Songs of Enchantment (17 page)

* * *

Dad was silent in his chair. And mum, sitting crouched on the floor, began to utter gnomic words. Her feverish voice somehow frightened us more than the upheavals all around, the dogs barking, the cats screaming. And all through the chants of the Party’s night-runners, mum spoke about hidden ancestors, priestesses of unnamed religions, bearers of eternal signs. Then she spoke about the sons and daughters of howling shrines, whose objects of worship lead to hallucinations, sexual fevers, possessions by demons. The contortions of these sons and daughters, she said, would invade many realms, brightening the dark antipodes with the dual potencies of their inheritance. And then she spoke of the puzzling children of the new-born country, of the new age, of all difficult crossroad ages: children with pale, long faces; victims of the epilepsies of the epoch, vulnerable to possession by spirits and sleep-runners; children of war, with faces dyed the colour of an unmentionable sensibility; children whose early years would be blighted by undernourishment, and who would suffer in their flesh and souls the future burning cross of the squandered nation.

When mum had finished uttering her prophecies, her voice quivering, a dense silence reigned in the room. And the silence closed my eyes and sent me spinning and I saw Madame Koto being fecundated by the Jackal-headed Masquerade, while the blind old man, transformed into a vulture with the feet and feathers of a peacock, played a dreadful harmonic accompaniment from his infernal accordion. And the consummation was effected and apotheosised by new crescendos of violence, of screeching birds, choked cries of sacrificed goats and sheep; and then the colours of Madame Koto’s dream became livid, incendiary bright, for she unleashed an ecstatic cry so fearsome that the night was silenced. In the long stillness which followed I saw that she had given birth to three baby Masquerades in her dream, children who spent their lives divided, warring against each other, fighting for their mother’s milk,
savaging her breasts, and tearing her apart in a bizarre, incestuous and greedy rage – while Madame Koto, the new Mother of Images, heaved gently, asleep, on her mighty bronze bed.

T
HE WORLD ABOUT
us heaved in dread and death, but dad completely refused to shut our door. The wind blew in the smells of blood, the noxious odours of triumphant Masquerades, the bitter scents of wood-sprites dying, the fumes of our hopes burning in the streets.

Dad sat now on the bed, watching the door, watching the leaves and dust blow in. And mum, her utterances ended, sat in a dim silvery glow. Meanwhile the deep chanting of mask-heads dominated the air, speaking of new armies, eternal converts, the victory of fear over silence. Every now and then we heard cats howling, unable to escape the hooves of the night-runners and the multiple phantom images unleashed in the dark by the blind old man, master-sorcerer. He had crowded the air with apparitions of our fears, materialising our terrors, converting our cowardice and anxieties into concrete bestial forms that wreaked havoc without any mercy.

I saw the blind old man that night, in a black suit and black shoes. His head was shorn, he had a yellow tie round his neck, a yellow umbrella in his hand. He went round in his new master guise, supervising the carnage inflicted on our area, on the torn-up streets, the dead animals, and on the men caught wandering about lost or drunk or homeless on that night of the artificial curfew. The blind old man
inspected the evidence of his powers. He strolled up our street, proprietorially looking at the damaged houses, the wrecked huts, and at the fallen trees that had ended their domino-like catastrophe on the buildings where the inhabitants sat huddled in corners of their rooms with branches in their living spaces. He inspected the twisted forms of animals, the contorted shapes of women caught in the forest, the quivering maniacal rage of his followers and party supporters in their unholy bacchanalian possession. Their faces were covered with masks from whose tight nostrils they breathed in fumes that fill the brain with rampant visions of power without end. The masks possessed the wearers with the images of menace carved on their dread-manufacturing features. The wearers became their masks, and the masks took on their own true life, enacting the violence of the blind old man’s sorcerous dictates.

