The Famished Road (3 page)

THAT NIGHT I slept under a lorry. In the morning I wandered up and down the streets of the city. Houses were big, vehicles thundered everywhere, and people stared at me. I became aware of my hunger when I came to a marketplace and saw the bean cakes, ripe fruits and dried fishes, and smelt the fried plantain. I went from stall to stall, staring at the traders. Many of them drove me away. But at a provision stall a man with a severe face regarded me and said:

‘Are you hungry?’

I nodded. He gave me a loaf of bread. He had only four fingers, with a thumb missing.

I thanked him and roamed the market till I found a barrel on which I sat down and ate.

I watched crowds of people pour into the marketplace. I watched the chaotic movements and the wild exchanges and the load-carriers staggering under sacks. It seemed as if the whole world was there. I saw people of all shapes and sizes, mountainous women with faces of iroko, midgets with faces of stone, reedy women with twins strapped to their backs, thick-set men with bulging shoulder muscles. After a while I felt a sort of vertigo just looking at anything that moved. Stray dogs, chickens flapping in cages, goats with listless eyes, hurt me to look at them. I shut my eyes and when I opened them again I saw people who walked backwards, a dwarf who got about on two fingers, men upside-down with baskets of fish on their feet, women who had breasts on their backs, babies strapped to their chests, and beautiful children with three arms. I saw a girl amongst them who had eyes at the side of her face, bangles of blue copper round her neck, and who was more lovely than forest flowers. I was so afraid that I got down from the barrel and started to move away when the girl pointed and cried:

‘That boy can see us!’

They turned in my direction. I looked away immediately and hurried away from the swellingmarketplace, towards the street.

They followed me. One of the men had red wings on his feet and a girl had fish-gills around her neck. I could hear their nasal whisperings. They stayed close to me to find out if I really could see them. And when I refused to see them, when I concentrated on the piles of red peppers wrinkled by the sun, they crowded me and blocked my way. I went right through them as if they weren’t there. I stared hard at the crabs clawing the edges of flower-patterned basins. After a while they left me alone. That was the first time I realised it wasn’t just humans who came to the marketplaces of the world.

Spirits and other beings come there too. They buy and sell, browse and investigate.

They wander amongst the fruits of the earth and sea.

I wound my way to another part of the market. I didn’t stare at the people who floated above the ground or those with the burden of bulbous heads and blond hair, but I became curious about where they had come from. I took to following those that were departing from the market and were heading home because they had done all their buying or selling, or had gotten tired of observing the interesting man-made artefacts of the world. I followed them across streets, narrow paths, and isolated tracks. All the time I pretended not to see them.

When they got to a wide clearing in the forest they said their bizarre farewells and went their different ways. Many of them were quite fearful to look at. Many were quite cute. A good number of them were somewhat ugly, but after a while even their ugliness became normal. I chose to follow a baby spirit with the face of a squirrel, who dragged a great sack. Its companions conversed amongst themselves, laughing in throatless undertones as they went along. One had yellow webbed feet, another the tail of a tiny crocodile, and the most interesting had the eyes of a dolphin.

The clearing was the beginning of an expressway. Building companies had levelled the trees. In places the earth was red. We passed a tree that had been felled. Red liquid dripped from its stump as if the tree had been a murdered giant whose blood wouldn’t stop flowing. The baby spirits went to the edge of the clearingwhere there was a gash in the earth. As I stared into the gash I heard a sharp noise, as of something sundering, and I shut my eyes in horror, and when I opened them I found myself somewhere else. The spirits had disappeared. I began shouting. My voice reverberated in the murky air. After a while I noticed a giant turtle beside me. It lifted up a lazy head, stared at me as if I had disturbed its sleep, and said:

‘I’m lost.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I don’t know where I am.’ ‘You are in the under-road.’ “Where is that?’

‘The stomach of the road.’

‘Does the road have a stomach?’

‘Does the sea have a mouth?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘That’s your business.’

‘I want to go home.’

