Abyssinian Chronicles (30 page)

We almost burst out laughing; our hero was going to show her a full-blooded erection, our erection, our riposte. Oh, the gutsy sensation of it!

“I said get out.”

“Please, mistress, cane me, cane me, please.”

“Out, out, out!” she screamed.

“Cane me, cane me, bitch.”

We roared, striking our desks with excitement. Tears flowed from the corners of our eyes. Cane was our avenger. How we loved the humiliation of this big-breasted bully! Normally, she didn’t hesitate to use the cane and to make you fetch ten buckets of water and pour it in the grass in front of the classroom, but Cane was untouchable.

In his own good time, Cane sauntered to the front, looked the teacher over, collected his picture and left. The dramatic effect of it! However, misgiving was ticking in my breast: Was this what I was supposed to do with Padlock? Cane was swarmed at lunchtime, but he ignored his admirers. He beckoned me and my
Treasure Island
friend, whom everyone called Island, to follow him. As the school compound quivered with noise and color and the sun hovered above us all like a ball of fire and brimstone, we cut across the football field. Two terraces lower was “the ring,” the sand patch where long-jumpers practiced and our fighters grappled in no-holds-barred confrontations. We were swallowed by the cassava trees and elephant grass. Whipped by the dry wind, the bushes crackled and rustled, their sharp blades tickling, cutting
and licking our bare limbs. In the valley, giant trees in eternal competition with school buildings shot more than twenty meters into the air, their canopies reminiscent of the papyrus reeds in the swamps of Mpande Hill.

A little distance from the trees and the overgrown path was a dead man in a black shirt and blue trousers, lying on his face, arms outstretched as if he were crawling toward the trees.

“This is what I wanted to show you,” Cane announced.

Where were the notorious flies? Why wasn’t I afraid? Island, on the other hand, wet his pants and quaked badly.

Farther on was the body of a woman on her back, her right arm across her face as if shielding her eyes from the sun. Was she sleeping? Where were the signs of death or deathly struggle?

“Who killed them?” I asked.

“Maybe our little friend here did,” Cane said, pointing to Island.

“N-no, not me.”

“Who, then?” Cane asked. “Me?”

My guess was that after the biology teacher had sent him out, he had roamed around and found the corpses and thought of shaking us up.

He glared at me and moved near the woman. He lifted her skirt with his foot. “You want to see her …?” He turned to Island and forced him to say the word. It seemed as if the effort would kill him. Cane grabbed the back of Island’s head and pushed him down. A yellow stream, like liquid gold, poured into the grass.

“Coward,” he said, releasing him. “These people are dead, yet you are afraid of them. Why, eh? If you weren’t my good friends, I would have made you undress them. It is time for class, boys,” he concluded, turning serious.

Had he answered my question? Of course he hadn’t. I always preferred people who spoke in plain language, but this was tantamount to speaking in tongues, and this time, like many times before, I was lost. I didn’t even know why he had shown us the bodies. I could only imagine that he was showing off how fearless he was. Was he expecting me to tackle my adversaries in the same way? Was that it?

Lusanani gobbled my virginity within the walls of the derelict house where we had made our bobbin transaction. We explored our eager
bodies and squeezed whatever delight we could out of them. I was finally clearing the last hurdle to adulthood. In the process, I was touched by twinges of regret: I should have asked her earlier, I kept thinking. In an attempt to make up for lost time, I tried to enjoy as much of her as I could.

I was back in my favorite tree, suffused with the smell of ripe jackfruit, salivary glands oozing, a rush of impending gratification bearing down on me. She sighed like ten bushes in a storm, and I tried to discover all the moaning voices of birthing village women, and the terrible voice of the birthing woman at the taxi park, in her vociferations. My biggest success that evening was the freedom to explore and occupy her mystery swampy terrains for as long as I wanted. I smeared myself with her fluids and arrived home smelling like an overripe jackfruit. It was late. Padlock was in a state. She asked where I had been. At the well, I replied, my eyes twinkling impishly with the pride of sexual discovery. I expected her to comment on my new perfume, but she ignored it. I was proud that I had lost my virginity and made it known. Now she would cancel her seminary plans, for I was no longer fit for celibate priesthood. I almost laughed in her face.

