In a Glass House (38 page)

That invisibility seemed in the end what most defined my stay in the country. If I’d fought against it, refused to obscure myself behind my difference, I might have broken through to some truer level of exchange with people, become real, an individual; but there seemed always a risk in the transition, a challenge to the accepted order, always the line to be walked between this innocuous thing I was seen as and the darker history I might cross back into. In my first months in the country I made an attempt, though English was common enough there, to learn the rudiments of the native language; but when I moved from simple greetings to phrases, to catching now and then some word of conversation, there appeared a subtle shift in people’s reactions to me, no longer the first exaggerated praise but a twinge of unease and a kind of boredom, as if I’d undermined somehow the game established between us.

What I seemed offered finally in my encounters with the
country, or what I was able to see, were always its most obvious elements, what was folkloric, colourful, quaint, the face prepared for the foreigner, for the white, what instinctively served to mask from outsiders the truer life that went on beneath. But that truer life, the complexities that informed it, seemed accessible only by a kind of indirection. The country cried out for caricature, all garish surfaces and excess, the noise and the heat, the oppression, the endless soldiers manning the endless checkpoints, the poverty and the wealth. Every journey out revealed some new contradiction, the elaborate rites for the dead and then the bodies left rotting at the roadside because people feared being implicated in their deaths, one that I’d seen on the Benin road flattened into the pavement like a decal, the contours still visible of hands and legs, a face; every month revealed some new fad, the tennis rackets strapped to the front grilles of Peugeot 504s, the sudden appearance of Coca-Cola in cans at the toll-booths off the Lagos expressway. The newspapers gave out a wealth of bizarre incident, riots in Lagos spawned by the stealing of genitals, human heads found in shoeboxes to be used to redeem the souls of wealthy chieftains; and everywhere there were the signs of a rampant mongrel spirituality, the
babalawos
and the brothers, the churches and the shrines, the thousand different sects, from the Hare Krishna to the Adventists to the ghostly luminousness of the Cherubim and Seraphim, who could be seen on Sundays dancing single file along roadsides in their gossamer robes. But these surfaces seemed to play against one another like mirrors, revealing only in what they obscured, some more secretive life going on beneath them, more magical, more mundane – the life of the school perhaps, with its prefects and prep, its adolescent hopes, its essential normalcy, or the
quietness Ikorita took on after nightfall, the stilled market stalls then and the smoky courtyards, the calm domestic ordinariness of meals and sleep.

Yet even as I stood outside it the country seeped into me, grew familiar as if I’d remembered it from my own past. There was a way people were there that brought up in me the sense that they were my secret, truer allies who I’d defected from to the whites: with students sometimes a gesture or tone of voice, the contour of a face, would bring back suddenly some classmate from Valle del Sole, the ramshackle classroom there, its uneven walls and stone floor; in the lorry parks the market women, mocking and independent and fierce, seemed to hold in them a familiar fire. And I was happy there finally, unreasonably so, felt a contentment at the core of me that seemed to have little to do with the daily texture of my life, its frustrations and tensions, its occasional satisfactions, was more the sense of the smallness of these things, tiny blips in an energy too large to take the measure of. Being there made the world seem suddenly without horizon, without centre, like the surprise of discovering life on another planet: here was a place going on so far from anything I had known, with its own history and rules, its own sense of importance, the thought filling me sometimes with a wonder that made of the simplest things tiny perfect revelations, the smile of a girl in the market, the signs over shops, the odd names of my students, Bunmi Benson, Lola Leigh. Or perhaps the wonder was simply in feeling fall away from me all the foreign world I had never quite entered into at home, to be in this place without expectation that I should ever have to find the way to fit in.

In the full moon there, bright enough to read by, the world was lit like an enchanted place, all silvered and phosphorescent
as from some cool inner glow. I wandered into the bush sometimes to revel in it, down the paths cut there like secrets by the local farmers to reach their tiny patches of hidden field. Even in daylight those paths were like some inner dreamscape, with their gigantic vegetation, their huge unknown flowers, their scattered evidences, the potsherds and blackened gourds, the ashy remnants of a fire, of whispered midnight rituals; but in that haunted moon I had the sense that I might step at any instant into the miraculous. It seemed a kind of redemption to be reawakened like that to the world, attuned to every possibility, to feel at every breath the blood’s quickening, the heart’s hollow thrum.

The mail truck came out to Mayflower twice a week, its blue hump surfacing like a tiny whale from out of the bush that lined the steep climb to the school gates. I grew attuned to its comings and goings, always the instinctive glance toward the gates on mail day mornings from the windows of classrooms, the small tensing of anticipation when it arrived; and then the trek to the administration block between classes for the quick furtive glimpse at my mail slot.

The school secretary, Mr. Johnson, sorted our mail with a painstaking slowness, squinting down at each envelope to silently sound out the name there and then seeking out some correspondence to it on our cubbyholes with the circumspection of someone seeing their foreign array for the first time. When there was nothing for me he’d avoid me, grow irritable, seeming to take my barely veiled expectation as a sort of affront, ready to defend himself against the accusation of it; but then finally something would come.

“Ah, Mr. Victor! I’m thinking you must be having a girlfriend in Canada, isn’t it?”