‘I don’t know where your home is,’ the turtle said, ‘so I can’t help you.’

Then it lumbered away. I lay down on the white earth of that land and cried myself to sleep. When I woke up I found myself in a pit from which sand was excavated for the building of the road. I climbed out and fled through the forest.

Huggingwhat was left of my bread, I went down the streets. At a junction I asked a food-seller for water. She gave me some in a blue cup. I ate of the bread and drank slowly of the water. There was a man standing near me. I noticed him because of his smell. He wore a dirty, tattered shirt. His hair was reddish. Flies were noisy around his ears. His private parts showed through his underpants. His legs were covered in sores. The flies around his face made him look as if he had four eyes. I stared at him out of curiosity. He made a violent motion, scattering the flies, and I noticed that his two eyes rolled around as if in an extraordinary effort to see themselves. I became aware of him staring at me too and I finished the water, wrapped up the bread, and hurried off. I didn’t look back, but I became certain that he was followingme. I could hear the peculiar dialogue of the flies around his ears. I could smell his insanity.

When I walked faster he quickened his steps, ranting. I went through a compound, came out at the housefront, and found him there, waiting. He pursued me, raving in grotesque languages. I tore across the road, through the market, and hid behind a lorry. He dogged my shadow. I felt him as a terrible presence from whom I couldn’t escape. In desperation I shot across another road. The hooting of a monster hulk of a lorry scared me and I dropped the loaf of bread and dashed over, my heart wildly fluttering in my chest. When I was safely across I looked back and saw the man in the middle of the road. He had snatched up my loaf of bread and was eating it, polythene wrapping and all. Cars screeched all around him. I carried on running for fear that he might suddenly remember he had been pursuingme.

After a while I got to a familiar street. I had broken the spell of the man’s obsession with my shadow. In the heated air of my bewilderment, I tried to understand what was familiar about the area. There were sweet voices of children in the air. I smelt rose blossoms from the garbage. The gutter gave off an aroma of incense. The houses were covered with dust. And yet in the night spaces white birds flew over trees. I kept expecting to recognise something. And when the spaces in the street began to expand, as if sunlight were being released from the objects, transfiguring the area into an expanse of sacred fields, I realised with a shock that it was the strangeness which was so familiar. And then, with my breath quickening, and with moonlight breaking out on the street, I recognised the voices of the children that sang in an intense blue chorus all around me. They were the twilight voices of my spirit companions, luring me to the world of dreams, away from this world where no one cared about me, enticingme to a world where I would never be lost.

The moonlight of their voices became too multiple and too sweet for me to bear. I felt myself breaking out into another space. Everywhere I looked the spirits invaded me with their manifestations. The smell of flowers overpowered me. The songs wounded me with their relentless beauty. Seared by the agony of their melodies, I stumbled across a road and I suddenly saw them all, spirits in full bloom on a field of rainbows, bathing in the ecstasy of an everlasting love. Something sharp tore through my brain. I collapsed on the flowering tarmac, with lorries thundering around me.

I WAS TAKEN to a police station. Afterwards I was carried to a hospital where my wounds were treated. When I was discharged a police officer volunteered to look after me till my parents had been found. He was a hulk of a man with a big forehead and hairy nostrils. He drove me to his home in a white car. His wife was lean and tall. She reminded me of the island women and had a complexion like the evening. She made me bathe and dressed me in her son’s clothes. We ate a wonderful dish of stew flavoured with shrimps and meat. The rice had a faint aroma of cinnamon. The fried plantain smelt of wild herbs. The fried chicken tasted of delicious spells.

The living room where we ate was very spacious and comfortable. The carpets were thick, and there were framed diplomas on the blue walls. Above a painting of Jesus with his large visible heart, arms outstretched, was the legend:

There were pictures of the police officer, his wife, and a handsome boy who had sad eyes. The boy looked at me while I ate. After a while I began to see with the boy’s eyes and the house resolved about me and I knew that he was dead and I lost my appetite and didn’t eat any more.

