Last night, as I was writing, Hyppolite knocked on the door of my room. He brought me a cup of herbal tea. I had not asked for the tea. Perhaps one of the other priests had done so. But Hyppolite is very old. He forgets. No one still expects him to work as our servant. But he has worked ever since the day, forty years ago, when Father Bourque brought him from Meredieu to act as houseman at our residence. Later, I was the one who taught him to drive the school car, something which gave him great joy and raised his status among the other servants. And so he has always thought of me as his special charge. Last night when he brought the tea I was writing down what Jeannot had said to me. ‘Christ gave His life for the poor. I want to be like Him.’
I looked up at Hyppolite.
‘Mesiah,’ I said.
He looked at me, puzzled, then smiled, showing his toothless gums. ‘Mesiah. Me souviens.’
Messiah. Of course, he remembers. Which of us, alive in those times, will ever forget that word? But I must not skip ahead, I must write first of those early days when Jeannot was still my pupil. He kept his promise, and I said nothing to Father Bourque. The following year, on my recommendation, our Provincial sent him to Montreal where he became a seminarian and obtained a degree in French literature. At the age of twenty-two, he joined our Order and was ordained as a priest. Because of my duties in Ganae, I was not able to attend the ceremony but I used some money my father had once given me, to buy, as an ordination present, a gold pocket watch with a ‘hunter’ case covering the dial. Inside the case were engraved his initials, J.P.C. In the letter he wrote thanking me, he said, ‘I do not believe that I should ever have or want a beautiful object like this. But I shall keep it with me always to remind me of what you have done for me.’
Shortly after his ordination, our Provincial arranged that he be sent to do postgraduate work at the Sorbonne. He remained in France for two years. At that time I thought I had lost him to the great world. He still wrote every week, telling of his excitement at being in Paris, describing lectures in those crowded classrooms, political demonstrations on the Grands Boulevards, Sunday picnics by the Seine. Yet in each letter he asked for news of the happenings at home. In my replies I spoke angrily, recklessly, about the misery of the poor and the unending cruelties and repressions of Doumergue’s regime. At that time I saw no hope of change. In the United States, dictators were still in vogue. Ganae remained a pawn on the international chessboard, a check against Castro, until the time of communism’s fall.
This, then, was the future I foretold for Jeannot. He would complete his studies and be sent to teach in Rouen, the headquarters of our Order. Gradually, in the course of time, our relationship would weaken and fade. And then, one morning at breakfast, Father Duchamp said to me, ‘I heard something last night which should interest you. I was at dinner at the papal nuncio’s house. He said your protégé, Jean-Paul Cantave, is to become the new parish priest of the Church of the Incarnation.’
‘A parish priest? Jeannot?’
‘It’s true. It seems Uncle D. asked Rome to appoint a black archbishop when Archbishop Le Moyne retired last month. Apparently, the Vatican has agreed. And one of this new archbishop’s requests is that your protégé be given a job as parish priest in La Rotonde.’
‘But why Jeannot?’
‘Because Jeannot wrote to the new archbishop and asked for the job. Strange, isn’t it? It doesn’t make sense.’
‘Now that you mention it,’ I said, ‘it does.’
But why had Jeannot hidden it from me? Did he think I would try to dissuade him? I felt betrayed but at the same time I experienced a mixture of shame and admiration. The boy I had rescued from the squalor of Toumalie had become the priest I myself had always wanted to be. He had turned his back on the life I led, a life in which I did nothing to dispel the misery I saw around me.
And then, a week after this conversation, Jeannot telephoned me from Paris to tell me he had been awarded his doctorate and was coming home. Hyppolite and I drove out to meet him at the airport. Seven years in northern climates had paled his colour. He looked tired but seemed filled with energy. When he embraced me, holding me tightly in his arms, it was the closest I have ever come to the feeling of joy that a real father must experience when he sees his son after years of absence. And yet I sensed that things had changed between us. From now on, I would no longer be his mentor. I would try to be a helper in his parish of the poor.
