A Burnt Out Case (16 page)

‘All the same I jotted down some questions,’ Parkinson said. ‘We might get on to those now that we’ve cleared the way.’

‘I said the interview was over.’

Parkinson leaned forward on the bed and then swayed back like a Chinese wobbling toy made in the likeness of the fat God of Prosperity. He said, ‘Do you consider that the love of God or the love of humanity is your principal driving force, Querry? What in your opinion is the future of Christianity? Has the Sermon on the Mount influenced your decision to give your life to the lepers? Who is your favourite saint? Do you believe in the efficacy of prayer?’ He began to laugh, the great belly rolling like a dolphin. ‘Do miracles still occur? Have you yet visited Fatima?’

He got off the bed. ‘We can forget the rest of the crap. “In his bare cell in the heart of the dark continent one of the greatest of modern architects and one of the most famous Catholics of his day bared his conscience to the correspondent of the
Post
. Montagu Parkinson, who was on the spot last month in South Korea, is on the spot again. He will reveal to our readers in his next instalment how remorse for the past is Querry’s driving force. Querry is atoning for a reckless youth by serving others. St Francis was the gayest spark in all the gay old city of Firenze – Florence to you and me.”’

Parkinson went out into the hard glare of the Congo day, but he hadn’t said enough. He returned and put his face close up against the net and blew his words through it in a fine spray. ‘“Next Sunday’s instalment: A girl dies for love.” I don’t like you any more than you like me, Querry, but I’m going to build you up. I’ll build you up so high they’ll raise a statue to you by the river. In the worst possible taste, you know the sort of thing, you won’t be able to avoid it because you’ll be dead and buried – you on your knees surrounded by your bloody lepers teaching them to pray to the god you don’t believe in and the birds shitting on your hair. I don’t mind you being a religious fake, Querry, but I’ll show you that you can’t use me to ease your bleeding conscience. I wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t pilgrims at your shrine in twenty years, and that’s how history’s written, believe you me.
Exegi monumentum
. Quote. Virgil.’

Querry took from his pocket the meaningless letter with the all-inclusive phrase which might, of course, be genuine. The letter had not come to him from one of the women Parkinson had mentioned: the
morgue
of the
Post
was not big enough to hold all possible bodies. He read it through again in the mood that Parkinson had elicited. ‘Do you remember?’ She was one of those who would never admit that when an emotion was dead, the memory of the occasion was dead as well. He had to take her memories on trust, because she had always been a truthful woman. She reminded him of a guest who claims one particular matchbox as her own out of the debris of a broken party.

He went to his bed and lay down. The pillow gathered heat under his neck, but this noonday he couldn’t face the sociabilities of lunch with the fathers. He thought: there was only one thing I could do and that is reason enough for being here. I can promise you, Marie,
toute à toi
, all of you, never again from boredom or vanity to involve another human being in my lack of love. I shall do no more harm, he thought, with the kind of happiness a leper must feel when he is freed at last by his seclusion from the fear of passing on contagion to another. For years he had not thought of Marie Morel; now he remembered the first time he had heard her name spoken. It was spoken by a young architectural student whom he had been helping with his studies. They had come back together from a day at Bruges into the neon-lighted Brussels evening and they had passed the girl accidentally outside the northern station. He had envied a little his dull undistinguished companion when he saw her face brighten under the lamps. Has anyone ever seen a man smile at a woman as a woman smiles at the man she loves, fortuitously, at a bus-stop, in a railway carriage, at some chain-store in the middle of buying groceries, a smile so naturally joyful, without premeditation and without caution? The converse, of course, is probably true also. A man can never smile quite so falsely as the girl in a brothel parlour. But the girl in the brothel, Querry thought, is imitating something true. The man has nothing to imitate.

He soon had no cause to feel envy for his companion of that night. Even in those early days he had known how to alter the direction of a woman’s need to love. Woman? She was not even as old as the architectural student whose name he couldn’t now remember – an ugly name like Hoghe. Unlike Marie Morel the former student was probably still alive, building in some suburb his bourgeois villas – machines for living in. Querry addressed him from the bed. ‘I am sorry. I really believed that I meant you no harm. I really thought in those days that I acted from love.’ There is a time in life when a man with a little acting ability is able to deceive even himself.

