“At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don’t need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens — that letting go — you let go because you can.”
– Tar Baby, Toni Morrison.
I never reached out to touch you. You never turned to look at me. And now, we will never meet again in this world.
It is a Thursday in April and I’m returning, like a dragonfly on a trail, home from the University of Ibadan. My day there was unsatisfactory: the registration for the hostel accommodation was botched, there wasn’t enough time to read The Continent as I had intended to, and the documentary I saw about Ghanaian women in politics later that evening at a film society on campus kept going off, courtesy of a faulty, unaddressed cord. Do you know how leaden a person can feel on a Thursday evening in Ìbàdàn? You should. I’m convinced that, like myself, you too are a bonafide Ìbàdàn resident. My joints throb with dull intensity. My tote bag is unbearable; yet I bear it. I flag down ọ̀kadà at different points, from that stinking gutter opposite Fortunate Bakery just near the university (although you might never know of this place and the specific odour that lives there) to Roundabout. From there on, with a bikeman who rebukes me with a father’s aggression for using earpieces when I ought to be attentive to the places we drove by, to Àpáta. From there, another ọ̀kadà to Kúọlá. I groan and transfer the bag to the other arm. I decide yet again, to comfort my mind, to sleep more and try rest and relaxation sometime soon before I resume school. Rest will edit my miseries. In the horizon of my mind, I sense malaria landing without a tarmac, bidding its time of eruption. “Not today, not soon,” my mind rebukes the presence. I board the ọ̀kadà here as the traffic of passengers and motorcyclists teem on the dusty, uneven planes that is partly their park and the roads they travel. Somebody calls out,
“Oríta Mẹ́rin, T-Junction, one.”
Another calls,
“Aunty, where you dey go? Uncle, Aláka, T-Junction, one.”
People are moving around. People are watching people. People are selling things: coal, pepper, nylon, fried fish, everything. People pause their lives and play it again. None of them can rewind their lives. People are talking among themselves. People are waiting. People are changing their lives. I’m not getting to the point, Boy on a Bicycle but I’m a storyteller and restraint is one of my methods. Wait for me. I bargain briefly before the ọ̀kadà rider agrees. An amiable man boards the ọ̀kadà with me. We drift on. We jiggle on like thrown keys. I must mention something you already know intimately: The local roads that are the lifeline of streets in Ìbàdàn are almost always untarred seas. In the dry season, they impose dust and rough rides on motorcyclists and passengers. In the season of rain, they grow treacherous. They have to be negotiated or they will cause fatal injuries or death. This one is a broad wasteland, an empire of artless dust and patterned erosions. A river almost washed me away on these roads once, you know. An October night last year. It was at the same portion of the road that I first beheld you. That place that is a benign stream on dry days. That place where assigned hoodlums tax motorcyclists for passage, where they have fixed a dangling chain across the road with which to interrupt passage and cause harm if not heeded. It was around that place that I saw you.
This is how it happened: we are at the mercy of the winding, broad road. I am thinking about my decision to finally work on my debut novel in English and I thrill myself with what the visionary explosion of the final draft will be like. The ọ̀kadà I am on starts down the decline and that is when you catch my eyes. I want to remember it like it happened. I see your back profile first. You wear a nondescript blue top of a make that is specific in its wretchedness. Every Nigerian or Third World child being raised by working class, poor and destitute parents have this kind of cloth and know its implications. So did I. You are mounted on the bicycle so I don’t pay much mind to your trousers. They must be trousers that settle somewhere in the middle. There are not many travellers on the road that evening. The day’s light is yielding its vitality by now so I couldn’t see you definitely, in a way that seals your face in my memory. A tray lays on your head and it is the spectacle of its presence that takes attention away from your face. There was an effortlessness that ravaged breath patterns in how you bear it. This is the external anatomy of your head: atop it is a crown of your making, of your selection. There is a sizable tray there. My memory says it was fùfú that laid on the tray. Wrapped in nylon, adorning the tray, there for the conditional taking of paying customers. A thick blue nylon surrounds the tray. It is neatly bound. All of it rests on your head. I don’t think you have an òṣùká to support the balance. You could not have needed one. And if you did have one in between the tray and your head on that evening, my memory excludes it because your grace precludes its existence or function. There you are, bearer of mundane trays, heading someplace else (was it home or to a T-Junction to sell off the fùfú? You never said where your Sankofa was headed). There, there, you, you, a force of nature. Replete. How can I talk about the sublime of that act with language that might falter?
