Ancestor Stones - Aminatta Forna [17]
Mama’s mother died of a swelling sickness back in the days of the old. Long before I was born. My mother had no brothers. When my father saw her she was visiting an aunt in the old place. She left her own people a long way behind when she married him. All the money she had of her own came from the sale of our snuff, which Madam Bah kept in her big jar and dispensed directly into the open palms of her customers or poured into the little glass phials and silver snuff-boxes they brought with them. From our room my mother sold snuff to the younger women, who slipped in between chores and smeared the dark dust above their back teeth. My sisters pinched me and told me not to tell. Nobody, especially Ya Namina. The younger wives were among our best customers.
Madam Bah gives me a piece of fried dough to eat. She leans out of her window and strokes my cheek. And smiles a small smile, with her head on one side. And she looks at me like this. ‘Such a shame,’ she says to my mother. ‘If she had been a boy … Then she takes a pinch of snuff. Sneezes. Clears her throat. Wipes her eyes with the back of her hand.
Mama says: ‘It’s a fine one,’ in a voice that expects to be corrected.
There is Bobbio. Sitting by a pillar in the shade of the awning. Wearing his grimy duster coat. Ashy legs. From a distance he looks like an old man. Bobbio is always somewhere, hanging around the meeting house, sitting on the edge of somebody’s verandah watching them talk or eat, a forgotten guest. Sometimes, when I go outside to pee in the night, I see him. Standing silent in the shadows of a house not his own. Nobody knew what was the matter with Bobbio. Why he had No Voice. He lived with his grandmother, the birth attendant, who said he was born in Daruth. The way she said it made it sound like everybody in that town was the same way. I imagined a town of silent people, moving noiselessly about.
But other people whispered that Bobbio was slow because his mother conceived him while she was still breastfeeding her last child.
I liked Bobbio. Though he sometimes did things that made children chase him and grown-ups shoo him away. He banged his chest with his fist. Then he’d slap you with the back of his hand. Whap! Hard like that. Bobbio was strong. People became annoyed. But I understood. Me, me, he was saying when he hit himself. You, you. Trying to start a conversation. They thought he was stupid. Bobbio couldn’t speak. But he wasn’t deaf and dumb. Bobbio could hear. And he understood what we were saying.
In his hands Bobbio holds a string of raffia. He loops it round the little finger and thumb of each hand. And again around his index fingers so it looks like a pair of crosses. He loops the string again around his third finger, once more over his little fingers. And in a trice he slips his two index fingers through the web, turns his hands inside out and holds them up. The string had transformed into an angular crane in mid-flight. I run and reach for it. Bobbio is older than me and taller than me.
‘Show me, show me!’
Madam Bah laughs at this. Her laugh is loud and empty. Just a bigger version of her smile. ‘Maybe they’ll marry,’ I hear her say. A crease appears on my mother’s brow. And she opens her mouth and takes a breath and presses her lips together. Madam Bah doesn’t see. She’s counting money on her lap, below the counter.
We sit on the stoop, Bobbio and I. Sitting on the stoop watching the world. We do this a lot, on different stoops. Sometimes here. Sometimes my father’s house. Sometimes the house where Ya Namina’s mother sits all day and doesn’t mind us. What I like about Bobbio is his silence. Everybody else talks too much. We sit a while. I tie the string in knots and Bobbio takes it from me and begins again.