Abyssinian Chronicles (22 page)

Serenity returned from work as usual, handbag in hand, his stiff trousers chiseling the air, a detached look on his face. As he changed and headed for the gas station, my fear was a gong in my chest. He returned with a satisfied look in his eyes, stationed himself in front of the box and began his political soliloquy. Padlock was busy crocheting, driving a long hooked needle into fat thread to produce the creased ropes she needed to make tablecloths.

Had he already got the news? Was he toying with me, spinning out threads of torture, waiting for the right moment to go for the jugular? His face was blank, devoid of any inklings. I drifted in and out of the living room with the creaky walk of a locust, my ears abuzz with Amin’s doctored voice as it poured out of the single television speaker. The house seemed to contract and dilate like a birth canal, awash with the smell of impending disaster. I felt every move terror made, but I was powerless to stop it. I lifted the sheet of false security to peek at the contractions and dilations of impending doom, but lacking the telepathic capacity to drill through the opaqueness of despotic conspiracy,
I failed to read the signs. I took refuge in the kitchen, doing my best to bury my trepidation in the gurgling noises of cooking food, and to fight the guilty feeling of unpunished transgression with the comforting fire of the cooking stove. It was all in vain. Even Amin couldn’t bring solace. I wanted an earthquake to arise in the pit of the pagoda and bury us all, but I soon learned that earthquakes, like so many other disasters, only visited places where they were unwanted, and would never come by order or wish.

The two-man tribunal always took place after night prayers, when the residues of Padlock’s nunly tremolos were still in the rafters and supper was just minutes away. This meant that most condemned persons were doubly punished: they bore the weals of guava-switch thrashings and entered bed with the gastric howls of unassuaged hunger. Sometimes the latter punishment was commuted and one could eat, but many found the food unpalatable only moments after being thrown about like balls and howling like wild dogs.

As the tribunal passed its sentence, taking time to ask if I knew the cost of a real bed, inflating the sentimental value of freshly acquired goods to a staggering level and bestowing the patina of false newness on secondhand goods, I got the feeling that I was the chosen victim of Indian curses invested in all their forcibly relinquished goods. Was it not possible that the bed and its magical headboard had been abandoned by a family that, out of desperation, had drowned themselves in Lake Victoria, or eaten poison, or thrown themselves in front of an oncoming truck? I was very sure that Serenity, courtesy of his educational sensibilities, had failed to assuage the spirits of the former owners, dismissing such precautions as superstitious mumbo jumbo. There was also the possibility that the red specks I had seen on the leg of the bed were residues of Indian blood, loaded with Indian curses, jetted by an Indian woman assaulted by frustrated soldiers. Serenity, in his educated arrogance, had not sacrificed a large cock or a goat to take away the blood and the curses of former owners. I saw myself as the sacrificial animal, caught between the hostilities of clashing cultures. It was a plausible explanation for my deadly fascination with the veneered banalities of that headboard.

On the other hand, I realized that a despot didn’t need the curried curses of dispossessed property owners to explode into murderous excess. A despot did what he did because the time was right, and because
he had allowed himself to be goaded into the hard corner of slowly simmering rage.

Serenity struck with the bare-clawed fury of a leopard at the end of a long antelope-stalking session. It seemed that everybody, including me, had seen it coming. The shitters watched to see whether the confrontation would live up to their expectations. Serenity was all over me with his suede shoe. For a moment, I was too overwhelmed to do anything about those scalding blows with cooked rubber. Up and down, left and right it went, guttural groans of you-saw-it-coming issuing from his twitching mouth.

With the first pain barrier cleared, I thought I was going to die. I was not afraid to die, because Grandma was on the other side waiting for me. In fact, I was terribly afraid of not dying and remaining a cripple with an arm broken beyond repair, or my head messed up like poor old Santo’s, or my spine damaged like the catechist who fell from the pulpit. There was a man in the village who could not sit or walk. A bull had tipped him into the air, and something had gone wrong. I was being thrown into the air now, but rather than stay handicapped for the rest of my life, pissing and shitting in a bedpan, I preferred to die.

I started to fight back, head-butting Serenity in the shins and the kneecaps. I started aiming for his swinging crotch. I got beaten harder. The audience stopped giggling. Serenity was out of control, answering his enforcer’s challenges to his despotic credentials. This was a demonstration beating. I wanted him to go on and on and on. Every blow drained off the chaff, leaving me pure. This was a landmark, a historic pillar in my life, and I wanted it to be so prominent that its scars would fire the boilers of my revenge. I was falling, falling, falling, like water escaping through cotton cloth, dropping into the glass, leaving the accumulated dirt on the cloth. The hammering whisked me off to the slopes of Mpande Hill, where I almost lost a foot in the spokes of a bicycle gone wild. This time I was the rider fighting to keep the bicycle on course, away from the ravine, instead of the boy riding pillion. I was back in the swamps, swimming with peers: I kept going up and down, up and down, swallowing green water as I now swallowed solid air. My friends were calling me now. I got ashore. It was over.

I woke up in my bed, bruised all over, the creaky movement of swollen joints a source of pain. General Amin’s spiritual help was the ointment which oiled the wounds of defeat and stopped them from festering into gangrenous ulcers of despair. I had lost, and now I had to regroup, train hard and engage the despots in my own good time, at a venue of my choice. War had been officially declared, and I was thrilled by the possibilities of impending engagement. Padlock had never hidden her hand. Serenity had shown his. It was my turn to show mine.

