Songs of Enchantment (25 page)

But dad’s blindness only multiplied his energies and his rage. He threw them off. A punch sent one of the men flying into the pool of blood. When the man got up blood dripped from his hair and he began to scream that the maggots were eating up his face. Ignoring the firewood landing on his head, the blows falling on his wooden face, dad pursued the screaming man, caught him, and pounded him into unconsciousness. The others should have known that dad gets more powerful the more his disadvantages increase, but they didn’t. They jumped on him, and he swung them round and flung one of them right through the front door of the bar, and hurled another against Madame Koto’s new car, his head smashing the side window. They came at him again, and dad released a thunderous cry, and for a moment it made them pause. But others rushed in with machetes and long poles and dad would most certainly have become one of the unnumbered dead if the people of the street hadn’t come to his rescue, throwing stones and bricks at the thugs, forcing most of them to beat an undignified retreat. Meanwhile, dad flailed about, his voice fearless, shouting of the glories of battle. And when a solid punch from an ex-boxer connected with dad’s chin, he was momentarily immobilised. He was stock-still. His eyes swam, his mouth drooled and, risking my head being chopped off in the confusion of battle, I
rushed to him. When I caught his hand, he awoke from his immobility, and said:

‘My son, we are in the most wonderful city.’

‘We are in trouble, dad,’ I said.

‘Everything is covered in gold,’ he replied.

‘Like where?’

He pointed up to the sky, to an empty space where the clouds were thin beneath the fiery sun.

‘There!’ he cried. ‘There the trees bear fruits of precious stones.’

Someone cracked me on the head from behind, crushing me to the floor. Dad was still pointing at different places of the sky and earth, the battle raging around him.

‘There!’ he cried again. ‘There is a man eating a rainbow. And there is a woman just like Madame Koto with worms crawling out of her ears. She has jade eyes.’

He was turning around, naming the mysterious golden city of the blind, when a man brought a thick piece of firewood down on his head. I cried out too late. Dad crumpled at my feet. When he touched the ground, he jumped up again suddenly, as if the earth had somehow regenerated him. He went running and growling in all directions, flailing, swearing. Then he stumbled over the corpse. He got up and the people of our street rushed over and held him and hustled him away before the full fury of the political mob fell on him and deprived us of his mad energies. While he was being whisked away, mum appeared amongst us. I don’t know how. And as dad went, tripping, cursing, refusing to be treated like a blind man, walking off into the bushes, submitting himself to mum’s voice, I heard him swearing that he would never go to Madame Koto’s place again, that the pact with her involving us had been broken for ever. And now he wanted the whole world to broadcast the fact that Madame Koto, Queen of the ghetto, Ruler of a new religion, had just acquired her most terrible adversary. He shouted the fact so loudly, knocking the heads of his protectors with his blind misdirected rage, that those who were
helping left his side, and it fell to mum to guide her uncontrollable storm of a husband back to our compound.

Dad astonished us that day. He swore that our room was the great atrium of a fabulous palace. The walls were draped with rich cloth. There were bloodstones in the eyes of warrior statues. The ceiling was glorious with royal chandeliers. Twinkling glass was everywhere, and even his three-legged chair was a mighty velvet sofa. And as he described the great atrium of his blindness, marvelling at how much and how miraculously our lives had improved, how our true royal condition had finally caught up with our poverty, mum looked at me with an expression that seemed to wonder if it wasn’t better in some ways that dad retained his blindness and his enchanted palace rather than live again in the dreariness that sight would bring.

D
AD BECAME HUMBLE
in the presence of his mysterious kingdom. Everywhere he turned he saw his subjects. Mythic warrior-kings, long dead, paid visits to his court. They came with ritual beads thick round their necks, their crowns so weighty that they couldn’t walk without the help of their royal entourage. Dad made us realise that there was much in common between kings and the blind. In his kingdom, dad was a prince. He spoke of our obscure royal birth, of mum being a princess of a small kingdom in the country. He spoke of his father as being one of the heirs to the throne in his home town. Everywhere dad saw animals with crowns on their heads. He saw tigers and leopards, lions and jaguars. He saw hunters who went out into the forests and who returned with boars that had tusks of bronze, ostriches with lapis lazuli eyes, unicorns with horns of topaz. There were many beautiful women in his court, and they were his handmaidens, They bathed him with milk and saffron oil. They were so beautiful that dad became suspicious of them. Sitting in his three-legged chair, he followed them in his mind as they went out for the afternoon. He noticed that as soon as they entered the forest they turned into wonderful antelopes. Dad spoke of the rich gift of songs they brought back to him from their other kingdom.

