My Chocolate Redeemer (24 page)

‘Pouf! Like magic!' He snaps his fingers in the darkness. Strange the way he hovers between excitement, sadness and amusement. I begin to wonder how far this plan is mine, and not his.

‘Yes, I suppose it will seem like magic.'

‘Shall I walk, run or fly?'

‘Whichever is easiest. I'll give you the keys to Monsieur Cherubini's black Mercedes. You'll find it in the parking area behind the square. You can't miss it, it's the biggest, baddest car around. You don't know him, but he owns this town. He'll be arriving with my uncle in the mayor's car.'

‘Bella, you are a genius! Would your papa were living at this hour … to see his daughter save me … in style!'

‘It's my pleasure, I promise you. I can't wait to see the Angel's face when he discovers his car's missing – and you've gone home!'

‘Home –' He takes a shaky breath, gulps and begins to sing, ‘Just a Closer Walk with Thee …', but he hasn't the heart to go on and lets the hymn trail off like water freezing in a tap.

‘Was that another favourite at your rallies?'

He nods, so fiercely the bed sways on its bricks. ‘Beloved of the market-stall holders. It was ear-splitting, you know, in their mouths. What time will you go to the rally?'

‘My uncle wants me there at ten.'

‘What about your sick grandmother? Will they leave her here?'

‘No. She won't miss it. Deathly ill though she is, they're going to move her on a litter.'

He is puzzled. ‘Explain please – what is this litter?'

‘It's like a stretcher. Grandmama is to be carried onto the platform. The doctor has warned her it may kill her. Grandmama disregards the warning of the doctor because it's tainted by socialism. She trusts instead that the aura of the Angel will heal her.'

‘To reach down and touch her, to raise her from her sickbed?'

‘Something like that. Why do you ask?'

‘Because I do the same thing myself. People were forever pushing forward demanding the sacred touch, expecting to be healed. I did what I could. In my day leprosy was slow to yield to the touch. Goitre was more congenial, and river blindness. Do you say – congenial?'

‘Easier to cure?'

‘Thank you. I am trying all the time to improve my English. I am most humble.'

‘Grateful.'

‘No, not grateful, I've never been grateful in my life. Grateful feelings are something people give you after you're dead or when they want you to kill someone else … In Africa, gratitude is not a virtue, it's a weapon. No, I feel humble to be curing people. All the people pushing and yelling and dying for my sacred touch – “Redeemer! Redeemer!” they would shout. And of course they would be pushed back by one's bodyguard who got real mad when this happened. Or they did worse than pushing. I had a lot of trouble with bodyguards. You don't find them like you used to. Palestinians were the best. If you're ever stuck for bodyguards, always you go for Palestinians. But you can't get them any more. East Germans do OK. Fine equipment, but slow to move without instructions. Not good if you know that you've got a few days coming up with what we call a high-loon factor.'

‘What's that?'

‘Every ruler has them. Days when the crazy people, who always wanted to kill you anyway, suddenly multiply. Because of the weather maybe. Or the breeding season for loons. Anyway the assassins line up to do it on what we call high-loon factor days. When that happens give me Cubans.'

He calls them ‘koobins' in his rough, growly whisper, biting off the name in the middle with a smile like it tastes nice, like it's a sweetmeat that he's fond of. It's amazing what you learn if you listen to a former redeemer. Did you know that, in Africa, it's when the parties of Russians and South Africans slip into town that you know the leader's dying? Birds of ill-omen arriving with a flap of leathery wings, and promises of trade credits. And coffins, I suppose. Shopping for political influence when the shades come down and night falls on the big man in the presidential palace. Then there are the games with names. Take his own Public Audit Committee, who seem rather fierce, especially for a bunch of accountants. Why should people run in terror from the Public Audit Committee?

He's still rather emotional and inclined to raise his voice and I have to keep putting my finger to his lips. When I do he kisses it. Or pretends to nibble it. That's really weird! Bits of me disappear inside him. From my silver trunk I now fetch two plastic cups and the flask of hot chocolate I've prepared and, for safety's sake, I move really close to him and we sit there in the darkness.

‘But why do you have to import bodyguards? If the Wouff are such a warlike tribe, why can't they do it?'

‘Well you see the Wouff believe their leader is a god-king. So therefore it is impossible to kill him. He does not need protection. Simple. And if perchance you do kill him, by some strange magic, then he will re-arise. So they don't see the point of becoming bodyguards.'

‘And what about the Kanga?'

