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 unrelenting sun, waiting for some tourist from the cruise ships to drop a coin in their outstretched palms.

Why did I bring Jeannot to La Rotonde? Even in the desperate rural poverty of Toumalie he had never seen such sights. And why, again and again, did he insist that we return there? Were those walks responsible for what happened to him in later life when, from that same great slum, he began his journey towards fame?

In the months that followed Christmas, Jeannot was not the only scholarship boy who did brilliantly in class. The other seven were all above average and for a time there was talk of increasing their number to forty, as we had first envisaged. Doumergue, the new president, was still promising to fight illiteracy and provide proper schools for the poor. He was meek and soft-spoken; his reign seemed mild. At official audiences in the presidential palace, he wore an ill-fitting black suit and carried a battered Homburg hat which, when he sat on the thronelike presidential chair, he would hand apologetically to a bemedalled military aide who stood directly behind him. In all of his addresses he made a point of speaking in Creole, which displeased the elite. ‘I am the president of all the people,’ he said. ‘I am noir and humble. I am the living incarnation of the people’s wish to better their lives.’

Did we believe him? I wanted to. I hoped we were at the beginning of a new era. I pleaded with Father Bourque to speak to the Archbishop about taking in more noirs. But the Archbishop informed us that no new scholarship students were to be accepted. ‘Frankly,’ he told our Principal, ‘nothing has changed and nothing will change. Doumergue is a puppet. As always, the Army remains in charge.’

The Archbishop was wrong. As I was wrong. Things did change. But, in Ganae, bad news comes through rumour, whispers, night visits, soldiers shooting wildly in the streets. At the college we lived in a world apart, remote as the elite on their Bellevue estates. The arrests, the tortures, the clubbing of those few who dared to demonstrate, none of these things was reported in the newspapers. Radio, the all-important source of information in an illiterate country, remained majestically silent. Parliamentary debates were listened to by other politicians, but never by the people. Within a year of his election Doumergue was a dictator. But we didn’t know it. It was, to my surprise, Jeannot, who first told me of the rumours of repression. I asked where he had heard them and he answered, ‘Claude Lamballe.’

Claude Lamballe was one of Jeannot’s classmates. His father, Simon, was a colonel in the Army and an instructor at the elite Académie Militaire. This same Simon Lamballe had, coincidentally, attended the Sorbonne in the period when I studied there. We did not know each other in Paris but when I met him at a school reception in Ganae, we became friendly because of our shared experience. And so, as no one at the college seemed to know the truth about Doumergue, I went one evening to Simon’s Bellevue mansion.

‘These rumours?’ Simon said. ‘All true.’

‘But isn’t it a fact that his election was backed by the Army? We’ve always assumed he’s your creature.’

‘He was,’ Simon said. ‘But now the Army is Dr Frankenstein.’

‘Yet, he seems sincere.’

‘Perhaps he was, once. I don’t know him personally. But the history of Ganae is like a cheap gramophone record. The new tune plays for a while, then the needle sticks in the groove and the player-arm slumps back and slips off the disc. Every Ganaen leader begins his term by promising to change things. Most of them don’t even try. But the few who do – well, it’s like the gramophone record. The needle sticks in a groove. There are many grooves – the elite, the Army, foreign business interests, the people’s illiteracy – you name it – there’s no way that progress or democratic ideals can work here. And so the leader becomes a strong man, trying to force his ideas through. Enemies have to be disposed of. Coups must be anticipated and crushed. The leader becomes a tyrant. Doumergue is simply a victim of this country’s history.’

‘Can’t the Army get rid of him?’

‘Father, let me give you a little advice. You are a priest, and a white foreigner. But you may not ask such questions of me, or of anyone. When you are discussing Uncle D. you’re not safe, no matter who you’re talking to.’

Some weeks after this conversation I was visiting a former pupil who lived in the Laramie section of the city. As I left my pupil’s house and walked up a side street which led to the Boulevard Carnot, four large noirs wearing blue seersucker overalls and carrying old-fashioned Lee-Enfield rifles came towards me. When they drew level, one of them stopped me by laying the barrel of his rifle across my chest. ‘Cigarette, Mon Pe?’

I said I was sorry but I did not smoke.

‘We do,’ one of the men said. ‘So we need money for cigarettes. Be quick now.’

They did not look like beggars. They had guns, after all. ‘Who are you?’ I said.

One of the men said to the others, ‘Who are we? Why does he not know? He is a priest, not a tourist. He’s making fun of us.’

‘Don’t make fun of us,’ one of the others said.

‘I have never hit a white face,’ a third said. ‘Maybe today is my day to hit a white face.’

‘Give us money, quick,’ the first man said. ‘Ten pesons, OK?’

‘I am a priest,’ I said. ‘Would you rob a priest?’

When I said that, the first man hit me with his closed fist. My nose dribbled blood. The second man swung the stock of his rifle and hit me on the shins. I stumbled and fell to my knees. They formed a circle around me. ‘Ten pesons,’ the first man said. ‘Give it, or we will take it.’

