Padlock did not trust me. She would lurk somewhere at the edge of the yard, her presence a loud warning to the shitters not to misbehave, her scowl a premonition of things to come if I hurt her children’s asses in futile acts of revenge. She stayed in the background till she was convinced that I was doing my job properly and that my hands would not succumb to stealthy temptations of dealing mean tricks, and then she disappeared quietly.
All butts wiped, the shitters would enter the house and leave me to deal with their odoriferous products. If the paper was not soaked through, folding the hills and streams of feces was quick work. Delivering the parcels to their destination was a task I executed with alacrity, because I was eager to leave for school. On bad days, however, the newsprint got soaked through and burst. My temper would flare, but its fires would be quickly doused by the fumes. I would do it all over again, deliver the parcels and take a deep breath as I hurried to my next task.
I always washed myself dreamily, buoyed by the thought of Tiida, Miss Sunlight Soap, the woman who bathed four times a day. Her profile would rise in my mind, and by the time I saw her whole body, I would be through.
I loathed breakfast. After seeing, smelling and handling all that excreta, I felt as if it had metamorphosed into the food before me. Over time I completely gave up omelettes and avocados, for obvious reasons, and used my share to barter for favors from the shitters, who loved both with childish abandon. They would compete tactfully, begging with message-laden looks. If somebody had seen me doing something wrong the day before, they would feign indifference, sure that I would do the sensible thing. I would then reject the other bids and buy that particular shitter’s silence. One or two clever shitters volunteered to do things for me. They spied on others on my behalf, and kept me posted. I did my best to please them, because my survival depended on it, like a mountain climber’s life depended on the strength of his ropes.
School was my paradise; there I competed on level ground, and did my level best to reach the top. It was the only place where I drew compliments from adults; I also drew pleas for help from fellow pupils, who regarded tests as I did the heaps of excreta I had to deal with every morning. I would look at the large boys, perspiration on the bridge of their noses, armpits runny with funky sweat, and smile thinly. The real joy came from beating the clever ones. It pumped my heart with zeal and filled my nose with the sweet scent of victory.
Time passed very fast at school, and when the last bell rang, I always felt a load on my chest, heavy as the ugly tasks which awaited me at home. I could already visualize the blood-curdling soaked nappies, swimming placidly like sated crocodiles in the filthy grayish-brown water with blobs of shit. What had the witch been doing all day? I would ask myself. I would kick the basin, but not hard enough to hurt my foot or tip it over.
After cracking the rudiments of the Archimedean principle, negotiating the typhoons of Asia, scuttling across the pampas of South America, climbing the skyscrapers of New York, combing the wine estates of France or ascending the snowcapped mountains of Africa, this sordid task was unbearable. In those days there was nothing I hated more than that demonic creation, the diaper.
One by one, I fished them from the shitty water, averting my eyes from the sight and my nose from the stench. I held them with the tips of my fingers, and shook the remaining muck from the depths of the fabric. The squeezing seemed to last a lifetime, for overused, over-stained garments never brightened even if you squeezed them with manic constancy. Padlock was an additional factor; if she was dissatisfied with their appearance, she was always ready to take the fabrics down from the line to soak again, even if they were already dry and stiff, and order you to wash them. “You will wash them till I tell you to stop,” she would say, heading for her Command Post. This was the room adjacent to the living room. It was fitted with a Singer sewing machine, and Padlock spent her day there pedaling away and receiving her customers.
I would listen to the rumblings of the treadle and the humming of the needle until the sounds became intermixed, and in my imagination her foot got stuck underneath the treadle, her finger trapped under the furious needle. The din ate up all her cries for help, and the more I became disgusted with my job, the more she suffered. I would look to see whether Loverboy, a twenty-year-old pimpled, arrogant fellow renowned as the only person in the city who gave Padlock the gift of spontaneous laughter, was around. He often came in the afternoon, swaggering like a conquering pirate, looked the place over and entered the Command Post to watch Padlock work. Sometimes he brought her clothes for repair; sometimes he came empty-handed, to collect finished work or just to talk. When he was around, I would sneak to the door and try to catch what they were saying. They mostly talked about the past. Padlock told him about her parental home, her convent days, her wedding and the like.
