Abyssinian Chronicles (9 page)

She would, over time, make him eat his words. She would, over the years, extinguish the flash of corrugated-iron sheets she saw in his eyes whenever he looked at her. She still knelt for him, as she was supposed to, and she stayed on her knees as he addressed her with the eternally irritating question “Are you fine, girl?” Did the old man think
that she had just been operated on by a team of drunken surgeons, given a defective heart or relieved of a terrible hernia? Or had her rubies, and the goat his son had given her family, put stupid ideas in the old man’s head? Did he think that his son was hung like a zebra, and that whenever he did it she had to be revived with cold water and then stitched up? She wanted very much to assure him that his son was quite average, and that from now on he would be in for regular droughts. To start with, there would be no sex on Saturdays and Sundays, on major Church feast days, on the feasts of St. Peter and St. John Chrysostom and during the forty days of Lent, the Holy Week and pregnancy. So if this old man believed in whispered falsehoods, she would correct the error. But for now, like any good daughter-in-law, she knelt, and even smiled when the word “girl” dropped from the old man’s lips.

Now, this old man rightly deposed from power years ago spoke with the authority of a despotic chief, giving the word intimations of a blessing, lacing compromise in its sounds: peasant you could be, he implied, but thank God you are not a work-broken hag. There was also a touch of condescension and doubt in it. She knew that, for himself and for others, he approved only of tall women, and she was not a tall woman. She didn’t have those excessively wide pelvic plateaus famed for fecundity. She was not possessed of an elephant’s back. But she would show him that she meant business. For the moment, as she rose and saw the two depressions left by her knees on the ground, she whispered, “Lord, Lord, Lord, how low have I sunk! How long have I got to be measured against the standards of common women and whores?”

Like all seemingly helpless souls, Serenity was fought over by many over a long period of time. The truth was that even after his migration to the city, many people still argued about the viability of his marriage and the suitability of his wife. On many a sultry afternoon, with a good meal under their belt, the coffee kettle sizzling on the fire, a mild wind combing the countryside and teasing banana trees in their afternoon torpor, my grandparents would discuss his affairs. Grandpa would suddenly change the topic of conversation and say, “He should never have married that girl. A chief’s son should never be bossed about by a little peasant girl.”

“It was his choice, and as long as they get on reasonably well … Anyway, Sere’s mother was a chief’s daughter, and look what happened to her.”

“That was different. The woman had a worm in the head: she could not settle down. She thought that the whole world revolved around her. I gave her the best silks, fed her the best goat meat, treated her the best way I knew, and yet she cheated on me. With that worthless bastard. She left her children for that feckless lout!”

“You did not pay her the attention she needed. She was the youngest woman about, pitted against diehard cases who had already seen everything between heaven and hell.”

“Come on, sister. She was my favorite wife. What more did she expect? On second thought, I should have sent a policeman after her and dragged her back here. I should never have allowed her to sleep a single night in that bastard’s house.”

“You lost her and now you think you’ve also lost your son?”

“Serenity is uninterested in clan affairs. He is married to a woman who should have been the wife of the pope or the archbishop. Am I not right to fear that I’ve lost him?”

“Look at it this way: Serenity had a woman who both feared and idealized him. What wouldn’t she have done for him? She gave him a daughter and would have gone on to give him many sons, but he sent her away and married this woman instead. Don’t worry about him. Worry about his daughter, our granddaughter, whom we have not seen in a long time. I have a feeling that the woman will give her to another man to please him or just to get back at Sere. And think about it: When was the last time Sere visited his daughter?”

“I liked that woman: she knew how to treat people. She was uneducated, but after getting rid of her, Serenity did not marry a doctor or a lawyer either. Well, he married a doctor in Catholicism.” He laughed out loud. “I have tried to interest him in his first child, his first blood, but he is evasive every time I mention her. What am I to do?”

“If I were you, I would be looking for a young girl or a decent woman to take care of me. I would not worry too much about a son who is married to a doctor in Catholicism.”

“Young girls are nothing but trouble. After the first day in the house they go looking for boys their own age who give them gonorrhea, and then they expect you to pay the doctor’s bills. Old women
are control freaks, chased as they often are by the demons of their past failings.”

“I would still not worry about somebody married to a woman who should have become the wife of the pope.” Grandma laughed. “And after leaving me her first child, be it that violently, I can only wish her the best.”

“Sere’s wife is nothing but poison.”

“Watch out for girls swinging their hips when passing by.…” She laughed knowingly.

Forty-five days after taking his bride’s virginity, Serenity’s first sex drought began: a doctor confirmed that I had been conceived. As further proof, Padlock vomited copiously every morning and nibbled at the salty clay from the vast swamp at the foot of Mpande Hill.

As a way of dealing with frustrated sexual energy, Serenity rekindled his migratory dreams and wrote out many application letters to government institutions asking for a job in the city. The country was quivering under the wind of Africanization, or indigenization of institutions, ripping them from the hands of Europeans and Indians. Serenity’s hopes were high.

Eleven months into the marriage he still had no invitations for job interviews. Then I was born. It rained so much that week, and so intensely that day, that the swamp swelled and seemed to divide into many smaller, fiercer swamps. It flooded and destroyed the aqueducts and drowned the blue Zephyr hired by Serenity to take his wife to Ndere Parish Hospital. As Padlock labored, the driver climbed onto the rack of his car and held on as the wind rushed and threatened to fling him into the dark, swirling inferno below. The water rose up to the roof of his car, and the driver spoke his last will into the winds, certain that he was about to die. But after two wretched hours the winds relented, the rain stopped and the poor man thanked his gods for saving his life.

My umbilical cord was cut by Grandma with a new double-edged Wilkinson Sword razor blade. Padlock named me John Chrysostom Noel, the last name given despite the fact that Christmas was still far away. Serenity selected a name or two from the ready arsenal of the Red Squirrel Clan. He charged me with the grave duty of avenging Grandpa by becoming a lawyer someday, and to show that the mantle
had left his shoulders he added the name Muwaabi (prosecutor) to my weaponry. He could as well have named me Revenge. Grandpa could not become a lawyer in his day, because of racial discrimination. He, for one, called me Mugezi (brilliant, intelligent), the name I kept when the time came to scrap the ballast of my nominal encumbrance. Grandma gave me no names but claimed me from birth, thereby prefiguring my future as a midwife’s mascot-cum-assistant (pregnant women, in their eternal quest for sons, preferred a male mascot).

Padlock hated Grandma for it but could not countermand her word because it was Grandma who had cut my umbilical cord. Her belief that Grandma had it in for her increased. The story was that a week before Serenity introduced Padlock to his family as his fiancée, Grandma had two short dreams. In the first one, she saw Padlock standing in a lake of sand with a buffalo behind her. In the second, Serenity was peering at a gigantic crocodile lying at the bottom of a canyon. Grandma refused to interpret the dreams. Padlock asked her fiancé to have a go at it. He based his interpretation on totemic symbols. Padlock belonged to the elephant totem. The buffalo, another bush giant, was a surrogate elephant and symbolized (totemic) power. The presence of the buffalo in the sand was just a further demonstration of its indomitability, he concluded.

The second dream was interpreted along the same lines. The crocodile symbolized extraordinary power, tact, patience, self-knowledge, appreciation of territory and longevity. With a crocodile, not a red squirrel, as his totem representative, Serenity had concluded that his marriage was going to be a partnership of equals. His wife, the buffalo, was going to be the aggressor; and he, the crocodile, was going to be the tactician, the voice of caution, the brains.

Padlock, a more paranoid entity, took a more pessimistic view of the dream. Women who hatched dreams usually possessed a darker side, like the witches of the Inquisition. She believed that Grandma was trying to blackmail her, that she was using the dreams to keep a tight leash on Serenity. Mothers-in-law, afraid to let go of their sons, often did that. Grandma was not her mother-in-law, but Padlock believed that she considered herself to be. Why a buffalo and not an elephant if it was all so innocent? And why the sand? Sand was a bad surface for movement: it was a bad sign. If anything, she reasoned,
Grandma was the sand that would impede her movements, check her actions and make her marriage a living hell.