Maybe the wonderful thing to me was that you drove the bicycle with a resigned tension. You were not too fast but you left us behind. I planned on telling you that this was impressive, that you were impressive but I knew either kismet or my tongue would not permit it. Most of us on that road at that moment yielded to accompanying you with our eyes.
The man behind me said,“Bọ̀bọ́ yìí gíràn-án gan! Ah, kò ṣẹ̀ṣẹ̀ máa ṣe é o. Mo gbọ́ pé ó ti fi jẹwó gan rí. Ẹ máa wò ó. Ẹ máa wo bó ṣe ń lọ. Háha.”
“The guy is an expert wizard. This is not his first time. I hear he won big from this balancing once. Hun? Just, just watch him. Just watch him go. Good God!”
“Báwo ló sẹ ń ṣe é?” I said twice or thrice or not at all. Maybe I said something else. I was attentive to your public passions. When we were behind you, I thought about the quote that prefaced this text. See, boy, in that moment your discipline, your surrender, your quiet sorrows, your secret loves, everyone who cherished you, your burnished dreams, your gift of utmost majesty in an irrational world, your pursuits of meaning or freedom or a shift, the violence that carved you and the tenderness that polished you, the evil you have witnessed and the goodness you have caused, everything, all the firmaments holding your organized life on the bicycle that Thursday evening, everything coalesced. I had a muted vision. There it was, the world’s beauty. Did you hear me, boy? You were the world’s beauty and you were fierce and you were magnificent and everything about you possessed such heightened meaning, do you know? Can you believe me? Did you know in that moment what you were? Did you think your act of grace was attained beauty, professing beauty, superior beauty, beauty of the morningstar in an obscure street in Ìbàdàn?
When we were level with you, I thought I would whisper it or cry it out. I believe I whispered it as the man behind me talked of your specific talent and your flair. I said you were impressive. I saw your face. You would be in your early twenties. It was dark, vestiges of acne and scars were there. I cannot remember seeing warmth in your eyes, only focus. You never blinked all the time I saw you. Now, because my memory is seldom interested in the minute, I will never remember your face except you declare yourself to me. But I know you won’t. As we left you behind and made for the crossroads, where policemen lay in open ambush for motorcyclists and drivers of all sorts for extortion in the name of keeping order, I wanted to look back at you but the man behind me was still speaking, he would be an obstruction to my sight if I turned.
He said to me,“Ah, tẹ́ẹ bá lè sọ fún ọlọ́kadà kó kàn dúró díẹ̀, ká lè tun wò. Bọ̀bọ́ yẹn lásán…” “Ah, if only you would tell the ọ̀kadà man to wait small, so we can see him again. Tsk. That guy is something else. Something else.”
He quieted eventually and I felt a sort of relief. If these places weren’t so volatile and I were a versatile boy who was documenting life for TikTok, I might have risked taking a clip of your wonder but I did not, could not. Recording you would be inadequate, a secular blasphemy. It would mar the reach of your casual flaunt. Who peddles pedestrian majesty to inattentive viewers? My relief was something of a glee. I was gleeful in my complicity, that I had witnessed an ordinary wonder and had not thought to record it or contaminate it. Yet here I am on the page trying to interpret your transcendence. I was grateful that I had seen you wield dexterity, that I found beauty in a form I might not have considered, at a time when I was not involved in active pursuit of it. You reminded me, Boy on a Bicycle, that one of beauty’s roles is to send us spiralling, to make us grasp for signs and symbols when this necessity of our existence remains both intimate and so unreachable, both a beloved’s chest and the sun’s doors. You remind me of so much that this text cannot accommodate.
I should tell my family of you when I get home, a voice from a region of my mind says. I got home and I never could speak about it. It felt incredible and unknowable and insubstantial to non-partakers of the experience. How would I tell it? How would I make them understand what happened? I might never tell them. I will never tell them.
So, boy, you have to understand. A stranger left me with a riddle, an unspeakable legacy. What were your intentions that evening? What do those who recognize you call you? What will we say to each other when this memory is selected for scrutiny on the Judgement Day? Will I learn your face then? Will it matter anymore?
Maybe I should have written this in Yorùbá, for you. Or Efik. Maybe I should have followed you home.