‘I guess they haven’t heard that he’s Elmer Gantry,’ I said but didn’t get a rise — maybe she hadn’t read Sinclair Lewis? — and so I added, ‘A fake, a snake-oil seller, an old hypocrite.’
‘He’s a sinner saved by grace,’ she said making the phrase sound like one word. ‘Like me. Like you.’
‘Thanks, but not like me. I have my faults but being like Jimmy Swaggart is not one of them.’
‘We’re all sinners saved by grace.’
Her calling me a sinner was not quite so offensive as it could have been, because all the while she was smiling and looking like Peter Pan. And of course the insinuation had a teasing, almost coquettish implication of naughtiness, as though she was saying You wicked man! So I let it pass. As far as I was concerned this was just small talk on the Limpopo Line.
‘How long do you figure you’ll be on your mission?’
‘The Lord guides me. The Lord sent me here. I’ll stay as long as the Lord wants me.’
‘What does the Lord want you to do in Mozambique?’
‘He wants me to tell people about Him so that they can be saved.’
‘What about homosexuals? Do you have any views on them?’
‘Homosexuality is an abomination. It says so in Leviticus.’
A Christian childhood, a lifetime of travel, of sleeping alone in hotel rooms with nothing but the Gideon Bible to read, and many years of close textual analysis to flesh out the preachers in my novels The Mosquito Coast and Millroy the Magician, had given me enough experience in scripture to reply to evangelists like this, who seldom expected a rebuttal. And anyway we were on the Limpopo Line in Mozambique, with nothing else to do.
‘Leviticus says a lot of things that no reasonable person can agree with,’ I said. ‘The Mosaic law is full of weird prejudices. Chapter fifteen is all about a woman being an unclean abomination when she’s menstruating and how she has to sleep alone then. I wonder how many Christians obey that one? Chapter eleven says fish without scales like tuna fish are an abomination. By the way, if you follow that logic so are calamari and shrimp. That makes marinara sauce an abomination. Leviticus eleven six says that rabbits are cud chewers and that’s why you can’t eat them. Ever hear of a rabbit chewing its cud? Later on, Leviticus says that a man can’t marry a non-virgin or a divorced woman, and that priests can’t cut their beards.’
Susanna was undaunted and stubborn. She said, ‘Not just Leviticus. In Romans, Paul says that homosexuality is a sin.’
‘You’re wearing pants,’ I said. ‘What does Deuteronomy say about that?’
She smiled, looking gamine, perhaps knowing what was coming.
‘The Bible says that women are forbidden to wear men’s clothes.’
‘Sometimes you have to interpret scripture,’ Susanna said.
‘I was hoping you’d say that. Deuteronomy, twenty-two five, condemns a woman who wears an article of man’s clothing as an abomination,’ I said. ‘You are wearing trousers. I don’t have a problem with them. Moses says that the Lord does.’
‘I guess I just interpreted it.’
‘That’s fine. Why don’t you interpret Paul on gays?’
‘I don’t hate homosexuals, but they’re committing a sin.’
‘Then why not kill them? Leviticus twenty thirteen says that sodomites must be put to death,’ I said. ‘And if you eat tuna fish and wear men’s clothes you are committing a sin, too, aren’t you?’
‘I know I’m a sinner,’ she said cheerfully. ‘We’re all sinners saved by grace.’
‘Do you believe in evolution?’
‘I believe in the Bible.’
The happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance is not the works of Shakespeare (as Buck Mulligan says) but the Holy Bible.
‘Adam and Eve? Garden of Eden?’
‘Yes.’
‘How long have humans been on earth?’ I asked. ‘You would say, what, something like four thousand years?’
‘Between four thousand and six thousand years,’ she said.
‘You know this as a scientific fact?’
‘It’s in the Bible.’
Such people had one book in their library, containing all history, all science, all geography, all nutrition. She was not alone. She would have agreed with the absurd notion propounded by the conflicted Philip Gosse, fanatic Christian and avid scientist, ‘that when the catastrophic act of creation took place, the world presented, instantly, the structural appearance of a planet on which life had long existed’ in other words (the words are those of his son Edmund in his chronicle of a weird childhood, Father and Son) ‘that God hid the fossils in the rocks in order to tempt geologists into infidelity’.
You just wanted to weep, not for her smug, pig-headed ignorance, but what made it all worse was that Susanna was here in Mozambique spreading disinformation and fear.
‘Call this a feeble rational quibble,’ I said, ‘but humans have been on earth for two million years. And Mesopotamia was settled at the date you give for the Creation.’
And in the year 1498, Vasco da Gama landed on Ilha de Mozambique, on the north coast of the Portuguese territory. Ten years later, priests were sent out from Lisbon and a vigorous trading center and missionary enterprise was started: Susanna’s antecedents in proselytizing — five centuries of this! But from experience I knew that there was no way that I could dissuade her from her belief, no light that I could shed.
I said, ‘I don’t want to argue. I know I will never change your mind. I simply want to tell you that I don’t agree with you and that you’re inconsistent. Tell me what you’re doing in Mozambique.’
‘Teaching scripture and also trying to set up a center to get prostitutes off the street,’ Susanna said, an answer that also echoed over 500 years on this coast. ‘Their families send girls out to make money. And people come here from Europe looking for them — Germans on sex tours get child prostitutes in Mozambique.’
‘How do you stop that happening?’
‘We have a street mission. We pray. We help the prostitutes.’
‘Don’t you find that men try to pick you up?’
‘All the time,’ she said. ‘They say horrible things to me. But I say, “Christ is my husband — I’m married to the Lord.” ’ She shrugged. ‘They just laugh.’
‘I take it your mission is mainly concerned with prostitutes, then?’
‘Quite a lot,’ she said.
I told her what I had read in The Road to Hell, that men encouraging child prostitution were criminals, but from an economic point of view a woman choosing to go into prostitution was making a rational decision. It was one of the rare chances for a woman to make real money. Susanna was not impressed with this argument.
I had a job in a factory, sitting at a machine, and then I realized I was sitting on a gold mine, the prostitute says, summing up her calling. The snag with trying to persuade prostitutes of the wrongness of their profession was the crystal logic of this. Leviticus also had a great deal to say about harlotry — the ones that could and couldn’t be temple harlots, how it was forbidden to marry them, how the Lord said to Moses: Go, take yourself a wife of harlotry and have children of harlotry.
Susanna said, ‘Not just prostitutes. I mean, the sex is terrible. People here have sex all the time.’
‘Africans tend to have sex within their own age group,’ I said, quoting the Samburu elder I had met in Kenya.
‘No,’ Susanna said. ‘Boys sleep with grannies. Girls go with men. Women commit adultery. They start having sex when they’re six or eight years old.’
‘Maybe playing at it,’ I suggested. And I thought, really if you were looking for graphic illustrations it was more satisfying to discuss sex with a Christian like Susanna than with a jaded libertine.