Abyssinian Chronicles (2 page)

Serenity’s mother, the woman who in his mind had metamorphosed into all those strange tall women, had abandoned him when he was three, ostensibly to go to the distant shops beyond Mpande Hill where big purchases were made. She never returned. She also left behind two girls, both older than Serenity, who adjusted to her absence with great equanimity and could not bear his obsession with tall women.

In an ideal situation, Serenity should have come first—everyone wanted a son for the up-and-coming subcounty chief Grandpa was at the time—but girls kept arriving, two dying soon after birth in circumstances reeking of maternal desperation. By the time Serenity was born, his mother had decided to leave. Everyone expected her to have another son as a backup, for an only son was a candle in a storm. The pressure reached a new peak when it became known that she was pregnant again. Speculation was rife: Would it be a boy or a girl, would it live or die, was it Grandpa’s or did it belong to the man she was deeply in love with? Before anybody could find out the truth, she left. But her luck did not hold—three months into her new life, her uterus burst, and she bled to death on the way to the hospital, her life emptying into the backseat of a rotten Morris Minor.

As time passed, Serenity crawled deeper into his cocoon, avoiding his aunts, his cousins, and his mother’s replacements, who he felt hated him for being the heir apparent to his father’s estate and the miles
of fertile clan land it included. The birth of Uncle Kawayida, his half-brother by a Muslim woman his father was seeing on the side, did not lessen Serenity’s estrangement. Kawayida, due to the circumstances of his birth, posed little threat to Serenity’s position, and thus attitudes remained unchanged. To escape the phantoms which galloped in his head and the contaminated air in his father’s compound, Serenity roamed the surrounding villages. He spent a lot of time at the home of the Fiddler, a man with large feet, a large laugh and sharp onion breath who serenaded Grandpa on the weekends when he was home.

Serenity could not get over the way the Fiddler walked with legs wide apart. It would have been very impolite to ask the man why he walked that way, and Serenity feared that if he asked his children, they would tell their father, who in turn would report him to his father for punishment. Consequently, he turned to his aunt with the question “Why does the Fiddler have breasts between his legs?”

“Who said the Fiddler had breasts between his legs?”

“Have you never noticed the way he walks?”

“How does he walk?”

“With legs spread wide apart as if he were carrying two jackfruits under his tunic.” He then gave a demonstration, very exaggerated, of the way the man walked.

“It is very funny, but I have never noticed it,” Grandma said, humoring him the way adults did to get out of a sticky situation.

“How could you not have noticed? He has large breasts between his legs.”

“The Fiddler has no breasts between his legs. He is ill. He has got
mpanama.”

Serenity’s sisters somehow got wind of the duckwalk and could not resist telling their village peers and schoolmates about the Fiddler, his breasts, and the little clown who portrayed him in silly mimicries. As a result, Serenity got the nickname Mpanama, a ghastly sounding word used out of adult hearing that dropped from gleeful lips with the wet slap of dung hitting hard ground from the rear of a half-constipated cow. Once again he was cured of an obsession, though he continued with his visits to the poor man’s home, faintly hoping to catch him pissing or, better still, squatting on the latrine, for he really wanted to see if the Fiddler’s breasts were as large and smooth as those of the women in his father’s homestead.

Apart from his secret fantasy, Serenity also wanted to learn how to play the fiddle. He could not get over the one-stringed moans, groans, sighs, screams, grunts and other peculiar sounds the Fiddler conjured, squeezed and rubbed out of the little instrument. The Fiddler’s visits formed the high point of his week, and the music was the only thing he listened to with pleasure uncoerced or influenced by adults or peers. He wanted to learn how to hold the instrument proudly against his shoulder and tune the string with a knot of wax. His aim was to charm strange women into his magic circle and keep them rooted there for as long as he wanted. In school he was known for his beautiful pencil drawings of fiddles. His wish never came true.

Grandpa, a Catholic, was unseated and replaced by a Protestant rival in a contest marred by religious sectarianism. As the fifties ended, his power gone and the heart taken out of his life, Grandpa’s homestead shrivelled as relatives, friends and hangers-on left one by one or in little groups. The women dropped out of his life, and the Fiddler took his talent elsewhere. By the time I was the age Serenity was when he ran up to strange tall women, Grandpa was living alone, sharing his house with the occasional visitor, relative or woman, a few rats, spiders and the odd snake that sloughed behind his heaps of coffee sacks.

