Abyssinian Chronicles (18 page)

“What has brought all this on?”

Faced with an educated man who she knew would scoff at the idea of dreams in which a girl became a horde of rock-throwing boys, she felt embarrassed, and so she resorted to what came easily to her: tough talk and threats. “Hajj Gimbi must be arming you with the skills of a polygamist. But that disease will never contaminate this house.”

“Leave Hajj out of this. He is my friend, not yours.”

“I will never share a roof with another woman.”

“I am getting very fed up with all this nonsense. If this is your way of voiding guilt over what you do with that boy, say it and keep quiet. I am not going to listen to this nonsense all night. I have to wake up early to go to work.”

“How can you trust those Muslims? Are they now talking you into converting to Islam or Aminism?”

“I told you to stop this rubbish. Hajj is my friend. Take your paranoia elsewhere. Saddle Boy with it, and tell him to drown it in a well. People are talking about you and me and are calling me a cuckold. They think the boy is all over you, like yaws.”

“I never want to hear that from your mouth again. Never!” she barked. The bedsprings groaned as she shifted her weight angrily.

“I don’t want people talking about us negatively. We are an exemplary family. Don’t ruin in minutes a reputation built in years.”

“He only flirts, but if those people out there are rotten enough to believe what they think, why should I care?”

“Flirting! In my house! Over my sewing machine! What does he do, sing you songs? Tell him to stop it. Let him find himself another tailor. I don’t want to see him here again.”

All this was very raw information; I was yet to digest it and find out what a godsend it really was. I was starting to get bored. I even thought of returning to bed because I had gotten more than enough for one night.

“You are not holy yourself. Why did you accuse me of jealousy when I sent the housegirl away?”

“I never said any such thing,” he replied sleepily.

“She was staring at you.”

“She was just trying to stop you from bullying her. I never noticed her.”

“I could not trust her around Mugezi,” Padlock put in.

“What is going on between you two?”

“Children have to be obedient; he is not. He thinks he is the man in the house. You let him get away with anything. Don’t you worry, I am going to break him myself. I am determined to stop him from turning into one of those people robbing, torturing and killing people. His grandmother spoiled him rotten, but I am going to undo all the damage, whatever it takes. I never trusted that woman.”

My legs buckled, and I almost fell against the door.

“You’ve gone too far. Stop it, stop it!” Serenity’s voice was a piercing whine.

Robber! Killer! Torturer! Who was robbing, torturing and killing my spirit every day? Who tortured me with terrible words, with the smell of shit and the fire of guava switches? Who corroded and robbed my spiritual goods in a bid to file me down to the conventionality of a cog in a wheel? A war had just been declared. I had no illusions of winning this trench warfare, but I was determined to become a very costly, very destructive victim. The enormity of the task of controlling myself, and using this new knowledge sparingly for maximum effect, made me tremble and break into a chilly sweat. How was I going to look at my parents, greet them and obey them, as if I knew nothing?

“I want a promise from you that you are not going to leave the job of breaking this boy all to me,” she said. “We have to claim him before the evil of this world does.”

“I am helping. Who pays his school fees?”

“I mean physically, in a disciplinary manner.”

“I will help, and I will also make sure that Boy does not come back here.”

“I told you there is nothing between us.” Padlock was angry that Serenity was trying to link two separate issues.

“Flirting in my house is nothing?”

“That boy walks miles looking for customers for me, free of charge. Without him I would be redundant most of the time. What could I do without his help and his connections? It is not in anybody’s interest to discourage him.”

“If you do not stop him, I will do it myself.”

“You have made your point.”

“It is an order.”

By now I could not take in anything more. The voices seemed to
echo from a faraway cave. I did not care what happened afterward. I did not care whether he broke her leg or her arm or whether she crushed his kneecaps or caressed them.

My stay in this city had, so far, been a calculated attempt to reduce my stature, to prune my idea of myself and to crush my personality in the mortar of conventionality. I was being ordered to do things without being told the reasons or the purpose. I was being beaten and lathered in contempt. I was only good for washing nappies, cooking, fetching water—for doing all the things that Padlock did not want to do. In other words, the torture rack was grinding and spinning, slowly doing its job of breaking body and will.

