Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

At the turn of the century, agents of an earlier holy armadillo had come to Uganda, locked horns with agents of other religions, got involved in bloody wars and poisoned politics with religion while the armadillo slept. Now Ugandans, descendants of those who died in those Religious Wars, were jostling to touch his successor, to kiss his ring, to be blessed by him, to be pictured with him, everything forgiven and forgotten. Serenity thought of his wife. He was annoyed that this man, whose principles and dogmas had scarred her forever and turned her into a rigid, frigid bundle of inhibitions, knew nothing about her and the troubles he had gone through in accommodating her and her implacable beliefs.

Serenity spent the nights in his hotel room, ruminating on what he had seen during the day. Richer pilgrims went out whoring. One got mugged. Another lost his way and spent the night searching for his hotel. Female pilgrims stayed in their own hotel, where some were joined by their male counterparts for wine-drenched fornication while a few others were fondled and flashed by city freaks who posed as photographers.

From his hotel window, Serenity could see whores walking the street, parading their wares, accosting men, bargaining, getting in and out of cars or simply looking bored with the waiting game. He found it curious that they were very expensive. They aroused supreme indifference in him. It was beyond him to contemplate flushing his precious black-market money down some sordid whore’s drain. He wished Nakibuka were with him, helping him to capture and savor the special moments. He ate just one meal a day to save money, but he felt filled up. He seemed to be feeding on dreams — Jesus in the desert, temptation galore, capitulation never an option.

Serenity bought souvenirs, but his heart was stolen by a bronze plaque depicting the legend of Romulus and Remus. This was what he had subconsciously come to get; this was what the blackbirds carried unseen in their beaks. In the middle was the wolf, big, dominant, her snout pointed menacingly at unseen intruders. Her large puffy teats were hanging down like strange fruits. Her eyes looked glazed with what could only be the joy and sensuousness of breastfeeding. The twins, nude and silky like hairless piglets, were sucking the diabolical milk as the wolf protected them with the arch of her body.

This was overwhelming for a boy abandoned by his mother to the wolfish quirks of his dad’s wives. He held the plaque as if somebody were about to snatch it from him. The vendor, an old man with a thick mustache and little gray eyes, was intrigued. Serenity was his first customer that day, and how strangely he acted!

Thoracic and gastric locusts nibbled at Serenity with gusto. He almost forgot where he was, in a cramped side street with tourists in shorts and mini-skirts passing like paper ghosts all around him. A river of mud seemed to carry him away from these people and their city and their wares, past the tower of Ndere Parish and the swamps at the foot of Mpande Hill, back to the bosom of the village.

The vendor offered him a good discount if he bought three of the plaques. Serenity seemed to wake up. The vendor reminded him of the old Fiddler and the breasts between his legs. Barrel-organ music was coming from the end of the street. He remembered how he had wanted to learn to play the fiddle. The vendor repeated his offer, looking at Serenity closely and hiding his growing sense of unease behind a large smile. The message of the plaque was too personal for either Hajj Gimbi or Nakibuka to really comprehend. No, he wanted only one plaque, for himself alone.

The rest of his stay in Rome disappeared in a speedy haze. Time oscillated between lucid bursts of euphoric consciousness — say, when a painting talked to him — and a groggy flow of tide, traffic, people. The bus rides, the monuments, the holy masses, the visit to Lourdes — all had something surreal about them. He felt it all slip away.

Serenity had bought a gigantic, meter-long rosary with wooden beads as large as tomatoes. He hated the thing, and the clapping wooden noise it made as he walked, but it was the height of fashion: all his fellow pilgrims wore them to show that they were not common tourists. He lacked their sense of pride and conviction. He thought they all looked like walking billboards for clerical commercialism.

Serenity woke up in Israel. It was hot and dry, with a sandy-gray haze clinging to the air. He looked at the embattled city of Jerusalem, which had suffered violence from time immemorial. He envisioned its destruction and reconstruction, its rises and falls. He pictured the seesawing between peace and war that had gone on over the centuries. He wondered how the city contained the pressure of all that history within its walls.

Serenity flew to the Old Testament. He recalled some of the wars, the internal struggles and Moses’ leadership ordeals. As a leader himself, albeit of a much smaller caliber, he appreciated Moses’ impossible position, squashed as he was between the will of God and the wishes of the Israelites. He remembered the story of the Golden Calf, and the snakes, and he wondered why God chose to operate in such a climate of violence. Serenity now appreciated Jesus’ rebel credentials much more. Stories of the poor, the dispossessed, the victims of Roman colonialism and local greed, made an impression on him. The people of Jesus’ time needed a charismatic leader to chip away at the bedrock of oppression and misery.

Serenity felt a bit like Jesus. He wished he could also be mythologized. He wished the peasants of Uganda could tell stories about him and his family from one generation to another. He realized that his childhood wish to learn to play the fiddle had had grains of mythmaking desire in it. He had wanted to be somebody to outlast time, a Jesuslike ghost who would sprinkle his name on the sands of time, a free spirit who would inspire strangers with the universal seeds embedded in its home-grown fruit. But what did he have to offer the peasants of his village and the slum dwellers of his city in return for eternity? His exploits as treasurer of the postal union? His father’s chiefly acts? His late aunt’s baby-delivering achievements? What universal seeds lay embedded in the jackfruit called Serenity? he wondered.

Some pilgrims wept when they arrived in the Holy Land. It was almost too much for peasant folk who had never dreamed, as they dug in the fields, as they plucked their coffee, as they fed their goats and pigs, that they would ever come here. All the powerful people in the world had been here, and now, wonder of wonders, they were here too! They marveled at the power of modern technology which enabled Israelis to grow crops in the desert. It seemed miraculous, like many Biblical stories of their childhood. Serenity also marveled at the level of technology here, but he noticed that the owners of this capability had lost that precious sense of wonder. They took everything for granted, like a peasant finding beans in a pod. It seemed sad to him.

The nights were cool and calm, a far cry from the hot, hectic days, and he looked forward to them. They enabled him to withdraw and to rest. It was three weeks now since he had last touched Nakibuka. He felt the miracle of her fire burning, testing him to the limit.

Serenity’s arrival at Entebbe Airport was anti-climactic. Ugly meter-long rosary dangling round his neck, the knocking of wooden beads a monotonous, raucous song, the iron links clinking like dog chains, he and other returnees vacated the plane and headed for the check-in gate. On the second floor, overlooking the tarmac and the silver-gray lake in the distance, excited relatives and friends waved and cheered with a mixture of ululation, rapturous song and the shrill calling of names. Serenity waved like everybody else, a dazed expression on his face: home, he was back home. Padlock, Kawayida, Nakatu and Hajj Gimbi were among the people who surrounded him and smeared him with the oil of their happiness, relief and joy. The gloom that had enveloped him all night on the plane lifted and dissipated like morning mist.