Parable of a father of quality

Some 292 years ago is a long time bygone. This is the year that a beautiful yet controversial book was published and circulated in France. The novel was banned not long afterwards.

It is a sonorous serenade of the illicit affair of an upmarket bachelor who elopes with a fair damsel en-route to being a nun! I still consider the author of the book the undisputed father of maverick French literature. His name is Antoine Prevost.

Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux, et de Manon Lescaut is the seventh and last part of a community of prose Prevost wrote under the larger title: Memoirs and Adventures of a Man of Quality.

In this week of fatherhood, piquant Prevost comes back to my mind, not so for the saucy renditions of love he painted unabashedly aeons ago. Granted, few meet and ever forget randy Grieux and nubile Lescaut. However, what crossed my mind and bade me to recall this novelist from the library of memories is a quote associated with him.

He once said: The heart of a father is the masterpiece of nature. This is what thought that came upon me as I did two things in an instance still livid within my living memories. First, I had just buried a man I venerate as the father of my literary career, hayati Wasambo Were, an abiding patron of my literary blossoming since the age of 18 here at the varsity. He was a father figure to me.

Second, because grief is like rain, it comes down in sheets of water from both the slits of the skies and those of the eyes. The waters, be they raindrops or teardrops, seldom cascade down surfaces without effect.

The effect of the liquid loss I have felt in the aftermath of the loss of my mentor and benefactor is one that is unspeakable. It is true to say that my current stasis in terms of writing, my blockade of writerly energies, lays here.

***

The hat of a father is a masterpiece of nature. Those who wear it rest easy under the mantle of its securities. This thought sat in my mind well into the night on Fathers’ Day, when my eldest walked into my writing room. She had observed I was up late and the rest of the world was tucked in. Only the cricket tweeted in pairs like the two lovers from the old French story above.

I told her I am in a kind of purgatory. She asked: “Dad, have you wallowed in sin?” She placed the two mugs next to my blank laptop. Shut it and eyed me minus her spectacles. I shook my head. Far from it.

I meant purgatory as a kind of place where a writer is neither burning nor frosted. She pushed my cup of bitter herbs closer to my fingers. They are still numb. The modern writer does not use the entire palm as did perhaps Prevost and his plume in that era bygone.

The modern writer exercises not the entire hand or even elbow or shoulder. It is the fingers that do the work for most. I am not an exception. The numbed fingers are the enemy of the writer in our age. They carry a mind of their own. They tingle when they are inactive. They sing when they are not.

In the latter case, each blood rivulet rushing through the tiniest of veins is audible. The thrust of life in them ties the nerves of fingertips with the central nervous system. The mind becomes one with the heart as such. What benefits arise out of such instances!

To spend an hour in the deep night listening to silence and late-night television is a saunter down the maze. The mind wanders and wonders at the amazing news tidbits from the nooks of earth and crannies of continents.

The daughter who can't sleep becomes a welcome third in the company a scribe shares with an unseen shadow. Tonight is no exception. In search of the meaning of narratives, laxative takes the form of a one-sided interlocution. What is the form and aesthetics of solitude, inertia, fatherhood?

***

The hut of a father is a masterpiece of nature. Think of that hut as any modern home today. Can one who is a father be lonely in the natural environment that is the family? What makes a writer stay up at night in a home full of relations who sleep it out as he twists and turns with thoughts of solitude?

Nature is the home of life. Nature is the location of disengagement from culture, too. It is the nature of people at old age to be surrounded by loved ones. The father, who has played his part in fathering and fatherhood, finally succumbs to the reality of a solo existence in his sunset years.

I know of a father who sews shoes in Limuru at age 79. He lives in a single room far away from his natal Nyamira. In this frost-crusted village in Kamiirithu, broken boots of tea pickers form a mound between his cobbler base and a roadside tea port. I frequent it.

I know of an octogenarian caretaker of a new highrise flat, who doubles up as a night sentinel in Thika. He returned from retirement in Mathira after monthly bouts of acute hunger threatened to make him insane.

He has six kids split equally between Nairobi, the West and towns of the Middle East. I knew all these after instructing my daughter to count him at supper and send a hot plate to his guardhouse at the gate. We got talking and he calls me son. I call him father. The rest of our exchanges will, of course, remain private.

This week I celebrate these two fathers. I do so wondering how my old age as a writer will turn out, years far away from this home of daughters, sons and a doting wife.