One morning while I was kneeling down to deliver courtyard worship, I noticed that something was sticking out from Padlock’s behind, as though a Quink ink bottle was stuck in her ass underneath her clothes. I knew that this was not a joke, because if Padlock had any sense of humor, it was not of this kind. So what was it? The bulge was too deliberate to be an oversight. So what was going on? Titillated by this rare piece of drama, my spirits catapulted me from my sullenness, and I got the tone right the first time. Padlock, anticipating resistance as usual, was startled by my humility. I quickly moved on to my usual tasks, washed and prepared to leave for school.
Padlock was the family banker, and since I had asked Serenity for money to buy exercise books a few days before, I had to go to her to collect it. This was normal procedure, because Serenity asked us to plan ahead. “Money does not grow on trees,” he often said, warning us that he needed time to get it.
I found Padlock in the sitting room. She said nothing when I told her what I wanted, but just turned round and headed for the bedroom, where she kept her purse. And then I saw it: a patch as big as a baby’s mouth, red as a ruby! I could hardly take my eyes off her behind. It was not that I had never seen blood before; no, I had seen it many times, and I also knew how it smelled. I concluded that a person this careful had to be in grave danger if she was leaking blood like this. I opened my mouth to alert her, but at the last moment I coughed instead. I had to kill those words. It was unwise to alert a dictator before she had given you what you needed. What if, in shame, she changed her mind and refused to surrender the money? I could not risk getting into trouble with teachers, and ruining a fine day at school, by doing something the consequences of which could only be guessed at. Wasn’t I a custodian of Aunt Tiida’s secret? Didn’t I know too well that silence was golden? Would this new secret be too hard to keep? I didn’t think so.
Joy swept over me: now I had something to blackmail my enemy with. I could use the secret against her in future. I could definitely use it to stop her from hammering me. How would I go about it? It was real blood, her very own despotic blood. Let her sit in it a little longer while I thought out a master plan to end my miseries. She could smear the house with it. She could retouch the red dates on the calendar with it. That would advertise the fact that despots were also human and that they bled when you cut them.
Next time around it would be Serenity’s turn. He was bound to bleed from the front, in the fly area. He could spray the courtyard, the toilet and the entire neighborhood with it. He could even spray Hajj Gimbi’s lime-green Kawasaki motorcycle, the gas station and some of the passing cars.
When I received the money, I did my best not to betray myself by recoiling from her touch. I had the suspicion that her fingers smelled of blood and that the money carried a nauseating whiff. Her fingers were damp and cold, which worried me a bit because Grandma had said that coldness of hands and feet was caused by anemia. How anemic was this woman? Obviously not enough to die before I returned from school, I concluded. I sniffed the money: it had no noxious smell on it.
As I walked to school I tried to imagine what was happening down Padlock’s pants. Was she bleeding like a headless cock? If so, what a tough nut she was, hemorrhaging and yet acting as if everything was under control! This should have been the right time to whine, yet she was not giving any inkling that she was in pain. Pregnant women undergoing hemorrhage used to feel alarmed, and call for help. I remembered that cocks used to kick and twitch as they bled to death: Was this woman feigning indifference? Padlock was impervious to pain, I concluded. It was the reason she was so handy with her guava switches. I was then gripped by curiosity. I wanted to find out if Padlock was incapable of feeling any pain at all. What would Loverboy have to say about that? Maybe it was the reason he liked her so much.
The day conspired against me by thrusting me onto the wings of irrepressible joy. I did very well in class, and during break time I found a ten-shilling note in the grass behind the classrooms nearest the playground. This was a rare stroke of luck, for I hardly ever found anything.
I looked at the note carefully to ascertain that it had not been deliberately planted there by a sufferer of boils or some other communicable disease, to be picked up along with the sacrifice, for ten shillings was a lot of money in the early seventies. Padlock would lash the skin off your back for losing it; Serenity might do the same thing.
By way of celebration, I called together two friends and bought them buns and sodas. As we ate I worked out where to store the rest of my booty. I would have shared my good fortune with my two most loyal shitters, but did not for fear that they might get so excited they would end up betraying us. In a dictatorship, there was no use getting oneself in trouble over superfluous generosity.
The school day drifted away with the speed of rain clouds chased by hurricane winds. In my exuberance I had forgotten to work out how to use my new knowledge against Padlock. And on the way home I could hardly think deeply. Nevertheless, I was feeling happy when I arrived. My thoughts kept dazzling me. I felt anchored in the glories of my academic capabilities and good luck.
The Padlock who confronted me when I entered the courtyard crushed my exuberance like a dry leaf: she looked like a fortress, her moat alive with piranhas, her drawbridge chained firmly to her castle walls. So she hadn’t bled to death! So she hadn’t smeared anything, even during her most difficult moments! She looked as if she were being eaten alive by so many locusts that the front she presented to the world was moments away from calamitous disintegration.
As though summoned by some worried gods and charged with the laudable task of defrosting the chilly air inside the house, a customer arrived at that moment. She lifted Padlock from the chilly depths of isolated suffering. Padlock asked how she was, how her children were doing, if her husband’s van was running again, and if … I felt totally useless.
City women, like this specimen, operated in their own hemisphere, even the pregnant and the ugly ones. This woman, whose stomach, thighs and buttocks had been crushed by too much childbirth, was the type who would have badgered Grandma and me to give her love potions and all the dubious charms insecure women resorted to in a bid to win back the spark of bygone days. Here, however, she did not even look twice at the short-trousered classroom terror whose exercise books were wrapped in old newsprint and glowed with the teacher’s red marks of academic excellence.
Padlock continued to shower the woman with attention. She rose and turned her back to me for the first time that afternoon. She was headed for the Command Post to take the woman’s measurements. I saw the patch. Was this a new one? It looked larger, more dangerous, and in need of immediate attention.
Suddenly, I lost control of the words I had imprisoned and barricaded in my head. Suddenly, as if the words were fed up with all the cowardly silence of the day, the sentences came out feetfirst like babies at a breech birth. Suddenly, I heard myself say, “You are going to die. Aren’t you aware that you’ve been bleeding all day … Ma?”
More words threatened to gush out, but I barricaded them with hands on my throat. Padlock stopped dead, her head thrust forward and then skyward as if yanked by giant hands. She pirouetted with the agility and grace of the dancers at her wedding. Her face creased into a thousand wrinkles. The customer’s face, which had gone pop-eyed when I first spoke, fell with the relief of a commuted death sentence, and her eyes twinkled mischievously as she saw the patch for herself. With all manner of nunly and girlish shames mincing her, all vestiges of self-control gone, Padlock snapped. Something like a tree trunk split in two by lightning flew sideways and hit me with such force that the lights went out.