No Other Life (2 page)

It was true, yet not true. By then, I was much involved with Jeannot although I had met him only two weeks before, while combing the few rural schools in the north of the island. A teacher in the village of Toumalie took me to his tin-roofed schoolhouse, excitedly talking of a thirteen-year-old boy, an orphan who, he said, ‘is a vessel into which you can put anything and bring it back out again’. I tested the boy. I was astonished. The following day I rode on muleback over a road never travelled by motor vehicles, up to a mud-walled mountain shack on land denuded by three hundred years of ignorant and relentless agriculture. There, a woman with the flayed face and wasted body of those who live on the rim of starvation sat on a ramshackle porch, breast-feeding a child. She was a widow with four children of her own and two boys who were the orphaned children of her brother, a warehouse clerk who had died three years ago. One of these orphans was the boy, Jean-Paul Cantave, known as Jeannot. When I told her my plan she gave him into my care as casually as she would give away a puppy from a litter.

An hour later I rode back down the mountainside, the boy hanging on behind me, his arms around my waist as the mule picked its way over the rutted road. He was small and frail. His clothes were a dirty denim shirt, patched trousers and wooden-soled clogs. Imagine – no papers, no signature, no document of any kind. What would I do with him if the Archbishop refused to accept him? He had been given to me. I wondered if people back in Canada had any idea of what life was like here. No one in the world had any idea. This was Ganae.

The other children I had selected were not orphans and so remained at home until the day, two weeks later, when we brought them before the Archbishop. But Jeannot I took straight back to the college, where I installed him in a dormitory with ten other boarders, all of them mulattos. After the first night he came to me. ‘They are laughing at me because they have clothes to go to bed in. I do not.’

He did not speak to me as a teenaged boy might speak to a person in authority. From the beginning, it was as though we were friends. I went out at once and bought pyjamas and underclothes. And, although he had not yet been accepted in the school, I arranged for him to be provided with the school uniform. In the next several days he learned to eat in the same manner as the rich boys, to blow his nose in a handkerchief, to take a daily shower and, above all, to use French as his first language. Until then it was the tongue he had learned in school, but now, surrounded by boys who spoke it in preference to Creole, he became fluent with astonishing speed. In fact, when two weeks later the other black scholarship students showed up, Jeannot was no longer of their world. The village teacher in Toumalie was right. He was a vessel into which you could put anything and bring it back out again.

He had been given to me. Almost every day when his classes ended he would leave the college and walk six streets to the staff residence where I lived. Hyppolite would admit him and he would sit on a stool in the corridor, reading and studying, but waiting to see if I would go with him for a walk. Yes, like a dog. I often thought of that. But I cannot say that he was devoted to me. He watched me, he studied me, he tried to find out how my mind worked. From the time he came into my care he completely cut himself off from his former life. When I asked if he had written to his brother and cousins, he said, ‘What use would it be to write? They will forget me. All that is over, isn’t it, Father? Now, I live in the city. I would never have seen the city if you had not taken me from Toumalie. You will not be sorry. I will do well for you. I am your boy.’

It was true. The other masters, seeing him waiting for me in the halls of the residence, began to refer to him as ‘Paul’s boy’. And when Christmas came around and the college closed down for the holidays what were we to do with Jeannot? I spoke to Father Bourque. ‘Let him stay at our residence,’ he said. ‘He can sleep in the basement with Hyppolite. Why send him back to people who have given him away?’

On that holiday because I was new to Ganae Jeannot and I discovered the city together. We went by bus into the hills of Bellevue to look at the splendid estates of the elite. We walked down the deserted ceremonial avenues of the Bicentennial Exposition Grounds, peering in at abandoned showrooms, built in the fifties when the government foolishly tried to ape the expansionist schemes of other, more prosperous, lands. We visited the national casino on the seafront and watched Swiss croupiers, elegant in white dinner jackets, spin roulette wheels and deal baccarat for American tourists, ashore for the day from the cruise ships which then called at Port Riche. Together, we roamed the cluttered aisles of the city’s open-air market and crossed the Place de la République to peer through gilded railings at the gleaming white bulk of the presidential palace. On Christmas morning we attended Mass in the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Secours and heard the choir sing Mass in Latin, a language Jeannot was beginning to learn. And then, on the day after Christmas, I took him to La Rotonde.

