The Famished Road (63 page)

THE BEGGARS WHO had gotten drunk on Madame Koto’s wine had unleashed the fury of their hunger at night while the world was changing. They had broken stalls, torn down Madame Koto’s signboard, shattered windows, and had finally lodged themselves in an unfinished house on the edge of the forest. The inhabitants of the street had risen up against them. Madame Koto had sent her party thugs to drive them away. I saw limbless beggars, the one-armed, one-eyed, legless, all along the road, scattered, in disarray, bruised, and beaten. They clustered under the trees overlooking Madame Koto’s bar, armed with pathetic-looking sticks. They were a sorry army. I didn’t go into the bar. I saw her sitting outside, on a high stool, surrounded by her prostitutes and the thugs. The beggars abused me as I went past.

When I got home the door was locked. Ade was playing on the broken political vehicle. He looked lean and was happy to see me. He told me about how the van of the rich people’s party had come along and begun to bundle the beggars away. But the beggars kept coming back. There had been much fighting. Many had been wounded.

Ade spoke hoarsely, his voice was weak. The sun was intense that afternoon. The chickens lay silent in street corners. The dogs were listless. We played around the van and when we heard screams from Madame Koto’s bar we hurried over and saw that the thugs were beating up the beggars again.

In the afternoon a tall man in an immaculate white suit came looking for Dad. He was very tall and he had sunken eyes and his head was small. He stood under the fierce sun, resting on his walking stick of a shadow. He complained of fleas. He went and bought a bottle of ogogoro and stood at our housefront, drinking patiently. He didn’t speak to anyone. His face was relatively long, and he blinked away the sweat that poured into his eyes. After a while he stood very still and when we went over to him we found he had fallen asleep standing up. We touched him, and he woke up with a start, and he went up the street, towards the main road, and disappeared.

In the evening Dad appeared with the beggars who had come to our room the other night. With the abundant energies of a man entering a new destiny, Dad led them up and down the road. He tried to organise them to clear up the rubbish, to sweep the road, to paint the stalls, to plant flowers near the gutters. Bristling with great enthusiasm, wearing his torn shirt, the plaster flapping on the side of his face, Dad went from house to house asking people to vote for him. He outlined his plans for a school, he suggested to people that they contribute to the beggars’ upkeep, and everywhere he went people cursed him for bringing more trouble into their lives. The beggars cleared the rubbish from one end of the road and dumped it at the other. They crushed the flowers they tried to plant. And because Dad could not afford the price of paint sufficient to give colour to the monotonous brown of stalls and the sun-bleached reds and blues and yellows of the houses, the beggars stood around most of the time with useless paint-brushes in their hands. The beautiful beggar girl followed Dad everywhere he went. When he went to another set of beggars they fell into mischief as soon as he turned his back. They turned stalls over and didn’t straighten them. They tramped around in the swamp. Near the wooden bridge they found a mattress that was overgrown with fungus and mushrooms. They beat the bugs and numerous infestations from the mattress. We watched strange forms take off into the air. The beggars intended to make the mattress a bed that they could all share. The photographer appeared, brief as a flash, and took pictures of them. He fled in such a hurry it was as if his enemies might emerge at any moment from the long shadows of evening. I didn’t even get a chance to speak to him. He had become mysterious and irritating. Dad went up and down the road shouting about the poverty of our will. And while he went up and down the place shouting, the second wave of our transformation was taking place.

THAT EVENING THERE was the most fantastic gathering at Madame Koto’s bar. There were yellow vans everywhere. Curious perfumes floated over the road. A great number of cars were parked along the lanes and side streets. Music rocked all night, making the houses tremble along the road. Women were attired in matching lace, in identical handwoven materials. Their imitation gold bangles and necklaces, brooches and rings of cheap rubies, their indispensable high-heeled shoes, glittered under the lights. The women were all over the place, bursting with scandalous sexuality.

Short, powerful men with chieftains’ beads round their necks and fans of eagle crests in their hands; men with big feet and white shoes; men with bulbous ancient eyes and protruding stomachs, who moved with the lumbering gait of unalterable clannish power; men who were almost giants, with thick necks and sweating thunderous brows and thighs of timber-like virility; all were there. They were the inheritors of titles and extensive acres of land.

