The Opposite House

by Helen Oyeyemi

When Chabella first became a Santero, Elegua chose her for his own – unusual that he should have chosen a woman. But then perhaps my mother’s family is favoured. My great-grandmother, Bisabuela Carmen, was a female babalawo, a Santeria priest.

  My middle name is Carmen.

  I like to sleep with the washed-out, monochrome, passport-sized photo of Bisabuela Carmen under my pillow – the only other copy of it is slotted into Chabella’s altar. In the pictures, Bisabuela Carmen’s skin doubles in on itself in a river of wrinkles; her mouth and nose are washed away. Her gaze is bright, tough; she looks as if she doesn’t care and not caring is a statement – really, I don’t care!

  Abuela Laline told Mami that once, when a child had been struck dead by lightning, Carmen called up the personification of lightning, Iya, for a fight – but Iya wouldn’t come. Chango came, amused, to see what the fuss was about, and so Carmen wrestled Chango, the storm god at the bottom of St Barbara’s stare. When Chabella says that Chango ‘came’, she means that at a Santeria Mass Chango stepped down from heaven. He slid into the space left between song and drumbeat, he pierced veils of spiced smoke, and he possessed the body of a burly, full-grown man. Then he seized my Bisabuela Carmen by the neck. Carmen must have been terrified but, as Mami says, ‘anyhow she tried’. She lost, of course she lost.

  Chango broke both of Carmen’s arms and a leg, sparing her her life because she surprised him – her boldness surpassed humanity. But Chango was wary ever afterwards of Carmen’s sharp nails and deep bite. Mami’s apataki tales aren’t only about the gods; they flow and cover her family too, her memories place a mantle around Bisabuela Carmen, whose namesake I am.

  Carmen was born in Camaguey six years before slavery was officially abolished in Cuba. My Bisabuela lived her last years in her other son-in-law’s house because she could not sleep under the same roof as my grandfather, Abuelo Damason the Unbeliever. Abuela Laline was unhappy; Consuelo was only her half-sister but seemed always to have been the smiled-upon one – Carmen had forgotten to halve her love. Also, Bisabuela Carmen predicted lunacy for my Abuelo Damason. Abuela Laline hissed, ‘How could you wish lunacy on the father of my children, Mami?’

  Carmen replied, ‘I don’t wish it. But if you forget your ancestors you forget yourself. Isn’t that what it is to run mad, to forget yourself?’

  Laline reported Carmen’s words back to Mami decades later, in tones of triumph, because Abuelo Damason had remained lucid and sardonic about everything going on around him right up until the day his heart muscle wound tight and flung him into the next life with the force of its uncoiling. But at the time of her prediction, my Bisabuela Carmen was adamant in her decision to live with Consuelo. Bisabuela Carmen ignored Consuelo’s children, Chabella’s boy cousins. She insisted on having Chabella by her on weekends. At mealtimes, Chabella brought food to Bisabuela Carmen’s room, knelt by the old woman’s rocking chair and handfed her. Carmen’s teeth were worn stumps. She sucked at her teeth and she looked out of the window and she said, ‘Jesus bless you,’ between mouthfuls of mashed cassava and ajiaco.

  Carmen smelt of sour wine. Chabella took an interest in her abuela because her abuela called her ‘Carmen, too’. Nobody in that house dared to contradict the old woman and remind her of her granddaughter’s real name. Carmen told Chabella stories about the Orishas as if she were telling about a place that she had just left and was impatient to get back to – without breaking the flow of her words she shook and rocked in her chair, she rose and lifted her voice, and clapped her hands.

  On Carmen’s mantelpiece, amongst her tall candles, was a statuette of a black Madonna. One afternoon, in the middle of her tale-telling, Carmen lifted her head and stared at the statuette. She strode across the dim room with her African print gown beating the air around her like wings, and she took the black Madonna in her hand and crushed its head against the wall. Dust fell out, and then a white flower. It was not a flower that Chabella could name. Chabella touched the flower and fresh dew rolled off the fringed petals, petals closed like a mouth around a spiky green stamen. There was blood on some of the petals, but it was not the Madonna’s blood, it was Carmen’s – she’d cut her finger on a piece of the porcelain.

  Carmen got to know that Chabella couldn’t eat pork chops because she was troubled by the problem of the bone beneath the meat. Carmen took a pork chop and tore the meat off the bone and divided it with her teeth. Chabella watched her abuela struggle with the meat against the suction of her gums and she understood that this was love. Bisabuela Carmen spat the brown mess into Chabella’s bowl and panted, ‘There, no bones. Don’t be afraid of it any more.’