Kneeling, blood dribbling into my mouth, I took out my purse and gave them a ten-peson note. For a moment I thought that they would take the rest of my money, but they did not. The first one took the note, held it up to the light, then put it in his pocket and nodded to the others. They walked away as though I did not exist.

When they were no longer in sight I stood up, my shins aching as I groped for a tissue to stem my nosebleed. Across the narrow street, a young girl was watching me from a second-storey window, but when I looked up at her she at once withdrew her head and closed the shutters. I fingered my nose. It was very painful. It could be broken. Behind me, I heard the sound of wooden clogs on the cobblestones. A tall woman from the countryside came up the empty street, carrying a large bundle of washing on her head. When she drew level she stopped and turned towards me, holding her head high to balance her load. ‘Eh, ben, Mon Pe. Bad times begin. You all right?’

‘Who were they?’

She looked at me, eyes wide, as though she could not believe the question. ‘You joking me?’

‘No, no.’

‘Bleus. They the bosses now. You didn’t know?’

‘No.’

She laughed, the huge load wobbling on her head. ‘Where you been, Mon Pe?’

My nose was not broken but swollen in such a way that everyone in the college soon knew about the attack. On the streets of Port Riche the number of men wearing blue seersucker overalls and carrying old Lee-Enfield rifles increased until they became as common a sight as police and soldiers. And when Jeannot and I passed the presidential palace on one of our walks we saw, inside the gates, not only the ceremonial guards provided by the Army, but men in blue overalls, sitting in comfortable armchairs near the sentry boxes, their weapons at their feet. At night, trucks could be heard racing through the streets. Volleys of rifle fire woke us from our sleep. Then, on the third anniversary of his inauguration, Doumergue announced that he was closing down the Académie Militaire. I went to see my friend Simon Lamballe.

‘It’s all over,’ he said. ‘I’ve lost my job. I’ve been “promoted” to the Northern Command. The Académie is finished.’

‘But why doesn’t the Army do something?’

‘Do what? It turns out that Uncle D. is a better student of history than the rest of us. He’s found a formula. Tell the noirs you’re their president and the enemy of the elite. Leave the rich alone to do what they’ve always done. In turn, they’re grateful for being spared and so they render unto Caesar. As for the Army we thought his game would be to cause divisions by promoting noirs over us mulâtres. He’s done something else. He’s created his own army. The bleus.’

‘So what will the Army do?’

Lamballe laughed. ‘I could ask you the same thing. What will the Church do? Uncle wants black bishops. Ganaens. You foreigners will be pushed out.’

When I mentioned Lamballe’s prophecy to the other professors, no one believed it. The Ganaen hierarchy had always been French. The people were religious and devoted to the Pope. The attack on me by Doumergue’s bleus was, everyone said, an aberration, the random violence of hired thugs.

A few weeks later while we were having supper in the refectory of the residence, two men wearing white suits and panama hats came in from the front hall and walked over to the refectory table. Our Principal rose up, irritated at this intrusion.

‘Who are you? What are you doing here?’

The men ignored the question. One of them looked at the food on our plates. It was a supper of beans and rice. The man put his finger into the serving dish and stirred it around. ‘What, no pork?’ he said. ‘Why do you eat like peasants, Reverend Fathers?’

‘Because we are poor,’ the Principal said. ‘Now, who are you and what do you want?’

‘Anti-terrorist Squad. Are you Father Bourque?’

‘I am.’

‘We want to talk to you. Do you have an office?’

When the Principal had gone off with the men, Father Nöl Destouts, a Ganaen, said to me, ‘I don’t think they’re police. They behave like bleus.’

The Principal did not return to finish his supper. After the meal we went, as usual, into the lounge where Hyppolite served coffee. As I took my cup from the tray I saw our Principal come downstairs with the two men. He led them to the front door and let them out. Then he came into the lounge. ‘Paul? Will you come with me?’

The others looked at me in surprise. When I went upstairs with Father Bourque he did not speak until he had shut us into the privacy of his study. He went to his desk and took up a printed sheet of paper. ‘This is a leaflet which those men brought here tonight. They say several copies of it were distributed in the Bellevue and Beaulieu districts two nights ago. They were handed out by some boys who, the police say, may be from our school.’

I read the leaflet. I don’t remember the wording, but it said that Ganae was a dictatorship and the only way to free its people was by revolution which must be led by young people ready to give up their lives for the poor. I realised it could be a twisted version of something I had said in class a few weeks before. I had told my students that nothing would change in Ganae until educated young people like them were prepared to sacrifice their comfortable lives and prospects for the good of the poor.

‘Well, Paul,’ Father Bourque said. ‘Do you know anything about this?’

‘No . . . but . . .’

‘But what?’

‘Perhaps,’ I said, stumbling with the words, ‘it could have had something to do with a remark I made in class.’

‘That’s why I asked. I’ve been meaning to speak to you. I know your feelings about this country. But political comments in front of the boys are totally uncalled for. You’re a priest, not a politician. We’ve got to be very careful. We’re white people in a black country. Foreigners – never forget that. Tell me. Do you know anything about these leaflets?’

‘No, Father. Why do the police say the boys could be from our school?’

