“Children are given by God,” his wife had fumed when he introduced the question of birth control. “How many people want them but can never have them? Take your aunt, if I may use your family as an example. She will never know the joys of parenthood despite delivering just about every other baby in the area.”
“Enough. Enough of that,” he had replied with finality. He now felt that he had missed a golden opportunity. He should have put his foot down and insisted that he was not going to breed for the whole barren world. He felt that he would have to create another opportunity in order to drive his message home. He stood a better chance when they migrated to the city. The cost of living was higher there, so it would be easier to convince her to space out the children and to have just those they could look after. It was going to be a hard task, and he wondered how successful he would be.
Serenity had viewed the wedding pictures over and over again, dissatisfied by he didn’t know what in his wife’s face. Now, with mud sucking at his feet and the water rippling away murkily into the bulrushes, into the stretch of forest and finally into the papyrus swamps on the other side of Mpande Hill, he believed that he had found the object of his musings and ruminations. The bride hadn’t smiled in any of the wedding pictures, and in a few she had just grimaced, like somebody with safari ants in her pants. The only person with a constant smile on her face was Nakibuka, the woman who had broken the nuptial stalemate and accessed his past with that magic touch on his shoulder. She smiled sweetly, confidently, as if it were her wedding, as if she were celebrating victory over all her husband’s past loves, as if she were quite invincible. The fire that had led him down the dais onto the dance floor, to be fucked by the other dancers and to dance himself, came rushing back. He smiled gratefully. During the honeymoon, Nakibuka had told him all about Padlock. It had not been the best thing to listen to. His wife’s background made Serenity wonder whether she would ever compromise and accept contraception.
Serenity knew that the glumness on his wife’s face was her eternal protest against the injustice of being denied her firstborn privileges. The hardness in the set of her mouth was a plea for redress. Her parents had ignored her as soon as her brother Mbale was born. The irony was that he had been the officiating brother-in-law, the one who had handed her over to her husband on behalf of the family. The birth of three more brothers had left Padlock doing all the hard work, the digging, the cooking, the washing and the fetching of firewood, because she had to learn how to run a home. As a woman she had to learn to wake up first and retire to bed last. In a short time she had all those boys, all those mini-men, to wash, to feed, to see off to school, to pluck jiggers from, to protect from fleas, bedbugs and mad dogs. She gradually became the swamp that filled with the murky waters of hatred, the steadfast clays of perseverance and the dark green papyrus of obedience and stoicism. Her back creaked with the loads of potatoes, cassava and wood the boys refused to carry. Her hair and her clothes reeked of kitchen smoke and dish soap. Her eyes reddened with too much worry and too little relief.
The two girls, Kasawo and Lwandeka, arrived too late, without any spare oil in their lamps for her. To them, she was like the forgotten bride: too young to be a mother, too old to be a sister, too jinxed to share secrets with and too mysterious to be of much use. So they kept out of her way, associating instead with the boys. Her parents never took her side, always coming down hard on her, because she had to learn to handle the dirty work and lift the bigger load. They seemed to have followed the same philosophy when selecting a name for her. From the arsenal of clan names they chose Nakkazi (strong, robust woman) for her. At first she was happy with it, till she came of age to go to school. There it turned into a bully’s dream because with just a little doctoring, excising a letter or two, it meant completely different things. Its malleability was her curse. Nakaza, Nakaze, Nakazi, Nakazo and Nakazu meant female pubic hair, vaginal dryness, female shit, a female cane plant and female nonsense, respectively. So to different bullies she was different things. At the end of each week they put a guava in her satchel, to thank her for her flexible name and her perseverance. At first she ate these guavas unwashed, till she discovered that they were spat on or rubbed against a bully’s buttocks before they were slipped into her bag.
In her free time she would go to the garden and stand lost in thought under guava trees, touch their smooth stems and look at their hard fruits. The stems felt like her hands, and she became fascinated, and could hardly stop caressing them. She would have swapped all her nicknames for “Nakapeela” (female guava), but nobody accorded her the privilege. When she complained to her parents, reporting the bullies, some of whom were villagemates, her parents made her say the rosary and asked her to forgive them seven times seventy times. By then she would be dreaming of guava stems, flexing her arms as if they were made of wood and using them to punish her tormentors.
She finally sought refuge in the convent, where she became Sr. Peter, a name, once again, forced on her. She had originally wanted to become Sr. John Chrysostom and rage against the body, extoll the spirit and the soul, but the Mother Superior was called Sr. John Chrysostom and there could not be two in the same convent. It was considered extremely vain of her to contemplate naming herself after that great saint when she knew that the Mother had been called to bear that mantle. Apologizing to Mother Superior, she settled for the harebrained action man St. Peter, who, despite his defects, had risen to lead the Church and become the first pope.
