Abyssinian Chronicles (7 page)

Virgin had felt it necessary to hold nine consecutive novenas to St. Jude Thaddeus, praying for assurance that Serenity was the man for her, because marriage was forever, divorce unthinkable. She prayed for fortitude to deal with Kasiko’s devilries, if any, and for enlightenment to guide her through the difficulties ahead. She prayed for happiness and for health. She prayed for twelve healthy, God-fearing children and for the strength to raise them. In the face of the seriousness and the holiness of matrimony, time had ceased to matter. She could have made it ten or more novenas without feeling that she had taken too much time. In her view, a man who had been living in sin deserved to wait however long it took the Lord to answer her prayers. Such an individual had to undergo some mortification in order to achieve the purification necessary to enter into holy matrimony with a virgin.

The wedding of the former county chief’s son gathered friends and relatives, strangers and villagers, from far and wide. The three houses in the homestead and the grass huts erected ad hoc for the wedding were filled to capacity. There were three days of intense activity, which climaxed on the Saturday the bride entered the house of her groom in holy union. It was set to be the wedding of the decade in the area. Grandpa made sure that everything was in order, and that there was enough food and drink for everyone. Great fires kicked up monstrous sparks and punctured the dark night with their glow. The air reverberated with singing, drumming, dancing, arguments, speeches, fights
and a panoply of human activity left unrecorded. The smell of beer, meat and banana plantain combined to wrench memories back to the days when Grandpa was still in power and people came to feast at his house every fortnight. This was how it had been; how many wanted it to be; how it might never be again. The lukewarm fingers of nostalgia stroked the hearts of the old, garnishing the smells and the sounds and the fires with old truths turned to dull uncertainties in today’s environment. Many dreamed about their own weddings, long ago when they were still men among men, when a bride had to be a virgin in order to get married and stay married.

Many remembered Tiida’s and Nakatu’s weddings. A daughter’s wedding was a mild affair, because a family member was leaving, given away, taken away to bring life and happiness to another family. Such celebration was lopsided, and did not last deep into the night. Who would want to celebrate when the children the girls bred were going to carry other people’s clan names? But this time, as in all cases when a son brought a bride home, somebody was coming to enrich the family and the clan with children. This was what gave the night its sharp sexual edge, its lewd undertones, its aggressive joy. It was as if everyone were going to marry and deflower the bride, and bite into virgin, undilated, unpolluted meat. It was the reason why the beer went to the head, loosened the tongue and came out in dirty jokes, naughty songs and provocative pelvic gyrations.

For Grandpa this was almost a repeat of his own bachelor-party night. His name was being mentioned a lot around the fires. His old praise songs were being sung here and there. The Red Squirrel Clan anthem was being drummed out at intervals on an old scuffed drum. Prominent clan members and leaders were talking about him, speculating on the remainder of his tenure as clan land administrator, weighing Serenity’s chances as possible successor to the post. Clan politics was the unstated theme of the evening and of tomorrow’s wedding day. By this time tomorrow, the bride would no longer be a virgin, and her character and fecundity would be the next episodes in the drama of her entry into this house and clan.

My parents’ wedding was consecrated in an old Catholic church chosen by my maternal grandparents. There, encased in thick brick walls, amidst dim, colored light falling from stained-glass windows onto a
lugubrious Christ, watching the joyous proceedings from his ugly cross; there, amidst pungent clouds of incense which killed off any neurotic insinuations of milk smells and other bodily odors stubborn enough to withstand the fastidious bathing and perfumings everyone had undergone; there, amidst the cheerful smiles and sibilant whispers of witnesses from both families, Sr. Peter Padlock and Serenity became wife and husband.

A good part of the bride’s family never made it to the church, or to her new home, because they had insisted on transporting themselves as a group and had turned down Grandpa’s offer of a bus. The carcass of a bus they hired broke down. The carcass of a truck they replaced it with got two punctures and, having only one spare tire, could not proceed farther. The sorry and not-so-sorry vans they commandeered, with great ingenuity, could take only the most prominent members of the family, vastly outnumbered by their counterparts who, in addition to cars, had two hardened Albion buses at their disposal.

