Abyssinian Chronicles (8 page)

The situation became so pathetic, so desperately insufferable, quiet as it was in the room and in the booth outside as the drummers rested and ate their supper, that Virgin’s aunt had to intervene in more than supervisory capacity. Authorized in all ways to get the job done, she, in the politest, kindest voice Serenity had heard that day, called for a break. As Serenity left the bed, she touched him on the shoulder to direct him to the chair where a beer awaited him. That was the key he had been searching for all day: it minced the wall of mist in which his
virility had been frozen. It closed the book on his fears, propelled him into rarefied realms of relief and engendered in him a blissful absence of anxiety. The relief swelled to such proportions that he wondered, as he sipped the beer, whether it had not gone beyond the mere healing of his past anxieties. Was it degenerating into desire for his bride’s aunt? The possibility that he could have real feelings for her crashed over him, and he felt mud sucking at his feet, pulling him to depths he dared not reach. The temptation was to see the bride and her aunt as complementary parts of one character, one person. If Virgin was the serious, determined, ambitious one, her aunt, then, had to be the playful, happy, lustful provider of fun. He had never been thrust onto the horns of such a dilemma before, and he prayed that this was pure fantasy, the hallucinations of an overwrought, overworked bridegroom.

Virgin’s aunt had been whispering things in his ear, but Serenity heard nothing. He shook to the core as he felt the hand on his shoulder again. The charge kicked like a mule. The woman sat down, and a gleaming dark knee caught in the golden light made him dizzy with confusion and pent-up desire. A touch on his calf shot his body full of delicious sensations. If this was not where the fate of the trio was sealed, it was where their lives, like three rivers going down a steep mountain, met, joined and fought their way to the bitter sea behind the mists.

Serenity was back on his way, rejuvenated, energetic, fiery in the thorax, ticklish in the balls, with wells of licentious power pumping from his stomach. He got cut again, but he hardly felt it or cared. The whitewashed walls, the white tablecloths and the white sheets seemed to tremble and quiver. He needed all the energy his stomach provided, for his wife had the hymen of a thousand women. His breath cut his windpipe as he breathed hard, sweating with the determination that even if his wife had a hymen tough as rawhide, he would bore through it.

With the walls cracking and tilting, the mice squeaking and squealing and the sheets crackling and rustling, Serenity tore through the barrier, Virgin a rocking wave of muscle. Three rubies, two big ones and a very small one, were created. The bride’s aunt, a smile on her face, congratulated them, happy that the bride had not climbed trees, ridden bicycles or played with sharp objects that would have torn
her hymen. The creation was whisked away for examination by a relative or two from both families. Serenity, now all smiles, awarded his bride’s family a large, juicy goat, according to custom.

Changed into a crownless outfit, with a stiff, pained look on her face, the bride returned to the booth. The dancers were back with their pelvic thrusts and gyrations. The crowd was afire with expectation. It would be a free-for-all, with everyone dancing or singing along; diehards cursing, catcalling, ferreting for quick sex or fighting, and the remaining old people retiring to make room for youthful excesses. The drummers struck the drums and the fiddlers rubbed the fiddles with great vigor, charged by the food, the beer and the full-throated cheers from the crowd. The bride could have tossed everyone into hellfire, if only to wipe the all-knowing glint from the eyes directed at her. The quick ones had already heard that she had been a virgin, and the drunken imaginings of blood and tight sex seemed to have made them bolder, more provocative.

Serenity was on the same wavelength with the crowd. He was so confident and so happy that he ignored the fire from the deep cuts on his glans. He enjoyed the attention and the congratulations he got from friends, relatives and strangers who came up onto the dais to shake his hand and whisper a few words in his ear. Their excessive politeness reminded him of his father at the height of his power. For a moment he even thought about campaigning for the post of clan land administrator. This was a dream away from the gap-toothed cheers of his pupils on parade or at the football pitch. The wave thrust him into the center of a hot political rally, with the loudspeakers booming, the politicians shouting and the crowd intoxicated with promises of a better life. Independence was approaching, and something coming off the imaginary rally crowd told him that he could not miss out on this chance of a lifetime. All the drumming, the singing, the dancing and the obsequious congratulations told him one thing: to grab the chance and better himself.

