My Other Life (7 page)

I wanted to dig a hole here. It would give this day a meaning—but more than that, anything buried here would (to use a word from one of my poems) become friable, crumble to dust, and one day, wetted and molded and baked, be turned into bricks for a latrine, a fitting end for these paltry poems.

The earth was dry. It seemed hard at first, but it cracked and gave and came apart, and soon, digging with a rusty shovel, I had a deep enough hole to bury the Kafka and my notebooks. I flung them in casually, raising dust, liking the way they plopped into their pauper's grave, and then I covered them with dirt.

"Great," I said.

In that same moment I heard a startled yelp and looked up. A little distance off I saw a woman running away and a man hitching his shorts up and dusting off his knees, slapping at them. He coughed loudly, glanced in the direction the woman had gone, and then hunkered down, elbows on his knees, and stared at me.

"Are you looking at me, Father?" he said in Chinyanja.

He was as dark as the shadow of the mango tree in which he crouched.

"These bricks"—I was mounding the dirt over the corpses of my papers—"are they yours?"

Now I saw his sweating face and bandaged feet, smeared with dust.

"They belong to the hospital," he said, using the word
chipatala.
The sick ones called it a hospital, the healthy ones referred to it as a village or a mission.

I walked nearer to him. He was wrinkled and black. Like many other Africans I had seen, he looked as though he had been worn down by the weather. His skin was roughened by wind and sun, like a tree stump or a fence post.

"They are for the kitchen," he said.

I could see a partly made wall; the mortar had hardened as it oozed out from between the bricks. This was perhaps the foundation, the outline of fireplaces that were like a row of barbecue pits. It was to be a communal kitchen.

"Is it your kitchen?"

"It is anyone's kitchen."

He seemed bored, but it was the way most of the lepers talked to mzungus—offhand, faintly jeering, because this was a world the lepers could not leave. And why should they care when they had the mzungus to worry about them?

"Are you working on it?"

In the same bored tone, now sounding haughty and indignant, he said, "No, I am sick."

He held up his bandaged hands.

"I thought maybe your woman was helping you."

"Not to work, but to play." He laughed in a rumbling way, and coughed and then spat, and all of that too was like a pronouncement.

"I just buried some rubbish," I said, realizing that he might have seen me. In Chinyanja the word for rubbish suggested something that was contaminated and unclean. I did not want him to become curious and dig it up, as a scavenging African might.

"If I work on the kitchen, will you help me?" I asked.

"How much will you pay me?"

"Nothing."

"Then I will not work."

It was a leper's response and it verged on insolence. He was frank, he was not afraid, he was blunt. In Blantyre, an African would have humored me and still not done any work.

"Why should I?" the man said, because I had not replied to him.

I thought of Franz Kafka in Prague confiding to his diary,
I feel like a leper.
The book belonged in the ground with my bad poems. Kafka was not a leper. He was a middle-class insurance clerk with a batlike face, pathologically timid and paranoid and guilt-ridden, developing various personal myths as he wrote long, fussy letters to lonely women desperate for the chance to love him.

This was a leper: guiltless, maimed, seeping into his bandages. He had just copulated under a tree with a leper woman, and he was now staring me down. In many ways he was healthy—certainly healthier than Franz Kafka. Reading meant nothing to him; a book was a mute object. He was patient and contemptuous because he was powerless, and he knew it. Perhaps he knew that nothing would change for him, nor would he change anything. He had no illusions, and so he was fully alive every waking moment, looking for food or water, looking for shade, looking for a woman.

"What is your name?"

"Wilson. And yours?"

"Paul."

"From England?"

"America."

"Americans have so much money."

"I don't have any."

He laughed at me and hobbled away before I could say anything else. One of his feet was bandaged, the other was big and yellow and cracked, with twisted toes. He wore a ragged shirt and tattered shorts. His hands were bandaged like mittens.

