Abyssinian Chronicles (41 page)

Lageau reminded me of Jesus cursing the Pharisees, calling them adorned graves filled with rotting flesh and terrible stenches. Yes, this man was some reincarnation of Jesus. He seemed transformed, too.
Soft golden light fell on his gold-wire spectacles and burst into twinkling stars that multiplied when he moved his head. At the moment, he was the quintessential personification of power and glory. When his hand slashed the air, his Rado burst into liquid arcs of gold that negotiated the air like lithe surfers on colorless waves. When light fell inside his mouth, tongues of gold flashed from each gold tooth like distant suns. This was fantastic stuff. I was hooked. I could feel my knees go rubbery, because I realized I was in the presence of somebody special. I felt attracted to this man’s sense of power and who he was.

In Fr. Lageau I saw the might of the Catholic Empire, advancing, conquering, subjugating, manipulating, dictating, ruling. I experienced the awe the lowly faithful felt when faced with the gods of the empire. This man also gave off intimations of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund hegemony. He personified cast-iron rules forged in golden rooms, immortalized in gold-edged books with thick golden pens in faraway gold-sprinkled cities. He had that rigid, straight-backed, take-it-or-leave-it attitude of the almighty when they had their man on the ropes. This man, encased in gold, towered over raggedy-ass, snot-nosed republics and used or abused at will. He twirled his golden burden on his gold-ringed finger and commanded them to catch and service it. With a few slashes of the golden pen in the golden room on the gold-edged page, he could double, triple or quadruple somebody’s burden or if, for whatever reason, he decided to reward a minion, he could halve or quarter the load. This was real power as I dreamed of it. This was real power as I wanted to have it in my hands. This was the ideal power which shielded one from the ghastly sight of dying babies, emaciated adults and stinking geriatrics. This was the ideal power that let one go to bed at night smelling roses and wake up in the morning unbothered by anything.

I was on my knees. I was sure that many boys believed I was praying. Far from it: I was worshipping power in its glorious isolation, juggernauting down the hill like the winds that had devastated Mbale’s village. I wanted to stay here for the rest of the term, for the rest of the year, maybe for the rest of my life.

It was the sound of boys singing the last hymn that woke me. Or was it the sight of boys vacating the church? Everything seemed topsy-turvy. I became aware that I was locked in dreamy isolation from the herd. Snot was creeping ticklishly down my nostrils. My
mouth was parched from exposure. I slowly regained my wits. Exorcised by my increasing consciousness, the demons of power retreated. I started asking questions.

Wasn’t arbitrary use of power on the weak the reason I hated Padlock? Hadn’t Lageau done exactly the same thing? If so, why was I so hypnotized? Wasn’t I worshipping color, some semblance I did not know? Beyond the power of his heredity, what had this man ever created? Had he ever carved his name in diamond by writing a wonderful book? Had he ever expanded somebody’s moment by composing a song? Had he ever invented a machine or some mathematical formula to increase the world’s knowledge or to relieve its pangs or its wastefulness? Not to my knowledge. He was just a masquerade. As Padlock had not created the uterus, Lageau had not invented money—or knowledge or power, for that matter. Like most of us, he was a scavenger, a user of other people’s remains. His excessive show of arrogance was the guilt-ridden chicanery of an inheritor. Maybe he had money, maybe he could buy a town, maybe he could own half the land in Uganda, but he was a mere cog in the money wheel, a mere spoke in the power hub, and as for his color and his nuclear-arms-secured prerogatives, what had he added to them? Nothing. Like many intelligent people, he had fallen into the trap of defending an old perspective, exploiting the weakness of others; he had not discovered a new way of thinking. In other words, he was merely regurgitating hundreds of years of philosophical, social and political vomit.

I felt very disappointed, and weary too. Lageau, like many people I could no longer learn from, had lost his allure. One day I would be greater than him, just as I would be greater than Serenity, his Padlock and other little despots. I felt nauseated, as though all the fish glue I had inhaled in the past week had been rejected by my system in one stabbing jolt. Despite his missionary education, Lageau had missed one chapter in cultural anthropology. To us, the monkey represented cleverness, curiosity and the sort of intelligence he boasted—it defended its own standpoint. As a matter of fact, among the fifty-two totemic clans, the monkey figured prominently. Girls of the monkey clan were known for their alertness, nerve, quick wit and loving care. Lusanani, the gobbler of my virginity, belonged to the monkey clan. The superficial disdain for monkeys, with its origin in the missionary-colonial era, was ludicrous, simply laughable. It was the hollow cry of
uprooted people dancing to strange tunes and breaking their legs. All these white people believed they were scoring a point with the monkey thing, but they were not: they were just scratching their own assholes.

