The Ventriloquist's Tale

by Pauline Melville

  Auntie Wifreda moaned, turned on her side and pretended to be too ill to respond.

  ‘Well, perhaps I could bring her in a few days when you are feeling better,’ Chofy persisted. ‘I’ll come back later with the tobacco.’

  He let himself out through the door.

  Not even the long journey back to his lodgings, the sun beating down on his back, through Le Repentir cemetery with its tombstones like broken teeth stuck at angles in the ground, could extinguish his feelings of elation. He turned into the part of town where he lived. The familiar smell of stale oil from the street vendors in Albouystown no longer sickened him.

  Just as he approached his lodgings, he heard the voice of Rohit’s wife, yelling at another woman from the window.

  ‘Everybody knows how yuh behind too hot to sit in church these days. Ain’ that so, Miss Lady?’

  A figure slunk behind the door jamb of the house opposite.

  ‘Look how she hidin’ sheself. See how she don’ dare come out. And when she does, I go buss she fuckin’ head.’

  Rohit edged into view, drunk, pushing his bike.

  ‘That’s it,’ he yelled. ‘Drop your pants and skin your arse up at dem, Madam War-Zone. But I goin’jump you tonight, like it or not, Mistress Hostility Head.’

  Chofy let himself in quietly. His small bare room closed itself affectionately round him. Everything in the room looked full of promise, even the black plastic chair with the stuffing poking out. He fixed the gas canister on to the stove and rummaged in his bag for some tobacco. Then he took the towel off the mirror and looked at his reflection. Immediately, he panicked at the thought that he was getting too fat. It wouldn’t do to get fat. He sank into the chair.

  For a few minutes he frowned guiltily and bit his lip. It was the time of day when Marietta would be watering the fruit trees. He pictured her broad back and shoulders as she tipped water from the bucket. He pictured Bla-Bla wrestling with the wheelbarrow full of firewood.

  ‘But life is such a struggle and I deserve some happiness,’ he pleaded to himself.

  Some time after Chofy had left, Auntie Wifreda sat up on the bed in her blue nightie and put her feet on the floor. The room was hot and airless.

  Ever since the mention of Evelyn Waugh, she had been fretting. It brought the whole business back to her. Wifreda still carried a burden of guilt. Not many people were left who knew what had happened. She pulled the patch off her eye, but the lid and surrounding flesh were still so swollen that she could not open it properly and test her sight. All her adult life, she had feared that she would go blind simply because of her kinship with her brother Danny and sister Beatrice. Kinship with them was itself enough to warrant some sort of supernatural reprisal.

  She ran her hands over her forehead where the headache sat behind her eyes, the thoughts clawing at her brain like crabs in a barrel. Don’t say the whole matter was going to re-surface now. She would say as little about Mr Evelyn Waugh as possible — not that he had anything directly to do with it. But she herself had told him the truth of the story and for all she knew, he was still alive. Beatrice, her sister, might still be liable to criminal prosecution over the business with the priest. Wifreda knew that she was alive, in an old people’s home somewhere in Canada.

  Yes indeed, she remembered Mr Waugh. She remembered him standing in plus fours by the long trestle-tables under the mango tree where the family sometimes ate. He had been curious to see the McKinnons sitting down to eat in European clothes, but talking in Wapisiana and with their feet bare under the table and bows and arrows slung over the backs of the chairs.

  And she remembered Mr Waugh’s encounter with her nephew Sonny. Sonny was her sister Beatrice’s child. When Beatrice left for Canada, she had asked Wifreda to raise him.

  It was odd how memories from so far back were more vivid in her mind than what happened yesterday.

  She could clearly see Mr Waugh, stick in hand, coming out of the house and walking towards the river. Sonny was about fourteen. He was seated on his own at the trestle-tables under the huge, spreading mango tree, eyes open but with that small smile on his lips which meant he was asleep. The family’s pet monkey was gibbering in its cage and a red macaw looked down in silence from the mango tree above. He was a beautiful-looking boy with black hair and wide, black eyes punched slantwise into a heart-shaped face. Mr Waugh was not to know that Sonny slept with his eyes open.