There were children in red, whole families in matching silk materials, an old man with a parrot, herbalists, ritualists, cultists, and a short man with a white cap and a string of goats for the great sacrifice. I saw them bring in a strange-looking animal, a duiker with penetrating eyes. They all clustered in the bar.

Outside, we heard rumours that the party was being thrown to celebrate Madame Koto’s attainment of new powers, the installation of electricity, the consolidation of her party connections, and to widen the sphere of her influence in this and other realms. It could be said that it was an event meant to seal her entry into the world of myths. The most bizarre rumours circulated about what had been really happening at night when we slept, and during the day when we, as always, were unaware of the changes taking place in constellations of energies and alignments. New spaces were being created while all we saw were the mundane events of thugs and canvassing vans and the violence of political struggles. New spaces which we couldn’t name, and couldn’t imagine, but could only hint at with unfinished gestures and dark uncompleted proverbs. The rumours invested everything with a higher significance.

Fabulous noises floated on the air. Ground-nut sellers, corn-roasters, fortune-tellers, tyre-menders, beer-traders, all gathered outside the bar, looking in from a respectable distance, doing business, while the bar resounded with drinking noises and laughter and the occasional piercing ritual cries.

Then to our amazement electricians and carpenters, mechanics and sundry workers arrived on the back of a lorry and connected silver cables from the electric pole to Madame Koto’s bar, or so it seemed; they connected cables from the ceiling to the front where the signboard used to be; they rigged up wires and brought the wonder of multi-coloured bulbs, lighting up the night. The chair-hire man, in his element, brought fifty-six chairs. Under our astounded gaze the workers rigged up a great tarpaulin tent of red and yellow. Fire-grates, surrounded by sweatingwomen, crackled with the oil of spit-roasted goat-meat and rams’ meat and antelopes’ flesh. Great quantities of beer were carried in crates with numbers and the names of the newly famous breweries. And for the first time we saw how public music could be. The sound of fiendishly virtuoso drummers, the flaming melodies of tubas, the slippery tones of clarinets and the octaves of bass saxophones, the nasal voices of syncopating musicians, the bells and gongs, made the air vibrate and the earth quiver and the feet of the spectators outside twitch with yearning. We watched the silhouettes of dancers under the tent. The light bulbs of blue and yellow and orange, the brilliant fluorescent tubes on poles drew the midges and the moths into a frenzy of dancing, their wings beating in violent rhythms.

The inhabitants of the area, who had no hope of being invited into the party, put on their best clothes and hung around the tent, hoping to catch a glimpse of the wild celebrations, hoping still more for a chance encounter, a ticket from the outer darkness where we all watched and whispered about Madame Koto’s abnormal pregnancy. They said her time was drawing near. Some people made it sound almost apocalyptic. The beggars, a good distance from us, also gathered outside the tent. The delicious aroma of goat-meat and antelopes’ flesh, of bean-cakes, fried plantains and rich stews made us salivate, made us curse with greater bitterness the poverty and outer darkness to which we seemed for ever consigned.

In the midst of all this Dad tried to get the other beggars to work. They had lost interest, it seemed, in his schemes. Dad began to shout along the road. Disillusion was beginning to burst in his veins. His sadness accelerated my understanding. Only the beggar girl, guiding her father around with a stick, still followed him. Dad shouted:

‘We can change the world!’ People laughed at him.

‘That is why our road is hungry,’ Dad hollered. ‘We have no desire to change things!’

One of the men outside the tent, inhabitant of the outer darkness, said:

‘Black Tyger is mad!’

Dad rounded on and chastised the man. The inhabitants of the area jumped on Dad.