As Hyppolite drove us home that first morning Jeannot leaned forward excitedly in his seat, staring out at familiar scenes, crowded, tawdry market stalls, the more marginal vendors crouched on the pavements, bleus striding arrogantly across the street, ignoring the oncoming traffic, children running alongside our slow-moving car, holding up bananas in the hope of a sale. As we turned off Avenue de la République, going towards the college residence where the other priests were waiting to give him a celebratory lunch, he said suddenly, ‘Can we go first to my new church? I want to see it.’
I told Hyppolite to drive to La Rotonde. ‘By the way, Petit, I’ve been meaning to ask you. How on earth did you manage this?’
He laughed. I often called him Petit. It was an old joke between us. ‘Letters,’ he told me. ‘I wrote to everybody asking for the job. But the letter that really worked was the one to Uncle D.’
‘You wrote to Doumergue?’
‘Why not? Friends of mine in Rome tipped me off to the new situation. I wrote saying that I am black and brilliant and I come from the poor. I said my Order would prefer that I teach abroad, but that I want to help him build a new Ganae. Apparently, he had Archbishop Pellerat speak directly to our Provincial. And so, here I am.’
‘But Uncle D. will expect you to be his man?’
‘That will be his mistake. I want to build a new Ganae with no place for a Doumergue. That’s why I came home.’
‘Petit, you’ve been away too long. You’ve no idea what it’s like to cross Uncle D. He’s Hitler and Stalin rolled into one.’
‘And look what’s happened to them. They’re already in the rubbish heap of history.’
‘Doumergue is different.’
‘Perhaps. But it’s not a matter of choice. It’s my duty.’
A few weeks after Jeannot joined his new parish I attended Sunday Mass in his church. The congregation overflowed into the aisles. People even sat on the window ledges, high above the nave. I saw at once that they were not only the slum dwellers of La Rotonde. In the centre aisle, jammed together like football supporters at a match, was a large group of street boys, the sort who hang around the airport, trying to carry travellers’ bags and offering to find taxis. There were also little islands of our students and I recognised at least five teachers from Le National, the public trade school.
The Church of the Incarnation is an ugly stucco building which looks like a garage, its dun-coloured walls hung with primitive wood carvings of the Stations of the Cross. The choir sings to the sound of an ancient pump organ which is forever out of tune. It is not a church where one would expect to be caught up in the magic and mystery of the Mass. And yet as we knelt, looking up at Jeannot, frail and childlike in a surplice which seemed to have been made for someone twice his size, it was as though he led us into a world from which all other worlds were shut out. As he raised the communion chalice, and in that solemn moment changed bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, we, who watched, were filled with the certainty that he, by the grace of God, performed a miracle on that altar. I, who have said Mass for forty years, prayed as though I were in church for the first time.
No words I write now can describe my feelings on that morning. When the Mass ended and Jeannot beckoned me to join him in giving communion to the scores who pressed forward to kneel at the altar rails, I looked at their faces and felt that, truly, God had come down among us. I was filled with a happiness I had never known in all my years as a priest. Jeannot had raised me from the grave of my sloth.
Communion had been given. The Mass ended. But the congregation did not rise and leave. They sat in their seats, waiting, as Jeannot climbed the stairs of a rickety pulpit. Looking down on them, he began to speak in a voice that was incantatory, compelling, a voice like no other I have heard. At once, the congregation was silent, rapt.
Brothers and Sisters,
Today I want to raise you up.
The Church is not far away in Rome.
The Church is not archbishops and popes.
The Church is us – you and I –
And we who are the Church have a duty to speak out.
You ask me, speak about what?
I answer. Who are the unholy ones?
They are those who sell your work to foreign countries
And pay you seven per cent of what they get.
Did you know that?
And for the first time in one of our churches I heard the congregation answer in a shout.
‘No!’
Brothers and Sisters,
We must begin to speak out.
But I warn you.
If you speak out you will receive blows.
St Paul received blows because he told the truth.
But he endured them.
