Two Hangmen, One Scaffold Book I: Baiting the Hangman

Chapter 22

191 C Chapter 22 s Binga Jochoma stood at the window, an excited boy riding a BMX bicycle along an avenue in Mashumavale reminded him of Peza, the peak, the banderillero and the gem of his life meant to be in the limelight of his thoughts. Contemplating the people dearest to him, beginning with any other order was wrong and despicable of him. Peza was the natural heir to the estate he would establish. At six, the boy was Grade 0 or 1 material. Unfortunately, Sakis Mine’s nearest primary school was at Venice Mine, about seven kilometres away. As a father, he found it punitive to make his son walk such a long distance to learn foreign rhymes and scribble stupid patterns in the earth. Though Binga repelled former oppressors in the country, he admired their single-mindedness towards accumulation of wealth. He had seen local whites giving cars and sprawling houses to their children at weddings, and found the custom highly admirable. In that fashion, he was establishing himself for Peza’s benefit. Binga had once been to Paris to stare at the Mona Lisa. His understanding of life overseas was a plethora of decadence and anomy. People who returned from Britain, Australia and America told tales of men marrying men, women taking the oath of marriage with women, and extravaganzas of gay parades of semi-nude participants. Surgeons turned men into women and vice versa. Obviously sensational Nomathemba had faked virginity when he married her. Was it possible for a girl to go through secondary education and attend Bulawayo Teachers’ College, and yet remain a virgin? Her virginity was perhaps a result of surgery or juju. The latter made sense. With juju, a person could do anything. The painful truth was that she fled him and the paramilitary police and became a victim of London’s hurly-burly matrix of sexual madness. A 192 He thought of Matipa. She had started well by bearing him a son, but the rest of their marriage was fruitless. He suspected she had been bewitched and was probably going about devoid of her ovaries and womb. Some witches and wizards were probably using her womb to breed goblins or merely as a pouch for the safe keep of valuable fetishes. Although Matipa had never been abroad, she was too Christian to consult traditional healers for her redemption. His seed on her was as purposeless as steady rain falling on a derelict graveyard. Then there was studious and encyclopaedic Gillian, a second-year student of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Zimbabwe, a goal-getter who brooded in her broad-mindedness. Before she attained the age of forty, she hoped to have risen to the post of Minister of Information and Publicity. Now she was twenty and financially dependent on him. Her father was a struggling, underpaid government headmaster. Gillian’s age and dreams fascinated Binga. Essentially, he wanted to be married to a composite woman of Matipa’s meekness, Nomathemba’s figure and Gillian’s encyclopaedic disposition, all aspects alloyed into one woman. He met Gillian about a year ago on a drizzling day in Harare while he was cruising in a rental double cab 240D Toyota Hilux. Customarily, he hired such vehicles whenever he was whiling time and unwinding in Harare after a prowl. Aimless driving through the streets and avenues of a city took a man’s mind from anything. Gillian was walking on First Street’s thoroughfare along Jason Moyo Avenue when he spotted her in a loose black and white sleeveless polka-dotted blouse, tight elastic black slacks and cheap knee-high boots all likely purchased from one of many Chinese shops dotted in the city. She held a small translucent umbrella over her plaited head covered in a ginger-tainted cascading weave. The satchel on her back and the tome in her free hand betrayed her as a college student. Most students were struggling under the 193 economic hardships. He pulled to the curb at the intersection of First Street and Jason Moyo Avenue, and hooted, attracting the attention of many strollers and shoppers including hers. He pointed at her and beckoned. She shook her head, drew a countenance of repulsion and shrugged before hastening away into the hustle and jostle on the thoroughfare. Wheel by wheel, he eased the four-wheel vehicle onto the prohibited thoroughfare and followed her steadily along...