Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

“I told you,” Nakatu replied. Both further agreed that the mountains of shit and lakes of vomit were indicators of fecundity. They knew that this was a woman to outbreed all. Not that they were in direct competition with their younger brother, but it was still a sign of power to bring many children to your father’s house when there was a wedding, a funeral or a clan meeting. Tiida had stopped breeding: the doctor, with his sensitive stomach and nose, could not bear the sight of nappies or the noise of children after a long day at the hospital. He had wanted only two children. Tiida had given him four, after a lot of pleading for the extra two. Nakatu had two children, twins, and it was feared that the pair had damaged something inside her to the effect that, despite many well-timed efforts, she had not conceived in the last eight years. It was she, with her unfulfilled desires, who was not too pleased with the bride’s putative fecundity. This was before she met Hajj Ali and his miracle-working semen. Nakatu did not like the bride very much, and in a way was pleased that she had turned out to be such a grouch; she would not need much reason to avoid her.

Padlock, for one, did not miss the company of her sisters-in-law much. Of the two she liked Tiida a little bit more. Tiida impressed her as a doer, someone trying to better herself all the time. The sad thing was that she was going in the wrong direction. The unforgivable affliction of pride and vanity she exhibited made Padlock pity her. A woman who bathed four times a day, fussed over just about everything and boasted about her flush toilet, her marble bathroom and her husband’s big post was sick, insufferable and highly pitiable. If Tiida had not been her sister-in-law, she could have sat her down and warned her about her affliction, and even shown her a way of overcoming it. She could have gone on to inform her that vanity indicated a lack of self-knowledge so deep that she would need a lot of hard work to combat it. How she would have liked to hammer it into Tiida’s proud head that beauty, especially the type she washed four times a day, was phlegm, blood, bile, rheum … She would have rubbed her nose in the writings of St. John Chrysostom, and even used the cane, if necessary, to make her take them on board. But sisters-in-law were royalty, incorrigible and damned to drown in their muck.

From the throne of her new reign Padlock reviewed Nakatu with a sick feeling of disdain. She was like a louse to her. Her insecurity, revealed in her ranting about her twins, her tall, gorgeous husband and the Raleigh bicycle he had given Grandpa, made her nauseated. This was lack of, or weakness of, character, accentuated by a deficient religious upbringing. What had the priests and the catechists done in this parish? Had they left the Devil to take over and eat the essence out of people? At the core of Nakatu was a pool of instability so fathomless that Padlock was sure the woman could be swayed this way and that, to the extent of sleeping with Muslims, marrying them or even converting to their religion. Padlock was sure that Nakatu was being exploited by witch doctors, who promised her children, ate her chicken and stole her money for nothing, soothing her mind with empty rituals which would pave her way to final damnation. She could see her strip, dance naked in front of fires and bathe in all sorts of garbage: the blood of animals, the piss of beasts, anything the witch doctors prescribed. She could see her drink concoctions made of lizard blood, snake eggs, anything. She could see her lie with circumcised witch doctors who specialized in conning women out of their money and their flesh. Her sister-in-law’s soul was yearning for a very serious exorcism. How she would have liked to drive all those demons out of her! From behind the wall of her glumness, the bride saw herself fasting, locking Nakatu up for days, entering her demon-filled room, stripping her, whipping her, commanding the Devil to leave her body. She would finally give her enemas with holy water, baptize her a second time and let her go. But sisters-in-law were royalty, incorrigible and damned to drown in their muck.

According to Padlock’s battle plan, Grandpa and Grandma were going to be tackled directly, through a show of sublime resentment aimed at discouraging their interference in her affairs. She did not like Grandpa, because he was the only person to make her feel uncomfortable and insecure. Who was he to do that to her? She always felt that, given the chance, he would scheme to reinstate Kasiko or to drive his son into the machismo of taking a second wife. She, however, was going to take the initiative and deliver a son first, one of the many to follow. With a dozen offspring, she knew that she would be invincible and in position to manipulate the situation to her advantage. That would be the best way to wipe the self-congratulatory look off the old man’s face. It was the insufferable look of somebody who had cured another’s leprosy — she, of course, being the leper, delivered from the leprosy of poverty. This, after all, was the man who had warned his son that he was marrying below his station. This, indeed, was the man who had, ever so un-Catholicly, questioned the quality of her genes. As a Catholic, she had to forgive seven times seventy times, and she had already forgiven him, but she would never forget.

She would, over time, make him eat his words. She would, over the years, extinguish the flash of corrugated-iron sheets she saw in his eyes whenever he looked at her. She still knelt for him, as she was supposed to, and she stayed on her knees as he addressed her with the eternally irritating question “Are you fine, girl?” Did the old man think that she had just been operated on by a team of drunken surgeons, given a defective heart or relieved of a terrible hernia? Or had her rubies, and the goat his son had given her family, put stupid ideas in the old man’s head? Did he think that his son was hung like a zebra, and that whenever he did it she had to be revived with cold water and then stitched up? She wanted very much to assure him that his son was quite average, and that from now on he would be in for regular droughts. To start with, there would be no sex on Saturdays and Sundays, on major Church feast days, on the feasts of St. Peter and St. John Chrysostom and during the forty days of Lent, the Holy Week and pregnancy. So if this old man believed in whispered falsehoods, she would correct the error. But for now, like any good daughter-in-law, she knelt, and even smiled when the word “girl” dropped from the old man’s lips.

Now, this old man rightly deposed from power years ago spoke with the authority of a despotic chief, giving the word intimations of a blessing, lacing compromise in its sounds: peasant you could be, he implied, but thank God you are not a work-broken hag. There was also a touch of condescension and doubt in it. She knew that, for himself and for others, he approved only of tall women, and she was not a tall woman. She didn’t have those excessively wide pelvic plateaus famed for fecundity. She was not possessed of an elephant’s back. But she would show him that she meant business. For the moment, as she rose and saw the two depressions left by her knees on the ground, she whispered, “Lord, Lord, Lord, how low have I sunk! How long have I got to be measured against the standards of common women and whores?”

Like all seemingly helpless souls, Serenity was fought over by many over a long period of time. The truth was that even after his migration to the city, many people still argued about the viability of his marriage and the suitability of his wife. On many a sultry afternoon, with a good meal under their belt, the coffee kettle sizzling on the fire, a mild wind combing the countryside and teasing banana trees in their afternoon torpor, my grandparents would discuss his affairs. Grandpa would suddenly change the topic of conversation and say, “He should never have married that girl. A chief’s son should never be bossed about by a little peasant girl.”