Dangerous Love (29 page)

The supervisor, banging on the table, said: ‘Won't you attend to the customers?'

‘What about the coffee?' Simon demanded.

Omovo went to his table. He felt himself trembling slightly under the attack of the conflicting orders. He felt the sweat running down his back. The air conditioner droned. He sat. He thought about the absorption of working, the curious pleasure of losing yourself in business. He also thought about how insidious, how deadening it was to work at something you found neither interesting nor creative. After a moment he got up, brushed past Chako, and knocked on the manager's door.

The manager harangued him. Omovo received his monologue calmly. The manager, sipping his coffee and not looking at Omovo, kept rambling, kept waving his hand in the air. Omovo noticed his gold wrist watch. The manager said he wanted the department to achieve the highest sales figures of the season. He warned Omovo against insulting important customers; they were the backbone of the business, and the company worked by their consent.

‘I don't want anyone to spoil this year for me, you hear?'

Omovo nodded.

‘Have you taken in what I said?'

‘Completely.'

The manager studied him. With a doubtful expression on his face, he waved Omovo out of the office.

During the office break everyone tried to pressure Omovo to go buy meat pies from the Kingsway. He absolutely refused. He sat at his desk, brought out his drawing pad, and started a series of sketches. He began with attempting to draw a section of the office. Simon, Chako, and the supervisor sat round a table deeply involved in one of their interminable discussions about pay increases. He decided to draw them. But he ended up with a set of caricatures. He made Simon's face look like a fractured calabash. He exaggerated his wrinkles as if life had not exaggerated them enough. He drew Chako as a mean-faced old man and gave him a comically long nose. And then he depicted the supervisor as a frustrated man and made his wiry beard into something resembling barbed wire and his ears into coins.

When he finished the sketches he began to laugh. His colleagues looked at him without saying a word. He stopped laughing and closed his drawing pad. They went on with their secretive discussions about pay increases, their plans, and their overtime.

Then, remembering Da Vinci's face-studies, his masterly drawings of old men, of powerful men, Omovo decided that it was too easy to satirise the powerless and the weak, to laugh at them rather than face them, ghetto-dwellers that they were, each face imprinted with its own hardship. He decided to draw his colleagues as they were, to test the edges of his craft by drawing what he saw without being sidetracked by his ego, by his ideas and opinions, his dislikes, and to do this within a limited time. He found their faces difficult to capture and found immense depths of shadows, of tenderness, that he hadn't noticed before. He felt a little ashamed.

Drawing made him think. He thought about Joe, about his lost drawing, his seized painting, about Ifeyiwa. The cold office made him think of a second-rate film he had seen some time ago. The film was about a kind of Shangri-la. Images from paintings he had done, canvases that he had rejected, rose to his mind. He remembered a song from the film. The words were idealistic but at that moment they found sympathy in him: For your reflections reflect on the things you do. And the things you do reflect on you –

He shut his eyes and began to meditate. He remembered another song from the film: There is a lost horizon waiting to be found...

He pondered the words, slipping deeper into a curious serenity. The words grew in his mind. They turned into other words and gave way to images, states of being, and landscapes of possibilities. The strangest flowers opened up to him. As the sound of his colleagues faded, and the drone of the air conditioner receded, he experienced a sudden sufflation, an expansion of being, and he had a momentary wordless sensation of the underlying unity of all things.

Chako, blowing his nose, disturbed Omovo's meditation. He opened his eyes, shut them again, and heard, as clearly as if it had come from behind him, his brother reciting the words from his own poem:

But I found sketches on the sand

While voices in the wind

Chanted the code of secret ways

Through the boundless seas.

