‘Hold him!’
‘Tie him down!’
‘Get some ropes!’
‘Where is he going?’
‘Send for the doctor.’
‘Which doctor?’
‘Doctor Okocha, his friend, the signwriter.’
‘Catch him first.’
‘He’s gone!’
‘Thief! Thief!’
‘Grab him!’
But Omovo ran up the road towards the bus stop. With rage and grief mixing in his brain, he ran without a sense of direction, utterly unaware of what he was doing. He struggled and got onto a danfo bus, and when the danfo moved, he jumped off. He ran into the main road without looking, raving. He heard the dim blast of car horns. He heard wild screeching, a distant crash and several human cries surrounding him. He had almost been run over. Walking round and round on the road as if in a dream, he did not register the fact that the car had stopped a few inches from him, till he smelt the sulphurous heat of its engine. The sky seemed to lower. Out of it he saw a host of blackbirds flying towards him. He saw eyes fixed on him. They disappeared when the car owner stuck his head out of the window and shouted:
‘Get out of the road, you madman! Get out! If you want to die it’s not my car that will kill you!’
He staggered across the road and fell in front of a kiosk. People gathered. Muttering gibberish, kicking about on the ground as if he had indeed gone entirely mad, he cried himself miserable. And the crowd stared at the bald young man, bewildered at the depth of his sorrow.
The compound men found him in front of the kiosk and tried to carry him home. Doctor Okocha was with them. They tried to get Omovo to stand up, but they found it impossible to move him, so strangely weighted had he become.
‘Fuck off! Get away! You voyeurs, bastards!’ he cried.
Doctor Okocha told them, with deadly authority in his voice, to leave matters to him. The compound men drew back. ‘Let the signwriter handle it,’ they said.
Doctor Okocha approached Omovo gently, as if he were a dangerous, unpredictable animal. He leant over and said something to Omovo. There was a moment’s silence. Then Omovo, lashing out, shouted:
‘Voyeurs! Spies! Ifeyiwa is dead! My father is a murderer! What more do you want from me! Vultures! Leave me alone! You can’t help me!’
Then Okocha slapped him. For a moment Omovo shut up. His eyes became bright and mad. The old painter slapped him again. Harder. Tears burst into Omovo’s eyes. The blood vessels in his neck stood out. He did not cry. The old painter said:
‘Are you mad, eh? You haven’t even been born yet. Have you forgotten – have you forgotten your responsibilities? Pull yourself together. You’re a man – an artist – a warrior.’
3
Omovo did not go home with the compound men, but was led by Doctor Okocha to his workshop. Omovo spent the night there. Doctor Okocha cleared the signboards from the floor space, fetched a mat and some pillows and tried to make Omovo lie down. Omovo sat, eyes distracted, silent. Doctor Okocha sent a message to his wife to prepare a strong bowl of herbal soup. Then he bought a bottle of ogogoro and some beer. When the pepper soup came Omovo drank it. Doctor Okocha poured stiff drinks for both of them. He downed half a tumbler of ogogoro and sighed. He suggested Omovo do the same. He did. He still hadn’t spoken. It would be many days before a word would pass his lips. Doctor Okocha waited a moment, poured some more ogogoro into the tumblers, then he began to speak.
‘My son,’ he said, ‘I am aware of all that’s happened to you. More is yet to happen. And more on top of that. Remember even this shall pass. Bad things will happen and good things too. Your life will be full of surprises. Miracles happen only where there has been suffering. So taste your grief to the fullest. Don’t try and press it down. Don’t hide from it. Don’t escape. It is life too. It is truth. But it will pass and time will put a strange honey in the bitterness. That’s the way life goes.’
Doctor Okocha paused. He sipped from his tumbler. Omovo was still. His eyes blazed. Doctor Okocha got up, rummaged around on his cluttered table, got some kola-nuts and alligator pepper. He gave some of the latter to Omovo, who chewed on them mechanically. Breaking a kola-nut with the slow deliberate motions of a diviner, the old painter continued:
‘Look at me, for example. I have buried two of my children. Both boys. They were Abikus, spirit children. The native doctor made marks on the body of the last one that died. The exact marks are on the body of my child that has been ill. We are still trying to get his spirit to stay in this world. That aside, I saw my village burn down during the war. I heard my brothers, my sisters, my mother cry out when a grenade fell near our house. It has not been easy. This heart is small but I have never been able to understand how it can take so much suffering and still go on beating. But it does. It does. I don’t know how.’
