It was then, at the point when my hearing became of this world and also of another, I understood that this cacophony was made of many different sounds. Just as, five months after my conception, I recognized that light and shade, and even shadow, played on the walls of the womb, it came to me that no single entity could make so much noise. I had discovered timbre, yet I had no way of differentiating what was an awesome Babel. One must understand that, womb-bound, the foetus is separated from the outside by layers of skin and muscle. She is surrounded by viscous liquid, and like the sounds one hears when swimming or lazing in the bath, they are deadened, but also amplified, so that her ability to discern different tones is distorted by this mutedness and echo. I must emphasize that the early sounds of my gestation had no name. It was only later, when I resembled a shelled prawn, that I was able to identify them. At the time it was one great tumult, a torrent of sound, and I was threatened with drowning. Soon, it is true, I began to perceive differences. For instance, I came to understand that inside me, although a pathetic parody of throb, was a heartbeat, when before I knew only my mother’s thumping muscle. The murmur of my stomach was, I noticed, weaker and more aqueous than my mother’s superior gut. And then, in the sixth month of my gestation, I began to distinguish between the sounds of my mother’s internal workings and those from the outside. No longer did the sea match the flutter of blood though her veins and arteries. I next set apart the flurrying of the leaves, moved by the wind, from insect rustlings. And the rasping of lead on paper became marked in relation to the spiralling needle of a gramophone. All this is far from the final mastery I had over sound. Alien was any sort of classification system. This was to come later. My hearing was demotic and unprincipled.
It was, I understand now, the opposite of a photograph, which preserves only an image, divorcing, at the moment of the shutter’s click, sound from vision. My hearing resembled more willingly a wholly different, though related, invention of the nineteenth century – the phonograph: a machine that for the first time captured sounds, isolated them from the object from which they came, and stored them, as if frozen, until they were ready to be replayed. Sounds in general are connected with action and utterance, tied to the mechanisms that produce them. I had no notion of the shape of an elephant, only its call and thunderous walk. To this day I take pleasure in thinking of such occasions: always vague and indefinite, encouraging movement, the essence of my freedom in the womb and, in part, the reason for my reluctance to be born. For instance, the sound of a ship’s horn heard late at night so that the ship is obscured by darkness; or the sound of rain striking the roof of a house or tent, preferably at night; or birdsong in the trees when one cannot know if the bird is many-coloured or ugly spotted brown; or the sound of an orchestra tuning up in the pit which conveys an excitement, since not only are the musicians hidden but one cannot distinguish between their noise; or the many-levelled bell-peal on Sundays; who is tugging at the ropes, blind Captain? hunchbacked man?; or the soughing of the wind, heard beneath blankets so one cannot distinguish it from one’s frenzied breathing; or any noise that is distorted by the echoes of tunnels and arches, such as when one whistles or shouts beneath a viaduct and one’s voice returns undoubtedly one’s own but changed, the reflection of one’s voice; or, indeed, the diffusion of any recognizable sound into a space where it is distant, distorted, indeterminate and not easily made out.
It was, I think, for this same reason that my mother found my presence inside her difficult to understand. I was a fish swimming in her waters, tied to her and nourished by everything she drank down. But also not piscean, something that was taking on the form of her: two-legged, mostly hairless, with fingers and even fingerprints – undoubtedly like her – yet living inside her. Creation weighed down and confused my mother.
