Abyssinian Chronicles (11 page)

The disgraced nun went down on her knees and begged and promised never to touch the children again, but to no avail. In desperation she pleaded that she had nowhere to go. To which her former superior replied, “Everyone has got a place to go. Remember, foxes have their own holes, too.” Paralyzed by shame and blinded by rage, Sr. Peter took refuge in the home of Mbale, the brother she had nearly maimed at the beginning of it all.

Within a few days, Mbale’s iron-roofed house was oppressed by the cataclysm of his sister’s depression. She locked herself in the guest room with a jerry can of water and a plastic basin, and refused to come out. She refused to eat, surviving on two mugs of water a day. She cried and prayed all day, and, spent, she slept all night. In mortification, she slept on the bare floor, and scratched the earth with her fingers till her nails bled. She asked Death to come for her. She rattled heaven’s door with poignant novenas to St. Jude Thaddeus, helper of
desperate cases. Each morning she scribbled a message on a piece of paper to the effect that she was still alive, and that no one should get alarmed or attempt to interrupt her prayer-and-mortification sessions.

On the seventh day, Mbale knocked on her door with the intention of starting some form of dialogue, but she sent him away. He threatened to break the door with a hammer, and she replied that he would regret it for the rest of his life. Afraid that she would die in there, he hurried to his aunt, a good-natured character whose negotiating skills he hoped would help. They arrived on the ninth day, and found the former Sr. Peter washed, fed, wearing a blue dress and relaxing in a wicker chair on the veranda. A hen or two was pecking at her toenails, mistaking them for maize grains. She agreed to go with her aunt, who found her a job as a filing clerk in a small cotton-buying firm in a nearby town.

Sr. Peter, as she still thought of herself then, attended her first wedding just to get out of her aunt’s house. All she was hoping for was a lingering sense of disgust, generated by the dancers’ pelvic gyrations and the people’s profanity, to buoy her home at the end of the evening. She did not look at anyone. She did not drink anything. She did not participate in any festivities. She would have preferred to hover above the crowd, unseen, and watch foolish people disgrace themselves by rolling in the muck of their lust. She stood outside the booth, arms across her chest, stared into space and let the noise, the cheering, the drumming pour over her like water washing a rock. This went on until a face crossed her line of vision. It disappeared and appeared again. It was the face of a young man who looked as lost as herself. He seemed to be trembling, quaking, as if experiencing something as quaint as a miracle. Looking closely, he discovered that she was radiating sublime calm and perfect solitude with such force as he had never seen before. He was hooked by the fathomless intensity pouring out of her frail bosom. Her apparent sanity in the face of the one hundred and one madnesses around her spoke eloquently to something so deep within him that he could not avert his eyes. It was this sudden awareness of her powers, powers she hitherto believed to have left behind the cold walls of the convent, that made her tremble and almost panic. Afraid that her loss of control had been witnessed by a second young man who came and stood next to the first one, she turned and left, melting into the excited crowd.

Young Serenity could hear himself swearing, through clattering teeth, that he would leave no stone unturned until he conquered, or was conquered by, this woman. He could feel mud sucking at his feet and locusts nibbling at his stomach. What was he getting into? She was not the model of beauty his father promoted, but he felt determined to go his own way. Infected by her solitude, or rather his solitude kindled by hers, he sealed himself off from the excess of booze, dance and funk which the wedding had become. Now she was gone, like an apparition. He could hear his friend laughing hard. The friend knew both the girl and her aunt, and did not think much of the girl: she was too intense, too uptight for his liking. He would have gone on to make a lot of fun of her but for the intensity in Serenity’s eyes.

For days Serenity could not excavate the image of the ex-nun from the caverns of his mind. He spent long periods of time recapturing the contours of her face, the lines of her figure and the depth of her solitude, all in vain. At the wedding he had drunk only one beer, but it seemed as if he had emptied a whole crate and that her image, or what he thought to be her image, was just a drunken man’s delusion. His friend’s caution and apparent lack of enthusiasm unsettled him. The only thing that kept him going was the feeling that he was on the right track. His friend, with a wry smile, agreed to help him.

