The Famished Road (46 page)

‘The next time that son of yours troubles me I will teach him a lesson he will never forget.’

Dad said nothing. He went home with the carpenter, and bought him another beer.

The carpenter drank happily. They talked about Madame Koto. They didn’t talk about politics. I watched them from the door.

‘Come in, or go and play!’ Dad said.

I went in.

The carpenter, slightly drunk, offered to fixDad’s chair.

‘No, I like it like this,’ Dad said philosophically. ‘It reminds me that whatever we sit on will one day make us fall.’

The carpenter laughed, finished his beer, haggled about his payment, received his money in a grumbling spirit, and left.

It was when Mum returned exhausted from hawking, her face a mask of dust and shadows, that Dad suddenly pounced on me. He whipped out his belt from his trousers, locked the door, tore the shirt off my back, and flogged me mercilessly. He lashed me as I ran, wincing, round the room. He thrashed me with the full energies and muscles of his great furious body. His flogging filled me with lightning flashes of pain. Every part of me burned with rawness. He had a savage expression on his face.

The belt cracked like a horsewhip. I jumped and danced in fiendish contortions. He belted my feet, my neck, my back, my legs, my hands. He chastised me the way a master boxer beats an inferior sparring partner, with rage and methodical application.

As he did so, he said:

‘You are a stubborn child, I am a stubborn father. If you want to return to the world of spirits, return! But if you want to stay, then be a good son!’

I gave up running round the room and collapsed in a heap near the door. I no longer felt the pain. Not once did I cry out. He wanted evidence that his punishment was being felt. I didn’t give him that satisfaction. His anger increased. And so after a long time, when I was no longer sure whether he was still punishing me or whether I was merely dreaming the pain, he stopped, gave up, held his arm, and sat on his chair. I lay on the floor. Mum came and lifted me to the bed.

‘Don’t give him any food tonight!’ Dad thundered, getting up.

That evening I watched them eating. Later, Mum relented and gave me some food in secret, but I refused it. Dad slept peacefully that night, snoring like a bully. The next day I refused to go to school. I refused to play. I refused to eat. And I stayed in bed, growing in stature, full of vengeance. That was how I went into a curious state of being. I began to feed on my hunger. I fed well and had a mighty appetite. I dipped into myself and found other worlds waiting. I chose a world and lingered. There were no spirits there. It was a world of wraiths. A world of famine, famishment, and drought. I dwelt amongst them for a long time. Mum would sometimes wake me up.

Dad grumbled incessantly about the amount of money it cost to feed me. He ranted about the cost of glass, the humiliations I had made him suffer in secret and in public, about the agony of his work and how I made his dreams wither because I was such a bad son. I stopped listening to him. I withdrew from the world of feelings, sentiments, sympathies. I refused to eat the next night. My mouth became dry. I lost energy and felt myself becoming light. I felt a terrible ecstasy growing in me. I smelt the world of holidays, the world of spirits. I saw the fields of music, the fountains of delights. My head filled with air. My face shrank. My eyes expanded. I listened to the music of famine.

On the third day of refusing to eat, I began to leave the world. Everything became distant. I willed myself away, wanting to leave, singing the song of departures that only my spirit companions can render with the peculiar beauty of flutes over desolate mountains. Mum’s face was far away. The distance between us grew. Dad’s face, large and severe, no longer frightened me. His assumption that the severity of his features gave him power over anything made him look a little comical. I punished him by retreating from the world. I tortured them both by listeningwith fullness of heart to the unsung melodies of spirit companions. My stomach, feeding on the diet of the other world, on the air of famine, grew bigger. I drank in the evils of history. I drank in the food of suffering that gathers in the space just above the air we breathe, just within range of all that we see. And then I heard Mother weeping. I refused to be moved. I sank into the essential indifferent serenity of the spirit-child’s soul—the serenity that accepts extremes of experience calmly because the spirit-child is at home with death. I did not sleep for three days. I did not eat. Mum wept. She seemed a long way off, in a remote part of the earth. I ranged deeper into that other world.

