The Opposite House

5 roots people

One day in Habana, the day that would end in nochebuena

(the good night, Christmas Eve)

Yemaya, in love with Cuba, went walking in La Regla, repeating after the Columbus in her mind’s eye, ‘This is the most beautiful land I have ever seen.’

The day was hot but gentle; beneath its healing steam lay granite, decrepit wood, rocks gloved in blanched sand. The harbour water caught sunlight in layered hoops of petrol-coloured dirt and tried to keep its clarity secret, but the divers told. Small, earth-brown boys kept bobbing up, their backbones hacking out of their skin, hair plastered to their heads, coin pouches around their waists rattling as they added new handfuls of slick bronze to their store.

Aya gathered up her seven skirts — blue lacing silver lacing more blue — and raced herself. She ran past irregularly spaced palm trees, looming with their tops drying out. She ran past a woman clothed in a swarm of toddlers; the woman cooked corncobs on a charcoal-heated griddle with her skirt hitched up around her knees. With her other hand, she kept her children from cooking themselves on her pan.

Yemaya didn’t even stop

(though she felt a pull and a fuzzy, bite-sized happiness like a kiss on the nape of her neck)

at the small household shrine, strung and nailed to a house’s doorway, that was meant for her. Ignored, Our Lady of Regla pouted sweet and pink from a ribboned cage of sea lavender and long-funnelled trout lilies, and cowrie shells with fluted mouths.

Aya stopped at the watchmaker’s parlour — here, a man with hair dreadlocked like a powerful man, like a babalawo, made watches and clocks, squinted over tiny, intricate mechanisms with pincers and thin magnets and hammers the size of Aya’s little finger. His clocks were not ordinary, but he sold them at carelessly cheap prices out of his living room. This watchmaker, he spoke exactly like a Cuban — but he said he was not Cuban.

Yemaya saw that, amongst old, knotted mahogany clocks with glazed faces, new clocks peeped out. Their faces were plain, mounted on block-like bases with hands of beaten brass that drove the minutes forward on their glint. Anyone who stood too close to see the time on one of these clocks felt a wafer-thin breeze from elsewhere, a colder place, a higher place. The watchmaker, a scattering of sawdust in his hair, waited for her at the counter with his fingers folded over some secret in his palm.

‘Hold out your hand,’ he said, smiling. He looked at her as if he thought her beautiful, and this was rare, and this made Yemaya trust him. She held out both her hands, cupping them to carry away sweetness, and he chided her: ‘Greedy. One hand is enough.’

His gift was a loose knot of seeds. They looked like oval woodchips, but something green slept inside them. She wondered what a drop of her vanilla would do to them, and stowed them thoughtfully in the pocket of her top skirt before she remembered to say thank you.

Her watchmaker said, ‘One day, not now, they’ll grow for you, and show you what it is that you most desire. Remember, won’t you?’

She nodded, and he told her then that he was going home. ‘But you must keep those seeds safe. Another time, many years ago, I gave some seeds such as these to a woman as a gift. What this woman most wanted was children, but she was barren. When she spoke of children, I saw how much of her life these dream children had already taken. She knew so much about them, and so little about anything else. She had decided she wanted two boys and a gentle girl, the two boys to take care of the girl and keep each other company. And they would all love each other. I had some of these seeds, and —’

‘Where did you get them from?’ Aya asked, eagerly.

With a wounded stare, the watchmaker said simply, ‘They are mine.’

She raised her hand in apology. He continued: ‘I told her to plant and water them, and to wait and see. She came back to me one month later, shaking. “Those seeds,” the woman said, “are growing.”

‘I said, “Of course.” Her face –

‘She said, “Children. Children are growing from the seeds.”

‘I said, “Of course.” Then I asked her, because she wanted me to ask, what kind of children. But she shook her head. She just shook her head. She couldn’t explain. How many are there? Three. Just as many as she’d wanted. I saw such fear in her. . she asked me what to do, then answered herself. She would leave them buried, her children; maybe that way they would die before they could properly draw breath. A cruel thing — I told her so. But she kept saying, “It is better this way. It is better this way.” ’

The watchmaker stopped speaking — Aya saw that he was lost. She pressed his hand.

‘What kind of children are better left buried?’ he asked her.

She tried to guess the end of his tale, the moral of it. ‘Did you dig the children up?’

He did not.

‘Did she take pity?’

