Seeds of Plenty (19 page)

SYLVIA

Chapter 31

Bizarre hallucinations continued to traverse the cluttered hallways of Sylvia’s mind throughout the spring of 1985. She had been sick for over a year now. At dawn, she walked around the garden. Her husband watched her as he ate breakfast under the franjipani tree. The dusty Harmattan sky was a pale pink, a cool dry season morning. The arid wind blowing down from the Sahara scattered the few remaining petals of the orchids on the brown grass.

“Come and eat,” he said, sounding worried.

“I’m okay, not hungry yet.” She stood among the dead branches of the orchids. These days, she didn’t tend to her garden or cut flowers for their table anymore.

“You’re looking too thin. Here, eat some eggs.” Being told you are thin in Chinese culture was not a compliment, she knew. Saying, “you’re so fat” in Chinese was a way to compliment someone for being healthy, happy, and prosperous.

Sylvia shook her head. “I’m fine. I’ll eat later. I’m just not hungry first thing in the morning.” But she would not eat later.

Winston did not press her. Instead, he dug into the
shefan
rice porridge, loudly slurping with a Chinese spoon. The table was set with the usual little dishes of roasted peanuts, ro-sung dried beef, pickles, tea-leaf eggs, and tofu with soy sauce and cilantro. Winston picked at the dishes with his chopsticks as he ate the
shefan
.

This was one of the few things she kept up for him. Chinese food was the unspoken language of their relationship, nourishing what little existed between them. Over the years, it had been the medium they used to communicate any affection—she by cooking the food and he by eating it. He slurped it down, savoring the food with a vigor and passion that was otherwise absent in their relationship. As her husband ate, he looked up several times at Sylvia, his expression full of compassion and worry. She realized it was not lost on him that despite her depression and illness over the past year, she still prepared Chinese food for him.

“I heard you moving around last night. Did you not sleep well?” he asked.

“It was nothing. Just a bad dream.”

“Again?”

“I’m fine. It’s nothing.”

Winston said no more. He did not send her to the doctor. Was it too much shame, she wondered, to admit she was suffering from some sort of mental illness and worse still, possibly as a result of a love affair? That was her diagnosis, wasn’t it?

Perhaps he worried if she went to the compound clinic everyone would soon know their problems, and he wanted to keep things to themselves. Instead, he brewed his own concoction of Chinese herbs, supposedly a cure for insomnia, anxiety, and appetite loss. But Sylvia didn’t drink it. The dark-brownish green tea was left sitting by her bedside, growing cold.

***

 

In the summer of 1985, while Winston and Donna were both away, Sylvia saw Ayo at a dinner party at the Scottish couple’s house. It was a rare appearance for her at a social event. Earlier that week, the Scottish woman had actually come over and knocked on Sylvia’s door to invite her personally. She didn’t know if this was at Ayo’s bidding since he was their close friend. She didn’t want to offend her neighbor, so she went to the dinner party even though she feared seeing Ayo. She arrived late to the party and hoped to leave early, minimizing her contact with him.

The Scottish woman had written name cards with a fountain pen. Sylvia found her name at the table and sat down. She noticed Ayo’s name was next to hers. She nervously twisted strands of her long hair. She wanted to be near him, but she just didn’t want him to see her this way. When he sat down next her, she didn’t look up. They were served an English roast beef, but Sylvia didn’t eat much and she hoped Ayo would not notice.

A red-faced Welsh man at their table told humorous stories of his encounters with “the locals” with quite the flourish. Ayo detested these stories, she knew. They were full of overt racism and condescension, exaggerating the locals’ ignorance or curiosity or awe, whatever suited the storyteller.

“Are you all right?” he said quietly to her, staring directly at her thin wrists. After spending days measuring children’s wrists for signs of malnutrition, she knew, he could see the signs in her. She pulled her arms away from the table and his examining eyes.

“I’m fine,” she said, but she sat tightly compressed, arms tucked close to her body as she ate, careful not to touch him. She felt uncomfortable next to him. She knew Donna was a better partner for him. After all, she loved his country unconditionally and just as much as him, perhaps more.

“You don’t look…well,” he said. “Come and see me…at the clinic.” His words hurt. The impersonality of it all, to come and see him at his clinic as if she were simply a patient, not the woman he had loved.

Sylvia rose from the table and walked away, her eyes full of tears, her dinner left unfinished. It was a mistake to tell a woman she didn’t look well. Her looks were fading, she thought, and with it, her hold on him. Sylvia was thirty-four years old, and he was with a younger, twenty-something woman. She left the dinner party early, making excuses to her hosts.

Later that night, she heard a knock on the door of her house. She knew it was Ayo, but she didn’t go to him. She was in the bathroom in her white silk robe, fumbling with a bottle of pills. She stuffed a handful of pills into her mouth and swallowed them with a glass of water. She kept doing this until she passed out. She must have hit her head on the tile because the last thing she thought was—
there’s blood.