‘They're the sort of people who'll shoot you before the loons can reach you.'

‘And of course the Ite wouldn't do.'

‘If you arm the Ite, they just sell their weapons.'

But it's not all politics, I'm pleased to say, as side by side on my bed we sit sipping hot chocolate from my thermos and extolling the virtues of the bean.

‘A Swedish botanist called it the “food of the gods”!' he tells me.

‘What was his name?'

‘Linnaeus. Do you know which vitamins and minerals the good food contains?'

‘Protein, calcium, phosphorous, iron, vitamin A, riboflavin.'

And he takes up the litany: ‘… theobromine, sodium, starch, potassium, thiamine and caffeine.'

‘To the botanist Linnaeus!'

And we bump our plastic cups together. I suppose it's the joy of knowledge that one hears about, the love of a subject that keeps you warm as it goes down. It's especially helpful to have a friend who shares a secret, to sit in a room late at night, in the darkness, with your enemies all around, knowing that nobody else realises what's going on is very exciting. Anyway, we all have to eat. Starve a saint, feed a tyrant. Believe me, it works. How often do you see a fat saint, or a thin tyrant? I kiss his cheek. I don't know why, except that it tastes good.

‘A dinner of chocolate in the darkness.'

‘Isn't there something wonderful about the way the word itself melts in the mouth and slips down the throat? What was its name among the Aztec Indians?'

‘Xocolatl.'

‘Very musical, Bella. And knowledgeable. I'm never too proud to learn. Tell me more.'

‘And the Mexican Indians called it Cacuatl.'

We sit on in the darkness repeating to ourselves the Aztec and Mexican words for chocolate – Xocolatl and Cacuatl.

‘A pretty reasonable slave could be bought among the Aztecs for a hundred cocoa beans.'

I hear him snort. ‘Well, the Ite never got such good prices when they sold us off to the Quakers.'

I apologise for the tacky thermos and plastic cups.

‘Nonsense. I would not enjoy it more if we were supping from golden beakers with tortoiseshell spoons.'

I know what he's talking about. That's how Montezuma took his chocolate when Cortés and his invading armies destroyed his country. Montezuma thought they came from heaven. That's the trouble with heavenly apparitions. You never know if they're after your chocolate or your blood.

‘I often wonder what would have happened if Montezuma hadn't listened to Cortés, but simply killed him. That might have made a difference.'

In the darkness beside me I can feel him shake his head so vigorously the bed sways on its bricks. ‘It wouldn't have changed things. Cortés was not a man, he was just a name for the future. If not him then someone else would have done it. Behind him, coming next, walks the big disaster. Look at the fellows in New Zealand who killed Captain Cooke. Well done, you might say. But behind Cooke came the riff-raff of the Empire with their sheep and their rugby balls. One dead Cooke does not stop time. By the way, did I tell you what the Quakers, who made their chocolate from the sweat of our slaves, who were marched to the coast by the Ite, called the benefits of this delicious substance?'

‘No.'

‘They called it flesh-forming. Ha! What does that make you think of – flesh-forming?'

I don't know what it makes me think of, or if I do, I don't, if you grasp my meaning. It seems about time to haul out of my silver trunk further supplies of chocolate, a selection of
Callebaut Dessert, Côte d'Or ‘Extra Dry
' and the very last of my
Suchard Velma
. And it goes down a real treat, I can tell you, if you need telling. And when we're licking the last crumbs from our fingers he speaks to me in his low, gravelly, growly voice, and takes my hand and holds it just like he did when we walked around the gallery and he cured my crying sickness, only this time he holds it and holds it like he's never going to let it go, and he says:

‘You're a good girl, Bella, just as your father promised you would be good.'

And the thing is, I don't care. He can sit and hold my hand in the dark for as long as he likes. And the feeling I get is a bit like swimming in black milk – and remember, this is a man who has quite probably eaten hands like mine and
still
I don't care! But then as if to show he means me no harm he lets me lick the last of the crumbs of chocolate from his beautiful fingers. A most lickable fellow! And perhaps for the first time in months I don't feel hungry and I don't mind even if he strokes my arm, or touches my cheek very gently with those amazing fingers. Just what Papa promised I would be good for I can't imagine. And sitting here in the dark I don't have to close my eyes to pretend he's here or that he's not here. I can open my eyes as wide as saucers and still believe he's not here, if that's what I want: But if I do want it, then he is. And he'll speak to me if I want him to. I have only to speak to him:

‘I don't think you should do that.'

