I felt a moment’s relief; but when I saw the people surrounding me I struggled to escape again. Some of them were tall eyeless women. And next to me sat the three men in dark glasses. All three of them turned their heads in my direction. One of them took off his glasses and instead of the blank white eyes I had expected he had normal ones.
‘What’s wrongwith you?’ heasked.
‘Nothing.’
‘Why did you spit into that man’s mouth?’
‘The boy is insane,’ said another of the three.
‘Unbalanced,’ said the first.
‘Drunk,’ said the second.
‘Hold him!’ said the third.
‘Yes, grab him before he spits at us.’
I edged away, keeping an eye on them. As I watched them, they began to transform, breaking out of their moulds. Their shoulders seemed momentarily hunchbacked. Their eyes blazed through their glasses and their teeth resembled fangs. I edged away, slowly, and found another corner, and stared intently at everyone. The clientele kept changing, becoming something other. What they were underneath kept emerging under the fleeting transparency of their skins. After a while I thought my eyes wereplayingelaboratetricks onme,orthatmy feverwasinvadingmeinstrange ways, and I shut my eyes. When I opened them the tall women with no eyes had disappeared.Iranoutofthebarandtookthelongway roundtothebackyard.
Madame Koto was sitting on a stool, holding her head. Occasionally she made a vomiting sound, and groaned. She didn’t have her white beads. She looked like a compressed rhinoceros on the stool. I touched her and she started.
‘Oh, it’s you!’ she said.
Her face was sunken. She looked quite ill.
‘What happened to you?’
Shegavemeasour look, madeadesperatevomitingmotion,heldherstomach,and said:
‘It was the milk.’
‘You drank it?’
‘Of course,’ she barked.
‘We didn’t.’
She said nothing. She fell into another futile spasm of vomiting. She looked dreadful.
‘What about the people in the bar?’
‘What about them?’
‘They were the ones who carried me away.’
‘When?’
‘The last time I was here.’
‘Nonsense!’
‘True!’
‘Where did they carry you to?’
‘To the river.’
‘Which river?’
‘I don’t know. But they are witches and wizards.’
‘How do you know? Are you one yourself?’
‘Look at them.’
‘They arejusttroublemakers.They havefinishedallmy pepper-soup.AndIamnot well enough to deal with them.’
‘What shall I do?’
‘I don’t know. Do what you like, but leave me alone, or I will vomit on you.’ She sounded so malicious in her bad temper that I believed she would do it. I went back to the bar and stayed at the door. I listened to the loud sinuous voices, I watched them as they laughed and banged the tables, and then I made an instant discovery. I realised for the first time that many of the customers were not human beings. Their deformations were too staggering and they seemed unaffected by their blindness and their eyelessness, their hunched backs and toothless mouths. Their expressions and movements were at odds with their bodies. They seemed a confused assortment of different human parts. It occurred to me that they were spirits who had borrowed bits of human beings to partake of human reality. They say spirits do that sometimes. They do it because they get tired of being just spirits. They want to taste human things, pain, drunkenness, laughter, and sex. Sometimes they do it to spread mischief and sometimes to seduce grown-ups or abduct children into their realm. The moment I saw them as spirits, drinking palm-wine without getting drunk, confused about the natural configuration of the human body, everything made sense. And then I became certain that Madame Koto’s fetish had somehow been attracting them. I was confirmed in this notion by the fact that they seemed to cluster most thickly beneath the fetish. I knew what I had to do. I went outside and said to Madame Koto:
‘Your bar is full of spirits.’
‘LEAVE ME ALONE!’ she shouted.
I left her alone and went round to the front and searched for a branch that was forked at the end. I went down the widening paths and found sticks, but they were either not long enough or strong enough. I got to the edge of the forest and heard trees groaning as they crashed down on their neighbours. I listened to trees being felled deep in the forest and heard the steady rhythms of axes on hard, living wood. The silence magnified the rhythms. I found a branch which seemed perfect. I broke off the long wood of the forked ends, lacerated myself on the splinters and bled. I took the stick back with me to the bar.
At the backyard Madame Koto was still on the stool, looking like a rhinoceros whose horn has been cut off. She held her head and uttered a low wailing sound. I went into the bar through the front door. The disguised spirits were now completely uproarious. They had overrun the place in an orgy of merriment, jumping up and down, dancing to non-existent melodies, fighting, singing unfamiliar songs in harsh languages. The man with the bulbous eye was playing with his other detachable one. A man who had removed his arm from its socket was hitting the toothless woman on the head with it. The spirits were drunk with their borrowed humanity and frolicked in their grotesque merriment.
I climbed on a bench and prodded the fetish with the stick. I had lifted it off the nail and wasbringingitdownwhenoneofthespiritssawmefromtheotherendofthebar and gave a piercing cry. I got down hastily. The fetish fell from the stick. There was a terrible silence in the bar. And then the disguised spirit who had shouted, pointed at me, and in a voice of command, cried:
‘SEIZE THAT BOY!’
I snatched thefetish fromthefloor,feelingitspotenciesburningintomy palm,and fought madly past the borrowed legs of the spirits, and gained the doorway. I stumbled and fell at the barfront. For a moment I couldn’t find the fetish. I searched around furiously while the commotion in the bar spilled outside. I eventually found the fetish under the bushes, where it seemed to have crawled, like a crab. I caught it just as Madame Koto responded to the clamour. She saw me and shouted:
‘Azaro, areyou mad?Bringthat thingback!’
In her heavy milk-contorted gait, she bounded after me. She wasn’t the only one. The spirits were after me as well, and one of them held his detached arm in the air like a misbegotten club. I fled down the paths. Their heavy footsteps sounded behind me and they shouted my name:
‘Azaro! Azaro!’
The whole area rang with my name. So fearfully did the spirits call it out that the lights changed and yellow clouds materialised beside me. It seemed I had entered another realm. Like animals who have discovered speech, they screamed my name, each in a different voice. I ran behind huts, hid behind sandheaps, but they were able to smell me out. The dogs barked my name, odd-looking goats blocked my path, and chickens flew out of the bushes in front of me. The trees rebounded the vowels of my name and I felt everything was in conspiracy with the spirits to betray my hiding-places. Nothing seemed safe for me; not the rutted foundations of houses, where I was set upon by strange insects, nor the circular well, in which I considered hiding, but from which my name echoed, nor the anthill, behind which red soldier ants deployed their malignant forces. So I made for the forest; I passed Madame Koto’s sacrifice to the road; the plate was intact, but the food and ritual objects had gone. I went and lay down behind the great fallen tree, where I had seen the two-legged dog. But I feared I might roll over into the pit and, unable to get out, become part of the new road. So I ran deeper into the forest.
The spirits were all over the place. They gave every tree a voice. I saw a rusted machete on the ground and picked it up. The man with the bloated eye pounced on me and I smashed his arm with the machete and he did not utter a sound, nor did he bleed. I dug the fetish into his bad eye and he let me go, blinded by Madame Koto’s powers. I ran on till I was lost. I was not sure any more why I was running. I stopped. I wandered amongst the silent, listening trees. I no longer heard the footsteps of the spirits. But from afar I could still hear them calling my name. Their voices were feeble on the wind.