Songs of Enchantment (20 page)

While we worked he would sit in our midst, with a bottle of ogogoro on a small table next to him, and he would draw out old melodies from his trusted accordion. He played us work songs, folk songs, and songs that accompanied heroes through their tribulations and their momentous journeys. It came as a surprise to us that he could play so beautifully, or that he played any music at all in the midst of our troubles. He played with great feeling. Yellow tears rolled down his face as he squeezed out solemn funereal music that seemed to have travelled across to us from the unrecorded centuries. He stirred old feelings in us, but we did not warm to him. His music threw a bridge from his weird nature to our wrecked lives. From the hidden depths of his feelings, the beating core of music that contained the compressed intimations of struggles without end, we glimpsed something quite disturbing beneath his new guise. He confused us. He had appeared in many manifestations, as a bull with multiple horns, as sorcerer of the elements, but now his features looked softer and gentler. The bitterness that had encased his aged crumpled face seemed to have dissolved. He looked more like us. He looked nice and trustworthy, even normal, even warm. Moved by his own music, which seemed to make him feel more deeply the wretchedness of our lives, he dabbed his yellow tears with a white handkerchief. His harshness was gone. His voice had lost some of its vile cackle. It was as if in unleashing so much evil he had become almost good; as if in expending so much of his dark transformative energies, he had lost the ferocity of his poisons.

E
VERYTHING WAS CHANGING,
the face of the world seemed an endless series of masks, and we did not know what to believe. We heard that Madame Koto had lost weight, and was now so beautiful that men were leaving their young wives to follow her around slavishly. We didn’t know if these were stories manufactured from hallucinations, because for a long time not one of us had set eyes on the fabulous Madame Koto. The only time we saw her was when she invaded our dreams with waves of her mythology.

And then one day, as our labours brought some normality back to the area, she appeared to us. It was a bright afternoon and we saw her resplendent in a red dress, with sequins in her netted hair. Madame Koto seemed like an absentee monarch who had returned suddenly to re-assure her subjects. She appeared to us briefly, full of smiles, beautiful in an oiled ripeness, like the grasshopper in the fire, growing more radiant and stunning as her destruction drew closer. She had indeed lost some weight, but her stomach was still massive with her abnormal pregnancy. Her foot, also, was still swollen. She had a white walking stick and she hobbled amongst us, full of commiserations, promising that her party would do everything in their power to help us in our plight.

She came to our house, and when I saw her I ran inside. She frightened me with her new beauty. Her transformation
made me more scared of her than ever before. Her smile revealed an ivory-white set of teeth. The skin had shrunken round her neck. Her face was robust in health, and it seemed to me that her destiny was invading her, filling her with sensual beauty, enriching her skin.

She didn’t come into our room. She sent a message instead. Dad went out and talked with her briefly. And when she left all the children followed her in silence, magnetised by her new appearance. And we would have followed her all the way to her bar if a cross-eyed man hadn’t emerged from the forest ringing a bell and uttering the direst warnings. He was like a possessed town-crier and when he shouted his warnings Madame Koto hurried on, losing some of her dignity, afraid, it seemed, of the man’s stinging prophecies to the community. He had a harsh voice and he came between us and Madame Koto. He was striking in his long white robe, with a red cloth tied round his head. I recognised him as the herbalist who had once prayed over Madame Koto’s car and who, in a moment of drunken intuition, had gone on to prophesy that the car would become a coffin. Relentlessly, in his scratched voice, he warned us to beware of those who grow beautiful on the milk of young women, of those who extend their lives in the night. He warned us not to trust any of the parties, saying they would sell us to the world for their own purposes.

‘Return to the old ways!’ he cried. ‘Return to the ways of our ancestors! Take what is good from our own way and adapt it to the new times! Don’t follow these witches and wizards. Watch them carefully. Watch these powerful people with all your eyes!’ he shouted, ringing his bell, destroying the magnetic pull Madame Koto exerted on us with her sequins and her moonstones.