As night fell, a ten-year-old black Mercedes thrust the newlyweds into the vortex of the celebration. The car was mobbed, the streamers parted, and greedy faces peeked inside at the clouds of tulle to see the bride. It took some time to extract the pair from the car, whose owner’s daughter Grandpa, Tiida, Nakatu, Kawayida and some other close relatives felt Serenity should have married. At last, the bride, swimming in tulle, with a white, moon-like crown on her head, orchids in the crook of one hand, Serenity’s hand in the other, waded through the mud-thick ululation, clapping, drumming, singing and gobbling eyes. She could hardly feel Serenity at her side in his small-lapelled black suit, white shirt, dark tongue-wide tie and pointy shoes. A crew cut had made his head look severely smaller, his figure taller and thinner and his ears squirrel-like.

The newlyweds were installed on a wooden dais covered with white mats, and seated in sofas covered with white cloth not so much to disguise their diversity of design or ownership as to cater to uniformity and a sense of conjugal purity. A glittering silver hurricane lamp, unbothered by a single moth, flashed as it rocked gently above them to the thunder of the jubilation. Padlock felt transparent, hypnotized and nauseated by such intense scrutiny, but it was the dancers who gave her an asphyxiating sensation in her chest which, at times,
made her afraid that she was going to pass out. To the deep, hard beat of the big drum the dancers made the most profane, most horrifying, most beshaming pelvic thrusts she had ever seen. They had comically accentuated their waists with padded long-haired colobus monkey sashes, making their thrusts look disturbingly larger, bolder and more obscene. Man or woman, they gyrated, ground very deep and, with legs spread in the exaggerated way of somebody getting off a high bicycle, drew back, quivering with sexual suggestion. Swivelling waists in which there was no unoiled bone and moving on feet which barely touched the ground, the dancers advanced toward two poles planted directly in front of the newlyweds, grabbed them and smothered them in diabolically frenzied pelvic thrusts. The crowd, drooling like tortured dogs, went crazy, so crazy that the whole booth shook as people followed suit, grabbing poles near them and fucking them in explosions of unadulterated joy.

Virgin could have covered her face but for the crown and the gloves. The sensation of being grabbed by powerful hands swept over her, making the shame of every thrust a very palpable ordeal. The crowd was fucking her, raping her, deflowering her, gobbling the rivers of blood that poured from her cavities. She would have wished to die, but this was her wedding, her show, her path to the new life and the mission she had dreamed of for so long. She visualized Jesus on the cross, all blood, all wounds, all pain. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them the dancers were gone.

Speeches were in progress. Grandpa, in a white tunic and a black coat, welcomed everyone, thanked them for honoring his family with their presence and requested that they stay until the break of day. Other speakers came and went without saying much. Most were more like preachers than speakers. They tried to inflame the crowd with such words as faith, loyalty, forbearance, respect for elders, but they never really succeeded. All these words poured over the bride and the audience like spent bullets. The bride felt like a stonefish extracted from the ocean floor and thrust into a laboratory tank for public display. She had to fight feelings of tension, alienation, irritation and impatience. It was true that she had craved attention, but what she had got was a deluge which made her feel like she was drowning. What were these people looking at so intensely? Her face? The tulle or the crown? Was this happening to her alone, or was it common at every wedding? Had
Serenity caused a scandal and were people wondering how she would cope? Or was it simply her mind playing games with her, seeing things where there was nothing? Why, why were they staring at her like that? Christ …

The next thing she saw was the cake and the glittering silver knife. She felt a stiff nudge from her matron. She rose and followed Serenity. He tried to help her with the bridal train and only succeeded in making her balance worse. She stumbled as she tried to keep her eyes on the steps, on the cake and on her groom at the same time. The moon on her head shifted out of orbit. Serenity acted quickly: he checked her fall. The moon returned to its orbit with a few expert touches from the matron. The crowd cheered. The drummer struck a few expert undulating beats. The bride cut the cake in a disembodied haze.

Children with outstretched palms surrounded her, the girls glowing with admiration, the boys alive with curiosity. Suddenly they all looked like Serenity’s illegitimate daughter, and were mocking her, sneering at her, openly despising her for supplanting their mother. Suddenly their mother was responsible for the breakdown of the truck and the bus which should have brought her family to this place to be with her. Suddenly she felt isolated, surrounded by children ready to pelt her with rocks, and adults ready to enjoy it. After the shame of those pelvic thrusts, and of the communal defloration, it had come to this: death at the hands of Kasiko’s diabolical child! Why was this child, and all copies of herself, smiling so sweetly, so innocently? The matron rescued her: she took the plate from her hands and distributed the cake to the jubilant children who, because their parents were hard by, were subdued and very disciplined.

