Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

At times I felt I was living within the covers of certain books. I was glad I had not been selfish. I could have sat back, munched my morsels and done nothing about the Mindi menace, but I had done all I could, as if I were one of those worst hit by the food crisis. No wonder I walked around with the feeling that the whole seminary owed me: after all, it had been my parcels that had, in part, brought about the arrival of the French Canadian millionaire who was going to revolutionize everything as we knew it. I had the feeling that good things always came wrapped in mysterious parcels.

Fr. Kaanders was very excited by the arrival of Fr. Lageau. The macho man in him peeped through his old liver-spotted skin, and his dull eyes lit up. He now walked with a twitch in his step and pulled his trousers up to his belly button in an almost showy fashion. The arrival of Fr. Lageau energized him. It gave him a feeling of being young again and of going into battle to tackle ancient problems. With a young man at his side, he would not be alone in his whiteness. He would have someone to drink a glass of wine with and talk to about the other side of the world.

Fr. Gilles Lageau looked very much like Sean Connery portraying James Bond. Beside him Kaanders resembled a panhandler soliciting pin money from a hunky Californian windsurfer. Straw-haired, arthritic, incontinent and bad-toothed, Kaanders could hardly keep up with the flashy North American. It became clear from the beginning that if any kind of relationship was going to exist between the two, it would be up to Kaanders to sustain it. We watched the two white men with almost anthropological fascination. The contradictions of the Western world held us spellbound, at least for some time.

Both priestly and seminarian narcissism generally found an outlet in a keen interest in material goods. The cars, the clothes and the furniture the staff had were analyzed to the last atom for information pertaining to quality, manufacturer, cost and durability. Lageau increased this activity. He boasted about his golden Rado watch (“the champion of chronometers”), which, putatively, lost only one second in ten years. Such Western reliability! Such Western precision! Wags spent time calculating the mountains of foodstuffs the watch alone could buy for the two hundred boys on campus. Others tried to figure out where Lageau bought his short-sleeved pastel shirts and the pastel trousers he wore. A boy helping in his office finally divulged the secret that Lageau wore French clothes, exclusively. Much was made of the expensive belts, checked socks and genuine leather open-toed sandals he wore in class. There were bets as to whether he possessed a cassock or not, for he and Kaanders never wore those cumbersome things, not even when the bishop visited.

The sudden appearance of this flamboyant man in the midst of poverty-stricken souls struck a blow for the rich: we developed a finely tuned idealization of them, accompanied by a deliberate transfusion of generosity into their veins and a conscious defeatist effort to justify or overlook their shortcomings. Few thought it strange that a man in his forties was openly boasting about his watch, coming as he was from a region where such watches were common; we felt that such little faults were the fleas on an otherwise powerful dog.

Local politics were also at work: you never bit the hand that fed you, or was most likely to feed you. Consequently, there was much turning of the other cheek and much patience in the hope that everything would turn out right in the end. After all, didn’t rivers flow toward the areas of least resistance? This force, this Western river coursing through our midst, was more likely to take up our burdens if we laid ourselves at its feet.

Ignorance was another ingredient in this concoction. There was little real-life knowledge about how the West, or the rich, carved out chunks of wealth for themselves. Hardly any of us knew how the magical Western economic machine, personified by this man, operated. The tendency was to glorify the unknown. So the Westerners, in this case Lageau, were glorified to a sickening degree at times. Most of us believed that Lageau was our God-sent conduit to the benefactors in the West. The doors he could open! The dreams he could fulfill! Fantasy perquisites ranged from pocket money to quality consumer goods to good meals, to begin with. From experience we knew that priests who had benefactors enjoyed a better standard of living than those who did not. They had decent cars, cash to spend and nice clothes. Occasionally, they also went for holidays abroad. Therefore, the magical hundred-percent-compensation scheme for having left both mother and father to follow Jesus flashed whenever Lageau’s blue eyes appeared.

A plethora of guessing games went on for quite some time. The priests were cautious; we were optimistic. Didn’t good things come to those who waited? A little more patience would certainly not kill us. And it surely didn’t, but neither did it bear the envisaged fruits.

Lageau demonstrated his aristocratic credentials in good time: he was impervious to opinion, anybody’s opinion. Tears of anguish flowed, falling into shards of dashed idealistic dreams. We felt a painful reluctance to revise our attitudes, our dreams and our scanty inventory of knowledge. No one wanted to admit that they had been wrong in expecting too much, for surely what could be too much for one who operated in a charmed circle of money power like Lageau? But reality had to be faced: Lageau said, “Some people think that there are money mines in Europe.” The wink which followed that statement made hearts jerk with excruciating pain. If there were no money mines in Europe, where the fuck were they? Here? In Siberia? Or in heaven? Shouldn’t he have said that money was not the problem but how to spend it? The wink, as we soon found out, had been a way of turning us into quasi conspirators, quasi confidants. He elucidated: “Priests come to me all the time begging for cars, hi-fis, money and benefactors.” This was delivered in the oblique manner of an aside. In reality, it was a condiment to flavor the harsh mathematical dish he was serving us. He taught us mathematics. When no laughter came, he winked, screwed his finger against his temple and awaited peals of laughter. We were supposed to laugh at the naive, greedy, materialistic priests, but the laughter that came was both lopsided and painful, because everyone realized that we were not conspirators and that, if anything, we were laughing at ourselves.

A dull, heavy feeling akin to bean-weevil-inspired flatulence permeated me and threatened to decapitate my keen interest in this man. All my feelers were out: this was my first encounter with somebody who had it all, and I wanted to learn as much as I could. I felt I had beaten Serenity to the finish line: I had come face-to-face with one of the “millionaires” he had met only in books. This was the first man to make me question the sense of power I had grown up with. In times of crisis, I always heard the cries of fifty babies in the background, reminding me of how special I was, had been. At the seminary, I often thought I was in the wrong company, among toddlers Grandma and I had delivered. I felt I knew something priests didn’t: I knew what to do at the hour life came into the world. Lageau was the first man to make me aware of another sort of power, a more devastating power that controlled millions of lives by remote control. I almost felt ashamed of myself: my former power lay in amniotic fluid and blood and the smells of birth. His power, however, glittered with the sharpness of silver and the richness of gold. It frightened me and held me hostage in its glare.

My faith in him, though, became dented very quickly: I have never been a man of faith. Weeks passed and the diet remained as revolting as before. My view was that any new leader worth his salt seized the initiative quickly, effected changes, even if only cosmetic, and swung people onto his side. The principle remained that a dictator was only as bad as his successor, but Lageau showed no sign of improving things, which was both very strange and sickening. Where was the money? Had he come empty-handed? If so, what was the difference between him and Mindi?