The Famished Road (52 page)

‘Are you the boy who vanished?’ I asked.

‘No.’

‘Did you turn into your own shadow?’

‘No.’

He answered my questions, barely givingme a glance.

‘Come down!’ I said. ‘Why?’

‘You are not allowed to play on the van.’

‘Why not?’

Disconcerted by his serenity, I clambered up the van and tried to push him down. We began to fight. I hit him in the face and he hit me back. I hit him again and he grabbed me round the waist and we wrestled. He tripped me, I fell, and he fell on me, knocking the wind out of my chest. Soon we were on solid ground. I kicked him, he caught my foot, and threw me down. I jumped back up and lashed out in all directions, with the sort of blind ferocity that Dad sometimes had, and one of my punches made contact. His nose sprouted blood. He was untroubled by the bleeding and he unleashed a volley of blows on me, cracking the side of my face, and we wrestled again, and fell, and we got up, and hit one another blindly and soon several adult hands tore us away from one another. Like two wild fighting cocks separated in a bloody battle, we kicked and raged in the air, cursing and swearing.

On another day, when Dad was training, I saw the boy standing on the top of the van again. I went over.

‘Come down from there!’ I said.

‘No.’

I clambered up again. He didn’t move.

‘My father’, he said, ‘has given me something special.’

‘For what?’

‘If you touch me...’

‘Yes...’

‘And I hit you...’

‘Yes . .’

‘You will fall down seven times and then die.’

‘Who is your father?’ I asked him.

‘My father is a great cobbler and carpenter,’ he replied.

‘My father’, I said, ‘is Black Tyger.’

And then I hit him in the face. He hit me back. Nothing happened. I began to laugh.

‘Why are you laughing?’

‘Because of the stupid thing your father gave you.’

He didn’t say anything. After a while he got down from the van and went and played nearer the crowd watching Dad. I stayed on the van for some time. It wasn’t much fun and I got bored and I noticed that people were staring at me. I got down and went to look for the boy. At first he didn’t want to talk to me. Then I told him again that the man shadow-boxingwas my father. His face lit up in transferred admiration.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Ade. What’s yours?’

I told him. We shook hands. His father was a cobbler and carpenter and a fierce supporter of the political party on the side of the poor. He was also something of a medicine man and counted many feared thugs as family friends. I was somewhat impressed.

He took me to their house. They lived in our area, in one small room. Their family was large; his father had two wives and ten children. I don’t know how they all managed in that room. His mother was buck-toothed and small and ferocious. She was the eldest wife. His father had great scarifications, noble and impressive like the statues of ancient warriors; he was tall and his spirit was rather terrifying. His teeth were kola-nut-stained and his eyes bloodshot, and he beat his children a lot, in the name of the sternest and most corrective discipline. His voice had a chilling, piercing quality. I didn’t like him much.

Ade took me to his father’s workshop and showed me the tools of his trade—his hammers and tongs, his chisels and boxes of heavy nails, his long work-bench and tables crowded with a mountainous tumble of shoes and handbags, the place smelling of glue and rusted nails and old metal and raw earth and ancient wine spilled on freshplaned wood. The shadows gave off the aroma of cobwebs and the intense sleep of cockchafers, of fetishes twisting on rafters. The ceiling was dark with a fastness of ancient cobwebs, and lengths of leather hung from the ceiling. The workshop was an exciting place and it seemed I had found an entirely new universe in which to explore and play. We tried on the different shoes, with their incredible variety of sizes and shapes. We hid behind the cabinet. We banged nails into fresh-planed wood. We glued bits of abandoned leather together, trying to create new shoes instantly. We were totally absorbed in our play when his father came in suddenly. He saw us playing, saw the laughter on our faces, and brought out the long whip he kept on a nail behind the door. He thrashed us on the backs and we ran out screaming. I decided not to go there again.

