The old painter smiled. ‘I used to. That’s all I used to paint. I would draw the bad roads, paint the women in their filthy backyards. And I did it so much that my life became filled with misery. You reproduce your work in your life. And I am poor. My life became unbearable. So I started to paint bright things, happy subjects, the smile of a child on the edge of a sea, the proud hunger of the truck-pusher, the defiance of the motor tout. My life opened up a little. Now I try to do both, to have the ugliness as well as the dreams.’
‘I can’t seem to do anything. Often I am overwhelmed by unhappiness.’
The old painter stopped and looked at him affectionately. Then he put a hand on Omovo’s shoulder and said: ‘You are young. Everything you see and feel now will be your reservoir later. But you feel things too much. Art is a poor substitute for real life. I like you. But live! Live fully. Act whenever you feel the necessity. Don’t live only in your head. You are in the world.’
Dr Okocha went on walking. Omovo stayed still. He experienced a rush of being. Then he touched his head and felt the fresh bristles and his sweating skin. He could not see beyond the distance of run-down houses and dust-covered bushes. People went past him as he stood. He didn’t notice them. After a moment he hurried and caught up with the old painter, who said:
‘I will be out of town for two weeks on a commission. When I come back I will look you up and see how you are doing. We have a duty to make manifest the good dreams, the visions, that we are given. An Indian poet once wrote that “In dreams begin responsibilities.” I prefer the word “vision” to “dreams” in this context.’
He stopped again. And this time Omovo knew that he was in a hurry and had to go. Omovo, grateful for the older man’s interest, could not find anything to say. The old painter smiled. His eyes brightened. In a dramatic flourish, waving his hand as if throwing confetti in the air, he said:
‘We cast our nets out into the darkness and draw in ourselves. Sometimes, if we are fortunate, we also bring back...’
‘Bright corals.’
‘Bright things.’
‘With light and wonder.’
‘I will see you when I return.’
Dr Okocha turned somewhat abruptly and began striding towards his workshed. Omovo watched him stride away. He felt a great wave of affection for the older man. As he began walking to Okoro’s place, he pondered on the things the old painter had said. He became so lost in his thoughts that he walked right into a crowd of young men. They were arguing about money. They did not notice them in their midst. He left their midst and stood away from them, resting his back on the wall of a house. He watched them. The more he looked at them the more he noticed the individuals within the crowd. They were all different from one another. The only thing they had in common was their frantic hunger to make money. He listened to them as they talked about deals, contracts, loans. He imagined that they dreamt of deals. He had seen others like them, victims of poverty. When they returned from work late in the evening they talked incoherently to themselves, they made calculations with their fingers, blind to the world which someday they might rule. Premature wrinkles ravaged their faces. As Omovo carried on walking to his friend’s place he felt, suddenly, that he didn’t understand the world. In the face of its manifestation, its realities, he seemed to have only bewilderment and morbid fascination.
7
When he got to the wooden bridge, a short cut which spanned the marsh separating Alaba from Ajegunle, the woman in the toll shed wouldn’t let him cross over because she had no change. He had to wait for a few people to pass. The woman had drooping lips and large eyes. She sat behind the counter, eating beans from a plate with her fingers, and eyeing Omovo disdainfully. When she got enough change Omovo paid his five kobo.
‘Go gently,’ the woman said, as he began the crossing.
The bridge wobbled. There were no railings on either side. As Omovo crossed over, he felt vulnerable; he felt that a false step could send him falling into the marsh. Birds thrilled all around. Weeds grew luxuriantly from the marsh, which had long become a dumping ground for communal rubbish. The air was permeated with a damp, sulphurous stench. The marsh was surrounded by a haze of forest.
Omovo felt someone step on the other side of the bridge. It wobbled dangerously. He waited. The person who had stepped on the bridge was a woman in high-heeled shoes. She wore a bright yellow dress and she swayed her hips as she walked. Apart from Omovo there was no one else around to appreciate the sensuality of her movements. The bridge shook. Omovo said:
‘Take it easy. Don’t make yanga on this bridge-o.’
