No Other Life

1

In the old days they would have given me a gold watch. I never understood why. Was it to remind the one who is being retired that his time is past? Instead of a watch I have been presented with a videotape of the ceremonies. My life here has ended. My day is done.

Next week I will leave Ganae and fly to a retreat house in Cuba. I have never lived in Cuba. Canada, where I was born and bred, is only a memory. You might ask why I was not permitted to end my days here. I am one of the last white priests on this island and the last foreign principal of the Collège St Jean. At the ceremonies on Tuesday night, this was not mentioned. But yesterday, alone in the sitting room of our residence, watching the videotape which they have made for me, I saw myself as they must now see me. The ceremony was held in the college auditorium. Priests, nuns, students and dignitaries, all were mulatto or black. On the wall behind the microphones and the podium there was a large photograph of our new Pope, himself a man of mixed blood. And then, walking towards the podium, a ghost from the past, this stooped white man in a frayed cassock, incongruous as the blackamoor attendant in a sixteenth-century painting of the French court. I am a reminder of a past they feel is best forgotten. They are happy to see me go.

And yet, on the videotape, they weep, they embrace me. Some profess love for me. One of my former students, now the Minister for Foreign Affairs, praised me in his address for my efforts to bring the benefits of higher education to scholarship students from city slums and rural backwaters. There was applause when he said it, but how many in his audience thought of Jeannot at that moment? Jeannot, the most important milestone of my life, is nowhere mentioned in this farewell ceremony. On the video screen, surrounded by smiling faces, I cut slices from a large cake. The videotape, like the gold watch of other days, attests that I lived and worked with these people for most of my adult life. It is a memento.

But what sort of memento? I am a member of the Albanesians, a Catholic teaching Order, founded in France. Unlike lay people who retire, I have no family, no children, or grandchildren, no link with normal life. My brother and my sister are strangers I have not seen for many years. When a religious retires it is as though he is struck down with a fatal illness. His earthly task is over. Now he must prepare himself for death. In another age it was a time of serenity, of waiting to be joined with God and those who have gone before. But, for me, death is a mystery, the answer to that question which has consumed my life.

At the ceremonies last Tuesday, our boys’ choir sang the school song. The words were composed by Father Ricard, a French priest who was principal here before my time. It is a sort of hymn in which God is asked to bless our school and, through education, to bring wealth and happiness to Ganae and its people. Father Pinget makes mock of this song saying that, evidently, God does not speak French.

French, of course, is out of favour now. When I came here it was the opposite. Creole was the language of the poor. To speak French was to show that one belonged, or aspired to belong, to the mulatto elite. Now, Creole is the official tongue. But does God speak Creole?

I think of these things because I am looking at the empty pages of my life. My years here have counted for little. I have failed in most of the things that I set out to do. But I am a man with a secret, with a story never told. Even now, as I write it down, is it the moment to tell the truth?

Where should I begin? Shall I begin with the anxiety that came upon me last night as I removed from the walls of my room the photograph of my parents and a second photograph showing my graduating class, long ago, at the University of Montreal? I put them in the trunk that contains my belongings, the same flat tin trunk which was carried up to this room when I first arrived in Ganae, thirty years ago. Next week, when they carry that trunk downstairs, there will be no sign that I ever lived here. I think it is that – the knowledge that the truth of these events may never be known – that makes me want to leave this record.

But how should I tell it? When we are young we assume that, in age, we will be able to look back and remember our lives. But just as we forget the details of a story a few months after hearing it, so do the years hang like old clothes, forgotten in the wardrobe of our minds. Did I wear that? Who was I then?

That is a question I cannot answer. I can tell you that my name is Paul Michel and that I was born sixty-five years ago in the town of Ville de la Baie in Northern Quebec. My father was a doctor in that town and when he died my younger brother, Henri, took over the practice. Why did I not become a doctor? I do not remember that, as a child, I was especially devout. I was educated by the Albanesian Fathers at their college in Montreal and when I showed some glimmerings of literary talent the Order offered me a chance to do graduate work at McGill University and, later, sent me for a year to read French literature at the Sorbonne. Now, looking back, I do not know if I had a true vocation for the priesthood. I was attracted to the Order by its propaganda about devoting one’s life to teaching the poor in faraway places. I became an Albanesian Father much as others of my generation were to join the Peace Corps.

The priesthood meant celibacy and that, for me, caused a terrible confusion. I would feel hopeless longings for a girl seen in the street, followed by a depression which my prayers could not cure. In Paris, I fell in love. She was a fellow student at the Sorbonne. On her part, it was innocent. I was just a friend. I thought for a time of giving up the priesthood and asking her . . . but I did nothing. It was not until I was posted to Ganae that my longing for her was eased. Here, far from any world I had known, I would live my life as God’s servant, doing His work.