I delighted in my formlessness and incapacity to discern. What I heard I felt loath to interpret. Yet I understood I had to make something of this world that was pouring into me. If I did not I knew that the massiveness of it all, the abundance and disharmony would stifle my development. And then something changed. After seven months in the womb, a new sound arrived. Until that moment Father had been absent. I had not heard his voice, had spent my days alone with Mother in our mutual cave, which had been as large as the world. The sun, filtering through her dresses and pellucid skin, had filled the womb with diffused rust-colours, pinks, apricot, bistre. At night it was as if I had sunk to the bottom of the sea. The banks of darkness were occasionally disturbed by light, and I dreamed confusedly. But Father’s voice changed everything; and with it the tick-tock of the pocket watch arrived, a new sound, like a heartbeat but more regular. And whenever I heard the clock I heard a voice. Let me describe that voice: slightly nasal, not deep and sonorous, but low all the same, monotonous, rarely altering its pedagogic drawl, sometimes sliding to the higher registers, abruptly cutting off, disappearing, always returning. It was not long before I began to pick out certain words. Where does the voice reside? I asked myself. And then I understood that my gurglings came from within and were the nascent forms of my father’s superior lexicon. I perceived that it responded to Mother’s higher, fluting voice, and that certain expressions produced laughter, others seriousness or consternation. Was it, the voice, attached to the body? And, if so, what relationship might it have to the mind or soul? I had no time to answer these questions because soon the words became sentences, and I knew syntax. I was at a disadvantage, of course, since I was growing under the sign of the phonograph. Yet there were moments of respite. For instance, when Father recited portions of Gray’s Anatomy I was able to construct a crude map of my body. I felt my ear like a tiny conch. I came to think of tibia and fibula as sisters. I had only a partial idea of the shape of the human form; instead I gestured outward. I mapped the geography of Narium Minor, following in my mind the Intercostal Artery to the Costal Cartilages, where, across a thin and sanguine sea, Pectoralis Minor began. Here, so I imagined, stood the Pyramidalis Nasi built by the embondaged monsters Coccyx, Os Hyoides, Tarsus, Sacrum and Ischium, stolen from the Underworld. And there was Atlas holding the sky on his shoulders!
At first I revelled in this learning, for I perceived that I might be able to contain the sounds that threatened to engulf me. I discovered in everything Father said a certain way of compartmentalizing the world. Where once the sounds had segued together, now, with my father’s teachings, I learned that each object and every sound had its opposite. I discovered that East and West repelled one another. I understood that Cat and Sparrow were coupled in mutual hate. And yet it struck me that, even as this conception of the world made it easy to know, name and thus understand, it also made the world unfree. And, of course, on all sides resounded the tick-tock of the pocket watch. I recoiled instinctively, since my inclination was to play. I found renewed joy in acrobatics. Night after night I was subject to my father’s noisome words. It was then I decided to remain in the womb, quiet in my submerged cavern, where miracles daily occurred; there, amid the amnion, I was free to tumble and dream.
Meanwhile, on the outside, Mother lay supine on her reclining chair. She sipped camomile tea. She ate limes. An ostrich-feather fan relieved momentarily the sticky fly-midden of heat. By the eighth month of her pregnancy, the weight of me was too great; fat-bellied, immobile, she would call for Ade – our servant-boy – to press wet cottons to her forehead and footsoles. In the day, when Father was at the Executive Board, Mother would clasp her arms tightly around her abdomen, crushing me into a half-portion of the womb. Sometimes she exposed me to the daylight, and I felt nearly poached and I twisted and sobbed. There were occasions when she would feather her stomach with lightly nerved fingers and call me her ‘little hatchling’, her ‘bald dove’, her ‘stubborn splinter’. Her courage would suddenly leave her. She voiced fears: that her slim hips – ‘boy’s hips’, Father called them – might prevent me from slipping out whole, or else squeeze me into horrid shapes. At night came the temporary relief of darkness, and all my energies c
ame to the fore. I would kick and flail, testing my new subtlety of movement. It was then, overcome, she would weep silently into her pillow. She cursed me under her breath, then Father for his pleasure that had brought this about. She began to call on saints and whisper prayers, although she had no religion. Father would rise from his bed heavily, aware that he could not better the situation, and fumble for the border of his mosquito net. He would climb out and stand over Mother, who was wet with perspiration, not daring to lift her netting. ‘Are you safe, Evelyn?’ he would say. And, ‘Is he coming now? Shall I call the doctor?’ We were like enemies, Mother and I, joined, but in mutual loathing.
