Season of Anomy

by Wole Soyinka

  “So you never did take my advice.”

  “No. And you haven’t taken mine either.”

  “True. But who is in trouble now? Is it me or you?”

  Jolted, Ofeyi asked, “Trouble? What trouble?”

  She put her arm through his and began to lead him to her apartment. “Ofeyi, all these childish pranks you’ve been playing, do you think they are not known? It makes my father very sad. He had hoped you would think things over on your study leave.”

  He waited. Given time she would grow still more voluble, reveal every detail of whatever reports had been blown towards this ear of the Cartel. She rattled on, “I don’t know what you hope to gain by it except to get yourself hurt. If you knew how much time my father has spent defending you! He insists you are merely misled by keeping bad company. The others wanted to get quite drastic with you. Anyway, I’m glad you’ve come. You know he’ll do anything to get you out of the mess. You could go on another tour.”

  She guided them onto a purple settee then recalled that Ofeyi’s companion had not been introduced. Ofeyi pointed out that she had not given him a chance to open his mouth, introduced the Dentist. She laughed, pressed a bell and a white-jacketed steward arrived, disappeared again at a wordless order.

  “You will both drink champagne won’t you. Ofeyi hasn’t been to see us for over a year so it calls for celebration. What does your friend do?”

  “Nothing yet” the Dentist replied. “I’ve just returned to the country. I was studying in the States.”

  “What was your study?”

  “Dentistry” he answered recklessly. But it struck no chord in Biye. Not a flicker in her eyes connected his profession with the notorious legend of the Dentist.

  “Well, if you are looking for a post my father will be glad to do all he can since you are Ofeyi’s friend. But I hope you don’t think like him.”

  The Dentist smiled. “No. I’m afraid our politics differ somewhat.”

  She could not contain her delight. “Oh that is good, very good. I am glad to hear it. Perhaps you can exercise some influence on him. He is rapidly turning communist.”

  “Oh I wouldn’t say that,” the Dentist replied.

  “Or anarchist. I think that is even more accurate.”

  Ofeyi asked, “Is that what your father now calls me?”

  She flared up at once. “You never stop thinking of me as a child do you? You seem to think I have no opinions of my own. You are an anarchist, everyone says so.”

  Ofeyi held up his hand. “All right, all right. I haven’t come here to quarrel with you.”

  “Yes, you have come because you are in trouble. It’s at least a year since…”

  “I came to see the family. I was passing by and suddenly felt like seeing you.”

  The champagne arrived in a silver bucket. She busied herself laying out the glasses while she challenged him to tell the truth. “You came because you are in trouble. For once you have managed to swallow your pride.”

  Then the steward coughed discreetly, hanging by the door. Biye turned and he beckoned politely to her. She followed him just outside the door and the two men heard the steward conversing with her in a low urgent tone. Her thin face bore a set angry determination when she returned to them.

  “Ofeyi, I’m sorry but you have to excuse me. Daddy needs me. You know the house, so make yourself at home. I’ll try not to be too long.”

  “Anything wrong?”

  “Oh it’s…” Her voice rose to a vehement shout. “It’s Mummy again. She just won’t learn that I also have my rights in this house. Wait here for me.” She turned sharply and went out. A moment later she was back. “Ofe, can you come with me?”

  Surprised, Ofe rose and met her by the door. “Come on, you are almost a member of the family anyway. Perhaps you can talk some sense into her.”

  Shying back Ofe began to protest but she had snatched his hand anyway and was dragging him away.

  The harridan voice of a middle-aged woman reached them before they arrived at the heavy leather-upholstered double door at the end of the corridor. Biye was about to march straight in but she checked herself at the last moment. Pulling one half of the door slightly open, she peeped into the room and began to listen. Moments later she appeared still content with merely eavesdropping and Ofeyi began to squirm with embarrassment.

  He whispered, “Don’t you think I ought to go back?” But Biye shushed him clinging to his hand as to a safety-belt. With her other hand she pushed the door open an inch wider.

