Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

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.”