No Other Life (17 page)

When we reached the bus station, Hyppolite was waiting for me outside the entrance. He did not look at the ‘nun’ who was with me. When I handed him the car keys, he smiled and said, ‘
Bon voyage, Pe Paul
.’

We watched him drive off in the car. I took her into the terminal and pointed to a bench near the ticket booths. ‘Will you wait there?’

She nodded and sat, her head bent forward, her face concealed by the ample head-dress. I went to the booth and bought two tickets to Damienville, the last stop on the northern route. As I paid for the tickets I looked back at her. What would I do if she tried to run away?

When I returned with the tickets and two
beignets
which I bought from a nearby kiosk, she took the food, thanked me and ate, still hiding her face from the other passengers who ran about, shouting at each other, asking questions, searching for the right departure platform. I had to leave her again while I, too, searched. When, at last, I found the Damienville bus, I seated us in the back row, behind a mother and three small, noisy children.

The bus, half-filled, began to move out of the terminal, its ancient engine noisily backfiring as we rolled into the Rue Desmoulins. One of the children, a little girl not more than five years old, put her head over the back of the seat, staring at us. After a moment she put her index fingers into her ears, wiggling them in performance for our benefit. Caroline Lambert laughed. The child, delighted, disappeared from view. And then Caroline, turning to me, put her hand on mine.

‘Thank you for saving my life.’

Her hand, holding mine. My hand, pressing hers, returning the secret embrace in a contact intimate as the touch of no other person in my life. I did not speak, nor did she. The ancient bus rumbled through the centre of the city, anonymous, unnoticed, a busload of poor folk – factory workers, farm labourers, artisans who had come to the city to offer their wares. I was alone with her, her body close. I trembled in strange exaltation.

In Ganae, as in no other country, to leave the slums of the capital is to enter an alternate scene of misery, the desolation of a land denuded of its trees, its fields debilitated by ignorant plantings of crop upon crop, its peasants living in lean-to shacks which give little shelter from the unrelenting sun and drenching rains. All day long, our bus travelled dusty roads, climbing into the harsh mountains, stopping in small villages, usually on the banks of a stream, where large-eyed children, their bodies brittle from undernourishment, clustered around the embarking or descending travellers in a listless charade of begging for coins. And then in late afternoon, as we came within twenty miles of Damienville, a man climbed on to the bus, holding in his arms a young goat. He sat himself down on a seat directly ahead of us and for a frightening moment he seemed to recognise Caroline, peering at her, smiling in an excited, half-mad way. She turned to the window, avoiding him, and at that point I saw that he was a Down’s syndrome victim. I leaned towards Caroline and whispered in French. I was sure he would speak only Creole. At that, she relaxed slightly but kept her head turned away from him. It was then that I looked at the goat, its long, sinful face like a carnival devil’s mask, its yellow, green-flecked orbs watching me, unblinking, the eyes of the evil one. I do not believe in the devil and not since boyhood have I feared hellfire. But, in some way I did not understand, it was as though the goat-eyes knew and incited my hidden desires. I heard my mother’s dying voice:

Please, Paul. It is not too late. Leave the priesthood now.

The goat flicked its head upwards, its eyes closing in a shame-filled blink. I looked at Caroline Lambert, hiding in her nun’s robe. She was seventeen years my junior, she was beautiful and foreign, someone from a world I could never enter. My longing for her was as unreal as that fleeting sight of the devil in the mask of a mindless goat.

There is only one hotel in Damienville, a dismal place where we ate in a dining room that smelled of rancid oil. Later, we were shown to rooms, small and squalid as cells. I tried to pray but could not. I lay on the dirty mattress, half-dozing, knowing that she lay a few doors away, my mind filled with the bitter irony of that beautiful, sensual face, framed in the purity of a religious robe.

Next morning I rented two mules and we set off up a twisting mountain track towards the region known as Pondicher. Here, in the high country, the air was thin and clear. Here, the land had not been endlessly divided among poor subsistence farmers, but belonged to a few rich families, people of Caroline’s sort. As we climbed upwards, we could see below us clouds like great grey airships, drifting into the tops of tall pines. This was Ganae as it must have been centuries ago, in those unknown times of the Arunda Indians, before the French conquest, before black slaves, imported from Africa, won their freedom by butchering their owners in the years of revenge and revolt.

We were alone. No birds sang. All was silence. I was riding on muleback in a landscape magical as a painting by Poussin. I looked at her, riding ahead, her body bobbing in the saddle as the mule picked its way upwards, and again, I was suffused by a sense of loss for a path not taken, an unlived other life.

Shortly before noon we sat together on a rock, overlooking a steep canyon, eating sandwiches which I had purchased that morning in Damienville. She was telling me about her education at a convent of the Soeurs de Charité in Paris.

‘I was twelve years old when I went to Paris. I had never been out of Ganae. I didn’t know your world. I found out that the white people in France saw me as a
noir
. I cried a lot. How could they think I was black? Look at me. If you met me in the street in Paris would you think that I was a dirty black person?’

‘Why is a black person dirty?’

‘You haven’t answered my question.’

‘You haven’t answered mine.’

She stared at me. ‘Would you have done all this for me if I had been a black girl?’

‘Yes. It has nothing to do with it.’

‘Are you sure?’

I could not face her. I turned away.

‘I’m sorry, Father. Forgive me. We were talking about the
noirs
. Even in Ganae, no one wants to be black.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘No? Then why does every
noir
who comes to power try to send his children to your school? Why do his children try to become like us, to marry us, to live like us?’

‘It isn’t because of your colour,’ I said. ‘It’s because you have everything and they have nothing. But, from now on, things are going to change. I know it.’

