Songs of Enchantment (11 page)

I saw soldiers in armoured trucks rolling into the city, I saw coup after coup, till our history became an endless rosary necklace of them, each new bead an assassinated head of state, or the secret numbers of failed coup-plotters, executed at dawn.

I saw history as a madman with a machine gun, a madman eating up the twisting flesh of the innocent and the silent.

I saw the blind old man administering potions for warding off evil projections directed at the master politicians.

I saw the blind old man changing, and I knew his secret identity to be that of a master transformer, who could turn into a bat and spy on his enemies.

The old man took me through the insurrectional afternoons, the boiling nights, through days and years merged together, with great events and ordinary happenings taking place simultaneously, and with his robotic grip fixed on my wrist.

My eyes were burning now with so much forbidden sight that I couldn’t see myself. Through the fire of such sight I suddenly found myself on a battleground deep in the country, deep in the dream of the unborn nation, and I saw a bloody war raging, a war without beginning and without end, whose origins formed a self-feeding circle like the ouroboros. I saw soldiers stick their bayonets into the eyes of their countrymen. I saw bombs explode, laughing, while limbs scattered about the place in unholy jubilation. Blood spurted from the trunks of palm trees. Limbs, intestines, eyeballs and pulped torsos grew from the earth and writhed and crawled amongst the rain-washed undergrowth. Flowers sprouted out of slit and rotting throats. Mushrooms bristled out of the suppurating anuses of the dead. The battleground became a liverish carpet of sliced tongues and slug-infested hearts. The blind old man turned into a skull, the skull exploded, and blood washed down on the earth. Detonations growled, and trees – dancing – were splintered. I saw a young man with his face melted by grenade heat. He ran howling through the cinderous village and women fled from him. The war raged and the blind old man turned into a mosquito, spied on the rebel troops, and reported back to the army chief who had hired him, whose emblem was a white lion. I was on fire all over with the horror, and the more violently I tried to get away, the greater was the metallic grip on my wrist.

Then an incandescent flash lit up everywhere and I saw a glowing yellow carpet on a beach, with the green ocean swelling and dreaming all around. And on the yellow carpet I was surprised to see a fervent mass of men and women tearing the blind old man’s body apart, eating his entrails, gorging themselves on his divinatory head. And when they had finished devouring him, his sorcerer’s blood drove them mad and they jumped into the ocean and drowned in a choir of ecstatic voices. The maddened waves washed the carpet away and deposited on the beach a new thing, a new image, a being, wriggling like a great horrid worm – the blind old man, reborn as a baby, regurgitated from the sea. His muscles were bunched-up, his head was mighty like a Nimba sculpture, his eyes were raw and intelligent. He had two sexual organs, his prick was monstrous and erect, his vagina was tiny, like a comma.

The ocean became calm. I saw the baby growing, and it saw me, and stared at me. I was knocked about in the old man’s dream of a dying country that had not yet been born, a nation born and dying from a lack of vision, too much greed and corruption, not enough love, too many divisions.

And when I looked I saw the baby impregnate itself: it grew into a man-woman, and struggled for many generations trying to give birth to itself, to its own destiny. The sky changed, and the earth heaved, and when the period of parturition was over, I noticed at the feet of the man-woman a bizarre birth, a birth within a birth. Everything was still. The man-woman had delivered several babies who were joined at the hips. They were all different, they had few resemblances, their hues were dissimilar, and they were secretly antagonistic to one another. It was truly frightening, this pullulation of babies with different voices, different eyes, different cries, different dreams, similar ancestry, all jostling, all trapped within the same flesh, pulling in conflicting directions. Unable to escape one another, growing at incompatible rates, some dying as others grew fatter, some dragging the corpses of their siblings through the days and nights,
feeding off the dead amongst them – this horrible sight made my head swell in the infernal labyrinths of the blind old man’s dreams.

Time accelerated. The original man-woman had disappeared into its hybridous offspring. And I saw them, with their unnumbered legs, their multiple arms and heads, seldom thinking together, suspicious of one another, condemned to wander as one, to build as one, to destroy as one, yet always trying to be separate from one another, always failing, for they were all of one body, one ancient and forgotten ancestry, their destinies linked – in union or division – for ever.

