' He has eaten all the bread I baked yesterday. '
' Then, Rebecca, you must bake some more. '
‘Yes, Father. ' She hesitated. ‘I think he meant to put back the picture. He wanted to look at it while Sylvia was away. '
‘I know. I beat him too hard. '
'Okay.' 'Yes.'
' Sylvia, who is that old lady?' asked Rebecca. ' She has a nice face.'
'Julia, her name was Julia. She is dead. She was my – I think she probably saved my life when I was very young. '
'Okay.'
A man may be austere by temperament rather than as a result of a decision to punish the flesh. The Leader was hardly one to examine his life with a view to improving his character, feeling that having been accepted by the Jesuits was enough ofa guarantee for Heaven; and when it did come to his attention that frugality was supposed to be a good thing, he remembered an early childhood where he had often been short of food and everything else. In some parts of the world the virtues of abstinence come easily. His father worked on a Jesuit mission as a handyman, and was often drunk. His mother was a silent woman, usually sick, and he was the only child. When drunk his father might beat him, and his mother was beaten because of her inability to have more children. He was still not ten years old when he confronted his father, shielding his mother, and the blows meant for her reached his arms and legs, leaving scars.
He was a clever little boy, was noticed by the Fathers, and chosen for higher education. Thin as a stray dog – Father Paul's description of him – short, physically clumsy, he could not play games and was often a butt, and particularly of Father Paul, who disliked him. There were other Fathers, teachers and curers of souls, but it was Father Paul who was the child's experience of the white world, a meagre little man from Liverpool, formed by a bitter childhood, with a tongue that ran contempt for the blacks. The kaffirs were savages, animals, not much better than baboons. Even more than the other teachers, he did not spare the rod. He beat Matthew for obstinacy, for insolence, for the sin of pride, for speaking his own language, and for translating a Shona proverb into English and using it in an essay. 'Don't quarrel with your neighbour if he is stronger than you. '
It was a major responsibility, so Father Paul saw it, to rid his pupils of such backwardness. Matthew loathed everything about Father Paul: his smell revolted him, he sweated freely, did not wash enough, and his black robes had a sour animal odour. Matthew hated the reddish hairs that sprouted from his ears and nostrils and on the backs of his thin bony white hands. The boy's physical dislike was sometimes so strong, waves of pure murder rose up in him, and he contained them, trembling, his eyes burning.
He was a silent boy. At first he read devotional books, and then a pupil from a fellow mission came on a Retreat and Matthew fell under the spell ofan ebullient joky personality, but even more, of his opinions. This boy, older than him, was political in the unformed way of that time – long before the national movements – and gave him black authors to read, from America, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and the pamphlets of a black religious sect that advocated killing all the whites as the devil's progeny. Matthew, still brilliant, still silent, went to college, leaving Father Paul behind, and there he was described long after, when he had become the Leader, as 'a silent observing youth, an ascetic, always reading political books, clever, not able to make friends – a loner'.
When the national movements exploded, Matthew found his place, and quickly, as a leader of his local group. Because he did not find it easy to join in argument and discussion, because he often sat rather out of things, really longing to be like the others, so easy and companionable, he acquired a reputation for cool judgement and political nous, and, of course, for information, since he had read so much. Then he was leader of the Party, after a nasty little jostle for power. The end justifies the means: his favourite saying. The Liberation War began and he was head of one of the rebellious armies. He made promises of every kind, as politicians do, the most productive of later harm being that every black person in the country would be given enough land to farm. Minor absurdities, like saying that to dip cattle was a white man's devilry, and to maintain contour ridges merely kowtowing to white prejudice, were trifles compared to this primal deception – that there would be land for everybody. But then, he did not know he would end up as the Leader of the whole country. When at Liberation his party came first, he secretly found it hard to believe that he could be chosen over more charismatic candidates for power: he did not believe he could be liked. Respected... feared... oh, yes, he needed that, the stray dog needed it and would for the rest of his life. When he had become converted – by, again, a strong and persuasive personality – to Marxism, he made rhetorical speeches copied from other communist leaders. He admired to the depths of his nature strong and brutal leaders. When he was head of a nation he travelled all the time, as Leaders do, always in America or Ethiopia or Ghana or Burma, seldom choosing the company of whites, for he disliked them. Because he had to put on the front of a statesman he had to conceal what he felt, but he loathed the whites, disliked even
being in the same room. Abroad he gravitated by instinct to dictators, some of whom would soon be dislodged from power, like the statues of Lenin that would litter the former Soviet Union. He loved China, admired the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, had visited there more than once, taking with him in his entourage Comrade Mo who had instructed him in the necessities of power long before he had attained it.
No sooner had he got power than he became a prisoner of his fear of people. He was meeting no one but a few cronies, and a young woman from his village, with whom he slept; he never went out of his residence without an armed escort; his car was bullet-proofed – the gift of one dictator – and he had a personal guard offered to him by the most hated despot in Asia. Every evening, as the sun went down, the street outside his residence was closed to general traffic, so that the citizens had to drive streets out of their way. Meanwhile, while he was immured as much as any victim in a story who is compelled to build the wall around himself with his own hands, there was no Leader in all of Africa more loved by his people, and from whom more was expected. He could have done anything with the populace, for good or ill: like peasants in former times they looked up to him as a king who would put right everything that was wrong; where he led, they would follow. But he didn't lead. This frightened little man cowered in his self-made prison.