  Chabella discovered that meat eaten from the bone was not so bad after all.

  Bisabuela Carmen put cracked lips to Chabella’s ear and said, ‘Carmen, we are one. Carmen, you are born again, but you are born without your tongue. Find it. Be who you were before before.’

  Mami’s Elegua collar came to her long before she became a Santero or understood what Santeria was. It came to her from Bisabuela Carmen’s hand. In Chabella’s first moment of ownership, the collar was of such weight that when she looked down at the double cup she’d made of her hands, the collar was in the centre of it and her fingertips were filled with the blood that had drained away from her palms.

  Chabella wanted to know if this collar was the tongue that Carmen had said was missing from her.

  Yes, no, perhaps, Bisabuela Carmen said.

  Chabella was twelve when Carmen died. Carmen did not warn Chabella of her intentions, but one morning she made a hand gesture of submission, lowering her palms with a resigned flick, turned over onto her stomach in bed

  (for that was how she liked to sleep)

  and let her breath leave her.

  Because she is venerated and loved to distraction, because Chabella will not let her fade, my Bisabuela is a friend who is locked inside her own face.

  The cold has driven Mami back into the house; she is perched woodenly on the arm of a sitting-room chair. From the next room Papi wonders aloud why some women need to act like madwomen and give old men trouble. Mami is directly beneath the benign gaze of Elegua’s double, the paint-swaddled Holy Child of Atocha. Tomás and I call him The Holy Kid. He is happy today. Before him, on a small mahogany wall-bracket, is a shallow dish full of pallid aguardiente, Elegua’s favourite alcoholic offering.

  When Mami sees me, she scrambles up from her seat. I pick up her overnight bag – its canvas corners are collapsing; the last time she used it, Tomás was being born. Tomás, the most fastened fifteen-year-old I have ever known, is probably lying on his bed right now, plugged into his Walkman; Fela Kuti’s hoarse euphony, or NWA.

  Before we can leave, Papi carefully emerges from the kitchen (hobbling is beneath him, but he is unable to disguise his arthritis) his close-cut grey hair gleaming in the light that ricochets from his glasses. He says, ‘Maja, help me talk to this woman. You’d better help me talk to her. She tried to poison me . . .’

  Mami puts her hand in mine and tugs me away.

  ‘I will come back when you have fixed my altar,’ Chabella tells Papi, coldly. ‘And when you’ve put it back where it was.’

  Papi groans, ‘Isabella.’ Nobody calls my Mami that except in desperation.

  Once Mami and I are safely outside she says, ‘Look at you in those jeans!’ and taps my thigh with forced gaiety. ‘Just look at you. They fit too close, they’ll do some kind of damage. M’hija, you will not be able to have children if you’re not careful.’

  Aaron sleeps amongst toppled blankets on the sitting-room floor. Mami and I tiptoe past him. I make her a late dinner and pretend not to hear her tutting loudly over the mess in the kitchen. Chabella eats enormous amounts of food with consummate delicacy; she gives the impression of eating sparely and denying herself, lining shredded pieces of fried plantain around the edge of her bowl of stew, mashing fufu into the stew with her spoon. But she eats it all, slowly and in small mouthfuls. With her other hand, she serene
ly marks A-level German coursework. Fifty-two, still dewy-skinned, with a serious, slow-burning bonfire stare and a head of coal-black hair, Chabella looks better and stronger than she ever did in her thirties and forties. I sit opposite her, chin in hand, watching her, smiling stupidly because she is so beautiful.

  ‘Listen to this,’ she says, pausing and looking at me. ‘This boy is absurd. His mother is wasting money paying me to help him pass. He will never pass; his head is a coconut. Here I see that he has sat down and thought to himself “I need to write another paragraph, but I am too stupid to use any more German.” So what does he do? He writes an entire paragraph in English and puts die, der and das where he feels it is appropriate. Sonntag abend, bin ich ins Kino gegangen, and then he puts a dash – not even a connective sentence – and a list of films: Austin Powers, Das Fifth Element, Face/Off, Der Full Monty –’

  ‘When are you going to make up with Papi?’ I ask.

  Mami says, ‘When he puts my altar back.’

  Her face is drawn.

  ‘Chabella,’ I say.

  ‘I can stand anything but that. There is so much of me that hasn’t survived with all this moving around. Paris. And Hamburg –’

  I put a hand to Chabella’s cheek, and she puts her hand over mine.