But she carried on swaying. She brushed past him with such violent nonchalance that it was only the good fortune of having stepped aside which saved him from falling into the marsh. He went on. He was nearing the other side when he heard her heel scrape a dislodged plank. He heard her scream. Then he heard the dreaded splash. He ran over and managed to drag her out. Mud oozed from her brassiere. Her yellow dress was covered in green and black slime. She was extremely miserable and bad-tempered. She kept abusing Omovo, as if it had been his fault. One of her high-heeled shoes had completely vanished in the marsh. Omovo led her to the woman at the toll shed, who gave her some water with which to wash her feet. Then Omovo watched her leave. She didn’t thank him. She was still bad-tempered and she walked gingerly down the street, holding up the bottom of her slime-covered dress.
His friend, Okoro, was seeing off his new girlfriend when Omovo arrived.
‘Hey! Hi man! Long time no see,’ shouted Okoro in his incorrigible American accent.
Okoro was of medium height and good-looking. His prematurely wrinkled forehead shone with perspiration. He had high cheekbones, and shadows under his eyes, and the vaguest terrain of a moustache. He was wearing a blue jacket, with sweat widening under the armpits, a pair of white trousers and black high-heeled shoes. He was brimming with enthusiasm. His new girlfriend was pimpled and pretty. She had wise eyes. She was wearing a white blouse over a red skirt. Okoro, putting his arm around her promising hips, said: ‘Where are you coming from, man?’
‘Home.’
‘How have you been?’
‘Fine. How are you?’
‘Okay. Great.’
‘Good.’
‘I saw Keme.’
‘What happened?’
‘I’ll tell you when I get back.’
‘Are you going to introduce me?’
‘Oh, don’t you know her?’
‘No.’
‘Meet my girl, July, flavour of all months. July, meet Omovo, painter of all seasons.’
They shook hands.
‘She’s at the College of Technology.’
They stood regarding one another for a moment. Then Okoro said: ‘Let me see her to the bus-stop, or do you want to come with us?’
‘I’ll wait. Is your door open?’
‘Yeah. Everybody’s out. I’ll be back in a moment.’
Omovo watched them go. They had gone a short distance up the untarred street when Okoro, placing his arm possessively round her shoulders, turned round and winked. Omovo smiled, and went into Okoro’s compound. His friend’s room was small and stuffy. The windows had to be kept permanently shut because of the sewer smells that came in from the backyard. In spite of it being daylight all the curtains were shut, the room was quite dark, and the blue light was on. The blue lightbulb had been intended to give the room a romantic atmosphere. Omovo noticed the sex-smells and opened the window. Light and vague sewer smells came in. Omovo, with nothing to do, looked around his friend’s room with a stranger’s eyes. It was something he had been practising. It was connected to his belief that he had to learn to see more clearly, look more carefully, without strain, without prejudice. He had to learn how not to let his eyes be bewildered by manifestations, and thereby learn to treat appearances as signs and codes of the interior.
On the blue walls of his friend’s room there was a poster of Fela Anikulapo Kuti, hand raised in a revo
lutionary gesture. Next to the poster was an Airways calendar with bright pictures of London, New York, Paris and Amsterdam. The calendar was two years out of date. A large bed occupied most of the living space. There was a small round table next to the bed. There were two chairs. On the floor were scattered pairs of shoes and slippers. At the foot of the bed was a clothes rack, weighed down with the latest fashions. Omovo sat at the only big table in the room, on which an impressive stereo stood. The rest of the space on the table was taken up with application forms, cassettes, keys, address books, brochures of American universities and correspondence course booklets. Okoro was studying for his Ordinary levels for the third time.
Omovo was exhausted by the scrutiny of his friend’s room. Usually when he came to visit, the room would be rocking with loud music. The silence and the heat made him drowsy. He laid his head on the table and was beginning to doze when Okoro came back in and slapped him excitedly on the shoulder.
