The Opposite House (17 page)

What Papi
did
say about having to leave the country was something that Señora Roberts wouldn’t have found exciting.
He said that the process that ends with you fearing for your life is gradual and actually quite congenial. It begins in a warm daze as the sun lays you bare in corner-room meetings. Paper falls apart under your sweaty fingers as you read and re-read directives and statements that you know it is essential for you to understand. If you don’t teach certain things, or if you forget to praise certain people and initiatives, you are called to account and at first you think that you are defective – then you realise that you’re becoming unreasonable because no one else is being reasonable.

Papi says, ‘If not reason, then what else can it be that separates us from animals, what is it that makes us fail to be innocent before God?’

I said, ‘I suppose by God, you mean reason undiluted.’

Papi ignored me and said, ‘There is something else. Unless the nature programmes are hiding something interesting from us, you never see a wolf struggling in a trap while a full pack of its own stand around it in a formal square, waiting for it to escape or to die. I don’t know what to call it, this other thing that makes us different from the wolves.’

‘Papi, I think that’s called malice.’

‘But that’s not what it is. It’s functional, it’s a process, it’s what must happen to ensure that a group remains a group. It’s what happens when something inside you cancels out your outer appearance and you show yourself not to belong. That’s what makes us different from the wolves; a body may appear as one of us and not be treated as one of us. Three categories of treatment instead of one. Person, God, and beast. And no
term
for what’s at the heart of it. Well, German’s the language of ideas. I’ll ask Chabella,’ Papi said, and I knew that he wouldn’t.

When Papi looks at Tomás trying to fight his reflux, I can see how darkly simple his pain is. My brother did not get his co-ordination from Papi. Papi was a bad dish washer and bad at keeping stacked crockery close to his body – he would forget his limits, place his hands higher and let the bottom of the stack go to pieces on the floor. Or if it was cutlery he had to wash them all over again. He didn’t think of money as money; he thought of it as a way to get books, going over title lists in his head over and over again, returning to the places where he felt strongest. Cuba was the restaurant kitchens and the narrow, high platform on which he moved. Whenever he cut his knuckles on knives and potato peelers hidden in the dishwater, the pain always came very late.

For a long time my Papi did not realise that hunger was the reason why he had to keep touching things to stop them floating away from him. When Chabella first met my Papi his eyes were still too big; prolonged malnutrition is hard to shake off.

History books: Papi stubbornly scratched surfaces to look for Africa. He knew that his friends hid dismay behind their teasing, that they wondered where the black boy was in him, the snap-back, the physical intelligence. But he had the snap-back; it was in his head.

When my Papi was Tomás’s age he would not listen to the restaurant owners’ comments that began: ‘The good thing about you
morenos
is that you can work! God, but can you work . . . on and on.’ He didn’t listen, but because he didn’t sneer, people didn’t know what he was thinking.

Papi saw a
babalawo
cry. Papi saw a
babalawo
come out into the street and stretch himself out on the ground because his daughter had died. He had come to heal her
because under Batista no one poor could get taken care of unless they knew someone in authority. But that
babalawo
could do nothing against his daughter’s cancer, the cells that unsheathed crab claws and waged civil war on each other. The
babalawo
was dressed in civilian clothes but Papi recognised him; he had come from La Regla. Papi’s uncle worked the docks there, and Papi’s cousins had been blessed and made Santeros by this very
babalawo
. Papi told me that this
babalawo
was over six feet tall and white-haired, that he was very, very black. ‘Can you imagine?’ Papi mused.

I could not.

‘The other boys from the neighbourhood were playing some bastardisation of baseball, but they steered clear of this priest. They took their game down to the other end of the street. They said, “Juan, come in on Miguel’s team,” but like the bookhead I was, I was on my way to the library and I didn’t want to tell them. But to get to the library I had to pass that priest. He lay very still; he was like a stain on the ground. So black. After only a second of looking at him he became something very simple to me, something just hurting on the ground, something with no other thoughts. I think I could have stamped on him and he would not have understood what I had done.

‘I got worried that some of those
Americanos
would come with cameras and take a picture. I was thinking,
Get up, you. Just get up, get up
. Blood was pouring from his mouth; every time he opened it his lips made this wet slapping noise and flies came near. I bent down to him, but I couldn’t do anything. I saw his tongue. Well, half his tongue. He had bitten his tongue in half; the end of it was in the dust, sort of coiled up like a wet tail. The heat made it
smell. And he was just trying to speak, trying to speak to the sky I think, not to me, but his mouth was full of blood.’