For three whole days I was too sick to go to school, and I could hardly restrain waves of disgust with myself for demonstrating such weakness. All the bones were fine, only the flesh ached. So why was I not at school? Why was I home listening to Padlock’s grating whine? Why was I allowing myself to be irritated by the victorious timbre in her voice? This was her moment of glory, a confirmation of her power, and I was showering affirmation on it. She now filled the house with her spirit, humming to herself to fill in the remaining holes, barking orders or working on her sewing machine.

Serenity was scared, though he was too inhibited, too set in his despotic ways, to come to me for absolution. I was ready to grant it cheaply, at the cost of a measly gesture, because I knew how hard it was for a despot to apologize, or to appear to be apologizing, for his actions. However, I was not going to give it to him for free. He had to come and get it, like a man, from a man who had bought that power with his blood, tears and bruises. As a boxing fan, he should have learned that boxers hug at the end of a fight, however hard or bloody, not so much because they like each other, but to acknowledge the other man’s role in the convolutions of victory, defeat or otherwise. I was ready to acknowledge him and his role, and to forgive him for losing control, for breaking the rules, for brawling, but he came neither to my corner nor to my bed. He started returning home late from work. He failed to look me in the eye. He ate his meals shielded from me, from his enforcer and the shitters, by the papery walls of a faded red hardcover Beckett book. He was hiding and waiting for the arrival of Godot. He forgot that I had usurped the role of Godot.

Serenity tended to like authors—like Beckett and Dickens—who had had difficulties with their mothers; I don’t know what he expected of them in his current predicament. From behind his papery fortress,
encased in despotic stiffness, he looked as chiselled as a latter-day Beckett. He seemed to be protecting himself from the curse of Padlock’s tongue, the very tongue which had imported the imagery of murder into his house during their late-night confrontations. He seemed to be reeling with the realization that he had stayed just this side of murder. He seemed to be wondering how and when he had regained control of his senses, for nobody, least of all Padlock, had raised a single voice of protest throughout the rampage.

During my confinement, I considered returning to the village and helping Grandpa as he wrestled with age and hernia, but I knew that he would disapprove and send me back. Had I learned nothing from his tribulations and lectures? Had he been beaten and immersed in a cattle dip and shot for nothing? All Grandpa wanted was a lawyer, and since Serenity had disappointed him, the responsibility was fully mine. Had I not learned that there was no giving up and that one had to lick one’s wounds and then come back in style? I was ashamed of myself. I also realized that there was no longer any village to return to. I carried the village with me, and it would remain so for the rest of my life, although the years with Grandma could never be relived.

With the beating still fresh in their minds, the shitters obeyed orders with the precision and dispatch of survivors who knew too well what could befall them. They weren’t about to tempt fate or to stir the wrath of sleeping gods. On a few occasions I caught them talking about me, but I ignored them. They were wary of me, as if I had contracted leprosy, most probably the leprosy of guilt by association. I could not blame them for finding it hard to proceed on the treacherous mudflats of despotic unpredictability.

For her part, Padlock acted as if nothing had happened. In her mind, the score had been settled. I had once condemned her to death, and she, in turn, had made me peep into the hungry lacunas where death putatively resided. Her only interest was in finding out whether my fall from grace had led to a total change of heart. When I attempted to stir her guilt by pretending to be too sick to do my shit duties, she said, “Cut out your little games, boy. Remember this: this is not your grandmother’s house.” From then on I executed my duties with the cold efficiency of a soldier on guard.

I avoided Lusanani like the plague. The note she thrust in my pocket on the way to the borehole was dripping with sympathy, the very thing I could do without. It irritated me as much as the sight of her nipples protruding from her wet blouse. It should have been a message of congratulation, for had I not passed the test, survived the ordeal?

I raided Serenity’s library of fantasies and lingered about, wondering whether to make off with Beckett. I finally decided to take
Treasure Island,
the most popular book in the house. I hid it for days, hoping it would be forgotten. I was planning to give it to a girl I was beginning to take an interest in. She was younger than I, in a lower class, and I did not even know whether she cared much for pirates, ships or adventure. Serenity ignored the disappearance of the book, but Padlock pursued the matter hotly. She slowed down only when she realized that no chest-beating, confessing fool was going to pop out of the woodwork and own up to the “robbery.” She took to saying, “I know who the thief is. God will shame him one of these days. Whatever one does in the deepest darkness will be proclaimed from housetops.”

Personal experience told me that whenever Padlock had recourse to Divine Intervention and Holy Scripture, it was not out of piety but out of a sense of looming defeat. I sat comfortably on the book, waiting for a chance to donate it. In the meantime, a friend of mine took an interest in it. It was an ill-fated move to lend it out. An aspirant girlfriend of his who was trying to assert her rights took it, and my friend, who had all along been looking for a chance to lay her, did not ask her to return it.

At school I got myself pocket money by writing love letters for large boys to their prospective sweethearts. It was my favorite hobby, for it accorded me the chance to see how burdensome hormones worked, and to what lengths boys went to appease them. This was also my foray into the arts of blackmail, deceit and corruption, which culminated in my most daring move: writing a love letter to Padlock.

The usual procedure was that a large boy would approach me, mostly at the recommendation of a third party. He would introduce the subject, often beating about the bush, especially if he was intimidated by my academic credentials. I would listen, and he would ask if I knew the girl in question. We would follow the girl. He would sing her
praises, even if she deserved none, and I would memorize what he liked about her. Back at my desk, I would write a letter emphasizing the girl’s strong points. If she possessed no visible beauty, I would improvise, assigning her qualities which would make her mind spin, but careful not to exaggerate too much. It often worked. If a girl was very clever, I would raid Serenity’s poetry books, extract a few catchy lines and stroke her heart with the words of a dead poet. The most accessible source of inspiration, however, was the Old Testament, which most pupils never read, making my quotations all the more impressive.