Abyssinian Chronicles (12 page)

For the herbal medicines she gave the women, Grandma combed the forest, the garden, the bush and the swamps and came up with leaves, bark and roots. I accompanied her with a bag or a basket, and I watched as she worked. She plucked the leaves skillfully, removing the old ones and sparing the sprouting tender ones, careful to preserve the
plant. She rarely pulled out whole plants, except when she was going to use the roots, the stem and the leaves. For the bark, she used a knife or a small hoe and removed the outer layer, which would quickly grow back. She always covered the roots with soil and tied banana leaves on stems she had deprived of thick layers of bark. I often grew impatient, urging her to let the trees take care of themselves, but she would not budge and insisted that those trees were our asset, and that it was our duty to preserve them.

Our village, Mpande Hill, and the swamp always made me think of an octopus, the hill representing the head, the swamp the long tortuous tentacles snaking round our village. And my observation of the swamp, and the way we approached it, made me believe it was a living thing, a large snake we warily attacked from the sides. The water, sometimes crystal clear, sometimes black, green or brown, was always cold and full of life: dragonflies, tadpoles, little fishes, leeches, frog spawn in long slimy strands and plants with matted roots that resembled long hair being pulled. As we walked in the shallows we were wary of the sharp-bladed bulrushes and of poisonous plants. This was the least popular part of the expedition, resulting in lacerated skin, wet clothes, insect bites and all sorts of discomfort because some of the plants we needed were in clusters surrounded by relatively deep water and hostile objects.

Among the herbs we collected were some which had to be taken raw, or crushed into a pulp and rubbed on the belly, on the back and into joints. Others we simply immersed in bathwater, roots, spawn, soil particles and all. The rest were dried in the sun and packed in plastic bags for future use. The most important herb was the one which helped to widen pelvic bones, thereby facilitating dilation and delivery. Women had to drink it and bathe in it twice or thrice a day throughout pregnancy. Grandma warned them sternly about the consequences of negligence, which included, among other things, the suffocation or deformity of babies and sometimes the death of both mother and baby.

In addition to administering herbal measures, Grandma advised the women to eat nutritious foods: meat, fish, eggs, soybeans, greens and more. In those days, most women were just learning to eat chicken, eggs and scaleless fish, which up to then had been eaten exclusively by men and despised and denigrated by women. A self-respecting, well-bred
woman would deign to cook them but would not bring them anywhere near her well-bred mouth.

Tiida was the first woman in the area to take up her aunt’s call for change. The conservatives said she broke chicken legs and slurped egg slime like a man, and that her babies would be born with feathers all over them and little wings instead of arms. She laughed at them, and at the greedy men who still denied their wives and daughters these delicacies. Everyone waited for feathered babies to be pulled out of Tiida, but she bred only healthy offspring. Now the women were largely convinced, with only a residual minority of die-hard skeptics. Aunt Nakatu was among the latter group: she somehow never got over the taboo. She tried chicken a few times, but complained about its smell.

Prenatal care was the glamour part of the baby business. Trouble broke loose with delivery. Babies, those little monsters, chose to come at odd times: deep in the night, very early in the morning or in the rainy season or at Christmas. And some enjoyed making everyone tense: the pangs would begin, the water would break, but then they would refuse to emerge for hours or even days. It was often under those inopportune circumstances that Grandma and I discovered that the advice and the exhortations had either been followed not at all or only partially or badly.

Many women neglected the daily herbal baths and imbibings which helped pelvic dilation. This exercise was called breaking bones. “How often did you break?” Grandma, suspecting the worst, would ask. Horrifying answers would come, dripping from flaky, fear-twisted lips. Hearing the same woman scream and express the fear that she was going to die would make one say, under one’s breath, that she deserved every ounce of pain she got, though for us that was no consolation at all, because the baby still had to come out.