Tomás doesn’t believe Papi about the
babalawo
. ‘You didn’t see his tongue, man. Not his tongue. Maybe you heard about that. He probably just drank chicken blood as part of a ritual or something.’

Papi is adamant: ‘It was his tongue. His daughter died and he bit it off. I ran away from him. You shouldn’t run away from grief, but my God, you must run from madness. That country. It seems that no one there is able.’

What if Papi has no strength either? What if he is wrong not to live in the place allocated to him and he is
gusano?
Then Tomás is the son of a
gusano
, and, after all, worms eat soil and dead bodies. If the boy can’t keep food down, maybe food is not meant for him. What can it mean, not to be in love with your country? That you belong above the earth, or under it.

One evening dinner was haphazard;
moros y cristianos
with
yuccas rellenas
and ladlefuls of stew poured over. Amy Eleni ate with us, and every bite brought her a surprise – one minute she tasted mashed rice and beans, the next mashed potato and beef, the next spicy tomato.

I teased Chabella about the Moors and Christians – ‘The beans are black, right, so that’s the Moors, and the rice is white, so those are the Christians . . .
ay
, Mami, we can’t be Christians, we’re
black!’
Amy Eleni backed me up; she said she reckoned that she was a Moor, and she wanted to know what Chabella was going to do about that. Mami whooped, ‘I didn’t name the dish!’

Papi didn’t say much. He ate and darted his attention from his own plate to Tomás’s face. And, maybe because of the pressure of Amy Eleni’s presence, Tomás gave a small
cough, the beginnings of a full-blown heave. Mami still smiled, but she quieted down, became watchful. Amy Eleni knew something was wrong and she looked at Tomás, too, even though I fussed at her to distract her, poured her more water, poured her more juice. Tomás bowed his head and pressed his hands on his knees, arguing with his food, his cheeks distended. Papi twitched but kept on eating, even when Mami gave him a quick, deep, mournful glance.

When Tomás looked at him, Papi barked,
‘Téngalo en. Tragalo hacia abajo.’
He told Tomás in Spanish to hold it in, to swallow it down, because he didn’t want Amy Eleni to know what he was saying. But Tomás wouldn’t hear him. He just held on to the chair and lowered his head, waiting for Papi to let him go to the bathroom.

I said,
‘Papi! El es apenas un chico pequeño!’

Papi made a sign that I should quieten down and said painfully,
‘El debe aprender.’
He must learn. In English he said to Tomás, almost pleading, ‘Come on, T-boy, it’s unheard of.’ Tomás didn’t move or look up, but his breathing grew more laboured – he was about to cry. Amy Eleni gave me a wide-eyed sideways glance. Papi said,
‘Tomás! Dije, tragalo hacia abajo!’

Amy Eleni studied Papi and studied Tomás and said to the top of Tomás’s head, ‘Tomás, go on, throw up. I dares ya. If you throw up, I’ll do it too.’

Tomás’s eyes found Amy Eleni’s and he shook his head desperately from side to side – no, no, don’t you throw up.

‘What? You don’t want me to throw up all over the table? But I will. You think you’re so tough! You think you’re so clever to throw up like that? I can do it too!’

Chabella said, uncertainly, ‘Amy Eleni –’ but Amy Eleni made a fake gagging sound that was so slimily authentic
that Tomás swallowed, burped, and squealed, ‘No!’ in a single moment of delighted horror.

‘We’re trying to eat!’ Mami said, bowing her head to Amy Eleni, her eyes full of thanks.

‘What’s wrong with you! Trying to throw up on the table!’ Tomás demanded of Amy Eleni, his face lit bright. It was the way Amy Eleni made my brother move when nothing else would move him that brought Papi to realise something. Before he put him to bed that night, Papi picked Tomás up under his arm, chuckling as he wriggled, and walked around the house with him, whispering things. I couldn’t hear what Papi told Tomás. But it must have been simple, because every now and again, Tomás replied calmly, ‘I know.’

