The Famished Road (13 page)

I knew she would become angry and would never give me food in future if I didn’t eat it; so, reluctantly, and hating every moment of it, I did. I cracked the chicken’s head with my teeth. I broke its beak. I swallowed down its red comb. I scraped off the thin layer of flesh on its crown.

‘What about the eyes?’

I sucked out the eyes and chewed them and spat them out on the floor.

‘Pick them up!’

I picked up the eyes, cleared the table, and went to wash the plates. When I got back she had set down a glass of her best palm-wine for me. I sat in a corner, near the earthenware pot, and drank peacefully.

‘That’s how to be a man,’ she said.

The palm-wine got to me fairly quickly and I dozed sitting upright. I woke up when some rowdy customers came in. They smelt of raw meat and animal blood.

‘Palm-wine!’ one of them shouted.

Flies congregated round the new customers. Madame Koto brought them a great gourd of wine. They drank the lot very quickly and the evening’s heat increased their smells. They got rowdier. They argued furiously amongst themselves about politics.

Madame Koto tried to calm them down but they ignored her altogether. They argued with passionate ferocity in an incomprehensible language and the fiercer they got the more they stank. One of them whipped out a knife, The other two fell on him. In the confusion they scattered the table and benches, broke the gourd and glasses, and managed to disarm the man. When they had put the knife away one of them cried:

‘More palm-wine!’

Madame Koto went out and fetched her broom. They saw the violence on her face.

‘No more palm-wine!’ she said. ‘And pay for what you’ve broken.’ They paid without any complaints and went out arguing as vigorously as they had been doing.

I went back to my corner and finished my glass of palm-wine. Madame Koto poured me some more. The aroma of her rich-scented peppersoup floated in from the backyard. The eveningwore on and customers drifted in. Odd customers. A man came in who was solidly drunk already. He kept cursing and swearing.

‘Look at that toad,’ he said about me. ‘Look at that fat woman with a beard,’ he said about Madame Koto.

Then he rushed outside, came back, and asked for a gourd of palm-wine. When he was served he drank quietly, occasionally perking up to abuse everything. He abused the lizards, flies, the bench, and the ceiling. Then he fell quiet again and drank peacefully.

Another customer came in who was so totally cross-eyed that I began to feel crosseyed myself from staring at him.

‘What are you looking at?’ he demanded angrily.

‘Your eyes,’ I said.

‘Why? Haven’t you got eyes of your own?’

‘Yes, but I can’t see them.’

He came over and knocked me on the head. I kicked him on the shin-bone. He knocked me again, harder, and I rushed out and grabbed Madame Koto’s broom and came back in and hit him on the head with it. He cried out. He backed off. I hit him again. The drunken man began to curse. He abused cross-eyed people, abused brooms, swore at children, and became quiet. Madame Koto came in and seized the broom from me. I sat down.

‘Serve me palm-wine,’ the cross-eyed man said. ‘And warn that boy of yours. He has been insultingmy eyes.’

‘What’s wrongwith your eyes?’ Madame Koto asked, staring intensely at him.

He didn’t reply and he sat down into a moody silence. After he had been served, he drank a great quantity in one go, looked at me, found me staring at him, and then he turned away, trying to hide his eyes from me.

‘Serve me peppersoup!’ he shouted.

Madame Koto served him and he devoured the meat and drank the soup very fast.

‘Tell that boy not to stare at me,’ he said.

‘Why?’

He drank some more palm-wine and peered over his shoulder at me. His eyes interested me. One of them was green. Looking at the green eye had a strange effect on me.

‘I will give you money if you look somewhere else,’ he said.

‘How much?’

Trying to hide his face, he came over and emptied all his spare change on the table. I pocketed it and watched him go back to his seat. He kept checking up on me. I had taken my eyes off him but it was hard to look anywhere else after the experience of seeing him. His eyes, in their strangeness, were magnetic. I kept my eyes off him and looked around the bar and noticed green patches on the floor. I couldn’t understand where they came from. I drank some more palm-wine. The alarming realisation that the green patches were the stains of the madman’s piss was beginning to dawn on me when the lights changed in the bar and the drunken man cursed and from the floor there rose a host of green spirits. They rose up and they grew till their heads touched the ceiling and then they shrank till they were no taller than the average chicken. They were all cross-eyed. They milled around the areas of the madman’s piss and they stamped and made swarming noises. Everywhere I looked I saw cross-eyed spirits. I cried out and the drunken man abused the moon and Madame Koto came and took me outside and gave me some water and alligator pepper to chew on.

