Abyssinian Chronicles (5 page)

He stood looking at the orange tree, lean, gray-green, its thin branches loaded with blighted leaves, short thorns and small green balls. It was said to be his late mother’s favorite tree. How little it evoked in him! It left him emotionally untouched, like a desecrated temple or a looted grotto. He had swept its leaves, together with the leaves of the acacia, the jackfruit and the mango trees, thousands of times without feeling anything special.

A storm was blowing in the thick forest of coffee trees around the house. He saw them being uprooted, overturned, broken like straw, swept over the village and ultimately dumped in the papyrus swamp at the foot of Mpande Hill. How many sacks of coffee had he picked in his life? How many wasps had bitten him in the process? How many liters of tears and sweat had seeped into the soil of this coffee shamba? Uncountable. Money from coffee sales had seen him through school up to Teacher Training College, but it had also seen useless people, like his father’s women, through many superfluous storms. Many had come, many had gorged and all had moved on to worship at trees sturdier than his father’s. Many had come under the
clan’s umbrella to partake of the proceeds from clan land, and had stayed till his father lost power. Serenity now wanted the storm to rake up all clan land, grind it up and sweep the dust in one mighty, furious river of erosion into the swamps. He wanted the storm to leave behind mean, uninhabitable craters and hostile, snarling gorges into which men would fall and break their necks. He wanted the remains to be so barren that no one would have anything to do with the place. He wanted another family to take over all clan land and all clan land troubles.

Religion? It seemed like poetic justice that his father had lost his power because of a religion he never practiced. At the same time he would not mind if the storm stretched its cadaverous hand to Ndere Hill and flattened the mighty church of his youth, sprinkling the bits in the surrounding forest. The aluminum church tower reminded him of all the fruitless Sunday masses, all the squandered prayers for the return of his mother and all the energy expended on church affairs. It also brought to mind the Virgin Mary: he had begged her to visit him, to turn into his mother. She refused. She would not wipe his tears, the few bitter ones he had ever shed. Now he wanted the tower and the church razed.

In the new life he dreamed of, there was no place for the county chief’s daughter flaunting her laudable background, her looks or her suitabilities. This person, whom he had never met and would not care to meet, however qualified she might be, did not figure in his dream. There was already somebody waiting. She was the new star, the new wine, the new Virgin, his ticket to freedom, success and happiness. With her at his side, he would be free of obligation to his father and to his other relatives. She would be the buffer against all the things he hated on his side of the family.

“Sir,” he stammered, “I already have somebody.”

“Do I know this person?” Grandpa, staggered, hoped it was not a village wench, the type he had spent his life dreading as a potential daughter-in-law. Had Serenity failed to get his priorities right? He closed his eyes for a moment.

“No, sir. She is new. She lives in another county.”

“Have you already proposed to her?”

“Not yet, sir.”

“I don’t like the sound of this, son. How can you build a house on sand? Do you know this person well? Her family background? Her education? Her temperament? How do you know if she is not epileptic or possessed by evil spirits?”

In Serenity’s ideal world people never promised things; they just did them. He could not bear to be promised anything. He distrusted all promises and the people who made them. The hunch on his Virgin was good. He was confident that there was nothing to worry about. If she had promised to marry him, he would not have trusted her.

“Do not worry about that, sir.”

Grandpa gave vent to his anger. “What sort of seed are you bringing into the family, son?”

Serenity knew what Grandpa meant. He wanted his women tall and elegant, wasp-waisted but firm-butted, and without the kind of boobs “which fell in the food while it was being served.” Without buckteeth, too. All Grandpa’s women looked alike. He admired consistency of choice—it demonstrated character. He believed that a man fell in love with one woman who appeared in different guises.

Serenity felt uneasy. His Virgin, his new star, was built differently: she was petite, the kind of woman who dried up with age instead of bulging all over and widening like a door. In a way she looked like Grandma, his aunt, though a touch more intense, more ambitious, more hard-willed, more self-contained.

“Some things one leaves to chance or to God,” Serenity said, instead of simply asking his father to trust him.

“I am trying to be understanding, son, but all these gray areas and don’t-knows do not sound convincing to my experienced ears. I would strongly urge you to consider my proposal. I will arrange for you to meet the girl; maybe that will help to make you realize what I am talking about.”

“That won’t be necessary, sir.”

This was a shrill trumpet blast announcing his first major victory over his father. The risk involved, the total investment in his hunch about his Virgin, made the victory even sweeter. He was beaming. Now it was just him and the Virgin. He had gone for broke; he had put all his eggs in one basket. It made him feel both giddy and good.

“Have you thought about clan land and establishing yourself in clan circles?”

Another triumphant trumpet blast: “Sir, I would like to concentrate on the wedding first.”

“It is all up to you, son,” Grandpa said heavily, realizing that Serenity was determined to go his own way, and that there was no stopping him. He capitulated. He had done his best. A man was judged by the way he provided for his offspring, by the education he gave them. Serenity could not blame him for anything. Perhaps he should say a few words about the boy’s late mother.

“Remember this, son: your mother was the love of my life, but things turned out badly. She must have done what she believed was right. It was just a shame that she could not take anyone into her confidence. If she had let me know about what she felt, I would surely have done something to alleviate the pressure. She hid her feelings from everyone, with catastrophic repercussions. I had planned to grow old with her. I think about her every day. You have a better chance to make things work for you and your family. Grab it.”

Serenity had won his freedom. The storm in the coffee shamba ceased. He heard birds chirping, twittering. He saw black migratory birds crossing over from the Northern Hemisphere. He had watched them all his life, waiting for them at the change of season. They were his mascots. One day he would follow them and fly the same route. Right now, there was one person from the village who could follow them: that Stefano girl, Miss Aeroplane, the air hostess. His dream now was to become the second person from the village to fly.

Unlike most prospective grooms, Serenity was not worried about how big a success or how crushing a failure his wedding was going to be. The prospect of marriage had a more insidious effect: it ate away at his crust of indifference and corroded the bulk of his serenity, exposing the deep-seated hate, contempt and fear he reserved for shopkeepers and shops in general. Whatever happened now, he would not be able to escape the claws of those phantoms.

He had to buy new clothes and new shoes, new household goods and countless other things. He was going to spend hours shopping, carrying the ghosts of his fear from shop to shop. Those shopkeepers would touch him, feel him, measure him, dizzy him with their curried, garlicked or scalding breaths, pocket his money and smile their corny smiles. But he would see through them all. In the same mad vein, others
were going to enter so many shops, come out with so much stuff and bring it all to him redolent with congratulations. Those goods would be his launchpad into the turbulent waters of married life, parenthood and adult responsibility. He wished there were a better way of expressing the same sentiments and intentions. Shops and shopkeepers had collaborated with a few other elements to make his life a cold, dark-chambered hell. How many times had he been beaten for refusing to go to the shops, or for going there too late and arriving when they were closed? How many times had he been punished for sending others in his stead who, now and then, stole all the money or all the goods or delivered half measures? His biggest problem had been that he could not explain to anybody the reason that he feared or hated shopping. He had been ashamed of his own terror.

One thing was clear: he did not belong in the shops. He did not trust shopkeepers, and he had never entertained the feeling that they trusted him. He always saw those Indians and those few Africans who owned shops, and the faceless financiers and manufacturers, as a species of silver-tongued man-eaters ready to tear people to bits. He saw them as well-dressed robbers with hidden knives, which they used to slice up people for the little they had and the much they hadn’t. He saw them as two-faced devils, forever preying on people’s peace of mind, sanity and confidence.

Who would believe that sacks of sugar, salt and beans, packets of sweets, matches and exercise books, released the worst fears in him? The fact was that the sight of all those things opened wells of insecurity, canyons of instability and craters of panic in him. Those objects exuded an indifference far bigger, far deeper and far meaner than his; they made him shrivel with insignificance. They exuded an air of preciousness, desirability and indispensability so profound that he could not bear to look at the way they were cared for and secured.