‘Do you? Do you believe your friend Jeannot? He is a dirty black person, a little
noir arriviste
. He’s jealous of us, he hates us. He wants to make this country into some sort of communist place. But nobody wants a communist place any more, do they? What’s his policy? Tell me? He doesn’t have one, does he? His policy is revenge, only revenge. And he’s stupid. Ganae is not a big African country. It is a little island off Central America. And who cares about Central America? Ganae wasn’t even a proper white man’s colony. It is two hundred years since we drove the French out. The
noirs
here weren’t trained by white colonists as they were in Africa and other places. All they’re good for is labour, cheap labour. Our independence is a joke. We live on the edge of the white world, we depend on the white world. That will never change.’

I didn’t answer her. I rose up and untied the mules. ‘We must reach the convent before dark,’ I said. ‘Are you ready?’

Later that afternoon, she broke the silence that had descended on us. It was the moment when, in the distance, across the gulf of a ravine, we saw the stone buildings and tiled roofs of the convent. She reined in her mule and pointed. ‘Is that where I will stay?’

‘Yes.’

‘When will you send for me?’

‘Not for some weeks.’

‘Are those nuns French?’

‘Some of them. Reverend Mother is French.’

‘So I am back in the convent with French nuns. Just like my schooldays. Who knows, perhaps I’ll like being here. It will be a change. Maybe I’ll become a nun.’ She laughed and kicked her mule’s sides. We moved on.

It was dark when I helped one of the convent servants unharness our weary animals. Reverend Mother had already taken Caroline Lambert up into the convent proper. As was usual with visiting priests, I was lodged in a small guest house near the stables. That night I dined alone in the convent parlour, waited on by an old nun who had been born in Boucherville, across the river from Montreal, and talked garrulously about her youth there in the time of Duplessis, a dictator of sorts, who once ruled that Canadian province.

In the morning, I said Mass for the nuns. As their attending priest came only on Sundays, this was an event. The church was full. The service was at seven. When I went up to the altar I looked to see if Caroline Lambert was present. She was not.

Later, after my breakfast in the convent parlour, I asked to see her.

‘I believe she is still sleeping, Father,’ Reverend Mother said. ‘Shall I wake her?’

‘No. It’s not important. Tell her I will telephone her very soon.’

It rained that day as the mules picked their way back over twisted tracks and I came down through a mountain fog into the lower heights above Damienville. It was almost dark when I saw the tangled tin roofs of the town below me. As I came closer, night fell and soon, amid the flickering town lamps, a stronger light blazed. It was a bonfire on what seemed to be a rubbish dump just outside the first cluster of dwellings. A group of people, old and young, circled, singing. Jugs of
usque
were being passed around. It seemed to be a celebration of some sort. Then the dancing, drunken throng took up a new song. I listened, stiff with surprise. It was not a song but a hymn, Jeannot’s favourite, ‘Dieu et Patrie’.

I moved on past the bonfire. A few streets later, I entered the main square of Damienville. Here there was a second bonfire, but it was dying out. Some people were moving past it, silent, peering at the ebbing flames. As I came closer, my mule reared and made a hoarse honking sound. And then I saw that the back seat of a car had been placed on a heap of stones near the flames. Tied to the seat by two wires was a stout middle-aged man. He was dead, his body bloodied by what looked like sword cuts, his face bruised and blackened by blows. Someone had placed awkwardly on his head a blue-and-white seersucker forage cap of the type once worn by Doumergue’s
bleus.

Three old men were coming up the street, going towards the corpse. One of them, gap-toothed and foolish, looked over at me and called out, ‘Justice,
Mon Pe
.’

‘Who was he?’

‘You don’t know? Boulez, head of
bleus
here in time of Uncle D. He want to push out Jeannot. Those
bleus
they trying to come back. Today we stop them. Justice time.’

He and the other men went up to the corpse. One of them leaned forward and awkwardly punched it in the stomach. ‘Finish with you!’ he yelled.

The other two turned and smiled at me, embarrassed, as though he had committed a social gaffe.

I watched them move off. The squalid hotel in which I had lodged the night before was just across the square. As I came up to it I saw a sign, scrawled on the wall with a charcoal stick.

bas les bleus

bas les blancs

mulâtres au mur

touche pas no’ pe

When I reached the hotel I paid a bellboy to take the mules back to where I had rented them. I was too weary and sickened to eat the stringy chicken offered in the hotel dining room. As I handed back the menu and asked for some fruit, I heard a radio voice in the courtyard. I recognised the speaker: General Hemon, Army Chief of Staff.

‘. . . in Mele. Four people were killed and several were injured including fifteen soldiers of the national guard. These figures, added to those I have already mentioned in the capital, make up a total of more than forty dead. To prevent further violence I have sent additional troops to each of the main centres and have instructed the commandant of the northern region to send re-enforcements to Pondicher. President Cantave has expressed his sorrow for the deaths that have occurred. He will address parliament tomorrow morning at ten. In the meantime, the Army issues this warning. Demonstrators carrying machetes will be arrested. Looters will be shot.’

The national anthem started up when Hemon finished speaking but after a few bars an announcer’s voice said, ‘We have received confirmation of our earlier report of property damage in the suburb of Bellevue. Shalimar, the mansion of Colonel Lambert where his wife, Caroline, entertained the international jet set, is reported to have been burned to the ground. In addition, demonstrators caused extensive damage to the residence of Senator Christian, leader of the Conservative Party, and ransacked the mansion of Herve Souter, the sporting goods millionaire, who is at present on holiday with his family on the Riviera. Troops of the Porte Riche Battalion have closed off all approaches to Bellevue. Only residents and official vehicles will be allowed access.’

I went out to the lobby and asked to use the telephone.