Africa39 (46 page)

A man shuffles through the dark, carrying a body over his shoulder. The legs dangle down the man’s front and bounce as he moves unsteadily down a corridor. He faces forwards but steps backwards. He turns and fumbles with a door knob. The bedroom door opens with a sucking sound. He bends slowly and lays the body on the bed. It tumbles down piecemeal, buttocks, then torso, then arms. The man stands and looks at it for a long time. All of a sudden, he pitches over the body. He seems grappled to it. A moan lifts and trips and falls into a scream cut short.

Which comes first? The knife handle abrading his palm? Or the wide agony in his chest? The man’s eyes open, he gasps. J.’s face floats above as if he had exhaled him: flat as day, dark as night. His fist is pressed hard to his own chest, his palm around the knife’s handle. J.’s fingers are wrapped around his, their hands a bolus of flesh and bone, wood and blade. Together, they wrench the knife free of its home. Blood washes over him, its temperature perfect.

The boy stood in the doorway of the kitchen, looking out. It was night. His
bwana
was at the bottom of the garden, busy with a black lump and a grey sack. The boy’s mind was empty but for a handful of notions – love, hunger, fear – darting like birds within, crashing into curved walls in a soundless, pitiless fury.

from the forthcoming novel
Harlot

Lola Shoneyin

By the time I was twenty-six, I knew how people could use their mouths to darken the skin of a banana coming into ripeness. I also grew to know the
asiri
of womanhood. Believe me, there are things that those who call women ‘harlots’ do not understand. You can wear the sole away if you march in a shoe for too long. And when you hammer a nail into a hole in a wall, the mud around it will begin to crumble. But, there is nothing like that thing between a woman’s thighs. It is like a well-treated mortar and no amount of pounding can damage it. It is not like the penis that will raise its head and falter. It does not slacken or waste away with use.

I tell you, it has neither measure nor clock. It is like a spring in the hills. It is the place to find delight or bury your sorrows. It can give life to those who want life and bring death to those who seek it. It is a woman’s strength, her fount of power.

The women who know the treasure that is clamped under their wrappers use it well. Those who do not will turn their mouths to those who do when sacks of sadness hang from their throats and their tongues hide gourds full of curses. I have come to understand that this is how it is for women. What they don’t have, no one else can enjoy.

I was born in 1940, sixty-three years ago, in Ilara-Remo. My father, Awoyemi Folarera, was a goldsmith and my mother, Iwalola, sold anything that grew, ran or died on our farm. We were not poor and we were not rich. We ate guinea fowl only at Christmas and Easter but we had leather shoes for church. Left to my mother, I would have become a tailor but my father said I should go to school and learn to read like my three brothers. It is because of my father that I can speak the small English that I speak today.

In 1949 while he was hunting in the deep forest, Baba’s trap caught an antelope. After the hunters cleaned it and smoked it, they gave my father the honour of dividing it. He carried up the cutlass to cut the head of the antelope but the blade came down on his pointing finger, slicing it at the second knuckle. The hunters had to carry Baba home. They said the blood that left Baba’s body that day could fill a calabash. When the medicine man arrived to wake Baba with a bull’s horn, he said the veins of death had crept into Baba’s eyes.

Those who once called my father spider-hands stopped coming to his workshop. He could no longer make beautiful butterfly pendants in brushed gold. He could no longer make anything. What was a man to do with only four fingers? So, to make him feel like a man again, in 1951, my father took a second wife.

When the new wife arrived, my mother cried for many days. But our people say it is only a selfish woman who wants to enjoy her husband alone. The new wife moved into a room in the three-bedroom house that my father had used his savings to build. Baba did not ask my own mother to move there with him so she started behaving as if Baba had poured
sombo
all over her body.