‘She dug them up in their ninth month, and they fled her. They must have known that she never wanted them to draw breath. Children know, and when they know. . it is terrible.’

‘They fled her? How do you know?’

The watchmaker gagged, gaped, put his hand over his mouth, then seemed to recover himself and pretended to wipe dust from his face. ‘I saw them.’

Aya’s vanilla didn’t make the watchmaker’s seeds grow, and neither did plain water. When she dug up the seeds and pocketed them, she wondered whether it was because she didn’t yet know what she wanted.

Dominique and I were good friends until we lost interest in each other. We had only really been friends because she lived two doors away. Then she moved, and nothing. Chabella was disappointed in us both: ‘You’re black girls, as good as sisters!’

Chabella made me phone Dominique a couple of times. I wasn’t allowed to mention that I had phoned against my will. Dominique phoned me a couple of times as well. It was excruciating for us both, and then we were allowed to stop. Even after I stopped, it was awkward for a little bit.

Dominique was in my class from primary school right up until we left sixth form for university. Either I had never looked at her properly, or her face receded beneath the swathes of her hair until I forgot it. Dominique is from Trinidad and she had beautiful hair, soft and thick, which her mother, like mine, banned her from straightening and helped her comb out into a fan. People teased her about it all the time and called her ‘picky head’. Dominique took the name calmly, without offering any insults of her own, which I couldn’t understand. But then some people give off a strange sense of preoccupation, as if there is something in their lives so important to them that they have to keep it silent, and close. And to keep this thing close, they make sacrifices.

Of course, Mami loved Dominique’s hair. And she loved Dominique, who ate everything Mami served at dinner with genuine relish. Dominique tried to teach me some of her sunny, rolling patois. I couldn’t pick it up, but I offered to teach her Spanish. She said, ‘No thanks.’

Dominique’s mum, Cedelka, was a cleaner; she became good friends with Chabella, and her stories about the everyday filthiness of the people she cleaned for racked Mami with guilt. Their conversations always ended with Cedelka assuring Chabella that Chabella worked just as hard as she did, taking care of her family and doing ‘all that language stuff’, and Chabella rhapsodising on Cedelka’s natural wisdom.

Cedelka wore dreadlocks and she was all soulful eyes and beautiful lips. When I played or ate dinner at Dominique’s, or when Cedelka came to collect Dominique from my house, she would reveal an instinct for freezing gracefully, a way of turning her face to the light when she stepped outside.

I always knew when Chabella had been talking to Dominique’s mum because she would start to mutter, ‘I don’t work hard enough, I’m not useful, all this paper and scribbling is making me soft.’ Chabella would take out her sponges and scrubbers and bleach and get on her hands and knees to clean the kitchen and bathroom from corner to corner. Papi didn’t like that. He especially hated it if I helped her, which I did to stop her from crying. ‘I don’t want to see my wife scrubbing away like that,’ he would say. ‘I write textbooks! Chabella, use a mop, or we’ll get a cleaner. And please, my daughter is not your assistant. Maja, go and have a bath and read a book or something.’

‘Get a cleaner! And you just equated this hypothetical cleaning woman with a mop!’ Chabella’s eyes filled with tears.

Papi kissed her, sweat and soap suds and all. ‘I was joking. Forget it.’

He didn’t know that mostly the cleaning was fun once we’d started; it was only the idea of it that made me sigh and drag my feet. We were never very thorough and it was more like play-acting, down on the floor with soapy rags and cleaner rags on our heads as we mimed to The Supremes and The Drifters and Melanie Safka’s ‘Brand New Key’.

Cedelka said to me, half-jokingly, ‘Please don’t try and teach my daughter Spanish! Black people ain’t meant to speak Spanish!’

‘Black people ain’t meant to speak English, neither, then. Or French Creole,’ I said, using exactly the same tone.

Cedelka swatted at my head. ‘You must get that big brain from your big-brain parents.’

I remembered what Cedelka said when I was in Year 9, when the most popular girls in my and Amy Eleni’s form were those with African parents; girls with perfectly straightened hair and mellow gospel voices that changed the sound of the sung school Mass; girls who had (or pretended to have) Igbo, Ewe, Yoruba, Chiga, Ganda, Swahili. They built a kind of slang that was composed of slightly anglicised words borrowed from their pool of languages. The code sounded impossibly cool if you had the right turn of the tongue for it, which I didn’t, although some of the white girls did. Lucy, who started up the slang, was Ugandan; she had a pretty heart-shaped face and a rabidly intent method of marking her netball opponent.