This man standing in church displaying his ignorance was scratching his behind, smelling his finger and screwing up his nose. Monkey business. This man baring his shallowness at the altar was nothing original; he was mimicking his forebears, the agents of the holy armadillo who had waged wars and poisoned our politics with religion. Hadn’t General Amin, time and again, charged that the Catholic Church was built on murder, terror, senseless war, genocide and robbery? This fresh slaughter of the innocent and the not-so-innocent was an old tool, and it shocked only the dim-witted among us. For a church that glorified pain and torture and raised the cross as its banner, this was insignificant. If, like Fr. Mindi, Lageau believed that he was showing us something to emulate, he had fallen far too short of the Church’s high psychopathic standards. It all just breathed the quaint air of the principle on which Lageau had stood to call us monkeys. I wasn’t turned on anymore; I was just irritated.

Not too long ago, Serenity had beaten me nearly to death just hours after Padlock had tortured me and bled my mouth for tearing a strip off a banal secondhand headboard cast away and accursed by departing Indians. I had, from then on, become a non-respecter of property. Now
Agatha
no longer awed me. Her sweet, smooth curves no longer made my heart race with suggestive thoughts. She had descended from the stratosphere of idealization to the lowly status of mass-produced consumer item barely saved from the dilapidation of secondhand dinginess by a clever reconditioning job. Some generous soul in Canada had paid for
Agatha
with no intention of turning her into a whipping post for the seminarians among whom she was going to live. Maybe a few dim boys believed that
Agatha
was brand-new and that Lageau had acquired her with his own cash. Wrong.
Agatha
was an old shoe, a cute little whore who covered her history with glossy makeup.

What did all this say about us seminarians and the priests we were supposed to emulate? Were we indeed pussy-whipped and glass-balled? Were those wax-faced priests indeed money-awed turds? There they were, sitting, standing, as a fat blue-green fly wiped his feet on their stupid faces, laying eggs in their gaping mouths which would
soon be gobbling a rich breakfast as we lapped thin, worm-infested porridge. Was that why they remained silent? Apart from their color, what had they added to priesthood? Had they expanded the vision of life and spirituality? Had they combatted suffering or added to human knowledge in any special way? When they opened their mouths, they merely regurgitated rotting Church rules, worm-infested dogmas and slimy platitudes created in the burrows of the holy armadillo. They were just perpetuating the stink-old order: white, nuclear-warhead-privileged priest above the black, shit-scared peasant priest, who was above the shitty-assed peasant nun, who lorded it over the wormy peasant faithful—man, woman, child. Hundreds of years of Catholic dictatorship later, ninety-five of them home-grown, had come only to this! What a waste!

Lwendo’s reaction to the incident mortified me. I found him at the water tank. He was waiting to draw water in his yellow plastic basin, at the bottom of which was an old loofah brush and a worn cake of Sunlight soap. Ah, Sunlight soap! A triumphant glint touched my eyes when I remembered that long ago I used to draw water and take it to the bathroom for him.

“Many bastards here have no respect for property,” he said. “Do you know how much that boat cost?”

“As if it was Red’s own money! Do you know the kind of stories he told the benefactor who paid for it? And the missionary organization which shipped it here? Yet he acts as if he paid for it all by himself. This is a simple boat, not a yacht.”

“Whatever it is, canoe or whaler, it deserves respect. A priest is supposed to look after the assets of his parish. Charity begins in the seminary.”

“What an original thought!”

“They did not have to injure her.”

“How sensitive of you! And how sensible of Red to shake his little monkey buttocks like that! Next year he might not have anything to sit on.”

“What should he have done? Called us saints?”

“He should have looked for the culprit, found him and dealt with him accordingly. But indulging in collective guilt is like licking his thin monkey lips—it didn’t come to much.”

“But at least you agree that he had cause to be angry.”

“Of course he had, like he had cause to swear at the power saboteur who is still at large,” I said, laughing.