  Sonny sat upright. Diamond-shaped leaf shadows flickered over his face and the top half of his body. He held himself erect, with his hands placed on the table in front of him. The moving pattern made him look like a harlequin. Sometimes the leaf shadows clustered together like the black, rosetted hide of a jaguar. A night wizard, sitting at a sunlit table.

  There were two rules with Sonny. Do not startle him, was one. Do not speak too fast, was the other. Mr Waugh went up to him and broke both at once.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ he said, in a high, jovial voice that sounded as if he were trying to be companionable. ‘I thought everyone had gone off fishing in …’

  He had not finished his sentence before Sonny exploded into a windmill of agitated, ungainly movement, his passionately guarded enclosure shattered. He rose clumsily, knocking a calabash from the table, and headed for the house. After a minute or two, the shadow of his hammock could be seen swinging to and fro inside his room.

  Mr Waugh, vexed, stared after him for a bit and then sat down at the table to read Dombey and Son until the kaboura flies drove him inside.

  It was to compensate for that encounter that Wifreda, in a rare fit of openness, had confided in Mr Waugh and explained Sonny’s history, not that the writer seemed particularly interested, in fact, she detected a certain distaste as he listened. The next day she had sneaked a look at his diary and discovered a cryptic reference to the affair and to her ‘dotty bastard nephew’.

  Auntie Wifreda shut her eyes. Even now after all these years, she regretted what had happened and missed her sister Beatrice more than she could express. An iron ache weighed on her stomach as she recalled the separation. Beatrice had been the elder sister who looked after them all. Everybody loved her. If anybody belonged in the savannahs, it was Beatrice. She had known every creature, every rock-stone and river, gully, bush and plant for miles around.

  Auntie Wifreda clenched her fists and grimaced as she remembered how she had been indirectly responsible for Beatrice’s final departure.

  She lay down and tossed restlessly on the bed in the stifling room.

  The picture of Beatrice finally leaving Waronawa pushed itself into her mind, clear in every detail.

  The whole family had risen before dawn. Danny, their eldest brother, went to and fro in the dark from the house to the bullock cart outside, stacking her bags and baskets. Beatrice had seemed perfectly calm. She sat at the table, sipping tapioca porridge. Most of her nine brothers and sisters sat or stood round in the kitchen with the two mamais, Maba and Zuna. Some of the vaqueiros were there too, up early because one of the horses was foaling. Very little was said.

  Wifreda had ridden over from Pirara to say goodbye and to collect Sonny. She was holding Sonny in her arms. Danny had wanted to leave before sunrise, but the sky was already streaked pink and duck-egg green and the sun had caught the top of the Kanaku Mountains by the time they were ready to set off. The mountains themselves seemed suddenly to have crept nearer to Beatrice as the sun touched them.

  When Beatrice climbed into the cart, Wifreda lifted Sonny towards her to say goodbye. The boy smiled at something over his mother’s shoulder, but not noticeably at his mother. He averted his head and pulled away a little as Beatrice ran her hand over and through his hair. Then Danny twitched the reins and the cart rumbled off.

  The last Wifreda had ever seen of Beatrice was the back of that straight, defiant figure, her dark hair down to her shoulders, holding on to the side of the cart and looking ahead towards the sky-foot where the Kanaku Mountains ended and the savannah began.

  Humm
ing-Bird Sucking Honey

  The night’s love-making had left Rosa feeling calm, elated and oddly weightless as if she were floating. Most of all she was surprised. She folded her arms behind her head and pushed her toes up under the sheet. What was to be the outcome of all this? She could not imagine. Her actions were normally those of a slow, thoughtful woman whose progress through life was methodical and thorough. She exercised caution in her dealings with the world. What had happened? On the other hand, she had been warned that this was a country of the random. It occurred to her that she might never see Chofy again. Or possibly end up with him as a lifelong partner. There was no telling. The used sheet coiled itself round her legs as she turned to doze off once more, the events of the night staying with her like a good dream.

