by Wole Soyinka
He now cut off the beaming welcome abruptly and selected a xeroxed graph, passed it on to Ofeyi.
Ofeyi examined the graph. He had begun to wonder if he had not made a mistake in changing his own plans of non-participation in the get-together. But the transformation of the Commandant’s personal representative—Ofeyi had recognized him at once—into the Cartel’s Trouble-shooter had intrigued him. After thrusting his letter of resignation into the hands of the Secretary he had succumbed to a curiosity about the real status of the Trouble-shooter. Now he wondered if he had not willingly walked into a trap. He fiddled with the graph and waited.
The Trouble-shooter continued. “The graph represents, you might say, one of the credit sheets in your balance book”—he grinned and looked around the table—“if I may borrow a metaphor with which everyone here would be very familiar. It shows the sharp decline in promotion expenditure since you took over the cocoa campaign for the Corporation. I understand that you cut down on many redundant posts and even undertook the writing of copy yourself, without extra remuneration. Naturally, what with throwing so many people out of the enjoyment of virtual sinecures, you were bound to make some enemies. Human nature, we all understand it. This is why we were disposed to discount for so long those sinister reports which began to come in on your activities….”
Ofeyi broke his silence. “If I may make a suggestion, just to cut short the proceedings…”
“One moment Mr. Ofeyi. I am conducting this enquiry and I understand all about procedure and I can assure you also that I have no interest in prolonging the session one second longer than absolutely necessary.”
Seated next to the speaker, the Chairman grudgingly admitted that this handling of Ofeyi, whom he regarded as the most devious employee he had ever encountered, was masterly. The Cartel-Cabinet representative continued:
“I have brought out these details merely to assure you that we do possess a full record of your campaign activities throughout the country, some of them very very dubious indeed. And I think it my duty to let you know why we have ignored most of these reports up till now. The results were positive and what we wanted was positive results. The country became cocoa-conscious, thanks to your drive. We no longer had to rely on foreign markets to dictate their own price to us. We have now built up a remarkable internal market for the first time in our cocoa-growing history.” He paused, fished out a few more graphs and passed them to Ofeyi. “You may like to look at those also Mr. Ofeyi. In them you will find confirmation of everything I have just said.”
Ofeyi waved them away, handed back the first graph also. “It’s not necessary. We all know the entire history of Cocoa-bix and Cocoa-wix.”
The Trouble-shooter shook his head. “I wonder Mr. Ofeyi whether you really do. I wonder whether you know the real extent of the multi-million industry which has developed from the hundred and one cocoa products in the country and the other hundred which are being developed even at this very moment.”
“I do. I even know where all the profits go. What we don’t know is where the workers disappear to, the so-called agitators.”
An expletive, hastily swallowed and turned into a racking cough by the Chairman was followed by the long silence. The Trouble-shooter leant back in his chair and tapped the side of his nose with a pencil in a gesture which he had copied and developed for moments when he needed to rethink his tactics. In a quarter of a minute he had made up his mind and, smiling thinly demanded:
“Perhaps Mr. Ofeyi, this enquiry will prove even short enough to satisfy you. So let me ask you one question straightaway. Are you also—to use your own expression—an agitator?”
“No.”
“No. Of course not. Nobody ever admits that they are trouble-makers. Let me put it another way then. Are you a communist? Or a Marxist? Or do you just call yourself a socialist?”
“I have read Marx…”
The Trouble-shooter snapped, “So have I Mr. Ofeyi so don’t let us beat around the bush.”
They stared at each other in silence for some moments. “If you must know, I disapprove of foisting cocoa-flavoured sawdust on the…”
The Chairman broke his self-imposed restraint, exploded; “What was that, young man? Who is foisting what sawdust on who?”
“Cocoa-wix and cocoa-bix. Not to mention cocoadine which does not fulfil a single one of the hundred benefits it is supposed to confer on human health.”
The Trouble-shooter turned down a corner of his lip in his best derisive manner. “I know that you are supposed to be a genius in promotion ideas Mr. Ofeyi. I’ve heard some of your songs myself, very catchy tunes indeed. I was not however aware that your talents extended to dietetics or pharmacy.”
“No they don’t” Ofeyi admitted. “But surely you must realize that I have taken the trouble to consult experts on the subject. They conducted the tests and their reports uniformly say…”
The Cartel spokesman banged his fist on the table. “And I must remind you that we also have our analysts, chosen and approved by the Government ministry. And we choose to accept their report rather than that of some disgruntled backroom chemist whose qualifications were probably obtained in Moscow!”
There was another pause, then Ofeyi commented, “You keep saying ‘we’ I notice. May I ask why? I thought this matter only involved a private concern—the Cocoa Corporation. Aren’t you here simply as a government—er—moderator in an industrial dispute between employee and employer? Or are there other matters you wish to bring up?”
At the end of the longest silence yet, the Trouble-shooter began to replace his papers in the files. He did not look at Ofeyi again but turned to the Secretary at the end of the table.
“The enquiry is over. The Co-ordinator may leave now.”
