Infinite Riches

by Ben Okri

  I had been clawed by hands of bone, a living skeleton, hooded with shadows, sharp-jawed, long-toothed. Yellow pustules glowed all over his face. I gave a cry of horror when I recognized the figure of the blind old man. He was raving above me. His eyes were yellow. He was raving confessions of murder. Screaming that he had killed the daughter of a goddess. With his vice grip round my wrist, he kept begging me to lead him home to his village. Scared beyond my wits, I led him through the chaos and the violent rain.

  The blind old man was possessed by a feverish insanity. He stumbled. Uttered terrifying confessions. Wailed as if an inferno blazed inside his spirit. Dragged me about the place. He staggered this way, rushed another, fell, brought me down on him, got up again. His evil grip kept crushing my wrist.

  Then a wave of howling women poured over us, almost trampling us into the ground. The blind old man squealed pathetically. As he fell, he let go of me. I fled from him, and wandered confused over the battlefield of enraged bodies. Later, when I saw the blind old man tramping into a marsh, intent on dying, bellowing out his desire to return to his peaceful farm in the village, and calling my name with the voice of a nightmare bird, I went blind again and fell on my hands and knees and crawled through the upheavals of that scabrous night.

  As I crawled, a large cat brushed past my face. Its tail tickled my nose. I sneezed, and the night became a little clearer. I got up. With my arms outstretched, I followed the form of the big cat. As I went, with great cries and noises all around me, I stumbled on a gargantuan body lying at the roadside. It was like a beached whale. I kept trying to get round it, but couldn’t. I tried to climb over it but felt how every time I touched it, thick liquids bubbled up from its flesh. Then the rain came down harder, beating magnified tattoos upon everything. The rain washed away my blindness and I saw the body not of a whale or a great horse but of a woman with her head turned away, one eye open, staring at me.

  ‘Get up!’ I said.

  The head turned ominously in my direction. The woman stared at me without moving, without breathing. Her face was swollen and full of folds. Blood gushed out of her belly.

  An intermittent light shone on the unholy sight. The woman’s eyes were wide open and her face was contorted. White moonstones gleamed in her hand. The string had broken. The moonstones were red in that dark night. The woman wouldn’t budge when I prodded her. It was when I pushed her, trying to get her to move, to stand up, that I noticed she was lying in the thick puddle of her own blood. Then, heaving a volcanic sigh that knocked the senses back into my head, the woman seized my hand, shoved the moonstones in my palm, and fell back with a grating death rattle.

  The moonstones burnt my palm and I dropped them. They sizzled on the rainwater. And when I realised that the woman was Madame Koto I screamed for the world to come and help her, but no one heard. I went on screaming, for the body of the legendary Madame Koto kept growing in my mind.

  Soon I was overpowered by the fury of the rain, and the smell of damp burning rubber, and the stench of Madame Koto’s wild blood. I heard someone calling my name from behind me. I turned, and saw nothing. Then I heard my name again, uttered with a ghostly sort of rhythm. When I looked back I made out the spirit-form of Ade. He was standing on a pile of bricks, an incandescent white hat on his head. My eyes were feverish. I went towards him and found nothing but shadows. Then I thought I heard the snorting of a big animal behind me. And when I turned round, I was astonished to find a wild bull with a golden bell around its neck standing astride Madame Koto’s body, as if protecting it. The bull bristled with low yellow flames. Its eyes were red.

  I stood transfixed. The bull lifted its great animal head. Then it snorted again. Then it kicked. And then it charged. Screaming into the dark universe, I fled into the arena of rioting. I fled past the dead, past the spirits and the horses, in that air emptied of rage. The rain suddenly ceased falling. But gusts of exhausted wind went on blowing over the desolation of burnt cars, broken houses, and writhing bodies.

