Infinite Riches

by Ben Okri

  All levels of society were represented. There were truck pushers, metalworkers, clerks in government offices, night soil men, road sweepers, messengers, street traders, policemen, thieves, murderers, bankers, all those who were the eyes and hands and ears of the ascendancy, protected under the vast wings of sorcerers and secret societies, party chiefs and business tycoons. I saw them all, the early denizens of Madame Koto’s bar. They had all changed. The bar too had changed beyond recognition. It had become a fantastical place of many spells.

  Many of Madame Koto’s prostitutes started coming back too. They had become boutique owners, powerful marketwomen, hoteliers, restaurateurs. Women who had long left her service, but who had not left the long arm of her influence, also returned. Many of them were covertly affiliated to her great underground organization. I saw the legendary marketwomen with dreaded eyes and wads of wrappers round their monumental frames, women who smelt of dried crayfish and much-handled money. I saw the women who had been started out by Madame Koto in their own independent lines of business, and who were now bar owners and cash-madams, all converts to her secret religion. And there were people whom I didn’t recognize, who seemed to have come from another planet, or from regions of the earth where there was no sunlight.

  They had all made long awkward journeys of one kind or another, weighed down with gifts. They had left the turbulence of their private lives to come and pay their respects to Madame Koto, as if they had heard of her forthcoming feast in advance. In fact, they were all on a mystic pilgrimage back to their beginnings.

  I was surprised to see our landlord among them. He too had changed. Now he collected his rent through thuggish intermediaries. He never deigned to come himself any more. He ran gambling houses on the edge of the ghetto, and owned huge portions of land which was now a marsh but which later would become the site of massive chemical-producing industries.

  Things seep back from the future into the present; the past presses everything forward; and the future makes things search for their lost origins.

  FIVE

  The black rock of enigmas

  THE RETURN OF all these people puzzled and worried us. Inhabitants of the area gathered at the street front of Madame Koto’s bar wondering what this new invasion of the past signified. It turned out that it wasn’t only those from the past who were returning. There were beings I had never seen before. People who were indeed complete strangers. Odd pilgrims. Celebrants. We watched them silently. We watched them as night fell, as the tumult and the celebrations grew noisier. We watched them sacrificing monkeys and sheep. We watched the fearful shadows cast by the great fire of their sacrificial rites.

  Their activities held us magnetized. Suspicions and forgotten bad dreams came amongst us. We watched the women who had become chiefs and title holders, the men who ruled places in the country so remote from the centre that they never encountered the national census or taxation.

  It was only when Dad cried out in horror at something he had seen in Madame Koto’s backyard, something illuminated horribly by their giant fire, that I began to understand. Dad had seen the sinister black rock that he had used to mark the carpenter’s grave in the forest. And when he saw it, we all saw it too. There it was, in the backyard, bristling with an infernal life. Its pitted surface kept quivering. It glowed a curious yellow under the flickering light of the flames. It fizzed and crawled, as if it were animate, or as if peculiar life forms were trapped and writhing within its implacable density.

  SIX

  A secret chain of dream worlds

  AND THEN IT occurred to me that all the people from near and distant places, who had received an impulse computed in direct relation to how long it would take them to arrive here, all these ghosts and revenants, all those who were strangers amongst us, who listened to our heartbeats, who knew the inclination of our politics, our hunger, our dreams and our rage – they had all come answering the call of a forthcoming spirit-child birth, a triple birth, one for each sphere.

  I have heard it said that there are two shadow worlds to every reality. I have also heard it said that every possibility is a reality existing simultaneously with the real.

  A nation was being born in our area. Somewhere else an avatar was dying, and another one was ready to take her place in an endless secret chain of dream worlds which, at the right time, explodes into a new way, a world dream. And the dreamers are often wholly unaware of the forces they are bringing into our lower world of the earth, for great truths take time to manifest in our leaden reality. And when they do manifest, their effect through time is never entirely pure.

  SEVEN

  Where does a birth begin?

  WHERE DOES A birth begin? It begins with a death. Things have to vacate the space we haven’t properly used, in order for new things to be born. It begins with a death, and that night we heard plangent dirges in the air, foretelling a death in advance. Meanwhile Madame Koto floated in the incense and cedar wood smoke of her ritual atmosphere, burning in her beauty. Meanwhile, the yellow dust of karmic angels grew in her spirit.

  There was much revelry and parrot squawkings from the bar. We heard many voices. Human voices. Animal voices. Voices of the dead who had borrowed human bodies to attend the homecoming. Even the nasal voices of spirits who never get used to the restricted noses of human beings.

  There were many languages too. Languages totally incomprehensible to us. Languages whose occasional word we understood. Languages from the extreme reaches of the earth. The languages of Inuits and Pygmies, of ancient Greece and Babylonia, of Celts and Indians. Languages of the dead and the unborn. Languages of power and dreams. But the revenants had no trouble understanding one another in Madame Koto’s bar.

