Songs of Enchantment (12 page)

The evening darkened. The wind made frightful noises as it blew over the head of the Masquerade. People hurried to their homes and heard the first mutterings of an exodus. I went towards Madame Koto’s bar.

When I passed the white horse it lifted up its head and gazed at me with green eyes. Then, unaccountably, it started kicking the air with one of its front feet. Convinced that it was threatening me in some way, I fled into the bar and into a completely new reality. The place had undergone another of its cyclical transformations. There were no long benches and tables. The counter had gone. The bird cages, the chained monkey, the mysterious peacock and the screened corner of the glass-eyed image had all vanished. The spaces inside were more expansive. The place had acquired a weird sort of domestic elegance. Red cushioned chairs had footstools beside them. Little tables had replaced the long ones. Spears and daggers decorated the walls. There were almanacs everywhere. Tinsel trailed down from the ceiling. Batik materials served as curtains. And, as always, the place was crowded. Women with almond eyes, long fingernails and lace dresses floated past holding cigarettes in their hands. There were short men with powerful heads and small eyes, tall men with servants who fanned them, stocky men with bleary eyes. The red lights made everything seem unreal and I kept going up to people and touching their stomachs till one of the women caught my hand and said:

‘Sit down and don’t move!’

I didn’t see mum in all the commotion of lights and loud music. There seemed to be more voices than there were people. Some of the voices were very guttural. I couldn’t understand anything that was being said. The longer I sat in the bar, the weirder I felt. It was as if I were asleep and awake at the same time, as if my body were at home and my spirit were under a red sea. Strange violent energies
wandered around in my head. My eyes began to pulse. My throat tightened. I suddenly realised that I couldn’t breathe. I screamed, and heard the sound at the other end of the room.

While I was trying to rally myself, a stocky man with big eyes and an elastic grin came over. He gave me a piece of fried chicken and tapped me on the head. I was about to eat the chicken when I heard mum’s voice saying:

‘Throw it away.’

I threw the chicken on the floor and the man came back and knocked me on the shoulder. I felt better. I got up from the bench, pushed past the crowd and went to the backyard for some air. The man came after me. There was a full moon over the forest. The man pointed to the moon, and when I looked at it, he laughed. I turned to him and became aware that he had holes in his eyes. He pointed to the moon again. I looked. The wind blew his voluminous garment. I smelt rotting flesh. When I turned to him again, his eyes were normal. His grin was still elastic. There was something distinctly odd about him and I didn’t know what it was.

‘Give me back my chicken,’ he said.

‘It’s inside,’ I told him.

‘Go and get it.’

I went in and picked up the chicken from the floor and when I went back outside he was gone. I looked for him and couldn’t find him. I threw the piece of chicken into the bushes and heard a subdued growl from the darkness. I went back into the bar and searched for mum. She wasn’t there. Neither was Madame Koto. The wind blew decomposition into the bar and when I sought the refuge of the backyard the man emerged from the bushes, with holes in his eyes, holes all over his face, and holes in his neck. He smiled at me. Then he laughed. And through his mouth, right through the back of it, I could see the moon. Then it dawned on me that the man had died a long time ago. Before I could do anything he went into the bar and I did not see him again.
I asked one of the women about him. She looked at me as if I were mad, and said:

‘I told you to sit down and be quiet.’

I couldn’t. The voices, all alien, and the lights, all garish, made me feel ill. I crept out to the backyard again. The moon was riding a white horse of a cloud. I was standing there, listening to the flourishes of drumming and tinkling bells approaching, when for the first time I became aware that a red haze of light surrounded me. I moved, and it followed me. I couldn’t step out of it and couldn’t shake it off. The red haze sent fiery visions through my head. Heat swept up my spine in vicious waves, filling my brain with the fury of hot nails. I tried to escape from the red haze framing me, but it stayed. It began to obsess me. I felt trapped in its violent peppery heat. But when I slipped back into the bar the heat ceased and the red haze vanished.

But I couldn’t stand it inside. The smells grew worse. The men smiled knowingly at me. The women’s hands were cold. And an agonised cry started from the barfront. Dogs began barking. When I went to the barfront everything was silent except for the dogs. Then I realised that the elysian voices were not singing in the forest.