Loverboy received these morsels of her past with an ironical air, sticking disdainful needles of criticism into the parts which did not appeal to him and rewarding the bits that he liked with loud laughter and corroborating remarks. In general, he waded through her life with the insolence of a lovable pirate. The remarkable thing was that Padlock seemed to enjoy every bit of it. I could hear them laughing, Loverboy freely, Padlock discreetly, as if she were straining a precious liquid through cotton cloth. At first I was at a loss as to what to do about this pimpled figure who handled Padlock as casually as secondhand clothes. I would watch him entering the courtyard, his legs striding, his arms held wide, his chest forward, and wonder, and also feel paralyzed. He looked like a fabulous, gargantuan weapon I could neither handle dexterously nor use crudely.
At first I used to ignore him, looking the other way when he turned up and speaking only when spoken to, but with time I faced him when he arrived and greeted him politely. He would return my greeting brashly, screw his nose up at the filthy mess in the basin or in my hands and trot into the house with a few athletic bounds. Once inside, he would engage Padlock there for long periods of time. Lusanani, who had befriended me by asking whether Padlock was my real mother, would come over and stand at the edge of the yard where Padlock stood to supervise shitting sessions, and we would talk. “She is not your real mother, is she?” she would ask, her head cocked.
This irritated me at first, till I found a riposte: “Is Hajj your real husband?” I would ask, and she would laugh. It was the laugh of mates, of people in almost the same boat, with a shared burden. I would look at her, imagining how she had gone through her first pregnancy, and how the baby had been delivered. Her body was young, firm, supple. I would get sudden urges to jump up, slip my hand up her dress and explore. Then I would be seized by the feeling that I was too young for that, and that even if I asked her to reveal herself to me, she would refuse. I would have visions of Hajj Gimbi on top of her, wheezing, squealing, sweating. Then I would hate her, him too. I would start wishing that on his way home the front tire of his motorcycle would burst so he would fall down on the asphalt, preferably in front of an oncoming truck, and his little mouth would be silenced for good. I would, at other times, see him on top of a tall building, spilling paunch-first over the railing and flying upside down like the late Fr. Lule. With him out of the way, Lusanani would be mine, and I would not have to wash those filthy nappies, or do anything else I loathed.
Meanwhile, we talked about the city, the taxi park, the Indians in the shops, the soldiers in their jeeps, the children at her home. We would begin eagerly, bursting with words, and then slow down, till we started repeating ourselves like an old couple. Many times she spotted Padlock too late. By the time she dropped out of sight, Padlock would be on me, her guava switch cutting into my calf or backside. I would look at her with disappointment: So she hadn’t caught her foot under the treadle! So she hadn’t caught her finger under the needle! So she hadn’t screamed herself hoarse in tortured solitude!
Padlock misread insolence into my look, and misinterpreted my open-eyed reception of pain as a challenge to her authority. “Village trash! She spoiled you rotten,
but I’ll teach you a lesson.” And the switch would move with the fury of a buffalo shaking egrets off the wounds on his back.
I lamented the dismissal of Nantongo, the housegirl, who was Padlock’s first and last incursion into the vertiginous world of status symbols. No prosperous household was complete without a housegirl. When Nantongo was around, I had less to worry about. She cleaned, cooked, washed—she did everything. During the short time between my arrival and her departure, all household work revolved around her. She washed Padlock’s football-field-sized bedsheets. She would rub and squeeze that white cotton fabric till I feared that she would end up like Fingers. She washed nappies and baby clothes with the stoic efficiency of a machine. Her frail hands were always moving, curling and uncurling like crazed millipedes, doing something every moment. Her back was always bent or straining with this or that task. Yet her face remained open, affable, unmarked by bitterness, as if all the labor were mere wind blowing over it. “Your mother is her own worst enemy,” she told me one day, as if that explained everything. I waited for her to elaborate, but she didn’t, and in order not to appear stupid, I desisted from inquiring any further.
