Although Iffe’s stand seemed modest with a single basket of onions, when one observed the small traders – there were several with sacking by the roadside which carried a dozen or fewer onions, surplus from their gardens, as well as roaming hawkers with their trays of cheap plastic wares, sea-sponges, matches, melon seeds, kola nuts, peanuts – seeing the hierarchy of sellers, I felt Iffe was a considerable woman. I learned this from one of her regular customers, the Honeymans’ cook, who told me Iffe was in line to become an O-lo’ri Egbe – soon she would represent the interests of all the onion sellers in the market. I had noticed she was ready with advice and that she solved disputes and laughed and judged quantities and prices for others, as well as pursuing her own trading practice. So Iffe was in demand, and I remained unnoticed by her. But But I listened for her voice with its rich, clear resonance emerging from between teeth that seemed to shine.
Our onions became fewer. The morning bloomed.
Some foods I knew, but several I had not encountered before. I had no need to ask, for Ade was being very attentive, in his man’s vest and sun-blanched shorts. He seemed put out by the attention I was drawing, therefore proud to show his knowledge, and he pointed to one stall and then the next, identifying wares. ‘Yam.’ ‘Cassava.’ ‘Okro.’ And the vegetables, whose names Ade spoke aloud, and which I repeated, names that until now I had known only as sounds, acquired meaning: each became real to me. It did not escape me that I myself was still to find a proper name, yet in that moment I found no fault in this. It made me feel free. And it was fun to try each vegetable, newly labelled, to see how it suited. ‘Okro,’ I said aloud. ‘O-k-r-o.’ I thought it a pretty name, only I did not like the k’s hard emphasis. ‘C-a-s-s-a-v-a.’ I liked it better, the middle fricative and the rhythm it made. But I was not a scaly root. I felt I had greater capacities.
With red-purple onions Iffe was filling the basin of the Honeymans’ cook.
‘When do we eat?’ I asked.
‘Soon,’ Ade said. But business was good. Certainly I was bringing luck, for Iffe was already in conversation with the next buyer. Leaning forward on the table-edge was a fat man with tribal woundings. I drank some water. I felt a tingling in my eyelids and when I closed them I saw bright lights. I lay my back against Ade’s. There was a sunburst in my head. Then momentary blackness. Until now, I thought, I had lived in small places: my knowledge was theoretical, principally aural. And just as, a fortnight ago, during the rainy season, I had dreamed of being in Lagos, so now, amid the heat and smells and peculiarity of the market, in the morning’s white light, I dreamed of returning home.
Iffe bought soup and fufu and portioned our lunch into three. I ate happily, swallowing the meat, scooping the fufu into balls and dipping them into my soup. The food was wonderful, yet Ade refused to eat.
‘Chop!’ Iffe said, but Ade turned his head.
‘Fufu makes me sick,’ he said. Iffe put down her bowl.
‘A disobedient chicken obeys in a pot of soup!’ she said, and struck him sharply on his leg. Ade did not reply but stepped back among the onion sacks, and his eyes were bright as he bent his head to the bowl. He ate until the bowl was empty. Then, without warning, he jumped to his feet and fled from the stand.
‘Trouble calls you!’ Iffe said.
A cloud-shadow passed over the vegetable line. Traders returned to their stalls. I lay down beneath the table and for several minutes I did not move. Many stopped at our stand and many more passed by it. My feet pulsed. I felt I slept. The sky was vast, uncomplicated by cloud. My feet stopped hurting. I slept.
When I woke Ade was back by the onion stand. He knelt beside me. I saw that his shorts were torn, and his skin dusty, rank-smelling. He seemed as full of shame as of pride, and wretched in both. My instinct was to turn from him, for in Iffe’s silence I sensed her anger, as she took down the table and began to gather the day’s unsold onions into a heap. I too was disappointed with Ade, for though I liked him enough, he had abandoned me; my displeasure was not for being left alone but for the adventures he had had without me. For all this he was supporting my head, pillowing it in the crook of his arm, and, despite the sickly odour – he had vomited the soup, which had stained his vest – I smiled up at his face.