“You talk like a supporter of the bastard.”

“Before he did something, all the fish ended up rotting in the freezer. Now, thanks to him, we get to see some of it on our plates.” I burst into laughter again.

“Maybe you are the power saboteur,” Lwendo said, grinning. “Maybe I should report to Father Lageau that I have caught his man.”

“It is good to see Father Red Indian turn crimson and swear at ninety miles per hour.”

“The bastard will get caught, and he will regret it.”

Lwendo’s conventionality in some respects defied my comprehension. This was the same fellow who used to grab other people’s things and use them without permission. This was the same one I nabbed fucking our very own Sr. Bison. Yet now he was defending Fr. Lageau’s indulgences. Was it obeisance to “might makes right”? Had Lwendo’s wild-man stint been just a type of inverted conformism? His reaction made me think that maybe I was the only person from a screwed-up environment and that I smelled rats where there were none. Why was nobody else experiencing a sense of outrage? Had I originally expected too much from Fr. Lageau and was now just working off my frustration?

I retired to the library. I wanted to stab Lageau and his ego, but which word could I sharpen like Dorobo’s monstrous arrows? Dirty words were out of the question: they would just confirm Lageau’s beliefs about us. Irony was the best ship home across the swirling waves of frustration and outrage.

I stole a cassock-like vestment from the pile used by altar boys, hid it behind the chapel and later moved it to the storage area where we kept old books. No one noticed the theft. A cassock was crucial for night raids: it was the insurance that Dorobo would not shoot you before issuing three loud warnings. Truants had their own cassocks, and often got away with their misdeeds because wandering priests mistook them for fellow priests and did not disturb them. Most priests, however, would not bother anybody roaming the night in a cassock because truants had, on a few occasions, thrown red pepper in the eyes of inquisitive priests in order to make good their escape. Fr. Mindi had
been a victim of the trick thrice, though it had not stopped him from snooping.

I rehearsed my moves a few times and struck early one morning.
Agatha
was in a dangerous spot: she was lit up on all sides. The chances of being surprised by a sleepless priest or even the watchman were great. The hardest thing was to get to the hallway and the offices, which were twenty meters from the chapel, seventy from the classrooms, ten from the refectory and three hundred from Sing-Sing.

The night was pitch-black. I started my journey at the bathrooms, via Lwendo’s barn till I made my way to the back of the chapel, the only place with a winking light inside. Because there were no dogs on campus, I walked without fear of sudden attack. Having come this far, I walked bravely from the chapel to the hallway, opened the door and held my breath when I entered.
Agatha
was in front of me, emitting an oily whiff, her alabaster skin super-smooth in the fluorescent light. If caught fondling her, I would be dismissed outright, but I did not think about it. I looked at the damage: a faint, timid, tentative line, not the vicious gash I had expected. This was curiosity. Viciousness would have been deeper and louder.

I removed a long nail from my pocket, chose a spot near the middle and went to work on
Agatha’s
belly, four ribs from the top. My cuts were deep and long. Etching five letters and an exclamation mark seemed to take an eternity. In reality, it was a quick job.
OH GOD!
proudly stood on
Agatha
’s belly. I was shaking. I drew back and stood behind the door, listening. I watched the way to the chapel carefully. I followed the same route back to the bathrooms.

Fr. Lageau had his first real migraine that morning. One half of his head, neck and side felt paralyzed. He was too entangled in the web of his anger to think straight. He retired to his bedroom, incensed that everyone was going to see the evidence of his humiliation. The migraine was horrendous—he felt like vomiting, diarrhea grated in his rectum, light hurt his eyes—and he lay down in darkness. “Oh God!” he mumbled. The irony of it! The priest who drove
Agatha
to the lake took him to the hospital.

Lageau was down but not out. A few days later, he took a bale of secondhand clothes he had received on behalf of poor seminarians to
Lwendo’s barn, doused it in paraffin and set it on fire. The flames and the thick smoke drew a crowd of boys and a few nuns who came to see what had happened. Lageau stood in front of the barn, at the spot where Lwendo stood to watch Bushmen fighting for charcoal, and watched without blinking, without saying a word. The nuns put their hands on their mouths when they saw what was burning, but said nothing. The boys stood a respectful distance away from Lageau and whispered among themselves.