When He Was Free and Young and He Used to Wear Silks by Austin Clarke

Author:Austin Clarke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc
Published: 2020-09-30T16:03:47+00:00

A Wedding In Toronto

“A police coming in a man’s house, and at a wedding reception to boot! and breaking up a party? Merely because some old can’t-sleep bitch next door or down-below can’t find a man or something? What kind o’ place, what sort o’ country is this? It never happened in Barbados and it never could. Imagine a police in Barbados coming into a man’s house, during a party, and a wedding party at that, to tell that man he is making too much noise! Man, that policeman’s arse would be so stiff with lashes he would never do that again! A police coming into a man’s apartment, and breaking up a wedding reception because some old bitch who can’t sleep, complained?” Boysie never got over the shock of seeing the policeman at the door, standing like a monument to something, with an untranslatable expression on his face, with one hand resting perhaps absent-mindedly on the holster of his gun, and the other raised and caught in the slow-motion paralysis of knocking on the apartment door again. It was a loud, firm knock of authority. The wedding guests were, at that time, in the middle of speeches; and Boysie, who was the master of ceremonies, had been saying some amusing things about marriage. It was at the point when he was saying, Ecce homo, over and over again (using his best stentorian, oratorical Barbadian dialect), exhorting them, as: “La-dies and gentlemen! ladies and gentlemen too! greetings and salutations, because on this most auspicious of evenings, on the aurora of long and felicitous matrimony, I say to you, to you, ladies and gentlemen, I say, ecce homo, behold the man! ecce homo, here I stand!” (Freeness, dressed to kill in a three-piece suit; Matthew Woods, spic and span; Estelle, beautiful as a virgin, as a star; and many other West Indians crammed into the happy apartment, screamed for joy when Boysie began this speech, his fifth for the afternoon’s festivities. Each wedding guest, including Agatha the bride, and Henry the bridegroom, had made a speech. Some had made two speeches. Boysie had made his first about an hour after the wedding party returned to the apartment. It was five o’clock then. Now, after many toasts and speeches and eats and drinks, Boysie was captivating his audience again. The time was midnight. The guests liked it, and they bawled and told Boysie they liked it. Henry, sober and married; Agatha turning red, and flushed, and happy, and drunk as Dots, Boysie’s wife, held her head back and exposed the silver cavities filled with silver, and said, “I could have another wedding reception like this tomorrow! One like this every month!”) “I say to you, ladies and gentlemen, I say, ecce homo, behold the man! ecce homo, here I stand! Here I stand, ladies and gentlemen, with a glass of drink in my hand, wherewithal for to mitigate the aridity of my thirst. And as I have arisen from my esteemed seat

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