The Opposite House

by Helen Oyeyemi

  ‘So what if your English is bad?’ I said. ‘I’ll talk to them.’

  Mami kissed my forehead, her arms dropped down around me; I stiffened because she was laughing and crying at once and I didn’t know what it meant. Her hands clasped around my throat, and when I looked into her eyes I couldn’t find her. Instead I saw something inky and strange rising. I said, ‘Mami?’

  She was hurting me.

  ‘Usted es una hija mala,’ she said. She sounded angry, but her eyes were shiny with hurt. ‘Cómo se atréve a contradecirme?.’

  ‘Mami,’ I said, and I tried but my fingers couldn’t unlock her iron ones. My vision took on black edges, and I began to believe that she was going to kill me; she was saying that I was a bad daughter and I didn’t know why.

  She let go of me; I fell down, and that was when I first learnt that I needed to protect my throat, my voice, because that was where my hands went first, to the circling pain. I croaked, and I vomited hard. Chabella said she was sorry. She said it just once, she said it very softly, and then she got up and walked halfway across the room and came back to me with her eyes swimming and glowing so that I cowered and thought she was so sad because I was going to have to die. But then she walked away again, came back, walked away from me with her face pulled mask-tight until finally she came back for good and snatched me up into her arms and kissed me and hugged me. It wasn’t enough; I was still afraid.

  I need words from Chabella. It has maybe been that way since the first time I understood that she didn’t already know what I was thinking. I was three; a friend had made me cry. Mami picked me up and asked me, ‘What’s the matter, what?’ Papi had rushed to pick me up too, but Mami got there first. Papi says that when she asked I was so surprised that I knocked my forehead against hers in my haste to get a proper look into her eyes. I don’t remember, but apparently I said, ‘I have to tell you?’

  Miss Lassiter’s telephone rings and rings, on and off, all afternoon long.

  Kneeling by the sitting-room table, I write cheques for bills with my eyes three-quarters closed so I don’t see how I’m decimating my bank account. Then I sit in the kitchen with my rosary wrapped around the hand that isn’t trying to finish fitting lyrics to a song, beating the rosary hand against the table in abbreviated rhythms that aren’t helping.

  Magalys calls to ask me if I want to have coffee with her. I want her to have forgotten my Cuba, or at least dimmed it amidst the train of other memories. I wonder if she’ll show me what I would have been like had we stayed in Habana. She and her brother teach dance classes near Bond Street, and I can meet her at the studio because she’ll be finished with her last class by the time I get there. It sounds as if at least ten million people are tap-dancing behind her, but her voice is very calm.

  Tomás has got awkward digestion. His condition is called reflux. What happens is he eats something, waits half an hour, and, no matter how carefully he has chewed his food, he vomits. Even when he was nursing, he used to dribble milk hours after having fed. I observed all this with deep interest, the return of Tomás’s food without invitation. Mami took him to the doctor, but the doctor said that as long as the reflux didn’t happen while he was sleeping, it was OK. And it never did happen while he was sleeping. When he was smaller Tomás didn’t used to think about it; he’d just go and vomit and then get on with whatever he was doing. He ate extra at meals in anticipation of the amount that he was going to lose. At fourteen I knew about bulimia; I’d read books with titles like When it’s Hard to Eat. Tomás’s vomiting like that wasn’t good, but it couldn’t be that bad because he didn’t do it on purpose.

  One day Papi noticed what Tomás was doing.

  Papi put down his newspaper, put on his slippers and followed Tomás upstairs. I followed Papi. The two of us watched Tomás lean over the sink and spit up his lunch, then thoroughly and unselfconsciously rinse out his mouth and dab his face with a face towel, the way Mami had taught him. Tomás was five. I looked at Papi to see what he thought; Papi’s mouth was wide open, his eyes were narrowed behind his reading glasses. Tomás turned, said, ‘What is it?’ to both of us, and tried to get past, but Papi clamped his hands on Tomás’s shoulders and knelt down so as to be small with him.

  ‘You do that every day?’

  Tomás said, incredulous, ‘What?’

  ‘It happens two or three times a day,’ I interjected, surprised.

  Papi didn’t look at me. ‘Stop that, Tomás. Do you hear me? Do you see me doing that kind of thing? It’s unheard of. Boys don’t do that.’