Ofeyi stood up, pointed in the direction of the Secretary’s pile of papers and said, “The Secretary has my resignation.” Then he turned to go, but not towards the door which the Secretary held open as wide as his mouth. He stared at Ofeyi who was headed in the opposite direction, waved his hand in protest but got no further than a prolonged stammer.
Suddenly the placidity of the room was broken as the Secretary rushed back to the table to fetch the letter while the Chairman sat up in his chair, spluttering with more astonishment than indignation at Ofeyi’s retreating back. The Trouble-shooter misunderstood the cause of his distress and wondered why such a fuss should be made over a gesture that was predictable and typical of such stereotypes as Ofeyi. But the Director finally found his tongue.
“You can’t go in there my friend. Use the main door over there.”
Ofeyi already had his hand on the door leading into the boardroom. “If you have no objection I’ll use this exit today.”
“Stop!” The new order came from the Trouble-shooter. Ofeyi ignored this also and vanished.
And now it was the turn of the Cartel Inquisitor to betray signs of dementia. He leapt from his chair and dashed round the table, ran through the main door and out. They heard his studded boots clattering down the stairs, his voice, thundering across the empty hall below:
“Captain! Captain!”
The rest of the table, already moderately alert by the unusual shape of the meeting sprang up in alarm and demanded to know what was going on and was there going to be shooting?
An officer accompanied by a private with a submachine gun burst into the room and demanded, “Which of you is the Secretary?”
Eight pairs of hands pointed instantly to the cowering man. The soldier swung the gun round at him while the officer shouted, “Show me the back door!”
The Secretary rasped out a yessir and shot through the door which Ofeyi had used. They heard him repeating “yessir, yessir, yessir” all through the lengthy boardroom and out through the other door. Comprehending at last, the Chairman recovered his poise, reflected how thorough the Cartel continued to be and took consolation
from the fact. The Trouble-shooter raced in, shot out again through the boardroom after the two soldiers. The Chairman assumed a new, contented pose, sighed:
“They’ll get him yet.”
* * *
—
A poster stared him in the face: WAKE UP WITH THE COCOA COMPLEXION. He felt sick at his handiwork. Worst of all was Iriyise’s figure on it emerging three-quarter nude from the wraps of sleep. His fingers automatically searched in his pockets for those strips of paper which he had taken to carrying about for pasting over the last four words, leaving a truncated message for an interpretation of subversive suggestiveness. The voice of the Personnel Director mocked him from earlier confrontations:
“I knew we had chosen the right man for the job and you can ask anyone on this table and he will tell you the same. We wanted fine fine film in technicolor telling the people what a fine fine crop this cocoa is. Fine fine women dancing to fine fine music. Fine fine happy family round the table in every fine fine home. Already you have made cocoa the sine qua whatever you call it in every family. Even my wife wakes me up every morning nowadays with a steaming cup in her hand and she sings: Wake up with the Cocoa Complexion and go and make us some money ha ha….”
Grumbling to Ahime over what he felt was a prostitution of his talents, he could only rouse the man to a shrug. “Food is sacred” he would say. “Cocoa is food.”
“Is cocoa-wix food?” Ofeyi demanded in turn. “A craving is being created for this and other cocoa-flavoured sawdust. What the farmer earns the Cartel takes back in return for sawdust!”
Glancing back at the poster again he thought how Iriyise was like the food he ate and, in some measure, grown. The only brightness in a long progression of compromises. He headed for her apartment. Not that the Corporation spies would not think of looking there but Iriyise occupied a cell in a deep hive which had a practised history of the Early Warning System. The utmost exertion that he might be forced to make, if a persistent party did find its way there, would be a short walk through gloomy corridors and urine-drained courtyards to another comb until that danger was past. And Iriyise was Queen Bee of the hive. Within it he remained immune, protected by a maze of signals and burrows created by the worker ants.
A nauseating leer rose before him. It belonged again to the fat figure of the Personnel Director: “Ah yes we do know that you have been combining business with pleasure, but do we blame you for it Mr. Ofeyi? Do we accuse you of nepotism? No we don’t. Because the result is what matters to hard-headed businessmen like us. Results Mr. Ofeyi, results! Who in his right mind would deny that in your whole country-wide search you could never have come up with a better choice of a Cocoa Princess? The public acknowledge it everywhere so who cares what private relations go on between you and the greatest asset of the Corporation. The point is, we don’t then accuse you of nepotism do we? I mean to say Mr. Ofeyi, when I think of the things you have been accusing us of! Accusing fine fine people like the honourable members of the Board of Directors seated around this table…!”
Gaining the outer precincts of the hive within which Iriyise lived, his steps became a little jauntier. He began to hum one of the songs which even the ardent hounds of the Cartel had failed to sniff out in time and, afterwards, could not eliminate. It acquired instant conquest as much by its brisk, aggressive rhythm as by its memorable tune. He jigged across the gutter from side to side, trying to boost his apprehensive spirits by the cheerful melody. In his head Zaccheus and his Cocoa Beans orchestra roared into accompaniment.
Who’s the friend of the cocoa farmer?
Insecticide!
What is the fate of parasites?
Fumigate!