‘What do you think of the broad, eh?’ he asked. But without waiting for a reply he put on a record. Then he turned up the volume.
‘Just what do you think, eh? Isn’t she heavy, eh?’ he said, shouting above the music.
Omovo made a vague gesture. Then he said: ‘I expected you last Friday.’
‘I went to a party with Dele.’
‘Did he tell you we went to his place?’
‘Yeah. The party was swell. That was where I met July. So what do you think of her, eh?’
‘Lower the music.’
‘What?’
‘Lower the music’
Okoro lowered the volume.
‘I thought girls in higher education scared you.’
‘Yeah, they do. They are too proud. But she’s all right. You never can tell with these girls, man.’
‘Sure.’
‘Don’t sound so bitter.’
‘Me?’
‘Yeah. Just because you had a girlfriend who left you as soon as she got an admission to the university.’
‘What’s that got to do with it?’
‘Frankly speaking, a girl like that never loved you in the first place.’
‘Sure.’
Okoro stared at him. The music reached the point where he usually got carried away. He increased the volume, and made sinuous movements, his eyes rolling in disco-hall ecstasy. Okoro sang along with the lyrics which spoke of yearning and love. When the song ended Okoro shut the window and stood near the table. With a positively lecherous gleam in his eyes, he said:
‘I met my girl at a party. Before I met her I was lonely, man. I saw her sitting with two other girls. She looked special, man. I don’t know what came over me but I went over and said: “Would you mind dancing with me?” I was wearing my new jacket, not this one, another one. It cost a bomb. I also had on new shoes. Anyway, she looked at me with cool eyes and said “No”. You won’t believe it, man, but for a moment I stood there dumbfounded. I didn’t know how I was going to walk back across the room. I thought she had said “No”, that she wouldn’t dance with me.’
‘She did say “No”’.
‘Sure. But then she stood up and looked at me as if I was supposed to do something. Then I realised that she had said “Yes”. Man, the English language confuses you sometimes. Anyway, we danced. She’s a good dancer. You should feel her body, man. I don’t want you to feel it, if you know what I mean.’
‘Sure.’
‘So anyway, I wrapped my arms around her. We danced close up. I asked about her. It took three records to get her talking. I put on my best accent and told her about myself, lying where necessary, you know.’
Okoro winked. Omovo smiled.
‘Then I took her away from her friends. They didn’t look too pleased about it, but who cares. A man only gets one chance. And before the party ended I was doing things to her that I couldn’t have dreamt of. I was so happy, man. I can’t tell you how happy I was. I felt powerful. I felt that I could move the world, and do all the things I hope to do. I felt lucky.’
Omovo began to feel uneasy, restless. He wasn’t terribly interested in all the details that Okoro sounded he was going to launch into. Omovo picked up some of the booklets on government and put them back down again.
‘Omovo, you know how hard it is. We all want love, man. It makes me feel lonely walking down the street and seeing everybody else holding a woman.’
Omovo said nothing. He sensed desperation in his friend’s voice. They stayed silent. Okoro looked a little embarrassed.
‘How are your studies?’ Omovo asked, and then wished he hadn’t.
Okoro looked away. He increased the volume of the music till the room fairly shook. Then staggering a little, as if he were exhausted, as if he had woken from a dream, he went to the bed, and sat. He stared ahead of him with a sad and vacant stillness. Then he stretched out on the bed, his shoes still on, and shut his eyes. The wrinkles deepened on his forehead.
