Only Uzo’s uncommon unawareness of Ogugua’s
smile-smothering convinced him he was in soberly agitated earnest when he told him
‘the whore house is a scandalous place.’
He did not
ask him as he was wont to do why he was ‘swallowing that smile,’ in fact, did
not appear to have noticed at all that his lips had thinned out in that
practiced manner which barred the beams of amusement from the teeth, passing
them on to the left cheek whose puckered upwardness then became alone the
defiant telltale of a muffled mirth.
Uzo thought
this, and told him often, was an ‘unaccountably sadistic’ habit as especially ‘laughter
is such a rare luxury on this campus.’ And Ogugua would only swallow even more
smiles, wondering vainly, like a pupil at his tutor’s deliberate grandiloquence,
however Uzo managed so much lingual felicitousness: ‘swallowing a smile,’
‘laughter is such a rare luxury,’ and as on this occasion, ‘the whore house is
a scandalous place.’
He had just
returned from a ‘cruelly unpropitious’ study session—8am to 4pm and he was yet
to finish Book 1 of Odyssey, thanks
to the ‘devilish distraction’ that had plagued him lately—and was bent on
making the most of a much needed slumber when a most uncivil bang on his door
jolted him again into grudging activity. It was Dubem, one of his newest
friends and in another light, one of his newest converts; for Uzo was the head
of a students’s league on campus called Youths for Life and meets a lot of his
kind often after public talks bordering on ‘love and life.’
The end of
one such talk on ‘sex and sexuality’ saw Dubem trailing him, head drooping like
a lost soul, overwhelmed by crushing, palpable guilt. He had introduced himself
when Uzo noticed him, and then gone right on to give a detailed, sordid account
of himself, the crux being that now he was something of a sex-maniac, who stood
in urgent, desperate need of help. Uzo was deeply sorry for him, and assuring
him that he was not hopeless have since taken him on on a rehabilitation
course—this in fact was a little beyond
three weeks since the course took off and Uzo had been quite joyous that his
patient was faring quite uncommonly gallantly on an otherwise tortuous path to
recovery.
‘Uzo, I’ll
be damned if I can’t poke with a female right away.’ All the rashness of
desperation, of a lax, self-unpossessing addict was lodged in that matter of
words, and the bang threatened consummate collapse for Uzo’s door’s already
ramshackle wholeness.
‘Come in
Dubem and tell me what the matter is. How have you been?’ Uzo cannot have
mistaken his voice not even in a daze, and had roused sharply, unbolted the
door for him, beaming with reassuring understanding.
‘Precisely
the whole point. Look at me Uzo, just look at me and tell me do I look the one
bit like I’m faring badly, do I? But oh all that is superficial shamness I tell
you—a most specious dazzle without any substance! Because, you see, what you’re
looking at is a human aberration, a bestial mutant, a hopeless helpless maniac.
No Uzo, I know what you’re going to say, but I tell you, I can’t get a word to
stay in my memory if I don’t poke with a female right away. And God, I’ve got a
most decisive test to do first thing morrow morning.’ His agony was pathetic,
contagious, and he was practically weeping.
‘You, we,
have managed to rid you of all your sex partners lately, Dubem, so what you’re
suggesting is not quite fea—sible. Don’t you see?’ He had hesitated, fumbled,
at the word feasible, sensing it implicated a strange unsuspected sort of
readiness to indulge some degree of moral laxity in his attitude; a readiness
it appeared Dubem too had sensed.
‘I know, I
know. Oh! I’d be beside myself if I, we, don’t find a way, some way—my crotch burns!’
‘Have you
any idea? I won’t mind coming along, only I can assure you someone’d feel
stupider by the end of all this.’
And for a
fleeting moment Dubem’s eyes rested on Uzo’s face, taking in all the tender
love and humaneness and companionship that weaved those words, as he said, ‘I
do have one,’ and led the way from the room.