‘You should go home now,’ she said.

I was silent.

‘Have some fresh air. Then go.’

I stayed outside a while. The moon was out in the sky. It was big, clear, and white.

It was white, then it became silver, and I saw things moving on its face and I couldn’t stop staring because it was so beautiful and so low in the dark blue sky. I watched it for a long time and sweet voices stirred in my ears and Madame Koto came out and said:

‘What are you doing?’

She looked up, saw the moon, and said:

‘Why are you looking at the moon? Haven’t you seen a moon before?’

‘Not like this one.’

‘Come in, take your things, and go home. It’s getting late.’

I pulled myself away from the moon and went back into the bar with her. The bar was full of the oddest people. There was a man in the corner who said loudly that he had just come back from Hitler’s war. No one believed him.

‘Hitler died years ago,’ someone said.

‘I killed him,’ said the loud man.

‘How?’

‘I used a special juju. I blew pepper into his eyes and his moustache stood up and I killed him with this knife.’

He whisked out a knife, brandished it, and no one seemed concerned. In another corner a man kept tossing his head. Another man snorted. There was a younger man next to the drunk. He had a bright scar down his face. The drunk cursed and stopped and cursed again. The green cross-eyed spirits mingled with the clientele and one of the spirits climbed the wall like a new kind of lizard and studied Madame Koto’s fetish.

It was a very odd night. The bar saw its most unusual congregation of the weird, the drunk, the mad, the wounded, and the wonderful. Madame Koto weaved her way through them all with the greatest serenity. She seemed fully protected and entirely fearless. I think she made a lot of money that night because as I was leaving she did something rare. She smiled at me. She was happy and graceful amidst all the bustle.

She gave me a piece of uncooked yam and I took the expanding paths back home to Mum.

OUR ROOM WAS crowded. Mum was back early. She looked sun-eaten and tired. Sitting disdainfully on Dad’s chair, with his feet on the table, was the landlord. Sitting on the bed, standing round the room, were the creditors and their relations. They looked angry and helpless. Everyone was silent when I came in. I went over to Mum. She put her arms round me and said:

‘You all have to be patient.’

‘How can we be patient?’ said one of the creditors. The others nodded vigorously.

‘Patience will kill us. We have to eat and trade.’

‘True.’

‘But we have paid most of the money,’ Mum said. ‘But not all.’

‘And not in one week,’ added the landlord.

‘Patience doesn’t kill.’

‘Nonsense,’ said a creditor. ‘Patience is killing my son. You think I will pay the native doctor patience?’

The landlord laughed and brought out a kola-nut from his voluminous robe. He ate it alone. I watched his lips turn reddish. Mum was silent and as the landlord munched away on his kola-nut the rats started chewing.

I looked round at the creditors as if their presence had robbed me of food. I said nothing.

‘Look at his big stomach,’ the landlord said of me, chuckling.

‘Leave my son alone.’

‘All we want is our money,’ one of the creditors said, staring at me.

‘I don’t have your money,’ I said. ‘This boy is worse than his father.’ Mum stood up suddenly.

‘If you have come to insult us leave our room,’ she said.

She shut the door and the window. It became dark in the room and Mum refused to light the candle. Every now and again the landlord lit a match and looked at everyone.

The rats ate louder and Mum launched into a song of lamentation. The creditors didn’t move. The landlord went on chewing.

When Mum stopped singing the silence became deeper. We remained in the silence and the gloom till there was a knock on the door.

“Who is it?’

‘The photographer.’

‘What do you want?’

‘The photographs are ready.’

‘So what?’

‘Don’t you want to see them?’

