The Famished Road

by Ben Okri

  Water was blown into rooms. Mothers cried out for that window to be shut or that door to be locked. Birds and insects vanished. The water, rushing down runnels to the lower regions and the half-dug gutters, soaking fast into the ground and rising quickly above the land, released forever in my memory the mysterious aroma of a new season, of leaves and rustic herbs, wild bark and vegetation, the secret essences of a goddess rising from the earth.

  The wind cleared the air of our area’s desolation. Caught between the desire to throw off my clothes and run naked into the first rain of the year, or to avoid having my clothes soaked, my books wet, I waited too long. The rain lashed me and I merely stood and watched as the water rose up past my ankles and earthworms crawled up my feet. I brushed them off. It rained with such insistence. The wind whipped the water on my neck so hard that each drop felt like a stone. I feared the heavens would unleash so much water that the earth would become an ocean.

  During the harmattan we always forget the rainy season. That’s why it rains so viciously on the first day, reminding us with a vengeance of its existence. It poured down so hard that sometimes I couldn’t see. I shut my eyes and walked blindly and even then the rain lashed my eyelids. I pushed on at an angle to the path. The downpour was a persistent weight. The force of the wind knocked me sideways and blew me off the ground. The road became slippery. The earth turned fast into mud. When I could see, the street seemed to have vanished. The forest was distorted. The houses quivered.

  And then terrible wonders unfolded. Lights flashed three times in a frightening succession. Two birds fell from the branches of a tree, wings vainly fluttering. I heard sheets of zinc crumpling and twisting, heard nails complaining, wood splitting, and then saw the entire rooftop of a house wrenched away and blown across the floodtide in the air. Children howled. Women wailed. It could have been the end of the world. I saw a mud hut disintegrate and turn into clumps. The roof lowered and people came running out. Two doors away a solid bungalow wall collapsed. The roof tilted sideways. Inside was a confusion of household objects and clothes scattered everywhere. At the mouth of our street a house was being carried away on the water, as if its foundations were made of cork. The road became what it used to be, a stream of primeval mud, a river. I waded in the origins of the road till I came to the red bungalow of the old man who was said to have been blinded by an angel. He sat outside in the rain, partly covered in a white shroud. He had a pipe in his mouth. He was staring through the rain, at the watery street, in ferocious concentration. Fascinated by his intensity, by the wavy image of him in the rain, his feet deep in murky waters, his red trousers soaked through, his green eyes clotted, I went closer. Suddenly he pointed at me, his finger gnarled and wrinkled, like an old thin pepper. And in the voice of nightmares, he said:

  ‘You boy, come here, come and help an old man.’

  ‘To do what?’ I asked.

  ‘To see!’

  As he pointed at me, his hand quivering, rain pouring from his eyes, changing their colour to purple, a chill climbed my neck, and terror rooted me to the shifting ground. The old man, raging, shouted in a quivering voice that he could see. He got up and took a few quaking footsteps towards me, his face ugly with joy, the white shroud falling from his shoulders. He got quite close to me, but a light flashed, shaking the earth, breaking the old man’s spell. I saw him stop, frozen in his gesture. I saw his face collapse, saw his eyes turn back to green. Then he began ranting and cursing the blindness that had come back to him; and with a wind rising against me, awakening goose-pimples all over my body, I shook off my trance and backed away. But the old man tottered after me and fell face down in the mud, and stayed there. I was too scared to do anything, and no one either moved towards him or saw him. I ran in the first direction that my feet carried me.

  When I stopped I found myself panting against the wall of an unfinished house. Millipedes and slugs and little snails climbed up the wall. They were knocked down by the wind. Undeterred, they climbed up again. I heard the old man’s voice in the rain and I hurried on down the path of origins. The earth kept slipping me. I fell into a ditch. Mud-water got into my eyes and covered my body. When I eventually found solid ground I stood up and looked around and saw a sepia universe full of the swaying statues of giants. There were shrines everywhere and God spoke in the bright wind and the giants spoke back in whispers.

