For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down,
that it will sprout again and that the tender
branch thereof will not cease. Though the
root thereof wax old in the earth and the
stock thereof die in the ground; Yet through
the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant. (Job 14.7- 9 King James
Version) She was not beautiful. Yet she had things that
made one notice her, and notice her in the
most civilized manner. It was her hands;
they were the first things I noticed about her
as we both reached for the same tape at the
checkout counter of the home video rental club. They looked soft and fresh. Her
manicured nails were painted a very
ladylike pink, with just the right amount of
chipping to discourage a verdict of
perfection. I murmured “Ladies first” and
she accepted graciously. I followed her hands up and past her elbow to her face. No, she was not beautiful. But she had huge,
expressive eyes in a small elfin face with
generous lips, as though God had fashioned
her out of various spare parts. She had a
magnetism that held me. Her voice was
truly God-given; deep, cool and clear, like spring water on a hot day. The kind that
makes the living feel electricity down the
spine at a high note in a song.. I was alive. I
asked her why she never thought of singing
professionally, and she laughed it off as if I
were a clown. As if I thought this country was America and full of opportunities. I
remember teasing her that success was
three parts talent and seven parts hard
work, but she only shrugged. That was how
she surrendered when she was losing a
war- with a shrug. I didn’t think much of it then. But when your eyes wandered down
to her physique, you made a mental wolf
call. She was built like what we used to call a
true African woman, with big soft mounds
straining out of her chest and enormous
nipples that seemed to have a life of their own to give, jiggling deliciously when she
spoke. It was hard not to stare, and let the
eyes wander down further and be
enraptured by a flat stomach that flared into
the most rounded hips I’d ever seen.
She carried a great sadness with immense
dignity. Only her eyes complained, detached
and hurt. At first I credited her detachment
to maturity; she was older than I was by at
least a decade. We were of course Africans,
and to be African is to be traditional. I was never so wrong in all my life. I met her two
or three times after that first time in the
video store and she always answered my
polite nods with a smile, a casual toss of her
head, or a petite wave of her wrist. But I soon forgot she existed. I was job
hunting and caught up in the frenzy that was
Abuja, rushing from one office to the next
and telling myself that maybe the next
application would be the successful one. This
went on for months. My savings got leaner and my cousin, Bulus, got meaner. It was no
fault of his; I understood his irritation.. I
began to avoid the squalid one bedroom flat
we shared by going for long walks in the
evenings that left me tired and sleepy so I
could escape conversations with him. These conversations were always filled with
venom and complaints, and almost
invariably ended with a question about my
job hunt. It was on one of these lengthy,
aimless walks that I ran into her again. I
was lost in thought when a sharp screech brought me back to reality. I found myself in
the middle of the road, bathed in the harsh
headlights of a 1992 Honda Accord, the one
Hausa men call Hala. I apologized stupidly
and stepped back on the curb, waiting for the
car to proceed. It did not. “Are you all right?” it was the Voice coming from the
dark interior of the car. “Yes,” I lied, shaken. “Come in, are you headed for the club? I’ll
drop you off.” That was how it started. Innocently, I
believe. Her name was Tani, which was
short for Evratanioremi. As we drove,
pregnant clouds heralded the rain. She ran
her own public relations firm and she knew
how to make one laugh. I heard myself tell her I was looking for a job and that my
ultimate dream was to win the Booker Prize.
We had so much in common. We shared the
same alma mater, loved the saxophonist
Kenny G, hated heavy metal rock music, and
lived for books. Books. That simple word never seems to convey the world of
meaning in each book. I inherited this love
from my father (a genuine intellectual if
there ever was one) and Tani was a
literature graduate. Her face visibly
brightened when I mentioned books. “You read?” she asked. A seemingly foolish
question, until one considers that in our busy
lives we often forget to spice up the journey
with distillations from another time and
place. It wasn’t common to read in our
culture so it was weird and a pleasant surprise to meet a soulmate. “Yes, all
kinds,” she replied enthusiastically.
“Danielle Steele, James Joyce, Yeats,
Soyinka, Steinbeck, Tom Robbins, James
Hadley Chase, anything.” Once in a lifetime, if God likes you, you will
meet your soul mate in a fleeting moment
that you remember for the rest of your life.
Sometimes, you regret this moment for the
rest of your life, because so many questions
are left unanswered. What if? What if you had talked to him or her? What if you had
played beautiful music together? What if you
had shared the rest of your lives? And once in a lifetime, if God truly loves you,
you get to be involved with your soul mate.
I felt that way about us, that we were two
separate halves of a whole, complimentary
and symbiotic. The differences in our
backgrounds, ages, and education faded to become insignificant. Tani was my soul
mate, pure and simple. Her insight always
left me breathless and contemplative, and
where I had disdained many of my
contemporaries for being shallow and light,
she was dazzlingly intelligent.. Because I had been raised in a conservative home, the last
thing on my mind was an intimate
relationship with an older woman. So we
began our relationship innocently, as friends,
and it remained that way for a long time.