PART FIVE

CHAPTER 1

It is characteristic of Africa the way that people come and go, as though the space and emptiness of an undeveloped continent encourage drift; the high tide deposits the flotsam on the edge of the shore and sweeps it away again in its withdrawal, to leave elsewhere. No one had expected Parkinson, he had come unannounced, and a few days later he went again, carrying his Rolleiflex and Remington down to the Otraco boat bound for some spot elsewhere. Two weeks later a motor-boat came up the river in the late evening carrying a young administrator who played a game of liar-dice with the fathers, drank one glass of whisky before bed, and left behind him, as if it had been the sole intention of his voyage, a copy of an English journal, the
Architectural Review
, before departing without so much as breakfast into the grey and green immensity. (The review contained – apart from the criticism of a new arterial road – some illustrations of a hideous cathedral newly completed in a British colony. Perhaps the young man thought that it would serve as a warning to Querry.) Again a few weeks went unnoticed by – a few deaths from tuberculosis, the hospital climbing a few feet higher from its foundations – and then two policemen got off the Otraco boat to make inquiries about a Salvation Army leader who was wanted in the capital. He was said to have persuaded the people of a neighbouring tribe to sell their blankets to him because they would be too heavy to wear at the Resurrection of the Dead and then to give him the money back so that he might keep it for them in a secure place where no thieves would break in and steal. As a recompense he had given certificates insuring them against the danger of being kidnapped by the Catholic and Protestant missionaries who, he said, were exporting bodies with the help of witchcraft wholesale to Europe in sealed railway trucks where they were turned into canned food labelled Best African Tunny. The policemen could learn nothing of the fugitive at the leproserie, and they departed again on the same boat two hours later, floating away with the small islands of water-jacinth at the same speed and in the same direction, as though they were all a part of nature too.

Querry in time began to forget Parkinson. The great world had done its worst and gone, and a kind of peace descended. Rycker stayed aloof, and no echo from any newspaper article out of distant Europe came to disturb Querry. Even Father Thomas moved away for a while from the leproserie to a seminary in the bush from which he hoped to obtain a teacher for yet another new class. Querry’s feet were becoming familiar with the long laterite road that stretched between his room and the hospital; in the evening, when the worst heat was over, the laterite glowed, like a night-blooming flower, in shades of rose and red.

The fathers were unconcerned with private lives. A husband, after he had been cured, left the leproserie and his wife moved into the hut of another man, but the fathers asked no questions. One of the catechists, a man who had reached the limit of mutilation, having lost nose, fingers, toes (he looked as though he had been lopped, scraped, and tidied by a knife), fathered a baby with the woman, crippled by polio, who could only crawl upon the ground dragging her dwarfed legs behind her. The man brought the baby to the Church for baptism and there it was baptized Emanuel – there were no questions and no admonitions. The fathers were too busy to bother themselves with what the Church considered sin (moral theology was the subject they were least concerned with). In Father Thomas some thwarted instinct might be seen deviously at work, but Father Thomas was no longer there to trouble the leproserie with his scruples and anxieties.

The doctor was a less easy character to understand. Unlike the fathers he had no belief in a god to support him in his hard vocation. Once when Querry made a comment on his life – a question brought to his mind by the sight of some pitiable and squalid case – the doctor looked up at him with much the same clinical eye with which he had just examined the patient. He said, ‘Perhaps if I tested your skin now I would get a second negative reaction.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You are showing curiosity again about another human being.’

‘Who was the first?’ Querry asked.

‘Deo Gratias. You know I have been luckier in my vocation than you.’

Querry looked down the long row of worn-out mattresses where bandaged people lay in the awkward postures of the bed-ridden. The sweet smell of sloughed skin was in the air. ‘Lucky?’ he said.

‘It needs a very strong man to survive an introspective and solitary vocation. I don’t think you were strong enough. I know I couldn’t have stood your life.’

‘Why does a man choose a vocation like this?’ Querry asked.