  ‘Papi, girls don’t do it either, though. Mami doesn’t do it. Maja doesn’t do it. Just me does it,’ Tomás argued.

  Papi straightened up and looked down at Tomás. All he said was, ‘Don’t test me.’ He went downstairs, back to his newspaper. Tomás came and took my hand, and gave me a look full of surprise. ‘It’s OK?’ he said. He meant everything. Papi, vomiting, everything.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said, gently putting his other hand back down to his side – Mami didn’t want him sucking his thumb because that was how people got buck teeth.

  After that, Chabella and I watched Papi watching Tomás.

  We all got to know the signs of Tomás’s regurgitation, the way his cheeks expanded, the way he’d get a dizzy, gassed look from trying to hold it in. Then, when we couldn’t bear to sit around watching Tomás hold sour food in his mouth any more, Papi let Tomás scramble up the stairs to the bathroom. To Mami, Papi said, ‘Why is this happening to my son?’

  Chabella said, ‘El crecerá fuera de ello, Juan, he’ll grow out of it. He’s so small now. And he’s the London baby.’

  There was a thing that happened that I didn’t tell Papi. My Spanish teacher wrote lots of letters for Amnesty International and thought that I should take more of an interest in Cuba. Miss Roberts was no more Spanish than I was, but we always had to call her Señora Roberts, to sustain the mood of the language lesson. After one lesson she leant on the edge of my desk and asked me, ‘You know what gusano means, don’t you?’

  I glanced at the door to make my intentions clear and I said, ‘Yeah, it means “worm”.’

  She said, ‘That’s what they call anti-revolutionaries and other dissidents in Cuba. It’s actually a key term in Fidel’s political vocabulary. Gusano. Or if not that then you’re the son of a gusano. It’s a terrible thing, isn’t it, using language to take away the humanity of someone who opposes you?’

  I said, ‘Yeah.’ I fidgeted with my bag strap; I didn’t like the way Señora Roberts had said ‘Cuba’ so softly, as if she were trying to rein in the towering force of it, as if she expected me to gasp or something. I didn’t like the way she was looking at me, eyebrows raised, lips quirked; she was looking at me as if we shared something, as if she knew me much better than she did.

  I knew that Señora Roberts was thinking that my father must have told me all about being gusano, what it was like to have your colleagues begin to denounce you to avoid the label themselves. She thought that as she spoke a painful reel was playing behind my eyes, a sequence in which someone wearing a Cuban flag for a bandana spits in my father’s face and shouts, ‘Gusano!’ Then, perhaps, the same man kicks Papi’s legs out from under him and stamps on his ribcage. But that is not the story. If Papi says ‘gusano’, he doesn’t let the word or its meaning come near him. Papi sits silent and bespectacled behind Cuban broadsheets, then he throws them away and says little about them.

  What Papi did say about having to leave the country was something that Señora Roberts wouldn’t have found exciting. He said that the process that ends with you fearing for your life is gradual and actually quite congenial. It begins in a warm daze as the sun lays you bare in corner-room meetings. Paper falls apart under your sweaty fingers as you read and re-read directives and statements that you know it is essential for you to understand. If you don’t teach certain things, or if you forget to praise certain people and initiatives, you are called to account and at first you think that you
are defective – then you realise that you’re becoming unreasonable because no one else is being reasonable.

  Papi says, ‘If not reason, then what else can it be that separates us from animals, what is it that makes us fail to be innocent before God?’

  I said, ‘I suppose by God, you mean reason undiluted.’

  Papi ignored me and said, ‘There is something else. Unless the nature programmes are hiding something interesting from us, you never see a wolf struggling in a trap while a full pack of its own stand around it in a formal square, waiting for it to escape or to die. I don’t know what to call it, this other thing that makes us different from the wolves.’

  ‘Papi, I think that’s called malice.’

  ‘But that’s not what it is. It’s functional, it’s a process, it’s what must happen to ensure that a group remains a group. It’s what happens when something inside you cancels out your outer appearance and you show yourself not to belong. That’s what makes us different from the wolves; a body may appear as one of us and not be treated as one of us. Three categories of treatment instead of one. Person, God, and beast. And no term for what’s at the heart of it. Well, German’s the language of ideas. I’ll ask Chabella,’ Papi said, and I knew that he wouldn’t.

