We got off the bus.
‘Why did you go there?’ Iffe said, contemptuous.
‘I didn’t,’ Ade said.
‘I told you!’ Iffe said. ‘There will be trouble.’
What happened next, the trouble Iffe had spoken about, the rise and surfacing of that trouble, together with the atmosphere that evening in our house, has stayed with me. The events that came surprised me in both their force and their injustice, and with the casual ceremony with which they were enacted.
Immediately after entering the house, we were taken to the kitchen, where Iffe told us to wait. In the minutes she was gone there was desperate silence between myself and Ade, who avoided my looks, stared down at his feet. I felt my presence was troubling him. When Iffe returned she was with Ben, who appeared calm as, with a cold and hostile face, she told him of Ade’s wickedness.
He asked Ade if it was true. Had he in fact gone to see Babatundi? Had he been into the garden of the idiot boy?
‘Yes,’ Ade breathed.
Who was Babatundi? What was in his garden?
‘Bend over.’
I was frightened. Ade was shaking, his eyes wide, like a hare’s. Ben held a cane. Iffe took my hand, attempting to lead me away, but I would not go. I stood by the kitchen door.
Ade tried once again.
‘I didn’t speak to him sef!’ He was frantic, nearly hysterical in his fear.
‘Water don pass garri,’ Ben said.
Very slowly, Ade untied his shorts and pushed them below his ankles. His buttocks were so thin and smooth, and his nakedness so unexpected, so humbly revealed — I was repelled, ashamed, moved. Ade bent and gripped his ankles.
Crack! The stroke was like a rifle shot. For a few seconds I heard nothing. Then came the second crack.
I could not see Ben’s face as he beat Ade, but I could hear from the way he was breathing that something had happened to him as he crossed the threshold into violence: he was seized with a kind of madness. Ade seemed to flinch a moment before each stroke of the cane, which was cutting into his buttocks. It was shocking to see the red-black wounds; they appeared so abruptly, as if painted by the cane. I counted six strokes and, after the last came down, my heart constricted with fear and pity. I wanted to go to Ade, since I knew a terrible injustice had been done. He pulled up his shorts and clutched his buttocks with both hands. He turned to leave the kitchen, and my feelings turned also; fear and pity joined with a third emotion, one that made me look at Ade anew. As he climbed the stairs to his room, I flushed with admiration. He had survived his beating in silence.
By seven o’clock, when Father returned from work and came as usual to kiss me on the forehead, I was lying, exhausted, on my bed, but I could not sleep. My mind was wild with the thing I had seen, the casual violence, one person striking another, and that person the father, the action provoked by neither fever nor rage, but carried out formally, almost as a ritual. I lay in darkness but had no feeling of shelter. And heightening the injustice was the knowledge that Iffe, who was a queen to me, and someone with whom I felt a tie, had acceded to the violence. Although she had been a spectator to the beating, she had participated in it also. And it came to me, as I lay, that I had witnessed a kind of theatre, events that had prior meaning and in part existed for display. I was troubled by this thought, although I did not understand why. But I know now what I could not have known then: that to witness an event (and later to record it, as I am now, here in the attic, on my computer) is to take the decision not to intervene, and so to consider myself a spectator, as I did then, a bystander looking on, was to grant myself an innocence which that evening I ceased to have.
What could I have done? How might I have reacted in a different way? These are questions I ask myself now. I could have cried out or made myself faint. I might have disturbed events by sending dinner plates crashing to the floor. Yet I only watched. And if I did not understand the nature of my complicity at the time, if I did not feel that, like Iffe, I had acceded to the violence, nevertheless I could not sleep. I was filled with the atmosphere of the evening, of my fear and pity and admiration for Ade, and with the high colour that had appeared so suddenly on his skin, and I wandered in my thoughts for several hours, just as, for several hours, I turned in my sheets. And when, after the midnight chimes, I rose and climbed through my bedroom window and crossed the garden, black beneath the starless sky, to the compound and unlatched the door and tiptoed up the stairs, uninvited, to let myself into Ade’s bedroom, and behind the closed door took him in my arms, there was no alteration from the atmosphere of the evening. He accepted me without a sound. My hands moved over his back and beneath his pyjama trousers, where I passed my fingers over the welts. Ade stiffened and let out a soft high note, then relaxed when I drew him to my chest.
Several days went by, curious memorable days, so short while they lasted, and so long after, and already I was forgetting life before the market — my period of confinement, as I thought of it now. I tried to take in and appraise everything about me. And I found myself passing through a threshold of understanding: aspects of the market I had been unaware of, or confused by, or careless towards, acquired meaning. For several weeks Lagos vibrated in bright colours and tones. The town appeared available, well-ordered, fabulously precise.
I liked to be beside Iffe every hour of the day. With fierce attention, unmoving, just as Riley’s pointer would stand beneath the swallow’s nest with her head cocked, I studied Iffe. In this way I was able to equip myself with a fixed point from which to understand the market. I had always needed to create order out of what confused me; even in the womb, on hearing Father recite Gray’s Anatomy, I had formed a crude taxonomy of my body. Now, for the first time out of doors, I began to understand the complex system of the market, its relationships, its rules of trade. A new world opened up to me.
Every morning Iffe brought out a table-top, cleaned its surface with a rag and propped it on two crates, on whose bleached plywood sides was printed, as Ade read out, PEARS SOAP IS THE BEST! The wholesale man arrived and filled her baskets, and she formed the onions into piles. It was wonderful to see the onions stacked this way — lovingly, in tiers like a ziggurat, and always the finest specimen, the ripest, most pinkly translucent onion at the summit.
I took my position beside Ade beneath the table. The sky, streaked with pale gold and a farther blue, spread itself towards the lagoon. The trading day had begun.
This was how the process went: the buyer approached, halted, greeted Iffe, then chose and paid for one of the piles; at which point, I supposed, she would pack up her onions and leave. But she would almost always remain by the table, for the most important part of the transaction was still to take place. The buyer would stand looking doubtfully at her pile. She was hoping to persuade Iffe to grant her a number of extra onions. This gift would vary — from a single onion to half-a-dozen, occasionally more — and was always contested.
There were a thousand techniques for obtaining a greater gift and a thousand small differences between each customer’s technique. My impulse is to record them all, every ruse and procedure I observed. Yet I must press on with my history. So I will record here only the most common: there was the shaking of the head and the clicking of the tongue; there was the wry smile and placing of hands on hips; I witnessed buyers swaying from side-to-side while appearing to make complicated calculations; I heard suggestions that the pile might ‘grow a little’; revelations of how little their husband earned, and what great appetites men possess; there were complaints about the meanness of their husband’s elder wives; heartfelt flattery and crocodile tears, mocking laughter and veiled threats; pleading of great friendship and near-starvation; there was mention of heavy taxes and high-priced juju, of greedy uncles, outsize children, mute but hungry dependants with accusing eyes. And there were attempts to embarrass Iffe by refusing to leave until the gift had increased. Iffe countered each technique with arguments equal or greater in strength. Nevertheless, with reluctance, as if each concession amounted to an equivalent emptying of her belly, she would grant to each customer a few extra onions.