“Ifem, don’t look as if somebody died!” Aunty Uju laughed, her wry laugh. She looked suddenly small and bewildered among the detritus of her new life, the fawn-colored jewel case on the dressing table, the silk robe thrown across the bed, and Ifemelu felt frightened for her.
“HE EVEN GAVE ME a little more than I asked for,” Aunty Uju told Ifemelu the next weekend, with a small smile, as though amused by what The General had done. “We’ll go to the house from the salon so I can give it to Brother.”
It startled Ifemelu, how much a relaxer retouching cost at Aunty Uju’s hair salon; the haughty hairdressers sized up each customer, eyes swinging from head to shoes, to decide how much attention she was worth. With Aunty Uju, they hovered and groveled, curtseying deeply as they greeted her, overpraising her handbag and shoes. Ifemelu watched, fascinated. It was here, at a Lagos salon, that the different ranks of imperial femaleness were best understood.
“Those girls, I was waiting for them to bring out their hands and beg you to shit so they could worship that too,” Ifemelu said, as they left the salon.
Aunty Uju laughed and patted the silky hair extensions that fell to her shoulders: Chinese weave-on, the latest version, shiny and straight as straight could be; it never tangled.
“You know, we live in an ass-licking economy. The biggest problem in this country is not corruption. The problem is that there are many qualified people who are not where they are supposed to be because they won’t lick anybody’s ass, or they don’t know which ass to lick or they don’t even know how to lick an ass. I’m lucky to be licking the right ass.” She smiled. “It’s just luck. Oga said I was well brought up, that I was not like all the Lagos girls who sleep with him on the first night and the next morning give him a list of what they want him to
buy. I slept with him on the first night but I did not ask for anything, which was stupid of me now that I think of it, but I did not sleep with him because I wanted something. Ah, this thing called power. I was attracted to him even with his teeth like Dracula. I was attracted to his power.”
Aunty Uju liked to talk about The General, different versions of the same stories repeated and savored. Her driver had told her—she swayed his loyalty by arranging his wife’s prenatal visits and his baby’s immunizations—that The General asked for details of where she went and how long she stayed, and each time Aunty Uju told Ifemelu the story, she would end with a sigh, “Does he think I can’t see another man without him knowing, if I wanted to? But I don’t want to.”
They were in the cold interior of the Mazda. As the driver backed out of the gates of the salon compound, Aunty Uju gestured to the gateman, rolled down her window, and gave him some money.
“Thank you, madam!” he said, and saluted.
She had slipped naira notes to all the salon workers, to the security men outside, to the policemen at the road junction.
“They’re not paid enough to afford school fees for even one child,” Aunty Uju said.
“That small money you gave him will not help him pay any school fees,” Ifemelu said.
“But he can buy a little extra something and he will be in a better mood and he won’t beat his wife this night,” Aunty Uju said. She looked out of the window and said, “Slow down, Sola,” so that she could get a good look at an accident on Osborne Road; a bus had hit a car, the front of the bus and the back of the car were now mangled metal, and both drivers were shouting in each other’s faces, buffered by a gathering crowd. “Where do they come from? These people that appear once there is an accident?” Aunty Uju leaned back on her seat. “Do you know I have forgotten what it feels like to be in a bus? It is so easy to get used to all this.”
“You can just go to Falomo now and get on a bus,” Ifemelu said.
“But it won’t be the same. It’s never the same when you have other choices.” Aunty Uju looked at her. “Ifem, stop worrying about me.”
“I’m not worrying.”
“You’ve been worrying since I told you about my account.”
“If somebody else was doing this, you would say she was stupid.”
“I would not even advise you to do what I’m doing.” Aunty Uju turned back to the window. “He’ll change. I’ll make him change. I just need to go slowly.”
At the flat, Aunty Uju handed Ifemelu’s father a plastic bag swollen with cash. “It’s rent for two years, Brother,” she said, with an embarrassed casualness, and then made a joke about the hole in his singlet. She did not look him in the face as she spoke and he did not look her in the face as he thanked her.
THE GENERAL HAD yellowed eyes, which suggested to Ifemelu a malnourished childhood. His solid, thickset body spoke of fights that he had started and won, and the buckteeth that gaped through his lips made him seem vaguely dangerous. Ifemelu was surprised by the gleeful coarseness of him. “I’m a village man!” he said happily, as though to explain the drops of soup that landed on his shirt and on the table while he ate, or his loud burping afterwards. He arrived in the evenings, in his green uniform, holding a gossip magazine or two, while his ADC, at an obsequious pace behind him, brought his briefcase and put it on the dining table. He rarely left with the gossip magazines; copies of Vintage People and Prime People and Lagos Life littered Aunty Uju’s house, with their blurry photos and garish headlines.
