THERE WERE TWO lighted candles on the table. A mosquito coil burned steadily. Mum was asleep on the floor, under the shadow of the centre table. She had a thin cloth over her. The flickering candle light, making the shadows dance on the bare walls, illuminating the rafters and the cobwebs, revealed to us more forcefully the poverty in our lives. As soon as we stepped into the room, breathing in the stale libations, mum woke up. Dad took a few steps towards her. I saw the plea for reconciliation on his face. He went towards her tentatively, with anxiety on his brow, and when he thought he had her in his arms, when his face relaxed into profound gratitude at being so soon forgiven, mum ducked under his empty embrace. With her eyes wet and shining, she put on her slippers, and hurried out of the room. She didn’t come back the whole night.
Dad sat in his chair and for hours he stared at the cupboard with a confused expression. He had the tormented look of a spurned lover. He sat very still, as if his brain had turned to wood, and didn’t speak. The itching on my body came and went. Occasionally, my eyes twitched. We sat up all night, with the gloom and the midges thickening in the air, the door wide open, and the mosquito coil dropping its perfect spiral of ash on the centre table.
I went and had a bath. When I came back the room was dark, dad didn’t light another candle, and all I heard was his breathing of a great animal in the disconsolate silence. I shut the door a little and brought out my mat. I lay down, listening to the language of mosquitoes, the complaints of the insistent midges, when I noticed that the spirit of the luminous demon-girl had left dad. There were empty spaces where she had been sitting. The labyrinth and the rain had washed away his insane passions.
All night I watched the spaces in dad fill with a great sorrow, the colour of anguished blue. Dad’s colours were of an immense sadness, almost a serenity, and I watched them deepen. I was determined to stay awake with him, but my eyes became heavy. I shut them for a while, and when I opened them again it was morning.
Dad was still sitting on his three-legged chair. His eyes were raw. He hadn’t slept all night. I could tell he’d had a bath. He looked a little fresher and had changed his clothes. When he saw that I was awake he said:
‘Go and buy yourself some food.’
He gave me some money. After I had washed my face I went and bought cooked beans, fried plantain and meat from the woman across the road. Dad didn’t eat with me. I was hungry and ate everything and when I had finished and drunk some water, dad said:
‘I’m not going to work, I’m not eating, and I’m not sleeping till your mother forgives me.’
Then he said:
‘Read to me from one of those books.’
I selected one at random. It was a book of love poetry. The words were strange to me but when I stopped concentrating too much they made sense. I read as if I were repeating words spoken in my head by one of the several lives resident in me. I read five poems out to dad. After a while he was trembling on the chair, his head shaking, his face contorted.
‘Are you crying, dad?’ I asked.
He turned his face away and wiped his eyes and then said:
‘How come you can read these books at your age?’
That was probably the first time that I felt the doors to my other lives – my past lives, my future lives – opening on me with frightening clarity. Sometimes my other lives would open and then shut, and what I glimpsed didn’t make sense. Other times I could see far into an aquamarine past; I saw places I had never been to, saw faces that were both entirely alien and familiar; and my mind would be invaded with the black winds of enigmatic comprehension. The lives in me increased their spaces, languages of distant lands bore my thoughts, and I found I knew things I had never learnt. I knew the charts and tides of the Atlantic, I understood complex principles of higher mathematics, the sign-interpretations of the forgotten magis, the sculptural traditions of the ancient Benin guild, the lost philosophies of Pythagoras and the griots of Mali. Powerful symphonies resonated in me and sometimes I found that I could compose passages of silent spirit-music while I played in the street. The presences in me had been growing vaster, swelling out to include intuitions of other spheres and planets, and the invasions of knowledge had become frightening – and it had all been happening so quietly, so inexorably, that I became sure I was soon going to die. And when dad asked me the question I got up from the mat and put the book on the table and went to him and held his comforting arm, and said:
‘My head grows bigger in the night.’
He stared at me for a while. Then he said:
‘Don’t read any more.’
He lifted me up and held me tightly. He pressed me into the sweet sad colours of his spirit. Deep inside I could hear him weeping. We stayed like that for a long time and then he put me down.
‘We have to go and find your mother,’ he said.
Leaving the door wide open, we went out into the street.
