The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl Read online

  They had all underestimated the ferocity of the Roman May. They were too respectable to unbutton. But several of them had taken off and were carrying their topcoats. The crook of their left elbows sweated unseen under furled thicknesses of sober, solid weave.

  Watching their own and their neighbours’ feet advance, the men envied the women (the whole group was dressed strictly within the conventions assigned by western taboo to the sexes) their freedom to go sandalled, even open-toed, and thus aerated. The women envied the men the rigid, shaping container that kept out the sun, the dust and the slap of the pavement on one’s sole. The women knew that their own freedom was freedom merely to ooze uncomfortably over the rim like warmed brie.

  When they reached the obelisk at the heart of the oval space, the pilgrims divided and straggled past. No one looked at the two flanking fountains, though the fringes of the group almost skirted their sphere of play. The fountains were things to avoid thinking about lest they prompt one or both of the coach-tourist’s endemic anxieties, when he would next be able to go to the lavatory and when he would next be able to get a drink of water.

  Several pilgrim minds cast back, with an affection provoked by comparison, to the confraternity’s trip of the previous year (Liége – Reims – Arc – Orléans – Châteaudun – Rouen – Liége again) which had been in the steps (but not literally the footsteps), of Jeanne d’Arc (and without language adjustment, too).

  The pilgrim feet slapped down on the decorative lines that marked on the ground the area’s radial symmetry.

  The pilgrims didn’t notice or, because the lines were straight and the pattern symmetrical, avoided noticing. The oval enclosure, with its tall obelisk and two slightly less tall fountains marking, in measured stages, its maximum width, might have been a formal garden, but one that, disappointingly to the pilgrims’ tastes, contained not so much as the semblance of anything natural.

  (On those of the women’s dresses that were decorated, the decoration was taken, of course, from natural forms. But the flowers and leaves that sprouted over the Belgians were much less gaudy than those on plants.)

  Probably it was disappointment as well as frustration and foot-soreness that made the pilgrims lower their gaze. The huge area which their minds had leapt across at coach-pace consisted of the oval and, leading out of it like a coda, a narrower but still vast slab of oblong space. The piazza as a whole was bounded by a double (and roofed) colonnade. This colonnade was the horizon which the pilgrims’ glimpses found when they looked up. It was, insofar as its chief ingredient was columns, classical and, insofar as it bulged into an oval, baroque; whereas the pilgrims, in their heart of Belgian hearts (whose tendency had only been abetted by the previous year’s tour), expected a truly religious edifice to be gothic.

  Having trailed (some of the carried coats dipping wearily towards the ground) through the oval, the pilgrims had now only the rectangle to cover: but the ‘only’ which their thoughts had framed turned out, as they plodded up it, to be another mistaken estimate.

  Still none of them looked anywhere except at the ground. So none of them remarked the moment when a number of objects, almost indiscernibly tiny at such height, began to tumble slowly down from the Poussin-blue sky.

  At last the pilgrims had traversed even the appended oblong. They watched their own feet slap slowly up the steps; and then the whole pilgrim group, as though swallowed in a mass sacrifice to Moloch, disappeared darkly into St Peter’s.

  Their passage through the piazza brought an illusion of a breeze, plus a moment’s mobile shadow across the brilliance of the light, to people standing about in the piazza, including a woman shorthand-typist of 37, from New Zealand, and her companion, a woman infant-teacher, aged 28, also from New Zealand, who were standing near the steps; a half dozen Japanese management trainees, who were holding out their light meters towards the fountains; young Father Kevin O’Flummery who, more tightly buttoned even than the Belgians, was gasping and taking shelter in the vaulted shadow afforded by the colonnade; and the gorgeous person who thought of himself as the Black Prince, who stood drawn up beside the obelisk as though challenging comparison with it, if not quite for height, then for impressiveness.

  This person was in truth black but not a prince. In the middle of Africa his father kept a thatched general store, whose open front was hung with bicycle tyres and transistor radios suspended by their carrying straps, and his mother kept hens whom his father was forever having to shoo out of the shop.