The landlord got up and opened the door. He stayed in the doorway, looking at the pictures with the help of the photographer’s torch. Then he came into the room. The photographer trailed behind him, a camera on his shoulder.

‘They are good,’ the landlord said, passing the torch and the pictures round.

The creditors became animated and talked about images of the celebration, how so-and-so looked drunk, how that person’s eyes were shut like a rogue’s. Then the landlord said, as the photographs came back to him:

‘Why is Madame Koto’s face like that?’

Madame Koto’s face was smudged. She looked like a washed-out monster, a cross between a misbegotten animal and a wood carving.

‘She’s a witch,’ one of the creditors said.

‘She’s not,’ I said.

‘Shut up,’ said Mum.

When I looked closer at the pictures we all seemed strange. The pictures were grained, there were dots over our faces, smudges everywhere. Dad looked as if he had a patch over one eye, Mum was blurred in both eyes, the children were like squirrels, and I resembled a rabbit. We all looked like celebrating refugees. We were cramped, and hungry, and our smiles were fixed. The room appeared to be constructed out of garbage and together we seemed a people who had never known happiness. Those of us that smiled had our faces contorted into grimaces, like people who had been defeated but who smile when a camera is trained on them.

The photographer was very pleased with the results and quoted prices for copies. One.

of the creditors said he would get his copy when Dad paid up. The landlord said:

‘I look like a chief.’ ‘Thief,’ I said.

Mum knocked me on the head.

‘Your son looks like a goat,’ the landlord said. The creditors laughed. Mum said:

‘We want to sleep now. Everyone should leave.’ ‘Is that how you talk to your landlord?’

‘Okay, everyone should stay,’ Mum said. ‘Azaro, prepare your bed.’

I got up in the dark, moved the centre table, and unrolled my mat. I lay down. The creditors’ feet were all around my head. The landlord went on chewing. After a brief silence one of the creditors said:

‘All right, if I can’t get my money now, I’m going to seize something.’

He got up from the bed, lifted the centre table, and went to the door.

‘Goodnight, landlord,’ he said, and left.

Mum didn’t move. Another creditor, asking the landlord to light a match for him, took Dad’s boots. The third one said:

‘I won’t take anything but I will keep coming back.’ The photographer said:

‘I will come tomorrow.’ The landlord said:

‘Tell your husband I want to see him.’

Then they all left. Mum got out of bed and warmed some food for Dad. When she finished she counted the money she had made that day. She put some aside for buying provisions and some towards the rent. The candle was low and as it burned towards the end its poor illumination showed up Mum’s bony face, her hardening eyes, and the veins on her neck.

‘I saw a mad boy today. They tied him to a chair and his mother was crying.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘How should I know?’ We were quiet.

‘How is Madame Koto?’ ‘She’s fine.’

‘Does she ask about me?’

‘No.’

‘What does she do all the time?’

‘She stays in her room. Today she had a lot of strange customers. She put up a juju on the wall. A madman came into the bar and ate a lizard and pissed everywhere.’

‘If it’s like that you must stop going there.’

‘I don’t want to.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t want to.’

‘How was school?’

‘I don’t like school.’

‘You must like school. If your father had gone to school we wouldn’t be suffering so much. Learn all you can learn. This is a new age. Independence is coming. Only those who go to school can eat good food. Otherwise, you will end up carrying loads like your father.’

We were silent again.

‘You must be careful of Madame Koto.’

‘Why?’

‘People have been saying things about her. We don’t know where she comes from.

And that juju of hers, who made it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Don’t touch it.’

‘I won’t touch it. But what do they say about her?’

‘You’re a small boy. You won’t understand.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Go to sleep.’

‘Did she kill someone?’

‘Go to sleep.’

We fell silent and Mum put away her basin of provisions and her money. She hadn’t made much and the sourness of her face told me she was wondering whether walking the streets of the world, day after boiling day, crooning out her provisions till her voice was hoarse, was worth the little she earned at the end of it all. She sighed and I knew that in spite of everything she would carry on hawking. Her sigh was full of despair, but at the bottom of her lungs, at the depth of her breath’s expulsion, there was also hope, waiting like sleep at the end of even the most torrid day.