How Beautiful We Were(5)
“Get my key from him,” the Leader shouted at our village head.
Woja Beki made no attempt to move. It was obvious to us why the Leader would ask this of Woja Beki—the Leader could never debase his honorable personhood by getting himself, or his men, into a physical confrontation with an uncouth madman.
“Get my key from that idiot,” the Leader shouted again.
Woja Beki remained frozen in his spot, perhaps ashamed, likely afraid, to look into the eyes of the big man from Bézam.
What came afterward, we’d long fantasized about doing ourselves—some of us had done it in dreams from which we woke up smiling—but it did not lessen our shock when it happened, when Konga, laughing no more, walked up to Woja Beki and spat in his face. We giggled, we gasped in horror, we half-shut our eyes. Woja Beki, without raising his head, wiped the saliva that had landed on his lips. Barely glancing at Woja Beki, the Leader, now a gesticulating bundle of fury and befuddlement, resumed his shouting, yelling at everyone, anyone, to get his key from the madman, someone get his key right now, otherwise there’d be severe consequences.
Not one of us did or said a thing.
None of us took it upon ourselves to tell the Leader that Konga was untouchable. We did not attempt to tell him that no matter what Konga did, however much he humiliated or hurt us or scared us, we could not touch him, because we do not touch men with his condition. We did not tell the Leader that for decades no one had touched Konga and no one ever would, because to touch a madman was to invite the worst curse.
* * *
—
If the Leader had sat down with us, we would have told him Konga’s story, the story our parents repeated whenever we ridiculed Konga, every time they caught us skipping behind him around the village, laughing at his matted hair, his lone pair of trousers, his dirt-clogged fingernails. We would have told the Leader that Konga wasn’t born a madman and that, hard as it might be to believe it now, he was once a proud, handsome man.
If the Leader had asked, we would have told him that long before we were born, when our parents were children our age, dozens of young women in our village dreamed of becoming Konga’s wife and bearing sons as chiseled and long-limbed as him. His parents, long gone now, dreamed of the grandchildren their only child would give them. He was a fine farmer, a fine hunter, and a very fine fisherman. On any given day, our parents told us, Konga could be great at being anything—he was destined for a beautiful life. But then, one day, a hot day, he began complaining of voices that wouldn’t stop talking to him. They were laughing at him, he told his parents, imploring him to kill himself, telling him he was going to live forever. They appeared in his dreams at night and emerged from dark spaces during the day in the form of men, women, and children who’d been in the grave for so long they’d lost most of their flesh. They seemed determined to never let him go, badgering him in a language he couldn’t understand, surrounding him whenever he sat down to eat, chasing him around the village.
His parents took him to our village medium, who told them that nothing could be done—a vengeful spirit had taken Konga’s sanity as punishment for an evil committed by one of his ancestors centuries before Konga was born. Konga was to spend the rest of his life as an atonement; the spirit could not be appeased. All his parents could do, the medium said, was to keep the front door of their hut open so Konga could come and go as he wished. They also needed to leave a mat outside their hut so Konga could find a suitable outdoor place and sleep comfortably on the nights the voices allowed him to.
By the time we were born, Konga had been sleeping under the sky for twenty years. With his parents gone and having left behind no siblings to feed him, our mothers took turns bringing him food and water under the mango tree. Some days he ate the food and drank the water; other days he ignored it until the flies came for it, and the ants marched into it, and the goats accidentally knocked over the bowls holding the rest of it, and our mothers sighed and took their bowls home, only to carry food to him the next time it was their turn. Many afternoons he sat half naked under the mango tree, scratching the skin that touched water only when it rained, pulling out thick chunks of crust from his nostrils. Occasionally, he sang a romantic ballad, his eyes closed as if he’d once been a character in a great love story. Sometimes he offered words of wisdom to his invisible friends, or chastised morons no one could see, his arms flailing, his face scrunching as he raised his voice to emphasize points that made no sense to us. He attended every wedding and funeral, watching from a distance, neither dancing nor crying, but he never attended the village meetings. On meeting days, he stayed in the school compound, uninterested in our plight. We thought him incapable of anger toward anyone but the voices in his head and the spirit that had ruined him. We thought him unaware of everyone and everything around him besides his immediate needs and the phantoms following him.
That evening, though, as he stood with the car key in his clenched and raised fist, we could see that he was capable of anger toward men, an anger that came out with no equivocation when he told the Leader that there was nothing the Leader could do to him.
* * *
—
The Leader, fatigued from railing to an unresponsive audience, paused and let out a deep sigh. He shook his head. He’d realized, it appeared, that he couldn’t make us get the key from Konga and that there was nothing he could do to a madman in a dark village, a long way from Pexton’s headquarters. We felt no sympathy for him—we had no capacity for that, occupied as we were in delighting in his despair. Beside him, Konga was now singing and twirling around. He waved the key in the Pexton men’s faces, prancing as gaily as a groom on his wedding day, repeating over and over that the men would be spending the night with us, perhaps many nights—oh, what a wonderful privilege for them.