***

 

When Sylvia woke up, she heard the busy midday street outside— the cacophony of vendors hawking their wares, astute mothers arguing the price down, children wailing in the background. She could smell meat cooking on an open fire. She thought she had returned to her childhood home in Shanghai, the home she had left so many years ago when her family had left China. But when she strained her ears, she did not hear the familiar language of her childhood, but the Yoruba of her lover.

She opened her eyes and recognized the peeling, light blue paint, the rusty electric fan, the faded biblical calendar hanging on a nail on the wall, the mahogany four poster bed of his father’s house. She didn’t want to look at herself in the gilded mirror on the wall opposite the bed. Outside her room in the courtyard, Ayo spoke to his steward. How had she gotten here? Where were her children? And Winston, did he know? She immediately climbed out of bed. She was wearing a white collared shirt of Ayo’s, but her legs were bare.

He saw her standing there. She felt embarrassed and looked away.

“You need to get back into bed,” he said. He came into the room and helped her climb into bed. She still did not meet his eyes. She was ashamed that she had tried to kill herself, a hopeless attempt with the sleeping pills from her Indian neighbor. She remembered the difficulty breathing, the blood on her head. She knew she hadn’t really wanted to die.

He sat down on the bed and touched her hair. “Sylvia, I need to ask you something, something personal.” He looked directly at her.

She wanted it to be about love, but she feared he would ask her about her suicide attempt.

“Are you having strange dreams or nervousness or anything like that?”

She paused and then lied, “No.” She didn’t want him to see her that way. She wanted him to see her as beautiful, not as the depressed, anxiety-ridden woman she had become.

“Right. How about any kind of psychological illness in your family?” He asked these questions matter-of-factly like he was conducting a medical analysis of her, not asking his ex-lover if she had gone mad.

“No,” Sylvia said quickly even though she knew her brother was ill. He left their university in England because he had some sort of mental breakdown. Leaving Hong Kong and coming to the West, the shock had been too much pressure for him. Her parents never mentioned him anymore as if they had rewritten the family story, minus one member. She had one brother now, not two, if people asked. He had been erased permanently from the family consciousness. She knew her mother visited him in a home in Hong Kong. But no one else in their family had ever seen him again. It was as if he did not exist anymore.

She knew her family couldn’t take it if they found out she was ill too. She was, though, wasn’t she? She had been sick for over a year now. She couldn’t reveal this to anyone, especially Ayo.

“Winston…does he…?” she said.

“He doesn’t know. They’re still traveling. They won’t be back until next week. You’ll stay here for a few days until you’re better.” She knew by his reference to “they” that he was communicating to her that Donna would also be away.

“And…my children?”

“Patience is with the children. I told her to tell any visitors that you’re ill and in bed at home. I pumped your stomach at the hospital yesterday and then brought you here.”

He looked at her differently now, his eyes full of not just love but compassion, pity, shock, a desire to understand. She resented the pity. After all these years she had spent working by his side, she didn’t like being his patient now. It seemed to put her in a position of weakness. She was no different from those forlorn, bedraggled mothers that frequented his clinic. She couldn’t claim superiority over them; she was just like them—helpless, sick, and desperate. She was no angel of nursing like she had imagined, she needed just as much care as them, if not more.

“How did…you…” she asked.

“Patience.”

Patience, of course, she knew everything. Patience had probably found her passed out in the bathroom. It was only natural she would call Ayo. Patience had betrayed her, but she knew Patience was also her guardian angel.

“No one knows I’m here?” Sylvia said this slowly as if processing all that had happened.

“No one needs to know.”

Did this mean she could just stay here together with him? They could borrow this time held in suspension by her suicide attempt.

He said, “I’m going to have to drop by the clinic. My steward will take care of you if you need anything.” He rose and kissed her on the head like she was a child.

***

 

Sylvia got up and wandered around Ayo’s house. She noticed the furniture sheathed in dusty, white sheets and the windows shuttered. It was true wasn’t it? He had never brought Donna here. The house looked abandoned.

When he returned that evening, Ayo climbed into bed with her and pulled her close, holding her tightly, like he didn’t want to lose her.

“I love you. Only you. Please know this,” he said as he held her.

“I thought you and Donna…”

“I’m only with her because I can’t be with you. I kept this house closed all these years, waiting for you to come back, it’s our house.”

It felt good to hear those words. She was always his first choice. Living here in his house, she let herself imagine what it would be like if this life belonged to them. She ordered the steward to make passion fruit juice for them and the maid to wash their sheets. She sat under the large breadfruit tree, the spiky hard skins of the large green fruit, almost soccer ball-size, scattered around her. She watched the headless body of a brown chicken run around the courtyard, its bloody head sliced off by the cook. When she was bitten by sandflies, the maid cut off a wedge of the aloe vera plant in the garden. She rubbed the green gel-like insides of the aloe vera onto her skin to soothe the itchiness.

But underneath this charade the real question still hovered. Could she stay here? Was that her cure? What about her husband?

“What’s wrong with me?” she whispered in the dark as she lay in his arms.

“You have
tamazai
, it’s what the Tuereg, a Saharan desert tribe, call this melancholy,” Ayo said, tracing her face with his fingers.