I tried to get Ade to wander the streets with me, but he never went far. He was scared of his parents. If they called him and he didn’t answer he got whipped for it later. I told him to run away from home and to come and stay with us, but he was afraid. He said his father would thrash him and put pepper on the wounds. He showed me his back and I saw the old whip marks alongwith numerous razor incisions for the herbal treatments he received. I felt sad for him. And because of him I didn’t go wandering for a while. I tried to take him to Madame Koto’s place, but he wouldn’t go there either. His father had told him that she was a witch who supported their political enemies.

We were playing in the forest one day when we came upon Madame Koto. She lay on the earth, at the root of the legendary iroko tree, her white beads like a jewelled snake in her hand. When she heard us coming she jumped up and dusted herself. She looked very embarrassed.

‘Who’s your friend?’ she asked, blinking.

‘Ade,’ I said.

She gave him a curious intense scrutiny. Ade said he was going home. He wandered off and waited a short distance away, watching us furtively. Madame Koto turned her disquieting gaze on me. She studied my stomach. The merest hint of compassion crossed her face.

‘So you don’t like my bar any more, eh?’

She smiled.

‘Are you hungry?’ ‘No.’

‘How is your father?’

‘No.’

She stared at me. Then she unwound her wrapper and untied the big knot at the end.

I had never seen so much money in my life. She had a thick wad of pound notes at her wrapper end that could easily have choked a horse. She unwrapped several notes and gave them to me. At first, looking over at Ade, I refused. But she pressed them on me, shuttingmy fingers tightly.

‘If your mother asks, tell her you found them in the forest, eh?’

‘No.’

‘Don’t tell her I gave them to you, you understand?’

‘Yes.’

She touched me gently on the head. For the first time I saw that she had changed.

She was now wholly enveloped in an invisible aura of power, a force-field of dread.

Her stomach was really big and she seemed very wide. There was a heaviness about her that made her look as if weariness had moved into her face as a permanent condition.

Even her shadow weighed me down. Her eyes were distant. They couldn’t come near human beings any more. They had the same quality that the eyes of lions have. Her face was round and fresh and she seemed very well.

‘I am not happy,’ she said, suddenly.

‘Why not?’

She gave me a puzzled look, as if she were surprised that I had spoken. Then she smiled, and turned, and shuffled down the forest paths with the grace that most human beings seldom have. The midges trailed her.

Ade didn’t speak to me for days because Madame Koto had given me money. And when I gave the money to Mum it caused an upheaval in the house. It turned out to be much more money than I had imagined. She made me sit on the bed and spent hours subjecting me to the most rigorous questions about where I had found the money. She feared that it belonged to some trader, to ritualists who could infuse syllabic curses into their possessions, or some powerful figure who might hunt us out and punish us.

But it was her suspicion that I had stolen it which annoyed me so much that I burst into angry weeping. Dad sat in his chair, rocking himself, smoking. Mum insisted that I take her to the spot where I had discovered the windfall. I told her I didn’t remember, that I had stumbled upon it as if I were in a dream, and that it was on the ground near some bushes.

‘Are you sure it wasn’t spirits who gave it to you, eh?’ Mum said with more than a hint of mockery.

‘Yes,’ I said.

Then Dad broke out of his imperturbability and threatened to beat me if I didn’t tell the truth. I went on lying. He got so impatient that he slapped me on the face. I stared hard at him. My body suddenly became serene. Then he held me to his chest and swayed and said:

‘Forgive me, my son. I did not mean it. But we are not thieves in our family. We are royalty. We are poor, but we are honest.’

Then he asked me again where I had stumbled upon such an amount of money. Still I went on lying. They gave up trying to get any sense out of me. They had been at it for hours and night had fallen. They decided they wouldn’t touch the money for a week and if they didn’t hear anything from anybody they would consider it a gift from heaven. Dad, in a mood of celebration, sent me to buy a big bottle of ogogoro. When I got back he spent another hour praying to our ancestors and to the inscrutable deities.

