Ijasan Adelehin

To understand retardation is to understand solitude. Solitude in its rawest form crippled eternally with the impossibility of hopelessness. Solitude in which for friends there are fiends and for family there are handlers; solitude in which the face in the mirror is nothing but the visage of some unfamiliar person, a face slack as if weighed down with the burden of stupidity—eyes drooping, nose bulbous and lips agape in the absence of intelligence, the supposed ingredient of sanity.

In the house of seventeen gables, there was a girl who lived in solitude. Her name was Anna but it could as well have been Sarah or Charlotte for she owned the name as she owned a liver, with the peremptory compulsoriness of ownership and without prior acquaintance or palpable relationship. In the house of seventeen gables, she was known to the numerous maids and butlers who fluttered around in a whirl of organized chaos as ‘the girl in the downstairs room’. To her parents she was simply, coldly, ‘the girl’.

And to herself she was nothing in words for words lay beyond her range of comprehension. The face which stared back at her from the mirror was a face which bore all the possible irregularities of a yam tuber. It was as though in the making of that organ, when it had been soft and malleable, some unseen force redolent of a fist had dealt blows unto it before it was cast in iron. Her expression held not a blank idiocy as one might have expected in relation to her degree of retardation, of solitude, but a grimace of vehement animosity. One eye lay open in queer pretence of sanity whilst the other had taken up an effortless squint, the eyeball of which lay tucked in the inner canthus, disappearing into a small crescent of black.

Her mouth was, for most of the time, agape closing occasionally with a fish like rhythm that had everything to do with the primordial reflexes that had been salvaged from the wreck that was supposed to be her brain.

And with this funereal face she stared. It was a look of hatred, but it was impossible to know for sure if she was capable of such feelings, whether the arrangement of her features was simply a confusion, another manifestation of her solitude. Or whether truly her expression meant, as it intimated already, that she longed to pluck out the eyes of her visitors with her claws and put them in her mouth; and without a single atom of remorse to accompany, for alongside her lack of sense it seemed probable that there should be an equal lack of conscience.

Anna was the only child of the Remembers, a stiff and nervous couple rich in their own rights but whom between them hung solely the conjunction of an arranged marriage and nothing else. The Mrs. was a large-eyed bony woman with a sharp mouth that was more literal than figurative. A strong willed creature she was, who by a haughty submission that was so absolute, so perpetual, she conveyed her inexorable distaste for her husband, an equally bony fellow whose dressing was never complete until he had donned a sweater around his neck and shoulders. Their forceful union, a business initiative of their parents, had estranged her and her true lover and for this she never forgave. Not her parents, not her friends, not the husband she was given, and not the world. She isolated herself entirely and wrapped herself in the bitter sweet cocoon of hate. And she bore this emotion so vehemently, so close to her bosom that it seemed probable that it seeped into her womb as she carried her child and damaged the fetus therein.

And when it was diagnosed that her daughter suffered from palsy, she disintegrated from her state of hate into one of recalcitrant depression. Drugs couldn’t help her and neither could therapy; the only thing which seemed to halt the waterworks was the care of her child who inescapably she had also come to hate. So, she immersed herself completely in the care of the girl. No maids or butlers were allowed around ‘the girl’ and consequently catering for her became a kind of punishment, a species of self flagellation for having brought her into the world in such an incapable state.

And sometimes, whilst she, say, gave her daughter a sponge bath, she would fall into a chasm of hopelessness, a caesura in the lucidity which the care provided and there tears would bleed profusely from her eyes, tears which did nothing to soften the unshakeable expression of suppressed anguish which her bony visage, large eyes and pointed mouth proffered to the world.

*

One night, shortly after the girl had begun her menses evidenced by the arrival of crimson in the palette of her diapers, the wife woke the husband from sleep. It was the first time she was to lay her hands on him since the night they had conceived their child, in the rapid and unsatisfying frenzy of inexperienced coitus, that he gave her such a look of desperate gratitude that she felt nothing but pity for him. She sidled up to him with all the slithering cunning of a poisonous snake, enveloping him in the warmth which she emanated. He on the other hand was pulled to her involuntarily as if by some magnetic force, a look of desperation, hunger and shame on his equine face. She slipped a hand into his pajamas and nestled him in her hand. The whole length of his erection lay within her hand span like some technical object, a bolt or a screw, and she manipulated him, stroking, pulling, tugging, working mechanically as a craftsman works an item, watching him with her massive eyes, her expression plain and not contrived into any petty simulation of sexual interest.

