Lwendo stuffed the nun with powerful, deliberate, loaded thrusts. A cheeky ray of light from a choked ventilator fell dully on red panties heaped around a work-conditioned ankle. Lust-glazed nunly eyes saw me first, and the gasp that burst in the darkness tore through my groin with the corrosion of sulfuric acid. Lwendo, well aware that the damage had already been done, would not be denied. He pressed to the juddering end with the preening insolence of a stud in a corral. Realizing that it was not a priest but me, his lackey, he laughed, and in his eagerness he tried to shake my hand.
I had bought my freedom and his friendship, on top of helpings set aside from the fathers’ table during the grateful nun’s cooking week. In my excitement I thought of Uncle Kawayida, the magician, the charmer, the storyteller, and of his story of the man with the three sisters. I would have liked to tell him about this coup, and about seminary life in general, but communication between us had faded badly since I left the village. Did he read books? No, he was too busy running his business, raising turkeys and broiler chickens. Had he forgotten about the old days? I didn’t think so.
I was a free man now. I toyed with the idea of going after a bully or two, but the bullying had cooled down. I decided to go after people larger than me, the real bosses of the place. I still found no pleasure in beating people of my level. I relished the challenge of reaching above myself and winning, albeit with more bruises. My attention had already been drawn by Fr. Mindi, the disciplinary master, and now probably solo fucker of efficient Sr. Bison. This man not only caned boys, but also went after them, hiding in bushes and behind buildings, high walls and fences, everywhere, to catch those breaking stupid rules like talking during silence time or eating between meals. He knew all the paths used by truants, and often hid behind the acacias overlooking Sing-Sing in the hope of catching hungry boys who escaped and returned to the seminary with bananas, corn, pancakes, sugarcanes, anything to keep hunger at bay. Some truants had a business instinct: they took orders and delivered foodstuffs at a profit. Fr. Mindi went after these “traders in the temple” with missionary zeal. He called them to their dormitories at odd hours in the hope of finding contraband or money in their boxes.
Officially, all pocket money was kept with him, but many boys hid most of it in places where they could get at it freely, without first going to Fr. Mindi and explaining why they needed it. Sing-Sing suffered most of Mindi’s money-hunting “police checks,” as they were called.
Die-hard truants and money hoarders fought back. They spread rumors and set him on the trail of the wrong people. With Mindi thus diverted, they made good their escape. He fell into this trap a number of times, till he discovered that boys were laughing at his gullibility. He caught some of the pranksters and punished them harshly. Information about police checks somehow leaked from the fathers’ dining room, and many of his raids were pre-empted, with the result that on days when he planned to surprise the real criminals, he found their lockers and suitcases empty.
The role of disciplinary master hinged on his self-image, and on the perceived image the boys had of him. As far as Fr. Mindi was concerned, both were poor. This only served to make him harsher.
I often wondered why this educated man couldn’t see the ludicrousness of his position. Boys fed on bad posho (corn bread) and weevilled beans stayed hungry and had to supplement their deficient diet. Wouldn’t he have done the same? Couldn’t he see that he was enforcing impossible rules? Couldn’t he see that he was the Pharisee who preached total rest on the Sabbath, yet rescued his donkey when it fell in the ditch on that day? It was easy to say that no one should eat between meals when your stomach was full of pork, fish, Irish potatoes, greens and the other goodies priests ate.
I also hated the lack of self-control this preacher of self-control exhibited when he caught his man. If he was indeed enforcing impersonal rules, made in Rome and imported by the bishop into the country, he had to exhibit some impersonality and impartiality. On the contrary, he enjoyed his successes, especially when inflicting pain on miscreants. It was personal after all. He was demonstrating that although some got away with it, anyone caught would pay a high price. Pride, ambition, future career prospects and power were in it for him.
Fr. Mindi was the most hated man in the seminary. Boys called him the Grim Reaper, and they prayed for him to get into a car accident and live the rest of his life in a wheelchair. They prayed for him to become blind, to get cancer and to be afflicted with every purulent disease on earth. The feeling was that as soon as he left, things would improve dramatically, for it was believed that he was deliberately keeping the situation bad. Nobody could understand why the food remained terrible when there was land, and possibly money to develop it. We had come to believe his philosophy was that bad food made good seminarians and ultimately good priests.
“He should die,” boys often said, especially when they watched him dribbling the ball at the football field. He could move with beguiling swiftness. He was the patron of Vatican dorm, and thanks to his participation and coaching, they won most annual inter-house competitions. Whenever they won, Fr. Mindi would allow two pigs to be roasted and would give us abundant food for one weekend.
“No, no, noo,” others replied. “He should live and suffer forever and ever.”
“What should we do about it?”
There was general agreement that the man should be left in the hands of the gods, who should see fit when to break his leg or inflict a car accident or subject him to armed attack.
Fr. Mindi penetrated my thought patterns. I tended to think of him as a brother to that constipated gorgon Padlock. Both had had a religious call. Both had responded to it. One had dropped out to become a real parent, while the other remained behind to become a symbolic one. Both believed that the harsher, the meaner and the more mysterious you played it, the better your children turned out.
It eventually struck me how limited Fr. Mindi really was. Padlock, in her nunly, peasant-girl constrictions, was more like a sore-infested buffalo hardly able to keep thousands of egrets and ticks off its festering back. Mindi, on the other hand, was bloated with theology, philosophy, Latin, Italian, Church history and all manner of other clerical and secular learning garnered from both local and foreign seminaries. The four years he had spent at Urban University in Rome had sharpened the edge of his conservative Catholicism, reinforced his harsher traits and dulled his empathic and self-analytical capabilities.
Yet, this was a man we were supposed to call Father and emulate and put on a pedestal. If scholarships to foreign universities and all that learning resulted in this barren role-playing and regurgitation, what was the use of it? This was a man programmed to obey, and to be obeyed. This was a man who had suffered and was now making others suffer so that they in turn would make others suffer. This was Mindi’s version of one hundred percent priestly compensation on earth and one hundred percent reward in the life to come. His material things, especially his car, were part of this package, this compensation scheme for having responded to the priestly call and given up the family life the damned enjoyed. He bragged about it, thinking that he was encouraging us to persevere. His dream was not different from my lawyerly one, taking into account the power he enjoyed and the rumors about him and Sr. Bison. It was only the oil of holiness and of predestination which he poured on his that put me off. My aim was to rub off that oily sheen and expose the dull, grainy core underneath.
I was back to my old sleepless ways. It felt scary to be up in the small hours of morning, but there was an exciting edge to it, a marauder’s adrenaline rushes, that made it worthwhile. I left Sing-Sing at around two o’clock. Dorobo, the newly hired night watchman, very tall, very strong, soot-black, lethal with his giant bow and arrow, was out doing his rounds, or sleeping. It was the image of his huge bow that etched itself in my mind like a diamond half-moon and followed me around as I moved from shadow to shadow. I praised the Lord that we Africans never idolized dogs: How awesome would this man have been with a huge German shepherd at his side? But there was not a single dog on campus.