Sometimes his eyes hurt so much that he said there were butterflies in his head trying to get out. Sometimes the world
drifted in a great bowl of milk. He swore that Ade came to him and begged him to bury his father. Then he began to speak of something growing in his eyes. He kept trying to get it out and we had to restrain him. Eventually, for his own good, we got some of the compound men to tie his hands behind his back. Dad would sit silently, surveying the peaceful splendour of his kingdom. Apparently, he had fifteen children and three wives and he kept getting their names confused. Mum watched him, marvelling. And I watched him knowing that something had struck his head and had burst open a strange door that opened him to fragments of another life.

Sometimes when he was quiet we were afraid for him. His silence became deep and unfathomable. His breathing became shallow. We never knew if he slept at night. He would sit there in his chair, his eyes open, and he would spend hours talking to his father who he said was right there in the room. They had long conversations in a language that even dad couldn’t properly understand. Sometimes dad spoke about a stream with the moon as a canoe which his father was paddling. Sometimes he sat still, his facial muscles all bunched up, his sweat dampening the air. He would sit up deep into the night, re-dreaming the world, and I would be unable to follow him on his crepuscular journeys to the remote places of his vision.

We were very sad for him. He didn’t eat, didn’t drink, and even the mosquito coil began to enrage him. Through all this, mum carried on with the hawking of her meagre provisions, treading the endless winding roads that led to new settlements, her feet blistering on the heated sand and stones, her face darkening under the onslaught of sunstrokes. And when she returned exhausted she would sometimes suffer the bizarre transferences of dad’s blindness, and for twenty minutes she would see holes in objects and walls and in me.

Dad stayed silent and often I tried to console him by reading aloud from books on precious stones and Egyptian
astrology. At no point during all this did he want the door shut.

Sometimes he amazed us by saying that he could see the wind.

‘The wind has many colours,’ he would say. ‘When the weather is cool, the wind is red. When it is hot, the wind is blue. But the colours keep flowing and they can be very beautiful. And when a bad neighbour is passing our door-front, the colour of the wind changes a little.’

Then after a long silence he would cry out and say:

‘Everything is alive.’

We would wait for him to continue. After two hours, when we had completely forgotten the original statement, he would say:

‘The table has been listening to us. The walls have senses. The ceiling has eyes. The bed breathes and suffers all our tossing and all our dreams. The secret stories of our lives are stored in all these pots and pans and spoons. My boots know more about me than I do.’

Then he would be silent. After another five minutes he would say:

‘This chair I am sitting on has been talking to me, releasing its stories. It used to belong to an Englishman who died in this country. He died of malaria. He had a child by one of our women and he disowned the poor boy. His wife didn’t enjoy sex. The chair then travelled from the expatriate quarters of the city and passed through two families and was nearly burned when a house caught fire. Then it was stolen, then sold, and I don’t know how it got here.’

There was another pause. Fearing it would go on for ever, I asked:

‘What about your kingdom?’

‘What kingdom?’ he said.

I stayed silent. The evening darkened the room. Dad forbade us to light a candle, saying it made the darkness in his eyes worse. We ate in the darkness, listening to the corpse of Ade’s father getting more bloated with the night. Later,
as the wind blew its strange colours into our room, I saw the form of Madame Koto standing on dad’s head.

‘I am carrying a mountain,’ dad said.

