Changes

by Ama Ata Aidoo

  Esi had always enjoyed walking around naked after love-making. For her, this was one of life’s very few real luxuries. Indeed, one miracle of her own existence was the fact that in spite of the torment she had suffered during childhood and adolescence for having an unfeminine body, as an adult she was not shy of showing that body to the men she slept with. As for walking around naked, she knew she could do that only when her fast growing child was out of the house, and the daily help had finished work and gone home. In fact, she had not gathered enough courage to sleep with Ali when either of those two or both of them were around. Already games were developing in the relationship, some of which were good, and others not so good. And one had to do with this business of Esi and nakedness …

  Quite early in the relationship, Ali had sensed that Esi was struggling to feel easy about him watching her. So as if to encourage her boldness, he often pretended to be asleep so that he could lie there, aware of all the movements she made. It excited him enormously and was a source of one of the pleasures of being with her. He had slept with a great number of women in his time, but he knew very few women from his part of the world who even tried to be at ease with their own bodies. The combination of forces against that had been too overwhelming -

  traditional shyness and contempt for the biology of women;

  Islamic suppressive ideas about women;

  English Victorian prudery and French hypocrisy imported by the colonisers …

  All these had variously and together wreaked havoc on the mind of the modern African woman: especially about herself. As far as Ali could tell, he told himself, most women behaved as if the world was full of awful things — beginning with their bodies. His wife Fusena, a good woman if ever there was one, was no exception. All the time they had lived practically alone in London, he never detected the faintest desire in Fusena ever to walk naked in the flat. And of course, with their present domestic set-up, there were always too many people around them for any body exhibitions anyway!

  So being with Esi was altogether a change for Ali, for a number of other reasons too. For one, he was freed from the ordeal of having to find a place to be with a woman who was not his wife. This was a problem which he knew some men faced. Especially those who liked younger women who had not become independent of their parents. The thought of sex with young girls made him shudder. Because, apart from the question of where to be with them, their inexperience filled him with a genuine feeling of horror. Being with Esi was also a rescue from the normal chaos of his existence. He could forget Linga for a while. He could also forget his home where, because of so many factors, privacy was a rare commodity. Here in this house, that was almost out of the city, he could unwind.

  As he drifted into sleep after they had made love, Ali was thinking that it had been a good idea to send the deputy manager to the meeting in Las Palmas. He could see Esi every day for the next two weeks.

  ‘Ali, Ali,’ it was Esi’s voice, coming to him from even further than the sitting room where she actually shouted from. His eyes flew open, and were immediately confronted by the vision of her in a wrap-around.

  ‘Supper is ready,’ she announced.

  Food. Another source of pleasure when you were with Esi, Ali was thinking. She cooked like nobody else he knew or had known. In fact, until he met her, he had not considered fish as an edible protein. Now he wondered how in his previous existences he could have done without fried fish, stewed fish, grilled fish and especially softly smoked fish for so long. Fusena his wife was not at all a bad cook. But like him, she had come out of a meat-eating culture and dealing with fresh fish was not one of her stronger points in the kitchen.

  Ali drew the cloth tightly round his body, even over his head, pretending as usual that he was asleep. Esi was forced to re-enter the bedroom.

  ‘Ali, Ali,’ Esi cried his name again, this time in a whisper. He nearly started to snore and the thought amused him so much, he himself began to laugh.

  ‘Oh you,’ exclaimed Esi, coming to sit by him. He tried to pull her down to him. She resisted firmly but unaggressively. He released her, and sat up.

  ‘How do you know that food is what I want to eat right now?’ he asked, taking hold of her and burying his head between her breasts.

  ‘Food is what I want you to eat, this minute,’ she replied, struggling somewhat for air.

  ‘Okay, my lady’s will shall be done,’ he said, and he released her a second time. They both got up from the bed. ‘But two things first,’ he said running to the bathroom.

