The Famished Road (20 page)

The mutant customers made the bar feel entirely different. They conferred on everything a dull yellow light. The bar itself gave the impression that it had been transported from its familiar environs of our area to somewhere under the road, under the sea, to a dimly remembered and unwanted landscape. Their laughter made the lights lurid. Their merged voices made me twitch. And the toothless woman, breaking suddenly into a high-pitched squeal of pleasure, unleashed on me a surprising rush of fear. I managed to make my way to my position near the earthenware pot. All the seats were taken, and two midgets shared a stool, drinking serenely. I did not recognise either of them, but they both smiled at me. The toothless woman turned towards me, staring hard, and then, very slowly, pulled out something from beneath the table. I watched, fascinated by her magician’s gesture. When she had pulled it out completely, I saw that it was a sack. I screamed and tried to get out of the door, but every available space was packed. The crowd jostled me, blockingmy way, as though they were deliberately trying to prevent my escape, while not seeming to do so. I shouted and a deep-throated laughter drowned my voice. I pushed and the harder I tried the more completely I was surrounded.

Then I realised that more people were pouring in from the doorway, materialising, it seemed, from the night air. The clientele kept multiplying, filling out the spaces.

They stood over me, giant figures with hair that fell off in clumps on my face. Their multiplication frightened me. The woman with no teeth became two. The midgets became four. The two men with dark glasses and white hair became three. The man with a bulbous eye acquired a double, and the double had a bulbous eye on the other side of his face. I calmed down. I had no weapon against their multiplication. The noise lowered. Everything quivered. I moved slowly, as if under water, towards the edge of a bench. I sat down. The people who surrounded me kept glancing in my direction every now and again, as if discreetly trying to make sure I was still in the bar. I became aware of being watched by everyone, even when they were not looking at me. I became convinced that they all had hidden and invisible eyes at the sides and the backs of their heads. And it was only when I looked up at one of the men who was so tall his head seemed to almost touch the cobweb-infested rafters that I knew the purity of fear.

The man had a wide mouth, prominent nostrils that flared unnaturally when he breathed, and two big disproportionate ears. And to my horror he had no eyes. I screamed very loud and I kicked the man’s shin and he leant over to me and opened his mouth wide as if he were going to swallow me. Then he stayed like that, in apparent contemplation. I found myself staring into the horror of his mouth. It was very dark and ugly and at the back of his mouth there was a single luminous disc, like a flattened moonstone, and I was horrified to see the disc blinking. Then I realised I was staring at an eye. I drew back in my shock and the eye elongated towards me and then moved around like a bright marble stuck in his throat. I spat at the eye and struggled away from him, kicking and raving. The man made a cawing sound and leant over again, his mouth open, and he looked for me, but I had made it across the room.

I felt a moment’s relief; but when I saw the people surrounding me I struggled to escape again. Some of them were tall eyeless women. And next to me sat the three men in dark glasses. All three of them turned their heads in my direction. One of them took off his glasses and instead of the blank white eyes I had expected he had normal ones.

‘What’s wrongwith you?’ he asked.

‘Nothing.’

‘Why did you spit into that man’s mouth?’

‘The boy is insane,’ said another of the three.

‘Unbalanced,’ said the first.

‘Drunk,’ said the second.

‘Hold him!’ said the third.

‘Yes, grab him before he spits at us.’

I edged away, keeping an eye on them. As I watched them, they began to transform, breaking out of their moulds. Their shoulders seemed momentarily hunchbacked. Their eyes blazed through their glasses and their teeth resembled fangs.

I edged away, slowly, and found another corner, and stared intently at everyone. The clientele kept changing, becoming something other. What they were underneath kept emerging under the fleeting transparency of their skins. After a while I thought my eyes were playing elaborate tricks on me, or that my fever was invadingme in strange ways, and I shut my eyes. When I opened them the tall women with no eyes had disappeared. I ran out of the bar and took the longway round to the backyard.

Madame Koto was sitting on a stool, holding her head. Occasionally she made a vomiting sound, and groaned. She didn’t have her white beads. She looked like a compressed rhinoceros on the stool. I touched her and she started.

