Season of Anomy

by Wole Soyinka

  The applause broke, swelled, obediently faded away at the upraised palms of the Chairman. “When therefore I commissioned this little thing here, I said to the…er…the man who is to do the job, the artist I mean to say, I said to him, this thing is to commemorate our mutual gratitude to the cocoa plant, so whatever you design, make sure that the matter is naked to the eye as clearly as I am seeing you now. Well let me not speak too much. It is not me who has to be unveiled; my better half standing over there did that a very long time ago.” He allowed the laughter to die down on its own, then stretched his arm towards the waiting Brigadier. “So let me call upon the Brigadier over there who has been so kind as to come and honour us by the unveiling of this fountain, this symbolical cocoa fountain which we all so fervently hope will never never dry from its eternal underground sources. Ladies and Gentlemen, Distinguished Guests—His Excellency the Regional Commandant—the Brigadier!”

  Conducting his orchestra on cue, Zaccheus brought forth a flourish from brass and a roll from drums and swung into a martial tempo for the Brigadier’s immaculate precision steps to the waiting silver scissors, held out by the Chairman’s lady, ribbon-side of the fishpond and nestling on a blue velvety cushion. A dozen cameras flashed and did not stop again for another half-hour. The Brigadier bowed, took the scissors, took her hand and implanted a kiss upon it to thunderous applause and delight. He was a resplendent figure the Brigadier, groomed it seemed from a nineteenth-century Venetian court—appropriately, it had to be conceded, when the dust-sheet fell away and the glory of Italian marble was revealed to the benighted audience. Only the Chairman’s running commentary jarred from time to time the viewers’ contemplation of a Florentine moment in the heart of the festering continent.

  White-coated servants gathered up the dust-sheets and pulled them slowly backwards. The fountain pool, itself a fish-pond was indeed scooped out in the shape of the cocoa-pod, floor and sides laid in tiny tiles of amber. From the centre of the pod rose a noble plinth, a marble arm from the enchanted lake, which for Excalibur upheld a blue marble platform upon which sat an armoured knight, equestrian. At the horse’s feet writhed a monstrous dragon, scales of silver, tongue of bronze, fiery, fire-flashing eyes of onyx. It was transfixed by a ponderous silver spear and pounded by steel hooves of the noble steed.

  “We all know the story of St. George and the dragon I think” the Chairman expounded as the applause rose and fell and the oh-ahs quietened. “Well, you may not guess that what I have done here is to put it to symbolical use. Which is why I specially hoped that one of our new rulers would be able to unveil the masterpiece in person. St. George seated on that horse there as you can see is representative of the new order which is battling the dragon which represents the forces of our greatest national enemy—corruption!”

  “Hear hear, hear hear, hear hear…”

  Spyhole, listening from the vantage point of the bandstand poised his journeying glass a few inches from his lips and turned slowly round to Zaccheus. Together they exploded in laughter, ducked behind a screen as a few pairs of eyes turned round in their direction.

  St. George fixed his gaze beyond the scene, intent upon a mission which did not involve the present company. A head-casque covered his head in tradition but the eyes and a nose-bridge were permitted to vulgar gaze. Hannibal, Alexander or even Boadicea, it did not seem to matter, he sat symbolical upon his leaden steed, oblivious to the important gathering that had come to honour his full-sprung birth. To yet another burst of demented drum roll and trumpet rampant a servant turned a hidden tap, the Chairman shouted out a frantic “Stand back a little ladies and gentlemen” and the water leapt out through a dozen gashes in the beast and through its serpent-tongued mouth, heavily fluoridated—the Director explained that dragon’s blood is blue but this was lost in the vociferous approval that greeted the display. There was little left of applauding energy when the final wonder was perceived. As the rush of water mounted to a level required of the hidden mechanism in the plinth, St. George, horse, dragon and platform began to spin, slowly and clock-wise on the plinth. The hardiest victims of déjà vu were won over and joined in the applause.

  “Ladies and Gentlemen, Distinguished visitors”—he bowed and bowed to unending cheers—“Ladies and Gentlemen, the bar is still open, more dancing to our famous Zaccheus and his Cocoa Beans orchestra. And…please attention please, attention Ladies and Gentlemen…I think we are even fortunate enough to be able to promise, later, a Personal Appearance of none other than our Cocoa Princess, in one of her famous presentations, the title of which I’m afraid is being kept secret till the actual moment.”

  * * *

  —

  Pandora’s Box, its denouement subverted to the private ends of sky, clouds, sunset and air-currents in the stratosphere, left its creator Ofeyi with a sense of superfluity, the watchers with a hint of cosmic threat. After the initial cautionary villains, so familiar to the farming audiences, had emerged from the black-painted pod—the same long-suffering, multi-purposed pod—after them came the unexpected. Four familiar faces, puppet-form, suspended also from balloons, faces whose identities none, not even of those present, dared claim to recognize—Ofeyi had counted on this—faces whose names were whispered with dread even in the hardiest sanctuaries of the underworld. These, the real powers of the Cartel unfurled with linked arms as the balloons flew higher and the strings were unravelled. In the uneven movements of the balloon barrage they appeared to do a slow macabre dance of the magic circle, heads slowly turning side to side in contemplation of a prostrate world. With the extra buoyancy of the larger balloons they soon overtook the lesser hazards, the drippy scaly microbious shapes that hovered lazily over the garden while Zaccheus at his clowning best leant, panting, on the lid he had hastily shut. But his moon-horror face was no longer acting as he saw the four bogey-men. Until they emerged after the weeds, the viruses, the swollen shoot and other plagues of the cocoa farmer he had not suspected their presence in the box.

  The applause was mild, uncertain. It hovered between a refusal to recognize the four linked figures—the “terrible quads” according to the christening of their own genteel circles—and realization that failure to applaud the technical display was admission of their recognition. The guests mostly began to wonder if they would ever attend another garden party. If one was not safe from such dilemmas in the very home of one of the top servants of the Cartel…!

  Iriyise waited in the lower half, waiting for Zaccheus to cue her for the commencement of her tiny-voiced plea “Let me out, let me out.” But Zaccheus was paralysed by the fear of what other outrage lay within Ofeyi’s conclusion to this divergence from the norm. Iriyise crouched among the props of aerosol, seeds for supplementary crops, fertilizers and rolled up banners suspended on balloons. She heard the scattered applause die an unnatural death, a hush descend upon the garden. The music which had been kept at skeleton strength by a few pieces in the orchestra faded also. Second Trumpet dropped to a lower octave and Voice-Guitar could barely mumble tune and lyric. Finally they gave up the struggle. Iriyise sensed an unhealthy stillness, turned cold in the womb of the pod.

  But the chill that had begun to set on the garden had not been caused by the appearance of the bogey-men alone. Perhaps it was the presence of armed men in the garden that prompted it—the Commandant had come with a bodyguard of nearly forty and they mingled among the guests with fingers on sub-machine gun triggers, as much at ease as the waiters who, regulated simply by clear-cut duties and apparel, are the true urbane beneficiaries of all ostentatious events. And so the armed men, natural dealers in death and thus the most superstitious were first to notice and to be affected by a phenomenon that had commenced in the sky some time before, but had remained unnoticed until the ascent of the sinister Cartel quadruplet. Whispering among one another, they soon communicated their unease and the cause. Other eyes which had followed the marionettes found themselves face to face with a specta
cle which began by astounding, then, as memories were awakened, ended with a cold apprehensiveness. There was no one present who did not remember the morning when the country had woken to the knowledge that their destiny had been taken in charge by the once-invisible men of the gun. It had darkened abruptly that day and many swore that the morning mist over the lagoon had dripped distinct black globules on the leaves. The hardiest rationalists had conceded that the short, fierce rain was out of season. And the pall that accompanied it, indefinable as fog, eclipse or mottled mist had been dark enough to force them to switch on full headlamps as they drove to work over the bridge that hung, barely visible over the lagoon.

  Standing around the cocoa fountain, their hardihood strained by alcohol that had seeped through and softened the protective carapace of scepticism, they like the other more portent-happy spectators no longer brooded on the latest outrage of the Pod. Their minds had shifted now to wondering if the sunset that now confronted them in some way bore a related warning to that non-rise of the sun that ushered in the barrel power of the unnerving guests in their midst. The tropics spawned some startling sunsets, but never one like this. Within the closure of the toppled pyramid each man and woman began to feel trapped, alone with doughy lumps of cirrus clouds, set vulnerably against an open hovering furnace. Oblivious of cricks commencing in their necks, their skins absorbed a fear communicated from neighbour to neighbour, unable to tear away from the mesmeric host of foetus shapes moulded and ejected from a kiln on the horizon, wafted by currents they could not feel within the pyramid. The shapes moved towards the dome centre of the sky, in a steady, unbroken formation. Briefly it looked like a recumbent flock of sheep, again like rows of dressed fowl through a display window. It even took on the brief suggestion of even rows of cocoa pods but, again and definitely the sky dislodged its pastoral teases, settled finally and lavishly for a blood-lit evocation of biblical horrors, flickering around a star that led and moved and guided the shapes over a mangy den—plagues and visitations, the Massacre of the Innocents.

  The Cartel marionettes had long sailed beyond vision, nodding to the last into a sunset apotheosis. The sunset-rinsed host settled directly over the garden. Details glowed, translucent networks of tender veins and arteries, the soft unearthly faces were curled inward to the navel, massive foreheads tinged, like the softer underbellies and folded limbs, in a flickering purple hue.

  Half the visible sky was now covered. And, to heighten the growth of an oppressiveness individually directed at the watchers, when the foremost row had all but reached dome zenith, hearing an ever-present sough of dark wings in their arm-pit squelch of apprehension, sensing the line almost flush with a line of division in the fear-distended lobes of their brains, the wind dropped suddenly and the host hung motionless. Now it was only the sun whose motion they could feel sinking deeper and lower, leaving its emphatic pace to be reflected in the somnolent eidola above their heads, their eyes glued to the responses of these shapes, to their vascular modulations, a pulsing of violent and purple intensities, uniform as if they all drew heartblood from a common source. Their far-side of the sun was the spinal curvature, again of a uniformity contrasted in sluggish grey and a smear of blue. The pulsing, the greatest source of disconcertion grew clearer though weaker, a late twilight hour on a neon-infested metropolis, a comfortless view from that sunken, closing alley.

  Zaccheus had recovered from the shock of the Cartel appearance and was impervious to the goings-on in the sky. Recalled to the tradition of his profession from the moment of the final disappearance of the Cartel quartet he roused his men, took the microphone himself and began to sing…

  In the beginning, there was nectar and ambrosia

  A little pod contained them

  Favoured of gods, they made the cosmos rosier…

  Accustomed as she was to violent and spontaneous changes in the programme it did not make much sense to Iriyise, trapped still in the beneficent sector of the Pod. She began to scratch gently, then, finding no response, changed to outright bangs. And the rehearsed tinniness which the role demanded was completely forgotten as she began to scream:

  “Let me out, let me out you drunken bastards!”

  IV

  The meeting was called to order.

  The Trouble-shooter tried his first joke of the day: “If only it were as easy to call our Co-ordinator to order, ha ha?” No one laughed. Deeper even than the cause that had inflicted him upon the corporation was his presence resented. The decision of the Cartel to send their own man to sort out a mere wayward employee implied a total loss of confidence. (The thought of danger did not occur to any member—who could threaten the Cartel!) In spite of the outrage of the previous week, in his own house, it was inconceivable. And then, for the Chairman at least, there was the personal aspect. A firm believer in personal diplomacy, proof of “having the ear of—you know who I mean…,” he had sent his little handwritten squeak of protest through an intermediary to the Cartel….“I humbly beg to remind you that this is a matter of concern to me as Head of the Corp. responsible for the day-to-day admn. of etc. etc.” Only to have it returned by the same courier with a contemptuous footnote which called him the head of that “headless corpse which should be interred as quickly as decently practicable etc. etc.” Something in the manner of the Trouble-shooter suggested just the kind of time-serving, power-drunk opportunist functionaire etc. etc. who would send out such a witless piece of effrontery. And that garrulous face—how else could the impertinent footnote “delivered by hand” have become the source of sly winks and guffaws in the night-clubs and casinos whenever the members of the Corp. appeared with their mistresses.

