The Famished Road (62 page)

‘If you get rid of them,’ Madame Koto said, ‘I will forget the damage, and you and your son can come here to drink anytime you want.’

The beggars played with the empty beer bottles. Dad snatched the bottles from them and stood up.

‘Let’s go,’ he said to me.

We went out and the three beggars, chattering, pawingDad’s trousers, followed us.

Along the street other beggars were asleep. The three beggars followed us till we got to our place. Dad turned to them and waved them away. They stopped. We went on. I looked back and saw the three beggars, crouched in the darkness, staring at us with odd eyes.

THE WIND AND thunder were hard that night. We found Mum sitting on Dad’s chair, a mosquito coil on the table, a tattered wig on the bed. Mum looked tired.

She didn’t say anything when we came in. She was rocking back and forth, while the wind blew over our roof and thunder rumbled above us. Things were changing, the room looked strange, and Mum sat there staring straight ahead as if down a long unfinished road. The candle had burned low, mosquitoes whined, a moth circled Mum as if her head were a flame, and her eyes became very bright.

‘What happened?’ Dad asked, sitting on the bed.

Mum was crying. She made no sound, her eyes were bright, she stared straight ahead as if into the wind, and she was crying. I went over to her and put my head on her lap and she didn’t move.

‘Go and buy ogogoro,’ Dad said to me gruffly.

He gave me money and I hurried across the road. Some of the beggars were gathered at the mouth of our compound. They were crouched in groups. I bought the ogogoro and on my way back I saw that they were now at our housefront. They lay down on mats, under the sloping zinc eaves, eyeingme as I went past.

When I got back to the roomMum was sitting on the bed and Dad was on his threelegged chair. The smoke from the mosquito coil formed blue spirals round his head. A new candle had been lit. Dad stolidly smoked a cigarette. He snatched the ogogoro from me, poured himself a generous quantity, and drank. Mum watched him. I brought out my mat. I told Dad about the beggars.

‘Next thing they will take over our room,’ Mum said.

‘I’m going to build a house for them,’ replied Dad. ‘I’m going to build them a school. Azaro will teach them how to read. You will teach them how to sell things. I will teach them how to box.’

‘Who will feed them, eh?’ asked Mum.

‘They will work for their food,’ said Dad.

Mum stretched out on the bed. She was silent for a while. Then she sat up and began to complain that her stall had been taken over at the market, that she had been hawking all day and had sold very little, that her feet were swollen, her face raw from the sun, and that the chair-hire man had come by and she had given him the little money she had.

‘You must pay me back,’ she said.

‘I will pay you double,’ Dad replied.

Mum went on about how she went hawking and was selling provisions along the main road when she saw a classmate of hers. They used to be in primary school together. Her classmate now had a car and a driver; she looked ten years younger than Mum, and she wore rich clothes. Mum sold her oranges and the woman didn’t recognise her. Mum didn’t sell anything else that day; she came straight home.

‘This life has not been good to me,’ Mum said.

‘Your reward will come,’ Dad said, absent-mindedly.

‘I will make you happy,’ I said.

Mum stared at me. Then she lay down. Soon she was asleep. The wind blew in through all the cracks in the room and made us shiver.

‘Something is going to happen,’ I ventured.

‘Somethingwonderful,’ Dad said, rocking his chair expertly.

The wind blew hard. The moth circled the flame. Then suddenly the candle went out. We stayed still in the darkness. The room was quiet.

‘I miss hearing the rats,’ Dad said.

‘Why?’

‘They made me think. Everything has to fight to live. Rats work very hard. If we are not careful they will inherit the earth.’

The silence grew deeper. I lay down and listened to Dad thinking. His thoughts were wide; they spun around his head, bouncing off everything in the room. His thoughts filled the place, weighed me down, and after a while I was inside his head, travelling to the beginnings: I went with him to the village, I saw his father, I saw Dad’s dreams running away from him. His thoughts were hard, they bruised my head, my eyes ached, and my heart pounded fast in the stifling heat of the room. Dad sighed. Mum turned on the bed. The room became full of amethyst and sepia thoughts. Forms moved in the darkness. A green eye regarded me from just above Dad’s head. The eye was still. Then it moved. It went to the door and became a steady tattoo on the wooden frame. The wind increased the sound. Dad creaked his bones. When the knocks became louder I smelt something so profoundly rancid that I sat up.

‘What’s wrong?’ Dad asked.

‘Something is trying to get into the house.’

