THREE

DAD STAYED AT home for six days after the fight. His bruises got very big, his eyes swelled to extraordinarily bulbous proportions, and his lower lip grew larger than a misshapen mango. He wasn’t ill, but he wasn’t well either. He lingered in a curious state of shock, between agony and amnesia. He was silent the whole time and his eyes were vacant. Occasionally he would give me a concussive smile, an idiotic wink. We had to feed him pap, as if he were the biggest newborn baby in the world. He slept for long hours, day and night. He slept like a baby. He grinned like one every now and then. He howled like one. And he sometimes even betrayed the curious stare of genius that only babies and certain madmen have. For a time he lost control of his limbs and he jerked constantly on the bed. He drooled and farted indiscriminately. He made funny faces and twiddled his great big fingers like a horrible buffoon. I expected his wounds and bruises to reveal the full extent of the beating he had taken. But the bruises proved short-lived, the swellings were not alarming, the growth of his bulbous eyes ceased, and his wounds didn’t bleed after a while. The true extent of the beating was not visible and that is what worried me. I watched him kicking on the bed like a beetle or an upturned cockroach, as if he had found a new freedom to be an insect, to enter into other statesofbeingnotpermittedtoadults.Hewouldbemoroseforhours and then suddenly delirious and idiotic. Our poor relations came to see us. They had heard what transformations had come over him, but no one could find an explanation for his condition, nor understand what had happened. All they could offer were the usual litany of stories about the hundreds of strange cases they had picked up over the years of consoling themselves on the miseries of others. We kept the business of Dad’s having fought a dead man to ourselves. During those three days the house was crowded with visitors and well-wishers. Dad’s cart-pulling, load-carrying colleagues came and they brought gifts and sat around, drinking in silence. Even the landlord came to see us briefly. He hoped, he said, that Dad had learned his lesson, and that when he recovered he would give up destroying his walls. He brought no gifts and didn’t even notice Dad’s condition, or the mood of the house. Everyone else felt it. Visitors were silenced by Dad’s deliriums and baby-talks, his flatulence, and vacancy, his inability to recognise people, his fits of playfulness. He seemed very tragic in his grotesque condition of an adult trapped in the consciousness of a child. The mood in the room was sad. It was as if an elephant was dying. No one wanted to see how monstrously comical Dad was in his condition. If I had said that a fully grown man, bearded and big-chested, married and with a son, was being born as certain huge animals are born, I would probably have been chastised by all the grown-ups around.

On the day that Dad’s bruises began to take on strange colours, Madame Koto paid us a visit. She too had heard of Dad’s condition. When she entered the room everyone fell silent. This also included those who didn’t even know who she was. She sat on Dad’s three-legged chair. She looked at everyone and everyone avoided looking at her. She had changed. Her face had become big and a little ugly. Her foot had swollen and was wrapped in filthy bandages. There was a patch of rough darkened skin on her face which made her expressions sinister. She had become more severe, more remote, more powerful. Her perfume filled the room and her expensive clothes illuminated everyone’s poverty. Her stomach was bigger. Her eyes were fierce and disdainful. Outside the room there were two men who had come with her. They looked like thugs, paid protectors. Mum invited them in and they stood in the doorway, blocking most of the light. One of them held a bundle under his arm.

For alongmomentMadameKotodidnotspeak.Then,jabbingDadontheshoulder with her stubby fingers, she asked:

‘What happened to you?’

Dad stared at her without recognition. She jabbed him again. He made insect-noises. She turned to me. Then she looked round the room. She drew up straight on the chair.

‘Sonobody wantstotalktome,eh?’shesaid,suddenly.‘WhatwronghaveIdone anybody that you all keep quiet when I come in, eh? Have I stolen your money? Did I burn down your houses? Am I your landlord?’

There was a pause. Then:

‘You too proud,’ someone ventured.

‘And you support that party,’ said another.

There was another pause. No one said anything. The silence waited for her reaction. It didn’t have to wait very long.

‘You are all jealous!’ she said. ‘And none of you can touch me.’

She stood up. She began to gesticulate, waving her arms about, but Dad made noises from the bed. Madame Koto restrained herself. She rearranged her wrapper, a clear sign that she had put up with enough and was now leaving. She made her exit address to Dad.

‘I heard you were ill and I came to see you. We are all human beings. We are neighbours. Your son helped me. I brought some gifts for you. I have no quarrel with you. This earth is too small for people to forget that we are all human beings. As for these other people who keep quiet whenever I come into the room, they will see what I am made of, they will find out what I am.’

She took the bundle roughly from her protector and put it on the table.

‘Ipray youshouldbestrongsoon,’shesaid,andlefttheroom.

Mumwent out with her. I heard themtalkingin thepassage. Thepeoplegathered in the room were uneasy. Dad made faces at them. There was a long silence. Dad went on making strange faces, his blue bruises and his green wounds concentrating his expression into a distillate of indecipherable mockery. He was actually in great pain. One of the gathered visitors, speaking for the others, said it was time to go. But they didn’t move. Mum and Madame Koto stayed talking in the passage for a while. The gathered visitors stayed a while too. In silence. When Mum returned, her face bright, thegatheringdispersed,oneby one,leavingtheirmodestgiftsbehind.

On the sixth day, when Dad had shown a few vague signs of improvement, the blind old man came to pay his respects. He wore a bright yellow shirt, a red hat with feathers in the felt, and blue sunglasses. He was led in by a younger man. He sat on Dad’s chair. He had brought his instrument.

‘When I heard that you were ill, I brought my accordion so I could play for you,’ he said in his weird voice.

Dad groaned. Mum served him ogogoro and the blind old man made a libation and drank the alcohol down as if it were a soft drink and began to play the accordion with astonishing vigour. Now and again he would swing his blind eyes in my direction, as if he were demanding applause. He played blissfully, happily. He played the most dreadful music that could possibly be imagined by the most fiendish mind of man. He deafened us with the sheer fabulous ugliness of his music. He made our flesh crawl and bristle with his noise. Mum’s face began to twitch. I kept jerking. A strange smell, as of a rotting corpse, or of a great animal in the throes of death, rose from the music, and occupied the room. It was incredible. Dad twisted and contorted on the bed as if the cruelty of the music were causing him greater agony than all the unearthly blows of the celebrated Yellow Jaguar. Mum opened the door and window to let the music out. The foul air of the compound came in. Dad began to sit up on the bed, struggling, kicking, fighting to get out of the womb of the vile music, as if he weretrapped in aspacetoo smallforhisspiritorhisframewhichwasacceleratingin growth.Fightingtoget up,hegroaned,almostweepingbecausethemusichurthimso much. The blind old man turned to me again and intensified the full ugly power of the music. Dad was struck still, unable to move, frozen by his own efforts. Then suddenly the old man stopped playing. Dad slumped back down. The old man said: