Seeds of Plenty (13 page)

SYLVIA

Chapter 18

On New Year’s Eve 1977, Sylvia spent the day picking frangipani blossoms and threading leis with the other compound wives for the New Year’s Eve Hawaiian Luau party. Winston feigned illness and bowed out of the party. She gladly went alone and for one reason. She wore a grass skirt with her bikini, a pink coral necklace, and a white frangipani
blossom tucked in her long, flowing black hair, echoing Polynesian princesses returning to the sea.

When she reached the clubhouse, she sat in her car for a moment. She closed her eyes. The scent of the frangipani blossom in her hair made her nauseous. What was the point of trying when her husband didn’t care about their marriage or his life and obviously regretted the whole thing? He had not said it, but he didn’t need to. She knew he was a man of limited words. He would not speak in smooth, sugary words to hide anything. His silence meant the truth was better left unsaid. But it still hurt. She got out of her car and walked up to the New Year’s Eve party at the clubhouse swimming pool.

The swimming pool was lit up and decorated with red flowers shaped into the word, “Aloha.” Paper lanterns were strung from trees and circled the poolside. Ayo came to the party late. He wore a local batik print shirt and shorts. But this time, she sought him out.

“Dance?” she said as she studied his eyes, dark-green pools waiting for her to dive, water smothering her lungs.

He hesitated at first, glancing at her bare midriff.

Soon he held her arm and waist, and they were dancing to a scratchy record of someone’s lilting Hawaiian hula music. The touch of his hand on her bare skin as they danced made her follow him later down the dark hill to the room full of pipes underneath the swimming pool. Or maybe it was the words left unsaid by her husband that chased her to these watery depths. In the dark mechanical room, Ayo pushed her against the wall, his hands moved over her bare stomach, her thighs under the grass skirt, and then he was inside her.

***

 

What followed was a kind of malaria-laced madness, papery snakeskin shells left on the grass, hundreds of dead frogs on the road. Sylvia swallowed bitter white malaria pills every Sunday to ward off the mosquito-love poisoning her blood. She lay in bed thinking she was delirious from malaria when what she was really suffering from was a spell of lust. There were secret rendezvous at his house in town, their bodies sticking together from the humidity as they made love. Or love for them could happen behind a wall while the party’s sherry glasses clinked on the other side.

She met Ayo at his father’s house in town in the afternoons. They lay on the mahogany four-poster bed, the room felt hazy and unreal behind the white muslin mosquito net. The blue paint on the bare walls was swollen and cracked from the humidity, the only decoration a faded biblical calendar and a large, gilded mirror opposite the bed. In the corner, a rusty green electric fan on a stool threw air back and forth around the room, comforting and suffocating the lovers at its will.

The metal window bars outside had bled tears of rust down the yellow walls of his father’s house. Even the scarlet bougainvillea could not cover it up. This house had already endured the forbidden love of his English mother and Nigerian father during Colonial times. These mud walls, once painted a vibrant yellow outside, had been built by this kind of love. Only now the pale stucco had cracked, revealing the dark mud walls underneath.

Sylvia was the ignored child, nobody’s favorite, trapped in a loveless marriage. She had been starved of love. When she finally found it, she became an addict. But what was she to Ayo? Was it that kind of love, like his parents once felt, a passionate, rebellious kind of love that went against all odds? She didn’t really know. But she did know this: he waited for her those afternoons at his rust-stained house in town. Sometimes she didn’t come, wracked with guilt at that particular moment. But he still waited. And sometimes she did come. Her long black hair flung across his face in their mad embrace while thunderstorms blew palm trees sideways.

***

 

Sylvia remained fearful about her husband and her daughter, guarding them against the spell and the spirits. She continued to put fresh fruit as an offering on the little shrine at the edge of their garden for Lila’s bush-soul, the wild boar. Since Winston had been born in the year of the Tiger, she decided his bush-soul was the lion. She had Energy build a shrine for him too, and she put out offerings for his bush-soul as well. She knew the lion would protect Winston. After all, wasn’t he the strongest animal here in Africa? She knew Winston would have simply laughed at her for doing this, but as far as she knew, nothing had happened, so she concluded it must be working.

