Abyssinian Chronicles

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Abyssinian Chronicles Page 25

by Moses Isegawa


  Lwendo’s job gave him freedom and brought him in contact with the nuns who cooked for the staff and for us. During manual labor he was to be found in the kitchen chatting up a nun or two, pretending to be making plans for his Saturday chores. In between visits to the kitchen, he would gather firewood, old sticks of furniture and anything else he needed, or pretended to need, for lighting the Saturday fire. Lwendo also spent much time with the pigsty gang, boys who looked after the seminary’s pigs and were responsible for slaughtering them on chosen Saturdays for the fathers’ table. Leaders of this group kept back some pork and smuggled it in buckets to Lwendo’s barn, where it was later roasted and devoured. All this was illegal and could lead to one’s immediate suspension or expulsion, but no one was eager to report these crimes.

  Rumor reigned supreme here. If one needed the truth, one had only to follow the noses of the gossipers. One such character linked Lwendo to Sr. Bison, a fat little black nun with very round legs, very round arms and a very ample behind on which fantasizers said one could stand the fat Jerusalem Bible without its falling off. This same nun was linked to the Rev. Fr. Mindi, the disciplinary master. I was only interested in the former connection.

  I started shadowing Lwendo in the evenings, in the hope of nabbing him while he was eating the forbidden fruit. If not, I wanted to catch him in some very compromising situation. I failed. What I knew was that whenever the food was bad, and it often was, he would go to the kitchen and eat leftovers from the fathers’ table after supper. During the cooking weeks of nuns with whom he did not particularly get along, his visits to the kitchen were less frequent. I had two options: either to link him with stealing pork and roasting it in his barn, which meant enlisting the cooperation of an interested priest, or to catch him fucking Sr. Bison or some other nun.

  It took me eight weeks to nail him. I shadowed him every evening during the night study, which began at 9 p.m. One evening he was not in class or in his barn or in the library. He could only be in some father’s office or in the kitchen. I went to the kitchen at 9:30 and found it vacant, the sooty boilers staring dolorously through the grimy windows. I stood outside the kitchen and thought hard. The food store, a long, cold room full of sacks of maize, maize flour and bad beans, was to my right. Normally, its heavy wooden door bore the weight of two large fist-shaped padlocks. I looked. The door was closed but not padlocked. I decided to chance it and go in. This room was out of bounds, except for those with special permission. I did not wait for permission. I was the librarian, after all. I could always say that I was looking for Fr. Kaanders, or that he had sent me to the bursar to see if some books had arrived.

  A thick, weevil-impregnated smell befouled the still air, making the long, cold room feel smaller and more forlorn. The pregnant gunnysacks on their stumpy wooden stands reminded me of Grandpa’s sacks of coffee, stuffed and ready for the mill at the top of Mpande Hill. The sacks, like the beds in Sing-Sing, were lined against the wall, creating a wide cement corridor in the middle which looked like a long, dark tunnel into a big hill. I stood and listened, fighting the sudden need to sneeze, afraid to be found here alone in the darkness. It was very quiet. A dead stick fell from the trees near the convent onto the corrugated-iron roof with a long, thin scratching sound. I started as though jabbed in the ribs.

  I thought I heard other sounds, this time coming from the back of the tunnel. They were more like squeaking rats. Maybe there were other prowlers in here. I thought I heard a dog sniffing repeatedly. The sound was sharply controlled and entered the body like needles or tongues of fire. Lusanani suddenly came to me, her bosom drenched by a leaking jerry can, her nipples erect under her cotton blouse. She suddenly filled the darkness, although this was certainly not her song. Hers was a more sophisticated rendition, garnished with a staccato chorus and blessed with flowery, praise-laden stanzas. This sound was genuine, clean, urgent and maddening. On tiptoe, the burden in my trousers a sweet hindrance I vaguely thought was donging like a church bell, I advanced toward the sniffer dog.