I was soon disappointed. I had come to teach the poor. Ganae is in the Caribbean, but is as poor as any African country. Eighty per cent of the population is illiterate. The few state schools are pathetically inefficient. The state university is an inferior training college which turns out substandard doctors and engineers. Our school, the Collège St Jean in Port Riche, is the only private institution of higher education. It was founded to produce students who could gain admission to foreign universities when they completed their high-school studies and went abroad. For this reason it was, from the beginning, a school for the sons of the mulatto elite, an elite who lived in large estates behind high walls and security gates, waited on by black servants, an elite who aped French manners, served champagne and haute cuisine, and gossiped about the new couture collections and the latest Parisian scandale. When I began to teach at the Collège St Jean, we had fewer than twenty black students in our classrooms.

Why was this so? Our Principal, Father Bourque, explained it this way. ‘The mulattos run Ganae, they always have. They control the parliament, they have business ties with the US and France. By educating their children we have a chance to influence events. This is a black republic but the shade of black is all important. Light skins rule. When a noir becomes successful he tries to marry into the mulâtre class. Besides, our Archbishop is a conservative. He wants to maintain the status quo.’

What would I have done if things had not held out some hope of change? Would I have become disillusioned and pragmatic like Father Bourque? Luckily, I was not put to the test. A few months after my arrival, in one of those political shifts not unknown in Ganae, a black country dentist named Jean-Marie Doumergue ran for election, promising to abolish torture, promote democracy, and curb the powers of the police. The Army saw in Doumergue a puppet they could use to control the black masses. Doumergue was elected. But, at once, he began to attack the privileges of the mulatto elite.

Why do we remember certain mornings, certain meetings? I can still recall my anxiety on that morning when I stood outside our Principal’s office with eight black boys clustered around me. The Archbishop had just arrived. Our Principal opened his office door and beckoned me to bring the boys inside. I bowed humbly to Archbishop Le Moyne, a cold Breton whom I did not know. He and the Principal went on talking as though the boys were not in the room.

‘We are dealing with a new situation,’ Father Bourque said. ‘We now have a president who repeats constantly that he has a mandate to improve the education of his fellow noirs, a president who complains about schools like ours. There are no other schools like ours. He is talking about our school. And so, Your Grace, if you will bear with me, I would like to propose that we increase the number of our scholarship pupils immediately. I am thinking of a sizeable number of scholarships. Perhaps forty. And they should all be noirs.’

But the Archbishop did not agree. ‘I’m afraid the elite will not tolerate their children mixing with children of the slums. A few more noirs, yes. The elite does not wish to seem bigoted, especially with a noir in power. But forty black students – where would you find them?’

Our Principal turned to me. ‘Father Michel has been doing some groundwork in that regard. Father?’

I was holding a sheaf of test results. I was, as always in those days, nervous and overanxious. ‘Your Grace,’ I said, ‘I have been travelling around the rural districts, and, believe me, I have had no trouble finding noir children of higher than average intelligence. Here are eight of them. For example, this little fellow seems quite exceptional. And yet he is an orphan, from the poorest of the poor – the village of Toumalie, if that means anything to Your Grace?’

As I was speaking I kept an eye on the boys. The other seven stood humbly, like animals whose sale was in the balance. But the one I had singled out, the boy named Jeannot, stared at us as though he, not we, were deciding his future. And then, suddenly, this boy said, ‘I wish to be a priest, Your Grace. No one from Toumalie has ever been a priest.’

Afterwards, at lunch, the Archbishop asked, ‘Surely you are not planning to make priests out of these little noirs? The college is not a seminary.’

Our Principal laughed. ‘The boy from Toumalie? I don’t know why he said that. Probably to make us take him in. Do you know, Paul?’

I suppose Father Bourque was merely trying to bring me into the conversation. I had sat tongue-tied throughout the meal. But, because I desperately wanted to have the boys accepted by the school, I answered with an evasion.

‘I have no idea,’ I said. ‘I hardly know the boy.’

It was true, yet not true. By then, I was much involved with Jeannot although I had met him only two weeks before, while combing the few rural schools in the north of the island. A teacher in the village of Toumalie took me to his tin-roofed schoolhouse, excitedly talking of a thirteen-year-old boy, an orphan who, he said, ‘is a vessel into which you can put anything and bring it back out again’. I tested the boy. I was astonished. The following day I rode on muleback over a road never travelled by motor vehicles, up to a mud-walled mountain shack on land denuded by three hundred years of ignorant and relentless agriculture. There, a woman with the flayed face and wasted body of those who live on the rim of starvation sat on a ramshackle porch, breast-feeding a child. She was a widow with four children of her own and two boys who were the orphaned children of her brother, a warehouse clerk who had died three years ago. One of these orphans was the boy, Jean-Paul Cantave, known as Jeannot. When I told her my plan she gave him into my care as casually as she would give away a puppy from a litter.