As you will endure them,
As I will endure them.
Because we must choose the Lord’s way.
We must speak out against those who exploit our poor.
We must take the path of love.
The path of love is the path of Jesus.
Help us climb out of this endless poverty.
We do not ask for riches.
We ask to live the lives of the poor
But not lives of starvation and despair,
Not the lives of slaves.
But decent humble lives
Under God.
Jesus asks you
Help each other.
The path of love is the path that leads to justice.
Walk with me on that way.
Jeannot made the sign of the cross and stepped down from the pulpit. And then I saw what I had never seen before. The congregation, behaving as though they were not in a church but in a town meeting, turned to each other, discussing the sermon, some of them clapping others on the back as though urging them on. People rose and agitatedly walked the aisles, while, at the rear, the church doors opened wide as the congregation streamed out into the sunlight, excited, talking, inspired.
When Jeannot came back to the altar, I followed him into the sacristy. I was still filled with that sense of God’s presence that had entered the church during Mass. I was certain that this boy who had been my protégé was now a person of exceptional holiness. Yet at the same time I could not reconcile that feeling with the sermon he had preached. It was a sermon of politics. Did he see it as that? Or did he see it, simply, as doing God’s will?
‘How long have you been preaching like this?’ I asked.
‘Since my first week. The crowds are getting bigger.’
‘But they must know you’re doing it?’
‘Of course they do.’
‘Petit, you spoke of receiving blows. What if they arrest you?’
‘They won’t arrest me.’
‘How can you know that?’
‘Because God is watching over me. Don’t be afraid for me. Believe me.’
And I did. In the months that followed I spent all of my evenings in a new community centre which Jeannot had set up in an empty warehouse. I enlisted my students to raise money from their parents so that we could buy furniture, beds and blankets for an orphanage in which the Sisters of Ste Marie were planning to house some of the abandoned children of La Rotonde. I wrote letters to Canada and France soliciting funds for a boys’ club and, indeed, such a club soon came into being.
I look back now on those days as a time when I achieved a state of happiness which can only be entered into by a total forgetting of oneself. I forgot my failures, my inadequacies, my guilts. I learned at last to lose that comfortable yet comfortless distance I had felt here, as a white priest in a foreign place, protected from the misery around him by his church and his calling. I worked with Jeannot. Jeannot worked for the people of La Rotonde. Now, at last, I had come to serve the poor.
The crowds grew. The word spread. In the mansions of the elite there was talk of this mad little priest who preached against the rich. Within weeks, when the crowds kneeling outside in the open air rivalled the numbers packed within the church, Jeannot had loudspeakers installed so that everyone could hear the sermon. And the sermon was always the same. Rise up, cast off your chains. You, the poor, will inherit this land.
‘I don’t understand it,’ Nöl Destouts said. ‘He’s preaching revolution. If he were anyone else, he’d be in prison by now.’
Father Duchamp, our resident cynic, saw things differently. ‘When Jeannot speaks about capitalists, he’s talking about the elite – he’s not speaking out against Doumergue. Maybe, he knows just how far he can go.’
I was angered by this remark. I knew it wasn’t true. Despite his belief that God would protect him I feared for Jeannot. And then, one Sunday morning, as was now my custom, I attended Jeannot’s Mass in order to help him serve communion. The church was packed. I was kneeling at the right side of the altar with my back to the congregation. A few minutes after the Mass began I heard shots which I took for a car backfiring. I heard shouts at the rear of the church. When I turned round I saw six or seven men, armed with rifles and machetes, pushing their way up the crowded aisles, some firing at the ceiling, some firing directly into the congregation. They were not soldiers or bleus. They looked like street scavengers, the sort who spend their days picking over rubbish heaps, cadging tourists for handouts, their nights drunk on bottles of homemade usque. Two of them had already reached the altar and now, raising their rifles, they fired directly at Jeannot. I saw a bullet strike the gilded door of the tabernacle behind him. A brass candlestick was toppled by a second shot.