As we left the trading district I felt very aware of Iffe: when she walked, as when she stood at the onion stand, she seemed to inhabit a sovereign world – where, I thought, to be admitted would be the endorsement of my day. I ran to keep up with her; and when, on the yellow bus, she took a seat in the front row, and I saw the effort of our day’s trading had raised a band of moisture across the bridge of her nose, I wanted to be beside her. But I followed Ade as he moved to the back of the bus. We motored quickly eastward. At one point during the journey Ade began to laugh.
We got off the bus.
‘Why did you go there?’ Iffe said, contemptuous.
‘I didn’t,’ Ade said.
‘I told you!’ Iffe said. ‘There will be trouble.’
What happened next, the trouble Iffe had spoken about, the rise and surfacing of that trouble, together with the atmosphere that evening in our house, has stayed with me. The events that came surprised me in both their force and their injustice, and with the casual ceremony with which they were enacted.
Immediately after entering the house, we were taken to the kitchen, where Iffe told us to wait. In the minutes she was gone there was desperate silence between myself and Ade, who avoided my looks, stared down at his feet. I felt my presence was troubling him. When Iffe returned she was with Ben, who appeared calm as, with a cold and hostile face, she told him of Ade’s wickedness.
He asked Ade if it was true. Had he in fact gone to see Babatundi? Had he been into the garden of the idiot boy?
‘Yes,’ Ade breathed.
Who was Babatundi? What was in his garden?
‘Bend over.’
I was frightened. Ade was shaking, his eyes wide, like a hare’s. Ben held a cane. Iffe took my hand, attempting to lead me away, but I would not go. I stood by the kitchen door.
Ade tried once again.
‘I didn’t speak to him sef!’ He was frantic, nearly hysterical in his fear.
‘Water don pass garri,’ Ben said.
Very slowly, Ade untied his shorts and pushed them below his ankles. His buttocks were so thin and smooth, and his nakedness so unexpected, so humbly revealed – I was repelled, ashamed, moved. Ade bent and gripped his ankles.
Crack! The stroke was like a rifle shot. For a few seconds I heard nothing. Then came the second crack.
I could not see Ben’s face as he beat Ade, but I could hear from the way he was breathing that something had happened to him as he crossed the threshold into violence: he was seized with a kind of madness. Ade seemed to flinch a moment before each stroke of the cane, which was cutting into his buttocks. It was shocking to see the red-black wounds; they appeared so abruptly, as if painted by the cane. I counted six strokes and, after the last came down, my heart constricted with fear and pity. I wanted to go to Ade, since I knew a terrible injustice had been done. He pulled up his shorts and clutched his buttocks with both hands. He turned to leave the kitchen, and my feelings turned also; fear and pity joined with a third emotion, one that made me look at Ade anew. As he climbed the stairs to his room, I flushed with admiration. He had survived his beating in silence.
By seven o’clock, when Father returned from work and came as usual to kiss me on the forehead, I was lying, exhausted, on my bed, but I could not sleep. My mind was wild with the thing I had seen, the casual violence, one person striking another, and that person the father, the action provoked by neither fever nor rage, but carried out formally, almost as a ritual. I lay in darkness but had no feeling of shelter. And heightening the injustice was the knowledge that Iffe, who was a queen to me, and someone with whom I felt a tie, had acceded to the violence. Although she had been a spectator to the beating, she had participated in it also. And it came to me, as I lay, that I had witnes
sed a kind of theatre, events that had prior meaning and in part existed for display. I was troubled by this thought, although I did not understand why. But I know now what I could not have known then: that to witness an event (and later to record it, as I am now, here in the attic, on my computer) is to take the decision not to intervene, and so to consider myself a spectator, as I did then, a bystander looking on, was to grant myself an innocence which that evening I ceased to have.
What could I have done? How might I have reacted in a different way? These are questions I ask myself now. I could have cried out or made myself faint. I might have disturbed events by sending dinner plates crashing to the floor. Yet I only watched. And if I did not understand the nature of my complicity at the time, if I did not feel that, like Iffe, I had acceded to the violence, nevertheless I could not sleep. I was filled with the atmosphere of the evening, of my fear and pity and admiration for Ade, and with the high colour that had appeared so suddenly on his skin, and I wandered in my thoughts for several hours, just as, for several hours, I turned in my sheets. And when, after the midnight chimes, I rose and climbed through my bedroom window and crossed the garden, black beneath the starless sky, to the compound and unlatched the door and tiptoed up the stairs, uninvited, to let myself into Ade’s bedroom, and behind the closed door took him in my arms, there was no alteration from the atmosphere of the evening. He accepted me without a sound. My hands moved over his back and beneath his pyjama trousers, where I passed my fingers over the welts. Ade stiffened and let out a soft high note, then relaxed when I drew him to my chest.
