Mami Wata

The story

In a village on the lagoon, where the wooden houses stand on stilts and the water is always a little higher than you expect, there lived a young fisherman.

He was good at his work. He knew the currents, the colour of the lagoon floor, the way the moon moves across the water. But for some time now his work had not paid. He cast his nets and pulled them up empty, once, twice, ten times. The neighbours watched him from a distance, saying nothing. His mother began cooking smaller portions.

One moonless night he went out alone in his narrow boat. The water was so still that the lagoon looked like a black floor. He rowed far from the houses, until he could no longer see even the neighbours’ fires. Then he rested his oars.

That was when he heard the sound.

Soft, faint, steady. Shh, shh, shh. Like someone combing long hair with a bone comb. It came from the water, a couple of oar strokes from the boat.

The fisherman craned his neck. On the surface floated something round and shiny, catching a little light from who knows where. He moved closer. It was a mirror. A small mirror with a dark frame, unbroken, dry, as if it had never been in the water at all. He picked it up.

His own face was not in it.

In it was a woman.

He raised his eyes. In front of him, a metre from the bow, the water had opened without a sound. A figure was rising out of the dark, upright and slow, with very long hair falling over her shoulders and chest like a second night. Her skin was light and gleaming, and her face was the most beautiful the fisherman had ever seen or imagined. Around her neck and arms, alive and calm, a great snake was coiled. Where her body slipped into the lagoon there were no legs, but a long fish tail, its scales faintly glittering.

She was not afraid of him. He was the one trembling.

“That is mine,” said the woman. Her voice was low and full, with the sound of water inside it. “You have held it in your hand. You may give it back to me.”

The fisherman realised he was still gripping the mirror tightly, almost as if to make it his. He held it out with both hands, his head bowed.

“Forgive me,” he whispered. “I didn’t know.”

The woman took the mirror, looked into it for a moment, and smiled. The snake on her shoulders shifted slowly. “I forgive you. You were polite. That is rare.” Then she fixed her eyes on him. “Your nets have been empty for a long time.”

“Yes.”

“I can fill them. I can give you more fish than your boat can carry. I can give you a house that does not rot, and health for your mother. I give these things to those who honour me.” She paused. “I am demanding, fisherman. And I am jealous. I want a place in your house, a clean corner where you keep a white cloth, a comb, a mirror, something sweet and a perfume. I want no one to speak ill of me. And I do not want you to use me like a tool. Either you respect me, or you do not come looking for me.”

“I will.”

“Good. Then go home.”

She sank into the water, slowly, like a light going out. The snake was the last thing the fisherman saw: a pale ring that sank and vanished.

At dawn, when he cast his nets, he could not haul them up on his own.

Months went by. The fisherman kept his word. In a corner of the room he began to keep a small altar: a spotless white cloth, a wooden comb, a mirror bought at the market, a bottle of perfume. Every evening he changed the sweet. His mother’s cough went away. His fish reached the market fresh when everyone else’s had already sold out. The village looked at him with suspicion and, deep down, with a little envy.

In the end, it was envy that ruined everything.

One day, while he was drinking with his friends after a good catch, someone asked him: “Tell us the truth. How do you do it?” And he, who had drunk a little, and who for months had been longing to show off, answered with a half laugh: “I’ve got a woman in the water who works for me.”

Some laughed. Some did not.

That night, coming home, the fisherman found the altar in disarray. The mirror had fallen. The comb had snapped in two. The lagoon water, which usually reached the foot of the stilts, had risen right up to the doorstep, and inside the house, in the dark, he could hear the rustle of a long body sliding across the floor.

The next day the nets came up empty. The day after that, a storm tore his boat from its mooring and carried it in pieces onto the shore.

The fisherman understood. It did not take much. He got a new mirror, a new comb, the whitest cloth he could find. He climbed into a borrowed boat, went to the spot in the lagoon where he had first seen her, and stayed there all night without saying a word, his hands resting on the water. When the waves rose, he did not run away.

A wave bigger than the others passed over his head.

He felt no pain. He only felt himself sinking, slowly, into a green, cold silence, held up by something that was not a hand. He saw lights that belonged to no sun. He saw a great hall of water and pearls, and someone watching him from high on her throne, without anger but with great attention.

“You talked too much,” said the voice.

“Yes.”

“What you had was not yours. It was a loan.”

“I know.”

A time passed that could not be measured. When the fisherman opened his eyes again he was lying on the sand at dawn, with the sun warming his face. His mother was weeping beside him. They told him he had been gone for three days.

He never went back to fishing the way he had before. But from then on, in the village, he had another gift: he touched the sick and they got well, or at least got better, and he could hear inside himself the voice of the water telling him what to do. He always kept the altar clean. And whenever someone asked him, in the evening, where his power came from, he answered quietly: “From respect.”

And from the lagoon, sometimes, on moonless nights, came that faint sound. Shh, shh, shh. Someone combing her hair under the water, in no hurry at all.