I was, I believe, an unreality to her. She tried to understand children and called for Ade.
‘Play, Ade. I want to know about games.’
‘I play outside.’
‘You’ll kindly adapt.’
Ade would visit her during the long, hot afternoons. He showed her how to fold a square of paper into a point, press a thumb along each edge, then snap one’s fingers and transform the paper into a white aeroplane. He made telephones from empty cans and lengths of string. He broke bread into pieces and threw them from the window; all at once Hoopoe birds arrived and snatched the morsels from the air. It was learning about play that shifted her idea of me. She understood that soon I would be a presence on the outside. And when she understood this, she wanted rid of me. Until then we had been indissolubly tied to one another. I was nourished by her; equally, my mood and vigour or weaknesses affected her so finely that it changed her skin colour and textures and dictated her eating patterns as well as her body’s shape. So we both understood that we were one thing and not a pair. But then, once I had reached the eighth month of my womb-term, and had manoeuvred into the birth position, Mother began to endow her swelling with the aspect of a recognizable form. And she wouldn’t have me inside. It was a crushingly hot morning in May. Father was at Ibadan for three days. Mother, dressed in a white wrapper, left the house with Ben – Ade’s father and our cook and driver. They drove west along the Ikoyi Road, which ran between the golf course and the European cemetery, crossed the Macgregor Canal and on past the Brazilian quarter to the law courts. There, at Tinubu Square, Mother instructed Ben to let her out of the car. Walking through the dusty labyrinth of streets, she came to a lane where a clay hut lurched against a wall. She found them inside: mother, father and idiot son. They stood in the cluttered room, utterly remote from one another, their skin cracked and veined with mud. The man and the woman each held a teacup from England, the large, breakfast kind, flower-patterned like the cloth which covered the old woman’s swollen hips. And the cups, which also lined the shelves, were cracked like their faces, with dirt also in the veins and without handles so that the pair – though not the son, who hadn’t the grip to hold anything but the flowery rag he wrenched between the fingers of one hand – encircled them, tenderly, as if the cups themselves, and not their contents, were precious. Now and then a lorry passed by on the road outside, which caused the cups on the shelves to rattle and also the supply tins, cut in half and their tops discarded, which it seemed held the family’s possessions – seeds, dried potatoes, gin, nails, nuts and bolts, clippings from The Times, resins, amulets, medicines, but also weirder things: shrunken monkey’s heads, chameleon skins, white rooster feathers. The old woman shifted her cumbersome weight and gestured Mother to a corner of the room where tins of many-coloured liquids stood. Mother paid for a blue vial and pocketed it away.
I had not heard it at first, perhaps because of the whine of the traffic, but gradually, as I had become accustomed to the stillness of the room, not stillness but something weightier, viscous and blank-dark, I had started to hear a low yellow groan, a continuous whine voiced not out of conscious despair, nor anything thought-of, but simply to occupy the quiet. Later, when Mother was back at our house in Ikoyi, I understood that that strange groan had come from between the toothless gums of the idiot boy.
And it was that same unyielding naked moan that accompanied me during the following days, days in which every other sound was eclipsed, those shattered fighting days. Mother had swallowed the blue liquid and spent the next morning climbing stairs, and in the afternoon sweated hours in a hot bath. She went to bed after and shuddered, sobbed openly. The rainy season had begun, and I too was weeping, clamped limpet-like to the womb wall. At times Ben came in from the kitchen, bringing food and limewater. He said he was going to call the doctor, he knew what was coming, but Mother shooed him away, it was all right, he was not coming now, it was only a dress rehearsal. It felt like I was being forced by a vast sea, the indrifts came with pain, and I fought hard against Mother and her poison’s will. But I knew I had won when her muscles relaxed and she cursed the old woman for giving her a weak drug.
When Father returned he found her in bed, still weeping. She shouldered him away and refused his touch lest he upset her and me inside. ‘What have I done?’ she whispered.