* * *
We searched for mum everywhere. We went up and down all the streets in our area. We asked all the women we encountered if they had seen mum. We asked men lounging outside their rooms, under the thatch eaves of makeshift kiosks; we asked children; we asked old men and young girls. No one had seen her and no one knew who we were talking about. We went to the marketplace where she used to have a stall before the thugs of politics drove her away because she hadn’t joined their parties. We asked the market women. They remembered her, but hadn’t seen her for a long time, they said. We tramped up and down the wondrous chaotic marketplace, from the ironmongers to the money lenders, from the fish-sellers to the cloth-traders, from the hair-weavers to the corn-roasters, from the makers of rope to the makers of magic. No one could help us. Dad grew frenzied. He asked beggars and blindmen, little girls on errands and the great matriarchs of the marketplace. We left the market and started wandering without any sense of direction. Dad would suddenly sprint across the road and accost a woman with a basin on her head. He stopped all the women he saw, asking them irrelevant questions, on the off-chance that they might be one of her companions in hawking. Many of them were offended at dad’s seemingly impertinent questions and they abused him, suspecting him of trying to rob them in some insidious way. Then he began wandering the confusing streets, the dirt tracks, the rough pitted roads, turning down blind alleys, backstreets, rutted pathways, roads that curved on themselves, following what he imagined to be the secret trail that mum took when she went hawking her meagre wares. How we wandered that day! The world seemed to be a nightmare of streets, a fiendish labyrinth of paths and cross-roads devised to drive human beings mad, calculated to get us lost. The world seemed to be composed of recently invented byways and tracks and dirt-roads created by the endless desire of human beings for shortcuts that elongate journeys, roads that start to induce their own peculiar form of dreaming on the exhausted soles of the feet. There are demons lurking underfoot in all the streets of the world that love to take men on terrifying unintended journeys. We walked that day into places that could only have been created by our own intense desire to exhaust all the routes of mum’s daily journey out of the ghetto. We suffered her secret agonies that day, staggering under the blinding glare, stepping on sharp objects, kicking stones, seeing mirages, but never seeing mum.
‘Didn’t your mother ever take you with her, eh?’ dad asked.
‘No,’ I replied.
We searched further. We wandered into the dreams lurking in all the sand-whorls, our faces dehydrated, our throats dry like leather, our eyes clogged with dust. After a long time, his voice humbler, deep with shame, dad said:
‘I didn’t know that your mother walked so much every day. Why didn’t she ever tell me that she suffered so much to sell so little, eh?’
I didn’t say anything. I don’t think he really expected an answer. After we had been conquered by fatigue, and had worn out our soles searching, we went to a kiosk and dad bought some beans and soft drinks. He had finished eating when he remembered his promise not to eat or sleep till mum forgave him, and he tried to spit out the food but it had gone inside and I was a little ashamed of him, but I ate and drank because I had made no such promises and because my eyes were throbbing and red with hunger.
We went on searching for mum through the vengeful burnished fury of the ghetto sun. By the late afternoon dad’s face was somewhat bony and darkened. Green veins were visible on his neck and forehead. His eyes were delirious. I had begun to sleepwalk in exhaustion. Dad carried me and went from house to house, describing mum to complete strangers, asking carpenters and brick-layers if they had seen a hawker like mum, and some said they had and pointed us in directions that led to creeks and clay villages; and we spent the worst part of the afternoon, when the sun most tormented the earth, wandering in dad’s frantic and heroic sadness. And when evening came, when dad began to hallucinate that he was seeing mum everywhere, I said:
‘Let’s go home.’
Dad took us back, staggering, tripping, his head bowed, as if the sadness in his mind weighed more than the monstrous loads he carried at work. When we got near our place dad put me down, saying that he could no longer bear my weight. The dust of the world rushed into my eyes. The bad smells of the street, more intense at my height, crowded my nostrils. Everything I saw drew my spirit away from the world: the poverty and the cracked huts, the naked children with sores and the young women who had accelerated in ageing, the men with raw faces and angry eyes. Dad, with his head bowed, like a giant destroyed by the sun, released a profound sigh.
We had started shuffling towards home when we heard a mocking cackle of laughter behind us. I turned and saw the old man who had been blinded by a passing angel. He had two helpers with him. He wore an ill-fitting green suit, a red cravat and a black hat. He tapped dad on the head with his walking stick. In his cracked funeral voice, he said:
‘It is terrible to care too much.’
Dad stared at him in bewilderment. The blind old man, releasing another cackle of laughter that made my eyes twitch, went on to say:
‘If you look too deeply everything breaks your heart.’
Then he was silent. Dad grabbed the old man’s cane.
‘What do you mean by that remark?’ dad wanted to know.
‘Your wife is working for Madame Koto,’ he said, and laughed again.
Dad let go of the cane. The old man brusquely signalled his helpers, and they led him up the street, towards the main road.
‘He’s talking rubbish,’ dad said.
We went home silently. And when we got to our room, with the door still open, we beheld a miraculous sight. The whole place shimmered with cleanliness. The floor had been swept, the walls scrubbed, the bed made with new sheets, the cupboard crammed with food. There was a whole bottle of ogogoro on the table. Fresh stew, excellent pounded yam and choice pieces of fried meat had been prepared. There were new cooking utensils next to the cupboard. There were new curtains over our window. The air, laced with the aroma of incense, smelt wonderfully ventilated and cool. At first we thought we had walked into someone else’s room. Then we thought we had wandered into a dream. And then we saw dad’s three-legged chair. Dad sat, and looked around in astonishment.
‘Maybe a good spirit is helping us,’ I said.