Red Jacket (15 page)

“I know Aston,” Leviticus interrupts. “A good man!”

“He should have been superior, I tell you.

“Avoid the politics, Jimmy! There's zero to be had from them.”

“I'll do my best, Levi, but sometimes there's no sidestepping them. Anyway, one day we were reading
Another Life,
by that St. Lucian poet ...”

Smiling with self-satisfaction, Leviticus pronounces, “Walcott. Derek Walcott. It begins with that wonderful image of the waves as pages of a book that's been left open by a reader who's somehow got caught up in a life somewhere else.”

“Right! Him! I was complaining that I couldn't get a handle on the damn poem, and then I read his description of a woman who's a nurse. She's hanging onto her books and walking with some other nurses. They're all laughing, and he says, and this exactly caught the way I felt, that his hand is ‘trembling' to say her name. I read them, and there I was looking at Rita Rose with the student nurses behind her! I just fell apart and the whole story came out!”

“What did Aston have to say?” Levi's look is tenderly amused.

“He didn't beat around the bush. He asked me if I loved her, to which I said yes, and then he asked me if I found her sexy, which shocked me for sure.”

Levi laughs. “For sure I'm most eager to hear the end of the story!”

“He said if I wanted her to go off with me to Shangri-La, I should ask her.”

“Well, I know you both didn't make it, but did you ask her?”

“No.”

“So don't keep an old man in suspense! What happened?”

“Aston helped me figure out I had the wrong
g
. The problem was not with girls, but with God, who kept assailing me with extraordinary women with whom I wasn't being allowed to enjoy anything, let alone a life.”

“You did marry Nila,” Leviticus interposes mildly. “And you seem to have been diverted by Marva and Rita Rose, even though you never ‘lay them flat' or tickled their ‘feminine gender' as our Latin rhyme says.”

“Aston said God wanted me for a permanent partner, so of course She did her best to wreck my relationships with other women.”

“Aston clearly hasn't changed a bit. We were both novices at Weston College. He insisted on a female God, or aspect to God, even then.”

“To tell the truth, Levi, I wish he were here now. Maybe he could help me again. You see, I still haven't told you my terrible secret.”

“I know, Jimmy. Why don't we deal with it?”

When Jimmy ends his tale, Levi is silent for several minutes. Then he asks, “Do you love God, Jimmy?”

Jimmy beams. “Indeed, I do love Her.”

Kitendi assesses him through grimy glasses, steps forward, and places his hands on Jimmy's shoulders, surprising him by being taller than he seems. “I can't speak for anyone else, but I do this one day at a time. I realized early on it was the only way I could do it. Did I want to be a priest? Yes. Was I sure I'd be able to be a good Jesuit till I died? No. So I decided to take it one day at a time. I'm still doing that.”

“But mustn't a priest have a core of holiness to count on?”

“We all have a core of holiness, and we do count on it, but if you're wise, not too much. You count on God's grace.”

“But what about the clairvoyance?”

“This is Africa, Jimmy, a place where the spiritual world is alive and well. I have known clairvoyants, good people whose gifts on occasion saved bodies and souls. It's a burden, yes, but it's not, in itself, an evil thing.”

In the end, nobody from St. Chris comes, for Gilbert, bad-John of all hurricanes, grinds its way through the Caribbean in the second week of September, and relegates planes to the tarmac at the Queenstown Airport for four days. By the time air traffic is taking off again, it is too late.

Mapome's Game

Two weeks after his ordination, Jimmy presides at the funeral of the husband of his eldest sister, Alleme. Munti died of AIDS-related pneumonia. The doctor is certain: the white fur in his mouth and throat says so. No one speaks about it at the time of his death or in the days after, but they all have the look Mapome referred to, chirruping her wry laugh, as the “chimp-chump” look.

A week after the funeral, at her father's and Jimmy's insistence, and at Andri Atule's expense, Alleme flies to a clinic in Paris with her daughters, one who is four and the other not quite two, to be tested for HIV. Jimmy meets them at the airport when they come back, and drives them home. He helps Alleme give the children supper, and put them to bed. Makda Atule cooked, and sent food to the house so there is something to eat when they arrive, but Alleme isn't hungry. So he stays with her, asks questions about Paris and about how she feels, having heard the results. She says she is glad the older child is okay. She and the younger one have medicine. They'll have to go back to Paris soon.

His other questions elicit mostly one-word answers, so they just sit. The radio is on, turned down, a local music station, and they keep company, not talking, for perhaps an hour, watching the fireflies doing a jitterbug outside in the mango trees, observing the sky darken, and listening to the rain tap out its first notes, then grow into a drum recital drowning out all other sound.

Raising her voice, Alleme finally speaks into blackness, for neither has turned on a light, and the house, an old one set in from the street, is far from its neighbours.

“The irony is, Jimmy, that I feel at fault. I should have been a better mother, kept house better, cooked, washed, and cleaned better. Fucked better.” Alleme is a poet, unafraid of words. “Then he wouldn't have gone to whores!”

“That makes no sense, Alleme.”

“Then you tell me what makes sense. He just wanted a whore every now and then, the way you feel you'd like a nice mango?”