It was the diabolical lure of those very same things that had taken his mother away from him. If they hadn’t been so desirable, and if the shopkeepers hadn’t polished them so much, he reasoned, his mother would still be with him. Alive. Those precious things, and the shopkeepers, and the man in question had all conspired to take his mother away from him, with her tacit cooperation. The man who took his mother away met her at the shops, bought her things, promised her more and sealed her fate with the phony blessing of a shopkeeper’s
crocodile smile. How, then, could he control himself, feign or demonstrate indifference, when he was in the snarling jaws of this ring of conspirators? How, then, could he put it all behind him when he could not pinpoint a single conspirator, dead or alive, who had facilitated the dismemberment of his life? Ergo, whenever he was near them, the locusts in his stomach worsened, his tongue disobeyed him, he trembled and failed to express himself. Occasionally, he forgot the items he had traveled kilometers to fetch. Sometimes he bought the wrong brand. All of this had got him in trouble at home. How come, the people queried, it was him alone, and not the girls, who messed up things all the time? Had he shit his brains down the toilet? Or was he just doing it to spite them?

Born in 1933, the year the locust plague laid waste to large areas of the country, Serenity often dreamed of evicting all shopkeepers, exiling and marooning them on a barren island in the Indian Ocean, and of demolishing all shop premises and washing all the rubble into the waters of Lake Victoria. As a victory celebration, he would plant mango and jackfruit trees on all the sites.

Over time, and with a lot of hard work, his confidence had grown. Nowadays he managed his nerves better, and in case of emergency, he could grip the counter, or thrust one arm in a pocket, or present a neat shopping list and elicit a bad-toothed smile from the man behind the counter.

Grandpa’s reference to evil spirits might well have been a hunch, a telepathic intimation or even a whiff from the nostrils of the hydra which brandished its three nefarious heads in Virgin’s family.

The first head breathed the harsh poison of ultraconservative Catholicism: the type which stifled personal enterprise, glorified poverty and hard labor, extolled stoicism, execrated politics and focussed on heaven. The second head spewed dictatorship: the all-authority-is-from-God type and obedience without question. The third head was responsible for violent temper, Virgin being a second-generation sufferer, and the defense of indefensible contradictory positions, like the Church’s stand on abortion, contraception and celibacy.

Grandpa should not have worried: Serenity was ready to deal with anything short of rock-throwing, shit-eating madness. With a
touch of idealization kicked up by the Virgin’s independence and self-control, he believed there was no female problem he could not handle, and no family conflagration he could not extinguish. A woman or two had made him tremble, a girl or two had started a fire in his balls and released a warm balmy oil in his thorax, but the intensity and the depth of those feelings had not come anywhere near what the Virgin ignited in him. This double-barrelled magmatic flow was his definition of love, and he felt that there was enough of it this time to go where he had not dared to go with Kasiko.

The groom’s party made two big visits to the bride’s home, or so Serenity remembered. As the two hired oily-white Peugeots packed with men in white tunics, black coats and black shoes went up hills and down valleys, Serenity had locusts on his mind. He could see them swarming in the air, flying, alighting, eating, shitting, shitting and eating. As the locusts on the ground ate and shat, those in the air advanced to virgin territory to eat and shit and shit and eat.

Virgin’s village was crammed under a chain of hills that evoked images of a wolf’s swollen teats, or the back of a monstrous crocodile. The village and the hills were flanked by a thick forest, stripped bare in 1933, divided in two by a laterite road with red dust that turned to red mud in the rains. The seasonal road into the village was lined with elephant grass and homesteads which stood hundreds of meters from each other. It would be another forty-two years before the village was stripped again, but for now it resembled the nest of a weaver bird crammed under an iron roof. This nest of a village had a sad, subdued air about it. Banana and coffee trees stood bravely in the sun, the former waving in the wind as if to draw attention to themselves, the latter staying still, as though to show how tough they were. At the village entrance were a few shabby shops, the type that specialized in the sale of paraffin, matches, soap and salt, their roofs rusting in the heat and humidity. A few curious eyes watched as the drivers wiped the red dust off the cars and as Serenity’s party straightened creased fabric and paid attention to their shoe leather and haircuts.