This anticipation in me seemed at first merely a kind of reflex: there was nothing of special import I had any reason to expect, no lover on whose words I hung, no final answer on which my future depended. The few correspondences I kept up, with people from university mainly, were little more than a matter of form – a letter or two to Michael, a few others to people who’d passed on their addresses in the last months of school in the quick, shallow intimacy that came before a departure; I wrote to these people at all, it seemed, only for that first fleeting pleasure of finding something more in my slot than the endless circulars from the Central Schools Board. Yet always there was the small unreasonable hope of some crucial message or change; or perhaps it was simply that I couldn’t abandon the proof some arriving letter gave that I’d existed before, that I’d come from somewhere and would one day return there.

Letters came from my family as well, from my father, from Rita. At bottom I hadn’t expected to hear from them, had imagined I had only to subtract myself from their lives and that would be the end of it, a sort of reverse insensitivity, the belief I could cease to have any meaning for them simply by leaving them; and yet I had written to both early on. To Rita I’d sent a postcard, falsely blithe and urbane, when we’d stopped in London a day on the way to Nigeria, making a joke about our planes crossing in mid-Atlantic; then a few days after I’d arrived at my post I’d sent a letter as well. I’d begun in the same false casualness, still trying to find some way around the strangeness that had marred our last parting; but then finally I seemed to find the right voice, the right distance, ending up with five
closely written pages, a diary of sorts of all that had happened since I’d left Canada.

Her reply, when it came, even written double-spaced in her billowing script, barely filled a page.

It went on like that, breathlessly adolescent, saying nothing – its tone made me think of the girls in high school who I’d loved and despised from a distance, had nothing in common with, who talked about dates and played on school teams and struggled each term to get their marks into the seventies. The Rita I’d written to, with all my careful analyses and descriptions, seemed now merely a fiction I’d conjured up: each time I read her letter through I felt more irritated, each time more baffled, kept coming back to it as if some revelation I’d missed lay hidden in it as in an artefact, in the slope of the letters, the paper smell of the page.

“Gotta go,” it ended. “Elena says hi.”

I was almost ready then to cease writing to her at all, put off replying for a month, then two; but toward Christmas a card arrived from her.

She’d included a school photo of herself, an odd gesture, inscribed “Hot Stuff!” on the back though she seemed imbued
in it – posed awkward and smiling before a swirl-patterned backdrop – with an unfamiliar pathos, her eyelids drooping against the camera’s flash and her forehead scarred with acne. I felt a small crumbling in me at the sight of her, at this tentative handing over of herself, off-putting almost in the need it showed: it seemed once again I’d misread her, shifting from one imagined extreme to the other when she was merely this simpler, more complex thing in between, a sixteen-year-old, my sister, guarding her own unknown fears and half-formed hopes.

We began to write more regularly, exchanging responses every two or three months, about as much as the erratic mails allowed. Rita’s letters grew slowly more sophisticated, more thoughtful: what had struck me at first as simple-mindedness seemed now to have been merely a kind of probing, the first evasive manoeuvres of intimacy. Even now she remained forever gingerly, made concessions, kept always to what was neutral between us, adopted a cynicism toward things that seemed not so much a true bitterness as her instinctive deference to me, the deprecation of her own life to make mine seem the more interesting; but it was exactly in this, in the subtle texture of what went unsaid, that emotion seemed to take shape between us, piecing itself together like a puzzle whose definitions were in what was left out. At the back of my mind now there was always the thought of our letters like a tiny secret retreat in me; the weeks would pass after I’d sent my own and then I’d feel the slow pleasant mounting of anticipation at the imminence of her reply.

My father’s letters were more sporadic. I’d sent a brief note home a few weeks after my arrival, the barest facts of my situation delivered in plainest English, addressing it to both my father and aunt, listing their names in full one beneath the other,
“Mario Innocente,” “Teresa Innocente,” reluctant somehow to link them more intimately. I half-hoped there’d be no reply, but then a few months later one came from my father.

Then part way through the letter switched to Italian, grew denser, more obscure. There were words, whole phrases, I couldn’t make out, lost in his script’s whorling sameness: he thought of me, had been happy to get my letter; then an uncertain stretch and the phrase “
ti voglio tanto bene
,” literally “I wish you well” but more expressive than that, the equivalent, really, of “I love you very much.” It was a ritual phrase and yet it stung me like an accusation.

I sent off a reply in my same impassive tone, saying nothing really, merely filling the page; but then his next letter followed the same pattern as the first, began with his rote greetings and wishes and then veered abruptly into wrenching emotion. There seemed something generic in these sudden declarations to me, without basis in any knowledge he had of me; and yet still the same despair flickered through me at them. I thought of him sitting at his desk to write these things out, his hand against the pen, against the page, and couldn’t bear somehow then the brute existence of him there in his close far-away life, still connected to me though I had gone.

A sort of correspondence developed between us then for a
time, a strange fretwork of engagement and avoidance. His own letters, all in his careful schoolbook Italian now, continued on in what seemed a twisted candour, honest and not, agonizingly raw and yet still seeming to be circling some unstated thing; and for a while I simply went on with my same empty replies, in my simplified English at first but then switching from time to time to Italian, borrowing his own rote phrases to try to forge some illusion of a common language between us. But he seemed to be trying to will some more direct confrontation.

“It makes me sad to think you’ve gone,” he wrote once, “and to know you don’t value the life I tried to make for you.”

I tried to respond to him directly then, careful and unambiguous, expressing my pride at what he’d accomplished, my gratitude at the possibilities he’d allowed me; but he seemed to miss the point, glancing from what I’d said still intent on his own trajectories.