Abyssinian Chronicles (35 page)

A week later, the vicar general paid us a surprise visit. He was a tall, fat man with a hanging belly, large buttocks and a clumsy gait. He spoke too quickly, disguising a lisp and a stammer, and it was hard to hear what he had to say. Despite his less than satisfactory locution, he loved the sound of his own voice. He slapped us with a fifty-minute sermon, to which we listened woodenly and throughout which Kaanders slept soundly. We were inundated with the same drivel about our vocation and what it meant to be a priest, how special we were, how we had to preserve our honor and the like. Many of us agreed that the vicar general had sweet, albeit empty, words to say, but we were irked that our breakfast had been terrible—thin, wormy porridge with dry bread—while the staff had feasted on goodies that had filled the corridor with wonderful smells. Here, the importance of a visitor was gauged by the changes his presence effected on our table. When the bishop came, the bursar gave us the best meals, because the big man often came to look in on what we ate. We wondered if he was dumb enough to believe that what he saw us eating was what we usually ate or if he just wanted to see whether we were grateful for not eating the usual hog feed. This guy, though, had not bothered to look at what we were being fed, and for that reason most of us did not care a damn about the wise words he had to say in his lispy, stammering sermon. The chapel came alive only once, when he failed to wrestle down the word “boss” and slid precariously: “Jesuth is the both, I-I mean the bosh, er, th-the boss of this inshtitution.” After that he spoke very slowly. We were overjoyed when the mass ended.

During such visits, the priests were also on their best behavior, punctually holding mass, wearing their cassocks everywhere, abstaining from smoking in public and putting on a show of being the most docile and most exemplary priests in the whole diocese. They had personal files at the diocesan headquarters which they wanted to keep as clean as possible, because the cleaner the file, the better the chances of being posted in the best parishes.

The vicar general disappeared after mass and left incognito. Eventually we learned that Fr. Mindi had been transferred. The big man had come to meet the staff and introduce the name of the new bursar because, being a controversial move, it needed a bit of sugar-coating. All we learned was that a white missionary was coming to replace Fr. Mindi.

For a while there was feasting, and for the first time the boys looked cheerful. There were no more spyings, no more police checks, no more fear of lurking stool pigeons. The truants enjoyed the time of their life. Now their contacts came and brought the contraband near the football fields behind Sing-Sing and traded pawpaws, sugarcanes and anything else they had. This was what I had intended to happen, and I was happy that it had worked. A lot of food was being thrown away now, the euphoria of wonderful meals in the offing sharpening the rebellious edge even in the truly docile.

I watched everything from a distance, wondering why the night watchman and the priests were letting things rip. At the height of the frenzy, I saw a symbolically violent act taking place one hot afternoon. Somebody had somehow procured an enlarged picture of Fr. Mindi, pasted it on manila paper and nailed it onto a tree trunk. A group of boys with sticks were hurling accusations at it and beating it. I left after the face had become mere bits of torn paper. The euphoria of change had stirred pools of reservation, even misgiving, in the pit of my stomach. What would happen to all this emotion if the new man failed to deliver? I did not want to speculate too much. I felt I would cross that bridge when I came to it. So far, the only reflection in the water coursing under the bridge of change was the dull, disappearing image of the former bursar, who seemed to sleep by day and pack at night.

Fr. Mindi’s replacement was Fr. Gilles Lageau, a French Canadian missionary from Quebec. Far from being the stereotypical bearded greaseball missionary, Fr. Lageau was a good-looking, straight-nosed, blue-eyed man with a keen awareness of his looks, his power, his influence and his fail-safe mission. He arrived with a decent suntan, which did nothing to disguise his ruddy complexion and matched his reddish hair and the golden fluff on his thick, meaty arms. One could detect in his walk the swagger of American silver-screen heroes. The fluid movement of his well-tended body was a lucid announcement of naked power, in whose perquisites every optimistic seminarian hoped to share. If the priest had arrived looking faded and woebegone, with the years trickling down his face, every seminarian would have been disappointed, but the combination of American power and French arrogance made the man seem the personification of the anti-lethargy cure everyone had been hoping for. His reputation had travelled far ahead of him. By the time he arrived, we knew that he was a financial whiz kid who had all the tools to fish us out of the quagmires of poverty, malnourishment and the opportunistic diseases that fed off underdevelopment. This made him an instant hero, and his arrival an event awaited with the anxiety of a conquering messiah.

