Ancestor Stones - Aminatta Forna [82]
Remember once you had some boyfriend you broke up with, and how you came home and refused to leave your room? You stayed inside moping, weeping, wouldn’t eat. All this for a man you didn’t even want. You told me you loved him, and yet it was you who refused to be with him. ‘It won’t work,’ you cried. ‘We are too different!’ What does this mean? I thought to myself, this girl can have whatever she wants and still she’s unhappy. Ever since then I have wondered at the world, how everything has changed and yet nothing has changed.
For me it was the other way. I had a husband, but he was not the man I loved. Everybody told me I could not have the man I wanted. Too different, they said, it won’t work. And they kept repeating these words, as if they were praying for it to come true.
For weeks I couldn’t get the stink of burned coffee out of my nostrils. The odour clung to my clothes, my hair, my skin; coating everything like an invisible film of shame. I didn’t shed myself of it until I left the village and went to live in the town. I had been betrothed, but of course my marriage plans went up in smoke along with the plantation. The groom’s family began to argue about the bride gift. Some time later another man was found for me who worked in the slaughterhouses. By then my choices were few. This man was so poor I became his only wife. I started my married life working like a servant.
Now instead of the smell of burned coffee I suffered the stench of dead animals. At night my new husband came to me. His skin smelled like an animal hide, his hands of blood, his breath of viscera. I pushed him away and told him to wash himself before he touched me. Then I would lie and listen to him out in the yard throwing water from the bucket over himself with a ladle. In the first year of our marriage he liked to whistle as he washed himself. Then he would come back to me, still whistling. But that kind of smell doesn’t wash off. So I pretended to be asleep, knowing he would never dare bother me.
I can’t say I either liked him or disliked him. I was prepared to live with him. To accept my fate for what it was. But always he wanted something more. My fate was no longer in my own hands. A marriage cannot be pulled apart easily as a dam in a river. When he caught me wrinkling my nose, he would tell me at least his was honest work, good work. And it was true we ate meat every day. Sometimes twice. Evenings he would arrive home with a parcel under his arm: maybe a rack of ribs, a sheep heart, a skirt of beef. If he was trying especially to please me he brought a cow foot. I’d put it in a pot with thyme, tomatoes and hot peppers. Boiled for four hours, it was tasty and tender as chicken.
There was so much meat; we had meat to spare. I wrapped up what was leftover and gave it to my other mothers, my father’s wives who clasped my hands to their hearts as they thanked me. At those times I would give a small smile, incline my head slightly. Shrugging off their thanks. As if it cost me nothing to do.
And though I didn’t encourage my husband I fulfilled my duties. I bore him three children. All boys. I lost two more. They were girls, and might have grown up to help me around the house. But there it is. Nothing to be done. What more could any man ask for? Each time my belly swelled, he would kneel, press his cheek against it and close his eyes. He stopped speaking for days after each of the two babies returned. Really, he was as tender and sentimental as a woman! Of course I regretted it, too. But deep down in my heart I saw it was for the best. I knew I could not stay this man’s wife for long.
My third son was born with hoops of fat round his neck and his stomach. Such an appetite! I employed a pair of wet nurses and he drained them both. So I fed him myself. And what lungs! When he wanted me he screamed, his little body rigid with rage. My husband called him Lansana. But at other times, when I was alone with my son, I would brush my nose against his small one. ‘Okurgba!’ I would