At school a lot of the other girls brought flags out on their countries’ independence days. With permission from the teachers, they tied them around their upper arms or waists and tied their hair up with ribbons in their flags’ colours. On Nigerian Independence Day, one girl did a special assembly on her country and passed around an overwhelming amount of fried Nigerian snacks. Amy Eleni and I were at the back. Amy Eleni put her hand up and said, ‘Can I just ask you what you think of this idea: if your parents taught you to be so proud of Nigeria, how come they’re over here?’

The girl stammered and fiddled with her tie-dyed head wrap. People started hissing disagreement with Amy Eleni. Amy Eleni and I hissed back. Isn’t living in your country the best way to show that you think it worthy of love? You choose to live in a country because there’s something there that makes it better than anywhere else. You set your daily life down regardless of the restrictive conditions. It’s the same sort of thing Clarence talks about in True Romance — he says real love is remaining loyal when it’s easier, even excusable, not to.

The talk about Nigerian independence continued. Amy Eleni sighed and wrote a long note in small letters on her hand. The note was so long that she had to take my hand to write on, too, and we could only read her note to me by placing our biro-splotched palms alongside each other. The note said:

You know what, if you want to talk about your original country, if you want to be serious about it, fine. But you don’t need to pretend that you love the place. People need to stop using love of some country that they don’t live in as an excuse for their inability to shut up about it.

We kept the note on our hands all day, smiling enigmatically and turning our hands palms-down when other girls wheedled, ‘Let me see.’

Dominique was at home sick the day Lucy came up to me at registration, peeped at me through heavy lashes and said, ‘You know, a lot of the others have been saying that out of you and Dominique, we like you better. You’re all right. You’re roots.’

I must have seemed stupid to her. I said, ‘Huh?’ I thought a black girl was a black girl. Why did it come down to a choice between me and Dominique, and not any of the other girls? Then I got it; we were both black without coming from the right place. We were the slave girls from Trinidad and Cuba; not supposed to speak Spanish, not supposed to speak English either. I wanted to curse Lucy Cuban-style, but I was afraid she’d understand; she was predicted an A star for GCSE Spanish.

Tonight I am singing a set at a café whose poetry-night theme is ‘Solitude’. They’ve asked me to start with my three least-favourite songs: ‘In my Solitude’, ‘Black Coffee’ and ‘Misty Blue’. When Michael from the band called to tell me about it last week, he anticipated my response, chanting ‘Oh, whine, whine, whine,’ along with me. ‘Don’t worry about it — next week it’s Ronnie Scott’s, with our own songs. .’

I hastily assemble my things so that they’re in the general vicinity of the full-length bedroom mirror — make-up bag, a selection of black stiletto heels, armfuls of dresses on hangers, hair tongs tangled in their own plug lead, sheer tights that are to the best of my knowledge unladdered. Aaron’s side of our dresser is analytically tidy: a small city of glass-bottled gift colognes and sable-backed hairbrushes, mostly unused, alongside a depleted bundle of the tough, dried-wood chewing sticks he swears by — my teeth ache just looking at them. The only things on his bedside table are a water glass and a photograph of him and his best friend, aged ten. In the picture Geoffrey is cola-dark, with astonishing, vine-like sideburns. Aaron is defiantly pale and chubby-cheeked; his hair is slicked into some attempt at a Jheri curl. They both have carelessly gappy smiles; they stand together in a heaving Accra sidestreet swept with umber dust, against a battered blue backdrop that says ‘PepsiCo’.

I have yet to meet Geoffrey, who still lives in Accra. But the fact that Aaron always refers to him as ‘Geoffrey’, never ‘Geoff’ or ‘G’, makes me think of him as diffident and kind and slightly stuffy. A boy who felt the pressure of being a cabinet minister’s son and tried his best to behave himself, growing up into the kind of man who rolls his English around in his mouth as plummily as he can.

I strip to my underwear and study myself in the mirror; it is a bronzed sorrel woman with a net of curly hair who looks back, and she does not look Jamaican or Ghanaian or Kenyan or Sudanese — the only firm thing that is sure is that she is black. Mami says only Cubans look like Cubans; put three Cuban girls together — white, black Latina, whatever — and you just see it. It is as if you could take away my colouring and I would be a white Cubana — a white Cubana not being, after all, particularly white.