  Esi went back to the kitchen, and was presently joined by Ali.

  ‘So that was the first thing, which is the second thing?’

  ‘A drink.’

  Esi was repentant, apologetic and soothing. He was forgiving and soothing; assuring her that, after all, it was not really her fault. He hadn’t given her much chance to offer him a drink, had he? And since they both knew what he was referring to, there was a short embarrassed space, until Esi asked him what he wanted to drink.

  ‘What have you got?’

  ‘Thanks to you, I’ve got just about everything, everything. Beer; wine: white, red, pink; rum: white and dark; proper scotch and all; vodka; cognac -’

  He stopped her. He just wanted a beer.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She served him the beer and poured one for herself. Then they sat down to what had already become All’s favourite meal at Esi’s: grilled fish, usually sole or snapper on a platter with a slice of kenkey and a salad of fresh hot peppers, onions, tomatoes and salt. ‘The usual’, as any coastal man would have told him. Esi often protested that it was really a breakfast meal. Her protest fell on deaf ears. Of course, he appreciated anything she gave him. But this he could eat any hour, any day, every day. This evening it was sole, and, for the next hour, they ate in companionable silence from the same platter.

  After the meal, Esi cleared the plates and went to dump them in the sink. As she was coming back to the table, she saw Ali emerging from the bedroom, dressed. She wondered aloud whether he was leaving, taking care not to let the mixture of her anxiety and disappointment show. But no, he said, not for some time, unless she wanted him to leave?

  ‘No,’ she replied simply.

  ‘I just wanted to check on something in the car,’ he offered, and went out.

  The question of when Ali came to Esi’s, and especially how long he stayed when he was there, had become another game which was already proving too dangerous to play. Ali was often out of Accra on business. And even when he was in town, he really could not see her every evening. Besides, he was also aware that when he came, there was what he himself considered to be a decent limit to how long he could stay. He loved Fusena his wife and tried not to hurt her deliberately. He knew she inevitably guessed when he was having a serious affair with another woman. Therefore the question was not whether he was deceiving her or not. There was an unspoken agreement between them not to talk about these affairs, that was all. But he always knew she knew. What he tried not to do was operate on the level of the kind of excesses which would leave her feelings unnecessarily bruised. In fact, he was not really capable of operating on that level. Or that was what he told himself. He was also too sensitive a father. He knew children would always have questions they would want to ask their parents. But then, neither the questions nor their answers need be too heavy for any young mind, he had told himself

  Esi’s grandmother could have told Ali that in the old days, there would have been no problem. ‘Why marry two, three or more women if you were going to go through such contortions?’ So no man who had more than one wife lived with any of the women on a permanent basis. Women could stay with their own people or you built each of them a small house if you were a man enough, because a woman had to have her own place. And the days were properly regulated. Wives took turns being wives. When it was one wife’s turn, she cooked for the man and undertook the housekeeping for him completely. She either went to his bedr
oom or he slept with her. When her turn was over he just switched.

  ‘And if a woman refused to leave when she had to?’

  ‘Did you say when she had to?’ She could not refuse. Everybody understood these things. There were no confusions.

  ‘Supposing a man had a favourite?’

  ‘He was not supposed to.’

  ‘But that is a matter of the heart.’

  ‘Ah, but that is why we do the serious business of living with our heads, and never our hearts.’

  On her part, Esi at this stage was not really allowing herself to understand or not to understand All’s comings and goings in relation to herself. She found the relationship very relaxing. She knew she had better leave well alone.

  That had been a Thursday evening. When he was leaving, Ali had told Esi that he would be seeing her the next evening. She had not believed her ears. Two evenings in a row?

  ‘It is surely going to rain,’ she had murmured in his ear.

  And it had rained... a somewhat unexpected downpour at that time of the year, when the rains were good. But then the rain had left a clear half of the total plantation of telephone poles on the ground.

