Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen

Want and lack exploded in their minds like a grenade and left shrapnel of desperation in its wake, so that — in time — the boys began to steal. But when they robbed a rich widow’s house with knives and toy guns, carrying away a briefcase full of money, the widow raised alarm once they set out running, and a mob took chase. A fast-moving car knocked Abulu down, as he attempted to cross a long road in haste to escape his pursuers, and sped away. At the sight, the mob hurriedly dispersed, leaving Abana alone with his injured brother. Alone, he picked up Abulu and managed to get him to the hospital where doctors rushed in to contain a damage already done. Abulu’s brain cells, Obembe said, had floated out of their compartments into foreign zones in his head, changing his mental configurations and completing the awful process.

When Abulu was discharged, he returned home a changed being — like a newborn whose mind is a clean slate, without a single dot on it. In those days, all he did was stare — blankly, concentratedly — as if his eyes were the only organ in his body and it could perform the functions of all the others, or as if every organ was dead except the eye. Then, as time passed, the insanity fledged, and while it still sometimes lay dormant, it could be roused when triggered — like a tiger merely asleep. The things that roused his insanity to life were diverse and numerous — a sight, a spectacle, a word, anything. The din of a plane flying over the house was what first did it. Abulu had cried out in a rage and ripped his clothes as the plane flew past. Were it not for Abana’s timely intervention, he would have got out of the house. Abana wrestled him to the floor and held him there until his strength diminished. Then he sprawled on the floor, asleep. The next time the insanity was stirred by the sight of his mother’s nakedness. He was seated in one of the chairs in the sitting room when he saw her going into the bathroom unclothed. He sprang from his chair as if he’d seen an apparition, hid behind the door and watched her bathe through the keyhole, the sight tossing many strange dice about in his brain. He brought out his erect penis and began fondling. Then when he saw she was about to exit, he hid himself and quietly stripped. He then slunk into her room, knocked her to the bed and raped her.

Abulu did not leave his mother’s bedside afterwards; he held her as if she was his wife, while she cried and grieved in his arms until his brother returned. Furious at what Abulu had done, Abana beat Abulu with his leather belt, refusing to yield to his mother’s pleadings until Abulu fled from the room in great pain. He pulled out the television aerial from its weak ballast, rushed back into the room and pinned his brother to the wall with it. Then, letting out a horrendous yelp, he ran out of the house. His madness had fully set in.

For the first years Abulu walked and slept in marketplaces, unfinished buildings, refuse dumps, open sewers, under parked cars — anywhere, everywhere the night met him, until he came upon a decrepit truck a few metres from our house. The truck had crashed into an electric pole in 1985, killing an entire family. Abandoned because of its bloody history, the truck gradually atrophied into a kingdom of wild cactus and elephant grass. Once he found it, he set to work, dislodging nations of spiders, exorcising untamed spirits of the dead, whose bloodstains had left perpetual smears on the seats. He removed spattered glass fragments, weeding out wild tiny islands of moss that clung to the bare moth-eaten furniture of the truck, and annihilated the helpless race of cockroaches. He then stored his belongings — materials picked from garbage, discarded objects of various kinds, and almost anything that piqued his curiosity — in the truck. Then he made it his home.

Abulu’s insanity was of two kinds — as though twin devils constantly played competing tunes in his mind. One played the tune that passed for regular or ordinary madness, wandering about naked, dirty, smelling, awash with filth, trailed by a sea of flies, dancing in the streets, picking up waste from bins and eating it, soliloquizing aloud or conversing with invisible people in languages not of this world, screaming at objects, dancing on street corners, picking his teeth with sticks found in dirt, excreting on roadsides, and doing all the things that stray derelicts do. He went about with his head forested with long hair, his face patched with boils, and his skin greasy with dirt. At times he talked with a league of doppelgangers and invisible friends whose presence was fogged from ordinary eyes. When in this sphere of insanity, he became a man on the move — he walked almost perpetually. And he did his walking mostly barefoot, treading on unpaved roads from season to season, month to month and year to year. He trod on dumpsites, on rickety bridges with splintered woods, and even on industrial sites that were often littered with nails, metals, broken tools, glasses, and various sharp objects. Once, when two cars collided on the road, Abulu — unaware there had been a car accident — walked through the shattered glass and bled so much he fainted and sprawled in the dirt until the police came and took him away. Many who saw what happened thought he’d died and were shocked to see him walking towards his truck six days later, his scarred body covered in hospital clothes, his varicose-veined legs concealed in socks.

When in the realm of insanity, Abulu went about completely naked, dangling his enormous penis — sometimes in a state of erection — unabashedly as if it was a million-naira engagement ring. His penis once bred a popular scandal, one that people told stories about all over the town. A widow who had badly wanted a child had once seduced Abulu: she took him by the hand one night to her house, washed him and had sex with him. Abulu’s insanity, it was rumoured, temporarily vanished while with that woman. When the affair became known and public, and people began calling her Abulu’s wife, the woman left the town, leaving the madman with a crushing obsession for women and sex. Not long after, rumours of his nightly visits to La Room Motel began to spread. It was said that a few of the prostitutes regularly smuggled him into their rooms under a thick cover of darkness. Almost as rampant as those rumours was the legend of Abulu’s open masturbations. Solomon once told us of a madman whom he and a few people had watched masturbate under the mango tree near the Celestial Church by the river. But I did not know Abulu at the time, nor did I know what he meant by masturbation. Solomon then went on to tell us how, in 1993, Abulu was caught clinging to the colourful statue of the Madonna in front of the big St. Andrew’s Cathedral. Perhaps thinking it was a beautiful woman, who, unlike the other women he leered at, did not make any move to resist him, he held the statue and began humping against it, moaning, while people gathered, laughing at him until some devotees wrested him off it. The Catholic Council would eventually pull down the desecrated statue and erect one in the compound of the church, within its fence. Then, as if still unsatisfied, they surrounded the statue with an iron gate.

Despite all of these stirrings he caused, when in this mode Abulu harmed no one.

Abulu’s second realm of insanity was extraordinary; a state he entered in sudden gusts as if while in this world — picking from a bin or dancing to inaudible music or any of the things he did — he’d find himself raptured into a dream world. But whenever in that state, he never completely left our world; he occupied both — one leg here, one leg there as if he were a mediator between two domains, an uninvited intermediary. His messages were for the people of this world. He subpoenaed tranquil spirits, fanned the violence of small flames, and rattled the lives of many. He entered this realm mostly in the evenings when the sun had shed all of its light. Having transformed into Abulu the Prophet, he’d go about singing, clapping and prophesying. He would slink into compounds with unbarred gates like a thief if he had prophecies for anyone there. He would disrupt anything to declare his visions — even funerals. He became a Prophet, a scarecrow, a deity, even an oracle. Often, though, he shattered both realms or moved between both as though the partition between them was only hymen-thin. Sometimes, when he came across people he needed to prophesy to, he would temporarily delve into the other state and tell them the prediction. He would chase after a moving vehicle, crying out his prophecy if it was for someone in it. People sometimes turned violent when he tried to make them hear a vision; they sometimes harmed him, piling curses, tears and jeremiads — like a heap of soiled clothes — on his head.