She helped me get a job as a floor manager in a department store and we spent time
together listening to jazz or having heated
discussions about the contributions of Japan
to world culture while she cooked banga
soup. Or we would read the same book
separately and dissect it together, seeking meaning and nuances.. I saw it coming
though; the signs were there. There were
times when we would brush against each
other, exchange looks that spoke volumes,
and fill our conversations with subliminal
invitations. Yet we never dared to cross that line, and I never tried to penetrate the wall
that she built around her memories. She
never talked about the pictures of the kids
on her mantelpiece and I never asked. It
was not my place. Bulus, of course, was born
a cynic and he would sneer at my denial and leer at me. He would make exaggerated
wolf calls, his snout pointing moonward. She
never really met my other friends and I
only met her closest friends, as if we were
each an embarrassment to the other, a
shameful secret to be hidden away. She had a few close friends, such as Ekaete, a plump,
bookish woman who wore unfashionable
glasses and hid a passionate nature behind a
schoolmarm façade. She ran an NGO that
addressed women’s health issues and was
forever fighting with someone over gender issues. It was pathetic when I ultimately
realized she did not believe in what she
preached. She also had a son out of wedlock.
There was Franca, a bank executive who
was a man-hungry, born-again Christian. She
had been married once but her husband ran off with a nymphet nearly twenty years
younger. Once, when Tani was not home,
Franca turned up at the flat on the e pretext
of forgetting something, and bored me for
two hours until I gently threw her out,
dismissing the flashes of thigh and cleavage she was challenging me with. I was no saint
but decency demanded a courting ritual
before mating. Tani’s other friend was
Salamatu, a slim, beautiful Moslem who had
been raped when she was thirteen and now
seemed to want to castrate all men. I suppose it was natural, then, that none of
these women liked me.
One day, Tani and me were watching cable
news in her home when a report about a
drunken driver who careened into a
family’s station wagon came on. Tani
started crying, softly at first, then in loud
sobs that wracked her whole body. I was at a loss so I just drew closer and put my arms
around her. She was so pliant and soft. Her
perfume stung my nostrils and I inhaled
sharply, like a bull. It was so natural. Our
lips and hands sought each other, and with a
moan I finally held her breasts in my hands. Desperately, as if we needed to feed on each
other, we discarded our clothing in the low
light. She was a painting done in human
pastels. I remember little else except I was
in her and she was in me and the cosmos
was one in our pleasure. That was how it started. Later, I found out
from Salamatu that Tani had lost her
husband and two kids in an automobile
accident caused by a drunk driver. She had
never learned to live with those memories
until I came into her life. Looking back, I put my heart into making her happy, and I
enjoyed those days when the world
retreated and became lost to us. A deep,
intimate, and very personal relationship
developed. All the words the world uses to describe
what we had seem so inadequate. I breathed
and lived her, but wasafraid that this thing
that fate entrusted me with was not going to
last. There was desperation in my hunger
then, like a starving man let loose on a king’s feast, yet under a hangman’s
loose. A dream destined to be tragic. We
never stood a chance. One night I arrived home from an out-of-
town trip early to the flat we shared. There
were two cars as well as Tani’s in the
driveway. They belonged to Franca and
Ekaete, her gossip club members. I was
about to let myself into the house when I heard Franca’s shrill voice. “For God’s
sake, Tani, don’t tell me you’ve fallen for
that boy. You know how it is.” “Use them
and dump them,” Ekaete added. “You
don’t understand,” Tani said in her sad,
deep voice. “This is different.” “Can you imagine the two of you walking down a
church aisle? Or worse, taking him to that
warlike village of yours?” Franca
protested. “Can he even hold a candle to
Lanre?” Tani’s silence said much. I chose
that moment to fiddle with the door. Their silence was deafening. They knew I had
heard. Lanre turned out to be a suitor, the
kind any girl could do without, who doesn’t
know the difference between persistence
and being a nuisance. He was not the cause
of my pain, though. I wondered why she had not stood up for me before her friends.
When I confronted her, she only shrugged. I
believed in her so I stayed. But the devil had
already taken an interest in our lives. It
became too much for us. Slowly, like a
cancer, the pressure grew and we began to drift apart. The words we once said easily
were now hard to come by.. I cannot boast
that I remained exclusive and I know
Lanre’s persistence paid off more than
once. Eventually, I left. There was no ritual. I just came home,
dropped her car keys in the bedroom and
her front door keys under the doormat, It
was better that way, without emotions or
second-guessing, or even a note. She would
understand. She would understand that in another world, in another place, things
would have been different. I knew that I
was being selfish, re-opening old wounds for
her, but I had my own soul to think about.
After a while, she moved to the United
States. I hope it eased her pain. It was odd, at first, not having her around.. I would
walk into a restaurant and halfway through
my meal, I would absent-mindedly say
something to her and wait for her reply, but
she would not be there. Or I would wake up
in the night, staring at the dark and aching inside, wondering what in the name of God
was happening to me. I threw myself at my
new job as a sales manager with a
carbonated soft drink company, and as the
months passed she became a distant
memory, a dull ache, a ghost I no longer pursued. I tried to make new friends and get
on with my life, but life felt bland and empty.
The new rituals seemed immature and
onerous. Now I live a struggle, a lie. I still
feel her, when the night is cold or when I am
inexplicably afraid, or when I hear our song on the radio. I feel her presence when I
watch the movies we once shared or when
NEPA strikes and I expect to hear her dry,
humorous wisecrack. Somehow, now, the sadness is gone,
swallowed by something infinitely more
beautiful. Why do we kick against destiny?
When you love and lose it feels as though
there is little hope in the dawn. Perhaps she
is free now, but I am not. Why did I not take that which the universe offered me? She did
leave something precious behind, though:
that there is hope, and for now that is all I
ask. THE END.
