Chinua Achebe - Sugar Baby

I caught the fierce expression on his face in the brief impulsive moment ofthat strange act; and I understood. I dont mean the symbolism such as it was;that, to me, was pretty superficial and obvious. No. It was rather his deadlyearnestness.

It lasted no more than a second or two. Just as long as it took to thrust hishand into his sugar bowl, grasp a handful and fling it out of the window, hissquarish jaw set viciously. Then it crumbled again in the gentle solvent of avague smile.

"Ah-ah; why?" asked one of the other two present, or perhaps both, taken abackand completely mystified.

"Only to show sugar that today I am greater than he, that the day has arrivedwhen I can afford sugar and, if it pleases me, throw sugar away."

They roared with laughter then. Cletus joined them but laughing onlymoderately. Then I joined too, meagrely.

"You are a funny one, Cletus," said Umera, his huge trunk shaking with mirthand his eyes glistening.

Soon we were drinking Cletuss tea and munching chunks of bread smearedthickly with margarine.

"Yes," said Umeras friend whose name I didnt catch, "may bullet cracksugars head!"

"Amen."

"One day soon it will be butters turn," said Umera. "Please excuse my badhabit." He had soaked a wedge of bread in his tea and carried it dripping intohis enormous mouth, his head thrown back. "Thats how I learnt to eat bread,"he contrived out of a full, soggy mouth. He tore another piecequite smallthis time-- and threw it out of the window. "Go and meet sugar, and bulletcrack both your heads!"

"Amen."

"Tell them about me and sugar, Mike, tell them," said Cletus to me.

Well, I said, there was nothing really to tell except that my friend Cletushad what our English friends would call a sweet tooth. But of course theEnglish, a very moderate race, couldnt possibly have a name for anything likeCletus and his complete denture of thirty-two sweet teeth.

It was an old joke of mine but Umera and his friend didnt know it and sograced it with more uproarious laughter. Which was good because I didnt wantto tell any of the real stories Cletus was urging. And fortunately too Umeraand his friend were bursting to tell more and more of their own hardshipstories; for most of us had become in those days like a bunch of oldhypochondriac women vying to recount the most lurid details of their ownspecial infirmities.

And I found it all painfully, unbearably pathetic. I never possessed somepeoples ability (Cletuss, for example) to turn everything to good account.Pain lasts far longer on me than on him even when--- strange to sayit is hisown pain. It wouldnt have occurred to me, not in a thousand years, to enactthat farcical celebration of victory over sugar. Simply watching it I feltbad. It was like a man standing you a drink because some fellow who onceseduced his wife had just died, according to the mornings papers. The drinkwould stick in my throat because my pity and my contempt would fall on thecelebrator and my admiration on the gallant man who once so justly cuckoldedhim.

For Cletus sugar is not simply sugar. It is what makes life bearable. We livedand worked together in the last eighteen months of the war and so I was prettyclose to his agony, to his many humiliating defeats. I never could understandnor fully sympathise with his addiction. As long as I had my one gari meal inthe afternoon I neither asked for breakfast nor dinner. At first I hadsuffered from the lack of meat or fish and worst of all salt in the soup, butby the second year of the war I was noticing it less and less. But Cletus gotmore obsessively hinged to his sugar and tea every single day of deprivation,a dangerous case of an appetite growing on what it did not feed on. How heacquired such an alien taste in the first place I have not even bothered toinvestigate; it probably began like a lone cancer cell in lonely winter daysand nights in the black belt of Ladbroke Grove.

Other tea and coffee drinkers, if they still found any to drink at all, hadlearnt long ago to take it black and bitter. Then some unrecognized genius hadlightened their burden further with the discovery that the blackest coffeetaken along with a piece of coconut lost a good deal of its bitter edge. Andso a new, sustaining petit dejeuner was born. But Cletus like a doomed manmust have the proper thing or else nothing at all. Did I say I lost patiencewith him? Well, sometimes. In more charitable and more thoughtful moments Ifelt sorrow for him rather than anger, for could one honestly say that anaddiction to sugar was any more irrational than all the other many addictionsgoing at the time? No. And it constituted no threat to anybody else, which youcouldnt say for all those others.

One day he came home in very high spirits. Someone recently returned fromabroad had sold him two-dozen tablets of an artificial sweetener for threepounds. He went straight to the kitchen to boil water. Then he brought outfrom some secure corner of his bag his old tin of instant coffeehe no longerhad teawhich had now gone solid. "Nothing wrong with it," he assured meagain and again though I hadnt even said a word. "Its the humidity; thesmell is quite unimpaired." He sniffed it and then broke off two smallrocklike pieces with a knife and made two cups of coffee. Then he sat backwith a song in his face.

I could barely stand the taste of the sweetener. It larded every sip with alingering cloyingness and siphoned unsuspected wells of saliva into my mouth.We drank in silence. Then suddenly Cletus jumped up and rushed outside to giveway to a rasping paroxysm of vomiting. I stopped then trying to drink what wasleft in my cup.

I told him sorry when he came back in. He didnt say a word. He went straightto his room and fetched a cup of water and went out again to rinse his mouth.After a few gargles he tipped the remaining water into a cupped hand andwashed down his face. I said sorry again and he nodded.

Later he came where I sat. "Do you care for these?" He held out the littletablets with palpable disgust. Strange how even one attack of vomiting couldso utterly reduce a man. "No, not really. But keep them. Im sure we wontneed to go far to find friends who do."

He either was not listening or else he simply could not bring himself to livewith the things another minute. He made his third trip outside and threw theminto the same wild plot of weeds which had just received his vomit.

He must have worked himself to such a pitch of expectation over the wretchedsugar substitute that he now plummeted headlong into near nervous collapse.For the next two days he kept to his bed, neither showing up in the morning atthe Directorate where we worked nor going in the evening as was his custom tosee his girl friend, Mercy.

On the third day I really lost patience with him and told him a few harshthings about fighting a war of survival, calling to my aid more or less therhetoric for which his radio scripts were famous. "Fuck your war! Fuck yoursurvival!" he shouted at me. All the same he got better soon afterwards andsuitably shamefaced. Then I relented somewhat myself and began privately tomake serious inquiries about sugar on his behalf.

Another friend at the Directorate told me about a certain Father Doherty wholived ten miles away and controlled Caritas relief stores for the entiredistrict. A well-known and knowing Roman Catholic, my friend, he warned methat Father Doherty, though a good and generous man, was apt to be somewhatunpredictable and had become particularly so lately since a shrapnel hit himin the head at the airport.

Cletus and I made the journey on the following Saturday and found FatherDoherty in a reasonably good mood for a man who had just spent six nightsrunning at the airport unloading relief planes in pitch darkness under fairlyconstant air bombardment and getting home at seven every morning to sleep fortwo hours. He waved our praises aside saying he only did it on alternateweeks. "After tonight I can have my beauty sleep for seven whole days."