SIX

‘OH, MY FRIEND, you’ve woken up!’ the female midget said to me.

She wore a white dress with lace frills and imitation sequins. I had seen her before. She had a demented smile stretched tightly across her face. Her eyes were moon-like and when I looked into them the insides of my head kept shifting. The eyes of the duiker pulled me. Warm, old, magnetic, they spoke a language of mood and blood.

‘I asked you to dancewithme,butyourefused,’themidgetsaid,flashingherweird animated smile.

She took my hands and placed them on her big frantic breasts. They palpitated like two mighty hearts. The female midget quivered, the smile became fainter on her face. She stared at me with such frightening tenderness and longing that I broke out in a sweat. She dragged me to the dance floor, and amidst bemused laughter from the other celebrants, drew me into the pounding rhythms of the music. She held me tightly to her breasts and drenched me in the strange sexuality of her soft body and before I was aware of it I was swirling amongst the sturdy legs of adults. She turned me round, threw herself at me, shook her breasts in my face, and clasped my young bottom, and clung to me, made me dizzy, and dissolved things around me, in her torrid dance. She kept spinning me, filling my head with bizarre potencies of desire, her smile widening. She held me so tight that the blood threatened to burst drunkenly in my ears. Red lights flooded my brain and when my eyes cleared, the smells of a thousand perfumes, of wild sex on hot illicit nights, of vaginal fluids, of animal sweat, overpoweredmy senses.Intheterribleheat ofthedanceIsawthat,amongtheerotic dancers, the politicians and chiefs, the power merchants, the cultists, paid supporters, thugsandprostitutes,allmovingtothebeat ofthenewmusic,amongthemall,there were strangers to the world of the living. I saw that some of the prostitutes, who would be future brides of decadent power, had legs of goats. Some of the women, who were chimeras and sirens and broken courtesans, had legs of spiders and birds. Some of the politicians and power merchants, the chiefs and innocent-looking men, who were satyrs and minotaurs and satanists, had the cloven hoofs of bulls. Their hoofs and bony legs were deftly covered with furry skin. Fully clothed, they danced as men and women when in fact they were the dead, spirits, and animals in disguise, part-time human beings dancing to the music of ascendant power. Everythingaround me seemed to be changing and yielding its form. I cried out. The female midget swirled me round. Tables flew towards me. They flew through me. And I was twirling, dizzy, my being in disintegration, dancing not with a female midget but with thefour-headedspirit whohadbeenbidinghistime.Iwasfallinginlovewithlifeand the four-headed spirit had chosen the best moment to dance with me, turning and twistingmethrough strangespaces, makingmedancemy way outoftheworldofthe living. The lights turned violet. Still in a dance which I couldn’t control, I found myself in a desert waste where shadows were real things, where the sand blew in the air and fixed into the shapes of fabulous glass monsters. The four-headed spirit led me in a dance through the desert, holding me in an iron grip. The harder I fought the tougher the grip became, till my arms turned blue. He danced me through the desert winds, which concealed the forms of master spirits and powerful beings who borrowed the sandstorms to cloth their nakedness; through the striated sands, over the vast desert worms, through the mirage cities in which the liquid apparitions of air concealed cities throbbing in rich bazaars and marketplaces and dens of hallucinations; he danced me through the mirage cities where tall women had breasts of glass and beautiful women had the phosphorescent tails of cats, over the wells, past the oasis where obscure figures turned silver into water, through the streets of the elite quarters where people cried out for love, past the slave alleys where innumerable souls had written their names on the walls with their flesh, along the precincts of drugged soldiers, the garrisons of slave towns, into the heart of forgotten civilisations where Pythagoras came to learn mathematics, into the sacred groves of desert gods, and the empty houses of reincarnated prophets, and the great wastes of desert stretches which werein fact populated with adventurous tribes and warringbeings and people who had become their own stone carvings, through it all the four-headed spirit led me in its dance of death. I beheld the Sphinx, with its original black face. I was plunged into sandstorms and whirlwinds, the sands howling, and I saw the invisible trees and plants, the meadows of flowers with passionate calyxes, all ghosts of the vegetation that used to be there. And I was thrust up through the burning vents of sandwhorls and I felt so hot, my head bursting with fires, my eyes full of steaming sand, and when I cried out the music of the desert gods drowned my cry. I fought to escape. I struggled, I kicked. I did not want deserts in me. And as we neared the scorching centre of the desert, where a ship in full mast waited to set sail, the four-headed spirit said:

‘That ship will take us home to your companions across the oceans of sand.’

Then a new music, composed entirely of desert vowels, poured over me and filled mewith anguish. I called out to thegreat kingof thespirit world, but hedidn’t appear. And so I called out, with all my being, for Mum. Out of the stillness of a strange love, I saw her in a tattered wig, a pair of blue glasses on her face, bangles on her arms. She wore a bright wrapper and a blouse blinding in its whiteness. She stood over me and lifted me up. The desert burned its way into my brain, scorching my head. The calmness of cool water flowed down my face and Mum, in the gentlest voice said:

‘Azaro, why are you crying?’

She held me gently. The midget had gone. The four-headed spirit had evaporated into the mysteries of dance. I couldn’t see the giants any more, or the hoofs of part-time human beings, those who would wreck our hopes for two generations, or the bird-feet of strange women. Forms had lost their mutability.

‘What’s wrongwith you?’ Mumasked.

I held on to her. She wiped the tears from my face. My throat was dry. I stayed silent for a long time. Occasionally a cool wind blew in from outside. Mum gave me some iced water to drink. I drank it all and had some more. Then after a while, when I began to feel a little better, I looked up at her. She smiled.

‘We watched you dancing, my son. You danced like your grandfather. And then you fell. Are you all right now?’

I didn’t answer her question.

‘Why areyouwearingthoseblueglasses?’Iaskedher.

She laughed.

‘I will tell you later. It’s a good story.’

‘Tell me now.’

‘There’s too much noise. Where is Madame Koto?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘If you help me find her, I will tell you the story when we get home.’

I set out to search for Madame Koto. Everyone I asked said they had just seen her. The beautiful beggar girl, sitting under a table, watched me as I went up and down. I was about to ask her a question when she motioned me to be quiet. She pointed. I followed her finger with my gaze and saw that the beggars were carrying out a complicated stealing operation. They grabbed fruits and fried meat and bowls of stew and plates of rice from the tables and passed them on in a relay of hands. The food disappeared beneath the tent. Helen was their watch-woman.

‘Do you want me to help?’

She waved me on.

‘Can’t you talk?’

She stared at me mutely and then, gently, pushed me away.