The Famished Road (35 page)

I had emerged into another world. All around, in the future present, a mirage of houses was being built, paths and roads crossed and surrounded the forest in tightening circles, unpainted churches and the whitewashed walls of mosques sprang up where the forest was thickest. The worshippers in the unpainted churches wore white cassocks and prayed to the ringing of bells all afternoon. The world of trees and wild bushes was being thinned. I heard the ghostly wood-cutters axing down the titanic irokos, the giant baobabs, the rubber trees and obeches. There were birds’ nests on the earth and the eggs within them were smashed, had fallen out, had mingled with the leaves and the dust, the little birds within the cracked eggs half-formed and dried up, dying as they were emerging into a hard, miraculous world. Ants swarmed all over them.

At intervals I passed people who were sitting behind trees. When I looked back they were no longer there. Nude women appeared and vanished before my gaze. The smell of earth, leaves, sun, and the merest hint of dried excrement overpowered my senses. I wandered deeper into the world of trees, amongst the solitude of acacias and needlepines, and saw people clearing the bushes, uprooting tree stumps, raking great clusters of climbers and dried mistletoes into heaps. I saw old bicycles resting on trees. I saw men and women burning the bushes, the clusters of climbers and vines, and there must have been ecstatic herbs amongst what was being burnt for the smoke yielded up voluminous aromas of sage and rosemary, dried leaves and densities of green and yellow fumes and all manner of secret potencies and powerful crackling smells into the air.

And the smoke and the smells were dense everywhere and it was impossible not to breathe them in and the mysteries of burning plants in the deep forest charged my head and I went around stumbling into trees, tripping over roots, walking up against the ochre palaces that were anthills, or wandering round in circles, or watching bicycles riding around among the trees without riders, or noticing women pedalling the air without anything beneath them. Anthills which I had passed followed me. I became certain that the whole forest was moving.

The trees were running away from human habitation. My eyes became charged too and I saw people with serene bronze masks emerging from trees. I saw a bird with a man’s hairy legs flying clumsily over the branches of the rain-tree. An antelope with the face of a chaste woman stopped and stared at me and when I moved it disappeared among the luxuriant bushes. An old man emerged from the anthill that had been following me. He had a white beard and green bejewelled eyes and a face that was both a hundred years old and childlike. His hands were up in the air, his neck slightly bent, as if he were carrying the heaviest riddle in the world. He seemed to follow me wherever I went. He had a staff which was the flowering branch of an orange tree and he hobbled slowly and came after me with inscrutable persistence. When I became aware of how intent he was I ran, but no matter how fast I fled he remained the same distance from me. I became confused and afraid. I tripped over a skull and hurt my ankle and couldn’t move. I waited. I heard no footsteps, but the old man kept on at me, neither catching up with me, nor retreating. He remained at the same distance, bearing the great weight of an invisible enigma on his head.

The forest was full of mirages from which I could not escape. I dragged myself along on the ground. The man kept on coming. I grew so scared that after a while I turned and dragged myself towards the old man to find out what he wanted. I became frustrated at the slowness of my pace. When I got to the skull, I picked it up, and threw it at him. He vanished and a wind blew hard through the trees and the voluminous air was full of leaves whirling and fruits and seeds failing. I dragged myself on till I came to a palm tree. There was a tapper’s gourd at its root and I was thirsty and drank of the new wine. It added to my intoxication. A black wind circled my head. A strange sound came from the centre of the tapper’s gourd. Trying to escape it, I hobbled towards the houses on the rim of the forest. But they too were a mirage.

Then I came to a place in the trees where it was raining. I couldn’t understand it.

There was sun and wind everywhere else, but at this spot it rained and water ran down the leaves of the cicadas and banana plants. I was afraid of the rain. Beyond the curious downpour I could see a man, lights flashing at his feet, in front of a well near the houses. It was the old man. He seemed to be staring at me. For the first time I noticed that he had hooves for feet. Golden hooves. I turned in the opposite direction and hobbled away painfully. Then I got tired and didn’t care what happened to me any more.