My late-night discovery taught me one thing: I had to use as much secrecy as the despots did in plotting against me. I had to strike with the padded stealth of a leopard, hiding my tracks as well as my claws. I had to fight their fire by carefully lighting mine in such a way that when both conflagrations met, they would destroy each other without torching the house. I had to act with the stubborn mischief of a pig.

In the village, when you bought a piglet and did not want it to escape, you put it in a gunnysack, which you tied up and carried home. Even then, some piglets did escape when the sty door was left ajar or when the rope on their leg was not properly fastened. They escaped not so much to return to their original homes as to retaliate for the boredom of captivity. The escapees took revenge by eating the neighbors’ crops. Some pigs waited longer: at mating time, sows carried to pedigree pigs escaped and had to be chased around the village. When they were caught and delivered to the males, they twitched out of position, wasted prime sperm and sabotaged the birth of pedigree animals. I was ready to apply some of those pig lessons.

I was restless for days on end, unable to sleep, unable to go to the door to spy again. A wooden stiffness oppressed my chest, crushing down into my abdomen and killing my appetite. On the way home from school, I would go to the taxi park and watch the vans, the travellers and the rootless spirits adrift. I was jostled by youths of my age peddling radio batteries, underwear, exercise books, toothbrushes—anything they could lay their hands on. I was stalked by pickpockets
who thought I had pocket money or grocery money with me. I was approached by a phony fortune-teller who promised to divine my future and bless me if I had money to buy his services. I saw con artists leading illiterate peasants to the wrong vans, the wrong vendors and the wrong corners and using colleagues stationed there to rip them off. I saw provocatively dressed women milling around, jiggling their buttocks, twitching their cheeks and doing all they could to catch men’s eyes. I saw women who looked lost, unwilling to ask for help, unwilling to go far in case they got more lost.

I concluded that there was a proliferation of rats in the land, because there was such a variety of rat poison and wire traps. In the village, we used to open dry batteries and mix the carbon inside with fish in order to kill the smell, then put the mixture in a mouse hole or behind coffee sacks for rats to eat and die. Here there were plenty of poison liquids, cakes and powders for killing rats. I had enough money to buy enough poison to kill that giant rat called Padlock, but it was the surviving power of rats that worried me. Rats often ignored poisoned food and jumped wire traps. What if, instead of eating the lethal food herself, Padlock passed it on to one of the shitters? I could not live with that. I probably could not live with Padlock’s death on my conscience either. There was also the police to think about. Padlock never went out, except for mass, and it would not be hard to find out that her poisoning had been a domestic affair.

I looked at the snakes, especially the gleaming cobras which danced and twitched and puffed out their necks when the gap-toothed charmers blew their flutes or whistled. The glittering magnificence of the scales and the black eyes made my chest swell with the temptation to buy one and deposit it in Padlock’s bed. The snakes were fangless and harmless, but maybe she would have a heart attack. Still, I could not see how her death would translate into more freedom or more rights for me, so I walked on.

I smelled rain in the air. The sky was darkening. Heavy clouds hovered above the broken-toothed skyline like vultures and marabou storks. They sealed off the sun, the minaret and the cathedrals on the distant hills. A cold wind bit the skin into goose bumps. The sky collapsed into walls of water, and a stampede erupted.

The deluge rolled into the bowl from the top of Nakasero Hill, sweeping in with the fury of impotent judicial courts and raking the
land with the crushing power of mighty army officers. Nakivubo River flooded, regurgitating filth onto its banks, into the roads and onto the nearby shop fronts. Snakes floated in the water, as did a tortoise, a few dogs and a drunkard trapped in the webs of his intoxication. The roar of the water merged with that of the military tanks, rocket launchers and troops involved in the January 25, 1971, coup. Riding on the waves was General Idi Amin.