That night I remembered his confident mocking laugh and I was ashamed of what I had told him. Did the disease make lepers frank because it made them clear-sighted? Of all the people I had met in my life, they had the least to lose.

One morning I went to mass. I had not been to mass for six or seven years, and I entered the church wincing and a little apprehensive, the way I had come home as a teenager after a long absence without a good excuse. And yet I need not have worried. The church was large and sunny and forgiving. One pew was taken up by lepers, about six men, and there were several pews of women, some with crying babies, the others suckling infants. There were nuns in the front pew, and Linda—Birdie—wearing a white dress. Standing at the back of the church was the pretty young girl, Amina, and her blind granny.

I felt friendly towards these people, and as mass began and progressed I thought of how my feelings of pity and my sentimentality had influenced so many of my friendships. And I knew self-pity, too, and the busy, domineering feelings that came from pity, saving myself by pretending to save other people. Here, in the place most likely to arouse such feelings, I was detached—not indifferent—and free to examine how I felt. Not pitying any of them, I felt lost and a little disoriented, but freer than ever.

Kneeling at the consecration, I found myself staring at Amina. She was not kneeling—because she was a Muslim, obviously—but she was steadying her granny, who was murmuring and motioning, making the sign of the cross; and I admired the young girl for doing this, being dutiful.

The mass was hot and solemn, all mumbled, with the cocks crowing just outside.

That night, during a lull in the game of whist, I said to Father DeVoss, "I'm giving up the English class."

"That is a good idea."

They had been his exact words when I told him I was planning to start the class.

"I think I'll work on the bricks at the outdoor kitchen instead."

"If you like, yes," he said. He smiled, but he might have been smiling at his hand of cards. "That is a good idea."

"Maybe Father Touchette will help me."

Father Touchette fumbled with his breviary, looking startled.

"I am busy with baptisms," he said. "So many of them these days."

"I suppose the lepers might help me."

"
Pepani, Bambo!
" Brother Piet exclaimed. Sorry, Dad!

"You really can't do anything," Father DeVoss said. But he was speaking of the game. He collected the last trick and then began counting the cards stacked in front of him. His satisfaction and his remoteness touched me. Nothing of what I had said really mattered to him. He was very happy.

"The kitchen and the bricks were Father LeGrande's idea," he said, smiling again. "He is now in Basutoland."

***

There were no Africans at the outdoor kitchen the next morning. In the mottled shade of the scrawny trees the half-built kitchen looked like an old ruin, one of those useless walls or battlements the British had left behind. I carried and piled bricks for an hour or so, and then as I mixed some mortar in a pit I looked up and saw some Africans staring at me. I had not seen their approach—they simply materialized, squatting, three ragged men.

They muttered, but none spoke to me as I continued the wall, scraping mortar and setting the bricks in place.

"Do you want to help?" I asked.

I used the plural, but there was no reply. I said it again in a matey way, using the word
iwe
—eeway—the bluntest "you" in the language.

They laughed and grunted as though I had nudged them with my elbow.

"Pay us some money," one said in English.

"
Ndalama,
" another said. Cash.

I ignored them and went on laying bricks. They were still talking softly among themselves, and I had the impression that they were debating the issue of whether to help me.

"It is your kitchen, not mine," I said.

"Then why are you working on it?"

"To help you."

"It is your choice," the English-speaking one said.

"Mzungus like to help," the third one, an old man, said.

They left soon after, crept silently away, leaving patches of shadow, deep black in the white dust, where they had been.

Feeling angry, I stayed there, laying bricks, wanting to be stubborn. I worked through the lunch bell and I was pleased when Birdie came over with a plate of
nsima
and beans, and a cup of tea. I needed her as a witness.

"Father LeGrande would be happy to see you working here," she said. She was wearing a long blue skirt and a floppy hat.

"I wish I had some help."

She was smiling at the leper village. "They're lazy," she said. "They just don't want to work. They don't care whether it's done or not. We do everything for them."

I was shocked by the casual brutality in her tone, and by her healthy, confident face.

