The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl (28 page)

To the pilgrims the piazza represented itself as a huge,
mercilessly
sunned space which they were suddenly doomed to plod across.

They had come from Belgium, by coach, under the
organisational
auspices of a pious, though lay, confraternity.

Successive days in the coach had accustomed their muscles to passivity and their sense of temperature to air-conditioning. Their perception of distance in relation to time had become set at the coach’s, not their bodies’, rate.

Expelled from the coach short of their objective, they made a laboured and straggly group, frustrated because their minds traversed the space in an instant, leaving their hot, passive bodies the lengthy chore of catching up.

Most of them as they walked were looking at their own feet because that was what they were, prompted by soreness,
thinking
about.

They had all underestimated the ferocity of the Roman May. They were too respectable to unbutton. But several of them had taken off and were carrying their topcoats. The crook of their left elbows sweated unseen under furled thicknesses of sober, solid weave.

Watching their own and their neighbours’ feet advance, the men envied the women (the whole group was dressed strictly within the conventions assigned by western taboo to the sexes) their freedom to go sandalled, even open-toed, and thus aerated. The women envied the men the rigid, shaping container that kept out the sun, the dust and the slap of the pavement on one’s sole. The women knew that their own freedom was freedom merely to ooze uncomfortably over the rim like warmed brie.

When they reached the obelisk at the heart of the oval space, the pilgrims divided and straggled past. No one looked at the two flanking fountains, though the fringes of the group almost skirted their sphere of play. The fountains were things to avoid thinking about lest they prompt one or both of the coach-tourist’s endemic anxieties, when he would next be able to go to the lavatory and when he would next be able to get a drink of water.

Several pilgrim minds cast back, with an affection provoked by comparison, to the confraternity’s trip of the previous year (Liége – Reims – Arc – Orléans – Châteaudun – Rouen – Liége again) which had been in the steps (but not literally the
footsteps
), of Jeanne d’Arc (and without language adjustment, too).

The pilgrim feet slapped down on the decorative lines that marked on the ground the area’s radial symmetry.

The pilgrims didn’t notice or, because the lines were straight and the pattern symmetrical, avoided noticing. The oval enclosure, with its tall obelisk and two slightly less tall
fountains
marking, in measured stages, its maximum width, might have been a formal garden, but one that, disappointingly to the pilgrims’ tastes, contained not so much as the semblance of anything natural.

(On those of the women’s dresses that were decorated, the decoration was taken, of course, from natural forms. But the flowers and leaves that sprouted over the Belgians were much less gaudy than those on plants.)

Probably it was disappointment as well as frustration and foot-soreness that made the pilgrims lower their gaze. The huge area which their minds had leapt across at coach-pace consisted of the oval and, leading out of it like a coda, a
narrower
but still vast slab of oblong space. The piazza as a whole was bounded by a double (and roofed) colonnade. This
colonnade
was the horizon which the pilgrims’ glimpses found when they looked up. It was, insofar as its chief ingredient was columns, classical and, insofar as it bulged into an oval, baroque; whereas the pilgrims, in their heart of Belgian hearts (whose
tendency
had only been abetted by the previous year’s tour), expected a truly religious edifice to be gothic.

Having trailed (some of the carried coats dipping wearily towards the ground) through the oval, the pilgrims had now only the rectangle to cover: but the ‘only’ which their thoughts had framed turned out, as they plodded up it, to be another mistaken estimate.

Still none of them looked anywhere except at the ground. So none of them remarked the moment when a number of objects, almost indiscernibly tiny at such height, began to tumble slowly down from the Poussin-blue sky.

At last the pilgrims had traversed even the appended oblong. They watched their own feet slap slowly up the steps; and then the whole pilgrim group, as though swallowed in a mass
sacrifice
to Moloch, disappeared darkly into St Peter’s.

Their passage through the piazza brought an illusion of a breeze, plus a moment’s mobile shadow across the brilliance of the light, to people standing about in the piazza, including a
woman shorthand-typist of 37, from New Zealand, and her companion, a woman infant-teacher, aged 28, also from New Zealand, who were standing near the steps; a half dozen
Japanese
management trainees, who were holding out their light meters towards the fountains; young Father Kevin
O’Flummery
who, more tightly buttoned even than the Belgians, was gasping and taking shelter in the vaulted shadow afforded by the colonnade; and the gorgeous person who thought of
himself
as the Black Prince, who stood drawn up beside the obelisk as though challenging comparison with it, if not quite for height, then for impressiveness.

This person was in truth black but not a prince. In the middle of Africa his father kept a thatched general store, whose open front was hung with bicycle tyres and transistor radios
suspended
by their carrying straps, and his mother kept hens whom his father was forever having to shoo out of the shop.

He himself, Hector Erasmus Mkolo, was their seventh child, a fact in which he had felt blessed by luck from the start.

His early schooling had been under a master who had himself been taught by an Englishman, at a time when the territory was under British mandate, with the result that the first intellectual instruction Hector Erasmus received placed particular emphasis on the dynastic history of medieval England. Hector Erasmus was seven when the image of the Black Prince fell on his imagination. His imagination was, indeed, so stunned that he paid no attention to the rest of the lesson and never learned why the son of Edward III had been thus called. The reason his imagination supplied, to his private satisfaction, was that the British royal family was, through a genetic fluke, given to
producing
, every few generations, a black heir.