Meanwhile, too, the 'progressive opinion' in the world adored him, and all the Johnny Lennoxes, all the former Stalinists, the liberals who have ever loved a strong man, would say, ' He's pretty sound, you know. A clever man, that's Comrade President Matthew Mungozi. ‘And people who had been deprived of the soothing rhetoric of the communist world found it again in Zimlia.
Into this fortress buttressed by fear, it might have happened that no one could find a way, but someone did, a woman, for at a reception for the Organisation of African Unity he saw her, this handsome black Gloria, who had all the men clamouring around her while she flirted and bestowed smiles, but really she had her eyes on the man who stood well to one side, following her every movement as a hungry dog watches food being conveyed to mouths not his. She knew who he was, had known, had laid her plans, and expected it would be a walkover – as it was. Close to, she fascinated, every little thing about her enthralled him. She had a certain way of moving her lips, as if she was crushing fruit with them, and her eyes were soft and they laughed – not at him, he was making sure of that, so convinced was he that people did. And she was so at ease where he was not, in the flesh, in that magnificent body of hers, in movement and in pleasure in movement, and in food, and in her own beauty. He felt that he was being liberated simply by standing next to her. She told him he needed a woman like her, and he knew it was true. He was in awe of her too because of her sophistication. She had been in university in America and in England, she had friends everywhere among the famous because of her nature, not because of politics.
She talked of politics with a laughing cynicism that shocked him, though he tried to match her. In short, it was inevitable that soon there would be a brilliant wedding, and he lived dissolved in pleasure. Everything was easy where it had been difficult – no, often impossible. She said he was sexually repressed, and cured him of that in so far as his nature permitted. She said he needed more fun, had never known how to live. When he told her of his meagre much-punished childhood she kissed him with great smacking kisses and pulled his head down into her massive breasts and cuddled it.
She laughed at him for everything.
Now, Matthew had at the start of his rule discouraged the comrades, his associates, the leadership, from indulging their greed. He forbade them to enrich themselves. This was the last of the influences from his childhood, and then the Jesuits, who had taught him that poverty was next to Godliness: whatever else the Fathers might have been, they were poor and did not indulge themselves. Now Gloria told him he was mad, and that she should buy this big house, that farm, then wanted another farm, and
some hotels that were coming on to the market as the whites left. She told him he must have a Swiss bank account and make sure there was money in it. What money? he wanted to know, and she scorned him for his naivety. But when she talked of money he still saw in his mother's thin hands the pitiful notes and coins put there by his father at the month's end, and at first, when he voted himself a salary, he had been careful it should be no higher than a top civil servant's. All this Gloria changed, brushing it away with her scorn, her laughter, her caresses and her practicality, for she had taken over his life and as the Mother of the Country could easily see to it that money flowed her way. It was she who quietly diverted big sums that flowed in from charities and benefactors into her own accounts. 'Oh, be a fool then,' she cried when he protested. 'It's in my name. It's not your responsibility.'
Battles for someone's soul are seldom as clear and easy to see – and as short – as the one where the devil battled for Comrade Matthew's. And Zimlia, ill-governed before on ill-digested Marxism and tigs and tags of dogma, or remembered sentences from textbooks on economics, now rapidly plunged into corruption. Immediately the currency began its steady, but rapid devaluation. In Senga the fat cats got fatter every day, and out in places like Kwadere money that had descended in a trickle now dried up altogether.
Gloria grew more fascinating, more beautiful, and richer, acquiring another farm, a forest, hotels, restaurants – and wore them like necklaces. And now when Comrade President Matthew went abroad to meet his favourite people, the immensely rich, dissolute and corrupt rulers of the new Africa and new Asia, he did not sit silent when they displayed their wealth and boasted of their avarice. Now he could boast of his and did, and when these men showed how they admired him, giving him gifts and flattery, that empty place in him where there would always be a thin stray dog with its tail between its legs was filled, at least for a time, and Gloria caressed and stroked and petted and nuzzled and licked and sucked and held him against those great breasts and kissed the old scars on his legs. 'Poor Matthew, poor poor little boy.'
The evening before Sylvia had left for London she had stood on the path just where the oleanders and hibiscus and plumbago bushes ended, and looked down at the hospital with more than the forgivable amount of pride. Anyone could use the word ' hospital' now of that cluster of buildings. No money had come through Comrade Mandizi for a long time, but the plunging Zimlia currency meant that small sums in London became large ones here. Ten pounds, the cost of a small carrier bag of groceries in London, here built a grass hut or replenished the stock of painkillers or malaria tablets.