Suddenly, it was as though all of us were figures in a painting, frozen in a frame. Jeannot did not flinch. He stood facing the killers, his arms outstretched as if to embrace them. His face showed love, not fear. At this point the marauders in the body of the church ceased firing and, like the rest of us, stood staring up at Jeannot on the altar. Again the two assassins raised their rifles and fired. They were not more than thirty feet from their target, but the bullets went wide. The upraised arm of a statue to the right of Jeannot shattered and fell on the altar steps. The two assassins, unnerved, looked at each other as though unable to believe what was happening. Then, suddenly frightened, they turned and pushed their way back through the crowd. I saw this, I heard screams, as people poured into the aisles, trying to escape. The other assailants, buffeted by the panicky congregation, began to lay about them with rifle butts and machetes as they beat their way back to the church doors. Four teenaged members of Jeannot’s boys’ club rushed up to the altar and tried to drag him off to the safety of the sacristy. He resisted, standing staring out at the crowd, until the assailants had left the church. Then he turned back to the altar, genuflected, and went down into the body of the church to comfort the injured. I saw an old man dead in a front pew, eyes glazed, blood oozing from his forehead. People were lifting up the wounded and stepping over inert bodies. Women prostrated themselves, weeping, on the corpses of kin.
I heard a dull roar. There was a second roar. I looked up and saw flames move across the ceiling of the church in a great red rolling wave. I smelled the acrid stink of diesel fuel. I saw Jeannot ahead of me, waving and shouting as he directed the evacuation. Incredibly, in the general panic, his orders were being obeyed. There were screams and shouts, but in the rush to the doors no one was trampled. Under Jeannot’s direction the injured and dying were carried out into the sunlight. It was then that I saw police and army trucks lined up opposite the burning church. Soldiers and policemen sat in those trucks, silent and unmoving, as people fled past them, escaping. I looked at Jeannot who knelt near me, holding a dying woman in his arms. I saw him stare back at his church, now ablaze in smoke and flames.
An hour later, when the last of the taxi-buses and ambulances had carried off the wounded, the papal nuncio and a representative of Archbishop Pellerat arrived on the scene. They spoke to Jeannot but not to me and so it was not until nightfall that I found out what happened. Jeannot came to our residence accompanied by a priest from the Archbishop’s palace. He told us that the Archbishop and the nuncio had ordered him to move in with us and on no account to return to his parish. This was not, as we first thought, a measure to save his life. Instead, incredibly, it was a form of censure. The facts tell the story. In the days that followed there was no announcement in the press or radio that there had been an attempt on Jeannot’s life, that innocent people had been shot and killed, or that the Church of the Incarnation had been burned down. In conversations with the nuncio Doumergue disclaimed all knowledge of the affair, despite the fact that police and soliders had stood by while the attack was carried out. But, to our surprise and shock, neither the nuncio nor Archbishop Pellerat made any formal protest to the government.
Jeannot was, for those weeks, almost a prisoner in our residence. It was a time when news of what was happening outside came to us only through the street boys who visited us nightly to tell him what was being said in the parish. What was being said was that Jeannot was protected by God. Twice, men had tried to shoot him as he stood at the altar of his church. Each time the bullets had not touched him. He was a prophet, people said. God had sent him to save Ganae. I listened to this talk with mixed emotions. I have always had difficulty believing in the miraculous. But I had long believed that Jeannot was a saintly person, possibly a saint. If that were true, it was conceivable that God had saved him. And, of course, I could not forget the evidence of my own eyes. I had seen the assassins miss, firing at close range.
But what did Jeannot think of such talk? One evening when we were in the sitting room of the residence I asked him. ‘What’s your idea? Do you think it was a sort of miracle?’
‘I don’t think about it,’ he said. ‘There could be another explanation. Perhaps those men were, in some way, afraid to kill a priest and so they aimed badly. Next time they will be even more afraid. If only God’s miracle had been extended to those who were killed. That’s what I think of now.’
