The Famished Road (58 page)

He didn’t go to work for days. He went around, driven by the new lights that Green Leopard had knocked into his head. He spoke to the prostitutes at length. He persisted even when they abused him, even when people began to speculate loudly about his strange alliances. Then he talked of getting a delegation of Madame Koto’s prostitutes to go and protest to the Colonial Administration. For three days Mum refused to cook.

And Dad, forced to eat beans cooked by hawkers, and brought down by a bout of stomach trouble, gave up the notion of the Council of Prostitutes. But he created a special place for them in his imagined country.

It didn’t take Dad long to realise that he didn’t know what he was talking about.

When he tried to organise the men of the area to start clearing up the rubbish along the streets, he was surprised at the ferocity of their insults.

‘Do you think we have nothing better to do?’ they said.

Dad, never to be daunted, took to clearing the rubbish himself.

‘We have to clear garbage from our street before we clear it from our minds,’ he said, echoing something he had heard in one of the books.

But when he had cleared a bit of rubbish, and dumped it in the swamp, people would litter the section he had cleaned up. In one week his efforts seemed to have resulted in there being more rubbish around. The street got worse. People began to think it more natural to dump their garbage on the street. Dad quarrelled with them. Those that might have voted for him, few as they were, publicly withdrew their support. After a while they began to see the possibilities of the swamp. Dad had shown them the way.

When the street became too cluttered, they emptied their garbage into the swamp.

When the rains fell, the swamp grew and covered half the street.

But it was when people took to bringing their problems to him, when they asked him for money, for advice on everything from how to get their children admitted to hospital to how to get books for their youngsters, that Dad realised he couldn’t be a visible or an invisible Head of State just by himself.

‘A politician needs friends!’ he announced one morning.

And he began to contemplate a new alliance with Madame Koto. He thought seriously of the importance of information and knowledge. First he dreamt of making me a spy. He wanted me to begin to revisit Madame Koto, to listen to the conversations in the bar, and to find out how to become a politician. We were amazed by Dad’s volte-face. Mum, at first, rebuked him, called him a hypocrite and a coward.

But, when she had got rid of some of her vengeance, she openly supported the plan.

She clearly had in mind the possibilities of makingmoney cooking for the great rally.

Dad’s next idea was that shortly after I had re-entered Madame Koto’s bar, he would begin his reappearance. His intention was to speak to her customers, to her party supporters and colleagues, learn something about how politics worked, and maybe even win some of them over to his philosophy.

‘You used to hate politics,’ Mum said. ‘What has happened, eh?’

‘I’ve been thinking.’

‘So it took Green Leopard to start you thinking, eh?’

‘Where there’s politics, there’s money,’ Dad said. Mum was silent.

‘We can’t remain poor for ever.’

‘Yes, we can,’ I said.

Dad gave me a vicious stare.

‘In this world,’ he said after a while, ‘this is what happens to you every day if you have nothing.’ He pointed to his swollen face, his puffed-out eyes, his bruised lips.

He paused.

‘But while we are doing these things, spying on Madame Koto, finding out everything, I will continue as I was.’

We didn’t understand him. The subtlety of his campaign eluded us. He didn’t explain.

And then, slowly, we realised that Dad’s manner had changed. When he pointed at something he did so with authority, as if distinguishing objects in space for the first time. His eyes were still obscured, so we couldn’t see what new lights dazzled in them. But he was no longer like a demented boxer, spoiling for a challenge to prove himself. He was slowly taking on the manner of a soldier, a commander. Me and Mum and anyone that listened to him were his team. It was a small army; and because we were a captive audience, Dad had his secret stage from which to spring. He filled our lives with a strange excitement. At the time we didn’t know it.

‘You,’ he said, pointing at me, so that I felt myself distinguished from everything else in the universe, ‘you can do what you like, but you also do what I tell you. From today listen carefully to what I say, watch carefully what I do. This life is a joke that is not really a joke. Even mosquitoes know they have to survive.’

