Abyssinian Chronicles (38 page)

“And all dressed in white!” Serenity wondered aloud. He felt alive for the first time in weeks. He pictured angels milling around on some celestial plain.

“Tell us, what does it look like in Rome?” Hajj asked.

“I wish I knew,” Serenity said.

“Tell us about all those women in short dresses who mill around anxiously waiting to see the pope,” Hajj pressed on, smiling mischievously.

“Well …”

“By the way, why don’t you go and find out? We could always use
eyewitness accounts. Buy a camera and take some nice colored pictures for your cronies,” Hajj suggested, to immediate corroboration from the others.

“Money,” Serenity said uneasily, to the roar of laughter.

“There is always some obstacle, money or whatever. Look, your pilgrimage comes only once in …”

“Twenty-five years,” Serenity said.

“Yes, twenty-five years. Ours is annual. What will you tell your grandchildren? That you failed to go because of money? There is always money, but chances come only once in a lifetime.”

Everyone agreed.

“I have an idea,” Hajj said, his little eyes sparkling.

“Yes?” Serenity jerked forward. It was clear that he wanted it to be a secret between him and Hajj, but Hajj was no lover of secrets. He had nothing to hide, he always said.

“Apply for three thousand rolls of cloth from the government textile mill at Jinja in the name of the union. Sell the cloth on the black market, and fly ‘Hajjati’ to Rome with you,” he said, referring to Padlock. They all laughed.

“Money,” Serenity said unhappily.

“Money!” Hajj Gimbi zoomed in ironically with his booming voice.

“Money,” the other two cronies said together.

“To be on the safe side, apply for five thousand rolls. Don’t worry about money. You only have to sell the delivery note to the black-marketeers. They do the rest.”

“The State Research Bureau …,” Serenity said, half with levity, half with genuine fear.

“The State Research?” Hajj asked, as if he had never heard of them.

“The State Research!” The others took up the joke, and the laughter too.

“You are a real leader, with many delusions of grandeur,” Hajj said to Serenity. “Those boys are too busy doing more important things to notice you. Ha, ha, ha, haaaa!”

Like a good husband and a sensible man, Serenity kept everything secret. Padlock, stung by his apparent indifference to her anxiety,
was pressuring him to listen to her and do something before it was too late.

“You have not even registered!” he countered as he wondered whether the next morning State Research boys were going to drag him out of his office, jam him into the trunk of a waiting car and take him to a forest, or a river, or a filthy cell.

“Do something.”

“We will see,” he said.

“ ‘We will see’ is not good enough. You know that.”

“We will see,” he reiterated for the umpteenth time. “I said, we will see.”

General Amin played his cards well. He knew that if he allowed Catholics total access to subsidized government-priced dollars from the Bank of Uganda, he would lose vital political capital. He wanted Catholics, for once, to acknowledge his importance in their life, and especially in this pilgrimage. He devised three quotas. In the first quota, he placed five thousand people, who received the necessary travel documents and dollars and were made to understand that they were the country’s official representatives. Unofficial government sources gradually let it be known that there were extra places for those who could secure foreign currency on their own; this was the second quota, composed of the elite, people with both money and connections.

The government sources warned that if any pilgrims sold government-priced dollars on the black market, they would be arrested and their passports torn to pieces. Catholics felt insulted that the government could suspect them of doing something so base. Serenity was exhilarated, Padlock dejected. The chosen five thousand were going without having to sell the clothes on their backs to pay for foreign currency! Being among the chosen ones, Serenity was in seventh heaven. The deal had paid off: he had sold the delivery note and secured the cash, and the buyers had neither pointed guns at him nor pushed him into the trunk of a car! It had been a revelation. In gratitude, he had bought Hajj Gimbi a very large goat with teats hanging almost to the ground. He also spent a weekend with Nakibuka. He bought her clothes and gifts for her children, but he did not tell her how he had made the money.

Serenity boarded an Alitalia jumbo jet with three hundred forty-nine other passengers one late afternoon. The most impressive sight he remembered was a view of Lake Victoria as they rose in the air: the lake resembled an oblong pool of quicksilver. The next morning he was in Rome, reborn, his life transformed. The city was alive, sighing and heaving under the crush of pilgrims from the world over, the ubiquitous tourists and its own dwellers.

Serenity was very interested in ancient sites, the Colosseum, the museums, the cathedrals, anything that could breathe new life into the characters he had encountered in the history lessons of his childhood. The Renaissance, the Reformation, the early Church and the Roman Empire all came alive now in a living context that linked past and present. Serenity felt strangely at home.

He stood in crowded St. Peter’s Square. Filled with wonder, Serenity ate holy bread from the hands of the aging pope, marvelling at his hooked nose and the glamour that still failed to dispel the dimness of his features, and found it hard to believe that so delicate a creature could be the head of so vast and powerful a corporation as the Catholic Church. What did this man know about him? What did he know about Catholics in Uganda? What did he know about the people who took him most seriously? Apart from feeding them dogma, what had he really ever done for them? Yet he influenced their lives as though he knew them personally!

In Serenity’s mind, the man resembled an armadillo that controlled his territory from underground, crawling occasionally to the surface, carapaced in dogma, to be seen and to confirm that he was still in control. Loaded with layers of exquisite garments and priceless jewelry, this monstrous armadillo seemed to have emerged from his hole ready to shine. He spoke with the calculated sloth of those assured of an eternal audience, and his magnificent raiment had the gleam of garments washed clean in the blood of imperial power. The holy armadillo moved with arthritic grace. His body breathed the air of sublime indifference. His demeanor oozed with the contradiction of preaching sadistic negation of the body while bedecking oneself in gold. He operated in the supremely detached ambience of holy dictators, tyrants who feared nothing, imperial despots who controlled the lives of hundreds of millions of people far away.

