My Secret History (40 page)

“Ghana after Nkrumah,” I said—and she still had a questioning smirk on her face, so I continued, “What now?—Who’s in charge?—What next?—Are we at a crossroads? On the one hand
this
, on the other hand
that
. It’s a thumbsucker.”

She laughed—she liked hearing new expressions in English. And laughter turned her into a new person—she made a loud
approving noise and her small body became supple. She had short black hair and golden skin. She loved the color green—dresses, scarves, even underwear—and because she was short she always wore interesting shoes—high heels and basketwork things with built-up soles.

“I can introduce you to some Africans,” she said, and drove on.

She lived in a hot little apartment in a building that was faced with plaster that had turned from yellow to gray in the damp heat. So many of the buildings in Accra looked brittle and moldy, like stale bread, and the streets too were crumbled like old cake. The sky was heavy with the dull gleam of stifling clouds, and even at night the air was clammy and unbreathable.

That first night, when we couldn’t buy any beer, we sat surrounded by packing crates and tea chests—she said that she hadn’t had time to unpack properly and anyway found them convenient for storing her things. They were like cupboards, she said. They gave the room the cluttered and stacked-up look of an attic or a storeroom. Her ceiling fan was no more than a whirring distraction. It made the calendar rattle against the wall, but it did not cool me.

Francesca wore a Ghanaian cloth wraparound, which slipped loose as she leaned over and spooned some sinister-looking stew into my plate. I looked down and saw lurid vegetables in greasy gravy. There was bread but it was hard and dusty, and the butter tasted of soap.

“This food is disgusting,” Francesca said. “My cook is good for nothing.”

I said nothing. It was obvious the food was bad. In any case I had no appetite. The coastal heat affected me like a sickness.

When I said I wasn’t hungry, Francesca squawked for the cook. He entered in a stiff and almost ceremonial way to remove the plates.

Francesca plopped her spoon into her plate, as the cook made a little bow.

“You want pooding, muddum?”

“No, no, no, no, no.” And she waved him away.

Silently the table was cleared, and I saw that it was not a table, but another packing crate.

“Why don’t
you
cook, if he’s so bad?”

“I hate cooking,” she said.

Then it was clear to me why she treated him so rudely. It was one bad cook blaming another.

“I just like eating,” she said.

The cook was padding back and forth, one room away. We sat restlessly, and her sentence still hung in the air. The ceiling fan went
ark-ark
. Someone else’s radio penetrated our wall, and there were children’s shouts from the street, and laboring cars and choking dogs. The kitchen door clattered: the cook was gone.

“I’m still hungry,” Francesca said.

“I’m not surprised.”

But she was smiling.

“Now I’m going to eat you.”

She switched the light off, but the yellow light from the street brightened the room and gave the packing cases crooked shadows. Francesca was standing before me.

“I like these Ghanaian dresses,” she said. “So easy to take off.”

She unknotted it and it slipped to the floor. She was naked. Her body was lighted by the streetlamps and stripes lay across her curves like contours—the shadows of the window bars showing on her skin. She dropped to her knees. I looked up at the ceiling.
Ark-ark
—the fan had a froggy voice; and later with the bed creaking it was like a jungle racket.

I woke up the next morning feeling ill. The humid heat was a weight that squeezed my eyes. It was a sense of oppression, like a memory of suffocation, and I sweated as though running a temperature. Francesca said it was a normal day in Accra. A normal day was like a fever.

I foresaw a week of this fever and this food.

“Why don’t we take a trip?” I said. “We could drive somewhere up-country in your car.”

I had a feeling that if we went north it would be cooler, and I hated this broken-down city.

Francesca was frowning—her way of showing me she was thinking.

“We don’t have any plans for New Year’s. There’s hardly any food in the cupboard. And there’s nothing to drink.”

“You are criticizing me,” she said peevishly.

I denied it and said I was sorry, but so feebly she knew I was lying.

“And it might be fun to take a trip.”

Now I regretted leaving London so suddenly, and I missed Prasad and Rosamond and the black gleaming streets.

“We could go to Kumasi,” Francesca said. “There’s a hotel where no one ever stays. It’s very green in Kumasi and a bit cooler. But what about those Africans you wanted to meet?”