Mama twisted my ears and called me a wayward child whenever she caught me coming out of the new wife’s room, licking palm oil from all the five fingers of my right hand. She said the woman would soon poison me. I did not listen to Mama. I liked the woman’s soup. I would eat it even if I would die. Mama hated me for my disobedience. She told people I did not remember whose breast I had suckled. Her friends would use their eyes to cut my feet from under my legs but I always went back to the new wife’s room. Even then, as a child, I did what my heart wanted. I had a hand in my own destiny.

Today, the Police Commissioner with the big stomach asked me to become his third wife. I told him I did not want to marry. He forgot that I was not one of his corporals. The slap he gave me left the mark of three fingers on my cheek. The next day, he came back crying. I asked him to remove all his clothes. When I finished with him, he slept like a rotting fruit, swelling from pleasure. I rubbed his penis with hot peppers. That day, he saw his ancestors and never came to my doormouth again.

The good Reverend Joshua said the world would end in 2016 but when my sweetness sank into the back of his head, he cried and asked Jesus to forgive him. The first time he did this, I was ashamed and afraid. I told him I did not want to make him sin. Reverend told me to bend over and continue God’s work. God’s work! I laughed that day. The things men say when pleasure takes them make me laugh.

I cannot remember them all. Many men have known the inside of my room and my inner chambers. I have taken pleasure from them when I needed it. I don’t know how women build their nests around one man.

Many wives should be grateful to me because I drove their husbands back to them. After I used the men like rainwater and threw them out, they would crawl back to their wives. In their stupidity, they would then put their mouths together and call me a harlot.

Some women believed the lies; they believed the stories of how I used my powerful thighs to capture their husbands. They would come to my shop to look at me with bad eyes. Some women admired me secretly and told me so; others envied the way men desired me. They tried to befriend me so I would reveal my secret.

But the truth is I had no secret. I did not want my childlessness to reduce me to clay. That I did not have a husband was not a reason for me to forget the ticking between my thighs. The gods gave me a soft core and I was determined to use it. For this, they called me a harlot. They used my name to frighten their young daughters. And when their sons brought home unsuitable girlfriends, they would say the girl had a face like mine.

I will never be ashamed of my life because I have lived the way only a few women can. I have lived like a man. I have lived like seven men. If that makes me a harlot then I wear the name with pride.

Age is a woman’s enemy. Five years before, no woman in Lagos was complete unless she had a piece of jewellery that was bought from me hanging around her neck or hooked around her wrist. But by 1973, many women were selling gold. And diamonds were everywhere. It seemed like my time had passed. Women with bigger breasts and blacker lips were snatching and devouring husbands as if the men were just fingers of roasted plantain lying by a fireplace. These reckless women opened their thighs for money and let men trample on them. If they had asked me, I would have told them that when a woman is too generous, men will suck her last breath. These women became slaves to men. I was not like them.

When a road was so bad that it was difficult for cars to pass, I would pay engineers to repair it. If children were sick and their parents could not afford a good doctor, I would call in favours from people in my past life and ensure that they were seen by specialists. It is good to know many people. I bought many sewing machines in those days. You know how Ebute Metta is full of old tailors today? Go and ask who bought many of them their first sewing machines. If you have money and you do not use it to do good, it is no better than ashes.

I thought often about my money and what would happen to it when I was returned to the soil. I could not have children and it worried me that the weeds around my grave would be uprooted by strangers, if at all. At these times, I would think of my village and the days of my childhood. I would think of the forest, and the fruits I used to pluck with my friends. I wondered if my friends had children. My money gave me a hundred wells but I desired the sound of a running river.

Later, in 1979, a man came to my shop. When he saw me, he prostrated himself and asked to see Madam Rolake Folarera. He did not recognise me but I knew who he was right away. I thought of the story about the brothers who sold Joseph into slavery but returned to bow down before him.

The man scrubbing the floor with his nose was Adenuyi, my eldest brother. I remembered the day he came to call me from the churchyard when Iya Ibeji died. There were many years between us, too many for us to be friends, too many for us to have much to talk about. As a child, he never offended me but sometimes silence is a sin. All the time my mother was making my life a pot of tears, he did not raise his voice to comfort me.