After dinner the woman showed me to my room. I was frightened to have a whole room to myself. When she shut the door behind her, I realised that it was her son’s room. His toys, his school texts, and even his shoes had been neatly preserved.

Photographs of him at play hung on the walls. That night I couldn’t sleep. There were inhuman footsteps all over the house. In the backyard a cat wailed. And later, in the dark, someone whose complexion was of the night came into the room and kept touching the photographs and rattling the toys. I couldn’t see who it was, but when they left I heard the soft tinkling of bells. It was only when dawn broke that I got any sleep.

I stayed in the policeman’s house for several days. His wife’s eyes were always large with unfinished weeping. I gathered from their nocturnal whisperings that their son had died in a road accident. She treated me well most of the time. She made me lovely bean cakes and vegetable dishes. After a bath she would comb my hair and oil my face. She sang to me while she swept the sitting room or washed the clothes. I sometimes helped her with the cleaning. We dusted the centre table and the glass cabinet with its crystal elephants and tortoises and ceramic plates. We also polished the big mask on the wall. She always dressed me in her son’s finest clothes. I only became scared of her when she started callingme by his name.

The noises in the house got worse the following night. I heard someone wandering around as if they were imprisoned. The glass cabinet shifted. The faint bells tinkled.

Birds broke into song near my window. In the morning the police officer gave me some pocket money. His wife spoke gently to me, served me food, and watched me eat. In the afternoon the house was silent. The woman wasn’t in. All the doors were locked. I slept on a sofa in the living room and woke up with the feeling that I wasn’t alone in the house. I was hungry. I felt dizzy. As I wandered about the house looking for an open door, a curious presence entered into me. I couldn’t shake it out. It roamed around inside me and said things to me which I couldn’t understand. It wasn’t long before I felt myself entirely occupied by an unhappy spirit.

I did everything I could to drive the spirit out of me. I kicked and thrashed and screamed. I ran against the walls. After a while I saw myself on the floor, bleeding from the mouth. Something rose out of me and began talking to the room. The woman was standing over me. The spirit that had come out of me was talking to her, but she couldn’t hear.

The woman carried me to my room. When I woke up in the evening I felt very ill. I had no idea who I was and even my thoughts seemed to belong to someone else. The disconsolate spirit had left empty places inside me. I slept through the evening, the night, and got up the next afternoon. I hadn’t eaten for two days. I had no appetite.

With no desire to do anything, I drifted on the white waves of exhaustion.

That night, while I lay on the bed, the door opened. The police officer, his wife, and a herbalist came into the room. I pretended to be asleep. The herbalist had a luminous machete. They talked about me in whispers. After a while they left. Beside my bed there was a bowl of rice and chicken, which I devoured. After I had eaten, and felt a little better, I began to plot my escape.

I listened to all the sounds of the house. There were voices everywhere. I heard the air whispering, the walls talking, the chair complaining, the floor pacing, the insects gossiping. Darkness filled the room. Figures moved about in the darkness. I saw yellow beings stirring, white forms floating, blue shadows flying about the ceiling.

But when I heard people talking everything around me became silent and still. I waited. Then I stole out towards the sitting room to listen.

THERE WAS SILENCE. A hurricane lantern burned low on the dining table, its bluish light creating shadows everywhere. Lower down, seven figures were seated round the centre table. A moth circled them. The eighth figure stood without moving. Soon I made him out to be the police officer. He was in charge of the proceedings.

The longer I looked, the clearer the murky atmosphere became. There were eight glasses on the centre table, dazzling where the bluish light touched them. I made out a half calabash, tilting with its liquid contents. Next to the calabash was a white saucer with lobes of kola-nut and fingers of kaoline. And next to the saucer was the image of a little feathered goddess.

With a deep chanting that altered the air in the room, the police officer made the figures rise. The faint lights showed them up to be policemen in uniforms. They took up the chanting in low tones. Then they stretched out their hands and linked them across the table. When the men sat back down, the officer remained standing.