Grandma, his only surviving sister, was also living alone, three football fields away. Serenity’s bachelor house, a trim little thing standing on land donated by both Grandpa and Grandma, separated the two homesteads. It was a sleepy little house, now and then kicked from the slumber of disintegration, swept and cleaned to accommodate a visitor, or just to limit the damage wreaked by termites and other destroyers. It only came alive when Serenity’s sisters or Uncle Kawayida visited and hurricane lamps washed it with golden beams. The voices and laughter made the rafters quiver, and the smoke from the open fire wound long spectacular threads round the roof and touched off distant memories.

The exodus of wives, relatives, friends and hangers-on had left a big howling lacuna which wrapped the homestead in webs of glorious nostalgia. The fifties and sixties were spanned by that nostalgia and provided us with stories pickled, polished and garnished by memory. Every migrant soul was now a compact little ghost captured in words, invoked from the lacuna by the oracle of Grandpa and Grandma and made to inject doses of old life into our present truncated existence.
The hegemony of lacuna’d ghosts in their stories was broken only when the characters, like resurrected souls, braved the dangerous slopes of Mpande Hill and the treacherous papyrus swamps to come and state their case in person. The Fiddler never returned, but was most prevalent because he was immortalized by the poor rendition of his songs Grandpa showered on his homestead as he shaved, as he toured his coffee plantation—the
shamba
—to supervise work, as he reminisced in the shade and as he wondered how to get a young girl with an old soul to see him through his last days.

Late in the sixties, no one’s visit was awaited more eagerly than Uncle Kawayida’s: the man was a wizard, a gold mine full of fascinating and sometimes horrifying tales, a fantastic storyteller endowed with a rare patience who answered my often tedious questions with a cheerful, reassuring face. When he stayed away too long, I became restless and worked out the days and months he was most likely to come. On such days I would climb into the branches of my favorite tree, the tallest jackfruit in the three homesteads, and fix my eyes on the distant Mpande (“Manhood”) Hill. If I was lucky, I would see his motorbike, a blue-bellied eagle encased in silver flashes, glide down the notoriously steep slope and disappear into the umbrella-shaped greenery of the papyrus swamp below. With “Uncle Kawayida, Uncle Kawayida!” on my tongue, I would speed down the tree—dry, sharp sticks pricking my skin, the sweet hypnotic smell of jackfruit in my nose—and rush into Grandma’s courtyard to break the good news.

Uncle Kawayida was a meter reader for the Ugandan National Energy Board. His job was to visit people’s homes and take readings used to calculate the monthly energy bills customers had to pay. Courtesy of his travels and, I believe, of his large imagination, he told stories of women who used sugared promises to try to bribe him into under-reading their meters, and of men who tried to impede his work by accusing him of flirting with their wives. He amazed us with stories of people living in congested urban squalor, ten to a little house, with parents fucking in the vicinity of children who cleverly feigned sleep. He spoke of women who committed garage abortions by slipping stiff leaf stalks or bike spokes up the condemned birth canals of unfaithful wives or sneaky daughters, an occasional fatal or near-fatal hemorrhage the price for puncturing the wrong things. He told tales of men
who beat their wives with electric cables, sticks, boots or fists and afterward ordered them to serve their dinner or to fuck them, and of women who drank and fought like men, cracked open men’s heads with beer bottles and subsequently emptied their pockets. In those places were wild children who did not go to school and got into a life of crime: stealing, robbing, mugging, sometimes even killing people. In the same places lived rich people’s children who went to school in big cars, laughed at teachers and wrote love letters in class. There were also people who could hardly make ends meet, who ate one meager meal a day after doing backbreaking work. In that world roamed fantastic football hooligans who fought their rivals in epic battles in which rocks, piss bottles, shit parcels, clubs and even bullets were exchanged to the point where police had to intervene with tear gas or bullets. There were men and women, devout churchgoing Catholics and Protestants, who worshipped the Devil and offered blood sacrifices during nocturnal orgies; and people of different religious denominations who deposited featherless, headless hens, dead lizards, frog entrails and other ritual garbage in other people’s yards, outside shopfronts or at road junctions. He once told us of a skinless lamb left to roam the streets encumbered with unknown curses and armies of greedy flies. I remembered the story of a man who kept three sisters: he started with the one he had married, progressed to her next younger sister and ended up with their youngest sister, who needed accommodation near a reputable school. As with all his stories, the last one was open-ended, game to all kinds of endings and interpretations.

