No Other Life (4 page)

‘But why Jeannot?’

‘Because Jeannot wrote to the new archbishop and asked for the job. Strange, isn’t it? It doesn’t make sense.’

‘Now that you mention it,’ I said, ‘it does.’

But why had Jeannot hidden it from me? Did he think I would try to dissuade him? I felt betrayed but at the same time I experienced a mixture of shame and admiration. The boy I had rescued from the squalor of Toumalie had become the priest I myself had always wanted to be. He had turned his back on the life I led, a life in which I did nothing to dispel the misery I saw around me.

And then, a week after this conversation, Jeannot telephoned me from Paris to tell me he had been awarded his doctorate and was coming home. Hyppolite and I drove out to meet him at the airport. Seven years in northern climates had paled his colour. He looked tired but seemed filled with energy. When he embraced me, holding me tightly in his arms, it was the closest I have ever come to the feeling of joy that a real father must experience when he sees his son after years of absence. And yet I sensed that things had changed between us. From now on, I would no longer be his mentor. I would try to be a helper in his parish of the poor.

As Hyppolite drove us home that first morning Jeannot leaned forward excitedly in his seat, staring out at familiar scenes, crowded, tawdry market stalls, the more marginal vendors crouched on the pavements,
bleus
striding arrogantly across the street, ignoring the oncoming traffic, children running alongside our slow-moving car, holding up bananas in the hope of a sale. As we turned off Avenue de la République, going towards the college residence where the other priests were waiting to give him a celebratory lunch, he said suddenly, ‘Can we go first to my new church? I want to see it.’

I told Hyppolite to drive to La Rotonde. ‘By the way,
Petit
, I’ve been meaning to ask you. How on earth did you manage this?’

He laughed. I often called him
Petit
. It was an old joke between us. ‘Letters,’ he told me. ‘I wrote to everybody asking for the job. But the letter that really worked was the one to Uncle D.’

‘You wrote to Doumergue?’

‘Why not? Friends of mine in Rome tipped me off to the new situation. I wrote saying that I am black and brilliant and I come from the poor. I said my Order would prefer that I teach abroad, but that I want to help him build a new Ganae. Apparently, he had Archbishop Pellerat speak directly to our Provincial. And so, here I am.’

‘But Uncle D. will expect you to be his man?’

‘That will be his mistake. I want to build a new Ganae with no place for a Doumergue. That’s why I came home.’

‘
Petit
, you’ve been away too long. You’ve no idea what it’s like to cross Uncle D. He’s Hitler and Stalin rolled into one.’

‘And look what’s happened to
them
. They’re already in the rubbish heap of history.’

‘Doumergue is different.’

‘Perhaps. But it’s not a matter of choice. It’s my duty.’

A few weeks after Jeannot joined his new parish I attended Sunday Mass in his church. The congregation overflowed into the aisles. People even sat on the window ledges, high above the nave. I saw at once that they were not only the slum dwellers of La Rotonde. In the centre aisle, jammed together like football supporters at a match, was a large group of street boys, the sort who hang around the airport, trying to carry travellers’ bags and offering to find taxis. There were also little islands of our students and I recognised at least five teachers from Le National, the public trade school.

The Church of the Incarnation is an ugly stucco building which looks like a garage, its dun-coloured walls hung with primitive wood carvings of the Stations of the Cross. The choir sings to the sound of an ancient pump organ which is forever out of tune. It is not a church where one would expect to be caught up in the magic and mystery of the Mass. And yet as we knelt, looking up at Jeannot, frail and childlike in a surplice which seemed to have been made for someone twice his size, it was as though he led us into a world from which all other worlds were shut out. As he raised the communion chalice, and in that solemn moment changed bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, we, who watched, were filled with the certainty that he, by the grace of God, performed a miracle on that altar. I, who have said Mass for forty years, prayed as though I were in church for the first time.

