The Famished Road (61 page)

‘How?’

‘I failed, but after me comes the spirit with five heads.’

‘Why?’

‘To take you back.’

‘Why did you fail?’

The lantern flickered. The other person in the bar, a massive figure, stirred. She lifted up her swollen face. She had the saddest eyes. They were big and lonely.

‘Madame Koto!’

‘Don’t call my name!’

‘Why not?’

She was silent. Her eyes changed. They became a little menacing.

‘There are spirits in the bar.’

I looked for the form behind the lantern. The form was gone. I noticed something moving behind the lamp. I looked. Writhing, its head green, its eyes scaly, was a large lizard. I moved slowly, felt for an object on the floor, touched a stone, and struck the lizard on the head. The lamp went out. A blue wind whistled in the bar and crashed at the door. I edged my way to the backyard. Madame Koto caught me in the dark and said, in the voice of an old bull:

‘Why did you bring them?’

‘Who?’ I cried.

‘Your friends.’

‘Which friends?’

‘The beggars, the spirit.’

‘They are not my friends.’

‘They are your father’s friends.’

‘No.’

‘He is their representative, not so?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘He has gone mad with politics.’

‘I don’t know anything.’

‘What did the spirit say to you?’

‘I didn’t hear.’

She let go of me.

‘You want some peppersoup?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

She went out and left me in the strange darkness of her bar. I wondered about what had happened to the electricity. I began to smell the corpse of the lizard, as if it had accelerated in its decomposition. The front door opened. The curtains parted. I smelt boots, restless energy, and saw a form at the doorway, the odour of mosquito coils preceding him.

‘Dad!’ I said.

He lit a match. His face was long, his eyes bright and deep-set, a cigarette in his mouth. The match went out. He sat. I listened to him thinking. Then he laughed airily and said:

‘A man can wander round the planet and still not move an inch. A man can have so much light in his mind and still not see what’s right in front of him. My son, why are you sitting like that?’

I didn’t know what to say. He chuckled in the dark.

‘A man can carry the world and still not be able to bear the load of his own head.’

‘What load?’ I asked.

‘Ideas, dreams, my son,’ he said, a little wearily. ‘Since fighting the Green Leopard the world has changed. The inside of my head is growing bigger.’

After a while, he said:

‘Maybe my thoughts are beginning to smell.’

‘There’s a dead lizard on the table.’

‘Who killed it?’

‘Me.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s a spirit.’

‘How do you know?’

‘The spirit spoke to me and then changed.’

‘Don’t kill lizards.’

‘Why not?’

‘They are messengers. Sometimes they are spies. My father once sent a lizard to warn me.’

‘Of what?’

Dad was silent. Then he said:

‘Some of our enemies were going to poison me. This was in the village. They put poison in my soup. I was about to drink when I saw this lizard shaking its head at me.’

‘That’s what lizards do.’

‘You are a goat, my son.’

‘So what happened?’

‘I ignored the lizard and was about to drink the soup when the lizard ran up the wall. I watched it, fascinated. Then it fell into the soup and died.’

I thought about what Dad had said. Outside I heard loud drunken voices from the forest.

‘Where is the lizard?’

‘On the table.’

Dad lit a match.

‘There’s nothing here.’ The match went out.

‘Maybe it went back to the land of the spirits.’

‘Don’t talk about spirits.’

The voices outside grew louder.

‘Someone gave the beggars wine to drink. I’ve never seen beggars so drunk. They are all members of my party.’

I could hear them laughing, cursing, fighting amongst themselves.

‘They see me as their leader,’ Dad said. ‘And I have no money to feed them. But I will build them a school. You will be one of the teachers. Is there any palm-wine?

Where is Madame Koto?’

‘In the backyard.’

‘Go and call her.’

I went out through the back door. It was very dark and I saw the prostitutes on stools or standing around, smoking in the night. When they saw me they kissed their teeth. The thugs and other clientele had gone. I went and knocked on Madame Koto’s door. After a while she opened. She had a lamp in one hand, a wig in the other. Her stomach was very big and wide, her face was swollen, as if someone had been hitting her. Weariness weighed on her eyes.

