Abyssinian Chronicles (40 page)

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.”

By the time
Agatha
arrived, a gigantic swan edging uphill in the dusk, a white bolt of light in a gloomy evening sky, she was already community property, dripping with the saliva of communal speculation. A glossy twelve-footer, she sat on her dolly, awash with fluorescent light, and glowed like a new alabaster Virgin. As cameras flashed in the dusk, Lageau stood in front of her, fascinated, like an inventor awed by his invention. He beamed and glowed, as if to say priesthood was the best profession on earth, as if every ordained priest got a twelve-footer at one point in his career. He had waited for
Agatha
for a long time, and now that she was here, he felt a boyish impatience to try her out.

Weeks of expectation followed. Everyone was watching. An African priest famous for his sycophantism drove
Agatha
to the lake with his car, affixed the engine and waited for Lageau to arrive.

Sometimes Lageau took a boy or two along to help with the boat. Dressed in white gym shorts, white canvas shoes and a white T-shirt, Lageau resembled a debonair tennis player. He began fishing with rods, then turned to nets. He first caught tilapia fish, then he started netting thirty- to seventy-kilo Nile perch monsters. The fathers’ fridge and deep freezer filled to the brim, but rotten beans continued to be part of our daily diet, except once a month, when we got Nile perch.

I thought about attacking Lageau head-on to ask why he was not giving us more fish, but I held back. I wanted somebody else to make the move. I didn’t want to appear to be too food-minded. I did not have long to wait.

We started experiencing frequent power failures. At first we thought it was a national or regional problem, and that it was the Energy Board’s fault, but it soon became apparent that the seminary
was suffering many more power failures than other local users. Lageau became extremely angry, because on top of being forced to use lanterns, he had to spend time tracing the source of the problem.

At first the saboteur just pulled out wires or fuses. Fr. Lageau fitted them back easily, a curse or two on his lips. Then the saboteur decided to raise the stakes. He ripped parts out of the system and drove Lageau almost crazy with frustration. We would have a situation where the fathers’ block was in total darkness while ours enjoyed sparkling fluorescent light. A week after that was rectified, the whole school would be plunged into darkness. Fr. Lageau then built boxes over all the transformers and kept the keys in his office. He told us that he had defeated the bastard this time. The bastard must have been listening and was not pleased. He waited a week or so and struck again. These power failures affected our night study, but the advantage was that we slept longer. In that sense, few seminarians ever got angry with this enigmatic character, and any anger toward him disappeared in the blaze of the deep-freezer dramas that followed. After every successful attack, the bursar would order the freezers to be emptied, and we would feast on the fish. The saboteur would wait for the freezers to fill up again, and then he would rip a part out of the electrical system and the bursar would be forced to give us the fish. In the meantime, all efforts were directed at catching this fellow, but in vain. I was intrigued by him. I wanted to know who he was: he thought so much like me. Serenity would have liked him too, for he seemed to spring out of the pages of a good novel.

The fourth, fifth and sixth times the power supply was sabotaged, we spent a total of twenty days without power. The rector addressed us on each occasion and warned the saboteur to stop his subversive activities. It was interesting that he made no threats of divine vengeance or anything like that. He must have known that this fellow was impervious to all matters divine. I waited for the rector to call me to his office and try to ask me if I knew who the saboteur was, but he did not.

After the sixth campaign, things changed a little: we now got fish thrice a month. The attacks stopped.

My indifference to the
Agatha
drama did not last long. One morning, Fr. Lageau woke up to find a two-inch scratch on
Agatha’s
second rib. Since she had not been to the lake for the past three days, there was
only one revolting conclusion to be drawn. A tomato-red Lageau, Elvis hair standing on end, concluded that
Agatha
had been assaulted, her pride chipped, her inviolability compromised. Who in this godforsaken place had dared to lay his hand on her? Who had marked her? After all she had done for these wretched boys and their wretched priests! Which senseless clod had done this? What was he trying to achieve or prove? It did not, could not, occur to Lageau that it might have been a mistake, an accident. After what the power saboteur had put him through, Lageau believed that accidents never occurred in this place. Everything was planned, and where
Agatha
was concerned, Lageau was not ready to hold back. He had had enough. At the back of his mind was also the idea that beautiful boats, like beautiful women, never got accidentally hurt. They were purposely assaulted. His car, his flowers, his person, had never been vandalized. Why did it have to be sacred
Agatha?
Who did not know that Agatha happened to be the name of his mother, his first girlfriend and his ideal woman? Who did not know that
Agatha
brought out all the protective instincts in him?

Like many powerful people who operated inside their own bubble of inviolability, Lageau was terribly hurt and offended. Excruciating pain seared him, making him afraid that he was going to have an improbable heart attack. He felt the approaching pounding devastation of a migraine, his mother’s staple affliction. He lived in perpetual fear of inheriting it. Too angry to give word to his emotions, he rushed to his room and locked himself in. He took a shot of whiskey. It burned with a familiar relief-laden fire, quickly cooled by dejection. God, he thought, it was not his week to say mass for the boys! He dressed quickly and hurried to the sacristy.

A golden hue suffused the interior of the chapel. Boys were mumbling prayers prior to the Angelus and the mass. The golden hue might have been a crimson bolt of fire. Fire was the only thing on Lageau’s mind when he asked the rector to let him say mass that morning.

“It is my week,” the pilgrim protested weakly.

“But I have a special message for the boys.”

“Can’t it wait till after mass? Couldn’t you address them in the refectory?”

“No, you have to understand the special circumstances.”

“Spiritual?” the rector asked, wondering whether the bursar had
seen an apparition or had a road-to-Damascus experience. He looked so red!

The rector capitulated despite Lageau’s refusal to say whether the special message was spiritual or otherwise. How Lageau’s ears glowed! the rector thought.

Two minutes into the holy mass, the rector understood why Lageau had been in such earnest. The bursar launched his attack: “Animals!” All the priests and boys eyed him curiously. What a strange intro! We were not the natural audience for animal-rights speeches: we beat our cows or let our herd boys beat them when they strayed; we whacked pigs on the head with pestles or cut their throats to prepare them for the pan; we persecuted squirrels for eating our groundnuts; we murdered rats with poison and traps; we kept dogs and their fleas outside the house; we had a love-hate relationship with monkeys, and if they eluded death for raiding shambas, it was thanks to their sensibilities. Animals were animals here. So what the fuck was Lageau talking about? After acquiring the boat and murdering fish, was he now turning champion of animal rights?

“Monkeys, black monkeys. Monkeys with no regard for aesthetics or property. How could anyone desecrate
Agatha?
What had she done to them? Why would anyone cut her rib? You know why? Because they are monkeys. During this mass, join me to pray for these monkeys to gain a modicum of respect for other people’s property.”

The priests, taller than lampposts in their immaculate robes, stood round the altar and behind Lageau like camouflaged bodyguards, their black, sheeny faces inscrutable in the morning air. Were they as coldly detached inside as they looked outside? Maybe, maybe not. They seemed protected, elevated above Lageau’s words. Surely their colleague knew how materialistic most of them were, and was aware that they could never raise a finger against
Agatha.
They remained as placid-faced as statues of the Virgin, and as taciturn.

Many seminarians, at least those who had been fully awake to hear this most controversial of intros, were too shellshocked to react. I heard a few shuffles of angry feet, and a hiss or two. Maybe I was not fully awake either, as I had just been released for a day from the bindery and its glue. Yet I was sure I had heard him. I was sure that most of us were warding off the stinging effect of Lageau’s words with the shield of docility and deference to authority. Wasn’t everyone
reacting in the classic good-seminarian way? Turning the other cheek? Letting the spittle run till the spitter ran out and then walking away? Wasn’t this the ultimate test of our fortitude?

Someone had once said that
Agatha
was too beautiful not to be the cause of someone’s downfall someday. But what had happened to her? Had someone copied my trick and painted her? Had someone taken a knife and cut her just to see if she was wooden or plastic or carbon fiber? How many kids cut their parents’ sofas just to see what made them soft? Hadn’t I chipped the despots’ bloody headboard? How many kids ripped arms off dolls just to see what made them squeak? Had the saboteur taken his campaign up a notch and done a number on
Agatha?
I almost smiled. This fellow really had steel in his balls. I could understand Lageau’s frustration: the saboteur who had made a mockery of his electrical skills was still on the loose, and now somebody, possibly the same sod, had done a number on his
Agatha!
I gave Lageau the benefit of the doubt, because I believed that somebody had made a long, deep, vicious cut into
Agatha
’s rib just to drive the poor “Red Indian” mad.

The whole mass seemed to be taking place inside a submarine, away from solid ground and reality. Normally, during these early morning masses, many boys were not aware of what took place till communion. Everything ran on automatic pilot, because the structure of the mass was the same; but now everyone was awake, as though receiving messages from tiny transmitters hidden inside the altar. In a way, everyone was struck by Lageau’s courage and self-righteousness. Your average white man, faced with two hundred glum black faces, would not call them monkeys so arbitrarily without a gun at his waist. Your average colonialist would have thought twice about going this far without a detachment of sharpshooters behind him. But this unarmed, boy-faced man was rubbing shit in our faces with absolute impunity! This was the tough guy many of us wanted to be: clean-shaven, soft-spoken and average-looking, but endowed with balls of steel. I felt like cheering. This guy was delivering blows to the faces of priests I had wanted to slap a few times! Yes, yes, this was great. I could feel the heat spreading in my chest.