Sylvia continued to volunteer at the clinic even though she and Ayo were now lovers. He never touched her at the clinic anymore. He maintained a professional stance toward her now that they were seeing each other in private. A year went by, and Sylvia was becoming a proficient nurse, learning on the job. The Nigerian nurses were happy to teach her. She lived for working at the clinic, it had been her calling. Even though the days could be harrowing, she was working beside the man she loved and doing something she cared deeply about.

In the spring of 1978, Sylvia wrote in the spiral notebook as the triage nurse spoke:
Grace, three years old, seizures, cerebral malaria.
Fatal at this young age, the triage nurse explained. Sylvia carried the little girl with cerebral malaria to an examining room. The thin toddler had journeyed with her aunt from their rural village for more than a day by a combination of foot, bus, and moped. By the time they had reached Ayo’s clinic, the malaria parasites had already latched onto the child’s brain.

Sylvia shaved some of the hair off the child’s head, and then, under the nurse’s instruction, she inserted an IV to administer quinine. The child lay unconscious, contorted in pain. Ayo came into the room to examine her. He embodied both the heroic and the sordid, brandishing his stethoscope in a blood-stained white coat. The doctor on the edge of humanity, hopelessly trying to save lives in the tropics where bacteria thrived and the water ran brown or red, but never clear.

“Will she…be all right?” Sylvia remembered when Lila had been on the brink of life and death with malaria as a newborn.

“She’s gone into a coma already. But let’s hope so,” Ayo said.

“You don’t sound so hopeful,” Sylvia said quietly.

“I’ve seen so many children die from cerebral malaria, semi-conscious as I pumped quinine and valium into the tiny veins in their skulls. And then the sudden rasping struggle of breath, followed by death and the total collapse of their little bodies.”

He looked defeated as he said this. She felt for him, doing this kind of work. Wanting to save lives, but in reality, watching life violently choke, gasp, and then pass away. But somehow, she didn’t share his sense of frustration yet. Maybe she still knew too little, her medical ignorance protecting her from this despair that Ayo sometimes felt.

The little girl, Grace, lay on the bed, still unconscious and rigid, frozen in pain. Sylvia looked at the shaved side of the child’s head with the IV still inserted. She saw how frail Grace seemed. The spirits’ grip on her was firm. She remembered the time she had spent by her daughter’s bedside when Lila had struggled with malaria. Suddenly Grace started having seizures, and her previously still body flailed around violently. The nurse showed Sylvia how to administer pain suppositories for the girl.

“Can you do anything?” Sylvia asked Ayo, feeling afraid.

He shook his head as if he knew death was coming and the only thing he could do was ease the pain.

***

 

That night, he came to her house around midnight. Sylvia opened the door, and he stood there in his stained, white doctor’s coat, his face unshaven. He looked like he had come directly from the clinic. They didn’t speak. He kissed her roughly, pushing her against the kitchen counter. His hands undid her silk robe. Grace is dead, Sylvia thought, he came to tell me.

He made love to her on the white terrazzo tile of her kitchen floor as if it were his life dangling by a thin IV line. Afterward, they got up from the cold, hard floor. Naked, she walked towards the living room. Ayo followed. The dark house was full of the swaying shadows of the palm trees outside. They lay down on the couch holding each other.

“She’s…” Sylvia began.

“She’s the same.”

For one more day, Grace was still with them, she thought.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

“For Grace?”

“For keeping me sane. You keep me sane,” he said.

She wanted to ease the pain of his toiling in a place of death and hopelessness; she wanted to be his nurse. She massaged his tight neck and shoulder muscles, the places where he held all his stress.

***

 

That morning, she set up a shrine for Grace too. She didn’t know what her bush-soul might be, so she picked the monkey.

The next day when she went back to the clinic, she felt obligated to sit watch by Grace’s bedside, not just for Ayo but also for herself. Grace’s precarious hold on life mirrored Lila’s struggle with malaria years before. Both girls were ravaged by spirits except this girl had no mother to protect her.

As Sylvia walked into the clinic, a nurse came up to her and grabbed her arm.

“Come and see dis,” the nurse said. Was Grace gone? She tried to brace herself.

They walked into Grace’s room. Sylvia almost fainted in surprise. The little girl’s eyes were wide open.

