Dangerous Love (6 page)

Omovo let him finish.

‘...a... gimmick, an artist's trick for getting attention?'

Omovo turned and walked out of the office. He heard a quiet, self-satisfied rumble behind him. As he left, the last spectacle he witnessed was a lizard doing a futile cross-country across the poster of a sculpture of an old African chief.

The anaemic receptionist smiled secretly when he fled past. Out in the street, in the colourless glare of sunlight, he looked back. He discerned a black curtain drop. He wondered why things seemed to be repeating themselves.

He made his way through the dappled shadows of tall, gently dissenting palm trees and ignored the throng of tired eager women who exhorted him to buy their wonderful wares. He returned to the office, to the chores, to the scheming hanging ghosts, and to the pressures of self-imposing customers.

When he went to the showing on Saturday the bleached receptionist wasn't at her desk. The whole place reverberated with a ceaseless stream of murmurs, shouted conversations, steamed speeches, clinking glasses, throaty monologues, and octaves of borrowed accents. Walton's ‘Belshazzar's Feast' raged in the background.

He felt lost in the dense crowd. A child screamed somewhere in the centre of the collective clamour. He pushed his way through fat women, spitting women, pretty women, tall bearded men, nondescript men, stammering men, through stinging sweat smells, fresh perfumes, jaded aftershaves, mingled odours. Drinks were spilt, conversations went round the same groove, text-book theories on the derivations and healthiness of modern African art were flung about like mind traps. And the child in the dead centre screamed even louder.

On the black walls there were paintings, small framed canvases, large etchings, gouaches, pastiches, cloth-bead works, cartoons. There were caricatures of the white man's first arrivals. Some of the images were the usual ones of the white missionary armed with Bible, mirror and gun. Others were grotesque, surreal representations. There were paintings affirming national unity; various tribespeople drinking palm wine together and smiling broadly. Paintings depicting traditional scenes: women eating mangoes, women with children on their backs, women pounding yams, children playing, men wrestling, men eating. Omovo saw Dr Okocha's two paintings and he felt that they had lost a certain desperate quality by being stuck side by side, unimaginatively, with the others.

Art theories stung Omovo's ears. The many mouths talking sprayed saliva at his face. Words assaulted him till he screamed implosively. He passed Dr Okocha's painting of the wrestler. It looked forlorn, gross and robbed of vitality. Omovo fled from it by dipping into the crowd. He sweated viciously. He raised a hand to wipe the beads of sweat from his forehead and in the process dragged up a woman's skirt. The woman shrieked: ‘Hey! Someone is raping me-o!' The crowd rumbled with laughter.

Someone shouted: ‘Picasso's forefinger.'

Someone else shouted: ‘Joyce Cary's mischievous painter!'

Omovo mumbled. His finger felt sticky. The child still howled in the centre of the showing.

And then something caught his interest. It was a riotous painting of two skeletons. Their faces were hollow. They had deep white blotches for eyes. A mirror of a river forked many ways behind them. A white bird circled over them. There was a golden sky all around. The work fascinated him. It was entitled: ‘Hommes vides.' Omovo looked at the credentials of the painter: ‘A. G. Agafor. Exhibited internationally. Studied in Nigeria, London, Paris, New York, India.'

A clean-shaven man came up to him. ‘Do you like the work? It explodes in the brain with visual impacts of predominant red. I think Mr Agafor is something of a pioneer in giving visual lacerations to apocalyptic motifs…'

Omovo, irritated, murmured: ‘Artists long before the first illustrations of Dante have been doing it.'

‘But the first Nigerian... Not really, but...'

Another man, with dark blue glasses, jostled them. ‘I say...'

Omovo ducked. Words bashed his ears. Confused, he wondered where his painting was. Walton's ‘Belshazzar's Feast' raged in the background as if someone had maliciously increased the volume of the invisible stereo. When Omovo saw his work he gasped. He saw his own painting, for the first time, with the eyes of a stranger. It was right beside another painting of an agbada-draped Yoruba man. The snot-coloured scumpool looked as if it had been done by scouring the canvas on the slimy walls of the bathroom at home. It seemed obscene and badly executed. His first impulse was to fling away the blasted people who were analysing it, and rip the shameful work to shreds. He stood there glaring, and he hated the work as much as he momentarily hated himself. Contractile waves of nausea swept through him, the child screamed inside his head, and he shouted: ‘It's fucking useless...'

