Songs of Enchantment (7 page)

He stared right through me. The door creaked open gently, as if the wind wanted to come in and listen to a story. I didn’t like the wind any more. It had chilled me, and it had not stopped waging war on my father’s secret form. But something made me want to turn round.

‘Don’t speak,’ dad said in a low voice that made me think he was dying.

His face hung down, his jaws were slack, but he stared at something behind me with a glittering intensity in his eyes. When I turned right round the sight of the black cat sitting on its tail, its eyes alight, frightened me. When I screamed, the cat disappeared.

‘You have driven our visitor away,’ dad said sadly.

‘It was another messenger,’ I said.

‘What was the message?’

‘Go and beg mum,’ I replied.

Dad was silent. He shut his eyes. He didn’t move for a long time. I blew out the candle. For the first time in seven
days, dad slept. He slept in his chair. That night, as dad slept precariously in his three-legged chair, I saw his other form gradually grow smaller. The gentle haze of gold diminished and settled in him and I never saw it again. I knew then that dad had found a secret way back into the immeasurable invisible happiness that is mixed like air into the long days of suffering, into the nights of agonised sleep. I knew then that he had somehow rediscovered the magic substance which the great God sprinkled in us and which sings with the flow of blood through all the journeys of our lives. And I dreamt that a large handful of that wonderful substance was sprinkled on us as we slept in the truce of the nightwind.

I woke to find that dad had bathed, shaved, combed his hair and put on his French suit. He was also singing. When I sat up the first thing he said was:

‘My son, today is Madame Koto’s day. Get ready. We are going on an interesting journey.’

N
O ONE HAD
seen Madame Koto for a long time. She existed only in rumours and in our dreams. Her absence had increased the force of her legend. The road was asleep when we set out to find her.

We made enquiries at the bar and the women gave us directions to one of her great stalls in the marketplace. When we got there her shed was shut. A woman directed us to another market. The same thing happened. Dad was not discouraged. We received many directions which sent us up and down the city. At one of her shops, where jewelry and lace materials were sold, a little girl told us she had just left. It was late in the afternoon before we arrived at a shop which Madame Koto rarely visited. It was a small shop, with a few tables of trinkets outside. We went into the shop and met a lean woman with a bandage over one eye.

‘We have come to see Madame Koto,’ dad said.

‘Which Madame Koto?’ the woman asked.

Dad was confused.

‘How many Madame Kotos are there?’

‘It depends,’ the woman said.

We looked around the shop. It was bare except for a few chairs. The place stank of sweat and urine and human misery. The woman stared at me with her one eye. She seemed rather intent on me. It made me uncomfortable. Dad said:

‘Maybe we have come to the wrong place.’

The woman didn’t say anything. A child began crying in a room at the back of the shop. The woman went out and my eyes cleared a little and I suddenly noticed the political posters in the deep shadows of the walls.

‘Let’s go,’ dad said. ‘This is the wrong shop.’

He started to leave when I heard other voices at the back, the voices of women whispering in a corridor. While I was straining to hear what they were saying, a goat wandered into the empty shop from the front door. It stared at us. Then the goat moved towards me, and edged me to the wall. It had big eyes, unfathomable and curiously human. I pushed the goat away, but it came back at me, its head lowered, its green eyes glittering.

‘Leave that goat alone,’ dad said.

The goat turned to dad and subjected him to a long intense scrutiny. Then it went out through the front door and soon afterwards the woman with the bandaged eye came in and said:

‘Wait.’

Then she was gone. I listened to the bustle of the main road outside the shop, the voices calling, the hawkers drawing attention to their goods, car horns blasting, news vendors rattling out the sensational headlines of the day, music playing all over the distances. While I listened dad touched me on the head and I suddenly had the distinct impression that Madame Koto was in the shop. I could feel the awesomeness of her body. She was breathing in the air. Her legend surrounded us, watching our every movement.