Then he and Mum spent the rest of the night discussingwhat they would do with the money. Dad wanted to buy all the paraphernalia he needed for boxing. Mum wanted to open a shop of provisions and a boutique. They argued bitterly all night and I fell asleep to the sound of their raging acrimony. When I woke up in the morning they were still boiling with discord. They were both foul-tempered. For three days they went on like that. Another four days passed and they still hadn’t reached an agreement and they quarrelled the whole time, dredging up old memories about a hundred unforgiven matters relating to money. During that time Dad used some of the windfall to buy drinks, entertain friends, and to buy a pair of canvas shoes and a second-hand pair of boxing gloves. As it turned out there was more than enough to get Mum a completely fresh stock of provisions for her trade, to buy us all some new clothes, to pay our rent, and to feed us happily for more than a good month.

THE DAY OF the great political rally, which had been much talked about and much postponed, drew nearer. The most extraordinary things were happening in Madame Koto’s bar. The first unusual thingwas that cables connected to her rooftop now brought electricity. Illiterate crowds gathered in front of the bar to see this new wonder. They saw the cables, the wires, the pylons in the distance, but they did not see the famed electricity. Those who went into the bar, out of curiosity, came out mystified. They couldn’t understand how you could have a light brighter than lamps, sealed in glass. They couldn’t understand how you couldn’t light your cigarette on the glowing bulbs. And worse than all that, it was baffling for them to not be able to see the cause of the illumination.

Madame Koto, much too shrewd not to make the most of everyone’s bewilderment, increased the price of her palm-wine and peppersoup. Then, for a while, she began to charge a modest entry fee for merely being able to enjoy the unique facilities. She was after all the only person along our street and in our area who had the distinction of electricity. She was so taken in by this distinction that she had her signboard amended to highlight the fact.

The next thing was that people heard very loud music blaring but saw no musicians performing. After that came stories of strange parties, of women running naked into the forest, of people who got so drunk they bathed in palm-wine, of party members giving away large quantities of money to the women whose dancing pleased. There were lush rumours of the things the men and the women did together, screaming into the electrified nights. In the midst of all this Madame Koto grew bigger and fatter till she couldn’t get in through the back door. The door had to be broken down and widened. We saw her in fantastic dresses of silk and lace, edged with turquoise filigree, white gowns, and yellow hats, waving a fan of blue feathers, with expensive bangles of silver and gold weighing her arms, and necklaces of pearl and jade round her neck. When she walked all her jewellery clattered on her, announcing her eminence in advance. She painted her fingernails red. Her eyelashes became more defined. She wore lipstick. She wore high-heeled shoes and moved with an increasingly pronounced limp, walking stick always in hand. She began to resemble a great old chief from ancient times, a reincarnation of splendour and power and clannish might.

Cars began to converge at her place. The lights burned till deep into the night and always from the street I could hear them talking, planning heatedly, and could see their shapes through the strips of curtain. Rumours, always stale, began to circulate that she had joined the most terrifying cults in the land, that she had been accepted in organisations that usually never allow women, that she performed rituals in the forest.

I heard of bizarre sacrifices, goats being slaughtered at night, of people dressed in white habits dancing round her house, heard of cries that pierced the ghetto air, of drumming and thunderous chants, but the strangest thing I heard of was the forthcoming birth of the four-headed Masquerade. No one knew what it was.

People came to believe that Madame Koto had exceeded herself in witchcraft.

People glared at her hatefully when she went past. They said she wore the hair of animals and human beings on her head. The rumours got so wild that it was hinted that her cult made sacrifices of human beings and that she ate children. They said she had been drinking human blood to lengthen her life and that she was more than a hundred years old. They said the teeth in her mouth were not hers, that her eyes belonged to a jackal, and that her foot was getting rotten because it belonged to someone who was trying to dance in their grave. She became, in the collective eyes of the people, a fabulous and monstrous creation. It did not matter that some people insisted that it was her political enemies who put out all these stories. The stories distorted our perception of her reality for ever. Slowly, they took her life over, made themselves real, and made her opaque in our eyes.