by Ben Okri
We expected to see her drop. Instead, her shadow became more voluminous. She didn’t even wince. The third bite seemed to empower her spirit, for she suddenly expanded, swelling out before our startled gaze. Her face darkened, her eyes became darker and deeper, and a wild energy obliterated her beauty, till she stood before us revealed in the full splendour of her ritual power. For a moment, unveiled, she seemed like someone else, like a secret self that we had never suspected was there, something quite monstrous, part-bull, part-woman, with black lips, sagging double chin, hot staring eyes, a stocky figure, and a neck trembling with insane rage. Uttering a word of unspeakable vileness and potency, a word capable of bringing on blindness or madness, she bashed the snake’s head on the top of the car, pulping its brain, as if infusing the painted metal with the powers of the snake’s poison, antidote to curses and badwishes. Then, turning all of us into soft stone with the withering heat of her eyes, she strode off with splendid dignity, taking the dead snake indoors to her tumultuous secret shrine.
28
DARK STREAM OF A HIDDEN LIFE
WHEN MADAME KOTO disappeared into her room, it took a while before we recovered from the hypnotism of the event. The crowd poured into the bar, to slake the thirst of their curiosity. Dad went with them. I didn’t go into the bar. I went over to Ade, who stood alone in the middle of the street, trembling, muttering dark words, his eyes rolling. I wasn’t sure if he recognised me, but when I got near him he laughed, and stopped, and held me, shaking. His shaven head was covered with cuts and bruises, his face with sores and welts. His eyes seemed deranged, his lips were chapped, and saliva dribbled from his mouth. His spirit was like a dizzying vortex bristling with inexplicable cries. In a weird, rattling voice, he said:
‘The day has come.’
‘What day?’ I asked.
‘The day the elephant dies on its feet.’
‘I don’t understand you.’
‘Crocodiles do not fly,’ he said, feverishly. ‘The moon does not sing. Everything you see now is going to be washed away. The forest is going mad. All my hidden lives are calling me. Madness is maybe too many lives overlapping in a single mind, it is only the mind locked in its own cupboard, with the key lost. The heart looks out of the keyhole and sees strange human beings turning the world to ashes and deserts. The stream flows into the river, but the river that doesn’t flow turns human bones to diamond. Nothing can stop an old wound from breaking out in your brain if the wound hasn’t healed. The road is singing and no one hears because the future speaks to us clearly in all the things that are here, right in front of our eyes. The future holds a bold signboard which no one can read because our minds are locked in an old cupboard. On the third moon of a remote century they fed me and my family to an incestuous pair of Egyptian crocodiles and the high priestess was a woman who buries moonstones. All the songs in this world cannot stop the rush of a mighty ocean.’
Suddenly he stopped speaking. He fell to the ground and began to tremble. I hadn’t understood a word of what he had said. Writhing and jerking on the ground as though he had been bitten by a poisonous snake, foaming slightly at the mouth, Ade had taken on a demonic glow. He looked ugly, deformed. I held him tightly and his tremulousness began to affect me, seizing my brain, distorting my sight. After a while a bigger spasm took over. His limbs contorted and he gave out a cry that momentarily deafened me. And then he was still. After a few moments he stood up, his face pale, his lips bleeding, and he stared at me with unfamiliar eyes.
‘What am I doing here?’ he asked, puzzled.
I got up. He looked genuinely confused. His eyes were red. It occurred to me that he had again been overwhelmed by the dark streams of his other lives, the spirit-child’s underworld.
‘You’ve been saying things,’ I said.
‘Me? I haven’t been saying anything.’
He looked at me as if I were a liar. Then he looked about him. Some people were staring at us.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked.
He didn’t answer. He dusted himself and ran away. I followed him. When we got to his house I began to understand a little of what had been happening to him. The house had been altogether destroyed. A tree had crashed on to the roof. The walls had disintegrated. His parents weren’t around. All about the house I could see their scattered belongings. The floor of his father’s workshop was covered in foul water. Dead fishes lay on the carpenter’s work-bench, spiders crept out from the kit of rusted nails and hammers, the freshly cut wood was stained with mucus, the walls were festooned with moss and algae, ferns sprouted from the floor.