Dad sat on a bench. I stood beside him, conscious of the disquieting notion that Madame Koto had somehow multiplied in the spaces where we waited. Then the wind shifted in the shop and a big man, draped in a cheap agdada, strode in. He eyed us and went through the back door, leaving behind flashes and hints of indecipherable possibilities. These were intensified a moment later when the woman brought in a tray of food – pounded yam and spinach stew, rich with dried fish, fried chicken and goat meat. She put the tray
down on a low table which she dragged out of the shadows. She brought water for us to wash our hands. We didn’t touch the food. The woman watched us. Dad’s face was stony; he registered no bewilderment. After a few moments of silence the woman said:

‘Follow me.’

We rose.

‘The boy first,’ she said.

We followed her through the back door, along a corridor, into another house, up a winding set of stairs, across a landing to the top floor of a two-storeyed building, down another set of winding stairs, and back into the same shop we had originally set out from.

‘What’s wrong with you, eh?’ dad growled. ‘Are you playing games with us?’

The woman smiled. She indicated the bench. Dad sat down. The food was gone. The room was somehow different. The woman left and soon came back with a crying baby. She left the baby on a chair and went out again. The baby shrieked and made us feel quite scared. I went over to the baby and played with it, trying to get it to stop crying. I touched the baby’s face and it stared at me with deep fearful eyes. I realised in an instant that it was not an ordinary baby. I was playing with its tiny hands when, with a sound in my head like the roaring of an enraged lion, it suddenly scratched me, drawing blood. Then it flashed me a radiant toothless grin. I showed dad the scratches.

‘Let’s go and get you a plaster,’ he said.

‘That baby isn’t human,’ I said.

‘All babies are strange,’ dad replied.

We went out and bought a plaster and when we got back the shop was full. Chairs and benches were packed tight with visitors, traders, hawkers and children. Loud voices made the crowded spaces quiver. There was a perpetual din of heated arguments. The spaces were jammed with all kinds of human beings and the intra-spaces were packed with all kinds of shadows. The goat wandered amongst the strange
crowd and no one seemed to notice. The evening drifted into the shop and everything slowly darkened. The walls yielded up their secret colour of green; the political posters were gone; the screaming baby was no longer there. The people went on arguing, gesticulating, and I couldn’t understand what anyone was saying or what their gestures meant. My head fairly whirled in the changed atmosphere of the airless shop. The goat rubbed its head against the legs of the men. Dad leant against a wall and lit a cigarette. The darkness pressed down on us.

‘We are under the sea,’ I said.

Dad was silent. The goat attempted to walk between dad’s legs, and I drove it away. Standing a short distance from us, the goat suddenly reared on its hind legs and gave vent to a chilling cry, like a woman in agony. The voices stopped. The woman with the bandage over her eye pushed her way over to us and said:

‘Follow me. Madame Koto will see you now.’

Dad crushed out his cigarette. We followed the woman down three long corridors. Animal skin lined the walls. In the third corridor there were drums at intervals next to the closed doors. Mirrors vibrated over the lintels. The corridor seemed endless. We went deeper and deeper, as if into another reality. The air smelt of cloves and river banks. In one room there were many goats. In another room there was a white horse with the heavy-lidded eyes of certain politicians. At the end of the corridor there was a sign which told us to take off our shoes. Dad took his off. I remained barefoot. There was pepper in the air. My eyes watered; I sneezed. We entered a big room. The walls were completely white. The ceiling was low. Dad had to stoop. On the walls there were preternatural feathers and flywhisks, empty bird cages and spears, animal hides and the head of an antelope. Beyond that room was another one in which a tumultuous gathering of women was holding a meeting. They fell silent when we came in. They had suffering faces, scoured with the religion of misery. They were petty traders, women without children,
women with ailing children, women with angled faces and hollow cheeks and sober eyes, faces that never smiled. They were waiting to be called in to see Madame Koto and they had been arguing about who was next, whose case was more urgent.