My eyes are long rather than wide, meagrely lashed and slanted unhurriedly upwards at their corners. In my blood is a bright chain of transfusion; Spaniards, West Africans, indigenous Cubans, even the Turkos — the Cuban Lebanese. My shape is that of a slightly distorted heavy pear; slender, Chabella-like shoulders and a gently rising collarbone cast lines that soften and swell past a high waist to what Amy and I refer to as ‘loot in the boot’ — hips that escape spread fingerspans — then the line returns.

I prod my thigh and, standing on one leg, run my hand down my calf. I sink to the floor, sink to the middle of this slew of things that are supposed to tease out, bejewel, enhance, improve on what I have. I coat my hands with cocoa butter and slowly, slowly start to reconcile myself with my skin, inch by inch. I am scared to touch my stomach, not because it is tender, but because it has begun to swell beyond the point where it can be comfortably rubbed with one hand. If I cup it with both hands the bump might rise to the space I allow it.

When Amy Eleni calls I am fiddling, trying to adjust the V-neck of my black dress so that it falls away from my shoulders and skims the arms left bare by my sleeveless polo neck.

‘Hey, Maja. I’m coming to hear you sing tonight after all,’ she says.

‘Good. How’s Jenny?’

‘I don’t know; we broke up.’

‘Oh?’

‘That’s all you’re getting on the phone. What of Aaron?’

‘He’s. . tired a lot, and out a lot.’

‘Can I place the first bet on when he’s going to pack the trainee-doctor thing in?’

‘Come on, Amy Eleni.’

‘No, you come on. It’s not like he needs to work. His dad is like, ker-ching.’

Before I can object, she asks, ‘What’s tonight’s theme?’

‘Of make-up, or the café?’

‘Both —’

I tell her: make-up, purple; café, solitude.

‘Solitude?’

Amy Eleni teaches A-level English Language and Literature; she has nothing but murder in her heart for amateur poets. She keeps telling me that most of them don’t read anyone’s poetry but their own, and that’s why they always think they’re doing something new, and why it’s always so appallingly not. I keep telling her that the people in her class are seventeen and eighteen and that she should give them a break. I remind her of her own amateur poetry at seventeen and eighteen and am told ‘Shut up! My poetry was never amateur!’

I hold my tights up to the light. They are laddered after all, and I have to hang up and look for another pair. Mami slips into the room with good-luck kisses for me and an opalescent white gardenia on a coiled green stalk. Before I can thank her she starts jabbing at my polo neck:

‘What is this? Why are you wearing this? That’s such a lovely dress, and you’re spoiling it —’

I am just trying to protect my throat. Before I realise what I’m doing I have taken her hands and pushed them back at her hard, too hard; she stumbles and laughs, astonished. I catch myself and take the flower from her.

‘Chabella,’ I say, ‘I can’t wear this. .’

Mami throws up her hands. ‘Your brother chose it. I told him it was ugly.’

Tomás, a pencil behind his ear, comes to look at me. ‘What’s wrong with it? Billie Holiday used to wear one, didn’t she? I thought you liked her? Are you off her now?’

I try to put the corsage box back into Mami’s hand, but she skips away, giggling.

‘It’s just that, you know, she’s. . I can’t explain. She’s. . well, it’s just not right to wear her flower. And this is not a big-deal occasion. Even if it was a big-deal occasion, it still wouldn’t be right to wear her flower.’

Tomás rolls his eyes and withdraws. Mami stamps her foot. ‘Am I a bad mother?’ she demands.

‘Chabella.’

‘I said, am I a bad mother? Didn’t I always tell you how beautiful you are and what a good singer you are? Who is Billie Holiday, anyway?’

‘Mami! She’s —’

‘Yes, I know. Anyway, you’re better at singing than she is. She just growls. And you’re better looking, too, even if you spoil your dresses with strange tops. So put that flower on.’

I turn to the mirror and comb my hair into an upsweep so that I can clasp it, but Chabella dives at me with the gardenia and fixes it at the back of my head with a hairclip. She puts her hands on my shoulders, her face a little behind mine, and looks at us in the mirror. We smile.

‘When are you going to make up with Papi?’ I ask. I have to ask while her gaze is on me.

‘Is my altar back yet?’ she asks. It is not a rhetorical question; she is not being stubborn, she looks so hopeful. And that’s worse. I close my eyes because I had not expected to be taken by this feeling of steam, angry like a new player in a game where someone has suddenly changed the rules.

