Abyssinian Chronicles (26 page)

“All of us who were raised right turned out right,” Padlock joined in. “You who had it easy are now paying for earlier freedom.” She looked at her second sister, Kasawo.

In Padlock’s eyes, both her sisters were whores. To begin with, Lwandeka had failed to find a man to marry her, shaming the family by breeding children in sin. Kasawo, the fatter and elder of the two, had not done any better. She ran amok during her teen days; she rebelled against her parents; and she eloped with a crooked man who drank heavily and beat her, almost killing her. She too had missed the honor of holy matrimony, and was now a market woman, that halfway station between a white-collar whore and an eternal mistress.

Padlock blamed her parents for neglecting their duty, especially for sparing the rod on the girls, and she felt that they deserved all the humiliations life dished out to them. At the peak of their rebellion, both girls had gone against parental will, returned home whenever they wanted, dated older men, dropped out of school and refused to do anything at home. Now they wallowed in sin like pigs in shit and made the same mistakes, like dogs eating their own vomit. Padlock was of the view that imprisonment could be the best thing that ever happened to her youngest sister, provided she didn’t get raped. Imprisonment would cure her of the urge to correspond with spoiled German women, most probably whores, who did not fear God and fomented rebellion.

Padlock went over her childhood days again. How she had worked for these people, washing, cooking, digging. How her back had creaked as she did chores they refused to do. How thorns had pricked her skin as she went to the forest to collect firewood for the family. How her neck had ached as she carried pots of water on her head. How her parents had always sided with the younger children, always blaming her for the mistakes others made. How she had got beaten for little errors. How her parents had refused to protect her against school and village bullies, rationalizing that it was her daily
cross, meant to make her strong. And how, after all that, her parents had gone soft on the younger children!

Padlock now saw her role as that of financier, with much of her money going to pay Lwandeka’s ransom. Gratified by her monetary power, Padlock did not air her most radical views on the disintegration of her parents’ authority. It was the reason she never pursued the lead when Kasawo hit back and said, “We never had it easy. We just had the guts to rebel, and to stay in perpetual rebellion. That was where we beat you, who turned out according to Mam and Dad’s prescriptions. The good thing is that we are all parents now.”

“You disowned your first child because his father tried to kill you, so don’t talk to us about parenthood,” Mbale hit back.

“Your wife has never tried to kill you, has she? Before she raises a panga at you, leave that extremity to me, who has been there,” Kasawo said rather calmly, and Mbale kept quiet then.

“We are all getting too excited,” Padlock said tactfully. “Why not discuss whether the men we are going to entrust the ransom money to are reliable people?”

That defused the tension. Padlock, having made the most important contribution to the discussion, stopped listening to the chitchat which followed: talk about wives, her nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles … Her mind was already back home, worrying whether the roof was still on her house. She had a life to lead, dresses to make and children to think about.

Conversation, however, stubbornly went back to her past. Kasawo, still smarting from Mbale’s earlier comments, ganged up with her youngest brother and accused both Padlock and Mbale of childhood mistreatment. She mentioned pinching, name-calling, malicious abandonment when they went to the well at night or to the forest on firewood-gathering errands. Padlock felt like slapping them and forcing them to shut up or to say the rosary. She and Mbale kept quiet under the assault, and the duo’s anger was soon deflated and lighter conversation introduced. Laughter erupted, and the place shook with the weight of family history resurrected.

By the third day, Padlock had reached a sort of compromise with her family: she tolerated their chitchat as long as they did not expect her to participate wholeheartedly in it. It gave her a sense of superiority to watch mere mortals grovelling in the quagmires of memory. She
was waiting for news about Lwandeka, which was not forthcoming. The carapace of her patience was gradually cracking up. It disintegrated totally with the arrival of the one person she had neither the intention nor the wish to meet: Aunt Nakibuka. The hydra of anger, hate and impotent disgust sank its teeth deep in her, and she had to fight hard to curb the violent upheaval inside. She somehow managed to sprinkle a sheen of civility onto her emotions.

