Songs of Enchantment (26 page)

‘I never knew how ugly he was till I couldn’t see him,’ dad said.

Then as I led him down the street he asked me to describe things to him. He wanted the minutest details about objects and the world. I did my best, and dad kept saying:

‘It’s not the same place. Nothing is the same. What colour is the sky?’

I tried to describe its mixture of lilac and brutish gold.

‘Even the sky has changed. I see it as green. What about the road? Describe it.’

I tried again and he shook his head as if everything were betraying him, and he said:

‘The road is like a river. It won’t keep still. It keeps moving. Where is it going, eh?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Take me to the front of Madame Koto’s bar and tell me what is happening.’

I didn’t want to take him there. For the past three days a terrible smell had been drifting over from the area in front of the bar. We had heard that at night strange forms had been converging above the bushes where I had last seen the corpse. Nightmares went there to get fat and, like birds with monstrous wings, they circled around Madame Koto’s bar and widened their flight to the rest of the street. We no longer went near the bushes at night, but the place became the centre of our discontent and unease. In the evenings, when the forest began to speak in nocturnal murmurs, people with ragged clothes and bad dreams raw in their eyes gathered there. They waited, and watched, and were silent. None of those who went while there was still some light in the sky, none of those who were unaccountably magnetised by the rumours of the dark converging forms, not one of them noticed the bad smell. Apparently, it got less the closer you were to its source. No one noticed the smell any more, and no one spoke. They were like a brooding Greek chorus that had been deprived of speech.

I took dad to three different places, deceiving him that he was in front of Madame Koto’s bar, and each time with increasing anger he said that he couldn’t see the palace of his enemy. When we finally got there he became agitated, pointing at trees that bore garnet fruits, pointing at the palace gates with their beautiful bronze statue of a half man, half crocodile. He kept asking me to describe what I saw and when I did he marvelled at how different it was from what he perceived. He kept asking me questions about colours, angles, textures, shadow forms. He saw ghosts where I saw bushes. He saw a fountain of yellow light where I saw the pool of stagnant blood. Plants with streaks of lilac had flowered in the pool. I described everything dutifully – everything except the corpse, which I never looked at, and never saw. But by its shadow, which was a form surrounding it –
solid in the muted orange lights of the dust-peppered evening – by its shadow I knew that the corpse was bloating and growing fat with all the fevers and bad dreams of the road.

Dad asked me about the corpse, which he had heard about, and couldn’t remember.

‘Is it there?’

‘It has walked away,’ I said.

‘Where to?’

‘To another city.’

‘What city?’

‘A city of gold.’

Dad hit me on the head.

‘Look!’ he said. ‘Tell me if it is there.’

I looked. I couldn’t see it. I told him so.

‘I can smell a corpse,’ he said. ‘It must be there.’

‘It’s not. I can’t see anything,’ I said.

Dad cocked his ears.

‘I can hear something singing. The song is coming from the ground.’

‘It’s the wind.’

‘I know the songs of the wind. This one is different.’

He pointed in the direction of the shadows.

‘It’s only the flies,’ I said.

‘Can flies sing?’

‘Yes.’

‘In one voice?’

‘Yes.’

‘Like a human being?’

‘Yes.’

He was silent. He listened again.

‘Whatever is singing is asking me not to forget him. Is someone there?’

‘No.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘What do you see then?’

‘Only the road and the flies.’

‘Describe the flies.’

‘They are big and blue and they have strange eyes.’

‘What is strange about their eyes?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Are the flies looking at me?’

‘A lizard is looking at you.’

‘Describe it.’

‘It has a red tail and a yellow mark on its head.’

‘Can you catch it?’

‘Why?’

‘It is talking to me.’

‘I can’t catch it.’

‘Why not?’

‘The darkness is coming and I don’t want to leave you alone.’

Dad was silent. Behind us, around us, the sullen brooding crowd were themselves becoming shadows. They seemed to be dissolving. Their faces were like the lineaments of ancient soapstone statues. Their eyes were dull.