Omovo's heart palpitated with a wild joy. He felt his being include all that was hidden and radiant in the world. The feeling came unexpectedly, like a revelation. Then just as unexpectedly his meditation changed. He remembered the girl in the park. He imagined himself as the victim, imagined himself dead, his organ defiled, lying dead and unidentified in a park. Omovo felt as if he were trapped in a hole, in a well, in a pocket of terror lurking in his mind. He couldn't get out. Then suddenly in the darkness he had another vision. He saw the nation in riot, in the grip and fever of revolution. He saw flames everywhere, saw structures tumbling down, ghettoes burning, towers crumbling, saw people in masses casting about, wailing about their burdens, saw children weeping, women with charred hair, ashes on their faces. He felt the land overwhelmed with desperation, as if living were a kind of inferno, a kind of hell, life as the purgatory of the poor. When he eventually escaped the vision and surfaced to the reality of his office environment he felt tears in his eyes. He brushed them off and carried on with work.

Weighed down with his vision he found the second half of the day's work harder than usual. He felt his vitality being sapped out of him in trivial chores. He also felt joyful to be alive and working in the world, but this didn't stop him being a little resentful of the moments when he felt the overwhelming need to paint, to draw, wasted in performing tasks anyone could do.

Towards the closing time, however, he could not help noticing a young man sitting near Chako's desk. Chako and the others were a little deferential towards him. Omovo later discovered that he was the manager's nephew who had failed his school certificate exams. He was seeking a job in the company. As Omovo went up and down the corridors, sweating under the weight of numerous chores, he could not help feeling that someone's job in the company was about to die.

The day's work ended and Omovo went home. The others stayed behind for overtime. They mostly did their own private business. As always Omovo found the struggle to get home worse than that of getting to work. The exhaustion, the heat, the frustrations and attritions of work made people that bit more ferocious.

When he got to the Amukoko garage there was dust everywhere. The dust rose from the untarred roads. Added to the dust and the heat were the many smells of the ghetto. The air was dense with the odours of frying oils and stinking gutters. The street was covered with litter.

The day's work weighed down upon him. He felt depleted. He stumbled along listlessly. The sweat and the dust, caked by the dry heat, made his face a mask of exhaustion, of enervation. The maddening noises of the area preyed on him. He stumbled down the molten street as if he were sleepwalking.

When he got home he was confronted by the lifeless desperation of the sitting room. He became unusually aware of the faded pictures on the stained walls, the large centre table with its anomalous leg, the scanty furniture. He was affected by the smell of indifferent cooking, the dust and the cobwebs and the staleness that settles in a room when the windows haven't been opened for a long time. He even noticed that the chairs were out of place and that one of the cushions was somewhat strangled between the springs. He saw an empty ogogoro bottle on the floor beside a chair. He guessed his father had been drinking.

There was no one around. Flies buzzed around the scraps of food still left on the dining table. Omovo became aware of another atmosphere in the sitting room. Things seemed all wrong. He was aware of the strange silence, the feeling of doom, a bleak finality. He shuddered. He went into his room. Then he went and had a cold shower. As soon as he got back to his room and touched down on the bed he fell soundly asleep.

‘Wake up! Omovo, wake up!'

Omovo stirred and woke, disorientated at seeing the face of a stranger becoming the face of his father staring down at him. He blinked and rubbed his eyes.

‘Is it you, Dad?'

‘Yes.'

He sat up. For a moment there was a tender silence between them.

‘Is there anything wrong?'

His father sighed and for a while he didn't say anything.

‘Is there?'

His father, avoiding his eyes, said: ‘No. Not really.'

Omovo smelt his breath of bitterness, smelt the drink, the cigarette smoke, the despair that came all at once from his father. He took in his sweat, his smell of deep earth, of trapped animals. He noticed the restrained panic in his father's shifty eyes. Omovo was overcome with the urge to embrace his father, to embrace him and to hold him tight. But his father, sighing, moved away and, sitting on the only chair in the room, his shoulders hunched, his head in his hands, said in an uncertain voice:

‘I want to ask you a favour.'

‘Anything, Dad. Ask me anything.'

‘This is very hard for me.'

‘Ask, Dad. Just ask.'