Father Bourque was in the room when Jeannot said this. I knew that he had complained to Jeannot about his sermons. I knew that he strongly disapproved of ‘those liberation theology priests in South America’. Now, he looked at Jeannot and asked, ‘Do you feel guilt?’
‘Guilt, Father?’
‘You know what I mean. For your sermons.’
‘I feel sorrow, not guilt. I think of what Saint Paul said, “Christ lives through me.” If I wish Christ to go on living through me I must continue to do His work.’
‘Liberation theology is politics, not religion,’ Father Bourque said. He rose and left the room.
And then, one morning about two weeks later, when we were breakfasting in the refectory, a servant brought in the morning’s mail. I saw Father Bourque pick out a letter with a foreign postmark. He read it, then said, ‘I have something here that concerns us all.’
He held up the letter. ‘This is from our Father General in Rome. Father General informs me that, after consultations with the Vatican, the Albanesian Order has decided to expel Father Jean-Paul Cantave.’
We sat in awful silence.
At last Nöl Destouts said, ‘But that’s ridiculous, Father! Why?’
Father Bourque continued to read from the letter. ‘The reason for expulsion is Father Cantave’s refusal to cease preaching sermons that exalt violence and class struggle. These sermons are largely to blame for the tragedy that occurred at the Church of the Incarnation when several parishioners were killed and the church was destroyed.’
Now, at last, he looked directly at Jeannot. ‘Furthermore, our General informs me that Archbishop Pellerat has decided that you will no longer be allowed to continue your duties as a parish priest. You are henceforth forbidden to say Mass publicly in any Ganaen diocese. However, as our General points out, you are still a Catholic priest.’
He folded the letter and put it in a pocket of his soutane. I looked at Jeannot. There were tears in his eyes.
‘But the Order is my family,’ he said. ‘More than a family. You found me, you took me in, you educated me and gave me life as a priest. How can you abandon me now?’
Our feelings, mine at least, were of shame, anger and embarrassment. But Father Bourque, a Frenchman of the old school, showed no emotion. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘We are all sorry. But, as you know, you have brought this on yourself.’
‘Surely that’s not true, Father,’ I said. ‘Burning down Jeannot’s church, trying to kill him? How can you say he brought it on himself?’
Father Bourque looked at me coldly. ‘Paul, you are not without blame in this matter. I had hoped that you would advise Jeannot against his dangerous course of action. Instead you have encouraged him. However, it’s too late for recriminations. This is a sad day for all of us. But, remember, these decisions have been made by our General after consultation with the Vatican and with the Ganaen hierarchy. It’s Jeannot’s duty to accept them and continue to serve God in other ways.’
‘What other ways? What am I going to do?’ Jeannot’s voice was breaking. He was openly in tears.
‘The boys’ club and the orphanage were both started by you,’ Father Bourque said. ‘They have not been destroyed and I’m sure Archbishop Pellerat will permit you to continue your work there.’
‘Does that mean my boss is now Archbishop Pellerat – he’s Doumergue’s creature, he wasn’t even appointed by Rome – you know as well as I do – ’
‘Stop it!’ Father Bourque said, sharply. ‘I will not have that talk here! You are a priest and you must obey your Archbishop. There is work for you to do. Useful work. I would remind you of the vow of obedience.’
‘I’m sorry, Father,’ Jeannot said. ‘Forgive me.’
He bent his head and sat for a moment in silence. I saw that he was trembling. Then, as if gathering his forces, he said, ‘Father, of course you are right. It is useful work. But, believe me, it will change nothing here. What good will it do to save a few orphans from the streets, to teach some poor children to read a few sentences, when tomorrow there will be a thousand others just like them? Wouldn’t it be better for us to do God’s work by helping the poor to force their employers to give them some sort of living wage? Running an orphanage and a boys’ club is like bandaging a small cut in a body covered with knife wounds. If we can help the poor to better their lives, then we are doing Christian work. That is all I have tried to do. Do the rest of you think it’s fair that I be cast out?’
He looked around the table.
‘I don’t,’ I said.