  Lwendo stuffed the nun with powerful, deliberate, loaded thrusts. A cheeky ray of light from a choked ventilator fell dully on red panties heaped around a work-conditioned ankle. Lust-glazed nunly eyes saw me first, and the gasp that burst in the darkness tore through my groin with the corrosion of sulfuric acid. Lwendo, well aware that the damage had already been done, would not be denied. He pressed to the juddering end with the preening insolence of a stud in a corral. Realizing that it was not a priest but me, his lackey, he laughed, and in his eagerness he tried to shake my hand.

  I had bought my freedom and his friendship, on top of helpings set aside from the fathers’ table during the grateful nun’s cooking week. In my excitement I thought of Uncle Kawayida, the magician, the charmer, the storyteller, and of his story of the man with the three sisters. I would have liked to tell him about this coup, and about seminary life in general, but communication between us had faded badly since I left the village. Did he read books? No, he was too busy running his business, raising turkeys and broiler chickens. Had he forgotten about the old days? I didn’t think so.

  I was a free man now. I toyed with the idea of going after a bully or two, but the bullying had cooled down. I decided to go after people larger than me, the real bosses of the place. I still found no pleasure in beating people of my level. I relished the challenge of reaching above myself and winning, albeit with more bruises. My attention had already been drawn by Fr. Mindi, the disciplinary master, and now probably solo fucker of efficient Sr. Bison. This man not only caned boys, but also went after them, hiding in bushes and behind buildings, high walls and fences, everywhere, to catch those breaking stupid rules like talking during silence time or eating between meals. He knew all the paths used by truants, and often hid behind the acacias overlooking Sing-Sing in the hope of catching hungry boys who escaped and returned to the seminary with bananas, corn, pancakes, sugarcanes, anything to keep hunger at bay. Some truants had a business instinct: they took orders and delivered foodstuffs at a profit. Fr. Mindi went after these “traders in the temple” with missionary zeal. He called them to their dormitories at odd hours in the hope of finding contraband or money in their boxes.

  Officially, all pocket money was kept with him, but many boys hid most of it in places where they could get at it freely, without first going to Fr. Mindi and explaining why they needed it. Sing-Sing suffered most of Mindi’s money-hunting “police checks,” as they were called.

  Die-hard truants and money hoarders fought back. They spread rumors and set him on the trail of the wrong people. With Mindi thus diverted, they made good their escape. He fell into this trap a number of times, till he discovered that boys were laughing at his gullibility. He caught some of the pranksters and punished them harshly. Information about police checks somehow leaked from the fathers’ dining room, and many of his raids were pre-empted, with the result that on days when he planned to surprise the real criminals, he found their lockers and suitcases empty.

  The role of disciplinary master hinged on his self-image, and on the perceived image the boys had of him. As far as Fr. Mindi was concerned, both were poor. This only served to make him harsher.

  I often wondered why this educated man couldn’t see the ludicrousness of his position. Boys fed on bad posho (corn bread) and weevilled beans stayed hungry and had to supplement their deficient diet. Wouldn’t he have done the same? Couldn’t he see that he was enforcing impossible rules? Couldn’t he see that he was the Pharisee who preached total rest on the Sabbath, yet rescued his donkey when it fell in the ditch on that day? It was easy to say that no one should eat between meals when your stomach was full of pork, fish, Irish potatoes, greens and the other goodies priests ate.

  I also hated the lack of self-control this preacher of self-control exhibited when he caught his man. If he was indeed enforcing impersonal rules, made in Rome and imported by the bishop into the country, he had to exhibit some impersonality and impartiality. On the contrary, he enj
oyed his successes, especially when inflicting pain on miscreants. It was personal after all. He was demonstrating that although some got away with it, anyone caught would pay a high price. Pride, ambition, future career prospects and power were in it for him.

  Fr. Mindi was the most hated man in the seminary. Boys called him the Grim Reaper, and they prayed for him to get into a car accident and live the rest of his life in a wheelchair. They prayed for him to become blind, to get cancer and to be afflicted with every purulent disease on earth. The feeling was that as soon as he left, things would improve dramatically, for it was believed that he was deliberately keeping the situation bad. Nobody could understand why the food remained terrible when there was land, and possibly money to develop it. We had come to believe his philosophy was that bad food made good seminarians and ultimately good priests.

