His Only Wife Page 4

  The traditional wedding happened three months after my mother told me about Aunty’s proposal. And now, maybe, my name was Afi Ganyo.

  Three

  When we arrived in Accra, Richard came to welcome my mother and me and show us where we would be living. I hadn’t known what to expect when Aunty’s driver told us we were close. No one had told me where I would be staying or how Eli and the woman would fit into my living arrangements. Mawusi and I had speculated most of the previous evening when I went over to Tɔgã Pious’s to say goodbye. She was grinding pepper in a cast-iron kole that was held in place by her feet as we perched on low stools in her mother’s corner of the kitchen, away from the ears of her father’s wives and their children who were busy lighting coal-pot fires to begin the evening meal.

  Mawusi was a believer in true love; she watched telenovelas way more than I did. She had started a Mills & Boon and Harlequin Romance book exchange club when we were in senior secondary school and believed that God created Yao—whom she had started dating in our first year of senior secondary school—to be her husband. My story—the marriage of a poor girl to a rich man whom she barely knew—was better than any telenovela or romance novel.

  “I’m sure you’ll be in whichever house he’s in,” she said with confidence.

  “They are not going to throw you into a bush,” my mother had said when I wondered aloud about where I would call home in Accra. I rolled my eyes at her response when her back was turned. My concerns temporarily receded the next day in Accra when the car drove through high metal gates, manned by two uniformed security guards, and stopped in a parking space in front of an eight-story apartment building. Seated in the back seat with my mother, I gasped at the sight of the white structure with its sliding windows and doors on each floor, which reflected the sunlight and caused the building to sparkle. I could see identical lawn furniture and potted plants neatly arranged on the covered balconies of the lower level flats. Beside us in the parking lot were an assortment of gleaming cars. A generator, which I would later discover was the size of a small house, hummed behind the building. Two men watered a lawn so green that I doubted its naturalness. The leaves of young palm trees, planted in the grass and perfectly spaced so that they looked like soldiers with elaborate headdresses on guard duty, rustled in the gentle breeze.

  “Welcome, Madam,” someone said, breaking my trance and causing me to shut my mouth, which had been hanging open. It was a young man in a brown-and-yellow uniform.

  “Thank you,” I mumbled, still enthralled by what I was seeing. I remembered that my mother was with me and turned to check on her. She had stuck her head out of the car window and craned her neck to look up at the structure in front of us. I left her to gawk and climbed out of the car. The driver had already opened the trunk and was removing our bags, which our greeter stood at the ready to collect. I picked my handbag off the seat and hung it on my shoulder and moved to help them with the bigger bags.

  “No, Madam,” the man exclaimed, and grabbed the nearest suitcase to keep me from taking it.

  “He will carry them,” the driver said.

  The man nodded vigorously and reached for a second bag. I backed away.

  “Fo Driver!” my mother called, she had climbed out of the car and was now standing beside us. “Is this where we are going to stay?” she asked the man who everyone, except the Ganyos, called Brother Driver. His name was Charles and his family’s house was less than a ten-minute walk away from ours in Ho. Charles nodded, his lips quivering in an effort to avoid breaking into a broad smile and his eyes purposely not connecting with ours. He obviously noticed and was amused by our reactions; he had probably come here many times before. Besides, he spent most of his day in Aunty’s house in Ho, which was quite majestic though it did not reach as high up in the sky as this one.

  “He will show you the way,” Charles said to me, pointing to the man who had begun rolling away one of my suitcases while balancing a second on his head. A second man had appeared and was rolling away a third suitcase.

  “Are you not coming?” I asked Charles, suddenly alarmed. Was he planning on simply leaving us here and driving away?

  “I have to go back, Aunty is waiting, but Fo Richard is coming,” he told me. He had set the last of our belongings on the pavement that ran the perimeter of the building.

  “Okay, thank you,” I said as he shut the trunk.

  “May God go with you,” my mother said to him.

  “Stay well,” he replied.

  Charles began to drive away just as Richard’s white Range Rover entered the compound and pulled into the parking space that Charles had vacated.