  It was late in the morning when Rosa finally got up, bathed and dressed in a fresh cotton print dress. Eyes half shut, she looked in the black-spotted mirror and pulled a comb through the tangled corona of black hair. A sort of dreaminess had hold of her which prevented her from doing any work so she went downstairs to find breakfast. She sat at the table outside, feeling self-conscious, as if the sexual activity of the night before was written all over her like the luminous entry stamp of a London disco.

  As if to confirm her fears, another guest was peering curiously across at her from his table through spectacles, rimless at the top and steel-rimmed at the bottom. Straggling wisps of hair wandered sideways over the top of his balding pink scalp. After a few minutes, he got up and made his awkward way over to her, his jacket flapping about him.

  ‘May I introduce myself. My name is Michael Wormoal. I am an anthropologist from the University of Berne. Did I see you yesterday going off somewhere with a group of Amerindians?’

  ‘Yes, you did,’ said Rosa cautiously.

  ‘I am a Czech. My research field is comparative mythology amongst South American Indians. When I saw you yesterday I wondered if you were … well … doing something in my area.’

  Rosa detected a competitive challenge in his enquiry. ‘I’m here to do research but in literature,’ she replied politely.

  He laughed.

  ‘Ah well, many of us anthropologists are just writing bad fiction these days. It seems to be the fashion. Analysis by metaphor. A sort of laziness really.’

  Rosa smiled with him.

  ‘I am here to do research into the English writer, Evelyn Waugh, who came here in the thirties.’

  He seemed relieved.

  ‘Your friend who left a while ago … what sort of Indian is he?’

  ‘Wapisiana.’

  ‘Oh really? Part of my fieldwork was amongst the Wapisiana people. I think I probably know more about the Amerindian peoples than they know about themselves. What is his name?’

  ‘His name is Chofoye McKinnon. Chofy for short. Apparently it’s a Wai-Wai name. It means “explosion of rapids or fast-flowing waters”.’

  ‘That’s interesting.’ Wormoal jotted it down in his notebook. ‘I would very much like to meet with him.’

  An inexplicable rush of possessiveness made Rosa prevaricate.

  ‘I’m not sure when he’ll be back.’

  Wormoal asked with a gesture whether he could sit down at her table. She nodded.

  ‘It is a shame,’ Wormoal said as he sat down, ‘how rapidly Indian culture is disintegrating these days – contaminated mainly by contact with other races.’

  Rosa took his words personally and flushed.

  ‘Well, I’m an internationalist, I suppose. I believe in a mixture of the races,’ she said hesitantly.

  Within minutes, a steely argument developed under the pleasantries.

  ‘You are going against the modern grain then,’ he continued. His glasses glinted in the midday sun. ‘People want to be with their own kind. Everyone nowadays is retreating into their own homogeneous group. Black with black. Serb with Serb. Muslim with Muslim. Look at me. I’m a Czech. First of all we got rid of the Soviet Union and then we parted from the Slovaks. Now we’re happy.’

  One of the kitchen staff arrived to put a plate of red water-melon slices on the table. Rosa found herself standing up defensively for the old Czechoslovakia.

  ‘I used to go on holiday to Czechoslovakia with my parents. We always had a wonderful time.’

  Wormoal gave Rosa a slightly patronising smile.

  ‘Real existing socialism was different if you lived it. I have gone in the other direction now. I believe in the purity of the nation.’

  Rosa was taken aback.

  ‘People have suffered a great deal from those sort of ideas,’ she retorted. ‘That sort of purity casts a dark shadow.’

  ‘Yes, but you must admit it has its attractions.’ His tone was teasing. ‘And you Jews also choose to stick together now in Israel.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I am not a Zionist,’ she replied sharply. ‘I support the Palestinians on most issues.’

  Rosa could not believe the argument had escalated on to such dangerous ground so quickly. She tried to neutralise the conversation.

  ‘You do your research entirely into Amerindian mythology?’

  ‘Yes. I’m going to present a paper at the university here on the scientific approach to mythology. I have a copy on me if you’d like to read it.’ Perspiration darkened a strand of fair hair that fell over his pink forehead as he fished in his briefcase and handed it over to her.

