by Paul Theroux
She opened and shut the door so quickly that I was inside before I realized that she was dressed as a nun, in the white robe and bonnet of this severe order of the Sisters of the Sacred Heart. Birdie had switched her lamp off. Two candles burned on her dresser, giving it the look of an altar and the room itself the feel of a dim chapel.
"Just a joke," she said.
People said that self-consciously of their most passionate acts. I did not know what to reply.
"Did anyone see you?"
I shrugged. What did it matter whether anyone saw me?
"Because you're not supposed to be here, Father."
She was whispering, she was barefoot, she had a crazed nun's look of sacrilege. She must have put her habit on hurriedly, because a lock of her hair was loose at the side of her face, and the gown itself—the robes, the sleeves—was disheveled. I could see her naked breasts through a wide, hitched-up sleeve.
When I turned to push the door open, to leave, she stepped quickly over and held the door shut. This was a nimble move, swift and serious, and when she put her finger to her lips to shush me, I heard other voices.
"This box of bandages has to be sorted for size."
"Did you see this other stack?"
They were nuns outside in the hall, speaking through an open door.
"We can start now or go on with it after dinner."
Go, I urged with my whole mind.
"I will do some. Sister Rose can wash the vegetables and then you both can come to help."
Sorting bandages, washing spinach—good, plain chores. It was what I wanted, what I valued most in the place, simplicity and completeness. For this I had gladly rejected my writing and buried my books. And this was the reason I was so uncomfortable in Birdie's room, with a bottle of South African sherry, by candlelight, the two of us dressed as priest and nun.
Her tongue was clamped between her teeth in a parody of concentration. She slid the heavy deadbolt in the door, then plucked my sleeve and led me across the room to the only place to sit, the edge of the bed.
The nuns were still fussing, some of them muttering in Dutch.
"I feel sorry for them," Birdie said. "But sometimes they're awful." She thought a moment, biting her lip. "I'm as bad as they are."
I did not need to be convinced that it was unwise of me to leave just then, with nuns hurrying back and forth in the hallway. But I realized how great a mistake it was for me to be here with Birdie. What convinced me of my error of judgment was Birdie's energy: my enthusiasm waned as hers rose. She liked this game of dressing up, she in her habit, me in my cassock, nun and priest clinking glasses of sticky South African sherry, sitting side by side in the narrow convent room, the door locked and bolted.
She seemed very excited, as though we shared a terrific secret. But each thing that roused her only made me more gloomy.
I said softly, "This is ridiculous."
She opened her mouth eagerly, as though shaping the word yes. It was the absurdity of it that she seemed to like best. She sipped more wine and kissed me, forcing my lips open with her tongue, and spat this sip of wine into my mouth. My surprise as I choked and swallowed only thrilled her more.
"Father," she said, and kissed me, holding my head, searching my mouth with her tongue again. At first I was so startled I began to pull away, but her boldness challenged me. I was astonished at the strength of her hunger.
Outside the room a nun said, "Twenty-eight. All folded. The rest are stained. We'll have to bleach them. It's never enough."
Birdie was probing my ear with her tongue. Her breath was hot, and she whispered, "No, Father. Don't make me. I'm so afraid."
And still she held me. I was going blind and deaf, fooled with the inklings of desire.
I would have taken my cassock off, but I was stuck in it—it confined me, like a sack around me; and her gown and robe were caught in its folds. So we embraced, pleaded in our different ways, in a great soft knot of white cotton, her gown, my cassock, the starched wings of her bonnet askew, and all her nakedness shifting beneath this tangle of cloth. Trying not to hold her, I trapped my fingers in the plackets of her robe and touched the softness of her warm skin, and, breaking free of her kissing, I dislodged her bonnet with my chin and her hair tumbled between our faces.
"Don't touch me, Father," she implored, her breath harsh with heat.