The man was unusual, but so were the circumstances in which he came. The era of white missionaries had ended. They had started the Church in Uganda almost one hundred years ago. Before disappearing, they had cultivated a local Church and a local clergy in most dioceses, except Jinja Diocese, where the die-hard polygamist culture held sway and stopped people from sending their offspring into the barren heartlands of priesthood and nunhood. The indigenous Church they started expanded very quickly. By the time they started leaving or dying, the Church had an indigenous archbishop, later a cardinal, many bishops and the full administrative cadre that manned the Catholic Church. The missionary element eventually dwindled, depleted by death and the demise of the Church in Europe. There was, in fact, a genuine fear among conservative missionaries that black people might one day rise and lead some of the formerly purely white missionary organizations, because most of the work done now was in Africa and vocations in Europe were almost gone.

At the moment, some of those organizations had their own local
seminaries. The diocesan seminaries were all under the leadership of indigenous priests, with the help of a white missionary here and there. Whenever a white missionary left, he was generally not replaced, because there was no one to replace him with. A white missionary replacing an indigenous priest was a rare occurrence. However, Lageau was anything but ordinary.

Lageau’s instant heroism was rooted in the fact that we, the seminarians, the downtrodden, believed that this new and energetic white man was going to offer a direct challenge to the black priests and, with his enormous zest, pull them toward a total revision of the administrative, financial and liturgical system. There was a lot of speculation as to Lageau’s motives for coming here. Some thought he had been sent as punishment for some big mistake, for, they reasoned, nobody could willingly leave the beautiful plains of Quebec for our little hill. Others said that Lageau had requested the transfer himself because he needed a challenge. As a corporate raider, he needed a sagging company to transform into a soaring eagle in order to soothe his ego. The third theory was that Lageau was an ombudsman sent by Rome and other financiers to investigate corruption inside the diocese and in the seminary system before making recommendations for change. There were also those who said Lageau was a cowboy in search of adventure, and that as soon as he got bored he would move on. The little we knew was that he had worked in parts of Asia and Latin America and was now in Africa. Whatever the truth was, Lageau had moved onto the scene in a big way and had become the dominant force in our little universe.

At long last we heard from official channels that Fr. Lageau had come to handle the seminary’s purse strings. There was singing and dancing in our streets, and especially in the open spaces between the beds in the dorms. Armpits ran with sweat as adolescent anticipation of fabulous meals got everyone excited. No more rotten beans. No more maggoty maize meals. No more half-cooked rice on Sundays. Come in,
matooke
—plantain—and meat. Come in, sweet potatoes and fish. Come in, fantastic meals all week long. What wouldn’t this rich North American do in this cheap-priced land of ours!

Food was the most important element in our secluded environment. We ate to live and to void our bodies of redundant desires. We went to bed with food on our minds and awoke the same way. How we envied the priests their daily treat and their Sunday banquets! The
nuns cooked for the priests with all their hearts and all their throttled sex drives. They indulged the priests as they would a super-lover, somebody they wished to drive to new levels of erotic madness by baiting him with condimented recipes that inflamed every zone of his body. In those days, priesthood was equated with good food. It was something worth suffering for. It was at table that one realized how words were divorced from reality: there was a lot of talk around the theme of equality, but those sweet words disappeared in a miasma of pig food when the bell rang for our lunch. I, for one, wasn’t too badly off, not after blackmailing my way into priestly leftovers, but the contrast was staggering nonetheless, especially on those days when I didn’t get any.