“She didn’t die, she woke up instead,” Sylvia said, rushing up to her bed.

Ayo came into the room.

“She’s come out of her coma,” Sylvia said. She held the little girl in her arms, feeling emboldened by her results. “I made a little shrine for her bush-soul, you know, like you told me to do for Lila. And it looks like it’s working.”

But Ayo said nothing. It was then that Sylvia noticed the child’s eyes were still cerebral looking, death-like, open but fixed, not registering anything around her.

Gradually, Sylvia nursed Grace back to health. In a few days, she was eating. In a week, she was talking again. Finally, Grace was released from the clinic. The day Grace left the clinic Sylvia stood with Ayo at the front doors. She watched as an aunt carried Grace on her back. She saw her little face disappear around the corner. She had grown attached to the small, frail girl that had vanquished death.

“She’s doing so well,” Sylvia said proudly.

“But she will never walk again,” Ayo said. “Despite holding on to life, like thousands of other children in Africa, she will suffer lasting neurological damage from the malaria.”

Sylvia saw the despair return to Ayo’s eyes. She thought about what this might mean for her own family. In the best case scenario, if they remained unscathed, she feared Lila and Winston might hold onto life like Grace, even as they suffered lasting damage from the spirits’ and the spell’s incursions on their physical and mental health. And what about her own mental health? All of this was taking a toll on Sylvia. She had told no one, not even Ayo, about her recent nightmares—horrible, frightening hallucinations. They were all about Lila. Her daughter was five years old. She still had two more years to go, and presumably her connection with the spirits would be severed. And Winston? Sylvia didn’t know about him. He continued to return to Simeon’s village despite the curse. Every time he drove off in his jeep, she wondered if it was the last time she would see him.

 

PART TWO

1980-1983

 

SYLVIA

Chapter 19

Two years later
1980

When Lila turned seven, the snake spirits came for her again. It was the local
Mama wata
spirit, the beautiful water goddess, sometimes a mermaid or a serpent.
Mama wata
brought her victims to the bottom of lakes and fed them black mud, worms, and raw fish. Divers claimed they heard voices and saw light coming from the deep under the water. They also said it was warmer down at the bottom of lakes. They believed that there were underwater mermaid spirit villages.

Along with some other children, Lila wandered down to the lake and the dam on the compound. Some older boys dared Lila and a few other girls to climb down into the empty dam. As Lila climbed down the ladder, she saw dragonflies and pretty butterflies, and they made her forget the danger. But when Thomas and the other children saw the snake, Lila began scrambling back up. It was a long way out of the dam, and Lila’s hands, sweaty from fear, slipped on the metal rungs, and she fell.

A security guard on his moped drove by, and the children shouted for his help. He climbed down and carried Lila out of the dam.

He brought Lila and Thomas on his moped back to their house.

“My arm hurts, Mama,” Lila cried.

Sylvia was beside herself. Had the snake bitten Lila again? She called Winston at his office and then immediately took the children to the small compound clinic. Sylvia knew she had grown lax about placing offerings at Lila’s bush-soul shrine. Nothing had happened for a while, and she had grown complacent. How could she be so careless?

The elderly English doctor examined Lila for signs of a snake bite. Lila lay on the table, crying in pain.

“Looks like she’s just broken her arm,” the doctor said.

Sylvia was relieved to hear these words. Most mothers would have panicked, but she was relieved. She hoped Lila was growing out of her connection to the spirit world since she had just turned seven years old. According to Patience, this was the age most children shed their ties to the spirits.

Winston came into the room at the clinic. Thomas ran up to him.

“You alright?” Winston knelt down to examine his son.

“I’m okay, Baba,” Thomas said. “But Lila’s hurt.”

Lila was lying on the examination table.

“She’s broken her arm,” Sylvia said.

Winston barely looked at Sylvia. They had reached a stalemate in their relationship. They had both given up trying and kept their distance. It wasn’t hard to do since he was rarely at home. Two years had gone by since the juju doctor’s threat, and Winston was still alive, living proof, he said, it was all nonsense. But she knew things happened to him out in the jungle, things he did not tell her.

Winston went to Lila, but he didn’t offer her any words of sympathy.

