The Age of Magic (22 page)

Soon afterwards the main door opened and a man wearing a wrapper came out. He shouted something that was lost in the wind. Then he dragged the figure into the house.

Omovo stared at the door for a long time. The night became cold and the dark coverlet of the sky pressed in on his skull. The pool of scum gave off a bad smell. The wrought-iron gate cranked and groaned. His footsteps ricocheted through the compound and through his skull.

Back in his room he got out his paintboxes, palette, and easel. He tried not to think of his lost drawing. He began to paint. The room was stuffy and hot. The mosquitoes whined and stung him in vulnerable places. He worked with unswerving determination. He caressed the white canvas with brush strokes of a deep muddy green. Then he punctuated the green tide with browns, greys and reds. Out of all this he painted a snot-coloured scumpool full of portentous shapes and heads with glittering, dislocated eyes. He knew what he wanted to do and was happy.

He worked at the painting, cleaned off a bit, retouched an edge, washed off some aspect, started a fresh canvas, and decided that the first one was appropriate. As he continued he thought he heard his father’s footsteps near the door. He stopped working to listen. The silence was broken now and again by the whining insinuation of a mosquito. Omovo tried to imagine what his father was doing or thinking outside his door. A moment later he heard footsteps move towards the sitting room. An incoherent emotion swept over him.

He returned to his painting. He worked intently, unaware of the passing time. He was surprised when on looking towards the window he saw the shy fingers of light prising through the yellow curtains. Then he suddenly felt tired and old. His eyes burnt with fatigue. His body smarted and itched where the mosquitoes had stung him. He was drenched in his own stale sweat.

When he finished with the night’s labours he took up a pencil and wrote ‘Drift’ on the bottom part of the canvas. He signed his name (even though well aware that he would still have to re-work it) and turned the painting to face the wall. He cleared up the room and cleaned away the familiar stains of paint. The paint had got everywhere.

When he made for the backyard he saw his father asleep on the cushion chair. His legs were sprawled and his head was slumped forward. Omovo stood there at the doorway, and he felt sorry for his father. Then he remembered many other things and he did not feel quite so sorry any more. At the backyard he washed his paint-stained hands with kerosene and turpentine and then had a light shower. When he came back to his room he drew aside the curtains. He felt trapped by his own emotions and felt very empty and dried up. Having nothing better to do, he searched around for his missing drawing. He gave it up. Then he rubbed some Vaseline on his parched hands and got back into bed.

He was studying a mass of accumulating cobwebs, which had festooned a high corner of the room, when sleep closed in gently upon him like the silent immensity of the sky.

The following week he worked furiously to complete the painting. When he finished it, however, he was uncertain and a little unsure of what he had created. It seemed to him strange and at the same time familiar. He knew, wordlessly, what he had attempted. He walked round the large green scumpool a thousand times. He had smelt its warm, nauseous stench and had stared at it as if hidden in its green surface lay the answer to a perennial riddle. He was also a little afraid of the uncharted things that had happened within him: the obscure, the foul correlatives which had been released on the canvas – snot-coloured, viscous, and unsettling.

On Tuesday evening, Omovo went to Dr Okocha’s workshed. It was shut. Freshly painted signboards leaned against the door. There was a large faded painting on the door. It was of a brooding green eye, with a black pupil and a gathering red teardrop. It stared all-seeingly at the teeming streets and back into its own darkness.

The week passed tortuously for Omovo. Evening after evening, when going out to ‘take fresh air’ he would lock his room door. The other loss still rankled. On Thursday evening he stood at the house-front playing with the children when the chief assistant deputy bachelor sidled up to him. That was what they called him because he was the oldest bachelor in the compound. He was a gaunt, dry-chested, hatchet-faced Igbo man in his early forties, who owned a small shop in the city centre where he sold all kinds of provisions.

‘Painter boy, how now?’

Omovo was swinging around a scruffy little child and when he saw the chief assistant deputy bachelor he dropped the boy, touched him on the head and told him to go and play with the other kids.

‘My name is not painter boy, you know.’

‘Okay now, okay. Anyway, how your body?’

‘Fine. What about you?’

‘Managing. What else can a man do?’

Omovo saw him jerk the wrapper round his waist and rearrange it.

‘See-o, see-o,’ he whispered, nudging Omovo. ‘Those two girls near the tank think they can see my prick when I arrenge my wrapper jus now!’ He laughed and then shouted: ‘Hey, what are you lookin’ at, eh?’

The two girls self-consciously turned their heads away, picked up their buckets of water, and staggered into the street. Omovo wanted to be left alone. He yawned. The yawn accomplished nothing.

‘Why are you yawning? Tired, eh? You young people. What is it that can make a young man just starting life tired? What’s making you tired? Is it work, is it too much fuck, is it woman palaver, or what? When I was your age I did all these things from morning till night and I was never tired.’

Omovo grunted. Two women from the compound chatted past, carrying stools, and paused near the chemist’s shop. They were going to have their hair plaited. One of the kids ran behind Omovo, and another chased after him. They scurried behind the old bachelor, pulling at his wrapper, hiding underneath it, and then they ran off again. The old bachelor seethed mockingly.

‘These children sef. They want to pull off my prick, eh!’