“That's probably closer to it.”

He leaves her at about nine o'clock, having coaxed from her a promise that she will not stay up all night. He undertakes to call when he reaches the priests' house, but he is glad there is no answer when he does, and after a few rings he hangs up.

What the personable, aristocratic, educated man married to his sister might want from prostitutes defies Jimmy's understanding. He thinks this lack of imagination must be a serious failing on his part. How is it that a clairvoyant whose dreams can assume epic dimensions has such difficulty in figuring out why Munti would, as some American movie star put it, dally with hamburger when he can dine on steak at home?

He isn't quoting verbatim, just delivering the movie star's dictum.

D for delivering. D for dictum.

D for dally. D for dine.

D for disease.

D for done. D for dead. D for “done dead,” like they say in St. Chris.

He is playing Mapome's dictionary game. Or rather, it is playing him.

Mapome loved words, language, stories. She taught him his first rhymes, taught him to read, to pore over the dictionary, and see it as a game board, storybook, history book, sacred text. She showed him as a ten-year-old how to play the game, which had many purposes: to teach him vocabulary, word derivations, memory gems, to impart values, and to tune his ear to sounds.

“You don't go looking for words. Just follow them as they come. The letter that chooses you first is the leader. If you find yourself straining for a word, it's time to stop.”

Desire. Danger. Death. He's done some disputing with the Deity about desire and death.

Debility. Disablement.

Doubt.

Debate. About divine decrees, destiny, pre-destiny. About determination, whether he'll have dead sisters, whether their descendants will die.

Dearth of doctors. Dominicans. Devotion.

Dolour. Dame des Douleurs.

In whose domain, he's done the deed, become a designate of the devotees of Melchisedech.

Designate? Devotees? He is reaching for words. Time to stop.

He eases up out of the armchair. These last days he is fatter. There was a lot of eating during and after the ordination celebrations and at Munti's wake. He pats his stomach, recalling Bagbelly in St. Chris, a fat teenager who befriended, and fiercely defended him, and then the Watsons, Aston, Rita Rose. She would be the perfect person to talk to right that minute. Since Munti died, he's been doing research in every kind of library in Benke and by now has pretty much exhausted what there is on HIV/AIDS. Rita Rose is in obstetrics and gynecology as well as pediatrics, and he is seeing a lot in his reading about the problem of mother-to-child transmission of the disease. For sure she's up on that.

He slips a bookmark into the book he's been reading. He needs to find Levi. The priest has just returned from Bamako. Maybe he is still in the chapel, for he often reads there until quite late at night. He has to ask him about Alleme, if he'll have time for a chat with her. He is no doctor but a jackass would know she is depressed, although she is refusing to see a psychiatrist.

“I'm not taking drugs so I can deal with life, Jimmy. That's crazy.”

Also, having had another change of heart and direction, he has to explore it with the superior. He is to leave for Georgetown University, soon, to do postgraduate work in education. He isn't sure he wants to do that any longer.

The next morning, Jimmy goes to see Alleme just after breakfast. She says she will talk to a sensible person, if he can find one. She has a parish priest, of course, a very dry, very old, very deaf man from Bamako who has been their pastor since they've been in Benke. What would result from a session between him and Alleme, Jimmy doesn't wish to consider. The idea has some virtue because when he suggests it, she laughs out loud. He is glad when she agrees to see Levi, who is a trained spiritual director. There aren't that many of them around and they are good listeners. He was also a journalist in his layman days. Alleme and the superior will have things in common.

“There's something else, little brother.”

“What is that, Alleme?”

“What about the others?”

“What others?”

“What about Ansile and Aisha? What about Angélique? Shouldn't they be tested?”

He has indeed thought that his other sisters and their spouses should be tested. He's not sure about approaching Angélique, but Alleme reminds him that sexual contact isn't the only way to contract AIDS and that Angélique is a woman of the world.

“Besides, Jimmy, she may be sexually active. Do you want her to be at risk because we are too delicate to raise the matter?”

“Of course not, Alleme. Don't be foolish.”

“I don't think I'm the foolish one here. I will talk to the others if you want. Their chances are better if they find out early. And ideally both spouses should be tested. I know I'm pretty far-gone, but I'd feel better if this at least served some purpose. And the children, they should have the tests as well.”

When Jimmy speaks to his father, he is not surprised that Andri has been busy, investigating the behaviours of his other sons-in-law, and getting in touch with a friend who knows a woman at the World Health Organization. When the elder Atule contacts her, she strongly recommends that they all be tested as Alleme recommends.

“Though I am unsure of how this matter should best be handled,” his father says, “I propose to speak plainly. I won't hide my anger.”

“Alleme says she'll speak to her sisters. She makes the point that sexual transmission isn't the only way the disease spreads, so no one need be offended.”

“Yes, yes. The woman in Geneva said that also.”

So it is arranged. Alleme speaks to them the next Sunday after Mass, as Makda Atule serves orange juice, bissape, and coffee laced with her own palm wine liqueur to fortify fearful spirits. Ansile and Angélique are concerned about costs, but agree it should be done. Aisha sulks at the impugning of her virtue, a quarrel to which Alleme puts paid. “Has my virtue has been compromised? I'm ill, my dear, not evil.”

