The Ventriloquist's Tale

by Pauline Melville

  Chofy looked dour and spoke firmly, as if by sounding decisive, he might be capable of anchoring the family to the earth.

  ‘I’ll go to Georgetown and try to dig up a job somewhere. Mining maybe. Or logging. Perhaps I’ll have to find something in Georgetown itself. I’ll send money back and we’ll build up the herd again. Can you manage the farm?’

  They lived on the outskirts of Moco-moco village, some distance from any other houses. Moco-moco was one of the last villages before the foothills on the northern side of the Kanaku Mountains. Many of the houses were scattered up to several hours’ walk from one another. There were no immediate neighbours to help. Their cassava farm or garden was planted on a bush-island three miles’ walk away beside the river.

  Despite his recent feelings of dissatisfaction, now that he was being forced to leave, Chofy felt unhappy. The idea of town filled him with dread. The wind in the house seemed to be an airy omen of disarray. It seemed to be laughing at him, even playing with him. As he spoke, his words sounded hollow, no defence against winds that could scatter human plans in any direction.

  He pushed his plate away abruptly and went to collect up his hunting knives. Through the window he caught sight of five small figures, headed by Bla-Bla, running pell-mell across the savannah towards a clump of mango trees in the opposite direction from the school.

  ‘There goes the Mango Truancy Squad,’ he said grimly.

  The tension in his shoulders signalled to Marietta that he was subsiding into one of his sulks.

  ‘You must beat him,’ she said. ‘When I was young, if we were lazy, they used to slap mucru squares on our back, especially woven so that the head of the ant came out one end and the sting the other. They’d slap the stinging end on us and hold it there. Or put pepper in our eyes. He’d soon learn.’

  Chofy ignored her and stalked outside. Grudgingly, he unpinned one of the deer-hides that was drying on the side of the house, as if he resented paying it attention. Then he went the two hundred yards down to the creek where he had left the other hides to soak. Two men who had come to help sat on the bank waiting for him. One deerskin was already softened, treated with white lime to remove some of the hair. The hides that had been scraped clean were in the barracong, soaking in a tub of water with mari-mari bark until they turned brown.

  He flung the softened deerskin over the trunk of a tree in the water and handed the other men a knife each. Then they waded in to scrape the rest of the hair off with the hunting knives.

  By the afternoon, the combination of standing up to his waist in water, the heat, the smell of the hide, the other men’s jokes and the arm-breaking physical work had made him temporarily forget his uneasiness about the future.

  The men were still down at the creek when Marietta noticed that the air inside the house suddenly smelt damp. Then everything went dark. As the storm broke overhead, she ran about the house collecting pails, pans, buckets, calabashes, gourds, anything that could be placed on the earth floor at the points where the rains came through the thatch. The first bolt of lightning struck an old defunct electricity post near the house, relic of some long-forgotten scheme to bring electricity to the area. It brought down the wires in a smoking tangle.

  Auntie Wifreda, clutching a cloth to her head, pushed her way through the pelting rain towards her row of plants at the back of the house. Bla-Bla was running home from the direction of the school. Lightning skittered down to the ground just in front of him.

  ‘Lightning juk me in the foot. I saw blood,’ gasped Bla-Bla to Marietta who was flying past him to get in the washing from the line. He tried to examine his foot, water pouring from his head on to his shoulders.

  ‘You must cover you head,’ shouted Auntie Wifreda who was waddling over to rescue her plants from the onslaught of the rain. ‘Lightning don’ like we hair. There’s too much iron about the place. Lightning gettin’ vex. ‘E don’ like wires and all this.’ She snatched up two pots that contained seedlings and took them inside.

  Under the dishwater sky, Chofy and the other men struggled to carry the sodden skins up from the creek. They dumped them outside and came in the house. Chofy immediately, without a word, went out again and climbed up on to the roof to make sure the falling electricity post had not damaged the thatch.

  In the distance he saw lightning zigzagging along the Kanaku Mountains from the peak of Darukaban to the peak of Shiriri.