La Rotonde is a city within a city, the black swollen heart of Port Riche. It lies along the edge of the docks, hidden away from the tourist shops, the markets and the legislative buildings that border on the palace. It is a vast, fetid hive of narrow, mud-clotted lanes, stinking of open sewage, a warren of plywood and cardboard shacks, roofed with rotting tin, a place without electric light or running water, where naked children bathe in muddy puddles left over from last night’s rains. Behind its filthy shanties, young girls, some of them no more than twelve years old, offer themselves to any passing man for fifty centos or, if he haggles, for less. Everything is for sale here. Cast-off clothing donated by American charities to the Ganaen Red Cross ends up on the street stalls of La Rotonde. Even human misery is put up for rent. If you walk deep enough into the maze of its narrow passageways, you will come suddenly into the sunlight of a central square, the Place Napoléon, where cripples, dwarfs, people covered with ugly sores, deformed children, women breast-feeding starveling babies, congregate each morning waiting to be paired off, a crippled man with a deformed child, a woman covered in sores with one of the famine babies, a dwarf with a blind girl. Deals are made, tableaux of human misery are assembled. Towards noon, a procession of these people moves out from La Rotonde going to the gift shops, the market and the port, to sit all afternoon in the unrelenting sun, waiting for some tourist from the cruise ships to drop a coin in their outstretched palms.

Why did I bring Jeannot to La Rotonde? Even in the desperate rural poverty of Toumalie he had never seen such sights. And why, again and again, did he insist that we return there? Were those walks responsible for what happened to him in later life when, from that same great slum, he began his journey towards fame?

In the months that followed Christmas, Jeannot was not the only scholarship boy who did brilliantly in class. The other seven were all above average and for a time there was talk of increasing their number to forty, as we had first envisaged. Doumergue, the new president, was still promising to fight illiteracy and provide proper schools for the poor. He was meek and soft-spoken; his reign seemed mild. At official audiences in the presidential palace, he wore an ill-fitting black suit and carried a battered Homburg hat which, when he sat on the thronelike presidential chair, he would hand apologetically to a bemedalled military aide who stood directly behind him. In all of his addresses he made a point of speaking in Creole, which displeased the elite. ‘I am the president of all the people,’ he said. ‘I am
noir
and humble. I am the living incarnation of the people’s wish to better their lives.’

Did we believe him? I wanted to. I hoped we were at the beginning of a new era. I pleaded with Father Bourque to speak to the Archbishop about taking in more
noirs
. But the Archbishop informed us that no new scholarship students were to be accepted. ‘Frankly,’ he told our Principal, ‘nothing has changed and nothing will change. Doumergue is a puppet. As always, the Army remains in charge.’

The Archbishop was wrong. As I was wrong. Things did change. But, in Ganae, bad news comes through rumour, whispers, night visits, soldiers shooting wildly in the streets. At the college we lived in a world apart, remote as the elite on their Bellevue estates. The arrests, the tortures, the clubbing of those few who dared to demonstrate, none of these things was reported in the newspapers. Radio, the all-important source of information in an illiterate country, remained majestically silent. Parliamentary debates were listened to by other politicians, but never by the people. Within a year of his election Doumergue was a dictator. But we didn’t know it. It was, to my surprise, Jeannot, who first told me of the rumours of repression. I asked where he had heard them and he answered, ‘Claude Lamballe.’

Claude Lamballe was one of Jeannot’s classmates. His father, Simon, was a colonel in the Army and an instructor at the elite Académie Militaire. This same Simon Lamballe had, coincidentally, attended the Sorbonne in the period when I studied there. We did not know each other in Paris but when I met him at a school reception in Ganae, we became friendly because of our shared experience. And so, as no one at the college seemed to know the truth about Doumergue, I went one evening to Simon’s Bellevue mansion.

‘These rumours?’ Simon said. ‘All true.’

‘But isn’t it a fact that his election was backed by the Army? We’ve always assumed he’s your creature.’