I was about to return to the bar when I saw red spirits clambering up the fretful white horse. The wind made the Masquerade’s jackal head cry out. People rushed from the bar to see what was happening. The shining machete reflected moonlight on us and the horse neighed, rearing. Tossing its head, the white horse kicked out and raged in an inexplicable access of terror. The red spirits clambered on it and the horse galloped insanely round the Masquerade and one of the women shouted:

‘Someone control that horse!’

Then one of the men – tall, impressive, with a bullet-shaped head and elongated eyes – stepped out towards the horse, his hands outstretched. The red spirits jumped off the horse and on to the man and they vanished in him, as if his body had absorbed them. And then the horse trotted
over to the man, its head lowered, as if ashamed. The people clapped, and the dogs stopped barking.

When everyone had gone back in I noticed white spirits clambering all over the red Masquerade. The moon burned in its enraged eyes. I had retreated to the backyard when the wind, blowing hard, caused a weird jackal cry to issue from the Masquerade. The cry was so powerful and strange that for a long time afterwards all the nocturnal animals, the dogs, the cats, the weeping children, were utterly silent till the wind had passed and the coded cry had been carried away to the distant regions of the forest.

A
T THE BACKYARD,
bathed in the sheen of moonlight, the red haze appeared round me again. But before I had time to be scared, the flourish of drums, the tinkling bells and the rhythmic feet materialised. I saw many women, dressed in black, with white kerchiefs, dancing in a circle in the backyard. The blind old man was in the centre of the circle, orchestrating their movements. In his hand was a fan of the brightest eagle feathers I have ever seen. He had his harmonica, he was barefoot, and he danced with the fury and vigour of a wild young man. He whipped the air with his fan. He sprang one way, bounded in another, spun in the air, stamped irregularly on the earth, and lashed their spirits with ageless ritual passion, as he guided them through the cultic dances of the new season.

He led them through the Peacock dance, the dance of the Jackal, the movements of the Bull, and the cornucopia dances they must perform so flawlessly behind their leader on the night of the great political rally. With the exemplary vigour of a bull-leaper, he displayed the requisite motions, foaming at the mouth, yellow liquids gathering at the corners of his eyes. His chest was bare and covered with hieroglyphic markings, his neck was stringy, his stomach twinkled with antimony. He had kaolin on one side of his face and a red cloth with three cowries tied to his upper arm. He made the women stamp to the war songs and the party chants with mad and
unbounded energy. He was a mystery of signs, riddles, power and time.

Mum stood apart from the circle of women, the veins bulging on her forehead. She didn’t seem to notice my presence, and I couldn’t get to her because she was on the other side of the circle. The blind old man went on leaping and capering with the energy of a young lustful bull, his voice thick and harsh. And after he had exhausted the women, he sent for some palm-wine. The women dispersed, holding their hips, hobbling. With a severe expression on his face, he came and sat on a stool near me. Kneeling down, a woman handed him a half-calabash of palm-wine. He took it, and dismissed her. Before he drank he turned his old yellow-watering eyes to me, and said:

‘You ugly spirit-child! The next time I catch you in my dreams, I will eat you.’

Then he gulped down the half-calabash of palm-wine, and burped. The dogs started barking. I tried to move as far away from him as possible. I moved surreptitiously, hoping he wouldn’t notice. But after a while he turned to me again and, in his harsh voice of a half-transformed bull, said:

‘Come here, and let me see with your eyes!’

I fled to the barfront and sat near the door. The white horse breathed over me. The moon burned the eyes of the Jackal-headed Masquerade. The red haze round me began to grow hot again; soon I felt my flesh on fire. I couldn’t move. I heard the blind old man laughing in my head. Then I became aware of him staring at me maliciously through the eyes of the Jackal-headed Masquerade. A curious sand-hot wind blasted my mind. A cat ran out of the bushes and leapt across my face. The white horse uttered a piercing scream. The wind became still. Several voices began speaking in my head at once, whispers of hoarse women, the growls of old animals, the screeching of children. I smelt the old man’s presence all around. Then I felt eyes on me in the dark, rooting me to the floor. The angry waves of an invisible river roared behind me. My brain began to itch with
insurgent passions. The red haze around me grew more intense. Then I had a distinct sensation that the Masquerade was moving. Its raffia trailing rustled in the alien wind. And then, all over the area, I saw them – the great spirits, in blazing lineaments, pouring in one direction, with the golden spirits of butterflies vibrating in orioles round their heads, their drums thundering on the silent air.