The wood-panelled café is low-lit and arranged like a fifties speakeasy, with tables ranged in concentric circles around a makeshift stage with a microphone stand. Chabella’s pretty hair is driven back with minuscule black pins so that it tickles her shoulders from high up, like a long feather. She clasps her hands and looks around, enraptured.

‘They’ll have a spotlight on you, and you’ll look like a princess, except for that purple lipstick,’ she tells me.

Having blown Amy Eleni kisses and pointed out to Chabella those seats that I consider safe for her to sit in, I am the last of our band to arrive in the box room behind the café. Michael is there, tense as ever, waiting with one arm curled around his propped-up saxophone, drinking water in tight swallows that don’t even wet his lips. When he sees me, he nods and smiles, but I know he’s only pleased to see me because now we can start our sound check. Maxwell, dreadlocks swaying in the rush of their own weight, body bumps me, and Sophie, our tall, prettily spoken cellist, gracefully offers her cheek to be kissed. She is from Senegal, and she is, just as Maxwell (who has been trying to ask her out for six months) says, sexy like chocolate.

When we go out to warm up on the stage I am happier than I thought I’d be, my foot tapping as Maxwell’s taps, but it’s always that way when I allow the song to come to me without question. Maxwell’s face is serene as he drums, never airless, never strained. He beats time for himself and Sophie — and for Michael, who sways as his fingers ride his saxophone’s polished stops. They are letting me take my own time, letting me fall in after them, but they know that I’m with them.

Really it’s Michael’s band; he cares most, he’s the one who calls for all-day rehearsals, he’s the one who helps us to understand where we’ve gone wrong when we fail to move together. I joined the band mainly because, after graduating, everyone became anxious that I should find something to do. Papi handed me weekly sheaves of job listings and told me to ‘start my life’. Tomás said, ‘It’s cool that you’re home, but you’re disturbing my growth.’ I kept beating him at Nintendo; he didn’t like it, I knew. Chabella found me a post as an assistant librarian — one of her friends ran the local library. That roused me in a way that Papi and Tomás had been unable to. I screamed at Mami, ‘A books job! Chabella, are you mad?’

Amy Eleni came by with some cassettes for me; Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan. With no real interest in the answer, I asked her how her teacher training was going. With no real interest in answering, Amy Eleni shrugged and said, ‘It’s going.’ I wanted to defer the future indefinitely, and I sort of wished that Amy Eleni would too. But I listened to the cassettes. And I started singing in a way that I hadn’t before, a kind of singing that made Mami and Tomás say, ‘Waaah, didn’t know you could do that!’ though Papi said nothing.

I sang to Amy Eleni. She didn’t say ‘Waaah’, but she came back with a bunch of ads put out by instrumental groups who wanted singers. I auditioned for Michael’s because his ad was the shortest and the least demanding. He wanted someone to do standards, no particular look or age, and he’d added ‘No divas’.

Michael didn’t seem impressed at any point during the audition, but I thought maybe he’d taken me on because he did an internal ‘Waaah’ at my voice. When we were better friends he told me I was the only one who’d showed up for his auditions. He said, ‘I suppose I offended all the divas.’

Standing discreetly near the back, the café’s owner watches us with her fingers in her mouth — her eyes are boiling-water blue and she looks as if she might snap if she’s not hearing good sounds. But I’m not ready to try my voice yet; we just test the microphones for static, and I follow the pieced strands of song that Maxwell and Sophie and Michael carelessly let swirl.

Amy Eleni, now contemplatively smoking a cigarette in a silvered holder, has seized Mami and they’re both sitting behind glasses of Bacardi and Coke

(Mami smiles a small and unforgiving smile if I ever refer to the mixture as a ‘Cuba Libre’)

their backs are to the other seats, which are filling with sprawled legs and talk. They’re sitting at the table that falls directly under my gaze. Amy Eleni is wearing purple-tinted shades. Chabella waves and smiles at me; I shake my head sorrowfully at Chabella because this is not one of the tables I told her she could sit at. Amy Eleni is wearing a black hat identical to mine over her smooth, shiny blonde bob. She is swathed from top to toe in black. She is wearing red stilettos, and jiggling her feet with impatience under the table.

