Abyssinian Chronicles (23 page)

Seeing how frantic some boys became, buying patterned handkerchiefs, underwear, petticoats, powder, perfume and sweets for girls who did not love them, and sometimes did not disguise their disdain but could not resist the lure of free gifts, one could not help concluding that love was a disease which one chose to ignore and endure, or cure by doing all manner of foolish things.

If we dispatched a letter and a girl took her time reacting to it, the boy would ask me why it took so long, as if I knew and I was just refusing to cooperate.

“Go and talk to her, beg her if that is what she wants. Tell her that I can’t sleep, and I can’t do anything without thinking about her. Tell her that I will give her anything she wants …”

At that point, I would doctor the pleas and the answers, because I wanted to keep my clients happy. If the girl said that the boy had bad breath or stank or that he should drown himself to save womankind from the scourge of his existence, I would say that her parents had threatened to beat her if she ever started dating in school and had put spies on her to make sure that she kept away from boys. My other favorite line was that the girl’s parents had vowed to make her drink azure blue to induce abortion if she ever became pregnant, and that afterward they would come for the boy with pangas. I would end by saying that the girl was in love but saw no way out of the situation, at least for the moment. Most clients bought the lie, at least for some time.

If two boys competed over the same girl, I would pocket their money and choose whom to favor. If I didn’t like the girl, I would campaign for one boy, get him a date and then tell the other about the rendezvous.

For bullies I had my punishment: I would take the money or the gifts meant for their girls and give them to Lusanani, and then lie that
the girl was not yet convinced, or that the reply would be coming soon. If the bully threatened to take action, I would ask Lusanani to write a letter insulting the fellow, asking him to leave her alone.

All this experience in wheeling and dealing proved beneficial later, when I entered the world of business. For the moment it made school the most interesting place on earth for me, apart from the taxi park bowl. Adding to the excitement, on top of the love letters, the deceit, the promises, the successes and the blackmail, there was sports. When the football season began, betting started, and fights broke out as losers who failed to pay up were hounded by angry winners. Large boys were often asked to intervene and frighten the losers into paying. When the hostilities reached insupportable levels, the score could be settled by a fistfight or a wrestling match at the sand patch, where long-jumpers made their sinuous springs. A date would be decided, and after school eager spectators and ready combatants would slip behind the buildings and enjoy the match.

One day, as I was wrestling with a letter to a trainee teacher on behalf of one of our hormonally unstable boys, it struck me that it would be a fine idea to tackle the despots by writing Padlock a love letter made to look as if it were from Loverboy. It was such a daring idea that for days I was restless. I woke up at night to listen through the connecting door and hear whether they were still feuding over him. I didn’t want to catch myself in the snares of my own lies. I wanted to strike at the right moment, hoping that the marital harmony of the despots would get a good jolt. I didn’t find out anything about the state of despotic feuding: it was as if they anticipated me and fought earlier or much later. The only constant factor in the drama was that Loverboy continued visiting, albeit less frequently than before. My guess was that Padlock had told him to slow down a bit and give Serenity a false sense of security before picking up the old routine. The situation was ideal for me. Serenity was probably not too happy with his wife’s intransigence, but because she had done something about the boy, he must have eased the pressure and ignored Loverboy’s irregular visits, waiting for the right occasion to put his foot down again.

I consulted
The Book of Letters
and
How Not to Write Your Letters.
The latter helped me most, pointing out the kind of grammatical and semantic
mistakes a person of Loverboy’s caliber, with his early secondary school education, was most likely to make. It took me two months to write and rewrite the letter, distancing myself as much as possible from my first literary document. It took me a few days to convince my
Treasure Island
friend to ask his sister to type out and mail my letter for me.

It took Serenity one glance at the typewritten khaki envelope addressed to his wife to know that something was wrong. In the first place, in all their time together, his wife had never received a typewritten letter before, and she had not now alerted him that she was expecting one. Second, there was neither
ON UGANDA GOVERNMENT SERVICE
nor
KAMPALA ARCHDIOCESE
nor any other official sign to indicate where it had come from. Third, the deplorable state of the print—half red, half black ink, instead of solid black—set off warning bells: who was so pathetic as to not be able to afford new ribbons? He swiftly decided to open the letter.

Serenity’s suspicions were vindicated as soon as he read the first line. Boy, that pus-inflated walking pimple, had struck! Serenity had all along suspected that Boy had continued flirting with his wife, and giving her laughs he could never give her, under the guise of a sober business relationship. The fact that his prude wife had accepted, rather enthusiastically, the Afro wigs he had given her indicated that she had fallen into the trap of desirability. Her passive acceptance of the lampshade, with its billowy-skirted Monroe woman, now took on more significance. Arms shaking, throat choking, armpits melting, bum itching, he read the letter again and again.

Serenity had been there before. He could smell post-adolescent verbosity, flatulence, crass emptiness and immaturity a mile away. In his day, the letter would have had pink and red hearts festooning it, with powder inside the envelope.

He found the name “Miss Singer” very disgusting. If that was an indication of a childish streak in his otherwise very mature wife, he would have preferred to know through other means. He knew older men and women who dallied with younger partners, how they grovelled, compromised their personality and marital status, just to come to the level of the younger party. The younger ones in question often spat on their partners’ status and age, giving them childishly younger or sillier names in order to gain a degree of control over them. Now the bug was inside his house. Had he not warned his wife to keep away from this fellow? Whom had Boy paid to write this garbage?