The insurgent voices in me grew worse. I wrenched myself up and the moon became obscured and I heard the mighty hoofs of the Masquerade stalking me. I ran and fetched some stones and threw them at the Masquerade and I hit its eyes three times, and three times I heard the blind old man cry out in the backyard.

The red haze tightened round me, scorching my flesh with itches. Unable to bear it any longer I cried out for mum. After a while the moon was clear again in the deep sky, and I heard footsteps approach, and I saw mum surrounded by a blinding glow. Her eyes were serene as if she were conscious of her own sleep-walking. She stretched out a bony hand towards my head, and for a moment I was afraid. She did it with a bizarre stillness, as if she were possessed by a secret powerful goddess. Fortified by light and wind, she said in the voice of one returning from a distant dream:

‘No one will hurt my only son!’

And with a new cry mum seized the red haze around me. With a quick movement of her wrists she gathered it together and held it like a hoop, and dispatched it into the air. I watched the red hoop spinning like a strange disc: red into blue, it vanished slowly into the dark sky. And then I felt the cooling clarity of the moon and wind. When I looked around, mum was gone. I saw nothing except the white horse, its head held up, regarding me with surprised intelligent eyes; and the Jackal-headed Masquerade, its two ram horns askew, its eyes of the blind old man glaring at me in puzzlement and fury.

I was standing there in the calm field of moonlight, confused about where I was and what had happened, when
I felt a concussive light in my head, a white searing agony, brief and strangely beautiful. In the horrible brilliance of that moment it seemed I crossed a threshold, a time boundary, adventuring into chaos and sunlight. Still spinning, I was startled by voices behind me. And when I turned round it was suddenly broad daylight. The afternoon sun was burning on the surviving bushes. The streets were populated with people I had never seen. Cars went up and down the perplexing criss-cross of roads, blasting their horns. Bicyclists jingled their bells. Hawkers went past me, smiling, singing out the items of their trade. A lorry shot past, raising dust from the untarred street. Children were playing games in raised voices. A water-tanker drove into the yard of the house next door and sold water to the house-owner. I noticed the aluminium tank in front of the house and a signboard which belonged to a tailor. Then Ade came up to me, his face long and lean, his eyes mischievous.

‘What has happened?’ I asked.

‘Look,’ he said, pointing at the chaotic grouping of bungalows and zinc abodes.

‘Look at what?’ I asked.

‘The forest has disappeared,’ he said, smiling in an irritating, almost patronising manner.

‘Where has it gone?’

‘You are a fool,’ he replied.

‘Why?’

‘Things have changed.’

I looked around again. There was no white horse, no Masquerade, no Madame Koto’s bar, no forest; just a dry dust-saturated ghetto with sand-coloured houses, unfinished buildings, the signboards of a hundred small professionals everywhere, naked children playing, and flat-breasted women wandering the streets. The wind was hot, the sun unbearable, the smells of rotten eggs and open gutters terrible in the nostrils, the sky a burnished expanse of yellow heat. Ade hit me playfully on the head and went down the street, chuckling. Then, suddenly, the growling blast of a car-horn
sounded behind me, freezing my heart, darkening my sight. I jumped, landed heavily, and fell. When I got up it was night again, with the red and green bulbs shining in Madame Koto’s bar, and the voices of the women scorching the forest air. Bewildered, I turned and saw the white horse regarding me. It seemed quite pleased with itself, as if it had carried out an insinuated threat. A sharp pain roamed my head, and I realised I had been kicked. Without thinking, I ran into the bar. I screamed, and fought my way through the squat men with toad eyes and women whose perfumes masked their wickedness. I rushed to the backyard, trampling over the blind old man who was smoking a pipe, and jumped into the arms of my mother, into her protective serenity. She stood with magical grace in the moonlight. Her eyes were dazzling. She had the sweet scents of crushed herbs about her. She held me tight and, after a brief silence, said: