THE MADMAN
Those the gods have chosen to destroy, they inflict with madness.
IGBO PROVERB
Abulu was a madman:
His brain, Obembe said, dissolved into blood after the near-fatal accident that left him insane. Obembe, through whom I came to the understanding of most things, knew Abulu’s history from God-knows-where and he told it to me one night. He said Abulu, like us, had a brother. His name was Abana. Some people in our street remember him as one of the two brothers who attended Aquinas College, the premier boys’ high school in the town, with a white plain shirt and white khaki shorts that were always spotlessly clean. Obembe said Abulu loved his brother; that they were inseparable.
Abulu and his brother grew up without their father. When they were kids, their father went on a Christian pilgrimage to Israel and never returned. Most people believed he was killed by a bomb in Jerusalem, while one of his friends who’d gone on the same pilgrimage said he had made his way to Austria with an Austrian woman and settled there. So Abulu and Abana lived with their mother and their elder sister who, by the time she was fifteen, took up whoring and moved to Lagos to practise her trade.
Their mother operated a small restaurant. Constructed with wood and zinc materials, it was popular in our street in the eighties. Obembe said even Father ate there a couple of times when Mother was pregnant and became too heavy to make food. Abulu and his brother used to serve at the restaurant after school, washing the plates and cleaning the rickety tables after every meal, supplying toothpicks, sweeping the floor that became darker with soot and grime each year until it looked like a mechanic’s workshop, and keeping the flies out in the rainy seasons, waving raffia-plaited hand fans. Yet, despite all they did, the restaurant brought little return, and they still could not afford proper education.
Want and lack exploded in their minds like a grenade and left shrapnel of desperation in its wake, so that—in time—the boys began to steal. But when they robbed a rich widow’s house with knives and toy guns, carrying away a briefcase full of money, the widow raised alarm once they set out running, and a mob took chase. A fast-moving car knocked Abulu down, as he attempted to cross a long road in haste to escape his pursuers, and sped away. At the sight, the mob hurriedly dispersed, leaving Abana alone with his injured brother. Alone, he picked up Abulu and managed to get him to the hospital where doctors rushed in to contain a damage already done. Abulu’s brain cells, Obembe said, had floated out of their compartments into foreign zones in his head, changing his mental configurations and completing the awful process.
When Abulu was discharged, he returned home a changed being—like a newborn whose mind is a clean slate, without a single dot on it. In those days, all he did was stare—blankly, concentratedly—as if his eyes were the only organ in his body and it could perform the functions of all the others, or as if every organ was dead except the eye. Then, as time passed, the insanity fledged, and while it still sometimes lay dormant, it could be roused when triggered—like a tiger merely asleep. The things that roused his insanity to life were diverse and numerous—a sight, a spectacle, a word, anything. The din of a plane flying over the house was what first did it. Abulu had cried out in a rage and ripped his clothes as the plane flew past. Were it not for Abana’s timely intervention, he would have got out of the house. Abana wrestled him to the floor and held him there until his strength diminished. Then he sprawled on the floor, asleep. The next time the insanity was stirred by the sight of his mother’s nakedness. He was seated in one of the chairs in the sitting room when he saw her going into the bathroom unclothed. He sprang from his chair as if he’d seen an apparition, hid behind the door and watched her bathe through the keyhole, the sight tossing many strange dice about in his brain. He brought out his erect penis and began fondling. Then when he saw she was about to exit, he hid himself and quietly stripped. He then slunk into her room, knocked her to the bed and raped her.
Abulu did not leave his mother’s bedside afterwards; he held her as if she was his wife, while she cried and grieved in his arms until his brother returned. Furious at what Abulu had done, Abana beat Abulu with his leather belt, refusing to yield to his mother’s pleadings until Abulu fled from the room in great pain. He pulled out the television aerial from its weak ballast, rushed back into the room and pinned his brother to the wall with it. Then, letting out a horrendous yelp, he ran out of the house. His madness had fully set in.