Her irrational sincerity scared me, and then her hands were on me, searching through the unbuttoned flap of my cassock. I was confused. I drew back, saying, "No, wait," though I could feel her pleading in the pressure of her fingers.
"Not if you don't think they're clean," a nun said in the hall.
Birdie took hold of the inert slug of my penis and began pumping it, as though trying to start some odd, primitive engine with a churning, chafing motion of a little handle.
It hurt. I wriggled free, keeping her away by holding her shoulders.
"Don't rape me, Father," she said, and now her eyes were unfocused and she lay back as though she were my victim.
There was drumming—was it from the village or from the throbbing of my temples? Whatever, it too made me hesitate.
I was overcome with embarrassment and anxiety. Everything that aroused her unnerved me—the clothes, the pretense, the seclusion, the nuns yakking outside, the risk of being caught in the convent room on this hot night. I could not lead her on. My heart was not in it. I had no interest in her, did not even like her much. I was too afraid and self-conscious and too remote from her fantasy to be able to perform in this sad comedy of dressing up.
"Then just hold me," she said. She was trembling.
I could not even do that simple thing. I was preoccupied with the problem of how to escape from her.
"I have to go," I whispered, though it probably sounded to her like a wicked hiss.
She said nothing, and then, "You can go at any time. You don't belong here."
Her face was in shadow, and she was a rumpled mass of hair and tangled clothes.
I stood up and undid the rest of the buttons on my cassock and took the thing off. I had a T-shirt and bathing suit on underneath. I folded the cassock and sat and put it on my lap. Birdie lay across the bed in a tragic posture, looking grotesque, a mass of shadows, sorrowing.
Nothing, not even laughter, kills sexual desire quicker than tears. The spell was broken. There was no more to be done. I could not determine her mood, whether she was disappointed or embarrassed.
I hugged her and she went rigid against my arm, pretending to be stubborn and unyielding. I imagined her to be very angry.
"This was a bad idea."
"I don't think so," she said. "But if you do..."
I held my breath, waiting for her to finish the sentence, because she was on the verge of tears.
"...then you're useless."
She began soundlessly to cry, making a horrible face.
That was not the end of it. I stayed two more hours, until eleven or so, which was after lights out in the convent. She ate some of her food. I chewed on its tastelessness and found it hard to swallow, because of my mood. The bed creaked and so I lay very still beside Birdie, without touching her, and we talked in whispers about ourselves.
I was young; my story was short. I told it quickly. But she was seven years older than me. She had been sent here on a Catholic church program, as a trained nurse. "I couldn't go home. I wouldn't fit in." It was exactly what she had said about the lepers. She was from a small town in southern Indiana. She told me about the town, how the high school kids hung out at the Dairy Den, and celebrated at Punchy's after the Panthers won a game, and how they drove up and down Main Street on Saturday nights, and hung out at Mickey D's and then paired up and went parking at the cemetery.
After that long, unusual day we lay like old friends, listening to the murmuring nuns closing drawers and doors. At last Birdie took a deep breath. When she let it out, all her frustration, all her yearning and humiliation were audible in the sigh.
"I w
anted it to happen," she said. "Now it will never happen."
I did not dare to look further into that thought.
"Don't you have any fantasies?" she asked.
"Not here," I said.
9
It was said at the leprosarium that there were no secrets. No matter what happened in darkness, it was known; no matter how soft your whisper, it was heard. Then everyone knew. That was another aspect of the reality of the place. Nothing was hidden, everything known—no subtlety, no symbols. A leper was a leper, and everything was easily visible. It was like a doctrine. We were naked.
And yet no one seemed to know what happened between me and Birdie in the convent that night. Perhaps it was too absurd, too outlandish—inconceivable in a place that was so lacking in fantasy and pretense. Perhaps it was because this knowledge of secrets did not include mzungus. Perhaps it was because we really had no secrets: the truth was that nothing had happened.
