Infinite Riches

by Ben Okri

  ‘The powerful Rain Queen lives in a mighty hut deep in a forest. She lives under a great tree that is two thousand years old and which bears powerful, poisonous fruits. There are many Rain Queens in the world but she is the mother of them all. She knows how to talk to rain, she knows the language of the spirit of the whirlwind, she can make clouds turn black, she can command lightning to strike, she keeps the secret of thunder in a white pot, and she has sixteen wives and many children. She is very old and very powerful. She can enter into the dreams of nations and continents. She has something to do with every great thing that happens in the lives of her people. Her spirit is feared all over the world, feared by people who have never even heard of her. She holds a great feast once every seven years. The feast usually means that something incredible is going to happen somewhere, or that it has already happened but no one knows it yet. But before she holds the feast she waits for a sign, an omen. Often the sign will take the form of a wonderful animal appearing in front of her hut. Once a giraffe lowered its head into her door. No one knew how it got there. Another time a camel was found sleeping near the communal well. Many years ago a white man came with gifts of gold and emerald beads. And people even say that there was a time when the spirit of their great god spoke through the mouth of a two-year-old baby. The feast she held after that particular sign was so fantastic that they still sing about it today, in a hundred versions, all over the continent. Great events don’t just travel to people’s ears through the mouths of men. Sometimes they travel through dreams, through the invisible cables in the air, or through the whispering mouths of spirits.’

  Dad paused and looked at us through eyes that momentarily blazed with a prophetic intensity. Then he returned to his focuslessness, and soared away to the wonderful south.

  ‘Not long ago men and women from several lands, from distant continents, from strange places in the universe set out on a pilgrimage to her famous shrine. When they began to arrive one by one people marvelled at the fantastic gifts they brought. They marvelled at the different kinds of human beings there are in this world. When these amazing people began to arrive the Rain Queen knew that this was no ordinary sign. In fact this was the sign she had been told to watch out for many many years ago. When the pilgrims left, she held a quiet feast. And during the feast she made the startling announcement that her time had come to leave the earth and join her illustrious ancestors. But she presented a riddle to her people. She said that from birth it was foretold that when her time to die came, she would have to choose between eating the fruit of the ancient poisonous tree or going up the highest hill and, without food or water, climbing the ladder of the gods into the realm of illustrious beings. Till this day no one knows what choice she made. That is my story, and it is true.’

  When Dad finished his story he shut the window and put out the candle. That night I dreamt that Madame Koto was a Rain Queen whose time to die had come. I saw her burning in the flames of her moonstones with a red angel standing behind her. Then I saw the angel’s enormous wings enclosing her as she burned, her eyes bright, in complete inhuman silence.

  TWO

  How Mum paid for my careless words

  I WAS PLAYING in the street the next day when I saw ghosts pouring into Madame Koto’s bar. I didn’t recognize any of the ghosts. I followed them but when I entered the bar I found the place quite empty. One of Madame Koto’s women came in from the backyard and saw me and drove me out. I told Mum about the ghosts, but she hit me on the head and made me promise not to utter a word of what I’d seen ever again. I told Dad about the ghosts and he said:

  ‘She is going to throw a feast.’

  I saw Madame Koto that evening. I saw her burning in her unnatural beauty. She waddled up to me, encircled by seven spells of protection and a perfume which could repel all evil. She seized my hand and then, in a man’s voice, she said:

  ‘I am soon going to give birth.’

  ‘You are soon going to die,’ I said.

  Uttering a twisted cry, her face contorting into a mask so ugly that she brought the night closer to my eyes, she let go of my hand and staggered backwards. Swiftly, drawing her spells about her, and banishing the waves of approaching madness with a fantastic movement of her arms, she regained herself and gave me the most eerie smile.

  ‘Your mother will pay for what you said,’ was her response.

  I wasn’t moved. Then, suddenly, a sharp pain cut through my head. For a moment the darkness was flooded with a blinding flash of lightning. And when the darkness returned I was standing alone in a hot space in the street. Madame Koto was gone. Not even her perfume betrayed her vanished presence.