An hour later I rode back down the mountainside, the boy hanging on behind me, his arms around my waist as the mule picked its way over the rutted road. He was small and frail. His clothes were a dirty denim shirt, patched trousers and wooden-soled clogs. Imagine – no papers, no signature, no document of any kind. What would I do with him if the Archbishop refused to accept him? He had been given to me. I wondered if people back in Canada had any idea of what life was like here. No one in the world had any idea. This was Ganae.

The other children I had selected were not orphans and so remained at home until the day, two weeks later, when we brought them before the Archbishop. But Jeannot I took straight back to the college, where I installed him in a dormitory with ten other boarders, all of them mulattos. After the first night he came to me. ‘They are laughing at me because they have clothes to go to bed in. I do not.’

He did not speak to me as a teenaged boy might speak to a person in authority. From the beginning, it was as though we were friends. I went out at once and bought pyjamas and underclothes. And, although he had not yet been accepted in the school, I arranged for him to be provided with the school uniform. In the next several days he learned to eat in the same manner as the rich boys, to blow his nose in a handkerchief, to take a daily shower and, above all, to use French as his first language. Until then it was the tongue he had learned in school, but now, surrounded by boys who spoke it in preference to Creole, he became fluent with astonishing speed. In fact, when two weeks later the other black scholarship students showed up, Jeannot was no longer of their world. The village teacher in Toumalie was right. He was a vessel into which you could put anything and bring it back out again.

He had been given to me. Almost every day when his classes ended he would leave the college and walk six streets to the staff residence where I lived. Hyppolite would admit him and he would sit on a stool in the corridor, reading and studying, but waiting to see if I would go with him for a walk. Yes, like a dog. I often thought of that. But I cannot say that he was devoted to me. He watched me, he studied me, he tried to find out how my mind worked. From the time he came into my care he completely cut himself off from his former life. When I asked if he had written to his brother and cousins, he said, ‘What use would it be to write? They will forget me. All that is over, isn’t it, Father? Now, I live in the city. I would never have seen the city if you had not taken me from Toumalie. You will not be sorry. I will do well for you. I am your boy.’

It was true. The other masters, seeing him waiting for me in the halls of the residence, began to refer to him as ‘Paul’s boy’. And when Christmas came around and the college closed down for the holidays what were we to do with Jeannot? I spoke to Father Bourque. ‘Let him stay at our residence,’ he said. ‘He can sleep in the basement with Hyppolite. Why send him back to people who have given him away?’

On that holiday because I was new to Ganae Jeannot and I discovered the city together. We went by bus into the hills of Bellevue to look at the splendid estates of the elite. We walked down the deserted ceremonial avenues of the Bicentennial Exposition Grounds, peering in at abandoned showrooms, built in the fifties when the government foolishly tried to ape the expansionist schemes of other, more prosperous, lands. We visited the national casino on the seafront and watched Swiss croupiers, elegant in white dinner jackets, spin roulette wheels and deal baccarat for American tourists, ashore for the day from the cruise ships which then called at Port Riche. Together, we roamed the cluttered aisles of the city’s open-air market and crossed the Place de la République to peer through gilded railings at the gleaming white bulk of the presidential palace. On Christmas morning we attended Mass in the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Secours and heard the choir sing Mass in Latin, a language Jeannot was beginning to learn. And then, on the day after Christmas, I took him to La Rotonde.

La Rotonde is a city within a city, the black swollen heart of Port Riche. It lies along the edge of the docks, hidden away from the tourist shops, the markets and the legislative buildings that border on the palace. It is a vast, fetid hive of narrow, mud-clotted lanes, stinking of open sewage, a warren of plywood and cardboard shacks, roofed with rotting tin, a place without electric light or running water, where naked children bathe in muddy puddles left over from last night’s rains. Behind its filthy shanties, young girls, some of them no more than twelve years old, offer themselves to any passing man for fifty centos or, if he haggles, for less. Everything is for sale here. Cast-off clothing donated by American charities to the Ganaen Red Cross ends up on the street stalls of La Rotonde. Even human misery is put up for rent. If you walk deep enough into the maze of its narrow passageways, you will come suddenly into the sunlight of a central square, the Place Napoléon, where cripples, dwarfs, people covered with ugly sores, deformed children, women breast-feeding starveling babies, congregate each morning waiting to be paired off, a crippled man with a deformed child, a woman covered in sores with one of the famine babies, a dwarf with a blind girl. Deals are made, tableaux of human misery are assembled. Towards noon, a procession of these people moves out from La Rotonde going to the gift shops, the market and the port, to sit all afternoon in the