The Famished Road (65 page)

‘Azaro, why are you crying?’

She held me gently. The midget had gone. The four-headed spirit had evaporated into the mysteries of dance. I couldn’t see the giants any more, or the hoofs of parttime human beings, those who would wreck our hopes for two generations, or the bird-feet of strange women. Forms had lost their mutability.

‘What’s wrongwith you?’ Mum asked.

I held on to her. She wiped the tears from my face. My throat was dry. I stayed silent for a long time. Occasionally a cool wind blew in from outside. Mum gave me some iced water to drink. I drank it all and had some more. Then after a while, when I began to feel a little better, I looked up at her. She smiled.

‘We watched you dancing, my son. You danced like your grandfather. And then you fell. Are you all right now?’

I didn’t answer her question.

‘Why are you wearing those blue glasses?’ I asked her.

She laughed.

‘I will tell you later. It’s a good story.’

‘Tell me now.’

‘There’s too much noise. Where is Madame Koto?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘If you help me find her, I will tell you the story when we get home.’

I set out to search for Madame Koto. Everyone I asked said they had just seen her.

The beautiful beggar girl, sitting under a table, watched me as I went up and down. I was about to ask her a question when she motioned me to be quiet. She pointed. I followed her finger with my gaze and saw that the beggars were carrying out a complicated stealing operation. They grabbed fruits and fried meat and bowls of stew and plates of rice from the tables and passed them on in a relay of hands. The food disappeared beneath the tent. Helen was their watch-woman.

‘Do you want me to help?’

She waved me on.

‘Can’t you talk?’

She stared at me mutely and then, gently, pushed me away.

One OF THE politicians was plasteringmoney on the sweating breasts of a woman who had danced with unbounded sensual ferocity. Dad was having a heated argument with a man in a red hat. The man kept pushing Dad away and Dad kept coming back. Mum went over to him and held his fists and soon they were dancing together. It was the first time in a while that I had seen them dance. I continued with my search for Madame Koto. In the bar the women were serving bowls of steaming peppersoup. I was given a plate and I drank hurriedly and had to have some palmwine to extinguish the heat the pepper generated in my brain. The wine swam in my eyes. I staggered to the backyard. The duiker held me with its brilliant eyes. The eyes held me fast and I carried on walking while still looking at it and I crashed into a woman bearing a tray of food. The plates fell everywhere, the food tumbled to the ground. The beggars materialised from the night and scraped together the fallen food and vanished again. The woman swore at me. I swore back at her. She picked up a piece of firewood and chased me all over the backyard. I ran into the bushes and into the figure of Madame Koto. She started and stood very straight. Her eyes were blurred, as if she were in some sort of trance or in a moment of passionate anguish.

She stank of odd perfumes, queer aromas, of flint and hyena-hides, feathers and old trees.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked. ‘Go to your father.’

I backed away.

‘My mother is looking for you.’

‘Go away!’ she shouted.

I retreated. I hung around the fire-grate. I hid behind the earthenware pot that had been brought outside. I watched her. She remained still. Behind me the celebrations raged, the music shook the vegetation, loud voices cavorted in the night air. Then she came out of the bushes. She came towards me. She stretched her hands upwards in a dramatic plea, and then she sighed. I caught the green glint of the duiker’s eyes. The green glint stirred something in my brain. I scurried from behind the pot and hid near the duiker. Madame Koto turned to where I had been, but she saw nothing. She was still again. The moonlight touched her eyes. The duiker pawed me and drew me into itself and the wind blew a curious darkness from my consciousness and water flooded my ears and I found myself in the eyes of the magic animal, looking out for a brief moment into the reality that it saw. There were forms everywhere, the humped shapes of writhing animals, eyes floating on the wind, organic houses that behaved like carnivorous plants, flowers with worms in them, worms with flowers in them, silver cords lighting up the air. And I saw that Madame Koto was pregnant with three strange children. Two of them sat upright and the third was upside down in her womb.

