Land of Love and Drowning by Tiphanie Yanique

Author:Tiphanie Yanique
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-06-24T16:00:00+00:00

52.

In Freedom City, Eeona saw the extent of Kweku’s back hair on the second morning. After all, during their first storming only she had been naked. The hair swathed most of his back and it disgusted her over breakfast, but then it thrilled her later when they went to the mattress again. That is how it would be with them. During their loving, she would pull on his back hair until he wrapped his hand around her neck, choking her into releasing. But then again at breakfast she would avert her eyes when his back was to her. The rest of his body was deceptively smooth.

Eeona felt that it had all been decided. She would make herself the mistress of this eight-legged house and it would be grander even than Villa by the Sea. Eeona saw the hibiscus growing wild and wonderful in the yard. And then all she had to do was see the rest in her mind. A grand house. A captain as master. Her as madame.

But Kweku was no regular man. He was a rejected man. His chest, and the organ in it, had closed like a seawall and no sweet water would wear it down. He wasn’t a man at all. He was a myth. He could fly a plane. He could trick an obeah woman. He could steal the stories from any lady of the sea.

After a week of Eeona, he began staying away. Some nights he wouldn’t arrive to his arachnid house until after dark and then he would come in smelling of rum and saltfish, which were also the scents of sex.

He was a man of stories. And that was the only way he could live, in other people’s mouths. Down in La Grange he would sit in a rum shop and listen to stories about his other self. “You hear about the Navy man from St. Thomas who leave his obeah woman, run way to Puerto Rico, and get lost in the rain forest?”

“Yes.” He would nod. “I hear he disappear for good, man. But I hear he used to give it to she good, too. And he only make he self lost because the obeah wife was too nagging, man.”

“But Kweku, where you hear that story? It ain smallie Anegada you from?”

“Even on Anegada we hear things. But watch, no. I ain think you drinking enough.”

In order to stay alive as Kweku Prideux, the Anancy, he needed to hear stories about himself, needed to be the mélee. And in this way he isn’t unlike other humans who find themselves unexpectedly in the Americas.

Kweku also knew that Eeona might reveal him, his pre-spider history. And so he kept her away from other people. He only let her leave for drives in the country with him. She would dress in something nice that he had brought for her. Something earth-colored, no more of her Virgin Mary blues—he wanted to be constantly aroused around her. He made her go barefoot—to keep her from roaming too far, though he told her it was because he loved her feet and always wanted to see them.

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