Valley of Bones (33 page)

My religion, such as it is, was a pure gift, a complicated densely layered device that I can barely understand. I have had the glory, yes, treats for beginners as St. Teresa says, the sweetness, as St. John calls it, of God’s embrace, but probably I would have walked away from even that God forgive me had I not loved Nora Mulvaney, of which more later, although it was not what you probably think.

The Rome headquarters of the SBC is a vast seventeenth-C. pile called the Palazzo Treschi, on Via Giulia between the Palazzo Ricci and the Criminological Museum. You go through an iron gate in a wall made of those purply brown stones they like for palaces in Rome and then you’re in a paved courtyard with a fountain and the original bronze statue of Marie-Ange and the dying lad. On its marble plinth are carved the names of the sisters who have died in service, and although the names are
quite small two sides of the plinth are already full and a third has been started.

They have the language school and the residence and the administration there, one in each of the three wings. Nora took me there just after we got to Rome and I found we were both in a heap of trouble. We were called in to see Constance Mucha, the prioress general, the woman in charge of the daily operations of the Society, second in command to the Mother General herself. She was a sharp little woman with the face and small round glasses of a Gestapo inspector in a bad movie, who for twenty minutes reamed us both out about my escape. Then I was sent out while she and Nora argued about my fate. The memory business was the key. Nora convinced her that I could learn languages real fast, and that I’d be a boon to her work in Africa, and so all through that damp Roman winter and for a year afterward I worked on learning Arabic and Dinka. My Arabic teacher was Mr. Sulieman. He said I had a terrible accent, but he was amazed by my progress in reading. Before the year was out I had read and memorized swaths of the Quran and the Thousand Nights and a Night, not particularly useful, we thought, but it gave him delight to see me do it.

Nora and I lived in a little apartment in Monti near Trajan’s Market. Not much time for sightseeing, not interested much, Rome a little overwhelming for a hick white girl from Caluga County, the most distinguished architecture I had ever been in were the Caluga County Courthouse (1911) and Miami hotels. Out for daily mass at Chiesa Nuova, a tradition. In the old days we used to march out two by two from our palazzo to the church, but now we just show up. I didn’t mind this at all, the one part of going to church that always pierced me through and through, the Eucharist as poor Robert Lowell said, perfectly real like getting your hand wet, well he was crazy too. Once to St. Peter’s, horrified, clearly the Hall of the Demon King, full of Japanese tourists viewing the ruins of my dying civilization.

(Do you need to know about this? I am determined to finish this miserable story in the present notebook, the four books according to Emmylou, do I dare take more than the Gospels, no, and besides I am aware that I am a danger to you and others. Being crazy officially has been a nice rest, but this must end soon.)

Evenings, we hung out in an Irish saloon on the Via Leo-nina, drinking Guinness while she laid out for me the complex politics of the Society of Nursing Sisters of the Blood of Christ. Power corrupts she said, as our good old Lord Acton used to say and you know he was talking about the church and the pope. And money is power and it’s corrupted us, I mean the Society. You have no idea how much money we have darlin’, we’re living on the interest of the interest of it, and now we have some of us saying, well why are we always sending our poor girls out to foreign shores to be shot and raped by ignorant heathens, why not change things so that the ignorant heathens get some lumps too, a bribe here and there, a little private army, so that we can do God’s work and help more people? And you know the prioress bloody general Mucha-do-about-nothing, that’s her goal in this life. Why, she says, the Templars and the Hospitallers took up arms to save the sick and the poor pilgrims in the Holy Land, forgetting that they also helped destroy the Holy Land and made the name of Christ a stink in the nostrils of those people unto the present day, and the Templars all got burned at the stake for their greed. But a lot of the sisters don’t see that, especially the ones from the third world, they’ve got a different attitude, and the kind of war they’ve seen is different from the kind the Society used to know. Now it’s just gangs of thugs wandering around looting and killing, not proper armies with front lines and command structures, and they’re thinking, oh, if we just had us a troop of boys with rifles, maybe poor sister Angela wouldn’t have got the chop, what’s wrong with that? Now, see, the mother general’s got a head on her shoulders, but she doesn’t want to split the Society, so she temporizes and she’s got me to
toss in Sr. Con Mucha’s face, so as to stay above the fray in a manner of speaking, between them who want us to hire private armies and me and me friends, who think it’s a rotten idea. And the whole issue would’ve never come up if it weren’t for the Trust, our golden calf, because even though the Trust keeps us independent, and allows the pope to wink at some of the stunts we pull from time to time, it also lets us contemplate hiring soldiers, so it’s still a gilded cage, d’you see.