Normally, nieces got on very well with aunts who had seen them to their bridal bed and stood by their side during the turbulent events which led to the first public celebration of womanhood. Nieces usually cherished these aunts, because they had held open for them the portals to womanhood and motherhood and proffered tips on how to control and manipulate a man without his awareness. These aunts were the first court of arbitration, and combined the role of defense lawyer, counsellor, conspirator and judge. Nieces often said things like “Our man has done this or that” or “Our man threatens to divorce us” or “Our man is seeing somebody else.” A niece’s marriage was also a bridal aunt’s marriage, in a sense, because both wanted it to work.

Padlock was not anyone’s average woman or niece: the nun in her never died.

She was uncomfortable with Nakibuka, who she felt knew too much about her. Nakibuka had seen her nakedness, which, in her convent days, was anathema. In those days, one never looked at oneself, even as one bathed or pulled devil hair. The body belonged to Christ, and to Christ alone. She felt that this woman also knew too much about Serenity: Had she not courted his erection? Had she not seen him impotent, afraid, defeated? Had she not bathed him when he made a fool of himself on their wedding night, cavorting with low-down drunks and common sinners who smeared him with vomit?

This woman had, worst of all, revealed family secrets to Serenity during the honeymoon period. For this Padlock felt she could never forgive her aunt. Hadn’t Nakibuka told Serenity everything about his wife’s early childhood, her nicknames, her attack on Mbale, her convent days, her desperation after expulsion from the convent, everything she did not want anybody to know? How dare she betray the family that way? People with loose tongues always got their punishment, and Padlock was sure that Nakibuka’s was waiting. Padlock also
felt that her aunt was in league with the Devil and was going to destroy her family and marriage.

It had taken Nakibuka a long time to find out that things were not going well between her and her niece. In her estimation, she had done a wonderful job preparing an uptight ex-nun for what was by family standards a very high-profile wedding. It had taken a lot of patience and cajoling, and she had expected some gratitude and a warm relationship in return, but apparently that had been asking too much. Invitations for Padlock to visit her had remained unanswered, and her visits to her niece’s home had become progressively colder. Her choice of Padlock as her daughter’s godmother had proved a catastrophe of shattered idealism. It was then that the older woman realized that something was wrong, and she withdrew. She consoled herself that her niece’s marriage was rock solid and that her counselling duties were redundant.

Years passed without the two women exchanging visits. Nakibuka’s marriage became stormy: her man wanted more children, she didn’t. She saw no use in having six children just to prop up a rotting marriage. The canings started. She insisted that if he really wanted to beat her, she would rather have it where she had had it before: on “government meat,” as they called the buttocks in school, the only place a teacher was authorized to beat a child. She could not imagine herself with a swollen eye or a torn lip or a broken nose.

The beatings on government meat resurrected the slumbering ghost of a platonic adolescent crush from her school days, and amidst its ashes rose the figure of her niece’s husband, Serenity. What had begun with furtive eye contact in her niece’s parental home and culminated in shoulder touching on the wedding night nurtured Serenity’s cheerfulness and attentiveness when she visited or when they met at family functions. At one such family function, a funeral which Padlock didn’t attend, they had talked for close to an hour, feverishly, spontaneously. She invited him to visit her and her husband, hoping that his manners would rub off on her man. Serenity never appeared.

Unlike the time when, possessed of adolescent hormonal devilry, she wrote letters every other day to the teacher she was infatuated with, even hinting at suicide, she remained calm. Except when her nights were haunted by the events of the wedding night. When thoughts of that gleaming male flesh cooking in the heat of the bridal
bedroom made her tremble. When coincidental resemblances to Serenity of men she met or bypassed made her heart beat violently and seized her muscles with lingering paralysis. When Serenity’s form filled her mind as she lay down to be caned on “government meat” and she screamed and begged, swelling her man’s ego with the falsehood of love sounds disguised as pain-choked noises. Months and months passed as she waited for Serenity to make a move. She attended every family function, every wedding, every funeral and every clan gathering in the hope of refilling her mind with his voice, the sight of him and his scent, but he eluded her.