At times I felt I was living within the covers of certain books. I was glad I had not been selfish. I could have sat back, munched my morsels and done nothing about the Mindi menace, but I had done all I could, as if I were one of those worst hit by the food crisis. No wonder I walked around with the feeling that the whole seminary owed me: after all, it had been my parcels that had, in part, brought about the arrival of the French Canadian millionaire who was going to revolutionize everything as we knew it. I had the feeling that good things always came wrapped in mysterious parcels.

Fr. Kaanders was very excited by the arrival of Fr. Lageau. The macho man in him peeped through his old liver-spotted skin, and his dull eyes lit up. He now walked with a twitch in his step and pulled his trousers up to his belly button in an almost showy fashion. The arrival of Fr. Lageau energized him. It gave him a feeling of being young again and of going into battle to tackle ancient problems. With a young man at his side, he would not be alone in his whiteness. He would have someone to drink a glass of wine with and talk to about the other side of the world.

Fr. Gilles Lageau looked very much like Sean Connery portraying James Bond. Beside him Kaanders resembled a panhandler soliciting pin money from a hunky Californian windsurfer. Straw-haired, arthritic, incontinent and bad-toothed, Kaanders could hardly keep up with the flashy North American. It became clear from the beginning that if any kind of relationship was going to exist between the two, it would be up to Kaanders to sustain it. We watched the two white men
with almost anthropological fascination. The contradictions of the Western world held us spellbound, at least for some time.

Both priestly and seminarian narcissism generally found an outlet in a keen interest in material goods. The cars, the clothes and the furniture the staff had were analyzed to the last atom for information pertaining to quality, manufacturer, cost and durability. Lageau increased this activity. He boasted about his golden Rado watch (“the champion of chronometers”), which, putatively, lost only one second in ten years. Such Western reliability! Such Western precision! Wags spent time calculating the mountains of foodstuffs the watch alone could buy for the two hundred boys on campus. Others tried to figure out where Lageau bought his short-sleeved pastel shirts and the pastel trousers he wore. A boy helping in his office finally divulged the secret that Lageau wore French clothes, exclusively. Much was made of the expensive belts, checked socks and genuine leather open-toed sandals he wore in class. There were bets as to whether he possessed a cassock or not, for he and Kaanders never wore those cumbersome things, not even when the bishop visited.

The sudden appearance of this flamboyant man in the midst of poverty-stricken souls struck a blow for the rich: we developed a finely tuned idealization of them, accompanied by a deliberate transfusion of generosity into their veins and a conscious defeatist effort to justify or overlook their shortcomings. Few thought it strange that a man in his forties was openly boasting about his watch, coming as he was from a region where such watches were common; we felt that such little faults were the fleas on an otherwise powerful dog.

Local politics were also at work: you never bit the hand that fed you, or was most likely to feed you. Consequently, there was much turning of the other cheek and much patience in the hope that everything would turn out right in the end. After all, didn’t rivers flow toward the areas of least resistance? This force, this Western river coursing through our midst, was more likely to take up our burdens if we laid ourselves at its feet.

Ignorance was another ingredient in this concoction. There was little real-life knowledge about how the West, or the rich, carved out chunks of wealth for themselves. Hardly any of us knew how the magical Western economic machine, personified by this man, operated. The tendency was to glorify the unknown. So the Westerners, in
this case Lageau, were glorified to a sickening degree at times. Most of us believed that Lageau was our God-sent conduit to the benefactors in the West. The doors he could open! The dreams he could fulfill! Fantasy perquisites ranged from pocket money to quality consumer goods to good meals, to begin with. From experience we knew that priests who had benefactors enjoyed a better standard of living than those who did not. They had decent cars, cash to spend and nice clothes. Occasionally, they also went for holidays abroad. Therefore, the magical hundred-percent-compensation scheme for having left both mother and father to follow Jesus flashed whenever Lageau’s blue eyes appeared.