‘What am I doing, my dear Bella?'

‘Feeling like that.'

‘Like this?'

‘Yes.'

‘But what is this tightness into which you're packed, my dear? I don't seem to be able to find my way.'

‘That's because the buttons are around the back.'

‘Ah yes! There – that's better.'

‘Oh, much.'

The tiny luminous claw print on my wrist shows the time is after three. And he is almost asleep now beneath me in his curtained alcove, an especially comfortable place and completely private. It's odd how things work out. From him I have got back all the things I missed so much – my Bapuna mask that hung on my wall in my bedroom in the old days, before the plastic shoehorn stepped in and took it all away; my doll Gloria whom Uncle Claude lost, or stole, or killed – and the bear who visited me when Grand-mère brought my hot chocolate every evening, the sad, wise, human bear. All come back to me now. Gifts travel in threes, like wise men. Then just before I sleep I remember something.

‘What happened to Fabrice? The clerk who ran out screaming at you to speak French, during your rebellion.'

The answer comes slowly and drowsily. ‘We hung him from a baobab tree.'

I suppose he must feel me tense above him because he adds quickly: ‘But someone put a recording of Racine on an old wind-up gramophone and sent him to paradise with the language he loved singing in his ears.'

I feel rather strange. Warm but strange. The sound of his breathing under my bed is very soothing. I love it, I love –

Chapter 11

A perfect, dreamless night; no aminos chased me, no figment howled in the abyss, blood blushing beneath the divine fingernails as Uncle's cleated boots clopped closer; no Feigenbaum's Constants hunted with teeth of digital numerals and liquid crystal eyes. Nothing but peace. I have been awake since dawn when the first light crept into my room and shook me awake like a friend, or a sentry, or a jailer, because the day was waiting to begin.

Under me. I think I can hear him under me, though his breath is faint. It lifts the corner of the bedcovers that hang to the floor. I could look, but I don't because I know he's sleeping safely, soundly. See the covers shiver. Look!

But of course you see. Yours is almost certainly the voice that says softly in my brain, ‘Bella, let sleeping monsters lie …'

Around seven, before the house begins to stir, I slip from my bed and dress very quietly, like a ghost, and I don't think I disturb him because the counterpane continues to shiver in time to the long slow breathing of my friend, my sleeping beast, my bear in his cave. Really, if you didn't know, you could be forgiven for thinking there is nobody here.

‘Well, well – up, dressed and waiting? Good, good. But why out here in the passage? Come, breakfast! We descend at ten. Father Duval and I will carry Maman on the litter. It's madness, but she insists. Loyal to the end. The square is filling already!'

Yes, you've guessed, it's Uncle Claude, dressed in a dark blue suit, wearing his mayoral sash, pale and freshly shaved, his eyes clouded with pain and anger, smelling muskily of some appalling potion he slaps on after his shave. Since the loss of his soup and his failure to kill Clovis, he has gone into a kind of irritable trance.

Plus
, there seems to have been trouble with the forces – the four forces of the GUT – or Grand Unification Theory which, if we truly believe in them, will one day lead us to TOE – the Theory of Everything.

The trouble is there are
not
four.

‘Maybe five – or even six!' cries Uncle Claude, ‘according to the very latest theory! Damn! Damn!'

I take this as a good sign. It seems people have been doing measurements, dropping weights over the sides of cliffs or something and the measurements – don't ask me which measurements – will not add up. There are discrepancies! Thank God for those discrepancies! If I were you I'd get lost among them.

‘Tried to draw a bead on him, sir! But the doggone critter disappeared into those darn discrepancies.'

I am wearing a halter-top in cream silk with buttons up the front, a beige skirt in cotton and rayon mixture, and very high red sandals. I've put my hair up and this can be tricky and took all my small skills (I do miss Catherine the Great!). Anyway, for what it's worth, I've put it up, working on it slightly damp, twisting it into a pretty chignon, low on the neck, to create what Catherine would call ‘a small silhouette', ruffling the sides with my fingers to soften the look and then planted the whole creation full of a garden of pretty pins, brass daisies and silver scarabs, gold bees with glass eyes. No make-up this time, I don't want complaints, just enough powder to keep the shine away.

I eat my last pieces of chocolate for breakfast. Well, I eat
almost
all of my last pieces of chocolate for breakfast. I leave a little bit for him, debating which he should get. Does he get the
Marks & Spencers Swiss Plain
or the
Lindt Excellence
? He will be hungry when he wakes and who can say when he will eat again after he leaves the house? In the end I give him the
Lindt
, it seems only right and I swallow the Swiss fake myself. A rather pretty girl with pale red hair and grey eyes waves goodbye from the mirror.