  It was small consolation that the joke quickly backfired. The name stuck. The Cocoa Corporations, regional fronts for a thousand conspiracies of the Cartel became known as the Headless Corpse. Figures of terror became, overnight, objects of sniggers. The Cartel however remained no laughing matter. The Chairman refused to be fooled by the inane grin which failed to mask the arrogance of their Trouble-shooter.

  Pompous too, the Chairman decided. Performing for relegated clods whose authority he had usurped, armed with the power of assignment from the Cartel. He shuffled papers round quite needlessly and spoke like chapters from a book. “I have made bold to make a spare copy of each of these reports. And the sales graphs. It is only right that the Co-ordinator should have a copy of everything as the indictments are read. We don’t want him to complain that he was not dealt with according to strict canons of juridical procedure and natural justice.”

  The Chairman shut his eyes and crossed his hands over his paunch. The Secretary complemented this gesture of long-suffering by raising an eyebrow and slackening his own mouth. He had been worsted in the preliminary skirmishes—the Trouble-shooter had come into the boardroom on his own to view the arrangements and insisted on the Chairman’s personal chair for himself, and right at the centre of the mahogany table—“where I can look this dangerous character in the eye.” The Secretary had stammered that this was the Chairman’s private chair. And place. Only to encounter the cool stare of the functionaire. “I am not here as an observer but to conduct a serious enquiry.”

  He was now relaying more or less the same sentiments to the assembled board. “If you would be kind enough to er—give yourselves some kind of observer status today gentlemen while I try to adopt my own methods in this rather crucial enquiry….”

  The Chairman detached a hand laden with heavy rings from the cross of martyrdom on his paunch and indicated his indifference in a casual wave. “Do carry on as you think fit.” Keeping his eyes rudely shut the while.

  “I shall do so” the young man promised. He glanced again all round the table, guessed accurately that they spent most of their infrequent sessions between snores and the crunch of colanuts and dismissed them from his mind. A hundred and one recommendations on the future of the Chairman roved through his mind and gave
him some solace. He turned to the Secretary:

  “Send in the Co-ordinator.”

  The Secretary remained loyal, turned first to his Chairman. The worthy man’s eyes were not as firmly closed as he would have the Trouble-shooter believe. Restraining his cheeks from showing his pleasure he nodded with gravity.

  “Yes I think we are ready. Send in Mr. Ofeyi.”

  After which, the Trouble-shooter took charge.

  Ofeyi entered the room as the Secretary held the door open for him. He paused to place an envelope in the hands of the man, causing him to look back to his Chairman as if to enquire what this trifling diversion might mean. But the Chairman had resumed his pose, and this time his eyes were truly shut. He had seen far much more of Ofeyi than he wished for the rest of his life. The Secretary shut the door, glanced at the envelope to ensure that it was marked neither Official nor Urgent and returned to his place at the end of the table.

  The Trouble-shooter beamed on the man he had come to try, pointed to the chair on the other side of the table. “Do be seated Mr. Ofeyi.”

  He waited for the chair to stop creaking. “You will not know me of course. I have been loaned to this case from the Head Office. I am here with the full knowledge and approval of the military government and will report back to the Cabinet office after my investigations are completed. The Commandant of the region is personally interested in this case. He considers it his duty to step in when a crisis threatens more than the immediate parties of that crisis. And, I regret to have to inform you, it does so in this case. The country’s economic health is affected. Your activities Mr. Ofeyi, have begun to cause both the Corporation and the Government very great concern.”