He walloped disgracefully beneath her, moaning and slobbering. In the height of his dramatics, a hand flew forth and alighted on her breast and she shot him a look of such hostility that he withdrew the offending hand apologetically, terrified of the implications of his oversight.

“If you do it I will love you,” she said after a while as she worked him violently, causing him to halloo in volleys of monkey-like chatter, his face contorted in a mélange of pain, pleasure and embarrassment.

“If you can do it,” she said again, “I will love you.” And abruptly she let go of him and turned to sleep as though nothing had happened. The man stared at her back in confusion and frustration. With the back of his hand he wiped spittle from his jaw and on his face the grimness of resolution was beginning to form.

*

The Mr. stood in his daughter’s room and stared for almost an eternity at her as she rocked in her chair, giggling and rattling within the impermeable bubble of her solitude. He knew what he had to do but he was terrified of the idea. As terrified of the idea as he had been the first time his wife had brought it up years ago. He walked up to the girl and squatted before her. Her face, hideous as it may, bore within the folds of ugliness the asphyxiated candle-flame of innocence and purity.

“Look at me,” He said to her, perplexed by the anarchy with which her gaze vacillated, alighting on imaginary spots in the air and taking off almost immediately in search of other spots.

“Look at me.” And this time he held her face gently and stared into her eyes. Finally, her gaze rested on him and in what seemed like a brief period of clarity in the irrevocable chaos of her retardation, her expression registered mild understanding. He had seen that expression many times before; when puzzle pieces were put before her, it would come upon her face like a veil and quieten her features as she with preternatural uncanniness rapidly organized a complex picture from a set of individual jargon tiles—a task which would have taken a normal individual days to complete.

“I’m sorry for what I’m about to do to you.” He said matter-of-factly. “My wife, your mother, has been asking this of me for years. It’s the only thing which can cure her.” And he leaned forward to carry her from her chair. Immediately, the expression of understanding vanished from her face and in its place was the ever so familiar visage of tantrum. She snarled and growled and snapped as he tried to carry her. She hit him with her awkward fists and tried to use her head which, inadequately controlled by her neck, lolled dangerously.

But despite her protests, she was light and frail and he held her close to his bosom in a tight vice and carried her to his wife’s bedroom.

“What’s this?” The Mrs. asked, groggy eyed, as he eased the girl into the dressing mirror chair.

“If I do it you will love me. You will never hold it against me.” The Mr. confirmed.

“You want to do it now?” The Mrs. asked, a shimmer of fear crossing her face. “Here? And why did you bring her here?”

“To watch.”

“To watch?”

And he climbed unto the bed, straddling his wife. He picked up a spare pillow.

“Ready?” He asked unceremoniously. He seemed a different man all of a sudden.

“She shouldn’t see this.” The Mrs. offered.

“She deserves to, even if she will never understand it.”

And without further ado, he put the pillow over her face and pressed down with all his strength. She lay quiet at first beneath him then she began to buckle and gallop and at a point she tapped him as though she had changed her mind, but he held on grimly till her efforts dwindled to pathetic little twitches and then to a stop. Afterwards he pulled the pillow from her face and saw, mangled by the horrid grimace of death, the mien of gratitude … and of course, the love she always promised.

Ijasan Adelehin is a Nigerian writer residing in Lagos. He has been published in magazines such as The Deepening, Everyday Fiction, Epic Literature, On the Premises, The Tiny Globule and 63 Channels. Other works have recently been accepted by Big Pulp, Anathema and Takahe. He received the Foyle young poet’s award in 2004 and the Highly Commended Award for BBC Northhamptonshire’s Write ‘04 poetry competition. He also received the second place award for the On the Premises short story competition of March 2008. His most recent work, Wings Against the Sea, Mirines & Myaegles Book I, a fantasy novella, was published by Eternal Press publishers in June 2008.