With the general on my side, I would crush the despots like nuts in a mortar. I saw sodden soldiers combatting the waves as they escorted a high-ranking officer. On their statue-like faces was the fatalism, resignation and utter obedience of worshippers dedicated to the gods of war. It was your head or theirs, when the chips fell. The air trembled with their deadly power, as it had once vibrated with the alfresco delivery of the baby on the asphalt.

If I could recapture the totality of such commitment, and the courage of Grandma at the moment the panga flashed, I would not need poison. I could just walk up to a soldier on patrol and inform him that Padlock and Serenity were Obote sympathizers. They would then be picked up, tossed into a jeep and carried off to the barracks. There they would have their teeth pulled and their backsides massaged with rifle butts or rhino-hide whips. There they would be made to do things outside the realm of even Uncle Kawayida’s story-spinning imagination. But if I called in soldiers, I would not be acting with the stealth of a leopard.

I could, if I wanted, join the State Research Bureau, the organization charged with keeping an eye on things, monitoring the enemies of the state, both actual and potential. I could get the Bureau’s red identity card, and no one would dare to touch me again. I could flash the card at teachers, Serenity, Padlock or anyone else who stood in my way. Armed with that card, I could strike fear into the depths of Padlock’s heart and make her know what it felt like to be at the sharp end of tyranny. There was also the possibility of claiming Lusanani, eloping with her, and daring Hajj Gimbi, or anybody else for that matter, to do something about it. The only problem was that, without Grandma to guide me, power would most likely destroy me. It would seduce me with guns, knives and white-hot threats and catapult me over the edge into vertiginous frenzy. That also would not be striking with the padded paws of a leopard. I put that alternative on hold.

The safest thing to do was to choose Amin as my bodyguard. He was a realist. He never turned the other cheek. He answered love with love, hate with hate, war with war. He was proud to the point of arrogance. Judging from how far he had come, how much he had endured on the way at the hands of the British and of his countrymen, and how patient he had been, his was a deserved pride, a fitting arrogance. This was a man who, unlike many Africans, was not afraid to voice his opinion because he did not fear reprisals, unlike me. He was reprisal itself.

At the Independence Day celebrations that year, he had demonstrated his power. Countless cymbals had ripped the air, countless tubas had farted deep into the stratosphere. He had separated the lake of vapor and sweat with the magnificence of his presence, lulling anxious hearts, soothing doubting minds and massaging parched palates with words of wisdom and the seeds of leadership. Inside him growled the whales of dominance. When he roared, his enemies shivered with the fatigue of crippling defeat. When he smiled, he was a gloomy sky cut by razors of lightning. When he rewarded his cohorts, he surpassed the multiplier of loaves and fishes by multiplying cars, mansions, high-powered jobs, money. I knew it: He was the baby I saw popping onto the asphalt. He was the baby born to rise like a mountain, flow like a thousand rivers and die a thousand deaths. My second guardian angel had materialized.

I rushed home with a snap in every step.

B
Y THE AGE OF SEVEN,
I had already become Grandpa’s principal audience. I listened to his political discourse and memorized the main points without understanding them; then, at the end, he made me defend the British, the Indian and the African sides of the national argument in question-and-answer sessions. I was his future lawyer, possibly a future politician too, since many lawyers turned to politics: his ideal mini-double. By this time, after many years of contemplation, Grandpa had come to the conclusion that the modern state was a powder keg which would go off in a series of major explosions. It was a house built on the treacherous sands of inequality, strife and exploitation. He secretly lived for the day when it would all blow up, for he truly believed that only then would a new order be born out of the rubble.

The city sat at the heart of Grandpa’s dissertation. When he was a young man, Kampala was divided between the Europeans and the
Indians. Africans came from the villages to work there, mostly in minor functions, and returned to their villages. Life was segregated, courtesy of official British policy. The British had first used Indian soldiers to defeat the central part of the country, and when it came to conquering the rest, Protestant chiefs from this region headed armies which fought to spread the tentacles of British colonial rule. As in the case of the Indian administrators, bureaucrats and traders imported to administer the area Indian soldiers had helped to conquer, the local Protestant chiefs were given administrative powers in the regions they had conquered, thus planting the seeds of modern tribal strife.