  FOUR

  A cooling wind

  I FLED THROUGH the riot, with the heat of the wild bull on my neck. I ran a clear line in the cool air, past limping women and masquerades on stilts, and dancers who still breathed out fire. I ran through the vertiginous domain of the god of chaos who had scattered the passions of men and women, torn up roads, devastated the rally, hurled beams and firebrands in all directions of the earth.

  I fled over the scattered garbage, the swollen gutters where dead cats floated, past the broken stalls and burnt-out cars, and agile drummers who were still beating out ferocious rhythms of a new ascendancy.

  The wind was mysterious and cooling. It cleared the dead from the air, swept away their insurrective humour, and vengeful appearance. It blew me past the crossroads, down our street, towards home. The wind made all the things of this world stable. It stopped the transformations. It stilled the dreams. It calmed the rage. It cooled our spirits. And it led me home, protected.

  The wind protected me from the huge fallen shadows, the mammoth forms of listening trees, the lion-headed butterflies, and from the voices of my spirit-companions of the other world who had been plaguing me ever since the day I arrived on the expanding spaces of the earth.

  V

  BOOK EIGHT

  ONE

  Earthing evil

  THERE ARE CERTAIN trees that seem worthless but when gone leave empty spaces through which bad winds blow. There are other trees that seem useless but when felled worse things grow in their place. In ancient times, according to Dad, wise men had a special place for the statues of the god that earths evil things in our interspaces. They were kept outside the village gates because they were too powerful. The statues were ugly. Their ugliness warded off greater evils. There is a kind of evil, a bearable and human evil, which prevents bigger evils from being here.

  There is always some kind of evil on earth. Poisonous herbs and wicked people and diseases and earthquakes. Some say there is no greater breeding-ground for evil than when a people’s reason falls asleep, their dreams unencumbered, and when the air seems clear.

  Dad says that sometimes we are more awake in our dreams: we hear what the spirits are whispering, we see what the gods see in our lives, we become what we really are.

  When Madame Koto died we slept as if the boil of time had burst. We slept as if time had been undammed. Slowly at first, and then suddenly, the future rushed upon us.

  TWO

  The disintegration of myth

  MADAME KOTO DIED and time changed. Her death altered our lives in ways we could never have foreseen. Her space was taken over by the vicious little monsters of this world: they fed on the myth of her great body. They came from everywhere. We did not recognize them at first. They came to her funeral and then stayed. They drained us of blood.

  When Madame Koto died, time accelerated. The hundred narratives of our lives merged as in a great weaving. Time became a flood of brackish waters. Not many of us survived. The gates of our sleep burst open and a horde of previously sleeping demons crept out into the world. They became real, and began to rule us.

  The time of miracles, sorceries, and the multiple layers of reality had gone. The time when spirits roamed amongst human beings, taking human forms, entering our sleep, eating our food before we did, was over. The time of myth died with Madame Koto.

  Her body festered for seven days in her secret palace. Poisonous flowers which give off sweet smells, herbs which cure blindness, onions and salamanders, grew on the myth of her great body. Hardy leaves of rhododendron grew from her armpits. The yellow dust of angels which had been germinating in her spirit burst into little golden maggots. They grew fat in the heat of her funeral chamber.

  Night and day, for seven days, her ministrants strove to disinfect her body. They scrubbed it with carbolic and the juice of banana plants. They washed it with fermented palm-wine and tar soap. They soaked her in a mighty tub full of herb-marinated alcohol and rubbed her over with palm-oil till her compl
exion turned ripe and beautiful, glowing in her death as if she were merely asleep.

  But as soon as they had finished with the cleansing of her body, decomposition set in again. The yellow dust turned into maggots, herbal seeds sprouted on her belly, and her eyes grew bigger for having seen so much.

  Her eyes kept growing and her followers became possessed by this terrible faculty, for with her eyes’ expansion came the diminishment of their sight. Her eyes grew so big that her followers became convinced she was seeing more dead than alive.