  He himself, Hector Erasmus Mkolo, was their seventh child, a fact in which he had felt blessed by luck from the start.

  His early schooling had been under a master who had himself been taught by an Englishman, at a time when the territory was under British mandate, with the result that the first intellectual instruction Hector Erasmus received placed particular emphasis on the dynastic history of medieval England. Hector Erasmus was seven when the image of the Black Prince fell on his imagination. His imagination was, indeed, so stunned that he paid no attention to the rest of the lesson and never learned why the son of Edward III had been thus called. The reason his imagination supplied, to his private satisfaction, was that the British royal family was, through a genetic fluke, given to producing, every few generations, a black heir.

  Soon after forming this theory, Hector Erasmus became strongly, though privately, persuaded that he himself was the fluke heir of the present generation, consigned to foster parents (quite kind and attentive ones, he admitted, which argued to him that they had been carefully chosen) and hidden away in an African village for reasons of state. As he grew, evidence seemed to corroborate his belief – the evidence, chiefly, of how and how extensively he grew. He quickly outgrew each pair of khaki shorts and then each pair of denim jeans that his father provided from consignments ordered for the shop. He overtopped, successively, each of his six elder siblings; then his father; and finally his mother. That convinced him he was no blood relation of theirs; and the princeliness of his true descent was quite confirmed for him by the time he was 17, when, having overcome the bodily awkwardness of his oversized puberty, he had turned out to be superbly (and again in contrast to his supposed family) handsome.

  Curiously, his sense of good fortune in being a seventh child did not desert him even though he was now sure he was not the child of those parents at all. Unless the royal family of England had bred and concealed six daughters before him, he was unlikely to be a seventh royal child, since it was obvious to him that he must be the eldest at least of boy children – and thus, like the first Black Prince, rightful Prince of Wales. Yet he clung to the luck of the number seven, no more disturbed by the discrepancy than pious Christians are disturbed by believing that Jesus was descended from Abraham and David (in lucky-three groups of twice lucky-seven generations at a time)1 through his father Joseph,2 while simultaneously believing that Joseph was not his father at all.3

  Sporadic irrationalisms apart, Hector Erasmus proved as intelligent as he was handsome, though it was probably less his intelligence than the soundness (despite an eccentric bias in some of its subject matter) of his schooling that made it easy for him to win a travelling scholarship.

  With a copy of Arthur Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer in one denim pocket and of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe in the other, he embarked for Europe, while his father and siblings made ritual gestures of anxiety on the quay and his mother, usually stoical in manner, ran up and down like one of her own hens.

  The voyage made Hector Erasmus seasick, and that in turn made him falter for the first time in his intention of carrying his grand tour as far north as Wales, there to claim his inheritance.

  He landed at Lisbon. He set off, brown fibre suitcase (again from the shop) in hand, to look for an hotel. He had not even left the cobbled area round the docks when his imagination was struck by a vividly patterned cotton material displayed on a market stall. It was probably, Hector Erasmus guessed, an import from his native continent. It was of good quality and a bargain
for cheapness. (He had developed expertise while helping in the shop on Saturdays.) He bought the whole roll.

  He entered his hotel suitcase in hand and roll of cotton balanced on his head. As the latter method of carrying large parcels was as acceptable in Lisbon as in Africa, it was a commonplace, if unusually good-looking, figure who, wearing tee-shirt and jeans, registered at the hotel desk. But when he descended that night for dinner it was in tribal splendour.

  The transformation had cost him three large safety pins and two hours’ struggle. He had wrapped the material, in horizontal mummy layers, into a tight cylinder round his body, and had then tossed the tail over his right shoulder. His left shoulder emerged bare, gleaming brown and beautifully muscled.

  He was treated, in the hotel dining-room, with deference.

