The Famished Road (21 page)

I was cold. My teeth rattled. The hand with which I had held the fetish was dyed indigo. The skin of the palm peeled away in wet flakes as though the fetish had eaten my flesh. The rain softened, drizzling, and I made my way home cautiously. Dogs howled in the dark. The wind blew strongly and lifted off the roof of a bungalow and knocked it over to the adjoining compound. The tenants wailed in the horrible voices of those who have been judged and damned, as if God had ripped off the cover of their lives and exposed them to a merciless infinity. They screamed in terrible desolation like Adam and Eve being sent out of the Garden of Eden for ever. It was a sad night, with the children crying and the rain pouring over their possessions. There was nothing I could do to help and I went on home, listening to thunder rumbling from its distant homestead, and lightning crackling its multiple candent fingers over the great trees.

Everything held menace for me. The barking of dogs was like the gnashing of vengeful spirits. Branches cracking sounded as if they were about to spring on me.

And even the clothes and garments flapping on washing lines seemed so like Madame Koto, dissolved from the world of flesh, threatening to wreak eternal havoc on me for the loss of her fetish. I went a long and complicated route to avoid going past her barfront. And when I got home Dad was on his three-legged chair, smoking a cigarette; the mosquito coil was on the table; the broken window had been mended; and fresh sweet cooking warmed the room with its aroma. Mum came in with a tray of food and said:

‘You’re just on time.’

Dad looked at me, laughed, and said:

‘So the rain beat you?’

I nodded, shivering.

‘Dry yourself,’ Mum said.

I went and had a quick wash and dried myself with Dad’s towel. I came back in and sat on the half-spread mat. I ate with Mum and Dad from the same bowls. The candlelight illuminated our faces. After I ate, I curled up on the mat, plantingmy secrets in my silence, and slept as if nothing unusual had happened.

I DID NOT go back to Madame Koto’s place for a while. I feared her anger. I feared her customers. And so after school I avoided going past her barfront. I would come home and find the door locked. I would sit outside our room and wait for Mum, who often returned late from hawking and the market.

The compound was quiet in the afternoons. The sunlight fell heavily on all things and made it difficult for sounds to travel and made the air somnolent. At the compound-front women who had done all their housework dozed on the cement platform. The heaps of powdered milk, beaten by the rain, spread their poisonous whiteness along the runnels of the widening paths. Dogs slept with one eye open, their tails pestered by flies. Little children played listlessly on the sand. Older children who had returned from school changed their uniforms and came out, their faces dark with sunlight and dust except where the sweat ran down. Their mothers sent them on errands. Transfixed by the sunlight, I listened to the music of distant radios and the muezzin’s rousing call to prayer.

Across the street the photographer bustled about with his camera, undeterred by the sleep-making sunlight, looking for interesting subjects. Sometimes he hung up the photographs he had washed in the glass cabinet outside his studio. We often went over to look at the wedding pictures of people who were complete strangers to us. He pinned up some of the pictures of the celebration of my homecoming. Beside them were the lurid photographs of the chaos unleashed when the politicians came round with their rotten milk. The rest of the cabinet was taken up with images of defiant women, milk heaps, street inhabitants pouring away the milk against a grainy backdrop of poverty. He was very proud of the photographs and when we gathered too close to the cabinet he would rush over and drive us away, saying:

‘Don’t touch the cabinet or you will spoil the photographs!’

The more he drove us away the more we gathered. The cabinet outside the studio became our first public gallery. Every afternoon, after school had ended, we went there to see what new subjects he had on display, what new funerals, what parades, how the thugs were harassing the women traders at the marketplaces, what newborn baby he had captured crying at the world. He was our first local newspaper as well.

It was the children who first showed interest in his photographs. Then the adults, on their
way
to work in the morning, began to stop to see what new images the industrious photographer had on display. They also stopped in the evenings whenthey returned. He always surprised us and began to play up to our expectations. He became very popular with the children. Whenever we saw him coming down the street with his camera we never failed to cheer him. He would smile, pretend to take pictures of us, and would disappear into the secret chambers of his studio. After a while we forgot his name and he became known to us simply as ‘the photographer’.