On the fourth day, the amnesia of hunger began to spread its curious ecstasy over my paradoxical soul. Then I found the three-headed spirit sitting beside me. He had never left. He had been waiting patiently. He could always count on the unintended callousness of human beings, their lovelessness, their forgetfulness of the basic things of existence. For a while, the three-headed spirit stayed silent. Dad was on his chair, polishing his boots. He looked at me furtively. I felt the frailty of parents, how powerless they really are. And because Dad said nothing to me, because he made no attempts to reach me, made no gestures towards me, did nothing to appease me, did not even attempt a smile at me, I listened to what the three-headed spirit was saying.

‘Your parents are treating you atrociously,’ he said. ‘Come with me. Your companions are desperate to embrace you. There is a truly wonderful feast awaiting your homecoming. They yearn for your lovely presence. You will be treated like a prince, which is what you are. Human beings don’t care. They don’t know how to love. They don’t know what love is. Look at them. You are dying and all they do is polish their boots. Do they love you? No!’

I paid attention to the words of the spirit. And his words led me into a blue terrain beyond the hungers of the flesh. Sunbirds sang from branches. The trees were golden.

I travelled on the wind of amnesia till we came to a mighty green road.

‘This road has no end,’ said the three-headed spirit.

‘Where does it lead?’ I asked.

‘Everywhere. It leads to the world of human beings and to the world of spirits. It leads to heaven and hell. It leads to worlds that we don’t even know about.’

We travelled the road. All the trees around could move and had their own form of speech. Every tree had a distinct personality and character. Some of the trees were quite evil and the bizarre forms of witches and wizards were perched on their branches, eyeing us with special interest. As we travelled on I saw a bird with Madame Koto’s face. It circled over us three times and flew on ahead. The road sloped downwards. The deeper we went the more vivid the colours of that world became. There were colours I never knew existed, colours so dazzling, so full of health and radiance, colours that blurred all distinctions between brightness and darkness, that seemed to occupy the highest octaves of new dreams, that I travelled in a state of perpetual astonishment. The world kept changing. The road began to move.

It behaved like a river, and it flowed against the direction of our journey. Travelling suddenly became very difficult. My feet hurt, I was excruciatingly hungry, and with each step I felt like giving up. I had thought the journey to the other world would be an effortless one.

‘Are we travelling this road to the end?’

‘Yes,’ the spirit said, walking as if distance meant nothing.

‘But you said the road has no end.’

‘That’s true,’ said the spirit.

‘How can it be true?’

‘From a certain point of view the universe seems to be composed of paradoxes. But everything resolves. That is the function of contradiction.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘When you can see everything from every imaginable point of view you might begin to understand.’

‘Can you?’

‘No.’

Dad got up from his chair and stood over me. His breathing manifested itself as a heavy wind in the world in which I was travelling. The wind blew me on. I felt very light. Every time my exhaustion threatened to wash over me completely, this wind lifted me up in the air. The spirit caught me and dragged me down to the ground.

‘Don’t fly away,’ the spirit said. ‘If you fly away I don’t know where you will land.

There are many strange things here that devour the traveller. There are many spiriteaters and monsters of the interspaces. Keep to the solid ground.’

Dad coughed, and I tripped over a green bump on the road. We travelled on. Then we came to the beginnings of an orange-coloured valley. The colours of the valley also kept changing. One moment it was blue, the next it was silver, but when I first saw it the valley was orange. Trees with each fruit as a human head populated the roadsides and the high grounds of the valley. I recognised some of the faces. The fruits fell, the faces dropped to the ground, the sun melted them, they became precious waters which flowed to the roots of the trees, and new faces appeared as beautiful fruits on the branches. The process of falling and regrowing seemed very quick and I saw several faces die and be reborn in moments between a single footstep.

