Lunatics, Lovers and Poets Read online

  He stared at me and I felt he could see the inside of my head.

  ‘I have read books backwards and inside out. I began reading Ovid in the middle and then to the end and then from the beginning. I once read every other sentence of a book I knew well and then went back and read the sentences I missed out. We are all children in the art of reading. We assume there is only one way to read a book. But a book read in a new way becomes a different book.’

  I felt he was reading me as he spoke.

  ‘And you have the nerve to tell me I am reading slowly. Part of the trouble with our world, my snooty young friend, is that the art of reading is almost dead. Reading is the secret of life. We read the world poorly, because we read poorly. Everything is reading. You are trying to read me now.’

  His focus on me made me nearly jump out of my skin. I could not read him. I would not even dare to begin. He was like a Chinese character or a hieroglyph.

  ‘Don’t deny it. I can see your eyes wandering about my face as if it were an incomprehensible text.’

  He paused.

  ‘You are even trying to read this moment in time. But you read it dimly. The words are not clear on your pages of life. Youth clouds your seeing. Emotions pass in front of the text before you have grasped it. Can you read yourself in the chapter of time?’

  He was staring at me again and all I had was muteness.

  ‘You are a living paragraph of history. Around you are all the horrors of time and all the wonders of life, but all you see is an old man reading with all his soul. Do you know what I am reading?’

  I shook my head, as if in a trance.

  ‘I am reading a text by a Spaniard about my adventures in La Mancha.’

  He guessed at the vacuity of my grasp.

  ‘You have no idea what I am talking about, and you dare to criticise how I read?’

  Another short laugh burst out of him.

  ‘I don’t read slowly. And I have long ago left reading fast to those who will continuously misunderstand everything around them. I read now the way the dead read. I read with the soles of my feet. I read with my beard. I read with the secret ventricles of my heart. I read with all my sufferings, joys, intuitions, all my love, all the beatings I have received, all the injustices I have endured. I read with all the magic that seeps through the cracks in the air. Do you, therefore, dare to judge the way I read?’

  ‘I’m sorry, sa,’ I murmured. ‘I did not mean anything…’

  ‘You would prefer me to gulp words down like a drunk guzzling palm wine in a bukka?’

  ‘No, sa.’

  ‘I suppose you think the faster you read, the more intelligent you are?’

  ‘Not at all, sa.’

  In truth though, this is what I believed.

  ‘I suppose for you living fast is genius. I bet you fuck fast too. Fuck so fast that the poor woman has hardly had time to notice that you were in her.’

  ‘Not at all, sa!’

  ‘Not at all, what?’

  ‘I don’t know, sa. I am confused, sa.’

  He conferred on me another long stare. I felt myself shrink to a tiny form, one inch from the floor. At the same time I felt magnified beyond the sky. He had that paradoxical effect. As he stared at me it seemed my life rushed before my eyes. I felt myself hurtling through time. I grew older, more arrogant, more successful. A chance event brought me down. Then the years of doubt followed. My waist thickened. I found a wife, became a father, and lost all my dreams. I worked hard, under the name of raising a family. And then I was an old man on a porch, wondering where all the magic and promise of life had gone. When only yesterday I was a young apprentice with all the world before me. Then Don Quixote comes to the printing workshop, and shakes my life with his mad Urhobo gaze.

  ‘What you don’t understand,’ he said, relentlessly, ‘is that nothing is done faster than when it is done well.’

  For the first time, I noticed the unnatural silence in the workshop.

  ‘You read for information, I read to extract the soul of the conception. Reading is like the mind of the gods, seeing beyond the page. Can you read an entire history from a single glance? Can you deduce a poet’s health or the station of their time here on earth from a single line of poetry? You think reading is about reading fast. But reading is about understanding that which cannot be understood, which the words merely hint at.’

  He would have gone on, in this fashion, had Sancho Panza not sneaked a look at the text that Don Quixote had in his hands.

  ‘My dear Don,’ said Sancho, ‘but I see your name on the pages you are reading. How did that come to be?’

  Don Quixote paused in a particularly brilliant crescendo of thought. Then he lashed Sancho with one of those gazes perfected in the creeks of Urhoboland.

  ‘Did you not hear one word I’ve been saying to our young friend here about reading?’

  ‘Don, the things you say are too intelligent for me. They go clean over my head. I watch them sailing past. I don’t think it helpful to pay attention to what you say. But your name on these pages, what is it doing there?’

  Don Quixote brought the machete, flat surface down, hard on the edge of the printing machine. Sparks shot out into our faces. Don Quixote was himself taken aback by the sparks. His eyes protruded. I could sense another long speech coming on. To distract him, I said:

  ‘Aren’t you going to continue with your reading?’

  For a moment he seemed torn between a scientific and a literary choice. With a sigh, and pulling at his beard as if it helped him concentrate, he returned to the text. He read in silence like a man drowning. A wall-gecko ran halfway up the wall. The wall-gecko saw Don Quixote reading and was transfixed by the vision. I watched the wall-gecko watching Don Quixote. It must have been a historic sight.