When Doctor Okocha broke the kola-nut he threw the lobes on a plate and observed their formation. He got up, stumbled on a signboard and searched around for his glasses. He found them, put them on and studied the lobes on the plate more intently. The glasses transformed his face of solid teak, introduced an ancient unearthly wisdom on his features, made his eyes curiously bigger. As he divined the kola-nut lobes he said without looking up:
‘And apart from me, look at this ghetto, this Ajegunle. Anybody’s story here is worse than ours. This place is a big wound. My eyes get raw when I look at it, look at our hardship, the way we manage to live. People live in houses with no roofs. Their children die every other year. Huts of zinc, full of holes. Big families who eat only one meal of garri every day. They can’t get medical treatment. Quack native doctors take the little money they get. Their children sell empty bottles and old newspapers from daybreak to night time. No jobs. Families ridden with disease. Their children shit worms. The young boys run off and become garage touts. Children suffer from malnutrition. And yet. And yet the heart of the ghetto beats. They suffer and smile, as the musician put it, they go on, fighting. I see it all with my eyes. Day to day. Day in, day out. This is my responsibility. I tell you, one day this place will go up in flames. All the ghettoes. In flames. The day the spirit of the people wakes up. I want to paint the ghetto. I want governments to see how their people live. I want us to wake up. I paint signboards free of charge for one-armed men who open up barber’s shops. For tailors with tuberculosis. Men with sick children. What else can I do? Looking at you makes me feel so ashamed of myself.’
He threw the kola-nut lobes again. He touched them, noting the ones that were facing up, the ones that were facing down. He read their significations, working his mouth, the sweat gathering in the crinkles of flesh on his forehead.
‘In seeing clearly begins the real responsibility. I feel ashamed, yes. I am in my fifties. I have been painting for thirty years. All I have is a workshop. My real responsibility has been staring at me in the face, burning my eyes, wounding me, and I haven’t even noticed it properly. It takes you, a child of a new generation, to come along and make me realise this. I have been asleep. You have changed my life this night, do you know that? I want you to stay here as long as you want. Paint here. I will make copies of the key for you. Treat this as your workshop too. But don’t let grief kill you. You are not born yet. You haven’t painted enough. You haven’t had an exhibition of your own works yet. You owe it to what you’re suffering now to make sure you survive. You owe it to us, your people. The Greeks have a saying that the skylark buried its father in its head. Bury this girl in your heart, in your art. So live, my son, live with unquenchable fire. Let everything you’re suffering now give you every reason in the world to master your life and your art. Live deeply, fully. Be fearless. Be like the tortoise – grow a hard shell to protect your strong heart. Be like the eagle – soar above your pain and carry the banner and the wonder of our lives to the farthest corners of the world. Build your strength. Destiny is difficult. The people without knowing it will always be on your side. They will nourish your soul. Never forget that the people suffer t
oo and struggle, and you will be safe in art.’
He threw the kola-nuts a third time, shook his head, smiled, took a lobe for himself and gave Omovo one. He uttered a prayer, drank and looked at Omovo. His eyes were neutral, deadened. Omovo took a long sip from the ogogoro, his head moving round and round, inscribing invisible circles in the air.
‘We all have to carry on, to continue the unfulfilled dreams of our fathers and mothers. Their dreams gave birth to us. Their dreams and failures are our mandates. To them we add our own ideas, we try to be better, we pass on the responsibility, we die.’
Okocha stopped. Sitting upright, his head drooping, Omovo had fallen asleep while the older man was talking. Okocha stretched him out on the mat, laid the pillow under his head and, drinking his ogogoro stolidly, geckoes running up and down the walls, he went on talking to the sleeping form.
‘I wanted to be a priest when I was a child. The priest of our village shrine. I couldn’t. Then I wanted to be a herbalist. They wouldn’t allow me. Then a doctor, but there was no money to send me to school. Now I am a painter. Signwriter. They call me Doctor – Doctor of Signs. They say I paint the best signboards in this city. I used to.’