‘He was,’ Simon said. ‘But now the Army is Dr Frankenstein.’

‘Yet, he seems sincere.’

‘Perhaps he was, once. I don’t know him personally. But the history of Ganae is like a cheap gramophone record. The new tune plays for a while, then the needle sticks in the groove and the player-arm slumps back and slips off the disc. Every Ganaen leader begins his term by promising to change things. Most of them don’t even try. But the few who do – well, it’s like the gramophone record. The needle sticks in a groove. There are many grooves – the elite, the Army, foreign business interests, the people’s illiteracy – you name it – there’s no way that progress or democratic ideals can work here. And so the leader becomes a strong man, trying to force his ideas through. Enemies have to be disposed of. Coups must be anticipated and crushed. The leader becomes a tyrant. Doumergue is simply a victim of this country’s history.’

‘Can’t the Army get rid of him?’

‘Father, let me give you a little advice. You are a priest, and a white foreigner. But you may not ask such questions of me, or of anyone. When you are discussing Uncle D. you’re not safe, no matter who you’re talking to.’

Some weeks after this conversation I was visiting a former pupil who lived in the Laramie section of the city. As I left my pupil’s house and walked up a side street which led to the Boulevard Carnot, four large
noirs
wearing blue seersucker overalls and carrying old-fashioned Lee-Enfield rifles came towards me. When they drew level, one of them stopped me by laying the barrel of his rifle across my chest. ‘Cigarette,
Mon Pe
?’

I said I was sorry but I did not smoke.

‘We do,’ one of the men said. ‘So we need money for cigarettes. Be quick now.’

They did not look like beggars. They had guns, after all. ‘Who are you?’ I said.

One of the men said to the others, ‘Who are we? Why does he not know? He is a priest, not a tourist. He’s making fun of us.’

‘Don’t make fun of us,’ one of the others said.

‘I have never hit a white face,’ a third said. ‘Maybe today is my day to hit a white face.’

‘Give us money, quick,’ the first man said. ‘Ten pesons, OK?’

‘I am a priest,’ I said. ‘Would you rob a priest?’

When I said that, the first man hit me with his closed fist. My nose dribbled blood. The second man swung the stock of his rifle and hit me on the shins. I stumbled and fell to my knees. They formed a circle around me. ‘Ten pesons,’ the first man said. ‘Give it, or we will take it.’

Kneeling, blood dribbling into my mouth, I took out my purse and gave them a ten-peson note. For a moment I thought that they would take the rest of my money, but they did not. The first one took the note, held it up to the light, then put it in his pocket and nodded to the others. They walked away as though I did not exist.

When they were no longer in sight I stood up, my shins aching as I groped for a tissue to stem my nosebleed. Across the narrow street, a young girl was watching me from a second-storey window, but when I looked up at her she at once withdrew her head and closed the shutters. I fingered my nose. It was very painful. It could be broken. Behind me, I heard the sound of wooden clogs on the cobblestones. A tall woman from the countryside came up the empty street, carrying a large bundle of washing on her head. When she drew level she stopped and turned towards me, holding her head high to balance her load.
‘Eh, ben, Mon Pe
. Bad times begin. You all right?’

‘Who were they?’

She looked at me, eyes wide, as though she could not believe the question. ‘You joking me?’

‘No, no.’

‘
Bleus
. They the bosses now. You didn’t know?’

‘No.’

She laughed, the huge load wobbling on her head. ‘Where you been,
Mon Pe
?’

My nose was not broken but swollen in such a way that everyone in the college soon knew about the attack. On the streets of Port Riche the number of men wearing blue seersucker overalls and carrying old Lee-Enfield rifles increased until they became as common a sight as police and soldiers. And when Jeannot and I passed the presidential palace on one of our walks we saw, inside the gates, not only the ceremonial guards provided by the Army, but men in blue overalls, sitting in comfortable armchairs near the sentry boxes, their weapons at their feet. At night, trucks could be heard racing through the streets. Volleys of rifle fire woke us from our sleep. Then, on the third anniversary of his inauguration, Doumergue announced that he was closing down the Académie Militaire. I went to see my friend Simon Lamballe.