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fiction
Satan’s Point of View
By UZOR MAXIM UZOATU
You were coming home; you ran into a funeral. A woman was
being buried, the very famous Madam Mercedes who died, you
were told, in highly embarrassing circumstances. She was
found naked and dead after a round of unprecedented
gymnastic sex. Her lover suffered a broken neck and was
hanging by a thread in the orthopaedic hospital. Even so,
the sin of Madam’s death did not matter for the moment. What
really mattered was one wailing voice dominating the serene
midday gathering of mourners.
“Cruel death has done us bad,” bellowed Father
Jerome, the parish priest, fighting back tears from under a
canopy of palm leaves. “Wicked death has snatched away the
pearl of our life. We are only consoled by one fact: Angels
never die – they find eternal comfort in the bosom of our
Father in Heaven!” He paused to scan the gathering, wiping
his brow with a sparkling white kerchief. “True, she was not
married,” he continued, his voice becoming quite shrill,
“but she did not wear misfortune on the face. The money she
would have devoted to the marriage and her children she
dedicated to the service of God, the church and the poor of
this earth. What could be loftier than that?”
Your dissenting voice rose sharply from the
crowd. “Father Jerome, nobody says you can’t mourn your
friend. But please leave God out of it!”
Quizzical looks shot back and forth in your
direction. An elderly man reeking of snuff and soot nudged
you and said, “Stop fighting God’s work.”
Other voices followed.
“Son of Satan!”
“Demon, what brought you here?”
“Evil son, tread softly on holy ground.”
Undeterred by the shush and the curses of the crowd, you
made to say more things but Father Jerome had vaulted into a
frenzy that could not be punctuated.
“Lord Jesus, receive your devoted daughter,”
Father Jerome wailed, showing his outstretched hands to
heaven. “The beautiful ones are always plucked away in their
prime. The only joy is that Heaven belongs to the jewels of
this life.”
Appalled at Father Jerome’s relentless eulogy
you could not but ask yourself if this was the same Madam
Mercedes everybody knew, the amorous one who seduced
you with such greased and greasy ease when you had just
gained admission into the university, the voluptuary who was
so dominating she made men pregnant instead of getting
pregnant herself. She was a paramour who lived by tickling
herself, died by it and was now getting a holy and garlanded
burial complete with parish priests, hallowed words, hot
tears and all. Perhaps one could get the same treatment with
a little more wealth, you said to yourself, swallowing
bitterly.
The coffin was laid out on a golden bier atop an
oak table festooned with variegated floral wreaths and
garlands. Lusty gold chains crawled and slithered on the
diamond-tinted casket, matching the sun’s sparkle glitter
for glitter. The chains were so overwhelming in their
abundance it could have been chains, and not Madam Mercedes,
being buried. Looking intently at the casket, a swooning
sensation swept down on you. The casket with all the festoon
of flowers and chains had the shape of the map of the
country. A disembodied voice whispered into your ear: “The
only industry that thrives in our land is death. People die
and go to Nigeria.”
Woken suddenly from your reverie you beheld good
old Madam Mercedes walking about, sharing snacks at her own
funeral, laughing, beckoning on you.
“Son of Devil,” she called out to you, “Opara
Ekwensu, you abandoned me only to impregnate a rich man’s
daughter. There’ll be no party at your funeral.”
“Kai!” you screamed, jumping away as she tried
to grab you by the waist.
Without knowing it you had broken into a run. It
was on wobbly legs that you got to your father’s compound.
You saw a new set of dark, coarse chains girding the dark
and creaky door to the aged wall. You stood fixed on the
spot, staring from the chains to the wall and to the door
and back again. You were still gaping when the old man
appeared from the pathway to your right. The sudden
appearance jolted you such that the first impression was
that your father was an apparition of Madam Mercedes
celebrating her own death.
As the first wave of fright receded you saw that
the man had aged markedly in the fortnight you last saw him,
with deep angular wrinkles cascading his brow. He wore a
browning loin-cloth and held a grimy machete in his right
hand.
“Some policemen were here,” the old man said
with an edge of panic to his voice and then pointed to his
right. “They are over there.”
Walking with a strength that did not appear to
come from your body, driven by a determination that was
compelling in a subtle incomprehensible way, you walked into
a massive gathering of people that was quite out of place in
Agogo.
Under a lush umbrella tree, a middle-aged man
dug feverishly with a hoe, making an oval shape in the
ground, executing self-conscious motions that exaggerated
his exaction. After about a handful of minutes the digging
man stood straight, threw away his hoe, looked fixedly into
the hole and shook his head. The policemen moved forward,
forming a shield round the knee-deep hole, as though trying
to screen a horrible sight from the prying eyes of the
world. You nearly swooned as you saw that the body which was
exhumed from the shallow grave was that of no other than
Anuoluwapo, your girlfriend. She was wrapped up with a
light-blue mackintosh, and she was dead like the clump of
sand falling from her hair and body.
