Infinite Riches

by Ben Okri

  Dad’s broken skin made the air feel peppery. It was as if he had bruised eyes all over his body.

  He sat in a small cell, the standing space of two coffins, unable to breathe. He sat there in great agony, his being dissolving into seven selves. I saw three of them while I sat at our housefront, watching the street, waiting for Mum to return. There was a moment when Dad was beside me, holding his head, but when I asked him a question he vanished. Then he was walking down the street and when I ran up to him he turned into a stranger. And then he called my name from our room and when I got there he was pacing for an instant, lighting a cigarette, but the match-flare dissolved him. My head widened. I feared that I was returning without warning to the land of spirits.

  After a while I stretched out on the bed and felt myself floating in a green space, where Madame Koto lay, encircled by powerful herbalists.

  SEVENTEEN

  Madame Koto and the shadows

  THE HERBALISTS WERE toughening the walls of Madame Koto’s spirit. Fortifying the foundations of her power. They were drawing back the seven breaths which had escaped from her being. Pulling her back from the realms of madness.

  The blind old man, sorcerer of the ghetto, was preparing for his own reign. He sent out ten spells, and reclaimed a terrain he had colonized for Madame Koto. He hurled out his ministrant incantations which altered the geography of the air, sealing out the powers of his associates.

  Madame Koto shivered on the floor, making the house tremble. As the herbalists drew the breaths back into her, she began to swell. They purified her blood and her milk. They made more potent the chemical constituents of her body, and realigned her spirit. They solidified her womb in preparation for the birth of her three children.

  These special herbalists struggled to restore her strength. They cast their cowries, and listened to the obscure language of divination. They saw that their seventeen interpretations led to the same dreaded crossroads, and became actors, foretelling wonders for her, while swiftly reconsidering their alliances.

  I saw them retreat. Leaving only their shadows behind. Or was it that they remained but their shadows left? Madame Koto lay alone in her enormous room. She was delirious. She muttered dark confessions which ran back two centuries and forward one hundred years. Her words took form and crowded the air. I fought to get back into my body.

  EIGHTEEN

  A dream of hope

  I FOUND MYSELF in another space, staring into the eyes of the policeman who had imprisoned me in his house many years ago. The policeman who tried to make me a substitute for his dead son. I was shocked that he was still alive, still in office, and that he couldn’t see me. He stared past me to a group of women who tramped in like beggars, led by a young lawyer, predictably arrogant for his age. The lawyer proceeded to make a speech which the policeman forestalled by raising his hand and saying:

  ‘I know this woman. She is a brave woman. Her husband is not locked up here, but I will do everything to help.’

  After two sleepless days on the road, set upon by dogs, hassled by miracles, beaten by policemen, to find someone who actually offered to help was too much for Mum. She collapsed on the floor, and was laid out on a bench, where she slept without moving for five hours.

  When she woke up she found herself in a strange house full of unfamiliar women. She was still so exhausted that she took it all for a dream. She turned over on the bench to have a nicer dream when a voice said:

  ‘They have found the station where your husband is held. Go back to sleep. Nothing can be done till the morning.’

  Mum heard it as a dream, for the night had conquered her body, and she had surrendered her spirit to the waning moon which shone like Madame Koto’s egg, or like a white bowl of palm-wine which an exiled god had balanced over our house, and which intoxicated the rooftops.

  NINETEEN

  Dad summons his ancestors, and fails

  THAT NIGHT, WHILE the voices of the forest started again, vaster in number, sweeter than ever, as if a whole secret age of dreaming was coming to an end, Dad was suffering in the aftermath of his second beating. He sweated all night long, covered in heat rashes. Lice and fleas crawled all over his body. Microscopic worms festered in his wounds.

  He had been incandescent that day, daring the policemen to torture him and see if they could kill him. He boasted all afternoon that his spirit was made of the inexorable stuff of justice. He poured out a torrent of calumny, listing the crimes of the government, denouncing all forms of police brutality, shouting that the prisons were erupting with innocent people who would one day destroy the administration.

  The more they tortured him the louder he cried about the love of injustice that would tear the unborn country apart. He poured out visions of future coups and riots, tribal massacres and famine, plagues of beetles and explosions at oil sites, the genocide of war and the decades of hardship to come. When the policemen got tired of beating him, breaking innumerable batons on his head, dislocating their wrists and cracking their knuckles on the solid bones of his tigerine face, they incited the other prisoners to set upon him and silence him altogether. When they did set upon him Dad was so broken by the treachery of his fellow inmates that after they had finished with him he sat in a corner nearest the bucket latrine, the only free space in the cell, and began to call out the names of his ancestors.