“Where are they?”

“One lives in the next block of flats,” Francesca said. “He works for the government. He might have some stories for you. His name is Kofi. Everyone is named Kofi or Kwame. We can see him before we go.”

I was so eager to leave I immediately packed my bag, and began hurrying Francesca. But this made her dawdle all the more. At last she said there wasn’t time to see Kofi, and he was so boring what was the point?

“I have to see him,” I said.

He was a man in his late twenties, with the sort of protruding teeth that gave him an amiable expression. He laughed each time he spoke, and everything he said was a compliment. “You are so young. You are so handsome. When Francesca told me you were a professor I imagined an old man. But not a smartly dressed young lad—”

Was this what Francesca meant by boring? I found it worse than that. I wanted to tell him to shut up. I said, “What ministry are you with?”

“Ministry of Works.” He smiled. “It is all bribery and corruption. That is the African way. It is hopeless.”

“The roads are in rough shape in Accra.”

He laughed very hard in a mirthless way.

“In Accra they are good! You should see the rest of the country!” His laugh went
ark-ark-ark
like Francesca’s fan. “The minister steals money and gives it to his wives. He has four wives. He has a house in London. He is a devil.” He laughed again.

“You don’t sound angry.”

“Why be angry? Life is short. We say ‘Be happy—don’t worry.’ You are in Africa, my young friend. Have a drink. It is New Year’s Eve.”

He took a bottle of beer from a crate on the floor and opened
it. He splashed some beer on the threshold. “That is a libation,” he said. “For the gods.”

“Which gods?”

“All of them.”

He filled three glasses.

All this time Francesca was sighing—a sort of audible boredom. We drank a little and Kofi emptied the last of the bottle of beer into my glass. It was very bad for the host to drink the last of the beer, he said.

“I thought they were out of beer in Accra. How did you get it?”

“Bribery and corruption,” he said.
Ark-ark
. “I will get you some crates. As many as you want. Leave it to me, my friend.”

There was a murmur in the next room. Kofi yapped in his own language, a sort of crow-squawk, and a woman appeared. She was about fifteen years old, and wrapped in a pink cloth; she was pregnant and perspiring.

“This is my lady wife, Mr. Endro,” Kofi said. “She doesn’t speak English. Just a simple village girl.”

She was barefoot, and breathless from the heat. She dabbed her face.

“When is the baby due?”

“One month or so,” Kofi said. “It will be our first child. You can be godparents. Or uncle and auntie.”

Francesca sighed again, but Kofi did not seem to mind. He was flattering, obtuse, full of promises and compliments. He never sat down. He walked up and down, laughing in his croaky way, urging us to drink more. He was much cheerier than the rather solemn-looking Ugandans I was used to. But he was repetitious, and I wondered whether he were drunk. He was scathing about the Ghana government. “They are like vultures,” he said. “There will be another coup, oh sure,” and he told me—laughing the whole time—how Nkrumah had misgoverned the country.

“I’d like to meet someone in the government,” I said.

“Sure. The minister? The perm sec? The deputy minister? I can arrange it for you. Have another cup of beer, please.”

Everything seemed so easy. An hour with a politician or civil servant was just what I needed. I could see someone at the American Embassy (“A western diplomatic source told me”),
and talk to people at the market in Accra, or other friends of Francesca’s; and I would have my article about Ghana, which would be my air fare for this month of travel.

“Any of them,” I said. “All of them. I just want to ask a few questions. Listen, are you sure you can fix it up?”

“Leave it to me. I can fix it up.” He seemed to be trying out my words, making them his own. “When you come back from Kumasi give me a tinkle and I will fix it up.”

He uttered two crow-squawks at his wife, who stopped dabbing at her perspiring face and tramped heavily out of the room. She returned with two bottles of beer.

“I’ve had enough,” I said, and snatched my glass off the table.

“This is a present,” he said. “You take them with you. Happy New Year. African custom.”

“We don’t want it,” Francesca said, bluntly, snapping her jaws at him.

“But the young man wants the beer,” Kofi said, winking at me.

Francesca was annoyed, and it showed. But Kofi seemed not to notice, or perhaps he didn’t care.

