Mukurob
Page 1
Copyright © 2018 by André Costa
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Print ISBN: 978-1-54393-859-3
eBook ISBN: 978-1-54393-860-9
“My only sin is to be able to see in the dark.”
—The inscription found on the portal of the Art Institute of Florence, next to the figure of an owl
To my wife Pernille
My daughters Agatha and Sofia
And all the women that will bring a New Earth to blossom
Table of Contents
Prologue
PART 1
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
PART 2
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
PART 3
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
PART 4
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
EPILOGUE
Prologue
In 1988, a peculiar rock formation in the Namib Desert called Mukurob—the Finger of God—collapsed. What made the sandstone structure, in what was then South West Africa, so fascinating was the fact that its base was considerably narrower than its peak, much like a triangle balancing upside down. Fifty thousand years of erosion had meticulously crafted this work of art, standing at twelve meters and weighing four hundred and fifty tons.
The Nama people, indigenous to the barren south-central region of today´s Namibia, told many legends about the rock. As the sun rose, shining on the dead man’s face, Jack, exhausted from the difficult task of consoling Marie until she fell into a restless sleep, tried to keep the flood of fear and grief at bay by sharing one of those stories with David.
“There was a Nama prophecy that the white man’s power would end once Mukurob collapsed. Nobody knows why, Father, but the rock fell just a few weeks before the South African, Angolan, and Cuban governments signed the New York Treaty, ending the Afrikaner rule over Namibia…”
History is indeed a repertoire filled with surprising facts, thought Father David Callaghan as he listened to Jack, “and yet humans still awe at their occurrences.” Both the Nama people and the resilient citizens of Newcastle West in his distant Ireland should know that a rock of such magnitude does not fall in one day, nor in a split of a second. Its descent is foreseen the moment of its creation, through the force of wind on its surface, slowly removing soil and little stones of sand, carving the clumsy structure.
At a specific moment… bang! The giant rock blasts the ground just like dazzling insights tear age-old ideas apart. To some, David’s quest to understand the brutal fate of his own kind will unveil the protagonist’s failure to absorb reality and accept human nature as it is. Conversely, and hopefully to many of you, the character’s response to a world deprived of braveness may be anchored far beyond his religious beliefs, revealing a battle that eventually relates to us all.
PART 1
Chapter I
“I’m a good Christian, but not a good Catholic!” said Father David Callaghan.
On this Sunday morning of the Irish summer, the church, built in Gothic style by public petition about two centuries ago, was packed, with the temperature approaching 30°C. The faithful sat shoulder to shoulder, bewildered by the blasphemy, while the warm color of the interior walls—yellow and light pink—increased the thermal sensation.
It is August 3, 2014, and for weeks, people in small and pleasant Newcastle West had noticed the priest’s impatience, or, to some, certain boredom with the pastoral life. Of note was the profound change in tone of Father Callaghan’s dominical preaching. No one paid more attention to the holy words that morning than the bride and groom’s parents, afraid that the priest’s annoyance would contaminate the church’s blessing of the new couple. “Marriage today is no longer assured, even under a solid Christian pillar,” an old female acquaintance of both families had remarked when the bride was walking down the aisle.
In fact, the matrimonial union should have been at the forefront of the Mass, but David’s declaration robbed it of its primacy. Until the beginning of spring, Father Callaghan’s homilies, when translating the Gospel into inspiring anecdotes of simple and ordinary life, were a candid, playful, and beautiful exposition. A lecture delivered on a weekly basis which worked as a steady placebo to ease the faithful’s innermost demons, and without the unpleasant side-effects of medication. However, by the time the re-blooming of flora was complete, Father Callaghan’s words had become a source of sarcasm and bitterness; as if God himself had reversed the priest’s creative spur.
At this particular Mass, the ears present—attentive or not—were captured by Father Callaghan’s public confession: two phrases, one affirmative and one negative, almost inaudible and uttered by trembling lips at the end of the Gospel reading. The witnesses at the altar were the first to be hit; but as is expected of urban spaces with fewer than ten thousand inhabitants, the young priest’s astounding statement became an up-hill fire and, within a few hours, was the most talked-about subject of the parish.
In the house of Elizabeth O’Brien, the ladies of the Tea Club—a confraternity that assembled the members of the pastoral council for social purposes—ran over each other like bulls at the San Fermín festival. While the agitated voices had forgotten to thank the hostess for the large, ornate table, Elizabeth orchestrated a solitary plea for temperance and compassion. That was her common default attitude, although, at that moment, she bore more unsettled demons in her mind than the whole pack gathered on her small backyard terrace.
The distinguished position of the widow O’Brien in doctrinal matters—both for being the council’s most senior member and for her voluntary housekeeping work at Father Callaghan’s home—added to the maternal affection she felt for the young priest. During that precise Tea Club Sunday meeting, Elizabeth struggled to avoid that the verbalized criticisms resulted in less than flattering observations of the character or dignity of her protégé.