I relished the new sense of danger, and I walked about with a swollen chest. I was no longer afraid of Hajj Gimbi, because what he could do, I could do too. Now I wanted Padlock to nab us, but would Lusanani agree? That would mean putting her marriage on the line, although I doubted whether the danger was that great. She was the youngest wife, with the power of desirability on her side. I knew she could get away with a lot.

Lusanani refused to cooperate the first time I suggested the plan. She favored the idea of writing me a love letter. Cane had warned me never to use one trick twice. Above all, I wanted an immediate reaction. We patched up our differences, though, and I returned home smelling to high heaven. Padlock ranted and raved but failed to address the issue at hand. I felt I was in control.

On the scheduled day, I bathed all the shitters except one. Night fell rapidly. I ordered the unwashed shitter to remain in the bathroom. I went to the edge of the courtyard. Lusanani took her time, but finally showed up. When most people had entered their houses, we crept to the front of the pagoda, the steps pouring in front of us, the city winking in the distance. I had my back in the direction Padlock was going
to come from. We pretended to be having sex. Hajj was away for a few days. Serenity was at the gas station. Everything was on schedule. We talked about our former schools. I dreamed about the university and a law degree.

“You will have forgotten me by then,” she whispered.

“Never,” I said sincerely. “I promise.”

We were standing in a corridor between two pagodas. Suddenly she said, “Allah akbar!” The tip of a stick had struck her on the head. Padlock flung herself on me in order to reach her, but Lusanani fled. Padlock concentrated on me. She was holding a thick stick and was hitting me on the shoulder, on the back and on the legs. I could only defend my head. I did not want her to take out my eye. My arms soon became paralyzed by the heavy blows. I tried to gore her in the stomach, but she hit me with the stick on the back of the head. She won the day.

My left hand remained numb for a week. I was scared that it might wither. I prayed to all the gods that it wouldn’t, because I did not want to resort to violent retribution. As luck would have it, feeling trickled back after ten days. Within a fortnight it could lift again.

My stint with the despots had begun with blood—Grandma’s—and had almost ended in blood—mine. Serenity stopped Padlock from pursuing the Lusanani side of the business. I told him that it was all my fault. I also told him why I had done it. By now he was more or less sure that I was responsible for the Miss Singer letter and the bobbin mystery. He and Padlock wanted me out of their house. Serenity proposed sending me to Kasawo’s, but Padlock refused. The seminary was only forty days away. I was finally sent to Aunt Lwandeka’s. I was relieved.

The conflicts had worn me out. I felt brittle and cracked like an old boot. There was no time to waste. The seminary was a detour I wanted to pass through quickly in order to get back on my lawyerly track. Although my stint at home couldn’t precisely be called an explosion, it had given me an inkling of what Grandpa meant by the expression that the modern state was a powder keg which would go off in a series of explosions. My secret wish was to have nothing to do with any of those conflagrations.

T
HE HYDRA
at the heart of the autocracy commonly known as the seminary system bore three venom-laden heads: brainwashing, schizophrenia and good old-fashioned dictatorship. This Infernal Trinity of venoms worked jointly; the erosion of old, unacceptable ideas and the infusion of new, approved ones were meant to lead to the gradual breakdown of the relationship between thoughts, feelings and actions, which would result in a malleable subject ready for use by and for the clerics in charge of the system.

In theory, seminarians were orphans, lowly bastards plucked from the dirty, sinful world and shepherded into purity by clerical fathers whom, God willing, they could one day join in holy priesthood. Therefore a seminarian’s mandate was to please, obey and be docile and trustworthy. A seminarian had to surrender his personality and sexuality and become a voluntary eunuch. He had to dedicate himself
fully to his calling, and in return he would be entrusted with the treasures of the kingdom come ordination day. A seminarian was the closest thing to the ancient apprentice temple whore: he entrusted himself and his rights to Mother Church, who was free to do whatever she wanted with him, including dismissing him summarily. If he persevered and cleared all the hurdles put in his way, he got his reward: one hundred percent compensation for everything he gave up on earth, and one hundred percent reward in the life to come.

