Chinua Achebe - Sugar Baby

I caught the fierce expression on his face in the brief impulsive moment of that strange act; and I understood. I don’t mean the symbolism such as it was; that, to me, was pretty superficial and obvious. No. It was rather his deadly earnestness.

It lasted no more than a second or two. Just as long as it took to thrust his hand into his sugar bowl, grasp a handful and fling it out of the window, his squarish jaw set viciously. Then it crumbled again in the gentle solvent of a vague smile.

"Ah-ah; why?" asked one of the other two present, or perhaps both, taken aback and completely mystified.

"Only to show sugar that today I am greater than he, that the day has arrived when I can afford sugar and, if it pleases me, throw sugar away."

They roared with laughter then. Cletus joined them but laughing only moderately. Then I joined too, meagrely.

"You are a funny one, Cletus," said Umera, his huge trunk shaking with mirth and his eyes glistening.

Soon we were drinking Cletus’s tea and munching chunks of bread smeared thickly with margarine.

"Yes," said Umera’s friend whose name I didn’t catch, "may bullet crack sugar’s head!"

"Amen."

"One day soon it will be butter’s turn," said Umera. "Please excuse my bad habit." He had soaked a wedge of bread in his tea and carried it dripping into his enormous mouth, his head thrown back. "That’s how I learnt to eat bread," he contrived out of a full, soggy mouth. He tore another piece—quite small this time-- and threw it out of the window. "Go and meet sugar, and bullet crack both your heads!"

"Amen."

"Tell them about me and sugar, Mike, tell them," said Cletus to me.

Well, I said, there was nothing really to tell except that my friend Cletus had what our English friends would call a sweet tooth. But of course the English, a very moderate race, couldn’t possibly have a name for anything like Cletus and his complete denture of thirty-two sweet teeth.

It was an old joke of mine but Umera and his friend didn’t know it and so graced it with more uproarious laughter. Which was good because I didn’t want to tell any of the real stories Cletus was urging. And fortunately too Umera and his friend were bursting to tell more and more of their own hardship stories; for most of us had become in those days like a bunch of old hypochondriac women vying to recount the most lurid details of their own special infirmities.

And I found it all painfully, unbearably pathetic. I never possessed some people’s ability (Cletus’s, for example) to turn everything to good account. Pain lasts far longer on me than on him even when--- strange to say—it is his own pain. It wouldn’t have occurred to me, not in a thousand years, to enact that farcical celebration of victory over sugar. Simply watching it I felt bad. It was like a man standing you a drink because some fellow who once seduced his wife had just died, according to the morning’s papers. The drink would stick in my throat because my pity and my contempt would fall on the celebrator and my admiration on the gallant man who once so justly cuckolded him.

For Cletus sugar is not simply sugar. It is what makes life bearable. We lived and worked together in the last eighteen months of the war and so I was pretty close to his agony, to his many humiliating defeats. I never could understand nor fully sympathise with his addiction. As long as I had my one gari meal in the afternoon I neither asked for breakfast nor dinner. At first I had suffered from the lack of meat or fish and worst of all salt in the soup, but by the second year of the war I was noticing it less and less. But Cletus got more obsessively hinged to his sugar and tea every single day of deprivation, a dangerous case of an appetite growing on what it did not feed on. How he acquired such an alien taste in the first place I have not even bothered to investigate; it probably began like a lone cancer cell in lonely winter days and nights in the black belt of Ladbroke Grove.

Other tea and coffee drinkers, if they still found any to drink at all, had learnt long ago to take it black and bitter. Then some unrecognized genius had lightened their burden further with the discovery that the blackest coffee taken along with a piece of coconut lost a good deal of its bitter edge. And so a new, sustaining petit dejeuner was born. But Cletus like a doomed man must have the proper thing or else nothing at all. Did I say I lost patience with him? Well, sometimes. In more charitable and more thoughtful moments I felt sorrow for him rather than anger, for could one honestly say that an addiction to sugar was any more irrational than all the other many addictions going at the time? No. And it constituted no threat to anybody else, which you couldn’t say for all those others.

One day he came home in very high spirits. Someone recently returned from abroad had sold him two-dozen tablets of an artificial sweetener for three pounds. He went straight to the kitchen to boil water. Then he brought out from some secure corner of his bag his old tin of instant coffee—he no longer had tea—which had now gone solid. "Nothing wrong with it," he assured me again and again though I hadn’t even said a word. "It’s the humidity; the smell is quite unimpaired." He sniffed it and then broke off two small rocklike pieces with a knife and made two cups of coffee. Then he sat back with a song in his face.

I could barely stand the taste of the sweetener. It larded every sip with a lingering cloyingness and siphoned unsuspected wells of saliva into my mouth. We drank in silence. Then suddenly Cletus jumped up and rushed outside to give way to a rasping paroxysm of vomiting. I stopped then trying to drink what was left in my cup.

I told him sorry when he came back in. He didn’t say a word. He went straight to his room and fetched a cup of water and went out again to rinse his mouth. After a few gargles he tipped the remaining water into a cupped hand and washed down his face. I said sorry again and he nodded.

Later he came where I sat. "Do you care for these?" He held out the little tablets with palpable disgust. Strange how even one attack of vomiting could so utterly reduce a man. "No, not really. But keep them. I’m sure we won’t need to go far to find friends who do."

He either was not listening or else he simply could not bring himself to live with the things another minute. He made his third trip outside and threw them into the same wild plot of weeds which had just received his vomit.

He must have worked himself to such a pitch of expectation over the wretched sugar substitute that he now plummeted headlong into near nervous collapse. For the next two days he kept to his bed, neither showing up in the morning at the Directorate where we worked nor going in the evening as was his custom to see his girl friend, Mercy.

On the third day I really lost patience with him and told him a few harsh things about fighting a war of survival, calling to my aid more or less the rhetoric for which his radio scripts were famous. "Fuck your war! Fuck your survival!" he shouted at me. All the same he got better soon afterwards and suitably shamefaced. Then I relented somewhat myself and began privately to make serious inquiries about sugar on his behalf.

Another friend at the Directorate told me about a certain Father Doherty who lived ten miles away and controlled Caritas relief stores for the entire district. A well-known and knowing Roman Catholic, my friend, he warned me that Father Doherty, though a good and generous man, was apt to be somewhat unpredictable and had become particularly so lately since a shrapnel hit him in the head at the airport.

Cletus and I made the journey on the following Saturday and found Father Doherty in a reasonably good mood for a man who had just spent six nights running at the airport unloading relief planes in pitch darkness under fairly constant air bombardment and getting home at seven every morning to sleep for two hours. He waved our praises aside saying he only did it on alternate weeks. "After tonight I can have my beauty sleep for seven whole days."