Abyssinian Chronicles (15 page)

I particularly resented this courtyard worship because I did not want to be seen on my knees by our neighbor’s third and youngest wife. Knowing that her eyes were on me made me feel like a little helpless bird, beak up and open, tongue quivering, waiting for mother bird to drop a worm down the throat. From the very beginning I saw Sauya Lusanani, the wife in question, as a combination of sister and lover and as the embodiment of the spirit of the city. I convinced myself that, with her in my camp, my plans for revenge would succeed. She was the youngest adult around with whom I could associate, and my present predicament made me want to know her more urgently. Until that could happen, I lived in torment. She was a Muslim, and there was the chance that she would reject me because I was a Catholic. In my desperation I convinced myself that I would convert if that was the only
way to get her. I wrestled with the question of circumcision: Was there a way I could convert without getting circumcised? How could I allow myself to be circumcised when there was the possibility of penile cancer? Had I learned nothing from Dr. Ssali’s ordeal? I was sure that Padlock would disown me and influence Serenity to stop paying for my education. How, then, would I become a lawyer?

At night I would think of Hajj Gimbi and his three wives, and wonder whether he was in bed with Lusanani. How was I going to supplant him? This man did not deserve that lovely girl. He was more of a father, or even a grandfather, to her. He had a large beard, which burdened his lower jaw and made his mouth look small and nasty. His large eyebrows overshadowed his small piggy eyes, which looked ridiculous in his large flat face. I felt that this man should have been the object of Padlock’s vilification for sending away wives of his own age and marrying younger women. I kept thinking about ways of invading his home and taking Lusanani away from him. I knew that it would cost me time and energy, but I was determined to get what I wanted.

Padlock, like many women who produced many children too quickly, hated the sanitary obligations that came with the territory: apart from hating the exercise of supervising her children’s toilet, she also hated washing the mountains of diapers and bedclothes. My coming was a blessing for her, and she made no secret of it. In one stroke, I had become the family shitman. Every morning my olfactory glands were bombarded with a string of scatological blasts, my eyes smothered with scatological disasters in different gradations of color and solidity. In the village, I had been above such mundane obligations, and I had got away with leaving visitors’ children in their shit. The clients Grandma and I dealt with, those superstitious mothers, wouldn’t dream of asking me to wipe their children’s butts, but here in the city, I paid for all my earlier prerogatives.

As if compensating for all the sleepless nights I had spent at Grandma’s funeral wake, I slept heavily in those days and found it hard to wake up. Padlock did not like this and had various ways of awakening me: she either shook me gruffly by the shoulder, barked in my ear, doused me in cold water or used her favorite tool, a guava switch. She used these methods in rotation, one for each day of the week. On the days she doused me, and on the days she beat me into wakefulness, I
could hardly bring myself to mutter the ritual greeting. As a result, it would take minutes to get the tone right as we fought a minor war of wills, which I always lost.

My main task each morning was to wake the shitters and line them up with enough space between them to avoid fights as they shat, because I wanted all the steaming stuff in the middle of the newsprint on which they squatted. In order to avoid catching the scatological blasts full in the face, I would stand a little distance away and watch, shouting at anyone whose rectum strayed from the bull’s-eye. The strainings and explosions were not too different from Padlock’s performance on the day I thought she was producing a baby destined to fall into the latrine. Anticipating the end of the shitting session, I would tear up rectangles of newsprint and call whoever was done to get his or her ass wiped. I was careful not to spread the shit over their little balls or cunts, because if I did, it was my duty to remove it, for which I had neither the time nor the patience.

Padlock did not trust me. She would lurk somewhere at the edge of the yard, her presence a loud warning to the shitters not to misbehave, her scowl a premonition of things to come if I hurt her children’s asses in futile acts of revenge. She stayed in the background till she was convinced that I was doing my job properly and that my hands would not succumb to stealthy temptations of dealing mean tricks, and then she disappeared quietly.