  Ali had not come that Friday evening as promised, or for the next two weeks. On Monday, Esi had tried to call his office but had not managed to get through. And it had taken all the strength she could muster not to go there in person ... or try and phone his house.

  In the course of building up whatever there now was between herself and Ali, Esi had laid down some rules for herself. One of the rules was that she would never never phone his house to ask for him. Another was not to make a habit of dropping into his office unexpectedly. These were clearly rules that were not going to be easy to obey. In fact, they often proved very difficult, and this was turning into one such time. The only solution to her restlessness was to keep busy. The days were no problem. The evenings were. Now she discovered the difference between not having people around but knowing where they are, and not having someone around and not knowing where he or she is. She also missed her daughter. For the first time, she was completely alone; and that made a big bag of emptiness to handle. Nyenyefo mpo wo ne nkaeda — having to love a burdensome child because one day you will miss her. Trust our elders to come out with a proverb to describe every situation.

  Suddenly, the tropical nights had become dark, hot and heavy with all manner of threats.

  10

  The next time Ali showed up at Esi’s was late morning on a Sunday. It had rained the night before, as it had done most nights of the previous week. Sometimes it had rained in the day too, and occasionally non-stop for a solid twenty-four-hour period. The sea was brimming and green. The grasses and leaves of the giant nim trees stood or hung at their greenest and silvery with raindrops. The world was slaked, content and quiet.

  Esi had woken up feeling fine. The previous evening, she had gone to Oko’s mother to see Ogyaanowa. There had been some tensions as soon as she entered the house. Leaving them she had told herself that if she could only stop herself from missing the child so much, she would just stop going to that place. But she couldn’t. One Saturday, she had decided not to go. As some test of her willpower. It had not worked. That weekend, she had experienced a strange restlessness. The following weekdays the restlessness had become so intense she had finally relaxed only after she had gone to see the child on Wednesday evening after work.

  This morning she had stayed late in bed reading. When she finally got up, it was to have a shower and get into a pair of shorts and a much-worn loose shirt that was something of a favourite. Next, she had rummaged through her rather impressive music library for some choral music. She smiled to herself as she remembered what her grandmother had said about that the last time she had been around for one of her very short visits. When Esi put on the cassette tape with her special selection of local Christian music, Nana had pointedly put one ear near the recorder. She had nodded her head and hummed along with the group who were singing: obviously enjoying herself.

  Then when it was all over, she had looked straight at Esi: ‘My lady, if you want to be with your God on a Sunday morning, just get yourself to church.’

  At that, Esi had protested that we can worship God everywhere and at any time.

  ‘Why did our ancestors build the shrines and the white people build their churches then?’

  The two of them had had one of their long and friendly arguments. Obviously, the older woman had read her. As usual. This time to discover that because she was too lazy to go to church, she played Christian music on Sunday mornings so that she would not feel too guilty.

  Now to guilt was added shame. But the hardest habits to break are our lazy ones. So here she was again, turning over her albums and her tapes. Later, the issue of what to play settled, she had sat down to her standard Sunday morning breakfast of dokon-na-kyenam. She was just thinking that after all living alone was not the unpleasant business people made it seem, when she heard the sound of a car pull up at the gate.

  She drew a curtain to see who it was. It was Ali. She went outside to open the gate. He drove into the courtyard. She locked the gate again, and strolled after the car.

  Esi was truly delighted to see Ali who in the meantime had brought his car to a standstill behind hers. She put her head through the window on the passenger side of the front seats and said, ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello, Esi,’ replied Ali, equally delighted. He jumped out of the car, and they both entered the house. As soon as Esi had shut the front door behind them, they embraced. Following their usual practice, Ali was clearly embarking on a long kiss which would have ended on Esi’s bed. But although she had missed him rather badly, or rather, because she had, and was somewhat afraid of what it would all mean in the long run, she was not going to have any of that. At least, not yet. Ali immediately sensed her reluctance, and withdrawing a little from her, asked her ‘why’ with his eyes.

