When the next morning came around, the asking in the man’s eyes was so powerful that no one could look at him without offering, offering, offering.
The girl was lighter without her heart. She danced barefoot on the hot roads, and her feet were not cut by the stones or glass that studded her way. She spoke to the dead whenever they visited her. She tried to be kind, but they realised that they no longer had anything in common with her, and she realised it, too. So they went their separate ways. Other people became closed to the girl, and she enjoyed it this way — at the marketplace she handed over her bread and exacted the correct payment for it with a slight pressure of the hand and an uncaring smile. When the girl moved amongst people, she felt as if she were walking in a public place at an hour of the night when it was too dark to come out, or at noon, when it was too hot to be outside, and all the doors around were closed and barred. The girl felt this solitude to be an adventure. She moved away from her parents and went to live by herself on the ground floor of a tenement, even though this was frowned upon. When she was not working or wandering, she listened to the white noise inside her head, or she sat on her bare floor and listened to people arguing, romancing, accusing, the people all around her, she let their words fall into her body like coins into a bottomless well. Sometimes she thought about her heart, and wondered how it was doing without her. But the girl was never curious enough to go and find out.
Except once, when she almost went back to see.
Except once, when she woke up one morning convinced that she was in love. All over her, her skin felt softer even than her breath, and her eyes felt wider, clearer, dreamy, lashed and lidded with an unknown stuff that had drawn a man in. For a week, she washed and dried and rubbed cream into her body with a special, happy care, and she realised that she was preparing her body for caresses. She found a taste for cold things that released their sweetness slowly — ice cream that slid down her throat before she could taste it, tinned peaches in chill syrup.
But there was no heart there in her chest.
When the girl remembered this, she forced herself to eat a bite of mashed plantain, and the first swallow was hard. But after that, life stepped straight again.
The man’s new mother told him, “That heart, that heart in the shrine, it’s the heart that we must take for my collection.” And then the art collection, the beautiful woman, the new mother’s obsession, would be complete. “If only we can locate the heart and take it with us,” the man’s new mother said, watching her new son closely.
The heart had told him, it had called to him, Come. Take from me, I am inexhaustible.
But the man said nothing.
“I know that you know where that heart is,” the man’s new mother said, and she bared teeth as sharp as daggers. “You are a seeker, you find things. Bring it to me.”
The man told his new mother to give him five days. He ground valerian root into her tea to make her sleep, and the new mother slept with a beauty like rose and earth, and her bitterness was a weed whose roots were scourged by her sleep, and so her bitterness fell away.
The man moved the collection, in carefully packaged batches, to the Osogbo shrine. It was a cry to the owner of the heart, this offering; he would not take the heart from the walls of the shrine until she came. He looked at all the love carved into the stone, and it was a lot of love, and he believed that it must be enough; he had to believe that it was enough. He arranged the fragmented woman as best he could, and sometimes he felt as if unseen hands helped him, propped a canvas in such a way that the light enhanced it. The man was desperate now, and he asked the heart to call to its owner, for she was the strength that he had somehow been born separately from.
The heart called.
The heart called.
The man called.
The gathered woman, scattered across sculptures and glass and photographs and scraps of paper, the gathered woman became complete and almost breathed.
Almost.
The man waited for five days. He thought that he must surely die under the sun and the pain of this disaster. But he didn’t die, because the shrine stones protected him.
When on the sixth day the man saw that the heart’s owner did not come, he left that place.
I don’t think my husband likes me. And I don’t know how to make him. I try talking to him about books, and when he replies he won’t look me in the eye, and sometimes his voice is muffled, suppressing a coughing fit. . or laughter. I think it’s important to be able to laugh at yourself — I hate people who are always offended. But when you’ve got to be prepared to laugh at yourself every single time you open your mouth. . well, that’s just depressing. I asked Greta for advice and she gave this tiny scream, as if she’d just heard the funniest words ever uttered, and she said, “Oh, did you marry him for the intellectual conversation? You didn’t even finish college, Daphne.”
I took her point, even though it was unfair of her to bring that up. College was a near-fatal bore. I had some really serious nosebleeds just at the thought of going to lectures. Gush, gush, gush, and afterwards I had to sit still for a couple of hours on account of having lost a lot of blood — doctor’s orders. Philosophy! I must have been crazy. I only did it because they told me at school that I was smart, and gave us all these thrilling speeches about the privileges and responsibilities of women in higher education. I can learn things all right; I don’t deny that I can learn things. But I can only learn them when it isn’t important. If someone tells me something and then says, “Well, you’d better remember that, because in three months’ time I’m going to make a decision about you based on whether you’ve remembered or not,” then it’s all over and there’s nothing I can do about it. Pops says he loves me just the way I am, but not everyone in the world is like my father. Maman, for example. A difficult and dissatisfied woman. She made me learn flower arranging and how to walk properly — books on my head, the whole bit. These things ruined me for life. Now it sets my teeth on edge when I see flowers carelessly flung into a vase, and I’m forever looking at other women in the street and thinking, Sloppy. . sloppy. And I know I shouldn’t care, and I want to poke myself in the eye for caring, but I care anyway, so thanks for that, Maman. I guess most mothers are difficult and dissatisfied, though. I haven’t heard of any easygoing ones, unless they’re dead and everyone’s being nice about them. But even then they don’t say, “She was real easygoing,” they talk about her sacrifice and how she had time to get involved in everyone’s business. Anyway. My mind is wandering. I know that’s because I’m thinking crazy thoughts and I don’t want to be thinking them. I liked St. John because he’s different from the boys I grew up with. Nothing like John Pizarsky or Sam Lomax; they just shamble around like they always did, only in nice clothes they buy for themselves now. I can’t take them seriously. Now, St. John could have been born into his elegance. It’s a dangerous kind of elegance — he doesn’t raise his voice, he lowers it. Sometimes he says something funny, and when I laugh he looks at me and asks what I’m laughing at, as if he’d genuinely like to know. And he’s a solitary type. . But when he comes back from wherever he’s gone he can look so glad to see me. .