Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

At night I would think of Hajj Gimbi and his three wives, and wonder whether he was in bed with Lusanani. How was I going to supplant him? This man did not deserve that lovely girl. He was more of a father, or even a grandfather, to her. He had a large beard, which burdened his lower jaw and made his mouth look small and nasty. His large eyebrows overshadowed his small piggy eyes, which looked ridiculous in his large flat face. I felt that this man should have been the object of Padlock’s vilification for sending away wives of his own age and marrying younger women. I kept thinking about ways of invading his home and taking Lusanani away from him. I knew that it would cost me time and energy, but I was determined to get what I wanted.

Padlock, like many women who produced many children too quickly, hated the sanitary obligations that came with the territory: apart from hating the exercise of supervising her children’s toilet, she also hated washing the mountains of diapers and bedclothes. My coming was a blessing for her, and she made no secret of it. In one stroke, I had become the family shitman. Every morning my olfactory glands were bombarded with a string of scatological blasts, my eyes smothered with scatological disasters in different gradations of color and solidity. In the village, I had been above such mundane obligations, and I had got away with leaving visitors’ children in their shit. The clients Grandma and I dealt with, those superstitious mothers, wouldn’t dream of asking me to wipe their children’s butts, but here in the city, I paid for all my earlier prerogatives.

As if compensating for all the sleepless nights I had spent at Grandma’s funeral wake, I slept heavily in those days and found it hard to wake up. Padlock did not like this and had various ways of awakening me: she either shook me gruffly by the shoulder, barked in my ear, doused me in cold water or used her favorite tool, a guava switch. She used these methods in rotation, one for each day of the week. On the days she doused me, and on the days she beat me into wakefulness, I could hardly bring myself to mutter the ritual greeting. As a result, it would take minutes to get the tone right as we fought a minor war of wills, which I always lost.

My main task each morning was to wake the shitters and line them up with enough space between them to avoid fights as they shat, because I wanted all the steaming stuff in the middle of the newsprint on which they squatted. In order to avoid catching the scatological blasts full in the face, I would stand a little distance away and watch, shouting at anyone whose rectum strayed from the bull’s-eye. The strainings and explosions were not too different from Padlock’s performance on the day I thought she was producing a baby destined to fall into the latrine. Anticipating the end of the shitting session, I would tear up rectangles of newsprint and call whoever was done to get his or her ass wiped. I was careful not to spread the shit over their little balls or cunts, because if I did, it was my duty to remove it, for which I had neither the time nor the patience.

Padlock did not trust me. She would lurk somewhere at the edge of the yard, her presence a loud warning to the shitters not to misbehave, her scowl a premonition of things to come if I hurt her children’s asses in futile acts of revenge. She stayed in the background till she was convinced that I was doing my job properly and that my hands would not succumb to stealthy temptations of dealing mean tricks, and then she disappeared quietly.

All butts wiped, the shitters would enter the house and leave me to deal with their odoriferous products. If the paper was not soaked through, folding the hills and streams of feces was quick work. Delivering the parcels to their destination was a task I executed with alacrity, because I was eager to leave for school. On bad days, however, the newsprint got soaked through and burst. My temper would flare, but its fires would be quickly doused by the fumes. I would do it all over again, deliver the parcels and take a deep breath as I hurried to my next task.

I always washed myself dreamily, buoyed by the thought of Tiida, Miss Sunlight Soap, the woman who bathed four times a day. Her profile would rise in my mind, and by the time I saw her whole body, I would be through.

I loathed breakfast. After seeing, smelling and handling all that excreta, I felt as if it had metamorphosed into the food before me. Over time I completely gave up omelettes and avocados, for obvious reasons, and used my share to barter for favors from the shitters, who loved both with childish abandon. They would compete tactfully, begging with message-laden looks. If somebody had seen me doing something wrong the day before, they would feign indifference, sure that I would do the sensible thing. I would then reject the other bids and buy that particular shitter’s silence. One or two clever shitters volunteered to do things for me. They spied on others on my behalf, and kept me posted. I did my best to please them, because my survival depended on it, like a mountain climber’s life depended on the strength of his ropes.

School was my paradise; there I competed on level ground, and did my level best to reach the top. It was the only place where I drew compliments from adults; I also drew pleas for help from fellow pupils, who regarded tests as I did the heaps of excreta I had to deal with every morning. I would look at the large boys, perspiration on the bridge of their noses, armpits runny with funky sweat, and smile thinly. The real joy came from beating the clever ones. It pumped my heart with zeal and filled my nose with the sweet scent of victory.

Time passed very fast at school, and when the last bell rang, I always felt a load on my chest, heavy as the ugly tasks which awaited me at home. I could already visualize the blood-curdling soaked nappies, swimming placidly like sated crocodiles in the filthy grayish-brown water with blobs of shit. What had the witch been doing all day? I would ask myself. I would kick the basin, but not hard enough to hurt my foot or tip it over.

After cracking the rudiments of the Archimedean principle, negotiating the typhoons of Asia, scuttling across the pampas of South America, climbing the skyscrapers of New York, combing the wine estates of France or ascending the snowcapped mountains of Africa, this sordid task was unbearable. In those days there was nothing I hated more than that demonic creation, the diaper.

One by one, I fished them from the shitty water, averting my eyes from the sight and my nose from the stench. I held them with the tips of my fingers, and shook the remaining muck from the depths of the fabric. The squeezing seemed to last a lifetime, for overused, over-stained garments never brightened even if you squeezed them with manic constancy. Padlock was an additional factor; if she was dissatisfied with their appearance, she was always ready to take the fabrics down from the line to soak again, even if they were already dry and stiff, and order you to wash them. “You will wash them till I tell you to stop,” she would say, heading for her Command Post. This was the room adjacent to the living room. It was fitted with a Singer sewing machine, and Padlock spent her day there pedaling away and receiving her customers.

I would listen to the rumblings of the treadle and the humming of the needle until the sounds became intermixed, and in my imagination her foot got stuck underneath the treadle, her finger trapped under the furious needle. The din ate up all her cries for help, and the more I became disgusted with my job, the more she suffered. I would look to see whether Loverboy, a twenty-year-old pimpled, arrogant fellow renowned as the only person in the city who gave Padlock the gift of spontaneous laughter, was around. He often came in the afternoon, swaggering like a conquering pirate, looked the place over and entered the Command Post to watch Padlock work. Sometimes he brought her clothes for repair; sometimes he came empty-handed, to collect finished work or just to talk. When he was around, I would sneak to the door and try to catch what they were saying. They mostly talked about the past. Padlock told him about her parental home, her convent days, her wedding and the like.