Serenity considered disappearing for a week. He could stay in a good hotel, relax and work off his anger, his sadness. He could visit his relatives: he had not seen his sisters in a long time, and this could be the chance to check on them.
It struck him like a bolt of lightning splitting a tree down the middle: Nakibuka! Had the woman not done her best to interest him in her life? Didn’t he, in his heart of hearts, desire her? Had he ever forgotten her sunny disposition, her sense of humor, the confident way she luxuriated in her femininity? The shaky roots of traditional decorum halted him with the warning that it was improper to desire his wife’s relative, but the mushroom of his pent-up desire had found a weak spot in the layers of hypocritical decency and had pushed into the turbulent air of truth, risk, personal satisfaction, revenge. His throttled desire and his curbed sex drive could find a second wind, a resurrection or even eternal life in the bosom of the woman who, with her touch, had accessed his past, saved it and redeemed his virility on his wedding night. Sweat cascaded down his back, his heart palpitated and fire built up in his loins.
The afternoon was laboring, hotly, toward evening. It was time for the departmental meeting and the weekly review of accounts. He was the first to arrive in the boardroom. He drank two glasses of water quickly and looked out the window. Where was everybody? He wanted to leave as soon as the bleeding meeting ended. He had to look for Nakibuka’s house, and that worried him. Impatient, alone, angry, he left the room and rushed back to his office to look in his diary. He hoped he had her address. What if she had moved? He perversely imagined Boy going through the same motions, scheming, debating, wondering. What if Boy was already in the Command Post making his Miss Singer laugh by praising her love bombs and her grammatical pools of silver? Eddies of anger washed over eddies of sadness. He thought about returning home in the hope of finding Boy in the Command Post and teaching him a lesson, but unable to figure out exactly what he would do to him in case fate tempted him by placing Boy in his hands, he decided against it. He feared he might lose control as he had when disciplining his son. In the name of discipline he had almost committed murder, and had not liked the experience at all. He had vowed never again to let himself go that way.
Thus, to Nakibuka’s he would go, even if she had moved, even if her man was home, even if he could not spend the night with her. He found her address and smiled half angrily, half sadly. He disliked Hajj Gimbi’s form of polygamy: What was the use of having all the women in one house? Every woman deserved her own house, and it accorded one many more chances of relaxation and escape from the problems, the moods and the quirks of the other women.
Serenity returned to the boardroom. The meeting was already in progress, but it all washed over him. Nothing could interest or irritate him now.
A millstone of anxiety kept my mood oscillating between jubilation and dejection: I was ecstatic at the realization that I had the wits and the discipline necessary to beat opponents larger and meaner than me; I felt oppressed by the irrational fear that Serenity had found out what I had done and was going to do something really terrible to me.
As I pounded groundnuts in a mortar with a wooden pestle polished to a red sheen by years of use, I tried to place myself in Serenity’s shoes. What would I have done? There was the possibility of fighting fire with fire, say, by leaving women’s underwear in my pockets or taking a woman or refusing to pay bills for some time.
Padlock did not strike me as a woman quick to run away; breeders like her rarely did, which meant that she would try her best to find out what was going on before taking any form of action, and despite my part in the drama, and my hatred for this woman, I did not really want her to go. She, in a crude sort of way, represented stability, provided me with a target for my attacks and chances to hone my wits.
As the eldest child in the family, I knew that my position would not change much even if Padlock left and another woman took over. I would most likely still do the shit jobs, wash, clean, cook and fetch water. But I would definitely never allow another woman to beat me, or to make me kneel in front of her. Was Padlock leaving? Was she even contemplating the same? Or was it all in my head?
Suspended in ignorance, Padlock was akin to a door on a single hinge. She acted with the restless and brittle charm of a buffalo with bees in his ears. She thought that Serenity had decided to break with habit for once and had gone straight to his friends without first reporting home, but he was not at the gas station.
I played along, enjoying the panicky rusty-hinge squeak of her voice and the seized storm of alarm which raged in her bosom each time I informed her that Serenity had not yet come back from work. Her sense of alarm was easy to fathom: a decent, reliable man staying away or returning home late meant trouble. Either there was a prominent death in his family, with all concomitant financial hemorrhage, or something nasty had occurred, say, an accident or a mistaken-identity arrest. Serenity was one of those men who informed their wives about their plans and movements and would never go off without sending a message home.
As night fell, Padlock’s face took on the sad expression of a tormented, short-tempered rhino. I fought hard to resist the unfortunate tendency to feel sorry for this woman, because at the center of it all, I wanted her to suffer, to wallow and howl like a bitch in hellish heat.
On the second night, Padlock looked vanquished. The alabaster crust of her face had been replaced by the broken-lined, brittle expression of an adolescent reeling under jilted love. She eyed me with the sneaky, quasi-conspiratorial look of somebody gathering courage to share an ugly secret. Pinned and writhing like a cockroach on a nature-study board, she drew on one’s reluctant supplies of pity. Expressions like “volcanic love” and “mellifluous eyes” rang in my ears, amazing me once again with the magic of their success: at school they turned adolescent hearts and earned me pocket money; now they were turning a despotic system on its head and making a despot dance on the hot spikes of her fears. I found myself appraising Padlock to see whether I had exaggerated too much, but she was too immersed in the cauterizing dust storms of her nightmare to be worth appraising. In writing the letter, I had only had Lusanani and the girl I had intended to give Treasure Island to in mind.
The sight of Serenity entering the compound, bag in hand, sent chills down my spine. His face looked tranquil, as if he had no worry in the world. I could not tell whether he had put two and two together or whether he had bought the stuff wholesale. He responded to my greeting neutrally and entered the library of his fantasies. I waited with bated breath. In the meantime, I noticed that Padlock’s two-day-old stoop had suddenly disappeared, venom had returned to her face and there was an angry snap in her gait. I felt I had done the right thing: this woman was not going to change. If anything, my struggles with her had just begun.
It was evident that there was trouble in the air. For once, the connecting door was locked and gagging rags peeped like petticoats from the space underneath. Serenity had given nothing away all evening, content to hide behind Godot as we ate. Padlock had shimmered all evening with a barely disguised rage, which had for once made her night-prayer tremolos sound faulty. For the first time in her married life, she dropped Serenity’s plate as she poured soup on it, and she could barely bite back some form of adulterated curse. From behind the papery walls of Godot, Serenity did not move a muscle. He was too busy ruminating on the events of the last three days and two nights to mind his wife’s tension.