  I stood amongst the onlookers. We were all silent in the face of such a powerful display of alliance. I could occasionally understand the language of the dead, the spirits, and the half-humans. These numinous pilgrims from the underworld of our history had come to pay their respects to the great Madame Koto. Whorehouse owner. Power broker. Priestess of a new and terrible way.

  They had all come to celebrate this woman who had managed to transform herself completely under the gaze of our history. They came to ritually infuse her, to show their extensive allegiances on the night before the great rally, and to widen our world for the birth of their ascendancy. They came to honour her, to seal the pacts of secret organizations for the satisfactory division of this world’s territories.

  They came, and stayed for two days. As always we were on the outside, looking in at a bewildering reality.

  EIGHT

  The last feast

  ON THE THIRD day Madame Koto, wearing a crown of rock-beads, held a great feast. It was an extravagant affair. Five bulls, three cows, seven goats and countless chickens were slaughtered, cooked and served. Whole areas of our street were filled up with collapsible chairs and tables. Throughout that evening it was as though a market-place and a bazaar had materialized in the street.

  It was a feast of monumental proportions. Chicken bones, skulls of dead antelopes, broken beer bottles were scattered and strewn about the place. Whiffs of oriental melodies, haunting pipe organs, speaking of last suppers, floated across the yellow clouds of twilight. The guests were rowdy and drunken. They argued about divisions of power, tribal rivalries, territorial control. They quarrelled about their loyalties, their achievements, their interpretations of the new African way, age-old disagreements surfacing. The air resounded with the clash of their myths and ideologies.

  Madame Koto tried to include everyone in the feast. That evening she sent for Mum, to ask her forgiveness before the moment of the great rally. She sent bowls of rice and aromatic chicken and antelope meat round to all the rooms, in all the compounds, asking for our forgiveness and support. No one replied.

  As night approached, the rowdiness of the guests mysteriously diminished. Only the drunken musicians kept up their performances. Sitting at different tables, they played their conflicting music, competing with one
another, answering dirges with praise-songs, assaulting threnodies with hunting songs, attacking the epic cycles of the seasoned kora-players with the withering satires of the harmonica-weavers, undermining the mnemonic feats of dynastic musicians with songs of lust and songs of work. Their different kinds of music fought one another in their hidden ideologies and world-views. They warred with music, carrying on where the main guests had left off. They sang of death and power, conquest and courage. They sang of illustrious kings and heroic families. They brought to us the rich river of all our songs, histories and philosophies. They salted the air with proverbs. They sang of birth and initiation, but they did not sing of love. They sang of politics, but they did not sing of the poor and the suffering.

  I did not see it myself, but it was said that as night swept over from the diminishing forest a yellow bird flew across Madame Koto’s head and shat on her crown of rock-beads. But I did notice when the musicians fell silent, as if the wind and the night were cancelling out their music, banishing it from the air. Some say that when the yellow bird flew off into the darkening sky one of the guests from Bamako cried:

  ‘A BAD OMEN!’

  I heard the silence which followed. Soon the wind was all I heard as it blew over the guests, their eyes both drunken and aware.

  Madame Koto, who was standing holding a bowl of stew, sat down and then stood up again. Some of the women rushed over to clean the birdshit from her crown, but Madame Koto made a gesture which stopped them. Then she began to make her speech.

  She spoke, but her words were silent. She cleared the rusty organ of her throat. She spoke again, but her words were still silent. A curious premonition spread over the guests. The night became deeper. The wind whistled softly over the trees. And then the oddest thing happened.

  The women closest to Madame Koto started singing and, without reason, she began to weep.

  At first, no one moved. No one comforted her. The women sang and Madame Koto wept noisily, banging her arms on the table, throwing food on the ground, her bangles rattling. The women stopped singing and then she became still. She wept in silence, her face contorted, tears glistening on her oily cheeks.

  The lights were kind to her. The lamps heightened the sadness of her ripe beauty. When she stopped weeping she got up and tried to speak again. She opened her mouth but instead of words a great gust of animal pain poured out and she held her stomach and staggered backwards, falling over a chair. She got up again, limping. Her women rushed to her, surrounded her, and led her to the house, while rainclouds gathered above us all. As they led her away a musician, striking up on the kora, began to sing, in a voice that pierced our chests, a single line of a proverb, over and over again:

  ‘If you look back, pilgrim, you will twist your neck . . .’

  And when the musician stopped singing, Madame Koto was gone. There was a brief silence in which the wind whispered insurrective words over the air, words which Dad would later pluck from the spirit of the times.

  And the monkeys that had been spared sacrifice because of some unique quality they possessed – the talent for mockery, or prophecy – and the peacocks and the birds in domed cages, all began to gibber and squawk. I could not understand their language. But a wind of madness started up from their horrid noises and all the guests were struck silent by the premonitions flying about in the blue darkness of the feast.

  Not long afterwards, a message came from Madame Koto. The message travelled round the guests and their faces changed at the prospect of their long journeys home. Madame Koto had insisted that the guests carry on feasting without her. She charged them to continue with their momentous task, their great work: to multiply their influence and power over the many spheres.

  The party ended abruptly. Those who were drunk, who had eaten too much, and who had a long way to go, became aware that their pilgrimage was over.