Lemi the Pagan looked at you and pointed. Two
policemen ran towards you. The shorter constable struck the
first blow as you made to talk, a whacking stroke of the
loose handcuffs that caught you on the cheek, nearer the eye
than the mouth, and it drew blood that dropped on the ground
with a distinct plop. A punch crashed on your jaw with the
crack of thunder. You spat out two of your teeth and a red
gob of blood as you slid down the body of the taller
policeman and slumped on the hard ground. Heaven and earth
came down on you, knocking the wind out of you and you
lapsed into a stony unconsciousness.
****
The cold stab of the cement floor shot all the
way up to your head like the electric tremor of a snake
bite. You had come to. Slowly, with a gentleness that was
meant to defeat all pain, you opened your eyes and a howling
darkness stared back at you, making shutting or opening the
eyes quite irrelevant. Your head vibrated with the
excruciating tolls of its inside, loud knocks that hung
heavily above your eyes. Lifting up your hand was like
picking up a heavy object that was independent of your body;
the pain of the effort was somewhat numbed, deadened by the
overwhelming nature of the pain in your head. Acrid anger
overpowered you and a sob escaped you and you tasted bile in
the mouth and you bit your lips; contact with the gap
created by your two knocked-off teeth made another sob of
anguish escape you. You rolled over on your back, letting
the coldness of the floor act out an equalizer for the
hotness of your anger and the scorching fire of your wounds.
A warm mixture of urine stench and body odour rushed into
your nostrils and you trapped the breath, exhaling slowly.
Your ears were now open to sounds flowing with a haunting
slowness in the distance, of the chirps of insects and
birds, of the flapping of tree leaves and grasses, of
tapping noises and pecking echoes. Your pain rose again, and
with it your anger, and all other sensations became
banished. You started crawling as though distance, no matter
how infinitesimal, would somehow assuage your hurts and push
you into a repose in which torpor would defeat pain. You got
to a wall and your anguish appeared to have multiplied. In a
fit of mad, unaccountable rage, you banged your head on the
wall and gravitated into fiery spasms.
“I have always been an outsider, the man at the
edge.” Voice of the waking mind, utterances of the
nightmare. “I weep. I cry not of the gashes on the body; the
painful wounds are within. My shouts are lost in their own
echoes. Who am I? Here is where?”
The dull light crawled in like a serpent,
slithered some about the floor and started creeping,
steadily, towards you. You stirred and your heart began to
race and your fists tightened into hard knots and your eyes
opened wide in fibrous, animal anticipation. All pain had
gone away and in its place stood the fierce desire of the
moment, the desire to master the predator coming upon the
fettered beast. You made out the opening through which the
light crept in was that of a door, a wooden door, and you
also made out with the help of the spreading luminosity that
you were in a room, an unclean room. When was the beast
yanked into the room? The door creaked sharply, harshly, and
your nerves tightened in fright. You waited, you stared, and
you pulsated.
“Are you there?” said a soft, quivering voice.
The figure that groped in holding a sooty
kerosene lamp was that of a policeman, Constable Kayode, the
taller of the two who had arrested you.
“I thought he had woken,” Constable Kayode said,
rather loud, to himself and held the lamp up to peer at the
corner you crouched.
He knelt over you, shook his head and said,
“They had no reason. I am sorry.”
You could not be sure you had seen well; you
peered closely at the man’s face and you could see his eyes
misting over, clouding with pricks of tears that glinted
with the lamp. Try as you might you could not stop your own
tears as they flowed even before the cop could open the
floodgate of his. He suddenly made a wild circular motion
with his hand and then assumed a surprising calmness, as if
he had not talked or lifted a limb.
“Do you have a relative who is a big man?” he
asked, and added, “I would like to go to him, to ask him to
come save you.”
You shook your head. “I have no big man. All I
have is my father and he is a poor nobody…”
“Actually it’s about your father…” Constable
Kayode cut in and suddenly broke off, confused.
“What happened to my father?” Your panic was
total, overwhelming.
“I had to smuggle your father into custody for
his own safety.”
“Is my father dead?” you asked sharply.
“No,” the constable said with a reassuring
decisiveness. “Some thugs attempted to lynch your father but
he was saved by the timely appearance of Father Jerome who
handed him over to me.”
You were incredulous. “You are not telling me
the truth.”
“This is no time for too much talk.” His urgency
was compelling. “Do you know any influential man I should
contact?”
“For what?”
“To save you.”
“Fate, what crime have I committed?”
“We don’t have time!” Constable Kayode shrieked,
turning down the wick of the lamp. “You ought to know
people. But they said you were in the university?”
“I didn’t go to the university to know
influential people.”
The man shook his head. “I have to do something
to save you. I would have wanted to escape with you now;
only it is no possible.” He paused and sighed. “But do I
really need your approval to contact your fellow students? I
can go to them on my own. I must tell them of the killing
being done here.” He turned, walking away.
“Wait!” a voice from within you said, a
compelling voice you did not know you had. “There is a young
man called Durotimi. He lives in Alata-Ijebu and runs a
place called People’s Awareness Centre (PAC). He was our
leader in the university. Tell him I sent you.”
