Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

“You torture women, for Christ’s sake,” she said in her American accent. “And I guess you would have liked me better if I had been circumcised.”

“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.”