No words I write now can describe my feelings on that morning. When the Mass ended and Jeannot beckoned me to join him in giving communion to the scores who pressed forward to kneel at the altar rails, I looked at their faces and felt that, truly, God had come down among us. I was filled with a happiness I had never known in all my years as a priest. Jeannot had raised me from the grave of my sloth.

Communion had been given. The Mass ended. But the congregation did not rise and leave. They sat in their seats, waiting, as Jeannot climbed the stairs of a rickety pulpit. Looking down on them, he began to speak in a voice that was incantatory, compelling, a voice like no other I have heard. At once, the congregation was silent, rapt.

Brothers and Sisters,

Today I want to raise you up.

The Church is not far away in Rome.

The Church is not archbishops and popes.

The Church is us – you and I –

And we who are the Church have a duty to speak out.

You ask me, speak about what?

I answer. Who are the unholy ones?

They are those who sell your work to foreign countries

And pay you seven per cent of what they get.

Did you know that?

And for the first time in one of our churches I heard the congregation answer in a shout.

‘No!’

Brothers and Sisters,

We must begin to speak out.

But I warn you.

If you speak out you will receive blows.

St Paul received blows because he told the truth.

But he endured them.

As you will endure them,

As I will endure them.

Because we must choose the Lord’s way.

We must speak out against those who exploit our poor.

We must take the path of love.

The path of love is the path of Jesus.

Help us climb out of this endless poverty.

We do not ask for riches.

We ask to live the lives of the poor

But not lives of starvation and despair,

Not the lives of slaves.

But decent humble lives

Under God.

Jesus asks you

Help each other.

The path of love is the path that leads to justice.

Walk with me on that way.

Jeannot made the sign of the cross and stepped down from the pulpit. And then I saw what I had never seen before. The congregation, behaving as though they were not in a church but in a town meeting, turned to each other, discussing the sermon, some of them clapping others on the back as though urging them on. People rose and agitatedly walked the aisles, while, at the rear, the church doors opened wide as the congregation streamed out into the sunlight, excited, talking, inspired.

When Jeannot came back to the altar, I followed him into the sacristy. I was still filled with that sense of God’s presence that had entered the church during Mass. I was certain that this boy who had been my protégé was now a person of exceptional holiness. Yet at the same time I could not reconcile that feeling with the sermon he had preached. It was a sermon of politics. Did he see it as that? Or did he see it, simply, as doing God’s will?

‘How long have you been preaching like this?’ I asked.

‘Since my first week. The crowds are getting bigger.’

‘But
they
must know you’re doing it?’

‘Of course they do.’

‘
Petit
, you spoke of receiving blows. What if they arrest you?’

‘They won’t arrest me.’

‘How can you know that?’

‘Because God is watching over me. Don’t be afraid for me. Believe me.’

And I did. In the months that followed I spent all of my evenings in a new community centre which Jeannot had set up in an empty warehouse. I enlisted my students to raise money from their parents so that we could buy furniture, beds and blankets for an orphanage in which the Sisters of Ste Marie were planning to house some of the abandoned children of La Rotonde. I wrote letters to Canada and France soliciting funds for a boys’ club and, indeed, such a club soon came into being.

I look back now on those days as a time when I achieved a state of happiness which can only be entered into by a total forgetting of oneself. I forgot my failures, my inadequacies, my guilts. I learned at last to lose that comfortable yet comfortless distance I had felt here, as a white priest in a foreign place, protected from the misery around him by his church and his calling. I worked with Jeannot. Jeannot worked for the people of La Rotonde. Now, at last, I had come to serve the poor.

The crowds grew. The word spread. In the mansions of the elite there was talk of this mad little priest who preached against the rich. Within weeks, when the crowds kneeling outside in the open air rivalled the numbers packed within the church, Jeannot had loudspeakers installed so that everyone could hear the sermon. And the sermon was always the same. Rise up, cast off your chains. You, the poor, will inherit this land.

‘I don’t understand it,’ Nöl Destouts said. ‘He’s preaching revolution. If he were anyone else, he’d be in prison by now.’

