by Paul Theroux
I recalled the birth I had witnessed, just before I fell ill. It had appeared in my feverish dreams: the leper woman, the perfect child. It had seemed miraculous.
"Do you separate them?"
"No. The mothers won't let us. We give the children mankhwala."
The nun said, "We had leprosy in Holland once, long ago. Europe was full of lepers. That was when Europe was poor and people lived in dirty conditions. Now the dirty conditions are in the tropics, Africa especially. That is why leprosy is here. It is a disease of dirt, of people living and breathing in one hut."
Another nun, folding bandages, said, "When I came here in 1946 we treated people with oil. That was the old remedy for leprosy."
"Did you say oil?"
"Chaulmoogra oil. It worked!" she said. "But now we use the sulfa drugs. They are better and stronger. This disease will be gone someday."
The nun with the pitcher frowned. "Europe was full of huts once," she said. "Little dirty huts."
I was on the path walking back to the priests' house, thinking that Birdie and these nuns were admirable, when I heard footsteps behind me. I turned to see Birdie hurrying towards me. Such a rare sight, someone running here in the heat of this slow-motion world.
"Almost forgot," she said. "Here's your aspirin, Father."
"That's not funny."
"I mean it, Father."
She glanced around, as though to make certain that no one was watching. She seemed hesitant and self-conscious. In such a frank and wide-open place any hesitation seemed obvious, even furtive.
"Have you been to the lake, Father?"
"Stop saying that."
"You're wearing a cassock—I can't help it," she said. "What about a picnic at the lake?"
I had nothing—no work, no reading, no writing. I had time to fill with whatever I wished to do.
"How would we get there?"
"Father DeVoss will let you use his motorcycle."
I had started again to walk along the path, thinking that she would accompany me. But she did not move.
"Aren't you coming this way?"
"Yes, but..." She smiled instead of finishing the sentence.
"What's wrong?"
"It's not a good idea for us to be seen alone together here," she said. "That's another reason to head for the lake."
Only when she said that did I realize that the whole time we had been discussing leprosy she had been flirting with me.
7
The longer I stayed at Moyo, the clearer it was to me that Father DeVoss was not very religious. I even suspected him of being an atheist. His title was Father Superior, and I knew he took it seriously from the way he mocked it. His spiritual presence made religion irrelevant. He said mass in a listless and sometimes impatient way, muttering, hesitating, seeming to forget some prayers, leaning with his elbows on the altar as though it were a card table. He was careless with communion wafers, poking and sorting them as though they were Malawi sixpence. He seemed bored when he was saying mass, but it was the intense reflection of a scientist sweeping a laboratory floor. His face was blank, but a pitiless light burned behind his eyes. He believed in himself; therefore he did not need to believe in God. Father DeVoss framed all the rules, and he was kind, and when he was in a good mood the whole of Moyo glowed with his benevolence.
God's grace is like a weather system, I thought: sunny, or cloudy, sometimes stormy, or an eerie emptiness that might be a prelude to anything, an uncertainty that tests faith. It was easy to tell when Father DeVoss was happy, because it showed on everyone's face. It was yet another instance of his power, that his spirit was felt throughout the leprosarium.
Tonight the sky was gray. I sensed over dinner that Father DeVoss was displeased.
"Why did you take your soutane off?" he asked. Calling it a soutane seemed to make the thing even more exotic. "It looked right on you."
This pronouncement, spoken with Father DeVoss's lofty simplicity, was like Holy Orders, as though detecting a latent vocation in me he had taken the authority to make me a priest, much as God might choose me.
"I don't want to mislead anyone," I said.
"Perhaps you would be telling them the truth by wearing it."
So I had guessed right. He was ordaining me in his forthright way, with a word and a wave of the hand, because he was God here.
"It will be very useful to you on your trip to the lake," he said. "Believe me, it's wise to wear it on the bush roads these days."