Omovo watched him, saddened by the expression of pain on his face. The war had scarred Okoro forever, and in ways that were not always visible. When Omovo first met him, he had just finished secondary school and he used to talk excessively about the war. He was driven then. Okoro had fought in the war, first as a boy cub attached to an officer. He used to sneak into villages near the fighting and steal food. He was a lookout who would climb up trees and watch out for invading soldiers and communicate what he saw by a system of signs. He survived three bombings, without the help of bunkers. He saw his village destroyed by air raids. He carried the wounded across minefields. He went on regular reconnaissances at night, deep in the forests, scouting the whereabouts of troops. On one such reconnaissance he saw three of his friends killed by booby traps. He was given a crash course in soldiery and conscripted into the main army. He wasn’t yet seventeen. He used to talk about the war and how it interrupted his schooling, and about the horrible things he had witnessed, like a woman who had been shot through the breast, or the baby that sat screaming in the midst of an air raid, or a soldier that was fifteen years old and who ran through the forests with a leg that had been pulped by bullets. He talked about the long nights in the swamp, with no blankets, while it poured down with rain, and while villages burnt about him, while the bombs fell, and lightning became indistinguishable from relentless shelling, and thunder inseparable from the bombs. He talked about friends who had deserted and who were caught by their comrades and shot point-blank. He talked about how lucky he had been to escape injury and death, about how his father had died on the battlefield and was buried in a mass grave. When the war ended he resumed his education. And when Omovo first met him he burnt with vitality and fire, with despair and hope. He burnt with the feral determination to reconstruct something from his life, to make up for the lost years. Omovo saw him as a hero, as one who bore the ineradicable memory of violence, as one who had come of age in the midst of ambushes and shelling, as one who had seen death, seeing the dying with the eyes of youth. But the years came and went. Okoro got various jobs and gradually his fire died away. Working in offices for so long and so aimlessly, living a life of mindless routines and grey regularity, had sapped his feral drive. He stopped talking about the war and began to sink into moods of unrelieved bitterness. But he had a happy spirit and when he felt bad he would plunge into parties and discos, he would chat up women, he would laugh loudly, while the wrinkles tightened on his face. Omovo knew that his friend lived with more terrors than he could ever understand.
The record stopped playing. The room was silent. Omovo thought about how his own childhood had alternated so sharply between laughter and loneliness. Growing up had been irredeemably spoiled by the difficult discovery that people have to struggle grossly for what amounts to a miserable compromise. It seemed to him a wonder that his people could bear their hard lives without going insane.
Okoro moved on the bed. His eyes were wide open and his face had hardened. ‘You can’t beat the establishment,’ he said. ‘Play me some music’
Omovo turned the recor
d to the other side and lowered the volume.
‘You ask about my studies? My studies are there. One gets fed up of reading for examinations,’ Okoro said.
‘Make this your last one.’
‘Sure.’
They fell silent. Okoro sat up on the bed and held his head between his palms.
‘My mother wrote. She is not well. She has been ill for a long time. I keep sending money home. It’s a terrible life. Everything is struggle. There is no rest. I feel like an old man. I feel tired.’
Omovo said nothing for a while. Then by way of changing the subject he said: ‘Have you seen Keme?’
‘Yeah. I don’t know what has come over him.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘I went to his place yesterday. He was angry. The police had detained him for a day. He didn’t tell me why because of his anger. He said something about his editor refusing to publish his story. He is threatening to resign. Do you know why he is so furious?’
‘We went to the park some days ago and found the body of a dead girl.’
‘What?’
‘We saw a dead girl’s body. It was mutilated. They had shaved her hair.’
‘Really.’
‘Yeah. We went to Dele’s place and phoned the police. Maybe something has developed. I knew Keme would follow up the story.’
They were silent again. Okoro stood up and walked around the cramped space of the room. He kept waving his hands without saying anything. He seemed agitated. He sat down again. Then suddenly his face contorted and he laughed. Then, quieting down, he said:
‘But why is he so worried about a dead body? I mean, I saw many of them stinking along the streets during the war. I mean…’
‘But we are not at war.’
‘Who said so? Our society is a battlefield. Poverty, corruption and hunger are the bullets. Bad governments are the bombs. And we still have soldiers ruling us.’
‘Okay. Okay. I don’t want to argue.’
They were silent again.
‘Okay. So it affected you. But you are too sensitive for our society. If you worry too much about these things you will go mad. Or you will commit suicide. You have to learn to forget, to shut them out, and to concentrate on yourself.’