They walked
down a severely thin corridor, out into the neighbourhood, down through its
stone-sodden bumpiness, onto a sparsely sward-flanked serpentine footpath, Dubem
leading all the time with a convulsiveness at once miserable and solemn, Uzo
trailing with patient, absent-minded compassion.
Except for
rare urgencies the distance from the bike stand to Dallas Park is walkable, but
Uzo did not object when there Dubem suggested they take a bike. And he did not
appear to mind either wherever they were going, for he was beginning to trust
to tender love, and why, God, to sort this whole thing out, though lately he
had been dissociating himself from the ‘God that comes and gets you out of
trouble’ in search of a truer God. At any rate he had relapsed into his own
personal nagging worries that he had not been quite able to master lately.
In a moment
they were at Dallas Park. Dubem paid the bike man and led the way still, this
time towards an unsuspected, to Uzo at least, slum of a hovel. And Uzo can have
sworn no breathing soul inhabited the place, only Dubem’s stride betrayed not
floundering but the sure-footedness of one so certain of his destination. Twists
upon twists of passageways towards the main entrance into this hovel, and Uzo
grown suspicious asked Dubem whatever idea it was he had anyway.
But for Dubem
there was no going back now, in fact he seemed to have forgotten Uzo
altogether, as his trudging had gained in convulsiveness.
A belated
thought flashed across Uzo’s mind that this might be, was, a whore house; that he had actually followed, Christ, accompanied Dubem to this place. The closest he had ever come
to such a place was when, only mere boys, they would after the manner they had
picked up from unsuspecting adults fling ‘Ashawo
no be work!’ through the wall perforations of one in his boyhood neighbourhood.
But now to really be in the very heart of the
place. And the earth will not open up a
benevolent belly to sallow him up.
Another mad
thought, and he had settled it was out of the question abandoning him here by
himself at this point, that he was following this up to the last, settlements
reached only like the choice of one drowning. For he had been overtaken by a
staggering sense of guilt.
Of
themselves the words had formed in his mind as they began passing the array of
ladies, brimful and spilling over with stark femaleness, displaying their wares in the most outrageous of ways,
that the whore house was a scandalous place. Little did he realize that a more
tangible evidence of this awaited him.
Dubem had
vanished into a threshold, abandoning Uzo to the most awkward circumstance of
his twenty and three years, for presently a near nude lady came tugging at his wears! And the earth will not open up a benevolent
belly to swallow him up.
A shocked reflex
and Uzo looked up at the face of the meddler, horrified first, then
scandalized, ashamed—for it was Chidimma of Ogugua’s neighbourhood! And the earth will not open up a benevolent
belly to swallow him up.
And his mind
had become a mesh of inscrutable darkness, so exquisite he could not himself
account for how he happened now to be—had he run for it?—in Ogugua’s company,
muttering the while with lachrymose agitation, ‘the whore house is a scandalous
place.’
Ogugua
swallowed a smile.
Then Uzo’s
acute agitation communicated itself to him, for he just kept muttering on,
curiously unaware of his smile-smothering, ‘the whore house is a scandalous
place.’
‘Well, every
decent man knows that.’ Ogugua offered at length seeing he was shivering from
terrible convulsion.
‘Oh! Crass
nonsense. If men were any decent such a place won’t exist at all.’ He sounded
as Dubem when he visited him, practically weeping. ‘And you haven’t any
idea…oh! Remember Chidimma?’
‘This
neighbourhood’s femme fatale?’
‘Oh! There
again. Is it her fault even a eunuch’s libido quickens at her sight, to blame that
she is such a rapturous delicacy even merely to behold? And now at the wanton
mercy of every peripatetic debauched dick—oh! You haven’t any idea Ogugua,’ he
had exhausted himself and though Ogugua had not helped swallowing smiles at
‘libido quickens,’ ‘rapturous delicacy,’ ‘peripatetic…dick,’ Uzo had broken down
in harrowing, heart-rending, convulsive sobs.