Several days went by, curious memorable days, so short while they lasted, and so long after, and already I was forgetting life before the market – my period of confinement, as I thought of it now. I tried to take in and appraise everything about me. And I found myself passing through a threshold of understanding: aspects of the market I had been unaware of, or confused by, or careless towards, acquired meaning. For several weeks Lagos vibrated in bright colours and tones. The town appeared available, well-ordered, fabulously precise.
I liked to be beside Iffe every hour of the day. With fierce attention, unmoving, just as Riley’s pointer would stand beneath the swallow’s nest with her head cocked, I studied Iffe. In this way I was able to equip myself with a fixed point from which to understand the market. I had always needed to create order out of what confused me; even in the womb, on hearing Father recite Gray’s Anatomy, I had formed a crude taxonomy of my body. Now, for the first time out of doors, I began to understand the complex system of the market, its relationships, its rules of trade. A new world opened up to me.
Every morning Iffe brought out a table-top, cleaned its surface with a rag and propped it on two crates, on whose bleached plywood sides was printed, as Ade read out, PEARS SOAP IS THE BEST! The wholesale man arrived and filled her baskets, and she formed the onions into piles. It was wonderful to see the onions stacked this way – lovingly, in tiers like a ziggurat, and always the finest specimen, the ripest, most pinkly translucent onion at the summit.
I took my position beside Ade beneath the table. The sky, streaked with pale gold and a farther blue, spread itself towards the lagoon. The trading day had begun.
This was how the process went: the buyer approached, halted, greeted Iffe, then chose and paid for one of the piles; at which point, I supposed, she would pack up her onions and leave. But she would almost always remain by the table, for the most important part of the transaction was still to take place. The buyer would stand looking doubtfully at her pile. She was hoping to persuade Iffe to grant her a number of extra onions. This gift would vary – from a single onion to half-a-dozen, occasionally more – and was always contested.
There were a thousand techniques for obtaining a greater gift and a thousand small differences between each customer’s technique. My impulse is to record them all, every ruse and procedure I observed. Yet I must press on with my history. So I will record here only the most common: there was the shaking of the head and the clicking of the tongue; there was the wry smile and placing of hands on hips; I witnessed buyers swaying from side-to-side while appearing to make complicated calculations; I heard suggestions that the pile might ‘grow a little’; revelations of how little their husband earned, and what great appetites men possess; there were complaints about the meanness of their husband’s elder wives; heartfelt flattery and crocodile tears, mocking laughter and veiled threats; pleading of great friendship and near-starvation; there was mention of heavy taxes and high-priced juju, of greedy uncles, outsize children, mute but hungry dependants with accusing eyes. And there were attempts to embarrass Iffe by refusing to leave until the gift had increased. Iffe countered each technique with arguments equal or greater in strength. Nevertheless, with reluctance, as if each concession amounted to an equivalent emptying of her belly, she would grant to each customer a few extra onions.
I noticed that, no matter how powerfully Iffe bargained, she always projected an image of friendship and generosity. To make each customer feel happy with her purchase, and return another day – that was her aim. And so Iffe introduced a kind of mock-intimacy at the onion stand, an air of human closeness mixed with spectacle; her gifts encouraged this, since the extra onions, wrapped at the end of the sale and quickly removed from view, could be assessed only by the one involved in the transaction; and since that person could not know the size of another’s gift, she had no standard by which to judge her own, whose true value remained elusive.
Several times a week the Honeymans’ cook came to buy onions. She was an old woman with dry skin, and her hair was wrapped in a white scarf, which indicated she had performed the hajj. Tall, yet hunched, grasping, shrewd, reptilian, she had very few of her teeth left. Often she chewed – but on what? And from between those dark gums came all her cunning, gossip and sour odours.
‘Ku aro,’ she said one afternoon, and put her empty basin on the ground. She chose a pile of onions and paid. There was a pause. The real bargaining was about to begin. The Honeymans’ cook began to sway from side to side. She gathered her loose jaw into an attitude of firm (yet somehow benign) force, raised her black eyes to a point on the horizon and said, ‘I think the world will soon end.’