  ‘Do you wish you’d stayed there? You can speak the language . . .’

  ‘No, of course not. Germans are racist.’

  I laugh. ‘All of them?’

  She doesn’t smile. ‘All of them,’ she says, firmly. ‘Every single one.’

  ‘What about Brigitte?’ I ask.

  Mami says, ‘Brigitte doesn’t count as German. Brigitte was trying to get away.’

  I ask her why Papi moved her altar, and she raises her hands defensively, as if I’m going to hit her.

  ‘I asked my babalawo for something for your father’s pain – you know it kills him to walk around with his ankles like wood, but he will never say anything. I knew that he’d refuse the remedy because it’s herbal and because it’s “religious”, and he wanted me to make him coffee, so –’

  ‘Mami! . . .’

  ‘Maja, I know. I know! And then I think I put in too much, because he vomited. My God, yes, he vomited, violently, so violently, and kept on stopping and starting like that for something like half an hour; I was praying. I thought maybe he’d vomit out the arthritis or something, either that or die. But then he stopped and he was fine. But straightaway he was shouting at me, calling me stupid woman, what had I done, because he said he knew I had done something, and he was saying all kinds of things to me – “You think you’re powerful,” he said, and then he said that I think I am a witch –’

  ‘Chabella, it’s OK, I know. It’s Papi. You know he’ll calm down.’

  She knows.

  ‘But when will I calm down?’ Chabella asks. She flounces into mine and Aaron’s bedroom and slams the door. Beneath his covers in the sitting room, Aaron convulses at the sound and asks ‘Whaaaa?’ then subsides.

  I tidy up Mami’s papers and wait.

  I do not wait long. Dressed in her pyjamas now, Chabella opens the door a little way and murmurs, ‘Sing for me please?’

  I start to hum, and to speak tunefully to myself, the way I do when I’m climbing into song. I am nervous because it’s been a few days and the most terrifying thing for someone whose vocal cords are strung for both song and speech would be to reach into the dark between one and the other for melody and find nothing. I find it.

  It’s the five-year-old Maja that brings jazz into me, blocking my chest so that I have to sing it out. I turn my Cuba over in my mind: a myriad of saltwater noons whirring around the inside of Vedado; a drinking glass stained camel-colour. I remember paper plates fuzzed with fruit-cake crumbs, livid seizures of multicoloured ribbon and being swung, squealing and dizzy, from arm to arm along a line of much older boys at someone’s quinceanera. I struggled away when people cried on me as we were leaving from Jose Marti.

  At the height of the Cuban summer, the heat came down from the sky differently from anywhere else I’ve been, came down with a passion for me, for every pore of my uncovered skin. I carefully extract my only complete memory that is longer than my life somehow

  (God gave a loaf to every bird

  But just a crumb to me

  I dare not eat it – though I starve . . .)

  I remember a tiny, veiled woman appeared beneath the palm trees at the bottom of the garden of a house in Vedado. Our going-away party. It was full moon, white paper moon; the glass lanterns on the tables cast shadowed orange crescents onto the grass. I peered out from beneath the high table, an earthy hinterland where I and another girl with a soft, ruddy face were sitting and eating papaya in the centre of a polished starfish of adult feet. There was a stir as someone else noticed that woman at the end of the garden, the woman who was not one of us. People began asking who she was. And then she began to sing to us out of the falling night. We couldn’t understand her words – she mixed Spanish with another language that no one there knew – but the first notes felled me the way lightning brings down trees without explanation or permission.

  The girl who was under the table with me began to suffer a fit – her eyes whirled blind, she slurped and dribbled and winced as she bit her tongue over and over. One of her hands drummed at the side of her head as if trying desperately to dislodge something. I noticed her only distantly. To avoid her slapping me by accident, I moved away, closer to the warm grass outside and the song. I didn’t think to tell anyone about the other girl’s fit. It was only when the woman had finished singing and slipped away under cover of the grown-ups’ applause that the girl’s mother discovered her under the table and carried her away.

  My Cuba is a hut with a tabletop for a roof, wall-less and unmoored by strange music and feet and fruit juice. So of course my singing is nothing like Billie’s speech from amidst the pieces of her heart, and it doesn’t imitate Ella’s pure tone; my noise doesn’t sound anywhere near as good as they do because I am not really singing. No one knows that but me. Peace. When I rework my Cuba I allow myself to notice that, just to the right of me, Papi’s tuxedoed knees are shaking. I understand what I didn’t understand then, that he didn’t see a path beyond leaving forever, that the country had been ripped up from under him and handed to an ‘everyone’ far above. And that it was scary; scary to freefall the way that he knew he was about to, with all chains cut, no land behind him and no solid ground before him.