I rested against a tree and shut my eyes. After a while I heard a low continuous song. I opened my eyes and saw a tortoise moving past me. I watched it for a long time and it moved so slowly that I fell asleep. When I woke up I felt better, but my feet still hurt. I pushed on and found myself at the same place where the bushes were being burnt, where the potent fumes made the forest itself fall into dreaming. There was no one around. In the bright white smoke I saw spirits turning into air, spirits of plants and herbs and things I didn’t yet know about; I saw their brightness of blues and yellows, shapes of sad faces, legs brilliant with oil becoming soot, golden eyes melting into vibrant space. I did not linger; I went on and when I recognised the place ahead, dimly at first, something fell on me and the black wind descended on my soul.

It was the sunbirds that awakened me.

What had fallen on me? I looked around. Beams of sunlight converged on my face.

There were branches and leaves and burst fruits on the floor. Strange stones warmed my soles. Not far from me, like a skull sliced in half and blacked with tar, was a mask that looked frightening from the side, but which was contorted in an ecstatic laughter at the front. It had eyes both daunting and mischievous. Its mouth was big. Its nose was small and delicate. It was the face of one of those paradoxical spirits that move amongst men and trees, carved by an artist who has the gift to see such things and the wisdom to survive them. When I picked up the mask a white bird flew out of the bushes, startlingme with the wild clapping of its wings and its piercing cry. I dropped the mask. Then I picked it up and wore it over my face and looked out from its eyes and something blurred the sun and the forest became as night.

When I looked out through the mask I saw a different world. There were beings everywhere in the darkness and the spirits were each of them a sun. They radiated a brilliant copper illumination hard to the eyes. I saw a tiger with silver wings and the teeth of a bull. I saw dogs with tails of snakes and bronze paws. I saw cats with the legs of women, midgets with bright red bumps on their heads. The trees were houses.

There was music everywhere, and dancing and celebration rose from the earth. And then birds with bright yellow and blue feathers, eyes that were like diamonds, and with ugly scavenging faces, flew at me and kept pecking at the mask. I took it off and the world turned and the trees seemed to be falling on me and it took a while before things came back to normal. I held on to the mask and went on hobbling, looking for a way out of the forest.

And as I went I saw the golden hooves of the old man again. I hid behind a tree.

The weight he was carrying seemed to be getting unbearably heavier. He stopped as he walked, but he showed no pain. If he saw me, he pretended he hadn’t. When he went past I wore the mask and looked at him. He was completely invisible. He was not there. I could not see him at all through the eyes of the mask. But, sitting in the air above his invisible space, floating on the wind, serene in the midst of a great emerald light covering that other world, was a beautiful young boy whose slender body somehow suggested the passionate weight of a lion. The boy stared at me with simple eyes that conferred on me an unspoken benediction. I took off the mask and saw the old man re-entering the anthill. I put it on again and was amazed to see not an anthill but a grand palace with beryl colonnades and jade green verandahs, parapets of gold, mistletoe clinging to the fierce yellow walls, with sculptures in dazzling marble all around. Into this palace of turquoise mirrors the boy-king of purest innocence disappeared, with a smile like that of a god. And then darkness fell over everything again.

The wind sounded strange. My wonder turned to bewilderment. When I took off the mask the darkness was the same. Patches of light came over the wind. I had begun to lose my sense of reality, confused by the mask. I sped on, my feet in agony. I went on for a long time, turning round and round, my sense of direction askew. After a while, when some light filtered through the leaves, when confusion was really beginning to twist my brain, I suddenly broke out into the clearing. It was the clearingwhere I used to play and where I had buried Madame Koto’s fetish. The curious thing was that there was something different about the clearing. It was both exactly as I remembered it and different. For some reason the place felt shaded even when there were no trees around. I stared about the clearing, trying to isolate what was different about it. I couldn’t. So I wore the mask and looked and saw that what was a clearingwas in fact a village of spirits. In the middle of the village was a great iroko tree, golden and brown, with phosphorescent leaves and moon-white birds in the branches, twittering out the sweetest essences of music. There were rose-bushes in the radiant square. I saw skyscrapers and flying machines and fountains, ruins covered in snails and flowering climbers, grave-stelae, orchards, and the monument of a black sphinx at the gate of the village. Luminous pilgrims, celebrants in yellow cassocks, made processions in honour of the mysteries of strange gods. I took off the mask, my head turning, the world spinning, my eyes flaming. I sat down on the ground and rested.