Serenity was consumed by the righteous rage of a wronged husband, but it did not last. It was replaced by sadness, a creepy feeling of missed opportunity and betrayal. Why hadn’t he confronted Boy face-to-face? Why had he felt the need to play the gentleman?

His sadness deepened when expressions like “love bombs,” “volcano
of hot juices” and “infatuated body” jabbed his mind. For a woman as prudish as his wife, Serenity felt that such expressions could only have come into use with her express encouragement. She was most probably attempting to clutch at the shreds of her faded youth, or the tatters of an adolescence eclipsed by parental sanction and convent rules.

The whole thing was especially pathetic because it was his wife who had decapitated marital passion by announcing so many days of sexless abstinence that copulation had become as calculated an act as going to the beautician.

He deplored the role he had played in the drama. He could have reported her behavior to Mbale, their marital arbiter, but he had felt too ashamed, too compromised, to unburden himself to a man who respected him so much. He had thought about it many times but could not find the right words, the apt opening: “Ah,
muko”
—brother-in-law—“you see … my sex life is …” or “My wife refused to see to my needs on such and such and such days …” or “I can’t get my wife to …” Serenity feared that Mbale would lose all respect for a man who could not get his conjugal rights from a wife he had married in church. Serenity also knew that a man of Mbale’s peasant background would never appreciate the kind of decency which made a man burn for such long periods without trying to get his rights by force. Serenity had also failed to unburden himself to Hajj Gimbi for fear that it might ruin their friendship.

Now he felt doubly sad and angry that his wife had fallen into the traps she had set with her own hands. It was evident that she wanted more sex, but did not know how to break down her barriers without losing face and power in other areas. Serenity believed that his wife’s recent obsession with Hajj Gimbi’s polygamy and his own putative affairs had been a mere smoke screen to hide her dirty secrets.

At the center of his sadness was the fact of his mother’s elopement and all the feelings of abandonment which had resulted. He remembered all the women he used to run up to and welcome home, and the fear at the back of his mind that they might indeed be ghosts disguised as tall women. He remembered the patronizing way they used to pat him on the head before letting him down. Where had he got the notion that his mother had been a tall woman? To a three-year-old, most women must have seemed very tall. He remembered the tall
woman who had ended his obsession. He suddenly felt very angry. Why hadn’t his father done something about the situation? He had known about his rival’s activities but had chosen to ignore it all. Was complacency a family weakness? he wondered. He suddenly wanted to do so many things at the same time. He wanted to prove that he could act, arrest situations and nip trouble in the bud. He did not want to end up wifeless, with all those children to raise alone. He also didn’t want his children to be brought up by another woman. He finally realized that a married cuckold with children could not afford family-shattering revenge: every form of retaliation had to be short-term.

Serenity considered disappearing for a week. He could stay in a good hotel, relax and work off his anger, his sadness. He could visit his relatives: he had not seen his sisters in a long time, and this could be the chance to check on them.

It struck him like a bolt of lightning splitting a tree down the middle: Nakibuka! Had the woman not done her best to interest him in her life? Didn’t he, in his heart of hearts, desire her? Had he ever forgotten her sunny disposition, her sense of humor, the confident way she luxuriated in her femininity? The shaky roots of traditional decorum halted him with the warning that it was improper to desire his wife’s relative, but the mushroom of his pent-up desire had found a weak spot in the layers of hypocritical decency and had pushed into the turbulent air of truth, risk, personal satisfaction, revenge. His throttled desire and his curbed sex drive could find a second wind, a resurrection or even eternal life in the bosom of the woman who, with her touch, had accessed his past, saved it and redeemed his virility on his wedding night. Sweat cascaded down his back, his heart palpitated and fire built up in his loins.

The afternoon was laboring, hotly, toward evening. It was time for the departmental meeting and the weekly review of accounts. He was the first to arrive in the boardroom. He drank two glasses of water quickly and looked out the window. Where was everybody? He wanted to leave as soon as the bleeding meeting ended. He had to look for Nakibuka’s house, and that worried him. Impatient, alone, angry, he left the room and rushed back to his office to look in his diary. He hoped he had her address. What if she had moved? He perversely imagined Boy going through the same motions, scheming, debating, wondering. What if Boy was already in the Command Post making his
Miss Singer laugh by praising her love bombs and her grammatical pools of silver? Eddies of anger washed over eddies of sadness. He thought about returning home in the hope of finding Boy in the Command Post and teaching him a lesson, but unable to figure out exactly what he would do to him in case fate tempted him by placing Boy in his hands, he decided against it. He feared he might lose control as he had when disciplining his son. In the name of discipline he had almost committed murder, and had not liked the experience at all. He had vowed never again to let himself go that way.

Thus, to Nakibuka’s he would go, even if she had moved, even if her man was home, even if he could not spend the night with her. He found her address and smiled half angrily, half sadly. He disliked Hajj Gimbi’s form of polygamy: What was the use of having all the women in one house? Every woman deserved her own house, and it accorded one many more chances of relaxation and escape from the problems, the moods and the quirks of the other women.