“Tamazai,” she repeated slowly.

“The Tuereg believe spirits of solitude are hidden in sand dunes, and they bring illness to the heart and soul. Women struck by these beautiful sounds of the spirit, in the form of mesmerizing drumming, become afflicted. They suffer from melancholy and depression, they are known as the ‘people of solitude.’ Secret love is considered the cause.”

He tried to frame it in beautiful terms, but in reality, he was telling her she was going mad, wasn’t he?

“You should stay here with me. You can’t go back,” he said as if he was somehow the cause of her melancholy.

But was he? She felt it was something deeper than that, something beyond her control. Perhaps Ayo knew this and wanted her close to him, so he could observe her under the microscope of his medical mind. She was afraid of what he would find. She did not want her lover to see her from this viewpoint—magnified into tiny details, revealing more about herself than she cared for him to know. And so, she said nothing but kissed him instead. She tasted the passion fruit, the crunchy black seeds still in his mouth.

 

WINSTON

Chapter 32

The soil in West Africa was deeply eroded like the edges of Winston’s heart. The natural channels, tree roots, and worm tunnels that had once let sustenance trickle to the heart of the soil had closed up under the weight of modern tractors, leaving the soil brittle and defenseless against the temperamental winds of life. It degraded quickly, running down riverbanks toward the sea, clumps of orange dirt that even the wind could churn up into the sky. So much runaway soil that from the sky, it looked like brown rivers pouring into the blue ocean. Winston thought of his wife and his project, if he could just stem the inevitable tide.

“De earth is tired,” Simeon said. “De soil no good anymore. It fly away.”

In the summer of 1985, Winston and Donna walked with Simeon in his fields. His maize crop was full of holes again although some of the crop had been spared this year. Winston crouched down and scooped up a handful of the ochre dirt. He felt the infertile, sandy soil, full of quartz in his hands—the soil of Africa. Was this fragile soil vulnerable to the weight of modern farm machinery like tractors, Winston wondered? Were the chemicals that were poured into the soil to stimulate crop growth ultimately impoverishing the soil? They were using tons of fertilizers to make the plants grow, but this also stimulated weed growth, and the farmers had to douse the fields with herbicides. Winston had believed that technology and science could solve hunger and poverty in Africa. But was it instead destroying the soil—the basis of food and life itself?

“Have you heard anything from the plantation next door?” Donna said, sounding worried.

“Dey keep coming here every week telling us to move. We keep telling dem we are no move. We will fight dem. We have to protect de forest from dem,” Simeon said. “Oluwa has already left. To join de plantation. Dat cockroach.”

“He’s left?” Donna said.

“That’s not a good sign,” Winston said. “Do you think Cole will go so far as to use force?”

“I wouldn’t put it past them,” Donna said and then she turned to Simeon. “Would you be ready? I mean to fight?”

“We would be ready. I’m not going to let dem take dis land. It belong to my grandfatha, my grandfatha’s fatha. It is our land,” Simeon said.

Suddenly, the juju doctor with yellowed eyes appeared. He stood in the middle of the village shouting, “Dis is the end of de village, dis is de prophecy!” The villagers shrank back away from him, even Simeon looked afraid. Then the old man disappeared just as quickly as he had appeared.

“You should send the women and children away. Just in case,” Winston said. He felt afraid now. The sudden appearance of the juju doctor had unsettled him.

Simeon was silent as they walked back to the village. The women were washing clothes at the river, dipping their large enamel basins in the water. Rows of colorful cloth lay flat to dry on the ground next to the river. A group of young girls carried their toddler siblings on their backs. The girls’ dark blue and green batik cloth wrappers contrasted with the ochre backdrop of the village—mud walls and the deeply-rutted orange dirt ground.

 

Winston and Donna drove off in their jeep, moving slowly along the muddy road destroyed by the rains. They were both silent, deep in thought. Winston worried about the safety of Simeon and his family. He didn’t want them to cave to Cole Agribusiness, but he didn’t want them to risk their lives either. Could they stop Cole, Oluwa, and the juju doctor? He hoped Simeon would at least send his family away.

And the harvest? There wasn’t much to hope for. Winston knew Simeon would probably salvage what he could at harvest time, the little left after the barrage of the pests. This would be enough to feed his family and perhaps have some small surplus to take to the town market. But nothing like Winston had promised him.
The miracle seeds will produce mountains of grain like you have never seen.
The only mountain that had materialized was Simeon’s debt—borrowed money used to purchase the seeds, the fertilizers, and the pesticides from Cole Agribusiness.

Everything he had believed in and staked his life on had turned out to be false. Worse yet, he had convinced Simeon to believe those empty promises too. Winston felt he was a liar, no better than the usual charlatans who came out to Africa with the next best thing. He didn’t know how he could look at himself in the mirror again.

On his way home, Winston drove by a gleaming, modern Conoil petrol station, but it was empty. The owner still made better money selling petrol on the black market by the roadside in large, yellow jerry cans, the way he had always done.