Okocha laughed wryly. ‘You were right, my son. I can’t help you. Words can’t fill a calabash. Only you can help yourself. But be like David in the Bible – use your own weapons.’
And so he went on talking to Omovo, who was fast asleep, till he himself became tired and drowsy. Then he put out the lights in the workshop, shut the door behind him, and staggered out into the ghetto on a mission of his own.
Omovo woke up suddenly. It seemed as if many days had passed: he had no idea how long he had been sleeping. Time had become disjointed, had changed in some way. It had been raining and now it had stopped. Everything was charged with the silence of the air after a storm. A steady noise, like a stream of murmured words, started in his ears. He got up from the mat and stood staring into the underwater darkness of the old painter’s workshop, wondering where he was. He felt curiously lighter. He felt he had entered a new universe of being. And he was afraid.
His eyes got used to the darkness. He did not put on the light. He saw a white juju pouch, weighed down with its sacrificial contents, above the door. He saw that the workshop had become even more cluttered and he was struck by the new presences of worn-out Egungun masks, carvings of teak, sculptings of ebony, forms of reincarnated mothers, sculpted panels, of Abiku babies all contained in the womb of agonised mothers, their heads upside down, their eyes large with mischief. He saw signboards stacked against the walls. He lit a candle and was bewildered by the quantity of new paintings, all fresh, all frenzied, on the walls of the workshop. Large paintings of crowds, of women with big stomachs, garish paintings of crowds at bus-stops, of laughing demented children, and he saw a painting of himself lying asleep, with the form of an old warrior watching over his sleeping form. He saw the cobwebs, the rafters, and the spiders. He blew out the candle and waded through the darkness. He opened the door and shut it behind him. He stared at the painted eye on the door, the eye with the red teardrop. He wandered into the twilight of the ghetto, seeing everything with new eyes, feeling as if his eyes, his senses, had been unbandaged.
The landscapes passed through him. He saw the scumpool, the immense heaps of rubbish in the streets. He saw the crumbling half-made houses, the perforated zinc abodes, the sinking bungalows, the huts entirely soaked though with rainwater. He passed the beggars who were huddled together, asleep by the roadside. He passed the drunken old men, with faces like crushed metal, who stumbled from stall to stall, coughing their lives away; the old women with eyes of bitter rheum, mouths like sores, with their flattened breasts that nourished a generation chained to hunger and poverty, their hands like the pulped branches of indeterminate crucifixes. One of the old women was clutching at a bottle and crying out about how her children had betrayed her. Further on he came to a man with a beaten face who clawed the wet earth for his fallen cigarette. Not far from him a baby had fallen, unnoticed, into the scumpool. It thrashed about hopelessly. Its mother was nowhere around. Omovo picked the baby out. It didn’t stop crying. He went on and encountered a young madman drinking from another scumpool as if it were an oasis in a land of bitterness. The wind blew the dirt along the unofficial rubbish dump of the street. It was dark. The landscapes passed. Beyond the ghetto, in the distance, shone the lights of multinationals, the lights of the rich, the flares of oil terminals burning precious unused gases away into the night air. Little whirlwinds cascaded round him as he walked and listened to the paradoxical heart of the hard and vibrant city.
Lightning cracked the sky. Thunderpeals detonated above them. The rain came pouring down. He was exhausted from seeing so much. He started hearing in his head noises like the gnashings of bad teeth. The rain soaked him. He slipped and found a curious sweetness in his fall. Darkness drifted past his eyes.
He lay down for a long time. Footsteps occasionally passed by in his mind. The rain had stopped. Something broke inside him, broke into calmness. And he saw himself in the midst of a field. A withered orange tree stood in the expanse. Then he saw a naked child running in the field. It stumbled, fell and went on running. The earth was its treadmill, for hard as the child was running it did so on the same spot, getting neither closer nor further away. But it went on running, the spirit of unconquerable being
The noise of an engine approached. A lorry went past and splashed water over him. He lay down, twice soaked, listening to the sounds of running water.
