Aminatta Forna - The Memory of Love

Did she love me? I don’t think so. Did it matter? Not at the beginning. I thought by then Saffia had moved beyond ideas of love.

But I am a jealous man. I’d been jealous of my younger brother. Not so much for the fact of my mother’s love for him. It was his joy I envied, I suppose, the very quality that made people respond to him as they did. He was an absurdly happy child, and I could never fathom why. I’d been jealous of Julius, for possessing Saffia. I’d even grown jealous of Kekura and Yansaneh. Of the dancer. Of any man who came near her.

Imagine then, how it feels to find yourself in a love triangle with a ghost. Your rival, complacent in death, can never misstep or disappoint. Julius had left Saffia, yet in dying he had at the same time atoned for all his sins, for his colossal selfishness and grandiose stupidity. And if I sound like I am contradicting myself, I am not. I merely describe the contortions of which the human heart is so eminently capable.

A memory.

Making love to Saffia.

I touch her back. For a few seconds, until she turns to me, she is utterly immobile. I kiss her. I caress her. She places her arms around me. But there is something held back. Her touch on my skin is altogether too light, as if she hesitates to make contact. In the moonlight that slips into the room from behind the blind, I see her eyes are open.

I remember Vanessa, her whispered encouragement and breathy endearments. With Vanessa I could succeed in losing myself. Vanessa had mastered the tricks of coquetry and seduction and she applied them to my pleasure. Vanessa could be a generous lover to those lovers who were generous to her. I remember the simulated passion of the girl from the bar. At least she showed me some gratitude. She admired me. A man needs some encouragement. I even feel a little tenderness towards her.

It is not true. I feel no tenderness towards the girl. A girl whose livelihood depended upon feigned pleasure. The same is true of Vanessa. Vanessa merely occupies a higher league, her ambitions greater and hence her abilities all the more finely tuned.

The truth, if you want it, was that it had never bothered me. I did not expect a woman to enjoy the act in the same way as a man. There was a time when these women were good enough for me. The act of lovemaking as performed with them was good enough. But no longer.

I am not comparing what I had with them to what I have with Saffia. It is all a lie.

Instead I am remembering a day. A day when I drove from the university campus to a pink house on the hill with a truckload of chairs for a party that evening. I cannot halt the memory. It enters my brain like a thief, slipping like the moonlight behind the blind.

I am remembering entering through the open door into the darkened recesses of the house. I am remembering standing alone in that wide, open space listening to a sound. A sound coming from somewhere behind a closed bedroom door. I am remembering the coarse humour and laugh of the truck driver. And I am remembering the heat rising in my face.

And this, the truth now, is what I was thinking. That, until the truck driver laughed his filthy laugh, I had been unable to place the sounds we both heard. They were unfamiliar to me because I had no idea what a woman’s pleasure sounded like. And when I heard it for the first time that day it sounded nothing like Vanessa. And I knew. I knew what Vanessa had been doing to me and I was angry. I heard the visceral reality, wild, abandoned, unheeding and unmistakable.

That is what I remember as I lie with Saffia.

Despite myself, the memory arouses me. But Saffia does not feign her pleasure. The anger returns, it rises and keeps me going. I become frenzied.

And suddenly I am spent.

There came a time when I became jealous even of Saffia, what she kept inside and would not share. My jealousy — frustrated and unappeased — transformed into anger, a low, unworthy rage. I wished to break her. At mealtimes I would sit watching as she chewed her food, observing the working of her jaw, the way she swallowed. For a while it became a minor obsession. I watched her surreptitiously as she moved around the house, as she read a book, sewed or made a shopping list. If ever she happened to turn in my direction and see me looking, she would smile at me, that skin-deep smile with which I had become so familiar. And I would smile back. I watched her at other times, too. In the old days I might have contrived to bump into her in this place or that place, discover her plans and make sure they coincided with mine. Now I tried and failed to catch her out in small lies and evasions. I read meaning into even the most open statement. I looked through her papers and belongings. I didn’t know what I was looking for. I suspected her of nothing at all, except of not caring for me. Meanwhile she ran the house, planned my meals, attended to every domestic duty; she listened and replied to my conversation. That was what made it so terrible.

A Tuesday. I’d been working in my office all morning. The short walk to work was one of the conveniences of living on campus. Sometimes on my way between the library and the office I would walk the hundred yards up the hill. I could tell if Saffia was home by whether or not the car was parked outside. I might wander up there two or three times a day. Thanks to my recent promotion I was less and less often to be found among the archives. I still lectured and I still researched and wrote, but more of my work was now made up of administrative duties. I didn’t complain. It suited me, to be honest. Simple, measurable and on the whole achievable goals. I kept in touch with developments in the academic world; over the years I published several papers. One of them, on early monetary systems, achieved significant critical praise and contributed to my eventual professorship. Though all that was yet to come.

The car was in the drive. I was about to turn away when I saw Saffia leaving the house, her head wrapped in her distinctive orange scarf. She didn’t get into the car and drive off, as might be expected. Instead she set off in the opposite direction, across the campus. After a moment’s hesitation I followed her. I followed her all the way to the eastern gate of the campus. The entrance was little used for the simple reason it was a long walk from the main campus buildings. However, it enjoyed the advantage of leading straight into a parade of houses and shops, one of the old Creole villages. It was an alternative place to pick up transport. Saffia hailed a taxi, slipped inside and drove off.

At dinner that night I asked her about her day. I noticed she said nothing about her trip outside the campus.

The next day I called Babagaleh. He was with us by then. Sent from the village by the aunt, though altogether a much more amenable personality. Much easier for Babagaleh to go unnoticed. There was a risk involved in my request. He was one of Saffia’s people, his loyalty to me was untested. I forget how, but I made it sound as though it was all being done for Saffia’s sake. A hint that I was concerned for her health.

Babagaleh acquitted himself well. The first two days she did nothing more than pursue her regular errands. Babagaleh was, rather I should say is , a man of minimal speech. One of his better qualities is his ability to resist the urge towards embroidery and irrelevance people of his class so often possess and which they seem unshakeably to believe will be read as empiric evidence of their efforts. Babagaleh knew what was required of him. He watched, he waited, and when he had the information he delivered it to me plainly. In his own words, she had been to the house where she had once lived with Mr Julius.

Interesting he knew the detail, because as far as I knew he had never visited the house before.