealist painter.
Rondani whimpered quietly, and in a barely audible voice said:
“You see! That is what brings a woman joy. Don’t you want to experience that again, my child?”
WAS HER HEAD spinning because she was so distraught over the arguments her family had presented earlier? She sat with her hands planted firmly on the steering wheel, remembering a statement she’d read in a women’s magazine that she had thought quite exaggerated: “A woman is never completely satisfied. Whereas some enjoy professional success, others build a solid marriage based on love, and then there are those who have children to feel fulfilled. No woman, however, manages to enjoy all three. And if there are women out there who are perfectly happy, who have brought these three together, they are extremely rare, and, in our opinion, if they have even two of these, that is a great achievement.”
Emilienne smiled. She admitted that the author of that statement was right. To this point, no woman had seemed to enjoy those three conditions.
She was concerned that she ranked among the women who had been left in the lurch by destiny. If she had to make a choice, she would have been incapable of doing so. And then, what use was it to speculate when destiny took charge of everything? When did a man’s freedom to act stop, and when did his destiny begin? What could one do to avoid the succession of miserable events that drove people down paths they hadn’t chosen without the option of getting a fresh start?
She had suffered every day since her daughter’s death, and although she had wished that today would be better, it ended on a sad note. Every thought and conversation with her close friends and family members had reminded her of her barrenness. It pained her even more that she had disappointed her family. And for the first time, she reflected upon the importance she attributed to her parents’ and sister’s opinion of her, not only because she needed their love, but also because she was responsible for the dark shadow that loomed over them and troubled their peace of mind. In fact, she was the dark shadow. The last thing in the world she wanted was to make them unhappy. But now what could she do?!
WHEN SHE GOT back home, Emilienne found Joseph on the divan, all excited, watching a tennis match. From the door where she was standing, she recognized Noah by his hair and silhouette, a player her husband loved—as all Africans did.
Joseph barely even turned his head when his wife slammed the door. Emilienne didn’t linger in the living room. From her bedroom, she could hear Eyang reprimanding her grandchildren. Weary and depressed, she took a quick shower and got into bed. Her bed had become the only place she liked to be when she had nothing to do, or rather, when she didn’t want to do anything.
Those moments of inactivity became more and more frequent. And, even though she was aware of the dangers of her physical and mental apathy, Emilienne did not want at that moment to move. What was she waiting for? Did she even know?
BY THE TIME Joseph came into the bedroom, she had already entered that half-comatose state of deep sleep. He turned on the air conditioner and plunged into the bathtub, which he had run very hot. It overflowed with green honeysuckle suds. He lathered himself vigorously. Then, eyes closed, he rested his head on the edge of the bathtub.
It had been about six months since the last time he had taken a bath at home. There was a time—now in the distant past—when he liked to make love to his wife in that very bathtub. For her it was hard work, scrunching up in uncomfortable positions trying to find a position that worked, and that would make him laugh so hard it would bring him to tears. Sometimes, when he made fun of her, he would lose his concentration, which made Emilienne so mad, though she would forget all about it as soon as he made love to her again on the carpet or on the bed. How many times had she sworn to herself that she would not let him take her in that bathtub again? But then, with each caress, she would melt further into her husband’s arms. She would not complain about her knees or her backbone, because in the end, the discomfort of it all intensified the pleasure they both felt.
Places like that, which for her were reminders that they had once been happily married, for him were no longer appealing. Could he say that he had ever felt at home in this luxurious villa to which he had followed his wife? Because that was the appropriate word. He followed his wife to this superb house on this enormous plot of land that her employer had rented to her. If he had only thought it through more carefully then, he would have
proposed a more modest home rather than encouraging her, as he had done, to choose a five-bedroom villa. At least he had refused a furnished house, even though it was, again, Emilienne who had bought almost all of the furniture. The man he was at the time—a man in love—had given very little importance to such details which, several years later, would assume great importance in his eyes. And their discussion on the subject had not helped his inferiority complex.
Years later, he was named secretary general at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. His salary tripled. He put in a request to his minister to find a house for him and his family. The minister himself called him in to refuse the request outright.
For a while, Joseph thought he would change all the furniture. The idea did not stand up to the arguments he concocted in his head and stewed over in order to convince his wife. Keeping his most recent mistress was a way for him to regain his self-confidence. He could finally assume his role as a man. Also, the young lady had never behaved authoritatively, and her demands were limited to money, which he would give her without counting. Although it wasn’t long before then that she had hinted at marriage, Joseph wasn’t worried about it; he knew that offering her the car of her dreams would appease her for now. He was at least sure of one thing: she would remain submissive to him for a long time—if not always—given the pittance she earned.
“Emilienne, on the other hand, doesn’t need financial support from any man, and that’s how I could lose her,” Joseph thought. “But, I don’t want to leave her. She is a remarkable homemaker and a perfect mother when all is well. My dream would be for her to raise all the children I have with my lovers. That’s what some wives do in her situation. Only here’s the problem, I fell for an intellectual who refuses to break certain barriers. She has really made me understand why some executives marry rural women. They see the world purely through the eyes of their spouses. Stuck in their own worlds and molded by tradition, they are obedient and tolerant. Too happy to have been chosen among so many others, they know how to show their gratitude with unwavering love. I still love my wife, and I will accept her as she is if she manages to produce another child. It is not too late. And medicine advances every day. Does she still want to? Good God, why did I have to fall for a woman with issues? Giving birth is not a luxury! The most pathetic women can bear children and why not she? She has so many positive qualities! She has been refused that simple happiness, yet she is capable of assuring a good education for her children. And I’m the one who drew this losing number. Everything is against us as a couple: her sterility, this house, and even our parents, who from the beginning disapproved of our marriage.”
The Fury and Cries of Women Page 11
