THE WIDOW

               Parents often toss a prayer into the heavens when their little minions run off to school – their small hands clutching onto their jingling pockets, heavy with the pennies that they had stolen and those that their mothers had reluctantly given them. Parents hope that their children’s march to school will be uneventful and safe and that their walk back will not be lengthened by their juvenile proclivities for adventure. However, every child loves a good spectacle, and each is designed to bring its parents grief. To the young mind, to forbid is to endorse and to reprove is to recommend. Therefore, as soon as children are old enough to go to school unescorted, they become like hounds that can follow the scent of devilry stewing nearby. When the clock strikes 4 pm and the school bell rings, it is the most pleasant song. It announces the period during which, being far away from the vigilance of their mothers, all the ribald suggestions that had been earlier announced to the giggles and laughter of their small gang, while hiding behind the school toilets, could finally be attempted.

                  Life in the city brands us all with the scars of foul memories, and no one who sojourns here for more than a short while leaves unscathed. You are in ‘lower primary,’ kicking bottle-tops and margarine cans as you take the longer route home through the Muthurwa shopping centre. That morning, a loving mother had sent you off with a lingering kiss after she had ensured that a clean hankie was pinned to your sweater even though you hadn’t a cold. To her, you are a fragile little angel. She has not yet trusted you enough to let you bathe yourself, and she still calls for you by yelling your name across the populous landscape. You are coming home from school in the company of your friends, and all seems at peace under the sun, when suddenly you are put aghast by a blood-curdling shrill.

                  A terrified man with a dirty footprint on his temple bolts past, with a stampede of jobless locals baying for his blood charging closely behind. It is not easy to forget the sound released by a brick sinking into a man’s skull like a thumb pushed into a tomato, squirting an eye out of its socket. It is not easy to forget the wails that preceded the final blow, as a red hot bicycle spoke unhurriedly punctured through one bleeding ear and out of the other. It is not easy to forget the groans that crawl through a dying man’s lips or to forget the weak quiver of a mangled finger when its hand, soaked in the crimson humors its wounds have expelled, can flail no more. When you are so close that a jet of warm blood squirts onto your leg and school shoes, so close that you can hear the final breaths bubbling through a crushed throat filling with blood, so close that you can see the evil in the eyes of the executioner, you become an angel no longer.

But the iniquities of the city are endless, with each passing one being more heinous than the last; a testament to the ingenuity of men. Soon, you will witness another and another, until your mind starts to regard extreme brutality as a common roadside event in which you might occasionally take part if only to vent out your frustrations of injustices past. And just as with every sin under the sun, by familiarity you become inured to it. By constant intercourse with the vile, you are brought to the peak of amorality, such that you could look over a reeking worm-infested cadaver with the calmness of a mother watching over a slumbering child.

* * * * * *

                  Summoned by the beauty of a peculiar line, Adira would part her quivering lips to recite it aloud but would let out only a soft murmur that broke the quiet of her study. Her face would contort into varied expressions as her finger, wetted by the flick of an ardent tongue, turned the leaves of the ancient world in her hands. Her face would reveal a most exceptional and unmistakable contentment with the universe, a look that she always wore while in the company of an eloquent man. Good books should not be read, they should be devoured. Her kanga, the only one this city girl possessed – a wedding gift from a long forgotten relation – would be fastened above her chest, exposing her bare shoulders to the setting sun pouring in. As the rays fall upon her, her brow would release a mist of sweat, and her silky Kikuyu skin would gleam with a distinctly warm shade, seeming to emit a radiance of its own as if in the exaltation of her soft, seductive features. Study suited her, for it offered what we all require but hardly ever pursue: the chance to live a life greater than our own. In the study room that was once her father’s, her fragile little form would seem dwarfed by the walls of books under which she usually solaced herself, like a lynx at the foot of the grand shelves of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France.

                  Her father, who she had scarcely ever known since she was a little girl no more, had walked back into her life and given her the greatest gift any man could ever give to his daughter. It was the gift to pursue the dreams of her childhood, to attain the most dazzling ambitions of her youth, to live free and unbound and to never have to endure the privations of marriage life. A small but significant estate, all bequeathed to her, was enough to feed the little minions that she may later acquire and to afford them a long, untroubled life while allowing her a comfortable existence devoid of banausic employment. However, in the arms of a father who was too quick to please his impulsive daughter, she eventually matched towards the dais. After all, wasn’t she the product of that same terrible institution, despite its limitations?

                  A stumble here and a stumble there, she was being guided chiefly by the whims of her feminine nature and by the customs that dictate the nature of human affairs. These traditions by which she must abide – customs that are beyond reproach, and are adhered to and evangelised by the self-proclaimed guardians of society – would bring ‘respectability’ to her family. “Ah,” her father had whispered with the gentle lenity of a doctor to a dying patient, “many women have done this before. It’ll be alright.” To him, watching her was like watching an infant struggling to climb out of its crib: the hesitance in its steps and the natural feeling of the certainty of failure when one undertakes a foreign task cannot be easily concealed.