He wandered the streets, surveying his new domain, with the tentative gait of a perfect gentleman. He looked into our houses, saw us cowering in our rooms, surrendering ourselves to his kingdom. And over the places he passed, great winds howled, multiplying the furies behind him. I followed him as he consecrated the manifestations of his powers. I followed his spirit’s delight as he blessed his desecrations, believing them to be for our own good, believing that the superior manifestations are the best ones and therefore always victorious. As he went deeper into the city, passing the new houses and the skyscrapers and the grand highways of Independence, I knew the exhaustion of his spirit. I knew the price he felt of containing and unleashing such powers, saturating the air with such demonic insurgencies. I knew the agony of having so much power in such an old body, unnourished by new blood. I also knew his spirit’s despair at not being able to find worthy successors to his secret might, thousands of years old, a lore of might that wrought leadership changes in old empires, a force at the service of dynasties of kings and queens, or against them; a force that brought rain or withheld it, that dimmed the moon, that
made the scorch of sun on earth more bitter, that filled old kingdoms with visions of glory, that exhausted the frames of the people, held back their development, that blinded them to the vastness of the world or to what ideas and dreams of conquest would bring the outside world to our lands; a force that made our kings and rulers think the earth not much greater than their own kingdoms. The blind old man’s despair was as deep as the powers he was heir to, a control over the minds of the people that made them unprepared when the invasions came which would change history for ever. His powers wove a pernicious web of rituals and beliefs that froze the minds of kings, deafened their ears to the words of the soothsayers and sages blessed by the jewels of radiant gods, who uttered innumerable prophecies about the invasion by the white peoples. The rituals confused our minds with too many manifestations, too many gods, too many dreams, confusing us in order to rule us, till our history became our own nemesis.

I followed the blind old man in spirit, circling round him as he passed the centres of secular power, the Presidential mansions, the army barracks that would be famed for future coups and secret executions. I followed him knowing that he was reaching the zenith of his power’s manifestations. I knew that he knew this. I knew his fear of spontaneously combusting and turning into a malignant force in the air, a potential that can be tapped only by those who reach the unique frequency of his spirit’s vibration. And I saw his sadness in having someday to leave this realm behind, for he was a demonic spirit-child of the worst kind, the kind that had developed all its potential for malignity to the highest degree, that had re-connected the old forces which ran in the veins of ancient secret societies and cabals, fuelled by an abundance of spirit energies. I saw his despair, his invisible tears, and his misery beneath his walk of an impeccable gentleman, a diplomat on an evening’s stroll.

And as he turned suddenly, aware that I had been following him in spirit, circling his disguise, the door of our
room creaked and the wind blew in a black smoke that was hot and acrid with the stench of unmentionable burning things. Then I heard mum say, in the voice of a little girl:

‘Azaro, don’t be afraid. Everything is connected.’

‘I’m not afraid any more,’ I replied.

‘Why not?’

For a moment I was silent. Something else was coming in. I listened. Then I heard the low cry of a small animal outside our door. The wind blew harder, straining the foundations of the house, knocking the door insistently against the bed. Something cracked at the housefront. The horses thundered past. I was about to answer mum’s question with an unformulated thought when a strange heat began swirling around in my head. Then something crept into our room, and stopped in front of me, its eyes glowing. It ran further into the room, brushing past the table silently. A moment later I saw two electric green eyes hovering over the centre table.

‘Something has come into the room,’ I said.

‘Shut up,’ said dad.

We didn’t move. The eyes watched us, unblinking, bright, fierce. Suddenly, dad lit a match. The flare dazzled twice, its harsh phosphorescence startling the two gem-like eyes. The match went out, and the eyes vanished. Dad lit another one and, to our wonderment, we beheld, on our centre table, a three-legged cat.

‘A message!’ cried dad.

‘What does it mean?’ asked mum.

The cat regarded us.

‘Silence!’ hissed dad, his eyes intent, brightened in the lumination of the undeciphered sign.

The cat stared at me, and then at mum. Then it leapt on dad’s chair, and sat on its tail, the stump of its bad foot twitching. Dad lit three candles. In silence we studied the cat, oblivious to the noises outside, all of our attention concentrated on the mysterious presence in our room. The cat became bored with our intense sign-reading scrutiny and
after a while it curled up and went to sleep, with its tail coiled half way round its fragile form.

It is hard to explain the somnolence and serenity that came over us as we gazed at the sleeping cat. At some point mum got up and, walking as if under water, blew out the three candles. In the darkness I saw the amazing other form of the cat. A green spectral light was spread around it in the shape of a great lion, filling the room with a mighty animal presence. In the darkness, I became aware of its forest smell of untamed hair, its warmth both damp and comforting. Watching the gigantic leonine aura round the little cat I drifted off into another darkness and into another light and I made several journeys to the shrines favoured by spirit-children all over the world, and when I came back to my body it was daylight.