‘WHEN A PERSON’S FAME REACHES ITS GREATEST AND STRANGEST HEIGHT,’ he bellowed, ‘VACATE THE SCENE BELOW, FOR THERE MIGHT SOON BE A GREAT CRASH!’

On and on he went, breaking into coded prophecies,
speaking of rainbows and the dying forest, national confusion and death and war, dire things lying in wait on the roads of our future.

And when Madame Koto neared her bar the herbalist turned to us and, furiously ringing his bell as if it were a magic instrument of fear, he chased us back down the street, hitting us roughly, kicking sand at us, shooing us away as if we were so many chickens. We scattered in every direction, surprised at the herbalist’s ferocity. I fled to our room, screaming. I stayed in till I no longer heard his bell, and when I went out tentatively, to see what he would do next, it came as no surprise to me to find that he had vanished.

Soon after Madame Koto’s reappearance three trucks came down our street and distributed powdered milk, flour and bags of garri to the different houses. They were from the Party of the Rich. They brought workmen to help with the broken houses, carpenters for the roofs and shacks, axemen to chop up the fallen trees, trucks of sand to fill up the pits in the road. They also distributed leaflets about the forthcoming elections. They presented themselves as the good party, as the organisation that cared for the poor, for communal well-being, and for the country. At first we were suspicious of their loaves of bread, bags of rice, and bundles of dried fish. Some of us were so suspicious that we attacked their vehicles and their drivers. But the party persisted; they made new promises over their loudspeakers; and they continued to bring gifts in spite of our resistance. We were so hungry as a result of the catastrophes, and most families had earned very little during the upheavals, that we began to accept their well-timed gifts. There were those amongst us who urged remembrance of the time of the poisoned milk. But our hunger was more insistent than our memories. One by one we went to the political trucks with outstretched basins.

Dad forbade us having anything to do with the spurious kindness of our former poisoners. He said he would resume
work and feed us with his own hands. In the afternoons we watched the re-fragmentation of our community. We noticed that those who accepted the gifts were converted after they had eaten the dried fish and rice and garri. We noticed also that they suffered no after-effects. There were no illnesses and no one complained of poisoning. People began to give the party the benefit of the doubt. Those who did certainly benefited themselves. The lorries returned with more provisions, more help, and they concentrated at first on the new converts. Those of us who doubted watched in silence as the houses of the converts were quickly repaired, as their children received fine clothes. We watched as they ate and drank and regained something of their former well-being. There were times when we felt foolish at having excluded ourselves.

For a while the night-runners were silent. For a while no curfews were unleashed on us in a rash of feverish voices. Masks temporarily stopped invading the night. The Jackal-headed Masquerade didn’t ride through our night-spaces on its white horse. We no longer had dreams of Madame Koto pressing down on lives, sucking in our vitality and will. We no longer had visions of the blind old man and his infernal transformations. If anything we began to dream of them as draped in white robes; we saw them as our saviours, our friends. In dreams they smiled at us, they made our lives secure, they policed the realms in which fear and frustration ate up our hopes, they manifested themselves as the powerful ones who could protect us from our worst enemies, and who would fight by our sides in all our battles.

O
N ANOTHER DAY,
Madame Koto appeared to us again. She had seven umbrellas held over her by seven women. It wasn’t raining. The sun was bright and the sky was clear. After this brief appearance, which was communicated to all of us by word of mouth, she retreated to her bar and pulled our spirits with a poignant music which was new to our ears. Her appearance seemed designed to make it clear that she was a solid force and that for her a crash would never happen. She seemed destined to rule the fears of men, and to weather all the madness of great heights, like most people of power, to a celebrated old age.

