Songs of Enchantment (21 page)

Then one morning we received a message from Madame Koto. She asked mum to come and help with the preparations. She also invited dad to a party she was throwing. And she requested that I resume going to the bar to sit and keep her women company. Dad completely refused our having anything to do with her. He had forgotten his promises to Madame Koto, promises he had made when mum disappeared. We stayed at home, isolated and hungry. One day mum said to dad:

‘I must go to her. I have seen what will happen. We are only holding back the future.’

Dad was furious. He was furious because he was confused. He forbade mum going to Madame Koto’s bar.

‘The future is coming,’ mum said. ‘In fact it is here already, looking for us.’

The next day she fell ill. We didn’t know what was wrong. People muttered about invisible powers. Dad tramped up and down the street, challenging the forces of the air that were trying to take his wife from him. Mum was feverish for a whole day, muttering strange words about the future leaking into our lives, about the things which must be. Dad became so scared of her utterances that in the dead of night he gave his consent for me and mum to return to the bar.

The next morning mum recovered completely. Early in the afternoon she went to the bar. It was a fated afternoon. The sun was blinding in the sky and the air was sweet-smelling. In fact it was the day that the future broke into our lives, as if it had been waiting impatiently for all of our artificial obstacles to be cleared out of the way. And in its impatience to become real the future pounced on us in the form of countersigns – a white snake, an epileptic road, a gentle wind, and vengeance stalking its victim in the form of a boy whose life was about to enter the stream of a spirit-child’s uncertain destiny.

I
T WAS A
day without visions, but I heard the road singing as I set out with dad for Madame Koto’s bar. The ladder had gone. Jacarandas and hibiscus had been planted around the borders of her terrain. The backyard teemed with elephant grass and cocoyam plants. The bar had been extended. There were white poles outside with banners announcing the new date of the big rally. It was a hot day. Inside, the bar was crowded with women, bawling children, and men drinking palm-wine, their eyes dazed, their faces sweaty. Dad and I sat in the bar, harassed by flies. We watched the dance rehearsals going on outside. We were surrounded by women with spiked, plaited hair and overwhelming perfumes. Dad was silent. He didn’t drink and didn’t smoke. After a while mum came to us, her face dull, her eyes bright, and she said:

‘There is a knife in the moon.’

Then she went away.

‘What did she mean by that?’ dad asked me.

‘The moon is going to kill someone,’ I said.

Dad stared at me. A fly settled on his nose. He blew it away.

‘How did the knife get to the moon then?’

‘It’s a message,’ I replied.

He was still puzzled. The heat was solid in the bar. The music made the heat more intense. A woman came to us with a tray of food. She put the tray on a little table in front
of us. Dad stared at the jollof rice and the plantain, the bean cakes and the fried meat. The only cutlery the woman had given us was two knives.

‘What meat is this?’ dad asked the woman.

‘Goat,’ she said.

‘Antelope,’ I said.

She glared at me. Dad stuck the knife into a piece of meat and scrutinised it.

‘It’s not antelope,’ she said.

‘White antelope,’ I said.

Dad smelt the meat and was about to take a tentative bite when a volcanic wind in my head made me knock the knife from his hand. The woman shouted at me. I watched her. She picked up the piece of meat and, brandishing the knife, began to abuse me.

‘If you want to use the knife, use it,’ I said.

She stopped abusing me. Then she dropped the knife on the floor and picked it up again and rushed out to the backyard. A moment later we heard a cry from the barfront. We went out and saw a crowd gathered around Madame Koto’s car. The commotion had nothing to do with the woman who had served us. Pushing our way through the crowd, we saw that everyone was watching the car intently as if it might suddenly start dancing. The driver was asleep at the wheel, his cap slipping off his head. The crowd wasn’t staring at the driver. They were staring at the top of the car, with eyes hypnotised by something amazing. Even dad caught his breath, his eyes wide open, his jaw dropping. I couldn’t see what it was that so focused the attention of everyone. I tugged dad’s shirt and he lifted me up and I saw a long white snake whose skin gave off iridescent colours. Its head was like a strange red fruit and its diamond eyes held our gaze. The snake was curled into a flattened spiral and its head of an Egyptian icon was straight, poised; and its tongue clicked in a steady rattle, transfixing us. No one spoke. Then the driver slid down on to the passenger’s seat, while the snake rattled away above on the roof.