The only noticeable improvement since Nantongo’s departure was the subsidence of Padlock’s tirades. When the girl was around, Padlock quarrelled with her at length, delivering sermons in a cold, grating, disembowelled voice just this side of a whine. It was as if the girl were driving pins under her nails. “You never wash the stains out of my bedsheets. You drink the baby’s milk. You wear my clothes before you wash them. You dribble the sauce on your way from the kitchen to the dining room. You abuse my children, pinching them, threatening them, treating them badly.”
“Should I keep quiet when they call me names?”
“She is answering her employer back! What an ingrate! Who do you think is interested in seeing the inside of your mouth or in counting your molars? You teach my children bad manners. How can I keep you under my roof? You look at everybody as if you were going to swallow them. Didn’t they teach you to respect authority where you came from, eh?”
“But Mrs.—”
“You are showing me your teeth once again! You are showing me the roof of your mouth! For once, listen to what your superiors have to tell you. What kind of a man would want a girl without manners who eats like a lawnmower?”
Me, me, me, I wanted to say. Others too. I had seen men dallying with one-legged or clubfooted women. I had seen men in love with one-eyed women. Uncle Kawayida’s mother had buckteeth. And that was just the tip of the iceberg.
I soon learned that Padlock was not displaying her knowledge of men; she was just carrying out a campaign to drive the girl out of her house.
“Remember when you came here, girl. You were crying. You were desperate to get a job, and a roof over your head. I gave you everything, and now you can’t even cook me a decent meal.”
To crown the drama, a cup slipped off the tray Nantongo was carrying to the cupboard and shattered on the floor. I had never seen anybody mourn so much for a lousy china cup with a chipped rim, a stained, scuffed bottom and a fading pattern of periwinkles. It hadn’t cost much, and would never have made it into an antiques gallery, but it got quite a send-off.
“I knew it! I knew you were capable of things like this! What will be the next move, Nantongo? Botulism, or something more potent? Don’t forget there’s a lot of rat poison in the shops, and a packet in the house.”
Padlock’s face bore the chipped strain of a faked rage; the girl turned around to face her, smiled and dropped all the cups on the floor.
“Oh! Oh! Oh!” Padlock struck her thighs and lamented as the cups collided with the cement and disintegrated into bits which seemed to cover the entire floor. Then her face hardened with the intent to cause serious bodily harm. Nantongo, as nimble as an antelope, sidestepped her and said, “I have allowed you to say whatever you wanted to say about me, but I will never allow you to touch me.”
Padlock could not believe the quiet vehemence of the girl’s words. She was momentarily caught between intoning another futile dirge and wringing the girl’s neck. To salvage the tatters of her authority, she blurted, “You are fired.”
By daybreak Nantongo was gone. All the remaining china was packed in boxes, and everyone got a mug.
Serenity espoused benevolent dictator tactics to the nth degree. He relied heavily on the potentiality of force rather than its actuality. He loved operating in a web of unuttered threats, restrained violence and low-voiced warnings. He let reports of individual misdemeanors hover round him like flies on a slumbering crocodile. He let it be known, indirectly, that he never interfered with the work of his enforcer, except in the most dire of circumstances. If he ever noticed that Nantongo was gone, he never said or gave any indication. According to his principles, Nantongo was just another ripple on the surface of a pool which would be around for eons. He let that ripple expand to the edge of the pool, where it died, unnoticed. With Nantongo gone, I was the next in line, yet Serenity acted as if he never received any reports about me.
Stiff as a ramrod in his pressed trousers and shirts of the same color, he walked into the compound with a leather bag under one arm, waving to the neighbors with the other like a beneficent general on holiday. If the courtyard was clean, without rubbish or excreta, he would nod and enter the house. If you had done well at school and there were no school bills or letters of complaint from teachers, he left you alone. He often retired to his arsenal of books, or changed and headed for the gas station to meet Hajj Gimbi and two other friends to converse, watch the traffic and bemoan the state of affairs or play cards.