  I saw her eyes growing in my sleep. The rest of her body got smaller. I was struck by the expression in her eyes. It was the expression of one who can’t speak, who sees too much, and who can’t express what they see. It was horror. And self-disgust. Her eyes swelled with bitterness. They turned purple. Then they turned yellow. And they became so disgusting that her ministrants dreaded their daily cleansing of her body.

  Her followers’ eyesight diminished and they began to see only the festering of her myth, its dissolution. They saw, with horrified eyes, the decaying of her ritual images. Her statue of a goddess started to crumble to dust in the space of a few days. The dust infected her followers with fevers. Her peacocks became ill. Green liquid dribbled from their eyes, maggots infested their feathers, and the smell of advanced rot emanated from their living flesh. Many of them died. Madame Koto’s moonstones vanished with the secrets of their self-illuminating powers. No one knew who took them. Her room gave off a fetid stench. Her bar stank. All her clothes, possessions and ritual objects were covered in vibrant mould, continuing the potency of her myth.

  Her domain shrivelled; her followers became ill; her camp divided; and most of the people associated with her fled and disappeared. The great black rock, whose sinister life compacted the force of her myth, cracked one night. We heard hellish cries escaping into the air of our street. How many lives, how many spirits, demons, djinns, had been trapped in that rock of old powers? I had no idea. But all night we heard hellish cries from the heart of the rock encircle our area.

  THREE

  The yellow growth

  DURING THE HEAT and silence of those seven days, Madame Koto’s body became the womb of worms and slugs, cockroaches and flies. Geckos mated on her brow. A yellow growth accelerated on her fine complexion and on her resplendent robes.

  When they found her on the fourth day, she had grown a beard which they shaved off and which grew again during the night. They shaved off her beard three times before the day of her funeral arrived.

  FOUR

  New rumours change reality

  THE DIMINISHMENT OF the sight of Madame Koto’s followers got so bad that they could not be relied on for the things they said. Things which filtered through to us in the form of ghostly rumours. The rumours changed the appearance of reality. I cannot be considered a reliable witness either, for I suffered hallucinations after I discovered Madame Koto’s body. I suffered most because I had been the first to stumble upon her. The days seemed to have merged into one another like successive dreams. Could it have been when I fled home from the rally, pursued by the incandescent bull, that I saw Dad battling with six political gangsters, or could it have been the next day? I could not be sure. And so I can’t be certain of the things I witnessed, or the things I remember. But on one of those days, as in a vivid moment of a living dream, I saw Dad fighting with six men at the mouth of our street. Uttering the cries of a madman freed from hell, he knocked three of them out with the new punch he had perfected from the spirit of revolution. He kept screaming that it was men like him who had defeated Hitler. Mum was there too, her wrapper tied tightly round her waist. On her face was an expression I had never seen before. The grim expression of a merciless warrior. She was hitting the men that were battling Dad. Hitting them with a pestle.

  Not far from where they fought, hunters were celebrating the death of a rogue elephant. It had fallen into one of the pits the white men got our people to dig for the creation of new roads. The hunters were drunk. While one of the thugs clubbed Dad at the back of the head with a blunt machete, the hunters sang salty dirges to the dead elephant. A thug swung a vicious blow at Mum. The blow glanced off her cheek. She howled and cracked his head with the pestle. Dad pounced on him and kept punching him on the nose till it was all bloody and textured like red paste. Then the other thugs fled, alarmed by Dad’s unbounded ferocity. And when they fled, when there was no more fighting to be done, Dad sank to the ground, covered in blood. I had been wailing. The hunters, seeing me crying out in the midst of my fallen parents, rushed over and carried Dad home on six shoulders like a fallen warrior. Mum went home, limping, bruises all over her face.

  FIVE

  Dad hears lovely melodies

  WHILE MADAME KOTO’S body began to smell, my father began to bleed from the ears. And when Madame Koto’s body released gaseous aromas of rotting wild hibiscus, Dad’s bleeding stopped. Then he started to hear things. He heard voices and the charming melodies of the dead.

