Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

“It was his choice, and as long as they get on reasonably well … Anyway, Sere’s mother was a chief’s daughter, and look what happened to her.”

“That was different. The woman had a worm in the head: she could not settle down. She thought that the whole world revolved around her. I gave her the best silks, fed her the best goat meat, treated her the best way I knew, and yet she cheated on me. With that worthless bastard. She left her children for that feckless lout!”

“You did not pay her the attention she needed. She was the youngest woman about, pitted against diehard cases who had already seen everything between heaven and hell.”

“Come on, sister. She was my favorite wife. What more did she expect? On second thought, I should have sent a policeman after her and dragged her back here. I should never have allowed her to sleep a single night in that bastard’s house.”

“You lost her and now you think you’ve also lost your son?”

“Serenity is uninterested in clan affairs. He is married to a woman who should have been the wife of the pope or the archbishop. Am I not right to fear that I’ve lost him?”

“Look at it this way: Serenity had a woman who both feared and idealized him. What wouldn’t she have done for him? She gave him a daughter and would have gone on to give him many sons, but he sent her away and married this woman instead. Don’t worry about him. Worry about his daughter, our granddaughter, whom we have not seen in a long time. I have a feeling that the woman will give her to another man to please him or just to get back at Sere. And think about it: When was the last time Sere visited his daughter?”

“I liked that woman: she knew how to treat people. She was uneducated, but after getting rid of her, Serenity did not marry a doctor or a lawyer either. Well, he married a doctor in Catholicism.” He laughed out loud. “I have tried to interest him in his first child, his first blood, but he is evasive every time I mention her. What am I to do?”

“If I were you, I would be looking for a young girl or a decent woman to take care of me. I would not worry too much about a son who is married to a doctor in Catholicism.”

“Young girls are nothing but trouble. After the first day in the house they go looking for boys their own age who give them gonorrhea, and then they expect you to pay the doctor’s bills. Old women are control freaks, chased as they often are by the demons of their past failings.”

“I would still not worry about somebody married to a woman who should have become the wife of the pope.” Grandma laughed. “And after leaving me her first child, be it that violently, I can only wish her the best.”

“Sere’s wife is nothing but poison.”

“Watch out for girls swinging their hips when passing by.…” She laughed knowingly.

Forty-five days after taking his bride’s virginity, Serenity’s first sex drought began: a doctor confirmed that I had been conceived. As further proof, Padlock vomited copiously every morning and nibbled at the salty clay from the vast swamp at the foot of Mpande Hill.

As a way of dealing with frustrated sexual energy, Serenity rekindled his migratory dreams and wrote out many application letters to government institutions asking for a job in the city. The country was quivering under the wind of Africanization, or indigenization of institutions, ripping them from the hands of Europeans and Indians. Serenity’s hopes were high.

Eleven months into the marriage he still had no invitations for job interviews. Then I was born. It rained so much that week, and so intensely that day, that the swamp swelled and seemed to divide into many smaller, fiercer swamps. It flooded and destroyed the aqueducts and drowned the blue Zephyr hired by Serenity to take his wife to Ndere Parish Hospital. As Padlock labored, the driver climbed onto the rack of his car and held on as the wind rushed and threatened to fling him into the dark, swirling inferno below. The water rose up to the roof of his car, and the driver spoke his last will into the winds, certain that he was about to die. But after two wretched hours the winds relented, the rain stopped and the poor man thanked his gods for saving his life.

My umbilical cord was cut by Grandma with a new double-edged Wilkinson Sword razor blade. Padlock named me John Chrysostom Noel, the last name given despite the fact that Christmas was still far away. Serenity selected a name or two from the ready arsenal of the Red Squirrel Clan. He charged me with the grave duty of avenging Grandpa by becoming a lawyer someday, and to show that the mantle had left his shoulders he added the name Muwaabi (prosecutor) to my weaponry. He could as well have named me Revenge. Grandpa could not become a lawyer in his day, because of racial discrimination. He, for one, called me Mugezi (brilliant, intelligent), the name I kept when the time came to scrap the ballast of my nominal encumbrance. Grandma gave me no names but claimed me from birth, thereby prefiguring my future as a midwife’s mascot-cum-assistant (pregnant women, in their eternal quest for sons, preferred a male mascot).

Padlock hated Grandma for it but could not countermand her word because it was Grandma who had cut my umbilical cord. Her belief that Grandma had it in for her increased. The story was that a week before Serenity introduced Padlock to his family as his fiancée, Grandma had two short dreams. In the first one, she saw Padlock standing in a lake of sand with a buffalo behind her. In the second, Serenity was peering at a gigantic crocodile lying at the bottom of a canyon. Grandma refused to interpret the dreams. Padlock asked her fiancé to have a go at it. He based his interpretation on totemic symbols. Padlock belonged to the elephant totem. The buffalo, another bush giant, was a surrogate elephant and symbolized (totemic) power. The presence of the buffalo in the sand was just a further demonstration of its indomitability, he concluded.

The second dream was interpreted along the same lines. The crocodile symbolized extraordinary power, tact, patience, self-knowledge, appreciation of territory and longevity. With a crocodile, not a red squirrel, as his totem representative, Serenity had concluded that his marriage was going to be a partnership of equals. His wife, the buffalo, was going to be the aggressor; and he, the crocodile, was going to be the tactician, the voice of caution, the brains.

Padlock, a more paranoid entity, took a more pessimistic view of the dream. Women who hatched dreams usually possessed a darker side, like the witches of the Inquisition. She believed that Grandma was trying to blackmail her, that she was using the dreams to keep a tight leash on Serenity. Mothers-in-law, afraid to let go of their sons, often did that. Grandma was not her mother-in-law, but Padlock believed that she considered herself to be. Why a buffalo and not an elephant if it was all so innocent? And why the sand? Sand was a bad surface for movement: it was a bad sign. If anything, she reasoned, Grandma was the sand that would impede her movements, check her actions and make her marriage a living hell.

The feeling that Serenity came from a depraved family grew stronger in Padlock’s heart. First, there was his whore of a mother, suspected of killing two of her own baby girls, who ran away, pregnant with another man’s child, to escape her network of shame, and who died in disgrace. Then there was his pagan father, who claimed to be a Catholic but had had wives all over the place, and a child of sin, Kawayida, most likely one of many bred and disowned, or bred and lost in the maze of illicit unions. Then came Serenity’s two sisters: one imprisoned in her ignorance and vanity, one weighed down with instability, witchcraft, devil worship and apostasy. There was the strange aunt, sufferer of chronic amenorrhea, who delivered babies, prescribed herbs and hatched arcane dreams she feared to interpret. Since the Church no longer sanctioned the public burning of witches, all Padlock could do was keep a wary eye on the woman and resolve to keep her out of her house, her life and the lives of her future children.