The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives (9 page)

Even when my belly was rounded, I continued to go to him. I couldn’t help myself. There was something he gave me that I wanted constantly, endlessly. Three days after I gave
birth to my first daughter, I waited for Baba Segi to leave for his new building materials store. As soon as Taju drove him away, I tied the infant to my back and sat on a boulder outside the meat seller’s home. When he arrived, he asked me if the child was a boy or a girl. I completely forgot that I even carried a child on my back. Please do not blame me. It was eagerness; I had not been with him for a week. By the time he had hung up all his tools, I had removed the baby and my clothes and laid them down in a neat pile on the floor. Tope was a good baby; she did not cry. He asked me if I had brought him some money. I wondered if he lay with me for the money alone.

For three years, that was how I lived: three days of pummeling from Baba Segi and a day of healing from the meat seller. Those afternoons were worth life itself and it was not until one morning, after I’d given birth to Motun, my third daughter, that I realized how little of life remained outside those afternoons. Iya Segi burst into my room, her brow folded with anger, the skin around her throat rippling. “Can you not hear the infant crying?” she shouted.

“Oh, my thoughts were far away.” I got up to lift the child out of her cot. Her small eyes were glazed from crying. I placed my nipple into her mouth. As I looked around for my other children, Iya Segi’s eyes followed mine. Afolake was sitting in a corner pushing what was leaking out of her nappy into Tope’s nostrils. Tope was fast asleep; all her clothes were inside out.

“Too far away!” Iya Segi pinched her nose and perched on the edge of the bed. “Last week, our husband asked me if
you were sick. He said there was a bad smell in your room.” She looked around suspiciously as if something catching would jump out of the walls. “I will not let you destroy this home with your excesses. You have allowed the concubine to become the husband. I have not known anyone to worship a penis the way you do!” She stopped to take a long breath. “Listen carefully to what I have to say because if I am forced to say it again, it will be wedged between curses. You will
not
see this man again. You are like a child who has not developed the temperament for secrets. You are lucky we have a husband who believes he is more than all women and most men. If he were more discerning, more like a woman, say, he would have seen through your madness. And anyway, a new wife is coming, so brace yourself. I just hope
she
has some sense in her head.” She left the room dangling Afolake by the arm. I heard her yell Segi’s name and instruct her to scrub the child thoroughly in the backyard where the dirty water would be absorbed into the ground.

I sat there quietly and watched Motun twitching in her sleep. She was six days old. Her mouth had abandoned my breast. She looked so small and so unloved. A deep, damning shame came over me. I could not believe that I had neglected the children who bought me the easy life I lived. There and then, I decided to become a good mother to my children.

I would be a liar if I said I wasn’t tempted to visit my meat seller. I was. The yearning was hard to bear but each time the urge came, I bit my bottom lip and rocked myself to sleep with a pillow between my knees. The body quickly remem
bers how to die in the face of pain. I cast all sweetness from my mind and drew my children close to fill its space.

Iya Segi was right: a new wife arrived. She was tall and lean yet you could see that she had whipped her life onto the road of her choice. She had great strength in her forearms and she did everything with determination. Iya Segi spoke sourly of me and referred to me as
apoda
—the stupid, slothful one—behind my back. Tope, my daughter, told me so. It would not surprise me if they were plotting to throw me and my daughters into a well.

Iya Femi, the new wife, soon gave birth to a son and there was much celebration. The new mother clapped her knees together when she sat and strutted about like her womb was a gold mine. That was to be expected but it was Baba Segi’s words that made my ears ache. He spoke as if Femi were a jewel, as if he were the first child to be born to the family: “A daughter can never be like a son,” he said. “Only a son can become a true heir.”

Iya Segi promptly reminded him that he already had an heir in Akin, her own son.

My daughters were born with eyes in their stomachs so they are quick to digest all that they see. They cling to each other for comfort and move together like a single wave. When one cries, the others cry too, and when one laughs, the others smile before asking what is amusing. Sometimes I feel like
I
am one of them. We look after one another and I have taught them all I know. “Do not commit adultery,” I tell them. “Follow the path that is good and right,” I say. And when they
forget to do their homework, I ask them if they want to be educated ladies or useless tubers with arms and legs. They giggle when I say this.