  ‘Mami, I was thinking of becoming a postulant, you know,’ I say, after a silence. But I say it in a joking way, as if Chabella is supposed to laugh. She does.

  ‘Well, if Aaron isn’t making you happy, there are other men, you know . . . you don’t have to become a nun . . . anyway, what’s wrong with Aaron?’

  She yawns, and goes to bed.

  If I’d begun in the right way I might have been able to tell her why I ran away to St Catherine’s. But I think about the two tiny, jewel-eyed girls who used to walk with me in my sleep, and I feel nauseated. It’s like telling Mami about my son will bring bad luck. If I say anything it’ll bring back the potions and the night vigils.

  Miss Lassiter’s telephone is ringing – she has it on a loud setting so that it soaks through the separating floors like a tremulous wave.

  3

  unto the little

  Aaron holds tube and lift doors open for people if he’s nearest, crumpling his newspaper against the hard edges as if he can stop gravity with paper. While waiting at bus stops he pulls faces at children in front of their parents. His smile has corners and a slant that no one else’s has. With no way of knowing whether I can trust him, I go on what I have to go on in the dark – when he touches me, there’s no describing the snow-blister craziness, seething quiet but large, waiting. When he whispers in my ear, I buckle under him. When we are walking, he reaches for me carelessly, holds me carefully, dips his hand into my pocket and holds it there so that I end up pulling him along. Or, his fingers hove
r over the nape of my neck, absent-mindedly tapping me to the pattern of my pulse, rubbing circles that make me dizzy. The whole time he talks, describes things as if we are on a clock face

  (‘Ugly baby in pram at twelve o‘clock. . . Maja . . . I didn’t know a baby could be so ugly . . . you have to look . . . but don’t be blatant. . .’)

  as if he doesn’t feel his effect on me, as if I have no effect on him, or my effect on him is spent. I think he lives by Lewis Carroll rules, his foremost to yelp before a needle pricks him, just to get the yelping over with.

  I don’t know why I can’t tell him about my son, our son.

  Aaron was the ‘hang king’ at his school, which means that he has a bizarre strength that seems to live chiefly in his upper arms. One afternoon we went to the jungle gym and he hung, long body perfectly vertical, from the second-highest bar on the climbing frame, dreamily sweeping the ground with his trainers, while I sat with his camera on my lap and let it watch while we talked. He hung, muscles crackling in knotty forks throughout his arms, for a full ten minutes. He talked the entire time. I kept asking him if he was OK; he said – gravely, calmly, kissably – yes. He asked me which of the X-Men I’d be. I said ‘Rogue’, and he groaned and said, ‘Too, too obvious.’

  I asked him what it had been like going to school in Ghana; he said, ‘It was OK.’

  I tilted the camera upwards; sun burst off the lens and into his eyes.

  ‘Ouch.’

  ‘Sorry. So. Aaron – what was it like going to school in Ghana, being white and everything?’ I said it formally, in what I hoped was documentary style.

  He said, ‘In Accra it was OK. People didn’t really fuck with each other the way I’ve heard about over here; initiations and ganging up and stuff. I mean, people would wrestle or whatever, but . . .’

  He faltered, but I didn’t prompt him. From the angle the camera caught him at, he was harsh – his face was formed from sharp, variant planes.

  ‘What’s weird is that it took another white guy to bring some crap in. He started in on me a week after he transferred, as if he had some kind of chip on his shoulder. I think his parents were colonial throwbacks who couldn’t bear to leave Ghana or something, and he couldn’t believe that my mum had set up the school. He kept talking about it and it wasn’t relevant. My mum didn’t teach. She owned the place, but she just ran administration. She could probably have stopped me from getting expelled, but that was it. Anyway, one time I was sitting in the library with this screen between me and Geoffrey, and I was doing some maths or something, and this boy comes in and sits with Geoffrey and starts joshing with him in a fake hearty way that he must have picked up from his old school, and this boy was like, ‘Aaron, yeah, he’s all right; a bit Jewish, though.’ I swear, English people – the way some of them can be sometimes. A certain type of English twat is a certain type of English twat even if he grew up somewhere else – the kind that pretends he doesn’t notice differences when really he notices, and he does care, and he does think about it.