“We cannot judge his words without considering the context. Father Callaghan is going through a tough personal time.”
At the same moment, and only a few blocks away, the controversy grew more profane. The Old Boys Pub, housed in the popular The Square, received an equally effusive audience, but not sympathetic to religious ideas. Balancing between doses of exhibitionism and sheer bad taste, a group of regulars erected large mugs of beer in honor of the priest’s surrender. The scent of discomposure had poisoned the air.
Peter O’Ryan, a drunk of unpolished words, climbed onto the table and whistled as loudly as his lungs would allow. Once in possession of silence, he said, “Do you want to know the truth? Your man exploded; that’s it! What’s between the legs is truer than the cassock.”
Laughter and a loud toast followed the brief speech of the widely-despised O’Ryan. His long skinny legs were so enthused that they lost balance, making his body—a thin covering of flesh on a two-meter skeleton—collapse on the nex
t table and then onto the floor. Gravity brought with it half a dozen mugs, three bowls of hot soup, and two forgotten wine glasses.
Before he plummeted and when still inebriated by the short-lived attention, the poor man did not notice that a constrained minority was about to rebel against his rudeness. Behind the counter, John Buckley, owner of the establishment and maternal uncle to David Callaghan, fumed and charged like an angry bull. He was preparing to defend his nephew’s honor without realizing that only a fraction of his gaze would take care of the task.
Back on his feet, the eloquent braggart examined his forehead while his mind engaged with the reminder of kinship. Avoiding the burly Buckley, he paid his bill as well as the one of the next table and left the bar tiptoeing on his awkwardness.
In his youth, the pub owner had been the leader and vocalist of a rock ’n’ roll band with the same name as his bar. Buckley, then a charming singer wrapped in long, black curls, suffered from chronic asthma that blocked his grave and velvety timbre from time to time. On such occasions, he would lock himself in his room for days until the cat squeal left his throat. It seemed an unfortunate coincidence that these asthmatic crises usually occurred whenever an opportunity to perform in Dublin arose. The other members of the band soon speculated that the disease had a clear psychological element, ready to sabotage any possibility of ascension for the musical group.
With little demand for their musical performances amidst the severe economic depression that had plagued the island in the late seventies, the band repositioned itself as a Celtic folk group catering to tourists. The pragmatic change came to fruition, but Buckley, who had sworn allegiance to traditional rock ’n’ roll against the dominant pop genres, opted bravely for a solo career abroad, yet signed contractual papers that were worth less than pyrite. Over the last two decades, tropical disease and a broken marriage had made him tired of pursuing the fool’s gold, and he headed back to Ireland.
The music still stirred his soul for some time, but not even the asthma from the days of the Old Boys’ band had survived. The hardships of life took his dreams away and did the same with his anxiety, the absence of which eventually healed the chronic inflammation of the bronchi. From this glorious time, only a rare electric guitar manufactured in 1966 by Guyatone remained, now exhibited as “vintage” in a glass box encrusted on the counter.
Oblivious to all controversy and parochial hubbub, David rested his body on the only sofa in his austere living room. The furnishings had remained untouched since his mother had passed away a little more than a year ago. Somber and faded, the décor was in fact the same one David had known from childhood. The three-seater sofa, a wedding gift to his parents from neighbors who had long left the town, had served him as an extension of the maternal womb for as long as he could remember. The Callaghans did not see time passing on material goods; and the young priest sinking into the old couch felt the same warmth and security as young David had.
Loose armchairs that did not talk to each other but bore, in their discolored and outdated upholstery, much personality, littered the room. One of them had a comfortable footrest and had been Lewis Callaghan’s refuge from the hours of bureaucracy at the insurance company. Over the fireplace, Lis Callaghan’s collection of bells kept crying out for a sense of purpose, almost as displaced as the bookshelf next to David’s feet. Two long dark brown curtains, virtually the same color as the worn wooden floor, covered the white window frames and much of the beige walls. Among the pictures hanging on the wall, that of a little boy and a little girl running wild and naked in the backyard defied the overall sobriety.
“It’s, however, the most habitable part of the three-bedroom townhouse,” Elizabeth O’Brien had once noted. As if to lend weight to her assertion, she had placed a vase of colorful field flowers from her garden next to the couch.
Curled up in a fetal position, David inclined his face to the ceiling, not looking at anything in particular. His thoughts were far away and intangible. There was, however, an inward calm as if things were all in the right place, even if he himself was nowhere. Or perhaps precisely for that reason; him not having been found meant he had no chance of being misplaced. When deformed thoughts insisted on entering his mind, he just let them pass, anticipating that they were up to no good. “There is fantastic freedom in choosing not to think about anything.” This thought, like all the others before it, was also given passage.
