The Ventriloquist's Tale

by Pauline Melville

  The first myth is from the Eskimo of the Bering Straits. It concerns a brother who falls in love with his sister and pursues her relentlessly. She takes refuge in the sky and becomes the moon. He continues pursuit in the form of the sun. When he catches up with her they embrace and there is an eclipse.

  The Wapisiana myth I am using also concerns the eclipse. They believed that man was at one with nature – incest I should add is the symbol of nature as opposed to society – until an eclipse separated humankind from the animals and plants. They believed that a brother came secretly to his sister at nights. She enjoyed this but, not knowing who he was, blackened his face with the magical genipap plant to identify him. In his shame he rose to the sky and became the moon. That is why the moon has dark patches on its face.

  The Tupinamba myth is similar except that the sister deliberately seduces her intoxicated brother at a childnaming feast. She paints his face with genipap to make him beautiful. When he realises what he has done, he rushes out of the house with a bundle of arrows and runs to a clearing in the bush. There, he shoots an arrow into the sky and another one into that and so on until they form a ladder of arrows. He climbs into the sky and becomes the moon. She takes off her skirt and follows him, naked, into the sky and becomes the evening star. Below there remains a child who is never named.

  Now, in all these stories there are certain similarities and overlaps. The eclipse. Incest. Metamorphosis into sun, moon or evening star. The split of man from nature. The founding of a magical order. I must also introduce one other element, the tapir, which is the animal symbol for incest amongst many of the South American tribes and which guards the tree of life. There is a savannah creation myth in which two brothers cut down this tree – Mount Roraima, in fact – and a flood gushes from the trunk.

  Therefore we have one set of connecting links between:

  The eclipse. Incest. The deluge.

  And another set of links between:

  The tapir. The deluge. Chaos.

  If we call each myth by a number, for instance M1, M2, et cetera and let S=sun and M=moon and so on, we can complete a full algebraic set of equivalences.

  ‘What are you reading?’

  Rosa looked up. Chofy had approached silently and stood by the bed smiling at her.

  ‘There was this man downstairs who gave me his work to read.’

  ‘What man?’

  ‘Another guest.’

  ‘I want to make love to you.’

  ‘Again?’ Rosa was laughing. ‘When can I get some work done?’

  Chofy flung himself down on the bed next to her.

  ‘I want to dive into that honey-pot and smear myself with honey.’ He held her and kissed her on the neck. She ducked out of it. He sat on the bed gazing at her.

  ‘I’m overwhelmed by you. I want to jump you now, this minute. I’m intoxicated by you.’

  Rosa attempted to deflect him.

  ‘The man was talking about Wapisiana mythology. You must know something about that. He wants to meet you.’

  ‘I don’t know any mythology. Who is this man?’

  ‘His name is Michael Wormoal.’

  ‘Did you talk to him for long?’

  Chofy lay across Rosa’s bed, his face blank with jealousy.

  ‘I told him about you and what your name means.’ She tried to appease him.

  ‘You shouldn’t have done that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘We’re not supposed to tell people about our names. It’s a belief. I only told you because I trusted you.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know that.’

  ‘I would have come back earlier but I had to fetch this tobacco for my aunt.’ He took the packet of tobacco from his pocket and threw it down on the bed.

  ‘Couldn’t we go and see your Auntie Wifreda and come back here later?’ suggested Rosa.

  ‘I told you, she’s sick. I don’t know if she can see anyone,’ said Chofy coldly.

  ‘Well, I’d like to post some letters. Would you walk to the post office with me?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Chofy with a deliberate display of politeness.

  On the way back from the post office, they went upstairs to the Demico Café and sat at one of the white wrought-iron tables ordering a beer each. Rosa paid.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Chofy. ‘I shouldn’t have behaved like that. I hardly know you but I feel so jealous about you.’

  She smiled at him. Creepers and vines twisted through the lattice behind her head. Her skirt was hitched up by one of the spokes on the chair’s arm. Chofy’s eyes slid down the length of her pale legs. He watched her drink. As he drank, his face became swollen with lust and he kept staring at her.

