“Of course,” I replied immediately. This was not a woman to inform that I did not even know what a circumcised woman looked or felt like, and that I would not care to find out. She had saddled me with the cross, and I was ready to carry it with a smile on my face. “There are 29,999,996 circumcised women in Africa. If you and your mother and sisters had been born there, you would have made it a cool 30 million, ha, ha, ha.” Her body shook with laughter, and we high-fived.
“All the wars, all the death of babies, all the backwardness,” she moaned while changing her tune. She resembled an aging star of a bad soap on hearing that her man was having an affair with a much younger woman.
“Yes, all that and more, and we are still standing.”
She threw me a superior look.
“You have no television, no MTV and no CNN. People over there don’t even know Michael Jackson!”
“No, they don’t. In fact I first heard of Michael Jackson on the plane,” I said, putting on a sad expression. She patted me on the cheek! Up to that point, I thought she had seen through my lies and appreciated the fact that this was a game, but I was mistaken. She was serious as hell.
“Poor you!”
“Yes, indeed,” I replied, resisting the urge to laugh out loud. Who had sanctified pop culture to this extent? At this juncture, she went to her collection of records and started a long lecture on her favorite artists, feeding me with the years the albums came out, who wrote the songs, who played the instruments on them and which songs had been big hits and which had not but should have made all the charts.
Secure as to who I was, I found it amusing to be playing the barbarian knocking down the walls of Castle Europe or rather Lady Eva’s palatial residence. But what was the booty? Popular music, Hollywood films, liquor, Tampax and perfume. Not the most inflaming of finds. I kept thinking that if Eva had been Lageau’s sister, I would have made her pay in more ways than one, but I had nothing to prove to this woman.
Then came the rages. They began slowly, like winds picking up momentum to cause mayhem. This was what I had been waiting for, but when it came, I almost got swept away by the deluge. It was evident that her anger had been boiling for some time, simmering on a slow fire, waiting for a chance to explode. Her old friends had heard it all before and could take no more, and it was my turn to help her air the dungeons of torture lurking in her mind.
As a regular fixture round the house, I got the full report of what went on at her workplace, details of human infirmity, dirt and suffering that made me happy I had never wanted to be near hospitals. The most recent government and City Council budget cuts and the concomitant sacking of staff had put extra pressure on the remainder, and it made her roar. Eva came home swollen with the shit and urine of white people, the dirt she washed off them and the food they dribbled onto her lap as she fed them through their false teeth and trembling jaws. It kept building up all day, and as soon as she reached home, it exploded, opening sluices of old pain.
“I hate all those motherfuckers, all of them. I want to break the neck of every single geriatric and their sons and daughters and grandchildren who leave them to us. Who do they think they are? Do they think that because we work for them, we are their slaves? At the least discomfort, a ninety-year-old bitch calls you to her cell to take her to pee. You help her with her nappies, all wet and disgusting. You sit her on the toilet, wipe her wrinkly ass, dress her, and then she complains that you’re handling her roughly! I am a qualified nurse, but those white bitches think I’m a kitchen skivvy. Come here, Eva, go there, Eva. This bitch is complaining about the way you fixed her false teeth; that motherfucker is moaning that you tied his shoelaces too tight. I am tired of this shit. I am tired of the way those nursing bitches swing their empty bras and their sorry flat asses. You would think there was a million dollars hidden in there! They think they’re the best thing that ever happened on the planet. God, what is wrong with these people? Can’t they see that they are not all that?”
At first I sympathized and tried to calm her down, but the more she went into the looks of the girls, the more convinced I became that it was her insecurity that was wreaking havoc. I appreciated the fact that she found herself in a terrible profession, but there was little I could do about it. I slowly began to enjoy her displays. They were theatrical, entertaining.