  I cried out for help and no one heard. As I stumbled around, walking into nettles, sliding to the ground, bumping into tree-trunks, I realised that I was both lost and blind. I washed out my eyes with rain-water and when some of the mud cleared I found myself at one of the Road Construction sites. The freshly laid tarmac had been swept away. Bushes floated on the water. Road-workers’ tents had been blown everywhere and all those who were building the road intended to connect the highway had fled for cover and were nowhere to be seen.

  Further on I saw thatch eaves over banana plants. I came to another site of devastation. It was the place where the men had been laying out electric cables. The tents were gone. I saw an umbrella on the branches of a tree. Something had happened. There was smoke in the air. Bushes were blackened. Charred bits of tarpaulin clung to the stumps of trees. The wooden poles were burnt. Workers stood around the cables, staring at them, expecting something dramatic to happen.

  The rain and wind forced me on to the forest edge, to the pit where they dredged up sand. The white man stood there with his foot on the log. He wore a thick yellow raincoat and black boots. He was looking through a pair of binoculars at something on the other side of the pit. Suddenly the path turned into a ditch. The earth moved. Floodwaters from the forest poured underneath us. I clung to a stump. The white man shouted, his binoculars flew into the air, and I saw him slide away from view. He slid down slowly into the pit, as a stream of water washed him away. The log moved. The earth gave way in clumps and covered him as he disappeared. I didn’t hear his cry. The log rolled over, and a moment’s flash completed the hallucination. I began to shout. Workers rushed out of the forest. They rushed down the side of the pit to try and find him. They dug up his helmet, his binoculars, his eyeglasses, a boot, some of his papers, but his body was not found. The pit was half-filled with water. Three workers volunteered to dive in and search for him. They never returned. The pit that had helped create the road had swallowed all of them.

  I drifted in the chaos of grief and wind and rain and wavy patterns in the air and I came to a half-familiar fairy-land where a signboard was face-down on the earth. The door was open. Water poured in and drenched the tables and chairs. The place was empty. And then I saw the elephantine figure of an ancient mother, sitting on a bench, with a disconsolate expression on her water-logged face. She caught me before I fell, and she carried me off to her room.

  6

  SHE MADE ME bathe. She fed me steaming peppersoup. She rubbed a grainy ointment all over me and massaged me with her rough fingers. She pulled out the edges of her green mosquito net and made me lie down on the great bed of her body-smells. She smiled at me beyond the netting, her face veiled in green. Then, slowly, she receded till only her smile remained, faintly sinister in the green darkness of my mind.

  When I woke up it was raining steadily. Water leaked in through the window and ceiling. The rain distorted my eyes, twisted the sheets of my memory. I was startled by my new surroundings. There were cobwebs on the massive mosquito net. I got out and sat on the edge of the bed. The room stank of freshcut wood, feathers of wild birds, camphor, aromatic plants, and an abundance of garments. There were clothes on every nail and line. There were garments everywhere, cascades of fine lace, white blouses, expensive wrappers with gold-threaded borders, massive skirts, headties, dyed cloths, and gowns that had volume enough for many bedspreads.

  White sheets screened off a corner of the room. Outside, the rain drummed on the cocoyam leaves. The screen shimmered with images. All over the room there were disembodied noises, cockroaches in flight, birds flapping their broken wings. Something tapped
away, measuring the heartbeat of the rain. Something breathed out an air of mahogany and breathed in silence. I resisted the urge to look behind the screen.

  The mysterious smells of rain on earth and plants blew in through cracks in the window. The rain made everything alien. Its persistence altered my vision. After a while it seemed to me that beyond the screen lay a bazaar of mysteries, a subcontinent of the forbidden. I got up and tried to draw aside the white sheet. It was heavy. A cloud of dust wafted from its fabric. Shadows moved in the room. On a wall the form of an enormous sunflower changed into the shape of a bull. Mosquitoes whined. A spider drew itself up on an invisible web. I decided to crawl under the screen. It seemed I was crawling under an impenetrable foliage of whiteness. Dust rose to my face. Cockroaches scuttled at my advance. Newborn rats broke into frightened motion. Ants scattered across my arms as I went into the labyrinths of a stranger’s secret life.