  Batoki, shrunk to half his size appeared to shrink further into a deep arm-chair in a huge living-room festooned in gold framed photos of dead family forebearers, smiling reception scenes and parades. An enormous figure of a woman loomed over him, her lips vibrating in an incessant sizzle over the unfortunate chief.

  “So? What is suddenly wrong with your tongue? Has Chief Biga cut it off at last? He’s supposed to be your creature in the Cabal but it seems to me you are more like his boot-cleaner. So why don’t you answer me? He’s cut off your tongue has he? Because you can’t bully him you think you can come into this house and take it out on me do you? You can’t play god with your colleagues so you come back to the house to play god, is that it?”

  The voice of the man whose form was wholly swallowed in the arm-chair uttered protests as though through a reed, “Control yourself Mama Biye, control yourself please. The whole household can hear you.”

  “The whole world will hear me before I take any more insults from you so answer my question and let us be done with it. Or don’t you speak the language any longer? From what they say about you that’s about the only thing your enemies fear from you, so use it now if your tongue is still loose in your head. Joke your way out of the question if you like but answer it. Am I taking the parade with you or are you going with that slut?”

  The man pleaded. “You were there when I promised she could ride in the open car with us. You said nothing at the time….”

  “And why don’t you take the whole family with you then? Am I supposed to be your wife or not? Why don’t you go hunting round the obscure branches of the Batoki family and let them loose in their rags and lice to take the salute?”

  “Abusing my family isn’t going to help us solve this problem” he pointed out.

  “Oho! Does it really hurt when your family is mentioned? And what have you done except heap humiliations on my own by using me worse than messengers in your office? What is that but belittling my family?”

  “Mama Biye, is this not a disgraceful scene in the home of a man in my position. You say I use you badly, isn’t it really the way you use yourself? I mean, if you must talk like a market woman….”

  Chief Batoki was seldom wrong. The insult had the effect he had expected, mild and plaintive though he had made his voice. Batoki’s voice at its most lacerating always became a woodwind instrument, sensitively controlled. With sorrowing, downcast and furtive eyes, more sinned against than sinning, he let fall his sly insults, a light return to the foul-mouthed barrage with which he was perpetually flooded by wife, business or political enemies. While his wife heaved with rage and gathered her vocal powers for the next assault he let drop the next rebuke, coated in equal mildness.

  “You know, sometimes you make me wonder. You really do. I mean there are times when you behave like an Ojuorolari. Really, if these toys mean so much to you that you cannot share them with your daughter….”

  Ofeyi made another effort to release his hand, longing for the peace and champagne in the sitting room. She clung harder to him, whispering fiercely, “Now you can see for yourself. You see the kind of life my own mother creates for me? Always wants to reduce me to nothing.”

  “Then why don’t you get out!” he demanded. “Get out and leave them to their squabbles. This game is too dirty for you.”

  “It
is my home, not hers.”

  Ofeyi sighed. “Biye, she is his wife. You are just the daughter.”

  She turned on him. “Ask Daddy. He needs me more than her. She knows I am far more use to him with all his contacts. All she does is disgrace him with her vulgar manners.”

  The lady of the house seemed to react most violently from just such imputations, the barb of which still smarted from the last similar pronouncement by Batoki. She plunged with relish into the task of demolishing the trapped politician, proceeded to level his pedigree to the dust.

  “You Omiteru, you! You dare suggest I am Ojuorolari, one of those who never before tasted splendour? You! You dare group me with those upstarts who never in their lives rubbed shoulders with greatness?” She drew back a little, her eyes raked his cushion-engulfed body up and down and reduced him to the status of such slaves as, in those days when nobility was what it should be, would be slaughtered to accompany her father on his final ascent to a resting-place among the heavenly rafters. She burst into a prolonged artificial laughter which bordered on hysteria, broke it off suddenly to scream:

  “Have you forgotten that you are what you are today solely by the grace of what I am? Because I will show you Omiteru. I will remind you, you and your nameless family, I will have to remind you from what dungheap your family used to scrabble for left-overs before I brought my name and wealth to raise you into something at which dogs no longer turn their nose!”

