Amidst all this Madame Koto was radiant with her necklace of white beads. As the eveningprogressed shegot darker, moredignified, whiletheclientelegot rowdier. She was untouched by it all, even when the men teased her. The original man with the bigeye, which got morebloated as hedrank, as if his eyewereastomach allto itself, said:

‘Madame, come and sit on my lap.’

‘Let’s see if you can carry your wine first, before you carry me,’ she replied, with great dignity.

‘This madame is too proud,’ said another man in the identical group.

‘Proud and strong,’ she said.

‘Come and sit with me, let’s talk about marriage,’ said the man whose head was like a tuber of yam.

‘Marry yourself.’

‘So you don’t think I amman enough?’ asked theoriginalman, wavinghis three fingers for more wine.

‘No,’ she said.

The bar rocked with the oddest sounds of ironic laughter. The men with dark glasses laughed very hard and banged away at the table.

‘Maybethatboy isherhusband,’saidoneofthem,takingoffhisglassesand polishingthem.

His white eyes didn’t move. They were so birdlike, so ghostly, that I couldn’t tell what or where they were looking at.

‘That’s my son,’ she said.

‘Is that so?’

‘Yes.’

‘Will you sell him to us?’

The bar suddenly became very quiet. Madame Koto stared at the two men with dark glasses. All the other customers watched her carefully. Then she turned to me, a curious gleam in her eyes.

‘Why?’

‘So we can take him with us.’

‘To where?’

‘Many places.’

‘For how much?’

‘As much as you want.’

‘You have plenty of money?’

‘Too much.’

The silence in the bar was incredible. Then the midget laughed. He laughed like a goat. The tall man with small eyes laughed as well. He sounded like a hyena.

‘Name your price, Madame.’

Madame Koto looked at the customers as if seeing them for the first time.

‘Any more palm-wine for anybody?’

‘Palm-wine!’ they cried in unison.

‘And peppersoup!’

And they all burst out laughing and resumed their vociferous conversations as if nothinghad happened.

MadameKotoservedthemandthey drankandateandkeptaskingformore.They drank a great deal and didn’t get drunk. They sat, all of them, drinking and talking as if the wine were water. It was only the two men in dark glasses who got drunk. They kept polishing their glasses. One of them even brought out an eye and polished it and blew on it and dipped it into his palm-wine and pushed it back into his red eye-socket. Then he put his glasses back on. They chewed and swallowed their chicken bones. They ate and drank so much that Madame Koto began to despair. She had run out of wine and food and the night hadn’t even properly set in. As she bustled up and down, starting a new fire, making hurried arrangements for more palm-wine, the midget cameup tome.Smilingvery expansively,hesaid:

‘Take this. You might need it.’

It was a little pen-knife. I put it in my pocket and forgot all about it. Then he went to the backyard. I heard him urinating in the bushes. He came back, smiling, and left without a word, and without paying. I told Madame Koto about it and she said:

‘What midget?’

I went back to the bar. I sat down. The tall man said:

‘Come with me.’

‘To where?’

‘I will take you round the world. On foot. I make all my journeys on foot. Like a camel.’

‘No.’

‘If you don’t come with me I will take you by force.’

‘You can’t.’

He smiled. The woman smiled as well. I decided they were more drunk than I had thought and ignored them.

The bar was so full of people that there were no seats left. Some of them sat on the floor. I was nudged off my stool. The smells in the bar became terrible and strange, the smells of corpses and rain and oregano, of mangoes and rotting meat, of incense and goats’ hair. And then, suddenly, I found I could no longer understand what anybody wassaying.They allspokeasifthey hadknownoneanotherforalongtime. They spoke in alien languages and occasionally pointed at Madame Koto’s fetish. It seemed to amuse them. Then they glanced at me, made calculations with their fingers, laughed, drank, became solemn, and looked at me again.

Madame Koto came in and announced that her supply of food and wine was finished. She demanded that they pay up and leave her bar. A great chorus of disappointment rose from the clientele.

‘Pay andgo,’MadameKotosaid.‘Pay up andgo.Iamclosingup forthenight.’

No one paid her much attention. Her temper rising, she stormed out of the bar. The voices grew rowdier, wilder. Previously I had heard the voices before the people had materialised. Now, I heard the voices but, as I looked round, the customers were vanishing. I shut my eyes in disbelief. When I opened them the bar was completely empty, and completely noisy, except for the two albinos and a beautiful woman whom I hadn’t noticed before. On the far table were the two pairs of dark glasses. The original man with the bloated eye, the group that looked like him, the tall couple, the two white-eyed men, were all gone. The bar was silent and everything was still and the wind whistled faintly on the ceiling, as if a hurricane had passed and hadn’t been noticed.

‘Where is everyone?’ I asked the albinos.

The beautiful woman smiled at me. The albinos twisted, shrugged, stood up, and spread out the sack. The woman distracted me with her smile. And then the albinos sprang at me and covered me with the sack. I struggled and fought, but they expertly bundled me in and tied up the sack as if I were an animal. And as I resisted; kicking, I heard the noises of the world, the voices of all the different people who had been in the bar. They talked in their inhuman languages in leisurely animation, as if they were merely setting out on a pilgrimage to a distant land. Overcome with fear, unable to move, surrounded by darkness and the death-smells of the sack, I cried:

‘Politicians! Politicians aretakingmeaway!’

My voice was very faint, as if I were shouting in a dream. Even if I had cried out with the voice of thunder, no one would have heard me.

They took me down many roads, rough-handling me in the sack. They swung me round, they changed me from one shoulder to another, and the sack kept tightening about me. I heard the noises of lorries and cars, the tumultuous sounds of a marketplace. All the time I fought and struggled like a trapped animal. The more I strained for freedom, the more they tightened the sack, till I had no room to struggle.

My feet were around my head and my neck was twisted to breakingpoint. I couldn’t breathe and I fought the panic that washed over me in waves. The blankness of death cameuponme.Ishutmy eyes.ItwasnodifferentwhenIopenedthem.AtonepointI fell into a strange sleep in which the figure of a king resplendent in gold appeared to me and vanished. My spirit companions began singing in my ears, rejoicing in my captivity and in the fact that I would soon be joiningthem. I could not shut out their singing and I’m not sure which was worse: being bundled away by unknown people to an unknown destination or hearing my spirit companions orchestrate my passage through torment with their sweet and excruciating voices.

When I had fought and my energy was exhausted and I couldn’t do anything, I called to our great king, and I said:

‘I do not want to die.’

I had hardly finished when the figure of the king appeared to me again and dissolved into the face of the midget. By now I had ceased to hear any sounds outside, except for the rushing of waves, the hissing of water, and the keening of birds. Suddenly, I remembered the pen-knife the midget had given me and began another struggle to find it. I searched my pockets. I searched the sack, and couldn’t find it. My fear became unbearable. Then a quietness came over me. I gave up. I accepted my destiny.