‘You bad-luck boy, what do you want?’

‘My father . .’

‘What father? Leave me alone. My business was doing well, then you went and brought all those beggars and drove away all my customers.’

‘I didn’t bring them.’

She stared at me a long time. She looked quite frightening. She gave me the lamp to hold and then put on her wig. She shut her door and went to the backyard and asked the prostitutes to go for the night. They grumbled about not being paid.

‘I will pay you tomorrow, when this bad-luck boy is not here.’

One by one the prostitutes got up. Grumbling, cursing, they went out into the darkness of the housefront. Madame Koto sat on a stool. There was a large green pot on the fire-grate. Frogs croaked in the bushes. From the forest a bird piped three times and stopped. The crickets trilled. Mosquitoes bit us. After some time one of the prostitutes came back.

‘What’s wrong?’ Madame Koto asked.

‘Those beggars are drunk.’

‘On my wine.’

‘If we don’t get rid of them our business will fail.’

‘Don’t talk nonsense. Go home. Come tomorrow.’

She went. We listened as the beggars called out to her. She cursed them. The beggars laughed raucously.

‘Those friends of yours broke all my glasses,’ Madame Koto said. ‘And my plates.

Abused my customers. Broke two chairs. Who will pay, eh?’

‘My father wants to talk politics with you.’

‘Who?’

‘You.’

Madame Koto reached for a stick and began to hit me. I didn’t move. She stopped.

‘You and your father are mad.’

‘We are not mad.’

‘I’m not well,’ she said, in a different voice.

‘What is wrong?’

‘Money. Politics. Customers. People.’

I was silent.

‘What does your father want?’

‘Palm-wine.’

She gave a short laugh.

‘I gave all the palm-wine to the beggars.’

‘Why?’

‘They were causing trouble so I gave them palm-wine and they left. I told them to go far away, but they went to my frontyard.’

‘They want to vote for my father,’ I said. Madame Koto stared at me.

‘Your father?’

‘Yes.’

She laughed again.

‘Only chickens and frogs will vote for him.’

‘What about mosquitoes?’

‘Them too. And snails.’

‘He said I should call you.’

‘Where is he?’

‘In the bar.’

‘So he has come back to my bar after callingme a witch, eh?’

‘He wants politics.’

‘Go and tell him I’m coming.’

When I went back into the bar Dad was asleep. He slept with his head held high, as if he were in a trance. I drew close to him and listened to him grinding his teeth.

Fireflies lit up the darkness. A yellow butterfly circled Dad’s head. I watched the butterfly. When it landed on Dad’s head I could suddenly see him clearly in the dark.

A yellow light surrounded him. The light was the exact shape of Dad and it rose in the air and came down and began to wander about the bar. I watched the light. It kept changing colour. It turned red. Then golden-red. Then it moved up and down, lifting up in the air, and bouncing on the floor. It went round Dad as if looking for a way to get back in. Then the golden-red light came and sat next to me. I started to sweat. I cried out. The light changed colour. It became yellow again, then a sort of diamondblue.

When I touched Dad the butterfly lifted from his head and disappeared through the ceiling. Dad opened his eyes, saw me, and gave out a strange cry. Then he looked around as if he didn’t know where he was.

‘You’re in Madame Koto’s bar,’ I said.

He stared at me, lit a match, and when he recognised me he blew it out. He drew me close to him. I could smell his frustrated energies, his mosquito-coil fragrances. He lit a cigarette and smoked quietly for a moment.

‘A man can wander the whole planet and not move an inch,’ he said. ‘My son, I dreamt that I had set out to discover a new continent.’

‘What is it called?’

‘The Continent of the HangingMan.’

‘What happened?’

‘When I landed with my boat I saw mountains, rivers, a desert. I wrote my name on a rock. I went into the continent. I was alone. A strange thing happened.’

‘What?’

‘You’re too young to understand this.’

