Songs of Enchantment (16 page)

‘The mind of man is bigger than the sky. All of us together somehow invent this world. I don’t understand how we can agree about anything. There is a bit of madness in politics.’

He paused, breathed deeply, put his arm round my neck, fondled my hair, lifted his head to the sky, and said, in a voice quivering with mystery:

‘But, my son, I think we have the WHOLE UNIVERSE inside us when we are joyful and full of life.’

I felt happy listening to dad talk. His words were bright in the darkness and they helped me see my way over the pits and stones and treacherous things of the road. His words helped me then, especially as my eyes hurt and seemed to burn the colour of a heated yellow from having seen the world for a single moment through the eyes of the Masquerade. I was happy listening to dad because his words cooled my spirit. It was balm over my eyes. And the silence of the forest, with the moon hanging over it, no longer frightened me so much. And for a brief deep moment I was radiant with joy because I had discovered that without trying, and wholly at random, I could also enter my father’s most extraordinary dreams.

W
HEN WE GOT
home there was a hurricane lamp on the table. It gave off a wonderful moon-glow in the room. All our possessions were illuminated and even their poor condition was touched with the benediction of bright light. Mum was sitting on dad’s chair, staring straight ahead of her. The light bared her lean neck and made the bones of her face more prominent with shadows. She didn’t move when we entered. But she turned her eyes on dad, then on me. Dad said:

‘I don’t like that light. It spreads ghosts everywhere. I want candles.’

Mum blew out the lamp. Waves of darkness washed me backwards, my head reeling. Dad stumbled, and cursed. Mum lit three candles and passed our food. While we ate, mum watched us. When we finished she cleared the table and went to the backyard. I went with her. There was no one around. Our neighbours had locked their doors early and put out their lights. The moon was strange that night. It was yellowish and had been bitten in a jagged half by another planet. I told mum about it and she looked at the moon and said:

‘The sun and the moon are quarrelling. There is going to be trouble.’

When we got back to the room we found dad ensconced on the bed. He had a determined look on his face. Mum
didn’t acknowledge his determination and I saw a dangerous mood gathering in dad’s spirit. The room was fiery with his desire. He was brusque with me, ordering me to lay out my mat and get some sleep immediately. Mum lit a mosquito coil and dad spoke angrily to me about not helping my mother with household chores. In a tone of stern command he wanted me from that day on to wash the plates, cook the food, buy household items from the market, clean the room, wash all the clothes, in short to make sure that mum never had to lift a finger. He worked himself into a displaced rage and pursued me round the room with his boots, threatening to knock my head off, hoping, it seemed to me, that his rage would encourage mum to come between us.

Mum was sitting on the floor, in a corner, with her knees brought up to her breasts, her eyes shut, her face shadowed with an impenetrable sad bloom. Dad caught me, made two feeble attempts at hitting me, gave up, and went back to the bed. I lay on the mat, watching the lighted coil, while dad tossed and grumbled, while mum sat on the floor, her outline like a dwarf’s, silent in the dark, spreading her bloom over the air, forcing something new to secure the foundations of our lives. Dad tossed. And kicked. He abused me. He cursed Madame Koto. He muttered something about the obligation between husbands and wives. He grumbled about money and politics. He sucked his teeth in uncontainable frustration, and then he got up and lit a cigarette, his head restless. He inhaled with a lustful noisy violence, and exhaled with the sigh of an angry beast. He got up and paced the room, dispersing the forces mum was concentrating around us.

As I lay on the mat, watching them, there came from the compound front the deranged twang of a shattered musical instrument, a guitar, or an accordion. Dad stopped pacing, his head cocked. There was a long silence. Then he sat in his chair. The mosquito-coil smoke circled his head. I watched the smoke turning blue round his head and then suddenly we heard a long deep cry from the forest. It was
a cry so extended that it couldn’t have been maintained by a single breath. And then it stopped. And then another wail replaced it, deep, unfathomable, communicating a grief beyond description. It was a wail without anger or rage. The frightful sound seemed to emerge from the earth itself, so profound was its sustained song of inconsolation. The wind carried the lament to all of our hearts and when it stopped mum said:

‘Azaro, shut the door!’