It was not a scandal that I sneaked out of the convent in the dark wearing my cassock. I took the long way back to the priests' house in order to conceal where I had been. By then the priests were asleep. If anyone else saw me, they did not say anything. I crept into bed, hardly believing myself what had happened, and I was so exhausted by the suspense and the fear of being caught in the convent that I went straight to sleep and did not wake until the sun was in my face, blazing into my eyes through my eyelids.
None of the priests mentioned my adventure. Whether they were ignorant or just being tactful I had no way of telling. Still I felt certain the secret was safe, perhaps I felt it most strongly because we had done nothing improper. We had lain in the path of temptation and afterwards gotten up and dusted off our souls, feeling lonelier than before.
"Now it will never happen," she had said.
She was probably right. And it cured me of dressing up in a cassock—of dressing up at all. It was not that I had been tempered in the fire. I was not stronger for having resisted. It was just that if it had happened as she had wanted, I would have had to leave the next day.
I was not ready, and though I was roused, it was not for her.
Now my days were orderly. I woke squinting and blinking like an animal, and then foraged for my breakfast and kept busy until the next mealtime. When I thought of reading or writing I felt a giddy thrill knowing that I would do neither. I had that same feeling waking from a dream in which something important and difficult was expected of me, a task that would involve my whole attention and engage my brain—and still I might fail; one of those dreams where the last words I heard were from a large, gray figure insisting that I meet this deadline. I would feel inexpressible relief that I had woken from this demanding dream, and then the whole day stretched ahead of me, all sunlight. The burden of writing had been lifted from me. I was excused from having to notice details; not writing meant not having to remember. I lived now in a luxury of forgetfulness.
I had never known such easy days. Birdie and I greeted each other as friends, and I understood her better. I saw her difference, her weakness. She was like a nun, like a leper—she belonged here, more than I had ever imagined. This interested me, yet I had very little to say to her. Except for being here, we had almost nothing in common. And she had never taken much notice of me. It was my cassock that had attracted her, and now I did not wear the thing.
Father DeVoss was the only person who mattered. He said nothing. His mind these days was on more pressing concerns.
It had begun that night of Father Touchette's tears, the angry discussion, the sobbing that had followed. There was more sobbing on other days. Father Touchette's crying was like an audible form of bleeding. You could not play cards when he was doing it. It was messy and shocking, it upset anyone who witnessed it, and it seemed to weaken him. And then one morning, after another night of this, I heard Africans grunting and their hard feet scuffing on the cement floor. They were laboriously moving furniture, I thought—no, not furniture. It was a large tin trunk, new enough to be only slightly dented. The three men struggled trying to share the weight.
"Katundu of Father Touchette," Simon said.
I had breakfast alone. I kept out of sight, spent the morning in my new way: cleaned the spark plugs on the Norton, talked to an old man about witches, looked for snakes to kill. On my way back from the withered cornfield I bumped into Father DeVoss.
"Is anything wrong?"
"No," he said. He glanced aside. The tin trunk rested on the verandah of the dispensary. "But Father Touchette is leaving us."
He said it as though it were no great occurrence: it was in the nature of things—not wrong, no one to blame. People came and went. I had asked the wrong question.
"He will be happier somewhere else," Father DeVoss said.
The old priest did not elaborate, but now I understood Father Touchette's sobs, and the way he had stood trembling at the open windows, glaring at the sound of the drumming at night from the leper village.
***
A solemn White Father, his bulky body apparent under his creamy robes, arrived at Moyo that evening on the train. He was Father Thomas, come to take Father Touchette away. There was no card game after dinner that night. Instead, Father Thomas conferred with Father DeVoss. The next day a high mass was held in the church—because we had an extra priest, Father DeVoss explained. I suspected that the service was being held in order to offer prayers for the troubled soul of Father Touchette, who sat with his hands in his lap in the front pew, looking stunned and shamed, like a fallen angel.