I am certain that Amy Eleni’s students fear her. It’s not just that her expression constantly suggests that she’s about to say something extremely harsh. She wears mirrored sunglasses indoors as often as she can get away with it, walks with her shoulders, and snaps her fingers when things aren’t happening fast enough for her. But she doesn’t look like a woman at all; she has all the angular, callous, radiant and uncompromising beauty of a girl who has only just grown into her body and barely has an understanding of what has happened. Her eyes are bright and keen and worrying.

When we were seventeen, she told me that she was gay. I was nonplussed; I kept expecting her to say ‘jokes’. I thought she hadn’t had boyfriends and never confessed to crushes because she had yet to meet a boy brave enough to take her on. I asked her if she was sure, because I hadn’t noticed any struggle inside her, any extra-special looks levelled at girls, or any of the things that lesbians were supposed to do. Amy Eleni was resolutely non-tactile — in our school, friendship was intricately tied in with touch; girls pinged each other’s bra straps and poked each other’s bellies and crowed ‘puppy fat!’, and flicked their skinnier friends in the taut bands between their ribs. That was affection. Amy Eleni dispensed winks and air-kisses. That was distance.

I pointed out Amy Eleni’s no-touching thing as one of the factors that made her not gay. She winced, laughed. ‘It just means that I don’t feel like running around grabbing people. It just means I’m sane,’ she said.

When I told Chabella, she left her wooden spoon in the stew she was stirring, closed her eyes tight and asked me in a near whisper, ‘Are you gay as well?’

‘I don’t think so, Chabella.’

‘All right, because don’t think I don’t know that you’ve been kissing as many boys as you can.’

I half-heartedly denied that, but Mami waved me off.

‘I am very sorry to hear that Amy Eleni is gay. Her life will be harder than yours, you know.’

Chabella gave me a topsy-turvy stone amulet on a piece of clean rope and told me to give it to Amy Eleni. I did, and Amy Eleni said, coldly, ‘What is this, something to make me straight?’

I told her no. That wasn’t Mami’s style.

‘You’re not going to ask me who my first crush was?’ Amy Eleni asked me. She was playing with Chabella’s amulet. I hastily said, ‘No, no.’ Amy Eleni looked at me then, with a soft, auroral reproach that made my heart flip over and made me ashamed of myself and my arrogance and made me want to promise her something that I couldn’t and made me think that I’d gone down in her estimation — all these things at once.

Mami had not always liked Amy Eleni; when she became the second girl after Dominique that I bothered to bring home for dinner, Mami was tense that entire first evening. The table was quiet whenever Amy Eleni lifted her fork to her mouth, and Chabella leant forward a little, as if she wanted to snatch the food out of Amy Eleni’s jaws, as if she didn’t think Amy Eleni should ever know what a good Cuban stew tasted like. Amy Eleni suspected as much, and to me she seemed more polite than I had ever seen her. Throughout the meal she said ‘Delicious’ in varying tones and volumes. With a grin that admitted that she would listen but not understand, Amy Eleni asked Papi about his work, and she told Tomás all that she could remember about the glory days of WWF wrestling. But when Amy Eleni went home, Chabella stopped me as I was going to bed and said sorrowfully, ‘You’ll learn that the white girl is never your friend. She works to a different system. She only pretends to understand.’

I said, ‘And what about Brigitte?’

Mami said, ‘Brigitte was my teacher. You know that.’

The café is full now; shadow-spotted faces encircle me. I close my eyes, and my Cuba comes, and the band is with me and then it lets me go and I am free.

One morning Mami came downstairs wrapped in nothing but a cloth of preternatural white, with strands of her hair swimming around her face, strands of her hair tied with little flags of white cloth. Strips of soft skin showed here and there, where the cloth gaped and made mouths around her shoulder blades, parted in protest at being trussed so tight around her breasts. Because she was pregnant with Tomás, Tomás became part of the outfit too: it was he that made the cloth coast out in front of her and around her; it was he that made the white flow. Papi got up and ran, actually ran, for a camera. Chabella watched him go, and as Papi passed her he caught her hand and twirled her like a giggling top.

Me, I looked up from my Saturday-morning cartoons and I gaped. I was eight; if I had been older I would have been able to admire Mami. I would have been able to apprehend Mami’s white sheet thing as a ‘look’, the way people assess high-fashion catwalks and shut down their instinct to free so they don’t feel any more how terrifying and elemental the shapes and colours are, the fact that people are walking around with cones on their heads and jewellery like chainmail, rouged violently right up to their foreheads, looking like the devil.