  That night Madame Koto remained alone in her room, with her illness worsening, and her foot erupting with pain. And while the agony of her pregnancy approached the unbearable, the guests outside soberly gathered themselves together to depart for their distant homes.

  NINE

  The wind whispers insurrective words on the air

  ON THAT THIRD night the visitants left. They came with gifts and left in silence. They returned to their shadowy worlds where history is a perpetual wound that grows on the faces of the people, and where good dreams for the future barely stir the wind or the dust. They returned to their crepuscular worlds where suffering, centuries old, had coalesced into severe religions of many roads and many ways. Each way crying with questions. Each road drawing blood from the feet of men and women, pilgrims who know not why they travel, what they seek, or what the golden doors of the grave hold for them.

  The visitants also left lethal shadows in the spaces sifted by the aroma of forest herbs. They had come with eyes of impenetrable indifference. They did not notice the rest of us; they did not notice those who are always on the outside, looking in. Within the computation of their gaze, we did not exist. They would rule segments of our world for a long time and never see us. Their shadows would lurk in our air, locked in pockets of our consciousness, awaiting a terrible exorcism.

  And when the visitants left, our world would not be the same: dust from their terrible dreams would always trouble us. That evening Dad began to speak for the first time of revolution. It was a word he had plucked from the air. It was a new word and I saw strange stars in the sky whenever he uttered it. Throughout the evening, whenever he commented on the visitations we had all witnessed, he used the word as if it were a new punch he had invented. He kept punching the empty spaces of our room, muttering gibberish, firing up his spirit. When we asked him what he was doing he began to speak of preparing for a higher fight, a greater struggle, transforming all the lessons and techniques of boxing into the realms of true revolution.

  That night, when he was silent, when Mum paced up and down the darkened room, with the smoke of mosquito coils dense in the air, I heard the spirits who wandered through our living space passing the word to one another. I heard them muttering it, making songs out of it, playing with it, shortening and lengthening its syllables, handing it over from one voice to another, till the word floated on the air, as in a barely audible choir. And then everything fell silent as Dad spoke again.

  ‘Revolution. It takes time and one second.’

  I didn’t understand him. He never mentioned the word again. It was as if he somehow understood that it was necessary to utter the word, to release it into the air, and then to let it descend into a potent silence, like a seed into the fertile earth, to die in order to be reborn with power and direction. It was as if he needed to utter the word, let it grow in the air, let it take on voice and life, and let it float in all the realms of reality, weighed down and gathering force like a rain cloud, till the word found its perfect conditions to be real and right in its manifestation. Then, and only then, as technicians of the fighting spirit, would we rise for the wonderful battle and the storming of the high walls of deadly and selfish powers till our lives had been changed into something beautiful for ever.

  When I lit a candle there was a sweet sadness on Dad’s face. I knew he was thinking that he might not live to see the day when we would be free enough to join the great transforming men and women of the earth.

  TEN

  A river of contending dreams

  THAT NIGHT, WHILE we slept, I found myself circling Madame Koto’s room. Her spirit drew me inwards. I spun in the vortex of her illness, her erupting nightmares, her agony. She was alone in a mint cool place, silk beneath her, graven images all around her, and five red candles alight in silver niches. At the heart of her solitude I saw a vision growing.

  She dreamt that her children had stabbed her from behind while she was walking through a silver forest.

  Then she dreamt that she was giving birth to a nation. An unruly nation, bursting with diversity. A bad dream of a nation, with potential for waste and failure as grea
t as its enormous resources, its fabulous possibilities. She did nothing to alter the dream. She could affect our sleep, and work powerful spells on our innermost natures, but could not transform her dream into something higher. And we who tuned into the resonances of her spirit were infected with this failure to change our dreams. And because of her we took our dreams as realities, our realities as dreams. We read our omens as prophecies, which became facts. Those who cannot transform their bad dreams should be rudely awoken.

  I tried to wake her up, screaming the word revolution into the vents of her spirit. But I became aware at that same moment that the people of the fertile land were also dreaming the nation into being, and not questioning the nature of their dreams. They were dreaming their futures in it. And I was knocked about in the wordless multitude. The river of dreams was without direction. The dreams were too many, too different, too contradictory: the nation was composed not of one people but of several mapped and bound into one artificial entity by Empire builders. The multitude of dreams became a feverish confluence of contending waters. The fever affected the dreamers, made their dreams more intense. All those who dreamt the nation created it even as they dreamed – all those who wanted their gods to prevail, their tribes to rule, their ideas to become paramount, their ideologies to wield the lash, their vengeance to be made manifest, their enemies destroyed, their crop yields greater than all others, their houses the biggest, their children the most powerful, their families the masters, their clans to gain the eternal ascendance of fame, their affiliations to rise the highest, their wars to be fought, their secret societies to gain the golden seat, their souls alone to know contentment, their mouths alone to taste the rich honeycombs of the land. They all created the nation as they dreamt it. All those who dreamt such narrow dreams imprisoned us who came later in their fevered steel webs of selfishness and greed.