Africa39 (5 page)

The choir had begun to sing. It was one of those Sundays when the priest blessed the congregation with holy water at the beginning of Mass, and Father Patrick was walking up and down, flicking water on the people with something that looked like a big saltshaker. Ukamaka watched him and thought how much more subdued Catholic Masses were in America; how in Nigeria it would have been a vibrant green branch from a mango tree that the priest would dip in a bucket of holy water held by a hurrying, sweating Mass-server; how he would have stridden up and down, splashing and swirling, holy water raining down; how the people would have been drenched; and how, smiling and making the sign of the cross, they would have felt blessed.

The Banana Eater

Monica Arac de Nyeko

Naalu and her family lived a block from us, at number G.16 in the housing estates. Many things about our houses were similar. Their size: a kitchen and store, a sitting room and a bedroom. The paint: cream and magenta against a brown tiled roof. Only our back yards were different. Theirs was almost bare – grassless and without any bougainvillea, thorn brush, or red euphorbia fencing to keep trespassers or vagabonds away. Ours was lush with paspalum grass. We had flowers, too. In the rain season, dahlias and hibiscus bloomed; so did roses and sophronitella, cosmos and bleeding heart vines. Everyone who passed by our house said the garden gave a fine display of colour and fragrance.

Ma’s gardening knowledge had been transplanted from her school years at Our Lady of Good Counsel, the Catholic girls’ school. Home economics was compulsory then. Ma never did like the cooking and baking bits. But she did like gardening. A house, she often said, starts at the back yard. See the state of the back yard and you’ll know if you want to enter.

Gardening might have seemed viable in Catholic boarding school, but in the real world things were different. In the estates, only potato fields and cassava survived to maturity. They were unspectacular. The silly boys were not interested in them; nor were the children who liked to roam about the houses breaking windows or anything that looked fragile. Plant fences and flowers, on the other hand, were different. They were boastful. They attracted everyone. And oftentimes people did stop to examine the garden arrangement or to pick flowers to stick in their hair. These people were generally not trouble­some. Ma tolerated them. The lot she found unbearable, though, were the market vendors.

Every day as soon as customers turned scarce, the vendors left the market. They crossed Estate Close, the road that separated the market from the estates, and came to sit in our back yard. They were choosy, those vendors. They avoided all the other back yards on the block. They came straight for ours, and laid down their tired and sweaty bottoms. Our back yard was a place to forget about the market and its unsold sacks of potatoes and bananas, a place to gossip, a place to laugh out loud at anyone, including our distinguished house guests.

One particular guest among all others ignited fits of laughter among the vendors. Perhaps there was something about his temperament that provoked them. Perhaps it was his German bowl haircut. Or maybe it was the fact that he often talked to himself. The man’s name was Patrick Aculu, a strange little man from our church. He was thin and unassuming, watchful and quiet. Because his demeanour seemed over-tolerant, I was convinced he had suffered heavily at the hands of bullies in his school days.

The first day Patrick Aculu came to visit us it was at Ma’s insistence. The market vendors, when they saw him, laughed with tears in their eyes. They clapped. They did not stop for a long time. I opened the door for him as soon as he made it past the vendors. I showed him into our sitting room. I even called him Uncle Aculu in the hope of pacifying him. But Uncle Aculu did not look up, did not show any interest in Ma’s gold cushion covers, the new curtains, or the vase with fresh roses.

On Uncle Aculu’s second visit – the next day – the vendors still laughed, but the insult was not as severe as before. Uncle Aculu sat in the sitting room. When I went to the kitchen to make him some tea, Ma followed. I thought she wanted to help, but she just wanted to talk. Ma said I should not call Patrick Aculu ‘Uncle Aculu’ any more. It was better to call him Brother Patrick, she said, because he was our brother in Christ. I did not tell her that the Sunday school children would not have agreed. They called him Red Devil. They thought his eyes were the colour of red devil peppers and that he talked like he was chewing fire, exactly like the devil on Uganda Television.