Soon after forming this theory, Hector Erasmus became strongly, though privately, persuaded that he himself was the fluke heir of the present generation, consigned to foster parents (quite kind and attentive ones, he admitted, which argued to him that they had been carefully chosen) and hidden away in an African village for reasons of state. As he grew, evidence seemed to corroborate his belief – the evidence, chiefly, of how and how extensively he grew. He quickly outgrew each pair of khaki shorts and then each pair of denim jeans that his father provided from consignments ordered for the shop. He
overtopped
, successively, each of his six elder siblings; then his father;
and finally his mother. That convinced him he was no blood relation of theirs; and the princeliness of his true descent was quite confirmed for him by the time he was 17, when, having overcome the bodily awkwardness of his oversized puberty, he had turned out to be superbly (and again in contrast to his supposed family) handsome.

Curiously, his sense of good fortune in being a seventh child did not desert him even though he was now sure he was not the child of those parents at all. Unless the royal family of England had bred and concealed six daughters before him, he was
unlikely
to be a seventh
royal
child, since it was obvious to him that he must be the eldest at least of boy children – and thus, like the first Black Prince, rightful Prince of Wales. Yet he clung to the luck of the number seven, no more disturbed by the
discrepancy
than pious Christians are disturbed by believing that Jesus was descended from Abraham and David (in lucky-three groups of twice lucky-seven generations at a time)
1
through his father Joseph,
2
while simultaneously believing that Joseph was not his father at all.
3

Sporadic irrationalisms apart, Hector Erasmus proved as
intelligent
as he was handsome, though it was probably less his intelligence than the soundness (despite an eccentric bias in some of its subject matter) of his schooling that made it easy for him to win a travelling scholarship.

With a copy of Arthur Rimbaud’s
Une
Saison
en
Enfer
in one denim pocket and of Sir Walter Scott’s
Ivanhoe
in the other, he embarked for Europe, while his father and siblings made ritual gestures of anxiety on the quay and his mother, usually stoical in manner, ran up and down like one of her own hens.

The voyage made Hector Erasmus seasick, and that in turn made him falter for the first time in his intention of carrying his grand tour as far north as Wales, there to claim his inheritance.

He landed at Lisbon. He set off, brown fibre suitcase (again from the shop) in hand, to look for an hotel. He had not even left the cobbled area round the docks when his imagination
was struck by a vividly patterned cotton material displayed on a market stall. It was probably, Hector Erasmus guessed, an
import
from his native continent. It was of good quality and a bargain for cheapness. (He had developed expertise while
helping
in the shop on Saturdays.) He bought the whole roll.

He entered his hotel suitcase in hand and roll of cotton balanced on his head. As the latter method of carrying large parcels was as acceptable in Lisbon as in Africa, it was a commonplace, if unusually good-looking, figure who, wearing tee-shirt and jeans, registered at the hotel desk. But when he descended that night for dinner it was in tribal splendour.

The transformation had cost him three large safety pins and two hours’ struggle. He had wrapped the material, in horizontal mummy layers, into a tight cylinder round his body, and had then tossed the tail over his right shoulder. His left shoulder emerged bare, gleaming brown and beautifully muscled.

He was treated, in the hotel dining-room, with deference.

In his early days in Europe Hector Erasmus avoided
fellow-Africans
and also, indeed, Europeans who seemed conversant with African culture. He was afraid someone would challenge the correctness of the arrangement of his tribal dress. Intelligence rescued him from anxiety and consequent furtiveness. He reasoned that Africa was so large and diverse that no one could be acquainted with all its cultures and that therefore no one could authoritatively pronounce that there was no African
culture
according to which he was correctly dressed. He began to travel about Southern Europe in open splendour, often
gathering
a train of unofficial courtiers as he went. In every city, he visited the market and thus compiled himself a varied and ever more princely wardrobe of his ‘native’ costume.

Arrived at Rome, he felt not in the least outdone by the ecclesiastical robes he saw at the church services.

The Roman climate, though no hotter than the African, was a little oppressive for him. On the other hand, the brilliant light set him off very well, and so did the Italian habit of staring and pointing at wonders in the street. (He had found the Portuguese disappointingly quiet, dignified and altogether rather
African
in demeanour.) He was increasingly disinclined to bother with Wales, to visit which would require of him another sea voyage and which might well turn out to be misty and where he might even encounter legal obstructions were he to try to establish his
claim. It occurred to him that it would be easier to avoid legal disputes and simply
use
the title that was his by right. If
challenged
, he could say it was a translation of an African title; and again he could rely on the diversity of African culture to
prevent
anyone from asserting either that there was no such title or that, if there was, it did not belong to him. Whether or not he should, from now on, simply give himself out to
be
the Black Prince he pondered as he stood beside the obelisk in Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s piazza (where he had been marked down by less attention than he was used to, because the place was
frequented
chiefly by foreign tourists, who did not always
demonstrate
what they were noticing). Unable to make up his mind, he waited happily for the luck of a seventh child, which had always attended him, to appoint his course.

Meanwhile Father O’Flummery leaned one hand against a column and used the back of the other to wipe his young, scrubbed, pitted, ugly, trowel-shaped face. He wished he
possessed
one of the inverted tea-strainer hats that Roman priests wore, instead of the thick, felted, shapeless one that kept out Irish drizzle but soaked up and magnified Italian heat. But he knew he was suffering not only from the heat but from the flush and the cold sweat of guilt.