Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

Joy swept over me: now I had something to blackmail my enemy with. I could use the secret against her in future. I could definitely use it to stop her from hammering me. How would I go about it? It was real blood, her very own despotic blood. Let her sit in it a little longer while I thought out a master plan to end my miseries. She could smear the house with it. She could retouch the red dates on the calendar with it. That would advertise the fact that despots were also human and that they bled when you cut them.

Next time around it would be Serenity’s turn. He was bound to bleed from the front, in the fly area. He could spray the courtyard, the toilet and the entire neighborhood with it. He could even spray Hajj Gimbi’s lime-green Kawasaki motorcycle, the gas station and some of the passing cars.

When I received the money, I did my best not to betray myself by recoiling from her touch. I had the suspicion that her fingers smelled of blood and that the money carried a nauseating whiff. Her fingers were damp and cold, which worried me a bit because Grandma had said that coldness of hands and feet was caused by anemia. How anemic was this woman? Obviously not enough to die before I returned from school, I concluded. I sniffed the money: it had no noxious smell on it.

As I walked to school I tried to imagine what was happening down Padlock’s pants. Was she bleeding like a headless cock? If so, what a tough nut she was, hemorrhaging and yet acting as if everything was under control! This should have been the right time to whine, yet she was not giving any inkling that she was in pain. Pregnant women undergoing hemorrhage used to feel alarmed, and call for help. I remembered that cocks used to kick and twitch as they bled to death: Was this woman feigning indifference? Padlock was impervious to pain, I concluded. It was the reason she was so handy with her guava switches. I was then gripped by curiosity. I wanted to find out if Padlock was incapable of feeling any pain at all. What would Loverboy have to say about that? Maybe it was the reason he liked her so much.

The day conspired against me by thrusting me onto the wings of irrepressible joy. I did very well in class, and during break time I found a ten-shilling note in the grass behind the classrooms nearest the playground. This was a rare stroke of luck, for I hardly ever found anything.

I looked at the note carefully to ascertain that it had not been deliberately planted there by a sufferer of boils or some other communicable disease, to be picked up along with the sacrifice, for ten shillings was a lot of money in the early seventies. Padlock would lash the skin off your back for losing it; Serenity might do the same thing.

By way of celebration, I called together two friends and bought them buns and sodas. As we ate I worked out where to store the rest of my booty. I would have shared my good fortune with my two most loyal shitters, but did not for fear that they might get so excited they would end up betraying us. In a dictatorship, there was no use getting oneself in trouble over superfluous generosity.

The school day drifted away with the speed of rain clouds chased by hurricane winds. In my exuberance I had forgotten to work out how to use my new knowledge against Padlock. And on the way home I could hardly think deeply. Nevertheless, I was feeling happy when I arrived. My thoughts kept dazzling me. I felt anchored in the glories of my academic capabilities and good luck.

The Padlock who confronted me when I entered the courtyard crushed my exuberance like a dry leaf: she looked like a fortress, her moat alive with piranhas, her drawbridge chained firmly to her castle walls. So she hadn’t bled to death! So she hadn’t smeared anything, even during her most difficult moments! She looked as if she were being eaten alive by so many locusts that the front she presented to the world was moments away from calamitous disintegration.

As though summoned by some worried gods and charged with the laudable task of defrosting the chilly air inside the house, a customer arrived at that moment. She lifted Padlock from the chilly depths of isolated suffering. Padlock asked how she was, how her children were doing, if her husband’s van was running again, and if … I felt totally useless.

City women, like this specimen, operated in their own hemisphere, even the pregnant and the ugly ones. This woman, whose stomach, thighs and buttocks had been crushed by too much childbirth, was the type who would have badgered Grandma and me to give her love potions and all the dubious charms insecure women resorted to in a bid to win back the spark of bygone days. Here, however, she did not even look twice at the short-trousered classroom terror whose exercise books were wrapped in old newsprint and glowed with the teacher’s red marks of academic excellence.

Padlock continued to shower the woman with attention. She rose and turned her back to me for the first time that afternoon. She was headed for the Command Post to take the woman’s measurements. I saw the patch. Was this a new one? It looked larger, more dangerous, and in need of immediate attention.

Suddenly, I lost control of the words I had imprisoned and barricaded in my head. Suddenly, as if the words were fed up with all the cowardly silence of the day, the sentences came out feetfirst like babies at a breech birth. Suddenly, I heard myself say, “You are going to die. Aren’t you aware that you’ve been bleeding all day … Ma?”

More words threatened to gush out, but I barricaded them with hands on my throat. Padlock stopped dead, her head thrust forward and then skyward as if yanked by giant hands. She pirouetted with the agility and grace of the dancers at her wedding. Her face creased into a thousand wrinkles. The customer’s face, which had gone pop-eyed when I first spoke, fell with the relief of a commuted death sentence, and her eyes twinkled mischievously as she saw the patch for herself. With all manner of nunly and girlish shames mincing her, all vestiges of self-control gone, Padlock snapped. Something like a tree trunk split in two by lightning flew sideways and hit me with such force that the lights went out.

Hours later I woke up with a bad headache and a swollen eye. Not a single word of what had occurred passed between the lips of the parties involved. In a dictatorship, the past and the present were Siamese twins, I learned, better left unseparated for the good of public order and family harmony. Anyone who needed a sense of history had to cultivate it in catacombs, where its ugliness could not disgust the eyes of the populace.

For now, I carved the incident in potato. The sweet potatoes I was made to prepare for supper were inedible. Serenity said nothing. Padlock shot me her warning eye, assuring me that neither was I forgiven nor the act forgotten.

For the next few weeks, I prepared the best meals in my repertoire, because I had seen the clothes Padlock had bled into. I did not want her blood to contaminate the food, so I did all the kitchen work with the fanaticism of a late convert. Because she left me alone for a while, I guessed that she took my enthusiasm for a change of heart, for remorse.

At night I was invaded by a series of bad dreams, which made me believe that Padlock had substituted mental torture for physical harassment. I was visited by the wooden effigy of Jesus on the cross. An image seen uncountable times in church, in prayer books and on rosaries, the Crucifixion had taken on the surrealism of a dream; however, it was not Jesus but Padlock on the cross. All her skin was lacerated, and her blood dripped on the stones propping up the ugly cross. I was the only person watching her ordeal. The look of blame on her lugubrious face was meant to cultivate eternal guilt in me: I was her putative crucifier. On other nights she came to me camouflaged as the Virgin Mary, in a white robe, a blue sash round her waist, in her hands a globe, her feet hidden in clouds. Then she would be crucified with her robe on, torn by whips, and she would start bleeding.