Swollen shoot’s like a swollen belly
Eats you dry and gives you hell-y
Fouls the earth and makes it smelly
Burn them out!
“Why swollen shoot Mr. Ofeyi? We eradicated the swollen shoot ages ago. There is no more swollen shoot on the entire west coast, none whatever. The World Health Organization itself declared this coast swollen shoot free, so why panic the poor farmer unnecessarily?”
A mere metaphor, Ofeyi reassured the Board. Swollen shoot is now common currency for any kind of parasite which plagues the farmer.
“Really Mr. Ofeyi?”
What’s the might of the cocoa farmer?
Matchet and hoe!
What’s the cure for weeds and nettles?
Uproot entire!
Root out the climbers and rotten creepers
They don’t-sow-nothing but ardent reapers
Till harvest time they’re heavy sleepers
Root them out!
“And this other verse Mr. Ofeyi? There are suggestions that…”
He came through a passage between two high fencing walls so narrow that an encounter with an oncomer could only be negotiated sideways. The short passage opened into an exposed courtyard, the only area of potential danger in the hive. Ofeyi paused, scanned the washing-line. The pair of brassieres that hung next to a bamboo support was a familiar black-laced one. He counted the clips that held it in place: three. Ofeyi stepped boldly into the yard, whistling the same tune, loudly.
V
On the day, the Final Day of that public airing of flesh, reconditioned wrinkles, artificial spots, deodorated pores, lightening creams and obituary scalps—thus Zaccheus christened wigs—on that day of breastful optimism, the favourite was missing. No ordinary favourite but, the only justification—so wrote Spyhole—the first and only justification he had ever accepted for the most degrading exhibition on earth. Yet even Spyhole, after years of lacerating contempt poured from his yellow columns on such “travesties of black womanhood,” even Spyhole had caught the fever. And this began from the early eliminations, and into the semi-finals.
“I still insist” he shrieked, “why must we ape this white charade!” But his voice was thinner than usual. Now it grew shrill with a genuine alarm that came from knowledge of the seamy world which it was his vocation to burrow through, to feast with the maggots and acquire a carapace as the dung beetle, demanding, “Where is Celestial?”
No warning. No reason. The “Celestial Certainty” had vanished. A show for which he had, deeply, nothing but contempt had turned foul and sinister.
He mourned her in his columns, bordered his page in thin black lines and pronounced the beauty contest dead. He rose to heights of his lyric journalese wailing, Where is that Iridescent face that lit us through the abyss of universal ugliness? Beneath the sweet-sad face of the missing queen he placed the caption—A Celestial Certainty!
Garage touts, tycoons, secretive civil servants, diplomats and shopkeepers mouthed the single question—Where is Iridescent? Doormen, newsvendors, thugs, market women, street pedlars, colonels, smugglers, catechists, highway robbers and students shook their heads and said there was dirty business about. They all turned to Spyhole. He had created her so to speak because he had first drawn attention to her and he was the avowed misogynist. His columns, witty and sensational, banal but sensational, predictable but sensational first and last wrote the sentences that founded the myth. I despise women, he wrote, it is my duty to despise women for what they are, but I finally met a woman that wasn’t a woman. When she vanished he swore to his readers that he would get to the bottom of her mystery though he had failed to get to her fascinating bottom. At the next bar which he entered to slake his journalistic thirst he was set upon and roughed up by three students. Celestial was not a subject for lewd cracks.
And then, just as suddenly, Iriyise reappeared. No explanation offered, no betrayal of knowledge of any fuss that surrounded her disappearence. Where were you Iriyise, but she would only reply, I’m back. She accepted her habitual homage, continued to hush hotel foyers with her appearance and drove diplomats to indiscretions.
“But where were you Iriyise
?”
Once in a while she unleashed the caged tigress in her at some trivial or imagined provocation, engaging the riot squad and fire brigade in a night-long siege which ended only when, on the stairway or on the lavatory bowl or even in bed she fell suddenly, immortally asleep. It was the Brigade who named her Firebrand. And the name was taken up and absorbed into the lyric repertoire of her legend.
“Where were you?”
She raised herself on an elbow and looked down on Ofeyi. She had not expected his insistence. “You are a funny one. All you men…! After all this time…”
“Where were you? And I am not men.”
“But you want to know don’t you? You all do.”
“Tell me where you were.”
“The sun came up and I vanished like the dew.”
“I acknowledge that you are a good pupil, but answer my question.”
“I was living up to my name.”
“Forget the dew on the feet, answer my question!”
“And dew turning back, fading away…”
Ofeyi sighed. “I confess I have sometimes allowed myself to get carried away by your exceedingly euphonious name but…”
She shook her head suddenly in his face and he felt warm drops of moisture. “And that is a few dewdrops of malaria to keep you quiet.” The effort exhausted her and she sank back again.
“You are wet all over. Is this the same Firebrand from which flying sparks ignite dead flesh?”
“I think I am ill” she conceded.
Ofeyi nested her head in his armpit and coiled her sweat-lathered body into his, her knees tucked into his groin. Something made her shiver and Ofeyi sensed it was beyond her malaria chill. Even so it took some moments for him to make sense of her next words:
