As the nights sat on him and the pressure and the pain permeated every fiber in his body, Serenity went over the course of his preliminary dealings with Virgin. He had surely not forced himself on her. The attraction had been mutual. In addition, he had shown her great respect. He had not blown his trumpet, or said anything to inflate his ego. If anything, he had given her the impression that her opinion was all that mattered. Why, then, was there this horrible news blackout? The weakness of the go-between system was that it left many questions unanswered for too long. How long was he supposed to wait? The days had now gone into high double digits. Anger and frustration had corroded his patience, his understanding, his hope. When the pain became too harsh, he contemplated dropping her. He could do it because he was a man aware of defeat in life; the feeling would not be new. He could call off the go-between, swear never to see Virgin again and crawl back into his father’s arms. He gave it three more days and nights. However, just as if Virgin had been spying on him, seeing into his mind and gauging his limit, he got a message from her two days later.
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.