Abyssinian Chronicles (33 page)

It eventually struck me how limited Fr. Mindi really was. Padlock, in her nunly, peasant-girl constrictions, was more like a sore-infested buffalo hardly able to keep thousands of egrets and ticks off its festering back. Mindi, on the other hand, was bloated with theology, philosophy, Latin, Italian, Church history and all manner of other clerical and secular learning garnered from both local and foreign seminaries. The four years he had spent at Urban University in Rome had sharpened the edge of his conservative Catholicism, reinforced his harsher traits and dulled his empathic and self-analytical capabilities.

Yet, this was a man we were supposed to call Father and emulate and put on a pedestal. If scholarships to foreign universities and all that learning resulted in this barren role-playing and regurgitation, what was the use of it? This was a man programmed to obey, and to be obeyed. This was a man who had suffered and was now making others suffer so that they in turn would make others suffer. This was Mindi’s version of one hundred percent priestly compensation on earth and
one hundred percent reward in the life to come. His material things, especially his car, were part of this package, this compensation scheme for having responded to the priestly call and given up the family life the damned enjoyed. He bragged about it, thinking that he was encouraging us to persevere. His dream was not different from my lawyerly one, taking into account the power he enjoyed and the rumors about him and Sr. Bison. It was only the oil of holiness and of predestination which he poured on his that put me off. My aim was to rub off that oily sheen and expose the dull, grainy core underneath.

I was back to my old sleepless ways. It felt scary to be up in the small hours of morning, but there was an exciting edge to it, a marauder’s adrenaline rushes, that made it worthwhile. I left Sing-Sing at around two o’clock. Dorobo, the newly hired night watchman, very tall, very strong, soot-black, lethal with his giant bow and arrow, was out doing his rounds, or sleeping. It was the image of his huge bow that etched itself in my mind like a diamond half-moon and followed me around as I moved from shadow to shadow. I praised the Lord that we Africans never idolized dogs: How awesome would this man have been with a huge German shepherd at his side? But there was not a single dog on campus.

The seminary stood on top of a hill, arranged around the chapel, accessible from all sides. It was easy to move from Sing-Sing, at the extreme end of the compound, to the chapel because of the protection accorded by the trees and a pine-tree fence for most of the way. I found Dorobo behind the chapel, crammed into a nook, roaring in his illegal sleep. My destination was to the left of the chapel, ten meters away. It was a long, slant-roofed building used partly to store tools and partly as a garage for the fathers’ cars.

I crossed the gravel-strewn stretch to the tool area and opened the side door with a key used by the student in charge. I found myself inside the long, cold building with heaps of scythes, hoes, pangas, rakes, defunct lawnmowers and chain saws reeking of dust, oil and neglect. I picked up a blunt panga and weighed it in my hand, remembering the maniac who had threatened to decapitate Grandma. I set it down again, careful not to let other implements slide and make noise. I proceeded to the connecting door.

The hinges squeaked, making me afraid that Dorobo might hear
me. I got inside the garage, and was confronted with the smell of cars: a tangy combination of oil, steel and rubber trapped in a confined space. There was Mindi’s blue Peugeot, Kaanders’ white Volkswagen, the rector’s beige Renault and an old grayish car left behind by a priest friend of the rector’s. In the far corner was a huge, full-bellied motorcycle on its flipper-like kickstand, seemingly leaning against the wall, a pool of oil under it.

It took me a few minutes of sweaty-palmed poking and fumbling to get into Fr. Mindi’s car. I imagined Aunt Tiida, dressed to kill, watching Dr. Ssali trying to get into their Peugeot and fussing with camouflaged pleasure as their neighbors looked on from behind parted curtains.

The stench of tobacco, however, brought me back to my senses. I was inside the car of a chain-smoker. I thought of pouring salt in Fr. Mindi’s engine and wrecking it for good, but that seemed uncalled for. I was not here on a rampage, but a courtesy call. I was principally here to send a modest message to the big man, something a touch above the average seminarian’s idle fantasy revenge. I had eaten a few pawpaws, bought from a truant, and combined with our weevilled beans, the stench they gave my excrement was overpowering. I held my nose as I opened the plastic bag. I had delved into Uncle Kawayida’s archives and pulled out a football hooligan’s weapon: shit. I used a trowel to smear the seats, the roof, the floor, the steering wheel, the gear shift, the dashboard and all the carpets. I locked the stench inside the car and worked on the door handles. I left the offensive plastic bag on the bonnet.