When we passed out through the narrow door the women began arguing again. In the new room we saw an orderly queue of women, all surrounded with the grave aura of people who had travelled vast distances to have their problems heard, people who had been waiting with great patience all their lives and who were waiting patiently now. They had brought food with them. They eyed us with profound indifference. We went past them into a smaller room potent with ritual smells, the smells of power, of the earth liberated by rain, of a mighty woman, of gold and perfume, of childlessness, sweat, eunuchs, virgins and pitchers. A great white veil divided the room. Beyond the veil seven candles were aflame. Two men were fanning a leviathan figure on a regal chair. Young girls were combing and plaiting the hair of this figure. We heard water being poured. Ritual chants reigned in rooms behind rooms. Somewhere a sheep was being slaughtered, a man screamed as if branded, a child wailed, women laughed. Everywhere I looked shadows were changing places.

The bandaged woman retreated without a word. The darkness in the outer room where we stood became thicker. I noticed the stained-glass windows and the kaolin-painted floor. When dad coughed the leviathan figure made a sign. The white veil was drawn aside. One of the men motioned us to approach. We waded through the dense air of legends.

Madame Koto, like an ageless matriarch, was sitting on an ornate chair, with the seven red candles surrounding her. She had a yellow mantilla on her shoulders. She had grown so enormous that the large chair barely contained her bulk. She wore a deep blue lace blouse and volumes of lace wrappers. She had acquired gargantuan space. As the evening darkened, her presence increased. Power stank from her
liquid and almost regal movements. Behind her, in a large golden cage, was a shimmering peacock.

The men went on fanning her in slow motion, as if the fan of giant eagle feathers were very heavy, as if they were working monstrous bellows. She studied us in silence and then, with a light gesture of her fat arms, dismissed the men. Drawing up the sleeves of her blouse, she revealed the beauty of her skin, which was the mahogany blue of the forest at night. Her face was large, her eyes big with deep secrets, and her features – serene like the bronze sculptings of ancient queens – defied memory. She neither registered nor betrayed any conceivable expression – as if nothing in the world could stir the great mass of her spirit. I had not seen her in a long time and she looked abnormally resplendent. Her face burned with health. The jewels round her neck bathed her in ghostly lights.

‘I know why you have come to see me,’ she said to dad, while looking at me.

Her voice was unrecognisable, deep with the tones of a bull. She cleared her throat.

‘You have stopped coming to my bar,’ she now said, addressing me directly.

‘You have been growing in our room,’ I replied.

‘What?’

‘Are you the nightwind?’ I asked.

‘Shut up,’ said dad, pinching me.

I fell silent. Madame Koto stared at us.

‘Both of you have caused me a lot of trouble in the past.’

Dad began to fidget. Madame Koto didn’t say anything for a while. Her silence made me sweat. Then she motioned for me to approach her. I did. She held my hand. Her palms were hot. I started to shiver.

‘I am dying,’ she said eventually.

I was astonished.

‘What is killing you?’ I asked.

Several thoughts, like dark winds, blew across her face.

‘The children in my womb,’ she said. Then after a moment,
she added: ‘And high living. Money. Power. Responsibility. My own success is pressing me down.’

‘What about my mother?’

She smiled and let go of my hand. I went back to dad. He put a protective arm on my shoulder, tilting me in the direction of his peculiar madness. Madame Koto made her reply to dad.

‘I will let your wife go on one condition.’

‘What?’

‘I want your son to come and sit in my bar again till I give birth.’

‘Why?’

‘Same reason as before. He is a strange child and has good luck.’

Dad shook his head vigorously.

‘But you are not a good person,’ he said.

Before he could unburden himself of a torrent of recriminations, Madame Koto interrupted him with an imperceptible movement of her arm.

‘You don’t have to agree with my politics,’ she said. ‘I just want your son to come to my bar as he used to. If you don’t make trouble for me, I won’t make trouble for you. I am not well. I am dying and maybe your son is the only person who can help me.’

Dad was confused.

‘Go home and you will find your wife waiting for you. Don’t say anything about your quarrel. She is working with me for as long as she likes. But from now on I want your son to come and sit in my bar any time he wants.’

Dad thought about her proposal. I followed the confusion in his spirit. I pulled his hand and he leant over to me and I whispered mum’s words into his ear.