David did not know how long he had hosted this feeling of inner peace since time does not survive in an absolute vacuum. In truth, the lethargy lasted only a little while, and soon a tornado of involuntary brainwork broke the dam of his defenses, threatening to drown him, just as the thoughts of the first hours of that morning had. While shaving earlier that day, he had realized how the nothing had become constant in his life, making emptiness a sound but worthless asset. He could fill a thousand-page book with facts and accounts of his short life, recounting everything from his baby booties and school breaks to sleepless nights in the seminary, but for what purpose? Existence and its senses, concepts well defined in the sacred texts, he thought, appeared to him now as a fanciful image.
It was necessary to block the grim daydreaming immediately. David started turning his body to bury his belly in the aged foam when he remembered the laptop still leaning on his hip. He stopped mid-movement and managed to hold the device before it found the ground.
Sitting up with the computer resting on his knees—the wave of gloomy clouds still gathering over his forehead—he surrendered to nowadays most popular source of external stimuli. With no real plan as to what he was looking for, his fingers wandered over the keyboard, like a ship in a thick fog looking for a port. In just a few minutes, the drifting pages weakened his hope. From national politics to new celebrity gossip, everything seemed to him uninteresting, pointless, decadent.
“It’s an endless world within a world within a world; it’s enormous, but it looks round and finite… It connects everything but leads to nowhere,” thought David.
Had it not been for fear of again succumbing to the thoughts of that morning, David would have closed the laptop after the first sequence of pages of little interest. At one point, he even considered resorting to his mother’s bookshelf, which was just an arm’s length away. Or he could go jogging—his favorite physical activity—although he did not wish to meet familiar faces, an impossible task in Newcastle West.
So he continued scrolling through countless subjects that did not move him until, entirely at random, his doggedness was rewarded with a title that finally put his senses on alert: “DNA study identifies the oldest race on Earth,” published by The Independent on May 1, 2009. The page featured a scientific article on the detailed analysis of the African people’s DNA. After a decade of research, the findings identified the San people, inhabitants of the Kalahari Desert in southwestern Africa, as the direct descendants of the earliest human ancestors.
David frowned as he reflected deeply on the discovery. After a few minutes, he took a deep breath and said aloud, “They’ve found the Garden of Eden.”
Chapter II
Despite the mockery and many conjectures, the citizens of Newcastle West at least agreed that no one honestly knew what was behind the young priest’s distant appearance. David, slightly above average Irish stature and neither thin nor fat, had brown hair a little too long for the priesthood. At thirty-two, his pale and freckled face showed early wrinkles around his eyelids. An asymmetrical yet attractive front contained faded blue eyes and a slim and softly bent nose. Despite his uneven teeth, his tender smile was charismatic—a powerful weapon that David seldom resorted to.
Years back in the seminary, a grumpy old professor whose words were puerile and quickly forgotten, had taught the students how smiling could make you look untrustworthy. The message had not hit home with David, who at the time had been looking out the window, confident that the memory of his sweet Karen’s laughter would never exp
ire.
In the days following the fateful wedding, David tried hard, but could not wholly escape the speculative glances being thrown his way whenever he ventured into public. Contrary to the current opinion about his physical and mental state, he was sure that he was not depressed. He had gotten to know this psychological disorder very well while nursing his mother through her growing apathy for daily activities and insomnia. Conversely, his dismay was only a thin layer to cover up his voluntary introspection—a firm resolve to get away from things and people to better evaluate the whole that surrounded him or the reality behind appearances. If some sadness overcame him during this process, it was not baseless melancholy but rather a result of the revelations about the human condition.
One morning, not long after David’s public confession, a cheery and well-disposed Elizabeth brought new daisies to his front garden. She hoped that a handful of Bellis Perennis, freshly harvested in a grassy pasture, would invite David to celebrate the beginning of a new day in communion with renewed thoughts of faith and fulfillment. As usual, she believed that the exterior of Father Callaghan’s residence was her domain, and thus took great care to ensure that the beauty of the flowers and their overwhelming sweet aroma would operate a small domestic miracle on this part of the property.
On her knees and excited by her gesture, Elizabeth did not even notice David’s shadow cast on her back.
“My dear lady, you must have forgotten to look at the clock this morning.”
“Our mother, what a fright! You’re awake, Father?”
“Planning a little surprise?” said David, gently tapping on her shoulders as an invitation to come inside the house.
As a child, Elizabeth had devoted herself entirely to the Catholic faith. At the age of eleven, while at boarding school, she was proud of her knowledge of doctrines, liturgy, and ethics. Her naïve and unmistakable joy in her moral elevation, however, once led the catechism teacher to inflict a fierce reprimand. The old lady, who was also the senior nun at the school, believed to have spotted in the girl the malevolent shadow of the ego and its side-effects. That was when Elizabeth, for the first time in her life, looked at herself in the mirror and saw the reflection of a sinner. She wept copiously. When she recovered, she vowed never to speak openly about her gifts again, but rather to express them solely through her actions and prayers, thus hoping to operate not by word but by example.