When I told him who I was, he did not seem surprised. He slowly got on his feet. His eyes were full of shame. He was bald. His clothes were worn and faded. He smelled as if he had been tending cassava all day, under the heat of the sun. There were patches of dry skin on his arms, as if the shea butter had been rationed.

‘Our father is dead and we have no money to buy a coffin,’ were the first words that fell from his lips. I should have known that he needed something from me. All the years that had gone by, not a dog, not a goat from my village had come to find me. Misery can make strangers of strands of hair on the same head. I told him that they should throw our father into the earth as he was.

‘So you are kind enough to buy my daughter a sewing machine. You are generous enough to repair the road that my son lives on but you do not care about your own father and whether he is buried in shame?’

‘What daughter? What do I know about you?’

He told me that one of the women I’d bought a sewing machine for, just months before, was his daughter whom he had warned not to reveal her identity.

‘So you thought I would not help her if I knew?’

‘Yes. For the same reason you are rejecting your father. I know that anger has kept you from us. The tales of your life reach us in Ilara. We wanted to visit you but shame would not let us. Baba wanted to touch you with his eyes but death was already claiming them. Every time we thought a day would be his last, he would climb into the next one. Mama has nursed him all this time. All the money we have, we have used to support him. What we have borrowed, we will never be able to pay back. We live like beggars. Finally, last week Friday, Baba woke up with clear eyes and asked why strangers dressed in white were carrying his clothes out of his room. We knew they were death’s messengers. As if he had dreamed the last thirty years, he asked when you were coming home from school. He said we should save you some red
omini
bananas because you liked them so much. He slept that afternoon and did not wake up.’ Adenuyi took off his cap and prostrated again. He begged me to forgive him.

I could not lie. I could not say I was still angry with my mother or my family because I had just forgotten them. My destiny was different from theirs. Living my life like an orphan was better for me. I leaned forward and lifted him up. He was my senior brother and I did not want to humiliate him. I asked about the village. I did not ask about Mama. I was afraid to.

I bought my father a coffin made from the finest bronze. I gathered the most expensive lace in my shop, the one I reserve for the wives of kings. I took my best gold to put round his neck. I bought him a leather wallet and filled it with money. I bought him two pairs of shoes – one for him to wear and a spare pair for the rocky roads that lead to heaven. I bought him a fan for the heat and a walking stick to ease each step. I wanted the ancestors to stop and stare when Papa walked through the gates of heaven.

For the funeral celebrations, I bought ten bags of rice, three cows, six goats and eighty chickens. Three buses followed me and my brother as we drove to Ilara in my new Volvo.

I was surprised to see how little the village had changed. There were electricity poles but no evidence of electricity. The main road that used to look so wide now resembled a foot-beaten pathway. The houses were tiny, many of them made of mud, a few with little concrete extensions. There were children running about. Young boys pushed an old tyre rim around with sticks, girls played hopping games and threw up sand with their feet.

Adenuyi wanted to be seen. He beckoned to them with the wave of a hand. He wanted the villagers to know that we had arrived. They left whatever they were doing and followed the car.

Mama was standing outside holding the hand of a young man for support. The boy was moving from leg to leg as if he wanted to urinate. I saw him and my stomach felt like there was a bead moving inside it. It was Olujimi, Mama Ibeji’s son. He was a man. I did not take my eyes from him as I got out of the car.

I surveyed everything that I had left behind. I felt tears come to my eyes. The woman who had made me suffer so much as a child was running towards me but her legs could no longer carry her. I ran to catch her so she would not fall. She embraced me. I embraced her. She called me by my praise names, names I had forgotten I owned. She pulled away to look at me. She began to dance. Her head tie fell from her head. No teeth, no hair, no breasts, no husband. Yet here she was. Crying with joy.