I was not allowed to witness the actual moment of birth. I always left when the woman lay down on her back, a pillow under her head, legs up under the sheet, perspiration dotting her face, fear popping under her eyelids, panic just a breath away, with Grandma combatting waves of hysteria. At such moments Grandma was like a goddess, a priestess, an oracle whose every gesture, every sigh, every twitch spoke volumes. At the flick of her finger, I would leave the arena, an acrid smell in my nose, the picture of the woman’s face deeply etched
in my mind, the sound of her voice buzzing in my ears, a vague evaluation of her chances coursing through my head.

At the beginning of my stint, I used to be afraid that the woman was going to die. I would quake and quiver, with sharp pains kicking up storms in my breast. Each woman cried differently, and with some it felt as if their blood would be on your hands, and on the hands of your children’s children, if they died. The men, gloomy and silent, were not reassuring either. They seemed to be studying every fluctuation, every nuance in the woman’s vociferations, as though waiting to pounce on you the moment they were sure that she had drawn her last breath. Half my mind would be busy with the woman, visualizing her anguish and her efforts, and half would be working out the safest escape route, but sometimes it went on for so long that I dozed off and slept, the woman’s screams fading away like wisps of smoke in the evening sky, until I would be jogged back into wakefulness.

I would go outside and be whipped by the smell of cow dung or pig shit or goat urine, depending on what animals were kept by the family. On rainy days the pigsties, oozing liquid shit, stank to high heaven, worse than the sodden kraals and the waterlogged cow pens. This stink and the runny shit I often stepped into didn’t endear animals to me in general.

It was in everyone’s interest for the delivery to go well. If all failed and the woman, with baby head peeping or leg popping, had to be rushed to the hospital, the resultant cloud of tension and anxiety messed up everyone’s peace of mind. There was only one car in the village, owned by a scion of Stefano, but it was more often than not out of order. It would often stop dead on the road, and he’d ask us to help push it.

The chronic unreliability of this machine meant that somebody would have to find a van to take the woman to the hospital, because in that condition she was in no position to sit on a bicycle. The most annoying aspect of it all, however, was that most of these cases had had prior warnings from doctors not to risk delivering at home. They always had reasons for not complying.

The transformation adults underwent with the onslaught of pain both fascinated and frightened me. Women who normally worked like horses, digging, fetching water, carrying mountains of firewood,
washing hills of clothes and the like, would suddenly be reduced to whimpering wrecks, head turning this way and that, arms beating weakly, legs gone rubbery, self-control in tatters. They reminded me of a dog under attack from thousands of bees or a teetering paper canoe in a stormy swamp.

It was equally fascinating to see the same women after the baby had arrived. They seemed to have sweated out all the pain, all the anguish, all the nightmares, and were open to joy, relief and satisfaction. I would see them laughing, smiling, beaming, shedding tears of joy, as though what had occurred before had been a joke, a mere bit of playacting.

The cause of all the prior commotion would lie there glistening like a baby monkey soaked in grease or a piglet immersed in crude oil, all wrinkles and purple membrane, the ugly umbilical cord popping with each exhalation. Our ordeal would be over. Dissolving into the air would be all the lost sleep, all the past anxiety, all the fizzled tension, all the sacrificial blood of cocks beheaded, cocks strangled or cocks buried alive at witch doctors’ shrines.

My first delivery was the hardest and the most memorable. The messenger woke us up just after midnight. It had rained, and a cold wind was blowing, rustling the iron sheets of the roof and making tree branches wail. Contemplating the discomfort outside made the bed feel warmer and sleep seem sweeter. Hearing the unwelcome caller made me wish the wind would carry him away and bury him in a ditch till day broke, but there was no stopping such individuals; they acted with the urgency of boiling milk on the rise.

Grandma called me several times, and I feigned sleep, like the children in Uncle Kawayida’s story who overheard their parents fucking. She shook me and I woke up with a start. She laughed and I laughed too, but that was where the levity ended. I had seen the woman in question twice; she was short and thin, her belly like a sack of potatoes strapped onto her frail body. Why hadn’t she gone to the hospital? I wished death on her, and then I revoked my wish because, whichever way it turned out, we still had to put in an appearance.