My soul was so wounded with the agony of witnessing such strangeness that I turned to the blind old man, all feathered and half-transformed, his phallus erect, and I said:

‘I want to go home.’

He laughed, but no sound issued from him. Then I realised that in his dream he could see but paid the price by being deaf and intermittently dumb. There were glowing pinpoints all over him. And when the lights became lurid in his dreams I noticed that he had eyes all over his body: he had eyes in his feathers like a peacock, he had an eye in the middle of his forehead, and he had a necklace of them round his neck. My fear had become intolerable, and I panicked. Then a voice said to me:

‘Be still.’

I was still. The voice said again:

‘Eat the wild flowers.’

I ate the wild flowers. Nothing happened. The blind old man tried to seize them from me, but he couldn’t. He hit me on the head, and I grew strong. He hit me again, and I grew stronger. I held him by the throat and throttled him with all the herculean might the flowers gave me. And when he eventually let me go everything first went white and then black, and I felt myself falling. I fell for a long time through many undiscovered universes. I fell, but I did not land, I did not hit the earth. Instead I found myself leaning against a tree. My body blazed all over with livid agony. It seemed as
if I were entirely covered with bruises and welts, as if I had been flayed. My head throbbed as if I had been hammered with a mighty stick, my eyes were full of fire, and my wrist seemed raw with exposed nerves. All this was the price I paid for sensing and suffering the future on my living flesh.

The lights were still on in Madame Koto’s bar when I hurried past. I heard the strains of the blind old man’s accordion as I fled across his darkened domain. An owl flew overhead, watching me. When I got to our room the door was open, the air was suffused with mosquito coil smoke, and dad was asleep on the mat, his legs spread wide apart. Mum was on the bed, asleep, as if nothing had happened. Lit up with pain, I lay on the mat beside dad. After a while of breathing in the familiar smells it seemed as if time had not moved at all. But I also felt that the world had turned. The new angle of things was strange to me.

M
Y BRUISES BECAME
visible. Dad enquired about them and I told him that I had hurt myself playing in the forest. Mum pressed the stinging juices of poisonous herbs on my welts and lacerations. Poison fought poison and two days later the bruises lessened noticeably. I marvelled at mum’s herbal lore.

That evening a message came from Madame Koto. She asked why I hadn’t been visiting her bar as we had promised, and demanded that I begin the next day. Dad was worried. Fighting had broken out everywhere, and it had become dangerous to wander the streets. Party thugs continued to terrorise people. The world was at a new angle to the sky, but the old violence had returned. People were beaten at street corners for giving the wrong political passwords. The nights became populated by strange men with hard faces and bad smells. Madame Koto’s bar was now the acknowledged centre of mobilising our area for the elections. Her new driver had been fitted out with a superb uniform. As Madame Koto’s personal driver he was a powerful figure in his own right and, like his ill-fated predecessor, had taken to speeding up and down the road, blasting his horn, frightening old women and babies learning to walk.

Dad was worried, but mum said nothing. It was as if she accepted that what would happen had already been foretold. Her serenity in the face of the new violence infuriated
dad. There was nothing he could do: mum had entered a new domain of her spirit and dad was scared of her. And so he took out his annoyance on me. He made me wash his clothes. He made me polish his boots twenty times in one day. He made me split firewood with an unwieldy axe and he towered over me, breathing heavily in his comic rage. Then later, in the evening, he relented. He carried me around on his shoulders and told me stories about the village which I entirely forgot because I was still angry with him.

O
N THE DAY
I went back to Madame Koto’s bar a rainbow appeared over the forest. It had rained that morning. All through the day the sun shone and the rain poured down steadily. People said that somewhere an elephant was giving birth. The rainbow was very clear and distinct. It made me think there was a great big jewel in the sky that light poured through. The people of our area stared at the rainbow in wonder. They spoke of signs. The rainbow of the forest was solid, but it had a twin. The second rainbow, which seemed to originate from Madame Koto’s backyard, was not distinct, nor clear. It was a half-rainbow, and its colours were all a little vague and washed together like an incomplete manifestation.

