My Other Life (12 page)

And yet no one seemed to know what happened between me and Birdie in the convent that night. Perhaps it was too absurd, too outlandish—inconceivable in a place that was so lacking in fantasy and pretense. Perhaps it was because this knowledge of secrets did not include mzungus. Perhaps it was because we really had no secrets: the truth was that nothing had happened.

It was not a scandal that I sneaked out of the convent in the dark wearing my cassock. I took the long way back to the priests' house in order to conceal where I had been. By then the priests were asleep. If anyone else saw me, they did not say anything. I crept into bed, hardly believing myself what had happened, and I was so exhausted by the suspense and the fear of being caught in the convent that I went straight to sleep and did not wake until the sun was in my face, blazing into my eyes through my eyelids.

None of the priests mentioned my adventure. Whether they were ignorant or just being tactful I had no way of telling. Still I felt certain the secret was safe, perhaps I felt it most strongly because we had done nothing improper. We had lain in the path of temptation and afterwards gotten up and dusted off our souls, feeling lonelier than before.

"Now it will never happen," she had said.

She was probably right. And it cured me of dressing up in a cassock—of dressing up at all. It was not that I had been tempered in the fire. I was not stronger for having resisted. It was just that if it had happened as she had wanted, I would have had to leave the next day.

I was not ready, and though I was roused, it was not for her.

Now my days were orderly. I woke squinting and blinking like an animal, and then foraged for my breakfast and kept busy until the next mealtime. When I thought of reading or writing I felt a giddy thrill knowing that I would do neither. I had that same feeling waking from a dream in which something important and difficult was expected of me, a task that would involve my whole attention and engage my brain—and still I might fail; one of those dreams where the last words I heard were from a large, gray figure insisting that I meet this deadline. I would feel inexpressible relief that I had woken from this demanding dream, and then the whole day stretched ahead of me, all sunlight. The burden of writing had been lifted from me. I was excused from having to notice details; not writing meant not having to remember. I lived now in a luxury of forgetfulness.

I had never known such easy days. Birdie and I greeted each other as friends, and I understood her better. I saw her difference, her weakness. She was like a nun, like a leper—she belonged here, more than I had ever imagined. This interested me, yet I had very little to say to her. Except for being here, we had almost nothing in common. And she had never taken much notice of me. It was my cassock that had attracted her, and now I did not wear the thing.

Father DeVoss was the only person who mattered. He said nothing. His mind these days was on more pressing concerns.

It had begun that night of Father Touchette's tears, the angry discussion, the sobbing that had followed. There was more sobbing on other days. Father Touchette's crying was like an audible form of bleeding. You could not play cards when he was doing it. It was messy and shocking, it upset anyone who witnessed it, and it seemed to weaken him. And then one morning, after another night of this, I heard Africans grunting and their hard feet scuffing on the cement floor. They were laboriously moving furniture, I thought—no, not furniture. It was a large tin trunk, new enough to be only slightly dented. The three men struggled trying to share the weight.

"
Katundu
of Father Touchette," Simon said.

I had breakfast alone. I kept out of sight, spent the morning in my new way: cleaned the spark plugs on the Norton, talked to an old man about witches, looked for snakes to kill. On my way back from the withered cornfield I bumped into Father DeVoss.

"Is anything wrong?"

"No," he said. He glanced aside. The tin trunk rested on the verandah of the dispensary. "But Father Touchette is leaving us."

He said it as though it were no great occurrence: it was in the nature of things—not wrong, no one to blame. People came and went. I had asked the wrong question.

"He will be happier somewhere else," Father DeVoss said.

The old priest did not elaborate, but now I understood Father Touchette's sobs, and the way he had stood trembling at the open windows, glaring at the sound of the drumming at night from the leper village.

***

A solemn White Father, his bulky body apparent under his creamy robes, arrived at Moyo that evening on the train. He was Father Thomas, come to take Father Touchette away. There was no card game after dinner that night. Instead, Father Thomas conferred with Father DeVoss. The next day a high mass was held in the church—because we had an extra priest, Father DeVoss explained. I suspected that the service was being held in order to offer prayers for the troubled soul of Father Touchette, who sat with his hands in his lap in the front pew, looking stunned and shamed, like a fallen angel.

