by Ben Okri
‘Managing. What else can a man do?’
Omovo saw him jerk the wrapper round his waist and rearrange it.
‘See-o, see-o,’ he whispered, nudging Omovo. ‘Those two girls near the tank think they can see my prick when I arrenge my wrapper jus now!’ He laughed and then shouted: ‘Hey, what are you lookin’ at, eh?’
The two girls self-consciously turned their heads away, picked up their buckets of water, and staggered into the street. Omovo wanted to be left alone. He yawned. The yawn accomplished nothing.
‘Why are you yawning? Tired, eh? You young people. What is it that can make a young man just starting life tired? What’s making you tired? Is it work, is it too much fuck, is it woman palaver, or what? When I was your age I did all these things from morning till night and I was never tired.’
Omovo grunted. Two women from the compound chatted past, carrying stools, and paused near the chemist’s shop. They were going to have their hair plaited. One of the kids ran behind Omovo, and another chased after him. They scurried behind the old bachelor, pulling at his wrapper, hiding underneath it, and then they ran off again. The old bachelor seethed mockingly.
‘These children sef. They want to pull off my prick, eh!’
Both of them laughed. Another compound man came outside and, seeing the chief assistant deputy bachelor, went towards him. They both became involved in a never-ending argument.
Omovo moved away, relieved. A light wind blew over the scumpool. His head tingled. The sky was strewn with clouds. The light about Alaba darkened. A few grown-up boys rode bicycles round and round the street, and jingled their bells, and chased after pariah dogs. Little girls made mock food over mock fires. They had baby dolls tied to their backs. Someone waved. Omovo straightened. It was a stocky man draped in an agbada. It was Dr Okocha. He had some signboards under his arm. Omovo went to meet him.
‘I have got you a ticket.’
‘Thank you, Dr Okocha. Thanks a lot.’
‘It’s okay. I told them that you were a good artist and people might be interested in your work.’
‘Thanks again...’
‘Anyway, the manager of the gallery wants to see your painting. So take it to him, say, tomorrow. If he doesn’t find a place on the first day maybe he will later when other works have been bought or something. Anyway, I am in a hurry. I’ve got many signboards to paint. I will see your new work at the showing, eh?’
Omovo felt the keen edge of a thrill. A joyful feeling deepened within him, then began to fill up and to expand. He felt wonderful. It was the same lightness he felt when he saw Ifi. He walked down the thronged street with the old painter. He could hear the older man’s breathing and the rustle of the threadbare agbada and the footsteps and a thousand other sounds. But they all seemed out there. He could hear other sounds within him: keen, fine, soundless sounds.
The older man began to speak. His voice quivered slightly. Omovo thought he sensed now the reason for the older man’s anxiety.
‘My son is not well. I just took him to the hospital.’
‘Sorry-o. What’s the matter with him?’
‘I don’t know. His body was like fire yesterday night. The boy is very lean, his eyes... you know... deep. So deep.’
They went on. Nothing was said for a long moment. Life bustled about them. They passed the hotel where Dr Okocha had painted the frolicsome murals.
‘So how is the wife?’
‘Well, she is fine. You know, she is pregnant and is worried about Obioco. She’s a good wife.’
The older man’s face darkened. The wrinkles deepened on his forehead. The skin of his face seemed to shrink and the flesh bulged under it. He looked strange. The evening darkened as if regulated by his sadness. Omovo felt that the dome of the sky repeated and oppressed the dome of his own head.
‘I hope Obioco will be well soon.’
‘Amen.’
Not long afterwards Omovo told the old painter that he was going back. The old painter nodded and trudged on towards his workshed. Omovo turned and picked his way back home through the debris, the thronging passers-by, and through the falling darkness.
Omovo walked away from the house, towards the fetid-green scumpool. He had felt good in his room. The room had been in a mess. He hoped nobody would steal his painting and toyed with the idea of insuring it. He thought: ‘There is nothing like having an idea and seeing it through to its manifestation.’ He was filled with the simple wonder that he had created something on the canvas that wasn’t there before. The shock and surprise still enthralled him. He thought: ‘If your own work can surprise you then you have started something worthwhile.’