  ‘Let’s go to the house. I want to screw you. Do you mind me using the word screw?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’d just like to put you up against a wall and screw you.’

  ‘Let me finish my beer. And what about your Auntie Wifreda’s tobacco?’ She laughed.

  ‘Well, we can deliver that first.’ He grinned and excused himself to go to the toilet. Beneath the café at the back was a lorry depot. The heat and smell of the grey exhaust fumes and the melting tarmac hung in the hot air. Rosa relaxed. The industrial smell reminded her of London.

  ‘Would you like to come to England? Come and stay with me there?’ she asked when he returned.

  ‘Of course.’

  They finished another beer each and got up to leave.

  Auntie Wifreda had left her sick-bed and was reclining in a chair by the door, the patch still over her eye. After sleeping in a hammock, the bed felt hard.

  Chofy introduced Rosa. Auntie Wifreda rolled herself a cigarette, holding it up in front of her good eye. The green parrot perched on the back of her chair, its head on one side, quizzically. Rosa leaned forward and spoke rather loudly, as if Auntie Wifreda might be deaf.

  ‘I met someone called Nancy Freeman in England. She told me that you would remember Evelyn Waugh’s visit. I am trying to collect all the information I can about him.’

  Auntie Wifreda shifted uncomfortably in her chair and gave an embarrassed laugh.

  ‘That was a long time ago. I can’t recall too much.’

  Her face showed nothing. It was impossible to tell whether or not she was affected by the visit.

  ‘Can you remember anything, Auntie, that Evelyn Waugh might have done or said?’ Chofy intervened eagerly on Rosa’s behalf.

  ‘No. Not really.’

  ‘I am hoping to travel to the Rupununi in case I can meet anyone there who might remember him,’ Rosa said, trying to jog the old woman’s memory.

  After thinking for a moment, the old lady replied: ‘They all dead now and the rains have started. You wouldn’t be able to travel. If my brother Danny was alive, he could have taken you. In his canoe, Danny could find his way like a fish. But he’s dead too.’

  There it was again, the picture of Danny on his death-bed. Auntie Wifreda began to sweat. The priest was asking Danny exactly what happened to Father Napier and Danny, his bronze skin glowing even more yellow with liver failure, was telling lies with his last breath and saying: ‘An epidemic killed him. Nothing else. Just a local epidemic.’ Minutes later Danny died. Within hours his body stank so much they had to take it out of the house and the funeral was conducted with his body on a table outside by the river.

  Rosa was saying something.

  ‘What?’ Auntie Wifreda wiped her brow with the sleeve of her nightdress.

  ‘I was just saying that there was someone else who might like to speak to you. A Mr Wormoal. He’s done some research into Wapisiana beliefs about the eclipse. I was just reading about it.’

  Suddenly, Auntie Wifreda felt violently ill and hot. She could hear a booming sound in her ears as if someone had struck a heavy bell that vibrated on a long single note. Rosa’s face began to melt at the edges and metamorphose into the face of her sister Beatrice. The whole room began to waver. The floor and the walls billowed sl
owly.

  ‘Leave me. Go away.’ She spoke to Chofy in Wapisiana. Chofy anxiously helped her put out her cigarette and climb back into bed. He signalled to Rosa to wait for him outside.

  ‘Do you think she will be all right?’ said Rosa anxiously.

  ‘I hope so,’ said Chofy.

  They walked back towards the Lodge slowly and in silence through the hot afternoon.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ she asked, wondering if he was worrying about his aunt.

  ‘Humming-bird sucking honey,’ he replied.

  After they had gone, Wifreda lay in bed and understood without doubt that she was losing her sight. Everything rippled like the wake of a boat on the Essequibo. But a blackness was spreading out from the centre. Nausea had loosened her bowels. Even with her one good eye open, all she could see was Beatrice’s face whichever way she turned her head. The face moved and distorted like a reflection in creek water when a canoe passes. Wifreda shut her good eye. When she opened it again, everything was entirely black. Beatrice’s face still floated in front of her but she knew it was in her mind only. In reality she could see nothing. The long-awaited blindness had finally struck. She heard Beatrice’s voice from long ago, screaming with fury.

