For bullies I had my punishment: I would take the money or the gifts meant for their girls and give them to Lusanani, and then lie that the girl was not yet convinced, or that the reply would be coming soon. If the bully threatened to take action, I would ask Lusanani to write a letter insulting the fellow, asking him to leave her alone.
All this experience in wheeling and dealing proved beneficial later, when I entered the world of business. For the moment it made school the most interesting place on earth for me, apart from the taxi park bowl. Adding to the excitement, on top of the love letters, the deceit, the promises, the successes and the blackmail, there was sports. When the football season began, betting started, and fights broke out as losers who failed to pay up were hounded by angry winners. Large boys were often asked to intervene and frighten the losers into paying. When the hostilities reached insupportable levels, the score could be settled by a fistfight or a wrestling match at the sand patch, where long-jumpers made their sinuous springs. A date would be decided, and after school eager spectators and ready combatants would slip behind the buildings and enjoy the match.
One day, as I was wrestling with a letter to a trainee teacher on behalf of one of our hormonally unstable boys, it struck me that it would be a fine idea to tackle the despots by writing Padlock a love letter made to look as if it were from Loverboy. It was such a daring idea that for days I was restless. I woke up at night to listen through the connecting door and hear whether they were still feuding over him. I didn’t want to catch myself in the snares of my own lies. I wanted to strike at the right moment, hoping that the marital harmony of the despots would get a good jolt. I didn’t find out anything about the state of despotic feuding: it was as if they anticipated me and fought earlier or much later. The only constant factor in the drama was that Loverboy continued visiting, albeit less frequently than before. My guess was that Padlock had told him to slow down a bit and give Serenity a false sense of security before picking up the old routine. The situation was ideal for me. Serenity was probably not too happy with his wife’s intransigence, but because she had done something about the boy, he must have eased the pressure and ignored Loverboy’s irregular visits, waiting for the right occasion to put his foot down again.
I consulted The Book of Letters and How Not to Write Your Letters. The latter helped me most, pointing out the kind of grammatical and semantic mistakes a person of Loverboy’s caliber, with his early secondary school education, was most likely to make. It took me two months to write and rewrite the letter, distancing myself as much as possible from my first literary document. It took me a few days to convince my Treasure Island friend to ask his sister to type out and mail my letter for me.
It took Serenity one glance at the typewritten khaki envelope addressed to his wife to know that something was wrong. In the first place, in all their time together, his wife had never received a typewritten letter before, and she had not now alerted him that she was expecting one. Second, there was neither ON UGANDA GOVERNMENT SERVICE nor KAMPALA ARCHDIOCESE nor any other official sign to indicate where it had come from. Third, the deplorable state of the print—half red, half black ink, instead of solid black—set off warning bells: who was so pathetic as to not be able to afford new ribbons? He swiftly decided to open the letter.
Serenity’s suspicions were vindicated as soon as he read the first line. Boy, that pus-inflated walking pimple, had struck! Serenity had all along suspected that Boy had continued flirting with his wife, and giving her laughs he could never give her, under the guise of a sober business relationship. The fact that his prude wife had accepted, rather enthusiastically, the Afro wigs he had given her indicated that she had fallen into the trap of desirability. Her passive acceptance of the lampshade, with its billowy-skirted Monroe woman, now took on more significance. Arms shaking, throat choking, armpits melting, bum itching, he read the letter again and again.
Dear Miss Singer,
How are you smoking the cosmos in these highly atmospheric days? I am highly honored to dispatch this greatly wonderful missive to you. I supplicate you to recall the wonderful happiness we shared before this highly antagonizing cutout of love lodged itself in our cosmos and disorganized its blissful ministrations.
Permit me to conjecture that by throttling your highly volcanic love, you are disorganizing the workings of the cosmos. I hate to see you that way, you know. Your disestablishment ofour love and its highly vertical thrust can only bring negative tintinnabulations in our hearts. I supplicate you to remember our Song of Songs:
Your felicitous neck is like a mesmeric tower of gold
Your fantastic nose is like a phonetic monument
Your mellifluous eyes are like grammatical pools of silver
Your wonderful breasts are like aquatic love bombs
Your infatuated body is a volcano of hot juices
Miss Singer, I supplicate you to recall that I am your best friend. A wise man said that we make many friends but trust only a few. The wise man also said that many are married, but few are happy, remember.
Miss Singer, you are the Queen of my heart, and I want you to make me the President and the Commander-in-Chief of yours.
Before I supplicate you to sign off, recall that I am yours amorously, marvelously, dangerously and thunderously,
Mbaziira the Great.
Serenity had been there before. He could smell post-adolescent verbosity, flatulence, crass emptiness and immaturity a mile away. In his day, the letter would have had pink and red hearts festooning it, with powder inside the envelope.
He found the name “Miss Singer” very disgusting. If that was an indication of a childish streak in his otherwise very mature wife, he would have preferred to know through other means. He knew older men and women who dallied with younger partners, how they grovelled, compromised their personality and marital status, just to come to the level of the younger party. The younger ones in question often spat on their partners’ status and age, giving them childishly younger or sillier names in order to gain a degree of control over them. Now the bug was inside his house. Had he not warned his wife to keep away from this fellow? Whom had Boy paid to write this garbage?