‘Nor do I,’ said Nöl Destouts.
‘It no longer matters what we think,’ Father Bourque said. ‘The decision has been made.’ He looked coldly at Jeannot. ‘What you do now is up to you. You are no longer under my jurisdiction.’
That same afternoon I drove Jeannot with his books and his few belongings to the orphanage that he had recently founded. It was in the Laramie district, some streets away from La Rotonde. He was silent on the journey but when he entered the building and was greeted with joy by the children and the Sisters of Ste Marie who were running the place, he turned to me and said, ‘Paul, don’t be sad for me. It’s not over, it’s just beginning. Look at these kids. Unless we stand up against Doumergue and the rich and, yes, the Vatican too, what sort of lives are they going to have ten years from now? Remember – I am still a priest. I don’t know what I’d have done if they had taken that away from me. The people of La Rotonde will still think of me as their priest. That’s the important thing.’
But Nöl Destouts, when I told him this, shook his head and said, ‘How can he be a priest if he has nowhere to say Mass and no congregation? It’s all over. They don’t have to shoot him now. He’s finished.’
I don’t remember whether I believed Nöl. I know that in the weeks that followed I felt that I, too, was finished. I had lost my courage. My days and nights were filled with resentment against Father Bourque and the General of our Order, against the Archbishop, the nuncio and, of course, those cardinals far away in Rome who had condoned a dictator’s actions in burning down a church and killing members of its congregation. I felt, as never before, a sense of revulsion at my daily tasks. I stared at my rich mulatto students and saw, in them, their fathers – army officers, industrialists, Doumerguists – those who had allowed the massacre to take place. I began to spend all of my free time at Jeannot’s orphanage and in the boys’ club whose membership grew until, on any afternoon, there might be a hundred youths in and around the premises. And, lacking a pulpit, Jeannot preached to them, as he still preached to anyone who would listen.
Then something happened, something obscure and sinister, some convulsion in that hidden inner circle that surrounded Doumergue. One rumour held that it was an attempt by his wife and son to kill his mistress, another that he was revenging himself against a senior officer who had slept with his daughter. But suddenly the nights were filled with the sounds of army trucks on the move, shots fired at random, sirens screaming in the dawn hours. These night moves were taking place not in slums or rural areas but in the elite districts of Port Riche and in Doumergueville, the newly renamed second city of Ganae. For us at the college the first certain sign of unrest was the sudden disappearance of a few of our students. Later we were told that they and their parents had fled the country.
And then, one Sunday morning after an ominous radio silence of several hours, Uncle D. himself was heard on the national radio. He announced in his usual oblique manner that certain snakes had been found to be moving out into the sunlight, waiting to attack any of the poor people of Ganae who walked in their path. These snakes, he said, were yellow-skinned snakes and they had been given added poisonous fangs by certain traitors in the armed forces. But no matter how cunning these snakes might be they could not escape punishment. That punishment had been meted out by the dedicated leader of the Ganaen people, appointed by God to protect the poor. That man, Pierre-Marie Doumergue, had swiftly moved against these snakes and cut off their heads. The nation had been saved and now must give thanks for its deliverance.
Within the next few days, reports came back to us, through priests in Cap Sud, that squads of bleus had raided southern villages, burned houses and fired on any peasants who tried to stop the burnings. Jeannot, hearing these reports, spent a two-night vigil alone in prayer in the St Jean-Baptiste Church, a few streets away from his orphanage.
A week after the dictator’s broadcast I went up to the boys’ club to teach my Sunday class in a literacy programme that Jeannot had started. When I went into the club I saw that fewer boys than usual were using the recreation hall. ‘Where is everyone?’ I asked Father Cachot.
‘Didn’t you hear? They say that last night in Papanos the bleus massacred nearly a hundred peasants. It was some sort of food riot. They’re starving up there. Anyway, the kids here are organising a demo. They’re marching on the palace.’
