Had they observed me carefully, however, they might have seen signs of the complicated workings taking place inside my head. My ears, for instance … were they not a little too large in proportion to the rest of my features? And did I not feel them quiver, ever so slightly, as I struggled to hear the widest spectrum of sounds? I cannot be sure. What is certain is this: that while events took their course above the onion table; while Nigerian statesmen called for self-government with increasing stridency; and my father continued to bury himself in his work at the Executive Board; while Iffe and the market leadership travelled to Government House to protest the slum clearances – while all this was going on in the world beyond the onion table, beneath it marvels were taking place.
Was it here, where I sat, that there existed a special property of sound? Had I chanced upon the city’s acoustical hub, towards which all sounds were inexorably drawn, as in some cathedrals there exists a nook, designed by the architect, where one can hear the tiniest whisper? Or was I myself that hub? Perhaps, I thought, I was like the radio, which could gather sound waves from all over the world. Yes, from all over the city the sounds rushed to me, as if I, who until now had left their paths unchanged, had started to emit some principle of infinite attraction.
And yet, I thought, I was not exactly like the radio; I seemed to attract sounds, but I did not broadcast them, something I had no desire to do. What happened to a radio when it was turned off? I asked myself. I thought about this for a long time. What does a radio do with all the sounds when it is asleep? Perhaps it trembles internally, I thought. Perhaps its insides stir with the trapped energy of untransmitted sound. Yes, I thought, the radio must exist in a kind of tormented state when it is switched off, hounded by an internal din, like the drunks who wander the streets, arguing with invisible enemies.
It was at that point that I began to question my powers of listening. I began to feel that the richness of my audile faculties was a danger to me. Where did all these sounds go? I felt my insides quivering. The glittering noises of Lagos which came surging towards me, arriving at first in what had seemed like a necessary sequence, began to confuse me. Soon I was unable to decipher or name the individual tones. In time I even found I couldn’t think properly. I mean I was unable to entertain ideas or sustain notions of a general sort. For instance, it became difficult for me to comprehend the word ‘footstep’. I could not understand how one word was able to embrace so many unique treads, and it pained me that a footstep heard at midday on the market’s gravel path should have the same name as the footstep heard at one o’clock on the asphalt pavement over Maloney Bridge. My own footsteps, my own voice, surprised me. I wanted to capture all these sounds, but I was condemned to listen to fragments.
In an attempt to contain the din in my head, I composed a catalogue of sounds. Now, all these years later, trying to recover this catalogue, I am plagued by doubts. I fear that, by committing it to writing, I will deaden what existed entirely in my head: the constantly shifting association of sounds. Displayed on my computer, my order will seem no order at all but an ugly, arbitrary act of preservation. What is more, it strikes me that the very act of preservation – the translation of sounds in my head to words on the page – signals the destruction of the very sounds I wish to save, just as for Linnaeus the only true subjects for contemplation were the specimens he collected and put to death, stifling life even as he tried to preserve it.
Nevertheless, I will transcribe my Universal Catalogue of Sounds (Lagos):
a) Sounds that come from me
b) Sounds that seem to rise from underground
c) Sounds that mimic other sounds
d) Sounds that I have never heard but which I will, one day
e) The sound that surrounds two people who’d like to speak but cannot
f) Sounds that only others can hear
g) Unearthly sounds
h) Sea-sounds
i) Sounds that cause my heart to beat faster
j) Sounds that have just caused a traffic accident
k) Sounds that seem commonplace but which become impressive when imitated by the human voice
l) Sounds that arouse a fond memory of the past
m) Wet-season sounds
n) Silence
o) Sounds that lose something each time they are repeated
p) Sounds that can be heard only in the month of January
q) Sounds that indicate the passage of time
r) Sounds that fall from the sky
s) Sounds that gain by being repeated
t) Insignificant sounds that become important on particular occasions
u) Outstandingly splendid sounds
v) Sounds that should only be heard by firelight
w) Sounds which I deliberately make, but which are not words
x) Sounds that come from inside me, involuntarily
y) Sounds with frightening names
z) Sounds that cannot be compared
17
How I Abandoned Ade
One evening after supper, when Father and I were listening to the news, there came a clattering from the garden path. Suddenly Riley’s pointer was up beside us. Unable to decide who to greet first, she ran around the table, leaping and twisting like a salmon, until her tail caught the lead of the radio and sent it crashing to the floor. Father roared and struck out at her. But he missed and fell off his chair. Unable to understand his rage, Riley’s pointer turned then loped back into the garden, leaving us in silence, looking at the battered radio.
The radio never worked properly again. Father took it apart, then screwed it back together, but it was no use. It would emit a broken whisper and we heard only fragments of the news. On fiddling with the tuning knob, it would stammer into life. No matter what the announcer spoke about – the Suez crisis, or the slaughter of the Mau Mau, or the latest dance craze in America – he spoke in the same deep, authoritative, almost indifferent voice, making it impossible to distinguish between the already scrambled news items. This did not bother me at all. What did I care for the news? I was more interested in the moments when the radio fell to static silence. Each time I felt the mood of the evening change. The temperature seemed to drop several degrees, and I would tremble with excitement. Mistaking my emotion for fear, Father would joke, saying, ‘The radio must be tired tonight. Poor thing, it has fallen asleep.’ I could not forget that noise which was also silence. I felt drawn to it. It spoke to me of another world.