He wondered if he could remember to write this down in his notebook. He doubted it. He wondered also if in completing the painting he hadn’t disturbed or dislocated something else. He had read about the dangers of this somewhere. When he couldn’t expand the thought he abandoned it.
He had passed the scumpool when a group of wild-looking men marched towards him as if they were going to pounce on him. He waited, tense. He could see himself being flung into the filthy water. But nothing happened. The men marched fiercely past as if they had a constant mission of terror to accomplish.
He recalled what Ifeyiwa had said in the backyard, near the well, when he had told her that the drawing had been lost, stolen. She stared at a bird that flew past overhead, and said: ‘Omovo, something has been stolen from all of us.’
Omovo felt that she had uttered something unintentionally profound.
‘You know, I didn’t understand the drawing,’ she said after a while.
‘It was simple. But neither did I.’ Then Omovo said: ‘Were you the person who sat outside...?’
‘Yes. I knew it was you. It was dark, and he came out to get me.’
He remembered, and then he tried to forget. Then he remembered something else. She had gasped when he had shown her the new painting. She then stared at him, and said nothing.
When he left the room he had searched the painting for a portent, an intimation of the future. He tried to read life through it. But his mind could not get beyond the images, the sickly, vibrant colours.
But through Ifeyiwa’s silence he had intuited a form, a morass, a corruption, something flowing outwards viciously, changing and being changed. He sensed then, vaguely, that the future was contained somewhere in his mind.
He stopped in his wanderings, and suddenly decided to go back home.
5
He obtained permission from his office manager on Friday to present his painting at the gallery. The Ebony Gallery was situated in Yaba. The roads there were well tarred, and the tarmac tinselled with illusions in the early afternoon heat. Palm trees, swaying, lined the road. Their shadows stretched across to houses opposite. Women retailing wares sat under these shadows. When any person went past they roused themselves and chanted their wares.
The Ebony Gallery had a large signboard with a painting of a Benin sculpture as its emblem. The building was two-storeyed, American-style, with a porch. It was painted black. The windowpanes were white and some of the windows were frosted. At the reception desk an excessively bleached young girl told Omovo to wait while she talked to the gallery manager. She spoke with a sickly English accent. A few moments later he was told to go in.
The gallery manager was a tall man. He swayed as he got up to shake hands with Omovo. His hand was bony, his arms hairy, and his neck was rather long. He had on a pair of black trousers, and a black silk shirt. A gold cross hung round his neck. His face was obscured by his neatly cropped black beard. He wore dark glasses and Omovo could only make out the dull obliqueness of his eyes. He sweated relentlessly and dabbed himself with a saturated white handkerchief, in spite of the fact that an air conditioner groaned sonorously in the pine-smelling office. His movements were nervous, but he was very alert. He spoke with painful slowness, as if every word was wrenched from him like a bad tooth.
‘Okocha told my assistant about you.’
Omovo nodded, and then looked around. A wall gecko vanished behind the sculpture of a Yoruba chief. Then it fled up the wall and ducked behind a flapping poster of an African Arts festival. Omovo thought: ‘This is a zoo.’
‘Is that your work?’
Omovo nodded again. Outside, through the window, Omovo saw a woman selling roasted groundnuts. Somebody stopped her and bought some. Omovo’s mouth watered.
‘Can I see it, please?’
Omovo nodded again. He was for a moment aware that he was playing an obscure part in a silent drama. A wall gecko, smaller than the one he had just seen, did a cross-country across the black wall. Then it stopped. Its stillness was perilous: a fly hovered in the air. A tongue shot out. And missed. Another stillness. The fly jetted across the ceiling. The wall gecko somersaulted and hit the ground. Then it scurried out of sight. It turned out to be a serrated lizard.
He carried the painting over to the gallery manager, who pushed back his chair, balanced the painting straight up on the mahogany table, and studied it.
For a moment nothing happened. Omovo listened to the manager’s laboured breathing. A telephone jangled somewhere in the building. The air conditioner groaned, changed gear, purred, and then groaned even louder. Omovo’s heart seemed to stop beating. He shut his eyes. Darkness fell over him. And he thought: ‘An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness.’ He took a deep breath and slowly exhaled, the way he had learnt long ago when he practised yoga.
The manager went: ‘Emmmmmm. Interesting.’
Omovo’s heart beat erratically.
The manager paused, looked out of the window, and again went: ‘Emmmmmm. Very interesting.’
For the first time Omovo became aware of the photographs of terracotta images, and the sculpted heads of African children: negritude in ebony. They all seemed to glare down reproachfully at him from the walls. He looked at the crowding presences and the question skimmed his mind: ‘Are you all dead?’
‘Yes. It is decidedly... yes, interesting. A vanishing scum-scape...’ said the manager, studying Omovo over the painting. Omovo felt uncomfortable.
‘Is this a... a...?’
Omovo felt he should help him. The drawn-out words stretched his nerves.
‘Yes. It is a painting.’
The manager knifed him with a glare. ‘Yes. A painting. I knew that. Are you a... a...?’
‘Well, eh, I work at...’
‘Yes, of course. I know. Yes.’
Omovo felt dislocated. The whole turn of the dialogue had a mind-prising aspect. He wondered if the manager was an artist himself or if he was a university man. He looked quite learned.
‘What... eh... I mean... what... eh, made you paint... it?’
If the very air had turned into a giant serrated lizard and proceeded to grab him by the collar, Omovo couldn’t have been more surprised.
‘I just painted it. That’s all.’
‘Well! Will you let me be with... it a... whole day? I need to absorb its... its... qua... lities. The best... li... li... ghting and po... po-sition.’
‘Sure. Okay. You mean you would like to...?’
‘Yes.’ It came out like a repressed sneeze.
They both sat there opposite one another. Between them was the table on which were bits of paper, black ballpens, a copy of Ousmane’s God’s Bits of Wood, the serviette of a palm-wine restaurant, and a large diary. And there was this silence. Omovo wondered what had happened to all the sounds. He decided it was time to go back to the office.
The manager began to inhale some snuff. And then he sneezed again.
‘Yes. When some of the works have been bought we will display yours. It is a good work. And yes, emmmmmm. Let me also tell you that a celebrity from the army will be present to grace the occasion. Well. That’s that, then.’ Where was all the stammering and the nervously drawn-out words?
‘Artists have always had an effect on me. I stammer when I see their works. So.’
Omovo scented an anti-climax. He had been right. It had been a silent drama, and the manager had been acting all along.
He said goodbye. The manager grinned, then sneezed as if he meant it, and then asked: ‘Shaving your head, was that a... a...?’
Omovo let him finish.
‘...a... gimmick, an artist’s trick for getting attention?’
Omovo turned and walked out of the office. He heard a quiet, self-satisfied rumble behind him. As he left, the last spectacle he witnessed was a lizard doing a futile cross-country across the poster of a sculpture of an old African chief.
The anaemic receptionist smiled secretly when he fled past. Out in the street, in the colourless glare of sunlight, he looked back. He discerned a black curtain drop. He wondered why things seemed to be repeating themselves.
He made his way through the dappled shadows of tall, gently dissenting palm trees and ignored the throng of tired eager women who exhorted him to buy their wonderful wares. He returned to the office, to the chores, to the scheming hanging ghosts, and to the pressures of self-imposing customers.
When he went to the showing on Saturday the bleached receptionist wasn’t at her desk. The whole place reverberated with a ceaseless stream of murmurs, shouted conversations, steamed speeches, clinking glasses, throaty monologues, and octaves of borrowed accents. Walton’s ‘Belshazzar’s Feast’ raged in the background.
He felt lost in the dense crowd. A child screamed somewhere in the centre of the collective clamour. He pushed his way through fat women, spitting women, pretty women, tall bearded men, nondescript men, stammering men, through stinging sweat smells, fresh perfumes, jaded aftershaves, mingled odours. Drinks were spilt, conversations went round the same groove, text-book theories on the derivations and healthiness of modern African art were flung about like mind traps. And the child in the dead centre screamed even louder.