I had asked him before dinner about using his motorcycle. It was another aspect of his complexity that he was able to convey his displeasure about the cassock while at the same time saying that he was delighted to lend me his motorcycle. It was the first favor I had asked of him. I knew he had been aloof. He was solitary, and I suspected him of being lonely. His granting me the favor brought me closer to the community. He wanted me to depend on him, because he was generous, and asking him for something was a way of making him powerful.
"Some of these boys in the bush can be difficult."
"Chipongwe," Brother Piet said. "Kwambiri."
Very insolent, he was saying, but making it sound comical, as this old Dutchman did when he was speaking Chinyanja.
"And they'll respect my robes, is that right?"
It was what Birdie had said.
"More than you might imagine," Father DeVoss said, lifting his arms to allow Simon to collect the dirty plates.
"I will deal the cards," Brother Piet said.
Father DeVoss touched my shoulder. There was gentle pressure in his fingers. He said in an affectionate way, "Have faith."
I wanted to say that I had faith in him—more than I had ever felt for anyone, more than I had been able to muster for God. I liked this for being a house without books, not even religious books. Except for the simple crucifixes, it was a house without pictures, too. I had faith in Father DeVoss's patience, and doubt, and humanity; his spirit, his compassion, his detachment. I had faith in Father DeVoss's lack of belief.
"If you have faith in God, you will have eternal life," Father Touchette said.
Father DeVoss smiled his melancholy smile and said, "I simply meant to trust the soutane, because of the roadblocks."
But I decided to reply to Father Touchette. "How can I believe in something I can't see?"
"People practice faith all the time," Father Touchette said. "They do it in order to be strong." He was pale, he was agitated, he looked haunted.
"Not me," I said.
"You should do it most of all," he said. "We are talking about the spirit and the soul. You are not a savage."
"I think I am a savage," Father DeVoss said, seeming jauntier, as though my argument with Father Touchette was lifting his mood. "Yes, I am a savage."
It was possible to tell how long a person had been in Africa by the way he used the word "savage." For Father Touchette a savage was an ignorant enemy, and hardly human. For Father DeVoss it was only another harmless group of people, not enemies but allies, like unpredictable younger brothers.
"You mean savages don't have faith?" I asked the young priest.
"They have trouble with it," he said.
"I don't agree. So-called savages are famous for being afraid of things they can't see. Most of their world is invisible and taken on faith."
"Paul is right," Father DeVoss said. "The Africans here are afraid of mfiti, invisible witches, who summon corpses from their graves and then eat them. They dream of mzimu, the spirit of the dead, who can take hold of their minds and rave and babble and utter oracles."
"Bwebweta," Brother Piet said, and motioned with his hands, indicating that it was the word for babbling. He was clowning again with the language, but Father Touchette looked terrified.
Father DeVoss smiled and went on, "That's why you have so many baptisms, Father."
It occurred to me then that Father DeVoss never performed baptisms. I said, "Having faith isn't a mark of civilization."
Father Touchette's eyes glis
tened as he said, "You are talking about superstition, not faith. One is false, the other is God's truth."
"I need to see things. I need to ask questions. I want to know more."
"Then you're in danger. You're looking in the wrong place. I pity you."
"Please," Father DeVoss said with a gentle smile. But he was not protesting. He seemed to be enjoying the argument.
"Don't I get credit for asking questions?" I asked.
"No," Father Touchette said. "You are turning your back on Almighty God."
"You're going to say, 'The answer is within you.'"
"Yes."
"I think the answer is probably out there."
I gestured towards the leper village. As always at this time of night the drumming was a muffled pandemonium, mingled voices and shrieks, and the knock of clubs against the scooped-out logs they used as drums.
"Sewerendo masewera a ng'oma," Brother Piet said: They are dancing the dance with drums. He touched with his fingertips the cards he had dealt, and he went on speaking. "Wopusa n'goma."
"What's that?"
"A proverb. 'The idiot beats the drum. The clever one dances,'" Father DeVoss said. "Now let's play cards."
