The Famished Road (53 page)

In spite of what people said, however, she prospered, while the rest of us suffered.

She opened another bar in another section of the city. She divided her time between both. She opened a mighty stall in the big market where she sold garri, lace materials, and jewellery. She had many servants. Conflicting stories, however, did reach us about her wealth. Some said she wasn’t very rich, that she had too many people to support. Others maintained that she had so much money she could feed the entire ghetto for five years. I heard that she spent endless days counting her profits, that when she went to the bank she needed an armed truck. Then we began to hear of how mean she was, that one of her servants needed money for treating a liver condition and she wouldn’t give him so much as a farthing. On the other hand, we heard that she had given a lot of money to a woman she didn’t even know, whose child would have died from food poisoning if it hadn’t been for Madame Koto’s timely intervention. It began to seem as if there were many Madame Kotos in existence.

And then one day as I was playingwith Ade we saw several people gathered outside her barfront. They all stood in the mud. They all wore white smocks and had ostentatious Bibles. Their leader had the biggest Bible of them all. It looked like an instrument of vengeance. He had wild hair and the rough, scraggy beard of a selfanointed prophet. He was barefoot. If it hadn’t been for the authority with which he held the wooden crozier, he could well have been mistaken for a complete madman. A large cross dangled from his neck. The whole group of them, whipped up to paroxysms of denunciation by their leader, constituted the representatives of one of the most influential new churches springing up in the city. The group consisted of prophets of varying ranks and they danced with righteous fervour and prayed with fearful certainty in front of the bar. They evoked visions of fire and brimstone, sulphur and torment and damnations. They prayed as if they were purging the land of a monstrous and incarnate evil. They sprinkled holy water over the ground and threw holy grains of sand towards the bar. They stayed for a long time, singingwith brio and might, in lusty voices, in perfect rousing harmony, chanting and stamping in the mud.

Their presence stopped people going to the bar. The women in the bar would occasionally peep out between curtain strips and the leader of the group, the chief prophet, foaming at the mouth, would point a crooked finger at the women and the singing would reach new proportions of intensity. They carried on till nightfall and completely succeeded in imprisoning Madame Koto and her women within the bar, souring their business for the day.

The following evening they returned, bringing a larger congregation. We saw them chanting and beating their church drums along the street. It seemed they had an entire orchestra with them. Brass sections pierced the air with their clash and roll, the trumpets blasted the wind, and the deep voices of the prophets leading the way to the battle against evil woke the street from its mid-season slumber. As the procession approached Madame Koto’s bar the world joined them. They became a great flood of human beings, a surging mass of spectators, like an army of divine vengeance. They sang different songs all at once. They arrived at Madame Koto’s bar and found it shuttered. They sang, played their music, chanted, and stomped. They bellowed and belted out their holy tunes till they were hoarse. Those who had expected something to happen were disappointed. The only thing that happened was that the frustration made factions of the crowd begin to quarrel. Fighting broke out between musical sections, between prophets of differing denominations, between contending visionaries. The head priest was leading a song of exorcism, his staff and Bible high in the air, when the fighting encircled him. He found himself torn between quelling his unruly flock and launching his bitter attack against the scourge of Madame Koto’s electricity. He managed to deliver, in the midst of all the chaos, a tremendous philippic on the apocalypse of science. The shouting grew wilder amongst his congregation. A man was hurled to the mud. Another man was being strangled with the folds of his smock. Soon everyone seemed to be fighting everyone else.

‘The DEVIL has come into our midst!’ the head priest cried.

No one listened.

‘Let us stand as one to drive out this ABOMINATION!’

No one heard.

‘THEY WILL START WITH ELECTRICITY AND THEN THEY WILL BURN UP THE EARTH!’ he thundered.

No one cared. And then the most extraordinary thing happened. The sky was rent asunder. The air lit up as if an unbearably radiant being was going to descend from the heavens. The light in the sky, flickering brightly, stayed for a long moment.