  He called out their royal titles, their chieftaincy titles, listing their achievements and legends, in order to lift the leaden weight of his betrayed spirit. On and on, he called to them, as if he expected them to appear before him, answering his harsh summons. His brain was all in a tumble, and his lips were so swollen that the names came out differently. He got stuck in the grove of his spirit. He uttered the famous name of Aziza, the road-maker, who built roads over marshes, and who charmed the silver spirits of the great forest surrounding the village. He incanted the name of Ojomo, the Image-maker, who felled a great boar with a single blow, who tamed the spirits of the valley, who discovered an ancient grove of monoliths in the forest, who initiated a religion without a name, who could discern the shapes of the ever-changing gods and built statues and masks to their ascendant attributes. He chanted the mighty name of Ozoro, warrior, blacksmith, who fought in one of the white man’s wars, who survived wrestling with the fabulous spirits of two oceans, who stopped seven bullets and killed five white men and was surprised by the softness of their spirits. He returned home an uncrowned hero, forgotten by those whose war he had fought; but he brought with him the message that the white man’s power was both real and an illusion, a reality that hadn’t been faced, and an illusion that had been accepted. Dad chanted the great name of Ozoro more than any other, the Ozoro who claimed that spirits are essentially the same the world over, and that power resides in hard work, in scientific investigation, in intellectual curiosity, in creative greatness and freedom, in the fullest exploration of our human powers, and in the truest independence. He sang Ozoro’s name with reverence, the Ozoro who returned home after the great war, opened a factory and became the first man of the village to build a radio. Before he died he announced that in the spirit-world we had already gone past the age of technology and entered the era of pure power, the power that moves the volcanic planets, the distant constellations, the wind, the moon, the heart and all destiny. Dad cried out the name of the legendary Ozoro who died an enlightened man, who saw the world being made smaller, who saw his people worshipping alien dreams, exiled from the mighty spirit world where the atom had been split thousands of years ago; and whose last cry to the world, the essence of his legacy, was: ‘CATCH UP WITH YOURSELVES!’

  Dad went on calling his ancestors in a heated voice, as if he had gone entirely mad. None of his ancestors appeared. None of his ancestors gave any sign that they had heard him. Dad fell to wailing, to throwing himself about. And when the darkness cleared from his mind he saw three forms over him. Thinking that they were his ancestors at last made manifest, he assumed an attitude of utmost reverence.


  The three men lifted him out of the cell and took him to a small room with a fan on the ceiling, a telephone on an empty table and an imperial map on the wall. The three men left and after a while a white man came in and sat six feet away from him, and looked out of the window. Then the three men came back in and asked him questions about agitations, planned riots, protest movements, political organizations, assassination attempts on the Governor-General, and underground efforts to destabilize the regime. Dad was unable to hear anything clearly because of his swollen ears. He heard only the pulsing of blood through the arteries of the world. He answered their questions with the names and legends of his ancestors. Then the white man, who had already wasted more time than he had intended on so worthless a specimen of humanity, turned angrily to the three minions in khaki shorts, and shouted:

  ‘You brought me a mad man, not an agitator! Take him away!’

  They bundled Dad back into a tiny cell, where he sat crouched, listening to the worms eating the walls and foundations of the building. Then, with horror, he realized that they were eating away at him. He screamed and his voice bounced back at him. He had been left with worms and fleas, in a cell of lice and diseases, with only a little window through which he could see a patch of the sky. But it was dark that night because he couldn’t see through his swollen eyes and the congealing blood on his eyeballs.

  TWENTY

  Dad summons a dreaded deity

  IN HIS CRUSHED space, with his wounds burning, his spirit tightening, Dad fell into a hole in his mind, from which he couldn’t get out. And not knowing the full range of his desire, the depth of his belief, the vibrating power of his summons, Dad began to call out the attributes of a deity. He called upon the god to manifest itself, to open the gates of his spirit, to show him wonders and images of redemption, to help him out of his abyss, to unleash revolution on the tormentors of his people. He called on the god of revolution, stern brother to the god of justice, to flatten the evil places of the world, to lash thunderstorms and hurricanes on all oppressors, to burn away the corruptions of the nation, to destroy the shacks and malarial abodes of the wretched, to drive their excessive tolerance of suffering from their backward lives, to goad them to rage and revolt, goad them into changing their conditions for ever, into something wonderful.

  Dad listed the awesome attributes of the god, inventing songs to an undiscovered deity, a deity so terrible that humans have always dreaded to include him in the pantheon for fear of his monstrous destructive presence.

  Then, quite suddenly, in the midst of Dad’s summons, came a sound which he had never heard before. He looked around the darkened cell. He heard the sound again, like the hesitant footsteps of a giant, or a monster. Dad couldn’t see clearly, but he perceived a light growing brighter in front of him, from a point in the wall. The footsteps resonated all around him in the cell. The brightness intensified and the light became so hard that he felt it was burning his brain. He covered his face, crying out. Spasms of the most delicious and agonizing intensity were tearing his being apart. Even with the shutting of his eyes he could not escape the blinding illumination that surrounded him like tongues of hard flame. And it occurred to Dad that he was in the very presence of an unbearable fire which was roasting his being and brain, turning all that he was into living ashes.