“If I tell you what these people do, eh,” Aunty Uju would say to Ifemelu, tapping at a magazine photo with her French-manicured nail. “Their real stories are not even in the magazines. Oga has the real gist.” Then she would talk about the man who had sex with a top general to get an oil bloc, the military administrator whose children were fathered by somebody else, the foreign prostitutes flown in weekly for the Head of State. She repeated the stories with affectionate amusement, as though she thought The General’s keenness on raunchy gossip was a charming and forgivable indulgence. “Do you know he is afraid of injections? A whole General Officer Commanding and if he sees a needle, he is afraid!” Aunty Uju said, in the same tone. It was, to her, an endearing detail. Ifemelu could not think of The General as endearing, with his loud, boorish manner, the way he reached out to slap Aunty Uju’s backside as they went upstairs, saying, “All this for me? All this for me?” and the way he talked and talked, never acknowledging an interruption, until he finished a story. One of his favorites, which he often told Ifemelu, while drinking Star beer after dinner, was the story of how Aunty Uju was different. He told it with a self-congratulatory tone, as if her difference reflected his own good taste. “The first time I told her I was going to London and asked what she wanted, she gave me a list. Before I looked at it, I said I already know what she wants. Is it not perfume, shoes, bag, watch, and clothes? I know Lagos girls. But you know what was in it? One perfume and four books! I was shocked. Chai. I spent one good hour in that bookshop in Piccadilly. I bought her twenty books! Which Lagos babe do you know that will be asking for books?”
Aunty Uju would laugh, suddenly girlish and pliant. Ifemelu would smile dutifully. She thought it undignified and irresponsible, this old married man telling her stories; it was like showing her his unclean underwear. She tried to see him through Aunty Uju’s eyes, a man of wonders, a man of worldly excitements, but she could not. She recognized the lightness of being, the joyfulness that Aunty Uju had on weekdays; it was how she felt when she was looking forward to seeing Obinze after school. But it seemed wrong, a waste, that Aunty Uju should feel this for The General. Aunty Uju’s ex-boyfriend, Olujimi, was different, nice-looking and smooth-voiced; he glistened with a quiet polish. They had been together for most of university and when you saw them, you saw why they were together. “I outgrew him,” Aunty Uju said.
“Don’t you outgrow and move on to something better?” Ifemelu asked. And Aunty Uju laughed as though it was really a joke.
On the day of the coup, a close friend of The General’s called Aunty Uju to ask if she was with him. There was tension; some army officers had already been arrested. Aunty Uju was not with The General, did not know where he was, and she paced upstairs and then downstairs, worried, making phone calls that yielded nothing. Soon, she began to heave, struggling to breathe. Her panic had turned into an asthma attack. She was gasping, shaking, piercing her arm with a needle, trying to inject herself with medicine, drops of blood staining the bedcovers, until Ifemelu ran down the street to bang on the door of a neighbor whose sister was also a doctor. Finally, The General called to say that he was fine, the coup had failed and all was well with the Head of State; Aunty Uju’s trembling stopped.
ON A MUSLIM HOLIDAY, one of those two-day holidays when non-Muslims in Lagos said “Happy Sallah” to whoever they assumed to be a Muslim, often gatemen from the north, and NTA showed footage after footage of men slaughtering rams, The General promised to visit; it would be the first time he spent a public holiday with Aunty Uju. She was in the kitchen the entire morning supervising Chikodili, singing loudly from time to time, being a little too familiar with Chikodili, a little too quick to laugh with her. Finally, the cooking done and the house smelling of spices and sauces, Aunty Uju went upstairs to shower.
“Ifem, please come and help me trim my hair down there. Oga said it disturbs him!” Aunty Uju said, laughing, and then lay on her back, legs spread and held high, an old gossip magazine beneath her, while Ifemelu worked with a shaving stick. Ifemelu had finished and Aunty Uju was coating an exfoliating mask on her face when The General called to say he could no longer come. Aunty Uju, her face ghoulish, covered in chalk-white paste except for the circles of skin around her eyes, hung up and walked into the kitchen and began to put the food in plastic containers for the freezer. Chikodili looked on in confusion. Aunty Uju worked feverishly, jerking the freezer compartment, slamming the cupboard, and as she pushed back the pot of jollof rice, the pot of
egusi soup fell off the cooker. Aunty Uju stared at the yellowish-green sauce spreading across the kitchen floor as though she did not know how it had happened. She turned to Chikodili and screamed, “Why are you looking like a mumu? Come on, clean it up!”
Ifemelu was watching from the kitchen entrance. “Aunty, the person you should be shouting at is The General.”