One of them had a little beard, the second had fully formed teeth, and the third had wicked eyes. They were all mischievous, they kicked and tugged at their cords, they were the worst type of spirit-children, and they had no intention of being born. I heard a terrible scream. Something knocked the curious darkness back into my consciousness. Madame Koto was bent over. I backed away from the duiker. Madame Koto straightened, came over to me, and said:

‘Why were you staring at my stomach like that with your bad-luck eyes?’

‘I wasn’t staring,’ I said.

She hit me again. It didn’t hurt. Then she put on her moonstones, cursing and muttering about the pain in her stomach. She went to her room and soon re-emerged with a fan of peacock feathers. She walked with great dignity back into the celebrations.

The politicians pasted money on her forehead when she performed an impromptu dance; the praise-singers sang of her accomplishments; women clustered round, showering her with compliments. Mum went over and they talked and pointed at the food. Madame Koto seemed to be tellingMum who the important personalities at the event were. Mum looked lean and famished besides Madame Koto. Her wigwas in a sorry state, as if it was something she had rescued from the roadside. Her blue sunglasses made her look slightly mad. And her copper bangles had turned greenish from rust and all the water that dripped in from our roof.

While they were talking the blind old man started shouting in his chair. At first no one thought anything of it. He kicked and struggled drunkenly and then he got up and staggered to the middle of the dance floor. He turned one way, then another. Then he fell on his knees and crawled around on the ground and he kept shouting:

‘Thieves! Thieves!’

Madame Koto, ever the attentive host, was the first to take note of his inexplicable agitation. Waving the fan across her face, hobbling through the weaving crowd of dancers, she went to the blind old man.

‘I see food floating under the table,’ he said in a cracked voice.

‘Where?’

‘Everywhere. Since when did fried goat fly?’

Madame Koto, humouring him, tried to get him to stand up. He refused.

‘You have rats under your table. I saw a big rat. It has only one eye.’ The blind old man stood up, adjusted his yellow glasses, and started to jump up and down, squealing like a demented sorcerer. Then he brought out his harmonica and played during the silence between two records. Some of the people dancing poured scorn on him.

‘Take your dirty music somewhere else,’ someone said.

Madame Koto was leaving when she saw a flash behind the blind old man. A bowl of peppersoup was floating above the table. She leapt in that direction suddenly, on an impulse, and hurt her foot, and fell to the ground. Her bodyguards rushed to her and helped her up. When she was standing again, she pointed, shouting:

‘Get those thieves! Flog them! Bring them here! Let me teach them a lesson!’

The place erupted with her fury. She shouted, she threw plates and food on the ground. The music stopped. She weaved about the place, waving her arms, lashing her minions with her walking stick. The thugs rushed outside. Amid the general confusion Madame Koto saw the beautiful beggar girl sittingmutely under the table and ordered her to be caught. The thugs soon came back in, dragging some of the beggars into the tent. They had incriminating bowls of food in their hands. Madame Koto made them carry the bowls on their heads. The celebrants laughed. With the full vengeance of her stomach throbbing with the abiku children, with the agony of her swollen foot and twisted neck, she ordered the bodyguards to thrash the beggars. There was silence. No one moved. The strange duiker looked on with impassive eyes. The bodyguards, one by one, said they wouldn’t whip the beggars. Madame Koto burst into such a rage, hobbling around with her lion-headed walking stick, lashing her bodyguards on the back, screaming at them to thrash the beggars as a public lesson. The beggars gazed at her without emotion. They were silent. Legless, one-armed, one-eyed, soft-limbed, they gazed at her with big and placid eyes. Madame Koto, still hobbling, transforming her agony into rage, began to push her employees out of the premises, out of the tent, shouting for them to leave her service, to return to the festering gutters from which she had plucked them. Then one of the prostitutes cut herself a cane in the bushes and, crying as she did so, proceeded to whip the beggars. She whipped them hard, on their backs and on their wounds, on their faces and on their bad limbs. The bodyguards changed their minds. That night a new order of manifestations appeared in our lives.

As the thugs thrashed the beggars a curious dust rose from their backs, rose into the air, and when the dust touched the lights midges multiplied everywhere. The dust turned into flying insects; the insects grew in size and soon the tent and the fluorescent lights bristled with a host of green moths.