The messenger, a big adolescent boy with thick calves, had come on a bicycle, but Grandma would not sit on it despite his great expertise (he regularly carried coffee sacks up the implacable Mpande Hill to
the mill, and participated in the suicidal downhill races in which one could brake only with one’s bare heels). I sat on the carrier for part of the way, but the bumps were so bad that I decided to walk. We arrived caked in mud. I had damaged a toenail on a rock, but there was no time for self-pity because of the turmoil at our destination.

The boy’s father, big, dark, tall, was trembling and his teeth were chattering as he bit back his tears. The woman was wailing, thinly, as if she were using the very last of her energy. This was more frightening than the more energetic, full-voiced screaming I heard on latter missions. This was the cry of a woman with a dead baby inside her, heavy like a sack of stones. It was the cry of a dog dying after being beaten by a horde of boys for stealing eggs or for biting somebody. She was calling for a priest, of all people! I peeped inside the room, saw the popping eyes, smelled the long labor and something else I could not name, and I drew back. It took Grandma two hours to deliver the baby. It should have been a large, thick-waisted parcel, but on the contrary, it was as small as a fist. We spent the rest of the night with the family. The puny baby woke us up in the morning with such a screech that Grandma glowed with pride.

The leper in our village, Fingers, was a nice, kind, harmless man. I was not afraid of him, but the scars of his deformity deeply disturbed and haunted me. The fading pink knots on the spots where the fingers had been made my stomach turn whenever I met him. My skin crawled when he touched me, or patted me on the head as he sent greetings to Grandpa or Grandma. I would stand there, not pulling away because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, answering his questions while praying for something drastic to happen to terminate my ordeal. Fingers was a generous man. He now and then cornered me and invited me to his home, and he gave me large yellow mangoes and juicy purple sugarcane. His children would be playing in the yard, without a care in the world. I could not refuse the gifts; it wasn’t polite or cultured to do so. So I ate, putting a brave face on things like the adult I believed I was, but as soon as I left, I would push a finger down my throat. I wanted it all out: all the residual leprosy, all the germs, all the juice. The fact that his wife and children bore no signs of infection did not reassure me: there was the possibility that leprosy was only infectious to non-family members.

Fingers’ wife was pregnant, and I believed that this time the baby would get it: our leper could not be lucky forever. My prayer was for her to deliver in the hospital, in the company of nurses and midwives who had medicines to combat the disease. Every time I saw the woman, I would look at her in parts, beginning with the head or the feet and moving my eyes up slowly in the hope that by the time I got to her midriff she wouldn’t be pregnant anymore; but the belly would appear only to have grown. Once or twice she asked me about a certain herb, and I gave her two kinds, hoping that they would speed up her delivery. I should have been so lucky.

The messenger arrived one afternoon. All day I had entertained plans to go to my favorite tree and look out for Uncle Kawayida’s blue-bellied eagle. I was hankering for his stories. Now I was trapped and paying for my procrastination. To make matters worse, Grandma dismissed the messenger with the news that we were on our way.

“I am not going to participate in delivering a baby with no fingers.”

“Who told you that?” She was taken aback.

“Look at its father’s hands.”

“He was cured, that is why he is back in the community.”

“Are you not afraid of catching leprosy?”

“No.”

“Well I am. If the leprosy was totally eradicated, the fingers would have grown back on, wouldn’t they?” I said, feeling and looking very clever.

“Stupid boy. Fingers and toes do not grow back on, and if you cut off your finger while knifing a jackfruit, that will be the end of it. You will be like him, with young boys developing theories about you.”

“Still, I am not going.”

“Get that bag quickly. Check the razor blades. Do you want to be held responsible if something happens because you’ve wasted time with your useless questions?”

The baby was born intact, without any missing fingers or toes, without holes in the face or stomach. I expected something to happen within a month or two. I spied on the family. In the meantime I got a boil, as Grandpa and Serenity were wont to, and had a load of nightmares. My fingers and toes rotted in front of my eyes and dropped off in my bed. Fingers bent over me and asked me how it felt to be without
fingers and toes. He laughed long and hard, the sound echoing in a dark corridor. I woke up with the feeling that I had lost my sense of touch and smell. The relief of finding everything intact!