  “Mia woezor,” Richard called as he came toward us, his arms opened wide. He wore dark blue jeans and white leather loafers, which I imagined would feel like a baby’s skin to the touch, and an unnecessarily tight polo shirt that revealed everything, including his obscenely protruding bellybutton. He hugged my mother and then me.

  “How was the trip?” he asked as he picked up my mother’s traveling bag.

  “Oh no, please leave it, Fo Richard,” my mother protested, too rattled to answer his question.

  “Let me carry it,” he said, brushing aside her protest and walking in the direction in which the men had taken the other luggage. We began to follow him. Behind his back my mother turned to me and formed a silent “Hehn?” with her mouth. Like me, she was in awe of it all, including Richard Ganyo carrying our bag. I broke into a grin and grabbed her arm. I was excited.

  We entered the foyer and the girl behind the curved security desk rose and greeted Richard. He responded in a way that told me he came here often, and then he poked one of the buttons on the wall beside the silver lift doors. My heart skipped a beat; I had never been on a lift before. I hoped that I wouldn’t embarrass myself in front of Richard and this girl who had a wide smile on her face though I suspected she was laughing on the inside at our awkwardness. I got the feeling that my arrival had been extensively discussed by the staff. When the lift doors opened, I held my mother’s hand and pulled her inside to stand behind Richard. We both held on to a hip-level iron bar on the wall, expecting the movement of the machine to rock us. The opposite wall had a mirror so that we could see our reflections. I still had on the weave from the wedding but had tied it back in a ponytail. I had wanted to wear jeans and a flowery off-shoulder top for the trip but had decided against it. I was not sure about where we would be going and who would be meeting us. So instead I had worn a simple pleated dress that I had sewn with batik my mother had bought me last Christmas, and flat sandals with crystal-like baubles on the straps; they had been in one of the suitcases the Ganyos gave me. My mother had on one of her good kabas and her wig from the wedding. Just as the lift pinged, I met Richard’s eyes in the mirror and we both smiled; me because I had successfully ridden in my first lift, and him, I assume, because he was happy to be showing me my new home.

  “This is your home for now,” he said as we stepped into an air-conditioned landing on the fifth floor with rose-colored walls and ceiling-high canvasses depicting men clad in batakaris and knee-high leather boots, drumming and twirling so that their batakaris lifted off their bodies and encircled them. Empty gold-painted clay pots sat on black wrought-iron stands in all corners and two large windows at both ends gave us views of the traffic and streets outside but kept out the noise. There were three doors on the floor. The one closest to us had a brass number fifteen on it. Richard opened it and we followed him inside.

  My mother and I paused in the doorway as our feet sank into the soft, cream-colored carpet beneath us. Was this a luxury hotel or my home? The brightly lit entryway led into a sitting room, a dining room, and a kitchen. To my left was the kitchen with its stainless-steel fixtures: a fridge, a stove and extractor, and a dishwasher. A silver toaster and an electric kettle sat on a marble-topped island and the deep brown of the cabinets matched the floor tiles in the kitchen. Between the kitchen and the sitting room was the dining room, bo
rdered by the back of the sofa on one side and the high stools placed against the island on the other. It held a polished glass table and six dining chairs in the same brown of the table legs and the kitchen cabinets. There were many other pieces of furniture, all of them sleek and modern. A coffee table held books that were stacked to form a small pyramid, and a widescreen TV was mounted on the white wall without a wire in sight. Beyond the sitting room was a corridor that I knew would lead to the bedrooms and baths.

  Richard threw his arm up as though to embrace the room and asked, “Do you like it?”

  My mother chuckled and I nodded; was that a question that had to be asked?

  “This kitchen is not for cooking akple or pounding fufu,” my mother said as she ran her hand on the shining island surface.

  “You can cook akple on the stove, it’s easy. And we have a special kitchen downstairs for pounding fufu in a mortar. Or you can use the fufu-pounding machine that’s in the cabinet beneath the sink,” Richard said from the other corner of the room where he was pressing some buttons on a white panel on the wall. A blast of cool air shot out from a vent above him.