‘He’s chosen. Oh, I don’t mean by god. By accident. There is an old Danish doctor still going the rounds who became a leprologist late in life. By accident. He was excavating an ancient cemetery and found skeletons there without finger-bones – it was an old leper-cemetery of the fourteenth century. He X-rayed the skeletons and he made discoveries in the bones, especially in the nasal area, which were quite unknown to any of us – you see most of us haven’t the chance to work with skeletons. He became a leprologist after that. You will meet him at any international conference on leprosy carrying his skull with him in an airline’s overnight bag. It has passed through a lot of
douaniers
’ hands. It must be rather a shock, that skull, to them, but I believe they don’t charge duty on it.’

‘And you, Doctor Colin? What was your accident?’

‘Only the accident of temperament, perhaps,’ the doctor replied evasively. They came out together into the unfresh and humid air. ‘Oh, don’t mistake me. I had no death-wish as Damien had. Now that we can cure leprosy, we shall have fewer of those vocations of doom, but they weren’t uncommon once.’ They began to cross the road to the shade of the dispensary where the lepers waited on the steps; the doctor halted in the hot centre of the laterite. ‘There used to be a high suicide-rate among leprologists – I suppose they couldn’t wait for that positive test they all expected some time. Bizarre suicides for a bizarre vocation. There was one man I knew quite well who injected himself with a dose of snake-venom, and another who poured petrol over his furniture and his clothes and then set himself alight. There is a common feature, you will have noticed, in both cases – unnecessary suffering. That can be a vocation too.’

‘I don’t understand you.’

‘Wouldn’t you rather suffer than feel discomfort? Discomfort irritates our ego like a mosquito-bite. We become aware of ourselves, the more uncomfortable we are, but suffering is quite a different matter. Sometimes I think that the search for suffering and the remembrance of suffering are the only means we have to put ourselves in touch with the whole human condition. With suffering we become part of the Christian myth.’

‘Then I wish you’d teach me how to suffer,’ Querry said. ‘I only know the mosquito-bites.’

‘You’ll suffer enough if we stand here any longer,’ Doctor Colin said and he drew Querry off the laterite into the shade. ‘Today I am going to show you a few interesting eye cases.’ He sat at his surgery table and Querry took the chair beside him. Only on the linen masks that children wear at Christmas had he seen such scarlet eyes, representing avarice or senility, as now confronted them. ‘You only need a little patience,’ Doctor Colin said. ‘Suffering is not so hard to find,’ and Querry tried to remember who it was that had said much the same to him months ago. He was irritated by his own failure of memory.

‘Aren’t you being glib about suffering?’ he asked. ‘That woman who died last week . . .’

‘Don’t be too sorry for those who die after some pain. It makes them ready to go. Think of how a death sentence must sound when you are full of health and vigour.’ Doctor Colin turned away from him to speak in her native tongue to an old woman whose palsied eyelids never once moved to shade the eyes.

That night, after taking dinner with the fathers, Querry strolled over to the doctor’s house. The lepers were sitting outside their huts to make the most of the cool air which came with darkness. At a little stall, lit by a hurricane-lamp, a man was offering for five francs a handful of caterpillars he had gathered in the forest. Somebody was singing a street or two away, and by a fire Querry came upon a group of dancers gathered round his boy Deo Gratias, who squatted on the ground and used his fists like drum-sticks to beat the rhythm on an old petrol-tin. Even the bat-eared dogs lay quiet as though carved on tombs. A young woman with bare breasts kept a rendezvous where a path led away into the forest. In the moonlight the nodules on her face ceased for a while to exist, and there were no patches on her skin. She was any young girl waiting for a man.

It seemed to Querry that some persistent poison had been drained from his system after his outbreak to the Englishman. He could remember no evening peace to equal this since the night when he had given the last touches to his first architectural plans, perhaps the only ones which had completely satisfied him. The owners, of course, had spoilt the building afterwards as they spoiled everything. No building was safe from the furniture, the pictures, the human beings that it would presently contain. But first there had been this peace.
Consummatum est
: pain over and peace falling round him like a little death.