Young Serenity could hear himself swearing, through clattering teeth, that he would leave no stone unturned until he conquered, or was conquered by, this woman. He could feel mud sucking at his feet and locusts nibbling at his stomach. What was he getting into? She was not the model of beauty his father promoted, but he felt determined to go his own way. Infected by her solitude, or rather his solitude kindled by hers, he sealed himself off from the excess of booze, dance and funk which the wedding had become. Now she was gone, like an apparition. He could hear his friend laughing hard. The friend knew both the girl and her aunt, and did not think much of the girclass="underline" she was too intense, too uptight for his liking. He would have gone on to make a lot of fun of her but for the intensity in Serenity’s eyes.
For days Serenity could not excavate the image of the ex-nun from the caverns of his mind. He spent long periods of time recapturing the contours of her face, the lines of her figure and the depth of her solitude, all in vain. At the wedding he had drunk only one beer, but it seemed as if he had emptied a whole crate and that her image, or what he thought to be her image, was just a drunken man’s delusion. His friend’s caution and apparent lack of enthusiasm unsettled him. The only thing that kept him going was the feeling that he was on the right track. His friend, with a wry smile, agreed to help him.
The ex-nun’s aunt had already seen the remarkable transformation on her niece’s face. The cadaverous downward warp was gone, consumed by the slow fire of unwinding revelation, replaced with the thinly disguised expectant visage of someone on the verge of great things. Told of the prospective suitor, the young woman’s aunt expressed tactical surprise at the news because she did not know the young man involved, but she was happy. Her niece needed a new start, a new purpose in life, intimations of which seemed to be hanging, like a cloud of locusts, in the air.
For Sr. Peter herself, the vision of the young man’s face clarified the significance of her name for the first time. She was the rock on which a new family, a new church, was going to be founded. She could feel the poles sinking into the bedrock. She could see the structure going up, coloring the firmament with its magnificence. Her death to the convent, to nunly life, had enabled this resurrection.
As Serenity’s go-between and her aunt negotiated off and on for weeks, Padlock felt not a shadow of a doubt about her future role. All she needed was God’s confirmation of the same, and Serenity’s commitment. There was the matter of his concubine and of his child of sin: St. Jude would look into that. After ninety days the answer came. There was nothing to stop her.
Pedaling back from the stream, Serenity sighed when he remembered the ninety days of hell during which he wondered whether Padlock had turned down his marriage proposal. There was a pattern to his life. He always seemed to be the last person informed about matters concerning him. Things always happened when he no longer had power to change them. Now what was he to do with his wife’s life story? Knowing her background was just going to make him sympathize with her even when he should not.
It was dark, and the swamp was pumping its fetid smell over the valley, suspended in the air like a wet blanket. In it one could discern the mingled odors of mud, fish, decomposing grass, wildflowers and frogs. Mosquitoes and other biting insects had upped their sorties on this bicycle-cleaning intruder. Serenity rode home, dead to the world. The trees and bushes along the path took on ghostly forms and grotesque dimensions which rattled memories of childhood stories of witches and magic from the cobwebby rafters of his mind. His father’s house was in total darkness. The old man was never home early in the evening: he went off to see friends and to look for female company. The period when the place crawled with no less than twenty people at any one time seemed too far away to rattle into consciousness. It seemed as if a storm had come, swept everybody into the swamps, pinned their heads under the murky water and drowned them en masse, leaving behind this grandiose pod which echoed with the Fiddler’s tunes.
He was nearing home now. Through the window he could see his wife leaning over the table, scrutinizing something. A letter had arrived from the city, laden with the Uganda Postal Union logo: he had been offered a job! The sixties were going to be his peak time: first he had gotten married, then he’d had a son, and now he was going to move to the city!
The new wine had, finally, torn the old village bags. The movable parts of the house — the personal effects, the pictures, the wedding gifts, everything needed to start a new life in the city — were compressed into parcels and sullen bundles and shoved into boxes sealed with tape or strangled with string. Wooden chests appeared and, like magic, swallowed the house. Soon only the veteran bed remained, in addition to a stick or two of furniture. All this torrent of activity raged around me, and, like a drowning man, flail as I could, I could not get a grip on it. A stream of people moved in and out of the shrunken house, drinking tea or sipping beer, wishing my parents good luck.
A puke-yellow lorry appeared and swallowed everything. It dawned on me that we were leaving. The house now echoed when one called. But why was I not dressed for the journey? A little crowd had gathered, despite the wet, and they stood in the grass, away from the thick tires, out of range of flying mud kites. It was then that I was told I was staying.
Serenity climbed into the cab. Padlock turned to follow him in. I touched her, smudging her dress. She cringed and, with blinding speed, drove her palm full into my face. I fell back in the mud and, in protest, rolled once or twice. I kicked a few times and then heard the driver’s booming voice lamenting that departures were often accursed affairs. Mud had flown onto Padlock’s dress. She raised her foot, the yellowish sole flashing, as if she were going to plant it full in my face. Serenity’s voice rose, and Padlock seemed to wake from a dream. The raised foot was placed on the steel foothold, and with my father’s help she got into the cab. The flash of that sole sobered me up. I sat in the mud, and at that moment smoke blew in my face. The truck growled and groaned like a mortally wounded animal. By the time I opened my eyes it was gone, two thick wet trails the only mark of its passing.
I was mud-soaked, like a piglet after a pretty good wallow. Grandma picked me up. Rain broke out. She lifted me, mud and all, and carried me to her house. It was not the first time that she had rescued me or watched me suffer. She was the only witness to my first thrashing, when Padlock punished me for insinuating my precocious curiosities into the very adult matter of her latrine functions. It was all because of babies: I wanted to know where they came from, but she would not tell me. I knew that she knew the answer. I decided to investigate and surprise her with my knowledge. For starters, I followed her to the latrine that day.
When the door closed behind her, leaving four inches of viewing space underneath, I lay down on my stomach, chin in the creepers, and amid rumblings, gassings and strainings I saw large cylinders appear, get soaked in dust-particled light and disappear down the rectangular hole. I got access to the hairy fleshiness underneath the stomach, and a magic flash of pink reminiscent of nasal tunnels convinced me that my research was going in the right direction. A baby was being born! Although I was seized by the urge to rush in and warn her about what was going to happen, I was too overwhelmed by my curiosity to move. Dust from the grass tickled my nose, but I forced the incipient sneeze back. Now I was thinking: if the baby fell in, it would have to be fished out.… The idea of such filth made my skin creep. Why wasn’t she squatting away from the deadly rectangle? Did she want maggots all over the baby and inside its orifices? She was pushing very hard now, as if a lance of pain were going through her.