‘Apparently, they arrested fifteen poor souls who had accepted the leaflets. They took those people to Fort Nöl and you can imagine what they did to them. These people told the police that the boys were well dressed, six mulattos and one black. All dressed like children of the elite.’

One black. I felt my heart in my chest.

‘Anyway,’ Father Bourque said. ‘See what you can find out. And, in the meantime, let’s not mention this to the rest of the staff.’

That night I lay awake. I thought of the policeman in his white suit putting his finger into the bowl that contained our food. I thought of those people arrested and now held in Fort Nöl, a place of torture, a place where protesters are silenced and disappear. When at last I slept, men in white suits stood over me, shouting, ‘You are white people in a black country. Foreigners – never forget that.’ I woke to the sounds of dawn in Port Riche. Roosters crowed. Food vendors, arriving from villages outside the city, passed below my window, the creaking of their ancient carts loud on the cobblestones. A church bell rang. I rose and dressed. It was time to say Mass.

At six o’clock in the school chapel my congregation consisted of seven nuns from a nearby convent. I hurried through the service and at a quarter to seven stood in the vestibule, waiting. Jeannot, like the other boarders, would be at the seven o’clock Mass, which would be said by Father Destouts.

At five minutes past the hour I saw Jeannot come running, among the other stragglers. I stepped out from the shadows beside the Holy Water font, and signalled him to follow me. Behind the chapel there is a cemetery. In it are buried the priests of our Order who died in Ganae. It is small and quiet, shaded by jacaranda trees. In the nearby chapel we heard the shuffling of feet, then silence, as the service began.

‘The police were here last night,’ I said. ‘Do you have any idea why?’

‘Was it about the leaflets, Father?’

I remember that I felt both anger and fear. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘So you’re responsible. What sort of nonsense is this?’

‘Is it nonsense, Father? You yourself told us it’s up to my generation to do something.’

‘So what have you done? What will you do? A few schoolboys with no plan and no idea how the world works. All you’ve done is cause innocent people to be arrested and put in Fort Nöl. And do you know what’s happened to those people? Do you?’

I was shouting. I saw him flinch as though I would strike him. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Forgive me, I shouldn’t lose my temper. How many of you are mixed up in this thing? And what else have you done?’

‘This was just a beginning, Father. It was my idea. We tried to hand the leaflets out to young people – educated young people. If we can make them turn against their parents that will be a beginning. That’s why we went to Bellevue and Beaulieu.’

‘How many of you are there?’

‘For now, maybe ten. But I don’t want to give their names.’

‘I’m not asking you for their names. Did you write the leaflet?’

‘Yes.’

There, in the cemetery, the unrelenting sun of the tropics had already mounted its daily attack. We stood in the hot breath of the morning wind while above us the delicate, violet jacaranda blossoms trembled in the moment before their fall. On the worn gravestones I could read the names of our priests, French and Canadian, forgotten now, their labours ended, their bodies rotted to anonymous bones in the unforgiving soil of this lost and lonely land. What was the true meaning of those lives, lived far from France and Quebec? What would be the meaning of my life if I left this island as I found it, still one of the most desolate, despairing places on this earth? But even as those thoughts moved guiltily in my mind, they were driven out by a stronger emotion, one of fear, the fear of a childless Father facing a brilliant black boy who was, to me, a son. Like a father I did not think of principles or causes. I thought of him, of saving him from men in white suits and panama hats.

‘Jeannot,’ I said, ‘listen to me. If those other boys who distributed the leaflets are caught by the police, their parents will intervene. Their parents are the elite and their sons will not be tortured, they will not disappear into prison and never be heard from again. But if you are taken by Doumergue’s police, it will be the end of you. And for what? What can you, a schoolboy, do to change things here? Nothing. But if you continue your education and go abroad, then, one day, you may come back with the power to influence events. Tell me. Do you still want to be a priest?’

Behind us, in the church, we could hear the rumble of feet as the congregation went down on its knees.

‘Why do you ask me, Father?’

‘Because if you do, I’ll try to arrange that you be sent to Canada or France to study. There are only certain things we can teach you here. With a mind like yours, that’s not enough.’

‘And if I do not?’

‘Please,’ I said. ‘Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not asking you to become a priest. If you do, you’ll be giving up a normal life. And believe me, I will help you in any way I can, no matter what you decide.’

He was silent.

‘You don’t have to decide now,’ I said.

‘I have decided. I want to be someone like you. A priest. A teacher. Someone who gives his life for others.’

‘Jeannot, you mustn’t become a priest because you want to be someone like me. That’s not enough. To be a priest you must want, above all, to serve God. That’s the only reason. Nothing else will do.’

Again, he was silent. On the path below our feet, tiny lizards whisked over the gravel as though fleeing some unseen enemy. In the church behind us, the Sanctus bell tolled. Instinctively, I bowed my head. And then Jeannot put out his hand and touched my sleeve.

‘Christ gave His life for the poor. I want to be like Him.’

‘If it pleases God, you will be like Him,’ I said. ‘But now you must help me. Fifteen innocent people have been arrested. Tell the other boys. This must stop.’

‘It will stop,’ he said.