Pelegrines
There is a young woman at the corner of the street. She shifts her standing posture in a way that shows that she is impatient. Her hair is slicked back and shiny, pulled into a little tail. On her head it seems like every strand has been oiled to perfection. She has four earrings, two in each ear, and a pair of expensive sunglasses pushed up on her head in spite of the night— the watching man can see them glinting in the streetlights and in the occasional lamplight of the cars that roll past to and for.
She shifts posture again. He wonders how at the contrast she makes with the ground she stands on; she is so clean, so smooth, so polished clean. The ground is made of dirt.
Her skirt is tight around the hips and the man knows that to touch it would electrify him to the bone. He smiles slowly to himself.
Pelegrines does not do a roaring business. In a city that loves to drink, places like Pelegrines do not roar. The market prefers other place, places where they can drink for love.
At Pelegrines, you douse your sorrows, moisten them, and cloak them around you like a cold damp rug, and its familiarity imprisons you within its folds.
Two thin grey strings of cigarette smoke slowly wind their way toward the naked red light bulb. They fade as they rise.
The tip of the cigarette glows—a rapid angry glow, with an audible sucking and a crumpling of paper behind it. Fat cheeks with stubble collapse. Quickly, then relax. Gusts of smoke spill out of the nostrils. The fleshy mouth talks and more smoke escapes among the words. The speaker is fat. His shoulders are broad and hunched. His fat hands have hairy fingers and move in sharp, startled, jerking motions as he speaks. He is loud and speaks with force, as if what he says is urgent and important. There is a woman with him. She receives his onslaught of words with no reaction. Her legs are crossed and her knees catch the light from the red bulb. She watches the speaker with eyes that are the eyes of an older woman. Her hair is braided, her wrist encircled in a bangle and those eyes look like traitors, betraying a disguise; she does not look as young as she is. She weathers the speaker’s urgent words without flinch.
Next to her, a spare dark man, balding about the temples, sits leaning towards the speaker. He wears a black blazer and black trousers. His chin and the lapels of his blazer throw angular shadows onto his chest so it is hard to see what colour his shirt is. It is probably white or beige. It is, he is, indistinct, obscured by an insufficiency of light and succumbs to shadows falling on him from everywhere. He nods and emits monosyllables of affirmation every time the urgent speaker pauses.
The speech is in a language the watching man does not know.
“Eh, Papa, I saw you looking at the young gel who was outside,” a voice draws the watcher’s attention from the table with the two men and the women. It is from a man who has sat next to him.
“Papa, I saw you appreciating. He he!” the man next to him has a bottle, which he sets down next to the watcher’s.
The watcher grins to acknowledge his friend, and to admit that he did, in fact, appreciate.
“Eh, Papa. These young gels. The things they wear: smallo dresses. Tight ones, I tell you!” the man next to the watcher says. He smiles. His smile is broad and his teeth glisten wet in the red light. His eyes glisten too. They are watery.
The watcher renews his grin. “Surely.”
The smiler shifts to a more square position on the stool. He looks out of the door to the place on the corner of the street where the girl had been standing. He shakes his head slowly. “My friend, my friend. I tell you.”
“Surely.” says the watcher. His bottle rises to his mouth again and he sucks.
“They are succulent!” the smiler says, his hands raised as if to hold onto two levitating buttocks. “Juicy and succulent. And I am sure she is also tight and can scream nicely! Ha ha ha!” As he laughs bits of spittle flash out of his mouth.
The watcher laughs along. “Where can we get such, my friend?”
“Papa, for us we cannot get such gels. They are for men with money. Serious men. For us, only old women.”
Together they lapsed into a silence to acknowledge the sadness of this. But it was perfunctory, lacking real regret.
“Me I once had this young gel. She was going to the university…” the smiler begins to say.
“You are deceiving,” comes the reply. But there is no challenge in it. It is said as the delivery of a cue. The smiler picks it up.
“No, you wait. Let me tell you.” And he shifts in his seat in preparation to launch into the tale.
The smiler is one of those men who are made to tell stories. With his comically round body, his mad shock of hair, he looks like a clown who doesn’t even need make up. He has a strong west-Ugandan accent and a loud gravelly voice, which knows how to trail off, rise and fall and suddenly rise again, at all the right points. His eyes are wild and round, and they dart and startle, then blink, then stare. His mouth can contort into a thousand shapes. He was built to tell stories.
“She was a young gel, from university. She had the buttocks which were round my friend, like two … the Baganda call it ncujju… what is it?”
“Pumpkin,” answered Papa.
“Like two sweet ripe pumokinds, very good. And my friend, she liked the smallo dresses. Always wearing the tight smallo dresses. With the pumokinds in the back and in the front, two breasts like the hills of Kigezi, with the nipplos flashing at you, at me, at everybody!” he spreads his arms wide, to show that it was indeed everybody. Papa chuckles.
“It was when I was still driver at the Ministry of Transport when it was still there.” The Ministry of Transport had since been assimilated into the Ministry of Works and Industry.