Serenity got up as two dancers approached the dais with waists gyrating, bellies jiggling, legs spread wide in anticipation of one of those spectacular splits which cramped amateur leg muscles. He went down to meet them, and they smothered him with bad-woman smiles. They thrust their dancerly pelvises at him, simulating copulation at its hardest and most playful. He shook fluidly, as they grabbed his arms
and quivered as if the earth were coming off its hinges. Then, raising their legs as if they were male dogs with cramped thigh muscles attempting to piss on a high section of pole, they quivered their withdrawal. The bride could have shot the whole lot. She could also have shot Serenity for taking off his coat, tying it round his waist, following the dancers and almost tripping over the straw on the booth floor. He was a bad dancer, too stiff, too inelegant, but since he was the groom, the man responsible for the extravaganza, the crowd cheered. He was floating on a new wave, intoxicated with a new daredevil spirit unwitnessed before. He was not sure about the origin of this blaze, and he didn’t want to pry too much for the fear of losing it or frightening it away. He hoped, as he pranced, that it had something to do with the rubies, and nothing to do with that magic touch on his shoulder. He was swallowed up by the crowd. They started pouring beer all over him, thrusting banknotes into his pockets and lifting him high in the air. All the drums seemed to be throbbing and thundering in his head. Grandpa was ecstatic. He swayed like a drunken dancer. Tiida and Nakatu were dancing, and shouting for good measure. Grandma was waving a scarf in the air to the rhythm of the song.

The last person he saw was Nakibuka, the officiating bridal aunt, disrobing him, washing the beer, puke and grime off him and ultimately leading him to bed.

Weddings were notorious for their anticlimaxes, and if the evidence outside Serenity’s house was anything to go by, something of a small disaster had insinuated itself into the jubilations. There was so much vomit outside the booth and on the veranda and in the road that if it hadn’t been too ridiculous to think that some plotter had paid people to vomit, Serenity would readily have believed that there was somebody behind it. All the banana plantain, all the lean meat, all the cow’s entrails and all the beer was there, with the least apology of digestion. The latrines and their environs were major disaster areas. Serenity had never seen such quantities of shit in his entire life. The trails of yellowish-green diarrhea were even more unsettling. If a herd of hippos weren’t to blame for this prodigal spread of dung, then there must have been something terribly wrong with the banana beer the crowd had consumed. He remembered that, as was usual on such occasions, various people had donated drinks without anyone putting them on a
list. What would a list of donors have helped anyway, he thought, and shrugged uneasily.

To clear away all the garbage, all the grass huts, all the muck, would claim a few days, but there was no shortage of volunteers. Luckily, no one complained about the beer or the food, and no deaths had been reported in the course of the week. So it hadn’t been a plot after all! So nobody had put bits of hyena’s liver in the drinks or in the food! What a relief!

In a social hierarchy where the husband’s family ranked above the wife’s, any woman hoping to do things her own way had to seize the initiative from day one of her honeymoon and send clear messages to her spouse’s relatives, and that was exactly what Padlock did with her glum expression and her taciturn attitude. Serenity’s relatives soon found themselves marooned in a steadily contracting sitting room with a noncommunicative bride in front of them and a heavy, oppressive silence. A few wished Nakibuka were the bride, because she was cheerful, talkative and had a very sweet smile. They soon learned not to call when Serenity was out, which was often, because he had many things to deal with apart from resuming his classroom duties.

Serenity’s sisters, Tiida and Nakatu, both marriage veterans and very knowledgeable in these matters, quickly realized that their brother had married a woman to keep them out of his house. Like many other relatives, they left for home as soon as the mountains of shit and the pools of vomit had been cleared, the borrowed chairs and benches returned and the booth dismantled. Tiida summed up her feelings: “She is some woman indeed. Another unclimbable Mpande Hill.”