There were two ' wards' down there now, long grass-roofed sheds, the grass close to the ground on one side where rain most often came, and high on the other. In each were a dozen pallets with good blankets and pillows. She was planning another shed, for the existing beds were filling up with the victims of this AIDS, or Slim, that the government had just decided to fully and frankly acknowledge, with appeals to foreign donors for help. Sylvia knew that in the village these were called ' the dying huts' , and she planned to build another, for patients who were merely malarial, or in labour – more ordinary pains of the flesh. She had had built a proper little house of brick, which she called the consulting-room, and in it was a high bed, made by lads from the village, of leather thongs stretched on a frame and on that a good mattress. Here she examined people, prescribed, set arms and legs, bound up wounds. In all this she was assisted by Clever and Zebedee. She had paid for the new buildings, and for medicines – paid for everything. She knew that in the village some said, And why should she not pay? She stole it all from us in the first place. It was Joshua who inspired this grumbling. Rebecca defended her, telling everyone that without Sylvia there would be no hospital.
On the evening after Sylvia returned from London, standing exactly in the same spot, she looked down at her hospital and was attacked by that failing of the heart and purpose that so often afflicts people just back from Europe. What she saw down there, the assemblage of poor huts or sheds, was tolerable only if she did not think of London, or Julia's house, with its solidity, its safety, its permanence, each room so full of things that had an exact purpose, serving a need among a multiplicity of needs, so that every day any person in it was supported as if by so many silent servitors with utensils, tools, appliances, gadgets, surfaces to sit on or to put things on – an intricacy of always multiplying things.
In the early mornings Joshua rolled from his place near the log that burned in the middle of the hut, reached for the pot where last night's porridge congealed, dug out from it with the stirring stick some lumps which he ate swiftly, supplying his stomach with its necessity, drank water from a tin jug that stood on the ledge that ran around the hut, then walked a few steps into the bush, urinated, perhaps squatted to shit, took up his stick that was made from bush wood, and walked the mile to the hospital, where he slid his back down the tree, to sit there, all day.
Surely she, a 'religious' as Rebecca called her – 'I told them in the village that you are a religious'-should be admiring this evidence of the poor in wealth, and probably of spirit, though she did not see herself as equipped to judge that. That great heap of a city, covering so many square miles, so rich, so rich — and then this group of paltry sheds and huts: Africa, beautiful Africa, which oppressed her spirits with its need, wanting everything, lacking everything, and everywhere people white and black working so hard to – well, what? To put a little plaster on an old weeping wound. And that was what she was doing.
Sylvia felt as if her own real self, her substance, the stuff of belief, was leaking away as she stood there. A sunset, a rainy season's going down of the sun... from a black cloud low on the red horizon shot heavy thick rays like spikes of gold that radiate around a saint's head. She felt mocked, as if a clever thief were stealing from her and laughing as he did it. What was she doing here? And what good did she really do? And above all where was that innocence of faith that had sustained her when she first came? What did she believe in, really? God, yes, she could say that, if no one pressed for definitions. She had suffered a conversion, as classic in its symptoms as an attack of malaria, to The Faith – which is what Father McGuire called it, and she knew that it had begun because ofascetic Father Jack, with whom she had been in love, though at the time she would have said it was God she loved. Nothing was left of all that brave certainty, and she knew only that she must do her duty here, in this hospital, because Fate had set her down here.
The state of her mind could also be described clinically: it was, in a hundred religious textbooks. The doctors of her Faith would say to her, Disregard it, it is nothing, seasons of dryness come to us all.
But she didn't need these experts on the soul, she did not need Father McGuire, she could diagnose herself. So why then did she need a spiritual mentor at all, if she was not going to tell him, simply because she knew what he would say?
But the real question was
, why would it be so easy for Father McGuire to say 'a season of dryness', but for her it was like a sentence of self-excommunication? What she had brought to her conversion was a hungry needful heart, and anger too, though she had not recognised that until recently. She could see herself, as she had been then, in Joshua, where anger burned always, forced out of him in bitter accusations and demands. Who was she ever to criticise Joshua? She had known what it was to be angry to the point she was poisoned by it, though at the time she had thought she was wanting comforting arms, Julia's. And now was she criticising Julia, because her love had not been enough to still that wanting, so that she had gone on to Father Jack? What had stilled the wanting? Work, always, and only, work. And so there she was, on a dry hillside in Africa, feeling that everything
she did or might ever do was as effective as pouring water from a (tin) cup into the dust on a hot day.
She thought: There is no person in Europe (if they have not been here and seen) who could comprehend this level of absolute need, a lack of everything, in people who had been promised everything by their rulers, and that was the point where a quiet horror seemed to seep into her. It was like the horror of AIDS, the silent secretive disease that had come from nowhere – monkeys, it was said, perhaps even the monkeys that sometimes played about in the trees here. The thief that comes in the night – that was how she thought of AIDS.
Her heart hurt her... she must tell Zebedee and Clever to tell the builders that there must be another good brick building here and she would say yes to the demands from the village for more classes.
Father McGuire heard that there would be more classes and said that she looked tired, she must look after herself.
Here was where she could have mentioned her season of dryness and even joked about it, but instead she said he must remember to take his vitamins and why was he not taking his nap? He listened to her strictures patiently, smiling, just as she listened to him.
The Sweetest Dream Page 39