The first love of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

This entry is posted on number 24-25 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until June 17, 2025.

My father was a professor and we lived on the campus of the University of Nigeria, in a house full of books; The bougganville marked our access road with purple sketches. This was the small, fenced world of my childhood: I attended the university elementary schoolthe children’s library of the University, the chapel of the University for Sunday Mass. Everyone was similar: calm and peaceful people from the academic world, our lives delimited by the cured hedges of the campus.

As a teenager, I traveled two roads on foot to the high school of the University, whose fame attracted people from outside the city, especially the children of the rich Tranisti of Onitsha, home to the largest market in West Africa, a stronghold of genuine chaos. For the first time I met people who were not like us. Bush It was the word we used to indicate their showy stylethe grammatical grammatical times disrupted, their imported school sandals.

The sandals of Echezona They were orange brown, with wedge heels, and walked with a funny mutual pace. It was popular and brazen, a natural leader. He often jumped the school, got into trouble with the teachers and wandered around during the lessons.
I was totally disinterested in the guys of Onitsha like him, until one day I began to feel so intensely the presence of Echezona who when the air passed vibrated. How strange that a feeling can be born alone, from nothing, even surprising your heart.

I started to comb my short Afro more carefully, looking at the mirror to see myself, but the me that he would have seen. I was 14 years old, he 16. I was an academic star, he had bad votes. I wasn’t sure I liked him – after all, I was smaller than him – until one day his friends came to me to tell me: “Echezona wants to talk to you”. “So he comes to him,” I replied, pretending to me quiet.

The first time he accompanied me at home he remained silent, almost solemn, with his eyes fixed in front or earth, without ever looking at me. I thought he was the superior, until I realized with surprise that he was shy. Perceiving his shyness was to feel the intimacy of a discovery, to see a different version of a person, suddenly known only by you.

He began to accompany me home. “I want you to are engaged and engaged,” he said, and I replied: “I have to think about it”even if I didn’t want anything else. One day I said yes. And so a passage opened in my protected world. A new and disconcerting current of air. My unlikely first
fiancé.

His was a delicate, shy and uncertain attention, was looking for my hand without really being able to tighten it. Often his skin touched mine. He treated me carefully and with a sort of fear, as if I could fall and shatter. (I thought back to him when I heard an aunt saying in Igbo language: “A man must keep you as if I were an egg”). I didn’t want me to take it in a hurry, so months passed before the trembling, delicious moment of the first kiss of my life, would arrive in the courtyard on the back, near the accommodation where the service staff lived.

“You are the most beautiful and intelligent girl I have ever known,” he told me. I was enchanted by her vitality, by her exaggerations. He believed the ghosts and blood pacts. He wanted us to swear that, whatever had happened, we would have expected and then married. He said he would throw himself under a car if I had never stopped talking to him. He made me laugh and laugh, he was serious but difficult to take seriously. He told obvious lies. He jumped the school and, as he walked normally, he said he had broken his leg the day before.

I was not impressed by his disinterest in the school, but I was fascinated, however. He never read anything. The childhood calligraphy of the few notes scattered in his notebooks intense myself. The first time he gave me a love letter, I understood that he hadn’t written it, but a friend of his. The same friend that one morning, during the Harmattan season (the wind that brings fresh to West Africa at the end of autumn, ed), came to my class to give me the red sweater of Echezona.

“Echezona said you seem to be cold.” I put my arms in that soft wool, and when the cool of the morning had gave way to a fierce sun, I still had his sweater on me.

“But what exactly are you talking about?” My university friends asked mewith the faces upset, as if I had gone mad, and in their eyes the words not said: Bush Boy, rough, unsuitable.
I don’t remember and I don’t always trust what I remember. The memory disappears, but also selects. Our memories try to protect us and often what slips away from memory is exactly what is best to leave behind. I just remember he heard that Echezona had stolen money from his father and tried to corrupt a teacher to get the questions of an exam.

I instead remember well how his face lit up every time he saw me, his mischievous, childish smile, eager to like me. I remember the ease of being with him, as I was grumpy when he jumped the school, how much I felt abandoned during the holidaysspending hours on the phone in my father’s study in an attempt to connect with the disturbed Onititsha line.
For my birthday he gave me a fragrant satin rose. Its perfume became unbearable if the long custody that contained it was agitated. He hid in a wardrobe, fearing that my mother forced me to return that expensive and inappropriate gift.

It was shortly after my birthday that he told me he would start, that his father was sending him to a severe collegebut that we would have remained together, whatever it happened. I cried as if I felt how quickly we would have lost sight of, our letters and raped calls and how soon I would have had a new boyfriend, from my world, son of a professor.

Echezona died during my first year of university. A friend approached me while the classroom emptied at the end of a lesson to tell me that they had killed him near a bank in Lagos; He was going to deposit a check when armed robbers had begun to shoot. I stared at the void. I was used to the stories of thieves who entered the open windows at night to steal televisions in the houses of the campus. That extreme and random violence seemed so far as to be surreal. It could not have been true. I couldn’t cry.

For months I led with me that news trying not to think about it, until, for a terrifying coincidence, after publishing a collection of poems, during my first interview with writer in the drafting of a Lagos newspaper, The journalist showed me a wall full of photographs rewarded in front of which I remained paralyzed. He asked me what there was that not
He went and I indicated a photo. “Did you know him? I am sorry. It was a terrible robbery in the bank close here ». Echezona’s head was abandoned against the car seat; His blood, in the black and white photo, was dark gray.

I will always remember the existential failure of my spirit, as if something I wanted, now it would never have been. And something I would have liked was not true, now it was forever true.

I tried on several occasions to erase that image from my mind, to replace it with his impetus pace, his laugh, the ease with which he passed from shyness to cheek, and then returns shy again. That photo forced me to accept it: he was really gone. For three years I had no longer news, we were big enough to be separated from our interests, and when he had left school, I already knew that we would hardly be back together. Still, I cried the future that would no longer be there.

Together with pain and sadness I had the strange feeling of having been betrayed. It had been my first love, but dying, he had turned into the idealized future that I could have lived.

Perhaps this is the reason why my new novel, The inventory of dreamsis pervaded by the idea of ​​those who would have been, and how a person can be made perfect by the loss. Exit
From the editorial staff of the newspaper, I started looking for desperately between a pile of old things the ticket that had brought me when I was sick of malaria, the only example I owned his writing. On that ticket, with its characteristic trembling handwriting, these words were written: «To my only love ngozi, from your echezona».

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