They were already exasperated with his antics. The beggar girl screamed. She threw stones at his assailants. One of the stones hit Dad on his wound. The inhabitants in their fury at being left out of the glittering celebrations, turned on the beggars. The beggars fought back, lost the initial battle, and fled into the tent. The thugs threw them out. The thugs and bouncers had horsewhips. After they had tossed the beggars out they stormed on us, lashing out in all directions, indiscriminately whipping the inhabitants and the beggars as if we all, finally, belonged to the same fraternity. The thugs whipped themselves into future eras. They whipped themselves into future military passions. They thrashed the women and the children alike. The wind blew us all together. They flogged us and we ran howling, scattered and confused. Under the intoxication of all the ritual chants unleashed on the unsuspecting air of the area, under the fevers of their new ascendancy, the certainty of their long future rule, and their inevitable transformation into men of power, the thugs made the air crackle with their contempt for those of us in the outer darkness, whose faces all seemed like one, and who threatened the party with nothing but chaos. And then Madame Koto came out. She saw the commotion, and screamed. She screamed for order. Her bouncers and thugs recovered their senses instantly. Madame Koto was resplendent in golden volumes of lace attire, feathers in her headgear. She had a new walking stick with a metallic lion’s head. Her foot had grown large. Her stomach had swollen. Her face was bunched, antimony shimmered on her eyelids. She looked glorious. Her presence alone, already legendary, made us silent in the darkness where we had been scattered.

She begged us to leave her party alone. She promised us our own celebrations, a party that she would throw to show her respect for us, and her gratitude for supporting her politics. She ordered her temporary new driver to give us drinks and left-over food.

She hobbled back into the tent.

The beggars and the inhabitants alike struggled for the food and drinks. The thugs and bouncers stared at us. Then they mocked us in songs. They got drunk on their mockery. Dad swore at them and stormed back to the house, the beggar girl following him at a distance. I followed her. Dad went into the room and the girl stayed outside.

The compound people whispered things about us. I couldn’t hear what they said. The beggar girl turned to me with her strange eye. I didn’t listen to the whispers any more.

‘What is your name?’ I asked her.

‘Helen,’ she said.

‘Do you like my father?’

She said nothing for a while. Then, as I was about to move, she said:

‘Maybe it’s you that I like.’

I didn’t understand. I went into the room. Dad was dressing up in his black French suit. He had three plasters on his face. He had daubed the dreadful Arabian perfume on him. He put on his old boots, combed his hair, and parted it. I told him about the man in white.

‘A white man?’ Dad asked in an excited voice.

‘No,’ I said.

‘What did he want? Does he want to vote for me?’

‘No.’

Dad stamped the boots on the floor. When he was satisfied with their occupation by his feet, he said:

‘All kinds of people are interested in me. From today I keep my door open.’

‘What about thieves?’

‘What thieves?What can they steal, eh?’

‘Mum’s money.’

‘Does she have money?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Good. We need votes. I’m going to Madame Koto’s party. Dress up. Go and wash your face. You are going to be my subaltern.’

‘What about the girl?’

‘What girl?’

‘Helen, the beggar.’

‘She will be my bodyguard. All beggars are my bodyguards. I will build them a university.’

‘When?’

‘After you wash your face.’

I went and had a hurried wash. When I got back Dad was gone. The beggar girl was at the housefront. I led her beggars to Madame Koto’s party.

OUTSIDE THE TenT Dad was struggling to get in. ‘I am a politician!’ he said.

‘We don’t want politicians like you,’ said one of the bouncers.

‘Why not?’

‘Go away. If you are a politician you won’t gatecrash.’

‘Did I crash your gate?’ Dad replied indignantly. ‘I don’t have a car.’

‘Just go away.’

Dad began to shout insults. He made such a fuss that the bouncer sent for the thugs.

They came and bundled Dad out and dumped him near the forest. He came storming back, his jacket covered in mud, dried leaves in his hair, his plaster flapping. He went to the bouncer and knocked him out with a single roundhouse punch.

‘If it’s only gatecrashers you respect, then I am coming in,’ Dad said.

The thugs fell on him. He threw one of them on the bonnet of a car. He winded a second with a punch to the solar plexus. He was quiveringwith energy; his eyes had a manic glimmer. Someone screamed. Madame Koto came out, saw what was happening, told the thugs to stop fighting, and very politely asked Dad to come into the party. I followed him. The beggar girl followed me. At the door I encountered the blind old man. He had a new instrument, a harmonica. He wore yellow glasses and a red hat.