It wouldn’t happen till several months later, one afternoon when we were laughing on Cocody’s veranda—me, Uwe, Cocody, and her friend Lulu. Malabo appeared from nowhere and stood in front of me. “I just want to say that I’ve never seen teeth as beautiful as yours,” he said. I died. I came back to life and died again. Weeks later, he would tell me that the whiteness of my teeth must make the clouds feel inferior, and I would tell him that the sharpness of his cheekbones made knives envious, but on that afternoon, there would be no words coming off me. With the full brightness of his eyes on me, I forgot how to produce sound. Embarrassment would have killed me if it were a disease. He told me that he’d seen me around the village and had wondered what I did to keep my teeth so white. Palm kernel oil, I wanted to say; I swish with it every morning. “Whatever you’re doing,” he said, “keep doing it.”
I forced a smile.
“Say something,” Cocody and Uwe whispered, adding to my mortification.
I widened my eyes at them, hoping they’d read in it: Say what? I’d spent hours fantasizing, but I hadn’t planned for the moment when Malabo would put his cheeks close to mine and ask me to go for a walk with him. I found myself lifted off the ground, unable to touch it again. Float away with him I did, from that moment till the end.
We were happy, Malabo and I.
I try not to forget that, but the nature of our last days together threatens to smear all memories of our spirits uniting as one. After that first walk around Kosawa—hand in hand, footsteps synchronized, me beaming—no one could convince me that the days I waited for him to come visit me in my village or for me to visit him in his weren’t worth the torment. I could have waited for ten dry seasons and ten rainy seasons to feel the beat of his heart for one minute. My friends laughed at me. “Sahel finally got the cheekbones of her dreams,” they said. I laughed with them. When it came to Malabo, everything made me happy. Even my friend Lulu’s annoying questions made me happy—Lulu asking me if I really wanted to marry the son of the most unhappy man who ever lived, what if I gave birth to children as unsmiling and despondent as their grandfather, could I imagine how uncomfortable it would be to live in the same hut as someone who grunted whenever you wished him a good day. I’d responded that, of course, I’d considered it all and who wouldn’t want to marry Malabo, the firstborn of the unhappiest man who ever lived? Who wouldn’t want to have his semi-smile directed at her every day? That semi-smile started vanishing when children began dying. By his departure, it was all gone.
But did it ever glow for me.
Did it glow that night when he took me into his bedroom, on a day when his parents were at a funeral in one of our brother-villages and Bongo had gone off in order to give Malabo all the space he would need, just as Malabo did when Bongo had a girl. Did it glow when, without his asking, with him merely sitting on his bed and looking at me, his eyes glimmering in readiness, I began undressing, beads of sweat appearing on his forehead as I pulled off item after item, slowly, until I was left with nothing but my body in its bare state, begging for him to stand up and hold it, which he did, rising with hands outstretched, lips parted, his eyes never leaving mine. I did not beg him to lay me on his bed, and he did not me ask if he could—we had talked about it, and laughed about it, how in not too long we’d be married, and once the children started arriving our only chances would be in the darkest hours of the night, under our sheets, as silently as we could, and there’d be so many things we wouldn’t be able to do with them in the bedroom, so we had to do it all now, as often as we could, while we were young and free.
I’m certain Yaya and Big Papa heard us the night of our wedding, excited as we were to lie side by side on our marital bed with no child yet in sight. Our clothes were on the floor even before the women from my village left, the ones who had carried my belongings on their heads and, with my mother leading the procession, sung and danced from my aunt’s hut to my new family’s hut, where they placed everything I owned in the parlor and pushed Malabo and me into our bedroom and closed the door, laughing and shouting from outside that we’d better not step out until I was pregnant. How happy were we to oblige? At least once I said to Malabo, in between sessions, that we needed to do a better job of being quiet, because we didn’t want to disturb Big Papa’s and Yaya’s sleep, but Malabo laughed and said that Big Papa and Yaya were probably not sleeping, they were most likely doing the same thing we were doing, and that the only reason why we weren’t hearing them was because they’d learned how to do it quietly, after decades of experience. I found it hard to believe this, considering the looks Big Papa gave me in the morning, an acknowledgment that he’d heard me, coupled with something I couldn’t decipher. I wished he hadn’t given me those looks, but it didn’t stop us the following night. Nothing stopped us until I was huge with Thula, and Yaya, one day in the kitchen, said to me that there were certain things a woman had to stop doing for the sake of her child. Nodding, I told her I understood. Malabo protested. He said that his friends had told him that it was not true, that their children had all come out fine, and that the important thing was to know how to maneuver around the fetus, but I told him we needed to do it for Yaya, and he agreed; it hadn’t been easy for us, but we’d done it, though when I was pregnant with Juba I was insatiable, which thoroughly thrilled Malabo.