Time passed. An old beggar, with a wasted wound of a mouth, an unlit cigarette end on his lips, came and shook him. He tried to get up. Everything swayed as if the world were in a bowl of transparent liquid. He saw the running wounds on the legs of the beggar and he developed a headache. The beggar flashed Omovo a smile which only made him look uglier. Omovo got up, searched his pockets, found a coin and dropped it into the beggar’s proffered bowl. Picking one step after another, his muscles stiffened, he moved with the awkwardness of one learning to walk for the first time.
He wandered back to Okocha’s place, raving. As he went he realised something was missing in the streets. The place had an unfamiliar nudity. He couldn’t place the feeling. But the streets looked starker, as if some vague beauty that made the place almost bearable had been stripped away. The bright, hallucinated murals of dancing clientele that adorned the hotel were now covered in blue paint. The signboard of the tailor had gone. The unusually colourful roadsigns had disappeared. Omovo was baffled. The streets had been entirely stripped of signboards. The murals of seedy brothels were painted over, the signboards of beer parlours, hairdressers’ shops, barbers’ saloons, with their depiction of the wicked pleasures of losing money, had all vanished. They were gone. Suddenly the place looked bare and frightening to Omovo, as if a malign whirlwind had swept away the identities of places. Omovo wandered on, feeling lost and displaced.
He found himself taking the path into the forest. When he recognised where he was he gave a start. He was near the broken bridge, not far from where the woman had discarded the baby. He turned round and went back. The lane was empty. He came to the gate of the strange organisation. The blank signboard at the gate had gone. The signboard with Okocha’s bizarre painting of a black messiah surrounded by hieroglyphics and birds with human faces was left standing. It stood alone, without reference. It stood alone in a vacant lot. The building that was behind it, where he had the odd encounter, had completely vanished, as if he had only dreamt it.
He rushed back to Doctor Okocha’s workshop. All around the shop, in all sorts of piles, were the signboards the ghetto. At the back of the workshop a bundle of them smouldered away in the remnants of a fire. The door was open. It was dark inside. Doctor Okocha wasn’t around. Omovo tried the lights. The electricity had been returned. Overwhelmed by a sudden rage, his mind a mixture of sadness, wonder, and bewilderment, Omovo dug out a blank canvas, set it up, prepared a palette of paints, and waited.
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He was hungry. He had been hungry all day. He drank some water. The water made his hunger more intense. He stood in front of the canvas, staring at a spot on its blankness. The spot began to move and then it grew bigger. Mists clouded his eyes. He shut them. Then something opened within him, illuminated by his expectant anxiety.
He began to paint. He painted a slightly unreal parkland. It was idyllic but tinged with menace. A night sky, faintly lit by an absent moon. Strips of water with moonbeams. Through the screen of trees he painted the Atlantic Ocean, its mighty waves rolling. Landing on the beach were strange green ships enclosed in mist. Around the ships were the forms of invaders. Predatory birds in ominous shapes emerged from the sky.
In the foreground of the painting was a tree withered like the biblical fig. Near the tree was the most central figure, the corpse of the girl. He made her skin tone luminous, phosphorescent, as if her body were blazing. She was like a hallucination, a dreamed being, in a naturalistic landscape. A beautiful, bloodied, intensely coloured being. Her dress is torn. There is blood on her breast, on her clothes. The area of her upper thighs is a stylised mess of mutilation. He painted a glimmering cross around her neck. Omovo worked intensely, hurriedly, not wanting to lose the flow of intimations. Then he stopped. He had trouble with the girl’s face. He had entirely forgotten what the girl’s face looked like. So, keeping Ifeyiwa’s face in mind, he painted and re-painted the face. He kept changing the features. First he gave her a tortured smile. Then a madonna’s grimace. He gave her a peasant girl’s face. A scarified face. A stylised face. None of them worked. He wanted to scream. His inability to give the girl a face seemed to be driving him out of his mind. Then, after a while, he wiped out her features and turned his attention elsewhere. He was about to add some touches of colour to her bright check dress when darkness swam before his eyes. He gave a shout, dropping the brush. Then he screamed, fearing his brain had snapped, that his mind had unloosened and now floated in some terrain of madness. After a moment he realised the lights had gone again. He lit a candle. When he looked at the painting something twisted inside him. He realised, instantly, that the work could only ever remain unfinished, beyond completion, and that the girl would have to exist without a face.