I did not. Oh, darlin’, she said, didn’t you read the little book? Where do you think the Trust gets its money, and of course I remembered and I said, oil, and she grinned and said right you are, and oil means politics, and it puts us in with some of the world’s worst, because what did oil ever do except make despots rich and ruin the people so unfortunate as to have oil under their feet, and I don’t even mention burning up the world. By God, if it was me in her chair I’d sell up and give the money to the poor and beg on the streets for the little we need. Dying for Christ is the cheapest game in the world, you know, it hardly costs a thing.

We didn’t have a sexual relationship I should say here. Nora was a strangely asexual sort of person, but with terrific erotic energy channeled into charismatic rather than genital lovemaking. There are people like that, although rare. Her brother was another. I came back from my Arabic lesson one evening and there he was in our kitchen, pouring drinks, Nora in drag, and twice her size. Peter was on leave from the army, thinking about getting out, and when I asked him what he did he said quartermaster, counting the sheets, and Nora laughed and said, he’s coddin’ ya, he’s in the specials, killed hundreds with his bare mitts, and he actually blushed red. I’d never met a man so sexy and at the same time without a hint of lust. Married with three kiddies and devout as Nora, it turned out. We went out and got drunk and he had to carry the pair of us home.

The next week we went to Nettuno, south of Rome, to the
parachute center there, and I learned to jump out of airplanes. It took two weeks, one of ground school and leaping off towers, and then three actual jumps from a light plane, wheeling above the Tyrrhenian Sea, flying through pure blue and landing on a broad beach, and then once at night. The Society runs its own planes and pilots and has the largest air force of any religious order, the reason being ubi vademus ibi manemur, the Society is often unpopular among nations, but that makes no difference so we sometimes have to stay off the roads and away from borders and then we move people and goods by air drop. Also parachute training tends to strip out the easily frightened and those with an excessive fear of extinction. I found I didn’t mind it at all, no, going out the door after Nora seemed the most natural thing in the world, flying nuns, although it was considered tacky to so express it.

Last night in Rome, the fourteenth of March, me having been nearly two years in the city, and being able to make myself understood in Italian, Arabic, and Dinka, we wandered through the old city, giving away all our lira to beggars, something she did all the time anyway even though it was clear to me that nearly all of them were scam artists. But she saw them as suffering people doing us a favor, allowing us the grace of charity.

And off we go to Africa, a couple of plane rides, Cairo, Nairobi, and now a Land Cruiser over red dirt roads, to the border between Kenya and Sudan. I found I was right at home, because Africa is like one huge bad trailer park in north Florida, very hot, bug ridden, rich in biting flies, sweaty, smelling of sewage and vegetable decay and cheap cooking, full of poor poor people wearing T-shirts with sports logos. There are fewer shoes and no wrecked cars in the front yards, however. We went to Lokichoko, in Kenya, which is the main base for the vast empire of Help. Nora despises Loki and all it stands for, the rich working out their guilt in relatively comfortable surroundings, eating three squares a day among the starved, trying out their
improving schemes upon the wretched of the earth, oops that didn’t work, let’s try this!, and when the bullets fly, it’s oh my, so long poor folks, we can’t stay, because we’re white and our bodies are simply worth more than yours are.

The Society had its Sudan operation headquartered at Mokilo about ten kilometers closer to Sudan so as not to be contaminated by the Helpers. There was an airfield, tents to sleep in, an office tent, a field of storage containers surrounded by barbed wire, and a wooden control tower. On the field was an antique Convair 580 being worked on by a couple of greasy sisters in cut-down bleus, and a little bit after we got there a newer Fokker 27 landed in a cloud of red dust.

