Abyssinian Chronicles (13 page)

Nasty post-natal cases now and then fell into our laps. A baby’s navel could become gangrenous, oozing a sullen yellowish-green pus which worried inexperienced parents a great deal. Grandma provided herbal cures and exhorted the parents to practice more rigorous hygiene. Women who did not dilate enough might have to be cut open, and in some cases would take a long time to heal, as Dr. Ssali’s sensitive penis did. Some would come weeks after, leaking, their loose stitches poisoning every sitting and walking movement. Some women, fed up with the pain, would ask Grandma to remove the stitches and concentrate all her healing powers on closing the cut. This was a disastrous idea, and Grandma did her best to explain what would happen to their sex lives if she did what they asked her to do. She would even go to the extent of citing songs hummed by men about “buckets,” women who were so wide that a tree could grow down there. She often succeeded in convincing them to return to the hospital to get the stitches redone.

By the time our stint ended, in 1971, we had delivered more than fifty babies, ten of which had died, mostly of measles: three at birth, seven in infancy. Four women had also died during or after childbirth, three of whom had been strongly advised by doctors at the mission hospital to stop breeding. The fourth case was a freak accident, and it turned ugly on us.

The husband of this dead woman came at Grandma with a panga raised in one of the blindest rages I had ever witnessed. Grandma, however, delivered the performance of her life: she did not move a muscle, and to top it off, she bent her head the other way, exposing her neck to the flashing blade. When the blade could not rise any higher, I closed my eyes for a moment. What was going to come off, her head or her arm? I imagined Grandma’s head bouncing round the courtyard and blinding everyone with blood in a dramatic show of power which would be immortalized in song. At that moment I wet my pants.

No one knows what brought the man to his senses. Maybe it was Grandma’s fearlessness; maybe it was the mechanics of a miracle; maybe murder was beyond him, and the panga was just a token of his
cowardice. He was a notorious brawler. I had seen him once in a fight with another man. He was not the kind to care much for his wife, and we heard that he often beat her. My guess was that she died of meningitis, exhaustion or something instigated by his violence, but whatever it was, I was too scared for Grandma to care anymore.

In 1967, at the age of six, I took my first crack at school. The 1966 state of emergency had passed without inflicting much damage on our area. Our school was perched high up on Ndere Hill and had escaped molestation. Serenity had been to the same school, and so had Tiida, Nakatu and many of our other relatives. Every morning children from the villages trekked to Ndere Hill to drink from the well of knowledge. If you stood on top of this hill and watched hundreds of these large and small creatures emerging from milky clouds of morning mist with their breath pluming, geometry kits rattling and feet crushing the pebbles, you could think it was an apocalyptic locust invasion visited on the hill by some angry deity.

I joined the ranks of these green-shirted creatures, bemoaning my fall from the pedestal of my lone status into the abyss of student anonymity. The price of this humiliation was walking five kilometers every day, wheezing and sneezing in the cold for good measure. To ease my pain, I would dream the gigantic church tower anew every morning. Sometimes I saw it flashing in the morning sun; sometimes it stared morosely through the clouds of mist; sometimes it disappeared as if it had toppled and fallen, making me wonder how large it looked flat on the ground, but it was always there, laden with its terrible majesty, steeped in its power, encased in its inviolability. It was fifty-five years old, five years younger than the church in whose shadow our school nestled.

Both the church and the tower had been built by a French priest. Moments after adorning the top with a black cross, some women who believed he could do supernatural things thought they saw him actually flying, impersonating an angel, a bird or Our Lord Jesus, in fulfillment of a promise of a big miracle to celebrate the completion of the tower project. The promise had been made because the tower had collapsed twice during construction before he got the idea of using corrugated iron sheets instead of bricks. People started clapping and singing “Hosannah in the highest” when they saw him spread out in
the air, white cassock billowing like full sails, hammer dangling precariously from his belt. It was the parish catechist who first realized what was going on and hurriedly linked hands with another man to break his master’s fall. Fr. Lule (a local corruption of Roulet) fell with such force that he broke the four hands trying to save him. His brains oozed out, his back snapped and he died without saying a word. The ladder, which no one remembered in the commotion, followed Fr. Lule down, killing a woman and breaking her daughter’s leg. Two months later, a catechist from one of the small subparishes fell from the pulpit and broke his spine, his pelvis and one arm. Some said he had been drunk. Some said he had always been afraid of heights. The majority believed that all the deaths and accidents were linked: every large building had to have a blood sacrifice before it opened to the public, and since no bulls had been slaughtered for it, they said, the church had decided to take its own sacrifices.