One night I sneaked out on to the veranda to fetch the radio and bring it to my room. I sat it on my pillow and switched it on. There it was, the silence! I put my ear to the speaker – and withdrew, for it seemed to emit a kind of cold breath coming from a distant world. I held myself still, listening to that pool of shifting quiet, feeling it float about me, inside me. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever experienced.
Soon I could think of nothing else. A delicious pleasure had invaded me, isolated me, without my having any clear notion as to its source. It made everyday concerns seem trivial, and filled me with a kind of precious essence – acting in the same way as, years later, on meeting Damaris, I understood love to act. Where could it have come from, this powerful joy? It was connected to the radio silence, I knew, but went far beyond it. What did it mean? How could I grasp it?
Once after supper I followed Ade down to the bottom of the garden. I found him looking at a boxing magazine. That evening he didn’t tell me to go away, so I sat down by the lakeshore, and we looked at photographs of the boxers. Ade told me about Hogan Bassey from Calabar, who was famous throughout Africa; he had become featherweight champion of the British Empire. At school they talked of nothing else, and there were bouts in the playground. The best boxer, Olu (he whose incipient moustache had showed under the spotlights during The Snow Queen), had bloodied another’s nose.
‘Well, but that’s nothing,’ Ade said. ‘One day I will be as good as Hogan Bassey hisself. Remember that no person can escape his right hook. If he gets hit, O, h
e hits back twice as hard!’ Ade stood up and started to swing his fists; jabbing, swiping, punching from all angles. When, finally, he stopped, he was breathing heavily, and there was a keen focus to his normally agitated eyes. Slowly and deliberately, he said, ‘Hogan Bassey has beaten every white fighter put against him.’ I recall the moment clearly, how he flashed his eyes then looked away, how he emphasized that word – white. I was stung. It was not the first time we had noted the colour difference. And yet until recently that difference had been a source of mutual interest. I thought: I hardly know Ade any more. He has a separate school-life, and separate friends, boxing one another, thinking of Hogan Bassey, and these friends knowing little or nothing of me, but hostile to me all the same.
‘I have something to tell you,’ I said.
‘OK, but remember I’m going to be a champion boxer like Hogan Bassey.’
‘OK,’ I said. And I began to talk all about the instances of silence in my life; I wanted to communicate something important. I told him about the season in 1946 when the skies became quiet, and I was conceived; about my first weeks in the womb, when I had no ears to speak of, and the silence was in me; about Mother’s funeral, her silence, which I could not grasp. I continued to speak, telling him about the period when I had lain in my cot, wide-eyed and unmoving. Without pause, halting Ade when he asked questions, I spoke of the cool quiet when he used to open the window and close the shutters of my room; of the silence dropping from the sky in ‘First Snow in Port Suez’; about my admiration when he had survived his beating without uttering a cry.
Ade watched me with agitated eyes. Was he sceptical about my words? I could not be sure. The more he stayed quiet the more I wanted to talk. And it was with a sense of relief, almost, of wild hope or foolishness, that I told Ade next about my powers of listening, about how I could hear the tiniest sounds, unbelievable things, things no one else could hear. I asked him to go to the end of the garden and whisper something. When he came back I repeated exactly what I thought he had said. Inexplicably, I got it wrong. We tried again, and I got it wrong again. I asked Ade what he had whispered but he refused to say; he only repeated that I had got it wrong, and sat on the bank. He tilted his head to one side. There was scorn in his eyes, and I was stung once again. He brought a mouse’s tail from his trouser pocket. It was then, as he began to twist the tail between his fingers, and the night darkened, and I felt his eyes watching me with a peculiar kind of focus, that I knew for certain that something between us had changed. That change, the challenge I saw in that moment, was affirmed and strengthened over the following weeks.
But I am getting ahead of myself. At the time, although I registered Ade’s scorn, I was not prepared to believe it, and I did not allow it to stop me talking; now I had started, I did not want to stop. I said that the time had come for me to tell him something very important, something which no one else knew about and which would put our lives in danger.
‘I have managed to make contact with another world.’
I did not want our friendship to end. If I made myself extraordinary, perhaps Ade would pay me the attention I knew I deserved. He was unimpressed.