The situation had changed in her favor: from behind the cool walls of the convent she watched with satisfaction as her brothers tilled the iron land, whipped by the rains, terrorized by pests, mocked by droughts, and were finally defeated by bad harvests. She knew that they would never come to much and would never rise above village level. Protected by the certainties of the habit, she watched as their wives, married young, labored with pregnant bodies, cooking, digging, washing, giving birth. She watched as they were dragged by fluctuating commodity prices into worry-infested tomorrows. That was her revenge. She sipped it in trim little drafts, and savored it whenever she had time to contemplate their lot. The only remaining step in the drama was for them to brave the sun and the rigors of climbing the steep hill to the convent, and stand, hat in hand, begging for help. She now had the power to grant or deny help. The rosebush of nunhood, with all its thorns, filled her nose with the holy smell of victory from time to time. At such moments she could not even feel the pain of a thousand thorns.
In those days, Sr. Peter had one big worry, which she prayed over every day. It was the single defect, the one weakness, she could confess to. There were some moments when she felt as if she were being lifted by giant hands and thrust inside a bathysphere which sank and negotiated dark, treacherous reefs on automatic pilot, beyond the reach of everybody, God inclusive. Once in there, traveling at incredible speeds, she lost all control. She felt like a wingless eagle dropping from the sky. By the time she became aware of her lower back, her armpits and her olfactory system, it was too late, the consequences a marvel even to herself.
It had all started long ago, on the day when she decided to fight back. She had grabbed a stick and hit her younger brother Mbale very hard on the shoulder. She went on hitting him even when he fell down. She would have gone on punishing him if two village men had not intervened, grabbing the stick and pulling her away. That was one of the reasons her parents had welcomed her nunly vocation, because peasant men, from whose ranks her suitor would probably emerge, would either maim or kill her if she ever did that to them.
Nowadays the attacks, or “flashes” as she called them, came only occasionally. They were usually triggered by an incident in which her anger was aroused and her temper inflamed. Gravity of transgression did not matter: a boy breaking another’s nose, trespassing in the convent garden or coming late to church could trigger the explosion. She would hear sounds and feel lifted up, and automatic action would ensue, followed by sweatings, purgings and the bursting of lemon odor on h
er whole skin.
It was the purgative effect of those attacks which both intrigued and worried the otherwise no-nonsense Sr. Peter. The explosion, like a holy fire, would pulverize all her inner tension and for a moment bring her bliss. In the midst of it, when onlookers saw and heard only wailing children, an orchestra would be tearing down her walls with music. At such moments of stormy bliss, everything revolved round her and she became the center of that raging, frothing, primordial, infernal world.
As a way of dealing with the resultant fear, she took the view that what occurred at such moments was a revelation, a holy fuse God had left smoldering inside her for His holy purposes which she, in her simplicity, was yet to understand. So she prayed for enlightenment and asked for answers to that mystical riddle. She fasted. She wore a strip of gunnysack on her skin. She worked harder than the rest, feeding the pigs, washing their pens, smelling their shit. She disinfected all the convent bathrooms and washed all the toilets. She won praise all round, and the fuse seemed to die a natural death.
Yet when she reduced the prayers and curtailed the work sessions, she discovered not only that the fuse was still alive, but also that its purpose was still a mystery. She turned to Holy Scripture. Elijah slaughtered four hundred fifty prophets of Baal; Jesus lashed the people who had turned the temple into a den of thieves; God unleashed snakes on His people and massacred thousands to extinguish His anger. But what was the purpose of her fuse? She was only a simple nun.
She finally concluded that the fuse was a test of the strength of her character and her commitment to the call. She started looking forward to the attacks in order to fight them. As a tribute to the lucidity of this new vision, she forgave defaulters, content to let them escape with verbal warnings buzzing in their ears. Sometimes she gave them light punishment, like collecting straw for brooms, raking mango leaves in the compound or helping the cook wash the porridge boilers, but soon she realized that, in the end, she could not spare the rod without spoiling the children. She picked it up once again and wielded it just like everybody else. This time, though, she tried to control herself. She was only partly successful. What happened in the end was that the pupils who got beaten first got off lightly, and those who came last, when the falling-eagle phenomenon had come into play, took the brunt, as if she were compensating for earlier leniency. The children were quick to remark that Sr. Peter had gotten worse, for, if they were all being punished for the same misdemeanor, why were some getting beaten harder than others?
During her week as duty mistress, in charge of school liturgy and general discipline, the inevitable happened. She hurt seven children so badly that in the end, in order to keep the affair out of court and out of the greasy hands of scandalmongers and church-haters, Sr. John Chrysostom, in her capacity as Mother Superior, promised the angry parents that she was going to take swift and decisive action. A few hours later, she disrobed the otherwise industrious Sr. Peter and, in one stroke, thrust her back into the world she despised so much.
The disgraced nun went down on her knees and begged and promised never to touch the children again, but to no avail. In desperation she pleaded that she had nowhere to go. To which her former superior replied, “Everyone has got a place to go. Remember, foxes have their own holes, too.” Paralyzed by shame and blinded by rage, Sr. Peter took refuge in the home of Mbale, the brother she had nearly maimed at the beginning of it all.
