My Secret History (41 page)

Francesca threw her arm around me.

“Don’t,” I said, and shrugged. “I have some kind of infection.”

We found a Ghanaian doctor in Kumasi. He sat me down and put on plastic gloves and examined me. He asked me some simple questions.

“It is gonorrhea,” he said. “Don’t worry”—-he was writing a prescription—“this will clear it up. Are you married?”

“No,” I said.

Francesca had waited in the car. I got in and said, “He says I’ve got VD.”

She crossed her legs, but said nothing.

“I know where I got it,” I said, trying to control my voice. “What I want to know is where did you get it?”

She began to cry. And then I knew, and I saw him clearly, his buck teeth, his bulging eyes. I remembered all his promises, and how she had said nothing.

I put the car into gear—it was such a little car. We tottered towards the coast.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Nowhere,” I said.

“You must drink,” the African man next to me said. We were on the flight from Accra to Lagos. Bottles of beer were being handed out to the passengers. “You must have one or two.”

The doctor in Kumasi had told me not to—alcohol reduced the effectiveness of the penicillin.

“I can’t,” I said. I still itched.

“Can’t
drink?”
He grinned at me in contempt, showing all his front teeth.

“I’m an alcoholic,” I said. “If I have one drink I’ll want to have another. And then I’ll get drunk and totally screwed up.”

“Yes! Yes!” he said eagerly, laughing hard, and pushing a bottle at me. “Go on!”

“And then I’ll vomit,” I said.

He was wearing a new suit. His hand went to his lapels, which
he smoothed, as he laughed again, but in a discouraged way. “I understand,” he said.

He was an economist. Feeling I had nothing to write about Ghana, I pressed him for his views on Nigeria—he was a lecturer at the University of Ibadan. He was very precise in his figures, and mocking in his manner. When he told me how Nigeria financed its industrial projects he spoke in a voice that was both gloating and complaining.

“You want to know the terms of reference of this little exercise?” he said. He drank and wiped his mouth. “The company pays over the odds in order to establish itself. The minister concerned takes a twenty-percent cut—and he sends this money to London or New York. The company has an exclusive license, so it pushes its prices up. When the minister sees the profits he demands his share. That’s how it goes on. The companies and the politicians are conspiring against the people.” He smiled at this. “Neocolonialism is not just an empty term. It has an actual meaning. No matter how much money this country makes it will always be poor. Nothing will change. In financial terms we were better off under the British.”

“But in political terms Nigeria is freer, isn’t it?”

He laughed at this. “We have had two military coups!”

“I thought Nigeria was more unified now.”

“There is going to be a war here,” he said, dropping his voice. “In the east—Ibo land. Don’t go there. It’s not political, and it’s not about money. The Ibos are fighting for the most important thing—their lives.”

“How do you know this?”

“I am an Ibo,” he said. “And what do you do?”

“I’m a teacher,” I said. “In Uganda.”

“Are you on holiday?”

It was always foolish to mention writing or journalism in Africa, so I said, “Sort of. I’m also seeing a friend.”

“I thought all the foreigners left after the last coup.”

“My friend is a Nigerian,” I said.

“God help you!” he said, and he laughed so loudly that several people turned to stare at him.

And then the plane was descending, streaking past mud huts and junked cars and the scrappy rooftops of small shacks.

The economist hurried out of the plane. I thought:
He’s not real
. The next day, talking to other Nigerians—editors, a reporter,
a publisher’s representative—and a U.S. Embassy official, I had the same thought, that they were not real either. They were acting. Their actual lives were hidden from me, but for my benefit they had cast themselves in the colorful role of writers or businessmen or teachers or tribesmen. In each public person was a smaller stranger person who bore no resemblance at all to the one I saw, and I was always on the point of demanding
Who are you?
or
Who do you think you are?
when I remembered, with a little shock, who I was.

I had not seen Femi for a year. I had never thought I would see her again. I did not want to startle her and so, instead of calling her, I called her brother George. This was after I saw the editors and officials, for the sake of my article.