‘Oh, it’s you!’ she said.

Her face was sunken. She looked quite ill.

‘What happened to you?’

She gave me a sour look, made a desperate vomitingmotion, held her stomach, and said:

‘It was the milk.’

‘You drank it?’

‘Of course,’ she barked.

‘We didn’t.’

She said nothing. She fell into another futile spasm of vomiting. She looked dreadful.

‘What about the people in the bar?’

‘What about them?’

‘They were the ones who carried me away.’

‘When?’

‘The last time I was here.’

‘Nonsense!’

‘True!’

‘Where did they carry you to?’

‘To the river.’

‘Which river?’

‘I don’t know. But they are witches and wizards.’

‘How do you know? Are you one yourself?’

‘Look at them.’

‘They are just troublemakers. They have finished all my pepper-soup. And I amnot well enough to deal with them.’

‘What shall I do?’

‘I don’t know. Do what you like, but leave me alone, or I will vomit on you.’

She sounded so malicious in her bad temper that I believed she would do it. I went back to the bar and stayed at the door. I listened to the loud sinuous voices, I watched them as they laughed and banged the tables, and then I made an instant discovery. I realised for the first time that many of the customers were not human beings. Their deformations were too staggering and they seemed unaffected by their blindness and their eyelessness, their hunched backs and toothless mouths. Their expressions and movements were at odds with their bodies. They seemed a confused assortment of different human parts. It occurred to me that they were spirits who had borrowed bits of human beings to partake of human reality. They say spirits do that sometimes.

They do it because they get tired of being just spirits. They want to taste human things, pain, drunkenness, laughter, and sex. Sometimes they do it to spread mischief and sometimes to seduce grown-ups or abduct children into their realm. The moment I saw them as spirits, drinking palm-wine without getting drunk, confused about the natural configuration of the human body, everything made sense. And then I became certain that Madame Koto’s fetish had somehow been attracting them. I was confirmed in this notion by the fact that they seemed to cluster most thickly beneath the fetish. I knew what I had to do. I went outside and said to Madame Koto:

‘Your bar is full of spirits.’

‘LEAVEME ALOne!’ she shouted.

I left her alone and went round to the front and searched for a branch that was forked at the end. I went down the widening paths and found sticks, but they were either not long enough or strong enough. I got to the edge of the forest and heard trees groaning as they crashed down on their neighbours. I listened to trees being felled deep in the forest and heard the steady rhythms of axes on hard, living wood. The silence magnified the rhythms. I found a branch which seemed perfect. I broke off the long wood of the forked ends, lacerated myself on the splinters and bled. I took the stick back with me to the bar.

At the backyard Madame Koto was still on the stool, looking like a rhinoceros whose horn has been cut off. She held her head and uttered a low wailing sound. I went into the bar through the front door. The disguised spirits were now completely uproarious. They had overrun the place in an orgy of merriment, jumping up and down, dancing to non-existent melodies, fighting, singing unfamiliar songs in harsh languages. The man with the bulbous eye was playing with his other detachable one.

A man who had removed his arm from its socket was hitting the toothless woman on the head with it. The spirits were drunk with their borrowed humanity and frolicked in their grotesque merriment.

I climbed on a bench and prodded the fetish with the stick. I had lifted it off the nail and was bringing it down when one of the spirits saw me from the other end of the bar and gave a piercing cry. I got down hastily. The fetish fell from the stick. There was a terrible silence in the bar. And then the disguised spirit who had shouted, pointed at me, and in a voice of command, cried:

‘SEIZE THAT BOY!’

I snatched the fetish from the floor, feeling its potencies burning into my palm, and fought madly past the borrowed legs of the spirits, and gained the doorway. I stumbled and fell at the barfront. For a moment I couldn’t find the fetish. I searched around furiously while the commotion in the bar spilled outside. I eventually found the fetish under the bushes, where it seemed to have crawled, like a crab. I caught it just as Madame Koto responded to the clamour. She saw me and shouted:

‘Azaro, are you mad? Bring that thing back!’

