Abyssinian Chronicles (72 page)

The power and pitch of the music had intensified over time, making Padlock feel as if she were inside a musical tornado or at a crowded conference where everyone talked at the same time, at maximum volume. When the music and the voices subsided, she would say her rosary and do her chores. In the meantime, Mbale went to Kasawo to get her opinion of her sister. Kasawo, who was doing well in her little town and had not seen Padlock in a long time, came to see her at their parental home. She was not taken aback by either Padlock’s appearance or her behavior. She was sure that her elder sister had always been like that: living in her own world. She dominated the conversation, because Padlock was not in the mood to talk and seemed strangely absent. Kasawo made it a point not to mention the late Aunt Lwandeka, or other victims of the plague. She talked only about how good life was at her place. Her business was doing well, she had a man and her eyes were firmly fixed on the future. Just before she left, early the following morning, she invited her sister to visit her. Padlock was going for mass and never understood what Kasawo was jabbering about. However, she smiled dryly, almost maliciously. Her eyes glinted as she saw Kasawo’s big body disappear in the mist on the way to the main road to catch the morning bus. She wished she could force her to go to mass with her. How she would have liked to drag her sister up the steaming hills and down the dewy valleys at breakneck speed and fling her broken, sinning body at the doorstep of the church of their youth! How proud she would have been to break and deliver her to the Lord on a plate and hear her full-throated entreaties for God’s forgiveness! But now Kasawo was going back to her godless life, and she might go the way Lwandeka did: to damnation. Damnation, damnation, damnation … Obsessed with her only remaining sister, Padlock lost her way in the hills for the first time and arrived at the parish just before mass ended.

On her last day, with her prematurely gray head shaking like a ball of cotton in the wind, Padlock went to investigate why the orchestra was playing non-stop and with such intensity. She heard the crushing and tearing and hammering and banging and donging of things, and mixed in the cacophony were what sounded like the painful screams of a torture chamber in full swing. She left her room in a temper.
When she stepped outside into the courtyard and looked at the forest in the distance, her legs buckled with holy fright: before her was the altar of St. Peter’s Basilica, above which doves hovered for a minute or so before dropping out of sight in blinding white arcs. There were so many doves that the whole sky looked white.

In the beginning, there had been a locust attack, and then the post-pilgrimage storm. Now there was the miracle of the celestial doves, come to wash evil from the forest and the village. The music crescendoed to a wailing wind’s pitch with breaking sticks, cracking iron roofs and splitting trees in the foreground. Then she heard the unbearable rustle of millions of locusts, and the sky filled with the violins of dropping doves.

It was almost ten o’clock in the morning. A sweet, toothless sunshine, golden to the eye and pleasant on the skin, was shining and flirting with the senses. Farmers were already in the garden with backs bent as they dug with hoes, which kept rising and falling to a deliberate no-nonsense rhythm. They worked inside the shambas, a distance from the path. Padlock could see them, but they could not see her. Now and then, the voice of a child lying on a bundle of banana leaves near the diggers came to her and resurrected the image of her dozen offspring. The diggers were busy tilling the land and planting or preparing to plant beans, maize, cassava, potatoes, tomatoes and greens. The children were either helping their parents in the garden or already at school.

Padlock found herself alone on the path. She turned off into the bushes leading to the forest of dropping doves, walking through the man-high elephant grass in a daze. She moved reverently, like somebody approaching holy ground. The elephant grass gave way to shorter grass interspersed with little umbrella-shaped trees. The forest was only meters away, the holy spectacle enticingly within reach. Her chest boiled with the feeling that she was not alone. Distracted by the egrets, she had not seen the mighty buffalo, over which the birds fussed whenever the ants inside his nose and head tickled his brain and made him shudder. The buffalo was extremely happy to receive her. He had been wounded days before by hunters who, in their inexperience, had failed to catch up with him and finish him off. Crazed with contained rage and energized by the discovery of a soulmate, the buffalo charged
at Padlock from under the little tree where he had been waiting in ambush.

