Mapome began telling Jimmy the story of the Blue Lady of Dolours before he could talk. When he was old enough, they had acted it out together: she played the grandmother and he played the children’s parts.
“Heheme!”
“Haheme!”
“Long ago, in a terrible hot time, a grandma was leading some sick and thirsty children up a dry kouri, through wasted country, past skeletons of dead animals, in search of food and water. Tired and despairing, she huddled with the children under a dolmen used by sheep and goats, for the sun was fierce.”
“What’s a dolmen?”
“A kind of stone table, Jimmy, a house meant for those who have left us.”
“You mean a grave on the top of the ground?”
“Yes, you could say that. May I go on?”
He nodded.
“The infants were hungry. Their mouths were dry and their clothes ragged and dirty. They missed their parents, so they cried and wouldn’t stop though their big sisters kept blowing in their faces.”
“Why did their sisters do that?”
“So the little ones would stop crying.”
“You used to do it to me?”
Mapome nodded.
“Did I stop?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes you cried louder.”
He said no more, and she continued the story.
“The babies scratched at rashes and blisters that had grown on their arms and legs and chests in the heat, and they howled till their bodies went limp.”
At this point, Jimmy threw his heart into the howling.
“Suddenly, it was quiet.”
“Heheme!”
“Haheme!”
“It is well, my grandson, that you are listening, for this is the marvelous part.” She rolled her eyes heavenward to stress the wonder of it and resumed. “Weeping softly, a woman in a blue kiloli appeared from nowhere. She slipped the children’s hands, one into another, and began leading them.”
Jimmy and Mapome’s journey began right then. It looped through the mango orchard in his grandparents’ front yard, round through beds of tomatoes, yam-hills, and clumps of eddoes beside the house, and down to the slope behind.
“The grandmother watched as the tearful woman led the children into the tinder of afternoon. The children wept quietly, like the Blue Lady. Tears washed down their faces, arms and legs, slowly merging to form a stream at their feet.”
Jimmy was good at howling, but better at quiet weeping. His features crumpled into a tragic, sniffing, lip-quivering assemblage that broke Mapome’s heart every time, but she never interrupted the tale.
“After a while, the Weeping One directed the children’s bare feet onto the damp earth. Soon they were stepping strong beside a steady trickle. They bent, cupping their hands to sip the clear water. Near the bank were reeds and plants, white lotus lilies and blue water hyacinths. Small fish swam among the waving stalks. And then like magic, they were splashing in a river, looking for njamra among the rocks, bringing them to the grandmother to cook on a bramble fire.”
Mapome sank to the ground beside a shallow creek that ran for much of the year. By now Jimmy had discarded his mask of misery. Gleeful, he raced up and down gathering leaves and dry grass for the make-believe fire.
“At the end of the day, they looked for the Blue Lady but she was nowhere to be found. That night, they slept under new gallery forest, bellies full of fat shrimp. Twigs clicked softly, and leaves twitched as trees rose beside the river. Tree frogs squeaked in the branches, cicadas cried, and bullfrogs grunted. Night birds trilled. The ripening moon, rimmed with haze, shed a blue light.”
Curled up on the grass, he and Mapome often fell asleep.
On the last Sunday before his ordination — now every day is some kind of “last” day — Jimmy wakes, looks through his window into a sky blue as the sapphire in Nila’s engagement ring, and feels his chest squeeze in on itself. What the hell does he think he is doing? What is he doing? He is young, not bad-looking, loves women, and thrives on sex. And he is becoming a priest?
He pulls himself together, goes through his misgivings again, and again dismisses them as being of little consequence.
“There is something of very large consequence. You’re just not facing it.”
He knows what the voice — his conscience, isn’t it? — is referring to. Compared to that thing “of very large consequence,” an occasionally energetic prick and lusts he can kill with a lime were small sappi. What if he is a seer, some kind of evil mage? After all, he has seen two people to their deaths. There is a world of evil — demons and devils — no doubt about that. It isn’t just the stuff of shrill books and Hollywood movies. Suppose he has unwittingly been caught up in that world? And if he has priestly powers, will they not make him more appealing to malevolent forces? How can he go through with it?
