The Sweetest Dream (53 page)

He was a silent boy. At first he read devotional books, and
then a pupil from a fellow mission came on a Retreat and Matthew
fell under the spell of an ebullient joky personality, but even more,
of his opinions. This boy, older than him, was political in the
unformed way of that time–long before the national movements–and gave him black authors to read, from America, Richard
Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and the pamphlets of a
black religious sect that advocated killing all the whites as the
devil's progeny. Matthew, still brilliant, still silent, went to college,
leaving Father Paul behind, and there he was described long after,
when he had become the Leader, as ‘a silent observing youth, an
ascetic, always reading political books, clever, not able to make
friends–a loner'.

When the national movements exploded, Matthew found his
place, and quickly, as a leader of his local group. Because he did
not find it easy to join in argument and discussion, because he
often sat rather out of things, really longing to be like the others,
so easy and companionable, he acquired a reputation for cool
judgement and political nous, and, of course, for information,
since he had read so much. Then he was leader of the Party, after
a nasty little jostle for power. The end justifies the means: his
favourite saying. The Liberation War began and he was head of
one of the rebellious armies. He made promises of every kind,
as politicians do, the most productive of later harm being that
every black person in the country would be given enough land
to farm. Minor absurdities, like saying that to dip cattle was a
white man's devilry, and to maintain contour ridges merely
kowtowing to white prejudice, were trifles compared to this primal
deception–that there would be land for everybody. But then,
he did not know he would end up as the Leader of the whole
country. When at Liberation his party came first, he secretly found
it hard to believe that he could be chosen over more charismatic
candidates for power: he did not believe he could be liked.
Respected . . . feared . . . oh, yes, he needed that, the stray dog
needed it and would for the rest of his life. When he had become
converted–by, again, a strong and persuasive personality–to
Marxism, he made rhetorical speeches copied from other
communist leaders. He admired to the depths of his nature strong and
brutal leaders. When he was head of a nation he travelled all the
time, as Leaders do, always in America or Ethiopia or Ghana or
Burma, seldom choosing the company of whites, for he disliked
them. Because he had to put on the front of a statesman he had
to conceal what he felt, but he loathed the whites, disliked even
being in the same room. Abroad he gravitated by instinct to
dictators, some of whom would soon be dislodged from power,
like the statues of Lenin that would litter the former Soviet Union.
He loved China, admired the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural
Revolution, had visited there more than once, taking with him
in his entourage Comrade Mo who had instructed him in the
necessities of power long before he had attained it.

No sooner had he got power than he became a prisoner of
his fear of people. He was meeting no one but a few cronies, and
a young woman from his village, with whom he slept; he never
went out of his residence without an armed escort; his car was
bullet-proofed–the gift of one dictator–and he had a personal
guard offered to him by the most hated despot in Asia. Every
evening, as the sun went down, the street outside his residence
was closed to general traffic, so that the citizens had to drive streets
out of their way. Meanwhile, while he was immured as much as
any victim in a story who is compelled to build the wall around
himself with his own hands, there was no Leader in all of Africa
more loved by his people, and from whom more was expected.
He could have done anything with the populace, for good or ill:
like peasants in former times they looked up to him as a king
who would put right everything that was wrong; where he led,
they would follow. But he didn't lead. This frightened little man
cowered in his self-made prison.

Meanwhile, too, the ‘progressive opinion' in the world adored
him, and all the Johnny Lennoxes, all the former Stalinists, the
liberals who have ever loved a strong man, would say, ‘He's
pretty sound, you know. A clever man, that's Comrade President
Matthew Mungozi.' And people who had been deprived of the
soothing rhetoric of the communist world found it again in Zimlia.

