Kayo didn’t stop knocking on his door begging to be let in. He never forced his way through. Kayo spoke of the times they shared and how they needed to talk yet he never elaborated on what the talk was about. He went on about his family and how it would be nice for Prof to meet them. He described how he told his wife of their escapades as children.
‘You know, she won’t believe that I once used to dress like a woman when I was a teenager. I told her I dressed and danced at the market to raise money for our Friday hang-outs.’ His laughter trailed off when Prof did not join in.
‘I have to leave now. I have to pick up my wife from her friend’s place where she is making her hair. I’ll come again, okay?’
Prof did not respond. It took a while before he heard the sound of his feet fade from the corridor. It was the way Kayo was; hopeful that things could change, playful and receptive of life’s inadequacies. Yet, even he could see that something was different about his friend. He spoke between philosophies. He spoke with a deliberateness which made it seem like he was weighing each thought before it was spoken.
Kayo looked out for him. Kayo never told him, but he sometimes wondered if his friend became a cult member. He had this feeling of being watched over all through his days in the university as a prominent student union member, and then a student union president, before he was ousted by a group the government bribed. He never encountered problems with the cult groups. The student union president before him was hacked down in front of the university gate by cultists, and another one became a cult member and ensured calm in the school. Kayo protected him in a way he never understood. He only remembered that whenever Kayo came to his university, he always used the excuse of seeing his friends in the evenings, tucking a blue beret he never wore elsewhere into his pocket. Even now when he spoke, he would slip into that carefree way of his younger days, ‘Once you can settle people’s needs—there is always one need—you’ll be fine. Everyone, everything, wants something. If it is money, give it to them.’
Kayo always knew what was going on. He was the one who rushed into his house one day, before he went to prison, to warn against granting an interview to Tell Magazine and Tempo Newspaper.
‘You can’t. We all know that Abacha is looking for a simple mistake from you.’
‘I will do what I want. I have to let the people know they can fight.’
‘Fight who?’
‘See, I have already spoken to others at the NADECO meeting, and Baba Fawehinmi…’ And Prof thought over what he was going to say, changed his mind and said instead, ‘I can’t say what your exact fears are, but with over twenty of our people in exile and a similar number held under detention, everyone says I’m lucky and should be more careful.’
‘Exactly!’
‘But Kayo, when you have a cause, a cause that grips your heart morning and night, you don’t become careful. You jump in and do all that needs to be done.’ He smiled and looked at his friend, ‘The CLO is organising a march today, will you join us?’
‘Just remember your mother. You’re not even thirty!’
Prof leaned against the door as his mind filtered in the days before prison. He shook his head and wondered how he might have introduced Desire to Kayo if things were different. He wondered how Kayo would have reacted, perhaps a little bashful remark on how he needed to “corner” the girl before she left him. Then he might have asked, ‘Abi, you’re still on that priest level? Are you still abstaining?’
But this Kayo was different. He chose his words. Sometimes too carefully.
When it was evening, Desire didn’t visit. Day two, she didn’t either. On day three of her absence, he began to feel his body split, like the hairs on his skin were ready to search for hers. He thought of the times she visited. His hairs stood erect when she swept past him towards her seat in the darkness. He started to inquire and argue with himself over whether he should not have opened the door to her when she first came knocking. He replayed her breathing, her sighs and the way her legs shook when she sat on the chair, the little laughs and small silences. Prof realised that just like the way a shattered mirror reflects our many parts, a broken individual captures how we are—he felt like Desire was himself. He relived his past and tried to think of what life was before her visit. And then, he thought of that first day when she didn’t visit. That inconsistency discomfited him.