“I told you,” Nakatu replied. Both further agreed that the mountains of shit and lakes of vomit were indicators of fecundity. They knew that this was a woman to outbreed all. Not that they were in direct competition with their younger brother, but it was still a sign of power to bring many children to your father’s house when there was a wedding, a funeral or a clan meeting. Tiida had stopped breeding: the doctor, with his sensitive stomach and nose, could not bear the sight of nappies or the noise of children after a long day at the hospital. He had wanted only two children. Tiida had given him four, after a lot of pleading for the extra two. Nakatu had two children, twins, and it was feared that the pair had damaged something inside her to the effect
that, despite many well-timed efforts, she had not conceived in the last eight years. It was she, with her unfulfilled desires, who was not too pleased with the bride’s putative fecundity. This was before she met Hajj Ali and his miracle-working semen. Nakatu did not like the bride very much, and in a way was pleased that she had turned out to be such a grouch; she would not need much reason to avoid her.

Padlock, for one, did not miss the company of her sisters-in-law much. Of the two she liked Tiida a little bit more. Tiida impressed her as a doer, someone trying to better herself all the time. The sad thing was that she was going in the wrong direction. The unforgivable affliction of pride and vanity she exhibited made Padlock pity her. A woman who bathed four times a day, fussed over just about everything and boasted about her flush toilet, her marble bathroom and her husband’s big post was sick, insufferable and highly pitiable. If Tiida had not been her sister-in-law, she could have sat her down and warned her about her affliction, and even shown her a way of overcoming it. She could have gone on to inform her that vanity indicated a lack of self-knowledge so deep that she would need a lot of hard work to combat it. How she would have liked to hammer it into Tiida’s proud head that beauty, especially the type she washed four times a day, was phlegm, blood, bile, rheum … She would have rubbed her nose in the writings of St. John Chrysostom, and even used the cane, if necessary, to make her take them on board. But sisters-in-law were royalty, incorrigible and damned to drown in their muck.

From the throne of her new reign Padlock reviewed Nakatu with a sick feeling of disdain. She was like a louse to her. Her insecurity, revealed in her ranting about her twins, her tall, gorgeous husband and the Raleigh bicycle he had given Grandpa, made her nauseated. This was lack of, or weakness of, character, accentuated by a deficient religious upbringing. What had the priests and the catechists done in this parish? Had they left the Devil to take over and eat the essence out of people? At the core of Nakatu was a pool of instability so fathomless that Padlock was sure the woman could be swayed this way and that, to the extent of sleeping with Muslims, marrying them or even converting to their religion. Padlock was sure that Nakatu was being exploited by witch doctors, who promised her children, ate her chicken and stole her money for nothing, soothing her mind with empty rituals
which would pave her way to final damnation. She could see her strip, dance naked in front of fires and bathe in all sorts of garbage: the blood of animals, the piss of beasts, anything the witch doctors prescribed. She could see her drink concoctions made of lizard blood, snake eggs, anything. She could see her lie with circumcised witch doctors who specialized in conning women out of their money and their flesh. Her sister-in-law’s soul was yearning for a very serious exorcism. How she would have liked to drive all those demons out of her! From behind the wall of her glumness, the bride saw herself fasting, locking Nakatu up for days, entering her demon-filled room, stripping her, whipping her, commanding the Devil to leave her body. She would finally give her enemas with holy water, baptize her a second time and let her go. But sisters-in-law were royalty, incorrigible and damned to drown in their muck.

According to Padlock’s battle plan, Grandpa and Grandma were going to be tackled directly, through a show of sublime resentment aimed at discouraging their interference in her affairs. She did not like Grandpa, because he was the only person to make her feel uncomfortable and insecure. Who was he to do that to her? She always felt that, given the chance, he would scheme to reinstate Kasiko or to drive his son into the machismo of taking a second wife. She, however, was going to take the initiative and deliver a son first, one of the many to follow. With a dozen offspring, she knew that she would be invincible and in position to manipulate the situation to her advantage. That would be the best way to wipe the self-congratulatory look off the old man’s face. It was the insufferable look of somebody who had cured another’s leprosy—she, of course, being the leper, delivered from the leprosy of poverty. This, after all, was the man who had warned his son that he was marrying below his station. This, indeed, was the man who had, ever so un-Catholicly, questioned the quality of her genes. As a Catholic, she had to forgive seven times seventy times, and she had already forgiven him, but she would never forget.