Thanks to the bizarre incidents of his life, he doesn’t lack the courage to tell his superior that ordination will be a mistake. He doesn’t know the new man, Leviticus Kitendi, well, but by all accounts he is a good sort.
His mother raps on his door. “Are you hungry, mon fils?”
He isn’t hungry, merely exhausted, though the day is only five minutes old.“Un moment, Maman.”
“Good. I’ll wait for you. We have peanut porridge today.”
It doesn’t usually take him long to get downstairs for peanut porridge, but today it requires a huge effort of will to make his limbs obey the smallest order. His mother’s dark eyes ferret out trouble, even before he pulls out his stool and sits down. “What’s wrong?” She shakes the Mabuli Messenger at him. “You are big news, you three. All over the front page.”
Jimmy shrugs. “I can’t go ahead with it, Maman. I’m going to Father Kitendi as soon as I’ve eaten to tell him so.”
“I think you’re having wedding jitters.”
“I’ve already had those.”
“You think they’re like mumps, that you only have once?”
“Maman, don’t joke. This is not something I can proceed with. Now that I know, I have to put a stop to it.”
“Has this just occurred to you, or has it been troubling you all along?”
“I won’t say it hasn’t occurred to me before, but I wouldn’t say it has been bothering me all along.”
“It overwhelmed you this morning, then?”
“Buried me like the worst sandstorm.”
She folds the paper, swift, and exact. “I too was scared on my wedding day. My mother gave me a test. She said, ‘Think of three things that you would much rather be doing today.’ ”
“And?”
“I couldn’t. So she said, ‘Think of one thing you’d much rather be doing.’ ”
“And?”
“I couldn’t. So I married your father.”
Jimmy swallows the last of his porridge, stands, and kisses her. “I won’t be long.”
“Are you going to walk?”
He nods, pats her shoulder goodbye, goes out on to the back verandah, runs down the stairs, and pauses at the bottom. The sun, set upon by feisty grey clouds, isn’t giving in. It elbows its way to a thin splinter in the murk, breaking through in an apostrophe of pure light that falls on his father’s most recent undertaking, a grove of red sorrel. Funny, he thinks of it by its St. Chris name, sorrel, rather than bissap, the name they give it in West Africa. Bissape is a popular drink in Mabuli. Sappi is a beer brewed from the flowers of the plant.
His father Andri thinks the plant might be commercially viable. The evening before, he’d stood on the steps at sunset swinging a bag of dried blossoms back and forth on its string as if it were a censer. “We Mabulians mostly use it for bissape and sappi, but other people use it for syrup, jam, chutney, even a sort of liquor. White people use it for food colouring. The seeds make good chicken feed, and yield cooking oil. And you can eat the leaves like spinach or add them to soup.”
“If it’s such a versatile plant, Papa, why aren’t we using it for all these purposes or gr
owing it for export?”
“Exactly what I say, my son. One reason is we’re not scientific farmers. We’re leaving crops to the vagaries of rainfall, which is inefficient. Rain is hardly dependable in these parts. If you’re serious about growing a crop, you have to work out good irrigation practices. Angélique has some friends at the college who’ve taken it on as a project. If this little effort here works out, I’ll fund a proper experiment.” Andri pursed his lips till they touched his nose, then slid apart in a smile of benign self-satisfaction.
Jimmy picks his way down the path through the bissap bushes. He stopped to put on one of the pairs of water boots that live at the kitchen door, because the ground is still muddy from unusually heavy rains in August. Mabuli was lucky. Floods have devastated several districts in Burkina Faso, some right on the border, but Mabuli has suffered comparatively little damage. Instead, trees are flagrantly green, pastures stout, mini dams brimful.
Vexation shoves him through the back gate into a lane pot-holed with shiny brown pools and embraced by acacias. He slops through the puddles. What a waste of the Jesuits’ resources! Maybe he can still hang around with them, teach, or work in one of their social action centres. Sadly, Maman’s test won’t serve. Marriage is a commitment to one person. Being a priest is, to use Mapome’s metaphor, a camel with another kind of hump. He’ll tell Kitendi the whole story, prophesying, womanizing, and all. The superior knows about Nila, but she’s not been the only woman in his life.
