THE BROKEN

CORD…
- Seun Touch®**
Àlàrí did not see it coming! It came so suddenly, faster than earlier ones; faster than she
could even duck- and deadlier. For eternity she held the remnants of her face in her
blistered hands, fighting to get a full glimpse of the constellation that had descended to
the expanse of space within her eyeshot. Before she could finish counting the stars,
Àkànmú had commenced the duty of kicking her out of the house.

“You are getting out of my house tonight” he barked at her like a deranged watchdog.
Àlàrí implored and entreated, she beseeched and supplicated, he was however as
defiant as a furious Shònpònná1. Unlike other nights, Àkànmú made good that night his
few years old threat to kick Àlàrí out of the home.

It was so late when Àlàrí left home; so late that even luck had by then gone to sleep.
Fortune was already dozing when her feet hit the streets; like no wild cat ever forages in
noonday, no good person ever walked around in the dead of the night. Ijàkùnmò was
not asleep however; Ijàkùnmò, the terror of the King’s guards; Ijàkùnmò, nightmare of
the neighbourhood.

“How dare you come out at this time of my night?” he snarled at her a hazel coloured
debris of a dentition. He looked the frame of Àlàrí up, down and middle, looked at his
boys and swaggered back into his den, somewhere under the Ojúelégba Bridge with
some expression on his wiry face which had some distant connection with a smile.
Before Àlàrí could start counting her breath, Ijàkùnmò’s cohorts had already hurled her,
carting her like some piece of contraband into their lair where they subdued her. Àlàrí
did not sleep with Ijàkùnmò; it was Ijàkùnmò that forced himself to sleep with her, deep
and dark in the middle of the night.

She came back to the village the following morning like some unsung antihero, dragging
in her trail the only item of property she could salvage from the nightwalkers that
attacked her; her headgear.

1
The god of smallpox in the Yoruba pantheon.
 *****************************

It was a day like never before the day Àlàrí got married; that day Àkànmú came to our
village, together with his city friends and their iron horses, those were not lorries and
they were not bicycles, those were cars; cars from the city. Àkànmú came to the village;
Oh! Olódùmarè, Àkànmú came to the village. For several markets after Àkànmú left,
money could not buy things in the marketplace for Àkànmú put money to shame in my
village, Oh! Àkànmú came to my village.

Àkànmú came with several things to my little village; tubers of yam like never before
seen; gourds of palmwine convulsing profusely in their spouted mouths, obì was like the
stones in the market square and orógbó became commonplace like midday meals, Oh!
Àkànmú came to my village, an in-law indeed.

It was when the tired sun was trekking back from its farmland that Àkànmú’s people
arrived. Trailing each other were several half nude young men, Àkànmú’s servants, like
the little chicks the mother hen. At the head of the procession was Àkànmú himself, clad
in a red robing of àrán, very much like the king’s. Oh! I cannot forget the day Àkànmú
came. It was like another odún ìjesu2, for we ate and ate until we begged to eat no
more, Àlàrí’s ìgbéyàwó was indeed the gossip of the villages by.

Àkànmú was the only sculptor in the province of Alágbàá. When the white men captured
the villages and townships around a couple of years earlier, they had developed some
sort of love for the deities of the land which they took to their lands and sold, as we were
told, for very big money. They had taken Àkànmú to work for them in the city. Day and
night he had worked in Ìwárò until we had no tree standing again but those which had
been carved to satisfy the whitemen’s craving for idols so they took him to the city to
continue killing the trees there. Àkànmú had made big money from the white men, we
could see; he had built a house in the white men’s area in the city, we were told.

