The Butterfly Heart (7 page)

“She’s too young to get married but her mother won’t help her as she’s scared of the uncle. My friend cries a lot and can’t do her schoolwork. I don’t know how to help her. What should I do?”

Ifwafwa lowered his eyes and was silent for a few minutes. Then he spoke. “I will need to have a think about this, Bul-Boo. A long think. You see, it’s hard when people misuse tradition. This uncle does not sound like a respectful man. It is no use if a wife is scared of the man she has accepted as a husband. If this girl’s mother is scared, then this thing will not work. I will think about it, and when I know what to do I will come back to you.”

He shook my hand, as he always does, and his hands felt warm and dry like the snakes he loves. He said he wasn’t hungry, so he didn’t come to eat at our house. I was not sure if he was telling me the truth, because he looked so thin. Madillo once said that maybe he eats the snakes that he takes from the houses. That he only pretends to like them. But I know that’s not true. She knows it’s not true as well, it is just that she likes the sound of the stories she tells.

I watched Ifwafwa once in our house without him knowing. (He never lets anyone into the room with him when he’s catching snakes because he says they sense people’s fear and will not come out.) He had come to us because we had discovered a puff adder in the lounge downstairs. There are big doors leading out from the room into the garden, and just outside them is a huge honeysuckle creeper. I crept in behind that and watched him. Ifwafwa walked into the middle of the room and lay down flat on his back, closing his eyes. He stretched his arms out each side of him and lay perfectly still. From my position I could not even be sure whether he was breathing or not. This went on for a while and then I saw the puff adder slide out slowly from underneath the couch, almost as if it wanted to get a better look at the small man.

Still he did not move. Then I heard a noise coming from his still figure. It was not like the singing he does when he carries the snakes around, more like a low hum. He knew the snake was watching him. When that noise started, it was almost as if an invisible string was pulling the snake towards him. It just moved steadily and slowly towards him and then went and laid its head on his outstretched hand.

It was hard not to scream. I thought it was about to strike and then Ifwafwa would die on our stone floor, killed by one of the creatures he loved best. But it was not so. Still humming, he rolled over so his face was only centimetres from the snake’s head. It was then that he saw me. He did not stop his noise, nor did he move, but I saw from his eyes that I should leave. Which I did. He never spoke about it to me and this made me feel worse than if he had shouted. I’ve never told anyone about it.

When Iwafwa had finished that day, he told Dad that he had found another, smaller puff adder, and so he took them both away. He said they were brothers. How on earth he could tell that from looking at them, I don’t know. If I was to put twelve puff adders in a row, there’s no way I could tell which ones were related.

I decided I wouldn’t tell Winifred that I had spoken to anyone. I’d wait a bit and see what Ifwafwa came up with. If he can’t think of anything, I might have to ask Dad. Although Dad doesn’t like interfering in other people’s business, so maybe that won’t work. He says that he wouldn’t want anyone interfering in his. He would put on what Madillo calls his resigned face and probably mumble something about tradition (even though, it seems to me, he doesn’t stick to too many traditions himself).

I don’t care how old a tradition is if it’s something that hurts people. Just because something is old, that doesn’t make it good. It was a tradition in China to bind young girls’ feet into lumps of uselessness. Why should that be respected? It used to be tradition in England to make small children climb up the chimneys to clean them and then they would die from all the soot. That’s no good for anyone at all.

I
heard the three children talking. The one I know best told them the story of small Winifred. I know her and her mother. Her father died of the illness no one wants to name. He was from my home, near Mpika. He was not an old man; he died many years before his time was up. He died so thin that his bones shone through his skin and his head was a skull with his sad face stretched over it. When he died he left his wife, helpless, to be stamped on by his brother. His brother is not a good man. His head may be wide like a buffalo but there is much empty space inside it. He grunts and roars and uses words that are ugly. He has no respect. This friend of his, the one who wants to marry a child, cannot walk straight because his belly is round from beer. He has no business with small Winifred.

I knew a young girl like her once, in the village I can no longer call home. They called her Lubilo. The fast one. It was her they would send to catch the chickens, because they could not escape from her. When it was decided that she should marry the old one, she ran away from the village. She was gone before anyone knew. But she was taken by the crocodile when she stopped to drink water. I know this from the snakes who live by the edge of the river, the ones who watch from both sides of their heads. She was not fast enough to escape the crocodile who lies so still that he looks like stone.