In her heavy milk-contorted gait, she bounded after me. She wasn’t the only one.

The spirits were after me as well, and one of them held his detached arm in the air like a misbegotten club. I fled down the paths. Their heavy footsteps sounded behind me and they shouted my name:

‘Azaro! Azaro!’

The whole area rang with my name. So fearfully did the spirits call it out that the lights changed and yellow clouds materialised beside me. It seemed I had entered another realm. Like animals who have discovered speech, they screamed my name, each in a different voice. I ran behind huts, hid behind sandheaps, but they were able to smell me out. The dogs barked my name, odd-looking goats blocked my path, and chickens flew out of the bushes in front of me. The trees rebounded the vowels of my name and I felt everything was in conspiracy with the spirits to betray my hidingplaces.

Nothing seemed safe for me; not the rutted foundations of houses, where I was set upon by strange insects, nor the circular well, in which I considered hiding, but from which my name echoed, nor the anthill, behind which red soldier ants deployed their malignant forces. So I made for the forest; I passed Madame Koto’s sacrifice to the road; the plate was intact, but the food and ritual objects had gone. I went and lay down behind the great fallen tree, where I had seen the two-legged dog. But I feared I might roll over into the pit and, unable to get out, become part of the new road. So I ran deeper into the forest.

The spirits were all over the place. They gave every tree a voice. I saw a rusted machete on the ground and picked it up. The man with the bloated eye pounced on me and I smashed his arm with the machete and he did not utter a sound, nor did he bleed.

I dug the fetish into his bad eye and he let me go, blinded by Madame Koto’s powers.

I ran on till I was lost. I was not sure any more why I was running. I stopped. I wandered amongst the silent, listening trees. I no longer heard the footsteps of the spirits. But from afar I could still hear them calling my name. Their voices were feeble on the wind.

It was rapidly getting dark. The wind blew hard through the trees. Trees groaned, branches cracked, and the wind among the leaves sounded like a distant waterfall.

Pods exploded from on high and one of them fell on my head, like a mighty knock, and I dropped to the ground. In the silence and darkness that came over me I found myself riding the invisible horse of the night. I rode through the trees. All around me were silent figures in great masks. All around me were ancestral statues. Wherever I rode I saw immemorial monoliths with solemn faces and beaded lapis lazuli eyes. The monoliths were of gold, self-luminating in the darkness. One of the statues moved and turned into Madame Koto. Her golden wrapper fluttering about her, she climbed on to a caparisoned horse of the night and commanded the other statues and monoliths to follow her. The figures in great masks moved. The statues moved. They climbed their horses, and rode after me.

I rode furiously and arrived at a place where all the winds of the world converged.

The winds blew the army of statues one by one off their horses and they broke into golden fragments. Only Madame Koto, an implacable warrior, stayed on her horse and thudded after me. Just before she fell on me, it began to rain. The water, pouring down, gradually effaced her, beginning with her raised arm and her grim sword. Her arm dissolved into an indigo liquid and poured down her face; and her face dissolved slowly, as if the rain were an acid that ate away flesh and steel. Then her hair fell off and her head became reduced; and then her head rolled off into a ball of red waters and her shoulders melted and eventually her great massive bulk disappeared and all that remained were her two big fierce eyes which throbbed on the ground and stared at me. And then the horse neighed and lifted its front hooves in the air and turned and galloped away, bursting her two eyes with its hind feet. Then it too disappeared, amid infernal sounds, into the effulgent winds.

I found myself wandering under the downpour. The fetish was still in my hand. I wandered in the relentless rain, till I found the clearing. I was weary. The fetish seemed to have grown heavier and its leaden weight frightened me. I threw the fetish into the middle of the clearing, away from any trees. Then I decided to bury it, just in case the spirits or Madame Koto accidentally found it. I dug a hole with a stick. Water filled the hole. I didn’t mind. I stuck the fetish into the hole and covered it over with wet earth and then I stuck branches and sticks around the hole to remind me where I had buried the fetish. Then I made my way back to the edge of the forest and stayed under the eaves of a hut till the rain softened.