In the afternoons, after being driven away from his glass cabinet, I often played with the other children. We had a whole universe in which to play. We played along the maze of streets and expanding paths, around huts and houses, in building sites, and in the forests. When I got tired and hungry I would ask the photographer for food.

Sometimes he would complain that I was disturbing him, but mostly he would give me a piece of bread, saying:

‘Your father hasn’t paid for his pictures yet.’

On another day, with a glint in his eyes, in a tone of conspiracy, he said:

‘Worry your father for me. I will give you a shilling if he pays for his pictures.’

He went on pestering me like that, asking if I had in turn been pestering Dad. He then threatened never to feed me again or speak to me till the pictures had been paid for. One day I saw him looking hungry and miserable and when I asked him what was wrong he snarled at me, snatched up the tripods of his camera and, screaming that no one ever paid for their photographs, pursued me down the street. He was quite fierce that day. His hunger and bitterness made him ugly, and I avoided him for a while.

His hunger got worse. In the mornings he no longer bothered to change the photographs in the glass cabinet. He no longer bothered to surprise us. The old images turned brown and sad and curled up at the edges under the bleaching force of the sunlight. In the nights we heard him raving, abusing everyone for not paying up, shouting that it was people like us who drove honest men to crime and corruption. His clothes became shabby and his beard turned wiry and brown. But even his hunger couldn’t extinguish his spirit and in the afternoons he still went up and down the place, taking pictures with demented eyes and in a constancy of bad temper.

The children stopped gathering round his cabinet. We invented new games and played football. One afternoon, while playing, we kicked the ball too hard into an unintended goal, smashing the photographer’s cabinet. He came out, waving a machete, his eyes mad, his movements listless, his tongue coated with white sediments. He trembled in the sunlight, feeble and ill. He came to the cabinet, looked at the destruction we had wrought, and said:

‘Don’t touch the cabinet! I kill anyone who touches it!’

And so the football remained in the cabinet with the smashed glass and the browning photographs. The adults who went past shook their heads in bewilderment at this strange new form of photographic montage. The football was still in the cabinet when it rained. Water flooded the images. Insects bred in the cabinet and curious forms of mould and fungi grew on the innocent subjects of his industry and we all felt sad that the photographer had lost interest in his craft. He wasted away in his tiny room, trembling in the grip of an abnormal fever, and when we saw him he was always covered in a filthy black cloth.

I felt so sad about his pictures that I began to pester Dad, who always got into a temper whenever the subject was raised. So I pestered Mum, but she got bonier the more I pestered her; and so I stopped, and forgot the sadness altogether. And in the afternoons, because I couldn’t go to Madame Koto’s bar, nor look at the pictures in the broken glass cabinet, my feet started to itch again, and I resumed wandering the roads of the world.

Sometimes I played in the forest. My favourite place was the clearing. In the afternoons the forest wasn’t frightening, though I often heard strange drums and singing and trees groaning before they fell. I heard the axes and drills in the distances.

And every day the forest thinned a little. The trees I got to know so well were cut down and only their stumps, dripping sap, remained.

I wandered through the forest, collecting rusted padlocks, green bird-eggs, abandoned necklaces, and ritual dolls. Sometimes I watched the men felling trees and sometimes the companies building roads. I made some money running errands for the workers, errands to young girls who rebuffed their advances and to married women who were secretive and full of riddles in their replies, errands to buy cooked food and soft drinks. With the pennies they gave me I bought bread and fried coconut chips and iced water for myself. And then I saved some of the money and offered it to the photographer for our pictures. But when he saw how much I offered he burst into a feverish temper, and chased me out, thinking that I was mocking him.