When Dad became aware of the beatings he ran over to the thugs and snatched the whips from them. They jumped on him and held him down. Madame Koto, still in agony, ordered that the beggar girl also be flogged. The prostitute whipped the girl.

Helen bore the whipping and did not move or cry. She stared at Madame Koto with gentle eyes as they whipped her. The gentleness in her eyes made Madame Koto madder. Mum went to her and said:

‘Tell them to stop. You don’t know who that girl is.’

‘She is a thief.’

‘She is not a thief.’

Madame Koto bellowed something at Mum. She insulted Mum loudly, saying that Mum too was a beggar. She gave vent to such a torrent of anger and bitterness that Mum was stunned. Then Mum did something quite odd. She tore the wig off her head and threw it on the floor. She took the blue sunglasses off her face. Then she stormed out of the disrupted party uttering the direst curses. The wind blew again when the whipping of the beggar girl was resumed. It was a strident wind. Slowly the beggar girl sank to the ground under the brutality of the whipping. Dad strained furiously against the people holding him down. The duiker let out a low snarl. The beggar girl began to bleed from the mouth. Blood dripped down her lips and fell in drops on the ground. I began to weep. Someone hit me. It was the blind old man. He started playing on his harmonica to the sound of the thrashing.

‘A good whipping, eh,’ he said every now and again.

The wind lifted the edges of the tent. The beggar girl crouched on the floor in a foetal position. I went round the gathered resplendent celebrants. They were fanning themselves. Their faces were animated by the new spectacle. As I pushed through them I again noticed their hoofs, their goat-legs, their spidery legs, and their bristly skins. I crept towards the duiker and untied it from the pole and released it from its sacrificial captivity. A mighty wail erupted from Dad. He stood up in a great burst of manic energy and sent the men flying. The duiker bounded from the backyard into the tent. And as the wind made the tent sway, as the lights began going on and off, a frightening cry rose from the bewildered crowd. The duiker bounded amongst the dazzling array of celebrants, scattering the bird cages, overturning the tables, stamping on the food, upsetting basins of fried meat, mashing the fruits, crashing into the cage of large parrots, shattering the tables with beer on them, and sowing pandemonium. The parrot beat its wings against the limitations of the tent, the monkey escaped and fled off with its hand full of fruits, the loudspeakers fell with a crash, people trampled on one another, howling and confused, the thugs chased the duiker, trying to recapture it, Dad hurled himself at the woman whipping the beggar girl and pushed her away, Madame Koto knocked Dad on the head with the metallic end of her walking stick, the blind old man squealed in his weird sorcerer’s delight, the duiker leapt out through the tent opening and the wind burst in and tilted the tent to one side, and Madame Koto ordered everyone to be calm. The parrot flew out through a gaping hole in the tent. The thugs turned on Dad, and were about to descend on him and beat him to a mash when a voice amongst the celebrants, profound with an unearthly authority, said:

‘Stop!’

Everyone froze as if in an enchantment. Then slowly they turned to see who had spoken with such power. The wind calmed down. The voices had stopped. Most of the motions in the tent ceased. And then the tall man in a white suit who had been waiting for Dad stepped out from the expectant crowd.

‘LEAVE HIM TO ME,’ he said in his thin ghostly voice. ‘I will thrash this Black Tyger without even stainingmy white suit.’

The blind old man played a strain on his instrument.

‘Ah, lovely, a fight!’ he said.

And before we could register what exactly was happening the man in white struck Dad in the face and sent him reeling. Dad fell on to a table. He didn’t move for fifteen seconds. No one saw the jab that did the damage. The celebrants, awoken from their enchantment, clapped. The old man played a tune. The beggars shuffled and crawled out of the tent. The beggar girl stayed crouched on the ground. Someone poured water on Dad. He jumped up quickly, looked around, and kept blinking.

‘Where am I?’ he wondered out loud.

The celebrants burst out laughing. Dad staggered around. Then he fell. He got up again and reached for a cup of palm-wine and drank it down. I went over to him.