  “Even palm soup; in fact, anything with oil, you can’t cook on this stove,” she continued, as though Richard had not spoken. “Can you imagine palm soup bubbling over and spilling onto this glass stove?” she asked as she turned to me.

  “It’s like any normal stove, Afinɔ, you only have to wipe it clean,” Richard said, trying to assure her. He reached for my suitcase and began pulling it down the short corridor. “Come and see the bedrooms,” he said to us.

  There were three bedrooms, two with en suite bathrooms, and one guest bathroom. We placed my bags in the biggest bedroom, which I thought was decorated rather simply. I would later learn that a bedroom does not need to have a dresser and a wardrobe and shoe racks and all the other things I had grown up seeing. Two brown doors interrupted the whiteness of the wall. A walk-in closet—big enough to hold a bed—was behind one and behind the other was the bathroom, which was white and had both a Jacuzzi and a glass-enclosed shower.

  “Where are Fo Eli’s things?” I asked after I’d inspected the closet in the second guestroom and hadn’t found a single item of clothing. It was clear that no one lived in the flat.

  “He doesn’t keep his things here, you know he has many houses in Accra,” my brother-in-law said very quickly, as though he had prepared for this question.

  “Which house does he keep his things in?”

  “Several, they are all over the place.”

  “But not this one?”

  “I’m sure he’ll start keeping things here,” Richard said, walking back into the hallway.

  “But . . .” I began before my mother pinched my arm to shut me up. I pulled my arm out of her reach.

  “That is okay. There’s nothing wrong with having more than one place to lay your head. In fact, it is a sign of God’s blessings,” she said loudly enough for Richard to hear. She then turned to me and frowned. I instantly knew not to pursue this line of questioning, at least not while she was there.

  The flat had been readied for our arrival. The fridge was stocked with everything imaginable, including koobi. The beds had been made, towels hung on racks, potted plants on the balcony watered.

  “Who did all of this?” I asked Richard as he waited for the lift to take him down.

  “We have people for these things; you’ll see them,” he told me. I nodded. Who were these people? Was this their full-time job? Watering flowers and buying salted fish for people they had never met? Would they be doing this every week or would we have to go to the market ourselves? And where was the market and how could we get there?

  As if he could read my mind, Richard said, “I’ll send a car to take you shopping at the end of the week.” He then handed me a crisp wad of notes. “Take this for anything you need to buy,” he said. I slowly extended my hand for the money. Gifts from the Ganyos usually passed from my mother to me.

  “Thank you,” I said. I had brought all of my savings, tucked into my handbag, but had been thinking about what I would do once it was gone. Was this wad of cash a monthly allowance? If I knew how often it would come I would know how to budget. I did not ask him this, but I did ask again about my husband, now that my mother was out of earshot.

  “He’s coming back next week,” Richard said.

  “Coming here?”

  “Partly . . . we’ll see,” he answered, his words halting. “You only need to focus on enjoying yourself,” he said as he stepped into the lift with a big smile.

  I stood in front of the silver doors long after they had closed. My fears pushed my excitement aside as they had done on my wedding day. I really wished that the Ganyos would tell me what exactly was happening instead of holding everything to their chests and only throwing scraps of information my way. I knew my mother would disagree, but I thought that they should have told me, before I even left Ho, that I wouldn’t be living under the same roof as my husband. I had been under the impression that he would be in Accra when we arrived there. They should have told me that this wasn’t the case; they should have told me when he would be returning from his Hong Kong trip. In fact, he should have called me to tell me these things himself; after all, I was his wife and he knew my phone number. Instead they had put me in this tower and given me pocket money like a schoolgirl. What was I supposed to do? Just sit in this building and wait?

  My mother became angry with me when I said this to her after we had cooked and eaten rice and beef stew with the ingredients we had found in the kitchen. She said that I was being ungrateful by asking so many questions and didn’t understand why I needed to know everything the future held. “Isn’t it enough to know that Elikem Ganyo is your husband?” she asked.