‘It is an almost completely silent world,’ I continued.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean somewhere not far from here is a place where people live in almost complete silence. My connection is very thin,’ I said, looking at him directly, ‘and it is only sometimes I can hear it.’ I paused. Ade frowned and stared straight at me. I had the feeling, false I know now, that he believed me. Nevertheless, he was intrigued; his eyes became more active. I was unsure what I was going to say next. I said, ‘Luckily for you, since you don’t have my powers of listening, I have discovered another way to make contact with this world.’ I was improvising. I ran to the house and fetched the radio. I switched it on, and Ade’s eyes became wide – in fear or with mocking I do not know. I began to tell Ade all about the silent world; about how you could walk for days without your eyes settling on a single thing; how it was a bright empty land of raven skies alternating with flaming white light. I told him how in this world there were few objects, animals, and even fewer people; how on the few occasions when you did see something, you didn’t really notice it, or rather you saw it but you didn’t ask yourself what it was, because in this world without sound you just knew. I told him there were no names for things, because a footstep was just a footstep, a branch a branch, a stone a stone, and so on for everything, including people, because each thing was only what it was, and there were no echoes or reflections and nothing cast a shadow, I said.
That summer I spent an hour or two every day searching for the silent world. I would stand in an alley behind the onion line, stretch my arms out and start to spin, faster than I had ever done before, turning and turning until my head felt light. Sometimes the sun went black behind my eyes, and I would fall on the ground. Once or twice after school Ade found me; sometimes he even played along, saying, ‘Have you found it yet?’
‘Not yet,’ I would say, lying there, waiting for the city’s sounds to quieten, then compose themselves. I did not always manage to snare that pool of quiet (it was tiny, hardly noticeable, a slight disturbance of the air, and at first seemed to come from no place in particular), but whenever I did, I set off in pursuit. Sometimes, at weekends, when he had nothing better to do, Ade came along. Running south through the market against the flow of the crowd, between the high-backed stalls, coming out between the cloth sellers, entering the back streets of town, stopping for breath, chatting, drinking, setting off again, following no logical path, but moving instinctively, and always we found ourselves drawn south. Like Riley’s pointer chasing a scent I was pulled along by something powerful which I could not see, a taut, quivering and irresistible force.
There were moments as we searched when we forgot our divide. Ade could be kind; for instance, when I fell on the ground he took my head in the crook of his arm. But there was also in all we did – not just in our search, but at the market also, and on the bus with Iffe – a touch of dishonesty. We did not acknowledge it; it was simply an omission, a silence we could not name. Many things had come between us – our ages and genders for instance – all of which contributed to this feeling of dishonesty. But what hurt me most, because it had come so suddenly, or I had become suddenly aware of it, was the race divide. Calls for independence were then ever-present in Lagos, and there was talk of ‘sending the white man packing’. Until now I had been unaffected by this talk, for I had been living powerfully in the half-real region of sounds, and at the market I was treated no differently from the other children. Prior to that there had been Mrs Honeyman; she had made an absolute distinction between the European and African, had spoken of a gulf – of feeling, of intelligence, of dignity, of truth – separating black and white. For a while I had come under the influence of her ideas and had more than half-believed her.
After Ade’s comment about Hogan Bassey, however, the divide was quite suddenly raised again. What is more, it became directly relevant to me. Ade seemed now to have his own way of talking about people and events, slightly alien or antagonistic to my own, and I thought his way seemed more in touch with the world than mine. How shut-away I had been all this time! It hurt me to think of it. What I had thought of as absolute – my right to consider Nigeria as home – others saw almost as an aberration. From Ade’s small comments I sensed how he and his friends saw me – as well as Iffe and countless others I did not know. I sensed also how he worked to put me down. Even as we ran in search of the silent world I noticed his mocking eyes, which said to me: Perhaps I’ll come along, but don’t expect me to believe in your childish game.
Now it was late afternoon, and we were running past the slaughter district. I realized we had not brought any water. Turning back would be a waste of time, especially as it wasn’t hot. In fact, I could feel waves of an unseasonally cool breeze. That afternoon the sky lay open, but big rust-coloured clouds came in from the lagoon, blockin
g the light – the harmattan season. It felt as if the sky was coming down to meet us.
I took Ade by the arm, saying, ‘We’re getting near. I can feel it.’ I said this and yet I wondered how I would know when we arrived. We came to a square built up on three sides. On previous days, in other light, I had been here, when Ben or Father had sent me to buy provisions from Hardy’s Euro-African Emporium. Now a row of houses had disappeared, and in their place modern buildings had sprung up, still half-built. At the far side a group of feral dogs was squabbling – the city was strangely full of them at the time. Elsewhere the space was wide and empty. The weather was cold, the air fuzzy, stale, bitter-tasting.
First the dust, then the cold drove us towards one of the new buildings. High above us rose a mass of girders, glass and steel sheeting, which merged into a tangle of vertical and diagonal lines. At the seventh or eighth floor the structure ended, and I saw a row of floating lights. Only then did I realize how dark it had become. Ade pointed to the lights, saying, ‘The workmen.’ And I noticed that the lights were attached to dark figures moving slowly over scaffolding. ‘Let’s go inside,’ Ade said. We pulled back a wooden fence, entered, passed the foundations and started to climb. I took Ade’s hand. He didn’t pull away. We clambered over planks, then up staircases connecting partly finished floors. Now we reached the fourth floor. Here we were protected from the force of the wind, but not its noise, which boomed in my ears. How should I describe my feelings? Fear, thrill, uncertainty, tenderness?
The Echo Chamber Page 19