Red Devil became a daily guest. Every evening after his job skinning fish for export in the industrial area, he headed not to his home but to ours. Red Devil wore a brown polyester suit. He lined the suit’s pocket with two sets of pens in four colours: black, blue, green and pink. I found the pens alarming and constantly worried that Red Devil’s brain was not wired properly. It did not help that at dinner time he used too much Blue Band on his bread and blew at the tea. They were things Ma said that only people with no manners did.

Now that he was a regular guest, Ma started to plan him into our evenings. When she bought maize flour, she added an extra quarter kilo just for Red Devil. When she cooked meat, she added three ladles of soup. When we ate dinner, she invited his thoughts and opinions. Ma encouraged him to speak like he was part of the family. After a few weeks, Red Devil’s confidence had grown bigger than the man himself.

Late one evening at the dinner table, Red Devil offered his unsoli­cited thoughts about the market vendors. I noticed he was careful about the way he approached the subject.

‘Your back yard is beautiful,’ Red Devil said. ‘But those vendors are too much. Have you seen how they pluck the roses? The way they leave your beautiful garden defiled, I cannot believe it sincerely.’

Ma did not speak immediately. When she did, she said, ‘Good point. Very good point, Brother Patrick.’

Chei
, I thought, such nonsense!

‘You are right, Brother Patrick,’ Ma said.

Though she was quick to agree, she was careful about implementing his advice.

About half a week later, Ma confronted the vendors. She left her office at the printing press early, walked home as usual, and before entering the house, stopped by the back yard. She surprised the vendors. They sat up respectfully in the grass and listened to Ma as if they were schoolchildren. But being as ill mannered as they were, the vendors lost interest as soon as they realised that her stopover was not friendly. Accustomed to talking as loud as they liked without rebuke, they did not take to being scolded. I watched with amusement from the sitting room window, curious to see what the outcome might be. That evening, when Red Devil came, Ma told him it had gone very well.

‘You really have good ideas,’ Ma said. ‘You should have been a lawyer.’

‘Ah, Sister, I can still be a lawyer. With God, nothing is impossible.’

Chei
, I thought. Such nonsense.

That evening there were fewer silences between Ma and Red Devil at the dinner table. The two of them talked adult things, reckless, as if I was too stupid to understand. They talked about God and his plans for the future. It was God who had widowed both of them, they said. It was God who knew what tomorrow looked like.

‘You know, Sister, the book of Song of Solomon might be about God’s relationship with the church, but it has also taught me many things. Very many,’ Red Devil said. Ma laughed. She laughed so much she almost choked on her saliva.

‘Amito, maybe it is time for you to sleep now.’

In my bed that night, I thought I ought to pray for Ma. It was true what they said about some diseases being contagious. Red Devil had infected Ma with his. Now the wires in Ma’s head were not working properly either.

The next day, I waited at the window for Ma’s return from work. I saw her making her way through the market joyful and excited, holding a pineapple in her hand. When she reached our back yard, she looked stunned. There were at least twenty vendors, some of them sleeping on the grass, others on the stairs. The paspalum grass was scattered with flower petals, as if someone was trying to decorate the yard. Papers and polythene bags from the market were everywhere.

Instead of threatening the vendors with eviction, Ma went directly into the house and stayed in the bedroom for a while. When she finally came out, she had changed into a black dress. She was wearing boots and carrying a spade. In the back yard, Ma found the vendors laughing and talking, happy, as if all was well. She tried to speak to them. They did not pay her any attention – not until she started to yell at them, her small arms shaking and her wig unstable on her scalp.

‘Leave. I want all of you to leave my compound now,’ Ma said.

‘Your compound?’ one vendor said. The rest joined in, and they did not allow Ma to speak again. If she wanted to live like the rich, she was on the wrong estate. She should hire a truck, load her household items on it, and head for Kampala’s hills, where the houses were large and double-storied and there were dogs and long fences to keep people away.