Men did not escape the lacerations of her tongue. “Those white bastards. They believe they own the whole world, even if they don’t have two quarters to rub together. The geriatrics whose asses I wipe look at you as if you were there to suck their flaccid dicks. They don’t know how pathetic they look with their pancake butts and wrinkly pissers. I hate it. My mother was married to a Dutch motherfucker in Paramaribo for ten years, until he died in his sleep. When she came to Holland and tried to introduce me to the family, a woman threw dishwater in her face. I never forgave them.”
My opinion was that if she examined the dark part of herself properly, maybe she would not have to fill her house with skin-toning creams that did nothing to heal the festering wounds in her soul, especially since during the creation process her nose had remained wide and her bum protuberant. At that point in time, I did not ask whether she had considered rhinoplasty or liposuction. The fact I stumbled on later was that she was not a qualified nurse; she had attended a course to help elderly people in the cupboards built for them to await the Grim Reaper. Her dream had been to become a singer and dazzle millions with her voice. She now and then did impressions of Aretha, filing her voice to a high pitch that made her neck veins bulge and her eyes pop, and holding notes for what she believed to be sensational intervals. She would move round the room with a spray can in her hand, head bobbing, body shaking, lip-synching to favorite oldies. I liked it, she loved it. She said that she used to sing to men in bed, especially to Richie, to whom I had not yet been formally introduced. But not anymore.
In her shoes, I would not have told the story the way she did, but Eva was a modern woman for whom nothing was too embarrassing. Anyway, in a country where sanitary pads were advertised on television every single day, giving details and reasons as to why one should buy this or that make, shame was a thing of the past.
“I hate those black American motherfuckers,” she said in her very American accent. What she really meant was that she hated the black American man who had crossed her path, raised her hopes and then dumped her. Even then, I doubted the hate thing, because she still kept pictures of him. I was sure that she still fantasized about him, and even loved him, and was urgently looking for a successor, American or European. He was well proportioned, hard-bodied, very light complexioned. He towered a whole six feet five inches. He resembled Lionel Richie like a twin, and, to expand the illusion, Eva had the singer’s posters up next to her old lover’s pictures. He had a charming ear-to-ear smile and the greasiest wet-look do I had ever seen on a man. Beside him, Eva had felt like a queen on a throne.
On the day before they were scheduled to leave for Houston, she got the shock of her life: Richie disappeared, leaving her bankrupt, jobless and without a house. At first, she thought he had taken a walk to inspect the ghetto for the last time, but then she realized all his things were gone. She looked for him under the bed and behind cupboards. She asked neighbors if … She went from apartment building to apartment building checking, in case he had got confused by the strange names. It was a wild goose chase. “The motherfucker left me high and dry,” Eva raged. “I should have bitten off his fucking dick and spat it in the fire.”
The rages were followed by binges, large helpings of apple pie, eggs, offal, meatballs and french fries with mayonnaise. My feeling was that she was inviting me to leave. I was right. I got replaced rather quickly. I went to see her one evening, and the door was answered by a very tall, very dark, very hard-bodied man who momentarily reminded me of Amin’s soldiers. The man had a nasty, menacing look, exactly like Badja Djola portraying the killer Slim in the film A Rage in Harlem. I was gruffly informed that Eva was away, and as I lin
gered, just before the door was slammed in my face, I heard her laughing in the background. I left with my replacement’s foul breath in my nose. There was too much marijuana and garlic on it for my liking.
Stripped of a place to rest, I took to drifting. Keema’s house was teeming with people, and I felt stifled by the cheer and optimism of migrants busily reinventing themselves. There was too much talk about jobs, jobs I would not have touched with a barge pole back home and which I resisted even thinking about now. Among the visitors were some who had slipped through the net and were now bookkeepers or partners in aid organizations or clerks, but the majority were in the blue-collar sector, and I was repelled by the stories they told, especially about how cruelly some of their bosses treated them.