Then the screaming stopped. Distorted faces and old eyes stared at him close up. The crowd pressed on him and breathed on his face. He sensed menace.

Someone laughed and shouted: ‘Gimsey's broken tonsils.'

A woman whose face he vaguely recognised said: ‘Van Gogh's roasted ears.'

Omovo broke down and cried. Something felt wrong inside him. Conversations were resumed, people went back to the circularity of their arguments, and he felt he was going to suffocate from the sheer density of mingled smells in the hall. And then someone came out from the crowd, touched him on the shoulder, and said:

‘Hey, Omovo. What's the matter?'

Omovo looked up. Through a swollen teardrop the face was like something seen in a drunken stupor. Tears broke loose and raced down his face. Omovo turned away and quickly wiped them off. It was many minutes before he could find his voice.

‘Hi, Keme. It's good to see you,' he said eventually. He glanced at the painting. ‘Keme, look, let's leave this sector.'

‘Okay. But are you all right?'

‘Yes.'

‘I saw your painting. It's strange and well done. Really.'

The crowd had moved away.

‘It's very good. And a bloody good commentary on our society!'

Keme was a journalist with the
Everyday Times.
He was a good friend. Slim, good-looking, intelligent, he was about the same height as Omovo. He had a small face, twinkling eyes and a large nose. He had a way of smiling which radiantly transformed the whole of his face. He was a self-conscious physical weakling, with a sense of inferiority that made him eager to prove himself. He was also something of a loner.

‘What have you been doing with your life? Someone told me you had shaved your head. I didn't believe it. God, you look strange.'

Omovo emerged gradually from his wretchedness. The emotion that had gripped him receded. The gallery was still packed full of people. A group of women near him were dressed in matching wrappers and lace blouses. The murmurs rose and fell like a giant's snoring. In the centre of the crowd the child had stopped screaming. He saw the gallery manager, his dark glasses on, as he swayed and laughed with a couple of women. The bleached receptionist tried to sell some black booklets to a group of young men.

‘Keme, I saw your coverage of the old man who was thrown out of his house by the authorities. It was very good. I understand you received many letters of support condemning the action.'

‘Yes. It was hard but worth it. The man is still sleeping outside. They haven't given him back his room.'

‘Just because he didn't pay a month's rent?'

‘Yes. People even sent in cheques covering the amount. It's nice to know that some people have a sense of justice.'

‘Yeah. It must have been good for your ego.'

‘It was good for my heart.'

They said nothing for a while. Both of them stared at the strange animal of the crowd. Drinks were passed. A voice mentioned T. S. Eliot very loudly. Another voice went on and on about terracotta. A woman's shrill and authoritative voice took over and declaimed about Mbari.

Omovo said: ‘Words words words. Voices. A damn zoo.'

Keme smiled. ‘Hey, Omovo, what is that painting really?'

‘Keme, a scumpool. What do you think?'

‘It is disturbing. It's a commentary on our damned society, isn't it? We are all on a drift, a scummy drift, isn't that what you are suggesting?'

‘Keme, you can read what you like into it... Have you seen Dr Okocha?'

‘Yeah. That way,' he said pointing. ‘Two people have bought the paintings he exhibited. He's happy and talking a lot.'

‘I liked the paintings when I saw them in the workshed. Here they look somehow out of place.'

‘Omovo, why did you paint that scumpool with those disorientated eyes?'

‘You know, I'd done a lot of drawings of that scumpool near our house. One evening our compound men were having an argument about that issue of dismissed corrupt officials...'

‘...When that ex-commissioner said: “Everybody is corrupt... it is all a massive bag of worms...” Man, it was a friend who did that report…'

‘Yes. Yes. So anyway, while they argued and then suddenly went in for a drink, something struck me. I had a sudden sense of... you know... something coming together... You won't believe this, but I hate that painting now. Anyone who buys it is a bloody fool.'

