No Other Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

oneself. I forgot my failures, my inadequacies, my guilts. I learned at last to lose that comfortable yet comfortless distance I had felt here, as a white priest in a foreign place, protected from the misery around him by his church and his calling. I worked with Jeannot. Jeannot worked for the people of La Rotonde. Now, at last, I had come to serve the poor.
    The crowds grew. The word spread. In the mansions of the elite there was talk of this mad little priest who preached against the rich. Within weeks, when the crowds kneeling outside in the open air rivalled the numbers packed within the church, Jeannot had loudspeakers installed so that everyone could hear the sermon. And the sermon was always the same. Rise up, cast off your chains. You, the poor, will inherit this land.
    ‘I don’t understand it,’ Nöl Destouts said. ‘He’s preaching revolution. If he were anyone else, he’d be in prison by now.’
    Father Duchamp, our resident cynic, saw things differently. ‘When Jeannot speaks about capitalists, he’s talking about the elite – he’s not speaking out against Doumergue. Maybe, he knows just how far he can go.’
    I was angered by this remark. I knew it wasn’t true. Despite his belief that God would protect him I feared for Jeannot. And then, one Sunday morning, as was now my custom, I attended Jeannot’s Mass in order to help him serve communion. The church was packed. I was kneeling at the right side of the altar with my back to the congregation. A few minutes after the Mass began I heard shots which I took for a car backfiring. I heard shouts at the rear of the church. When I turned round I saw six or seven men, armed with rifles and machetes, pushing their way up the crowded aisles, some firing at the ceiling, some firing directly into the congregation. They were not soldiers or bleus . They looked like street scavengers, the sort who spend their days picking over rubbish heaps, cadging tourists for handouts, their nights drunk on bottles of homemade usque . Two of them had already reached the altar and now, raising their rifles, they fired directly at Jeannot. I saw a bullet strike the gilded door of the tabernacle behind him. A brass candlestick was toppled by a second shot.
    Suddenly, it was as though all of us were figures in a painting, frozen in a frame. Jeannot did not flinch. He stood facing the killers, his arms outstretched as if to embrace them. His face showed love, not fear. At this point the marauders in the body of the church ceased firing and, like the rest of us, stood staring up at Jeannot on the altar. Again the two assassins raised their rifles and fired. They were not more than thirty feet from their target, but the bullets went wide. The upraised arm of a statue to the right of Jeannot shattered and fell on the altar steps. The two assassins, unnerved, looked at each other as though unable to believe what was happening. Then, suddenly frightened, they turned and pushed their way back through the crowd. I saw this, I heard screams, as people poured into the aisles, trying to escape. The other assailants, buffeted by the panicky congregation, began to lay about them with rifle butts and machetes as they beat their way back to the church doors. Four teenaged members of Jeannot’s boys’ club rushed up to the altar and tried to drag him off to the safety of the sacristy. He resisted, standing staring out at the crowd, until the assailants had left the church. Then he turned back to the altar, genuflected, and went down into the body of the church to comfort the injured. I saw an old man dead in a front pew, eyes glazed, blood oozing from his forehead. People were lifting up the wounded and stepping over inert bodies. Women prostrated themselves, weeping, on the corpses of kin.
    I heard a dull roar. There was a second roar. I looked up and saw flames move across the ceiling of the church in a great red rolling wave. I smelled the acrid stink of diesel fuel. I saw Jeannot ahead of