  When Papi looks at Tomás trying to fight his reflux, I can see how darkly simple his pain is. My brother did not get his co-ordination from Papi. Papi was a bad dish washer and bad at keeping stacked crockery close to his body – he would forget his limits, place his hands higher and let the bottom of the stack go to pieces on the floor. Or if it was cutlery he had to wash them all over again. He didn’t think of money as money; he thought of it as a way to get books, going over title lists in his head over and over again, returning to the places where he felt strongest. Cuba was the restaurant kitchens and the narrow, high platform on which he moved. Whenever he cut his knuckles on knives and potato peelers hidden in the dishwater, the pain always came very late.

  For a long time my Papi did not realise that hunger was the reason why he had to keep touching things to stop them floating away from him. When Chabella first met my Papi his eyes were still too big; prolonged malnutrition is hard to shake off.

  History books: Papi stubbornly scratched surfaces to look for Africa. He knew that his friends hid dismay behind their teasing, that they wondered where the black boy was in him, the snap-back, the physical intelligence. But he had the snap-back; it was in his head.

  When my Papi was Tomás’s age he would not listen to the restaurant owners’ comments that began: ‘The good thing about you morenos is that you can work! God, but can you work . . . on and on.’ He didn’t listen, but because he didn’t sneer, people didn’t know what he was thinking.

  Papi saw a babalawo cry. Papi saw a babalawo come out into the street and stretch himself out on the ground because his daughter had died. He had come to heal her because under Batista no one poor could get taken care of unless they knew someone in authority. But that babalawo could do nothing against his daughter’s cancer, the cells that unsheathed crab claws and waged civil war on each other. The babalawo was dressed in civilian clothes but Papi recognised him; he had come from La Regla. Papi’s uncle worked the docks there, and Papi’s cousins had been blessed and made Santeros by this very babalawo. Papi told me that this babalawo was over six feet tall and white-haired, that he was very, very black. ‘Can you imagine?’ Papi mused.

  I could not.

  ‘The other boys from the neighbourhood were playing some bastardisation of baseball, but they steered clear of this priest. They took their game down to the other end of the street. They said, “Juan, come in on Miguel’s team,” but like the bookhead I was, I was on my way to the library and I didn’t want to tell them. But to get to the library I had to pass that priest. He lay very still; he was like a stain on the ground. So black. After only a second of looking at him he became something very simple to me, something just hurting on the ground, something with no other thoughts. I think I could have stamped on him and he would not have understood what I had done.

  ‘I got worried that some of those Americanos would come with cameras and take a picture. I was thinking, Get up, you. Just get up, get up. Blood was pouring from his mouth; every time he opened it his lips made this wet slapping noise and flies came near. I bent down to him, but I couldn’t do anything. I saw his tongue. Well, half his tongue. He had bitten his tongue in half; the end of it was in the dust, sort of coiled up like a wet tail. The heat made it smell. And he was just trying to speak, trying to speak to the sky I think, not to me, but his mouth was full of blood.’

  Tomás doesn’t believe Papi about the babalawo. ‘You didn’t see his tongue, man. Not his tongue. Maybe you heard about that. He probably just drank chicken blood as part of a ritual or something.’

  Papi is adamant: ‘It was his tongue. His daughter died and he bit it off. I ran away from him. You shouldn’t run away from grief, but my God, you must run from madness. That country. It seems that no one there is able.’

  What if Papi has no strength either? What if he is wrong not to live in the place allocated to him and he is gusano? Then Tomás is the son of a gusano, and, after all, worms eat soil and dead bodies. If the boy can’t keep food down, maybe food is not meant for him. What can it mean, not to be in love with your country? That you belong above the earth, or under it.

  One evening dinner was haphazard; moros y cristianos with yuccas rellenas and ladlefuls of stew poured over. Amy Eleni ate with us, and every bite brought her a surprise – one minute she tasted mashed rice and beans, the next mashed potato and beef, the next spicy tomato.

  I teased Chabella about the Moors and Christians – ‘The beans are black, right, so that’s the Moors, and the rice is white, so those are the Christians . . . ay, Mami, we can’t be Christians, we’re black!’ Amy Eleni backed me up; she said she reckoned that she was a Moor, and she wanted to know what Chabella was going to do about that. Mami whooped, ‘I didn’t name the dish!’