Anyway, my Mami looked wild, wilder than animals. She was not made to live in a house or even on the plains, but in the atmosphere. Chabella turned off the TV; I didn’t object.

‘I used to take classes in folk dance,’ she said, slipping a cassette into the sound system. She rewound it, took it out, fiddled with it, turned it over.

‘Your Abuelo Damason used to complain because they were expensive. But then the dance classes stopped with the Revolution because they were un-Cuban; they were too African. And it’s true; I suppose El Jefe was right to be nervous that something was going on with Santeria. Something is going on. Those West Africans brought another country in with them, a whole other country in their heads. After dance classes stopped, you could only get to see people dance out apataki if you knew the roots people, the ones who didn’t have any money, like dockworkers. They wouldn’t teach me anything. Maybe they knew something about me that I didn’t. It is hard to learn how to be black when people don’t let you.’

Mami pressed ‘play’.

A drumbeat jumped up, collided with another one, and the two chased each other around and around — rhythm. Chabella laughed, gasped, held her belly against Tomás’s kick. ‘He likes that,’ she said, proud. Both of us were shaking our shoulders to the rhythm. Even Papi was stamping as he steadily caught Chabella on film — click, click, click. Inside my head a group of drummers played, swaying in unison with a flourish of hands. Their drums were in their laps, small but with tough heads. The drum talk was threaded through with fast, loud bembe singing, Yoruba patched up with Spanish. I couldn’t understand a word, but I understood that it was a story, and that the way Mami began to dance, she knew which story. Chabella was awkward at first, watching her step, trying to make a pattern, pulling faces as she touched the ground flat-footed and clumsy under the weight of Tomás. But then I saw the song come through her. It came because she didn’t give up. The drums came like

kata-kata-ka

kata-kata-ka

KA-TA

kata-kata-ka

kata-kata-ka

KA-TA

Mami became Yemaya Saramagua, a sure, slow swell in her arms and her hips like water after a long thirst, her arms calling down rain, her hands making secret signs, snatching hearts.

Kata-kata-ka

Kata-kata-ka

KA-TA

Water is an unhappy eye. Alone it lives, wishing it were blind. Look into water; it will look back at you, and it will tremble. Yemaya Saramagua is her father’s eye; she watches the earth for him. Her own eyes, though, are shy. Orisha of water, she could drown the world in a flood if she wanted to, but she has never been in love.

Kata-kata-ka

Oh, now she’s in love!

Kata-kata-ka

She’s in love with Ogun Arere; iron Aguanilli, handsome, strong, so cold that even in the midst of the flame he shrugs his shoulders. She shouldn’t love him, but she can’t help it. Come, come, Ogun Arere, come to your true love. But Ogun rejects her. Still she comes back. He would have to build a mighty dam to keep her love away.

KA-TA

the story went on. Mami stopped knowing that we were even there. Very quietly, Papi sat down.

Once the story had danced itself out, I waited for the goddess to be gone. Then, behind her back, I clapped until my hands hurt. Papi wolf-whistled. I felt winded. It was infinitely better than cartoons.

Mami didn’t dance out apataki again, which made me think that it must have been some kind of Tomás-related thing, like a craving.

Aya’s family is large. Each member of Aya’s family has aspects, and those aspects have aspects. That is why, with only a little pain, the family could afford to separate when there was great need for them to do so. They had to scatter. When it happened, it was not so bad for Aya, as she did not love her aspects:

Yemaya Ataramagwa was never still for a minute; light jumped in her hair and chased her so that she was confusing to look at. And she loved the Ogun river too well, annoying Aya by insisting every day that they two go to play there.

Yemaya Achabba was as cold and limp and quiet as a fish-scale coat.

Yemaya Oqqutte made eyes at men, and swung her hips lazily; her walk was a trail of sleepy invitation. The men and boys who came to her were the ones who did not know that they wanted to die.

Aya said goodbye to her aspects cheerfully, though they wept and said, ‘Do not forget us, Yemaya Saramagua.’

Besides, Aya’s family is a wild family. They do not need to speak to each other or eat together to know that they are family. They strike each other, curse each other, take fifty-year holidays, but, always, they love.