  Marietta took the fish out of the pan, put a cloth over her head and went to clear leaves from the trench round the house. Brown water gurgled and gushed past the back door.

  ‘Bla-Bla. Tomorrow you must help clear the trench and dig another one round the barracong,’ she said as she came back inside, drenched, holding her soaking dress away from her breasts.

  She called to Chofy: ‘Chofy. Come, let us drink tea.’

  Chofy came in, wiping his head and his hands on a rag. The four of them sat with the other two workers at the table. Thunder crashed outside. Spindles of rain twisted through the holes in the thatch and spattered on the floor.

  ‘This is not a roof,’ said Marietta ruefully, looking up at the thatch. ‘This is a strainer we livin’ under.’

  The fact that the rainy season was beginning hastened the decision. It was agreed that Chofy should stay for the planting which had to be done before the rains set in properly. Then he would leave for Georgetown straight away in case flooding made the journey impossible.

  He would take Auntie Wifreda with him for the longoverdue cataract operation on her eyes. Although he grumbled about taking her, secretly he was grateful to have company. Every time he thought of leaving, he experienced a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. The priest at Lethem had told them there was a Catholic home for the elderly where she could stay for nothing while she attended the hospital. He would have to find lodgings for himself.

  The night before he left, Marietta had just gone to lie in her hammock when she heard his voice calling from the other room.

  ‘Where is my darling?’

  ‘I am here, Chofy, and I love you,’ she called back in the night. Then she made her way, rather shyly, through the palpable darkness to join him on the bed which consisted of an old mattress resting on some boxes and crates, and they made love for the first time for months, feeling rusty and out of practice, a little embarrassed and happy.

  A City Built of Space

  The city of Georgetown darkened Chofy’s spirits like a black crow overhead. The room that he rented in the district of Albouystown was cramped and cheap. His new East Indian landlord, Rohit Persaud, however, appeared anxious to please.

  ‘Tell me whatever is missing here that you might need,’ he said, waving a triumphant hand around the dilapidated room, ‘and I will tell you how to do without it.’

  On his third Saturday, Chofy was woken by the bar of blazing sunlight that fell across his eyes from the window and by the sound of bitter fighting from the next room.

  Every morning was the same. The house got off to a noisy start with the sound of Rohit Persaud arguing with his wife. Rohit’s wife would not sleep with him because she suspected him of having an affair. Rohit’s almighty battle to get some sex was heard by everybody. Walls were thin. The whole house knew about it.

  ‘What happen, Mistress Arctic-Front? Legs closed? You shut up shop or what?’

  ‘If I find you bin seein’ that dog-bone, I goin’ take your balls and push them down your throat.’

  ‘What dog-bone?’

  ‘You know who I mean. Grater-face. Broomstick-leg. Dhal and rice. That Guava Jelly Queen of Sixth Street you so keen on.’

  ‘An’ if you ain’ game, what I supposed to do? Hold my prick between my legs and bite my tongue?’

  Then came the sound of the wife levering herself out of bed and moving around on the other side of the wall, smacking pots and pans down on the stove. After a while the smell of dhal being heated wafted over the partition.

  They make so much noise, these people, thought Chofy as he
fetched water and bathed. He dressed neatly in cotton trousers, a well-ironed blue shirt and the brown boots he always wore in the bush. He still found looking in a mirror to comb his hair an odd experience. The mirror reflected back with vicious clarity a stranger – some other man with black hair, similar to his, that came to a widow’s peak at the front, giving a heart-shaped appearance to his round face. His eyes stared back at him reminding him of an otter.

  He hung a towel over the mirror.

  On his way out, Chofy bumped into Rohit coming up the stairs with a bucket of water from the stand-pipe, his face swimming in sweat and his chest gleaming a bilious yellow under his vest.

  ‘Me na know is warung wid dat woman,’ he said, shaking his head in exasperation. ‘She swell up and vex about de least little ting. Can’t take de rockings.’

  Mrs Persaud stared at her husband from the open window with disdain, her head settled back on her fat neck like a pigeon on its nest.

