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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