For the first years Abulu walked and slept in marketplaces, unfinished buildings, refuse dumps, open sewers, under parked cars—anywhere, everywhere the night met him, until he came upon a decrepit truck a few metres from our house. The truck had crashed into an electric pole in 1985, killing an entire family. Abandoned because of its bloody history, the truck gradually atrophied into a kingdom of wild cactus and elephant grass. Once he found it, he set to work, dislodging nations of spiders, exorcising untamed spirits of the dead, whose bloodstains had left perpetual smears on the seats. He removed spattered glass fragments, weeding out wild tiny islands of moss that clung to the bare moth-eaten furniture of the truck, and annihilated the helpless race of cockroaches. He then stored his belongings—materials picked from garbage, discarded objects of various kinds, and almost anything that piqued his curiosity—in the truck. Then he made it his home.
Abulu’s insanity was of two kinds—as though twin devils constantly played competing tunes in his mind. One played the tune that passed for regular or ordinary madness, wandering about naked, dirty, smelling, awash with filth, trailed by a sea of flies, dancing in the streets, picking up waste from bins and eating it, soliloquizing aloud or conversing with invisible people in languages not of this world, screaming at objects, dancing on street corners, picking his teeth with sticks found in dirt, excreting on roadsides, and doing all the things that stray derelicts do. He went about with his head forested with long hair, his face patched with boils, and his skin greasy with dirt. At times he talked with a league of doppelgangers and invisible friends whose presence was fogged from ordinary eyes. When in this sphere of insanity, he became a man on the move—he walked almost perpetually. And he did his walking mostly barefoot, treading on unpaved roads from season to season, month to month and year to year. He trod on dumpsites, on rickety bridges with splintered woods, and even on industrial sites that were often littered with nails, metals, broken tools, glasses, and various sharp objects. Once, when two cars collided on the road, Abulu—unaware there had been a car accident—walked through the shattered glass and bled so much he fainted and sprawled in the dirt until the police came and took him away. Many who saw what happened thought he’d died and were shocked to see him walking towards his truck six days later, his scarred body covered in hospital clothes, his varicose-veined legs concealed in socks.
When in the realm of insanity, Abulu went about completely naked, dangling his enormous penis—sometimes in a state of erection—unabashedly as if it was a million-naira engagement ring. His penis once bred a popular scandal, one that people told stories about all over the town. A widow who had badly wanted a child had once seduced Abulu: she took him by the hand one night to her house, washed him and had sex with him. Abulu’s insanity, it was rumoured, temporarily vanished while with that woman. When the affair became known and public, and people began calling her Abulu’s wife, the woman left the town, leaving the madman with a crushing obsession for women and sex. Not long after, rumours of his nightly visits to La Room Motel began to spread. It was said that a few of the prostitutes regularly smuggled him into their rooms under a thick cover of darkness. Almost as rampant as those rumours was the legend of Abulu’s open masturbations. Solomon once told us of a madman whom he and a few people had watched masturbate under the mango tree near the Celestial Church by the river. But I did not know Abulu at the time, nor did I know what he meant by masturbation. Solomon then went on to tell us how, in 1993, Abulu was caught clinging to the colourful statue of the Madonna in front of the big St. Andrew’s Cathedral.
Perhaps thinking it was a beautiful woman, who, unlike the other women he leered at, did not make any move to resist him, he held the statue and began humping against it, moaning, while people gathered, laughing at him until some devotees wrested him off it. The Catholic Council would eventually pull down the desecrated statue and erect one in the compound of the church, within its fence. Then, as if still unsatisfied, they surrounded the statue with an iron gate.
Despite all of these stirrings he caused, when in this mode Abulu harmed no one.