I could not stay cooped up for ages. The red-light district, like a diabolical hurricane lamp, kept tempting me, just as it had tens of thousands of others before me. I joined the stream of pilgrims to the shrine of the sex industry. The revenue from the videos and the magazines alone was enough to reconstruct the whole of the devastated Luwero Triangle. There were booths for watching videos and live sex shows sold by smart pimps in suits and leather shoes. I ignored all that and joined the current flowing toward the cages where women both displayed and sold sex. The lines of cages were endless, and I could only think of slave buyers parading the selling blocks, the men fingering cunts and the women feeling men’s genitalia to see if they were well-endowed enough to warrant a buy.
My buy cost me forty dollars, almost two whole salaries at Sam Igat Memorial College. I felt a twinge of remorse as I paid it to a Latina moth who had flown all the way from the Dominican Republic toward the lethal luminescence of the red-light district. The little island was the biggest supplier of whores to Holland and some of the surrounding countries. Among the Dominicans were Colombians, Thais, Eastern Europeans, Spaniards, a few Africans and a few Dutch women. This clash of continents at the selling block lost all irony whenever the buy turned out to be bad, as in my case. If anything, the whore reminded me of the despots’ hypnotizing headboard, and once again I got burned for taking things at face value. My whore was well formed and, locked in her cage and bathed in the dull red light with a come-hither look on her pleasant face, she looked outstanding. She could have been any of Uncle Kawayida’s sisters-in-law or the mixed-race children left behind by the Indians as they departed in 1972. This mingling of blood and the gyration of continents to the tinkle of dollars made my head swim. I thought I was in the middle of something special, probably standing at the epicenter of some cultural or historical or even metaphysical tornado. I followed her into her room.
All her life was crammed into that single room. In a corner was a huge leather bag with airline stickers. Under the sink was a statue of some deity of money or prostitution, a dinner plate overflowing with quarters at its feet. I resisted the temptation to sacrifice to this deity in exchange for a good, clean hard-on. For lack of a bidet, there was a small plastic basin, blue like the one we had had at the pagoda. A foot away from the makeshift bidet, the shrine and the big bag stood a small table with three conspicuously arranged pictures: the whoring mother, flanked by a mulatto boy and girl. The implications almost made me puke. Here were ghosts of children thousands of kilometers away, keeping mother company as she sold it day and night to buy them clothes, to send them to school and to pay their medical bills. Every month or two, Grandma got a letter from Holland, and possibly some money too, and in turn she sent news of the children. This whoring of the children’s pictures disgusted me more than anything else. I felt the urge to strangle this woman and throw the pictures in the fire. I wanted to leave this cage, but I felt that she had played the trick on so many other decent men that it was foolish to throw away two months’ salary like that. I undressed with the disgusted impatience of Fr. Lageau on the day he delivered his monkey sermon. She watched me like a dutiful sacristan directing a priest where to place mass vestments. I kept looking at the children, imagining how they waited for Mum to return with goodies from Europe, smelling of all the fishy perfume, the rancid semen, the slimy lubricant and the greasy dollars. The girl was beautiful, and I could see her being approached by hawkish agents, checked for cesarean cuts and big scars, and then offered a job as a dancer in a European nightclub, only to end up selling it like her mother before her. Obsessed with the children, I was not unsettled very much by her disaster.
In the village that got wiped away by the war, men would have called her a bucket: she was so loose, there was simply no traction at all. It was pure robbery. She was like a tantalizing jackfruit that, when cut open, is found to be watery, spoiled, sour. As a former midwife’s assistant-cum-mascot, I knew what had happened: after the birth of the brats that looked at us from the photos, the woman had not bothered to be sewn up, probably with an eye to exploiting her condition.
I had learned my lesson: prostitution was a business where the packaging was better than the goods, and being ripped off was part and parcel of the trade. More annoying still was the fact that the white men I saw emerging from these cages wore the satisfied looks of money well spent. What was their secret? Either they knew the secret of telling buckets from wholesome whores, or they were built like zebras, or maybe they just buggered their buys. I remembered the soldier women and the silence I had kept about the attack. There was a possibility that these white men were getting ripped off but felt too ashamed to admit it. I left in a huff.