By now the whole garage was alive with stink-hammers. I hurried out of the contaminated air, closed the connecting door as carefully as possible and tiptoed around the heaps of scythes, pangas, hoes.… I was aware of the precariousness of my position: somebody could smell me from a mile off. I made my way to the bathrooms, cleaning myself along the way with odoriferous pine needles plucked from the fence.

I had visualized a more sophisticated aftermath to my painting job. The staff members were typically very equivocal about the attack. “Somebody vandalized Fr. Mindi’s car.” “Somebody did terrible damage
to a certain staff member’s property.” “Somebody acted very disrespectfully and uncharitably toward our bursar,” they said. The details finally leaked out via the boys who were made to clean up the mess. Fr. Mindi had found them talking during silence time and had charged them with the horrible task of scrubbing, washing, wiping and drying his desecrated status symbol.

Finally, Fr. Mindi told us officially. He dressed his anger in curse-laden threats, ultimately announcing that if the culprit did not give himself up within three days, something was going to happen to him. I was in familiar territory, hardly able to believe how similar dictatorial thought patterns were. This man with an ego as large as a cirrhotic liver expected the culprit to crumble under its holy smells. If this was what that Urban University conservatism had come to, then I didn’t envy him all the lasagna he had eaten in Italy. His experience with truants should have warned him that not all miscreants were in awe of his university curses covered in Bolognese sauce.

Fr. Mindi paid us a second visit, this time at the refectory. “What sort of a seminarian can do such a thing? What did he come here for? Does he want to become a priest? How did he enter the system? It is in your interests to denounce this character. I am sure he said something to somebody, criminals often do. Please, let me know. If this sort of behavior is left unpunished, we are all in big danger. This is the kind of person to set the whole place on fire.” I wasn’t turned on; neither were the majority of the boys, who felt that Mindi deserved every dose of pain he got.

The rector, as somber as a judge with piles, asked us after a day to surrender the culprit. Like Mindi, he believed that somebody had heard something or seen something or smelled something. He hinted that somebody might have a grudge against the bursar, but that the manner in which he had expressed himself was beastly and unworthy of somebody destined for the altar. He laid on the syrup: “Come and talk to us if you have a problem. We are here for you. Without you we would not be here. This is a family, and if one family member hurts, the whole family suffers. Remember, one rotten orange can corrupt the whole basket. If you know anything, tell your spiritual director, or slip a piece of paper under my door. Don’t let anyone see you. I assure you: nobody will be penalized for giving us the necessary information.
And if anyone threatens you, trying to keep your mouth shut, come directly to me and he will be dealt with.” I had heard all this in my former life. It left me cold.

Four days after the attack, amidst a cloud of speculation, Fr. Mindi announced, rather triumphantly, that he had caught the culprits. The staff was divided. Mindi wanted three bully boys expelled with immediate effect. Others wanted the boys punished but given a chance to continue with their education. The skeptics questioned the manner of the discovery, because they found it too plausible: somebody commits a crime, names are anonymously given on a piece of paper and heads roll.

Lwendo and his classmates were in an uproar. They went around saying that a Bushman was responsible for betraying the trio to the staff. There were threats against the Bushman and vows to squeeze them till they squealed, but when one of the trio was expelled and the other two were suspended for a fortnight, the furor died down.

So much for justice. I never succeeded in finding out who the smart Bushman was who had punished the bullies by saddling them with responsibility for the crime. I didn’t mind either. My neighbor in the dorm said that I often laughed in my sleep.