With consummate ease, he picked her up, tossed her into the air and made her fly upside down like the Korean trapeze artists she had seen many years ago on the Toshiba. Bushy ground rushed madly toward her. Falling and screaming, she landed with both shoulders on the gigantic marmorean horns, feet in the air like St. Peter on the cross. The buffalo took off at great speed, tearing through the singing, wailing, weeping bushes, a flock of egrets in his wake. As they penetrated the forest the undergrowth clawed at her. The foliage looked so green, the air smelled so heavy, her body felt as light as a child angel’s wing. She was back in the clouds, headed for Rome and the Holy Land.

They arrived at a clearing in the middle of the forest, dark because of the wall of giant trees which cut off much of the sun. The buffalo tossed her into the air, and she sprawled in the dewy grass; then it ran to one end of the clearing and, taking off at high speed, tore to the other end. The dank air vibrated with hoof-chopped clods and the thunder of its breath. Everything—the sky, the trees, the undergrowth, the ground—seemed to quiver and shudder under the assault. After sixty-three sprints, the buffalo collapsed on the tiny remains of its companion and rubbed slowly with its enormous belly. It made seven more such dashings and rubbings. After the last dash, it fell so heavily that it did not rise: there was nothing more to rub into the ground. It died of massive exhaustion and heart failure. The November rains, which the farmers had been waiting for, came the same day and started erasing the hoof marks with torrents that almost washed away the freshly planted crops. After the rains, the grasshoppers came, and the whole area quivered with efforts to catch this flying delicacy.

The girl who helped Padlock around the house came from school to find her aunt gone. She immediately knew that something was wrong. The fireplace was cold. The food she had left on the fire stones for her aunt to cook was cold. The girl was hungrier than usual and was hammered by the feeling that trouble was in the air. Had her aunt collapsed somewhere? Had she lost her way in the hills? Had she gone to the well and got carried away by the water? She already missed her. She had not liked her aunt at first sight, but had grown fond of her. She
had got used to the strict but fair ways of the older woman. There was something sadly likeable about her. There was something oddly impressive about her determination. To a young girl, there was something amazing about the total independence from everything that the woman enjoyed. She seemed to have an unlimited capacity for reflection, meditation, prayer, or whatever she did during those long stretches of uninterrupted silence when she seemed totally cut off from this world. With tears in her eyes, the girl rushed to her father’s house to inform him of her aunt’s disappearance. She somehow expected to find Padlock there, talking or listening to her father, or even lying down with fatigue. She willed her to be there. She prayed to God that she be there.

Mbale received the news with a wooden face, his only betrayal of emotion the slight drop of his mouth and the furrows that appeared on his forehead. He went round the village asking about his sister. He ended up at the parish church, where nobody had seen her that day. He walked back to the village through the hills, which were quivering under the assault of grasshopper catchers. Nobody seemed to remember seeing her that day, or any other day for that matter. Many said they believed she had returned to her home long ago. Mbale organized a big search in the area, but no one thought of going to the forest. They checked wells, water holes and ditches to make sure that she was not lying somewhere waiting for help.

In the meantime, Serenity got the news. He arrived in the torrents of rain, looking like a chick fished out of a pool of crude oil. Plagued by the failure to locate his father in 1979, he suffered from a massive lack of confidence. Memories of his one-legged uncle filled his head. Had all those dreams about the man come to this? Was it his wife, and not him, who was supposed to share the one-legged man’s fate? He felt momentarily relieved. Then he thought about the children and decided that he had to find his wife. She must be somewhere in this village. He pictured her back in the days before the wedding. He remembered their first meeting. He remembered the wedding ceremony, and the preparations, and the big day itself. The woman had to be found. The enormity of the task made him shudder. He knew that it would take a miracle to find a person who never got lost in all her life. Nakibuka joined the search party, but she could bring no new insight
to the task. The evenings were the hardest. Exhausted, wet, sad faces gathered round the fire, which was not a funeral wake because a body had not been found, and not a bonfire because of the uncertainty that clung to the air. Days ground into weeks with the tortured sloth of an old steam engine. In the midst of the gloom, somebody suggested searching the forest. Serenity was vehemently opposed to the idea—the woman could not be there—but the forest was attacked the next day all the same.

There were no clues as to Padlock’s whereabouts. The tiny threads which had clung to undergrowth and thorns as she rode the buffalo had been washed away. The river of trees and its mysteries made Serenity tremble. The darkness, the wetness and his fear of the forest made him wish he could turn back. He felt like somebody walking to his own death, somebody about to be swallowed by wells of boiling mud after being crushed by the gigantic trees.