There was singing, there was drumming, there were solos with Angoni finger harps; hearing this, more Africans came from the village and crowded the church. The front pew was all nuns, with Birdie at the end. She did not look at me. I knelt just inside the communion rail while the priests sang the mass, and in between—dressed in black pants and a white shirt—I served as altar boy.

I rang the bell, I genuflected, I uttered the responses. I brought the tray of cruets at the consecration. I bowed and I gloried in the strangeness of it—the heat, the ceremony, the singing, the drumming that rattled the loose panes of glass in the church windows. No one outside Moyo knew we existed or that this ritual was taking place. As always, I had a dusty sense of remoteness here, but I found an intense pleasure in this obscurity, in no one else's knowing or caring about us, because I knew this world was real.

The mass was sung in Latin, the hymns in Chinyanja, the drumming too was African—filling the gaps of the ritual. The drumming seemed to unnerve Father Touchette again. His mask of sadness grew tighter on his face as the drumming banged louder, echoing against the walls of whitewashed plaster, while incense rose from the thurible, drifting past the glitter of the monstrance. Then the smoky incense curled as thick as drug fumes in the shafts of sunlight that pierced it.

Amina sat in one of the rear pews with her blind granny. I watched Amina closely, the way she followed the priests with her eyes, the passing back and forth, the sudden chants and sung prayers, my spoken responses, the jostling at communion.

In her eyes this must have seemed strange, even frightening, like a ritual of magic, the kind of village sorcery used to cast a spell, drive out devils, making a person whole again. In a sense this sort of purification was the aim of the mass—the holy sacrifice of the mass, as I had been taught to call it.

Afterwards I put out the candles and gathered the cruets and tidied the sacristy while Father DeVoss whispered to Father Thomas. And I knew what he was saying—practical things, like the mood of Father Touchette and the time of the train to Balaka and Blantyre.

Lunch was a long silence. We sat eating
nsima
and chicken in the heat while Father Touchette paced the verandah. Then Father Thomas led the weakened priest to the Land Rover and helped him in, taking him by the arm. Father Touchette climbed in slowly, like someone elderly or ill, and without a word he folded his arms, seeing no one, waiting to go. His eyes were sunken and dark, he looked haunted, his mind was elsewhere. I heard someone in the watching crowd of lepers say the word
mutu,
referring to Father Touchette's head—something wrong with it. Talking louder than the others, Amina's blind granny was asking questions: Who is it? Where is he going? Will someone else come to take his place? Is he sick?

With the old blind woman monopolizing the attention of the crowd, I sidled over to Amina and was glad when she did not move away.

"I saw you in church, Amina."

"Yes."

"But you are a Muslim."

"I went because of my granny. To help her. She is a Christian."

"Did you see me watching you?"

"Yes." She sniffed nervously. "I did not know why."

"Because looking at you makes me happy."

She sniffed again, she blinked. What I had said embarrassed her.

"How did you know I was looking at you?"

"Because I was looking at you," Amina said.

This touched me, and though she spoke with her eyes averted, out of shyness, she was bolder than I had expected. And perhaps she was not looking away out of shyness, for there was confusion in the dusty road as Father Touchette's big trunk, hoisted by dirty ropes, was slung into the back of the Land Rover. Already Father DeVoss was gunning the engine, and beside him Father Thomas had the grim resignation and grumpiness of a parent who has been inconvenienced by his son's expulsion from school. Father Touchette was in the rear seat, looking defeated, watched by lepers who seemed stimulated, even thrilled by the sight of this ruined mzungu.

Father DeVoss had tried to play it down, but in a place where very little changed from year to year this departure counted as momentous, an event that would be remembered and distorted in the years to come.

"
Alira,
" someone muttered. He is weeping.