On the black walls there were paintings, small framed canvases, large etchings, gouaches, pastiches, cloth-bead works, cartoons. There were caricatures of the white man’s first arrivals. Some of the images were the usual ones of the white missionary armed with Bible, mirror and gun. Others were grotesque, surreal representations. There were paintings affirming national unity; various tribespeople drinking palm wine together and smiling broadly. Paintings depicting traditional scenes: women eating mangoes, women with children on their backs, women pounding yams, children playing, men wrestling, men eating. Omovo saw Dr Okocha’s two paintings and he felt that they had lost a certain desperate quality by being stuck side by side, unimaginatively, with the others.
Art theories stung Omovo’s ears. The many mouths talking sprayed saliva at his face. Words assaulted him till he screamed implosively. He passed Dr Okocha’s painting of the wrestler. It looked forlorn, gross and robbed of vitality. Omovo fled from it by dipping into the crowd. He sweated viciously. He raised a hand to wipe the beads of sweat from his forehead and in the process dragged up a woman’s skirt. The woman shrieked: ‘Hey! Someone is raping me-o!’ The crowd rumbled with laughter.
Someone shouted: ‘Picasso’s forefinger.’
Someone else shouted: ‘Joyce Cary’s mischievous painter!’
Omovo mumbled. His finger felt sticky. The child still howled in the centre of the showing.
And then something caught his interest. It was a riotous painting of two skeletons. Their faces were hollow. They had deep white blotches for eyes. A mirror of a river forked many ways behind them. A white bird circled over them. There was a golden sky all around. The work fascinated him. It was entitled: ‘Hommes vides.’ Omovo looked at the credentials of the painter: ‘A. G. Agafor. Exhibited internationally. Studied in Nigeria, London, Paris, New York, India.’
A clean-shaven man came up to him. ‘Do you like the work? It explodes in the brain with visual impacts of predominant red. I think Mr Agafor is something of a pioneer in giving visual lacerations to apocalyptic motifs…’
Omovo, irritated, murmured: ‘Artists long before the first illustrations of Dante have been
doing it.’
‘But the first Nigerian... Not really, but...’
Another man, with dark blue glasses, jostled them. ‘I say...’
Omovo ducked. Words bashed his ears. Confused, he wondered where his painting was. Walton’s ‘Belshazzar’s Feast’ raged in the background as if someone had maliciously increased the volume of the invisible stereo. When Omovo saw his work he gasped. He saw his own painting, for the first time, with the eyes of a stranger. It was right beside another painting of an agbada-draped Yoruba man. The snot-coloured scumpool looked as if it had been done by scouring the canvas on the slimy walls of the bathroom at home. It seemed obscene and badly executed. His first impulse was to fling away the blasted people who were analysing it, and rip the shameful work to shreds. He stood there glaring, and he hated the work as much as he momentarily hated himself. Contractile waves of nausea swept through him, the child screamed inside his head, and he shouted: ‘It’s fucking useless...’
Then the screaming stopped. Distorted faces and old eyes stared at him close up. The crowd pressed on him and breathed on his face. He sensed menace.
Someone laughed and shouted: ‘Gimsey’s broken tonsils.’
A woman whose face he vaguely recognised said: ‘Van Gogh’s roasted ears.’
Omovo broke down and cried. Something felt wrong inside him. Conversations were resumed, people went back to the circularity of their arguments, and he felt he was going to suffocate from the sheer density of mingled smells in the hall. And then someone came out from the crowd, touched him on the shoulder, and said:
‘Hey, Omovo. What’s the matter?’
Omovo looked up. Through a swollen teardrop the face was like something seen in a drunken stupor. Tears broke loose and raced down his face. Omovo turned away and quickly wiped them off. It was many minutes before he could find his voice.
‘Hi, Keme. It’s good to see you,’ he said eventually. He glanced at the painting. ‘Keme, look, let’s leave this sector.’
‘Okay. But are you all right?’
‘Yes.’
‘I saw your painting. It’s strange and well done. Really.’
