He paused. His eyes were bloodshot.
‘If you want to vote for the party that supports the poor, they give you the heaviest load. I am not much better than a donkey.’
‘Eat, you’re tired,’ Mum said.
Dad shut his eyes and began mumbling something which I took to be a prayer. He didn’t open his eyes for a long time. And it was only when he began to snore that we knew he had fallen asleep again. Mum didn’t want to disturb him a second time so we ate half the food and saved the rest for him to eat in the morning. We ate more quietly than the rats did.
Before I woke up in the morning Dad had gone and all I had of him were the smells of his boots, of mud, of cigarettes, the mosquito coil, and his sweat. The mood of the room was infected with his exhaustion.
We had cut down our food. That morning we had pap and bread. Mum went off to the market, went hawking her boxes of matches, sweets, cigarettes and odds and ends down the roads on a quite empty stomach. She looked much leaner and her blouse hung from her and the straps fell over her shoulders as if she had shrunk in her clothes.
As I walked behind her to the junction where we parted I felt very unhappy about the thinness of her voice amongst the noises of the ghetto. As she went off on her arduous journeys she seemed so frail that the slightest wind threatened to blow her away into the molten sky. Before she went she gave me a piece of bread, and told me to behave myself at school. I followed her a short way. She was barefoot. It pained me to see her stumble on the rubbish and stones of the paths. It seemed very harsh not to be able to go hawking with her, not to be able to protect her feet, and help her sell off all her provisions. I followed her and then she turned, saw me, and waved me on to school. I slowed down, turned back, and watched her disappear into the expanding ghetto.
2
WHEN I WENT to Madame Koto’s bar after school, the place was empty. I was hungry. Sitting near the earthenware pot, I kept telling myself that I didn’t have a stomach. I slept and woke up. Flies had come into the bar. I went to Madame Koto’s room to ask for food and was about to knock when I heard her chanting. I heard the ringing of a bell. I was about to go back to the bar when two women of the compound saw me and said:
‘What are you doing?’
I said nothing. They held me and I shouted. Madame Koto came out. She had antimony on one side of her face, kaolin on the other, and her mouth was full of the juice of ground tobacco. The women looked at her, then at one another, and hurried on.
‘Why didn’t you knock?’ she asked, her mouth dripping with the tobacco.
‘You were busy.’
‘Go to the bar.’
‘I’m hungry.’
‘How can you be hungry with that small stomach?’
Then she went back to her room. The bells started up. I went to the bar and the flies played around my nose. It got very humid and I couldn’t breathe and my hunger got unbearable. I went out of the bar and wandered along the paths. It was excruciatingly hot. Trees shimmered in the sun. The shadows were dense. Insects sizzled among the bushes. A lizard half crossed my way and then it stopped, turned towards me, and nodded. A bell rang. Its jangling noise scared me and I jumped out of the path, into the bushes, and a huge man with a wide mouth rode past on a little bicycle. He gave an insane laugh as he shot past. I stayed in the bushes and only came running out when I felt my legs burning with stings. I had trodden on an army of ants. I got them off me and was about to return to the bar when I noticed that the poor lizard was dead in the middle of the path. The bicycle had ridden over it and it had died with its head caught in an exaggerated nod. The ants marched towards it and I picked up the lizard by the tail and took it with me towards the bar, intent on giving it a good burial.
Outside the bar there was a man standing barefoot in the heat. He had on only a pair of sad-looking underpants. His hair was rough and covered in a red liquid and bits of rubbish. He had a big sore on his back and a small one on his ear. Flies swarmed around him and he kept twitching. Every now and then he broke into a titter. I tried to go round him but he kept cutting off my path.
‘Madame Koto!’ I called.
The man came towards me. He had one eye higher than the other. His mouth looked like a festering wound. He twitched, stamped, laughed, and suddenly ran into the bar. I went after him, carrying the dead lizard as if it were a protective fetish. I found him crouched behind the earthenware pot. He snarled at me.