  When I emerged on the other side I noticed the kaolin-painted floor. Its whiteness stuck to me and wouldn’t come off. An earthenware bowl was near the wall. In the bowl were cowries, lobes of kola-nuts, a sprouting bulb of onion, feathers of a yellow bird, ancient coins, a razor, and the teeth of a jaguar. Three bottles stood next to the bowl. In one was pure ogogoro. In another roots marinated in a yellow liquid. In the third were little beings with red eyes in brown water. There was an upturned turtle near the third bottle, its underside painted red, its feet kicking. The turtle made noises. I turned it over. It began to crawl away. I caught it, was surprised how heavy it was, and I turned it on its back again. The turtle stopped making noises. Then I sensed the emanations of an enormous feminine presence and became aware, for the first time, that someone was staring at me from the musty darkness of the chamber.

  I could feel the intense gaze of an ancient mother who had been turned into wood. She knew who I was. Her eyes were pitiless in their scrutiny. She knew my destiny in advance. She sat in her cobwebbed niche, a mighty statue in mahogany, powerful with the aroma of fertility. Her large breasts exuded a shameless libidinous potency. A saffron-coloured cloth had been worn round her gentle pregnancy. Behind her dark glasses, she seemed to regard everything with equal serenity. She gave off an air of contradictory dreams. I was mesmerised by the musk of her half-divinity.

  I could hear her heart beating. It sounded like an erratic clock. There was a transistor radio near her seat. On the wall behind her was a blue mirror. Just above her head, on a little shelf, was a clock that had stopped working. On a nail, behind her head, was an iron gong and a bell. At her feet were a pair of red shoes. She gave off the accumulated odours of libations, animal blood, kaolin, the irrepressible hopes of strangers, and a yellow impassivity. White beads rested on her lap. The clock made a sudden clicking noise, and I started. She watched me intently. Under her gaze, serenity and intensity were the same thing.

  The clock was still. I saw the yellow bird in the shadows behind the ancient mother. It was bound and its feathers kept twitching, its eyes shining in the niche. I became aware of the cobwebs on my face. A fly droned behind me. Then it flew round and settled on the nose of the pregnant goddess. The clock made another noise, startling the fly. The turtle kicked. The bird fretted. I looked at myself in the blue mirror and couldn’t see my face. I became afraid. At that moment the ancient mother in wood spoke to me.

  She spoke to me through all the objects, through the defiant noises of the upturned turtle, the bird beating against its captivity, the complaints of the fly. The clock began ticking. A lizard scuttled over my foot, and I jumped. When I recovered I found myself pressed against the wall, my heart pounding. Then I noticed that everything in the corner was alive. The bowl moved towards me. The mirror banged itself against the wall, reflecting nothing. I sensed the wall moving, disintegrating beneath my touch. Things crawled in the air. I saw a snail on the wall. I moved away and nearly stepped on the turtle. It was on its feet, behind the bowl. I noticed that there were snails all over the white screen. They were big enough to eat. I staggered against a bucket. Then I realised that there were snails all over the ancient mother, on the face of the mirror, on the edges of the bucket. I didn’t know where to turn. My head expanded with the goddess who was speaking to me through the snails and objects in her chamber.

  How could I find my way out of the maze of these dreaming objects which were all obstacles before me? How could I escape from the mystery of the head of a snake, its sloughed skin on a newspaper? How could I escape the stones blackened with the tar of new roads, or the single finger pointing at me in a jar of transparent liquid? The goddess in wood spoke to me through all these things, but most of all she spoke to me with her eyes. I didn’t understand her speech. Without thinking, like someone wandering around in a stranger’s dream, I climbed the body of the goddess and took off her glasses. In the deep hollow of her sockets she had eyes of red stone, precious stones the exact colour of blood. My breathing seized. Her eyes fixed on me with such heat that I hurriedly put her glasses back on. Sweat broke out all over me. I found myself caught in a strange immobility. Then to my greatest horror, she moved – as if she were about to crush me into her pregnancy. I jumped down from her great body and fought my way through the tangle of cloth, screaming.