The village square is crowded by mid-morning. Despite the absence of Clovis, leader of the motorised battalion of communication workers in the Angelic divisions for a new France, Pesché has nonetheless organised things perfectly. A ruddy-faced man with tiny regular teeth that gleam unexpectedly when he lifts his heavy lips in a slow, wavelike motion to shout orders to his men, a modest soul, who tells Father Duval:

‘God willing, Father, we'll pack them together in the square like strands of rope, they will twine in a human chain to welcome Monsieur Cherubini,' and he laces his fingers together to illustrate how closely and beautifully people will be packed.

‘Not the deity. Science is responsible for this organisation, I think,' Father Duval replies. ‘Forward planning, Chief. It's won more battles than masses in the front lines, believe me.'

‘But surely Father would agree that some divine vision is useful, even in a policeman?' The Chief of Police is an agnostic but he is also very stubborn.

‘The poor see visions when they don't have enough to eat. The drinker sees visions in the bottom of his glass. The voter sees visions when he swallows the cheap remedies supplied by the other parties which promise him that his living standards will improve, that his old age is secure, his birthright as a free Frenchman is safe and the uncontrolled admission of foreigners to our country won't infect and weaken the national identity of which you and I are so proud. So much for visions! That is why the
Parti National Populaire
believes in clarity, reason, persuasion, logic and truth. French qualities.'

‘French exports maybe,' says the Chief of Police drily. He is known for his rueful wit.

‘I promise you that under the direction of Monsieur Cherubini such virtues will once again become home industries providing for local consumption. You may be assured of that, Chief.'

Father Duval is dressed today in a dove-grey tracksuit and running shoes and a salmon-pink cap, a Party cap with the letters PNP embroidered upon the peak, one of the many souvenirs on offer today from a stall near the pizzeria presided over by the De La Salle sisters with the help of a number of the Gramus children. There are also badges, scarves, pens, books, pictures, balloons, flags, bunting, many of them carrying pictures of the leader. Top of the market is a watch with the Angel's craggy face sporting a pair of hands, like weird whiskers.

Seating in the square is being arranged on the exclusion/participation principle: everyone may participate but only after certain people are excluded. First in, and allowed to take up the majority of seats around the platform, are the Party supporters who have been arriving by bus and car since dawn. Here now come the Party chairmen, accompanied by their wives, burly men in their best suits, faces scrubbed and their hair showing clearly the teeth marks of their combs. Their wives puff along importantly beside them in linen costumes and cotton frocks. Many of the crowd are young men in jeans and leather jackets; there are plumbers, waiters, white working-class boys with their girlfriends, or their mothers, sisters, aunts and children. Some have their heads shaved or dyed red and blue, others wear the Party initials emblazoned on their skulls like cattle brands. The single heartshaped drop-earring, out of which the face of Monsieur Cherubini beams happily, is especially popular. There are lots of children. Many buy picture-postcards from the market stalls, and the children love their free balloons with frosted messages that look like they've been written in toothpaste: ‘
Give them hell, patron!
' and ‘
We love the Angel!
'

Now here come groups of the disabled drawn from the hospital and homes in the area, the blind, the halt, the lame, the mentally defective and the terminally ill from hospital and hospice, accompanied by drips and nurses. They are always invited to his rallies, living proof, says Monsieur Cherubini, that all French people are God's children and we owe a debt to our old and our ill, that despite their disabilities they are our brother citizens, and that there is strength and beauty to be attained through disability. ‘Our people are at home here,' says Monsieur Cherubini, ‘but
only
our people are at home here.' When most of the seats are taken, the ‘public' are admitted. In fact, they are the opposition, a small crowd of perhaps sixty or seventy socialists and communists, enemies of the Angel, here to barrack and scoff but seated so far back that their cries will barely carry to the platform. Behind them the Chief of Police lines up his men. It is known as the sandwich tactic.

‘Tell me, what happened to the mad boy? The one you saved?' Pesché asks Father Duval. ‘The one with the glass boot and the funny hair? He did a good day's work for me, despite having so much powder in his veins. I think sometimes he was so high that he thought he'd come down from outer space. Some sort of celestial being who'd returned to earth.'

‘He took something which did not agree with him,' says Father Duval.

‘Heroin?'