Books took over. It was bound to happen anyway. Life was too regimented and too boring. Sports were dull, picking up their only blast of annual excitement during inter-house competitions. The dominance of church activities and liturgy was generally asphyxiating. As others caved in to total submission or to sporadic fits of bravado, I turned to books. I was intrigued by the secret universe under the dust-laden covers and thrilled by the endless morsels one could extract from the most unlikely volumes. Between some very dull covers were the most spectacular wars, adventures, murders, love affairs and characters, whole terrae incognitae to explore.

Given the faking, the pretense and the fear that stool pigeons were lurking everywhere, collecting news, marking every critical word one said, books offered a reliable escape route into a safer reality crammed with fantasy and ideas.

As in most dictatorships, secular books were unpopular in the seminary; they were considered subversive. Good seminarians distrusted
such books, because they contained demons that made you critical of the good fathers and of Mother Church. They made you rebellious and arrogant, deaf to your vocation. They gave you a mind of your own and made you ask the wrong questions.

I remembered World War II and the men Grandpa had conscripted. I spent days looking through war records to see if the local contribution had been recorded. All I learned was that Africans had died in that war. There was nothing specific about the Ugandan contribution to the effort. The slaughter of tens of millions of people in Europe just nineteen years after the end of World War I, plus the deaths of the twenty million who had succumbed to the Spanish flu soon after, apparently did not include blacks and seemed another of the whitewashed versions of modern civilization sold to us here. It was as lopsided as the gloss the Church put on the carnage of the Crusades, and on all the other Church wars right up to our own Religious Wars at the turn of the century.

Fr. Kaanders gradually began to make sense to me. He had spent a good part of his youth fighting polygamy to uphold standards he believed were universal and crucial, and had ended up almost dead from exhaustion and sleeping sickness. It was while in the grip of death that he had realized the forlornness of his attempts, the stupidity of his sacrifice and the impracticability of putting the clock forward thousands of hours. Wisely, he decided to freeze the clock and let time take care of itself. I would do the same. I would embrace death in a timeless hold, look it in the face and turn it into an ally. I was delighted. I ruminated on my discovery for days.

It was on one such woolgathering day that Fr. Mindi caught me reading during prayer time. In fact, the bell had just rung. The boys had just started marching to the chapel, and I think he was smarting to get somebody. I hadn’t moved quickly enough or shown any sign that I would. He had already put the painting job behind him and had reverted to spying and stalking around the compound with a vengeance, as if to say he would not be forced to change by a bunch of snotty boys. Now he stood before me, the cassock making him look taller than he really was.

At the end of the morning I went to his office for my punishment. Music was playing in his cozy little office, the pop sound fluttering in
the background like butterflies on a windowpane. I thought about Sr. Bison and wondered whether this was the music he played as she made her maddening fucking sounds. All the furniture was in good order, covered with clean cloths to avoid staining. I lay down to take my punishment. The hairy carpet tickled my fingers and took me back to the infernal carpet at the pagoda.

I got my three on “government meat.” The memory of my painting job anesthetized me totally. I was struck by the fact that this man had learned nothing. He was knowledge itself, thus ineducable. I thanked him for punishing me with a docile, contrite look on my face. His eyes lit up.

“Good boy. You are very quiet, very humble, and you never cause trouble. I am sure that one day you will make a very good priest.” I could hardly believe what was coming out of the mouth of this Urban University alumnus, but I politely said, “Thank you, Father.”

The main topic of conversation among us was still food: it was becoming worse. The posho was half-cooked, or simply bad, made as it was from wormy maize flour bought in bulk and stored for too long. The beans were weevilled and hardly responded to the cajoling of boiler fire. They remained hard and indigestible, and made us fart like hippos. The staff constantly complained about ill-mannered boys who farted in church, in class and in the hallways. Served them right. Truancy increased, and the price of black-market pawpaws, sugarcane and pancakes skyrocketed.

The drought came, turned the grass from green to gold, terrorized our water supply and made the smuggling in of foodstuffs a little easier. As we trekked the one kilometer down to the seminary well with our buckets, basins and jerry cans, the experts slipped into the bushes to meet waiting vendors. Some smuggled the contraband home inside their water containers. Others hid the stuff in secret places and fetched it during supper time or night study. That was how the unlucky ones fell into Fr. Mindi’s net.