  I sat on the bed. My journey into the secret world changed things I saw in the room. What I had previously thought of as tumbles of clothes became wigs, shawls, undergarments, coloured headties, batik materials. Dull almanacs of secret societies hung on the walls. Snails inched along the walls, leaving a clean wet trail. In a cupboard there were men’s clothes, a black walking stick, and five umbrellas. Above the cupboard was the legend, printed in gothic lettering: GOD’S TIME IS THE BEST. High up on the wall was the image of a crucified Christ and beneath it another legend: THE EVIL THAT MEN DO. There were faded prints of Madame Koto and a man on the walls. The man had only three fingers on one hand. He had a lively face and sad eyes. It was an old picture, browned by sun and time. How could I escape that labyrinth of objects? I went to the bed, lay down under the green netting, and slept in the feverish dreams of the room.

  7

  WHEN I AWOKE I felt as if my memory had been wiped clean. The room had changed. Intense shadows brooded on the walls. Futures not yet visible crowded the spaces. Powers not yet active crowded the air. My eyes filled with the shapes of captors, the albumen of unbounded monsters, genies in murky bottles, homunculi in the nests of bats. Unformed beings were everywhere; trapped ghosts and masquerades in unwilling shapes of terror lurked in that forest of shadows. The rain had stopped falling. The wind whipped the zinc roof. I tiptoed out of the room and shut the door behind me. I felt different. I felt as if a wind from the future was blowing through me.

  The passage was empty. At the backyard someone had attempted to start a fire with wet wood. The smoke was terrible. Evening had fallen with the rain. The sky was grey. The backyard was full of puddles. With each step I took towards Madame Koto’s bar I felt our lives were changing.

  There were no lights in the bar. When I went in I thought the place was empty. I moved noiselessly to my place beside the earthenware pot. The front door was partially open. Flies buzzed and I could hear the wall-geckos scuttling between the tables. As I sat I distinguished the outlines of women in the darkness. They sat still, their heads facing the front door. After a while they began to speak.

  ‘When are they bringing our electricity, eh?’

  ‘How should I know?’

  ‘Madame Koto has been talking about it for a long time.’

  ‘She has become a politician.’

  ‘Only promises.’

  ‘And talk.’

  ‘They will bring it.’

  ‘And this bar will shine.’

  ‘And one day it will turn into a hotel.’

  ‘But when will they bring the light?’

  ‘One day.’

  ‘One day I will build my own hotel.’

  ‘How? Will you steal the money?’

  ‘Politics will give it t
o me.’

  ‘Will you fuck politics?’

  ‘Isn’t that what you too are doing?’

  ‘Not only me.’

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘Madame Koto.’

  ‘Don’t mention her name. Her ears are everywhere.’

  ‘I hear that she is pregnant.’

  ‘For who?’

  ‘How will I know? Was I there when they did it?’

  ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘Anything is possible nowadays.’

  ‘Who told you she’s pregnant?’

  ‘Yes, how do you know?’

  ‘People talk.’

  ‘People always talk.’

  ‘I don’t believe them.’

  ‘People talk too much.’

  ‘Rumour is a cheap prostitute.’

  ‘So what are you?’

  ‘I am not cheap.’

  ‘You’re cheaper than shit.’

  ‘What about you, eh? The men say your anus smells.’

  ‘Your cunt smells.’

  ‘Even chicken can fuck you.’

  ‘Rat fuck you.’

  ‘Dog fuck you.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘You too shut up.’

  ‘Pig fuck your mother.’

  ‘Goat fuck your mother and produce you.’

  ‘Shut up!’

  ‘Why do you keep telling everyone to shut up?’

  ‘You too shut up!’

  They fell silent for a while. The wind blew the front door against the outside wall, straining its hinges. Then the women started up again, abusing one another in blistering phrases, their voices sharper than glass. One of them lit up a cigarette. There was a lull in their bored quarrels during which the wind moaned in the trees. Then, all over the area, the crickets started their trilling. During the silence Madame Koto came in through the back door, a lantern in her hand. She looked massive, as if she had somehow bloated in the dark. Her face shone. Outside I could see a palm-wine tapper, his bicycle encircled with climbing ropes; kegs of wine, tied together, dangled from his carrier.