Ade sat at the housefront, twisting sporadically. The house had become a haven of strange birds. Yellow eggs had been laid on matrimonial mattresses. Chickens strutted about the room in which the entire family used to live. A goat chewed on yam peelings near the cupboard in the makeshift kitchen.
‘What happened to the house?’ I asked Ade.
‘That witch destroyed it,’ he said. ‘Now we have no home. My father has gone mad. My mother is dying in a hospital where no one will treat her. My brothers and sisters have been taken to the village.’
I didn’t believe him. He sensed it.
‘There is a snake in my head. Did you know that elephants sleep on their feet, standing up? My father looks at the sky and sees Madame Koto pissing on him.’
‘Come home with me,’ I said.
He laughed hysterically.
‘There is only one home I want to go to,’ he said in his fiendish voice.
‘Where?’
He burst into his cackling laughter again and said:
‘Look!’
He pointed at the sky. A flock of red birds, wings outstretched, sailed beneath the sun. When I turned back to him, he had gone.
29
THE SECRET TRUTH IN HALLUCINATIONS
LATER I DISCOVERED that all he said was true. The political storm had rendered them homeless. His father had become deranged. He had gone from herbalist to herbalist, asking them to pluck out his eyes so he could stop seeing Madame Koto everywhere he looked. Then one morning he snatched up his biggest hammer and was seen running through the streets, towards Madame Koto’s bar. The thugs held him, bound him, and carted him off to a hospital on the mainland. Ade’s mother had been taken ill during the devastations, and one night she was seen raving in the street, with her arms stretched out, apparently blinded by the horrors of the storm. The blindness was temporary. They had since moved away from their ruined house and people said that every day they saw Ade sitting at the housefront, like a spirit bound to a place of suffering. He was always seen playing with a knife.
Everyone had concluded that suffering had unhinged the minds of the entire family. They also said that Ade had been bound twice for treatment. Small as he was, he had burst free from the ropes and taken to roaming the wild forest and the hot streets, his feet bleeding, sores on his shaven head, raving and shouting out curses, and frightening the birds and animals with his madness.
30
PAVANE FOR A SPIRIT-CHILD
I COULDN’T SLEEP that night. Neither could dad. The air was poisoned with forebodings. There was no wind and the street was silent as if the area had been evacuated. Dad sat on his three-legged chair, thinking, nodding his head constantly. Mum slept soundly on the bed. She had retreated curiously from the drama in our lives. She said nothing about her first day back at Madame Koto’s bar. But she occasionally made bizarre pronouncements, in a tone of almost fatalistic acceptance, which left echoing spaces in our minds.
In the morning it rained. Dad went off early to earn some money carrying loads at the garage. I no longer went to school. Our building had been blown away by the storm. Most of our teachers had left the area and they hadn’t been replaced. The pupils often went back to what was left of the school and played in the afternoons and recited their disrupted lessons.
That morning I went with mum to Madame Koto’s bar. The earth was soft. I noticed a wan rainbow in the sky; it
was incomplete, and it didn’t touch the earth. Suspended, the rainbow looked sad. When we got closer to the bar we saw another crowd. The signs were beginning to multiply. The crowd was gathered round Madame Koto’s car, which had been rescued from the bushes. Everyone was staring at a rash of little blue snails which had attached themselves to the car. They were all over the windscreen, the doors, the bonnet, and even the wheels. The driver had been trying to wash them off with water, but they wouldn’t budge.
While we watched the frustrated driver trying to get rid of the snails, Madame Koto came out of the bar. Behind her were three women, two of whom carried a large chair, and the third bore an umbrella. Behind them was a man with a fan of ostrich feathers. Madame Koto herself had a flywhisk in one hand. The women put the chair down near the car. Madame Koto examined the blue snails, surveyed the crowd and, in a powerful voice, said:
‘Whoever sent these snails to my car should remove them now!’