  In his early days in Europe Hector Erasmus avoided fellow-Africans and also, indeed, Europeans who seemed conversant with African culture. He was afraid someone would challenge the correctness of the arrangement of his tribal dress. Intelligence rescued him from anxiety and consequent furtiveness. He reasoned that Africa was so large and diverse that no one could be acquainted with all its cultures and that therefore no one could authoritatively pronounce that there was no African culture according to which he was correctly dressed. He began to travel about Southern Europe in open splendour, often gathering a train of unofficial courtiers as he went. In every city, he visited the market and thus compiled himself a varied and ever more princely wardrobe of his ‘native’ costume.

  Arrived at Rome, he felt not in the least outdone by the ecclesiastical robes he saw at the church services.

  The Roman climate, though no hotter than the African, was a little oppressive for him. On the other hand, the brilliant light set him off very well, and so did the Italian habit of staring and pointing at wonders in the street. (He had found the Portuguese disappointingly quiet, dignified and altogether rather African in demeanour.) He was increasingly disinclined to bother with Wales, to visit which would require of him another sea voyage and which might well turn out to be misty and where he might even encounter legal obstructions were he to try to establish his claim. It occurred to him that it would be easier to avoid legal disputes and simply use the title that was his by right. If challenged, he could say it was a translation of an African title; and again he could rely on the diversity of African culture to prevent anyone from asserting either that there was no such title or that, if there was, it did not belong to him. Whether or not he should, from now on, simply give himself out to be the Black Prince he pondered as he stood beside the obelisk in Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s piazza (where he had been marked down by less attention than he was used to, because the place was frequented chiefly by foreign tourists, who did not always demonstrate what they were noticing). Unable to make up his mind, he waited happily for the luck of a seventh child, which had always attended him, to appoint his course.

  Meanwhile Father O’Flummery leaned one hand against a column and used the back of the other to wipe his young, scrubbed, pitted, ugly, trowel-shaped face. He wished he possessed one of the inverted tea-strainer hats that Roman priests wore, instead of the thick, felted, shapeless one that kept out Irish drizzle but soaked up and magnified Italian heat. But he knew he was suffering not only from the heat but from the flush and the cold sweat of guilt.

  He had not been in Rome 24 hours, and it was no more than ten minutes since he had undergone what should have been the grand spiritual experience of first setting eyes on St Peter’s. His reaction to the sight had appalled him. It seemed tinged not only with heresy but with unpatrioticness. (At the memory, he blessed himself.) His instant thought had been that St Peter’s was not a patch on St Paul’s. Even an a second and, mentally at least, cooller look, he found the building before him at once squat and grandiosely gigantic, while his memory played applaudingly on the superb, almost marine-architectural design of the Protestant cathedral built by an Englishman.

  His response was the more culpable in that he had fallen instantly in love, to the point almost of sensual excitement, with Bernini’s colonnade, a monument which, though commissioned by a pope,4 had no spiritual significance.

  O’Flummery was taken, first, by the physical presence of the columns. When you looked at the ones on the opposite side of the piazza, they were all smooth, slim elegance. But those you were actually in among presented not only a roughness of surface but great swelling thicknesses of shape. To stand next to one was like standing next to the stout wrinkled leg of an elephant, and it tempted you in the same way to measure your affection and wonder by rounding the palm of your hand against it.

  O’Flummery’s eye for a building had been tacitly trained by his being brought up in Limerick and having served as a curate in Dublin. No one had offered him instruction; so puritanism (at least until he shocked himself by his dislike of St Peter’s) had not intervened between him and his perceptions.

  When his vision shifted from the columns to the colonnade as a whole, he fell in love again – and, in addition, automatically perceived the design in groundplan. That made it clear to him5 that the oval plus the oblong approach to the church made up the shape of a keyhole. Bernini had baroquely punned on the keys of St Peter.

  (Though he had not yet entered the church and was not now sure he would ever dare to, O’Flummery knew that the keys themselves were incorporated, putto-borne, in the monument inside the church which Bernini had designed to enshrine the throne of St Peter.)

  In his delight in the papal pun his appreciation had discovered, Father O’Flummery feared that he (having already been unpatriotic and incipiently Protestant) was being flippant.