Normally, before entering a new house, one slaughtered a goat and sprinkled some of the blood on the walls. If one could not afford a goat, a few cocks sufficed. The owner of the chronically sick village car had sacrificed a cock to it: he chopped the head off and tossed the headless bird onto the roof. It slid down the windshield with spectacular twitches and bled to death on the hood.

When I asked Grandpa if it was true that the church had killed the priest, the woman and the catechist and maimed the rest, he only asked, “What would you think if you were (a) a fanatic Catholic, (b) a skeptic, (c) a pagan?” “Truth has many sides,” I concluded after a long moment of reflection.

“You will make a good lawyer,” he replied.

School brought me into direct competition with other pupils. I did very well. Thanks to Grandpa, I already knew the multiplication tables by heart and I could read and write, though my handwriting was horrible.

Dull pupils often got into trouble, but so did the bright ones. Large boys, some of them sprouting beards, passed me chits to scribble answers on and pass back. I got caught a few times, and the teacher caned me.

The large boys, whom we called “grandfathers,” distributed nicknames. Mine was Sperm of the Devil because, according to
Dummy A, only a devil could know the multiplication tables by heart and spell so well at my age. He wrote “Spam ov Devill” on a piece of paper and pasted it on my bench with a knot of jackfruit sap as large as a fist. I got punished, but the nun commented on the author’s appalling spelling, which was some consolation to me.

I tried to induce Dummy B, another large boy, to punish Dummy A for me, but he refused. Dummy A was notorious for retaliation. He could lock you in a cupboard and make you beg for release. He could sit on your stomach and spit in your face. He could thrust you inside an unwashed porridge boiler, or threaten to break your leg in a game of football. We were all afraid of him.

One morning I heard two young teachers saying that bullying was pure blackmail. I decided to try it myself. Before the teacher entered the classroom, I proclaimed, “My grandmother is a witch doctor. Only one word and one caterpillar thrown in the fire at midnight, and the penis of the person who wrote ‘Spam ov Devill’ on my desk will wilt and grow hairs all over it.” I spat thrice in my palm and rubbed my crotch. A cloud of gritty silence descended on the class. At lunchtime, the culprit took me behind the toilets, making me fear the worst, and confessed. I let him roast for some time, funk escaping from the wet patches that were his armpits. We made a deal. I acquired my first bodyguard.

Now it was the girls’ turn. Since they had no penises to be turned into caterpillars, they thought they were inviolable. They would shout “Spam ov Devill,” laugh and scamper away. Dummy A seized their books, hid their netballs and threatened a few, without much success.

One morning six girls surrounded me. I spat in my palms and addressed their ringleader, a large girl with breasts the size of my head. “You have a man,” I bluffed. “You will give birth to a limbless creature, and your breast milk will turn to pus.” Contrary to expectation, I was not mobbed or booed. Milkjar just crumbled, like a lump of clay under a millstone. She started to cry. I panicked. I ran toward the blind side of the church, but I was caught by the headmaster. Held by the wrist, I was thrust amidst Milkjar’s cronies. I pleaded self-defense, and explained that I had not meant anyone any harm. Milkjar was pathetic: she could not stop crying. The headmaster thrust a stick in her hand and ordered her to beat me. She dropped the stick as though it were a hairy caterpillar. The headmaster dismissed me with a stiff warning
never to make penis or breast threats again, and gave me two strokes with the cane for good measure. I was furious.

I expected Grandma to side with me and condemn my tormentors. I was wrong. “Never stoop to their level, you hear?”

“Stooping! A girl large enough to birth me bullies me, and giving her a taste of her own medicine is beneath my dignity!”

“There is a part of the story you have not told me,” she concluded. She was right. I had excised the witch doctor part from the story.

One person haunted my early school years: Santo the madman. He was quiet, harmless and as stealthy as a shadow. He always wore a clean white shirt and khaki trousers and never reeked of funk like Dummy A. Sometimes he wandered around, counting the fingers of his hands as if he were putting the final touch to a mathematical calculation. No one bothered him, which was rare, what with the many large, bored boys around. The teachers had warned everybody of the dire consequences—many hot canes and the task of uprooting two thick mango stumps with a hoe—if anybody was nabbed harassing Santo.