  “Look here Mama Biye…” Batoki turned on his voice of cajolery but it only acted as raw pepper in the wound, as he knew it would.

  “I don’t mother bastards” she screamed. “So don’t ever call me Mother-of-Biye ever again. Got rot my womb if that is what brought out that bitch.” She spat viciously on the carpet. “Perhaps you should have named her Biyi. Mo bi yi na—worse luck for my womb!”

  “Leave the child out of it. If it is anyone’s fault, it is mine. The poor girl is not responsible for my blunder.”

  She missed the ambiguous wording, screamed “Poor girl!” and turned her eyes in a final appeal to heaven. “Do you hear him? Poor girl! How many broken homes has that”—she made a feeble attempt to catch the squeak in his voice—“poor girl to her credit? It’s a wonder she has not even taken to procuring as a profession. She does it on the side-line for all your Corporation friends doesn’t she?”

  Scornfully now Batoki replied, “So we are now touting all the cheap gossip, are we?”

  “Gossip! Doesn’t she bring her disease-ridden friends for you to sleep with? Of course what else can one expect? There isn’t a single streak of honest dealing in the family of the Batokis, there never was. She has inherited your blood, no doubt about that! I thought I could close my eyes to the number of houses you bought outside to lodge your mistresses but I never thought my own daughter would bring those free-for-alls for my husband to sleep with, under my roof.”

  “Keep your voice down if you must retail these stupid gossips….”

  “It is hardly your fault of course” she continued, raking him downwards again with contemptuous eyes. “It is the fault of those who took pity on the bare neck of the vulture and lent him a shawl. They weren’t to know he would forget a time when the cold winds froze the blood before it could even reach his head.”

  That was a fatal game to play with Batoki. His rejoinder followed swiftly. “You should know all about wind and feathers. The turkey with a permanent itch opens her tail-feathers to the first wind that blows into a yard.”

  Mrs. Batoki stood still, open-mouthed for a long moment. Then she gave ground on that particular front, gathered her handbag and shawl. She had the ultimate weapon, a reminder that she was totally unselfconscious, uncaring for the demands of dignity in a public showdown.

  “I shall be in that Cadillac when it calls here for you. Bring your procurer if you like and the whole clan of the Batokis. We shall find out then if the descendant of Adegunlewa, a princess in my own right was born to wipe the dung off the feet of the Batokis.”

  She turned off and, at that moment, before he could restrain her, Biye flung the door open and burst into the lounge. In his instinctive effort to restrain her he was catapulted into the room. Once exposed there was no retreat. Accepting the situation he stepped boldly forward and bade them a good-evening, only to find that his presence was completely ignored in the confrontation that followed swiftly on the flashpoint of Biye’s entry. The mother’s face underwent violent contortions.

  “Get out! How dare you enter when I am talking to your father?”

  She ignored her, went straight to the father. “Dad, I hope you haven’t allowed her to bully you into changing your mind.”

  “Did you hear me tell you to get out?”

  “I am talking to Dad,” Biye retorted, regaining some calm.

  “And I said get out you slut. Get out of this room before I fling you out myself.”