Just as in the dictatorship I had left behind, at the seminary I found myself in acting school, because survival here depended on how well you adapted to your new role and how wonderfully you performed it. You had to second-guess your superiors, tell them what they wanted to hear, show them the face they wanted to see and feed them the best cues, for they too had a role to play. The sooner you learned the stage value of fine delivery, the longer your life span in the seminary and the more likely you were to make it to the altar and to the time when the faithful would grovel at your feet for blessings, exorcism and deliverance from sin.

The seminary was like any other mildly wild school in the seventies, and certainly not a holy garden full of angelic children who watched butterflies and picked flowers in between lessons. It was true that there were no boys with guns or butcher knives in their school-bags, but the common, less lethal weapons they had, they used very well on us newcomers. For many long nights we hardly got a chance to sleep. Gangs of second-year bullies, still smarting with the previous year’s sufferings, swooped down on us soon after dark, and especially after lights-out, doing considerable damage.

This kind of attack was not unexpected. The bullies exercised their newly acquired powers by inventing nicknames for newcomers, or reusing old ones. They kicked newcomers around, whistled at them and called them “Bushmen.” That was for starters.

On the first night, boys armed with canes, mallets, electric cables and anything else they could find woke us up—we had not been sleeping anyway—and took over from where they had left off during the day. The few who pretended to be fast asleep got drenched with cold water before being pulled out of bed. We were divided into small groups and led to the end of the dormitory, where there was a platform
resembling a long podium (the dorm had once been a recreation hall). We were made to kneel on the floor, raise our hands in the air and recite Psalm 23: “The Lord is my shepherd … He prepares a banquet for me …” This was the banquet our masters had prepared for us for over a year. We were made to recite the Our Father, the Hail Mary and a number of other prayers while we knelt, sat, stood, bent, held hands aloft or spun around. Those who were slow to react were either kicked or prodded with sticks. Someone produced a huge aluminum bucket full of cold water and a fat jug. We were told that the baptismal ceremony was about to begin. We stood at one end of the podium and waited as a chair was installed at the other end. A boy in church robes, or what looked like church robes, sat on the chair with a paper miter on his head—he was the High Priest in charge of the ceremony—flanked by the bucket man. A boy in a cassock, holding a piece of paper, appeared and signalled to one of us to crawl to the feet of the High Priest. The cassocked boy shone a flashlight on his paper, read out a name, turned to the Priest and whispered the candidate’s new nickname in his ear. The Priest got the jug from the bucket man and drenched the candidate with cold water as he said the following words: “I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. From now on you are ‘Hornbill’ ”—or any other selected name—“God bless you my son, and go in peace.” The cassocked boy then told the victim to recite his nickname once, thank the Priest and crawl back to the other end of the podium.

There were four dormitories, officially named after patron saints but popularly called Vatican City, Mecca, Cape of Good Hope and Sing-Sing. I was in Sing-Sing, the most notorious dormitory, abode of truants, rule benders and bullies, the chronic victim of negative publicity, neglect and dirt. The same initiation ceremony went on in all four dorms, with varying intensity. Sing-Sing, with its unique position at the back end of the sleeping quarters, very near the bathrooms and the acacia trees and the seminary fence, topped them all. Every bully there lived dangerously and made every “Bushman” wonder why the priests let all this happen, for surely they knew about this and other initiation ceremonies.

At two o’clock, as sleep gradually took over and the tin roof dripped with dew in tiny, tortuous rivulets, there was commotion once
again: we were being woken up. Clad in pajamas, we were made to stand in the corridor between the two columns of beds. After a check to see that we were all present, we were marched off to the bathrooms, ten meters away. The timing was deliberate: the air was ice-cold and windy, and fat clouds loomed in the sky, as though it was going to rain. We stood under the acacia trees, a mat of dead leaves underfoot, our bodies quaking as much as our teeth clattered, and awaited our fate. Dew dripped from the leaves above, driving all semblance of sleep from our eyes and fatigue from our bodies.