Jagua Nana

The truth dawned on Jagua. She stared about her. From the back seat came Freddie’s voice. ‘Wait. You’ll get your money.’ Jagua saw his head rise as if actuated by a spring.

‘I told you I knew her beat,’ the young man went on. ‘But you never believed.’

‘You were quite right, oh God, you were! Now I should chop her head off with an axe.’

Cold chilling streams of sweat ran down Jagua’s back. She could not look back because her eyes no longer focused. The young man beside her, the instruments in the car, the street lights, all swam in circles. Her head was splitting. Why had Freddie humiliated her so? Freddie, the one man who must never see her in so shameful a light.

They must have talked to him; egged him on till he took to sneaking on her. These Lagos people would never mind their own business. The car stopped, but the circles still swam before her eyes and she did not even know that it was not Ikoyi but the front of where she lived in Lagos. She got down. She saw Freddie get down too and thank the driver. She followed Freddie into the room. He sat on the bed. She was too terrified to sit beside him. He held his head in his hands and massaged his eyes and cheeks the way he always did when anger blinded him.

‘Jagua, I sure say you know I don’ want you again.’

She sat silent.

‘You never tell me true word one day. One day, jus’ one day! Only lies, all de time! You say you love me, but you sleepin’ with any man you see and you takin’ dem money. You cryin’ you cannot conceive chil’, but you keep spoilin’ you blood with rotten nonsense. You say you wan’ to be my woman. And you run after any man with car or money! True, I no understand all dis. Me, young man like me! Is no wonder dem say dat you take magic and witch-craft to hold me. Dem say you give me juju to chop. Das why I can’t see anodder woman but you. Das why you treatin’ me like boy who got no sense.’ She saw genuine tears in his eyes and she knew that when that happens to a man, the wound has gone deep. But she could not go near him. She had become unclean. For once she actually felt unclean and he was to her a god with the power to pass judgement. ‘What you wan’ from de worl’, Jagua? You jealous, but you no fit to keep one man. You no fit take your eye see money in a man hand. You mus’ follow any man who give you money. Whedder he get disease or not. So far as he got money. You mus’ go to Tropicana every night.

You must feel man body in your belly every night. Any day you don’ see anodder man private you sick dat day. If dat be de kin’ of life you choose, why you wan’ me den?’

He talked on and she resigned herself to the lash of his derision and the acid of his condemnation.

She could not get herself to leave Freddie until well into the morning hours and when she tried to lie beside him on the bed, he jumped down and spread a mat on the floor and lay there. ‘Don’ come near me, Jagwa; you smellin’ anodder man smell!’

She was afraid. Never had she known Freddie to refuse her. She got out of the bed and looked at the long-limbed but tense body on the floor. ‘Freddie! … Freddie, I beg you …’

She saw him stiffen. ‘Don’ come near me.’ The words terrified her. She threw herself on him. ‘Kill me, make we two die together – now!’ At that moment, she meant it. There was nothing she could have wished better than for Freddie to shoot her or stab her or in some violent way shatter the degradation on her head. Even as she thought of it, she received it – in the face.

Freddie had struck her. It was deliciously painful. Freddie ripped open her dress and pushed her against the wall. She yelled for help, opened her mouth wide and screamed – at three in the morning. The piercing note carried farther than the whistle of a railway engine. No one came. Freddie’s hands had become claws trying to tear out her windpipe. Other hands had begun pounding on the door. She heard the stampede on the other side. Help had come. She screamed, but it was not a scream that came out. Freddie was crashing her head against the door now. But the door was caving in, and suddenly it burst and there were strangers in the room. She was whimpering and she was gloriously naked. She clung to her rags.

Before they could say anything she had slipped away and climbed the stair to her room. She heard Freddie ordering the strangers out of his room. With her door bolted behind her she listened to the chatter. But after a while it died down and she presumed that everyone had gone to bed. She sat in an armchair, rolling her head from side to side. The bitter side of a woman’s life, she thought. Young Freddie – twenty-five – trying to discipline her, a woman of forty-five, simply because they had shared the same bed. She could go now to the Police Station and report and he would be charged with assault. She could even say he was trying to rape her. She rolled her head from side to side, and the tears rolled off her cheeks. But what would be the result? She still loved Freddie. He had the right to be jealous. He had the right to flog her – it was her choice. She must take all it implied, and not only the sweet part.