  That night, while we were all asleep in a land with too many dreams, my mother began to rave and it took six men to hold her down as she fought with the tigerous strength that madness gives. She howled all night and drained our compound of energy. The men were exhausted, their eyes scratched, their chests lacerated, their wrists sprained from the supernatural effort of holding Mum down. Foaming at the mouth, her eyes bulging, it was as if many insane spirits were fighting for dominion within her lean body.

  My mother went mad while Madame Koto burned in her new beauty. They stuck a spoon in Mum’s mouth to prevent her biting off her tongue and in her elemental fury she left precise indentations of her teeth on the metal object. Dad refused to bring in a herbalist. His stillness grew more fearful as he regarded Mum with his dark eyes. For an entire day Mum was insane. The politicians returned with their trucks and bullhorns, their traditional attire, their dubious powdered milk and their extravagant promises while Mum screamed about strange things in strange languages. I watched her contort on the bed, kicking feverishly.

  Then, astoundingly, she burst from the bindings of hempen ropes and began destroying the room, tipping over the cupboard, hurling the bed at the wall, throwing the centre table to the far corner of the room, and tossing clothes towards the ceiling. She developed a sudden obsession for the staring lizard and pursued it across the walls, throwing her shoes at it and missing. And in the afternoon, when the heat reached its most unbearable intensity, Mum quietened down and began to sing a dirge in tones so vertiginous that we sat around her wondering what demon had entered her spirit. I watched Mum’s eyes swimming round in their sockets till only the whites were visible.

  And when she began to mutter again, fighting the rising tide of insanity, she broke into the familiar language of her ancestors, and spoke about a hot black rock growing inside her womb, growing hotter and vaster. She spoke of ghosts who had missed their way and who had wandered into her body and who were confused about their destination. She muttered about drums pounding in her head. And when she spoke of a leopard growling in her heart, releasing a flood tide of ancient desires and dreams, Dad’s expression changed. No longer was Dad’s stillness potent. It had emerged from its lair.

  In the evening Mum broke into torrential prophecies, shouting about hanged men in distant continents and others who suffered injustices inflicted on the beauty of the skin, shouting about women who were turned into animals by the sheer pressure of the unnumbered days, about burning towers and liquid currencies bursting up from the dark sleeping earth, about eras of extravagant corruption, incredible devaluation of currencies, murders by governments in broad daylight, assassinations and wars, worms on the living flesh of children, about people walking around breeding colonies of diseases and rage, about marketwomen storming the government houses, about poor nations whose entire lands and seas and minerals and skies had been leased to foreign powers for two hundred years, about earthquakes which would level cities leaving only children below the age of seven; and when she began to scream of the dreadful time of karmic balances, the assault of old religions, when she broke into her torrent of prophecies and nonsense none of us were surprised that it began to rain outside, that it began to pour, that rain gushed down in an avalanche, a deluge, battering the rooftops, disintegrating the houses, and flooding the streets.

  When the r
ain reached its cataclysmic height, and most of us cowered close to the floor, terrified of the abnormal fury of the storm, and while Mum lay quiet on the bed, her mouth moving, her words silent, Dad sprang to life, uttering his powerful incantations. He became electrified, as if his spirit had finally been prodded from sleep. Seizing Mum by the waist, he tossed her on his shoulder, and ran out into the storm, wading thigh-deep in the stream of the road, shouting in his mighty voice.

  I followed him, and saw how small he was beneath the torrential sky, beneath the low street-long cracks of lightning that split everything open, revealing visible and invisible realms. The lightning opened a way for Dad through the forest. Still growling, as if he had turned into a beast, he took Mum to a place where five paths met. There were sacrificial plates of food at the mouth of every one of them. He laid her down on the waterlogged ground beneath the thousand-year-old tree, and vanished into the forest, his voice ringing out through the labyrinth drenched with rain.

