Each evening, when the sun goes west to rest and darkness falls, many people yield to the body’s sweet summons to sleep. But for prostitutes sunset is the time of awakening and the call to work.
“Why are prostitutes drawn to the night?” It seemed an obvious first question.
Iyese had taken time off work that night in order to tell me her story. We were seated on the carpeted floor of her flat, each with a tumbler filled with Guinness stout. Iyese had also bought herself a packet of Jay Menthol, touted in newspaper advertisements as a cigarette made with “the modern woman” in mind. She lit one and drew strongly, considering her answer. My tape recorder whirred lazily, capturing the silence. A mosquito laced my ear. As I searched for it Iyese began to speak.
“Because the night gives us cover from prying eyes. Besides, our customers seem more comfortable at night. We are more shadowy then. They don’t have to see us clearly. They can think of us as creatures of pleasure, creatures of the night, belonging to a different category from other women. They can’t handle seeing us any other way. They’re scared to see that we’re the same as their wives, their daughters, their sisters. If they saw that their manhoods would shrivel up. That’s why they prefer to meet us at night, in dark rooms.”
“A moment ago, you said prostitutes don’t wish to be seen, either.”
“Yes, because we would always be seen with the eyes of prejudice, as the lowest of the low.”
“But as shadows, don’t you always come out the loser?”
“Loser? No. Have you never wondered why prostitutes use false names?”
“I was getting to that. Why?”
She laughed. “It’s a sort of revenge. If men pretend we’re mere shadows, then there’s no use giving them our real names. It’s our way of saying that the whole situation is false – that they, too, are unreal. It also signals to them that they are unworthy of trust. We don’t let them know our real names, and when we have sex with them we don’t let them touch our real bodies. A prostitute carries two spirits within her. With one she goes out into the night. With the other she lives a normal life. A false name keeps our two spirits apart. If we didn’t keep them separate, we might go mad.”
“Explain it to me.”
“Take me, for instance. My real name is Iyese. The name connects me to the spot where I was born, to my mother’s womb, my father’s blood, my brothers and sisters, my childhood memories. It’s the name with which I get angry or feel happy. With it I smile my true smiles, laugh my deep laughter, shed my real tears. It’s the name with which I sigh at life. When I stand before the mirror, it’s Iyese I see. When I dream it’s the name with which my mother’s voice calls across the valley warning me to run from the demons. It’s the name that flows into my ears as water flows upon its bed of washed stones and white sand. Iyese is the name with which I see the world in the day. It’s the name that reminds me of what contains shame or honour. It’s the name with which I make love, when I do.”
She paused briefly, then continued. “As for Emilia, it’s like a label on a loaf of bread, or the name a vain man gives to his mansion, calling it Paradise or Harmony. Emilia is the name with which I return all the fake smiles that greet me at night. It’s the name with which I utter whispers into men’s ears. It’s the name I use for my made-up moans and my faked orgasms. It’s the name with which I throw my thighs apart for a stranger’s erection and afterwards take his money. All my bruises and soreness I take as Emilia. It’s a name that takes the rapes of my body so that Iyese may go unhurt. It’s a name with which I am connected to the night and nothing else.”
“The false name acts as a shield against your night-time encounters?”
“Yes. I couldn’t sleep with a customer who knew my real name. I would be totally frigid.”
“Why?”
“Because Iyese is not a prostitute. Emilia is.”
“Do all prostitutes experience this split phenomenon? This idea of being two persons in one?”
“Most, I’d say. There are prostitutes who can’t imagine themselves as anything else. But those are the exception.”
I asked: “How do people become prostitutes?”
“By asking to be paid for sex.” A bitter smile passed across her face, scarcely masking the pain that lay close to the surface.
“How did you become a prostitute?”
She stubbed out her cigarette and swallowed what was left of her Guinness. Her eyes, vulnerable and luminous, reminded me of the moon’s magic when beheld by a child’s eyes.
When she spoke, her voice quavered. “Please turn off the recorder. I want to cry.”
There are tears whose flow ought not to be interrupted – such were Iyese’s then. She buried her head in my chest, wetting my shirt, whimpering. It was some minutes before she grew still.
“You asked how I became a prostitute. It’s a long story, but I will try to tell you.”
She drew her legs up and rested her chin on her knees. “It began twelve years ago when I was a second-year student at Madia Teachers’ College.”
