Alayonmbere - The Gecko

Chapter 6

"Get me a cup of water," Mama says, swallowing hard.

I hurry towards the kitchen section of our self-contained room, fill a glass cup with tap water which I returned to her.

After taking a few gulps, Mama resumes her story.

"Alayonmbere, my daughter." Mama's head trembles vigorously. "When your father was affected, I knew I'd explored the valley of nothingness and reached the depth of hopelessness, where death smiled at me and I grinned at it. I beckoned on death to whisk me away, but just when it reached out to take me, a ray of hope flickered at me with its feeble glow, shooing death away until I returned to the realm of the living. Needless I say that life had no meaning. I prayed to die, but God rejected that prayer. He had great things in stock for us."

"From the middle of nowhere, one Thursday evening, the thirteenth of August, a bald old man walked into our compound wearing a white robe and a pair of white sandals. He came towards our house and knocked only once when Akin jumped to the door. The stranger asked to see the long-suffering pregnant woman. Akin asked him in right away."

"He was very tall, much taller than my husband. Heavy winds accompanied him into the house. He looked like a sage, I think. The first thing he said on setting eyes on me was that my mother offended someone who refused to forgive her. I shook my head, unable to recall my mom's quarrel with anyone, even if I was only six when she died. But the sage repeated the statement twice. I stayed quiet."

"Akin started rolling on the floor, pleading. Whoever felt offended wasn't the main issue. The man must help deliver our baby if he could. Your father grabbed the stranger's robe, almost tearing it off."

My father was begging a stranger he hadn't met before? I ask Mama: "Is he the man you said named me Alayonmbere?"

She ignores my question.

"'You will suffer no more,' the sage declared, pointing his right index finger at me. Akin rubbed his hands together, nodding to the prayers. So did I."

"Right away, the sage mentioned the solution to our problem: capture three geckos and place them in a bowl filled with stream water. For three days, drink from the bowl morning and evening. On the third day, you'll put to bed, the old man said confidently and then turned to leave our house. But he left us a warning at the doorstep: we must name you Alayonmbere and nothing else. And we mustn't celebrate your birth."

Mama's eyes nearly pop out as she returns to the chair. "Your father went in search of geckos and returned with eleven of them. Instead of one bowl, he filled three with water from a nearby river."

For the first time since she started her story, a smile creeps onto Mama's face. "Of course, it wasn't easy to drink from a bowl of crawling lizards. For all I cared those geckos might have been plucked from soakaway tunnels or refuse bins, animal dungs or rooftops full of birds' shit. They might be carrying germs and diseases."

"But I drank from the bowl because Akin persuaded me to. I needed to carry my child in my hands and not permanently in the belly. Not once did I miss the prescription in the following days. But every time I took from the bowl, I slept off and had a pleasant dream – dreams I didn't remember after waking up, but a smile would linger on my face as a mark of its pleasantness."

"My daughter, the event that took place on the third day weren't those we saw coming. We stayed alert all evening, thinking labour would start before sunset. Present in our house were neighbours who had eavesdropped on us when the sage visited. They stayed around to help us should there be an emergency. But it was not to be that evening. Or so we thought."

"After the sun had disappeared, Akin and I retired to bed thinking the sage's prescription didn't work after all. Electricity supply was cut off, leaving us in total darkness. Akin couldn't even light up a candle or lantern, he was too disappointed to care. Our neighbours left for their houses, wondering what the old man's windy and dusty visit was all about."

"Little did we know that horror lay ahead of us later that night. When darkness had spread through and night-time insects chirped outdoors, at around half-past nine or thereabouts, glints of light filtered into our room from the holes in our wooden windows, after which heavy winds threaten to break them off. The wind was so strong that it moved objects around the room. In no time, it shook the foundation of our house, targeting the same bowl of geckos I drank from, knocking it off the shelf."

"Egba wa o! Akin shouted for help before the gale-force rendered us deaf in our own house. But most shocking that night was the geckos' stunts that followed. Those in the bowl, all of which had died, came back to life and queued up on the floor like military men on parade. The ones Akin hid inside the shelf also crawled out of hiding to join their peers in forming a straight line, each nodding its head and wagging its tail as if dancing to some strange music playing underground."

"To my horror, I saw an image of my late mother on the wall, smiling at me. The sight made me feel like collapsing on the floor but before I did so, labour cramps ruptured from the depth of my groin, threatening to tear my stomach open."

"'Call the midwife', I yelled at Akin who wasn't sure of the step to take. It was pitch dark outside, where would he run to at that time of the night? But neighbours came out of their houses to help. Also visiting was the traditional midwife who'd been following my case since our last visit to her place. Shockingly, that same night, two of my friends who ran away came around to help out. How they got to know I was in labour surprised Akin and I."

"Anyway, I saw hell the day you arrived, but I'll leave out the details for now. because you're still too young to know such things. One strange event followed another. But I recall clearly that you had teeth in your mouth on your birthday. And you kept flapping your lips as if you wanted to talk."

"Alayonmbere is here," Akin shouted with joy, running around the house like a child. He spent the whole day talking to you and you blabbered at him in reply, but I wanted nothing to do with you that day, for you gave me too much trouble."

"You carried me for three years," I repeat Mama's words with tears in my eyes.

She nods, raising three of her fingers. "Three unforgettable years," she says with retrospection, bringing her story to an end with a smile that shines through pain. A smile which sums up her wonderful personality: a woman of immense courage and patience. A mother who lives for the present and future comfort of her only child.