It was so odd to see this grown man sitting in the vehicle with his face in his hands, tears running through his fingers. The crowd of lepers and others simply gaped at him—they were skinny, crippled, crooked, barefoot, ragged. So many of them wore large stained bandages. They watched impassively, with hardly a murmur. It was the lepers' pitiless curiosity that made Father Touchette especially pathetic.

I had always disliked the way Father Touchette carried his breviary around with him, consulting it and seeming to wrestle with its verses. I resented his saying, "I have baptisms," when I needed help carrying bricks. The book seemed like a talisman against his ever having to work. He used it the way the lepers used their mutilation, as an excuse. The young priest wore socks with his sandals, which made him look silly. I thought how madness is often a way of dressing.

"He is your friend?" Amina asked.

"No."

"But he is a mzungu."

"I would rather talk to you."

I wanted to tell her that I was glad to see him go. He was a worrier, a baptizer, a converter, a scold. "That's savage," he had said of the drumming almost every night. Perhaps I had alarmed Amina by being forthright, for after the Land Rover had driven off, she disappeared as the dust settled over us.

The drumming was louder that night. There were shouts and yells, a kind of whooping, like panic. In my fever that same drumming had filled my imagination with vivid images of Amina dancing—her slender body gleaming, her mouth open, her glazed eyes looking drugged.

Desire for me was always the fulfillment of a fantasy—not a surprise or a shock, but something studied in advance, dreamed and premeditated. It was pleasure prepared, the completion of a thought begun in a vision. Desire was familiar and fixed; not something new, but an older, deeper wish, with a history, an embrace that had already shadowed forth in my mind. It was something specific, like a gift I yearned for. And later, when it seemed to be granted—flickering into reality and becoming attainable—I seized it.

I had heard that same drumming many nights before, rattling through the heat to reach me in my bedroom where I lay alone on my cot. It was also the sound the village women made when they pounded corn into flour, thumping a heavy pestle into the mortar. When there was more than one woman pounding, it set up a syncopation in the trees, and a chorus of grunts and thuds.

"No cards tonight," Father DeVoss said. He did not have to explain that this was out of respect for Father Touchette, who hated our card playing. Among other things, the sight of us flipping cards and collecting tricks had driven him crazy. Never mind, we would play tomorrow.

"No cards," Brother Piet exclaimed, taking up his sewing. "
Pepani, palibe sewendo!
" Sorry, no games!

It was as though we were respecting the memory of someone who had just died. And leaving Moyo was like death: life outside it bore no resemblance to life here.

"I hope he gets better," I said.

Guessing what was in my mind, Father DeVoss said, "He won't come back."

There was a great cry from the village and a surge of brightness, as though a mass of dry straw or corn shucks had been dumped in the fire and exploded into flames.

"They never come back," Father DeVoss said.

At just that moment it seemed that the only life was down in the leper village—the drumming like a faulty heart beating; not wood at all but the racing pulse of the place.

Brother Piet was sewing by the light of the pressure lamp, and Father DeVoss sat near him, with shadows on his face. In any other place they would have been reading, writing a letter, looking at pictures. But this was Moyo, as stark as anything else in the bush. They were like an old married couple.

I said good night and went to my room, where I stood by the window. I was restless, impatient, ready to leap into the darkness. The trees beyond that darkness were lighted by the fire in the village. Because of the flames each branch was distinct and black.

Slipping down the back stairs, I went outside, avoiding the path but following the firelight and the sounds of the drumming.

Though there was a thin circle of spectators, almost the whole village was dancing in the clearing, women on one side, men on the other, shuffling and stamping their feet, nodding their heads, raising their arms, calling out. Their heavy tread echoed in me as though they were moving flat-footed through my body.

The men clapped their hands and the women yodeled in a shrill ululation that was both fearful and triumphant—a sort of war whoop. There were no carved masks, but there were painted faces, none more frightening than the man whose face was dusted with white flour. He was a leper and he was wearing a bed sheet and carrying a crucifix. A woman opposite him was also wrapped in a bed sheet. Priest and nun, writhing in a suggestive dance that was a riotous sexual mockery or a ritual, or both.