‘I am not going anywhere. I am not. This is my house,’ Ma said, repeating herself until she started pointing to the ground, claiming her back yard for her own, refusing to be defeated in this fight.

‘Your house? You think this is your house?’

The vendors were undeterred in their efforts to make Ma shut up. They told her that no one came into the estates with any piece of land on their heads. They called my mother a whore. They said she was a husbandless slut, a fanatic Christian, a sex-starved bitch who should migrate back to the north of the country where people were unciv­ilised and lacked manners.

I hoped Red Devil would walk up. If he did, and if he tried to come to Ma’s defence, the vendors would beat him until all his teeth fell out. Maybe if he stayed in Mulago Hospital long enough, Ma would forget him. But he was lucky, that Red Devil. He only heard about these exchanges from Ma. And being the Red Devil he was, he just said, ‘Um, um, if I was you, I would really make sure those men leave for good. This is your house, they need to know that.’

On the third day of the confrontations, Ma decided to return late from the office, when day would be giving way to night. The day vendors would have left, and in their place would be the night vendors, who were not troublesome. The night vendors kept away from people’s back yards. They spread themselves around the market and along Estate Close with their tables full of bread and milk for sale, tomatoes heaped on sisal sacks, kerosene lamps, and large saucepans of cow-leg soup cooking, offal, pancakes, roast meat, and fried cassava, and filled the roadside with the aroma of life. Men, labourers from the industrial area, the market, and the factories around the estates, stationed themselves on benches waiting to be served. Ma always said those men fed their families on eggplant while they fattened themselves on roadside chicken and beef.

I waited for Ma at the window. I was anxious for her, hoping the vendors would be gone by the time she returned. But they weren’t. When Ma arrived home, there were as many as the day before.

‘You. You thought we would leave just because you came late? You thought we would leave?’ The vendors started even before Ma crossed Estate Close. She avoided looking at them and hurried towards the house. They were not ready to let her pass. Everyone in the market stopped to see what was going on. Ma stopped too. She turned.

The vendors resumed the shouting, but one voice among them commanded more attention. It was the man with keloid scars all over his chin. He said no woman should talk to them like that, most especially Ma. She was unworthy. He said nothing good ever came out of her. He said even Ma’s womb carried the ugliest of children, children who came out with heads the size of water basins and nostrils that could fit a man’s fist. I didn’t move from the window for a long time.

Later that evening, I told myself I shouldn’t be affected by the stupid things those uneducated vendors said. The vendors came and went, and the market didn’t even notice. But me, I was destined for greater things. I was going to end up in Makerere University, Kampala’s hills, and maybe even outside countries, the ones Naalu my friend always spoke of. Naalu said that in London, which was one of the cities we could easily end up in, people were rich. They left cars by the roadside if they didn’t like them. Every morning the city council worked overtime clearing the street of unwanted merchandise.

I woke up early the next morning, hoping the previous evening would be forgotten. But bitterness and doubt stayed with me like an illness. Throughout the day at school, I found myself holding a fist to my nose to gauge its size. In class, even when the teacher said funny things about Didi Comedy on Uganda Television, I did not smile. I thought it was my fault I did not have many friends. I was not pretty – and good looks, it seemed, were a prerequisite for everything, even for being at the top of the class.

On my way home that evening, I waited for Naalu at the end of Estate Close. She went to another school, and we always met by the cemetery before walking together. That evening, when Naalu joined me, I asked her if she thought I was ugly. Yes, she said and then, realising I was serious, she asked what was wrong with me.

‘OK, OK,’ I said, and I told Naalu the vendors must be evicted from our back yard. I told her I was fed up.

‘Eh, this is serious,’ Naalu said. But she offered to help, as long as we did whatever we were planning to do when her father was not home.