George appeared at my hotel. He was so black and smooth he seemed to be wearing a second skin: he was like someone else within that slippery skin—but who?

“Come, we will have a drink!” He was hearty, expansive, energetic. He would not look me in the eye. We went to a noisy club five streets away. That was the strangeness of Lagos. From a fine, expensive hotel it was a short walk to a dangerous slum. There were prostitutes in the club—tall skinny girls in tight skirts, wearing orange and blonde wigs.

George shouted for two beers, and when they were brought and we touched glasses his eyes met mine and he lost his smile. “I am very sorry for what happened,” he said.

I could see this was going to be an impossible conversation. His mood was somber and apologetic, but the place was noisy—brass band, people dancing and flailing their arms, old women shrieking. I had to ask him to repeat that sentence, and the second time, shouting it so that I would hear it, he sounded insincere. But I knew he was not.

“The family is very ashamed!” he yelled.

“Let’s not talk about it.”

“We found the boy! We beat him! We took some money!”

“I can’t hear you,” I said, shaking my head. But I could, and I didn’t want to.

“Why are you not drinking your beer?”

“I’m sick!” The symptoms were gone but I was still taking the penicillin.

George smiled: he didn’t understand. He went on shouting.

I pretended I couldn’t hear him through the music and the noise, and at last he gave up.

Eventually he said, “Femi wants to see you.”

It was what I wanted to hear. I stood up, and George followed me outside.

As soon as we had left the noise of the club and were in the street, George changed. The apologies were over. He laughed at the heavy traffic and the horns. He told me he was planning to study engineering in Kaduna. He talked about his own life. And he seemed relieved to be talking about something other than Femi—that talk was lost and forgotten in the twanging music and the shadows of the club. He was no longer hearty. He looked depleted; he was quiet. After all that effort he had nothing more to say.

George had given me Femi’s address without telling me where it was. The taxi driver snorted when I told him, and he drove for an hour, never leaving the same ruined road. It was midday, and we went slowly in a line of contending cars, past low buildings and daubed signs. Did it look familiar to me because the whole of Lagos looked chaotically the same? It was an ugly place. Its noise and heat seemed like other aspects of the same disorder. That—the ruin—was real. Everything else was unreal. It was not a city, the money was worthless, the food was bad, the air stank, the poorest people were extravagantly dressed in bandannas and bright robes, with turbans and sashes and crisply folded togas.

It was the way Femi was clothed. Her turban matched her gownlike dress, the purple and white cloth shot through with gold thread; and there was something Egyptian in her bearing, the way she held herself, all that cloth wrapped neatly on her head, and even in her features, slanted and slightly hooded eyes and full lips and rising cheekbones—pharaonic. She was like a black cat wrapped in gold cloth.

That was how she looked when she shoved aside the rag that hung in place of a door. A chicken ran out from behind her, its head down, clucking madly.

Her village—if it was a village—was near the airport. It was part of the continuous ruin by the roadside. The planes roared low overhead, landing, taking off, leaving a smell of diesel fuel
in the hot air. Gray soap bubbles and gobs of toothpaste ran in a trickle of wastewater through a furrow in the dirt and gurgled into a ditch—a lovely sound that made me look at the nauseating thing. Femi’s hut was made of paper and planks and flattened oil cans. But she was a beauty.

We didn’t kiss—we shook hands: her mother was there. Her mother did not speak English, and so she was especially attentive. She was also dressed in a lovely gown, with a shawl and a drooping headdress. She watched us closely while we were standing in the dusty hut, but as soon as we sat down on opposite sides of the room she seemed to lose interest and she drifted away.

“So, where are you coming from? George said London. I said hah!”

“I was in London for Christmas.”

“Sometimes even Nigerians go to London for Christmas,” Femi said. She had heavy lidded eyes that became absolutely unseeing when she was scornful. “I think it is a bloody waste of time.”

“Where would you go.”

She looked up, becoming interested again. “Maybe to Ikeja.”

She was from Ikeja.

“Or maybe to Uganda.”