In the end, it is decided that the screening should be done as soon as possible. For now, Andri Atule will cover the expenses. He doesn't speak at length, but it is clear he is on the warpath, and that the matter is not by any means done with.

Calamity befalls swiftly. Both the husbands test positive. Ansile's test is negative, but Aisha is HIV-positive, and when the children are tested, her one-year-old daughter also has the disease. Angélique is fine.

Andri Atule alters like the desert reconfigured by a violent sandstorm. Jimmy tries to persuade him of their good fortune in having everyone tested early, being able to send them for treatment, having the resources to pay for expensive drugs. The elder Atule is beyond consolation. His sons-in-law are from powerful families, but it is his children who have been violated, his grandchildren despoiled. Often he cries out as if in physical pain. He summons the parents of his sons-in-law. There are lawyers and accountants. Negotiations are conducted and binding agreements made. Monies are paid into medical funds, trusts set up for wives and children. Elders guarantee the behaviour of their sons — much too little, far too late.

Jimmy has no trouble persuading Leviticus Kitendi that Georgetown should be postponed. He can honestly say it is not only what has happened in his family that weighs on him, but the plight of his country, of Mabulians. When Levi asks what he feels immediately called to do, he says he wishes to do something about HIV/AIDS.

“What do you think that might be, Jimmy?”

“Can I take that one step at a time, for a while, anyway?”

Jimmy's research into how the disease spreads takes him to shanty-bars in Benke where he sips sappi and watches women service men in the cabs of trucks, hopping up to check them in turn, like customs inspectors or border police. Truckers from the west via Bamako, the east via Kano and Niamey heading north through the desert to the Mediterranean and those making the journey back mostly pause to rest overnight in Gao, but they come to Benke often enough. So it isn't just to Gao that the disease, dubbed “the Skinny” in Mabuli, comes with the truckers. No doubt it also comes with tourists or traders, but truckers are obvious culprits, always coming and going, promiscuous on the road. Sex traders collect it from them, and pass it on to Mabuli farmers, tradesmen, itinerant workers who “suck a sweetie” while they are away from their wives. And to his distinguished brothers-in-law!

When all things are equal, water from the Mabenke's few tributaries allows farmers like the Atules once were to plough and be assured of reaping, but for much of the seventies the drought that parched the Sahel brought farming to a halt. Benke swelled as refugees from stricken holdings came to the city to find jobs, ply trades they knew, or learn new ones, or, in desperation, fall into the oldest trade. So maybe the drought is to blame for HIV?

“Blame the sun, the moon, the Milky Way!” Mapome often said. “But there's no millet to be had from that!” She is right. One needs to assign a useful blame. It comes down to how you apply the word: as censure, or as verdict, diagnostic, with a view to improving things. Sometimes it is hard to figure which is which. Something else keeps bothering him: why didn't he have the slightest inkling about Munti's death or the disaster that was to overtake his sisters and their children? Or is it that his gift is indeed a curse and his having no warning of this scourge on the Atules is a kind of inverted payback? Shouldn't he have foreseen what was going to befall his family?

Ansile and he are having a cup of tea on the verandah of the family house. They are both visiting. When the Atules moved north, Alleme and Aisha were already married and set up in their own households, but Ansile and Angélique still lived at home. Now, only Angélique, who made bold to be born after Jimmy, still lives with their parents.

“What am I to do, Jimmy?” Ansile asks. “How can I have sex with Raphael? It's suicide!”

“I can see it might be a problem, Ansile.”

“It's no time for irony, Jimmy. Should I divorce him?”

“I don't know. Perhaps.”

“That's not helpful, esteemed little brother!”

“Do you want to divorce Raphael?”

“I don't know what I want, except that I don't want to get AIDS.”

“Well, you do know something you want.”

“He says he's never been with anyone else.”

“Do you believe him?”

“I don't know what to believe, so I tell myself to deal with the facts. And he is HIV-positive. So what are my options? There's no way this marriage is going to proceed in a state of celibacy, so the only solution to us staying married is his using a condom.”

“That seems logical enough.”

“But the Church says we can't.”

“The Church isn't married to a man who is HIV-positive. Besides which, you have a conscience. In the end, it's your conscience that you answer to.”

“You mean that?”

“I do. It's ethically sound, as far as I know.”

“Well, that's reassuring.”

“You could talk to Father Kitendi.”

“And run the risk of his trotting out the church's line? I think I'll just hang on to the leeway you've given me, and obey my conscience, thank you.”

“Why don't you pray about it?”

“What's that going to do?”

“You won't know till you do it, will you?”

Jimmy is glad that Ansile goes home feeling better. For days he thinks about her dilemma, and the advice he has given her. His work clearly has to be twofold: to assist with stopping the spread of HIV/AIDS and to minister to those with the disease and their loved ones. Perhaps Rita Rose will come, and help. They need scores of her. The supply of nurses in Mabuli is each day more depleted. They keep falling ill, but nobody knows what ails them. The Skinny is like rumour: say nothing, and it doesn't exist.