The knocks sounded on the window. I opened it; the wind came in and blew me towards the bed. Mum sat up and went to the door. She opened it and gave a low scream. Dad was still. The smells of death, of bitterness, of old bodies, decomposing eyes, and old wounds, filled the room. Then several eyes lit up the darkness. There was laughter; and from their breath came the bad food and hunger of the world. They came into the room, surrounding us. In the darkness, a bitter wind amongst them, with the calm of strangers who have become familiar, they sat on the floor, on the bed, on my mat. We couldn’t breathe for their presence. One of them went and sat at Dad’s feet. She was a girl. I could smell her bitter beauty, her bad eye, her unwashed breasts.

They came amongst us not like an invasion, but like people who have waited a long time to take their place among the living. They said nothing. Mum stayed at the door.

All the exiled mosquitoes came in; the fireflies looking for their illumination clustered round the figures in the room. A red butterfly circled the girl’s head and when it settled on her the room was faintly lit up with a ghostly orange light that made my eyes twitch.

‘Who are you people?’ Dad asked, in a voice devoid of fear.

There was a long silence.

‘Azaro, who are they?’

The girl stretched out her hand and placed it on Dad’s foot. Then she began to stroke it. She stroked his feet gently, till they too caught the orange light, and looked burnished, separated from the rest of his body in the dark.

‘My feet are burning,’ Dad said, ‘and I feel no heat.’

‘Who are you?’ Mum shrieked. ‘Get out, now! Get out!’

There was another silence.

‘They are the beggars,’ I said.

Mum caught her breath. Dad pulled his feet away and sat up straight. The orange light died in the room. I heard Dad fumbling for the box of matches. After a moment the match was lit, but not by Dad. The beggar girl held the flame up in the air so we could see. She looked so wonderful sitting there at Dad’s feet. Her bad eye, in the deceptive light, had turned a curious yellow colour. Her good eye was almost blue, but it was full of the deepest sadness and silence. Her dress stank. Her face was serene like that of a spirit-child. Without taking her eyes off Mum the beggar girl lit the candle. We looked round and saw them, seated peacefully, as if at a village council meeting, on the floor, their backs against the wall, on the bed, each of them fertile in deformities, their wounds livid, the stumps of missing arms grotesque, their rubber-like legs distorted. There was one with a massive head like a great bronze sculpture eaten by time. Another had a swollen Adam’s apple. Yet another had two of the most protruding and watchful eyes I have ever seen. They seemed to have been made by a perverse and drunken god.

Mum cried out and charged at the beautiful beggar girl. She seemed quite demented. She grabbed the girl by the hair and tried to pull her up. The girl didn’t move, didn’t utter a sound. Mum seized her arms and tried to drag her out. Mum was screaming all the time. We all seemed in a trance. We all watched her without moving. Mum tried to shift the girl, but it was as if she were struggling with an immovable force. The girl’s eyes became strange. She took on a great weight, as if all her poverty and her suffering had invisibly compacted her like a dwarf star. Mum began shouting:

‘Get out, all of you! Get out, you beggars! Can’t you see that we too are suffering, eh? Our load is too much for us. Go! Take our food, but go!’

She stopped shouting suddenly. In the silence that followed, the curious spell was lifted. I breathed in the deep fragrances of wild flowers, of herbs beaten to the ground by rain, of clouds and old wood, of banana plants and great open spaces, of verdant breezes and musk and heliotropes in the sun. The fragrances went. Then Mum turned on Dad, pounced on him, and began hitting him uncontrollably. Dad didn’t move in the chair. Soon he was bleeding from a scratch right next to his eye. Then Mum tore at his shirt and when all the buttons flew off she woke from her fever. She stopped again and went to the beggar girl. She knelt in front of her. The beggar girl began to stroke Dad’s feet. Mum, weeping, said:

‘I didn’t mean any harm. My life is like a pit. I dig it and it stays the same. I fill it and it empties. Look at us. All of us in one room. I walk from morning till night, selling things, praying with my feet. God smiles at me and my face goes raw. Sometimes I cannot speak. My mouth is full of bad living. I was the most beautiful girl in my village and I married this madman and I feel as if I have given birth to this same child five times. I must have done someone a great wrong to suffer like this. Please, leave us. My husband is mad but he is a good man. We are too poor to be wicked and even as we suffer our hearts are full of goodness. Please go, we will do something for you, but let us sleep in peace.’

A long silence grew in the wake of Mum’s speech. The beggar girl stopped stroking Dad’s feet. I began crying. Dad lit a cigarette. He poured himself more ogogoro. He gave some to the beggar girl. She drank. Dad downed what was left. The girl coughed.

