The sight of the richly dressed but highly confounded Tiida strengthened Padlock’s resolve to go to Rome. This woman had to be shown that poverty could be defeated with honest labor, and that Catholicism was still the paramount religion in society. She wanted to show this woman, together with Kawayida’s wife, that she was powerful in her own right. Padlock remembered clearly that on the day Tiida and her husband had visited Kawayida and his wife in their newly acquired Peugeot, Kawayida’s wife had said, “It is a shame that Nakkazi does not have the brains to make dresses out of chicken feathers. It is the only way they can get a car, if you ask me.” The same woman lamented that Padlock’s brothers lacked the brains to use turkey shit to make bricks and tiles and build a respectable kitchen for their parents. Padlock was awaiting a confession from Tiida, but Tiida was not about to weaken her already precarious position by kowtowing to her brother’s terrible wife. She had her pride, lots of it; kowtowing to peasants was where she drew the line.
Padlock made her intentions clear by backing out of the sitting room as soon as she had served the refreshments. Leaving Tiida on her own, she retired to the Command Post and sent the sewing machine chugging. As the needle bit into cloth, the Singer filled the house with the monotonous, train-like sound of its immobile journey, sprinkling the compound with the joyous revenge of its mistress. When the children came home from school, she ordered them to maintain a deathly silence and not disturb the guest for any reason or else she would tear the skin off their backs. After long stretches of time, Padlock would go into the sitting room to check on her visitor, the way one checked on a poisonous snake coiled inside one’s precious china pot. She would mutter a few words of mock civility, then leave Tiida to languish in the heat of her discomfiture.
At five o’clock, when the national television program began, Padlock deigned to ease her sister-in-law’s solitude by switching on the stinking Toshiba. Tiida got annoyed with the fleeting nonsense of American cartoons and their nasal chatter, which was all mumbo jumbo because she didn’t understand a word of it. The black-and-white things flew, collided with each other, clobbered each other, ran themselves over with cars and did all sorts of stupid things only a child or a moron could appreciate. To soothe her biting rage, Tiida thought about Dr. Ssali. She wished he would come for her. She wished he would run her brother’s wife over with their Peugeot. She wished he were rich enough to finance Grandpa’s journey on his own and save her the humiliation of dealing with her brother’s peasant wife.
By the time Serenity returned home, in the evening, Tiida was silently mourning the fact that she had decided to stay and wait for her brother. Her usually clear eyes were bloodshot. There was perspiration on her brow and on the bridge of her nose. She wanted to scream and to call her brother’s wife all the names that swept through her head. But she was so enraged that she could hardly speak, let alone order her thoughts.
Serenity took his sister for a walk. Night was falling. A thin mist was descending in the distance, hovering over the tops of tall buildings and on the peaks of distant hills. They did not go toward the gas station, because Serenity did not want to introduce her to his friends. Serenity explained that he was very tired because he was in the middle of campaigns for the post of treasurer to the Postal Workers’ Union. He talked about long meetings, canvassing drives and visits to workers’ homes. He said that the campaign had robbed him of his sense of reality. He complained about his insomnia. He expressed his wish to win and gain access to extra resources. He was angry that somebody had edged him out for the chairmanship, but he could not really complain, because Hajj Gimbi’s invisible friends had intervened, pushed aside a Muslim candidate and supported his candidacy for treasurer.
Serenity monopolized the conversation and lectured his sister as never before. Tiida found herself playing second fiddle. She was amazed at how eloquent her younger brother had become; he had finally come into his own. She could now see him representing other people, a bit edgy but capable. Before she could say why she had come to see him, he told her that he had absolutely no money to spare. He was going to Rome to boost his leadership image, he said. Tiida agreed with everything he said, sadly wondering whether the first thing she had met that morning had been a woman or a dog: this was too much bad luck to be coincidental.
“Is your wife also going?” she valiantly asked, seething with suppressed rage.
“She wants to, but she has neither the money nor a parish to register in.”
“They have never been strong, money-wise,” Tiida couldn’t help chipping in.
