Normally, before entering a new house, one slaughtered a goat and sprinkled some of the blood on the walls. If one could not afford a goat, a few cocks sufficed. The owner of the chronically sick village car had sacrificed a cock to it: he chopped the head off and tossed the headless bird onto the roof. It slid down the windshield with spectacular twitches and bled to death on the hood.
When I asked Grandpa if it was true that the church had killed the priest, the woman and the catechist and maimed the rest, he only asked, “What would you think if you were (a) a fanatic Catholic, (b) a skeptic, (c) a pagan?” “Truth has many sides,” I concluded after a long moment of reflection.
“You will make a good lawyer,” he replied.
School brought me into direct competition with other pupils. I did very well. Thanks to Grandpa, I already knew the multiplication tables by heart and I could read and write, though my handwriting was horrible.
Dull pupils often got into trouble, but so did the bright ones. Large boys, some of them sprouting beards, passed me chits to scribble answers on and pass back. I got caught a few times, and the teacher caned me.
The large boys, whom we called “grandfathers,” distributed nicknames. Mine was Sperm of the Devil because, according to Dummy A, only a devil could know the multiplication tables by heart and spell so well at my age. He wrote “Spam ov Devill” on a piece of paper and pasted it on my bench with a knot of jackfruit sap as large as a fist. I got punished, but the nun commented on the author’s appalling spelling, which was some consolation to me.
I tried to induce Dummy B, another large boy, to punish Dummy A for me, but he refused. Dummy A was notorious for retaliation. He could lock you in a cupboard and make you beg for release. He could sit on your stomach and spit in your face. He could thrust you inside an unwashed porridge boiler, or threaten to break your leg in a game of football. We were all afraid of him.
One morning I heard two young teachers saying that bullying was pure blackmail. I decided to try it myself. Before the teacher entered the classroom, I proclaimed, “My grandmother is a witch doctor. Only one word and one caterpillar thrown in the fire at midnight, and the penis of the person who wrote ‘Spam ov Devill’ on my desk will wilt and grow hairs all over it.” I spat thrice in my palm and rubbed my crotch. A cloud of gritty silence descended on the class. At lunchtime, the culprit took me behind the toilets, making me fear the worst, and confessed. I let him roast for some time, funk escaping from the wet patches that were his armpits. We made a deal. I acquired my first bodyguard.
Now it was the girls’ turn. Since they had no penises to be turned into caterpillars, they thought they were inviolable. They would shout “Spam ov Devill,” laugh and scamper away. Dummy A seized their books, hid their netballs and threatened a few, without much success.
One morning six girls surrounded me. I spat in my palms and addressed their ringleader, a large girl with breasts the size of my head. “You have a man,” I bluffed. “You will give birth to a limbless creature, and your breast milk will turn to pus.” Contrary to expectation, I was not mobbed or booed. Milkjar just crumbled, like a lump of clay under a millstone. She started to cry. I panicked. I ran toward the blind side of the church, but I was caught by the headmaster. Held by the wrist, I was thrust amidst Milkjar’s cronies. I pleaded self-defense, and explained that I had not meant anyone any harm. Milkjar was pathetic: she could not stop crying. The headmaster thrust a stick in her hand and ordered her to beat me. She dropped the stick as though it were a hairy caterpillar. The headmaster dismissed me with a stiff warning never to make penis or breast threats again, and gave me two strokes with the cane for good measure. I was furious.
I expected Grandma to side with me and condemn my tormentors. I was wrong. “Never stoop to their level, you hear?”
“Stooping! A girl large enough to birth me bullies me, and giving her a taste of her own medicine is beneath my dignity!”
“There is a part of the story you have not told me,” she concluded. She was right. I had excised the witch doctor part from the story.
One person haunted my early school years: Santo the madman. He was quiet, harmless and as stealthy as a shadow. He always wore a clean white shirt and khaki trousers and never reeked of funk like Dummy A. Sometimes he wandered around, counting the fingers of his hands as if he were putting the final touch to a mathematical calculation. No one bothered him, which was rare, what with the many large, bored boys around. The teachers had warned everybody of the dire consequences — many hot canes and the task of uprooting two thick mango stumps with a hoe — if anybody was nabbed harassing Santo.
We envied Santo his handwriting, a fine, leaning cursive, and his arithmetical capabilities. Teachers often said that if we could write half as well as Santo did, they would reward us. Before going home, we wiped all the blackboards clean, but every morning we would find the legend KYRIE ELEISON, KYRIE ELEISON, CHRISTE ELEISON on every blackboard in the school. The spelling was always immaculate, the display the same in all classrooms. It was said that Santo was a genius and that he had gone mad just before leaving for Rome on a four-year scholarship to Urban University. He was destined to be the first priest from our area. The celebrations to mark his departure had lasted five days. Fr. Mulo (a corruption of Moreau), who was Fr. Lule’s successor, was going to take him to the airport. That morning a fire woke everybody up. Santo had poured paraffin on his luggage, his bed, his curtains, and torched everything. He never said a word again. All efforts to make him talk, including a few, early attempts at torturing him, failed.
Sometimes he came to school for food. Sometimes desperate boys passed him pieces of paper loaded with difficult sums. Sometimes he helped them out; sometimes he just chewed the papers. The clever ones left complex questions on the board, and if they were lucky, by the next morning the answers would be there next to the legend. It might also happen that the answers would come days later. Some guessed that he had a spare set of keys, others that he just got in through the classroom window.
On a number of occasions, I woke up very early and ran to school, hoping to catch Santo writing on the blackboard or climbing out of the window. I failed. I never solved the riddle of how he got in and out.
The baby business slowed as my primary school years passed. The birthrate plummeted in the villages. Most young men and women succumbed to the dusky seductions of the towns and the city. I could not blame them. They looked different when they returned: they were larger, richer, smarter, and had loads of dirty stories to tell. These exiles no longer made me tremble. They were just poor copies of Uncle Kawayida, and their stories were often pale shadows of his exciting narrations. I no longer listened to them. As a result, I spent much time playing in Serenity’s house, in the trees and all over the village. I frequently climbed into my favorite tree to scan the horizon. I sometimes espied people cutting papyrus reed, which they used to make carpets and roofing. I watched them standing in the water, braving leeches and water snakes, and cutting, cutting, cutting, careful not to get lacerated by strips of papyrus as sharp as Grandma’s double-edged razor blades. I loved watching Mpande Hill. Now and then I caught sight of a bicycle race in progress, one of those suicidal dashes made by the hard boys from the villages. They were always won by the boys who ferried coffee to the mill, as they were the only ones who could brake a bicycle with their bare heels. I participated in one such race, riding pillion for a friend: it nearly cost me a foot. I was banned from the races then because the boys feared attracting Grandpa’s wrath.