‘Soup,' says the priest.

‘It couldn't have been bouillabaisse.'

Everything has been most carefully timed. At ten o'clock my grandmother is to be carried through the crowd on a litter by Uncle Claude and Father Duval. She is semi-conscious, her breath coming in harsh, choked little patterns, her eyes flickering weakly, yet she is enough herself still to issue instructions.

‘This is yours, child. Yours to keep and remember. A small token of my love. Keep it always by you as I've done.'

It is the picture of my grandfather which always stands by her bed. Other gifts are handed out and Uncle Claude receives the photograph of Marshal Pétain. Doubtless the statue of Joan of Arc is destined for the Angel. My grandmother is divesting herself of her treasures. It's plain that she expects to die but she isn't sad or frightened, rather she is seized with a fierce joy so wonderful and immense that it makes her half hunch up on the litter as it is carried through the crowd, her hands are wings that beat against her chest like a child overcome by excitement, a child who can hardly wait for some huge event to come. And it isn't either that my grandmother is eager to meet her maker, or that her heart is set on heavenly things, far from it, for Grandmama is frantic with joy and anticipation simply and solely because she is going to lie by the side of her beloved. At last! And if it takes dying to do something so wonderful, then die she will, with an emotion very like pleasure.

And no one, not even her son, is going to interpose good sense or reason between her and her desire. Though he tries in a feeble fashion:

‘You shouldn't stir. We love you, Maman. The
patron
knows you wish to come and he will take the wish for the deed. But please don't go out. Please remember what the doctor said! You must not move!'

In reply she merely stretches out her hand towards the podium, towards the platform that awaits the arrival of the Angel, towards the microphone and the row of chairs and in that gesture includes her dream of paradise.

Because he can't make any headway with her – yes, you guessed it – he picks on me. He begins raging on about the current state of the controversy as to whether the universe is going to expand indefinitely as it has done since the big bang when it blew up from something as infinitesimally small as a proton, to a grapefruit, to a galaxy, to everything we know now, all in a billionth trillionth of a second. Or will the balloon burst and it all collapse again one day into the big crunch?

‘It's a question of matter. It's a question of critical density. If there's enough matter then there'll be enough gravitation to pull it all together again. We think today that there is enough, but we can't find it.'

‘Where is it? This missing matter?'

‘Hidden. Maybe it's there in the form of neutrinos. We've been counting neutrinos since the explosion within the Large Magellanic Cloud of Supernova 1987A. We think the missing mass may be found in the neutrinos. If, that is, neutrinos have any mass. We know they're almost massless. But are they completely massless? They're so tiny, Bella, that even as you stand here trillions of them stream through your body, through the earth and out the other side like machine gun bullets through smoke.'

‘But why can't we find this missing matter?'

‘We will,' he says grimly. ‘But just at the moment we can't find it because it's invisible, it's cold dark matter hidden somewhere out there –' he jerks a finger heavenward. ‘Don't you worry about it, though, we'll track it down one day. And when we do we'll know the answer to one of the few remaining mysteries about the universe.'

This is said with a glare which suggests that I might have seen the missing matter recently, and if I have I should be sure to pass on his warning.

‘It can run, but it can't hide.'

Luckily, this is when Father Duval drags him away because Grandmama is to be lifted onto the litter and carried to the platform, now ready to receive the Angel, who is reported to be drawing near. No expense has been spared to make the litter as rich and impressive as possible. It has gold coverings and a satin cushion with tassles upon which her head is propped and where, with her white face and her eyes flickering, she looks no more than she is, an elegant, dying lady, but most regal, and goodness how the people cheer as she is borne to the platform. Even Granny Gramus, who is in fact a good deal older than my grandmother and might have been expected to feel just a twinge of jealousy at the attention being paid to someone so many years her junior, can scarce forbear to cackle and raise a thumb in the air as the litter goes by and the sunlight striking the white hairs on her pointy chin makes her look more witchlike than ever, notwithstanding her good cheer. And Old Laveur, the drycleaner, is overcome and cries openly. Even Brest the butcher, who does not, as they say, compete with the fountains of Versailles in his flow of water, looks distinctly moist-eyed. Uncle leads the way and Father Duval follows, carrying her easily on their shoulders because she weighs so little. The crowd falls back and some, thinking perhaps that they are watching the passage of a saint, fall on one knee, others cross themselves. I bring up the rear, walking some way behind so that the full focus of attention falls on my grandmother. I carry the photograph of my grandfather.