The four friends discussed the post-independence situation, the suspension of the original constitution, the 1966 state of emergency, the 1971 coup, the future of the country, of Amin, the Muslims, the Catholics, the Protestants and the foreigners. When they got bored, they reminisced about their youth, their careers, their dreams.
On the way to the borehole to get water, I would pass this Total petrol station, its trinity of pumps sealed in the dull uniformity of headless statues, the store behind smothered in fluorescent light and the glitter of oilcan tops, the rectangular hole in which greasy mechanics buried themselves to examine the underbellies of cars gaping like a mass grave. The four friends, epitomes of male privilege, would be placidly intoxicated by motor fumes, flying dust and the grating passage of time. Sometimes they seemed lost in the magic of the cards, or dazed by conversation about the feel of a woman or the first smile of a child, or the rush of a successful deal. Sometimes they were rocked by laughter at a rude adult joke.
The mood at the block of African shops hard by was always different. Music from loudspeakers placed on the gas station’s veranda charged the air and set the tone for the loud arguments, the hard laughter, the backslappings and gruff chest-thumpings which crowned a successful joke or a clever statement. Sometimes there would be the roar of an explosive quarrel, spiky words carving the air and captivating loafers with their viciousness, outrageousness or acerbity. Sometimes there would be an acrobat, a contortionist or a guitarist picking notes off rotten strings on a rotten guitar. Sometimes the air would whistle explosively amidst a fistfight complete with glistening muscles, rasping gasps like tearing metal, and generous cheers as spectators appreciated the show. Sometimes a travelling quack would be promoting wonder drugs which cured baldness, halitosis, barrenness, bad luck and premature ejaculation with a single dose.
I never stopped there; I had to hurry to the borehole and stand my jerry cans in line, awaiting my turn. There was an old-fashioned British pump, heavy, cumbersome, thick-handled, large-mouthed, impossible to handle on an empty stomach, destined to last a century. The wooden handle always smelled of grease, smeared on to discourage the ubiquitous termites.
If a well-shaped girl like Lusanani was pumping, and you stood two feet behind her, you could see her arms rise, her body bend into curves and her face dip under the handle. You wanted her to pump on for ages because
her openmouthed, dilated-eyed expression and her laboring body lighted your mind up with lewd fantasies. Her slender waist; the lines of her underwear peeping through her dress; her thighs, her calves and her legs, taxed by the motion of the heavy pumping action, fueled diverse imagery in my lively mind. As I watched her buttocks opening and closing, and how her panties curved around them each time she bent over the handle, I knew that some adult part of me desired her, and would get her and capture her spirit, and it would infuse the next stage of my life’s journey. I felt doomed.
On the way home, with cars roaring on the road and some occasionally stopping at the gas station, the sight of Hajj Gimbi, his white skullcap and trademark beard, would unsettle me. I felt he was studying me, reading my mind. This suspicion was bolstered by the fact that many fortune-tellers were Muslims. It was common knowledge that the Koran was a potent book, full of magic, blessings and curses. Hajj Gimbi seemed to know what I thought of his wife, and that I wished he would disappear and leave her to me. He seemed to be waiting to catch me red-handed with her. I figured he was taking his time because Dad was his friend and he did not want to act rashly without concrete evidence. When we met, or when I was sent over to his home to deliver a message, I would tremble, waiting for him to confront me with my evil thoughts. He never did. He appeared strangely happy to see me, which confused me, although it did not change my thoughts or my feelings for Lusanani.
Confronted with dictatorship, and especially with the lack of freedom of speech for the first time, I thought I was the only one suffering in silence, but the red-ink incident proved otherwise. I had somehow adapted to the blind alley that was my new home. I had learned to keep quiet, to divert my eyes and to not say a thing. It was a new sense of self-preservation, the type I lacked in the village, the type which made your throat scratchy just when you were about to make a dangerous statement. Why the despots were super-sensitive to little things I could not tell.
Abyssinian Chronicles Page 12