The feeling that Serenity came from a depraved family grew stronger in Padlock’s heart. First, there was his whore of a mother, suspected of killing two of her own baby girls, who ran away, pregnant with another man’s child, to escape her network of shame, and who died in disgrace. Then there was his pagan father, who claimed to be a Catholic but had had wives all over the place, and a child of sin, Kawayida, most likely one of many bred and disowned, or bred and lost in the maze of illicit unions. Then came Serenity’s two sisters: one imprisoned in her ignorance and vanity, one weighed down with instability, witchcraft, devil worship and apostasy. There was the strange aunt, sufferer of chronic amenorrhea, who delivered babies, prescribed herbs and hatched arcane dreams she feared to interpret. Since the Church no longer sanctioned the public burning of witches, all Padlock could do was keep a wary eye on the woman and resolve to keep her out of her house, her life and the lives of her future children.

Because Padlock had no gossip friends round the village, rumors about her proliferated like weeds after a bushfire. People did not understand her, and since they could not get the information they craved, they supplied their own. This led to Padlock’s growing hatred for the village. She felt squashed between Grandpa and Grandma, the centrality of Serenity’s house charged with the vertigo of a precipice. She began feeling policed, the invisible eyes nudging her to jump into the abyss on either side of the house. Grandma made matters worse, for whenever she heard me wail or scream for any period of time, she would quietly appear in the compound with a vague expression on her face, as if she had come to borrow something she had forgotten. Padlock would see her out of the corner of her eye and ignore her at first, pretending that she was too immersed in whatever she was doing; then, still fuming with economically managed anger, she would turn, acknowledge Grandma, hold her eye for one long moment and say, “Welcome, aunt. To what great fortune do we owe this unexpected visit?”

“It is not an unexpected visit,” Grandma, exhibiting great equanimity, would reply. “It is a courtesy call from an old-fashioned woman.”

Later, when the hostility increased and came out in the open, she would add, “An old woman who believes in keeping an eye on her husband.” Grandmothers jokingly called their grandsons “husbands” because, traditionally, a grandson of my caliber was the putative protector of his widowed grandmother. Padlock could barely stomach this brutal flaunting of crude paganism in her own yard, especially because there was nothing she could do to stifle it.

Paralyzed and incapacitated, like a legless grasshopper, Padlock could not help turning the fire of her hatred on me for my arrival on that monstrously rainy day, thus helping her worst enemy to gain such a firm hold in her house. Yet all the clashes in the village were just mere curtain-raisers for the epic showdowns that were to come in the charged atmosphere of the city.

Padlock realized quickly that she would never win the war against rumormongers, some of whom had gone as far as saying that she owed her current status to witchcraft. Knowing that they could do worse, she tried to avoid the villagers, keeping quiet even when she wanted to tell off those pagans. As a result, pressure accumulated dangerously inside her, and the need to migrate and leave the dead to bury themselves became even more urgent. It had to happen soon. She was the new wine which needed new bags, but she feared that the old bags into which she had been put on her wedding day would taint her before she got the chance to tear them up.

When she was alone in the house, it seemed to swell, and to press down on her with its old ghosts, old secrets, jealousies and hatreds. When she entered the bedroom, she was hit by a rancid-milk smell mixed with the funk of Serenity’s ten years of bachelor exploits, making her aware, once again, of the tainted bed on which she had sacrificed her holy hymen. The bed, with its infernal squeaking springs, seemed to be the source of the unholy smells, the gangrenous sore sowing cancer everywhere. She cringed at the thought that she had allowed herself to become one of its victims. That same bed reminded her that Serenity had not been a virgin on their wedding day, and that his sin was incarnate in that daughter of his, whom he did not talk about but who was somewhere in the countryside, doubtless mocking her and her children. Padlock was happy that the child of sin was a girl,
who could never become an heir, but she shuddered to think that one day the girl would perpetuate her sin by having her own offspring, mostly likely out of wedlock.

Padlock kept going back to the days before the wedding. She saw herself being smeared with butter oil by Aunt Nakibuka, who ordered her not to move, not to do anything, because the oil had to be driven deep into the skin by the fire of the sun. While she suffered the smell, the anxiety, the heat, the dehydration, Serenity, tainted as he was, was only having a haircut and a long bath. She would have wanted to thrust him in hot oil and scald all the women from his skin and his mind. She would have wanted to use molten soap, hot like liquid fire, and burn all the sin from his pores, and make him say many prayers, and give him many enemas with holy water. Then and only then would he be ready to take somebody’s virginity. But it was too late. This degraded house had to be abandoned, if only for the sake of the children. She had already given Serenity enough time to work things out; now she was going to threaten to tear this stained, stinking bag of a house down.