  Papi didn’t say much. He ate and darted his attention from his own plate to Tomás’s face. And, maybe because of the pressure of Amy Eleni’s presence, Tomás gave a small cough, the beginnings of a full-blown heave. Mami still smiled, but she quieted down, became watchful. Amy Eleni knew something was wrong and she looked at Tomás, too, even though I fussed at her to distract her, poured her more water, poured her more juice. Tomás bowed his head and pressed his hands on his knees, arguing with his food, his cheeks distended. Papi twitched but kept on eating, even when Mami gave him a quick, deep, mournful glance.

  When Tomás looked at him, Papi barked, ‘Téngalo en. Tragalo hacia abajo.’ He told Tomás in Spanish to hold it in, to swallow it down, because he didn’t want Amy Eleni to know what he was saying. But Tomás wouldn’t hear him. He just held on to the chair and lowered his head, waiting for Papi to let him go to the bathroom.

  I said, ‘Papi! El es apenas un chico pequeño!’

  Papi made a sign that I should quieten down and said painfully, ‘El debe aprender.’ He must learn. In English he said to Tomás, almost pleading, ‘Come on, T-boy, it’s unheard of.’ Tomás didn’t move or look up, but his breathing grew more laboured – he was about to cry. Amy Eleni gave me a wide-eyed sideways glance. Papi said, ‘Tomás! Dije, tragalo hacia abajo!’

  Amy Eleni studied Papi and studied Tomás and said to the top of Tomás’s head, ‘Tomás, go on, throw up. I dares ya. If you throw up, I’ll do it too.’

  Tomás’s eyes found Amy Eleni’s and he shook his head desperately from side to side – no, no, don’t you throw up.

  ‘What? You don’t want me to throw up all over the table? But I will. You think you’re so tough! You think you’re so clever to throw up like that? I can do it too!’

  Chabella said, uncertainly, ‘Amy Eleni –’ but Amy Eleni made a fake gagging sound that was so slimily authentic that Tomás swallowed, burped, and squealed, ‘No!’ in a single moment of delighted horror.

  ‘We’re tryin
g to eat!’ Mami said, bowing her head to Amy Eleni, her eyes full of thanks.

  ‘What’s wrong with you! Trying to throw up on the table!’ Tomás demanded of Amy Eleni, his face lit bright. It was the way Amy Eleni made my brother move when nothing else would move him that brought Papi to realise something. Before he put him to bed that night, Papi picked Tomás up under his arm, chuckling as he wriggled, and walked around the house with him, whispering things. I couldn’t hear what Papi told Tomás. But it must have been simple, because every now and again, Tomás replied calmly, ‘I know.’

  Aya steps through her London door and crosses concrete slopes that balance drowsy houses on their shoulders. Night’s edge blunts itself at traffic-light level. Aya wishes that she could reach that night and bring it down. Her Aunty Iya could. Aya has seen her Aunty Iya stop walking, stretch languorously, then leap with her arms splayed against impact and sprint up into the atmosphere on a diagonal, hot sparks snapping from her heels as she wrests clouds open. Aya walks and wishes.

  A girl sitting on the pavement with her legs crossed under her, this girl holds her hands out to Aya with soft words, words sighed more than said. Her smile is numb, fragile, milk and water. A round plaster at her temple drives back long black waves of her hair. The girl smells of wild honey, jellied amber so raw that fingers delving into its centre bring up the crisped black remnants of bees. The girl is saying, ‘Ye-ma-ya-Sa-ra-ma-gu-a-Ye-ma-ya-Sa-ra-ma-gu-a,’ and she rocks, wrapped in the rhythm of her own words, rapt like a child at play.

  ‘How do you know my name?’ Aya asks the girl.

  The girl looks into Yemaya Saramagua’s eyes and slowly, painfully puts her smile away somewhere safe. The girl says to Aya, ‘I don’t know your name. What’s your name?’

  A rainbow of blowsy silk handkerchiefs hangs from the girl’s belt. And when the girl says her name is Amy, to Aya this does not feel true. Amy puts out her hand for help, and to make a beginning of it, Aya helps her to stand up.