  The torrent obscured Mum from me and the crash of thunder over my head sent me scurrying back to the street and to our compound. I stayed in the devastation of our room. Many hours later, rising out of myself, I circled the air and saw a silver form floating over Mum. It was the old woman of the forest. And when Dad returned from his futile search for the old woman’s hut, he found that Mum had disappeared from the crossroads.

  The lightning created new roads in the air that night and the old woman took Mum’s spirit flying into its crevices, to the miraculous centre and source of lightning flash. And when the incandescence flooded over our street, blinding the earth and trees with explosions of light, I saw Mum neck-deep in the secret springs of the millennial shrine and heard her cry out in a purified voice.

  Not long afterwards I heard Mum and Dad coming down our street. Mum was covered shoulder-downwards in a white cloth. Her hair had been cut low, her face bore multiple cuts and bruises, her eyes were calm, and she was singing a dirge which was as sweet a tune as any mermaid ever uttered from the great rivers.

  The rain had stopped when Mum got home. When she stepped into the room her eyes registered profound displeasure at the chaos she beheld. She flashed Dad an angry glance, which told me that she had no recollection of her fury. She did not even remember her madness as a dream. It was all my fault, Mum’s suffering. I hated Madame Koto so much that I wanted her to live.

  THREE

  Vigilance

  WE DID NOT speak to Mum about her brief madness. We tried not to look at her as if she were a freak. But we watched ourselves, we watched what we said, we were careful about our gestures, we hid all the mirrors for a time, and Dad resorted to all kinds of methods to make sure that we were discreetly vigilant. There was no need for any of it, because Mum’s one-day storm had passed for good, and we had survived one more of Madame Koto’s bewitched transferences.

  I kept Madame Koto’s threat to myself, but I changed my wish. At night I prayed for her beauty to burn her up into golden cinders.

  FOUR

  Ghosts of narratives past

  MADAME KOTO HAD indeed returned and there was no way to avoid it. In the classic manner of the powerful, through the agency of Mum’s ravings, she sent word round that she had survived her nightmare ordeals and had made terror her ally.

  She sent us a basket of onions as a present. I threw them out, and on the same day they sprouted in our backyard. I uprooted the bewitched onions and ran to her bar and threw them in. As I fled I heard her laughter all around me in the wind.

  It was a special day for Madame Koto. The power of her flaming spirit had sent word round to all the realms of her affiliations. And that day, as if our street had become the centre of the world, as if a shadow religion were being born in our midst, we saw the most amazing pilgrimage of people to her bar. They came as ghosts first, a legion of shadow beings.

  I saw the ghosts of sacrificed animals. I saw the spirits of the unborn. I saw the host of spirit-children who were chained to one mother and to one place, a confluence of several histories. It was as if from their lives must come the resolution of so many crossroads, and cross-histories. They all came in silence, shadows without bodies, spirits without memory, ghosts without dreams. They melted into Madame Koto’s bar and hung on the walls or floated in the air.

  I saw them all and was afraid that my time had come and that my end was assaulting me in visions of last farewells, and homecomings – which is what a pilgrimage also is. I waited for these ghosts to leave, but they stayed. And it was only later I realized that they had merely travelled in advance of themselves. Their substance was yet to catch up with them.

  The next morning, I saw the real people pouring into Madame Koto’s bar. They were revenants. It began with a man who was half-spirit and half-human. He had the trickster god’s smile on his face. He wore clothes of many colours, checked trousers, a bright red shirt, a yellow hat and carried a white umbrella. He was very tall and thin and I recognized him as the last man Dad fought outside Madame Koto’s tent in the twilight of the early years. I was so struck by his return that I stopped to watch what reception he would get. He had hardly stepped into the bar when two midgets went past me. They too were headed for Madame Koto’s bar. Then came the man who could remove his eyes. And the spotted albino couple who could exchange their features, and the yam-headed woman, and then the toothless man who had an eye at the back of his throat which looked like a bright marble when he yawned. Then there was the short man whose head resembled a camel’s. I couldn’t understand why all these people were returning to the bar after their long absence. And while I stood there puzzling, two blind men with sunglasses came up to me and asked the way to Madame Koto’s bar. They said they had been travelling for a month.