Abulu’s second realm of insanity was extraordinary; a state he entered in sudden gusts as if while in this world—picking from a bin or dancing to inaudible music or any of the things he did—he’d find himself raptured into a dream world. But whenever in that state, he never completely left our world; he occupied both—one leg here, one leg there as if he were a mediator between two domains, an uninvited intermediary. His messages were for the people of this world. He subpoenaed tranquil spirits, fanned the violence of small flames, and rattled the lives of many. He entered this realm mostly in the evenings when the sun had shed all of its light. Having transformed into Abulu the Prophet, he’d go about singing, clapping and prophesying. He would slink into compounds with unbarred gates like a thief if he had prophecies for anyone there. He would disrupt anything to declare his visions—even funerals. He became a Prophet, a scarecrow, a deity, even an oracle. Often, though, he shattered both realms or moved between both as though the partition between them was only hymen-thin. Sometimes, when he came across people he needed to prophesy to, he would temporarily delve into the other state and tell them the prediction. He would chase after a moving vehicle, crying out his prophecy if it was for someone in it. People sometimes turned violent when he tried to make them hear a vision; they sometimes harmed him, piling curses, tears and jeremiads—like a heap of soiled clothes—on his head.
The reason they hated him was because they believed his tongue harboured a catalogue of catastrophes. His tongue was a scorpion. The prophecies he gave to people bred fear of the dark fate awaiting them. At first, no one heeded his words until event after event buried the possibility of the things he saw being taken as mere pockets of coincidences. The earliest, most prominent one was when he predicted the ghastly motor accident that claimed an entire family. Their car had plunged into a bigger portion of the Omi-Ala close to the city of Owo, drowning them—exactly the way Abulu had said it would happen. Then there was the man he said would die from “pleasure”; that man would be carried out of a whorehouse a few days later, having died while having sex with one of the prostitutes. These strings of occurrences engraved themselves in flaming letters on the memories of people and carved a fear of Abulu’s prophesies in their minds. People began to see his visions as ineluctable, and they believed he was the oracle of the scribbler of the telegraph of fate. From then on, whenever he gave a prediction to someone, they went about believing in its inevitability so much that in many cases, people attempted to prevent it from happening. One very memorable instance was the case of the fifteen-year-old daughter of the man who owned the big theatre hall in the town. Abulu predicted she would suffer brutal rape by the child she would bear. Gravely shaken by this grim future awaiting her, the girl took her own life and left a note saying she’d rather not wait to face that future.
In the fullness of time, the madman became a menace, a terror in the town. The song he sang after every prophecy became known by almost every inhabitant of the town, and they dreaded it.
Most bothersome was Abulu’s tendency to peek into people’s pasts the way he could into the future, so that he often dismantled vain kingdoms of people’s thoughts and lifted shrouds from the swaddled corpses of buried secrets. And the results were always very dire. He once revealed, upon sighting a woman and her husband getting out of their car, that she was a “whore.” “Tufia!” the madman had cried, spitting. “You keep sleeping with Matthew, your husband’s friend, even in your matrimonial bed? You have no shame! No shame!!” Then the madman, having set that marriage on fire—for, after a string of denials, the husband would find out about the affair and divorce his wife—walked away, totally oblivious of what he’d done.
Yet in spite of all this, a fraction of Akure’s population liked Abulu and wanted him alive, for he frequently helped people, too. An armed robbery attack was botched when, foreseeing it, Abulu went about announcing that four men “clothed in masks and dark clothes” would attack the district that night. The police were called in to watch over the street, and when the robbers appeared, the police stopped them. Just about the same time he predicted the robbery, he also revealed the hideout of certain men who had kidnapped a little girl for ransom. The girl was the daughter of one of the state politicians. Following Abulu’s accurate directions one night, the police arrested the men and rescued the girl. Again, Abulu earned appreciation and people said the politician loaded the madman’s truck with gifts. It was said that the politician even contemplated taking him back to a psychiatric hospital for healing, but others countered, arguing if his insanity left him, he would be of no use to them. Abulu had always escaped psychiatry. After the incident in which he’d walked on a pool of shattered glass, he was taken to a psychiatric hospital. But while there, he challenged the doctors, threatening that he was sane and claiming that he was being incarcerated there illegally. When that did not help, he set himself on a suicidal hunger strike, refusing—no matter how he was pressured—to drink even water. Fearing he would die from the strike and because he’d begun to demand a lawyer, they let him go.