‘Madame Koto!’ I called again.
The madman tittered, baring his red teeth, and then he rushed at me. I threw the dead lizard in his face. He laughed, screamed, and fell on the benches, tittering in demented delight. He got up, walked in every direction, oblivious of objects, knocking over the long wooden tables and the benches. He came after me. I ran in circles. He scuttled round the floor like a monstrous quickened crab. With the exhilarated animation of a child, he discovered the dead lizard and began playing with it. He sat on an upturned table, his eyes making contradictory journeys round their sockets. Then he began to eat the lizard.
‘MADAME KOTO!’ I screamed, with the full volume of my horror.
She came rushing in, holding a new broom. She saw the confusion in her bar, saw the madman eating the lizard, twitching and tittering, and she pounced on him, hitting him with the head of the long broom, as if he were a cow or a goat. The madman didn’t move. He ate with a weird serenity. Madame Koto knocked the lizard from his hands. Then, tying her wrapper tighter round her waist, she went for his neck with her big hands.
He turned his head towards me, his eyes bulging. White foam frothed from the sides of his mouth. Then, with a sudden burst of energy, and a cry uttered at white heat, he tossed Madame Koto off him, stood up straight like an awakened beast, and charged at everything. He fought and clawed the air, uttering his weird cry. Then he changed. He brought out his gigantic prick, and pissed in every direction. Madame Koto hit his prick with her broom. He pissed on her. She rushed out and came back with a burning firewood. She burned his feet and he did a galloping dance and jumped around and tore out of the bar and ran tittering towards the forest.
Madame Koto looked around her wrecked bar. She looked at the burning firewood in her hand and then she stared at me.
‘What sort of child are you?’ she asked.
I began to pick up the benches.
‘Maybe you bring only bad luck,’ she said. ‘Since you have been coming my old customers have gone and there are no new ones.’
‘I’m hungry,’ I said.
‘Attract customers, draw them here, and then you will have food,’ she said, going to the backyard.
Later she took the benches and tables outside and scrubbed them with a special soap. She swept the bar and washed the place with a concentrated disinfectant. She brought the tables and benches back in when the sun had dried them and then went to have the bath she always had before the evening’s customers arrived.
When she finished bathing she came to the bar with a bowl of peppersoup and yam. She slammed it down and said:
‘Since you’re so hungry you better finish it.’
I thanked her and she went back out. I washed a spoon and settled down to eat. The soup was very hot and I drank a lot of water. The yam was soft and sweet. There were pieces of meat and offal in the soup and I had almost eaten them all before I realised that one of the pieces was actually a chicken’s head. The pepper burned in my brain and I was convinced that the chicken’s head was eyeing me. Madame Koto came in carrying a fetish glistening with palm oil. She dragged a bench under the front door, climbed on it, and hung the fetish on a nail above the door. I noticed for the first time that she had a little beard.
‘I don’t like chicken’s head,’ I told her.
‘Eat it. It’s good for your brain. It makes you clever, and if you eat the eyes you will be able to see in the dark.’
I didn’t eat it. She came down, dragged the bench back to its position, and stood in front of me.
‘Eat it!’ she said.
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‘I’m not hungry any more.’
Madame Koto regarded me. She had rubbed pungent oils on her skin. She looked radiant and powerful. The oils smelt badly and I think they were one of the reasons why the spirits were interested in her.
‘So you won’t eat it?’
I knew she would become angry and would never give me food in future if I didn’t eat it; so, reluctantly, and hating every moment of it, I did. I cracked the chicken’s head with my teeth. I broke its beak. I swallowed down its red comb. I scraped off the thin layer of flesh on its crown.
‘What about the eyes?’
I sucked out the eyes and chewed them and spat them out on the floor.
‘Pick them up!’
I picked up the eyes, cleared the table, and went to wash the plates. When I got back she had set down a glass of her best palm-wine for me. I sat in a corner, near the earthenware pot, and drank peacefully.