In the superior’s study, Jimmy inspects Leviticus Kitendi. He is an awkward man, given to looking absent, inattentive. It is Kitendi who told him four Christophians were coming for the ordination: the Watsons, Father Aston Cole, S.J., and Sister Rita Rose. In September 1979, his first time in St. Chris, the Watsons put Jimmy up because the island had a “visitation,” as Harry Watson put it, from weather associated with Hurricane Frederic, and the badly damaged Jesuit house was being repaired. Marva was Harry’s wife. The priest, Aston Cole, taught him Rhetoric and Caribbean Literature during his teaching stint on the island while Rita Rose, a Dominican nun, was a nursing sister in the Catholic hospital where he was helping the arthritic chaplain to get around.
Preparing to recite his woes, Jimmy isn’t sure Kitendi will be helpful, but he proceeds anyway. “Father, I have to make a confession.”
“Another one, Jimmy? If it will make you feel better, sure, let’s do it. Shall we go to the Lady Chapel?”
“Not that kind of confession, Father. I have to tell you why I can’t go through with my ordination.”
“The Lady Chapel will still do, if that’s okay with you. And please, call me Levi. We are labourers in the same vineyard, remember?”
So he confesses. He tells the older man how he became friends with Marva and Harry, that Harry taught him how to cook St. Chris food and Marva gave him his first lessons in St. Chris Creole. “She made it clear she’d have been happy to give me other lessons too, and I was tempted. She was a former Miss St. Chris and in her forties at the time, but you’d have needed her age paper to know. She was stunning.”
“Ah, women from the Caribbean certainly are,” Levi muses.
“We got past that, thank God, and she was invaluable in cluing me into local customs and into the behaviour I could expect from ‘yout’ in St. Chris. They were very influenced by American TV and movies, she said, and most important, I shouldn’t lose my temper, because that was their aim and purpose. Plus, she said, it would be no big deal that I was from Africa, but if I cooked up a good tale about my clan markings, it might hold them for a bit. I did, and it did.”
“Sounds like quite a woman, and Harry must be a very special man. But she’s not why you can’t be ordained, Jimmy, is she?”
“No!” a not-so-small demon says. “That was Rita Rose.”
Not true, but Jimmy is stalling so he tackles her next. “Have you met Sister Rita Rose who’s coming, Levi?”
Leviticus shakes his head.
“For sure she is no Marva Watson, and she was certainly issuing me no invitations. She merely worked havoc on me — completely upsetting my equilibrium. She was like Nila, not so much in looks but in disposition, a pressure cooker, oodles of seething psychic energy. I fell desperately in love, and was going crazy with worry. The regional superior at the time wasn’t in St. Chris right then, what with the hurricane and all. Lucky for me, Aston Cole was teaching me Rhetoric, and a sort of survey course in Caribbean Literature.”
“I know Aston,” Leviticus interrupts. “A good man!”
“He should have been superior, I tell you.
“Avoid the politics, Jimmy! There’s zero to be had from them.”
“I’ll do my best, Levi, but sometimes there’s no sidestepping them. Anyway, one day we were reading Another Life, by that St. Lucian poet ...”
Smiling with self-satisfaction, Leviticus pronounces, “Walcott. Derek Walcott. It begins with that wonderful image of the waves as pages of a book that’s been left open by a reader who’s somehow got caught up in a life somewhere else.”
“Right! Him! I was complaining that I couldn’t get a handle on the damn poem, and then I read his description of a woman who’s a nurse. She’s hanging onto her books and walking with some other nurses. They’re all laughing, and he says, and this exactly caught the way I felt, that his hand is ‘trembling’ to say her name. I read them, and there I was looking at Rita Rose with the student nurses behind her! I just fell apart and the whole story came out!”
“What did Aston have to say?” Levi’s look is tenderly amused.
