That was back before Cocody and I were friends, when she was just my friend Uwe’s friend. Uwe and I were in Kosawa so she could see Cocody and I could visit my aunts who live here. I had just turned nineteen. I remember I wore a layer of anxiety that day—I’d reached marriage age with no one handsome in sight. A man in my village named Neba was my only option, but I couldn’t look past his nostrils, which flared like a windswept skirt. “How could you turn down a man because you hate his nose?” my mother had sighed. “How could I not, when I would have to look into the thing every day,” I’d replied. When my mother cautioned me to lower my standards, I laughed. Neba would be good to me, I knew, but would that suffice for a marriage?
Malabo showed up at Cocody’s hut, looking for his best friend, Bissau, Cocody’s husband. I saw his cheekbones, sharp as a spear’s edge, and a pointy beard to match. What a face. What a man. Could any man alive be more viciously gorgeous?
Every time I visited Kosawa after that day, my eyes labored in search of him from my arrival till my departure. Cocody and I would walk past his hut at least twice every visit. Whenever I saw him, I pushed out my chest to display the largeness of my breasts, patting dry any sweat on my face as Cocody laughed the laughter that everyone knew belonged to her only: ka ka ka oh. My efforts, though, had no effect on Malabo—he wouldn’t notice me until the day he was ready to.
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