Nakibuka placed a hand on his shoulder, and they pushed on. In the clearing, everyone was flabbergasted by the rivers of maggots and the armies of flies which cascaded out of the gigantic buffalo carcass. The flesh had caved in; the ribs resembled a hollowed-out mountainside. The hunters told their story, but no one placed Padlock anywhere in its framework. To begin with, Padlock never went to the forest. Most people believed this to be a different buffalo, because the other one had been speared seven kilometers away. They reasoned that if the wounded buffalo had wanted to kill people in retaliation, it would have had plenty of opportunity in the other area, which happened to be more heavily populated. Most people in the search party wanted to go back to the village right away. They saw no use in prolonging the wild goose chase in a section of the forest known for harboring big-game traps. Mbale and Nakibuka insisted that the group proceed to the other end of the forest, and told everyone to look for pieces of cloth. It was a very unpopular decision. The long, grinding search provided neither a solution nor any clues. Not a single piece of cloth was discovered. People grumbled all the way back. At the clearing, the hunters bravely moved the gigantic carcass. Maggots climbed up their legs and arms, and flies made the air crackle and buzz with the protest of their wings. The wet stench made Serenity feel as though he had a huge hole in his head. At that juncture, he ordered the men to stop moving the carcass.
His wife was definitely not under that filth. Not his Padlock. Not his Virgin. He also discouraged those who were crawling on the ground in search of any minuscule clues.

Many theories sprang up. Some said Padlock had been eaten by a stray leopard, and her polished bones were hanging a forked tree somewhere in this forest. Some said a stray pride of lions had eaten her flesh, and a pack of hyenas had ground her bones in their powerful jaws. Some said she was carried away by the river on the other side of the parish. Some said she fell into a secret pit. Somebody even suggested that she had gone to heaven on the way back from hearing mass.

Serenity’s depression increased after the failure to find his wife. As a distraction, he became fascinated with water. He remembered the Tiber River in Rome, where Romulus and Remus had lived. He talked about water and bodies of water all the time. Of all the theories flying around about Padlock’s disappearance, he believed that she had been swallowed by a river. Cornered by her lover’s obsession, Nakibuka encouraged Serenity to visit the shores of Lake Victoria on a regular basis. They started going every weekend, frequenting certain fishing points where they watched canoes go out to lay their nets. They would sit and listen to the waves and the winds as they sang and wept. The fact that Nakibuka was his wife’s aunt helped bring the image of his wife closer. Serenity started thinking about the Virgin Mary.

At first he had adored her, and even asked her to mother him, long before he found his own Virgin, his Padlock. In order to deal with the pain, he united the two virgins, and the belief grew in him that his virgin was going to return to him via the lake. She was the crocodile his late aunt had talked about. She was going to emerge from the lake’s canyoned depths to soothe his aching heart. The miracle-working demons of religion Serenity had resisted for the better part of his life plagued him now, teasing his mind, twisting his dreams, enhancing their allure by insidiously referring to the miraculous way he had got the money to finance the pilgrimages. Nakibuka would see him lost in thought, his soul on the waves, combing the horizon for the virgin, and she was happy that he was not alone. He no longer read his books. The long wait for Godot had ended in disillusionment. The holes that had not been plugged could no longer be patched up by imported fictions.
Serenity’s world had narrowed down to the house, the cows, the road and the pilgrimages to the lake.

Hajj Gimbi tried to help, but Serenity no longer said much. He was back to the taciturn days after the mysterious tall woman had pushed him away and healed his obsession. On occasion, he saw the returning Indians: they were like shadows to him now, beings from an alien planet. He no longer feared or disliked them; they simply did not exist for him. Nakibuka was the only person who could reach him. She had moved into Padlock’s dream house in the village. She now looked after the few remaining shitters who were not in boarding school. On a number of occasions, Serenity made Nakibuka swear that she would look after his children like her own. She did, not caring whether the shitters liked her or not. Serenity started going to the lake every other day. Nakibuka could not accompany him all the time because of the duties of running the home. Alone, he felt braver: he was discovering the world and molding it through his own words and vision. He also knew that his wife would reveal herself on the waves only when he was alone. The reunion would definitely begin as a private affair, and he believed that each solitary excursion would be the last.