The day he appeared on her doorstep, his clothes smelling of the evening air, his shoes coated with dust, dogs howling in the background, she could hardly hide her shock. She hid in the bedroom for a long time, calming herself, preparing to accept rejection, negative reports about Padlock and pleas for her intervention to save his marriage. Rejection had to be taken with dignity; she was ready. Back in the room with Serenity, conversation flowed naturally and almost careened out of control when she discovered that it was not her intervention he craved but her caress. She was not looking for a husband, nor was he looking for a wife. They had both been looking for lovers. With her husband out of the way, they were left to themselves, the dogs in the background harbingers of things to come. There was no going back now. She could not give up Serenity, and neither would he give her up.

The unexpected undercurrent of sweet guilt at this first meeting with Padlock made the older woman’s voice shake a bit, but since it was not taboo for them to share a man, she managed to look her niece in the eye. The friction and resistance she read there were expected. A maternal uncle robbed of his wife by his nephew would have worked up the same frustrated intensity, sorry that the robbery was not traditionally taboo. By now Nakibuka had admitted to herself that she was Padlock’s rival. Better-looking and more confident, she could afford to be generous and nice to her beleaguered niece, who looked worn, like an old boot. The younger woman was being courted by premarital, post-convent winds, which made her look as if she were shouldering all the world’s tragedies. If she did not take care, Nakibuka thought, soon birds would be nesting in her hair, baby hippos
snorting in her belly and hyenas rubbing their rumps in her armpits.

Nakibuka concluded that Padlock worried too much, thrived on pressure and misery, and that it was too late to change her. She had learned her lessons badly and controlled her man too openly; no wonder he had turned his back on her. Nakibuka was happy that it was all in the family. If Padlock did not want to share Serenity, she could go to hell.

Padlock did not say much, preferring to keep her feelings to herself, happy to keep Nakibuka guessing. Serenity had betrayed her; so had this woman. She had not taken Serenity to task; she saw no use in quarreling with this whore. The next twenty hours were so wretched that they reminded her of the floating, gorging feeling she had experienced when Sr. John Chrysostom chucked her out of the convent so many years ago. She wanted to wring this whore’s neck, but she couldn’t stoop that low. She put her tribulations at the feet of Jesus, thinking of Judas Iscariot. The proximity of her whoring aunt made the hours wail with chilly desolation and isolation amidst this crowd of laughing, romanticizing, reminiscing relatives. Each minute sank into her with the force of an eagle’s talon. She fought time with her only cherished weapon: thoughts of home, her own home, where she was supreme ruler. The rest—her relatives, their voices, the food, the noise in the distance—became blurred, sealed in a miasma of endless fog.

At night Padlock lingered in the darkness, watching the stars. She suddenly remembered Mbaziira and the Miss Singer letter. What if it was Nakibuka who had engineered the plot? But how had she come to know about Mbaziira? Impossible.

Padlock noticed no one on the bus home; she had not noticed her relatives when they bid her farewell. Vendors assaulted her somewhere along the way, pushing things in her sightless face, but she didn’t see them. By the time she entered her pagoda, Padlock was shaking with excitement, as though she had just eluded drooling devils stationed all along the road. The house smelled slightly of fish and of washing soap, but that did not matter: smells, like pests, could always be annihilated. She checked the rooms to make sure that nothing was missing. Everything was intact: she was impressed. She had not expected Serenity to do such a good job, what with his nose always in a book and
his heart with his cronies at the gas station. This was real power, she thought, a system which worked despite its enforcer’s absence. The stench of diapers drove her from the bathroom; her nose longed for the more cultured smell of sewing-machine lubricant. Her head was already buzzing with the sound of the machine, savoring what inexperienced ears called dreary monotony. The sound reminded her of a train, safe in its singular track, unstoppable in its purpose, single-minded in its labor toward its destination. She felt like a train. She dared Nakibuka to destroy her family: she would be reduced to bits, like any other whore suicidal enough to stand in Padlock’s way.