‘It’s a pity in the way there is no woman — any longer,’ Gabriel said. ‘The Bishop is sympathetically disposed, in the new enlightenment which prevails after Vatican II. The sexual problems of his priests deserve loving consideration. Perhaps you read his piece in The Cross? However, in your case you might be better advised to apply for a transfer.’
‘Right! I apply for a transfer — to the world next-door. Kindly inform His Grace.’
PINK PRIEST MUST GO!
Blanchaille did not consider himself particularly pink and he certainly no longer thought of himself as a priest, but he was in full agreement with the sentiment expressed in the crudely lettered banner the Kretas waved so enthusiastically — he was fully prepared, indeed he most devoutly wished, to go.
Gabriel Dladla had returned with the Bishop’s reply soon after the siege began.
‘I’m afraid it can’t be done, Blanchie. This is your place now.’
‘I’m finished here.’
‘Finished? For heaven’s sake, you’ve barely started.’
Gabriel had arrived wearing what he called his second hat. This wasn’t a hat at all but referred to the car he was driving, a sleek black Chrysler belonging to the Papal Nuncio, Agnelli, whose secretary he was, as well as serving as Bishop Blashford’s chaplain, choice appointments both indicating to a sceptical world that the Roman Church in Southern Africa took to its heart its black followers, indeed did more than that, set them soaring into the firmament, rising stars. Gabriel had come a very long way from the picnic basket in Father Lynch’s garden when the two brothers, Gabriel and Looksmart, sat flanking the little priest. ‘My two negro princes’, he called them, as they sat watching the altar boys struggle with the weeds. Gabriel’s was the only entry into the priesthood which had been approved. His brother Looksmart’s attempt had failed when the new black theology took hold of him and he burnt the Bible on the steps of the seminary as ‘the white man’s manual of exploitation’ and joined the political underground. Blanchaille’s vocation had been derided and ignored. Only Gabriel’s decision to become a priest had been applauded.
‘He is only doing what any intelligent boy would do who wishes to rise. His behaviour would be entirely logical in Spain, or Portugal or Ireland. May we skip any tiresome talk of faith or morals? Gabriel intends to get ahead.’
Father Gabriel Dladla in his beautifully tailored dark suit and its pristine dog-collar, in his soft black fedora which he did not remove in the course of their interview, his chunky gold watch which he consulted with elegant economy in an unmistakable signal that the interview was nearing its end, with his whole air of intelligent, assured concentration with which he listened to Blanchaille but which did not suppress the faint air of impatience of a busy man with other, more important things on his mind. This was once the barefoot boy on the blanket translated in what seemed like a wink of time into a personage of weight and responsibility in the Church hierarchy. And it was with a wink surely that Blanchaille could move him back again to the blanket in the garden. He tried and failed. His eyelid fluttered. Gabriel remained the elegant, deft, important young person he was.
‘Now I’m sorry Blanchie but I must be off. I have a party of visiting Italians to collect from the airport, guests of the Papal Nuncio. They’re flying in from Rome. Do you know Rome at all? I adore Rome. Quite apart from the obvious connections in our case, it is the most surprising, rejuvenating of cities.’
‘Gabriel, I cannot stay here. There must be another parish…’
‘If you ever go, I recommend to you the Piazza Navona, a square which should be everyone’s first glimpse of Rome, not even the tourists can ruin its perfect proportions…’
‘Another appointment —’
‘Another appointment? But this is your appointment and I am here to let you know that Bishop Blashford confirms you in this appointment. There is nowhere for you to be but here. Nowhere to go but back, back to Pennyheaven, this time for an indefinite stay.’
Blanchaille watched him walking down the garden path. The protesting parishioners cheered when he approached. Gabriel doffed his hat, waved cheerily to them and was gone.
Blanchaille phoned Lynch. The old priest cackled at the news of the visit. The electronic eavesdroppers chirruped and squawked along with him.
‘Speak up, Blanchie, and keep it short. The line’s heavily and ineptly tapped. The bastards never worked out how to use the equipment they import in such quantities from America.’
‘I’m thinking of moving on.’
‘Good. Knew you would come to your senses one day. Perhaps we should have a few words. Where are you?’
Blanchaille told him.
‘My God, right in the sticks. What’s that noise? I can hear people shouting.’
‘Those are my parishioners. I’m under siege.’
Lynch’s laughter was drowned in a shriek of static.
And I saw in my dream how Blanchaille’s stay in the new periurban suburb of Merrievale as parish priest of the spanking-new church of St Peter-in-the-Wild had come to end in undignified confusion after just one month. The defection of his black housekeeper Joyce upset him particularly. She’d never got used to his arrival or the loss of the man he had replaced. How dreadfully unfavourably he must have compared with his predecessor, the youthful, energetic Syrian, Father Rischa. The Parish Consensus Committee had got to Joyce. They told her that Blanchaille was on his way out, they’d shown her the fatal mark of blood upon his lintel imprinted there by the Angel of Death who had passed that way and she’d shot off like a rabbit, an absolute winner in the Petrine stakes, in the thrice-crowing cock awards. Traitress. To hell with her!
St Peter-in-the Wild was Blanchaille’s first parish and his last. He hadn’t been there two minutes when the complaints began.
‘And what is the nature of your complaint, Mr Makapan?’
‘History,’ came the simple if unexpected reply from the brick salesman. ‘Not only your own particular history, but your lack of understanding of the historical process in general and of our parts in it.’
Blanchaille’s particular history — what was it? Unremarkable, really. A hostel boy, one-time altar server who had gone up to the seminary to become a priest. Why a priest? Because he wished to be like Father Lynch who understood the system of the Regime and sought to expose it. ‘You are not priestly material,’ Father Lynch had cautioned. ‘You are raised with the puritan, primitive, moralising web of the system and cannot destroy it, but what you can do is to hunt down the guilty men and bring them to book. That is your real vocation. Blanchaille, the police college waits for you — answer the call!’
For once Lynch and the Bishop were in agreement. Blashford opposed his entry into the seminary and when the time came for Blanchaille’s ordination, continued to oppose it, avoiding the duty to perform the ceremony by being indisposed. Instead Blanchaille was ordained by a visiting Hungarian archbishop who was deported soon after the event for gross interference in the domestic affairs of the country. Blanchaille had long suspected Blashford’s hand behind the expulsion. Newly ordained, his first visit to Lynch had been disastrous. Lynch had stood him up in the pulpit and introduced him to the congregation as ‘the boy you might remember having served at this altar for many a year, and is now a policeman engaged in important undercover work in the country, hence his disguise…’
Blanchaille had done no parish work. After six years of moral theology mixed with intense sexual agonies in the seminary, applying the purity paddle (a miniature ping-pong bat without the usual rubber facings) with a short, downward slap morning and night, whenever his errant member stiffened beneath his soutane, he went to work in the transit camps, the garbage heaps where the human rubbish, the superfluous appendages were thrown away; the huge shanty towns in the remote and barren veld set aside by the Regime as temporary homes for a variety of black people: there were in the camps the dependants, wives, children, grandparents of black workers in the cities; there were illegal immigrants who had taken work in the cities without proper papers; there were the aged, infirm and unemployable who had failed to fulfil the requirements of their contracts; there were shattered black communities which had been living, either by historical accident or with illegal intent, in areas designated as being for other ethnic groups, tribes, races, clans, formations laid down according to the principles of Ethnic Autonomy.