“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. We’re used to her having malaria. I know exactly what to do when I get home.”
He left.
This was the first time since her arrival that Lilly Loveless was hearing anything about Dr Wiseman Lovemore’s family. She thought to herself: So he has a daughter, and is married. How interesting! Why has he been so economical with information on his family status? I’ve told him about my parents, my ex-boyfriend and a lot more. But he’s stayed guarded, measuring everything he says like water in the desert. We’ve been everywhere together, save for his home. Of course, I haven’t asked to be taken there. That’s a decision for him to make.
“How well do you know my friend, Wiseman?” Bobinga Iroko asked, as soon as they were alone.
“Not that much. He’s a friend of my supervisor’s. And he has been very helpful in ensuring that I settle in without much pain. He’s arranged for very good and terribly affordable accommodation for me with his colleague Desire, a very friendly woman herself. Desire is such an amazing personality. She’s so friendly that she can enter this place and be friends with everyone within minutes…” Lilly Loveless spoke at length on Dr Wiseman Lovemore and Desire, full of superlatives.
“I’ve known Dr Wiseman Lovemore for years, and we’ve been friends since our secondary school days. He’s very hard-working, but not terribly lucky. It took him years to get his PhD, and it is taking him for ever to change grades. He has been marking time as a lecturer for years. And his scholarly inertia seems to be affecting his social life. His wife, whose highest qualification is a Masters, heads the Department of Rhetoric. She is almost always on a plane to somewhere, to attend one conference or another, and the poor guy is forced to babysit a daughter of whom he seriously doubts he’s the father. He is particularly bitter about the fact that his wife talks openly here and there about her infidelities…”
“His wife is unfaithful?”
“It is the talk of the town. She’s said to be a favourite hunting ground for many, including our very own local champion the Reg, which isn’t surprising, given our penchant for light-skinned women.”
“I now understand why he has never taken me to see his family.”
“The Reg?”
“No, Dr Wiseman Lovemore.”
“He is not a happy man at home.”
“Has he thought of moving out?”
“He thinks it is still possible to patch things up, if only she wouldn’t go around broadcasting their private life at coffee tables and panel discussions at feminist congresses. There are certain things she just shouldn’t talk about outside the home.”
“I do empathise with the fact that he is not happy at home, but you can’t keep your wife from talking to her friends or expressing herself. That’s almost symbolic violence. We survive by discussing our troubles with women friends! And there’s no room for inhibition in scholarship.” Lilly Loveless felt pleased to reproduce her cherished rhetoric in favour of a sister and expert at rhetoric.
“They hardly talk. She at least should talk with him first. Charity begins at home, doesn’t it?”
Lilly Loveless nodded. They at least should talk to each other, try solving their problems themselves, and only after repeated failure at this level should they turn elsewhere for mediation.
“When you visit them as I do,” Bobinga Iroko continued, now drinking directly from the bottle, having inadvertently broken his glass. “You notice the huge chasm between them. He seems to live at the back of the house where there’s the kitchen and she seems to live at the front of the house. Their daughter is often made to serve like a boundary tree between two warring villages.”
“It must be really tough for both of them.”
“What would you say to this: A year ago, she left their marital bedroom, to sleep in the parlour, and sometimes in their daughter’s bedroom.”
“I think that’s completely natural. I know several married couples where he has his room and she has hers. Sometimes they visit each other at night … My mom and dad lived like that for a couple of years before their divorce.”
“No, that doesn’t exist here in Africa.”
“I admit my knowledge of Africa isn’t that great, but I’d be surprised if Africa is that different from Muzunguland,” she replied, taking care not to sound as if she wanted to pick a quarrel on the rampant attitude (often informed by assumptions of superiority, she was convinced) of ‘Africa is not like your Muzunguland’ that she encountered almost every day.
“That’s exactly what she would say, has always said. It must be something Muzungulander … how you are brought up, perhaps,” observed Bobinga Iroko.
“What do you mean? Is Dr Wiseman Lovemore’s wife a Muzungulander?”
“What did you think? He hasn’t told you that his wife is half white, half black? Only half as white as you, but Muzungu all the same?”
“No, he’s told me very little about his family situation, like I said.” Lilly Loveless was still to come to terms with what she had just heard. Dr Wiseman Lovemore, married to a Muzungu? He didn’t come across that way. How interesting… “When did they marry? How did they meet?”
“That, you’d have to ask him.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be discussing his private life in his absence.”
“As I was saying,” Bobinga Iroko went on, “if and when she speaks to him, her words are harsh. They burn his heart like vomit from the belly of the mountain.”
“Instead of just listening to her words, he should listen to her actions. If she didn’t care, would she still be sharing the same house with him? I bet she buys all the groceries and does all the cooking. You talked about words. What soft words does he say with her? What has he done to lure her back some nights? Why should we take those acts for granted?” Lilly Loveless was all too conscious of springing to the defence of a sister without any real knowledge of the facts of the case.
This, Bobinga Iroko picked up on. “You talk as if you’ve been there and know who does what, and who says or doesn’t say what. You may have some wise words, but you don’t really know what it’s like.”
“Maybe so,” she conceded. “All I know is that it seems God gives us this funny thing we call love, then he seems to sit back and enjoy watching what we’ll do next …”
“He also gives us investigative journalists to document what we do next, and with whom,” he laughed, and screamed for the waiter to replenish the drinks.
They drank and chatted deep into the night. Lilly Loveless learnt a lot.
Bobinga Iroko told her more about Dr Mukala-Satannie, how he came to write his column for The Talking Drum, and how he got offered part-time lectureship at the university. Dr Mukala-Satannie was unemployed back home in Muzunguland. He had completed a PhD on Karl Marx at a time when everyone was saying farewell to Marx. He used to give free public lectures to interested students and the clientele of a pub next to the university that awarded him a degree that could not be listed on the stock exchange.
It was at those lectures that he met a young, beautiful woman who had a soft spot for philosophy. She had just completed a Masters programme on Sustainable Philosophies of Environmental Management, and had been offered a very good job in Mimboland, with the Mimbo Forest Conservation Project, funded and managed entirely by Muzungulanders. The unmarried young woman feared being lonely in Africa.
When Dr Mukala-Satannie heard of her prospective fat expatriate salary, and especially of the fact that her husband could earn an unemployment allowance as well as