"What is the answer, then?" I asked Father Touchette.
He stared at me and clutched the black brick of his breviary, and his look was so sad, so much deeper than anger or insult it might have been despair.
"He has forgotten the question," Father DeVoss said, and though his face was solemn there was laughter in his voice, and it was like wisdom.
Again it struck me that Father DeVoss's melancholy humor seemed to indicate a lack of religious belief. It was spiritual, though—quiet, serene, a bit spooky, like the Africans' wary reverence. They did not discuss or elaborate their fears of witches. You knew what they feared by their conspicuous silence.
As we began to play whist—tonight my partner was Simon—a child's sudden whimper just behind me made me jump. It was Father Touchette, crying in his chair. Father DeVoss raised his eyes from the card he was about to play and his eyes found the younger priest and silenced him.
***
"I love it," Birdie said.
"So do I," and I gunned the engine.
Father DeVoss's motorcycle was a black, older model Norton, with fluted plates on its twin cylinder heads and two wide, dishlike seats. Its fenders curled front and rear like the peak of an imperial helmet, and it had roomy leather saddlebags. Like every other material thing in the priests' lives, it was simple and practical and well cared for.
"Not the bike," Birdie said. "The outfit."
My white cassock, she meant. But wearing it, I felt more like a choirboy than a priest.
"It was Father DeVoss's idea."
Smirking, as though she did not believe me, Birdie got onto the rear seat. She was wearing Bermuda shorts and a loose blouse and knee socks. She clung to me instead of to the leather loops, and I could sense a nervous impatience in the way she held me.
It was two in the afternoon—a late start because of extra bandaging. At this dizzy time of day, the sun at its hottest, the village was empty and not even the small boys were outside.
We passed the dispensary, the hospital, the village, and then we were out of the leprosarium, jouncing on the rutted road through the stands of thin yellow trees. I slowed down for the railway tracks. Beyond them, there were no huts, no people, no dogs, no gardens, only baked earth and dusty sunlight and the narrow road. I settled the bike into a wheel rut and took off.
I had done this before in the south of the country, traveled fast on a motorcycle in the groove at the side of the road, but after so many weeks of following the routine of the leprosarium there was something unreal about this. It was not just the speed; it was that I was hurrying away from an existence I had begun to understand.
So, on the road with Birdie, I felt uneasy and somewhat unsafe—insecure, anyway. I had no desire to see the lake or the roadblocks Father DeVoss had warned me about. There was also something less definite in my anxiety. Outside the leprosarium I was in the big, unstable world. It was a midafternoon of hot stillness and slanting shadows. Here and there were baobab trees, looking like a child's monstrous version of elephants, distorted and fat and gray. I was already anticipating being late on the return trip. No one traveled in the dark on a bush road in this part of Africa.
Behind me, Birdie was talking excitedly. I could hear the sound of her voice, but the slipstream of rushing wind muffled her words.
I had been put off by Birdie's first reaction to my wearing a cassock: "I love it." Farther along, an African woman on the road dropped to her knees when she saw me, and she made the sign of the cross, almost spilling the load of wood on her head. Birdie clutched me tightly and called out in triumph. That repelled me, too.
Soon after, we passed a cluster of mud huts, and at the edge of this small settlement there was a horizontal bar across the road, an iron pipe resting on two oil drums: a bush roadblock. At either side of the road were about eight men and boys, looking hot and bad-tempered, wearing the faded red shirts and smocks of the Malawi Youth League. They held wicked-looking sticks and vicious slashers and crude, lumpy truncheons. Yet seeing how I was dressed, they backed off, seeming sheepish and awkwardly respectful, handling their weapons with obvious embarrassment.
"Good day, Fadda-sah," one said.
"You can pass this side," another said, raising the iron pipe.
It was all just as Father DeVoss had said.
They were staring at Birdie now, their mouths slack and hungry.
"What's the problem?" I asked.
"We are assisting wid da security situation, Fadda-sah."