Keme laughed. Sensing how unreal he must sound, Omovo laughed as well. Beside them a woman loudly expounded her ideas on contemporary African art to a cowed and sweating man who passionately smoked a cigarette. Omovo recognised her as the woman who had mocked him when he broke down a moment before. He vaguely knew that she was a feature writer for a newspaper. She was not attractive. She had on too much red lipstick and beads weighed down her hair. Her voice was hoarse. She was saying:

‘...we have no Van Goghs, no Picassos, no Monets, no Goyas, no Salvador Dalis, no Sisleys. Our real lives and confusions have not been painted enough. You cannot describe a place, or setting, or character, by any reference to an African painter – because there are truly none! We have no visual references. You cannot say that a palm-wine bar is straight out of a painting by... dash, dash, dash, you cannot say a traditional meeting reminds one of a painting by... dash and dash. There are no quintessentials. It's all arid. Why?'

There was a white woman with them. She wore a black suit and also sweated. She looked anguished and kept saying: ‘But no, but no, but Negritude...'

Soon afterwards Dr Okocha came over. He wore a tight-fitting nylon-mixture French suit. He too sweated and he talked fast. He was excited. His cheeks hollowed into the shape of scallops whenever he smiled. Laughing loudly and semi-drunkenly, he moved on to talk with some students who were interested in his work.

Then Omovo began to notice a dangerous silence in the area of his painting. A man in plain clothes, obviously a soldier, obviously powerful, stood glaring. His gestures were imperious. He was surrounded by his aides. Suddenly, something happened in a blur. A flurry. Silence spread in ripples of dying murmurs. ‘Belshazzar's Feast' ranted absurdly. The gallery manager pushed to the centre of the hall and, encompassed by ‘Belshazzar's Feast', announced:

‘Will Mr Omovo please come over this way immediately! Will Mr Omovo come this way immediately!'

The music went dead. Keme started to protest. For a long moment Omovo was transfixed. Disconnected thoughts skeltered through his mind. Then came sadness. Then a sense of terror. The terror of individual reality. A vast shadow. He and Keme went towards the manager, who led them to a corner. There was a blanket silence, snuffing all sound. Faces stared at them. People nudged one another. The plain-clothes man said something about mocking national progress, about corrupting national integrity. A photographer's camera flashed twice.

‘You can wait behind,' a very black man said to Keme.

‘I am a journalist with the
Everyday Times,'
Keme said, producing his press card.

‘So what? Wait behind!'

Omovo said: ‘It's okay. Take care of your end.'

There were a few black-painted chairs in the room. Omovo was made to stand with his back against the wall. The manager was nowhere around. Only unfamiliar faces.

‘Why did you do that painting?'

‘I just did it.'

‘You are a reactionary.'

‘I painted what I had to paint.'

‘You want to ridicule us, eh?'

‘I read a newspaper report. I heard an argument. I had an idea. I had to do it, so I did it.'

‘You are a reactionary.'

‘It is you who are reading hidden meanings into it.'

‘You mock our independence.'

‘I am not a reactionary. I am an ordinary man, a human being, I struggle to catch a bus, I get shoved, I go to work, I cross the filthy creek at Ajegunle every day.'

‘You mock our great progress.'

‘My mother died. My brothers were thrown out of the house, I am not happy. Nothing is what it could be.'

‘We are a great nation.'

‘I am a human being.'

‘You are not allowed to mock us.'

‘I had to paint, so I did.'

‘You are a rebel. Why did you shave your head?'

‘I had this impulse. So I shaved it. That's freedom, isn't it? Does it offend the national progress?'

‘Your name? What's your name?'

‘Omovo.'

‘Your full name?'

‘Om... ovo...'

‘We are going to seize this painting.'

‘Why?'

‘This is a dynamic country.'

‘Why is my work being seized?'

‘We are not in some stupid drift, in a bad artist's imagination, you hear?'

‘It is not illegal to paint, is it?'

‘The work will be returned to you at the appropriate time. If at all. You can go, but be warned. Worse can happen to you.'

‘Is it illegal to paint? I want to know.'

‘For your own good ask no more questions.'