  Now, many years later, I see how much of a historic moment it was. It was a moment in which a golden line between the old and new time was crossed. Can someone reading constitute a significant moment in the cultural life of a whole people? Can something so intimate have historical repercussions? I do not want to make extravagant claims for such a subjective activity. But what if the understanding of one mind precipitates the understanding of the many? There is a moment in the life of a people when things are suddenly seen for what they are. It may be injustice, or it may be a great social evil. But what if such a seeing was achieved first by one and then by the rest of us? Maybe the great historical moments, the storming of barricades, the tearing down of palaces, are the outer form of an inner activity. Maybe a people see first and then the realm of deeds comes after.

  But as Don Quixote read that text we could feel the air in the room change. His way of reading was like a prosecution of all our assumptions. It was like a thousand question marks scattered across our corruption-infested landscape. Even his face kept altering as he read. His beard was twisted into the enigmatic shapes of ancestral sculptures.

  In the silence a thousand questions began to swim up to me. Maybe it was that long in-between time usually given up to chatter. Maybe it was the time used in covering up that which we do not want to see, but which stares at us like a corpse at the side of the street. Maybe it was that silence, so rare in our times, that allowed the questions to rise up to the holes in the roof, through which they escaped out into the nation.

  Being an eminently practical man, according to his own curious logic, Don Quixote would disapprove of such fanciful notions. But something happened in that space, in that silence, as he sucked in the air with the concentration of his reading. It may have been the beginning of our reading the world that we saw all around us, the world that we suffered every day. It was that more than anything.

  He infected us with a new way of reading. We began to read the cockroaches. We read the spider’s webs. We read the raw roads and the corpses under the bushes. We read the cracks in our faces, through which despair seeped out. We read our extraordinary talent for evasion. We read our breathing and noticed what a pungent text the air made. Wh
en we began to read the shacks, the slums, and the palatial houses with armed guards and high electric fences, when we began to read those who grew fatter as we grew thinner, when we began to read the ambiguous text of our recent history, we saw that the world was not how we thought it was. Before we had seen the world as somehow inevitable. We had seen that it was the only way it could be. Now, with the new reading, we saw that the world was only one of a thousand ways it could be. But we had chosen this one, with its bad smells, its injustice.

  All this happened in the space of a printed page. He read the page. Then took up another printed page. He read that. Then he looked up. His head aslant, he regarded us with puzzlement.

  ‘What is it?’ Sancho said, rushing forward. He sensed distress in the eyes of his beloved master and friend.

  ‘What is it? What is it? Have you seen what I am reading?’

  ‘No. What is it?’

  I don’t know how, but he had ink on his face. He looked both comical and ghoulish. He misunderstood our collective stares. He seemed to think that we knew what he had been reading, and that we had somehow colluded in it. His machete rose above his head, and we backed off into the shadows, and pressed ourselves into the walls. The shape of our backs ought to have dented the bricks.

  ‘These are pages about our adventures,’ he cried.

  ‘What adventures?’

  ‘All our adventures.’

  ‘All?’

  ‘All since we left Ughelli and roamed the world as far as La Mancha, fighting demons, defeating giants, rescuing women from abduction, tilting at oil rigs, battling corruption. It’s all here!’

  ‘But how can that be? No one else knows of those adventures except us. I haven’t told anybody. Have you?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Sancho.’

  ‘But who is writing down those adventures? Is it someone we know?’

  ‘Someone called Ben Okri. He claims to be writing the adventures from oral history.’

  ‘Oral history?’

  ‘Yes, oral history. Don’t look so stupid, Sancho. It is word-of-mouth history.’

  ‘You mean gossip?’

  ‘Not just gossip.’

  ‘You mean rumour?’

  ‘No. Stories told by people.’

  ‘Can you trust it?’

  ‘Oral history can be more reliable than written history.’

  ‘You don’t really believe that, do you?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘People exaggerate. They tell tall tales. Sometimes they engage in propaganda.’

  ‘I know. But oral history gives us the spirit, whereas written history gives us only the facts. The facts, by themselves, tell us very little.’

  ‘So are we to believe this Ben Okri?’

  ‘He also claims to be writing the adventures from manuscripts originally written by Cervantes, who wrote his from papers he discovered by Cide Hamete Benengeli, who got it from an Arabic manuscript.’

  ‘It sounds very complicated.’

  ‘It is not complicated at all. It’s like Biblical genealogy.’

  ‘What is genealogy? You are always using words bigger than me and I am a big man. Can you not find a simpler word for a plain man like me?’

  ‘And that is not all,’ roared Don Quixote, ignoring Sancho’s request.

  ‘There’s more?’

  ‘Of course there is more. Why else would I be so upset?’

  ‘You are always upset about something. Or you are always upsetting something.’

  ‘Shut up, Sancho.’

  Sancho offered the Don a glum look.

  ‘This fellow has written adventures I haven’t had yet.’

  ‘You mean he has written your future?’

  Don Quixote considered this. His face was almost meditative.

  ‘He has written one future.’

  ‘How many futures are there?’

