“Do you know what you’ve done?” This woman knew how to irritate me on all fronts: her pathetic country-western girlie whine, xeroxed from a white nun from her convent days, the same nun from whom she had inherited the little tremolos which she sprinkled piously on the last hymn every night, really got to me. If somebody was going to torture me, I preferred it to be done manfully or womanly, not childishly or girlishly, which made it feel as if I had been spat upon by a five-year-old brat.
“Ma-ma-my liip,” I said, trying to control my fears.
“Do you think you are still in the village, where they do things mindlessly?”
“No-no-nooo,” I replied for lack of a better answer, angry that I had betrayed myself. People didn’t do things mindlessly in the village. On the contrary, they conformed to norms. People did a lot of mindless things in the city but were too pretentious to admit it, and possibly too ashamed of themselves to face the fact. In the village Grandma or Grandpa would have told me straight away that the glittering thing was just a bloody headboard for a bloody bed, wooden, veneered, period. Here, in the jungle of pretensions and despotisms, adults acted dumbly, explained nothing, and at the same time believed they were doing a wonderful job. In the meantime, Padlock twisted my lip and slapped me again.
“Do you know what that bed cost?”
I kept quiet. My lip got twisted. Colored dribble mixed with tears ran down my chin.
“Remember this: I am not your grandmother, and I am not going to spoil you like she did. I am going to set you straight. And I am going to hammer sense into your head even if it kills you.”
“Yes, yes, Grandma, Ma.”
“I am tired of your boorish behavior. I am tired of your rotten manners. I am tired of always getting shamed by your behavior, you hear?” A twist of the lip followed each of those statements, her eyes wells of black, yellow, red fires.
“Stop eating like an ox, you hear? Stop eating as though there was no tomorrow. Do you hear me? Stop it, stop it, stop it.”
This was very hard to bear: being reduced to the voracity of a healthy ox in a wire-thin voice was the ultimate insult. The eating habits of city dwellers totally disgusted me, especially when their deficiencies were veneered with brittle respectability. In the village you ate your fill, and more food was forced on you; all that on top of the sugarcanes, the jackfruit and the pawpaws eaten between meals. Here, on the contrary, you were expected to starve yourself or eat as little as possible, work like an ox and be proud of it all! If you wanted a sugarcane or a pawpaw or a jackfruit, you had to buy it. Since there was no money to throw around, many people could not afford to buy fruit, yet they acted as if you were supposed to be proud of that too. If city dwellers revelled in the masochism of measly meals, that was their business, but expecting me to adore it like a sacrament and to strive for it like a Holy Grail was totally unacceptable to me, because I knew better. If the despots found it hard to feed their children, it was their problem. Maybe they should not have migrated. Maybe they should have planned their births better. To expect me to play along, and to worship deficiency, was to insult my intelligence, especially when I was working so hard, freeing them from their filth. Consequently, I never forgave Padlock for the scalding transgressions of her tongue, the vicious excesses of her imagery and the despotic myopia of always seeing things from her side.
As more and more strings of bloody saliva dripped through her fingers onto the front of my shirt, Amin’s words dripped through the filters of my brain into my consciousness. Amin had exhorted every citizen to walk tall, to act proud and not to let anyone deny them their rights, their dignity or their self-worth. Amin called on everybody to empower themselves and to excel in their chosen fields. He said that as a boxer, he always won by knockout in order to avoid the traps of biased officiating and the pitfalls of contested victory. He called upon everyone to knock down the obstacles in their way, no matter what, to emerge victorious and remain on top. He reminded us that the axis of power was always shifting, drifting in the opposite direction, and that nothing would remain the same, especially for those who were ready to work hard and realize their ambitions. He said that the main reason most people were not what they wanted to be was because they were too timid, too ready to follow others, too lacking in initiative and too unwilling to take risks. He said that his government was a government of action, a revolutionary government which would wake sleeping dogs and pull everybody along. He asked everyone to get involved. He asked pupils to depose bad teachers, workers to overthrow tyrannical bosses, wives to divorce bad husbands, children to reject bad parents, victims to rise up and take power and the poor to take chances, make money and enjoy the fruits of this country. He reiterated that Uganda was a free country, for free people, where all were free to do what they wanted.
I was in chains, and what was I doing about it? I was bleeding, crying, begging for mercy, allowing injustice to go unchallenged.
If I wanted, I could chin-drop Padlock with the top of my head and crack her jaw. If I dared, I could gouge her eye, break her nose or dislocate her knee with a side-kick. If I had the balls, there were many things I could do to end my suffering. But, like the people Amin talked about, I was not taking any action. In this case I was afraid of Serenity. Would he not kill me for injuring his wife? How was I supposed to unite powerful exhortations of courage, freedom and self-empowerment with the immediate dangers of retaliation from Serenity’s anger? St. Amin, help me. St. Amin, pray for me. St. Amin, overlook my cowardice. St. Amin, deliver me from my fears. With all my attention on Amin, my pain subsided. I started feeling proud that I was not crying out and that I had not pissed in my pants. I was keeping up in my own way.
Amin had said that if you got cheated out of your deserved victory, go home, regroup, train harder than before, return to the arena and deliver the biggest knockout ever seen. He said that for some it took two or three or four trials before the glorious moment came, but that one should never give up, and never accept defeat. I stood very still, apparently impervious to further punishment. I had decided to wait for my chance.
By now Padlock had become annoyed with my lack of attention to her words and her torturings, and with a final shove, she released me. Bloody, like her ink patch of not so long ago, I felt proud. My lip was swollen and devoid of sensation, droopy like a pig’s teat, but I carried it like a flag of courage. Amin had to be proud of me.
I was clever enough to realize that my punishment was not over yet. I cleaned the blood from the floor and left the garden of the Lamp Lady with her billowing skirt, fear ticking like a small device in my head.
Serenity returned from work as usual, handbag in hand, his stiff trousers chiseling the air, a detached look on his face. As he changed and headed for the gas station, my fear was a gong in my chest. He returned with a satisfied look in his eyes, stationed himself in front of the box and began his political soliloquy. Padlock was busy crocheting, driving a long hooked needle into fat thread to produce the creased ropes she needed to make tablecloths.
Had he already got the news? Was he toying with me, spinning out threads of torture, waiting for the right moment to go for the jugular? His face was blank, devoid of any inklings. I drifted in and out of the living room with the creaky walk of a locust, my ears abuzz with Amin’s doctored voice as it poured out of the single television speaker. The house seemed to contract and dilate like a birth canal, awash with the smell of impending disaster. I felt every move terror made, but I was powerless to stop it. I lifted the sheet of false security to peek at the contractions and dilations of impending doom, but lacking the telepathic capacity to drill through the opaqueness of despotic conspiracy, I failed to read the signs. I took refuge in the kitchen, doing my best to bury my trepidation in the gurgling noises of cooking food, and to fight the guilty feeling of unpunished transgression with the comforting fire of the cooking stove. It was all in vain. Even Amin couldn’t bring solace. I wanted an earthquake to arise in the pit of the pagoda and bury us all, but I soon learned that earthquakes, like so many other disasters, only visited places where they were unwanted, and would never come by order or wish.