"They pretend to be sick," she said. "They laugh at us behind our back. And they're bloody rude. If we went away, they'd die or kill each other. They can't go home—they don't fit in."

She was smiling—she wanted to shock me.

"I'll send someone for the bowl and the cup," she said, and gathered her skirt so it wouldn't drag in the dust and headed for the dispensary, leaving me flustered.

What she had said made her physically repulsive to me. I repeated it in a whisper to myself and, watching her making her way down the path, I found fault with the way she walked, her ridiculous hat, her raised elbows, the jumping of her skirt.

The Africans did not come back that day. I worked until dusk, when the mosquitoes came out, and then I headed for the priests' house for dinner. I was too tired to play cards or read, and the priests were still awake when I went to my room.

I did the same the next day. Birdie brought me food, and again she said, "And where are they? Sleeping in their huts while you work."

"I am doing this for myself," I said. "This is my idea, not theirs."

I ate the food while she watched, standing over me.

"Why don't you sit down?" I asked.

"Dust," she said, and smiled.

"Have you stopped wearing your nun's outfit?"

"I'll start wearing it again if you want."

She went away laughing, and I thought: Do I dislike her because she says what I secretly think? I knew that I had begun to resent the Africans at Moyo for just the reasons she said.

But I kept at it the following days, always starting just after breakfast and working through lunch until Birdie showed up with a plate of
nsima
and beans, heading home at dusk and arriving at the priests' house in the dark, when the path had been swallowed by night, and guiding myself by the pressure lamps blazing at the windows.

I like this place because no one knows me, I thought.

On the Friday of that week, I was walking through the leper village in the falling darkness, which was night mingled with dust and the smell of dirt and lamp oil. I heard a shriek, and a gasp, and a groan—the sounds of suffering coming out of the open window of a mud hut. I suspected that it was a woman being beaten, or perhaps suffocated by her husband. That kind of random domestic violence was fairly routine. This sudden brutality seemed like another aspect of the sexuality of the leper village.

I went to the door of the hut, but seeing two women, one of them a nun, kneeling beside a mat on the floor, and another woman lying on the mat and gasping, I hesitated. A kerosene lamp lit only the room and the women; it distorted everything else, and outside the shadows were dark enough so that I could hover without being seen. I squatted down to watch.

The woman on the mat called out again, and I could tell from the way she gasped, and the naked heap of her belly, that she was in the throes of childbirth.

The white nun and the African woman spoke to her gently, and the nun held the woman's legs, bracing her. The African chafed the woman's hand to comfort her, and I could see that the woman about to give birth had a hollow between her thumb and forefinger—the tiger's mouth—and the fingers themselves were mangled: a leper.

Childbirth scenes in movies, my only experience of a woman giving birth, I had always found excruciating: the screams, the hysteria, the upraised knees, the parted legs, the contorted face of the mother. But this was different, no more than muttering now, a labored breathing, a kind of sighing, as the midwives encouraged her. After another grunt the child was lifted into the yellow lamplight.

"
Mwana,
" the nun said. It's a boy.

It was a perfect child, pinky gray with a full head of hair, all his fingers and toes intact. He dripped for a moment and then pissed—a narrow stream in the air—while he howled, growing pinker, as the women laughed in relief.

When I got up to go, I staggered and almost fell, and wondered why. My eyes hardly focused. I seemed to see a small group of people, gathered in the shadow just beyond the reach of the lamplight. Was one of them Amina? I saw the smooth face and bright eyes and blue turban. I had the sense that she was looking at me and not at the hut, where the women were rejoicing. Then I was groping on the path in the darkness, and I thought of the man beneath the tree telling me, "I'm sick."

"I think I'll lie down," I said as I entered the priests' house. My voice was quacky and echoey in my ears, and I felt terrible, though I pretended to be well—just tired, as I had been each evening on returning from the kitchen outside the leper village. Tonight I tottered like a drunk trying to pass for someone sober.