No one moved. She made the statement two more times. The wind rose, fluttering her wrapper. She gave swift orders to her women. Then she went to the backyard and returned with a bucketful of hot water. She poured the fortified water on the car, uttering spell-breaking incantations that made us come out in goose-pimples. As we watched we saw the snails writhing, the blue colour dissolving off them, turning a golden-red, then black. The melted snails flowed down the car in ugly colours, and the crowd let out a disturbed cry. Madame Koto, enormous as a moon on strange nights, sat down on the chair with a grim expression on her face. She paid the closest attention to us, studying our reactions to the demonstration of her powers, as if she expected us to betray ourselves and confess to having tried to bewitch her car.
‘You people are not serious!’ she said, as the women fanned her.
Touching the moonstones round her neck, which glowed pink under the radiant sky, while the rainbow faded into a lilac mist, she said:
‘What does it take to make you people fear me, eh? Heaven knows that I am good to you. When you are in trouble I send you provisions, I get our party to bring you help, I give you food, I take care of your damages, I protect you, and yet you people still want to poison me, to kill me. Well, I am too strong for you all. My father was an iroko tree. My mother was a rock. The tree grew on the rock. It still stands deep in the country. The rock itself has grown. Now it is a hill where people worship at the shrine of the great mother. My enemies sent thunder, but the rock swallowed the thunder. They sent lightning, but the rock seized the lightning. Now, when the people of the shrine touch the hill with iron, electric sparks fly in the air. Our enemies sent rain, but the water made the rock grow even bigger. Now, flowers and plants that cure blindness and cancer can be found on the rock. Then our enemies tried to cut down the iroko tree, but their instruments were destroyed. And when they tried to blow up the rock the explosives failed and the rock started to bleed. Then one by one our enemies died, or went mad. And when the worshippers of the shrine saw the blood they made a great sacrifice and the oracle told them that the blood of the rock saves lives, cures palsy and madness, it cures leukaemia, epilepsy and impotence. Some people even say that when you rub the blood on your skin a knife can’t cut you. A new god will be born for our age from the blood of the rock and the trunk of the great tree. I am only a servant. Friends of mine are friends of great forces. My enemies will turn to stone, will go mad, go blind, lose their legs and hands, forget who they are. They will tremble from dawn to dusk, their wives will give birth to children who will torment them, and some will give birth to goats and rats and snakes. The rock is my power. The sea never dies. Anyone who tries to kill me will kill someone else in my place, will kill their best friends, their child, an innocent bystander, a servant, but they won’t touch me. I am only a servant of the people who want me. So don’t stand there looking at me. Either you come into my bar and drink and celebrate with us or go away and carry your trouble with you!’
There was a long silence when she had finished. No one breathed. The sun rode higher in the sky. The earth began to warm. The scent of jacarandas and hibiscus floated over our skins. The driver began to wash the melted snails off the car. Some people drifted into the bar. Some hung around. Others wandered off reluctantly. I didn’t see mum.
Then quite suddenly an agitated wind materialised beside me. I turned and saw Ade, with flowers round his neck, snot in his nose, standing next to me. His eyes were clear and fierce. He stank of an unbreakable deathwish. His spirit swirled around him, creating the eddies of agitation. He seemed utterly possessed by a deranged understream. A tidal fury roared about him and his eyes shone like polished steel. An old rage, bursting through the bounds of his young body, through the doors of his spirit, frightened me and made me tremble in his presence of a boy at the gates of an unfathomable destiny, a destiny like a poison in his brain waging war on his urge to live. Suddenly I could see his future as an unconquerable foe of lies and corruption, a martyr, a madman gifted with prophecies of stone; but now he was compact in the spirit of vengeance, like an inscrutable force. A heroic mission was taking over his dreams, borrowing his body, turning him violently away from the road lined with broken glass that runs up through seven mountains, each higher than the one before, leading either to the kingdom of rainbows or to the realm of mad religions.