The ex-nun’s aunt had already seen the remarkable transformation on her niece’s face. The cadaverous downward warp was gone, consumed by the slow fire of unwinding revelation, replaced with the thinly disguised expectant visage of someone on the verge of great things. Told of the prospective suitor, the young woman’s aunt expressed tactical surprise at the news because she did not know the young man involved, but she was happy. Her niece needed a new start, a new purpose in life, intimations of which seemed to be hanging, like a cloud of locusts, in the air.

For Sr. Peter herself, the vision of the young man’s face clarified the significance of her name for the first time. She was the rock on which a new family, a new church, was going to be founded. She could feel the poles sinking into the bedrock. She could see the structure going up, coloring the firmament with its magnificence. Her death to the convent, to nunly life, had enabled this resurrection.

As Serenity’s go-between and her aunt negotiated off and on for weeks, Padlock felt not a shadow of a doubt about her future role. All
she needed was God’s confirmation of the same, and Serenity’s commitment. There was the matter of his concubine and of his child of sin: St. Jude would look into that. After ninety days the answer came. There was nothing to stop her.

Pedaling back from the stream, Serenity sighed when he remembered the ninety days of hell during which he wondered whether Padlock had turned down his marriage proposal. There was a pattern to his life. He always seemed to be the last person informed about matters concerning him. Things always happened when he no longer had power to change them. Now what was he to do with his wife’s life story? Knowing her background was just going to make him sympathize with her even when he should not.

It was dark, and the swamp was pumping its fetid smell over the valley, suspended in the air like a wet blanket. In it one could discern the mingled odors of mud, fish, decomposing grass, wildflowers and frogs. Mosquitoes and other biting insects had upped their sorties on this bicycle-cleaning intruder. Serenity rode home, dead to the world. The trees and bushes along the path took on ghostly forms and grotesque dimensions which rattled memories of childhood stories of witches and magic from the cobwebby rafters of his mind. His father’s house was in total darkness. The old man was never home early in the evening: he went off to see friends and to look for female company. The period when the place crawled with no less than twenty people at any one time seemed too far away to rattle into consciousness. It seemed as if a storm had come, swept everybody into the swamps, pinned their heads under the murky water and drowned them en masse, leaving behind this grandiose pod which echoed with the Fiddler’s tunes.

He was nearing home now. Through the window he could see his wife leaning over the table, scrutinizing something. A letter had arrived from the city, laden with the Uganda Postal Union logo: he had been offered a job! The sixties were going to be his peak time: first he had gotten married, then he’d had a son, and now he was going to move to the city!

The new wine had, finally, torn the old village bags. The movable parts of the house—the personal effects, the pictures, the wedding gifts,
everything needed to start a new life in the city—were compressed into parcels and sullen bundles and shoved into boxes sealed with tape or strangled with string. Wooden chests appeared and, like magic, swallowed the house. Soon only the veteran bed remained, in addition to a stick or two of furniture. All this torrent of activity raged around me, and, like a drowning man, flail as I could, I could not get a grip on it. A stream of people moved in and out of the shrunken house, drinking tea or sipping beer, wishing my parents good luck.

A puke-yellow lorry appeared and swallowed everything. It dawned on me that we were leaving. The house now echoed when one called. But why was I not dressed for the journey? A little crowd had gathered, despite the wet, and they stood in the grass, away from the thick tires, out of range of flying mud kites. It was then that I was told I was staying.

Serenity climbed into the cab. Padlock turned to follow him in. I touched her, smudging her dress. She cringed and, with blinding speed, drove her palm full into my face. I fell back in the mud and, in protest, rolled once or twice. I kicked a few times and then heard the driver’s booming voice lamenting that departures were often accursed affairs. Mud had flown onto Padlock’s dress. She raised her foot, the yellowish sole flashing, as if she were going to plant it full in my face. Serenity’s voice rose, and Padlock seemed to wake from a dream. The raised foot was placed on the steel foothold, and with my father’s help she got into the cab. The flash of that sole sobered me up. I sat in the mud, and at that moment smoke blew in my face. The truck growled and groaned like a mortally wounded animal. By the time I opened my eyes it was gone, two thick wet trails the only mark of its passing.