Serenity was consumed by the righteous rage of a wronged husband, but it did not last. It was replaced by sadness, a creepy feeling of missed opportunity and betrayal. Why hadn’t he confronted Boy face-to-face? Why had he felt the need to play the gentleman?
His sadness deepened when expressions like “love bombs,” “volcano of hot juices” and “infatuated body” jabbed his mind. For a woman as prudish as his wife, Serenity felt that such expressions could only have come into use with her express encouragement. She was most probably attempting to clutch at the shreds of her faded youth, or the tatters of an adolescence eclipsed by parental sanction and convent rules.
The whole thing was especially pathetic because it was his wife who had decapitated marital passion by announcing so many days of sexless abstinence that copulation had become as calculated an act as going to the beautician.
He deplored the role he had played in the drama. He could have reported her behavior to Mbale, their marital arbiter, but he had felt too ashamed, too compromised, to unburden himself to a man who respected him so much. He had thought about it many times but could not find the right words, the apt opening: “Ah, muko”—brother-in-law—“you see … my sex life is …” or “My wife refused to see to my needs on such and such and such days …” or “I can’t get my wife to …” Serenity feared that Mbale would lose all respect for a man who could not get his conjugal rights from a wife he had married in church. Serenity also knew that a man of Mbale’s peasant background would never appreciate the kind of decency which made a man burn for such long periods without trying to get his rights by force. Serenity had also failed to unburden himself to Hajj Gimbi for fear that it might ruin their friendship.
Now he felt doubly sad and angry that his wife had fallen into the traps she had set with her own hands. It was evide
nt that she wanted more sex, but did not know how to break down her barriers without losing face and power in other areas. Serenity believed that his wife’s recent obsession with Hajj Gimbi’s polygamy and his own putative affairs had been a mere smoke screen to hide her dirty secrets.
At the center of his sadness was the fact of his mother’s elopement and all the feelings of abandonment which had resulted. He remembered all the women he used to run up to and welcome home, and the fear at the back of his mind that they might indeed be ghosts disguised as tall women. He remembered the patronizing way they used to pat him on the head before letting him down. Where had he got the notion that his mother had been a tall woman? To a three-year-old, most women must have seemed very tall. He remembered the tall woman who had ended his obsession. He suddenly felt very angry. Why hadn’t his father done something about the situation? He had known about his rival’s activities but had chosen to ignore it all. Was complacency a family weakness? he wondered. He suddenly wanted to do so many things at the same time. He wanted to prove that he could act, arrest situations and nip trouble in the bud. He did not want to end up wifeless, with all those children to raise alone. He also didn’t want his children to be brought up by another woman. He finally realized that a married cuckold with children could not afford family-shattering revenge: every form of retaliation had to be short-term.
Serenity considered disappearing for a week. He could stay in a good hotel, relax and work off his anger, his sadness. He could visit his relatives: he had not seen his sisters in a long time, and this could be the chance to check on them.
It struck him like a bolt of lightning splitting a tree down the middle: Nakibuka! Had the woman not done her best to interest him in her life? Didn’t he, in his heart of hearts, desire her? Had he ever forgotten her sunny disposition, her sense of humor, the confident way she luxuriated in her femininity? The shaky roots of traditional decorum halted him with the warning that it was improper to desire his wife’s relative, but the mushroom of his pent-up desire had found a weak spot in the layers of hypocritical decency and had pushed into the turbulent air of truth, risk, personal satisfaction, revenge. His throttled desire and his curbed sex drive could find a second wind, a resurrection or even eternal life in the bosom of the woman who, with her touch, had accessed his past, saved it and redeemed his virility on his wedding night. Sweat cascaded down his back, his heart palpitated and fire built up in his loins.
The afternoon was laboring, hotly, toward evening. It was time for the departmental meeting and the weekly review of accounts. He was the first to arrive in the boardroom. He drank two glasses of water quickly and looked out the window. Where was everybody? He wanted to leave as soon as the bleeding meeting ended. He had to look for Nakibuka’s house, and that worried him. Impatient, alone, angry, he left the room and rushed back to his office to look in his diary. He hoped he had her address. What if she had moved? He perversely imagined Boy going through the same motions, scheming, debating, wondering. What if Boy was already in the Command Post making his Miss Singer laugh by praising her love bombs and her grammatical pools of silver? Eddies of anger washed over eddies of sadness. He thought about returning home in the hope of finding Boy in the Command Post and teaching him a lesson, but unable to figure out exactly what he would do to him in case fate tempted him by placing Boy in his hands, he decided against it. He feared he might lose control as he had when disciplining his son. In the name of discipline he had almost committed murder, and had not liked the experience at all. He had vowed never again to let himself go that way.
Thus, to Nakibuka’s he would go, even if she had moved, even if her man was home, even if he could not spend the night with her. He found her address and smiled half angrily, half sadly. He disliked Hajj Gimbi’s form of polygamy: What was the use of having all the women in one house? Every woman deserved her own house, and it accorded one many more chances of relaxation and escape from the problems, the moods and the quirks of the other women.