‘That’s how to be a man,’ she said.
The palm-wine got to me fairly quickly and I dozed sitting upright. I woke up when some rowdy customers came in. They smelt of raw meat and animal blood.
‘Palm-wine!’ one of them shouted.
Flies congregated round the new customers. Madame Koto brought them a great gourd of wine. They drank the lot very quickly and the evening’s heat increased their smells. They got rowdier. They argued furiously amongst themselves about politics. Madame Koto tried to calm them down but they ignored her altogether. They argued with passionate ferocity in an incomprehensible language and the fiercer they got the more they stank. One of them whipped out a knife. The other two fell on him. In the confusion they scattered the table and benches, broke the gourd and glasses, and managed to disarm the man. When they had put the knife away one of them cried:
‘More palm-wine!’
Madame Koto went out and fetched her broom. They saw the violence on her face.
‘No more palm-wine!’ she said. ‘And pay for what you’ve broken.’
They paid without any complaints and went out arguing as vigorously as they had been doing.
I went back to my corner and finished my glass of palm-wine. Madame Koto poured me some more. The aroma of her rich-scented peppersoup floated in from the backyard. The evening wore on and customers drifted in. Odd customers. A man came in who was solidly drunk already. He kept cursing and swearing.
‘Look at that toad,’ he said about me. ‘Look at that fat woman with a beard,’ he said about Madame Koto.
Then he rushed outside, came back, and asked for a gourd of palm-wine. When he was served he drank quietly, occasionally perking up to abuse everything. He abused the lizards, flies, the bench, and the ceiling. Then he fell quiet again and drank peacefully.
Another customer came in who was so totally cross-eyed that I began to feel cross-eyed myself from staring at him.
‘What are you looking at?’ he demanded angrily.
‘Your eyes,’ I said.
‘Why? Haven’t you got eyes of your own?’
‘Yes, but I can’t see them.’
He came over and knocked me on the head. I kicked him on the shin-bone. He knocked me again, harder, and I rushed out and grabbed Madame Koto’s broom and came back in and hit him on the head with it. He cried out. He backed off. I hit him again. The drunken man began to curse. He abused cross-eyed people, abused brooms, swore at children, and became quiet. Madame Koto came in and seized the broom from me. I sat down.
‘Serve me palm-wine,’ the cross-eyed man said. ‘And warn that boy of yours. He has been insulting my eyes.’
‘What’s wrong with your eyes?’ Madame Koto asked, staring intensely at him.
He didn’t reply and he sat down into a moody silence. After he had been served, he drank a great quantity in one go, looked at me, found me staring at him, and then he turned away, trying to hide his eyes from me.
‘Serve me peppersoup!’ he shouted.
Madame Koto served him and he devoured the meat and drank the soup very fast.
‘Tell that boy not to stare at me,’ he said.
‘Why?’
He drank some more palm-wine and peered over his shoulder at me. His eyes interested me. One of them was green. Looking at the green eye had a strange effect on me.
‘I will give you money if you look somewhere else,’ he said.
‘How much?’
Trying to hide his face, he came over and emptied all his spare change on the table. I pocketed it and watched him go back to his seat. He kept checking up on me. I had taken my eyes off him but it was hard to look anywhere else after the experience of seeing him. His eyes, in their strangeness, were magnetic. I kept my eyes off him and looked around the bar and noticed green patches on the floor. I couldn’t understand where they came from. I drank some more palm-wine. The alarming realisation that the green patches were the stains of the madman’s piss was beginning to dawn on me when the lights changed in the bar and the drunken man cursed and from the floor there rose a host of green spirits. They rose up and they grew till their heads touched the ceiling and then they shrank till they were no taller than the average chicken. They were all cross-eyed. They milled around the areas of the madman’s piss and they stamped and made swarming noises. Everywhere I looked I saw cross-eyed spirits. I cried out and the drunken man abused the moon and Madame Koto came and took me outside and gave me some water and alligator pepper to chew on.