THE FALCONER
Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer.
W. B. YEATS
Mother was a falconer:
The one who stood on the hills and watched, trying to stave off whatever ill she perceived was coming to her children. She owned copies of our minds in the pockets of her own mind and so could easily sniff troubles early in their forming, the same way sailors discern the forming foetus of a coming storm. She occasionally eavesdropped on us in attempts to catch snippets of our conversations even before Father moved out of Akure. There were times when we gathered at my brothers’ room, and one of us would slink to the door to detect if she stood behind it. We’d pull the door open and expose her in the act. But, like a falconer who knew her birds deeply, Mother often succeeded in tracking us. Perhaps she’d already begun to sense that something was wrong with Ikenna, but when she saw the M.K.O. calendar ruined, she smelt, she saw, she felt and she knew that Ikenna was undergoing a metamorphosis. It was thus in an attempt to find out what had started it that she’d coaxed Obembe into divulging the details of the encounter with Abulu.
Although Obembe had left out what happened after Abulu went away, the part about how he’d told us all what Abulu had said while the plane flew past, a monstrous grief seized Mother nonetheless. She had punctuated every point of the account with a trembling cry of “My God, My God,” but after Obembe finished, she stood up, biting her lips and fidgeting, visibly ripped from inside-out. She went out of our room afterwards without saying a word, shaking from head to foot as if she’d caught a cold while Obembe and I sat pondering what our brothers would do if they knew we’d divulged the secret to her. Just about then, I heard her voice and theirs as she confronted them on why they never told her such a thing had happened. Mother had barely left their room when Ikenna stormed into ours in a rage, demanding to know which idiot had revealed the secret to her. Obembe pleaded that she forced it out of him, in a voice that was deliberately loud so Mother could hear and intervene. She did. Ikenna left us with a vow to punish us when she was not around.
An hour or so later, when it seemed she’d slightly recovered, Mother gathered us in the living room. She wore a headscarf that was knotted behind her head into the shape of a bird’s tail—a sign she’d been praying.
“When I go to the stream,” Mother said with a voice that was husky and broken, “I carry my udu. I stoop at the brook and fil
l my udu. I walk from the stream—” Ikenna gave a wild yawn at this time and heaved a sigh. Mother paused, stared at him for a while and continued. “I walk—to my home, to my home. When I get there I set my pot down only to find it empty.”
She let the words sink in, rounding us up with her eyes. I had imagined her walking down a river with an udu—an earthen jar—balanced on her head with the help of a wrappa formed into many layered rings. I’d been so drawn and moved by this simple story, by the tone in which she told it that I hardly wanted to know what it meant because I knew that such stories, told just like that after we’d done something wrong, always had kernelled meanings; for Mother spoke and thought in parables.
“You, my children,” she continued, “have leaked out of my udu. I thought I had you, that I carried you in my udu, that my life was full of you”—she stretched her hands and carved them into a convex—“but I was wrong. Under my nose, you went to that river and fished for weeks. Now, for even longer, you have harboured a deadly secret when I thought you were safe, that I would know if you faced any dangers.”
She shook her head.
“You have to be cleansed from every evil spell Abulu has cast on you. We are all going to the service at the church this evening. So, no one goes anywhere else today,” Mother said. “Once it’s four, we will all go to the church.”
David’s playful laughter came from Mother’s room, where she’d left him with Nkem, and occupied the silence created after Mother delivered her speech and watched us to make sure her words had sunk into our heads.
She rose and was heading to her room, when she stopped abruptly because of something Ikenna said. She turned back sharply: “Eh?” she said. “Ikenna, isi gini?—What did you say?”
The Fishermen Page 9