And then, with the force of a new cycle that has waited too long to be manifest, he pushed me aside and stood in front of Madame Koto – the child challenging the rock, the boy daring the iroko tree that has survived centuries of turbulent history. With a rough voice, blasting the air with more power than a sorcerer could command, he said:
‘Where are your crocodiles now?’
Storming the gates of our cowardice, he shouted:
‘Where are your crocodiles? Where is your kingdom? Where are your servants? Where are your slaves? You fed me to crocodiles because I wouldn’t follow your religion. You watched the crocodiles eat me up. My head was the last to go. I died with the face of your spirit lodged in my destiny. I have returned. I am a spirit-child and I have returned to your womb, you ugly daughter of rock. I have returned and I am chained to your neck just as the abiku-children in your womb are chained to your death. One way or another we will get you. Where are your crocodiles now?’
The silence that followed made the trees creak. They were straining against the wind to hear our hearts beating in the presence of such fierce mystery.
‘What crocodiles? What crocodiles?’ Madame Koto asked. ‘This boy is mad! Seize him! Hold him!’
Then I saw the knife on the moon. It quivered, flashing its fantastic lights in Ade’s hand. Awkwardly, like a child withdrawing from the brain’s confusion at sacrificing a chicken; awkwardly, as if he had never held a knife before, Ade thrust the sharp instrument towards Madame Koto’s stomach. She turned and, falling with the chair, saved her life. Ade missed her stomach, but managed to plant the knife into her massive arm. The flowers fell from around his neck. Then he blew his nose and his snot landed on her moonstones. The women fell on him. He disappeared under the weight of their bodies. I heard the earth singing. I heard Madame Koto, the knife still in her arm, shouting:
‘Seize him! Hold him! Don’t beat him! He’s mad! A witch has entered his brain!’
And when the gathered people howled and the driver gave out a cry of horror, something shifted in my eyes and I saw Ade’s spirit. It was large and brilliant, distinct in the effulgent shape of a diamond lion. I saw the size of his spirit, but I couldn’t see him. I heard the growl of his spirit energies before I saw him burst out from under the weight of the women. He stood there, with all the women thrown from him. He stood renewed. Then, screaming weird biblical prophecies, he fled up the street. He ran like the wind which precedes a hurricane. Madame Koto commanded her minions to go after him.
‘He’s mad! Seize him! He has bad blood! We must treat him! Hold him, but don’t hurt him! Catch him!’
Galvanised by the terror and the confusion, by Madame Koto’s screaming, and by t
he general pandaemonium, the crowd, the women, the thugs bounded after Ade. The driver jumped into the car and, with an unthinking concentrated expression on his face, reversed furiously, and swung into the street. It was a blazing afternoon. While we pursued the deranged figure of Ade the diseased goats and chickens, suffering from dropsy, stared at us. The driver shot past in the car. Blasting his horn, nearly running us over, nearly mowing us down, he sped up the street, driving as if fleeing from the furies. Then, to our horror, in the heat of that unforgettable afternoon, Ade stopped. He stopped and turned to face the oncoming car. The car hurtled towards him. He even seemed to go towards it. The horn went on blasting, turning us momentarily into wood, and I could have sworn I saw an ecstatic glow on Ade’s face. For a long second I thought the joke would stop. The driver had done this to us before, rehearsing the moment when his life would change for ever, and it changed that moment when his brakes failed him. We watched in dread and in silence as the car crashed into Ade’s fragile pathetic frame. The gates of the road opened. A red light poured out. A single spirit with the head of a lion emerged. And when we saw the red light bleeding on the road we screamed, ran to the car, which had stopped too late, and found Ade quivering in an agonised spasm underneath, blood on his tattered shirt, his arm pulped, his forehead cracked, his eyes fierce. The world was full of strange sounds as we pulled him out. I leant over his broken form, crying, shaking uncontrollably. Ade, in the voice of a child, said: