Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

In addition, Mbale was the subparish catechist, teaching and preaching the Good News, counselling married people and preparing those who wanted to receive the matrimonial and other sacraments. His faith was rock solid, and the biggest insult was to tell him that the Virgin Mary menstruated or that St. Joseph might have been impotent. All skepticism concerning the Bible was anathema to him and could fetch one a sharp remark or even a slap when he was loaded with enough banana beer.

No pilgrim was prouder of his journey than this uncle of mine. He retold the story a thousand times over. The meter-long rosary became his personal trademark. It reminded everyone that he was not just another peasant farmer breaking his back on the land, crawling with sweat in the iron sun, but somebody who had conquered space and traveled to the Vatican, Lourdes, Jerusalem and other places mentioned in the Bible. His sermons on Sundays became legendary. If in the gospel Jesus had been to Cana, Capernaum or Jericho, Mbale would tell his hearers: “When I was in Cana … I felt the power of the Lord inside me, moving like a raging fire. Then God commanded me to go home and preach to you my people.…” When talking about the pope, he often said, “The Holy Father commissioned me to tell you that he loves you. He wants you to repent, because the end is near.…” Two months after his return, vicious winds ravaged the village and a big part of the countryside.

The winds, when they first whistled down the hills, sounded like many wooden rosaries clapped together. They found Mbale in the beer hall listening to a song some women had composed in his honor for putting the village on the world map by conquering space. The winds swept down the hills into the village, carrying with them the fury of forty-two years of dormant disaster. They tore the roof off the beer hall, wrapped it into a jagged ball and deposited it two football fields away. They decapitated wind-blocking trees, spreading the crushed canopies all over the place. They aimed lower, uprooting or breaking banana and coffee trees. They terrorized fragile houses, blowing holes into walls, ripping off doors and carrying them to unknown destinations. The subparish church was a sturdy edifice; it put up a good fight. The winds whipped it from all sides, dumped coffee trees uprooted so many meters away onto its roof and hammered its doors with flying banana trees. The winds dived under the roof with the evil intention of furling it up obscenely like the Lamp Lady’s skirt, but all they got off were bits of tired rafters. They rampaged to the anemic little school affiliated with the church and crushed its much older buildings, ground to liquid mud the pit latrine and flooded the yard with Sunday-service and school-week excreta. Water completed the demolition job, washing away crops, paths, dogs, rats, sheets and anything else found in open space. The paltry remains of Mbale’s tomato plants were found in the village well, jamming its surface and sabotaging its flow.

No one was more nonplussed than the pilgrim, who had narrowly escaped decapitation in the storm. The rosary got lost in the process, much to his chagrin.

“God tests those he loves,” he said philosophically, wondering how he was going to pay his creditors.

Padlock, who would one day meet her end in the nearby forest, returned to the village to survey the damage and to see what she could do.

The natural disasters which were going to dog their family and their in-laws’ families had just begun to show their hand. Unlike the locusts, which had come in the thirties and had almost been forgotten by the villagers, the new disasters would leave scars that would last through the ages.

To begin with, though, the people fought the battle of reconstructing their village. Mbale spent the next seven years struggling to pay his creditors.

Holy masses were said copiously throughout the land, and if prayer alone were enough to turn things around, the country would never have undergone the catastrophes that dogged it in the coming years. At the seminary, we seemed to be attending one long, unending mass. Morning light seemed to be doing perpetual battle with stained-glass chapel windows, holding us hostage to a self-repeating drama. Seminarians, faces upturned in sublime boredom and lips moving somnolently, were like baby birds waiting to be fed. The rector, minus meter-long rosary, told and retold the story of his journey in apparent perpetuity. The Vatican, Jerusalem, Lourdes, or was it St. Peter’s Square, Jerusalem, Lourdes, or some other peripatetic configuration? Nowadays, when he caught defaulters, he called them to his office, asked them why they had broken the rules and then clinically passed sentence. “Give me one good reason” became his leitmotif and nickname. Some staff members were annoyed by this leniency. They openly wondered how long this road-to-Damascus conversion would last.

In the meantime, Lageau’s popularity waned, and we finally found him a nickname: “Red Indian.” He was ruddy, after all, but the name was actually a passing reference to the fact that, despite his Wasp roots and apparent wealth, to us he could have been a marginalized Red Indian on a reserve. We mostly called him Red.

In the midst of this teacup storm, the Agatha controversy arose and kept us on tenterhooks till the end of the year. It was as if Lageau were issuing a riposte.

The seminary was built on a hill three kilometers away from the nearest stretch of Lake Victoria, the same lake on whose eastern shores Kaanders had fought polygamy and contracted sleeping sickness. The lake provided good fishing and swimming facilities in these areas. The locals combed the waters with nets dropped from wooden canoes and caught both small and large fish, but did not think much of swimming. Seminarians were allowed to go swimming once a month, but the prospect of walking three kilometers to take a dip, get wolfishly hungry and then return to the hill for ghastly meals never appealed to many. The only people who made use of this dispensation were the die-hard truants; they used the chance to meet their contacts, and sometimes their girls.

Lageau gradually came to personify both swimming and boating. Whenever he was not in the mood for volleyball, he would get in his car and go swimming. On the weekend, he got permission for a few good swimmers to accompany him to the lake. It was to this select group that he revealed the imminent arrival of Agatha.

The news spread like a gasoline fire in a wooden shack. The materialists among us praised the man to the sky. They could hardly wait to cast their eyes on Agatha. Someone stole a picture of the boat, and it changed hands faster than porno magazines in a military barracks. Eyes devoured the swan-like contraption with a mixture of admiration, awe and cold envy. The Red Indian was sending a big message, putting everybody, including the rector, with his Vatican-Lourdes-Jerusalem stories, in his proper place. This boat, still hundreds of miles away, was like a Holy Grail full of elixirs for a national plague. The quick ones pointed out that our meals were finally going to improve.

“With all the big fish he will catch, we will certainly get a share.”

“God has remembered us at long last,” the optimists intoned.

Lageau basked in this glory without directly fanning it. He struck an uncharacteristically reticent pose and let the boys and a few loose-tongued priests do his dirty work. I kept aloof of the drama. At the time, Kaanders and I were busy nursing old books back to health: cutting, gluing, pressing, trimming the finished product and hallucinating on the fish glue. Normally, Kaanders’ hands trembled, as though little electric currents were passing through his veins, but inside the bindery, amidst mountains of paper, the odious paper guillotine and the tattered, needy books, he became steady as a surgeon. He worked nonstop for long stretches, disregarding mealtimes and looking almost frantic in his zeal. He kept a block of cheese in the drawer, nibbled it like a rat nibbling a cake of soap and returned to work. Nothing seemed able to break his concentration. We worked all week, including during sports time. He kept on saying, “Oh boy, this has to be completed, boy.”