  The smell which escaped from Madame Koto’s body hung over our area for days. The decay of her possessions, the crumbling wood of her images, the dust of her dead tortoises, leaked out into the air and made many people sick.

  And when we heard rumours that her body had shrivelled and become so small that it resembled the corpse of an ugly old woman, not many of us were surprised, because the disintegration of her myth had begun long before her assassination.

  SIX

  The curious stigmata

  MUM’S BRUISES HARDENED her face. Dad couldn’t hear most of the things we said to him because of the voices and tinkling bells in his head.

  Mum’s face became calloused. Her eyes took on the spikiness of bitter herbs. Desert herbs that retain their water through the heat of the hallucinating sands. She began to talk of giving up hawking and of selling clothes instead. She complained about Dad not going to work. She berated me for eating too much when there wasn’t enough food in the house. Dad didn’t hear her for all the wailings he heard in his deafness.

  He stayed in all day, listening to bells and cries in his echoing ears, like one straining at other people’s keyholes. His deafness made him appear distracted. He listened intently to all the melodies, and the voices of the universe about us. The things he heard seemed to age him.

  Lumps appeared on Madame Koto’s body, making her beard difficult to shave. My hallucinations grew worse. The redness in the middle of my palm, caused by Madame Koto’s moonstones, began to expand. I was so afraid of this curious stigmata that I told no one about it. I went around with my fist clenched.

  SEVEN

  ‘Who is crying?’

  ON THE THIRD day after Madame Koto’s death, with time accelerating around us, Dad heard wailings long before they manifested in the street.

  The wailing puzzled him. It worried him. He would sit up suddenly in his three-legged chair and say:

  ‘Who is crying?’

  We would say no one is crying. But he wouldn’t hear us. He went on asking the same question over and over again. He drove us mad with his insistence.

  Mum’s face became so hard that not even the shadow of a smile touched her cheeks. She gave off the weight of a bitter presence. Between them both, one deaf, the other hardened in spirit, the room became unbearable. I went out to play and saw the faces of the women: they were all hard and bony, their eyes unforgiving. Their bitterness made their children ill with the bitter milk of their breasts. The children cried all night long. The men went around as if they were deaf, or slightly blind, or dumb. They spoke very little, they didn’t recognize anyone, and they heard no greetings.

  Something new and infernal invaded our lives. Our doorways which had been crowded by Madame Koto’s presence were now empty. The imps of the new era crept into our rooms. They found a corner, installed themselves comfortably, and watched us with hollow eyes.

  Meanwhile the smell from Madame Koto’s domain filled the air with fevers and rumours. The dust of her disintegrati
ng myth fed the hungry mouths of ghosts. An era was passing away. The blasting heat of new realities blew over from gaps in the forest.

  EIGHT

  The blind old man’s piety

  ON THE FOURTH day of Madame Koto’s death, when the elephant in the pit began to smell, when the hyenas came and reduced its great bulk with their jagged teeth, we heard the horrifying noises of wailing in our street. When we couldn’t locate the source of the wailing we too began to ask Dad’s question: ‘Who is crying?’

  The wailing continued for hours. It was only in the evening that we became witnesses to the blind old man’s peculiar piety.

  He appeared in public, wearing a black suit and tie, a black hat and white shoes. He looked normal enough. He was without the pustules caused by the dust of the yellow angel. It was as if I had merely dreamt them, or as if they were not yet visible. He began to mourn loudly, throwing himself on the ground, weeping at the death of Madame Koto.

  His weeping was a mystery to us. While Madame Koto’s body stank out the labyrinths of her palace, the blind old man unleashed on us his weird and overpowering mourning. He wept at night, he wailed in the afternoon, he sang dirges in the evening. And while he was mourning in public, and mourning very loudly, he was seizing power, taking over Madame Koto’s terrain, swallowing it into his shrivelled body, sucking it into his public weeping.