‘No — doing it,’ Susanna said, her face clouding over. ‘I was up in Nampula, and we talked to a chief about condoms. He said, “You don’t eat sweets with the wrapper on. You don’t eat candy that’s in paper. You don’t carry an umbrella if it’s not raining.” He just laughed at us.’
‘I don’t understand the part about the umbrella.’
‘Neither do I,’ she said. ‘But AIDS is a problem because no one does anything about it. Lots of people in our church have AIDS. Three of my co-workers have AIDS. It’s terrible. They have sex with four-year-olds, thinking it’s a cure. They pray to their ancestors!’
‘I think it’s good that you’re concerned with AIDS, but really when you condemn people for praying to their ancestors you sound like you’re condemning them as pagans. “Destroy your heathen idols.” Isn’t that what the Taliban say?’
Mozambicans were not sufficiently unhappy, not poor enough, not sick enough, not adequately deluded: they needed to feel worse, more blameworthy, more sinful, abused for merely having been born, for Original Sin was inescapable. And like all the other missionaries, Susanna was determined to bully Africans into abandoning their ancient pantheism that had been inspired by the animals and flowers of the bush; by the seasons, by their home-grown hopes and fears.
So this Christ-bitten nag and everyone like her sought Africans out in remote fastnesses such as Nampula to abuse them with the notion that they were sinners, to browbeat them into arcane forms of atonement, such as screeching hymns, and the dues-paying routine of tithes and the destruction of their ancient artifacts of veneration.
But speaking softly, I suggested these arguments to her and wanted to add, as Henry James had said in a letter to a do-gooding friend, ‘Only don’t, I beseech you, generalize too much in these sympathies and tendernesses — remember that every life is a special problem which is not yours but another’s, and content yourself with the terrible algebra of your own.’
She held her ground but later let slip the fact that she had once had a husband. She reluctantly disclosed that she had been married for three years and was now divorced. This I found wonderful.
‘The Bible says that divorce is not an option,’ I said in the sort of scolding tone I imagined she would have used on a gay person. ‘Aren’t you afraid of incurring the wrath of God?’
‘My husband was abusive. I prayed. He beat me. “I want you to worship me!” he said. He hated that I loved the Lord.’ She looked tormented. ‘I didn’t know what to do. I just prayed.’
‘I think you did the right thing by leaving this man, if he was horrible,’ I said. ‘But a pious Christian would disagree with me. A Christian might say, “Be a martyr for your faith! He beats you — he kills you for loving the Lord, and you go to Heaven. You can’t lose. The sinner will see his crime and feel remorse, and repent. So you both end up in Heaven.” I’m not saying I agree, but isn’t that what’s supposed to happen?’
‘I still don’t know if I did the right thing,’ she said.
‘You definitely did the right thing, but it wasn’t by the book,’ I said. ‘All I’m saying is that you should be as open-minded when you’re dealing with gays.’
She said nothing. I thought of changing my seat. But she was a compellingly decorous bigot with sex on the brain, and we still had not reached Manhiça. I stayed put and was glad I did, for with time to kill Susanna told me how she ran a shelter in Maputo — another admirable effort. Street kids were invited to stay there, where they were given baths and food and clean clothes. She had been doing this for two years and over that length of time she had gotten to know the street kids — boys mostly. One night when she was getting out of a car, some boys accosted her and begged for money, and then seeing that she was alone slashed her bag and stole all her money. She recognized the boys as ones she had bathed, fed and clothed at the shelter, and what’s more, they recognized her as an easy target.
The shelter, too, seemed like another duff scheme, like rescuing prostitutes from the lucrative streets of Maputo, one of the few ways of making a living in Mozambique that was unconnected with weeding maize. Not for the first time I was reminded of Mrs Jellyby and her obsessive busybody philanthropy.
We came to Manhiça. Susanna said, ‘I’m going to pray for you. For your happiness, and health, and your family, and your safe travels.’
‘I’m going to pray that you stop using the word “abomination” for gay people,’ I said. ‘Also, I’m going to pray that you read a history book and a book of paleoanthropology and that you stop calling these poor people sinners. As if they haven’t got enough to worry about!’
We had arrived late, I had missed the bus to Xai-Xai, and there was no other way to go there, except by matatu or by chapa, as these overcrowded minivans were called here. Now that I was reading the South African newspapers regularly I kept seeing items about minivan crashes and multiple deaths, so I had sworn off them, as death traps. I had made it safely, so far; I did not want to press my luck by imperiling myself any further. I ate lunch in Manhiça — caldo verde, soup of mashed potatoes and greens and garlic, the dubious culinary legacy of the colonial masters. Obscurely irritated by my to-and-fro with the missionary, who believed herself to be in sole possession of the truth, I decided to take a taxi back to Maputo.
The next day was a national holiday, Samora Machel Day. Machel had been Mozambique’s president from independence in 1975 until his death in a plane crash, an event that looked like part of a sinister plot, in 1986. The holiday was the fifteenth anniversary of the crash. No one seemed to mind that Machel had been the leader of a chaotic and bankrupt country. The political and economic failure was not entirely of his own making, but he had presided over it. On the posters he was depicted as a benevolent bearded figure in combat fatigues and a Fidel cap, over the slogan Samora — Nossa Inspiração — Our Inspiration.
‘Machel was nobody,’ a sour Portuguese named Da Silva said to me at the Polana. ‘He was just a hospital worker. His job was to carry out corpses from the wards. I know! My wife worked in the hospital.’
Da Silva could hardly be blamed for being bitter. His house in Maputo had been confiscated. He had returned to Maputo from his home in Johannesburg to try to obtain some compensation. His forcible exit from the country in 1974 had been undignified.
‘They said my wife was a prostitute. They made us into refugees. We had nothing. We had to run away. I am here but you know what? I want to cry. They have destroyed this country. The only people here are opportunists and thieves. Angola is better.’
That was news to me. I had been under the impression that Angola, still divided by a civil war, was an impossible and dangerous place. Chaotic Mozambique was at least peaceful.
Da Silva said, ‘My son is there,’ and winked at me and made a finger-rubbing gesture to indicate his son was raking in the bucks.
I used the two-day Samora Machel holiday to sit on the bluff by the Indian Ocean to write. I was nearly done with my erotic story, now novella-length, well over 100 pages. It was a pleasant task, like whittling a block of wood into a discernible shape. Then I put it aside and looked at the Indian Ocean and thought about my trip, how far I had come; and what remained, the train trip from Johannesburg to Cape Town.
The last leg of my safari I contemplated with mixed feelings. I was eager to take this train, I was sorry my trip was ending. I was not travel-weary. This mode of travel suited my disposition. I had kept the promises I had made for my peace of mind: no deadlines, no serious appointments, no planning ahead, no business, no mobile phone, no email. If anyone inquired, I was unobtainable. I had remained unobtainable. No one knew I was in Mozambique. This sort of disappearance made me feel wraithlike and insubstantial, as though I had become a ghost without the inconvenience of dying in order to achieve it.