When Uncle Kawayida came, I made myself indispensable around the house, making sure that I was not sent away on long errands. When I suspected that he had some particularly juicy information about a relative or someone we knew and that Grandpa was going to send me away, I would voluntarily go off to play, double back, hide behind the kitchen and listen. Many times, however, Grandpa and Grandma were so enthralled that they forgot all about me, or just ignored my existence and intelligence, and I would listen to the story as if the future of the entire village depended on it.

Uncle Kawayida pricked my imagination so much that I wanted to verify some of his stories by visiting the places and the characters he talked about. For example, what sort of parents did whatever they did in bed with children snoring, falsely, on the floor? Were they
Catholics? If not, did Protestantism, Islam or traditional religion allow such behavior? Were such people educated and well-bred? Unable to tame my raging curiosities and doubts, I begged Uncle Kawayida to take me with him, at least just once, but each time he refused, bolstered by Grandma and Grandpa. Most annoying were their weak excuses. Later I found out the real reason why: Kawayida’s wife, a woman from a very large, polygamous household, was not on good terms with my mother, who came from a very Catholic family, and none of the trio was ready to risk Padlock’s anger by sending her son to the house of a person she disliked and disapproved of so much.

The tension between their wives had driven the brothers apart. My mother despised Kawayida’s wife’s background because she believed there was no morality and no salvation in a household with thirty girls and ten boys born of so many “whore” mothers in a climate of perpetual sin. Kawayida’s wife despised Padlock for the poverty of her parental home, and for her guava-switch-wielding propensities. A cousin called her disciplinary activities “beating children like drums.” She also accused Padlock of standing in the way of Kawayida’s progress by stopping Serenity from helping his brother to get loans from the bank and able individuals. Kawayida’s ambition was to own a business and make and spend his own money, but he lacked capital and needed his brother’s recommendation. The truth was that Serenity, who had helped Kawayida get his current job, did not believe in retail business, hated it for personal reasons, and would not help anyone get into it. Because he had remained very laconic about his stand, Serenity’s position got interpreted ad libitum by each of the warring parties.

Nowadays, the brothers met at weddings, funerals and when Muhammad Ali fights took place. Uncle Kawayida conveyed to us the details, wreathed in the sheen of his saliva, redolent with tricks of his imagination, on the wings of the blue-bellied eagle. Grandma listened to the endless accounts with the same vague irony that had entertained Serenity’s revelations about the Fiddler’s burden, and the same sparing laugh that had rewarded the famous duck walk. Kawayida took us through Ali’s flashy arsenal of jabs, hooks and wiggles with the same appetite that animated his usual stories. Behind his back Grandma called him “Ali,” a name which never stuck because, apart from us,
only one family, the Stefanos, knew of Muhammad Ali’s exploits, and they could not see the appeal of this lanky substitute.

Aunt Tiida, Serenity’s eldest sister, was the most unpopular, albeit imposing, visitor we received all year round. Her visits put everyone on edge, especially when she first arrived. In order to blunt the arrogance of his eldest child, Grandpa would greet her with generous, half-mocking cheer. Grandma, a great believer in countering vanity with candor, would receive her with an indifference which diminished only in direct proportion to Tiida’s arrogance. Both strategies had their limitations, for as soon as Tiida opened her bags, she made sure that things were done her own way. I always had the impression that we were being visited by a government health inspector in mufti.

Tiida was like a member of an endangered species threatened with extinction, her life made more precarious by this inevitable contact with our backward village environment. She never came unannounced. Days before her arrival, Serenity’s house had to be aired all day, swept, and the bed doused in insecticide. I had to combat the prolific spiders, dismantling their nets, puncturing their webs, destroying their eggs. I broke the veins the termites built on doors and windows. I scraped bat shit from the floor and windowsills with a knife. It was my duty to smoke the latrine with heaps of dry banana leaves, a duty I detested most of all because it reminded me of my first proper thrashing at the hands of Padlock.