Chapter 10 #16
He took great pleasure in the work, thinking it would be useful for the brethren who work alongside him in tending the sick and the poor.
He worked on it in his cell, late at night, composing it in ink of blue-black, marking in the swamp, crosshatching the dampest areas, using the symbol for marshy ground, taking care to include each individual dwelling, even the names the inhabitants had given to the pathways.
When he handed it, with no small expectation of praise, to their spiritual leader, the Provincial, the man had put on his spectacles, held it for a long moment at arm’s length, brows raised, then turned a searching look on Liam.
Was it then that Liam felt his faith loosening in its foundation, like an unsound tooth? He doesn’t know.
Early this morning, as he was consuming his breakfast of maize porridge, a ragged and stained letter was handed to him.
On it was a postage stamp of his home country, and Liam saw by the franking marks that it had taken nearly a year to reach him: the Order had initially sent it, in error, to Rome, and since then it seemed to have lingered for an entire winter and spring in Bombay, before making its way to him, here in Cochin.
Liam had set aside his bowl and opened it.
The letter was composed of several paragraphs, signed “your old friend, Father Joseph,” and it told him that Liam’s father, Tomás, had departed this life, not long after suffering a disfiguring accident, and was now with God.
He was buried next to Liam’s mother, may they both rest in eternal peace.
Puzzling, Liam thinks, as he stands before his pupils, that he should have had no notion of something so visceral, so significant.
In some obscure way he feels cheated or hoodwinked.
Would it be an unfair expectation that he might have received some sign or intimation of this, being a man of the cloth who has devoted his very life to the Lord?
Could God in His wisdom not have taken the trouble to let Liam know in a dream or a vision or in one of His mysterious ways that his father had been injured and had died?
If the boys at their desks were to look up at this point and observe their master, they might notice a quivering in the hand that reaches up to dab at his face with a handkerchief.
No such trouble was taken. No such vision or dream was sent to him.
His father died—there were no details as to how and why—and has been buried for more than a year, and Liam has been going about Cochin, teaching, hearing confessions, weeding the vegetables, helping the poor and dispossessed, blithely trusting that all at home was as it should be, not the wreckage described by Father Joseph.
What was it the letter had said? Liam has to strain to remember.
That Rose and Eugene were gone to live with the widow, the cottage shut up.
No reference at all to Enda, and Liam would like to know why she is also not living with the widow.
Where has she got herself to? Could she have married and be living elsewhere?
Why would Father Joseph not mention her?
This incomplete account of his family’s dissolution, the unknown accident suffered by his father, his death, had caused Liam to stand up from the refectory table with a start, his bowl and spoon clattering to the floor, the letter crushed in his fist. He was aware of the other priests murmuring and exclaiming among themselves.
The Provincial had laid his hand on Liam’s shoulder and steered him from the room.
After a few discreet questions, he had suggested that Liam forgo his duties for the week, even perhaps go into retreat, but Liam had shaken his head.
No need, he had said. Work is the best medicine for me.
There is much, in this town, for Liam to be doing, besides teaching these boys, besides overseeing the construction work, which are the main duties assigned to him.
A church is being built not far from here, funded by generous donations from ship-merchants and spice traders and tea-plantation owners: an edifice of stone and marble, in alternating stripes of lemon-white and malachite-green.
It will be a towering monument to God, the Provincial tells them.
It will bring people from miles around to the word of the Lord; its splendour will persuade doubters, will beckon many into their fold.
It will include a college, in a side-wing, where young men may train as priests.
The other Jesuits here are from all over the globe: between them all, Liam knows, they speak sixteen languages.
They spend their days at prayer, at work, instructing the faithful, in silent contemplation, talking with tact to the people from the pink and balconied villas: they might be prevailed upon to offer funds to the cause, perhaps a topaz frieze for the interior of the church’s vestry or a gold-winged eagle-lectern for the pulpit.
Liam tries to avoid this particular duty, preferring to go out in the evenings or the early mornings to distribute maize, milk, clothing, whatever medicines can be spared, to the inhabitants of the swamp-village.
Liam cannot suppress his unease at the sight of the church raising itself from the ground, its walls creeping upwards.
It is his allotted task to check and recheck the engineer’s calculations, and he does so, unfailingly, every day, unrolling the charts and plans with a leaden heart.
He has prayed for guidance, implored God to help him appreciate the beauty of the building, and recognise the purpose of the Order’s presence here in this country.
Increasingly, however, it sickens him to see the men from the swamp labouring in the midday heat on the malachite facade, on the marble buttresses, their children crouched in miserable groups on the ground, wielding rudimentary hammers, breaking apart stones.
His hands, clasped behind his back, tighten around each other as the schoolboys intone their algebraic principles.
It is not just the construction of the church that is eroding the conviction that has sustained Liam for most of his life.
It is not only the filth and the poverty, the clay shacks, from whose walls protrude twigs and rushes and matted hair and old fabric.
It is not merely the ordure that runs down their pathways, the carcasses of dogs and goats that lie, bloated and discoloured, in full view.
It is not the biting insects that mass in storm clouds over the swamp.
It is not just the children at whose bedsides Liam must pray before he supervises their burials, their tiny bodies shrouded in rough sacking. It is all of this yet none of this.
In the end, what erodes the effigy within him into rubble is something so prosaic, so imperceptible, Liam cannot explain it to anyone—not his brethren, not the Provincial.
He cannot explain it to the committee of stern and angry senior priests who summon him to Calcutta to interrogate him, or even people he will meet later in life, those to whom he will have to say that he was once a priest, that he spent years in the Church, that he was not only a priest but a Jesuit—until one day he wasn’t.
He will, of course, realise over time that it is best not to disclose this; he will learn it is not something to throw into conversation but instead something to steer around, as a ship navigates past a submerged rock.
Best not to divulge, unless he wants to elicit either judgemental silence or a slew of unanswerable questions.
On this day, which is like any other—apart from the letter, of course, apart from that—Liam moves up and down the lines of desks, the shining heads of the boys.
The usual brisk trade wind is eddying through the town, finding its way around corners, up alleys, through window frames, down gutters.
Through the windows, as he paces, he glimpses men sifting through a sackful of gnarled ginger roots, a boy pulling a horse by its bridle, two government officials sitting at a table outside a chai house, holding clay cups in gloved fingers.
At an ornamental fountain is a group of young girls in frilled dresses the colours of hyacinths, their pale hair swinging down to their waists, watched from wooden benches by their mammas, their bird-like voices reaching Liam in the schoolhouse.
An elephant topped with an ornate, carved howdah lumbers past at a stately pace, and Liam observes the bobbing heads and the profiles within, a young man with a blue turban leaning out from the silk cushions, laughing, to throw a green-skinned papaya to a passer-by.
Around Liam are the sons of wealthy traders, in starched white collars and ironed blue smocks, their leather-clad feet swinging above the parquet, their little elbows propping up their heads. It is the theorem of Pythagoras that they are reciting.
The square of the hypotenuse of the right-angled triangle, the boys intone, with varying enthusiasm, is equal to…
Liam glances out once again at the people drinking chai, the beady-eyed mothers under the trees, the elephant as it rounds a corner, half listening: of the right triangle, his mind echoes, square of the hypotenuse.
Only yesterday, one of the older and more unruly of the boys had grumbled about having to learn Pythagoras’s theorem, saying what possible use could it be to any of them?
Liam had expounded to them the exquisite simplicity of it, and how it was the exact formula that enabled surveyors to calculate distances, to create maps.
Imagine, he had said to them, the whole vast extent of this country, divided up into triangles: that is how they were able to do it.