“You’re the oldest, Lila. I expect you to be responsible for you and your brother,” he scolded. “You shouldn’t have gone down into that dam. It’s dangerous. You understand?”

Lila said nothing. She looked like she was about to cry. His words hurt more than the broken arm. Sylvia stood closer to her daughter, stroking her hair.

Winston returned to his office while Sylvia waited for Lila’s cast to set. Afterward, Sylvia took the children to the clubhouse and bought them ice cream, served in soft swirls on a cone from a machine. They sat down at a table on the clubhouse patio. She watched as Lila ate.

“Feel better now?” Sylvia leaned over and touched her daughter’s face.

Lila looked up at her and smiled. That beautiful smile, thought Sylvia, what she would do for that smile from her little girl.

***

 

Later that night, Lila had a nightmare. She had these dreams often, and Patience said it was a sign of her travelling to the spirit world at night. This time, Lila was sleepwalking, and Sylvia coaxed her back into bed. Lila’s eyes were open, but she was not awake.

“I went to visit the mermaid in the lake,” Lila said as if in a trance.

Sylvia tried to shake Lila out of this dream by waking her up, but Lila started screaming and flailing her body around. Sylvia worried her daughter would hurt her arm in the cast. It took all her strength to lay her child back down in bed. She held her down, stroking her face. Finally, Lila drifted into sleep. Sylvia went back to bed exhausted. But she couldn’t fall back to sleep herself. She was filled with dread.

According to Patience, a child grows out of the spirit world once she can separate the dream world from the real world. If her dreams still merged with reality, the connection to the spirit world remained. Clearly, Lila was still making her nightly sojourns to the spirit world, continuing her double life. She was holding onto her lifeline to spirit world, and unlike normal children at this age, she would not let go.

***

 

Sylvia tried to escape it all—the spirits, the curse, her failed marriage. For over two years now, since that New Year’s Eve in 1978, she had been leading a double life of her own. She met Ayo at his father’s house in town at the end of her shift and during Ayo’s afternoon break, the two of them leaving the clinic in separate cars at staggered times. Ayo gave Sylvia’s driver, Ige, a small “dash” or tip to ask no questions. Sylvia knew Ige had just had triplet boys, and he could use the extra income from Ayo’s weekly tips. Ige didn’t seem to care either. He mostly parked his car in the shade outside Ayo’s house and leaned the driver’s seat way back for an afternoon nap. It was easy money.

Ayo and Sylvia lay in bed, hiding behind the white mosquito net in that hazy, make-believe world of theirs.

“Spend the night with me this weekend,” Ayo said.

“I can’t.”

“Why not? Isn’t Winston away for several weeks?”

“His schedule is random. He could just turn up.”

Ayo was silent as if he resented being constrained by the existence of her husband.

“I can’t leave the children anyway. I’m worried about Lila,” she continued.

“Patience can handle that.”

“I know she can…but if I weren’t there…if something happened.”

“You can’t let the spirits dominate your life. You have to take care of yourself too. You need a break. You’re a ball of nerves. Stay the weekend, and I’ll take you somewhere special, a place I used to love as a boy.”

“I want to but…” He put his fingers on her lips.

“Right, it’s final then. Doctor’s orders,” he said.

***

 

Sylvia left Ayo’s house in town feeling apprehensive. She twisted her hair nervously in the car. They had made a plan to meet on Friday after their shifts at the clinic. Although she had agreed in theory, she wasn’t entirely sure she would actually go. She worried about what she would say to Patience. Would Patience approve? Would she be willing to keep her secret?

When she walked into her house, the kitchen smelled like fried plantain. Now that she volunteered at the clinic several times a week, her steward Energy had started cooking more. She had taught him how to cook all the basic Chinese dishes, but tonight he was cooking a local dish—pounded yam, fish stew, and fried plantain—which the kids loved. Patience had already set the dining table and was bringing the hot dishes to the table where the children waited obediently. Sylvia realized her house and her family functioned like clockwork without her.

“Madam, you’re here just in time,” Patience said, smiling.

Sylvia went and hugged her children. After a hard day’s work at the clinic, she felt grateful for her own healthy children.

“Mama, we caught a frog today,” Thomas said. He was five years old now and full of mischief.