The days were always long except when I played or wandered. The streets were long and convoluted. It took me hours to get lost and many more to find my way back again. I began to enjoy getting lost. In my wanderings I left our area altogether, with its jumbled profusion of shacks and huts and bungalows, and followed the route of the buses that took workers to the city centre. At the roadsides, women roasted corn. In palm-wine bars and eating—houses, men swallowed fist-sized dollops of eba, gesticulating furiously, arguing about politics. At a barber’s shop, I watched a man being shaved bald. Next to the barber’s shop there was a pool office. A man, wearing a blue French suit, his arms round a beautiful woman, came out; I started towards him. He didn’t recognise me. When he got into a car, with the woman, both smiling on that hot day, and when they drove off, it occurred to me that I had seen the future incarnation of my father’s better self, his successful double.

I went on walking till I got to the garage. Activity bustled everywhere. There were lorries and transport vehicles and buses reversing, conductors rhythmically chanting their destinations, commuters clambering on, drivers shouting insults at one another, bicyclists tinkling their bells. Traders cried out their wares, buyers haggled loudly, and no one seemed to be still.

There was no stillness anywhere and I went on walking and saw a lot of men carrying loads, carryingmonstrous sacks, as if they were damned, or as if they were working out an abysmal slavery. They staggered under the absurd weight of salt bags, cement bags, garri sacks. The weights crushed their heads, compressed their necks, and the veins of their faces were swollen to bursting point. Their expressions were so contorted that they seemed almost inhuman. I watched them buckling under the weights, watched them become knockkneed, as they ran, with foaming sweat pouring down their bodies. Their trousers were all soaked through and one of the men, rushing past me, farted uncontrollably, wobbling under the horrible load. Further on I came to the lorries that brought the bags of garri from distant regions of the country. The carriers of loads were lined up at the open backs of the lorries awaiting their turns, with rolled cloths on their heads. I watched the men being loaded, watched them stumble off through the chaos. Each man bore his load differently. Two men at the back of the trucks would lift the bags on to the heads of the load-carriers. Some of the carriers flinched before the shadow of the bags, some recoiled before the loads had even been lifted, and a few invariably seemed to rise towards the load, anticipating its weight, neutralising their pain, before the terrible moment. But there was one among them who was different. He was huge, had bulbous muscles, a toweringly ugly face, and was cross-eyed, I suspected, from the accumulation of too much weight. He was the giant of the garage. They lifted a bag on his head. He made inscrutable noises and flapped his hand.

‘More! More!’ he said.

They lifted a second bag on his head and his neck virtually disappeared and his mighty feet sank into the muddy street.

‘He’s mad!’ said one of the load-carriers behind him.

‘He’s drunk!’ said another.

He turned towards them, his mouth twisted, his face contorted, and shouted, in a strangled voice:

‘Your father is mad! Your mother is drunk!’

Then he turned to the two men at the back of the truck and gesticulated again. He flapped his hand so violently it seemed he was trying to attack them. They drew back in horror.

‘MORE! MORE!’ he cried.

‘That’s enough,’ said one of the two men. ‘Do you think we are politicians?’ said the other. His gestures became more furious.

‘He’s not mad,’ said the carrier behind him. ‘He’s poor, that’s all.’

‘MORE! MORE!’ the giant squealed.

‘Look, go! That’s enough even for you.’

‘MORE! MORE!’ he said, his voice disappearing.

They lifted one more sack on his head and an extraordinary sound came from his buttocks; his head vanished altogether; the sound continued, unstoppable; and he staggered one way and then another. Those waiting to be loaded fled from behind him. He wobbled in all directions, banging into stalls, toppling tables of fresh fish and neat piles of oranges, staggering into traders’ wares, trampling on basins of snails.

Women screamed at him, pulling at his trousers. He went on staggering, balancing the weights, slipping and miraculously regaining his footage, grunting and swearing, uttering the words ‘MORE! MORE!’ under his breath, and when he went past me I noticed that his crossed eyes were almost normal under the crush, and his muscles trembled uncontrollably, and he groaned so deeply, and he gave off such an unearthly smell of sweat and oppression that I suddenly burst into tears.