Suddenly, the silence was broken by a cry from the street. Released from the snake’s bewitchment, I turned and saw Ade raving, shouting, pouring curses at everyone. I didn’t understand. He looked quite insane and he kept trembling under the assault of sunlight. His hair had been shaved, and he looked demonic and bony, as if he had been initiated into a fiendish sect. His clothes were in tatters, his feet bloody, his neck stringy, his hands stiff, and he unleashed a torrent of ominous words at us. Before anyone could react to his disquieting apparition, we were distracted by another cry. The snake had moved. It had turned its Eygptian head in Ade’s direction. Then, showering rainbow colours in the air, as if it had been drenched in the liquids of melted precious stones, it uncurled itself slowly. Overcome with fear, some people began to poke sticks at the snake. Others threw stones at it, and missed, and hit the side window of the car, startling the driver. He sat up, looked around, saw a crowd of people throwing stones at him, and panicked. He started the car frantically, shot forward (barely disturbing the snake), reversed violently, and sent everyone scattering. Then he drove forward again, ran into the white pole, and brought down the banner announcing the rally, which draped itself across the windscreen. The driver, confused even further, rammed the car into the bushes, and then stopped suddenly. The snake serenely uncoiled itself above, its head elegant and primeval, its eyes like illuminated beads.

Before anyone could make a movement, Madame Koto strode towards her vehicle. She was wearing a yellow robe, with a little mirror on a chain round her neck. Without looking at any of us, having taken in the whole situation in the space of a glance, she strode to the car and grabbed the snake by the neck. The snake stung her once on the wrist, and she let out a piercing cry. She staggered backwards, her face contorted by the agony of her bad foot in its plaster cast. She was still holding on to the snake, but it bit her again, swiftly, bursting a vein. Blood dripped down her arm and evaporated on the hot earth. There was a deep silence.
Something curious happened to time, for, in the space of a frozen moment, Madame Koto looked magnificent, she effloresced, her hair twinkled with sheen, her face glowed with well-being, and even her massive stomach had a sculptural grandeur. The moment passed swiftly and the next thing I saw was Madame Koto pouring out incantations, uttering strange sounds and a string of commandments at the snake. To our astonishment, the snake seemed to listen. Its head was still. Then, as we watched, a fantastic battle of wills ensued, and the snake coiled its tail round Madame Koto’s neck, slowly. Then, just as slowly, the grip was tightened. The wind blew in a mild frenzy. The snake, replying to Madame Koto’s incantations with a rattling language of its own, stung her a third time.

We expected to see her drop. Instead, her shadow became more voluminous. She didn’t even wince. The third bite seemed to empower her spirit, for she suddenly expanded, swelling out before our startled gaze. Her face darkened, her eyes became darker and deeper, and a wild energy obliterated her beauty, till she stood before us revealed in the full splendour of her ritual power. For a moment, unveiled, she seemed like someone else, like a secret self that we had never suspected was there, something quite monstrous, part-bull, part-woman, with black lips, sagging double chin, hot staring eyes, a stocky figure, and a neck trembling with insane rage. Uttering a word of unspeakable vileness and potency, a word capable of bringing on blindness or madness, she bashed the snake’s head on the top of the car, pulping its brain, as if infusing the painted metal with the powers of the snake’s poison, antidote to curses and badwishes. Then, turning all of us into soft stone with the withering heat of her eyes, she strode off with splendid dignity, taking the dead snake indoors to her tumultuous secret shrine.

W
HEN MADAME KOTO
disappeared into her room, it took a while before we recovered from the hypnotism of the event. The crowd poured into the bar, to slake the thirst of their curiosity. Dad went with them. I didn’t go into the bar. I went over to Ade, who stood alone in the middle of the street, trembling, muttering dark words, his eyes rolling. I wasn’t sure if he recognised me, but when I got near him he laughed, and stopped, and held me, shaking. His shaven head was covered with cuts and bruises, his face with sores and welts. His eyes seemed deranged, his lips were chapped, and saliva dribbled from his mouth. His spirit was like a dizzying vortex bristling with inexplicable cries. In a weird, rattling voice, he said:

‘The day has come.’

