Chadee, Abbott and Kidogo were told to go in the jeep with Yeates. As they drove off, Yeates said they were going “up the river” to burn Benson’s clothes. They stopped at filling station in Arima and bought some kerosene, and they drove eight miles to Guanapo Heights, beside the Guanapo River. Yeates left the three men there, with the wood and the kerosone and the bags. And he gave them a message from Malik: they were to keep the fire burning, because in an hour’s time Malik and his children were coming to the river to bathe.
Chadee stood guard while Abbott and Kidogo got a fire going on the riverbank with the wood and the kerosene. They burned Benson’s clothes and papers piece by piece. Certain things couldn’t be burned. Chadee buried these a short distance away, digging a hole two feet deep. There was less of a rush now than in the morning, and the digging came more easily to him. Kidogo and Abbott left Chadee for a while; and Chadee, doing as he had been told, looked for more wood and kept the fire going. When Kidogo and Abbott came back they were carrying fruit in one of the bags into which Benson’s things had been stuffed earlier: it was an extra precautionary touch.
Shortly afterward, keeping strict time, Steve Yeates drove up with the jeep, and he had brought a whole party: Malik, Malik’s two daughters, Jamal, and the young Englishman who was a guest in the commune. They all bathed in the river, and then they warmed themselves at the fire. No one asked about the fire. Malik didn’t ask Abbott or Kidogo or Chadee any questions.
Blood in the morning, fire in the afternoon. But to an observer who wasn’t looking for special clues, to someone on the outside seeing only the busyness with car and jeep and sand and cement, it would only have been a good commune day: constructive work in the morning, and then a bathing party in a tropical wood.
That bathing party, with the fire on the riverbank: it was the crowning conception of an intricate day. Like an episode in a dense novel, it served many purposes and had many meanings. And it had been devised by a man who was writing a novel about himself, settling accounts with the world, filling pages of the cheap writing pad and counting the precious words as he wrote, anxious for world fame (including literary fame): a man led to lunacy by all the ideas he had been given of who he was, and now, in the exile of Arima, under the influence of Jamal, with an illusion of achieved power. Malik had no skills as a novelist, not even an elementary gift of language. He was too self-absorbed to process experience in any rational way or even to construct a connected narrative. But when he transferred his fantasy to real life, he went to work like the kind of novelist he would have liked to be.
Such plotting, such symbolism! The blood of the calf at Christmas time, the blood of Gale Benson in the new year. And then, at the end of the sacrificial day, the cleansing in the river, with Benson’s surrogate pyre on the bank. So many other details: so many things had had to be worked out. Neither Chadee nor Abbott (with their special anxieties) had been left alone for any length of time during the day; both men had always been under the eye of Kidogo or Steve Yeates. And Jamal had always been sheltered. He had been at Abbott’s mother’s house while Benson was being killed and buried; and he had been at Parmassar’s mother’s house, helping with the kitchen, when Kidogo was clearing away Benson’s clothes and papers from the bedroom that had been hers and Jamal’s.
It had been thought out over many weeks. And it worked. Benson had always been withdrawn, and now she was not missed. For a fortnight or more everybody in the two houses at Christina Gardens stayed together. The two English visitors remained, the woman Simmonds continuing in her “total involvement” with Steve Yeates; toward the end there was even some talk of a restaurant that she and Yeates might run together.
Chadee didn’t go home. On the evening of the murder Malik told him that he and Parmassar, the two Indians in the group, had become “members for life”; and that night, after he had gone with Steve Yeates to fetch his clothes, Chadee slept again in the bedroom of the servants’ quarters in Malik’s house. Later he was given a room in Jamal’s house, and he began to mow the lawn and do other yard jobs.
But then the commune Christmas party began to break up. The two English visitors went away. And—eighteen days after the murder—Jamal and Kidogo went away, back to Boston. Jamal acknowledged Malik as the master, and Malik thought of himself as the master. But Malik had grown to need Jamal more than he knew. Without Jamal’s own lunacy, his exaltation, his way with words, his vision of the master, Malik’s fantasies of power grew wilder and unfocused, without art, the rages of a gangster. He thought of kidnapping the wife of a bank manager; he ordered Abbott to plan the “liquidation” of a family. And then, for no reason except that of blood, and because he was now used to the idea of killing with a cutlass, he killed Joseph Skerritt.
It was the murder of Skerritt that finally unhinged Steve Yeates, “Muhammed Akbar,” Surpreme Captain of the Fruit of Islam. Yeates dealt in racial hate; he was pure in his hate; and he couldn’t understand why Skerritt had been killed. Every time he looked through his window he saw Skerritt’s grave; and the fast that Malik ordered after the killing of Skerritt didn’t help. They were all weakened and perhaps made a little light-headed by four days of fasting when they went on the excursion to the dangerous bay of Sans Souci; and Yeates, when he got into trouble with the strong currents, seemed at a certain moment to have decided not to listen to the shouts of people anxious to save him, not to struggle, to surrender. Abbott thought that Yeates drowned himself; and Abbott thought that before he went down Yeates gave a final wave with his left hand.
That was the beginning of the end of the commune. Blood didn’t keep them together for long. Abbott helped Chadee and Parmassar to escape: Abbott himself went to Tobago; Malik went to Guyana, and the house in Christina Gardens burned down.
Fifty-five days after the killing of Benson, Chadee took a police inspector to Guanapo Heights and showed where he had buried those things of Benson’s that couldn’t be burned. This was the police inventory, which Chadee certified:
One brown leather sleeveless jacket; one brown leather hippy bag; one pair of lady’s pink mod boots; one pair of brown shoes; one pair of brown slippers; three silver bracelets; one empty small bottle; one tube Avon Rose-mint cream; one tube of Tangee cream; one small circular face mirror; a quantity of black wool; two hippy pendants; one tin containing Flapyl tablets; one small scissors; one plastic rule; one triangular keyholder; one empty Limacol bottle; one brown small tablespoon; one Liberation of Jerusalem medallion with 7.6.1967 stamped thereon; one brown belt with a buckle made in the form of a heart; one damaged grey suitcase; one large scissors; one blue ballpoint pen; one damaged brown suitcase; one silver ring with the Star of David; and one gold ring with two stones.
Malik appealed many times against the death sentence. And it was only when legal arguments were exhausted, and the appeal was on the grounds of cruelty—on the grounds that, after the long delay, the carrying out of the death sentence would be an act of cruelty—it was only then that the point was made that Malik was mad. The point, if it had been made at the beginning, might have saved Malik’s life. But, for too many people in London and elsewhere, Malik had embodied, at one and the same time, the vicious black man and the good black cause. A plea of insanity would have made nonsense of a whole school of theatre; and among the people abroad who supported Malik there were those who continued to see his conviction for murder as an act of racial and political persecution. So Malik played out to the end the role that had been given him.
He was hanged in the Royal Jail in central Port of Spain in May 1975, three years and four months after the killing of Benson. His wife sat in a square nearby. There was a small silent crowd with her in the square, waiting for the sound of the trap door at eight, hanging time. The body of the hanged man was taken in a coffin to the Golden Grove Prison, not far from Arima; and there bare-backed prisoners in shorts carried the coffin to its grave in the prison grounds.
Chadee was sentenced to death, but this was later commute
d to life imprisonment. Abbott, after his twenty years for the murder of Skerritt, was sentenced to death for his part in the murder of Benson. His was the true agony: he rotted for nearly six years in a death cell, and was hanged only in April 1979. He never became known outside Trinidad, this small, muscular man with the straight back, the soldierly demeanor, the very pale skin, and the underslept, tormented eyes. He was not the X; he became nobody’s cause; and by the time he was hanged, that caravan had gone by.
The Return
Of Eva Perón
1 The Corpse at the Iron Gate
Buenos Aires, April—June 1972
Outline it like a story by Borges.