One day, I had a thought and shared it with them. I said it would probably be better for me to hang myself after they marry and leave home. They crumpled into a pile on the floor and wept. “Mama, we would never leave you here,” they cried. They understood so much more than I ever did. Like I said, they have eyes in their stomachs.

Bolanle does not deserve the treatment the other wives give her. They bark at her as if she were a child: “Don’t sit there!” and “Don’t touch that!” All day long, they are at it, yet she does as she is told and never complains. We both do as we are told. One of these days, I should talk to her. I must think of the words that I will say to her. Perhaps it is too early. And the other wives would call me a traitor. They would eat my flesh and the blood from their lips. I think I will watch her a little longer. If fate says we will speak to each other, then one day we will.

I have a secret. I have started weeding again. I do it when Baba Segi comes to lie with me. He doesn’t like it; he keeps clasping my hands high above my head to stop me but when he is in the throes of humping, I wiggle one arm out of his grip. I close my eyes and scrape the soil. I push aside the leaves; I prod the stem and pinch the bud. My mind goes to the meat seller so I pull slowly, very slowly. Then, quite unexpectedly, the plant is uprooted and pulsing at my fingertips. I do not open my eyes. I don’t want to see Baba Segi looking at me.

I
N THE TWO YEARS
I’ve been living in Baba Segi’s house, he has never apologized for his mistakes. He makes peace his own way and it involves tattered brown envelopes bursting with fifty-naira notes, thrust beneath doors at dawn. I’d been ruffled by the red-thread incident and I could think of no better way to calm myself than to spend the day at Dugbe market. I walked the length of Dugbe market, then decided to visit the bric-a-brac stall around lunchtime. My intention was to buy something really ostentatious like a copper plate but when I got there, I found neither bell nor bell ringer.

“You better keep walking,” a woman who stood with her back to me warned. “The police might be watching from afar to see who comes looking for him. Keep walking. We are talking about
stolen
property, you know?” The woman was unpacking cheap aluminum pans and cutting up card-
board boxes with a giant pair of tailor’s scissors; she didn’t turn round to face me.

I wondered if she was addressing someone else. “Sorry to disturb you but I am looking for the man who sells imported tableware.”

“Move closer to my stall. Didn’t you hear me? He has been arrested. Yesterday, a rich man came to buy some plates. When he got to your friend’s stall, he immediately called the police. It turns out some of the plates on sale were his very own. Within minutes, your dish seller and his stolen wares were bundled behind the counter at the police station.”

“You mean
all
the crockery was stolen? But he said they were imported by Italian merchants!”

“Italian merchants?” The woman burst into laughter. She clutched her enormous breasts before doubling herself over, as if she feared gravity would lug them off her chest. When she sat up straight, there were tears streaming down her face. “My sister, you make me laugh! Did you expect him to say he got the plates from so and so’s house? Or maybe you expected him to give you the address they were stolen from. My dear, he confessed within minutes; he didn’t even wait for the sergeant’s third slap. Sister, the sun is high. Go your way. You are blocking my stall. Unless of course you want to buy pots. Mind you, these ones are made in Nigeria.”

“No, thank you.” I shuffled along with the ebb of evening buyers. I felt like a stupid fool, but more than that I felt like an accomplice.

I rushed home as soon as I could, wondering what to do with the bowls. Apart from the fact that their splendor now seemed iniquitous, they were evidence, stolen goods, and I knew I had to dispose of them.

The bats were on their daily pilgrimage; the sky was awash with them. As a child, I’d always marveled at their fluidity, how, like dirty water, they poured onto the graying sky in organized chaos: a chosen few dropping to the flanks, floating awhile before rejoining the rest of the cloud.

“Why do bats travel at dusk?” I once asked Mama.

“Because they are witch birds. Witches fly at dusk.”

This was not a satisfying answer for a nine-year-old. “But how can a bat be a witch?”

“Because they hang upside down. If you hang upside down what will happen to you?”

“Would I die?” I asked. The good beans dropped through my fingers into the bad beans pile.

“Of course you would. But
they
wouldn’t. They can sleep upside down because they have evil powers. Stop talking and sort the beans, Bolanle. We have to finish quickly. The landlord’s wife wants us to grind them as well.” She whispered, “It’s her husband’s birthday party tomorrow.”

“Can we go? I want to see the cake. Lara found some in a plastic bag last year.”