  ‘Look at you, greaseball,’ she sneered. ‘No wonder people does call you the Sardine of Surinam.’ She pursed her lips in disgust.

  ‘You could do with some greasing yourself, Madam Dry-dock.’

  A half-eaten portion of dhal flew out of the window just missing Rohit’s head.

  Relieved to escape from the house, Chofy headed for Stabroek market to make a connection with a Macusi man whose wife had a stall there on Saturdays and who was travelling by truck to the Rupununi. He had agreed to carry money home for Marietta. Chofy’s new job did not require him to be there until ten o’clock on a Saturday and he finished at twelve. After that, he would visit Auntie Wifreda and check to see how she was settling in at the St Francis of Assisi home.

  He let himself through the broken gate on to the street, emerging into the raucous noise and the ramshackle, grey, sun-bleached, wooden slums of the neighbourhood. He picked his way over stinking trenches, piles of trash and junked tyres, holding his breath as much as possible against a variety of stomach-churning smells. The tingalinga tingalinga sound of a steel band fought to gain ascendancy over the tireless thump of reggae, tata toom, tata toom, bombarding his ears as people pushed past him and shouted to each other across the street. He longed for the peace of the Rupununi savannahs.

  A sharp-faced boy, black as ebony, played with his friends on the twisted metal frame of a derelict car. As Chofy passed, he yelled out, ‘Hey, buck man,’ after him and then, ‘Look at de moon-face buck man.’ One of the others threw a chewed mango seed at him. ‘Get back to the bush, buck man.’ Chofy ignored them, seething inwardly. He put on a blank expression and continued walking.

  With the help of a letter from the priest in the Rupununi, Chofy had found himself a temporary job in the main library, shifting and re-stacking books while the library was being refurbished. For the first few days he suffered from continuous headaches.

  It was the first time he had ever been employed by anyone else. Working indoors made him feel imprisoned and breathless. He deliberately put on what he called his ‘buck-man face’, polite but expressionless, revealing nothing of what he really felt, even though he suspected that it made people think he was stupid. As each day passed, he felt diminished, like a deflating balloon with the air slowly fizzling out.

  Working to a rigid time-table irked him but the most difficult adaptation of all was to the idea of leisure, of work being one thing and leisure another. In the Rupununi, he never made the distinction. There was always some task to be done and usually someone to do it alongside. You stopped to eat, or you zopped in your hammock. Otherwise, there were always fishing nets to be made, arrow-heads to be whittled, guns cleaned, planting or weeding to be done, roofs to be mended, skins to be scraped. Work was continuous and varied.

  Confining work to certain hours and then having nothing to do appalled him. For the first week, when he had finished at the library, he would go home, get into bed, although it was not yet dark, and turn his face to the plank wall, pulling the sheet over his head to keep out the daylight. Sometimes he hugged his pillow, to avoid confronting the endless acres of waste-time.

  As Chofy walked with light, rather hesitant step over the rough concourse towards Stabroek market, he was aware of numerous pairs of eyes watching him. He made his way tentatively inside the vast iron structure of the old Dutch slave market and through the maze of stalls, looking for the man who would deliver the money to Marietta.

  At first, the cavernous gloom of the huge market overwhelmed him. It seemed to him to be a market of lethargy. There were few people shopping that early. A tubby man sprawled on the counter asleep next to the beef he was selling. A slow-moving woman sold rolls of cloth by candlelight. Another thin-faced woman with liquid, treacherous eyes lounged next to a stall which displayed some shallots, bunches of fine-leaf thyme and a few bottles of Cutex nail varnish.

  Chofy found the Macusi man he was looking for sitting by his wife’s stall and he handed over the money for Marietta. The man had been about to accompany Chofy outside, when his wife developed a violent headache and he decided to stay with her. Chofy said his goodbyes and began to look for a way out of the labyrinth.

  He came to a crossroads of passages. Suddenly, there seemed to be a whirlwind of draughts, a tornado of breeze. His knees began to give and he found himself leaning slowly backwards. Then it felt as if little flies were settling all over him. Little hands. His body moved as if it were being manipulated. He felt the pickpockets’ light touch like flies on a carcass. Realising what was happening, he pivoted slightly on his heel and took a low swing, punching out behind him. His fist scrunched into a face at the height of his hip. Figures pressed in on him, Chofy skipped sideways and ran through the alleyways towards the light.