Iyese and her best friend had travelled to a distant village to visit her friend’s uncle, a doctor who had trained in Russia and Yugoslavia and had imbibed as much Marxist ideology as medical training. This strange doctor, Maximus Jaja, at forty still a bachelor, had actively sought a position in a poor settlement that was cut off from the rest of the world. The Ministry of Health posted him to Utonki, a quaint riverine village of several hundred fishermen and peasants. To reach the village one travelled by bicycle for ten miles on craggy footpaths, then spent an hour in a small boat that plodded along a mud-coloured, fish-rich river. The life of Utonki revolved around that river and the fish that teemed in it.
Dr Jaja lived near the banks of the river, in a hut that smelled of earth. Iyese remembered listening at night, half afraid, to the river’s raging voice as it travelled down to meet the big sea.
“What took your friend and you to Utonki?” I asked.
“Money,” she said, laughing. “My friend needed some money for a project. She wanted to get some of her uncle’s monthly salary before it vanished.”
Dr Jaja gave away most of his salary to the villagers. He had no use for money, he told them. The grateful villagers made up adoring praise-names for him. He was the magician who came by water. Son of the sun. Sun that sweeps the earth. Wealth that has found its way home. They repaid his generosity by adopting him as the ward of the whole community. He ate at different households while making his daily rounds of the village, a routine that started at 5:30 every morning and ended only when there were no more patients to be succoured.
Iyese had accompanied the doctor’s niece to Utonki out of curiosity. She had heard many stories about the man and she craved to see him in his strange world, in flesh and blood.
“Something magical happened the moment Dr Jaja saw me,” Iyese said, smiling distantly, as if the memory filled her with a sweet sadness. The doctor, who had never known carnal love, discovered it in Iyese, and expressed it with touching clumsiness. Iyese was thrilled by his attentions. She was twenty-one years younger than the doctor, but she agreed to take his hand and guide him through the caverns of love.
Dr Jaja proposed to Iyese at the moment of his first orgasm, and in the afterglow of their love-making she acceded. Later she experienced vague doubts and fears, but she was swept along on the now powerful current of Dr Jaja’s desire.
Like many who first savour a delirious experience late in life, Dr Jaja developed an insatiable appetite. During the next two nights they traversed the village and made love wherever he chose. They did it twice on the banks of the river amidst the choral croaks of toads, the chirr of crickets, the chirp of birds, the drone of mosquitoes and the plop! plop! of fish drawn to the bank because the fishermen had withdrawn to their homes to sleep. Once, as they were relieving their passion in the shrine of the sun deity, Iyese saw the sacred python slither in. The python’s eyes glowed on a small head, its richly decorated body radiant in the moonlight. It moved noiselessly, but its entry chilled the moment for Iyese, freezing all her sensations. Dr Jaja alone exploded in eerie spurts and songs.
On the first night Iyese had been worried that her lover’s ecstatic cries might scandalise the villagers, but the next day she met the village chief, an old hunched man with a mischievous twinkle in his eye. Smirking, he asked her, “Daughter, are you the one making our son a man?”
Embarrassed, she asked, “What do you mean, elder?”
“Every child cries when it is born,” explained the chief. “It cries to announce its arrival. It also cries because of all the evil it sees in the world. But every child has another cry waiting in the future, the cry of love. It is the cry that makes a boy a man, a girl a woman. Last night, we heard our son crying the cry of manhood. It put much happiness in our breasts.”
“Does nobody sleep in this village?” she asked in playful reproach.
“Yes, we sleep,” replied the elder. “But a wise man sleeps with his eyes and keeps his ears awake. Your neighbour might call out for your help at night. There might be a snake snatching your hen. It is the ear’s duty to hear these commotions and to rouse a sleeper. The cry of love delights the ear. May the sun bless you for showing his son the mystery of manhood.”
Two days later Iyese went back to college carrying in her handbag a letter the doctor asked her not to read until she was safely in her room.
“You may read the letter,” Iyese said to me, extracting it from a box-file that was hidden under her bed. “In fact, keep it. It disturbs my nights when I remember it.”
The words sprawled across two pages in a cursive hand that was more like an artist’s than a doctor’s. The language sometimes read like a neophyte poet’s:
Some people are doomed with eyes that see little. I was one such. Some have hearts that know love only by giving, never by receiving. I was also one such. There is knowledge and there is wisdom. Wisdom is to know that eyes are good but seeing is better; that a giving heart is good but the heart that knows how to receive is beautiful and blessed.
How strange that it took somebody as young as you to lead me to these lights. The village chief said you made me a man. How I wish he knew how deeply. Now, I want to be the small seed which dies and decays in the bowels of the earth; dies and decays in order to be resurrected with startling, vibrant, magnificent life.
I wish I had known before now that the magic of the world often flows from the things we account too peripheral. If only I had listened more closely to the wise words of our elders who in their wisdom said, “What one is looking for in Sokoto town is in the sokoto gown.”