The dictator is overthrown and more than half the people rejoice. The dictator had filled the jails and emptied the treasury. Like many dictators, he hadn’t begun badly. He had wanted to make his country great. But he wasn’t himself a great man; and perhaps the country couldn’t be made great. Seventeen years pass. The country is still without great men; the treasury is still empty; and the people are on the verge of despair. They begin to remember that the dictator had a vision of the country’s greatness, and that he was a strong man; they begin to remember that he had given much to the poor. The dictator is in exile. The people began to agitate for his return. The dictator is now very old. But the people also remember the dictator’s wife. She loved the poor and hated the rich, and she was young and beautiful. So she has remained, because she died young, in the middle of the dictatorship. And, miraculously, her body has not decomposed.
“That,” Borges said, “is a story I could never write.”
But at seventy-six, and after seventeen years of proscription and exile, Juan Perón, from the Madrid suburb known as the Iron Gate, dictates peace terms to the military regime of Argentina. In 1943, as an army colonel preaching a fierce nationalism, Perón became a power in Argentina; and from 1946 to 1955, through two election victories, he ruled as dictator. His wife Eva held no official position, but she ruled with Perón until 1952. In that year she died. She was expensively embalmed, and now her corpse is with Perón at the Iron Gate.
In 1956, just one year after his overthrow by the army, Perón wrote from Panama, “My anxiety was that some clever man would have taken over.” Now, after eight presidents, six of them military men, Argentina is in a state of crisis that no Argentine can fully explain. The mighty country, as big as India and with a population of twenty-three million, rich in cattle and grain, Patagonian oil, and all the mineral wealth of the Andes, inexplicably drifts. Everyone is disaffected. And suddenly nearly everyone is Peronist. Not only the workers, on whom in the early days Perón showered largesse, but Marxists and even the middle-class young, whose parents remember Perón as a tyrant, torturer and thief.
The peso has gone to hell: from 5 to the dollar in 1947, to 16 in 1949, 250 in 1966, 400 in 1970, 420 in June last year, 960 in April this year, 1100 in May. Inflation, which has been running at a steady 25 percent since the Perón days, has now jumped to 60 percent. The banks are offering 24 percent interest. Inflation, when it reaches this stage of takeoff, is good only for the fire insurance business. Premiums rise and claims fall. When prices gallop away week by week, fires somehow do not often get started.
For everyone else it is a nightmare. It is almost impossible to put together capital; and even then, if you are thinking of buying a flat, a delay of a week can cost you two or three hundred U.S. dollars (many business people prefer to deal in dollars). Salaries, prices, the exchange rate: everyone talks money, everyone who can afford it buys dollars on the black market. And soon even the visitor is touched by the hysteria. In two months a hotel room rises from 7000 pesos to 9000, a ton of tobacco from 630 to 820. Money has to be changed in small amounts; the market has to be watched. The peso drops one day to 1250 to the dollar. Is this a freak, or the beginning of a new decline? To hesitate that day was to lose: the the peso bounced back to 1100. “You begin to feel,” says Norman Thomas di Giovanni, the translator of Borges, who has come to the end of his three-year stint in Buenos Aires, “that you are spending the best years of your life at the moneychanger’s. I go there some afternoons the way other people go shopping. Just to see what’s being offered.”
The blanket wage rises that the government decrees from time to time—15 percent in May, and another 15 percent promised soon—cannot keep pace with prices. “We’ve got to the stage,” the ambassador’s wife says, “when we can calculate the time between the increase in wages and the increase in prices.” People take a second job and sometimes a third. Everyone is obsessed with the need to make more money and at the same time to spend quickly. People gamble. Even in the conservative Andean town of Mendoza the casino is full; the patrons are mainly workpeople, whose average montly wage is the equivalent of fifty dollars. The queues that form all over Buenos Aires on a Thursday are of people waiting to hand in their football-pool coupons. The announcement of the pool results is a weekly national event.