  Outside, he half ran and half walked away from the place, looking at people with suspicion, his heart pounding. In his agitation, the notion struck him that everyone around him was controlled by the Master of Pickpockets. The Master of Pickpockets must have organised the whole thing: the woman’s sudden headache, the confluence of winds, the pickpockets themselves.

  He shook his head and tried to regain control of himself. His hand felt to see that his few dollars were still in his pocket. At least he had delivered Marietta’s money safely before they pounced. The blow he had landed on someone’s face worried him. He dreaded becoming involved with the police or the courts in any way. He hurried blindly through the streets, instinctively walking close to the wall or fence like a cat, protected at least on one side.

  Within ten minutes, he was lost.

  Eventually, he slowed down somewhere near Camp Street and Brickdam. The broad, spacious street was nearly empty. Few people had ventured out into the morning’s hazy heat. Making sure he had not been followed, Chofy walked along Brickdam, uncertain of his direction, looking at the great, detached, white, wooden colonial mansions, like huge birds with folded wings that had come to rest some way back from the street.

  He slowed to a halt outside one house that had ‘Mynheer Nicklaus’ written in wrought-iron lettering on the gates and sat down on the short stone post that supported the gate, gradually recovering his composure. As his breathing slowed down, he became more aware of his surroundings.

  There is a strange emptiness in some cities.

  Chofy had not visited Georgetown often. From his first visit as a young boy, the city had made him uneasy. It was not just the geometrical grid of the Georgetown streets, the parallels, squares and rectangles which disorientated him after the meandering Indian trails of his own region, but as he walked over the dry brown clumps of grass along the verges, he experienced the unaccountable sense of loss that hung in the spaces between buildings renowned for their symmetry and Dutch orderliness.

  From early on in its history, there had been something pale about the city of Stabroek, as Georgetown was known in the eighteenth century. It was as if the architects and builders had attempted to subdue that part of the coast with a geometry to which it was not suited and which hid something else. The labours of men had th
rown up a city made of Euclidean shapes, obtuse-angled red roofs, square-framed houses on evenly spaced stilts, delicately angled Demerara shutters, all constructed around transparency, emptiness and light.

  From the start, the city’s population was not great enough to cause bustle. Even the width of the streets produced melancholy amongst the European colonists, used to the narrow cobbled alleys and uproarious slums of their own capital cities.

  Water Street, in those early days, was one of the few areas where the movement and stir of business was perceptible. Merchants’ shops, retail premises, watch-makers, cigar-makers, saddlers and apothecaries buzzed with activity. The Africans, clad mainly in blue trousers and coarse shirts, retained some spirit of gaiety, despite their circumstances. The white men, lounging under their umbrellas, dressed in nankeen pantaloons and fine calico shirts, were the ones who succumbed frequently to mental instability through languor and apathy.

  Other parts of Stabroek were more silent. Heat made people walk slowly as if they walked through water. The streets were wide and divided along their length by canals. A European woman out for a stroll in those early days would wave to an acquaintance across the width of the street rather than cross to greet her in the heat of the day. This lethargy yielded up into isolation. The space surrounding each person was too great. It fostered a particular kind of madness amongst those early colonists, a loss of grip on reality. Visitors or outsiders mistook this lethargy for serenity, rather than the incipient madness it foretold.

  Many of the colonists were gripped by a fear of the existence of something they could not see. Slave conspiracies. Illnesses that could kill within hours. What they also failed to perceive was that the continent was tilting and sinking towards the sea in a manner which even the Dutch, with their gift for managing water and planting grasses to prevent the erosion of river banks, did not suspect. There was a whole plane that they failed to take into account, a dimension which they did not fully understand. The non-Euclidean waters which in some rivers ran backwards were as incomprehensible to them as the fish discovered in the south of the country which, apparently, walked on land.