All butts wiped, the shitters would enter the house and leave me to deal with their odoriferous products. If the paper was not soaked through, folding the hills and streams of feces was quick work. Delivering the parcels to their destination was a task I executed with alacrity, because I was eager to leave for school. On bad days, however, the newsprint got soaked through and burst. My temper would flare, but its fires would be quickly doused by the fumes. I would do it all over again, deliver the parcels and take a deep breath as I hurried to my next task.

I always washed myself dreamily, buoyed by the thought of Tiida, Miss Sunlight Soap, the woman who bathed four times a day. Her profile would rise in my mind, and by the time I saw her whole body, I would be through.

I loathed breakfast. After seeing, smelling and handling all that excreta, I felt as if it had metamorphosed into the food before me.
Over time I completely gave up omelettes and avocados, for obvious reasons, and used my share to barter for favors from the shitters, who loved both with childish abandon. They would compete tactfully, begging with message-laden looks. If somebody had seen me doing something wrong the day before, they would feign indifference, sure that I would do the sensible thing. I would then reject the other bids and buy that particular shitter’s silence. One or two clever shitters volunteered to do things for me. They spied on others on my behalf, and kept me posted. I did my best to please them, because my survival depended on it, like a mountain climber’s life depended on the strength of his ropes.

School was my paradise; there I competed on level ground, and did my level best to reach the top. It was the only place where I drew compliments from adults; I also drew pleas for help from fellow pupils, who regarded tests as I did the heaps of excreta I had to deal with every morning. I would look at the large boys, perspiration on the bridge of their noses, armpits runny with funky sweat, and smile thinly. The real joy came from beating the clever ones. It pumped my heart with zeal and filled my nose with the sweet scent of victory.

Time passed very fast at school, and when the last bell rang, I always felt a load on my chest, heavy as the ugly tasks which awaited me at home. I could already visualize the blood-curdling soaked nappies, swimming placidly like sated crocodiles in the filthy grayish-brown water with blobs of shit. What had the witch been doing all day? I would ask myself. I would kick the basin, but not hard enough to hurt my foot or tip it over.

After cracking the rudiments of the Archimedean principle, negotiating the typhoons of Asia, scuttling across the pampas of South America, climbing the skyscrapers of New York, combing the wine estates of France or ascending the snowcapped mountains of Africa, this sordid task was unbearable. In those days there was nothing I hated more than that demonic creation, the diaper.

One by one, I fished them from the shitty water, averting my eyes from the sight and my nose from the stench. I held them with the tips of my fingers, and shook the remaining muck from the depths of the fabric. The squeezing seemed to last a lifetime, for overused, over-stained garments never brightened even if you squeezed them with manic constancy. Padlock was an additional factor; if she was dissatisfied with their appearance, she was always ready to take the fabrics
down from the line to soak again, even if they were already dry and stiff, and order you to wash them. “You will wash them till I tell you to stop,” she would say, heading for her Command Post. This was the room adjacent to the living room. It was fitted with a Singer sewing machine, and Padlock spent her day there pedaling away and receiving her customers.

I would listen to the rumblings of the treadle and the humming of the needle until the sounds became intermixed, and in my imagination her foot got stuck underneath the treadle, her finger trapped under the furious needle. The din ate up all her cries for help, and the more I became disgusted with my job, the more she suffered. I would look to see whether Loverboy, a twenty-year-old pimpled, arrogant fellow renowned as the only person in the city who gave Padlock the gift of spontaneous laughter, was around. He often came in the afternoon, swaggering like a conquering pirate, looked the place over and entered the Command Post to watch Padlock work. Sometimes he brought her clothes for repair; sometimes he came empty-handed, to collect finished work or just to talk. When he was around, I would sneak to the door and try to catch what they were saying. They mostly talked about the past. Padlock told him about her parental home, her convent days, her wedding and the like.