Darkness had grown over the forest. The noises of insects and birds had diminished. The wind, scented with leaves, had become cooler. Gradually the trees, the clearing, the open spaces, became obscure. Ordinary things became riddles. In the obscurity of things I saw what was different about the clearing. Something was standing there. A tree had grown there. It had grown in the spot where I had buried Madame Koto’s fetish. It was an odd tree and in the dark it seemed like an animal asleep on its feet. It was shaped exactly like a bull without horns. It was a stout muscular tree, without leaves. It seemed comfortable to sit on, to play on, and I wanted to see the darkening world from the height of its back. I tried to climb on, but couldn’t take the mask with me; so I wore the mask and tied it round my head with climbers. With the mask on my face, with the darkness all around, and spirits everywhere in the darkness, I got on the back of the tree. All the moon-white birds seemed to be in the branches of my hair.

From the back of the tree I saw a completely different world to what I had been seeing. I saw a different reality. For a moment I expected to see birds twittering in my eyes, spirits dancing around me, luminous and dazzling. But when I looked out the spirits vanished, the white birds had somehow flown away, the village was not there.

Instead I heard the earth trembling at the fearsome approach of a demonic being. A white wind circled my head. I was confused by the new world. The earth shuddered.

The tree moved beneath me. And when I looked out through the mask, I saw before me in that new spirit world a creature ugly and magnificent like a prehistoric dragon, with the body of an elephant, and the face of a warthog. It towered before me. It was more graceful and less heavy than an elephant, but its tread was more resounding. Its face was incredibly ugly. A devourer of humans, of lost souls, of spirits, of all things wonderful, this creature opened its dreadful mouth and roared. Beneath me the tree began to change. Suddenly it seemed the tree was no longer a thing of wood. It became a thing of quivering flesh. The wood rippled slowly into flesh, transforming beneath me.

The monstrous creature drew closer and its foul breath knocked my consciousness around. I couldn’t bear to look at it any more and I desperately wanted to take the mask off so I wouldn’t have to see anything. I tore off the vegetable string, but the mask stayed on, stuck to my face. I tried to tear it off again, but it was like stripping the skin off my own face. And then the transformation of the wood into flesh became complete and I was suddenly blasted by the earth-shaking bellow of a wild animal beneath me. I was overpowered with the odour of its animal virility. Tossing and shivering, shaking its head, and bellowing again as if the sound in some way made its transformation more permanent, I realised that I had made a terrible mistake, and that I was riding on the back of a wild animal, awoken from a fetishistic sleep.

The monstrous creature swiped at me. In that confused moment, without caring, I ripped the mask off my face, obliterating its existence from my eyes. My face felt somewhat raw. I no longer saw the prehistoric monster, but the beast beneath me obviously did. It turned this way and that, wrenching each foot from the earth as if it were uprooting itself, and when all its feet were free it was still for a moment, drawing a deep breath. Its body expanded, bristling. I tried to get down. The beast backed off, giving a vicious snort as if it had burst open a channel through centuries of bad dreams. Then it began with an awkward canter, picked up speed and jumped about the place, tossing its head, attacking the invisible monster. Its hooves crushed the mask into pieces. It charged towards a thick cluster of bushes at such speed that I was thrown off and it was lucky I landed on grass and vegetation or I would certainly have broken my neck. I heard the wild beast returning, snorting, pounding the earth. I jumped to my feet, as if from a feverish torrent of nightmares. Completely forgetting my hurting ankles, I ran out of the forest, and fled like a child beingwhipped to Madame Koto’s bar.

I DIDN’T GO in right away, but wandered in the forecourt of the bar watching the night spread its power over the sky. I stayed outside for a while, planting my secrets in the silence of my beginnings. Night was falling and, all over, the shadows were short and blurred. Lamps came on in the houses. I could make them out through the leaves and bushes. A gust of wind, like the sighing of a great animal, blew over from the forest. The wind brought the night closer. It also seemed to sweep the last lights of the day to the farthest reaches of the earth. One section of the sky was grey and deep blue, the other was sad and red. The pain returned to my ankle. I sat outside a long time, waiting for the world to quieten around me. My spirit took a long time to settle. I breathed in the wind from the moon.