“You did?” Sylvia said.

“The frog’s disgusting,” Lila said, rolling the pounded yam into a ball and then dipping it in the flavorful sauce of the fish stew.

“You want to see it? Patience said I could keep him as a pet,” Thomas said.

“Yes, I’d love to. After dinner,” Sylvia said, kissing both children on the cheek.

***

 

After the children had gone to bed and before she let Patience return to her quarters behind the house, Sylvia broached the subject.

“I’m going on a trip this weekend,” Sylvia said. “I need you to take care of the children.”

“Of course, madam. Dey go be safe wit me, don’t you worry. You go. Relax. Be happy. You go look so sad all de time here,” Patience smiled, encouragingly.

Patience did not ask who she was going with or where she was going, but Sylvia felt it was understood between them. Her secret was safe with Patience. Patience was the mother and friend she had never really had. She could rely on her in a way she had never been able to rely on anyone in her life before, except Ayo. Patience and Ayo, these were her true friends now.

“I will be back by Saturday evening. You can still have Sunday off,” Sylvia added, knowing Sunday was the one day Patience dressed up and went to church in town. Church was a social activity, and Patience usually stayed well into the evening, returning home late at night. She had heard rumors from some of the other house girls that Patience was popular with the older men because she couldn’t get pregnant, making her a low-risk woman to have an affair with. She knew Patience had needs just like everyone else, and Sylvia wanted to be there for her too if she could.

 

On Saturday morning, Sylvia woke up for the first time in Ayo’s arms listening to the song of the tropical birds at dawn—a chorus of soprano voices and the low, melancholy echo of her favorite bird. As a child, she had awoken to the rude noise of traffic and alley street vendors clattering in between the tall, narrow buildings of Hong Kong. It was calming to hear the sound of birds instead, the music of their mating call. But she still couldn’t forget her fears. What if Winston suddenly returned home? It wasn’t likely, but it could happen. Worse still, what if something happened to Lila? Ayo seemed to sense her anxiety and he pulled her closer to him.

After breakfast, she and Ayo drove several hours north into the dusty savannah. The green jungle gave way to the dull brown landscape of the grassland—dead yellowed grass and dry, withered shrubs. After several hours, they came to a bright turquoise spring, so much color, an indulgence in the surrounding gray-brown landscape.

Ayo stripped off his clothes and jumped naked into the aquamarine spring, and Sylvia followed. The blue-green water was lukewarm, a natural, warm spring bubbling from underground. She floated on her back, watching the monkeys leap from branch to branch above her. The trumpeting of elephants echoed in the distance. The tension in her body eased, and she let herself feel some kind of happiness.

She swam after him to the far end of the spring where there was a rock wall. She noticed he was holding a flashlight in an airtight plastic bag. He took her hand, and they dived underwater and swam underneath the wall. It wasn’t very deep. They surfaced inside a cave and swam to a rock ledge where the water was shallow. He took his flashlight out of the plastic bag. As her eyes adjusted, she saw they were inside a small underground cavern.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

“Spirits are said to reside here. Good spirits,” he added.

“How did you find this place?” she said.

“As a boy, I would come and swim in this spring with my half-brothers. We could tell the water was coming out from under the rock wall. So one day, we dared each other to explore what was underneath. We wrapped a torch in plastic just like I did today and swam under the rock. We felt a bit like explorers when we discovered this cave.”

“So it became your secret hide-out?”

“Yes, of course. And back then, no girls were allowed.”

“Then later, it probably turned into the place to bring girls.”

“No actually, it didn’t…I haven’t. You’re the first. I’m breaking the rules.” He pulled her closer in the water and kissed her.

In the darkness of the cave, they made love with their bodies half-submerged in the water, the sounds of their lovemaking echoing off the walls of the cave.

“I love you, you know that?” he said, holding her in the warm turquoise water.

“I know,” she whispered. She should have felt happy to be loved by him, this was what she had craved. But she felt a foreboding that their love would soon become a mere memory, a scrapbook of photographs in her head, a lonely woman’s dream. She traced her fingers over the place where he had etched his name on the cave wall as a boy. She wanted to add her name underneath as if engraving it next to his would somehow lend permanence to their love.