In the early hours of the morning, just before she dropped off to sleep, she heard a car parking outside. A man came to her door and knocked and later on she could hear his footsteps on the stairs, going out.

When she awoke, she heard not a sound in the whole house. She yawned and rolled out of bed. Yesterday seemed so far away, and her throat was as uncomfortable as a blocked pipe can be. She felt thirsty, but knew she could not drink. She slipped her painted toenails into slippers. She could see her own oily face with the swollen lips and black eyes in the mirror opposite the bed. This mirror which she had placed in that position in the room, gave her an exciting view of her own feet and of the feet of the men as they made love to her. And when she rose she would turn first to the left, and pat her wide buttocks and turn to the right and pat her tummy. She never failed to revel in the beauty of her body. The superb breasts, God’s own milk to humanity, the lovely shoulders, and the skin, olive-orange, in the manner of the best Eastern Nigerian women. But on this morning, the stiffness was in her joints and her temper was strained.

A sudden glare of light reminded her that Lagos had been awake for a long time. The men were already at work. Freddie must have gone to school too. Freddie. What had come over him last night? She must find some way of making amends. She would go and cook him a nice meal, and when he returned from school she would dress herself well and tempt him into lying with her. After that, she would beg him to forgive her.

She went downstairs. The air was thick with the smell of diesel oil from the buses; cycle bells were jangling, and the trains were shunting away at the railway yard; in the streets the hawkers were yelling their wares, weaving songs around simple commodities. Freddie’s door was open, but this was nothing. He usually left it open when he went to school.

But when she got to the door she found nobody in the room. No furniture, not a sign that the room had ever been tenanted. She looked round for Freddie’s servant.

‘Sam! … Samuel! …’ And when he did not answer: ‘Mike! … Michael! …’ Her servant came and she asked: ‘Mike, where’s Freddie and Sam?’

‘Dem done pack away, Madam.’

‘He tell you where he go?’

‘No, Mah. When he come back in de mornin’ he call one taxi and de taxi pack all his thing and go. You been sleepin’ all de time, Ma, so I no worry you because I think say you mus’ know. But, Ma, I hear say he gone to meet him brodder.’

Jagua held on to the wall. ‘So Freddie done gone and lef’ me, like dat? Oh, Lord! …’

She kept walking round and round the corners of Freddie’s room and crying but the room could tell her nothing.

She tried to trace him in Lagos but failed. In desperation she went to the school where he taught, but the Principal of the National College told her he no longer taught there. He had resigned some time ago. The rumour was that Freddie had begun to teach in some night school in the suburbs of Lagos while preparing for an important examination. She came away feeling that she had been done. Obviously, with all his silence, and his gentlemanliness, Freddie had been planning this move for a long time.

One day she heard his name mentioned. It was in the Tropicana and they said his name had appeared among the three hundred names printed in the Daily Sensation. He had been awarded a Government Scholarship, and the flying date was put against his name. She felt like one betrayed, the victim of an incalculably mean trick. At that particular moment, if Freddie had confronted her, she would gladly have shot him.

She ordered a double whisky. She had begun to drink furiously again. Her body wanted fiery drinks at this time. She lit a cigarette – one of the chain, endless and enslaving. The burning weed smouldered, the fumes of smoke issued from two nostrils like the twin exhausts of some ancient car. The whisky came on a tray and she heard the waiter call her ‘Madam’. She knew the hypocrisy behind it all. He wanted some of her money. She picked up the change which he had carefully arranged on the tray, leaving him the shilling. Immediately she had downed her double whisky, she ordered another. Life was short, she told herself. Lagos was full of men. Even if Freddie fled to England, eventually he must come back home to Nigeria – to Lagos. They must meet face to face. He could not get away from his own spiritual beginnings in this simple manner. Only young men deceived themselves they could. She had lived almost twice as long as Freddie and she knew that the process was not as simple as he imagined.

She could not think of him without bitterness, and the bitterness carried nothing but depression. She must get away from the Tropicana atmosphere. The ‘beat’ would be a good place to go now. She collected her bag and slipped away.