A prodigal, I thought the truth lay in what the ancestors of Europe had to say. I searched for the matrix of Marx, embraced the delusions of Descartes, the cant of Kant. I was drawn to Hegel’s heresies, to the fraudulences of Freud. I dismissed my own patrimony as naive, atavistic and inconsequential. I imagined that all true wisdom existed in the tomes of Europe. I read them voraciously. Through them, I found eyes, but the key to seeing still eluded me. Yes, I harvested knowledge from Europe’s soil but I found little wisdom in it.
I returned from Europe with a grand agenda for our country. But who was going to lend me a hand? Our finest talent, I found, had been consumed by cynicism, the youth had surrendered to despair. I, too, quickly shed the illusion that the world was waiting to be saved – by me and a small band of messiahs. But I truly wanted to serve, and if I could not serve my country I was quite content to seize a small corner and give service. I could live with a small dream; dreamlessness, on the other hand, would kill me.
So I asked to be posted to a small needy community. I asked with love, but the officer who sent me to Utonki did so with a punitive heart. For four years I have spent my revolutionary fevers in this small world. In those four years I have learned that the quality of service is hardly flawed.
Now you have come and opened my eyes to another wisdom: that service is flawed – can only be flawed – when one refuses to be served in return. You could not have come at a better time.
The same blubbery bastard at headquarters who posted me here has of late dreamed up a new way to crush my spirits. He now wants to post me out of here to – a city, of all places! He has written a memo to set off the process. In it he alleged that I have virtually been on holiday here; that no superior officer supervises what I do (or don’t do); that I spread dangerous propaganda among the people, thereby flouting civil service rules (the specific sections and subsections of which he diligently listed). But the most unbearable part of his memo was his argument (and here I must quote him) that, “The rationale for maintaining qualified medical personnel in Utonki does not exist in actuality. The people are accustomed to, and prefer, traditional forms of therapy, viz divination, herbal pharmacology, spirit medium, and other pagan rites. Consequently there are no tenable considerations to support retaining Dr Jaja in his present post.”
Based on this outrageous memo the Ministry sent one of its officers here to evaluate the situation. A mouth-foaming idiot! The first question he asked me was what did I gain from living in such darkness? A grown man like me, he remarked in astonishment. He said there were “progressive” doctors in cities making good money and building beautiful houses and buying nice, nice cars. It was apparent from his accent that he felt that I had somehow interrupted his rapturous life in the city. When he found out that the salary they routed to me every month was shared with the villagers, he asked, the glutton, could I let him keep some? When I said no, he tried blackmail. Was I aware that it was unethical to relate too socially with my patients? He could recommend that I be disciplined, did I know that?
I laughed in his face. A hard, derisive laugh, in his startled face. Then I told him that he and I spoke two different languages, that no magic of translation could ever bridge the gulf of mutual incomprehension between us.
He left Utonki, I am sure, with the echo of that laugh ringing in his ears. I know that he is going to be dangerous once he has ascended the throne in the miniature kingdom of his office. I can almost picture him in the chagrined thrill of meagre power, his quivering hand penning the verdict: “After a thorough and exhaustive consideration of all the extant facts pertaining to the above subject, bla bla bla, I have come to the conclusion that Dr Jaja’s posting in Utonki is not consistent with the Ministry’s objective of optimising healthcare delivery. Bla bla bla.”
What options am I left with in this unfair situation? To ignore my redeployment and stay back? It’s the option that most appeals to my idealism. But stay back and do what? The ministry would quickly withdraw all medicines and other supplies. Idealism – even I must concede – cannot synthesise drugs. Rather unfortunate; but without drugs a doctor becomes a mere bogeyman. I cannot operate in a situation where all I can offer my patients is the arbitrariness of miracles. I am left, then, with a choice that sounds to me like a betrayal. But, as I think about it, the betrayal is not mine but that of small men who would rather be gods!
As I brace to depart from these people, I am filled with great hope – that the inner energy and natural cunning of all who dwell among forests are going to keep them one step ahead of their worst troubles.
As for my own situation I can only say this: my going to the city will not optimise healthcare delivery. But it will bring us closer to each other. Not a bad punishment, if you ask me! I used to think of marriage as something peculiarly absurd which only fools inflicted on themselves. That changed when I asked and you said yes. Now I am filled with a great longing.
I will keep you apprised of the situation with the chaps at headquarters.
With my bottomless love,
Maximus
Dr Jaja was eventually posted to Bini, a city less than an hour from Iyese’s college. Still, he cried as he climbed on to the old boat that was to take him away from Utonki. All the adults and children of the village stood on the bank to bid him farewell, in silent tears that came from a deep region of their hearts.