Within a few days, Mbale’s iron-roofed house was oppressed by the cataclysm of his sister’s depression. She locked herself in the guest room with a jerry can of water and a plastic basin, and refused to come out. She refused to eat, surviving on two mugs of water a day. She cried and prayed all day, and, spent, she slept all night. In mortification, she slept on the bare floor, and scratched the earth with her fingers till her nails bled. She asked Death to come for her. She rattled heaven’s door with poignant novenas to St. Jude Thaddeus, helper of desperate cases. Each morning she scribbled a message on a piece of paper to the effect that she was still alive, and that no one should get alarmed or attempt to interrupt her prayer-and-mortification sessions.
On the seventh day, Mbale knocked on her door with the intention of starting some form of dialogue, but she sent him away. He threatened to break the door with a hammer, and she replied that he would regret it for the rest of his life. Afraid that she would die in there, he hurried to his aunt, a good-natured character whose negotiating skills he hoped would help. They arrived on the ninth day, and found the former Sr. Peter washed, fed, wearing a blue dress and relaxing in a wicker chair on the veranda. A hen or two was pecking at her toenails, mistaking them for maize grains. She agreed to go with her aunt, who found her a job as a filing clerk in a small cotton-buying firm in a nearby town.
Sr. Peter, as she still thought of herself then, attended her first wedding just to get out of her aunt’s house. All she was hoping for was a lingering sense of disgust, generated by the dancers’ pelvic gyrations and the people’s profanity, to buoy her home at the end of the evening. She did not look at anyone. She did not drink anything. She did not participate in any festivities. She would have preferred to hover above the crowd, unseen, and watch foolish people disgrace themselves by rolling in the muck of their lust. She stood outside the booth, arms across her chest, stared into space and let the noise, the cheering, the drumming pour over her like water washing a rock. This went on until a face crossed her line of vision. It disappeared and appeared again. It was the face of a young man who looked as lost as herself. He seemed to be trembling, quaking, as if experiencing something as quaint as a miracle. Looking closely, he discovered that she was radiating sublime calm and perfect solitude with such force as he had never seen before. He was hooked by the fathomless intensity pouring out of her frail bosom. Her apparent sanity in the face of the one hundred and one madnesses around her spoke eloquently to something so deep within him that he could not avert his eyes. It was this sudden awareness of her powers, powers she hitherto believed to have left behind the cold walls of the convent, that made her tremble and almost panic. Afraid that her loss of control had been witnessed by a second young man who came and stood next to the first one, she turned and left, melting into the excited crowd.
Young Serenity could hear himself swearing, through clattering teeth, that he would leave no stone unturned until he conquered, or was conquered by, this woman. He could feel mud sucking at his feet and locusts nibbling at his stomach. What was he getting into? She was not the model of beauty his father promoted, but he felt determined to go his own way. Infected by her solitude, or rather his solitude kindled by hers, he sealed himself off from the excess of booze, dance and funk which the wedding had become. Now she was gone, like an apparition. He could hear his friend laughing hard. The friend knew both the girl and her aunt, and did not think much of the girl: she was too intense, too uptight for his liking. He would have gone on to make a lot of fun of her but for the intensity in Serenity’s eyes.
For days Serenity could not excavate the image of the ex-nun from the caverns of his mind. He spent long periods of time recapturing the contours of her face, the lines of her figure and the depth of her solitude, all in vain. At the wedding he had drunk only one beer, but it seemed as if he had emptied a whole crate and that her image, or what he thought to be her image, was just a drunken man’s delusion. His friend’s caution and apparent lack of enthusiasm unsettled him. The only thing that kept him going was the feeling that he was on the right track. His friend, with a wry smile, agreed to help him.
The ex-nun’s aunt had already seen the remarkable transformation on her niece’s face. The cadaverous downward warp was gone, consumed by the slow fire of unwinding revelation, replaced with the thinly disguised expectant visage of someone on the verge of great things. Told of the prospective suitor, the young woman’s aunt expressed tactical surprise at the news because she did not know the young man involved, but she was happy. Her niece needed a new start, a new purpose in life, intimations of which seemed to b
e hanging, like a cloud of locusts, in the air.
For Sr. Peter herself, the vision of the young man’s face clarified the significance of her name for the first time. She was the rock on which a new family, a new church, was going to be founded. She could feel the poles sinking into the bedrock. She could see the structure going up, coloring the firmament with its magnificence. Her death to the convent, to nunly life, had enabled this resurrection.
As Serenity’s go-between and her aunt negotiated off and on for weeks, Padlock felt not a shadow of a doubt about her future role. All she needed was God’s confirmation of the same, and Serenity’s commitment. There was the matter of his concubine and of his child of sin: St. Jude would look into that. After ninety days the answer came. There was nothing to stop her.
Pedaling back from the stream, Serenity sighed when he remembered the ninety days of hell during which he wondered whether Padlock had turned down his marriage proposal. There was a pattern to his life. He always seemed to be the last person informed about matters concerning him. Things always happened when he no longer had power to change them. Now what was he to do with his wife’s life story? Knowing her background was just going to make him sympathize with her even when he should not.
Abyssinian Chronicles Page 8