  “He should die,” boys often said, especially when they watched him dribbling the ball at the football field. He could move with beguiling swiftness. He was the patron of Vatican dorm, and thanks to his participation and coaching, they won most annual inter-house competitions. Whenever they won, Fr. Mindi would allow two pigs to be roasted and would give us abundant food for one weekend.

  “No, no, noo,” others replied. “He should live and suffer forever and ever.”

  “What should we do about it?”

  There was general agreement that the man should be left in the hands of the gods, who should see fit when to break his leg or inflict a car accident or subject him to armed attack.

  Fr. Mindi penetrated my thought patterns. I tended to think of him as a brother to that constipated gorgon Padlock. Both had had a religious call. Both had responded to it. One had dropped out to become a real parent, while the other remained behind to become a symbolic one. Both believed that the harsher, the meaner and the more mysterious you played it, the better your children turned out.

  It eventually struck me how limited Fr. Mindi really was. Padlock, in her nunly, peasant-girl constrictions, was more like a sore-infested buffalo hardly able to keep thousands of egrets and ticks off its festering back. Mindi, on the other hand, was bloated with theology, philosophy, Latin, Italian, Church history and all manner of other clerical and secular learning garnered from both local and foreign seminaries. The four years he had spent at Urban University in Rome had sharpened the edge of his conservative Catholicism, reinforced his harsher traits and dulled his empathic and self-analytical capabilities.

  Yet, this was a man we were supposed to call Father and emulate and put on a pedestal. If scholarships to foreign universities and all that learning resulted in this barren role-playing and regurgitation, what was the use of it? This was a man programmed to obey, and to be obeyed. This was a man who had suffered and was now making others suffer so that they in turn would make others suffer. This was Mindi’s version of one hundred percent priestly compensation on earth and one hundred percent reward in the life to come. His material things, especially his car, were part of this package, this compensation scheme for having responded to the priestly call and given up the family life the damned enjoyed. He bragged about it, thinking that he was encouraging us to persevere. His dream was not different from my lawyerly one, taking into account the power he enjoyed and the rumors about him and Sr. Bison. It was only the oil of holiness and of predestination which he poured on his that put me off. My aim was to rub off that oily sheen and expose the dull, grainy core underneath.

  I was back to my old sleepless ways. It felt scary to be up in the small hours of morning, but there was an exciting edge to it, a marauder’s adrenaline rushes, that made it worthwhile. I left Sing-Sing at around two o’clock. Dorobo, the newly hired night watchman, very tall, very strong, soot-black, lethal with his giant bow and arrow, was out doing his rounds, or sleeping. It was the image of his huge bow that etched itself in my mind like a diamond half-moon and followed me around as I moved from shadow to shadow. I praised the Lord that we Africans never idolized dogs: How awesome would this man have been with a huge German shepherd at his side? But there was not a single dog on campus.

  The seminary stood on top of a hill, arranged around the chapel, accessible from all sides. It was easy to move from Sing-Sing, at the extreme end of the compound, to the chapel because of the protection accorded by the trees and a pine-tree fence for most of the way. I found Dorobo behind the chapel, crammed into a nook, roaring in his illegal sleep. My destination was to the left of the chapel, ten meters away. It was a long, slant-roofed building used partly to store tools and partly as a garage for the fathers’ cars.

  I crossed the gravel-strewn stretch to the tool area and opened the side door with a key used by the student in charge. I found myself inside the long, cold building with heaps of scythes, hoes, pangas, rakes, defunct lawnmowers and chain saws reeking of dust, oil and neglect. I picked up a blunt panga and weighed it in my hand, remembering the maniac who had threatened to decapitate Grandma. I set it down again, careful not to let other implements slide and make noise. I proceeded to the connecting door.