“Me, Serapio, I was the driver of the Permanent Secretary!” he says the last two words with emphasis and draws his torso up and forward, the round man’s equivalent of puffing his chest out. “You see me and you think I am a smallo man like these smallo men? Me, I used to sit with the permanent secretary and we would discuss issues. You should know who I am.
“Now, the permanent secretary knew me very well because, not only did I do office work with him, I also sometimes helped him in personal errands. Like driving his wife and, even, his gel-o-friends. And sometimes…” a wicked glint in his moist eye, “…I drove his daughter. The one with the ncujju, the pumokinds.
“One day I was going to collect her at Makerere University. The highest centre of learning in Uganda. I was taking her to her father’s office so that they could travel to the village to make plans for the marital introduction ceremony of her fianch. The one she was saying she was going to marry. I reached the place at Makerere and I found she was not there. I say, wait and I ask her friends. They told me to go and look behind that wall.” Serapio cranes his arm in a complicated twisting gesture to show that the wall was behind a corner. “Then I go behind the wall and I find Susanna. But only Susanna?”
“Who else was there?”
“My friend, can I tell you what I saw? My old eyes, they failed to close, even though I was seeing thing which was shameful! This young gel and a young boy, and they are ssssucking each other on the mouth. With saliva and noise like nssshoooo! Nssshoooo! And in the open public. They are ssssucking. It is called kiching mouth. Nsshooo! Nssshhhoooo!”
“Eh? My friend, in public?”
“Okay,” Serapio concedes, “not in the full public. They had tried to hide behind the wall. But where there is no roof, and there is no door for a person to knock and say ‘Can I come in’ before you enter, then it is in the open public.
“I was ashamed my friend. I went back in the car and waited for her. When she finishes kiching, she will come. I sat there my friend, and I sat there thinking. Now, this gel, educated, and beautiful, and the father is so rich. Moreover and she is going to the marital introduction ceremony of the fianch just next month. And now she has another boy-o-friend. Kiching his mouth in public. These people. You have everything and you throw it all away. I know my friend the permanent secretary if he knew he would be shocked. His pressure would attack and I would have to drive him to hosiptal.”
“But were you planning to tell him?”
“You wait and I tell you. When the gel entered the car she started greeting me, calling me muzeeyi. When every day she was used to ignoring me and behaving as if I am a mere servant only because I am a driver. She came and sat in the front chair. ‘Oh, muzeeyi, how is work?’ she us saying.
“Me I told her stop pretending. That ‘Young gel, you father will be shocked. Pressure will get him and I will have to drive him to the hosiptal.’ ‘But you don’t tell him.’ ‘No. He is my friend. I have to tell him. No.’ “
Serapio’s arms are becoming even more animated now, bouncing around his body to accent his words.
“My friend, the gel was young in her years, but she was old in the appearance. I saw her sitting in the chair with the smallo dress climbing the thighs. And the breasts, they were like the hills of Kigezi!”
Serapio’s round eyes roll maniacally. “I tell you, I am trying to drive but my eyes they are just walking off the road going to her body as if they are having legs!
“The gel is young, but she is old in knowing the things of womanhood. When she saw that I was refusing, she saw that my trousers, my lion was standing. My friend, didn’t she say: ‘Okay, if I allow you to taste, will you promise not to tell?’ He he!”
Serapio looks more shocked than his audience does at this moment, as if this point in the story has just knocked the wind out of him.
“My friend I was -eh! Even me I was going to get pressure that day. I failed to say anything. Only the lion answered. I drove quickly to my shack kazigo and she entered the bed and said, oh my goodness, she said…. ‘Do quickly then. There is no time.’ My friend, Serapio facked the permanent secretary’s daughter! I am not a smallo man like these smallo men. You should fear me! Ha ha ha!”
Serapio claps his hands and laughs. His guffaw, hectic and demanding, swells through the air to join Papa’s laugh, and the laughter of the others who always eavesdropped when Serapio began his stories. The urgent man and the old woman and the shadow-engulfed man also laugh and comment to themselves in that language of theirs.
Serapio wipes the spit from his mouth and the tears from his eyes. “I pierced the ncujju!” he laughs. “When you see me now, why do you think I am a smallo man? I pierced the ncujju of the permanent secretary’s daughter. I am not a smallo man like these smallo men!”
Papa laughs and laughs. He knows Serapio was lying through his large wet teeth, but the lie has been sweet. This was Pelegrines. Beer and lies conspire to defeat the weight of truth.
“I am not a smallo man,” Serapio echoes, and the night, with these words, finds a path along which to stretch towards home. A point at which to start the familiar journey, past the familiar landmarks, towards the inevitable conclusion to which all these nights lead. They will speak and the sounds will be as vapid and insubstantial as the cigarette smoke of the urgent man. They will cloud up the air and the night between them, only to fade as they rise. The men will take drink after drink until, sated, they will decide to part ways, each to head for a different spot in the night to meander through the late, cold night, to what he called home. Until the next time night fell, when they will return to Pelegrines.