Both of them laughed. Another compound man came outside and, seeing the chief assistant deputy bachelor, went towards him. They both became involved in a never-ending argument.

Omovo moved away, relieved. A light wind blew over the scumpool. His head tingled. The sky was strewn with clouds. The light about Alaba darkened. A few grown-up boys rode bicycles round and round the street, and jingled their bells, and chased after pariah dogs. Little girls made mock food over mock fires. They had baby dolls tied to their backs. Someone waved. Omovo straightened. It was a stocky man draped in an agbada. It was Dr Okocha. He had some signboards under his arm. Omovo went to meet him.

‘I have got you a ticket.’

‘Thank you, Dr Okocha. Thanks a lot.’

‘It’s okay. I told them that you were a good artist and people might be interested in your work.’

‘Thanks again...’

‘Anyway, the manager of the gallery wants to see your painting. So take it to him, say, tomorrow. If he doesn’t find a place on the first day maybe he will later when other works have been bought or something. Anyway, I am in a hurry. I’ve got many signboards to paint. I will see your new work at the showing, eh?’

Omovo felt the keen edge of a thrill. A joyful feeling deepened within him, then began to fill up and to expand. He felt wonderful. It was the same lightness he felt when he saw Ifi. He walked down the thronged street with the old painter. He could hear the older man’s breathing and the rustle of the threadbare agbada and the footsteps and a thousand other sounds. But they all seemed out there. He could hear other sounds within him: keen, fine, soundless sounds.

The older man began to speak. His voice quivered slightly. Omovo thought he sensed now the reason for the older man’s anxiety.

‘My son is not well. I just took him to the hospital.’

‘Sorry-o. What’s the matter with him?’

‘I don’t know. His body was like fire yesterday night. The boy is very lean, his eyes... you know... deep. So deep.’

They went on. Nothing was said for a long moment. Life bustled about them. They passed the hotel where Dr Okocha had painted the frolicsome murals.

‘So how is the wife?’

‘Well, she is fine. You know, she is pregnant and is worried about Obioco. She’s a good wife.’

The older man’s face darkened. The wrinkles deepened on his forehead. The skin of his face seemed to shrink and the flesh bulged under it. He looked strange. The evening darkened as if regulated by his sadness. Omovo felt that the dome of the sky repeated and oppressed the dome of his own head.

‘I hope Obioco will be well soon.’

‘Amen.’

Not long afterwards Omovo told the old painter that he was going back. The old painter nodded and trudged on towards his workshed. Omovo turned and picked his way back home through the debris, the thronging passers-by, and through the falling darkness.

Omovo walked away from the house, towards the fetid-green scumpool. He had felt good in his room. The room had been in a mess. He hoped nobody would steal his painting and toyed with the idea of insuring it. He thought: ‘There is nothing like having an idea and seeing it through to its manifestation.’ He was filled with the simple wonder that he had created something on the canvas that wasn’t there before. The shock and surprise still enthralled him. He thought: ‘If your own work can surprise you then you have started something worthwhile.’

He wondered if he could remember to write this down in his notebook. He doubted it. He wondered also if in completing the painting he hadn’t disturbed or dislocated something else. He had read about the dangers of this somewhere. When he couldn’t expand the thought he abandoned it.

He had passed the scumpool when a group of wild-looking men marched towards him as if they were going to pounce on him. He waited, tense. He could see himself being flung into the filthy water. But nothing happened. The men marched fiercely past as if they had a constant mission of terror to accomplish.

He recalled what Ifeyiwa had said in the backyard, near the well, when he had told her that the drawing had been lost, stolen. She stared at a bird that flew past overhead, and said: ‘Omovo, something has been stolen from all of us.’

Omovo felt that she had uttered something unintentionally profound.

‘You know, I didn’t understand the drawing,’ she said after a while.

‘It was simple. But neither did I.’ Then Omovo said: ‘Were you the person who sat outside...?’

‘Yes. I knew it was you. It was dark, and he came out to get me.’

He remembered, and then he tried to forget. Then he remembered something else. She had gasped when he had shown her the new painting. She then stared at him, and said nothing.

When he left the room he had searched the painting for a portent, an intimation of the future. He tried to read life through it. But his mind could not get beyond the images, the sickly, vibrant colours.

But through Ifeyiwa’s silence he had intuited a form, a morass, a corruption, something flowing outwards viciously, changing and being changed. He sensed then, vaguely, that the future was contained somewhere in his mind.

He stopped in his wanderings, and suddenly decided to go back home.

Available now

‘The Age of Magic has begun.

Unveil your eyes.’

Eight weary film-makers, travelling from Paris to Basel, arrive at a small Swiss hotel on the shores of a luminous lake. Above them, strewn with lights that twinkle in the darkness, looms the towering Rigi mountain. Over the course of three days and two nights, the travellers will find themselves drawn in to the mystery of the mountain reflected in the lake. One by one, they will be disturbed, enlightened, and transformed, each in a different way.

An intoxicating and dreamlike tale unfolds. Allow yourself to be transformed. Having shown a different way of seeing the world, Ben Okri now offers a different way of reading.

The Famished Road

‘Overwhelming – just buy it for its beauty.’
New Statesman

‘A brilliant read, unlike anything you have ever read before.’
The Times