I had hoped she wouldn’t say that.

“Everyone misses you,” I said.

“The people are very primitive, but it is a pretty place,” she said. “I remember the bush. The people are so backward there. That is why they are friendly. Bush people—”

A plane went overhead, perhaps taking off, perhaps landing. It drowned the rest of her words. She finished her sentence with a shrug.

“You like it better here?”

“Cities are better,” she said. “I don’t like it here. But this is my mother’s house. I came here after the surgery and just stayed.”

I almost asked
What surgery?
until it struck me what the euphemism stood for.

She stared at me. She was theatrically dressed, as for an opera or a pageant of some sort, something unreal; but the things she said were factual. They cut deep and made me remember.

“How is your life?” she asked.

“Moving right along,” I said. “And yours?”

“Not so bad. I’m still weak,” she said. “I thought I would never stop bleeding. They said to me that sometimes people die of it. That’s, what they told me afterwards.”

Her lids grew heavier and made her haughty again and more pharaonic as she raised her head.

Her mother reappeared. She had a skull-like simian face, the color of shoe leather and just as dry and full of creases. She entered laughing softly and set a bottle of orange soda onto a plate. She produced two glass tumblers from a cloth, and wiped them with the cloth, and poured the orange soda into them, taking her time and laughing, not hearing anything but watching with wet reddened eyes.

“Why didn’t they tell me before? That people die of it?” Femi said.

The mother had distracted me from what Femi had been saying, and so I asked a simple question and then regretted it as soon as Femi answered.

“Because they can’t stop the bleeding,” Femi said. “And I lost so much blood I was fainting all the time. I took iron tablets. I am still anemic.”

“God, those planes are noisy,” I said, as another roared past, making the flimsy walls of the hut vibrate.

“And my family was ashamed of me,” Femi was saying.

“But that’s over now. You can finish your studies.”

Femi looked away. She wasn’t listening to me. She said, “When I left this place to be with you in Uganda they were so happy. It was such an adventure. They were proud of me. George was boasting about me.” She frowned and said, “And me, I was happy as well.”

I said quickly, “It wasn’t my fault.”

“And when I came back so soon they were just sulking like hell.” She touched her turban, steadying it with a long red fingernail and said, “I did not think I would come back. It is horrible to go back when you don’t want to.”

“I didn’t want it, Femi.”

“It was very hard,” she said. “And then it was worse. I mean, then I had to go to the village.”

“Which village?”

“Where they do these things. Where they cut you. Where the old woman was living. She was big and fat. She cut me. That is why I was bleeding.”

As she said
bleeding
another plane went over. It became a drone and a dog barked crazily, choking on its barks. The air in Femi’s hut smelled of dampness and heat and of the ditchwater with the toothpaste and soap scum that stood bubbling beside the hut.

“You didn’t have to go to the village,” I said.

“But I wanted to finish my studies.”

“Did you start in September?”

She half closed her eyes. It meant no. “I was still bleeding then.”

I hated this conversation. It was like visiting—not a hospital but a leprosarium or a village of sick people. There was a pathetic stink of neglect in the air.

But what else could she say? This incident was all that linked us now. She had visited me in Uganda, and after a month with me she said she was pregnant—two months pregnant, the doctor said. At first I had said,
That’s impossible
. But I was wrong. She had another life, and so she had returned to it, and I had tried to forget about her.

I had visited her out of friendship, but I did not want to hear this.

“And the boy didn’t give me enough money, so my father paid for it.”

“I would have given you the money.”

“Why should you? It was not your problem.”

That was true.

“It was the other boy.”

She was twenty-one, but we were all boys to her. It had made me feel like a boy but it had turned me into a man—and it had turned her into a woman. Yet she wasn’t bitter. Her manner was still dismissive and haughty.

“The other boy was getting married. He was from Onitsha, an Ibo. And these days he is fearing about the fighting. There is trouble in the eastern region. It is all shit. I want to go away. Are you angry?”

I shook my head: no.

“White people look angry much of the time,” she said.