‘You should go home now,’ she said.
I was silent.
‘Have some fresh air. Then go.’
I stayed outside a while. The moon was out in the sky. It was big, clear, and white. It was white, then it became silver, and I saw things moving on its face and I couldn’t stop staring because it was so beautiful and so low in the dark blue sky. I watched it for a long time and sweet voices stirred in my ears and Madame Koto came out and said:
‘What are you doing?’
She looked up, saw the moon, and said:
‘Why are you looking at the moon? Haven’t you seen a moon before?’
‘Not like this one.’
‘Come in, take your things, and go home. It’s getting late.’
I pulled myself away from the moon and went back into the bar with her. The bar was full of the oddest people. There was a man in the corner who said loudly that he had just come back from Hitler’s war. No one believed him.
‘Hitler died years ago,’ someone said.
‘I killed him,’ said the loud man.
‘How?’
‘I used a special juju. I blew pepper into his eyes and his moustache stood up and I killed him with this knife.’
He whisked out a knife, brandished it, and no one seemed concerned. In another corner a man kept tossing his head. Another man snorted. There was a younger man next to the drunk. He had a bright scar down his face. The drunk cursed and stopped and cursed again. The green cross-eyed spirits mingled with the clientele and one of the spirits climbed the wall like a new kind of lizard and studied Madame Koto’s fetish.
It was a very odd night. The bar saw its most unusual congregation of the weird, the drunk, the mad, the wounded, and the wonderful. Madame Koto weaved her way through them all with the greatest serenity. She seemed fully protected and entirely fearless. I think she made a lot of money that night because as I was leaving she did something rare. She smiled at me. She was happy and graceful amidst all the bustle. She gave me a piece of uncooked yam and I took the expanding paths back home to Mum.
3
OUR ROOM WAS crowded. Mum was back early. She looked sun-eaten and tired. Sitting disdainfully on Dad’s chair, with his feet on the table, was the landlord. Sitting on the bed, standing round the room, were the creditors and their relations. They looked angry and helpless. Everyone was silent when I came in. I went over to Mum. She put her arms round me and said:
‘You all have to be patient.’
‘How can we be patient?’ said one of the creditors.
The others nodded vigorously.
‘Patience will kill us. We have to eat and trade.’
‘True.’
‘But we have paid most of the money,’ Mum said.
‘But not all.’
‘And not in one week,’ added the landlord.
‘Patience doesn’t kill.’
‘Nonsense,’ said a creditor. ‘Patience is killing my son. You think I will pay the native doctor patience?’
The landlord laughed and brought out a kola-nut from his voluminous robe. He ate it alone. I watched his lips turn reddish. Mum was silent and as the landlord munched away on his kola-nut the rats started chewing.
I looked round at the creditors as if their presence had robbed me of food. I said nothing.
‘Look at his big stomach,’ the landlord said of me, chuckling.
‘Leave my son alone.’
‘All we want is our money,’ one of the creditors said, staring at me.
‘I don’t have your money,’ I said.
‘This boy is worse than his father.’
Mum stood up suddenly.
‘If you have come to insult us leave our room,’ she said.
She shut the door and the window. It became dark in the room and Mum refused to light the candle. Every now and again the landlord lit a match and looked at everyone. The rats ate louder and Mum launched into a song of lamentation. The creditors didn’t move. The landlord went on chewing.
When Mum stopped singing the silence became deeper. We remained in the silence and the gloom till there was a knock on the door.
‘Who is it?’
‘The photographer.’
‘What do you want?’
‘The photographs are ready.’
‘So what?’
‘Don’t you want to see them?’
The landlord got up and opened the door. He stayed in the doorway, looking at the pictures with the help of the photographer’s torch. Then he came into the room. The photographer trailed behind him, a camera on his shoulder.
‘They are good,’ the landlord said, passing the torch and the pictures round.