Your pains, within and without, returned and you
sank to the floor. Constable Kayode looked at you and then
beyond you, rolling some words in his mouth: “Durotimi.
People’s Awareness Centre. PAC. Alata-Ijebu. The students.”
He shook his head. “We shall see.” He stared at you some
more and then braced himself up to walk away.
“But tell me, did they succeed in killing my
father?” Your voice quivered and was hardly audible.
Constable Kayode, transfixed at the door by the
question, inertly turned to look at you. For a moment he
sought for words; he only found tears. Even in the dimness
you saw these tears.
*****
You lay coiled in a corner, observing the waking
spell of a sleeping-waking-weeping continuum. Ever since
Constable Kayode left in the small hours it had been a
wearying, long-drawn-out process of nightmare-infested naps
that always gave place to ghost-ridden wakeful moments in
which you stared forlornly at the wasted bodies of your
girlfriend and your old man, all loved ones, the sight of
whom brought tears to your eyes and a wounding heaviness
upon your heart.
“Who you de talk to?” barked a police sergeant,
barging in on you. “Or you don craze mad?”
You said nothing.
“My oga wan see you,” said the sergeant.
“Inspector dey call you.”
You struggled up on wobbly feet, groggy like a
felled boxer, and followed the sergeant like a zombie.
The inspector, a cross between ugliness and
death, sat on a wooden platform. He was very tall, very
bulky, very dark, very ruthless and richly deserved his
alias: Idi Amin. He had many words for you, words about
going to the university to study the art and science of
trouble-making, about sponsoring a crude abortion and
burying a potentate’s daughter in an unmarked shallow grave,
words about upsetting the balance of the land and putting so
many lives at risk…
“Son of Devil, what do you gain from fighting
God?” Idi Amin asked, shoving you. He ominously looked
towards his right. In the shadows sat a baldheaded pudgy man
who emitted a choking animal stench. In front of the man was
a freshly-dug hole forming a valley between two heaps of red
soil. To the side of the man were two spades with which the
hole was dug. Idi Amin waved a hand and the pudgy man threw
a heavy truncheon to him.
Time stood pregnant like the charged instant
between the referee’s whistle blast and the striker’s
penalty kick.
“You killed Alhaji Adeyemo’s daughter and
thought you would live,” said Idi Amin, glowering at you.
“You shall live a grisly life underground screaming for
death to come.”
He furiously raised the truncheon and just as
furiously lowered it on you, hitting at every point of your
anatomy: the thighs, elbows, joints, anywhere. At the end of
it all you lay still, numb, whimpering like a stricken
horse.
“Get me the coffin,” Idi Amin said, waving.
The pudgy bald man fetched a hideous coffin from
the shadows. You did not shake, could not, as you were put
into the coffin. It was only when the bald man, working
fast, started knocking in the nails that you began to bang
your head loudly against the walls and roof of the coffin.
Time stood still, surreal, as you were lowered, ever so
giddily, into the grave. Up where they stood, the men could
hear your frenzied jerks inside the coffin, but these jerks
soon petered out to a harsher sound when the men started
hurling red sand into the grave.
The men kept vigil, waiting for the torturously
suspended moment of wretched subhuman death, until a
mammy-wagon suddenly appeared on the scene. Idi Amin and the
pudgy bald man ran when they saw Durotimi and the students
emerging ferociously from the wagon. A good half of the
invading army immediately gave pursuit. Durotimi rallied
some of his troops to ransack the police station but ended
up finding the place deserted by the policemen who as ever
would show clean heels to the militancy of the new Nigerian
days. A frenzied search of the premises fetched only one
fellow, a spent witness cowering in his cell. Durotimi and
his comrades could not get the unrecognizable man to make
coherent talk let alone introduce himself. They left the
poor fellow alone to his incoherence after many futile
minutes of questions and threats and appeals. They then ran
after their other comrades in the general direction of the
pursuit.
Only the little man remained behind, the
unfathomable fellow who bore no voice to conduce Durotimi
and his men to hold out. Stricken by the compelling presence
as witness of one’s own unbidden immolation, the little man
stared cryptically at the peculiar mess of red sand and said
to himself: “I know our people. We don’t bury the dead. It
is life we lay under the earth.”
He grabbed the clayey spade, digging, grunting,
working alone and digging some more, his mind a swirl of
images of the renegade son damned for not seeing like all
through the classic eye-view of God but rather via the
spectral viewpoint of Satan. He dug on until the spade
struck something hard. Dredging the sand, the coffin’s ochre
somewhat softened the encompassing redness. Knocking out the
coffin cover and bringing you out were awfully daunting, but
the little man managed somehow.
As father beheld son the stink and spatter of
faeces apprised the old man of the grim struggle for life
inside the box of death. In a trice he hit you beneath the
breastbone, nodded at the effect and then mightily lugged
you up on his shoulder and headed for the thicker end of the
nearby bush only to be stopped in his tracks by Constable
Kayode who was doing a recce of the area with some students.
THE END
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