Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

As it turned out, there was nobody at home. She was thirty years of age, starting to bulge at the front and the back, and I kept thinking about my maternal aunt Kasawo. Eva was half white, half black, but looked whiter than some white people I had seen that week. She had a flat face and silky jet-black hair, which she covered with a dark blond wig. She confronted the world and its lechers, marauders, crocodiles and strangers with a cold look. Yet she could deploy a nice smile that made her face inviting. I liked the smell of flowers that hit me when I entered her flat. It was quite a departure from Keema’s overused air.

Eva had fat furniture, a huge hi-fi, a big collection of records and videos, and many pictures of herself and her family on the wall. I was disappointed not to find any books in the house, except for her telephone directory, television guide and a heap of fashion magazines. Her bathroom was filled with skin-toning creams, perfumes, powders, shampoos, toothpicks, nail files and many bizarre-looking objects of body care whose purpose I could not fathom. I was amazed. The stuff could fill a small boutique in Uganda. I kept imagining her in there feeding her skin for hours, and the trouble she took to select the day’s facial weaponry from such a formidable armory.

The first meetings were easy. We kept skirting each other, hiding behind the banalities of weather, life in the ghetto, talk about drugs, young people and music. She was surprised to hear that I was from Uganda. She thought I was American or Jamaican. I asked her whether she knew where Uganda was, and she just laughed. I got the message. I did not pry or try to force information down her throat. The spotlight was mostly on her. She was working in a retirement home on the white side of Amsterdam and had a son, two sisters and three brothers in the Caribbean. She had been in the country for the last fifteen years and generally felt at home. Her life revolved around her work, a few friends, visits to clubs and not much more. She was generally not interested in what went on in the country or in the city or in the world. I was disappointed. What, then, was I going to learn from her?

At that juncture, I tried to say something about myself — my education, my teaching experience, the wars, my experiences in the Luwero Triangle — but she was not interested, and I quickly gave up. It was American pop music that turned her on and made her explode into flame like the torch of a fire-eater doused in paraffin. She could not praise Gregory Hines, Lionel Richie, James Ingram, Michael Jackson, Prince and Aretha Franklin enough. My knowledge in that zone was shallow, garnered as it was from old magazines, but I was only expected to listen. She inundated me with details of their personal life. I tried to change the subject to literature but got no response. Hollywood, though, made her sing. Her knowledge of Hollywood films and film stars was endless. She knew when films were made, and by whom, and who had starred in them. She knew the difficulties they had had in shooting or marketing this or that film, and which releases deserved being hits and which were simply overhyped. Romantic comedies, musicals and adventure films were her favorites. At such times, I wanted to leave, but she was not done yet. The catwalk had to be stormed. I had no interest in clothes and who made them and who modelled them, but once she got started, there was no stopping her. At the back of my mind was the idea that I too would get my chance in the sun and inundate her with information about places and facts and books she did not know. I would make her writhe and squirm. I was wrong.

The moment liquor was introduced, conversation, or rather the monologues, started glowing with passion. I learned that she had taken to drinking when she gave up smoking, which had done nothing for her weight, in addition to making her sweat and puff. Frequently, in a frustrated reaction to her weight and her work, she would attack men.

“Dogs, dogs, dogs,” she said in a very American accent. She might have been a character from a Spike Lee movie.

“And what does that make you?”

“They lie all the time.”

“And you swallow the lies,” I said excitedly. This was our first real dialogue. “And in turn you lie to them.”

“Now you are defending your kind,” she said, almost angrily.

“I love a good discussion. Monologues work better on stage.”

“At least you should have supported me and waited for me to give you the details.”

The women I dated back home found it hard to tell me about their conquests and defeats. They felt it was much better if a man did not know everything about a woman’s past. Eva did not care; she liked it. It liberated something in her. She quickly got very deep into the subject of men, and, with eyes glittering, she idealized six-foot-six types, men who towered over her like lampposts. My impression was that she was always waiting or looking out for one. To begin with, she had bought a huge bed, and in her spare closet were two huge robes and an assortment of fancy but very large sandals. I looked at the pop posters on her wall and knew that it was not alcohol but the real Eva talking. I felt lucky I wasn’t her ideal man. The preparations she had made for the arrival of her Prince Charming were enough to give more cautious types an impression of desperation.

Amidst alcohol fumes, she invited me to share her bed. This rather surprised me. Why hadn’t she waited to know me better? Were there no six-foot-six types waiting in the wings? It came as no surprise when I almost failed. My thoughts were elsewhere. Jo Nakabiri suddenly invaded my head, would not let go, and instead of transforming this woman beside me into a wet-dream goddess or at least something I could drool about while I did the job, thoughts of Jo just made me softer. Of course, I could have put on my pants and left, but that would probably mean it would be my last time here. I still wanted to know more about this woman. I turned to those marathon foreplay maneuvers and licked all the sweat from her neck, her arms, her stomach and every dash of her stretch marks. I attacked her armpits and sucked all the hairs, ingesting her bottled perfumes to the point of feeling dizzy. I inflamed her with calculated thrusts of my tongue. After a good half hour, with her squirming, sweating, oozing and puffing, I finished the job. Older women are nefarious drainers of younger men’s energy; they are hard to satisfy, and are vocal about jobs half done. During those gruelling sessions, I paid for all the food and alcohol and water I had touched. As I growled with a mediocre orgasm, I knew that Eva would be my last older woman ever.

I started seeing her regularly, doing her shopping and cleaning her house, vacuuming her carpets and emptying her garbage. This was not what I had come to do, but it was a respite from the racket at Keema’s. I had to give up any idea of interesting her in the country of my birth. Uganda sounded too obscure a place to merit even cursory interest, and Africa was a Pandora’s box of horrors and shames best left untouched and condemned to the depredations of dust, termites, cobwebby neglect and calculated silence. Whenever I tried to show that there was more to a people, a continent, than its sum total of ills, she would slap me repeatedly with female circumcision. I had seen an anti-circumcision campaign poster on a wall at the metro station in Amsterdam the day I entered the ghetto. Eva was one of the colored people mortally wounded by this other horror from what she considered to be the place of horrors. In fact, she told me once that she wanted to burn up all the posters and all the offices of organizations mounting such shaming campaigns. Eva’s impression was that all women in Africa were infibulated, and that Africa was one and the same from Egypt to South Africa.