We envied Santo his handwriting, a fine, leaning cursive, and his arithmetical capabilities. Teachers often said that if we could write half as well as Santo did, they would reward us. Before going home, we wiped all the blackboards clean, but every morning we would find the legend
KYRIE ELEISON, KYRIE ELEISON, CHRISTE ELEISON
on every blackboard in the school. The spelling was always immaculate, the display the same in all classrooms. It was said that Santo was a genius and that he had gone mad just before leaving for Rome on a four-year scholarship to Urban University. He was destined to be the first priest from our area. The celebrations to mark his departure had lasted five days. Fr. Mulo (a corruption of Moreau), who was Fr. Lule’s successor, was going to take him to the airport. That morning a fire woke everybody up. Santo had poured paraffin on his luggage, his bed, his curtains, and torched everything. He never said a word again. All efforts to make him talk, including a few, early attempts at torturing him, failed.

Sometimes he came to school for food. Sometimes desperate boys passed him pieces of paper loaded with difficult sums. Sometimes he helped them out; sometimes he just chewed the papers. The clever
ones left complex questions on the board, and if they were lucky, by the next morning the answers would be there next to the legend. It might also happen that the answers would come days later. Some guessed that he had a spare set of keys, others that he just got in through the classroom window.

On a number of occasions, I woke up very early and ran to school, hoping to catch Santo writing on the blackboard or climbing out of the window. I failed. I never solved the riddle of how he got in and out.

The baby business slowed as my primary school years passed. The birthrate plummeted in the villages. Most young men and women succumbed to the dusky seductions of the towns and the city. I could not blame them. They looked different when they returned: they were larger, richer, smarter, and had loads of dirty stories to tell. These exiles no longer made me tremble. They were just poor copies of Uncle Kawayida, and their stories were often pale shadows of his exciting narrations. I no longer listened to them. As a result, I spent much time playing in Serenity’s house, in the trees and all over the village. I frequently climbed into my favorite tree to scan the horizon. I sometimes espied people cutting papyrus reed, which they used to make carpets and roofing. I watched them standing in the water, braving leeches and water snakes, and cutting, cutting, cutting, careful not to get lacerated by strips of papyrus as sharp as Grandma’s double-edged razor blades. I loved watching Mpande Hill. Now and then I caught sight of a bicycle race in progress, one of those suicidal dashes made by the hard boys from the villages. They were always won by the boys who ferried coffee to the mill, as they were the only ones who could brake a bicycle with their bare heels. I participated in one such race, riding pillion for a friend: it nearly cost me a foot. I was banned from the races then because the boys feared attracting Grandpa’s wrath.

After an insufferably long time, I finally caught sight of the blue-bellied eagle gliding down the hill. “Uncle Kawayida, Uncle Kawayida, Uncle Kawayidaaa!” I chanted. I quickly got the key to Serenity’s house and opened it. I swept all the rooms with a straw broom. As the breeze cleared the air, I heard the motorcycle roaring outside. Uncle Kawayida had bad news, though.

His father-in-law, Mr. Kavule, had died. Uncle Kawayida was morose and taciturn, making me think that he loved the dead man very much. He left the following morning with Grandpa. They returned tormented by disgust.

The man had died of cancer and was stinking like a dead elephant, but he could not be buried because in his will he had demanded a four-day wake, and a dead man’s last wish was binding. The body was kept in his sitting room. When the wind blew, half his village squirmed under the blows of stench hammers. Everybody was hungry, because the stench punished any eaters by clawing all the food and most of the bile out of their stomachs. The man had left a record forty offspring: thirty girls and ten boys. Grandpa openly wondered how the man got the beautiful women he bred with, for twenty of his girls surpassed many people’s concept of beauty. Even the not-so-beautiful were beautiful by many people’s standards. Kawayida’s wife was very beautiful: tallish, brown-black, shapely, done in only by her large ears. The main criticism was that the girls could have done with better manners and more education. They tended to say whatever came to their minds, and some were on the loose side. Of the thirty girls, only nine got married. “Quantity, quantity, quantity,” Grandpa said one afternoon, shaking his head with regret. “They are lucky to be beautiful, but unlucky to be so uneducated.” That was the only time I heard Grandpa make a comment about Kawayida’s wife.