GRADUALLY WE SAW the subtlety of his campaign. We thought he had changed. He had. But to our chagrin instead of saving the money he had made from the fight, as Mum had suggested, he immediately let it be known that he was throwing a party. He invited the compound people, Madame Koto, the blind old man, Ade’s father, and the herbalist who had treated him. The word went round that the man who had conquered Green Leopard was having a party to celebrate his victory. Dad invited only a few people, but the whole world came.

It was meant to be an intimate party. Dad ordered some drinks and got Mum to fry three chickens. While Mum fried the chicken, coughing from all the smoke, Dad kept appearing and walking off with his favourite pieces. A fourth chicken had to be ordered, which I fried, because Mum said she’d had enough of the smoke. Dad confined himself to a steady consumption of beer.

‘You used to drink ogogoro,’ Mum said.

‘Life gets better,’ replied Dad, opening another bottle.

When I had finished with the frying and the burning of the chicken, I was sent to go and hire some chairs. When I came back with the chair-hire man, as we called him, Dad was outside, at the housefront, sweating. He had been training again. We piled the folding chairs in front of our room and Mum, grumbling, paid the chair-hire man, who asked if he too could attend the party.

‘It’s a small event,’ Mum said.

‘Good, so I can come with my wife.’

Mum had no choice but to give her consent. At the housefront Dad had begun to stride up and down the street, bare-chested, his battered gloves on, calling himself the champion of the world, and inviting all challengers. He was quite drunk and he boasted with a fury I never knew he had. He said he could beat five Green Leopards.

He said he could kill three lions with his bare hands. He announced that he could knock out ten trees and destroy a buildingwith a single punch.

‘Isn’t that the man who humbled the Green Leopard?’ asked Mr. Chair-Hire.

‘Yes.’

‘Excellent. I will come and enjoy his party. I will bring all my friends.’

And he hurried off to attend to his business. Dad went on raving. He boasted with such ferocity, lashing out with such energy, and sweating so profusely, that his drunkenness soon left him and he had to keep going into the room to replenish his intoxication with bottles of beer. When he returned and resumed his furious boasting Madame Koto’s car drove past. The driver slowed down to listen to him.

‘As I was saying, I can destroy a house with only one punch! I can lift a car with one finger. If the car is coming at me I can put out one hand and the car will stop. I can build a road in one day!’

The driver laughed.

‘I can punch a man so hard’, Dad shouted, ‘that all he will be able to do is laugh for the rest of his life.’

The driver took the hint and moved on. When Dad had spent himself with training and shouting, and no one took up his challenge for a battle, he went in, had a bath, and prepared for the party.

The evening came slowly. On the road I watched as the forest darkened. Flocks of white birds settled on the topmost branches of the trees. Madame Koto and her driver went past several times, carrying cartons of beer, boxes of paper plates and napkins. I watched also as the women of her bar helped with piling up hired chairs. Preparations for the great rally were underway. There was now a general fever of anticipation about the event. Those who swore they wouldn’t attend it had changed their minds. Its promise of spectacle, the numbers of popular musicians appearing, the hints that money would be distributed to the crowd, the talk even of witnessing free films, made the staunchest opponents waver.

Ade’s father, his two wives, and Ade himself, were the first to turn up for Dad’s modest celebrations. We opened a few folding chairs for them and poured them drinks. Dad talked to Ade’s father about politics. Mum talked to the wives about opening shops and trading in the market. I talked with Ade about Dad wanting to be Head of State.

Then the blind old man turned up with his accordion and his helper. After them came Madame Koto, her stomach massive, her face sad. And after her were the herbalist and her silent, distrustful acolytes. Behind them came the compound people, with their children. We ran out of chairs. The room was already crowded. People carried on turning up. We didn’t recognise many of them. Traders, lorry-drivers, clerks, stall-owners, hawkers, bicycle-repairers, the carpenter and his colleagues. The party spilled out of the room and into the passage. By this time the room was excruciatingly stuffy and hot. Flies buzzed over the drinks and settled on our sweating brows. Someone tried to open the window, applied too much force, and practically destroyed it. The carpenter promised to fix it for free. The blind old man supplied music from his vile accordion.

