Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

It took Serenity one glance at the typewritten khaki envelope addressed to his wife to know that something was wrong. In the first place, in all their time together, his wife had never received a typewritten letter before, and she had not now alerted him that she was expecting one. Second, there was neither ON UGANDA GOVERNMENT SERVICE nor KAMPALA ARCHDIOCESE nor any other official sign to indicate where it had come from. Third, the deplorable state of the print — half red, half black ink, instead of solid black — set off warning bells: who was so pathetic as to not be able to afford new ribbons? He swiftly decided to open the letter.

Serenity’s suspicions were vindicated as soon as he read the first line. Boy, that pus-inflated walking pimple, had struck! Serenity had all along suspected that Boy had continued flirting with his wife, and giving her laughs he could never give her, under the guise of a sober business relationship. The fact that his prude wife had accepted, rather enthusiastically, the Afro wigs he had given her indicated that she had fallen into the trap of desirability. Her passive acceptance of the lampshade, with its billowy-skirted Monroe woman, now took on more significance. Arms shaking, throat choking, armpits melting, bum itching, he read the letter again and again.

Dear Miss Singer,

How are you smoking the cosmos in these highly atmospheric days? I am highly honored to dispatch this greatly wonderful missive to you. I supplicate you to recall the wonderful happiness we shared before this highly antagonizing cutout of love lodged itself in our cosmos and disorganized its blissful ministrations.

Permit me to conjecture that by throttling your highly volcanic love, you are disorganizing the workings of the cosmos. I hate to see you that way, you know. Your disestablishment ofour love and its highly vertical thrust can only bring negative tintinnabulations in our hearts. I supplicate you to remember our Song of Songs:

Your felicitous neck is like a mesmeric tower of gold

Your fantastic nose is like a phonetic monument

Your mellifluous eyes are like grammatical pools of silver

Your wonderful breasts are like aquatic love bombs

Your infatuated body is a volcano of hot juices

Miss Singer, I supplicate you to recall that I am your best friend. A wise man said that we make many friends but trust only a few. The wise man also said that many are married, but few are happy, remember.

Miss Singer, you are the Queen of my heart, and I want you to make me the President and the Commander-in-Chief of yours.

Before I supplicate you to sign off, recall that I am yours amorously, marvelously, dangerously and thunderously,

Mbaziira the Great.

Serenity had been there before. He could smell post-adolescent verbosity, flatulence, crass emptiness and immaturity a mile away. In his day, the letter would have had pink and red hearts festooning it, with powder inside the envelope.

He found the name “Miss Singer” very disgusting. If that was an indication of a childish streak in his otherwise very mature wife, he would have preferred to know through other means. He knew older men and women who dallied with younger partners, how they grovelled, compromised their personality and marital status, just to come to the level of the younger party. The younger ones in question often spat on their partners’ status and age, giving them childishly younger or sillier names in order to gain a degree of control over them. Now the bug was inside his house. Had he not warned his wife to keep away from this fellow? Whom had Boy paid to write this garbage?

Serenity was consumed by the righteous rage of a wronged husband, but it did not last. It was replaced by sadness, a creepy feeling of missed opportunity and betrayal. Why hadn’t he confronted Boy face-to-face? Why had he felt the need to play the gentleman?

His sadness deepened when expressions like “love bombs,” “volcano of hot juices” and “infatuated body” jabbed his mind. For a woman as prudish as his wife, Serenity felt that such expressions could only have come into use with her express encouragement. She was most probably attempting to clutch at the shreds of her faded youth, or the tatters of an adolescence eclipsed by parental sanction and convent rules.

The whole thing was especially pathetic because it was his wife who had decapitated marital passion by announcing so many days of sexless abstinence that copulation had become as calculated an act as going to the beautician.

He deplored the role he had played in the drama. He could have reported her behavior to Mbale, their marital arbiter, but he had felt too ashamed, too compromised, to unburden himself to a man who respected him so much. He had thought about it many times but could not find the right words, the apt opening: “Ah, muko” —brother-in-law—“you see … my sex life is …” or “My wife refused to see to my needs on such and such and such days …” or “I can’t get my wife to …” Serenity feared that Mbale would lose all respect for a man who could not get his conjugal rights from a wife he had married in church. Serenity also knew that a man of Mbale’s peasant background would never appreciate the kind of decency which made a man burn for such long periods without trying to get his rights by force. Serenity had also failed to unburden himself to Hajj Gimbi for fear that it might ruin their friendship.

Now he felt doubly sad and angry that his wife had fallen into the traps she had set with her own hands. It was evident that she wanted more sex, but did not know how to break down her barriers without losing face and power in other areas. Serenity believed that his wife’s recent obsession with Hajj Gimbi’s polygamy and his own putative affairs had been a mere smoke screen to hide her dirty secrets.

At the center of his sadness was the fact of his mother’s elopement and all the feelings of abandonment which had resulted. He remembered all the women he used to run up to and welcome home, and the fear at the back of his mind that they might indeed be ghosts disguised as tall women. He remembered the patronizing way they used to pat him on the head before letting him down. Where had he got the notion that his mother had been a tall woman? To a three-year-old, most women must have seemed very tall. He remembered the tall woman who had ended his obsession. He suddenly felt very angry. Why hadn’t his father done something about the situation? He had known about his rival’s activities but had chosen to ignore it all. Was complacency a family weakness? he wondered. He suddenly wanted to do so many things at the same time. He wanted to prove that he could act, arrest situations and nip trouble in the bud. He did not want to end up wifeless, with all those children to raise alone. He also didn’t want his children to be brought up by another woman. He finally realized that a married cuckold with children could not afford family-shattering revenge: every form of retaliation had to be short-term.

Serenity considered disappearing for a week. He could stay in a good hotel, relax and work off his anger, his sadness. He could visit his relatives: he had not seen his sisters in a long time, and this could be the chance to check on them.

It struck him like a bolt of lightning splitting a tree down the middle: Nakibuka! Had the woman not done her best to interest him in her life? Didn’t he, in his heart of hearts, desire her? Had he ever forgotten her sunny disposition, her sense of humor, the confident way she luxuriated in her femininity? The shaky roots of traditional decorum halted him with the warning that it was improper to desire his wife’s relative, but the mushroom of his pent-up desire had found a weak spot in the layers of hypocritical decency and had pushed into the turbulent air of truth, risk, personal satisfaction, revenge. His throttled desire and his curbed sex drive could find a second wind, a resurrection or even eternal life in the bosom of the woman who, with her touch, had accessed his past, saved it and redeemed his virility on his wedding night. Sweat cascaded down his back, his heart palpitated and fire built up in his loins.