‘Tell me.’

‘As I went I started to dream the place into existence. I dreamt plains, forests, paths, great open spaces, spiked plants, and then I dreamt up the people. They are not like us. They are white. Bushmen. They advanced towards me. They wore strange clothes and had precious stones round their necks. To the eldest man, I said “What are you people doing here?”

‘“What about you?” he asked.

“I have just discovered this place. It is supposed to be a new continent. You’re not supposed to be here.”

“We’ve been here since time immemorial,” he replied. ‘And then I dreamt them away. And then a shepherd came to me and said:

“This continent has no name.”

“It’s called the Continent of the HangingMan.”

“That’s another place,” he replied.

“So why doesn’t it have a name?”

“People do not often name their own continent. If you can’t give it a name you can’t stay here.”

‘The continent vanished. I found myself on a strange island. The people treated me roughly. They were also white. Unfriendly people. Unfriendly to me, at least. I lived among them for many years. I couldn’t find my way out. I was trapped there on that small island. I found it difficult to live there. They were afraid of me because of my different colour. As for me, I began to lose weight. I had to shrink the continent in me to accommodate myself to the small island. Time passed.’

Dad took a drag from his cigarette. His eyes were bright in the darkness.

‘Then what happened?’

‘I began to travel again. I travelled on a road till I got to a place where the road vanished into thin air. So I had to dream a road into existence. At the end of the road I saw a mirror. I looked into the mirror and nearly died of astonishment when I saw that I had turned white.’

‘How did it happen?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘So what happened?’

‘Then everything changed. I was in a big city on the island. I was a news-vendor, selling newspapers outside a train station. It was a temporary job. I had bigger plans. It was very cold. There was ice everywhere.’

‘Ice?’

‘Yes. Ice fell from the sky. Ice turned my hair white. Everywhere ice.’

‘Then?’

‘Then one day you came to buy a newspaper from me. You were a young man.

When you gave roe the money it burned my hand. I started to run away when you woke me up.’

We sat in silence. Dad creaked his bones for five minutes. Then he stretched. Then he banged the table and said:

‘Where is the wine, eh?’

The electric light came on in the bar, driving away the shadows, rendering the objects curiously flat. Madame Koto, two bottles of beer in one hand, a bowl of peppersoup in the other, hobbled over to our table.

‘Finish this and go,’ she said, banging down the beer and soup.

‘The Great Madame Koto, aren’t you pleased to see me, eh?’

‘After you called me a witch?’

‘That was your palm-wine talking, not me.’

She hobbled away. Her foot had grown worse, and had been rebandaged. She went to the counter, sat behind it, and put on some music. Dad drank the soup hungrily. He gave me some meat. He opened the bottle of beer with his teeth.

‘No wine?’ he asked.

‘I gave all the wine to your friends.’

‘What friends?’

‘The beggars,’ I said.

‘They broke my plates and glasses. Why did you have to bring them here, eh?’

‘I didn’t bring them.’

‘Why did you invite them to your party?’

‘I didn’t invite them.’

Madame Koto stopped the music. Dad finished the first bottle of beer and startedon the second one.

‘Madame Koto, I want to talk politics with you.’

‘Why?’

‘Out of interest.’ ‘For what?’ ‘People.’

‘Who will you vote for?’ ‘Myself.’

‘I hear you want to start your own party, eh?’

Dad said nothing. I looked up at the posters of the political party that MadameKoto supported. I studied the pictures and almanacs of their leaders. She said:

‘Don’t bringme trouble. Take your beggars away. I don’t want to lose my customers.’

‘Beggars also vote.’

‘Let them vote for you, but take them away.’

The wind blew at the door. Then we heard a curious drumming on the roof. The bulb kept swaying. Someone came in. At first I could not see them.

‘Get out!’ Madame Koto shouted.

Then I saw three of the beggars at the door. Two of them were legless and moved on elbow pads. The third one had a bad eye. They came into the bar and gathered round Dad’s table. Dad finished off his beer.