I
know that it was foolish to tell Madillo. She keeps a promise only until she forgets she made it. Sometimes she forgets within minutes. At supper, I knew she was going to say something even before she opened her mouth. She has this way of looking at you from the sides of her eyes without even turning her head. Then comes the deep breath. I think there’s a voice inside her head saying, “You probably shouldn’t be doing this, Madillo, but you’ve started now, so carry on…”

“Mum, are there forced marriages all over the world?” she asked.

“Not
all
over the world, but in some places, yes. Some work, some don’t.”

That was a very un-Mum-like response. Short, no lecture on how women everywhere are oppressed and how this is just one example. Maybe she was hungry and didn’t feel like using up her eating time.

It gave me a glimmer of hope that this would be the end of it. Maybe, in some other Madillo-free universe, it might have been.

“Dad…?”

“Yes, little one,” he said, oblivious to the narrowed eyes of Madillo on a mission.

“Do you think that the Bemba-speaking people are good?”

He laughed. “Bemba-speaking people? Like me, and you, and your sister?”

“Yes.”

“Well, there’s good and bad in everyone. I wouldn’t say one group has all the good in the world, nor all the bad.”

“Well, the traditions … are they good?”

“Which traditions? There are thousands of things that could be called traditions,” he said.

Time to intervene.

“We’re studying tradition with Sister Leonisa at school … in history,” I said quickly.

“Why does she assume that all traditions of the Bemba fall into the ‘historical’ category? I might have to have a word with her,” Dad said.

From past experience I know that “I might have to have a word with her” means it has already been decided that many more than one word will be exchanged with Sister Leonisa.

“I didn’t finish what I was saying, Dad,” I said in the humblest voice possible. “I meant history
and
geography…”

Madillo seemed to be enjoying my misery here.

“Well, in either subject, why does the question of good or bad arise? And are you studying the traditions of, say, the English-speaking people of the world? Or does Sister Leonisa think that only people in Africa have traditions worth studying?”

Just when I thought we had avoided a lecture from Mum, Dad was getting into full swing.

“Well,” Madillo said, undeterred. “Say, for example, the way young girls are forced to marry old men… Surely that’s not good?”

So much for my diversion.

Dad finally put down his fork and paid proper attention. “That is not good, no. But it’s something that’s in decline. You wouldn’t find it in town any more, only in the villages.”

“Not true,” muttered Madillo, just loud enough to be heard.

“Is there something you wanted to say, Dilly? In a voice we can all hear?”

Madillo hates it when Mum uses the shortened version of her name. Never mind being named after an armadillo, she once told me that being called “Dilly” makes her feel like a small cow with a bell round her neck.

The advantage of Mum calling her this was that Madillo then refused to continue the conversation – on principle, she said, because Mum knows how she feels about the name. I was glad, I just felt embarrassed at the thought of what Winifred would say if she knew her life was being discussed over supper.

It
rained today after I left the girls’ house. Big heavy drops of rain that filled the potholes in the road and washed away the heat of the day. I had far to go because the bag was full and the snakes were restless. They grow tired of being trapped in the bag, they want to move along the ground and feel the wet against their bodies and then, when the rain stops, find rocks warmed up by the sunshine.

In the rainy season I am busy, but in the dry, cold season the snakes sleep the long sleep. Then it is quiet and people have no need for the Snake Man. Sometimes they forget about me until September, when the wake-up begins. Then they remember. In the sleeping months I travel away from the high land of Lusaka, down to where it is warmer. There I can rest and still find food. Only a little, but if I keep very still the food lasts long.

Since I left home, food has not mattered to me so much. Never again will I taste the
nshima
porridge that my mother made for me when I was small. Soft and warm in my stomach. Now food is just whatever I can find. The only food that I can taste properly in my heart is a sweet mango. Every time I bite into one I can see my mother looking up at the mango tree, waiting for them to ripen. Not one would she let fall to the ground.

Because
I wasn’t sure if I could wait for Ifwafwa to think about this, I decided to tell Dad about Winifred today. Ifwafwa is a kind man but he has sleepy eyes. Everything he does, he does slowly. (Maybe that’s why the snakes like him, because he never gives them a fright.) There isn’t much time left for Winifred, and if Ifwafwa has a long, slow think about everything it will be too late.