‘What day?’ I asked.

‘The day the elephant dies on its feet.’

‘I don’t understand you.’

‘Crocodiles do not fly,’ he said, feverishly. ‘The moon does not sing. Everything you see now is going to be washed away. The forest is going mad. All my hidden lives are calling me. Madness is maybe too many lives overlapping in a single mind, it is only the mind locked in its own cupboard, with the key lost. The heart looks out of the keyhole and sees strange human beings turning the world to ashes and deserts. The stream flows into the river, but the river that doesn’t
flow turns human bones to diamond. Nothing can stop an old wound from breaking out in your brain if the wound hasn’t healed. The road is singing and no one hears because the future speaks to us clearly in all the things that are here, right in front of our eyes. The future holds a bold signboard which no one can read because our minds are locked in an old cupboard. On the third moon of a remote century they fed me and my family to an incestuous pair of Egyptian crocodiles and the high priestess was a woman who buries moonstones. All the songs in this world cannot stop the rush of a mighty ocean.’

Suddenly he stopped speaking. He fell to the ground and began to tremble. I hadn’t understood a word of what he had said. Writhing and jerking on the ground as though he had been bitten by a poisonous snake, foaming slightly at the mouth, Ade had taken on a demonic glow. He looked ugly, deformed. I held him tightly and his tremulousness began to affect me, seizing my brain, distorting my sight. After a while a bigger spasm took over. His limbs contorted and he gave out a cry that momentarily deafened me. And then he was still. After a few moments he stood up, his face pale, his lips bleeding, and he stared at me with unfamiliar eyes.

‘What am I doing here?’ he asked, puzzled.

I got up. He looked genuinely confused. His eyes were red. It occurred to me that he had again been overwhelmed by the dark streams of his other lives, the spirit-child’s underworld.

‘You’ve been saying things,’ I said.

‘Me? I haven’t been saying anything.’

He looked at me as if I were a liar. Then he looked about him. Some people were staring at us.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked.

He didn’t answer. He dusted himself and ran away. I followed him. When we got to his house I began to understand a little of what had been happening to him. The house had been altogether destroyed. A tree had crashed on to the
roof. The walls had disintegrated. His parents weren’t around. All about the house I could see their scattered belongings. The floor of his father’s workshop was covered in foul water. Dead fishes lay on the carpenter’s work-bench, spiders crept out from the kit of rusted nails and hammers, the freshly cut wood was stained with mucus, the walls were festooned with moss and algae, ferns sprouted from the floor.

Ade sat at the housefront, twisting sporadically. The house had become a haven of strange birds. Yellow eggs had been laid on matrimonial mattresses. Chickens strutted about the room in which the entire family used to live. A goat chewed on yam peelings near the cupboard in the makeshift kitchen.

‘What happened to the house?’ I asked Ade.

‘That witch destroyed it,’ he said. ‘Now we have no home. My father has gone mad. My mother is dying in a hospital where no one will treat her. My brothers and sisters have been taken to the village.’

I didn’t believe him. He sensed it.

‘There is a snake in my head. Did you know that elephants sleep on their feet, standing up? My father looks at the sky and sees Madame Koto pissing on him.’

‘Come home with me,’ I said.

He laughed hysterically.

‘There is only one home I want to go to,’ he said in his fiendish voice.

‘Where?’

He burst into his cackling laughter again and said:

‘Look!’

He pointed at the sky. A flock of red birds, wings outstretched, sailed beneath the sun. When I turned back to him, he had gone.

L
ATER I DISCOVERED
that all he said was true. The political storm had rendered them homeless. His father had become deranged. He had gone from herbalist to herbalist, asking them to pluck out his eyes so he could stop seeing Madame Koto everywhere he looked. Then one morning he snatched up his biggest hammer and was seen running through the streets, towards Madame Koto’s bar. The thugs held him, bound him, and carted him off to a hospital on the mainland. Ade’s mother had been taken ill during the devastations, and one night she was seen raving in the street, with her arms stretched out, apparently blinded by the horrors of the storm. The blindness was temporary. They had since moved away from their ruined house and people said that every day they saw Ade sitting at the housefront, like a spirit bound to a place of suffering. He was always seen playing with a knife.