During the small hours of morning, Padlock tabled her request. Serenity resented the timing. She had not left him any room to maneuver, any chance to go behind her back and give the opportunity to her aunt, whom he was dying to see. He agreed to finance his wife’s journey, especially because the dollars were government-priced. To test her, he said that he was going to borrow the money from Hajj Gimbi, but Padlock raised no objection. As a matter of fact, during her desperate hours, when she feared a plane crash or some other disaster involving Serenity, she had also thought of that alternative. All that was behind her now: she was going!
Everything had fallen into place for Padlock. She left a few days before Mbale, because he still had some things to straighten out. She waited for him at the airport in Rome, showed him the few places she knew by then and warned him about con artists, fake photographers and guides who flashed pilgrims and tried to rob them.
In the air, looking at clouds stacked like cotton wool dropped from great heights onto empty fields, she felt like the Virgin Mary. She could see herself standing in those cottony clouds, globe in hand, eyes raised to heaven, balancing the evanescent with the eternal, heaven and earth, life and death. She was sitting next to the window, and her neighbor did not see the tears of joy furtively trailing down her cheeks. She wanted them to flow and flow and flow, and etch tracks in her flesh, and drench the cottony clouds outside. She pushed her childhood away when it tempted her with negative feelings. She focussed her mind on peace and virtue. As she wheeled across the cottony celestial plains, she espied a small old woman. It was Grandma. She remembered Jesus’ exhortation to settle disputes with neighbors before offering sacrifice. She whispered the end of her grudge and vendetta into the stratosphere. She hoped that Grandma had forgiven her, too.
Padlock had discovered that, locked in this hermetic sarcophagus, flying at a thousand kilometers per hour, it was easy to forgive earthly wrongs. She remembered that in Grandma’s dream she had been standing in front of a buffalo in a lake of sand. She now understood it. Sand was the clouds, and she was the mighty one-ton buffalo. If only she had known that the old woman was only mouthing prophecies! If only she had known that the old woman was only a harbinger of the greatest triumph in Padlock’s life! If only she had known! But all that was in the past now. She was headed for the future.
As they flew over Israel Padlock saw the sand and remembered that she was the mighty buffalo who had come from a humble village to consummate her Biblical relationship. She was the virgin raised from the mud and the bush of a lowly village to the triumph of birthing God’s son and bringing salvation to all. She was the Virgin of Nazareth, a place where nothing good was expected but where the greatest man had lived before starting his preaching and healing career. She could feel the monstrous power of Biblical history moving under the land of Israel, crashing to a climax at the portals of Jerusalem. As she walked on this holy soil she could feel herself swelling with all the prophecies, all the miracles, all the trials and victories of the Israelites, for she was the new Israelite, with a circumcised heart, embodying the bread of life that had come from Nazareth. She wanted to go into all the little villages Jesus had traveled through and talk to the people, taste the wine, eat the bread, touch the palm trees and search for the essence of the phenomenon that had begun here and burst upon the whole world. She wanted to go to the well where Jesus sat and talked to the Samaritan woman. She wanted to watch people drawing water and carrying it on their heads, as in Uganda. She wanted to sleep in a tent and listen to the music of this land. She wanted to get to the very bottom of her faith. She wanted to go to Golgotha, and walk up the hill of skulls, and sweat as Jesus had done. She wanted to pray at the spot where the crucifixion occurred. She wanted to pray at the spot where Jesus ascended to heaven. She remembered the woman who for years had been tormented by hemorrhage. Such faith! She felt Jesus’ healing power inside her.
Brother and sister held a joint thanksgiving ceremony in the village of their birth. Mbale, the catechist and the gifted talker of the two, told of what they had seen during their pilgrimage and how it had felt to meet the Holy Father and to be in the Vatican. He tried to describe what it was like to see the crowds in Lourdes, the mountains and the edifices in Jerusalem. The day ended in drinking and drumming and singing.
However, all those things could not fully drown out Mbale’s worries. He had financed his journey by borrowing against the coming harvest. His living, breathing collateral was a healthy tomato crop sprawling over a big stretch of land. In his absence, his wife and children had sprayed the plants and chased off curious monkeys and hungry birds. Three fantastic harvests were behind them, and this one promised to be even bigger. Mbale saw it as God’s gift to him, a sort of repayment for all the good work he did in the subparish. Nobody disputed that, not even his critics. They all agreed that Mbale was the hardest-working man in the area. The family woke up before six, prayed, ate breakfast and braved the dew and mist to tackle the day’s work. Come rain or shine, they worked the whole day, with just a few breaks to eat lunch, drink water or snack on sugarcane. This was a regimen for boy and girl alike. Mbale’s family worked like donkeys, and everyone agreed that the man deserved every cent he milked from the land. The villagers used to say that Mbale’s sugarcanes smelled of his sweat.
In addition, Mbale was the subparish catechist, teaching and preaching the Good News, counselling married people and preparing those who wanted to receive the matrimonial and other sacraments. His faith was rock solid, and the biggest insult was to tell him that the Virgin Mary menstruated or that St. Joseph might have been impotent. All skepticism concerning the Bible was anathema to him and could fetch one a sharp remark or even a slap when he was loaded with enough banana beer.
No pilgrim was prouder of his journey than this uncle of mine. He retold the story a thousand times over. The meter-long rosary became his personal trademark. It reminded everyone that he was not just another peasant farmer breaking his back on the land, crawling with sweat in the iron sun, but somebody who had conquered space and traveled to the Vatican, Lourdes, Jerusalem and other places mentioned in the Bible. His sermons on Sundays became legendary. If in the gospel Jesus had been to Cana, Capernaum or Jericho, Mbale would tell his hearers: “When I was in Cana … I felt the power of the Lord inside me, moving like a raging fire. Then God commanded me to go home and preach to you my people.…” When talking about the pope, he often said, “The Holy Father commissioned me to tell you that he loves you. He wants you to repent, because the end is near.…” Two months after his return, vicious winds ravaged the village and a big part of the countryside.
The winds, when they first whistled down the hills, sounded like many wooden rosaries clapped together. They found Mbale in the beer hall listening to a song some women had composed in his honor for putting the village on the world map by conquering space. The winds swept down the hills into the village, carrying with them the fury of forty-two years of dormant disaster. They tore the roof off the beer hall, wrapped it into a jagged ball and deposited it two football fields away. They decapitated wind-blocking trees, spreading the crushed canopies all over the place. They aimed lower, uprooting or breaking banana and coffee trees. They terrorized fragile houses, blowing holes into walls, ripping off doors and carrying them to unknown destinations. The subparish church was a sturdy edifice; it put up a good fight. The winds whipped it from all sides, dumped coffee trees uprooted so many meters away onto its roof and hammered its doors with flying banana trees. The winds dived under the roof with the evil intention of furling it up obscenely like the Lamp Lady’s skirt, but all they got off were bits of tired rafters. They rampaged to the anemic little school affiliated with the church and crushed its much older buildings, ground to liquid mud the pit latrine and flooded the yard with Sunday-service and school-week excreta. Water completed the demolition job, washing away crops, paths, dogs, rats, sheets and anything else found in open space. The paltry remains of Mbale’s tomato plants were found in the village well, jamming its surface and sabotaging its flow.