‘Leave that door open!’ dad ordered, in a voice that had forgotten about desire.

And all at once voices spouted from the earth, voices and songs of such sweetness that they could only have emerged from an abyss perfumed with roses. They were the voices of the incandescent women of the forest, whose songs burned brightest with the funereal accents of a dying moon. The songs brought heat-bursts on the air. As we listened it became harder to breath, for the melodies pulled at our insides, scorching the depths of our spirits with the flaming proclamations of the deep. The melodies, in the voices of repentant witches, became so piercing that they began to hurt, they began to grate and tear at our entrails, and everywhere I felt a concentration of restlessness. The air became dense. The songs became so beatific – rising from the earth with the anguish of animals dying, of spirits leaving the earth for ever, of hopes expiring in the birdsongs of the deep forests – that there opened in the room the vision of a field devoured by fire, with the flowers roasting, and people melting in their sleep of fear. The field vanished, but the songs became ugly in their sweetness. They became the opposite of music, with their gnashings and their harsh accents of horror and hell. The room was hot, the mat was damp, smoke blew in and overpowered us with its smell of forbidden things burning. The smoke was red and peppery, chafing the lining of our throats, cutting off our voices as we choked in silence.

And when the voices stopped, leaving a single song sustaining the peal of an old bell (resonant with the warning that
every domination is an illusion which we accept) – a thunderous crash, the shrieking of metal on metal, and the silver lash of a whip cracked in the air and cleaved the song in half, one side still resonating in the silence afterwards, the other side entering a void, never to re-emerge. And it was when I heard the neighing of horses, the cantankerous snorting of hallucinated bulls, that I first had the inkling that a vehemence vaster than the fury of torrential rains had been unloosened over our lives.

T
HAT NIGHT SAW
the great convulsions of incendiary powers. Spirits roasted in the inferno of the air, while the sun raged its anger on the moon. Our area became a vast beast in torment; it writhed and twisted. The houses shook with the vibrations of mortars exploding on our collective flesh. The roads arched their backs like mighty snakes in their last agonised heaving for life. Huge drums thundered in the air. Elephants crashed on trees, trees crashed on houses. Every noise was a picture, and every picture was mined with dread. And as I listened, the noises stopped, and a cold wind swept over the rooftops. And in the glacial silence of the yellowing moon an iron ritual rode through the air on red horses.

That night the Jackal-headed Masquerade, surrounded by its multiples and companions of hyenas and panthers, chanting with the voices of possessed men, wreaked an incredible violence on the forces of wind and forest, slaughtering the spirits and the insurgent women, murdering the trees and our silent protectors, the dormant gods sleeping in our dreams. And while all this happened the future burst on me and I saw tanks rolling over the wounded roads; I saw armoured trucks and jeeps and great military lorries, and I saw swarms of soldiers in dark places of the country, while the rest of us dreamt of a new domination.

A twisted African way invaded us that night as the
Masquerades and the political sorcerers rode all the seasons of our future in advance, spreading terror and curfew, disease and the stench of charred earth, destroying the paths, ripping up the roads, lifting rooftops and breathing oil fumes on the sleeping inhabitants, wrenching electric poles from the ground, entangling cables, creating pestilential accidents on highways. The Masquerades woke up the terrible ghosts of our deep past and the air howled with freed deranged spirits of hunger and injustice. The Masquerades rode red horses and bulls, slaughtering the spirits, destroying the potent shrines, killing the guardians of the jewelled forests and their secrets of complete rainbows.

It was the worst night of the political Masquerades, as spirits died in the air with strange moanings, as the clash of machetes sent electric sparks through the darkness, as farmyards and good harvests caught fire, as metal cut through bones, and as angels – scorched by the fury of the new powers – flew away from us, higher into the sky, beyond the burning moon.

