My desire was, and remains, its own beast, rabid and untamable.
In those early days of our love, it was no punishment. It was a gift to my husband, this wanting and more wanting, every night. Cocody and Lulu laughed at me whenever I yawned in the middle of the day and told them that we couldn’t stop, it was too hard to stop. They said no woman should have an appetite like mine, that their husbands would send them to Sakani to be given whatever I’d drunk if they somehow discovered that it was possible for a woman to be as desirous as a man. “I hope Malabo isn’t telling Bissau any of these things you guys are doing and giving him ideas,” Cocody said. “I don’t want any trouble with him coming to me in the middle of the night and asking me to open my pot so he can cook some crazy meal in it.” At which Lulu sighed, pressed her tongue against her gap tooth, and said, “My own pot, for two months now, I haven’t felt like taking off the lid. I don’t even want to think about how many cobwebs have accumulated inside it.” Lulu swore that most of my insides had to be male. She said I probably had invisible hair on my chin and a lump on my throat that nobody could see. Cocody had agreed and laughed, ka ka ka oh, and they’d slammed their palms together. In those days I’d laughed with them, because Malabo was around to honor me and my voraciousness, but after he left and never came back, what was there to laugh about?
* * *
—
In the first year after his disappearance, I cried many different kinds of tears. The tears I cried in the morning were different from the ones I cried at night. At night, I thought of our nights together. I thought of my palm on his cheek, his on mine. I thought of how much he loved my breasts. I cried with longing, alone under my sheets. I cried because no one had touched me since the day he last touched me, and to this day, no one has touched me.
Like every woman who has lost a husband before me, like every woman who will lose a husband after me, I am doomed to aloneness. My days of being cuddled and fondled have come and gone. I hear my mother’s voice in my head from back when I was a child. Like me, she lost a husband, though she was much older than the twenty-nine I was when Malabo left. I hear her say to her friends: I lost the one husband life gave me, I have no right to ask for another one, not when there are other women waiting their turn. I see her friends nodding sadly: what is the point in questioning a broken heart?
I was eight when my father died and, with my five older sisters married, it was just my mother and me in our hut. It was clear to me that she did not resent her fate—she never complained—but I prayed the Spirit that I would never become like her. Malabo promised never to leave me husbandless. Why would I want to leave this body? he said.
* * *
—
There is an abundance of women like me in Kosawa and throughout the sibling-villages—wives with dead husbands. Men marry us young and die before us, taken away by nature or disobedience to our wisdom. At their deaths, we cry, we dry our eyes, we prepare to spend the rest of our lives taking care of the very young, the sick, and the very old. Desire becomes of the past. We’ll never be afforded the same privilege given to husbands with dead wives. For these men, there will in all certainty be another companion, thanks to the Spirit’s design that our women outnumber their men. For grieving men, there’ll quickly arrive someone younger and willing to take over the mothering of their children, someone eager to add to their lineage. Unless they’re so old that only the grave wants them, they will never know what it’s like to have a body begging for just a little touch at night. They will never be ashamed to announce that they have found someone to take their wives’ place, because everyone would agree that a man should not be alone.
You can be alone, the men say to us. You’re a woman, you’re built to endure.
In that first year after Malabo vanished, I prayed the Spirit to cause another woman’s husband to wander into my bed. Some nights I prayed for a young man who hadn’t yet picked a wife to keep me as a placeholder, take this used-up body and enjoy it until a fresh one came along; even then, he could retain me for the months when his wife was pregnant. I’d do what I hear some women in my position do: meet him deep in the forest, under a tree, with only the birds and beasts watching, or in a barn late at night. I’d let him do to me all the deeds he might not be so bold as to ask his wife to engage in.
On our worst days, Cocody and I cried together in my bedroom.
Where once we’d been happy to marry best friends who did everything together, now we wept that we’d married best friends who did everything together. In between our tears, we joked that perhaps we should marry each other. One evening, Cocody’s younger cousin Aisha was with us when I said this. She joined us in laughing at the idea, before adding that maybe women marrying each other wasn’t such a bad idea, it might even be the best thing to ever happen to humans. This made Cocody and me laugh hard—Aisha was an adolescent, she could get away with saying such ridiculous things.