‘You boy, come here, come and help an old man.’
‘To do what?’ I asked.
‘To see!’
Ashepointedat me,hishandquivering,rainpouringfromhiseyes,changingtheir colour to purple, achillclimbed my neck,andterrorrootedmetotheshiftingground. 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 rantingand cursingthe 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 hurriedondownthepathoforigins.Theearthkeptslippingme.Ifellintoa 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 everywhereand allthosewhowerebuildingtheroadintendedtoconnectthehighway 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 thecables, staringat them, expectingsomethingdramaticto 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 andblackboots.Hewaslookingthroughapairofbinocularsatsomethingon the other side of the pit. Suddenly the path turned into a ditch. The earth moved. Floodwaters fromtheforestpouredunderneathus.Iclungtoastump.Thewhiteman shouted, his binoculars flew into the air, and I saw him slide away from view. He slid downslowly intothepit,asastreamofwaterwashedhimaway.Thelogmoved.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 Isawtheelephantinefigureofanancientmother,sittingonabench, with a disconsolate expression on her water-logged face. She caught me before I fell, and she carried me off to her room.
SIX
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. Somethingbreathed 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 kaoline-painted floor. Its whiteness stuck to me and wouldn’t come off. An earthenware bowl was near the wall. In the bowlwerecowries, lobes of kola-nuts,asproutingbulbofonion,feathersofayellow 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, andIturnedit onitsbackagain.Theturtlestoppedmakingnoises.ThenIsensedthe 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.