  It was the New Zealanders (Dinah Lightbight and Lorette Lukey) who first looked up towards the sky.

  They had not known each other in New Zealand but had first met at the pensione in Rome where, by a chance they remarked on with amazement, they were both staying. (The chance was less extreme than they supposed, as the pensione was the only cheapish accommodation in Rome included on a list used by several New Zealand travel agents, but they had both contrived to forget how they came by its address.)

  In Rome they were both impressed by the shrinking into the small, hazy distance of matters which, in New Zealand, had seemed to them of prime and unquestionable importance. They felt exhilarated by freedom and novelty, yet dizzy, disorientated, and almost as though they were spinning in space. It was probably in order to induce in themselves a bodily dizziness to match their intellectual state that, as they stood, two tall, large-boned, rather plain women, one in a red cotton dress and the other in blue linen shorts, near the front steps of St Peter’s, they expressed their appreciation of the hot, clear weather by throwing back their heads and tilting their long bony faces into parallel with the sky.

  What they saw descending from it they took to be snowflakes.

  Delighted and excited, they remarked to one another on the freakishness of so cold an intrusion into such a burning day. Suddenly the anomaly became for them a metaphor of the unnatural (as they thought of it, their education having concealed from them how often something of the sort happens) passion for each other. It was a passion not yet expressed, let alone acted on. But as they shifted their attention from the incipient snow to one another, the visible (to each other) thought visited them both that, early in the day as it yet was, the maid, early-rising and hard-working in the Italian fashion, would probably by now have finished ‘doing’ one or other of their bedrooms at the pensione, where they could consequently be secure from interruption.

  Without waiting for the expected snowflakes to land and cool them, they marched briskly back down the length of the hot piazza, towards the river and their pensione.

  As they passed the fountain, the Japanese management trainees were zipping their cameras back into their carrying cases and moving, in a disciplined group, away. Only one lagged. He had received such an exceptionally high reading from his light meter that he paused to peer up into the dazzling sky for
confirmation.

  What he saw pleased him. He was an amateur of Aubrey Beardsley and a theorist who believed that, since the enormous influence of japonaiserie on western graphic styles in the Nineties, the visual cultures of East and West had interpenetrated to the point of fusion. Before he hurried after the rest of the group (which was due, in 15 minutes’ time, to attend, in the conference room of their hotel, a lecture by a representative of Pirelli), he took out his notebook and, in characters themselves more like drawing than writing, and in syllables which he thought he might be able to re-cast into a poem incarnating a little of the sadness of mortality, made a note to the effect that even in Rome the cherry blossom falls.

  Hector Erasmus, from the moment he saw the objects descending, knew that they were pieces of paper bearing a message for him. He waited; and one seemed to be directing itself precisely towards him. But at the last moment some unseen eddy in the air lifted it and bore it aside, where it spiked itself on the obelisk.

  He considered climbing up to get it. He had been adept, in Africa, at shinning up tree trunks. But in Africa he had not been wound about by African dress, and he was not sure but that the sharpened sides of the obelisk might make it harder than a tree to negotiate. It would not be consonant with princedom to get half way and stick. So he continued to wait, content to count on his luck.

  From one side of the oval, a woman trained as a botanist, who practised these days as an environmentalist, began to make the circuit of the colonnade. Glancing out between columns at the piazza, she noticed a fall (blown, she presumed, from some nearby garden) of oleander petals.

  From the opposite side, in the opposite direction, the circuit of the colonnade was slowly begun by a collection of Indian novice nuns, newly flown in, on economy fares, to people a depleted convent. They were under the command of an elderly nun who, magpie in her habit, seemed to hop around them and peck at them with long stabs of Italian, which they scarcely understood. They moved, lightly chattering among themselves, with the soft driftingness of the saris they had had to discard in favour of wimples, from beneath which gleamed cow-brown eyes and an occasional jewelled caste mark. They were neither happy nor unhappy, neither willing nor unwilling to be in Rome. They believed, though without passion, that Jesus was as loving as Krishna, albeit in a different way, and that they would, with practice, learn Italian.