T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

For that was what they christened it that morning, the crowd gathered around his stall that was nothing more than a rickety table set up at the far end of the marketplace where no one bothered about anything: Juliana cloth. William Wamala stood behind the table with his measuring tape and shears and the bolts of cloth in a blue so deep you fell into it, with slashes of pale papaya and bright arterial red for contrast. “How much for the Juliana cloth?” one woman asked, and they all knew the name was right as soon as she’d pronounced it. Because this print, unlike any they’d seen before, didn’t feature flowers or birds or palm fronds or the geometric patterns that had become so popular in the last few years but a name — a name in English, a big, bold name spelled out in the aforementioned colors that ran in crazy zigzags all over the deep-blue field. “Juliana,” it read. “Juliana, Juliana, Juliana.”

Miriam wanted the cloth as soon as she saw it. Everyone wanted it. Everyone wanted to be the first to appear in the streets or at the disco dance in a kanga cut from this scintillating and enticing cloth. But it was expensive. Very expensive. And exclusive to William Wamala. Who proved ultimately to be a very understanding and affectionate young man, willing to barter and trade if shillings were unavailable, accepting pots of honey, dried dagaa , beer, whiskey, and cigarettes in payment, and especially, when it came to the beauties of the town, exchanging his Juliana cloth for what might be considered their most precious commodity, a commodity that cost them nothing but pleasure in the trading.

When Miriam stopped in the market two mornings later, he was there still, but the crowd around him was smaller and the bolts of cloth much depleted. He sat back now in a new cane chair, his splayed feet crossed at the ankles and looming large over the scrap-strewn table, his smile a bit haggard, a beer pressed like a jewel to his lips. “Hello, Little Miss,” he crooned in a booming basso when he saw her standing there with her satchel between two fat-armed women wrapped in kangas that were as ancient as dust and not much prettier.

She looked him in the eye. There was nothing to be afraid of: Beryl Obote, fifteen and resplendent in Juliana cloth, had told her all about him, how he hummed and sang while removing a girl’s clothes and how insatiable he was, as if that very day were his last on earth. “Hello,” Miriam said, smiling widely. “I was just wondering how much the Juliana cloth is today?”

“For you?” He never even bothered to remove his feet from the table, and she could see the faintest glimmer of interest rising from the deeps of his eyes like a lonely fish, only to sink back down again into the murk. He was satiated, bloated with drink and drugs and rich food, rubbed so raw between his legs he could scarcely walk, and she was no beauty, she knew that. She made her eyes big. She held her breath. Finally, while the fat-armed women bickered over something in thin piping voices and the sun vaulted through the trees to take hold of her face, he quoted her a price. In shillings.

The first to fall ill was Gladys Makuma, Uncle Milton Metembe’s special friend. It was during the long rains in April, and many people were sick with one thing or another, and no one thought much about it at first. “Let her rest,” Miriam’s mother insisted from her long slab of an aristocrat’s face. “Give her tea with lemon and honey and an herbal broth in the evenings, and she’ll soon be on her feet again.” But Miriam’s mother was wrong.

Miriam went with Aunt Abusaga and Uncle Milton to Gladys Makuma’s neat mud-and-clapboard house to bring her beef tea and what comfort they could, and when they stepped into the yard there was Lucy Mawenzi, doyenne of the local healers, coming gray and shaken through the door. Inside was a wake, though Gladys Makuma wasn’t dead yet. Surrounded by her children, her husband, and his stone-faced sisters, she had shrunk into herself like some artifact in the dirt. All you could see of her face was nostrils and teeth, no flesh but the flesh of a mummy, and her hands on the sheets like claws. There would be no more disco-dancing for her, no more sharing a pint of whiskey with Uncle Milton Metembe in a dark boat on the dark, pitching lake. Even an optimist could see that, and Miriam was an optimist — her mother insisted on it.

With Beryl Obote, it was even worse, because Beryl was her coeval, a girl with skinny legs and saucer eyes who wore her hair untamed and had a laugh so infectious she could bring chaos to a classroom merely by opening her mouth. Miriam was coming back from the market one afternoon, the streets a soup of mud and an army of beetles crawling over every fixed surface, when she spotted Beryl in the crowd ahead of her, the Juliana cloth like the ocean come to life and her hair a dark storm brooding over it. But something was wrong. She was lurching from side to side, taking little circumscribed steps, and people were making way for her as if she were drunk. She wasn’t drunk, though when she fell to the ground, subsiding into the mud as if her legs had dissolved beneath her, Miriam saw that her eyes were as red as any drunkard’s. Miriam tried to help her up — never mind the yellow tub of matoke , rice and beans her mother had sent her for — but Beryl couldn’t find her feet, and there was a terrible smell about her. “I’m so embarrassed,” she said, and if you couldn’t smell it you could see it, the diarrhea and the blood seeping through the deep blue cloth into the fetid trodden mud.

After that everyone fell sick: the women who’d bought the Juliana cloth with their favors, their husbands, and their husbands’ special friends, not to mention all the men who had consorted with a certain barmaid at the disco — the one who wore a kanga in the blue, red, and papaya of decay. It was a hex, that was what people believed at first, a spell put on them by William Wamala, who had come all the way across the lake from the homeland of their ancestral enemies — he was a sorcerer, a practitioner of the black arts, an evil spirit in the guise of a handsome and affectionate young man. But it soon became apparent that no hex, no matter how potent and far-reaching, could affect so many. No, this was a disease, one among a host of diseases in a region surfeited with them, and it seemed only natural that they call it Juliana’s disease, after the cloth that had brought it to them.

Typically, it began with a headache and chills; then there was the loosening of the bowels and the progressive wasting. It could have been malaria or tuberculosis or marasmus, but it wasn’t. It was something new. Something no one had ever seen before, and all who caught it — women and men in their prime, girls like Beryl Obote — were eventually wrapped up in bark cloth and sent to the grave before the breath of two months’ time had been exhausted.

Uncle Milton Metembe and Aunt Abusaga contracted it at the same time, almost to the day, and Miriam moved into their house to tend them, afraid in her heart that the taint would spread to her. She cooked them soup and rice through the reek of their excrement, which flowed like stained water; she swept the house and changed their soiled sheets and read to them from the comic papers and the Bible. At night, the rats rustled in the thatch, and the things of the dark raised their voices in an unholy howl, and Miriam fell away deep into herself and listened to her aunt and uncle’s tortured breathing.

The doctors came then from America, France, and England, white people in white coats, and a few who were almost white and even stranger for that, as if they’d been incompletely dipped into the milk of white life. They drew blood like vampires, vial after vial, till the sick and weary trembled at the sight of them, and still there was no cause or cure in sight, the corpses mounting, the orphans wailing; then one day the doctors went away and the government made an announcement over the radio and in the newspapers. Juliana’s disease, the government said, was something new indeed, very virulent and always fatal, and it was transmitted not through cloth or hexes but through sexual contact. Distribution of condoms was being made possible by immediate implementation in every town and village, through the strenuous efforts of the government, and every man and woman, every wife and girl and special friend, should be sure of them every time sexual union was achieved. There was no other way and no other hope, short of monkhood, spinsterhood, or abstinence.