Moses Isegawa: Abyssinian Chronicles

Serenity had won his freedom. The storm in the coffee shamba ceased. He heard birds chirping, twittering. He saw black migratory birds crossing over from the Northern Hemisphere. He had watched them all his life, waiting for them at the change of season. They were his mascots. One day he would follow them and fly the same route. Right now, there was one person from the village who could follow them: that Stefano girl, Miss Aeroplane, the air hostess. His dream now was to become the second person from the village to fly.

Unlike most prospective grooms, Serenity was not worried about how big a success or how crushing a failure his wedding was going to be. The prospect of marriage had a more insidious effect: it ate away at his crust of indifference and corroded the bulk of his serenity, exposing the deep-seated hate, contempt and fear he reserved for shopkeepers and shops in general. Whatever happened now, he would not be able to escape the claws of those phantoms.

He had to buy new clothes and new shoes, new household goods and countless other things. He was going to spend hours shopping, carrying the ghosts of his fear from shop to shop. Those shopkeepers would touch him, feel him, measure him, dizzy him with their curried, garlicked or scalding breaths, pocket his money and smile their corny smiles. But he would see through them all. In the same mad vein, others were going to enter so many shops, come out with so much stuff and bring it all to him redolent with congratulations. Those goods would be his launchpad into the turbulent waters of married life, parenthood and adult responsibility. He wished there were a better way of expressing the same sentiments and intentions. Shops and shopkeepers had collaborated with a few other elements to make his life a cold, dark-chambered hell. How many times had he been beaten for refusing to go to the shops, or for going there too late and arriving when they were closed? How many times had he been punished for sending others in his stead who, now and then, stole all the money or all the goods or delivered half measures? His biggest problem had been that he could not explain to anybody the reason that he feared or hated shopping. He had been ashamed of his own terror.

One thing was clear: he did not belong in the shops. He did not trust shopkeepers, and he had never entertained the feeling that they trusted him. He always saw those Indians and those few Africans who owned shops, and the faceless financiers and manufacturers, as a species of silver-tongued man-eaters ready to tear people to bits. He saw them as well-dressed robbers with hidden knives, which they used to slice up people for the little they had and the much they hadn’t. He saw them as two-faced devils, forever preying on people’s peace of mind, sanity and confidence.

Who would believe that sacks of sugar, salt and beans, packets of sweets, matches and exercise books, released the worst fears in him? The fact was that the sight of all those things opened wells of insecurity, canyons of instability and craters of panic in him. Those objects exuded an indifference far bigger, far deeper and far meaner than his; they made him shrivel with insignificance. They exuded an air of preciousness, desirability and indispensability so profound that he could not bear to look at the way they were cared for and secured.

It was the diabolical lure of those very same things that had taken his mother away from him. If they hadn’t been so desirable, and if the shopkeepers hadn’t polished them so much, he reasoned, his mother would still be with him. Alive. Those precious things, and the shopkeepers, and the man in question had all conspired to take his mother away from him, with her tacit cooperation. The man who took his mother away met her at the shops, bought her things, promised her more and sealed her fate with the phony blessing of a shopkeeper’s crocodile smile. How, then, could he control himself, feign or demonstrate indifference, when he was in the snarling jaws of this ring of conspirators? How, then, could he put it all behind him when he could not pinpoint a single conspirator, dead or alive, who had facilitated the dismemberment of his life? Ergo, whenever he was near them, the locusts in his stomach worsened, his tongue disobeyed him, he trembled and failed to express himself. Occasionally, he forgot the items he had traveled kilometers to fetch. Sometimes he bought the wrong brand. All of this had got him in trouble at home. How come, the people queried, it was him alone, and not the girls, who messed up things all the time? Had he shit his brains down the toilet? Or was he just doing it to spite them?

Born in 1933, the year the locust plague laid waste to large areas of the country, Serenity often dreamed of evicting all shopkeepers, exiling and marooning them on a barren island in the Indian Ocean, and of demolishing all shop premises and washing all the rubble into the waters of Lake Victoria. As a victory celebration, he would plant mango and jackfruit trees on all the sites.

Over time, and with a lot of hard work, his confidence had grown. Nowadays he managed his nerves better, and in case of emergency, he could grip the counter, or thrust one arm in a pocket, or present a neat shopping list and elicit a bad-toothed smile from the man behind the counter.

Grandpa’s reference to evil spirits might well have been a hunch, a telepathic intimation or even a whiff from the nostrils of the hydra which brandished its three nefarious heads in Virgin’s family.

The first head breathed the harsh poison of ultraconservative Catholicism: the type which stifled personal enterprise, glorified poverty and hard labor, extolled stoicism, execrated politics and focussed on heaven. The second head spewed dictatorship: the all-authority-is-from-God type and obedience without question. The third head was responsible for violent temper, Virgin being a second-generation sufferer, and the defense of indefensible contradictory positions, like the Church’s stand on abortion, contraception and celibacy.

Grandpa should not have worried: Serenity was ready to deal with anything short of rock-throwing, shit-eating madness. With a touch of idealization kicked up by the Virgin’s independence and self-control, he believed there was no female problem he could not handle, and no family conflagration he could not extinguish. A woman or two had made him tremble, a girl or two had started a fire in his balls and released a warm balmy oil in his thorax, but the intensity and the depth of those feelings had not come anywhere near what the Virgin ignited in him. This double-barrelled magmatic flow was his definition of love, and he felt that there was enough of it this time to go where he had not dared to go with Kasiko.

The groom’s party made two big visits to the bride’s home, or so Serenity remembered. As the two hired oily-white Peugeots packed with men in white tunics, black coats and black shoes went up hills and down valleys, Serenity had locusts on his mind. He could see them swarming in the air, flying, alighting, eating, shitting, shitting and eating. As the locusts on the ground ate and shat, those in the air advanced to virgin territory to eat and shit and shit and eat.

Virgin’s village was crammed under a chain of hills that evoked images of a wolf’s swollen teats, or the back of a monstrous crocodile. The village and the hills were flanked by a thick forest, stripped bare in 1933, divided in two by a laterite road with red dust that turned to red mud in the rains. The seasonal road into the village was lined with elephant grass and homesteads which stood hundreds of meters from each other. It would be another forty-two years before the village was stripped again, but for now it resembled the nest of a weaver bird crammed under an iron roof. This nest of a village had a sad, subdued air about it. Banana and coffee trees stood bravely in the sun, the former waving in the wind as if to draw attention to themselves, the latter staying still, as though to show how tough they were. At the village entrance were a few shabby shops, the type that specialized in the sale of paraffin, matches, soap and salt, their roofs rusting in the heat and humidity. A few curious eyes watched as the drivers wiped the red dust off the cars and as Serenity’s party straightened creased fabric and paid attention to their shoe leather and haircuts.