‘Each of you is skilled in the art of listening,’ he continued. ‘You each received an aural training from childhood. This performance, then, is constituted by you. I am simply the conduit.’
Mr Rafferty once again opened the window. He stood facing the angled square of perspex, his back to me, both arms raised, in his left hand the ivory wand with which he conducted the silence. For, in spite of the open window, silence reigned over that padded room. Then he raised his arms, balled his hands and punched the air. At once, silence changed her name.
In swept the thrum of traffic, dully, distantly, vibrations of cars, buses, truck-thunder, the sudden shriek of a bicycle’s brakes. Silence. From which opened quiet machine-noise, the Green Man’s yelp. And now the flurry of footsteps, shouting voices, the collapsed hobble of the old. And there were seagulls, perched on roofs and everywhere circling; shifting, the sand at Portobello beach; shivering, the leaves of the old oak on Princes Street.
At length, when the city was sounding in an immense caterwauling, Mr Rafferty leaped to the window and snapped it shut. Delighted with his performance, I began to clap.
Later that evening, as I waited for a bus at York Place, the silence was immense. For the first time in many months the ringing in my ears had disappeared. And the few sounds I heard at that almost completely deserted hour were solitary and discontinuous, which only deepened the silence.
Why does that which makes the greatest noise breed silence? Certainly, after the cruel disharmony of war, in the weeks and months following May 1945, and stretching into the New Year, a great silence prevailed.
Silent were the skies. Silent the soldiers, inched under the soil. Silent too the burned bodies, heaped in cinders. Unspeaking were my parents after the war. Silent the guns. Silent the wasted cavalcade of men, women and children as they journeyed, blind, towards their homes that were different to how they had left them. Without noise, heaped under blankets, my parents made love for the first time. Silent too the fires that had burned down cities. Silent the gas chambers, an echo of their quietening work. Silently the seed thrust towards the egg. Silent the monsters of war, spent of fuel. Silent the waves breaking against the bow of the mailboat as it pierced the seas towards Africa. Silence at the Captain’s table, where Rex and Evelyn once dined on their way to Lagos. Silent, without tears, were the mothers whose children died for Progress. Silent the birds in Japan. Silent the rock. Without words, my parents crossed the bar of Lagos and motored towards Customs Wharf. Silent the yachts, rocking in the wake of their boat. Silent the lawns, with their muted underlife. Silently my parents sipped tea on the veranda. A season of silence.
And all the time I was growing inside Mother and listening.
6. I Gestate, Listen, and — Finally — I Am Born
Listening, I gambolled in the womb. I turned somersaults and figures-of-eight. I saw nothing, felt only the warm stickiness of the amnion. No odours reached me in my chamber. Not the stink of gin or soap, spoiling meat or burned oil. A mermaid sings. I was not a mermaid. A grub in a preserving jar floats in an azoic age. I was not that grub. Without conscience, I took in every sound.
This is what I heard: the vicious spitting of feral cats, rug-beaters thwacking, traffic-bustle and crowds. Fat goats being led to market, their bleating disharmonious and afraid. Women pounding manioc. Hawkers singing shrill and repetitive love songs to vegetables, paeans to fish and fruit — shrimps, prawns, smoked alive! Lovely oranges, lovely fresh oranges — and tailors, their sewing machines chattering in bursts. Hiss and splutters were street food cooking in palm oil. I heard the punishing of boy-thieves. And at all times of the day and night the ringing of insects. The womb, helped by the resonance of the amniotic fluid, sounded with the buzz, the flutterings, the shrill almost musical droning. And in the rainy season, thunder and the wild mutiny of rain, the curtain cord striking the window. I noted the coursing hum of blood. The sea too was almost always present.
When I was twelve weeks in the womb my parents embarked on a tour of Nigeria. We — the three of us — travelled up from Lagos, past Ibadan and Illorin and, after crossing the Niger River, to the city of Zaria, where prayer-songs and cantillation echoed in my head, new sounds I took in hungrily. At Gusau I heard three bars of a chorus played on a piano, over and over again. My parents toured Nigeria, and the quiet but invasive whisper of the sea was replaced by the sucking-noise of car tyres on muddied roads, forest paths, long-drawn footfalls and aspirate conversation. I recall the unique echoing of public spaces, antechamber, church, mosque, state hall. The splitting crackle of a bush fire. Bird notes, one especially I remember, a flute-like call. And another, a kind of boom resembling the distant baying of a hound. I heard the slapping of limbs during wrestling matches. The agonies of a constipated child.
And if the sounds swept in any-which-way, I too was indiscriminate, so that amid the commonplace I also heard that which is normally held aloof, set aside for night or passed off with a quick intake of air, things which cannot be repeated easily: District Officers’ dirty jokes, lovers’ sighs, the death agonies of men. All of us, in the echo chamber of the womb, are able to receive the wildest spectrum of sounds; it’s simply that we cannot retain them as we grow up. Who, in their maturity, can recall the special sound of sunlight? It rings in the ears as when one circles the top of a fine-wrought wine glass. And the tumescent heat of Nigeria, which sprawls and rumbles like a jet aeroplane. I heard the almost unbearable sorrow of an elephant’s call, the sad music of the nightsoil workers at Five Cowrie Creek. I eavesdropped on smugglers’ tales, and they reminded me of prey-birds swooping, bent on murder. I perceived three worlds in the rhythm a girl beat out on an aluminium barrel at the same time each evening: the one that surrounds us, the reality that one can sense; the world of those who are dead and buried but continue to exist and may participate in our lives; and the splendid realm of objects, which hold in their very matter, despite their incapacity, the sign of everyone who has held them, traded, buried, smitten, pocketed, hurled, sought knowledge from, tapped out a rhythm on or packed away. My ears were keenly alert. They were small, yet they captured every sound.