The cake seemed to have gone to the head of the crowd, which responded feverishly to the assault of the dancers and the drummers. The whole booth was swinging, rocking to the shouting, the clapping and the whistling of the crowd. Amidst this explosion, the bride was whisked away from the dais.

Serenity was nervous, groggy, anxious. He had not been this close to his wife in a long time. He was in the grip of a very vague yet very real fear. His courage, his virility, his self-control were at their nadir. Erections! They seemed to be manufactured in a factory far away in the hemisphere where the black birds, his mascots, came from. The
spark he had been gathering, the ball-bursting explosion he had been dreaming of, seemed to have fizzled out. He was now in the bedroom of his bachelor years, the room which had witnessed his best and his worst sexual encounters. Inside these tight walls he had had sex with Kasiko. In the tightness of this room his daughter, God protect her, had been conceived. Outside this room, in the spare bedroom, the same daughter had been born, under Grandma’s supervision. The moans of his brother Kawayida’s premarital sex partners seemed to mix with the moans of his own women to give this room a strange feeling of looming disaster. He knew that it was imperative to decapitate all those ghastly hydras haunting the room, watch them writhe in death’s throes, and then await a new spirit to arise and possess him. Before that, it could only be disaster. He wished he had wedded at a friend’s house, some neutral territory unhaunted by the past.

As he waited for Virgin to bathe the day’s worries, storms, fears and dust off her body, he inopportunely remembered Kasiko’s parting shot: “You are rejecting your Eve, your own rib. If I am not enough for you, why can’t you have us both? I will do anything to make you see your mistake …” Was that a threat or the purest bluff? The unsettling vagueness of it!

Serenity felt his bowels melt with shock: his bride was being escorted into the bedroom by the very woman he had exchanged meaningful looks with! His throat was parched, his hands were trembling. Was this a trick? Thrust as he now was inside the caverns of many men’s dreams, the dreams of being taken care of by two luscious females, he clammed up. This could not be true: who had chosen this woman as the officiating aunt for his virgin?

In that capacity, she was there to help the couple get down to the nitty-gritty of their nuptials, if they needed her guidance at all. She had gunned for the job, not so much for the pair of sheets she stood to gain if Virgin was indeed a virgin, or for the honors, but for more personal reasons. The groom was an interesting person, a learned man whose friendship or acquaintance could be beneficial to her. It had not happened in years that she liked somebody the first time she encountered him. This man was the reincarnation of an adolescent crush, when she had become infatuated with a teacher and done her best to fuck him. Thank God, the man had been old-fashioned and far more
sensible than she. It was that admiration that she now wanted to invest in her new in-law.

The first intimate encounter between my parents in many ways typified the whole pattern of their marriage. Serenity wanted Virgin’s aunt out of their bedroom: her absence would lessen the myriad thoracic and gastric locusts nibbling at him. And anyway, he was not a virgin; he did not need anyone’s help. The woman, large eyes downcast, resignedly left the room, but then had to return because every time Serenity touched Virgin, she pushed him away.

In her mind, Serenity personified the crowd of lechers and perverts who had made her life a hell with unholy pelvic thrusts and booth-pole fuckings. She was not going to allow him to deputize for them. She recalled the teachings of St. John Chrysostom: “Bodily beauty is phlegm …” In the convent, they used to call what he intended to pour in her womb “holy snot.” The sound of it!

Virgin’s aunt, untainted by either the words of St. John Chrysostom or their slow-working effect, restored order by reiterating the importance of the “holy” exercise. Holy snot or devil snot, the deed had to be done. Serenity, now under the eye of the woman he had once played eye games with, fumbled, barely erect, and got cut by the three-day-old stubble, gritty as iron rust, cultivated by the bride, who had just been introduced to the workings of the double-edge razor blade. In the convent they used to pull out those devil hairs one by one, not so much for the less brutal stubble which resulted as for the mortification part of the exercise. Cut, angry, frustrated, the squeaking bedsprings as irritating as locust bites, Serenity boiled in his own anger. The joyless futility of it was magnified by too keen an awareness of his bride’s indifference, and the supervisor’s eye on parts of his body he never revealed to strangers.