“But her younger brother has registered himself,” Serenity said proudly.
“Where did he get the money?”
“He is going to fly on his pigs,” Serenity said, laughing, remembering a joke about flying pigs, but his sister totally missed it. She flinched, because in her husband’s religion a pig was a filthy animal. She found herself thinking that her brother’s wife’s family were like pigs to her: she did not want to have anything to do with them.
The crushing sense of defeat Tiida felt was almost akin to that dating back to the days of the plague of flies, the dogs’ heads and the villagers’ claim that her husband’s conversion to Islam was a curse. She wished she had not come. She felt encumbered by the bad news she had to bear, and by the ballast of spurious negotiating power and insulted personal charm she had to jettison. She heard Serenity ask again how they had finally won the car, and she felt angry. He was just asking for the sake of softening the hard edges of her defeat.
“Conversion Committee politics. Heads rolled, and the new man cleared the backlog during the euphoria following his victory,” she said, languidly thinking about Nakatu. She had probably foreseen the defeat, and that was why she had refused to come along.
Tiida’s visit only served to highlight Serenity’s almost impossible financial position. Where was the money going to come from? He had a sneaking feeling that Hajj Gimbi could be of help, but how could he go to him after all he had already done? Serenity was like a viper eyeing a juicy rabbit: in order to swallow it, he would have to break his own jaws and suffer the pain of ingesting the animal and of realigning his jaws afterward. Was he ready to take the risk? Serenity felt he was, but how was he going to broach the issue? There were also more worrying considerations: What if Hajj’s friends got fed up this time and asked Serenity to do something grisly in return? What if they asked him to transfer big amounts of union money to secret accounts? Serenity was tormented for weeks.
Nowadays, when he joined his cronies at the gas station, he spent long periods of time brooding, saying nothing, responding late to jokes and exhibiting a surly absentmindedness that annoyed his friends.
“I never knew that treasurers slept during the day and counted money during the night,” Mariko, a Protestant friend who talked little himself but won most card games, teased. They all laughed, Serenity too.
Hajj Gimbi started talking about his pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina five years back. As he talked he became very animated, as if each sentence brought him closer and closer to the glowing heart of the pilgrimage and its significance to him: “People were like grains of sand on a gigantic plain!”
“And all dressed in white!” Serenity wondered aloud. He felt alive for the first time in weeks. He pictured angels milling around on some celestial plain.
“Tell us, what does it look like in Rome?” Hajj asked.
“I wish I knew,” Serenity said.
“Tell us about all those women in short dresses who mill around anxiously waiting to see the pope,” Hajj pressed on, smiling mischievously.
“Well …”
“By the way, why don’t you go and find out? We could always use eyewitness accounts. Buy a camera and take some nice colored pictures for your cronies,” Hajj suggested, to immediate corroboration from the others.
“Money,” Serenity said uneasily, to the roar of laughter.
“There is always some obstacle, money or whatever. Look, your pilgrimage c
omes only once in …”
“Twenty-five years,” Serenity said.
“Yes, twenty-five years. Ours is annual. What will you tell your grandchildren? That you failed to go because of money? There is always money, but chances come only once in a lifetime.”
Everyone agreed.
“I have an idea,” Hajj said, his little eyes sparkling.
“Yes?” Serenity jerked forward. It was clear that he wanted it to be a secret between him and Hajj, but Hajj was no lover of secrets. He had nothing to hide, he always said.
“Apply for three thousand rolls of cloth from the government textile mill at Jinja in the name of the union. Sell the cloth on the black market, and fly ‘Hajjati’ to Rome with you,” he said, referring to Padlock. They all laughed.
“Money,” Serenity said unhappily.
“Money!” Hajj Gimbi zoomed in ironically with his booming voice.
“Money,” the other two cronies said together.
“To be on the safe side, apply for five thousand rolls. Don’t worry about money. You only have to sell the delivery note to the black-marketeers. They do the rest.”
“The State Research Bureau …,” Serenity said, half with levity, half with genuine fear.
“The State Research?” Hajj asked, as if he had never heard of them.