Into this fortress buttressed by fear, it might have happened
that no one could find a way, but someone did, a woman, for at
a reception for the Organisation of African Unity he saw her, this
handsome black Gloria, who had all the men clamouring around
her while she flirted and bestowed smiles, but really she had her
eyes on the man who stood well to one side, following her every
movement as a hungry dog watches food being conveyed to
mouths not his. She knew who he was, had known, had laid her
plans, and expected it would be a walkover–as it was. Close to,
she fascinated, every little thing about her enthralled him. She had
a certain way of moving her lips, as if she was crushing fruit with
them, and her eyes were soft and they laughed–not at him, he
was making sure of that, so convinced was he that people did.
And she was so at ease where he was not, in the flesh, in that
magnificent body of hers, in movement and in pleasure in
movement, and in food, and in her own beauty. He felt that he was
being liberated simply by standing next to her. She told him he
needed a woman like her, and he knew it was true. He was in
awe of her too because of her sophistication. She had been in
university in America and in England, she had friends everywhere
among the famous because of her nature, not because of politics.
She talked of politics with a laughing cynicism that shocked him,
though he tried to match her. In short, it was inevitable that soon
there would be a brilliant wedding, and he lived dissolved in
pleasure. Everything was easy where it had been difficult–no,
often impossible. She said he was sexually repressed, and cured
him of that in so far as his nature permitted. She said he needed
more fun, had never known how to live. When he told her of
his meagre much-punished childhood she kissed him with great
smacking kisses and pulled his head down into her massive breasts
and cuddled it.

She laughed at him for everything.

Now, Matthew had at the start of his rule discouraged the
comrades, his associates, the leadership, from indulging their greed.
He forbade them to enrich themselves. This was the last of the
influences from his childhood, and then the Jesuits, who had
taught him that poverty was next to Godliness: whatever else the
Fathers might have been, they were poor and did not indulge
themselves. Now Gloria told him he was mad, and that she should
buy this big house, that farm, then wanted another farm, and
some hotels that were coming on to the market as the whites left.
She told him he must have a Swiss bank account and make sure
there was money in it. What money? he wanted to know, and
she scorned him for his naivety. But when she talked of money
he still saw in his mother's thin hands the pitiful notes and coins
put there by his father at the month's end, and at first, when he
voted himself a salary, he had been careful it should be no higher
than a top civil servant's. All this Gloria changed, brushing it
away with her scorn, her laughter, her caresses and her practicality,
for she had taken over his life and as the Mother of the Country
could easily see to it that money flowed her way. It was she
who quietly diverted big sums that flowed in from charities and
benefactors into her own accounts. ‘Oh, be a fool then,' she
cried when he protested. ‘It's in my name. It's not your
responsibility.'

Battles for someone's soul are seldom as clear and easy to see–and as short–as the one where the devil battled for Comrade
Matthew's. And Zimlia, ill-governed before on ill-digested
Marxism and tigs and tags of dogma, or remembered sentences from
textbooks on economics, now rapidly plunged into corruption.
Immediately the currency began its steady, but rapid devaluation.
In Senga the fat cats got fatter every day, and out in places like
Kwadere money that had descended in a trickle now dried up
altogether.

Gloria grew more fascinating, more beautiful, and richer,
acquiring another farm, a forest, hotels, restaurants–and wore
them like necklaces. And now when Comrade President Matthew
went abroad to meet his favourite people, the immensely rich,
dissolute and corrupt rulers of the new Africa and new Asia, he
did not sit silent when they displayed their wealth and boasted of
their avarice. Now he could boast of his and did, and when these
men showed how they admired him, giving him gifts and flattery,
that empty place in him where there would always be a thin stray
dog with its tail between its legs was filled, at least for a time, and
Gloria caressed and stroked and petted and nuzzled and licked
and sucked and held him against those great breasts and kissed the
old scars on his legs. ‘Poor Matthew, poor poor little boy.'