I do not know whether the poison was designed to finish me or simply to induce the birth. Whatever her intention by taking it, it made me more determined to stay put. Soon I had dwelt longer than nine months. Mother now lay motionless in the day, occasionally dozing. Father dared not leave her and spent much time chattering. His talk was different than before. Now I heard the Arthur Ransome stories, the adventures of the Arabian Nights. He read aloud portions of certain novels. I listened with puzzlement, although never with indifference. And the longer I delayed my birth, the keener my sense of hearing became.
Nevertheless, I began to conceive Father as a danger to me. He was, I told myself, an inverse Scheherazade: he told stories, true, yet they were intended not to preserve but arrest life – his purpose, I thought, was to prevent my birth. Could it be that as long as I listened to this nightly chatter I would be unable to emerge from the womb? I began to think it might be better on the outside. I knew that there was greater variety in the world than my father recognized. Had I not heard its miraculous cacophony? Might it not be my task to try to regain this lost possibility? Besides, I was tired of the dampened underwater sounds, of stories only ever half told. So I took the decision to be born.
By then, however, after the forty-sixth week of her pregnancy, the doctors had decided to have me induced. At the Children’s Hospital midwives administered morphine and wet presses to my mother. Doctors swabbed below her belly button and readied their scalpels. They tried to cut me out. But no doctor ushered my arrival. I – myself only – timed my birth. On August the second at six o’clock, I began to initiate the contractions. In and out, in and out, I rocked the womb wall. There was tearing flesh. There was blood. And through her pain, mother whispered, ‘Late, late. Stubborn as a splinter.’
Afterwards, Mother lay on the blooded sheets, empty and half-spent, blinking at me, unable to hold my weight. Father or one of the nurses would support me by the back and head and tilt me towards her. But she died after three days of this.
So the first ceremony I attended was my mother’s funeral. I was not brought like every new-born to have holy water dowsed on my forehead. Instead, east we went, to St Saviour’s Church on Ikoyi Island. As I lay quiet in my cot (and my mother in hers), the mourners’ eyes flitted from cot to coffin, from coffin to cot, some sad for our family, others appalled, one pair of eyes, my father’s, narrowed in shame.
I kept quiet. I shed no tears. And for the most part neither did my father. But – only I noticed – as the priest spoke his final lamentation, a single tear fell from my father’s right eye. I see it now, inching down his cheek, slowly at first, then quickening, until it reaches the crest of his mouth; where it halts for a moment, caught between his closed lips; then, with their parting, Father’s tear makes its way down to the tip of his chin; suspends; and falls, silently striking my forehead.
7
Transcribing My Mother’s Diary
Sometimes I have the feeling that my memory is a mausoleum of broken sounds. I feel an almost unbearable sadness when
I think of all I have heard, the little that I retain and everything that is gone, all those minute, unutterable tones which most faithfully encapsulate my history. I know that one day all the sounds will disappear. Occasionally they will drift towards me like ghosts and timorously make themselves known. But gradually they will be overwhelmed by the rising clamour in my ears, as stars are eclipsed by city lights. It will take a bit of time. To begin with there will be an intensifying of pitch and volume. Next, the higher registers will expire. Then all timbre will be lost. One by one the sounds will merge until my hearing is no more than a roar alternating with a terrible silence. All I will be left with are these words.
Arrived at Jebba on 17th November, reads the first entry in my mother’s diary. It is a journal for the year 1945, leather-bound, measuring ten inches by five. It has been lying in Mother’s trunk since her death, when Father packed her belongings away. Since I moved up to the attic I have read the diary many times; as, I imagine, did Father in the course of his top-floor retreat. Soon the mice will discover the journal. Like me, they will consume the words. And in the process they will destroy the paper on which they are written. I will, then, preserve, here on my computer, this record of my parents’ tour. The diary continues: DO Niger met us at the station. We must have looked a couple of frights. Red dust matted my hair and Rex’s eyebrows. The DO took us to the rest house.
The Echo Chamber Page 7