Matters moved from bad to worse. She refused to go to the hospital. All the shames of her past gushed back. She became a sinner earning her rightful punishment for straying and rebelling for so long. She became so ashamed of herself that she could hardly bear to look in the mirror. She hated the burden of her fame and influence. When she locked the door to her room, the whole world invaded. She could see some people laughing at her, some sympathizing, some pitying her, some totally indifferent. All the people she had worked with at the market, in the movement, in the war, were there. Her parents and brothers and sisters never left her side. As the first person in the family to catch the plague, she could not bear the shame.
The brigadier took her away for some time and hired nurses to look after her, but she felt like a fish out of water; she wanted to return to her house. She was brought back one night, and she did not leave the house again. The house stank with the heat of fever and the fumes of green-black diarrhea when she became too weak to wash her things. At the same time, she refused all help. When the few people she wanted to see dropped in, she loaded the air with bottled perfumes and hot incense, and from behind the curtain, she said firmly that everything was fine. The fire in her bowels and the talons in her flesh were nothing compared with the raging inferno in her brain. She could no longer bear to look at her children: she felt she had betrayed and shamed and stigmatized them forever. She would hear them moving round the house, handling pans with great care, running the tap as quietly as possible, and burn with sorrow. She no longer prepared their food for fear that she might revolt them or pass on to them her horrible disease. She wished they could bang the pans and break the cups and run the taps full blast and play loud music. She wished they could piss on their beds and shit in front of her and vomit in her lap as of old. But now only her stenches rattled the roof and terrorized the ventilators. Now the children tiptoed round the house as though a leopard were lurking behind the cupboard. These new changes made her burn with the caustic fires of regret. In her chosen solitude, she wished she had been conventional and malleable enough to marry early and lead an obscure life and meet a banal death. She would close her eyes and wish she were the Virgin Mary flying to heaven without leaving a trace of her life on earth. She passionately wanted to erase herself from the face of the earth, from the annals of the village, from the heads of all who knew her. She could see her grave next to the refurbished ones of her parents, and wished she could just disappear through the roof and strike everyone dumb with disbelief. She was haunted by the feeling that she had let everyone down. All the evils of guilt the parish priest and her parents had inculcated in her invaded and smothered her in their sulfurous blaze.
The next time I went to see her, she refused to open the door. She had already sent the children to their fathers. She was determined to go through her last days on her own. From behind closed doors and curtains, she said that I should understand. She wanted me to remain with a certain image of her: “Son, I am a skeleton out of the Church’s devil books.”
“I don’t mind even if you looked like the Devil himself.”
“I never did anything right,” she said dryly.
“You have helped countless people. You fought for freedom, for common good. You sacrificed yourself in many ways. What more could you have done?”
“All that does not matter, son.”
“It is what really matters. Am I hearing you, or is it somebody else speaking?”
“Maybe I am losing my mind, son.”
“I am going to get an axe and break this door down. I have already contacted your best friend, Teopista. She is going to help you personally. First we have to take you to the doctor.”
She did not object to this woman; she had come from the same village, and both families knew each other well.
“No, I am not going back to the doctor. Not with all those people watching.”
“They are going to die one day; why do you worry so much about them? We will cover you up and walk you to the car.”
I kept remembering the red-ink-patch day and my belief that Padlock was bleeding to death. The thought that Aunt was oozing to death almost paralyzed me. Why wasn’t she blaming anyone? She believed she was responsible for everything. Looking at all this misery, Dad’s family history of dying violent deaths seemed glorious. It seemed more meaningful than this diabolical, slow disintegration of everything one has been. Faced with the decomposition of beauty, the eclipsing of good memories, the trashing of fortitude and the disintegration of dignity in a pool of futile suffering, any other death seemed better than this torture rack of poisoned afflictions.
It was total mayhem. Padlock and all the rest of the family arrived in force. Padlock looked haunted by her own prophecy. She firmly believed that God had spoken through her, although the physical deterioration of her sister shocked her. Kasawo was moved too, but she was more interested in what was going to become of Aunt’s business affairs. She started interrogating me about a hundred and one things. She seemed to believe that I had plundered Aunt’s safe, bank account and treasure box. I did not like it, but the fight had been taken out of me. I bent with the wind. I wanted to extract myself from the whole grisly situation, but first I had to see this through.
In her last days, Aunt dreamed and talked many times about snakes. She would scream that her bed was full of snakes, and that a big snake had entered her mouth and was swallowing her intestines. Her helper would stroke her and reassure her that there were no snakes anywhere in the house. It was painful to watch. The woman I had once desired, spied on through a keyhole and felt protective about had gone, leaving behind a skeleton barely covered by rubbery skin. Her eyes were floating partridge eggs. Her nose had shrunken; her lips had tightened like rubber bands around her mouth. The neck was gone, the vertebrae protruding. The arms and legs had dried up. The kneecap was like a stone balancing precariously on high, gale-whipped ground. She jabbered a lot about snakes, but when she recovered from her delirium, she told cheerful stories in a squeaky, scratching voice. She had become a smiling skeleton, a talking bundle of bones. I remembered the skulls on fruit stands I had seen soon after the guerrilla war. They had been removed and taken away by government workers, some for burial, some for preservation in a museum of national history. For me, they had all been dumped inside Aunt’s house, and she was fighting their legacy with the forced demonic smile of the tortured living dead.
On the last day, her friend Teopista took me aside and asked me to fetch a priest. I refused. What was the use? The woman had undergone her purgatory and hell here. If anything, she was a saint who could do without frocked platitudes. But I finally caved in. In the meantime, the brigadier came with some of his relatives. He looked embattled; they looked vengeful. The priest came. In his black clothes, he looked like an undertaker, or a gangster after a painful point-blank execution. The bundle of bones was buried by multitudes. The burial ceremony and its aftermath remained one blur of ungummed images. Aunt Lwandeka had got it right: “Nobody got born thrice.” The virus had denied her a third chance.
Lwendo came to my aid. “You need to go somewhere and sort yourself out, man,” he insisted. “Go to Britain or America for a long holiday. You can afford it.”
“I don’t know anybody there.”
“There are many Ugandans there. Some of our old schoolmates are already there. Go and meet them.”
“No, I want to stay here.” The brigadier had offered me a job on top of pledging to settle his late wife’s business affairs personally.