Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

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.

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.