“He didn’t beat around the bush. He asked me if I loved her, to which I said yes, and then he asked me if I found her sexy, which shocked me for sure.”
Levi laughs. “For sure I’m most eager to hear the end of the story!”
“He said if I wanted her to go off with me to Shangri-La, I should ask her.”
“Well, I know you both didn’t make it, but did you ask her?”
“No.”
“So don’t keep an old man in suspense! What happened?”
“Aston helped me figure out I had the wrong g. The problem was not with girls, but with God, who kept assailing me with extraordinary women with whom I wasn’t being allowed to enjoy anything, let alone a life.”
“You did marry Nila,” Leviticus interposes mildly. “And you seem to have been diverted by Marva and Rita Rose, even though you never ‘lay them flat’ or tickled their ‘feminine gender’ as our Latin rhyme says.”
“Aston said God wanted me for a permanent partner, so of course She did her best to wreck my relationships with other women.”
“Aston clearly hasn’t changed a bit. We were both novices at Weston College. He insisted on a female God, or aspect to God, even then.”
“To tell the truth, Levi, I wish he were here now. Maybe he could help me again. You see, I still haven’t told you my terrible secret.”
“I know, Jimmy. Why don’t we deal with it?”
When Jimmy ends his tale, Levi is silent for several minutes. Then he asks, “Do you love God, Jimmy?”
Jimmy beams. “Indeed, I do love Her.”
Kitendi assesses him through grimy glasses, steps forward, and places his hands on Jimmy’s shoulders, surprising him by being taller than he seems. “I can’t speak for anyone else, but I do this one day at a time. I realized early on it was the only way I could do it. Did I want to be a priest? Yes. Was I sure I’d be able to be a good Jesuit till I died? No. So I decided to take it one day at a time. I’m still doing that.”
“But mustn’t a priest have a core of holiness to count on?”
“We all have a core of holiness, and we do count on it, but if you’re wise, not too much. You count on God’s grace.”
“But what about the clairvoyance?”
“This is Africa, Jimmy, a place where the spiritual world is alive and well. I have known clairvoyants, good people whose gifts on occasion saved bodies and souls. It’s a burden, yes, but it’s not, in itse
lf, an evil thing.”
In the end, nobody from St. Chris comes, for Gilbert, bad-John of all hurricanes, grinds its way through the Caribbean in the second week of September, and relegates planes to the tarmac at the Queenstown Airport for four days. By the time air traffic is taking off again, it is too late.
19
Mapome’s Game
Two weeks after his ordination, Jimmy presides at the funeral of the husband of his eldest sister, Alleme. Munti died of AIDS-related pneumonia. The doctor is certain: the white fur in his mouth and throat says so. No one speaks about it at the time of his death or in the days after, but they all have the look Mapome referred to, chirruping her wry laugh, as the “chimp-chump” look.
A week after the funeral, at her father’s and Jimmy’s insistence, and at Andri Atule’s expense, Alleme flies to a clinic in Paris with her daughters, one who is four and the other not quite two, to be tested for HIV. Jimmy meets them at the airport when they come back, and drives them home. He helps Alleme give the children supper, and put them to bed. Makda Atule cooked, and sent food to the house so there is something to eat when they arrive, but Alleme isn’t hungry. So he stays with her, asks questions about Paris and about how she feels, having heard the results. She says she is glad the older child is okay. She and the younger one have medicine. They’ll have to go back to Paris soon.
His other questions elicit mostly one-word answers, so they just sit. The radio is on, turned down, a local music station, and they keep company, not talking, for perhaps an hour, watching the fireflies doing a jitterbug outside in the mango trees, observing the sky darken, and listening to the rain tap out its first notes, then grow into a drum recital drowning out all other sound.
Raising her voice, Alleme finally speaks into blackness, for neither has turned on a light, and the house, an old one set in from the street, is far from its neighbours.
“The irony is, Jimmy, that I feel at fault. I should have been a better mother, kept house better, cooked, washed, and cleaned better. Fucked better.” Alleme is a poet, unafraid of words. “Then he wouldn’t have gone to whores!”
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