Serenity returned to the boardroom. The meeting was already in progress, but it all washed over him. Nothing could interest or irritate him now.
A millstone of anxiety kept my mood oscillating between jubilation and dejection: I was ecstatic at the realization that I had the wits and the discipline necessary to beat opponents larger and meaner than me; I felt oppressed by the irrational fear that Serenity had found out what I had done and was going to do something really terrible to me.
As I pounded groundnuts in a mortar with a wooden pestle polished to a red sheen by years of use, I tried to place myself in Serenity’s shoes. What would I have done? There was the possibility of fighting fire with fire, say, by leaving women’s underwear in my pockets or taking a woman or refusing to pay bills for some time.
Padlock did not strike me as a woman quick to run away; breeders like her rarely did, which meant that she would try her best to find out what was going on before taking any form of action, and despite my part in the drama, and my hatred for this woman, I did not really want her to go. She, in a crude sort of way, represented stability, provided me with a target for my attacks and chances to hone my wits.
As the eldest child in the family, I knew that my position would not change much even if Padlock left and another woman took over. I would most likely still do the shit jobs, wash, clean, cook and fetch water. But I would definitely never allow another woman to beat me, or to make me kneel in front of her. Was Padlock leaving? Was she even contemplating the same? Or was it all in my head?
Suspended in ignorance, Padlock was akin to a door on a single hinge. She acted with the restless and brittle charm of a buffalo with bees in his ears. She thought that Serenity had decided to break with habit for once and had gone straight to his friends without first reporting home, but he was not at the gas station.
I played along, enjoying the panicky rusty-hinge squeak of her voice and the seized storm of alarm which raged in her bosom each time I informed her that Serenity had not yet come back from work. Her sense of alarm was easy to fathom: a decent, reliable man staying away or returning home late meant trouble. Either there was a prominent death in his family, with all concomitant financial hemorrhage, or something nasty had occurred, say, an accident or a mistaken-identity arrest. Serenity was one of those men who informed their wives about their plans and movements and would never go off without sending a message home.
As night fell, Padlock’s face took on the sad expression of a tormented, short-tempered rhino. I fought hard to resist the unfortunate tendency to feel sorry for this woman, because at the center of it all, I wanted her to suffer, to wallow and howl like a bitch in hellish heat.
On the second night, Padlock looked vanquished. The alabaster crust of her face had been replaced by the broken-lined, brittle expression of an adolescent reeling under jilted love. She eyed me with the sneaky, quasi-conspiratorial look of somebody gathering courage to share an ugly secret. Pinned and writhing like a cockroach on a nature-study board, she drew on one’s reluctant supplies of pity. Expressions like “volcanic love” and “mellifluous eyes” rang in my ears, amazing me once again with the magic of their success: at school they turned adolescent hearts and earned me pocket money; now they were turning a despotic system on its head and making a despot dance on the hot spikes of her fears. I found myself appraising Padlock to see whether I had exaggerated too much, but she was too immersed in the cauterizing dust storms of her nightmare to be worth appraising. In writing the letter, I had only had Lusanani and the girl I had intended to give Treasure Island to in mind.
The sight of Serenity entering the compound, bag in hand, sent chills down my spine. His face looked tranquil, as if he had no worry in the world. I could not tell whether he had put two and two together or whether he had bought the stuff wholesale. He responded to my greeting neutrally and entered the library of his fantasies. I waited with bated breath. In the meantime, I noticed that Padlock’s two-day-old stoop had suddenly disappeared, venom had returned to her
face and there was an angry snap in her gait. I felt I had done the right thing: this woman was not going to change. If anything, my struggles with her had just begun.
It was evident that there was trouble in the air. For once, the connecting door was locked and gagging rags peeped like petticoats from the space underneath. Serenity had given nothing away all evening, content to hide behind Godot as we ate. Padlock had shimmered all evening with a barely disguised rage, which had for once made her night-prayer tremolos sound faulty. For the first time in her married life, she dropped Serenity’s plate as she poured soup on it, and she could barely bite back some form of adulterated curse. From behind the papery walls of Godot, Serenity did not move a muscle. He was too busy ruminating on the events of the last three days and two nights to mind his wife’s tension.
I left my bed at around one o’clock and placed my ear on the keyhole. I heard only whispers. I slipped out of the house and stood outside the bedroom window. Mosquitoes buzzed cantankerously, moths collided against naked bulbs suicidally, a pack of dogs howled lustfully. I ignored it all, plus the robbers and the ghosts and the soldiers on the prowl. Voices rose and fell, and finally my reward came.
“I stayed away for your sake.”
“For my sake? How could you say that?”
“My first impulse was to come home and kick your head in.”
“What?”
“You have seen the letter. Now stop insulting my intelligence with that innocent-girl stuff.”
“It has nothing to do with me.”
“A boy calling you Miss Singer is nothing! Your stooping to that stupid boy’s level is nothing! And your denying all responsibility is nothing! Your cheating in my house is nothing, eh? It is all nothing, nothing, nothing.” Serenity’s voice had thinned dangerously, like an icicle.
Abyssinian Chronicles Page 18