A spectacular win of some 330 million pesos by a Paraguayan laborer dissipated a political crisis in mid-April. There had been riots in Mendoza, and the army had been put to flight. Then, in the following week, a guerrilla group in Buenos Aires killed the Fiat manager whom they had kidnapped ten days earlier. On the same day, in the nearby industrial town of Ro-sario, guerrillas ambushed and killed General Sanchez, commander of the Second Army Corps, who had some reputation as a torturer. Blood called for blood: there were elements in the armed forces that wanted then to break off the negotiations with Perón and scotch the elections promised next year. But the Paraguayan’s fortune lightened all conversation, revived optimism and calmed nerves. The little crisis passed.
The guerrillas still raid and rob and blow up; they still occasionally kidnap and occasionally kill. The guerrillas are young and middle class. Some are Pero-nist, some are communist. After all the bank raids the various organizations are rich. In Córdoba last year, according to my information, a student who joined the Peronist Montoneros was paid the equivalent of $70 a month; lawyers were retained at $350. “You could detect the young Montoneros by their motorcars, their aggressiveness, their flashiness, James Dean types. Very glamorous.” Another independent witness says of the guerrillas he has met in Buenos Aires: “They’re anti-American. But one of them held
a high job in an American company. They have split personalities; some of them really don’t know who they are. They see themselves as a kind of comicbook hero. Clark Kent in the office by day, Superman at night, with a gun.”
Once you make a decision [the thirty-year-old woman says] you feel better. Most of my friends are for the revolution and they feel much better. But sometimes they are like children who can’t see too much of the future. The other day I went with my friend to the cinema. He is about thirty-three. We went to see Sacco and Vanzetti. At the end he said, “I feel ashamed not being a guerrillero. I feel I am an accomplice of this government, this way of life.” I said, “But you lack the violence. A guerrillero must be despejado—he mustn’t have too much imagination or sensibility. You have to do as you are told. If not, nothing comes out well. It is like a religion, a dogma.” And again he said, “Don’t you feel ashamed?”
The film maker says:
I think that after Marx people are very conscious of history. The decay of colonialism, the emergence of the Third World—they see themselves acting out some role in this process. This is as dangerous as having no view of history at all. It makes people very vain. They live in a kind of intellectual cocoon. Take away the jargon and the idea of revolution, and most of them would have nothing.
The guerrillas look for their inspiration to the north. From Paris of 1968 there is the dream of students and workers uniting to defeat the enemies of “the people.” The guerrillas have simplified the problems of Argentina. Like the campus and salon revolutionaries of the north, they have identified the enemy: the police. And so the social-intellectual diversions of the north are transformed, in the less intellectuall
y stable south, into horrible reality. Dozens of policemen have been killed. And the police reply to terror with terror. They, too, kidnap and kill; they torture, concentrating on the genitals. A prisoner of the police jumps out of a window: La Prensa gives it a couple of inches. People are arrested and then, officially, “released”; sometimes they reappear, sometimes they don’t. A burned-out van is discovered in a street one morning. Inside there are two charred corpses: men who had been hustled out of their homes two days before. “In what kind of country are we living?” one of the widows asks. But the next day she is calmer; she retracts the accusation against the police. Someone has “visited” her.
“Friends of friends bring me these stories of atrocities,” Norman di Giovanni says, “and it makes you sick. Yet no one here seems to be amazed by what’s going on.” “My wife’s cousin was a guerrillero,” the provincial businessman says at lunch. “He killed a policeman in Rosario. Then, eight months ago, he disappeared. Está muerto. He’s dead.” He has no more to say about it; and we talk of other matters.
On some evenings the jackbooted soldiers in black leather jackets patrol the pedestrian shopping street called Florida with their Alsatians: the dogs’ tails close to their legs, their shoulders hunched, their ears thrown back. The police Chevrolets prowl the neon-lit streets unceasingly. There are policemen with machine guns everywhere. And there are the mounted police in slate gray; and the blue-helmeted anti-guerrilla motorcycle brigade; and those young men in
The Return of Eva Perón, With the Killings in Trinidad Page 9