In the Society the head of a regional operation is called a prefect, and the prefect here was Sr. Isobel Alecran, a barrel-shaped Filipina with a hard flat face that converted itself into a broad gold-toothed grin when my Nora walked into the office tent. She greeted me more formally and announced that since they had no need for my language skills at Mokilo, she was going to put me in logistics. It turned out that logistics was yet another thing, like religion and languages, that I was not much interested in but I was a dab hand at, I am a walking demonstration of God’s mysterious ways.

Medical logistics starts with the patient-day (and the treatment unit for outpatient work) and from each of these there flows a physical stream of necessities from drugs to rubber gloves to pillowcases. These are embodied in packagings of a zillion different weights and dimensions and these in turn must be entombed in standard air-droppable palletized crates of particular volumes and weights, so given that say a F-27 can haul 6.3 metric tonnes in a usable volume of 62 cubic meters, figure out how to get the maximum number of packages per flight while ensuring that there is no day when your recipient has all catheters and no morphine. Needless to say the Society has been doing this for a long time and they have it down, but still it is useful to
have a person who has all the logistics charts in her head, especially when the computers crash, as they so often do in African conditions.

So I worked in the ops center writing out pack tables for the Sudan sites, Wau and Juba and Bor and the outlying places, Wibok and Pibor Post, where we were going. Our flights were made at night because they are all into the no-fly zone that the Government of Sudan has declared in the regions controlled by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, with whom it has been fighting a war since 1955 except for a short break in the 1970s. GOS and SPLA, as we call them, have between them caused the death of around two million people and made another five million into refugees. There have been many efforts to stop the war but all have failed because all the valuable resources are in the southern part of the country, especially the oil in the Bahr al-Ghazal basin, and the political control is in the northern part, and the northerners think they are Arabs and thus superior to the southern people, who are Nilotics, although I believe every single person in that country would be considered a nigger in Caluga County, Florida. The northerners are Muslims and would like the whole country to be ruled by Muslim shari’a law, but the southerners are mainly Christians or traditionalists, what we used to call pagans I suppose, and they don’t want this at all.

The real reason is racial and cultural, according to Nora. The Islamized Sudanese used to raid slaves in the south, that was the only real business in the country before the Brits took it over, and they still call any southerner
abd
, which means slave, and they still have slavery, that’s how they drive the southerners away from the oil regions, they give Islamized tribes weapons and set them loose to raid and rape. And all that about Islam is a crock anyway because they attack the Nuer, who
are
Muslims, but that doesn’t count because they are also
abd
.
And so the SPLA are the good guys? Well, no, not really because they’re always breaking off little tribal or clan or warlord groups,
sometimes siding with the GOS or some local confederation of thugs. Honestly I never got the politics and now it’s so boring that I can’t talk about it anymore and it would be just crap except it killed all those people.

But Nora loved the Dinka. Not what they call themselves, the first literate person who met a Dinka asked him what people he sprang from and the Dinka said we are of Deng kak, giving the name of their clan ancestor, and so Dinka they became, but they call themselves Monyjang, which means the husbands of men, meaning they are so manly that other men are women compared to them, which gives you some idea of their haughty views. But they also call themselves the slaves of cattle. They loved their cows, and not in the 4-H way they did in Caluga County, cattle are wealth, pride, honor. They write love poetry to their cows, one of their major art forms. Every boy has what they call a personality ox to which he devotes the kind of attention Americans devote to their girlfriends if the girls are lucky. Women are valued by how many cows they bring as bride-wealth and if they produce sons. So women get the shaft as usual I said, but Nora said, not really, it’s hard to explain, the women are as proud as the men, they’re all aristocrats, even if they have nothing they own except spears, cows, pots, and poetry. There’s also a great tradition of women warriors among the Dinka, the thing they respect more than anything is spiritual power. The Dinka we were going to stay with—the Peng Dinka—traced their origin to a woman named Atiam 150 years ago, who led them across the Nile to a promised land, just like Moses.