At that moment, we heard shouting in the courtyard. I went out and saw a crowd of people carrying long sticks, which they held like drumsticks, beating them together to create a din. The marchers were not only street boys. There were young priests from various parishes around the city, sisters from the Convent Ste Marie and, improbably, because until now they would have been afraid to take part, a group of the desperately poor residents of La Rotonde. Makeshift banners were being prepared. They held one up.
stop the killing. justice for the people
I ran back into the building and into Jeannot’s office. Father Cachot was on the phone. ‘No, we didn’t do it,’ he was telling someone. ‘It’s the kids themselves. I’m trying to find him. Yes, I know.’
‘What’s going on?’ I asked. ‘Where’s Jeannot?’
‘I don’t know.’
Suddenly, I had an idea. I ran out again and down the street to the Church of St Jean-Baptiste. When I went into the church I saw him kneeling in a pew in a side aisle, almost hidden from view. His head was bent in prayer. I hurried up to him. ‘Jeannot, come quickly. Have you heard about this demo?’
His eyes were closed. He opened them, made the sign of the cross, then, genuflecting to the altar, rose and joined me. ‘I didn’t start this,’ he said. ‘I’m praying it will not go badly.’
‘But you’ve got to stop it. Doumergue has outlawed public demonstrations. And they’re marching on the palace.’
‘I can’t. Don’t you see? They’re defending the poor against violence. It’s our duty to help them.’
As we left the church, we heard the long sticks begin to beat a tattoo. The demonstrators had already moved out of the courtyard. Some of the youth club boys, seeing Jeannot, pulled him into their ranks. I went up to him as the procession began to move out on to Avenue de la République. ‘Jeannot, speak to them. They could be killed.’
‘Paul, you don’t have to come. Stay here.’
But, of course, I could not stay. I joined the march. At the start there were perhaps eighty marchers, but as the procession moved into the big Meredieu district, people who came out to watch read the banners and joined the throng. It was seven o’clock in the evening at the end of a burning hot day. As the ranks of the marchers thickened, police and army vehicles were seen moving into the side streets. They did not attempt to block the procession and, within minutes, disappeared as though called back by some central command. Now, the procession was coming to an end of the Avenue de la République which leads into the great square of the presidential palace.
The palace dominates the city. It is a replica of the American White House, but twice as large, a cluster of blindingly white buildings surrounded by formal gardens and high, ornate gilded railings. To reach the palace the marchers must cross the vast empty square that surrounds it, an area forbidden to all but official vehicles. And now, as the sun blooded the evening sky, the marchers were met by the sight of army tanks and weapons carriers blocking the side streets that gave on to the square. As the procession of a hundred and fifty marchers came off the Avenue de la République, army tanks moved in behind them, effectively cutting off their retreat. The marchers, ignoring the tanks, beating their sticks, chanting, ‘Stop the killing!’, moved boldly across the huge empty square, coming to a halt at the gilded main entrance to the palace. The din and chanting ceased.
I, with Jeannot, was in the front rank of the marchers. As the demonstrators stood there in silence, smartly uniformed soldiers of the Garde Présidentielle appeared in the main courtyard, moving in orderly formation, their rifles at the ready. Leading them, on horseback, was their colonel, who had unsheathed his revolver from its holster. There was no sign of the surly bleus who normally lounged around in that courtyard. The main gates of the palace were open. It was a formal confrontation, the President’s elite guard, standing inside the courtyard, facing down the mob.
Suddenly, from somewhere behind the marchers, a volley of shots was fired over the heads of the crowd. In fear, I ducked my head. Others all around me cowered down, but Jeannot moved forward.
In a sight none of us will forget, this small insignificant young man, his white cassock dragging the dust behind his sandalled heels, walked slowly towards the opened gates of the palace, the gun barrels of the Garde Présidentielle aimed at him like the rifles of a firing squad. When he entered the courtyard he knelt down, bowed his head and joined his hands in prayer.
