Many theories sprang up. Some said Padlock had been eaten by a stray leopard, and her polished bones were hanging a forked tree somewhere in this forest. Some said a stray pride of lions had eaten her flesh, and a pack of hyenas had ground her bones in their powerful jaws. Some said she was carried away by the river on the other side of the parish. Some said she fell into a secret pit. Somebody even suggested that she had gone to heaven on the way back from hearing mass.
Serenity’s depression increased after the failure to find his wife. As a distraction, he became fascinated with water. He remembered the Tiber River in Rome, where Romulus and Remus had lived. He talked about water and bodies of water all the time. Of all the theories flying around about Padlock’s disappearance, he believed that she had been swallowed by a river. Cornered by her lover’s obsession, Nakibuka encouraged Serenity to visit the shores of Lake Victoria on a regular basis. They started going every weekend, frequenting certain fishing points where they watched canoes go out to lay their nets. They would sit and listen to the waves and the winds as they sang and wept. The fact that Nakibuka was his wife’s aunt helped bring the image of his wife closer. Serenity started thinking about the Virgin Mary.
At first he had adored her, and even asked her to mother him, long before he found his own Virgin, his Padlock. In order to deal with the pain, he united the two virgins, and the belief grew in him that his virgin was going to return to him via the lake. She was the crocodile his late aunt had talked about. She was going to emerge from the lake’s canyoned depths to soothe his aching heart. The miracle-working demons of religion Serenity had resisted for the better part of his life plagued him now, teasing his mind, twisting his dreams, enhancing their allure by insidiously referring to the miraculous way he had got the money to finance the pilgrimages. Nakibuka would see him lost in thought, his soul on the waves, combing the horizon for the virgin, and she was happy that he was not alone. He no longer read his books. The long wait for Godot had ended in disillusionment. The holes that had not been plugged could no longer be patched up by imported fictions. Serenity’s world had narrowed down to the house, the cows, the road and the pilgrimages to the lake.
Hajj Gimbi tried to help, but Serenity no longer said much. He was back to the taciturn days after the mysterious tall woman had pushed him away and healed his obsession. On occasion, he saw the returning Indians: they were like shadows to him now, beings from an alien planet. He no longer feared or disliked them; they simply did not exist for him. Nakibuka was the only person who could reach him. She had moved into Padlock’s dream house in the village. She now looked after the few remaining shitters who were not in boarding school. On a number of occasions, Serenity made Nakibuka swear that she would look after his children like her own. She did, not caring whether the shitters liked her or not. Serenity started going to the lake every other day. Nakibuka could not accompany him all the time because of the duties of running the home. Alone, he felt braver: he was discovering the world and molding it through his own words and vision. He also knew that his wife would reveal herself on the waves only when he was alone. The reunion would definitely begin as a private affair, and he believed that each solitary excursion would be the last.
One afternoon, he realized that he was lost. He simply could not remember where he was. He started plodding through the bulrushes, headed for a fishing point on the other side of the lake. He went deeper into the marshes, the saw-edged grass cutting his skin. Leeches leaped out of the water, bit him and drank till they fell off, bloated with his blood. At one point, he nearly fell down a slippery rock into the lake. His destination seemed to recede as he approached it. His clothes were sodden, and his shoes full of water. Mud was sucking at his feet. Locusts were gnawing at his thorax and stomach. The sun was going down, hovering dangerously on the horizon; it seemed about to fall into the lake and drown.
His attention was quickly snatched by a floating piece of wood, no, a floating desert island, jagged, ribbed, magnificent in its desolate antiquity. He was back in Rome with Romulus and Remus and the Wolf. Were those jagged edges not the erect teats of the wolves which had reared him at his father’s house? Suddenly the sharp edges multiplied, as though there were many wolves floating upside down, erect teats provocatively exposed. He could hardly tear his eyes from the bizarre spectacle. A gigantic flash or wave, or both, burst, blurring everything. It lifted as arrows of water pierced his eyes and washed over him.
The huge crocodile had caught up with him. He had taken to patrolling this territory only recently, because a group of smaller males had tried to oust him in a little coup, which he had nipped in the bud. Now he took his time combing the shore, overturning a canoe or two whenever possible, making sure that he was the sole ruler of his territory. It was a month now since his last decent meal. This would be one of the fifty large meals he would have this year — not bad for a creature fifty-eight years old, seven meters long and so many hundreds of kilograms in body weight. He opened his gigantic jaws, and Serenity saw pink and red kaleidoscopes amidst the boiling wavelets. For a moment, everything was froth, boiling waves and furious action. Three final images flashed across Serenity’s mind as he disappeared into the jaws of the crocodile: a rotting buffalo; Nakibuka, his longtime lover, who was also the aunt of Padlock, his missing wife; and the mysterious woman who had cured his obsession with tall women. In that final instant, he suddenly realized where his wife’s bones lay, but because the ancient art of communicating with the dead through dreams had been killed off in the family by Catholicism, Western education and abject neglect, Serenity’s knowledge did not leave the belly of the crocodile, not even when it died ten years later.
Hajj Gimbi and Nakibuka believed that he had drowned, and they commissioned fishermen to look for his body and notify the police as soon as it was found. However, Serenity’s was to be a cenotaph burial too. The body was never found, and to their last days, Hajj Gimbi and Nakibuka could not agree as to how Serenity had met his end.
After the death of the despots, it dawned on me that sooner rather than later, I had to make a decision about what I wanted to do with my life. I still had a few thousand dollars, which I could spend on hand-to-mouth living or on some investment. I took the latter option and, throwing all caution to the wind, got in contact with a man who sold European passports. He was reliable, but expensive as hell. He was generally called Chicken Shit, because he always said to people who complained about his prices that you cannot make chicken soup from chicken shit. He prided himself on delivering quality product, as opposed to those who sold cheap, fake-looking booklets which led many customers into trouble with the police. I needed a good passport in order to start infiltrating Dutch society. I was already thinking about getting a job in order to practice the language and earn a little money as I worked out my next moves. Chicken Shit offered me a choice of becoming a British, American, Spanish or Portuguese citizen! A few months in the country, and by the power of money, I had qualified to become a European! It was hard to take in at first, but eventually it dawned on me that it was soon going to happen. The powers that had parcelled out Africa among themselves at the Berlin Conference in 1884 had done it without even stepping foot on the continent. Me, I had travelled all the way to Europe, paid for everything I used and now was about to pay for my citizenship. I realized that what I was about to do was not the most extraordinary occurrence — I was just going to become one of the ants in the subterranean passages of the underworld which kept much of the economy going — but I still had a few questions. Would I exist in any particular country’s records? Of course I would: Chicken Shit was using existing particulars for the booklets. What would I do if the police needed a birth certificate? He said he could provide one quite easily. First I had to choose which nationality I wanted. I chose to become British.