  ‘I will make you blind, like a termite.’

  It had come true. She took off the eye patch and opened and closed her eyes several more times. Everything was black as a parrot’s tongue. She heard Beatrice laughing as clearly as if she had just walked into the room. The laughter became jumbled up with the sound of the parrot’s chesty giggle behind her. Then Beatrice was sitting at her side, talking to her, prattling on cheerfully about their childhood in the savannahs.

  ‘Yes,’ Beatrice was saying. ‘The thing I remember best, my first and most vivid memory, is laughing with Danny at Waronawa. I couldn’t have been more than three and Danny must have been about five, although who knows, births were never registered in those days. I shall remember the bliss of laughing like that till the day I die.’

  Part Two

  Waronawa

  The two of them were naked at the back of the house. A line of washing flapped between the fruit trees and the adobe wall. Three rounds of cassava bread sat drying on the thatch roof and a dirty, white half moon hung in the blue sky. Danny was playing with a wheeler, a pole with two small wooden wheels at the bottom, pushing it backwards and forwards. Beatrice squatted in the red earth, poking at some leaves with a stick. Her face was blotched with dirt.

  It was the same red dirt that sat in the fine wire gauze mesh of the windows, the same red dirt that blew through all the savannah Indian dwellings and settled on shelves and beams and rafters; the same fine red dust that coated the drinking water in the huge pottery jar they called the potch. It filled the creases of clothing, clogged the feathers of the bows and arrows, blocked up the barrels of guns, covered the saddles and harnesses hanging on the walls, choked the plants and made everyone’s skin thirsty, like a red plague.

  ‘You look like someone paint you with annatto for a party,’ said her mother in Wapisiana, smiling at her daughter’s smudged face.

  Mamai Maba stood by the stove. She wore only a cotton skirt and her breasts shivered as she worked, feet planted firmly apart, cleaning and gutting a pile of small round silver patwa fish. She threw the intestines on the ground and let the hens dive for them.

  Most of the cooking took place outside under a palm-thatch shelter. A long trestle had been rigged up of forked poles with a metal sheet on top. Resting on this, the stove consisted of loosely stacked clay bricks with a gap in the middle; a blackened sheet of metal with a hole in it lay on the bricks and underneath this burned a log, the flames clawing at the air through the hole in the metal.

  Every time Mamai Maba threw a handful of fish in the large pan, they jumped. Now and then she flicked her long black hair back over her bare shoulder and wiped her eyes with her forearm because of the stinging woodsmoke.

  Beatrice looked up from playing and watched the fish leaping in silver arcs as if to get away from the fire. She had the same beautiful slanting eyes as her mother, black and set so wide apart they seemed ready to fly out of the side of her head. Her complexion was paler and creamier than her mother’s. At home they nicknamed her Tapioca-face.

  As the smell of frying fish wafted over to him, Danny began to feel hungry. He flung aside the wheeler and came running towards them. Beatrice laughed at the way his penis wiggle-woggled as he ran. Catching her mood, he began to strut and show off in front of his sister, thrusting his little pelvis forward. Beatrice laughed with all the more excitement because she realised that his penis danced like one of the fish cavorting in the pan. It was the first time that she had understood that one thing can be like another. The discovery exhilarated her.

  ‘Do it again. Do it again. Do it some more.’

  The more he did it, the more she laughed and he laughed too.

  Then he threw himself on top of her and began to tickle her until she went into paroxysms. She squealed and giggled and squirmed in the warm dust. She laughed so much that she nearly choked. She could not tell whether the laughter was inside her or outside her. It was as if she had become a balloon of laughter. She screamed and laughed so much that she thought she would rise into the blue sky with pleasure.

  The day was scorching hot. Hearing the children shout, Zuna, Mamai Maba’s sister, came lazily to the door of the thatched benab to see if something was the matter. She was pregnant. Both sisters were married to the same white man. They had been jealous of each other at first. Sometimes the jealousy still flared up. But as time went on and especially after Maba had given birth to Danny and Beatrice, they both appreciated that there was too much work for one woman.