Everyone fell silent and froze in the presence of the unknown annunciation. A terrible enchantment hung over us like a single flashing sword. The wind flowed in silence.

‘GOD HAS ANSWERED OUR CRY!’ said the head priest.

The sky darkened and lowered. The air became full of presence. The wind was still.

I smelt, in that moment, all the known and unknown herbal essences of the forest. The world swam in aromas.

‘HALLELU ... HALLELUYA!’ cried the head priest.

His congregation picked up the cry, lifted it up to the heavens, and fell silent, waiting.

Then in the deepest reaches of the sky something cracked. It broke loose altogether.

Then it rolled down the unnumbered vaults of the heavens, gatheringmomentum and great wondrous volumes of sound as it neared us. Then it exploded over our heads and before we could recover from the incredible drama of the universe the sky opened and yielded a river of rain upon us.

The congregation scattered everywhere. The commotion was farcical and wild.

People screamed, children howled, mothers yelled. Only the head priest stood firm.

Soon the entire crowd, the valiant brass sections and the rousingwind ensemble, fled their many ways, lashed by the torrential rain. I watched them fleeing as if from a burning house. The head priest called to them, denounced them, urged them to have courage and to be steadfast in crisis. He waved his staff and Bible in the air, and thunder cracked above him. But he did not move. He did not give ground. He went on praying with great fervour. He cursed the abomination that was Madame Koto and referred to her as the GREAT WHORE OF THE APOCALYPSE, and he danced and sang alone, while the rain mercilessly drenched him.

He soon became a ridiculous sight. He resembled a monstrous drenched chicken.

He shivered as he prayed. His smock clung obscenely to his buttocks. As his passion waned, gradually extinguished by the indifferent rain, he trembled more. Everyone watched him from the cover of rooftops and eaves. Trapped in his solitary defiance, his Bible dripping a second flood, his beard a sad sunken ship upon the waters, his voice disappearing in the din of cosmic events, he had no choice but to continue with his absurd posture. He chanted, shaking at the knees. And as he chanted, railing against prostitutes, science, theories of evolution, the enshrinement of reason against God, and evil women of Babylon, a procession of cars drove down the street. They parked around him. The car doors opened. Men and women in fine attire spilled out.

They all had umbrellas. Madame Koto was among them. She wore a massive and dazzling black silk dress, with white shoes and a white scarf, her arms and neck glittering with jewellery. The splendid guests passed the head priest and if they heard his ravings they betrayed no signs of it. The bar door was opened, and they all went in. Only Madame Koto came back to give the head priest her umbrella. Shamelessly, he took it. She limped back to her bar, walking stick in one hand, while the head priest resumed his imprecations and denunciations of her. It was at this point that people began to jeer him. When the evening fell, and the darkness spread, the head priest was a wreck of a soaked man. Under the cover of darkness, shivering, his voice hoarse, he left Madame Koto’s barfront and made his miserable way down the street. Much later we learned that he had led his congregation against Madame Koto mainly at the instigation of the party supported by the poor. There was also talk of possible charitable contributions to church funds. We were disappointed by their methods.

AND THEN, TO crown our amazement, the news reached us that Madame Koto had bought herself a car. We couldn’t believe it. No one along our street and practically no one in the area owned such a thing as a car. People owned bicycles and were proud of them. One or two men owned scooters and were accorded the respect reserved only for elders and chieftains. But it most certainly was news for a woman in the area to own a car. We clung to our disbelief till we saw the bright blue little car, with the affectionate face of an enlarged metallic tortoise. It was parked in front of her bar. We still clung to our disbelief even when we saw her hopeless attempts at driving it, which resulted in running over an old woman’s stall. She promptly had the stall rebuilt and gave the woman more money than she had possessed in the first place. We watched her learning to drive the car. She was much too massive for such a small vehicle and at the steering wheel she looked as if the car was her shell and she merely the third eye of the tortoise. The fact that the car was too small for her was the only consolation that people had. But we were still amazed.