I returned after two months. I wanted to make sure. I tried a whore who seemed to wear the sun on her head and the Virgin Mary’s alabaster complexion on her face. Were these women using too much lubricant? No. It was the fucking dildoes, spiked plastic cacti on which they sat during practice sessions in this red-lighted desert of theirs. I had had enough of these greased tombs in which men buried their doomed treasures in exchange for the pleasures of a pissoir. White men had been in the business for ages; I left them to navigate the cesspools of the flesh market.
The news of the demise of the despots reached me in the ghetto during the chilly silver days of winter. It was a severe winter, and the old heater could not chase the chill away from Keema’s large house. We wrapped ourselves in thick clothes and waited for the freeze to grind to its end.
Padlock and Serenity were seventies people, and the eighties, with the guerrilla war, the turbulence and the changes of government, had left them feeling bewildered. It made them realize that the cancer was not all Amin’s doing, and, forced to look further, they felt their sense of optimism flagging. The idea of a strong man holding the roof on the house had made sense to Padlock; didn’t the pope do the same thing? However, with Amin’s departure and the escalation of the killings, the bickering among Coalition members and ultimately the advent of a weak and murderous Obote II government, the despots were attacked by the locusts of pessimism and indifference.
It was during the depth of his suffering that Serenity came up with the only political statement he ever made. He said that Uganda was a land of false bottoms where under every abyss there was another one waiting to ensnare people, and that the historians had made a mistake: Abyssinia was not the ancient land of Ethiopia, but modern Uganda. Buoyed by intermittent bouts of optimism, he would go over his statement, looking for ways to improve it and make it attractive enough for ambitious politicians to pick up, for he believed that the time had come to change the name Uganda to Abyssinia.
Serenity lived in the exaggerated fear that his crimes would be unearthed, as though he were among the mass murderers and torturers who had escaped with Amin and Obote II. He would spend hours staring into the distance, working out how to cover his tracks, what to tell arresting detectives, what to deny. He thought about writing down his exploits in a story that took place in the legendary land of Abyssinia, changing the names of the characters, but he balked at the idea that some clever detective might dig into it and finally make him confess to the fraud at the center of the story. The other reason he refused to write an account of his crimes was th
at his opening lines sounded pitiably inadequate when compared with the tone, rhythm and power of the best of the novels on his shelves. He could not bear the idea of making a fool of himself in front of knowledgeable readers.
Serenity told Nakibuka on many occasions that he was afraid of the future. This was at the height of the guerrilla war, when government propaganda claimed that the guerrillas were just a bunch of fanatic Communist maniacs out to kill people, take their land and nationalize everything. The message sounded familiar, and having been spread by skillful government agents, not soldiers, it seemed plausible as well. In the sixties, the Church had been part of the anti-Communist campaign, to the extent of saying that the Communists routinely nationalized people’s wives along with other property and that they had to be fought in a holy war. Serenity bought the anti-guerrilla line for a short time at the height of his despair: the war was not going anywhere, people were dying, and he believed that negotiations were the best way out of the quagmire. At one point, he no longer cared who won—both sides were killing people, and the situation looked very grim—he just wanted them to stop fighting, and when rumors had it that the guerrillas were defeated, he was happy. Then he heard that they had instead migrated to western Uganda, captured towns and divided the country in two, and he gave up; he realized that he did not understand what was going on. He stopped listening to the news and the rumors. He resigned his post at the trade union and disappeared out of the limelight. He followed Hajj Gimbi’s advice and bought cattle, hiring a herdsman to look after them. Padlock’s job was to supervise the man and make sure that he did not steal or dilute the milk or keep the animals hungry or thirsty.
On weekends, Hajj Gimbi and Serenity compared notes on cattle. They no longer talked about politics. Hajj Gimbi had given up on politics, because he could not trust the current players; he adopted a wait-and-see attitude. Serenity was not too fond of the animals, especially when they broke the fence at night and went out and ate other people’s crops and he had to pay fines and apologize to angry neighbors, but he knew that they were a good investment.
Abyssinian Chronicles Page 54