He became sober. He shrank into himself. His neck disappeared. Nothing I did could budge Madame Koto’s form from dad’s head. And as the night grew deeper dad began to cry, but he disguised the pain in a weird kind of laughter which made mum’s jaws ache. Her eyes burned in the darkness, and mum saw more as dad saw less. The uncanny transferences began to operate again. The weight pressed down on dad, and we found it hard to move: my limbs became heavy, as if I were a boy in an elephant’s body; and mum walked with an unbearable lassitude, as if she were two years pregnant with twins. The weight on dad made me sweat all the time. At night I heard him grinding his teeth and we had to keep waking him up because we feared his teeth might crumble in his mouth. Our sleep became oppressed. In our dreams we were unable to move or speak. It seemed as if the house was actually on top of us all through the night. In the morning it came as a shock to find that dad’s hair was flattened and his scalp bleeding. There had been nothing visibly on him. Dad complained of excruciating headaches and as it grew worse he spoke of being in an unrecognisable country where people were thrown in fires or thrown to crocodiles, in a city where the poor lived in caves. He said our room was a catacomb and that there were worms on the walls. He rejected the plate of fried bush-meat we gave him, saying that it was a live animal, and the rice we fed him made him cry out again, saying:

‘EVERYTHING IS ALIVE!’

He spoke of tormentors everywhere. He said a wizard was whipping him with a lash made of crocodile hide. We didn’t believe him at first, but when we looked at his back we were horrified to find it covered in fresh welts. Other times he said the wizard was making razor incisions on his flesh and we noticed that he came out in strange cuts and blisters.

‘Fight them!’ I said. ‘Fight them, Black Tyger!’

‘I am a blind Tyger,’ he replied gravely.

I saw dad’s spirit shrink, and his other form became smaller as Madame Koto’s form became greater on his head.

‘I see blood everywhere,’ said dad.

His eyes had turned red. I stared into them intently.

‘A seven-headed spirit is staring at me,’ he said.

I began to cry.

‘Shut up,’ he said. ‘That noise makes the weight on my head heavier.’

I fell silent, swallowing my tears. After a while mum began to sing in a low voice. She sang sweetly and her voice made me sad. I didn’t understand her song.

‘Don’t sing for me,’ dad growled. ‘There is blood in my ears.’

Mum stopped singing. We didn’t look in his ears to see if what he said was true. We were very afraid. Dad began to moan. He held his head. As the pain grew worse, he said:

‘The wizard is hammering a nail into my ear-drums.’

Mum opened her mouth in alarm. Dad continued:

‘My head is full of pressures. I am breathing the air of diamonds.’

We stared at him, wondering what he was going to say next. His silence expanded the spaces in our heads. I became quite terrified of dad’s blindness.

Sometimes, as I stared at him intensely, his blindness would enter me for a moment, and I would make out the solitary form of an angel hovering just below our ceiling. Dad would suddenly cry:

‘I can see!’

At that precise moment the angel’s form would dissolve. Already, dad had jumped up, his face brightening with a diamond joy. My eyes cleared. Then dad would sit down again, disconsolately, and in a scared voice he would say:

‘It’s gone. The darkness has returned. All I see now is the wind stirring just beneath the ceiling.’

It became so bad that mum began to talk of getting a
herbalist to treat dad. She mentioned a few names, outlining the awesomeness of their reputations. Dad refused such treatment. He swore. He accused mum of trying to get herbalists of dubious politics to make his blindness permanent. He went on and on, ranting about how we were making faces at him, mocking his blindness, sticking feathers in his hair, tickling his nose, shadow-boxing round him, and blowing hot air into his eyes. We were dumbfounded by his accusations. And when we failed to deny them he took them for the truth. He wouldn’t let us touch him. He became suspicious of the food. He demanded that we tell him our exact positions at any given moment. This went on for a whole day. When he slept, snoring heavily, he would wake up all of a sudden, calling my name, saying that an angel was offering him precious stones. He wouldn’t take them. And when the angel left, Madame Koto started to dance on his head.

‘Take me outside,’ he cried. ‘This room is full of demons!’

I led him out into the street. Neighbours greeted us, offering profuse condolences, and dad growled at them.

‘Who was that?’ dad asked, after a particular neighbour had gone.

I told him.