I was mud-soaked, like a piglet after a pretty good wallow. Grandma picked me up. Rain broke out. She lifted me, mud and all, and carried me to her house. It was not the first time that she had rescued me or watched me suffer. She was the only witness to my first thrashing, when Padlock punished me for insinuating my precocious curiosities into the very adult matter of her latrine functions. It was all because of babies: I wanted to know where they came from, but she would not tell me. I knew that she knew the answer. I decided to investigate and surprise her with my knowledge. For starters, I followed her to the latrine that day.

When the door closed behind her, leaving four inches of viewing space underneath, I lay down on my stomach, chin in the creepers, and amid rumblings, gassings and strainings I saw large cylinders appear, get soaked in dust-particled light and disappear down the rectangular hole. I got access to the hairy fleshiness underneath the stomach, and a magic flash of pink reminiscent of nasal tunnels convinced me that my research was going in the right direction. A baby was being born! Although I was seized by the urge to rush in and warn her about what was going to happen, I was too overwhelmed by my curiosity to move. Dust from the grass tickled my nose, but I forced the incipient sneeze back. Now I was thinking: if the baby fell in, it would have to be fished out.… The idea of such filth made my skin creep. Why wasn’t she squatting away from the deadly rectangle? Did she want maggots all over the baby and inside its orifices? She was pushing very hard now, as if a lance of pain were going through her.

I closed my eyes to avoid seeing a human being drowned in muck. So this was the reason why she was so secretive about the birth of babies!

“You are going to learn never to spy on people again,” I heard her saying. I was half-flying, half-walking. We broke up a fight between two hens over a long earthworm. I felt like that worm: the game was over for me. I tried to explain, but the cutting edge of Padlock’s anger, aided by a guava switch, could only slash, whack and thrash. Why wasn’t anyone coming to my rescue when I was screaming like a piglet being castrated?

Suddenly Grandma was there. At the edge of the battlefield, her head thrown back, arms across her chest, waiting to be noticed. I wanted those arms around Padlock’s neck, but on the chest they remained. Is that the best you can do? she seemed to be asking Padlock. I threw the question back in Grandma’s face.

Sensing a change in the air, Padlock stopped, momentarily embarrassed at being caught off guard. Snotty tears falling, I escaped and hid behind Grandma. A threat or two followed, and though the glass in Padlock’s eyes shone bleakly, I knew I was safe. Swollen but safe.

Now, soaked and runny with mud, I felt safe again. I was happy with the new deal. The millstone of Padlock’s temper and the bushfire of her anger were off my back. I wallowed in the mud not because I had been left behind, for children were left with their grandparents
all the time, but because I had not been informed of my freedom earlier on.

I started life where most people ended it: in the baby business. Suddenly, as a midwife’s mascot-cum-assistant, I was catapulted into adult circles and felt comfortable high up there with dads and mums, heavily involved in the facilitation of the coming of their babies, privy to adult secrets, seeing adults in instances of vulnerability my age-mates would never dream of. Suddenly, I was being treated like a little prince by superstitious women who attributed their safe deliveries and the coming of long-awaited sons to my mascotry, and I had a vague claim to the life of many babies born in the village and a few surrounding villages. Suddenly, it occurred to me that I had powers of life and death, because I could give a pregnant woman herbs which might cause a miscarriage or prevent one or help the fetus to grow. All that power was as overwhelming as it was unbearable.

In my new capacity, I attended consultations—that is, pregnant women came to talk to Grandma about their gestation. They described how they felt, how long and how much they vomited and how much it stank. They gave lurid descriptions of their fevers, backaches, frequent urination, pile attacks, constipation, swollen ankles and heartburn. They discussed their appetites, fears and hopes and wanted to know up to what month before delivery they could continue to have sex. In order to deal with the last item, I would be sent off on errands, but anticipating it, I often stood behind the door and listened. Sometimes Grandma would ask the women to show her their bellies. I craved to touch those tight-skinned balloons, but I knew that I would never be granted the opportunity. Grandma stroked them, kneaded them, felt them, and advised the women accordingly. If a case needed closer examination, she would take the woman behind the house, and I would hear them whispering or laughing or arguing. They would return with the woman fastening her belt or pulling down the hem of her skirt.