  ‘But surely, you yourself are contaminating the Indians when you stay with them,’ she could not resist saying, as she glanced through the paper.

  A rueful expression crossed Wormoal’s face. Plates could be heard clattering in the kitchen.

  ‘I’m afraid you are right. We try just to observe but our very presence alters things. Mine are the wasted talents of a secret agent. I have the entire map of this country in my head. I know about the history and movements of the indigenous peoples here, their kinship structures, occupations, philosophies, cosmologies, labour pattern, languages. We Europeans have access to all the books and documentation that they lack. And what do I do with it? I become a professor and enrich European and American culture with it.’

  Rosa looked at him curiously.

  ‘You make knowledge sound like a new form of colonial power.’

  Wormoal startled her by suddenly leaning forward with an intense expression on his face.

  ‘But of course. Information is the new gold. You, as a scholar, must know that. My knowledge of the Indians is a way of owning them – I admit it. We fight over the intellectual territory. But it’s better than stealing their land, isn’t it?’

  Confused, Rosa shrank from being bracketed with him. Wishing to extricate herself from his presence, she rose to leave the table.

  ‘Thank you for your paper. I’ll read it as soon as possible. I must go upstairs and sort out my work.’

  ‘I’ll let you know when I’m speaking at the university. You might like to come.’

  ‘Thank you very much.’

  As she stood up to go, a sparkling new Land Rover, with the words ‘Hawk Oil’ on the side, swung into the yard. Five burly, weather-beaten white men, all wearing baseball caps, got out. Two wore light suits. Three wore T-shirts and jeans.

  ‘Dey’s come. De Americans.’ Anita the cook stood in the yard and yelled upstairs excitedly. Mrs Hassett, the manageress, bustled out to greet them. The new arrivals gazed round with a proprietorial stare.

  As Rosa went up to the attic, she passed Anita and Indira on the stairs.

  ‘Perhaps they can get us a visa.’ Anita was giggling. ‘Or perhaps one of them will marry me. Or perhaps they will carry us out to America in their pockets or hide us in their suitcases.’

  The attic felt warm and peaceful, a safe retreat. The conversation with Wormoal had disturbed Rosa. She flopped on to the bed frowning and began to study the academic paper he had given her. His views had unsettled her. Racial integration had always been the bedrock of her outlook. But he had made her feel self-conscious about her relationship with
Chofy, as if slipping a poisoned wedge between them. She started to read:

  The Structural Elements of Myth by M. J. Wormoal

  It is my intention today to talk to you about the science of mythology. I think we must all agree that science is the winning strategy of the modern world. Science and reason are now invoked in every field, including areas which have previously evaded them such as mythology.

  There is nothing that cannot be tackled by reason. As Stephen Hawking has said: ‘We live in a universe governed by rational laws.’

  Everything finally is written in mathematical language. It has only to be decoded and the world surrenders. It used to be thought that by obeying nature we commanded it. This was the basis of much ancient Amerindian culture. Now, however, it is generally understood that man has become the master and possessor of nature. The need to obey has disappeared.

  After many years of research, we have discovered that the most effective and fertile methods of analysing myths are those regulated by algebra. With algebra, we can constitute a set of elements of units by which myths can be compared and by which we can analyse their internal logic. It is to science that we must now look for explanations of mythology. Even such a rambling and misshapen body of artistic entities as mythology can be proven to have a scientific basis.

  I shall take several myths indigenous to the Americas and divide them structurally into a set of elements with ordering relations.

  The myths I have taken are from the Bering Straits, the Wapisiana people of the Rupununi savannahs and the Tupinamba of Brazil. Amerindian cosmology is at the root of these studies.

  Throughout the Americas from as far north as the Bering Straits to the southernmost part of Brazil, one of the most widespread, indigenous myths concerns the eclipse, which represents brother-and-sister incest in the form of a copulating sun and moon. The myths all vary in detail with some overlaps.

  What I intend to do is to relate the myths briefly and work out what are constants and what are variables. We can then take certain elements of units and find them repeated in a variety of combinations to which we can apply a mathematical formula.