The man who said this was dressed like the others—faded red shirt, khaki shorts, barefoot—but he was grizzled, with a nasty face; a little old man in a boy's clothes.
Assisting with the security situation was the opposite of what they were doing. They were the paid thugs of the government, obstructing the road in order to intimidate anyone on it into buying (for five shillings) a membership in the Malawi Congress Party. Like other hacks in this one-party state, they were making trouble while pretending to keep the peace. At Moyo I had forgotten the political trouble in the country.
There were two more roadblocks (grubby men, a dusty iron pipe, "You can pass, Fadda") before we got to the lake. Then Birdie was shouting into my neck. I saw the lake shining through the trees, not cool or blue but a hard metallic glitter, like tin foil, a great wrinkled expanse of it, and I felt helpless. There was too much of this emptiness, and this was not where I wanted to be. I wanted to ride straight back to Moyo. I said so to Birdie.
"But I brought food," she said.
Because she had food was I obligated to eat it? I parked the motorcycle, but I did not walk far from it.
"I'm not hungry."
"I am," she said. "Very hungry."
She said this in a good-humored way, paying no attention to my ill temper.
"I hate those roadblocks. I hate those horrible guys and their dirty faces."
"They respect your cassock, Father. Doesn't that give you a sense of power?"
"No. It's like scaring someone by wearing a mask," I said.
"They do it all the time."
"It's cruel."
"They're cruel." She said this with a shrug, as she poked in the saddlebags for something to eat.
"I'm thinking about the trip back."
"I know, Father." She unwrapped a sandwich and took a bite.
"Stop calling me Father."
She ignored me and said, "I sometimes think I don't belong anywhere else."
As she chewed the bread, she seemed innocent and defenseless, and I thought how a person's character was never more apparent than when she was eating. There seemed to be a brainlessness about eating, too: poor dumb hungry animal.
Perhaps sensing my pity for her and mistaking it for compassion, she swallowed and looked grateful. Then she touched my hand and in the kindest way said,
"What would make you happy?"
I was glad that she had put it that way. It gave me the confidence to say plainly that I was uneasy here on this great sloping shore, among the boulders and the stones and the blowing trees and the splash of the lake. It was almost four-thirty. It would be dark at six or so. Couldn't we just leave?
Birdie said, "I was imagining a picnic by the lake. But we could have it somewhere else."
"What about back at Moyo?"
"I have a bottle of cream sherry in my room back at the convent."
"Let's go home."
8
This abrupt change of plans was like a reprieve and put me in a good mood. Everything seemed simple now. Instead of killing time at the lake, we would forget the picnic and go back. I had not had an alcoholic drink in over a month, and the prospect of it, the novelty, and the way Birdie had tried to please me made me willing. She said, "OK, let's go," and without realizing it I began following her directions—a shortcut back to the mission. I was glad we were together and liked her high spirits and this haphazard outing that had just proven to me that I too felt at home among the lepers of Moyo.
It was growing dark when we got back—dark enough for me to need my headlight. The road and the paths were empty, the whole mission occupied eating their early supper. I drove slowly behind the dispensary and up the hill to the motorcycle shed, which was near the church, and between the priests' house and the convent.
As I cranked out the kickstand with my toe and propped the bike, Birdie said, "Let me go first, to see if the coast is clear."
I did not wonder what she meant by that. It seemed just another expression of her unpredictable high spirits.
At this time of day the fading light gave everyone a ghostly appearance, the threadbare look of an apparition that might quicken or fade. Birdie turned and glowed for a few moments and then was gone.
I waited—longer than I expected—wondering what to do. Then I saw a light go on in an upper room of the convent. Birdie came to the window—said nothing, but raised her head, beckoning me.
And I obeyed. I did not question all the randomness that had led me this evening to climb the back stairs of the convent to Birdie's room. I did not take Birdie seriously, because I knew that if I did, I would have to conclude that I did not like her very much.