Meanwhile, outside, the problem of those who turned up, uninvited, to the party grew worse. They clamoured and raised a terrible din along the passage. When I felt I was going to suffocate inside, from the sweat and the old man’s music, I struggled to get out. I was shocked at the size of the crowd. Dad’s modest party had been overrun by tramps whose hair was the breeding ground of lice and sprouting rubbish, and who stank; by the wretched and the hungry and the homeless, all of whom had such defiant and intense eyes that I felt they would pounce on anyone who dared ask them to leave; by the deformed, whose legs looked like the letter K, whose mouths always seemed to be dribbling, whose rickety feet were turned somewhat backwards; by weary ghetto-dwellers, people I had seen sitting outside mechanics’ workshops dreaming about sea-journeys, people I had seen in the streets or at the markets, faces worn, eyes yellowish. There were handsome youngmen who brought their girlfriends, women of unknown histories, old men and women who looked like all the old people I had ever seen. There were people in black habits, with wizened faces, eyes bright like royal jaguars, chests and arms covered with spells and amulets. There were also people long rumoured to be witches and wizards. I could recognise them instantly by their anti-smells and by the way they didn’t want anyone to touch them. They always stayed on their own. I stared at one of the wizards intently. He stared back at me.

Then he began coming towards me. When I turned to run, I heard a dog barking.

When I looked again the wizard had gone and a dog stood in his place. It was a white dogwith green eyes.

‘Kill that dog!’ I shouted.

The dog had an almost human expression of bewilderment on its face. Someone threw a stone at it. I aimed a kick at its mouth. The dog fled, howling. Moments later I saw the wizard coming down the street. One of his eyes was swollen. He avoided me for the rest of the evening.

Apart from the witches and the wizards, who brought an almost sweet smell of evil to the crowd, there were thugs from both of the main parties as well as some from the lesser organisations. They had come to see what Dad looked like and to pay their respects to the man who had tamed the legendary Green Leopard. The thugs struggled to get to our room, but the crowd was too dense along the passage. So they lolled around the compound-front, flexing their muscles, expanding their chests, and chatting up the women.

Evening fell and more people poured in from all over the place. Boxers turned up in their training shorts, with their boxing gloves on, with towels round their necks. Men with guns and rounds of ammunition also turned up. They were soldiers and policemen, some of them. They strolled proudly into the gathering and chatted with the prostitutes. They, too, had heard of Dad’s feat. They were all ex-ghetto men, who wore their wretched pasts proudly. They kept asking for Dad, but he was nowhere to be found. He wasn’t in the room, along the passage, in the toilet, or at the compoundfront.

Then as we were looking for Dad we saw a procession of beggars coming down the road. They were led by a hypnotically beautiful young girl. There were about seven or eight of them. Some of the beggars had legs that were limp and pliable as rubber.

Some had twisted necks. Others had both feet behind their heads. One of them had one eye much higher up on his face than the other. Another seemed to have three eyes, but on closer inspection it turned out to be a wound like a socket with an eye missing. One was almost completely blind and could see only through pupils so scrambled up and confusing that they seemed like mashed egg yolk. It was when the girl got closer that we saw she was blind in one eye. All the beggars trailed along the ground, in filthy clothes, each with sticks and pads of cloth beneath the joints of limbs that scraped on the rough earth. Dust rose with their advance. Then to our puzzlement the beggars, looking up with the bright faces of arrivants, turned into our compoundfront.

The girl arranged them into a semi-circle. Then I saw that the procession of beggars were a family. The most deformed was the father. He seemed to have all their deformities. As the line went towards the youngest each member seemed to have a peculiar variation of a particular deformity. It ended with the clarity of the little girl’s blind eye. I couldn’t stop looking at the girl. She was extremely beautiful, like a flower whose flaw is its luminous perfection. She was also curiously familiar, like the distant music heard on those afternoons when all the world is resolved into a pure dream, a music without a location, the music of one’s mood and spirit, distilled by a secret affinity. I went over to the beggars and asked who they were.