  ‘Don’t you think we should do some talking first?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. Talking can be done anytime.’

  ‘Not always, Ali,’ she said uncertainly. ‘Sometimes things get too late even for talk.’

  ‘Okay. I believe I owe you some explanation for promising to come the other day, and then not showing up for two weeks.’

  Relief flooded through her. She was grateful that he had recognised that something had not been correct.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, eagerly.

  ‘But don’t you think I could have a proper welcome first?’ Ali was persistent. Esi wasn’t yielding either. By this time, they were standing in the middle of the sitting room. ‘But can I at least sit down?’ Ali asked.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Esi, with a voice that clearly said that even that was a big decision to make. Ali sat on the couch and patted the space by him for Esi to sit down. She did.

  ‘Actually, I tried to phone.’

  ‘Then you might as well have saved your energies,’ she said with something like resignation. ‘We all know the phones

  ‘They hardly work at the best of times. And with the recent merciful downpour, and possibly all the poles down, they’ll stay dead until the end of the century!’

  ‘Oh Africa. Fancy a normal blessing like rain coming to us with strings,’ Esi said with a very big sigh.

  Ali protested vigorously at her tone and reminded her that after all, Allah had been kind to the continent and its people. What was causing some confusions was inefficiency.

  ‘Drought and all?’ Esi wondered, uncertainly.

  ‘Drought and all.’ Ali had no such doubts. As far as he could see, given the enormous resources of the continent, even solving the problems that natural disasters such as drought created should not have been difficult if people worked seriously. Spoken with such earnestness, Esi had to see his point. So they both laughed a little bitterly and scolded themselves for being too serious and consequently depressing themselves on a beautiful morning. After that, Ali rushed through his explanations for that
long period of absence. How it had occurred to him that it was vitally important that he checked his telex machine. And so from her place he had driven back to his office instead of going home, and on and on and on. Esi accepted all that. What else could she do? She knew that Ali knew that she had to believe any movements he claimed he had had to make based on messages received on the telex machine. Although of course there always were other factors. She could only guess at these because she did not know enough about his life to make any other type of deductions. And what use is guess work most of the time?

  Ali had had the telex machine installed in his office when it became clear that the agency’s business was expanding sufficiently to make the acquisition of such a facility worthwhile. Fairly soon after that, it occurred to him that messages come in at odd hours because people have a tendency not only to finalise travel and holiday plans at odd hours but also immediately to move to do something about them. Besides, there was also the matter of time differences between the countries of the world. He had therefore told himself that since he was not the head of a government department, and since he could not pretend to afford to run a nine-to-five schedule, the least he could do was, once an evening, to go and check on the telex machine. Although it was already possible for him to delegate such duties even by the time he met Esi, and in the meantime he had disciplined himself to see that, except matters of life and death, nearly every issue can wait to be handled in the light of the next day, he kept up the practice of occasionally checking on the telex.

  There had been one other reason why Ali went to his office first after leaving Esi’s instead of going straight home. It was not something he could tell Esi. In fact, he couldn’t have told anyone else but himself — that it was an essential part of managing his situation.

  Again, by the time Esi became part of his life, Ali had learnt to expect Fusena to phone his office if he was not at home by a certain time in the evening. He had never believed in making a bedroom of his office. He knew that some executives did. But he was aware that Fusena had her own ideas about what he stayed up there so late to do so often. So although he had given up trying to dispel her suspicions, he had decided that at least it helped if he was sometimes in when she rang. In fact, one evening Fusena had been so suspicious that she had actually driven over to check things up for herself. Ali had been absolutely alone. Fusena had felt so ashamed, she had never repeated the trip. But once in a while, when the waiting got really unbearable, she still rang and he always enjoyed taking those late night calls. There are few pleasures left, and surely one of them must be having the chance to prove you are a faithful spouse — especially when you are not.