Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [80]
“Thirteen.” He took a pull off his cigarette. “Or eight. Ten.” He shrugged. “After the hondo anyway,” he said obscurely.
I suspected then that he had been a soldier of fortune, spilling from the Rhodesian War to other wars that had erupted in surrounding countries.
St. Medard, of anyone I had ever met in my life, was the person least afraid of death, or maybe the least afraid of losing life—which might amount to the same thing. It seemed to me that he had become numbed to violence, accustomed to horror. He expected the worst from life, and the worst was delivered. As a result, he looked much older than his forty-seven years: a beer belly stretched over powerful, stout legs, his beard was grizzled, and his skin looked oxygen-deprived. But he was, I had no doubt, still terrifyingly strong and robust. His visible body, abused and shattered and alcohol-soaked, was the shell within which a powerful memory of survival—a kind of wild intuition and an ability to seek out weakness in others—burned strong. St. Medard had a special gift that allowed him to continue living against all odds, even while others died like flies around him.
Mapenga came down from the kitchen. “I’ve asked Andrew to make steak for us,” he said.
“No, Mapenga,” K said. “Not for me, hey. I don’t graze nyama anymore.” He looked at me. “Neither does she.”
I said, “That’s okay, really. I’ll be fine. I don’t want to put anyone to any trouble. I don’t need supper.”
Mapenga stared at me. “You don’t eat meat.” He looked at K. “Not even you?”
K shook his head. “It’s a fast,” he explained.
“A fast what?” asked St. Medard.
“A fast,” explained K. “When you give up eating something for religious purposes or something.”
St. Medard shook his head and blew out a cloud of smoke. “What’s fast about that? Seems slow to me.” His laugh erupted from the bottom of his lungs and tore at his throat until it shook his cheeks a mottled shade of purple.
“And you,” said Mapenga, “what’s your excuse?”
My vegetarianism suddenly seemed strident and self-indulgent in a country where the opportunity to eat a whole rat is, for a great percentage of the population, a rare treat. Out here the threshold for insanity and murder is high, but the tolerance for anyone who could be perceived as sanctimonious is zero. I tried hard to think of the best way to boil down the reason for my fourteen-year-long rejection of meat, in a way that would be least likely to lead to my automatic crucifixion. “I won’t eat anything that I wouldn’t, in theory at least, have the guts to kill myself,” I said lamely.
There was an appalled silence. St. Medard broke it. “Well, shit,” he said at last, “I hope no one expects me to eat all those gondies in Tete.” And he burst into a hail of choking laughter.
Another round of drinks was brought from the house. Talk turned to fishing. St. Medard said he would take K fishing the next day, if he liked, but he didn’t want to fish with Mapenga. “He’s too restless. You park in one spot, switch off the engine, and about five seconds later Mapenga says, ‘There’s no fish, here. Come, let’s move.’ ” St. Medard looked at his friend. “I am not going fishing with you, Mapenga. That’s flat.”
“We’ll give him double doses of his medication to calm him down,” K suggested.
Mapenga started laughing. “Ja, once I told St. Medard he has exactly the same problem as me. He’s ADHD for sure. So when I went to see my psychiatrist in Harare I told him, ‘Listen, man, I have a friend who needs the same stuff as me. Can you give me some extra?’ So the doc gives me extra and I give St. Medard a month’s supply of Ritalin.” Mapenga paused. “Ja well, the mad bastard took the whole lot in two days. Thirty Ritalin in two days.”
“That’s terrible stuff,” said St. Medard. “The more pills I took, the worse I felt. I didn’t sleep for days. I was walking up the walls, man. It started out like this—I took a pill and I waited half an hour and I didn’t feel any calmer, no different than usual, so I took six or seven and then I felt worse, so I took another ten and then I felt really kak and before I knew