“Did she eat it?” Mama’s hands stopped moving and crept to her waist. Her jaw stopped too, which was a bad sign because she never completely swallowed her bitter kola. She always swirled a diminishing nugget around her mouth.

“No. Yes.” I knew I’d said too much. Mama forbade us from scavenging.

“Will you children never learn?” Mama turned to her left and then her right as if she was addressing an invisible audience. “Look at me sitting here sorting beans! Do you think I don’t have better things to do? I agreed to pick these stupid beans to secure the roof over your head, so
Madam
will not tell her husband that I am unhelpful, so
her
children will not see
my
children carrying their belongings out on their heads like wretches after
they’ve
served
us
a notice.”

“I know, Mama.”

She wasn’t finished. She tucked her hair into the black hairnet and pulled her right earlobe in my direction to indicate that I should open my ears to their full capacity. “I don’t want to see you going there begging for food. If your father wants to go there, lick their bottoms and beg for beer, let him. I am not bringing my children up to be beggars. I am working myself to death because I want you and that glutton sister of yours to own houses and cars. I am bringing you up to be able-bodied women who will fight for prosperity and win. No one enjoys success if they do not work hard for it.”

“I hear you, Mama.”

She still wasn’t finished. “Will the taste of cake improve your lot in life? Is it nourishing?” Mama also asked ridiculous rhetorical questions when she was annoyed. The problem was that they required contrite monosyllabic answers.

Mama lifted her hips off the stool. I knew there was more trouble to come from the look on her face. Her features had
become pinched and distorted with anger. “Let me go and find that Lara. She will hear it from me today. Why must she follow her long throat wherever it beckons? And was she not supposed to help us sort these stupid beans? Where is she now? Lara! Omolara!” she bellowed.

A few moments later, I heard Lara screaming. Mama had yanked her from the mattress she was curled up on, pulled her outside by her ear, all the time slapping her over her head. A slap for every syllable. “You are a la-zy girl. Who will mar-ry a glut-ton like you? Why is it al-ways you? Why can’t you be like your sis-ter?”

Through tears, she glared at me, her large seven-year-old eyes full of malice. I could only stare back; my eyes were also brimming with tears. Lara did not speak to me for three weeks. When I entered a room, she walked out. When we were forced to sit together, she made sure our legs didn’t brush against each other. It took six balls of
akara
to appease her. And even then, when I handed them to her, she just wolfed them down without saying so much as thank you.

As soon as I got home, I ran to my bedroom and pulled on a pair of worn jeans. I forced my arm under my bed and pulled out an old cardboard box. Then, one by one, I knelt before my stack of crockery and crushed them against each other.
The Long Honeymoon
tried to flee my fingers when I groped under the bed for it; I threw it in the box. I gathered all the mementos I’d kept over the years: the single earring that Segun, the landlord’s son, had given me when I turned eighteen. Just wear it like a pendant, he said. In went the hairpiece
Baba Segi said looked like a horse’s tail. All the love letters I’d written to myself were the sort I’d have liked to receive. I tore up every one and sprinkled the pieces around the box like confetti.

When I was finished, I hauled the box onto the top of my head. It was heavier than I had thought it would be but I’d learned to endure that sensation of my neck disappearing into my shoulders. Years before, Lara and I had been forced to fetch buckets of water from a nearby well because the landlord had complained that the human traffic to the bore-hole on his property unnerved him. When the cold water splashed over our shoulders as we trudged home, we cursed the Water Corporation that denied us tap water in the first place.

I heaved past the other wives in the sitting room. They stared at me and then at one another in puzzlement. I pretended not to see them and marched ahead to the desolate spot in the backyard where the old drum was. Charred bits of metal and melted plastic that had been pushed into the ground by rainfall protruded from the earth like gravestones. The ground around was scalded, the stones discolored by soot.

I eased the cardboard box onto the ground with a clatter and gave the blue keg a generous jiggle. The liquid trickled from paper to pottery and immediately the air around the box distorted the patterns on the crockery. It took only two matches to set the box alight. I stood there and watched the fire cremate my past, even when the heat drew sweat from
my face. When the fire died, I gathered scattered shards, dug a hole in the warm soil and buried them.

Back in my bedroom, I surveyed the open spaces that rolled out before me. Now there would be room for a cot, I thought.