‘Did you hear me?’ Mum asked.

‘She’s a princess,’ Dad said. ‘They travelled for seven days to come to my party. I did not invite them but they came. A river does not travel a new path for nothing. The road gave them a message for me. Can’t you see that they are messengers?’

‘What is their message?’ Mum asked.

‘What is your message?’ I asked them.

All the beggars turned to me.

‘And where is your old one?’ I said, rememberingmy encounter in the bar.

Dad looked at me.

The beggar girl got up. The other beggars changed their postures. Then, without speaking, taking their deformities and their wounds with them, but leaving their vile smells behind, they filed out of the room. The girl was the last to leave. She stared at me intensely, then at Dad, and shut the door behind her. I heard them shuffling up to the housefront. Dogs barked in the distance. Fireflies, mosquitoes, and moths, died on the table and floor, killed, it seemed, by the smell in the room. Dad drank steadily, weaving his head round and round as if he were in a profound dream. Mum leant over, slapped her foot, straightened, and in a low voice, said:

‘They brought fleas and left them to eat us. That is their gift. You are crazy, my husband.’

I had never heard Mum sound so harsh. She went and sat on the bed. Dad’s wound bled freely. His eyes were intense, his jaws kept working. Then he said:

‘They were once a great people. Hunger drove them from their kingdom and now the road is their only palace. I will build them a school. I will teach them to work. I will teach them music. We will all be happy.’

Mum went out, fetched some water, and disinfected the room. The disinfectant, sprinkled thickly everywhere, stung my nostrils. Mum changed the bedclothes. Dad sat there, his eyes dreamy, a rough growth of beard on his face, blood dripping down the side of his face and thickening on the shoulder of his torn shirt. Then Mum came and dressed the cut and put a plaster on Dad’s face. She went and lay down on the bed. Dad mumbled drunkenly for a long time. He talked about building roads for the ghetto, about housing projects that would lift up the spirit of the people, about the need for world inspiration, about sailors without ships, priests without shrines, kings without homes, boxers without opponents, food without stomachs to eat it, gods without anyone to believe in them, dreams without dreamers, ideas without anyone to make use of them, peoples without direction. He made no sense to us. The candle burned low. He got up and, still muttering, came and stretched out on the floor beside me. He had the smell of a great animal, a lean elephant, the smell of too much energy, too much hope, too much contradiction. His eyes kept rolling. He muttered incoherently and soon he was grinding his teeth. When he was deeply asleep the candle burned high, it flared, as if Dad’s sleep somehow allowed it more oxygen.

Mum got off the bed, asked me to move, and then she did something strange. She sat astride Dad and began to hit him. She punched his face, hit his chest, beat a manic rhythm on his stomach, kicking and hitting him with all her might, screaming in a low frighteningmonotone all the time, hitting him unceasingly, till her hands gave.

‘I think I’ve broken my bones on his jaw,’ she said.

Dad didn’t stir. Mum glared at him as he slept with his mouth open. ‘Why is it that when I am happy rats die all over the floor,’ she said. I was silent.

‘Go and sleep on the bed,’ she commanded me.

Then she blew out the candle and lay quietly beside Dad in the airy darkness of the room. Soon I heard her sleeping. The world turned round. The night filled the room and swept over us, filling our space with light spirits, the old forms of animals; extinct birds stood near Dad’s boots, a beautiful beast with proud eyes and whose hide quivered with gold-dust stood over the sleeping forms of Mum and Dad. A tree defined itself over the bed where I lay. It was an ancient tree, its trunk was blue, the spirit sap flowed in many brilliant colours up its branches, densities of light shone from its leaves. I lay horizontal in its trunk. The darkness moved; future forms, extinct tribes, walked through our landscape. They travelled new roads. They travelled for three hundred years and arrived in our night-space. I did not have to dream. It was the first time I realised that an invisible space had entered my mind and dissolved part of the interior structure of my being. The wind of several lives blew into my eyes. The lives stretched far back and when I saw the great king of the spirit-world staring at me through the open doors of my eyes I knew that many things were calling me. It is probably because we have so many things in us that community is so important. The night was a messenger. In the morning I woke early and saw one of its messages on the floor. Mum and Dad, entwined, were still asleep. There were long tear-tracks on Mum’s face. I slept again and when I woke the sun was warm, Dad’s boots had gone, and Mum had left an orange for me on the table.