I found myself circling the cataclysm and I saw the blind old man turn into a green vulture with blazing eyes. The vast span of his bony wings created mighty gusts of boiling air as he flew over our rooftops, slobbering, reviewing the nakedness of our lives. His laughter was harsh and infectious, for the hyenas and the terrible ghosts of our past laughed as well. And when the Jackal-headed Masquerade laughed three hundred children died in the country in secret ways, and many fathers went berserk, and for the first time in many years some of our women committed suicide. And the oracles and luminous stones of secret shrines burst into twisted laughter, breaking out in livid prophecies of butterflies dying in the air, birds turning into stone in mid-flight, prophecies of monstrous births, of wars that make mothers go insane, catastrophes and freak earthquakes, prophecies of madness-making wealth, of oil bursts alongside famine. The oracles laughed while the winds raged and the glass tombs split open and wooden cages caught fire, roasting
their trapped birds, and churches collapsed, and fountains of blood burst out from white concrete floors in empty army barracks, with animals delivering eggs of metal, birds giving birth to snakes, donkeys giving birth to frogs, as if the cycles of life and death had gone mad. And it wasn’t till I saw the Jackal-headed Masquerade with an erection of obscene size, riding the red wind, with the moon burning, and with the butterflies that escaped the incandescent air turning into stars which flickered every fifteen seconds, that I began to understand the illusion of the new conquering force.

The wind cooled suddenly. The silence was broken by the cry of the wind on the taut cables. I looked around our room in the darkness and found myself somewhere else, in a long hallway. The rooftop was gone and the sky was empty. A door opened, blowing me through the walls into another room where I saw Madame Koto asleep, completely naked, her mighty breasts heaving like gargantuan bellows, her great legs quivering. A sound cracked my head from behind, spinning me round into a new space where I saw Madame Koto, dressed in a golden nightgown, naked underneath, riding a yellow horse, burning on the saddle, in pursuit of the Masquerades. I followed her heaving form in the air, overwhelmed by her heated lust smells, by the deep essences of her enormous body stewing beneath the constraints of her convulsive flesh. Her craven volcanic desire made the air demonic. Around her lashed the fury of a lust that had been rising all her life, hurtling her deeper into the powers of her spirit, making her flesh blubbery with the over-ripeness of days without lust and release. It made her eyes sharper in their penetrating insight into the weaknesses of men. It made her centre riper, richer, voluptuous and soft. It made her face mask-like in the solidity of self-control and manipulation. It deepened her command of the psychic centres of men and women and invisible forms of power, drawing to her great body the magnetism of the earth’s hunger for fertilisation. And it turned her from a woman into a Queen of nights, protector of the strong,
creator of new rituals, guardian of women’s forces, controller of witches and sorcerers. She became a mediator between the women of secret cabals and the spirits of shrines drenched with potent menstrual blood, an encounter which fertilises stones and gives birth to new monoliths with faces and features of alien beings.

Her awesome desire, which had survived the penetrations of dream-sorcerers who clambered up her spirit-body and got locked inside, and who were released only when they surrendered all their powers; her robust desire of years without rich release drove her on obsessively, drove the yellow horse to distraction, as if it too were in pursuit of the great white mare, maddened by an unearthly lust. I watched her go, her face contorted, her golden nightgown flapping and creating agonised noises in the air. And I had no idea of her destination, or who it was that could so arouse her mountainous desire, or who could satisfy it without getting lost, or drowned, or being swallowed altogether, or being crushed by the weight of her myth, or destroyed, burned to ashes by her volcanic consummation.

On and on through the air of her dream she went, her skin smooth, freshened with milk baths, her hair silken, her body fleshy, rude in health and prosperity. On and on she went, seeking the giant love story hidden in the flesh of all our agonies, the love between her powerful beating heart and a being or a god worthy of impregnating her with offspring that could command and concentrate the minds of men and women and nations, and possess their dreams and affect their realities. Offspring that could be myths and deities who would extend her powers, offspring worthy of her ancient blood, a blood as old as oral history. I saw her wild and raw, saw her massive heaving buttocks above the saddle, her tumescent palpitating breasts, her lust-steamed breath; and then for a while, as she flew, creating mists from desire, she became obscured from me. And I found myself back in our room, with sinister explosions crashing around us.