  He saw the flame all over his body. Burning his flesh and hair and face. Burning him all over as if he were covered in phosphorus. Purifying his being even as it wracked and consumed him. And he crouched there in the awesome flames, enchanted and terrified, hearing clear voices in the fire, voices that were varying registers of one voice, chanting codes over him. The voices spoke to him in an unearthly accent, in an entirely incomprehensible language. The words intensified the flames. And the flames climbed high in brilliant colours, till the whole cell and the whole city seemed illuminated.

  Then in the lightning flash of a moment, Dad saw a boy with a face of sublime beauty. His hair was haloed with a golden crown. In his hand a black sceptre shone like diamonds. Then the boy was gone. The flames vanished. There was no smoke in the air of the cell. And everything was plunged into primeval darkness. In that darkness Dad saw a mighty form, darker than the darkness. The form had green eyes. Then Dad heard words that were not spoken. Harsh words that were like electric shocks on his body. Words that broke him out in violent tremulations, inflaming and destabilizing his brain for many years to come. He heard words that shortened his life. Burning away his years in the consummation of enduring the presence, not of the deity he thought he had summoned, but of another one altogether, whose name is too terrible for words. All night long Dad burned in the aftermath of the manifestation. But the burning did not stop then, did not stop till the end of his cycle.

  In the morning his jailers found him covered in white ash. They found that all his wounds and welts, his cuts and bruises had healed miraculously overnight. They found him with his eyes open, staring straight ahead, as if into a visage of pure golden horror.

  They found his spirit serene. He didn’t speak, his neck was stiff, and he could barely support himself. They found that the white ash wouldn’t come off his body, that the cell smelt of the sweetest perfume, and that the walls were all charred, not with black, but with aquamarine, with streaks of yellow and gold and red, as if a goldsmith had patterned the walls in rough medieval splendour.

  They found Dad’s hair matted with gold dust. Diamond powder clung to his face. They led him out in wonder and horror and took him to an empty room. He stood against the wall, his mind empty, his eyes staring vacantly but wondrously ahead, as if he had finally seen the constituent secret of all objects, all trees and metal, as if he could perceive once and for all the secret of the world – that all things are alive, and all things are manifest by virtue of fire. The flames were all he saw. He saw faces as flames. Saw wood as flames. Saw the air as incandescent, with everything burning at different speeds. He saw wonders in that sight, but he could not speak. The things he saw were too much for the words with which to say them.

  TWENTY-ONE

  A public confession

  THAT NIGHT, WHILE Dad burned in the visitation, the forest broke into voices of the dead. The forest was populated with voices which breathed out melodies of incomparable clarity, sweet like a choir of angels trapped in an earthly sphere. Voices that longed for a different space. A space that was pure reality.

  The songs in strange languages found me and lifted me one foot above the bed. I remained like that in the intense lucidity of pure dream. Then the spell was broken. A sudden rash came out in my spirit. And I crashed down and landed awkwardly back into my body.

  Startled and disorientated, I jumped out of bed. And through the vicious headache which pounded in my brain I heard coarse voices of two men raving in the night like jackals.

  I was not the only one who heard them. The whole community listened as the two men began screaming that insects and slugs were eating up their brains. We listened to them shouting out incriminating words very clearly so that the earth and sky could hear them, words from which I made out public confessions and livid descriptions of their crimes. They confessed to the beating up of men who had done them no wrong, the kidnapping of children, and the brutalization of women. They confessed to partaking in schemes to rig the forthcoming elections, to acts of rape on women who flashed their sexuality at them on hot nights, to armed robberies and murders, to intimidations and fetishistic rituals for breaking the spirit of whole communities. They shouted out a horrific confession of why and when they murdered the carpenter, of how they stabbed him in the navel and throat and forehead and dumped his body on a patch of weeds.

  They confessed to having performed crude abortions on a great number of women for money, to how they dug around in their wombs with metal spokes, in barbaric ignorance of the business. They confessed to the vile number of wombs they had destroyed permanently for the sake of two weeks drinking at Madame Koto’s bar. But what they said next made my headache worse, made th
e air – innocent in its existence – take on the form of beasts without memory. In the heat of their confessions, for they sounded quite mad, screaming as if the words they uttered would somehow save them from the turbulence of their thoughts, they said that their crimes were great, they begged no forgiveness, they called on the heavens to break hurricanes on their spirits, but they warned that they had greater masters above them, a hierarchy of masters, who never committed crimes, whose hands were always clean, and who delegated the thoughts, the acts and the consequences of their crimes and wickedness to lesser beings, to their minions, their servants and their disposable friends.

  Then, quite suddenly, the men turned from confession to growls without words, antiphonal gnashings, tuberculous coughs, coarse sounds of spitting, noises like the mindless grinding of teeth. They went on like that, as if their energies were jammed in the production of horrid noises. They went on all night.

  And in the morning, the people of our street found the two men in the forest. Their bodies were covered with sores and gashes, pus oozed from their ears. They were still shouting their confession to the murder of the dead carpenter in hoarse voices, begging that they be punished and beaten without mercy. But the people of the street merely bound them with ropes and carted them off to the nearest police station, where they kept on raving their confessions to the bewildered policemen.