There was a moment of total silence. The guards, aiming, looked up at their colonel as if waiting for an order. I saw the Colonel hesitate, then turn and look back at the long french windows on the ground floor of the palace. His horse, fidgeting, made a sudden sidestep as though shying at some invisible object on the ground. The Colonel, steadying his horse, stood up in his stirrups, staring back at the windows as though searching for something there. Suddenly, he barked out a command. The Garde Présidentielle lowered their weapons.
The central set of windows opened and in the red light of the setting sun a stooped figure shuffled out on to the marble steps. He wore a shabby black suit and a battered Homburg hat. As he stepped down, carefully, each marble stair negotiated as though he would fall, he removed his hat and held it by his side. The reddened evening light fell on the bald black skull of an authentique, a noir as dark as the poorest peasant from Cap Sud or slum dweller of La Rotonde. His face was disfigured by ugly grey blotches or sores. I saw him moisten his lips with his tongue.
The demonstrators stood, transfixed. The only sounds in that vast square were the clacking hoofs of the fidgeting horse and the slow, dragging steps of the dictator as Doumergue walked slowly towards the open gates and the kneeling figure in his path. He stopped directly in front of Jeannot and, looking out over the crowd, made a feeble signalling gesture with his left hand. At once a bemedalled military aide ran out from the palace, carrying a hand microphone, attached to a long coil. Doumergue waited, staring ahead into the red sky like a blind man until the microphone was put into his hand. At that moment he gave his battered hat to the military aide and tapped the microphone with his fingers to see if it was working. The sound of the tap echoed, eerily loud, from public-address speakers high above the palace courtyard.
And now we heard that reedy yet commanding voice, familiar to us as the voice of a relative, speaking in Creole, the common tongue:
‘My people. You have come here to talk to me. You have heard bad rumours which are not true. Those rumours are spread by enemies of the poor people of Ganae who know I am their protector. You have come here like children who have been deceived. I am sorry that our enemies have lied to you. Your life is hard. You work hard. This is the Sabbath day, a day of rest for you, and for me. I ask you now. Do not believe these stories. They are not true. Go home. Go in peace.’
Jeannot, still on his knees, looked up at the dictator. ‘God has given us the strength to come here. We pray to Him to help us now. If you did not do the killing in Papanos you must punish those who did.’
The dictator stared at him for a moment, then lifted the clublike microphone that he held in his hand and brought it down with a sickening sound on Jeannot’s head. Jeannot, stunned, fell forward, sprawling on the ground. At that moment, one of Jeannot’s orphans, a fifteen-year-old boy called Daniel Lalonde, broke suddenly from the ranks of the crowd and ran in at the opened gates, his long stick upraised to strike the dictator.
A single shot rang out. The boy staggered, then fell prostrate a few feet away from Doumergue. I saw the Colonel on his horse, the revolver in his hand. Jeannot rose from his knees, went to the boy and bent over him, lifting him into his arms. Blood, spreading from a wound in the boy’s neck, spilled on to Jeannot’s white cassock in a great crimson stain.
The dictator, still holding the microphone in his hand, said, in a voice which echoed eerily on the loudspeakers, ‘Bring him inside.’
But Jeannot, carrying the boy, turned away from Doumergue and walked out through the gates. Several of us ran to assist him. When I helped lift the boy from Jeannot’s arms I saw that he was dead. I looked back. The presidential guards were closing the gates. The Colonel had holstered his revolver but sat, slumped on his horse as though he had suffered a wound.
Suddenly, Jeannot called to the marchers, ‘Go home! Go home! God will avenge us! God will avenge us!’
The marchers were no longer a mob, no longer threatening. They were people, shocked, stunned, frightened by violence. Behind the now-closed gates the dictator shakily remounted the marble steps and reentered his palace. The presidential guards still held ranks, their rifles aimed at the marchers who were retreating, half-running, across the vast empty square.
Jeannot, his cassock soaked with the dead boy’s blood, his forehead cut and bruised from the dictator’s blow, walked back with me, silent, at the heels of the fleeing crowd. The red sky went black as the sun fell swiftly behind the distant sea.
In darkness, we brought the dead boy home.