At the turn of the century, agents of an earlier holy armadillo had come to Uganda, locked horns with agents of other religions, got involved in bloody wars and poisoned politics with religion while the armadillo slept. Now Ugandans, descendants of those who died in those Religious Wars, were jostling to touch his successor, to kiss his ring, to be blessed by him, to be pictured with him, everything forgiven and forgotten. Serenity thought of his wife. He was annoyed that this man, whose principles and dogmas had scarred her forever and turned her into a rigid, frigid bundle of inhibitions, knew nothing about her and the troubles he had gone through in accommodating her and her implacable beliefs.

Serenity spent the nights in his hotel room, ruminating on what he had seen during the day. Richer pilgrims went out whoring. One got mugged. Another lost his way and spent the night searching for his hotel. Female pilgrims stayed in their own hotel, where some were joined by their male counterparts for wine-drenched fornication while a few others were fondled and flashed by city freaks who posed as photographers.

From his hotel window, Serenity could see whores walking the street, parading their wares, accosting men, bargaining, getting in and out of cars or simply looking bored with the waiting game. He found it curious that they were very expensive. They aroused supreme indifference in him. It was beyond him to contemplate flushing his precious black-market money down some sordid whore’s drain. He wished Nakibuka were with him, helping him to capture and savor the special moments. He ate just one meal a day to save money, but he felt filled up. He seemed to be feeding on dreams—Jesus in the desert, temptation galore, capitulation never an option.

Serenity bought souvenirs, but his heart was stolen by a bronze plaque depicting the legend of Romulus and Remus. This was what he had subconsciously come to get; this was what the blackbirds carried unseen in their beaks. In the middle was the wolf, big, dominant, her snout pointed menacingly at unseen intruders. Her large puffy teats were hanging down like strange fruits. Her eyes looked glazed with what could only be the joy and sensuousness of breastfeeding. The twins, nude and silky like hairless piglets, were sucking the diabolical milk as the wolf protected them with the arch of her body.

This was overwhelming for a boy abandoned by his mother to the
wolfish quirks of his dad’s wives. He held the plaque as if somebody were about to snatch it from him. The vendor, an old man with a thick mustache and little gray eyes, was intrigued. Serenity was his first customer that day, and how strangely he acted!

Thoracic and gastric locusts nibbled at Serenity with gusto. He almost forgot where he was, in a cramped side street with tourists in shorts and mini-skirts passing like paper ghosts all around him. A river of mud seemed to carry him away from these people and their city and their wares, past the tower of Ndere Parish and the swamps at the foot of Mpande Hill, back to the bosom of the village.

The vendor offered him a good discount if he bought three of the plaques. Serenity seemed to wake up. The vendor reminded him of the old Fiddler and the breasts between his legs. Barrel-organ music was coming from the end of the street. He remembered how he had wanted to learn to play the fiddle. The vendor repeated his offer, looking at Serenity closely and hiding his growing sense of unease behind a large smile. The message of the plaque was too personal for either Hajj Gimbi or Nakibuka to really comprehend. No, he wanted only one plaque, for himself alone.

The rest of his stay in Rome disappeared in a speedy haze. Time oscillated between lucid bursts of euphoric consciousness—say, when a painting talked to him—and a groggy flow of tide, traffic, people. The bus rides, the monuments, the holy masses, the visit to Lourdes—all had something surreal about them. He felt it all slip away.

Serenity had bought a gigantic, meter-long rosary with wooden beads as large as tomatoes. He hated the thing, and the clapping wooden noise it made as he walked, but it was the height of fashion: all his fellow pilgrims wore them to show that they were not common tourists. He lacked their sense of pride and conviction. He thought they all looked like walking billboards for clerical commercialism.

Serenity woke up in Israel. It was hot and dry, with a sandy-gray haze clinging to the air. He looked at the embattled city of Jerusalem, which had suffered violence from time immemorial. He envisioned its destruction and reconstruction, its rises and falls. He pictured the seesawing between peace and war that had gone on over the centuries. He wondered how the city contained the pressure of all that history within its walls.

Serenity flew to the Old Testament. He recalled some of the wars, the internal struggles and Moses’ leadership ordeals. As a leader himself, albeit of a much smaller caliber, he appreciated Moses’ impossible position, squashed as he was between the will of God and the wishes of the Israelites. He remembered the story of the Golden Calf, and the snakes, and he wondered why God chose to operate in such a climate of violence. Serenity now appreciated Jesus’ rebel credentials much more. Stories of the poor, the dispossessed, the victims of Roman colonialism and local greed, made an impression on him. The people of Jesus’ time needed a charismatic leader to chip away at the bedrock of oppression and misery.

Serenity felt a bit like Jesus. He wished he could also be mythologized. He wished the peasants of Uganda could tell stories about him and his family from one generation to another. He realized that his childhood wish to learn to play the fiddle had had grains of mythmaking desire in it. He had wanted to be somebody to outlast time, a Jesuslike ghost who would sprinkle his name on the sands of time, a free spirit who would inspire strangers with the universal seeds embedded in its home-grown fruit. But what did he have to offer the peasants of his village and the slum dwellers of his city in return for eternity? His exploits as treasurer of the postal union? His father’s chiefly acts? His late aunt’s baby-delivering achievements? What universal seeds lay embedded in the jackfruit called Serenity? he wondered.