With a man sitting next to her she learned to drive along our street. With a determined, half-crazed look on her face, her shoulders hunched as if her weight somehow helped the car to move forward, she zigzagged down our street. She couldn’t keep the car straight. When she was seen coming a voice would cry out, saying:

‘Hide your children! Hide yourselves! The mad tortoise is coming!’ Then we would see her vehicle, swaying from side to side, scattering goats and fowls, and causing innocent bystanders to flee into the most unlikely places. Her persistence never paid off. Even when she could manage to get the car to travel straight, she was so fraught, working up such a fury wrenching the gears around that the engine would make fearsome coughing noises.

‘The tortoise is hungry,’ people would say.

Then we heard that she had difficulties with the car because of her bad foot.

Whenever she applied the brake she did it so abruptly that the man teaching her had his head banged against the dashboard. And because she couldn’t drive it, she left the car for her driver to take on errands.

It didn’t really matter that it was a small car, or that she couldn’t drive it properly.

What mattered was that yet again she had been a pioneer, doing something no one else had done. People became convinced that if she wanted she could fly over the ghetto on the back of a calabash.

When the day arrived for Madame Koto to wash her new car, many people came to celebrate the ritual with her. Our landlord was present. People brought their bicycles and scooters. Many came on foot. There were old men whom we had never seen before. And there were a lot of powerful strange women with eyes that registered no emotion. We saw chiefs, thugs, and there were even herbalists, witch-doctors and their acolytes. They gathered in the bar and drank. They talked loudly. Eventually everyone was summoned for the washing. They formed a circle round the vehicle.

The great herbalist amongst them was a stern man with a face so battered and eyes so daunting that even mirrors would recoil and crack at his glance. He uttered profound incantations and prayed for the car.

‘This car’, he said, after much mystification, ‘will drive even to the moon and come back safely.’

The people nodded.

‘This car will bring you prosperity, plenty of money. Nothing will touch it. Any other car that runs into it will be destroyed, but nothingwill happen to your car. This is what we call superior magic. Even if you fall asleep while driving this car you will be safe. Anyone that steals it will immediately have an accident and die. Anyone that wishes evil on the car will die!’

The people assented. Madame Koto, her walking stick in one hand, nodded vigorously. At this point, everyone was more or less drunk.

‘If people want to be jealous of you, let them be jealous. Jealousy is free. People can eat it and grow fat on it if they want. But anyone who thinks evil of you, may this car run them over in their sleep. This car will hunt out your enemies, pursue their bad spirits, grind them into the road. Your car will drive over fire and be safe. It will drive into the ocean and be safe. It has its friends in the spirit world. Its friends there, a car just like this one, will hunt down your enemies. They will not be safe from you. A bomb will fall on this car and it will be safe. I have opened the road for this car. It will travel all roads. It will arrive safely at all destinations. This is what I say.’

The people cheered. Some laughed. The herbalist sprinkled his complex potions and his corrosive liquids on the car. He emptied half a bottle of precious ogogoro on the bonnet. And after the ritual washing was complete, after the old people present, the powerful ones, the chiefs, and the cultists, had made their libations, the gathering got down to the momentous business of getting drunk. They drank solidly. They argued to drink better and they drank to argue better. More people joined them. The prostitutes served palm-wine, peppersoup, fried bushmeat and grilled rabbits. The blind old man turned up and threw himself into the serious drinking and got involved in a heated discussion with a chief. The gathering got rowdy. It was to be expected, it was even desired. But suddenly an uproar broke out. No one knew how it started.

Birds wheeled overhead and alighted on the roof of the car. The sky darkened. The great herbalist, looking uglier than ever before because of his drunkenness, began to utter the most controversial statements. Then he said something which brought on complete silence.

‘This car will be a coffin!’ he suddenly announced. ‘I have just seen it.’

The people stared at him in utter bewilderment. A strange wind seemed to blow over his head. His eyes became crossed. His twisted mouth gave his utterance the weight of destiny.