“You are welcome here,” Kofi said. “We respect teachers in Ghana. They are like gods to us. We are thirsty for education.”

On the road to Kumasi, I said, “You weren’t very polite to him.”

“Kofi? He is like an Italian,” Francesca said. “He thinks only of himself.”

“If he gets me an interview with the minister I’ll forgive him for anything.”

After a long silence Francesca said, “Sometimes you say such stupid things.”

I was driving the Fiat now. The little car strained on the rising roads—but the road was better than I had expected. Contrary to what Kofi had said, as soon as we left Accra the road had improved. We entered a higher and more wooded region. But the foliage was messy and cluttered, a disorderly forest of broken and hanging trees and dense bamboo. The birds were frenzied, and every hundred yards or so there was a dead dog in the road, some of them plump and bleeding, but most of them old and as stiff as mats. The roadside huts matched the trees and had similarly shaggy roofs. What houses I could see—the more solid buildings—were stained and cracked.

I compared what I saw here with what I knew in Uganda and Malawi. My Africans seemed more sensible and quieter, and the woods and forests more orderly, the roads in better repair. I could put that in the article.

I was so intent on thinking of the article and driving the car that I did not speak for a long time, and then I started talking, and as I did—asking questions and answering them myself—I realized that Francesca had not said a word for half an hour. Her face was averted.

“Are you sulking?”

“No,” she said. “But I wish I hadn’t taken you to see Kofi.”

“Why? Because he ignored you?”

“He didn’t ignore me,” she said quickly. “But did you see how he treated his wife?” She mimicked someone spitting. “They’re all like that.”

I drove on. Ramshackle forest. Goats. Men on bikes. Mammy wagons.

She said, “I didn’t realize until I saw you two together how much I disliked him.”

“And how much you like me?” I said, intending to tease her.

“I do like you, Andre. You know that. Sometimes I think the feeling is stronger than liking you.” She frowned and turned away.

I put my hand on her knee. “You know I love you.”

“Don’t joke about it,” she said. “It’s bad for me to like you so much.” She faced me and said crossly, “I want more than this!”

“So do I.” I meant it, and I said it with such force that she turned to me again and touched my face tenderly and let me kiss her hand. She snuggled closer and let my fingers drift between her thighs.

“This is the bush.”

“I like the bush,” I said.

The shaggy roadside woods were a preparation for shaggy Kumasi. It was a green town with sloping streets and small shops and municipal buildings plastered with red dust. Its trees were shapeless, like gigantic weeds on long stalks, though there were prettier ones, like tall feathers. We arrived as it was growing dark, and found the Royal Hotel where we registered as man and
wife. There was no beer available at the hotel, so we drank the bottles that Kofi had given us.

The hotel smelled of dampness and dead insects. The wood squares of the parquet floors had worked loose. We ate mutton and boiled vegetables in the empty dining room.

The waiter said in a reproachful way, “It is New Year’s Eve. The people are all at the parties in the bars and nightclubs.”

We heard the shouts and the music from down the street.

“What shall we do?”

Francesca said, “Come upstairs and I’ll show you.”

I had never known her so amorous. We did not leave the bedroom until after midnight. Drunken men were staggering and singing in the street. We went back to the room and made love again, and then slept until noon.

That day we drove to the palace. I said, “It doesn’t look like a palace.” We went to the museum. It was shut. So was the market. Without people, the streets and shops looked dirty and ugly.

In bed that night Francesca said, “I thought Africa would be darker. More dangerous and mysterious. Sometimes I want to leave–just go away before I start to hate them.”

She held me tightly. I wondered what it would be like to travel with her. When she was amorous she was like a child. I liked that—having a lover, a daughter, a wife: one woman. And I liked the thought that she was strong, that I could depend on her.

“Happy New Year,” I said. That I was with her on this day—surely that was significant? “We’ll have to get used to saying nineteen sixty-eight.”

Francesca hugged me and said, “I’m happy, Andre.”

It was just dawn the next morning when I sat up, thinking I wanted to take a piss. I felt a familiar itch—a thread of irritation—inside my penis. I squeezed it, holding it like a toothpaste tube, and a gob of thick yellowish fluid collected on its tip. I rolled over and cursed.