 • • •

The evening before Sylvia had left for London she had stood on
the path just where the oleanders and hibiscus and plumbago
bushes ended, and looked down at the hospital with more than
the forgivable amount of pride. Anyone could use the word ‘hospital' now of that cluster of buildings. No money had come
through Comrade Mandizi for a long time, but the plunging
Zimlia currency meant that small sums in London became large
ones here. Ten pounds, the cost of a small carrier bag of groceries
in London, here built a grass hut or replenished the stock of
painkillers or malaria tablets.

There were two ‘wards' down there now, long grass-roofed
sheds, the grass close to the ground on one side where rain most
often came, and high on the other. In each were a dozen pallets
with good blankets and pillows. She was planning another shed,
for the existing beds were filling up with the victims of this AIDS,
or Slim, that the government had just decided to fully and frankly
acknowledge, with appeals to foreign donors for help. Sylvia knew
that in the village these were called ‘the dying huts', and she
planned to build another, for patients who were merely malarial,
or in labour–more ordinary pains of the flesh. She had had built
a proper little house of brick, which she called the
consulting-room, and in it was a high bed, made by lads from the village, of
leather thongs stretched on a frame and on that a good mattress.
Here she examined people, prescribed, set arms and legs, bound
up wounds. In all this she was assisted by Clever and Zebedee.
She had paid for the new buildings, and for medicines–paid for
everything. She knew that in the village some said, And why
should she not pay? She stole it all from us in the first place. It
was Joshua who inspired this grumbling. Rebecca defended her,
telling everyone that without Sylvia there would be no hospital.

On the evening after Sylvia returned from London, standing
exactly in the same spot, she looked down at her hospital and was
attacked by that failing of the heart and purpose that so often
afflicts people just back from Europe. What she saw down there,
the assemblage of poor huts or sheds, was tolerable only if she did
not think of London, or Julia's house, with its solidity, its safety,
its permanence, each room so full of things that had an exact
purpose, serving a need among a multiplicity of needs, so that
every day any person in it was supported as if by so many silent
servitors with utensils, tools, appliances, gadgets, surfaces to sit on
or to put things on–an intricacy of always multiplying things.

In the early mornings Joshua rolled from his place near the
log that burned in the middle of the hut, reached for the pot
where last night's porridge congealed, dug out from it with the
stirring stick some lumps which he ate swiftly, supplying his
stomach with its necessity, drank water from a tin jug that stood
on the ledge that ran around the hut, then walked a few steps
into the bush, urinated, perhaps squatted to shit, took up his stick
that was made from bush wood, and walked the mile to the
hospital, where he slid his back down the tree, to sit there, all
day.

Surely she, a ‘religious' as Rebecca called her–‘I told them
in the village that you are a religious'–should be admiring this
evidence of the poor in wealth, and probably of spirit, though
she did not see herself as equipped to judge that. That great heap
of a city, covering so many square miles, so rich, so
rich
–and
then this group of paltry sheds and huts: Africa, beautiful Africa,
which oppressed her spirits with its need, wanting everything,
lacking everything, and everywhere people white and black
working so hard to–well, what? To put a little plaster on an old
weeping wound. And that was what she was doing.

Sylvia felt as if her own real self, her substance, the stuff of
belief, was leaking away as she stood there. A sunset, a rainy
season's going down of the sun . . . from a black cloud low on
the red horizon shot heavy thick rays like spikes of gold that
radiate around a saint's head. She felt mocked, as if a clever thief
were stealing from her and laughing as he did it. What was she
doing here? And what good did she really do? And above all
where was that innocence of faith that had sustained her when
she first came? What did she believe in, really? God, yes, she
could say that, if no one pressed for definitions. She had suffered
a conversion, as classic in its symptoms as an attack of malaria, to
The Faith–which is what Father McGuire called it, and she
knew that it had begun because of ascetic Father Jack, with whom
she had been in love, though at the time she would have said it
was God she loved. Nothing was left of all that brave certainty,
and she knew only that she must do her duty here, in this hospital,
because Fate had set her down here.