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘We got a message,’ they replied.

  ‘What message?’

  ‘Why do you want to know?’ they asked querulously.

  ‘I’m interested,’ I said.

  They became impatient with my questions, and so I described the way. Looking up at the sky, as if the land was above, they went towards the bar. And then I recognized them. They were the ones whose sight improved the more they drank.

  The people who poured back to Madame Koto’s shrine came slowly at first. They came, most of them, with their musicians, who bore xylophones, accordions, guitars, koras and improbable drums on their backs. They came alone or in groups. They came with glittering robes and emblems of power, with staffs, crosiers, shields, standards, pennants, mast-heads and flags with indecipherable emblems. And they came, all of them, as if the story of the birth of our community was being replayed.

  Then they came in droves, in torrents, in crowds. They filled out the bar and had extraordinary celebrations outside. Their acrobats did somersaults in white robes, turning over and over through hoops woven from elephant grass. Their jugglers circulated bright red eggs in the air. Their musicians performed strange lovely melodies with haunting harmonies, their faces ghostly with antimony. They transformed Madame Koto’s bar into a fairground. And they all came bearing gifts. We heard rumours about the gifts they brought, and we were astonished.

  They brought monstrous lobes of cola-nuts, golden cowries, basins of rich Sudanese sweets, cages with aquamarine parrots, monkeys with red hats and yellow three-piece suits, gramophones, magic stones which turned light into rainbows, bronze stools, a baby camel, a white mare, a fetish with a demonic androgynous smile, a cow without a tail, a bull with its head painted red, a chicken that laid stones instead of eggs, bales of lace cloth, a basketful of snails, tortoises in green buckets, red and brown sunglasses, hats and headties, dane guns, machetes electrified by lightning, eels, singing fishes, a dead shark painted gold, dogs with blue eyes, cats with an iridescent sheen on their fur, and sculpted messengers of new gods made out of black rocks which glowed in the dark.

  Apparently, they also brought silver bangles and taut-skinned drums, giant calabashes and antelope horns, the teeth of crocodiles and golden r
opes, sand from the Nile and rocks from the site of the great Egyptian pyramids. They brought the earliest models of telephone, ballpoint pens, varied electronic gadgets, and electric light bulbs. They brought maps of future countries, documents signed by the Governor-General relating to secret economic pacts between the colonizer and the colonized – trade bargains, military dependence, monopolies – documents the Governor-General thought he had destroyed. They brought papers with the signatures of future heads of state. They brought lists of future events, coups, executions, scandals, wars and uprisings. They brought newspapers with future headlines about the numberless massacres of rioting students, the economic collapse of the nation, the diversion of national funds to private accounts in foreign countries. They brought photographs of the key players in the four-year war that was being obliquely dreamt into being by the nation in advance. They brought aerial photographs of future oil sites and details of future trading partners. They brought papers relating to future models of military equipment and military technology, papers relating to the construction of the houses in which future heads of state would live, and extensive maps of the ghettoes with all roads leading out of them drawn in red. They brought many other gifts, gifts seemingly unconnected with the bearers; and the bearers themselves were all strangers from the past.

  Slowly, I began to recognize them beneath their transformation, ghosts of narratives past. There were midgets who had become a little taller, tall men who had become a little shorter. Former barmaids of Madame Koto who had grown fat with complacency. Thugs who had become politicians. Assassins who had become priests. There were witches and wizards with shining skins and wall-gecko eyes. Dogs and goats came as well. Cats on strings. Peacocks. People with no legs. Wrestlers and perfect gentlemen. White-haired magicians in black capes. There were mermaids in high-heeled shoes, of dazzling beauty in the daytime, but ambiguous at night. There were animals that had turned into men, and walked uncomfortably with their hoofs in big boots. I saw them all. Contact with Madame Koto had transformed them into individuals with influence in many spheres, transformed them into spies for the dominant powers.