  ‘We have a wise saying in our village. A man’s future changes when he changes how he lives.’

  ‘Forgive me for being stupid, but is that not one of the futures too?’

  ‘No!’ bellowed Don Quixote. ‘We believe that a person can confound their future. It was prophesied for me that I would die in my bed, and that I would renounce the life I have lived. But I will do no such thing.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘They can write my future. But I am the only one who can write my present.’

  ‘So you are going to become a writer now?’

  ‘Of course not, Sancho. I have chosen to live. I have chosen the noble path of adventure, not the sedentary art of writing.’

  ‘You had me worried for a minute.’

  ‘When I say I will write my present I only mean that I will write it in how I live it. For many writing is what they do on a page. For a rare few, writing is what they do with life. Some write their texts on paper. I write my text on the living tissue of time. I write my legends on the living flesh of the present moment.’

  ‘I prefer pounded yam and egusi soup, with goat meat.’

  ‘Of course you do, Sancho.’

  ‘Each to his own.’

  ‘For me, however, all destiny is here. In this moment. This present moment is one the gods have no control over.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because they have yielded to us the marvels of consciousness.’

  ‘I had never thought of that before.’

  ‘Of course you hadn’t, Sancho. Most people read books; I read life. Some people write stories; I live them.’

  He looked around the workshop.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said abruptly. ‘We have spent enough time in this house of embalmment.’ He slid the machete into a rough sheath that he wore on his side.

  Moved to a defence of my apprenticeship as a printer’s assistant, I cried:

  ‘Embalmment?’

  ‘Yes, embalmment,’ replied Don Quixote, calmly. ‘What else are you doing here but burying living time in the tomb of print? What are you doing but fixing in the amber of print that which was fluid and multi-dimensional?’

  Again I stared at him stupefied. My mind had a thousand objections, but my mouth was stuck. He continued evenly.

  ‘This workshop is a graveyard of life. Life has a thousand colours, meanings, layers, aspects known and unknown. Print has only one face. That face, in a thousand years, is taken to be the only truth. This is a house of the falsifications of time. I will have nothing more to do with it.’

  ‘But we leave a record,’ I cried. ‘This is history!’

  ‘The father of lies!’ returned Don Quixote with unnatural tranquillity.

  The years pass and a great ambiguity falls over those words. The years pass and I become aware that we never really see what is there before us. It is as if the event veils its own truth.

  It seems he could indeed read the future in a grain of text. The truth is that after he left that day we scoured all the printed matter we had in the shop. We found that nothing we had printed that day or any other day bore any resemblance to what he claimed he had read.

  It began to dimly occur to us that maybe we did not know how to read the secret scripts of life concealed in the ordinary stuff we printed every day. It occurred to us that we did not know how to read at all. This was perhaps the greatest shock. Don Quixote had read our walls, the dust at our feet, and had discerned that which we would not notice in a hundred years. In that way he taught us that there is a secret reality before us all the time. This secret reality reveals all things.

  There still remains some doubt as to whether his reading of this secret reality is a consequence of his madness, or whether our inability to read it is a consequence of our dimness. It may just be that we are blind to the prophecies written on the plain features of our times.

  That day, after he returned the printed pages back to me, he cast one last look at the workshop. Did ever a glance reveal the poverty and richness of a place? For a moment, seeing it through his eyes, I wanted to tear down every brick from that squalid worksho
p. But then, seeing it through his eyes the next moment, I glimpsed an unsuspected magnificence. With his unique seeing he could transform a hovel into a castle.

  After that ambiguous gaze, he turned to me. I expected from him a long speech, such as antique knights are inclined to give. I braced myself for meandering locutions. Instead he favoured me with a smile, in which was mixed compassion and amusement. To this day I have not been able to fathom the full meaning of that smile. It bothers me often on the margins of sleep.

  With a gesture to Sancho, he left the room. I should write that line twice. No one has ever left a room the way he did. He left it altered forever. He left the room, but the room retained the stamp and magic and chaos of his spirit. Afterwards when I went to the workshop a little of Don Quixotism invaded my quiet life.

  Why else do I write with elegiac cadences of a moment that happened more than forty years ago? I too would have liked to have set out on a steed and take on the challenges of our times. Later we heard how he would attack garage boys thinking they were stragglers from Boko Haram, or would defend a prostitute in Ajegunle thinking her a celebrated Yoruba princess, or how he set upon a convoy of soldiers, accusing them of electoral fraud. In the last instance he was beaten within a half-inch of his life for his absurd bravery.

  These actions have changed in the telling into deeds of heroism that shame our famous activists. His deeds, reimagined by our storytellers, made my days into something a little glorious. The years have been good to him.

  When he died, in a hovel on the edge of the ghetto, surrounded by his beloved books, he had only Sancho with him, and a scheming niece. His last words were not remembered. Sancho was too broken by grief to ever speak of them. But over the months word went round of his passing. All the market women he had irritated, all the politicians he had insulted, all the prostitutes he tried to reform, all the truck-pushers he had taunted, all the bus drivers who flinched when they saw him, all formed processions along his street and held long vigils outside his house.