‘I cannot believe it,’ Iffe replied.
‘Buy a small pile for two pennies? Whasamatter?’
‘I cannot believe the world will end because you don’t get a pile for less than two pennies.’
‘Can a porson chop if onions begin to cost money like that?’ The Honeymans’ cook gestured to a passer-by. ‘Eh? Have you seen anything like it before?’ But the woman continued down the vegetable line.
‘This girl na waya o!’ cried the Honeymans’ cook. Then, imploringly, ‘Drop on a little.’
‘This is how I sell it.’
‘Don’t be a stronghead.’
Iffe said nothing.
‘You think I’m an oyinbo?’
There was a pause.
‘Or picken with a small belly?’
‘I need to make profit,’ Iffe said.
The Honeymans’ cook remained silent. She passed a bead from hand to hand. Then, after several minutes, she bent as far as her hunched frame allowed and said, conspiratorially, her wide grey lips close to my ear, ‘This is not the first time the price is so high.’ She unbent herself and said loudly, ‘Iffe, I think you can remember! That time of Hitla. There were very few onions in Eko. Five pennies couldn’t buy a single pile. Ikoko Omon, can you imagine! People begin to use that onion powder. Yekpe!’ The Honeymans’ cook made a hacking sound that might have been laughter. ‘Our trouble was more than. Iffe, can you remember?’ Iffe nodded her head. ‘So,’ the Honeymans’ cook bent to address me once again, ‘I asked a few questions. And they said this Hitla is the man who is stopping onions from reaching Eko. I said this Hitla must be a nonsense foolish man. Does he want everybody to die? Ikoko Omon, do you hear! But it was not Hitla but the government. They were chopping onions for the soja! Ehen. Well, If
fe, she wouldn’t allow her people to starve. Some woman. Not so? Ikoko Omon! Eh? So she said she must gather a protest because she wants her people to prosper. The reason is because she is a big honest woman.’ The Honeymans’ cook raised her hands above her head. Passers-by had stopped to listen. She coughed at length, then continued her story. ‘Oh yes. I remember. Iffe went to the Alaga and said that she will join the onion sellers in a big protest. The Alaga began to look at Iffe, straight for her in face. “Iffe,” she said. “Iffe, you are a good woman before.” The next day now Iffe took the women to Government House. They were singing and dancing, up down, up down up. The noise of the women grew. But some they were getting scared. The government was trying to cut their heart. Some were forming fool. Some began to hala. So Iffe closed her eyes and said, “All those who are getting scared … go home.” Not so?’ Iffe smiled. The Honeymans’ cook was enjoying her story, as was I, and the onlookers too. ‘And Iffe kept her eyes closed. Well, so when she opened them no porson went. Very soon Iffe asked to see the governor. But he didn’t agree to come out. So the women sang.’ The Honeymans’ cook gestured expansively. She sang for me.
Governor Richards!
A big man with a big ulcer!
Your behaviour is deplorable.
Governor is a thief.
Council members thief.
Anyone who does not know Iffe
trouble no dey ring bell.
Oh you, vagina’s head seeks vengeance.
You men, vagina’s head seeks vengeance.
Ehen. Well, the Governor he didn’t agree to Iffe’s terms. So what did she do? She put stones in the onion sacks to make up the price! Ha! Iffe, God don butter your bread!’
It was a striking story. And yet what impressed me more than the account of the demonstration, more than the belligerence of the market women, was the excitement the Honeymans’ cook had introduced to the bargaining process: the brilliant length of the tale, her bold flattery, the spectacular waving of her feeble arms. But even more striking was Iffe’s response. She must have been aware of the charade, alert to the charming words whose purpose was self-gain. Nevertheless she granted a superior gift to the Honeymans’ cook. Reward the deceiver? I was astonished. And I arrived at a fresh way of understanding the market: what I had thought was fuelled wholly by the need for profit was, I understood, reliant also on spectacle, on the ritual of display, so that she who bargained most creatively, or more skilfully and emotively than the other, or excited the other’s pride, won the greater bargain. And I understood that to trade was, like other human endeavours, a form of theatre.
The Echo Chamber Page 13