Father Duchamp, our resident cynic, saw things differently. ‘When Jeannot speaks about capitalists, he’s talking about the elite – he’s not speaking out against Doumergue. Maybe, he knows just how far he can go.’

I was angered by this remark. I knew it wasn’t true. Despite his belief that God would protect him I feared for Jeannot. And then, one Sunday morning, as was now my custom, I attended Jeannot’s Mass in order to help him serve communion. The church was packed. I was kneeling at the right side of the altar with my back to the congregation. A few minutes after the Mass began I heard shots which I took for a car backfiring. I heard shouts at the rear of the church. When I turned round I saw six or seven men, armed with rifles and machetes, pushing their way up the crowded aisles, some firing at the ceiling, some firing directly into the congregation. They were not soldiers or
bleus
. They looked like street scavengers, the sort who spend their days picking over rubbish heaps, cadging tourists for handouts, their nights drunk on bottles of homemade
usque
. Two of them had already reached the altar and now, raising their rifles, they fired directly at Jeannot. I saw a bullet strike the gilded door of the tabernacle behind him. A brass candlestick was toppled by a second shot.

Suddenly, it was as though all of us were figures in a painting, frozen in a frame. Jeannot did not flinch. He stood facing the killers, his arms outstretched as if to embrace them. His face showed love, not fear. At this point the marauders in the body of the church ceased firing and, like the rest of us, stood staring up at Jeannot on the altar. Again the two assassins raised their rifles and fired. They were not more than thirty feet from their target, but the bullets went wide. The upraised arm of a statue to the right of Jeannot shattered and fell on the altar steps. The two assassins, unnerved, looked at each other as though unable to believe what was happening. Then, suddenly frightened, they turned and pushed their way back through the crowd. I saw this, I heard screams, as people poured into the aisles, trying to escape. The other assailants, buffeted by the panicky congregation, began to lay about them with rifle butts and machetes as they beat their way back to the church doors. Four teenaged members of Jeannot’s boys’ club rushed up to the altar and tried to drag him off to the safety of the sacristy. He resisted, standing staring out at the crowd, until the assailants had left the church. Then he turned back to the altar, genuflected, and went down into the body of the church to comfort the injured. I saw an old man dead in a front pew, eyes glazed, blood oozing from his forehead. People were lifting up the wounded and stepping over inert bodies. Women prostrated themselves, weeping, on the corpses of kin.

I heard a dull roar. There was a second roar. I looked up and saw flames move across the ceiling of the church in a great red rolling wave. I smelled the acrid stink of diesel fuel. I saw Jeannot ahead of me, waving and shouting as he directed the evacuation. Incredibly, in the general panic, his orders were being obeyed. There were screams and shouts, but in the rush to the doors no one was trampled. Under Jeannot’s direction the injured and dying were carried out into the sunlight. It was then that I saw police and army trucks lined up opposite the burning church. Soldiers and policemen sat in those trucks, silent and unmoving, as people fled past them, escaping. I looked at Jeannot who knelt near me, holding a dying woman in his arms. I saw him stare back at his church, now ablaze in smoke and flames.

An hour later, when the last of the taxi-buses and ambulances had carried off the wounded, the papal nuncio and a representative of Archbishop Pellerat arrived on the scene. They spoke to Jeannot but not to me and so it was not until nightfall that I found out what happened. Jeannot came to our residence accompanied by a priest from the Archbishop’s palace. He told us that the Archbishop and the nuncio had ordered him to move in with us and on no account to return to his parish. This was not, as we first thought, a measure to save his life. Instead, incredibly, it was a form of censure. The facts tell the story. In the days that followed there was no announcement in the press or radio that there had been an attempt on Jeannot’s life, that innocent people had been shot and killed, or that the Church of the Incarnation had been burned down. In conversations with the nuncio Doumergue disclaimed all knowledge of the affair, despite the fact that police and soliders had stood by while the attack was carried out. But, to our surprise and shock, neither the nuncio nor Archbishop Pellerat made any formal protest to the government.