His father stammered. When he had mastered himself, he said: ‘I need... I am a little out of immediate funds. I need some money to pay the rent. Can you manage the money, I mean as soon as you receive…'

‘Yes, Dad. Absolutely. Is that all? Oh God, Dad, it's nothing. Sure. I can. I will. As soon as I'm paid.'

His father looked up, a little taken aback by Omovo's response.

‘Thanks, my son,' he said, sighing again and straightening himself. Some of his old authority returned. ‘I will pay you back as soon as everything is all right. It's just a temporary setback.'

They were silent for a moment. Omovo avoided his father's eyes. Then his father got up and at the door he said: ‘Have your brothers been writing to you?'

Omovo nodded.

His father looked down and then lifted his head. Then suddenly he made an odd noise, as if he were repressing a pain that had shot through his internal organs.

‘They write to me as well,' he said. ‘They write me letters that wound me and make me bleed inside.'

Then, abruptly, he left the room.

Omovo stared at the door, his thoughts spinning.

To escape the confusion of his feelings Omovo spent some part of the evening in serene contemplation of the works of the masters. Turning the pages of
Great Paintings of the World
had a calming effect on him. He realised, as he studied the colour prints, often making quick copies in his pad, that he wasn't looking at them as much as bouncing off them into his own world, his own realities. He studied Brueghel, with his quivering world of nightmares; Da Vinci, with his secret mystical signs. He loved the famous Mona Lisa and remembered that it was Da Vinci who wrote that ‘perfection is made up of details, but detail is not perfection'. He exhausted himself in art, from cave paintings to the hallucinated visions of the Latin American Indians through to the modernists like Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Picasso – who he had heard described as a supreme creative plagiarist. But he returned to his four great affinities: Da Vinci, Brueghel, the wild man of the imagination, to Valasquez and his fastidious quest for truth, and to Michelangelo. Then he delved into another book of African art. He looked at reproductions of sculptings, mysterious monoliths, jujus, masquerades and serene bronze busts. But he studied them with too much familiarity, for African Art seemed to him to be everywhere. He saw the terrifying shapes, the evil fighting forms, and the ritual powers as being part of things, part of an order. They were in him. It was only later that he would learn to see them with estranged eyes, see them for the first time and be startled into the true realm of his artistic richness.

Before he stopped off his day's study he returned to Michelangelo's sculpture of David. Omovo never failed to be struck by the fact that Michelangelo chose to represent David at the moment before he confronted Goliath. He never failed to be moved by the inner tensions of that moment: David absorbed, about to step out from obscurity forever, to transform himself from shepherd to hero, about to step into history, religion, myth. Did he feel a current pulling him back, with voices singing to him of the sweetness of anonymity, the terrors of fame? Or was he, in his serenity, reaching to the flood of all origins, the birth of gods, touching forces of the air? What was the weight of that absorption, stone in one large hand, wrist abnormally curved, his life about to be changed forever by a stone, a sling, by the destiny of his wrist, by a timing, a grace, a precision, a fearlessness that could only have been prepared for in an apprenticeship so secret, so agonised, and so undefined?

When Omovo had finished his day's study he got rid of the books and meditated for a while, in order to clear his mind and strengthen himself for his own work which would make one day of his life worthwhile.

An hour later he sat in front of a canvas, afraid. The flat white surface daunted him. He sat in expectant silence, waiting for something, an urge, to rise within him. He tried to make his mind as clear and blank as the canvas.

But the mosquitoes got at him even through his khaki overalls. Isolated whining sounded in his ears. He ignored them.

As he stared at the canvas, he became aware that the urge to paint wasn't strong enough, but he felt images fermenting within him. And still he waited for the waves to rise, for the tide to surprise him. He waited with absolute faith that the hunger within him would emerge in its own time, when the moods within synchronised with the landscapes without.

But the waiting, the expectancy of being, the preparation for vision, awaiting an inner annunciation, a flow, a command, a direction, an overall picture, a single true detail, a precise image, made him miserable, made him afraid. He waited with all his being for a sign, for the waves of desire to reach an unbearable pitch.