That same afternoon her driver was sent to deliver provisions to us all. He drove up and down the street like a demented clown, his cap askew, dumping fresh fish and rice at our compound-fronts, hurling small bags of crayfish and prawns at us with an unmistakable contempt, the contempt which the party leaders tried to conceal. It is odd how servants always reveal the secret intentions and true feelings of their masters. We couldn’t read these feelings at the time, but when the driver rode roughly amongst us the mutterings began to grow. And it was only when he knocked over one of the carpenters that a delegation, with dad among them, plucked up the courage to confront Madame Koto with their complaints. They couldn’t get an audience. She asked them to pass their message through one of the women
in the bar. They did, and she replied that she would scold the driver. He was prevented from using the car for a while. Later, we saw him staggering around the street, drunk, swearing and threatening us for nearly getting him sacked.

I
T IS HARD
to say what made so many of us new converts to Madame Koto’s way. The ranks of the Party swelled and people who had suffered together during the long nights of the storms and earthquakes now became hostile to one another. The Party gained an enormous following, and every day the supporters converged outside Madame Koto’s bar chanting Party songs. We saw their lives improve visibly.

It may have been the sweet music from the bar which drew us to her. The music spoke of flowers and scented rain, of an ordered life blessed with wealth. The music filled the space where something else had been.

For many weeks after the upheavals dad told no stories, there was no music in our lives, and the forest was silent. At first we didn’t notice the silence. Then we were sad at the absence of the sweet female voices that sang so passionately of another way. The silence seemed to last for ever and we no longer heard people talking about white antelopes in the forest, or about jewelled eyes among the trees in the dark. The silence lasted so long and seemed so final that we began, slowly, to forget that the voices had ever been real. They too seemed like things manufactured during our hallucinations. The upheavals and the storming of our minds had the effect of making us doubt our memory. And because we doubted, we forgot. And because we forgot, we were ready for the turning of a new cycle.

The only music in our lives came from Madame Koto’s bar. And as it didn’t seem malignant – full, as it was, of an indecipherable sweetness – we went there in greater numbers, to drink, to eat, and to celebrate the public birth of a new force in politics.

O
N THE AFTERNOON
that I set out to the bar with dad, it came as a surprise to find that the Jackal-headed Masquerade had disappeared. In its place was a ladder which had been thrust into the earth and which stood without support. The ladder climbed into the open sky, a sign which hid its own meaning. We were so taken aback with the disappearance of the Masquerade that dad didn’t want to go into the bar. Its absence confused everyone.

It was only when night fell, and when the wind whistled over the earth without menace, that a sinister thought occurred to me. The Masquerade had gone, but it had entered a higher level of reality, penetrated our fabric, and permeated the wind. It began to be the only explanation for things which puzzled us and which ultimately controlled our behaviour towards the party and towards one another. The invisible Masquerade became our secret censor; it became the eyes of harmless-looking butterflies; it seemed to invest its spying spirit into lizards and moths; it whispered to us of the right ways of doing things; it made us reasonable in ways that made us more powerless. And without knowing it we surrendered ourselves to its directives. The Masquerade became more powerful and fearful for being invisible, for it now seemed to be everywhere, existing in the corners of our eyes, in the margins of our
vision, vanishing when we turned to look at its censoring manifestation.

Those who opposed the party, or who spoke ill of it, and suffered inexplicable pains, whose children fell to vomiting, who became temporarily blind, seemed to prove to us the greater powers of the invisible Masquerade. Every illness, every fever, every failure in endeavour, the rain flooding our rooms, children who accidentally cut themselves on glass, men who raved for two hours and returned to a stunned normality, convinced us that we were surrounded by an implacable force. And because we could not see what it was to which we attributed so much power, we feared it even more, and built it up into something which could not be defied.

Under the relentless wind of this new fear, dad was silent most of the time, pondering his strange philosophies, breaking occasionally into interpretations of the fragments he had brought back from his dream. But no one listened to him any more. As everyone else seemed to grow more healthy, mum grew listless. Her eyes were dull, her movements sluggish, and she became lean. She performed her tasks with a sleep-walking lassitude. Meanwhile, the area celebrated. The elections drew closer. And the preparations for the endlessly postponed rally resumed greater intensity.