  I became angry and retreated into my room to speak with Mawusi on the phone.

  “I can’t imagine marrying Yao and not living in the same house with him! You should ask Richard what’s happening the next time he comes,” she said.

  “That’s what I’m saying: he doesn’t want to tell me anything proper, he’s just talking in circles.”

  “You need to be firm when you’re speaking to him, that way he’ll know you’re serious. They need to know you’re not some small girl that they can play with.”

  “You make it sound so easy. What if Aunty hears that I’m asking all these questions and becomes angry? Then what?”

  “Hmmm.”

  “I’m not trying to make trouble, I only want to know what’s going on. How can I be a good wife with no husband by my side?”

  My mother and I settled into a routine. We woke up by six every morning at the latest and cleaned every inch of the flat. We had turned away the cleaners who showed up the morning after we moved in.

  “We do it for everybody, Madam,” one of them explained, but I still refused. We had never had servants, even when my father was alive. I simply wasn’t comfortable with them in the flat. Besides, we could do it ourselves. We had nothing else to do.

  “You know, it could all be a test,” my mother said as she mopped the kitchen floor and I wiped the windows with a blue solution I had taken from the cleaners.

  “How?”

  “Maybe they want to see the kind of wife you are; whether you are the type of woman who will sit down and relax while other people clean for you.”

  “Hmmm,” I said; I hadn’t thought of that. “But Aunty already knows me. Besides, if she wanted to test me she should have done it before I married her son, not after.”

  “You are young, you don’t know,” she said while shaking her head. The headshaking and her downturned lips told me that I would be receiving a lecture in the evening. The things I needed to know in order to succeed in this marriage were endless! I couldn’t help but think that the other woman had it much easier than me.

  A few days before the wedding when Richard was visiting Ho, my mother and I had gotten him to tell us about this other woman. He said that Eli met her on his first trip t
o her country. He had recently graduated from the university with a degree in philosophy (a course assigned to him by the university, not one he selected) when Fred, his older brother who was then the national secretary for the governing party, sent him to Liberia to oversee his interests in a cement factory that he had opened with a group of investors.

  “You will be my eyes and ears over there,” Fred had told his younger brother when he saw him off at the airport. Eli would be staying in a flat that Fred had rented for him in Monrovia, and he would be driving a company car. He was ecstatic; it wasn’t every day that a young man straight out of university got such an opportunity. But it had taken him a while to adjust to his new life: the way the English differed from ours; people’s consumption of leaves that he hadn’t known were edible; crumbling buildings riddled with bullet holes and green with moss due to years of war and torrential rains; the masses of unemployed youth with hardened eyes that told of unspeakable pasts and impossible futures. He empathized with the people and the harsh lives that many were forced to live. On the other hand, he had quickly grown to dislike the work his brother had sent him to do; his main task was looking over everyone’s shoulder and reporting everything back to Ghana, a responsibility that didn’t endear him to his colleagues. He wanted to work in a place where people didn’t scowl and hunch over their desks when he appeared in their doorway. Besides, he knew that he was capable of much more.

  After he arrived in Liberia, Eli carefully studied his surroundings for opportunities and had listened intently to what the new friends he had made had to say. He gathered that there was money to be made in Liberia. The war, which had crushed the country, had also created the need to reassemble it and to make sure that it functioned better than before. Roads had to be built, schools reconstructed, electricity turned back on, baby diapers and wheelchairs imported, oil drilled, and gold mined. And these things had to be done by people with money to fund their ventures and fill the bank accounts of the government officials who issued licenses and permits and selected who was awarded government contracts. Eli saw a place for himself in the chaos. He knew people who had money and he was confident in his ability to run a business. He and his siblings had helped their mother build up her small, one-mud-oven bakery into a flour distribution and retail chain. He knew that he could replicate that success in Liberia. He shared his ideas with Fred. Though initially reluctant because he worried that his interests in the cement factory would be left unattended, Fred had come around when his brother convinced him that they could earn ten times what they were making in the cement factory if they diversified.