‘Something is going to happen,’ dad said. ‘I can smell it.’

‘Let’s go home,’ I said. ‘The clouds are coming down. It’s going to rain.’

‘I can’t smell rain.’

I tried to drag dad home, but he was immovable. He had acquired immense weight. As I was pulling him he suddenly snatched his hand from mine and, staggering towards Madame Koto’s bar, began to bellow out his challenges. He defied her to send the worst of her demons and wizards, he shouted that he was ready for anything she could hurl at him, and that not everyone would keep silent for ever. He went quite berserk, stamping one way, staggering another, shouting and foaming. It took all the silent gathered people to hold him, and it took mum whispering something in his ears to restrain him. The moment dad stopped raging, he cried out that the weight on his head had multiplied. Everyone thought he had gone completely mad. Dad had challenged Madame Koto in public, but she had replied to him in secret, and in silence.

Dad carried Madame Koto’s weight home, carried it in his sleep, and woke up to it. But that evening, as we led him home, he could barely move. His eyes bulged as if his secret agony would make them burst out of their sockets. The veins in his eyes were blue and green.

I never saw dad more sober than he looked that evening. The shadow-minions of Madame Koto surrounded us, followed us home, filling our footsteps, measuring the psychic vibrations of our souls. Dad was very sober and he walked as if he were a midget in a world of monoliths. He cowered from the empty spaces. Noises antagonised him. The wind made him tremble. He was even scared of the leaves that were blown into his face.

The weight on him made him humble for a whole day. He never went out. He never spoke. His agony began to affect us and mum complained of a black rock in her brain. But like a lamb, dad did everything we told him to do. He retreated from our world. His shadow grew smaller.

Meanwhile, the season was changing, and the preparations for the great rally were moving steadily towards their climax. And a new cycle of time was beginning. It announced itself with another inexplicable plague and a smell of sulphur in the air.

I
T WASN’T ONLY
dad who was overcome with the fear of shadows. We had all become afraid of the corpse. We were afraid of breathing in its air and its silence. We feared that it was spreading death in the atmosphere, sowing it in our eyes, reaping it in our dreams. And because we were so afraid and so cowardly, we stopped looking at the corpse.

The activities for the rally became hectic at the barfront. Fire-eaters, somersaulters, soft-limbed dancers performed in bright-coloured dresses to the beating of drums, while Madame Koto’s stomach grew bigger, while her bad foot split the plaster-cast, and while the dead man rotted on our street. None of us looked at the body as we hurried past the bushes, and a great infernal stink settled over our houses. Not even the winds that made the trees bend could move the smell. We made no reference to the body and we stopped using the word death.

Then one day we heard that the body had gone. The first person to say this publicly went blind that very night. The smell of sulphur increased the darkness in the evenings. Those who went past the bushes and came back to tell us that the body had disappeared were struck with blindness. It wasn’t long before the ordinary inhabitants of our area began to go about the place with their hands outstretched, feeling the empty air, saying that everything had changed, and that minor spirits with large heads and kwashiorkor stomachs
were passing through our buildings as if they were transparent.

We woke up one morning to find that a mysterious plague of blindness had struck our community after we had stopped seeing the dead body. In the mornings or in the afternoons, in the midst of daily tasks, we heard people crying out that they couldn’t see. No one went to their aid because of the fear of its transference. The blindness spread like the night, invading the carpenters, the street traders, the hawkers and the butchers. We heard stories of children who were born blind. We heard stories of hawkers who went down the streets, selling their wares, with children leading them. The blind multiplied in our street. Then the nightmares which grew fat over the bushes began to appear amongst us with quickened wings, swooping into our midst, flying over our houses, entering our rooms, dwelling with us, eating our food before we did, drinking our wells dry, spreading the pungent sulphurous smell into our living spaces. The nightmares became our companions. They came with red eyes and weird vegetable growths on their disgusting bodies. We could no longer bear our rooms. In the evenings the inhabitants began to go out into the street. No one spoke of the plague or the unbearable smell.