  Batoki settled down to enjoy his release from the strain of his own torment. No one could accuse him now of having set one against the other, a practice in which he believed implicitly, even in the domestic politics of his own home. When two dogs are fighting, he would advise, run off with the bone. If there is no bone anyway set them fighting so you can take a rest while they use up their strength. Biye was more than a match for the mother, and in a way she was continuing his fight where he had left off. He shut his ears to their slanging match, and drifted on to other problems. He had heard it all before, he was confident that he would come out of it with the advantage of having exhausted the troublesome woman without expending any more energy. Sad though he was when Biye’s marriage broke up—Biye’s happiness, he persuaded himself, was the sole purpose of his existence—yet he had experienced a measure of joy at the thought that he would now see her more often. But within months his wife had begun to resent his increasing reliance on Biye. In commercial and even government circles she became known as Batoki’s deputy. That had galled the mother, a thought which brought a smile of pleasure to his wily face. The girl was an undoubted asset, the woman an embarrassing vulgarity. Through his reverie her voice now filtered in vicious demolition of Biye’s pretensions. Batoki sighed. He knew how it would end and he wished they would hurry it up. Biye would be worn down by the sheer stamina of that formidable woman. That would be the moment for him to intervene, scoring an easy victory over the much weakened victor of that duel.

  “You keep forgetting this is my home, not yours” Madame Batoki reminded her daughter for the eleventh time. “Neither you nor your father nor your entire family on that side can drive me out of it. You had a home and you lost it, you lost your husband and you are fast losing all chances of finding another.”

  Was it perhaps the right moment for him to interfere? “Oh come now” Batoki murmured half-heartedly. “That is not a kind thing to say.”

  “Then tell her to behave herself. Do I have to put up with all her nonsense until some poor fool takes pity on her. This house is big enough but she makes it a point of duty to get in my throat. I won’t have it. Nobody does that to me in my own house. I am no one’s slave here. I wasn’t brought to this house in settlement of any debt and I am not a bastard. I didn’t come here to pay off my people’s mortgage, and I didn’t step up in the world when I put my foot on your doorstep. You took me from the home of kings. My birth title is Omofayiwa, Omofolasere, Mosunmoloye, and if you don’t know yet whose daughter I am go and ask whose mother is known as Asiwaju Ibode….”

  Batoki sat up in alarm, aware for the first time that he had delayed too late. She was mounting rapidly towards that pitch of hysteria with which he was only too painfully familiar. In that state, anything could happen. Even he was no longer safe from her physical violence. Acting with urgency now he tried to calm her down but she rode over his efforts, her voice rising with every word.

  “I am no twopenny commoner whose chieftaincy was created by the civil service gazette.
Am I now an object to be trampled under by you and your daughter, by this shameless harlot whom you call a blessing? You had better let her know whom has the voice in this house because I am warning you that I Mofolayelu, daughter of Asiwaju Ibode will not…”

  Biye’s voice cut through sharply. “And you I suppose are the Asiwaju Ibadi? You taunt me with losing my home but is it surprising? What else could one expect when the mother precedes the daughter to her marital bed? You should call yourself Asiwaju Ibadi—you’ve more than earned the honour!”

  Ofeyi, tip-toeing his way out, stopped dead. The room seemed to have suffered a similar seizure. Biye, her eyes blazing betrayed a little hesitant motion, as if afraid that she had gone too far. Then Batoki gave a long sigh, sank back into his chair feeling, not for the first time, that his cup of humiliation had run over. Then the frieze was cracked open, a bellow of animal rage tore through the room as with the shout “Liar!” the mother flung herself on Biye who went down heavily under the unexpected attack.

  Ofeyi remained indecisive, looking to Chief Batoki to move to the rescue. The little man moved at last, but his wife had already gathered herself for the next blow. She lashed out with her foot, Biye rushed her hands upwards to protect her face and felt her mother’s shin across her knuckles. The demented woman now attempted to dig her heel in the girl’s stomach but now Batoki had gripped her by the waist and was dragging her back. A final kick as she struggled in his grip took Biye in the ribs and Ofeyi saw her grimace in real pain. He rushed forward just as the mother fell back into the chair, smothering Batoki beneath a bulk he had underestimated. He gasped as though winded but Ofeyi had already scooped up the girl and was racing outside with her. The mother’s abusive shouts followed them until they were out of hearing.

  Back in her living-room he snatched the napkin from the neck of the champagne bottle, dipped it in the ice-bucket and tried to soothe her bruises. But she seemed far more concerned with reiterating the truth of the scandal.