Mum slept on the floor near me, grinding her teeth. Dad snored on the bed, with his boots on. The warm smell of an affectionate animal was still rich in the room. But the cat itself had disappeared, as if we had all collectively dreamt it into existence during the worst night of the political magicians.

I
T WAS THE
worst night, but it wasn’t the only one. The days afterwards saw us discovering the phenomenal extent of the devastation of our area. It was as if an unrecorded hurricane had swept through our lives, disorienting our reality. The devastation shocked us. When we went out in the morning, it was as if the world had been hurled against a primal rock. Everything was scrambled up and fragmented. The air was darker. The sky was lower, and it seemed to bear down on us with an oppressive menace. Houses had crumbled altogether. Rooftops had been torn off and twisted under the pressure of a malign force. The broken-down political vehicle, which the inhabitants of the street had destroyed in the early days, had been crushed and its parts scattered as if the wind had taken steel fists to it and flung its components all over the area. Some people woke up to find bits of the steering wheel on the beams of their shattered roofs. Others found the vehicle’s doors jutting through their windows. Tyres had been hurled into rooms. The vehicle’s engine, broken to pieces, was found in buckets, smashed against walls. Some people found pellets lodged in their doors, in their pots of food. It was as if revenge for the vehicle’s initial destruction had now been visited on all of us.

We woke up that morning to find the innards of a dog stamped on our door. We wandered down our street and
heard that the heads of black cats had been found in living rooms, in communal kitchens. Parts of animal bodies hung from the branches of trees. Houses had been broken into, properties smashed. We saw the corpses of lizards floating on the debris of the streets. There was rubbish everywhere, flung against the clothes we had left out to dry, in our kitchens and toilets and housefronts. The mounds of rubbish were of such volume that only a wind of vicious intent could have blown them at us from other parts of the city. Clothes and shoes, offal and rotting vegetables, slimy feathers and warped tin cans, broken chairs and stinking plantain and mushroom-infested mattresses had been scattered everywhere. Overnight our street had become a fetid rubbish dump. Dead frogs were all over the place. When we stepped on them accidentally, we were horrified by their popping sounds. We wandered the street and saw live fishes wriggling on the rubbish. Toads had been squashed into the ground by metal hooves. The overwhelming smell of fermented palm-wine rose from the earth as if the rain had drenched us in an infernal libation.

Flowers had been crushed everywhere. The bushes had been torn up. Shrubs and low vegetation, clumps of earth, stumps of trees were found in our backyards, on our rooftops, and along the street. Cracks had appeared in houses. Trees had suffered weird deformations. Stalls had been broken up. Water tanks had been turned upside down, with mud and gore inside them. And throughout our area – as if the force that had raged its visitation on us had given birth to multiples of itself in terrifying irregularity – we discovered broken masks, abandoned jujus, twisted masquerades, eyeless heads of wooden carvings, disintegrated statues of minor gods. They were at street corners, nailed against trees, hurled into our rooms. The masks and statues were truly ugly and quite frightening, with big indifferent eyes that stared at our incomprehension in broken silence.

The destruction wreaked on our area stunned us into speechlessness. The mangled dogs, the bloated eyes of goats,
the twisted metal and the crumbling houses played havoc with our senses and made us feel that we had stepped out from the reality of dreams and into a bizarre universe. We kept looking at one another with dazed eyes, seeking confirmation that we were not inventing the monstrosities that we saw. The chaos made us brain-shocked: everywhere we looked our stunned brains conjured further devastations. The chaos made us hallucinate. The air had changed. Some people screamed that they saw spirits melting in the air. Some said they saw rainbows turning red. Others that they saw spirits walking about, their mighty heads higher than the tallest trees. A girl cried out in wonder and her mouth hung open as she followed, with her eyes, the flight of seven angels dressed in rainbows, blue lights flashing round their feet. People amazed us by seeing crocodiles swimming in the density of the darkened air. People saw antelopes with aquamarine eyes running through them, as if they were ghosts. Others saw bulls and goat-headed masquerades dancing on rooftops.