  The hinges squeaked, making me afraid that Dorobo might hear me. I got inside the garage, and was confronted with the smell of cars: a tangy combination of oil, steel and rubber trapped in a confined space. There was Mindi’s blue Peugeot, Kaanders’ white Volkswagen, the rector’s beige Renault and an old grayish car left behind by a priest friend of the rector’s. In the far corner was a huge, full-bellied motorcycle on its flipper-like kickstand, seemingly leaning against the wall, a pool of oil under it.

  It took me a few minutes of sweaty-palmed poking and fumbling to get into Fr. Mindi’s car. I imagined Aunt Tiida, dressed to kill, watching Dr. Ssali trying to get into their Peugeot and fussing with camouflaged pleasure as their neighbors looked on from behind parted curtains.

  The stench of tobacco, however, brought me back to my senses. I was inside the car of a chain-smoker. I thought of pouring salt in Fr. Mindi’s engine and wrecking it for good, but that seemed uncalled for. I was not here on a rampage, but a courtesy call. I was principally here to send a modest message to the big man, something a touch above the average seminarian’s idle fantasy revenge. I had eaten a few pawpaws, bought from a truant, and combined with our weevilled beans, the stench they gave my excrement was overpowering. I held my nose as I opened the plastic bag. I had delved into Uncle Kawayida’s archives and pulled out a football hooligan’s weapon: shit. I used a trowel to smear the seats, the roof, the floor, the steering wheel, the gear shift, the dashboard and all the carpets. I locked the stench inside the car and worked on the door handles. I left the offensive plastic bag on the bonnet.

  By now the whole garage was alive with stink-hammers. I hurried out of the contaminated air, closed the connecting door as carefully as possible and tiptoed around the heaps of scythes, pangas, hoes.… I was aware of the precariousness of my position: somebody could smell me from a mile off. I made my way to the bathrooms, cleaning myself along the way with odoriferous pine needles plucked from the fence.

  I had visualized a more sophisticated aftermath to my painting job. The staff members were typically very equivocal about the attack. “Somebody vandalized Fr. Mindi’s car.” “Somebody did terrible damage to a certain staff member’s property.” “Somebody acted very disrespectfully and uncharitably toward our bursar,” they said. The details finally leaked out via the boys who were made to clean up the mess. Fr. Mindi had found them talking during silence time and had charged them with the horrible task of scrubbing, washing, wiping and drying his desecrated status symbol.

  Finally, Fr. Mindi told us officially. He dressed his anger in curse-laden threats, ultimately announcing that if the culprit did not give himself up within three days, something was going to happen to him. I was in familiar territory, hardly able to believe how similar dictatorial thought patterns were. This man with an ego as large as a cirrhotic liver expected the culprit to crumble under its holy smells. If this was what that Urban University conservatism had come to, then I didn’t envy
him all the lasagna he had eaten in Italy. His experience with truants should have warned him that not all miscreants were in awe of his university curses covered in Bolognese sauce.

  Fr. Mindi paid us a second visit, this time at the refectory. “What sort of a seminarian can do such a thing? What did he come here for? Does he want to become a priest? How did he enter the system? It is in your interests to denounce this character. I am sure he said something to somebody, criminals often do. Please, let me know. If this sort of behavior is left unpunished, we are all in big danger. This is the kind of person to set the whole place on fire.” I wasn’t turned on; neither were the majority of the boys, who felt that Mindi deserved every dose of pain he got.

  The rector, as somber as a judge with piles, asked us after a day to surrender the culprit. Like Mindi, he believed that somebody had heard something or seen something or smelled something. He hinted that somebody might have a grudge against the bursar, but that the manner in which he had expressed himself was beastly and unworthy of somebody destined for the altar. He laid on the syrup: “Come and talk to us if you have a problem. We are here for you. Without you we would not be here. This is a family, and if one family member hurts, the whole family suffers. Remember, one rotten orange can corrupt the whole basket. If you know anything, tell your spiritual director, or slip a piece of paper under my door. Don’t let anyone see you. I assure you: nobody will be penalized for giving us the necessary information. And if anyone threatens you, trying to keep your mouth shut, come directly to me and he will be dealt with.” I had heard all this in my former life. It left me cold.

 

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