It was when Àkànmú wanted to make himself our village ruler in the city that he came
home again. Àkànmú had met Àlàrí for the first time the day he came to the village, after
several years, to beg us to come out to select him as our leader in the city. He had told
us that the white men had wanted to go back to their lands and intended to set up
councils that would lead in the big city after they were gone; an election, he had called
it. Àlàrí had had the misfortune of going to the stream that day to fill her mother’s pot
when Àkànmú drove past her on the dusty way to the stream. Àkànmú looked back at
her; he could not but look back at her lithe figure again and again from the back glass of
his cream-coloured 404. He made up his mind that morning he would snatch Àlàrí from
whoever her intended husband was, and so he did.
2
Yam festival
Esúgbàyí’s compound was like a beehive that night of his arrival, women pounded
pestles frantically and young man emptied the bushes of its fauna which later strained
several pots of èfò rírò. Even Isíoláòtán, the basket weaver, to whom Àlàrí was earlier
betrothed, was there to see what wonders the whitemen’s money could do. Àkànmú
had paid Isíoláòtán several cowries to keep his mouth shut and agree to be separated
from Àlàrí, he had also promised to buy a three spoked bicycle for him; Isíoláòtán had
given up his wife so he could be the second person in the whole of Ìwárò who owned
such a bicycle.

Àlàrí indeed appeared at first to have been a lucky bride. When Àkànmú came out to
declare his intention formally to her father, as was customary, he had so little left to do.
Olókò, the alàrínna had done so much for Àkànmú, he needed not bother himself with
so much formalities. Much money had gone into hollow pockets; even the Baálè
vacated his seat and came to Esúgbàyí’s compound to see Àkànmú get the hands of
Àlàrí in marriage. Esúgbàyí’s belly was so sweet that he could not refuse; he dared not
refuse. “Papa,” Àkànmú called Esúgbàyí; it was our custom that you call on your in-laws
as though they were your own parents “I saw a flower in your garden that I would like to
pluck.”

“My son” Esúgbàyí had replied; everybody always is willing to find some family ties to a
wealthy one; no one is ever a pauper’s kinsman; “I give you the hands of Àlàrí with all
my heart” he had declared. We drank and ate that night till our eyes could see no more;
not always in the village did food come so surplus for all. The following morning, before
we all could recover from the hangover of palmwine, Àlàrí was gone. Then people
started counting the moons.

The first festival after the marriage, it was said that Àlàrí had not yet started seeing her
women’s visitor so she could not get yet pregnant; she was just fifteen festivals old; her
mother had explained to all; she would soon conceive after all after a few more moons.
Then the second festival passed, then the third, till the sixth.

When however the toxins of love eventually dried from Àkànmú’s blood, he decided to
speak. Many times he would come home late from his drinking rounds and exert the
energy of beer, working on Àlàrí’s face; calling her names Àlàrí never remembered
being given. It was the blows that made Àlàrí’s face grow fatter, some said, when she
came back to the village.

The day came then, after six festivals, when Àkànmú could not tolerate her anymore;
she had to go back to the village, Àkànmú had told her in the middle of the night. “How
can I continue to come close to you…” he had barked at her just like ilèrikà, the village
hunter’s dog, “…if you cannot give birth afterall.”
“You have to remember…” Àlàrí had wept back at him that night “…that I do not make
children, Olódùmarè does.”

“Ehn…Ehn!” he had screamed, “you are right, it is not only that you do not make
children” he had spat at her, following it with a slap across the face, “ it is actually that
you cannot make a child” he had declared. “This night you are leaving my house.”

Àlàrí had knelt and begged like she was used to doing for several moons but that night
Àkànmú did not budge. He drove Àlàrí out of his house into the waiting hands of the
night.

*****************************

It has been seven festivals now since Àlàrí got married and three moons now since she
has been back in her father’s house. Àlàrí came back home fatter than she left her
father’s house; yes, she was fatter in the face, the arms; she was fatter in the back and
in the buttocks. She was fatter in the chest and fatter in the legs; Àlàrí never for a day
got fatter in the belly in Àkànmú’s house; that was why she had to come back to the
village.

It’s been three moons now since Àlàrí came back to the village; it has been three moons
now since Àkànmú drove her away from the city like the child of a slave; it has been
three moons now since Àlàrí got pregnant. Yes, Àlàrí is pregnant, whether for Àkànmú,
or for the marauders, about whom she could tell no one back in the village for the
shame of it, she does not know.