From a distance it seemed as if Madame Koto had now entered the god-like business of creating rainbows. Our respect for her grew. But when I drew nearer to her bar the rainbow, like a spirit seen by those who are not part-spirits, seemed to vanish altogether. I heard people whispering that her power now depended on space, on distance, on silence, which was why no one saw her any more.

The way people talked about her made me scared of going to her bar alone. It was as if she had multiplied in some way, as if she had conquered our dreams. I kept delaying having to go there. I wandered around a bit, approaching her forecourt and retreating. Then I decided to go and see
my friend Ade. The herbalists had apparently finished the first course of his treatment. What did they know of his condition? My friend was lean and pale, his lips quivered, and he broke into subterranean voices when I wasn’t looking. He had been told not to wander far from their house. Boredom was dehydrating his spirit. An intense light had entered his eyes. He was like a child who knew something very evil, but in his case it was as if he knew that something hot and beautiful was approaching his soul. I knew that every day he was willing himself to die. He had that look in his eyes. The world had no power over him. His sense of freedom was awesome and terrifying. And when he broke into the hoarse cavernous voices of his spirit-companions a black wind blew through my mind.

‘Let’s go to Madame Koto’s place,’ I said.

‘I am not afraid,’ he replied, irrelevantly.

‘Of what?’

‘Of rainbows.’

‘Why should you be afraid of rainbows?’

‘When there are four rainbows in the sky, the flood will come.’

‘What flood?’

‘I won’t be here then.’

‘You’re talking nonsense again,’ I said.

He gave me a strange smile. The smile grew bigger and a happy expression filled his face. Then he began to tremble. His limbs shook and he was bathed in radiance, as if his fit were a sweet juice that he was drinking, or as if it were sunlight to the feverish. I became scared. He burst into laughter, the jubilant laughter of death. I slapped him. He stopped for a moment. Then I grabbed him by the collar and dragged him to his father’s workshop and left him there, afraid that he might do something dreadful to himself in his unearthly ecstasy. I called his parents and when they came out and saw their son, I fled home.

In the evening the drizzle ceased. The half-rainbow disappeared from Madame Koto’s backyard. I set out for her
establishment. As I drew closer I was surprised to see a weird towering structure in front of her bar. At first I thought that this structure was responsible for the half-rainbow. People had gathered and they kept pointing at the new phenomenon. It was a gigantic red Masquerade, bristling with raffia and rags and nails. It had long stilts for legs and two twisted horns at the sides of a wild jackal’s head. The red Masquerade held aloft a shining machete in one hand and a white flag, emblem of their party, in the other.

This terrifying colossus was so tall that even adults strained their necks looking up at it. No one knew who had built it, who had brought it there, or when. No one could explain the dark enigma of how the Masquerade stood upright on its long wooden legs without being blown away by the wind. And as if all these things weren’t astonishing enough, no one amongst the gathered people could explain the most puzzling fact of all. The Masquerade had the head of a jackal, with fiercely protruding jaws, and it had the twisted horns of a ram – but it had human eyes. The eyes kept looking at us, turning in their sockets, regarding us with intense hostility. It was when people noticed the eyes that they began to be really mesmerised with horror. A man suggested, in a whisper, that there was a human being high up in the Masquerade. But another man said it was impossible and wondered how someone could be up there so still, in a space as small as the head, trapped in raffia and nails. It occurred to me that the eyes were familiar. At first I thought they belonged to the blind old man. Then I thought they were Madame Koto’s. But none of these seemed likely. And as our speculation increased so did the palpable malice in the eyes of the red colossus.

We were so fascinated by the gigantic apparition that we didn’t notice another enigma that stood right in front of us. The enigma was a white horse standing near the door of the bar. It looked docile, its head bent low. It was a big handsome horse, with a wonderful mane, and it shone in the evening light. We stared at the white horse and the red
Masquerade for a long time, speechless, overcome with an indefinable sense of dread.