Before prison, Prof’s hair was cropped low and the strands curled into themselves like worn wool on an old towel, which gave the impression of him balding. His thin eyes sliced into the edges of his face with webs at the corner indicating a perpetual laugh in his eyes. It gave him the look of an excited schoolboy, so that when he was actually agitated or excited, he looked like a baby who was about to cry. This boyish look was the reason he left the whisker-like hair on his chin and attempted to grow a beard in secondary school, yet it only made people tell his mother he would end up a heartbreaker. Girls hung around him like flies around an open sore. In the early days, his mother took the time to warn him about how he might drop out of school to have to fend for his child and its mother if he impregnated anyone. So, from his secondary school days through university, he tried to keep his relationships with girls as mere trifles—once his friendship with a girl became dependent, he broke it off. This earned him the nickname, oniranu. They saw him as a lover boy and player—which was contrary to what he intended.
There was however an exception to his constant girl-dumping relationships. Victoria was the first girl Prof almost broke the rule for. He was 16. He couldn’t remember how old she had been, perhaps a few years older. He could never forget the days of lying in wait for her to return from her mother’s stall and the demure return of his advances. Kayo found a way to convince her on his behalf but her first visit to his house was not a successful rendezvous. Just as he was becoming comfortable with his guest, his mother walked into the house. He could still remember how he avoided saying anything about Victoria, whose hands were tucked between her thighs, waiting patiently for him to introduce her to his mother, who flopped onto the sofa, shaking her legs while her eyes remained fixated on the door. As Victoria stood before her, trying to find the best way to appear respectful and in love and shy and scared at the same time, Prof felt his mother’s words springing out—although they were unspoken—to haunt him: ‘Don’t impregnate anybody-o. At least, wait until we can eat well.’
Prof tugged at Victoria’s hand and dragged her with him, pulling her through the streets without stopping, towards Kayo’s house. Through all of this, she complained about his strange behaviour, and he mumbled something about wanting to see Kayo urgently. The truth was that he never prepared for his mother’s appearance when they planned on bringing Victoria to the house. His mother, however, decided to fall sick that day.
Years later, his mother would be the one begging him to find a woman to be with.
‘Your mates have three children now, and you’re going about living like a lifetime bachelor.’ For his mother, a man needed to be married and with children—that was success.
He was 27 when he stopped having sex. This was after Blessing, and the numerous girls who came after her unveiled his years of suppressed emotion. So, he stopped having sex. He woke up one morning and convinced himself that he could access self-denial. He was not doing this because he wanted to be like Sigmund Freud who, perhaps, sought to write great books. Perhaps, Prof’s hope was that his abstention would generate ideas on how to win the war of ignominy he fought for his people. There was so much he tried to explain to Kayo, who was the only one he told about his abstinence at the time. He was the one who also told him, ‘Are you mad? Sex is life, man!’
He didn’t respond. The thought in his mind was simply that nobody feels sensual when they feel cornered and trapped. For one, he could never understand how anyone with a conscience, who had travelled the world and seen the potentials of the country, could still feel sexually aroused, with all the pain the people went through. The pain which was trapped in their eyes, which begged him to fight for them—the tired, hungry mouths which were like locked lips deprived of drinking water. He compared them to lamps burning without oil. He walked the streets, each time convinced he was born to save the people from suffering.
Once his decision to abstain from sex came, he would excuse himself after the caucus meetings he held with other comrades—which usually led to sexcapades with other activists—to go and think. He left many of the men and women, who had fed each other with looks lingering for greetings and the exchanging of room numbers. He witnessed some hold hands and tickle palms as affirmation of their sexual hunger. Sometimes, when they insisted he should stay around after the meetings, he would mutter something about being too tired or deep in some documents which must be understood before “the next congress”.
At first, Prof reasoned his abstinence on his rising anger over the state of the nation. He told everyone who cared to listen that the mind was where pleasure and pain lived and one of these emotions would sometimes supersede. His friends joked about how they who were married “cut side shows”, and he was always quick to explain that what they thought was a stifling of heat between the loins of people who were not sexually active, was simply wet coal. For a stove was not hot until lit with fire: you become what you think about. It had already been over ten years of anger taking the place of his sexual desires, pushing his needs down to the dark places, which he now felt were being erupted by a woman whose name sounded like an aphrodisiac.