                  Her husband was the average rich man, a mundane who liked to talk about his hair, his shoes, his money and all other artefacts with which simple-minded men make themselves agreeable to women. He was, according to her ‘daddy’, merely a “failed biological experiment, a Precambrian slob of protoplasmic slime which hovered over the surface of the planet memorising football facts.” He was a man who never informed his wife of his whereabouts and caused her much grief. She, therefore, grew stoical towards him, submitting to his whims without protest, and as is the nature of married women she ignored him and became chiefly devoted to her children. Silence, it is written, is the sharpest argument that can be grasped by the common man, but can it?

                  She, too, was infrequently spotted wandering about the market with her wedding ring missing from her hand. Whether or not she retained the services of her old lovers or had acquired new ones was, of course, open to conjecture, but no crime could be said of her that could not be levied against a good wife. Her simple home, furnished with hand sewn vitambaas, plastic flowers and glitters from that long forgotten Christmas, served the purposes for which it was intended: for the rearing of children. After all, he was a man whose money she loved dearly, a man whose devotion to a kanywaji and nyama choma would not allow him to live long enough to see the divorce proceedings through.

              It is therefore to the pleasant task of motherhood and to the thrills of study that she condemns herself since his death if only to provide amusement for her quiet mind. She makes a virtue out of never inquiring into other people’s affairs, even though they often try to pry into her own. She instructs her boys to play gently with the girls and to become creatures that never weep when they are wounded. Their suffering is quite as much hers as their own, every tear they shed wrings her heart, and every cry they release hurts her soul, but her suffering will never be revealed to them. To each, she gives precisely what he requires: to the quiet and withdrawn, a good book that she has read, and to the high spirited the freedom to immerse himself into the current of society. Good parents know that the desire for the luxuries of sin can be extinguished by good upbringing and that all materials at their disposal should be employed to ensure that the succeeding generations do not suffer the plagues of the preceding ones. She, therefore, flogs the demons out of them when they take the longer route home, but as a good mom does, ensures that they finish their ugali. She is a mystery in the eyes of men, and a god in the eyes of her children. She hopes she would be a good mother to them, even though her soft lips would on occasion require a hard drink with which to dull her anguish that time has failed to relieve.

                When musical notes escape from her lips as she is employed in her motherly duties, as was the habit of her own mother, she gives the world not merely the song, but also herself. She lends us her happiness today and sickens us tomorrow with the agony in her voice. The songs she sings become the medium through which out-pour her sentiments, her personality in its free artistic nature, such that passers-by would scarcely doubt that there is a good woman in that house. But occasionally, while looking out through a window, she would be moved to distraction by a neighbor’s son, on who she had often cast an immodest eye. She would wonder whether her long lashes and the ebony eyes on her small dimpled face still retained their charms, especially when by the cosmetic dusts and oils the symptoms of her age are concealed. Careful not to disturb her curtains lest her cover be blown, she would wonder, would the world be right to condemn a young widow’s desire for a moment’s bliss? It surely would neither destroy the lad’s future nor do more than color his tales with events that his friends would never believe. Must she be merely content with what fate provides? The answer comes to her swiftly: a little indulgence, not too much, just an hours worth, would purge her of her desires, or may inflame them still.

                  While she wanders through the Central Park, clutching onto a scandalous book that she had often reread, she would spot a lecherous adolescent perched upon an elevated platform. The girl, plagued by demons that resembled her own, would pretend to be immersed into the contents of her phone, yet parting her legs ever so slightly, just enough for the wandering eye nearby to find what it sought. On other occasions that weren’t rare enough, while walking back home under cover of dusk while in the delirium of a trusted mendicant, she would lift the hem of her loosely tailored frock and stamp her foot heavily as she marched home. She then would whistle softly, announcing her passing to the prowling brutes of the night, who she wished would violently and oh so pleasantly wring the prurience out of her.

                  Back home, in the throes of solitary gratification, she would bend over her kitchen table. It is a rare artifact of local craftsmanship whose size and strategic placement could half-obscure her from an intruder who might unexpectedly charge in. Placing her weight against it, she would, by the dexterity of her fingers, bring herself to attain a moment’s beggar’s bliss, pulsating and melting to the back of her knee. A little forbidden joy savored between a mother’s duties, would be her palliative agent, a primal attempt to extinguish the furnace in her loins that is permanently aglow with fierceness, consuming her from within. Though the guilt of sin soon after outweighs the sin’s sensations, the sin’s sensations burn hotter than the fear of guilt. As darkness falls, she would hug her knees to her breasts and re-live the joys that she had forgotten somewhere along this path of motherhood within the safety of her mind. She would wonder why her sorrows last too long, and her pleasures not long enough. She would wonder why, as she often observed of her life, curiosity could ruin a girl’s reputation but fortifies a boy’s. She would wonder and wonder, till all questions departed from her and her mind would be left as empty as her heart used to be those servile years past. Tis then that she would discern at once that life is meant to be lived; not to be understood.

definitions –  vitambaas:  Those chair covers that your grandmothers used to sew, back when grandmothers knew how to hold a sewing needle.