  ‘I’ll give you a hand with the farine.’ Zuna yawned, stretched and waddled over to them. Maba took the pan of fish off the fire and set it aside to cool. The sun filtered through the ite-palm leaves of the roof so that shadows slashed at their faces and turned them to red-gold as they hauled the heavy metal trough over to the flames and struggled to hoist it on to the fire. They filled it with farine and started the back-breaking work of parching it, turning the farine with great paddles, raking it back and forth until it turned golden yellow and fluffy.

  Heat from the fire blasted into their faces as they worked. Their eyes turned red with smoke. Zuna began to sweat heavily.

  ‘Go to the lake,’ said Maba, looking at her sister’s dripping forehead. ‘I’ll get on with the farine.’

  Zuna put down her paddle and rubbed her aching back. Her hair was long like Maba’s but her brow was lower which somehow made her look more anxious than her sister. Maba’s placid round face rarely looked troubled. Although Maba wore a skirt, Zuna had gone back to wearing her seed apron because clothes felt too hot and restricting now that the baby was nearly due. The little rectangular apron sat beneath her huge belly. It was made entirely of tiny, flat, dun-coloured seeds threaded together, with a fringe of cotton and three yellow macaw feathers fastened to each side.

  The small lake at the back drained into the river. It was dry season. Water in both the river and the lake was low. The place stood on a slight rise by the east bank of the Rupununi River. It was called Waronawa – hills of the parrot – but the slope on which they lived was known as the hill of the spirit macaw, because a great scarlet macaw was supposed to live in the lake and to drag unwary passers-by down under the waters.

  It was for this reason that Zuna stood stock still when she heard a rustling behind her just as she was bending down at the edge of the lake to throw water on her face and arms. Her heart banged. She turned around. Facing her head-on was the long, brown, pointed snout of a bushy-tailed ant-eater. It stood there, the weight on its great forelegs, and turned a small malevolent eye to look at her. She yelled and the creature grunted and started to amble off through the tufts of dried grass.

  Stricken with the thought that the animal had been sent to harm her unborn baby, Zuna just stood where she was and sh
rieked. Maba threw down her paddle and came running down the trail. When she heard about the ant-eater, she laughed.

  ‘You stupid bad. It’s just an ant-eater. Come quick. The farine will spoil.’

  That night Zuna gave birth to a daughter. She knelt on the ground and held the hammock in both hands, forcing it down against her belly to help push the baby out. Beatrice and Danny slept through it all in the hammock above. Maba and some of the other women from the settlement helped with the birth by the light of a flickering kerosene lamp and then they all walked down to the river to bathe the new baby. Zuna was relieved that it was over. She was longing to eat beef again and mangoes both of which were forbidden during pregnancy.

  They decided to wait until McKinnon returned from Brazil to name the child. When the little girl turned out to have bad eyesight, Zuna blamed it on the way the ant-eater had looked at her. Years later, other people in the settlement said that the child’s eyes were already trying to go blind in order not to see what she was eventually to see.

  Blue Eyes Mean Ignorance

  A few weeks later, McKinnon returned in high spirits on horseback from a visit to Boa Vista in Brazil where he had heard that someone was able to grow apples. He named the new baby Wifreda after the wife of a friend he had stayed with there.

  Alexander McKinnon was a lean, energetic Scotsman in his thirties who prided himself on being a free-thinker. He had arrived in the colony via Jamaica where his father was an archdeacon and where he had been raised. Rejecting the Church and determined to get as far away from civilisation as possible, he struck off into the interior of Guiana with a group of nomadic Atorad Indians who had come to Georgetown to trade. After travelling for several weeks through the wild rain forest which, they told him, was neither darkness nor light but a gigantic memory, he did not know exactly how far up the Essequibo River he had come. Having eaten nothing but cassava bread and saltfish, he fell ill. When he could no longer keep up with them, the Indians abandoned him to lie in his hammock by the river. It was not their custom either to ask for or to give help in such circumstances.