My father was dead. I’d inherited the house and his allowance. I did not work. How did I spend those years? I took walks on the beach. I visited Mr Rafferty. I spent more and more time in the attic, attempting to clear out my father’s things. More often than not I would become distracted by the objects. Selecting one from the heap, I’d take it in my hands, open it up, take it apart, all the while attempting to tease out the stories it could never tell. I would tap, stroke and shake it, noting its particular sound. Then I would imagine its past life in sound. Once I even detached the needle from the phonograph and tried to ‘play’ an old plate of my mother’s, thinking its grooves might reveal buried signals from the past. Then there was the period when I stared for hours at the photographs in our family album, imagining — hearing — the sounds the camera had failed to capture. It was as if my eyes, in a process of miraculous traduction, were standing in for my powers of hearing.
I tried to distract myself with certain projects. I listened to the tapes I had made in America and attempted to categorize the sounds. I had an idea I’d fly to America exactly a decade after my first visit; I’d return to where I’d recorded the sounds, and in those exact same places, ten years later, at exactly the same hour, I would make a new series of recordings. I failed to leave the country. After that I spent a lot of time in the public library in Edinburgh, reading, novels mostly. I’d found a wonderful passage in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, at that time my favourite book. Jim and Huckleberry are drifting on the Mississippi, chatting and smoking, with the whole river to themselves. ‘Next you’d see a raft sliding by, away off younder, and maybe a galoot on it chopping, because they’re most always doing it on the raft; you’d see the axe flash, and come down — you don’t hear nothing; you see that axe go up again, and by the time it’s above the man’s head, then you hear the k’chunk! — it had took all that time to come over the water. So we would put in the day, lazing around, listening to the stillness. Once there was a fog, and the rafts and things that went by was beating tin pans so the steamboats wouldn’t run over them. A scow or a raft went by so close we could hear them talking and cussing and laughing — heard them plain; but we couldn’t see no sign of them; it made you feel crawly, it was like spirits carrying on that way in the air.’ I started to work my way through the novels in the library, from A to Z, in order to create an Encyclopaedia of Novelistic Sounds. I barely got started.
Then one day in 1997 I received a letter. It was from Ade. He had found my address on an old envelope addressed to my father, among Iffe’s possessions. He was married and living in the outskirts of Lagos. Having been a corporal in the Nigerian army, he was now a taxi driver. We corresponded for several months. One of Ade’s letters, his last, made the most vivid impression on me. It concerns a terrible incident in 1966, a massacre, in which both he and Sagoe — Babatundi’s older brother, the one with whom I had witnessed Ade fish for seagulls — were involved. In a moment I will proceed to transcribe this letter on to my computer; not only because in Ade’s story I recognize a thread that runs through this history, via Edrisi’s story and the massacre at Benin, the thread of violence, which I have come to associate with the mappa mundi; not only because I wish to cease writing in my own words and continue to transcribe from my papers; but because I regard Ade’s letter as signalling the end of the period in my life of which I have just been speaking, the period set off by my visit to the anechoic chamber — the lost decades, as I think of them — and the beginning of the next, which would culminate in my beginning to write my history.
Enough! I am speaking in my own words when, in order to stop speaking, I should be transcribing from my papers.
28. Map of the World, 3: Ade’s Story
The mappa mundi. A few brief words about the mappa mundi. In the years I have been writing this history, the moths have not stopped feasting on that ancient fake. Every now and then I rise from my desk and, in the light of my computer, take note of the ever-advancing decay: today, the map’s destruction is almost complete; all that is left is a network of frayed channels connecting some two-dozen holes. Where once I could gaze on seas, continents and fantastic events — Noah and his ark, the pelican feeding her young from a wound in her side, the amorphous, disproportionately large landmass of Britain — now all I can make out are larger or smaller holes, exposing the wooden wall. Gone too are the monstrous races, those men and women who once crowded the east bank of the Nile River, Amyctyrae with her giant lip, Androgini the man-woman, Blemmyae whose head grew beneath her shoulders, not to mention Panotii with her ears that reached the ground and served as blankets. Yes, that eccentric tribe who’ve kept me company for so long have been almost completely wiped out.
Only a single trace of the monsters remain, not a portrait but a text. Inscribed on a scrap of vellum, located in what must have been the earth’s upper right-hand corner, is a short paragraph designed to elucidate the drawings themselves. The paragraph tells the story of how the monstrous races came into the world. One day Noah fell asleep naked on the ground. He was mocked by his son Ham and, on waking, cursed him, saying, ‘A servant shall you be all your life.’ Noah asked God to stain Ham’s children black. And that, so the rubric says, is how there sprung into the world all the dark and savage creatures, the ill-shaped forms and specious, corrupt personalities, condemned to grovel and serve mankind as a warning of the sins of pride and disobedience. Less than fully human, the paragraph continues, but human nonetheless, they have been punished by divine decree, some with heads like dogs, some with mouths on their breasts, others with eyes on their shoulders, still more with a massive single foot, which, ironically, impedes their progress, and all so hideous that they make even the Devil scared.
Dear Evie,
I am very happy to be corresponding with you and I pray this letter finds you well. My mother is content that you asked about her health, and she is surprised to hear that you are not married at all. Do you know, Evie, I myself was surprised that you do not remember many of the things I wrote to you about in my last letter. I am especially surprised that you forgot Babatundi, he was your favourite. Your little b! I will tell you about him in another letter.
For now since you asked I will tell you what happened when I joined the army. They were terrible things, so terrible I think they will give you bad dreams. I am talking about what I witnessed in October 1966, when I was twenty-four years old, not long before the war in Biafra began. Some of the people who took part are still alive and living as free men of Nigeria, so please do not repeat this letter to anyone. Promise me that, Evie! Myself, I have told only one other person. My wife, Sue. When my nightmares arrive it is Sue who wakes me up. Then we go to the kitchen and drink some whisky. But sometimes my nightmares arrive too often during the night, and she says to me, ‘Try to stay calm, and do not shout too loudly, because our son will know that you have trouble.’ ‘Yes, Sue,’ I tell her, ‘I will try to stay calm.’ I will try to stay calm in this letter as well, even though I must recall a troop of ravenous wild men.