“The State Research!” The others took up the joke, and the laughter too.
“You are a real leader, with many delusions of grandeur,” Hajj said to Serenity. “Those boys are too busy doing more important things to notice you. Ha, ha, ha, haaaa!”
Like a good husband and a sensible man, Serenity kept everything secret. Padlock, stung by his apparent indifference to her anxiety, was pressuring him to listen to her and do something before it was too late.
“You have not even registered!” he countered as he wondered whether the next morning State Research boys were going to drag him out of his office, jam him into the trunk of a waiting car and take him to a forest, or a river, or a filthy cell.
“Do something.”
“We will see,” he said.
“ ‘We will see’ is not good enough. You know that.”
“We will see,” he reiterated for the umpteenth time. “I said, we will see.”
General Amin played his cards well. He knew that if he allowed Catholics total access to subsidized government-priced dollars from the Bank of Uganda, he would lose vital political capital. He wanted Catholics, for once, to acknowledge his importance in their life, and especially in this pilgrimage. He devised three quotas. In the first quota, he placed five thousand people, who received the necessary travel documents and dollars and were made to understand that they were the country’s official representatives. Unofficial government sources gradually let it be known that there were extra places for those who could secure foreign currency on their own; this was the second quota, composed of the elite, people with both money and connections.
The government sources warned that if any pilgrims sold government-priced dollars on the black market, they would be arrested and their passports torn to pieces. Catholics felt insulted that the government could suspect them of doing something so base. Serenity was exhilarated, Padlock dejected. The chosen five thousand were going without having to sell the clothes on their backs to pay for foreign currency! Being among the chosen ones, Serenity was in seventh heaven. The deal had paid off: he had sold the delivery note and secured the cash, and the buyers had neither pointed guns at him nor pushed him into the trunk of a car! It had been a revelation. In gratitude, he had bought Hajj Gimbi a very large goat with teats hanging almost to the ground. He also spent a weekend with Nakibuka. He bought her clothes and gifts for her children, but he did not tell her how he had made the money.
Serenity boarded an Alitalia jumbo jet with three hundred forty-nine other passengers one late afternoon. The most impressive sight he remembered was a view of Lake Victoria as they rose in the air: the lake resembled an oblong pool of quicksilver. The next morning he was in Rome, reborn, his life transformed. The city was alive, sighing and heaving under the crush of pilgrims from the world over, the ubiquitous tourists and its own dwellers.
Serenity was very interested in ancient sites, the Colosseum, the museums, the cathedrals, anything that could breathe new life into the characters he had encountered in the history lessons of his childhood. The Renaissance, the Reformation, the early Church and the Roman Empire all came alive now in a living context that linked past and present. Serenity felt strangely at home.
He stood in crowded St. Peter’s Square. Filled with wonder, Serenity ate holy bread from the hands of the aging pope, marvelling at his hooked nose and the glamour that still failed to dispel the dimness of his features, and found it hard to believe that so delicate a creature could be the head of so vast and powerful a corporation as the Catholic Church. What did this man know about him? What did he know about Catholics in Uganda? What did he know about the people who took him most seriously? Apart from feeding them dogma, what had he really ever done for them? Yet he influenced their lives as though he knew them personally!
In Serenity’s mind, the man resembled an armadillo that controlled his territory from underground, crawling occasionally to the surface, carapaced in dogma, to be seen and to confirm that he was still in control. Loaded with layers of exquisite garments and priceless jewelry, this monstrous armadillo seemed to have emerged from his hole ready to shine. He spoke with the calculated sloth of those assured of an eternal audience, and his magnificent raiment had the gleam of garments washed clean in the blood of imperial power. The holy armadillo moved with arthritic grace. His body breathed the air of sublime indifference. His demeanor oozed with the contradiction of preaching sadistic negation of the body while bedecking oneself in gold. He operated in the supremely detached ambience of holy dictators, tyrants who feared nothing, imperial despots who controlled the lives of hundreds of millions of people far away.
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 breastfeedi
ng. 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.
Abyssinian Chronicles Page 29