The valley was essentially populated with strange beings. Instead of faces they had masks that became more beautiful the longer you looked at them. Maybe their masks were their faces. They had houses all along the sides of the valley. They also had their palaces and centres of culture below, under the earth. Their acropoles, alongwith their fabulous cemeteries, were in the air. In the valley they were all hard at work.

‘What are they doing?’ I asked.

Dad crouched low, his face close to mine. He touched me, and I shivered.

‘They are building a road.’

‘Why?’

Dad held my hands. I felt cold and began to tremble. He breathed in my face and the wind almost knocked my head away and I kept being flung up into the spaces and the spirit finally had to hold me down by my hair.

‘They have been building that road for two thousand years.’

‘But they haven’t gone far at all.’

‘I know. They have only built two feet of the road.’

‘But they are working so hard.’

‘What has that got to do with it?’

‘All they seem to be doing is building the road.’

‘Absolutely.’

‘But why are they building it?’

Dad touched my face and his hands burnt me. He shook me. I felt my bones rattle.

My head rocked violently. He churned the emptiness of my stomach, and stirred the fury of my famishment. He stared deep into my eyes. Some of the inhabitants of the valley stopped working and turned their masked faces towards us. Dad threw me back on the bed, got up, and left the room. The people resumed working.

‘Because they had a most wonderful dream.’

‘What dream?’

Dad slammed the door shut when he left the room. The force of its slamming shook me all over.

‘They had been living for eternity as faces on the great tree. They got tired of eternity. They were the ones that the sun didn’t melt into precious water. They became beings, people in masks. One day their prophet told them that there were worlds and worlds of people high up. The prophet spoke of a particular people. A great people who did not know their own greatness. The prophet called that world Heaven and said they should build a great road so that they could visit those people, and that those people could visit them. In this way they would complete one another and fulfil an important destiny in the universe.’

‘Why did the prophet call that other world Heaven?’

‘Because his people are the dead.’

‘How can the dead have prophets?’

‘There are many ways to be dead. Besides, the dead are not what you think.’

‘Carry on with what you were saying.’

‘About what?’

‘About why the prophet called the other world Heaven.’

‘Yes, because the prophet’s people are the dead. Heaven means different things to different people. They wanted to live, to be more alive. They wanted to know the essence of pain, they wanted to suffer, to feel, to love, to hate, to be greater than hate, and to be imperfect in order to always have something to strive towards, which is beauty. They wanted also to know wonder and to live miracles. Death is too perfect.’

‘So why has it taken them so long to build so little?’

‘Their prophet said many things which they never understood. One of the things their prophet said was that the road cannot be finished.’

‘Why not?’

‘What their prophet meant was that the moment it is finished all of them will perish.’

‘Why?’

‘I suppose they will have nothing to do, nothing to dream for, and no need for a future. They will perish of completeness, of boredom. The road is their soul, the soul of their history. That is why, when they have built a long section of it, or forgotten the words of their prophet and begun to think they have completed it, landquakes happen, lightning strikes, invisible volcanoes erupt, rivers descend on them, hurricanes tear up their earth, the road goes mad and twists and destroys itself, or the people become distorted in spirit and start to turn the road into other things, or the workers go insane, the people start wars, revolts cripple everything and a thousand things distract them and wreck what they have built and a new generation comes along and begins again from the wreckage.’

I looked at the road with new eyes. It was short and marvellous. It was a work of art, a shrine almost, beautiful beyond description, created out of the most precious substances in the world, out of amethysts and chrysoberyl, inlaid with carnelian, brilliant with patterned turquoise.

‘Why is it so beautiful?’

‘Because each new generation begins with nothing and with everything. They know all the earlier mistakes. They may not know that they know, but they do. They know the early plans, the original intentions, the earliest dreams. Each generation has to reconnect the origins for themselves. They tend to become a little wiser, but don’t go very far. It is possible that they now travel slower, and will make bigger, better mistakes. That is how they are as a people. They have an infinity of hope and an eternity of struggles. Nothing can destroy them except themselves and they will never finish the road that is their soul and they do not know it.’