Aya steps through her London door and crosses concrete slopes that balance drowsy houses on their shoulders. Night’s edge blunts itself at traffic-light level. Aya wishes that she could reach that night and bring it down. Her Aunty Iya could. Aya has seen her Aunty Iya stop walking, stretch languorously, then leap with her arms splayed against impact and sprint up into the atmosphere on a diagonal, hot sparks snapping from her heels as she wrests clouds open. Aya walks and wishes.

A girl sitting on the pavement with her legs crossed under her, this girl holds her hands out to Aya with soft words, words sighed more than said. Her smile is numb, fragile, milk and water. A round plaster at her temple drives back long black waves of her hair. The girl smells of wild honey, jellied amber so raw that fingers delving into its centre bring up the crisped black remnants of bees. The girl is saying, ‘Ye-ma-ya-Sa-ra-ma-gu-a-Ye-ma-ya-Sa-ra-ma-gu-a,’ and she rocks, wrapped in the rhythm of her own words, rapt like a child at play.

‘How do you know my name?’ Aya asks the girl.

The girl looks into Yemaya Saramagua’s eyes and slowly, painfully puts her smile away somewhere safe. The girl says to Aya, ‘I don’t know your name. What’s your name?’

A rainbow of blowsy silk handkerchiefs hangs from the girl’s belt. And when the girl says her name is Amy, to Aya this does not feel true. Amy puts out her hand for help, and to make a beginning of it, Aya helps her to stand up.

Amy lives on the top floor of a tall house with stairs that go apologetically naked after their third rotation. Inside, Amy’s warm honey smell drugs every hollow; the immediate inside rectangle of doorways, the cracks in the corners of window cases. This place is more of a home for books
than it is for people; scruffy paperbacks lounge in heaps on the sofa, rickety shelves host a gap-strewn gallery of faded titles. The light, when it comes, will be full and frank; the night sky heaves against square windows wider than Aya’s outstretched arms. When Amy pleads with her to stay, Aya curls up in the contours of the armchair to wait. If you should find yourself in a place that is indifferent to you and there is someone there that your spirit stretches to, then that person is kin.

In the morning comes the man that Amy lives with, and Aya feigns sleep to watch him. He is beautiful. He might be from Abeokuta, where the essence of the Ewe poet stirs and causes cool-faced people to be born, cool-faced people whose hearts are self-stoked furnaces, great anger and great love. He stows his trunk into a space at the foot of the television. His gaze lingers on Amy who, still asleep, has curled up on the sofa so tightly that she is no more than a patch of denim topped with a tangle of brown hair, and then he bends over the trunk and snaps its locks open. The trunk is filled with ash, or grey sand, and he hunkers down beside it and makes a small, distressed sound, running his fingers through it, watching the grains whirl together into twisted fronds as they touch his hand.

When Tayo straightens, his eyes find Aya. Aya stays still, but she fears her face will crack under the pressure of keeping her eyes open to just this degree. Then, as the fear grows strongest in her, Tayo turns away. He softly tells the air, or Amy, ‘She’s very ugly.’

Amy surfaces from sleep for him, says, ‘Tayo.’

Blood mists her face in tiny, diamond buds.

Tayo kneels by her and says her name with sorrow and they lay their heads together and are hidden there in Amy’s
pain and in her hair. When Aya comes to take Amy’s face in her hands, there is the bruise. It stains Amy’s cheek in dull blue and brown veins, starbursting as if a finger has punctured a pressure point in her cheek and opened other tunnels.

Amy touches Aya’s hand then, and smiling rigidly, she rolls up the sleeves of her long T-shirt, rolls socks down, brings daylight to bruises burnt old and deep purple, bruises clicking together around her arms like connected bangles, or another skin. Amy’s blood runs and will not turn back, though Aya counters it with water, with her vanilla. Tayo watches her. A smear of ash is on his temple. She cannot bear his gaze.

‘Have you come to help us?’ he asks Aya, and his laughter is so sudden and so quickly spent that it divides Aya from her nerve, sends her to the door, hauls her out.

10
presentiment (that long shadow on the lawn)

Magalys and her older brother Teofilo are the only people in the studio, and they are dancing together between the mirrored walls; he promenades her, then draws her to him, pretends to back away from her, beckons her on. They step slow, quick, quick, slow, quick and quick, to a Xavier Cugat song. It’s the kind of music I laugh at when Mami and Papi dance to it. But Magalys and Teofilo move and I see that inside this song there is something even, something near to perfection; there is a rhythm that a dance keeps.