There was singing, there was drumming, there were solos with Angoni finger harps; hearing this, more Africans came from the village and crowded the church. The front pew was all nuns, with Birdie at the end. She did not look at me. I knelt just inside the communion rail while the priests sang the mass, and in between—dressed in black pants and a white shirt—I served as altar boy.
I rang the bell, I genuflected, I uttered the responses. I brought the tray of cruets at the consecration. I bowed and I gloried in the strangeness of it—the heat, the ceremony, the singing, the drumming that rattled the loose panes of glass in the church windows. No one outside Moyo knew we existed or that this ritual was taking place. As always, I had a dusty sense of remoteness here, but I found an intense pleasure in this obscurity, in no one else's knowing or caring about us, because I knew this world was real.
The mass was sung in Latin, the hymns in Chinyanja, the drumming too was African—filling the gaps of the ritual. The drumming seemed to unnerve Father Touchette again. His mask of sadness grew tighter on his face as the drumming banged louder, echoing against the walls of whitewashed plaster, while incense rose from the thurible, drifting past the glitter of the monstrance. Then the smoky incense curled as thick as drug fumes in the shafts of sunlight that pierced it.
Amina sat in one of the rear pews with her blind granny. I watched Amina closely, the way she followed the priests with her eyes, the passing back and forth, the sudden chants and sung prayers, my spoken responses, the jostling at communion.
In her eyes this must have seemed strange, even frightening, like a ritual of magic, the kind of village sorcery used to cast a spell, drive out devils, making a person whole again. In a sense this sort of purification was the aim of the mass—the holy sacrifice of the mass, as I had been taught to call it.
Afterwards I put out the candles and gathered the cruets and tidied the sacristy while Father DeVoss whispered to Father Thomas. And I knew what he was saying—practical things, like the mood of Father Touchette and the time of the train to Balaka and Blantyre.
Lunch was a long silence. We sat eating nsima and chicken in the heat while Father Touchette paced the verandah. Then Father Thomas led the weakened priest to the Land Rover and helped him in, taking him by the arm. Father Touchette climbed in slowly, like someone elderly or ill, and without a word he folded his arms, seeing no one, waiting to go. His eyes were sunken and dark, he looked haunted, his mind was elsewhere. I heard someone in the watching cro
wd of lepers say the word mutu, referring to Father Touchette's head—something wrong with it. Talking louder than the others, Amina's blind granny was asking questions: Who is it? Where is he going? Will someone else come to take his place? Is he sick?
With the old blind woman monopolizing the attention of the crowd, I sidled over to Amina and was glad when she did not move away.
"I saw you in church, Amina."
"Yes."
"But you are a Muslim."
"I went because of my granny. To help her. She is a Christian."
"Did you see me watching you?"
"Yes." She sniffed nervously. "I did not know why."
"Because looking at you makes me happy."
She sniffed again, she blinked. What I had said embarrassed her.
"How did you know I was looking at you?"
"Because I was looking at you," Amina said.
This touched me, and though she spoke with her eyes averted, out of shyness, she was bolder than I had expected. And perhaps she was not looking away out of shyness, for there was confusion in the dusty road as Father Touchette's big trunk, hoisted by dirty ropes, was slung into the back of the Land Rover. Already Father DeVoss was gunning the engine, and beside him Father Thomas had the grim resignation and grumpiness of a parent who has been inconvenienced by his son's expulsion from school. Father Touchette was in the rear seat, looking defeated, watched by lepers who seemed stimulated, even thrilled by the sight of this ruined mzungu.
Father DeVoss had tried to play it down, but in a place where very little changed from year to year this departure counted as momentous, an event that would be remembered and distorted in the years to come.
"Alira," someone muttered. He is weeping.
It was so odd to see this grown man sitting in the vehicle with his face in his hands, tears running through his fingers. The crowd of lepers and others simply gaped at him—they were skinny, crippled, crooked, barefoot, ragged. So many of them wore large stained bandages. They watched impassively, with hardly a murmur. It was the lepers' pitiless curiosity that made Father Touchette especially pathetic.