Moses Isegawa: Abyssinian Chronicles

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 lingered, 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.