Loverboy received these morsels of her past with an ironical air, sticking disdainful needles of criticism into the parts which did not appeal to him and rewarding the bits that he liked with loud laughter and corroborating remarks. In general, he waded through her life with the insolence of a lovable pirate. The remarkable thing was that Padlock seemed to enjoy every bit of it. I could hear them laughing, Loverboy freely, Padlock discreetly, as if she were straining a precious liquid through cotton cloth. At first I was at a loss as to what to do about this pimpled figure who handled Padlock as casually as secondhand clothes. I would watch him entering the courtyard, his legs striding, his arms held wide, his chest forward, and wonder, and also feel paralyzed. He looked like a fabulous, gargantuan weapon I could neither handle dexterously nor use crudely.

At first I used to ignore him, looking the other way when he turned up and speaking only when spoken to, but with time I faced him when he arrived and greeted him politely. He would return my greeting brashly, screw his nose up at the filthy mess in the basin or in my
hands and trot into the house with a few athletic bounds. Once inside, he would engage Padlock there for long periods of time. Lusanani, who had befriended me by asking whether Padlock was my real mother, would come over and stand at the edge of the yard where Padlock stood to supervise shitting sessions, and we would talk. “She is not your real mother, is she?” she would ask, her head cocked.

This irritated me at first, till I found a riposte: “Is Hajj your real husband?” I would ask, and she would laugh. It was the laugh of mates, of people in almost the same boat, with a shared burden. I would look at her, imagining how she had gone through her first pregnancy, and how the baby had been delivered. Her body was young, firm, supple. I would get sudden urges to jump up, slip my hand up her dress and explore. Then I would be seized by the feeling that I was too young for that, and that even if I asked her to reveal herself to me, she would refuse. I would have visions of Hajj Gimbi on top of her, wheezing, squealing, sweating. Then I would hate her, him too. I would start wishing that on his way home the front tire of his motorcycle would burst so he would fall down on the asphalt, preferably in front of an oncoming truck, and his little mouth would be silenced for good. I would, at other times, see him on top of a tall building, spilling paunch-first over the railing and flying upside down like the late Fr. Lule. With him out of the way, Lusanani would be mine, and I would not have to wash those filthy nappies, or do anything else I loathed.

Meanwhile, we talked about the city, the taxi park, the Indians in the shops, the soldiers in their jeeps, the children at her home. We would begin eagerly, bursting with words, and then slow down, till we started repeating ourselves like an old couple. Many times she spotted Padlock too late. By the time she dropped out of sight, Padlock would be on me, her guava switch cutting into my calf or backside. I would look at her with disappointment: So she
hadn’t
caught her foot under the treadle! So she
hadn’t
caught her finger under the needle! So she
hadn’t
screamed herself hoarse in tortured solitude!

Padlock misread insolence into my look, and misinterpreted my open-eyed reception of pain as a challenge to her authority. “Village trash! She spoiled you rotten, but I’ll teach you a lesson.” And the switch would move with the fury of a buffalo shaking egrets off the wounds on his back.

I lamented the dismissal of Nantongo, the housegirl, who was
Padlock’s first and last incursion into the vertiginous world of status symbols. No prosperous household was complete without a housegirl. When Nantongo was around, I had less to worry about. She cleaned, cooked, washed—she did everything. During the short time between my arrival and her departure, all household work revolved around her. She washed Padlock’s football-field-sized bedsheets. She would rub and squeeze that white cotton fabric till I feared that she would end up like Fingers. She washed nappies and baby clothes with the stoic efficiency of a machine. Her frail hands were always moving, curling and uncurling like crazed millipedes, doing something every moment. Her back was always bent or straining with this or that task. Yet her face remained open, affable, unmarked by bitterness, as if all the labor were mere wind blowing over it. “Your mother is her own worst enemy,” she told me one day, as if that explained everything. I waited for her to elaborate, but she didn’t, and in order not to appear stupid, I desisted from inquiring any further.

The only noticeable improvement since Nantongo’s departure was the subsidence of Padlock’s tirades. When the girl was around, Padlock quarrelled with her at length, delivering sermons in a cold, grating, disembowelled voice just this side of a whine. It was as if the girl were driving pins under her nails. “You never wash the stains out of my bedsheets. You drink the baby’s milk. You wear my clothes before you wash them. You dribble the sauce on your way from the kitchen to the dining room. You abuse my children, pinching them, threatening them, treating them badly.”