Dad was silent through it all. He sat in his chair, in a royal solitude, weaving in and out of his new kingdom, suffering his agony with a curious timidity, asking no questions, and doing everything we asked. His body began to lose its forceful presence.

‘The dead are more alive than the living are,’ he said one night.

His pain had opened a door in his spirit. He spoke of strange animals with diamonds round their necks. They wandered around in our room. That night mum went out and didn’t return till we were fast asleep. In the morning I noticed that she too had changed. Her acceptance made her sadder. That evening she went out again, and when she came
back I could smell the forest on her clothes. There was a new moon out and when it was brightest in the night sky the corpse began to sing.

I
TOLD DAD
about the corpse singing. He listened intently through his pain, and said:

‘That is the road singing. Everyone should be careful.’

As the night grew darker the song of the corpse became more intense, and sweeter. It made the room hot. I found it difficult to sleep. As I listened to the solitary voice of the abandoned corpse I began to feel quite ill. That night the room glowed with a little green light in the dark. The light had nothing to do with dad, who sat in his chair, disappearing under the invisible weight. It had nothing to do with mum, who became more compact in her inexplicable stillness. Something was being born in our living-spaces. The little light kept flitting about the room. It shot past my face and I saw it as a phosphorescent fire which didn’t hurt.

‘The moon is burning our room,’ I said.

‘It’s not the moon,’ mum said. ‘It’s the fire of sorcerers.’

The light hovered over the centre table.

‘I can see it!’ dad cried. ‘It is a wandering spirit, a soul that has lost its body. My father always told me that when I see this light I should know that there is a person who is dead and who is trying to be buried.’

‘A child trying to be born,’ mum added.

Then, suddenly, the light went out through the open door.

‘I can still see it,’ dad said again. ‘A spirit is trying to tell us something.’

After a while mum got up and, saying words we couldn’t hear, went out into the passageway. I followed her. She went to the housefront. The street was covered in rubbish again. The inhabitants, under the spell of blindness, had begun to dump their refuse everywhere. In the backyard, near the well, two men, recently blind, were talking while the moon cast a spectral bewitchment on their faces. Mum went down the street. In front of her I saw the phosphorescent little light flitting over the road, darting all over the place, while the solitary voice sang from the bushes. Nightmares deepened the shadows in the air. The moonlight brightened the road as if it were a river of silver reflections. Mum followed the erratic light, and I followed her.

The world was silent except for the corpse singing and the jackals baying somewhere at the other end of the forest. Mum went past Madame Koto’s place and alongside the forest till she came to the marshes where a crocodile lay dead on a fallen tree. Mum didn’t see the dead crocodile. Maybe I’m the only one who did. When the erratic light reached the marshes it became two, and the two lights became three, and they darted everywhere, sometimes colliding. Mum stopped near the invisible crocodile and watched the lights. Then she turned and went into the forest.

I followed her till I came to a black rock which not even the moon could illuminate. The rock gave off the living smell of a great human body and when I touched it I was amazed to find that it was sweating. I drew back and noticed that curious-looking flowers were growing on the rock. The horror of it knocked me backwards and I banged my head against a tree. Almost immediately afterwards, I heard voices inside the dark stony mass; and I went round it three times, but I saw nothing. Then I drew closer, and put my ear up against it, and listened. When I heard my heart beating inside the rock, I gave a startled cry, and jumped back. And when I recovered, alarmed by the certainty that the rock was alive, I fled from its monstrous freakishness.

The forest was silent. The trees watched me with blind
eyes. The wind was quiet. I couldn’t find mum. After running for a few moments, I stopped. I stayed still and let the world re-align itself about me. I watched spiders weaving their webs from threads of moonlight. A bird swooped over me and when it had gone I noticed the little green light flitting across the forest floor. I followed it silently, tripping over climbers. The leaves of medicinal plants cut me with their serrated edges.