When Aya’s family came into Cuba on a ship, they brought along with them three young ones from a Dahomey branch of the family who got confused and thought they were invited. They weren’t invited, but it was too late. The Dahomeians had to stick with Aya’s family, and so they discovered their Cuba in the dark, hidden in bigger emergencies, cries of warning as patrol ships tried to intercept the cargo. On arrival, communications arrived from the others; word from Haiti, from Brazil, from Jamaica, from America. Even from England there were some whispers, and then all the talk stopped. The conversations had become too strange. The family’s aspects abroad had changed. It was hard to know what the difference was, but it was there. There were secrets.

When Papa left the Cuba family, he left absentmindedly, shunting a toothpick around his gums, leaving a partly spoken sentence in the air behind him. When he shut the door on his way out that day, the house trembled from roof to basement. Aya knew that Papa wasn’t coming back, not to that house. Aya’s Mama knew it and so did all of Aya’s uncles and aunts.

Mama’s friend Echun, with his matted hair and his red and yellow striped cap, he was disgusted at being mistaken by the Spanish for a harmless baby. The Holy Child of Atocha was rosy-cheeked and dimpled and couldn’t drink as much palm wine and aguardiente as Echun would have liked. Echun went to Mama in her room, and all the flames wavering in the eyeholes of her masks shrank for fear of mischief being made upon them. When Echun wanted to shout, he stood up very straight and half closed his eyes. The first thing he asked Aya’s Mama was: ‘Why am I now called Elegua?’ Mama had no answer.

Echun asked, ‘And why have those three jokers from Dahomey started to speak Spanish? Are they Spanish? Are they Cuban? I don’t want to see those chattering Dahomeians. Same faces, different talk — it smells bad to me. If I could, I would kill them. At least that would be a change.’

Mama said only, ‘Echun. You always say more than you mean.’

Echun embraced her before he uncorked a bottle of palm wine and swaggered out of the door. He went down to meet his friend Anansi, a recent acquaintance, a stick-man with a pot belly and a beady-eyed grin. Anansi kept forgetting and calling Echun ‘Elegua’, but that was all right as long as they were leaving.

Aya’s Uncle Iku laughed and clapped his hands to hear that Echun was gone — he had little love for Echun. Once, for a joke, Echun had cut Iku up and scattered him all over the universe. When Mama told Aya about this, Aya said, ‘Mama, are you lying?’

Her Mama would only say, ‘Yeye, what followed was the most important treasure hunt ever.’

Ochun was the most beautiful of Aya’s family, the one with the gentlest voice. She suffered secret agonies over the drab garb that her counterpart, Our Lady of Mercy, wore in portraits. Strangenesses came to Ochun: it seemed to her that Our Lady of Mercy came into her bedroom as the night breeze flapped her muslin curtains, and tried to throttle her while she slept. Ochun told no one of this. But she left the Regla house soon after Echun did, taking nothing but the short bubi she stood up in and the five bright silk scarves that criss-crossed her waist.

And the three Dahomeians, finding that no one would speak to them and that everyone disdained them, spoke amongst themselves in Spanish until they painstakingly relearned Yoruba. They were two males and a female, and there were no more of their kind since they came from a small, proud land whose borders were smudged away by time’s white thumb. The Dahomeians had no aspects abroad. They had learnt Spanish because they could not afford to forget or to stop speaking, but no one could see that. No one in Aya’s family, not even gentle Mama, remembered to pity the Dahomey folk. This the Dahomeians could not forgive. Once they had relearned Yoruba to their satisfaction, they left the house too.

Nobody asked after the Dahomey folk, though the family searched high and low for Ochun who did not normally leave home just like that.

Then, one night, it happened to Aya too. She tried to lie down and sleep there, in her father’s house, but she couldn’t lie down.

Midnight boomeranged ten thousand times in the space of a second, and night slammed shut to stop day from even beginning to point out a path to the sky’s rim.

Ensoulment is never imagined as the cold terror that it is.

Snuffling, Aya packed before she knew that she’d done it.

She fled to be born. She fled to be native, to start somewhere, to grow in that same somewhere, to die there. She didn’t know just then that she wasn’t quickening towards home, but trusting home to find her.

Only Aya was to find the three Dahomeians. Only Aya was to discover what had become of Ochun and Echun. She found Ochun with her waistful of silk scraps, Echun with a guarded smile and drawers full of stubborn prayers. But by the time Aya found the Dahomeians, and by the time she found Ochun and Echun, she could not recognise them, and she did not know them by name. That is what aspects are like; they change.