The Ventriloquist's Tale

by Pauline Melville

  During the daytime, he was tormented by kaboura flies and mosquitoes and at night he felt the chill river mist reaching into his bones. Thinking he was going to die, he deliberately swallowed all the laudanum in his possession in order to be unconscious at the time of his death. How long he lay in that state he never knew, but eventually, he came round and started to vomit up black stuff like coffee grounds. Having no idea where he was, he crawled along the river bank and after half a day, came to the Wapisiana village of Katiwau in the savannahs.

  ‘When we first saw him,’ Maba told the children as she spread clothes on to the prickly bushes to dry in the sun, ‘he was creeping along the ground like a dung-beetle, so we couldn’t tell what sort of man he was or even if he was a man at all. Usually, you judge a man by how he does walk. If he walk brisk or slapdash or to show himself off, or day-dreamy or idle – the walk will betray him.

  ‘At first I didn’t like him. He was thin as a blade of savannah grass and when we were little we were told about a man who pulled a brother out of one eye and a sister out of the other, leaving his own eyes blue and empty like the sky, with no thoughts. Blue eyes meant ignorance. So I kept far from him.

  ‘Then Daddy made me nurse him and I helped him to learn to speak Wapisiana. In the end we got on well. He wanted to stay. We all lived in one huge house then. Everyone in the village discussed it and Daddy gave him permission to hang his hammock next to mine in the big house, which meant that we were married.

  ‘Another man in the village wanted to marry Zuna but our father said that McKinnon must have first choice because it was the tradition amongst Wapisiana people that if a man marries one sister he has first choice of the next one. Your father accepted both of us, so here we are.’ By the time Maba was expecting Danny, McKinnon decided to move away from Katiwau. He travelled as far as possible along the Rupununi River and built a ranch-house. The place was Waronawa. Three miles to the north there was an isolated tree and beyond that, the Kanaku Mountains rose a thousand feet from the savannah floor. He bought cattle from a Dutchman, the only other white man for hundreds of miles, who was selling up and leaving.

  Soon most members of Maba and Zuna’s family joined them, including their father and mother and brother Shibi-din. Other villagers came and before long a whole Wapisiana settlement grew up there.

  The new arrivals helped McKinnon plant fruit trees. They cut cassava farms for themselves and carried on hunting and fishing as usual. They thought McKinnon odd because he liked to experiment. He kept guinea fowl and erected boxes on tarred legs to keep away the cushi ants from the tomatoes he tried to grow in manured earth. He accumulated a flock of sheep. At first, he planned to take parrots and monkeys to sell in Georgetown but the long journey made it impracticable. He tried to send down samples of dried beef, but people ate the samples and didn’t put in any orders. He tried Brazil nuts. That failed too. His herd of cattle grew, more by default than anything.

  Gradually, he gave up the ideas he had once had of creating a flourishing business of one sort or another. The land seemed set against it. The harsh surroundings defeated one project after another and little by little, he settled into the traditions of the Wapisiana people. He spoke nothing but Wapisiana because nobody around him knew any English. After a while, he picked up enough Portuguese to manage when he went over the river to Brazil. On his rare visits to Georgetown, he always returned with books for his library and with photographic equipment because photography was his great passion.

  He was aware that Maba and Zuna and the others on the settlement tolerated with good humour his efforts to be innovative because he often saw them catching each other’s eyes and giggling when he suggested a new scheme. He wondered why they were never surprised or disappointed when each fresh idea of his failed and gradually he came to realise that they laughed at the idea of progress, despised novelty and treated it with suspicion. Novelty, in fact, was dangerous. It meant that something was wrong with the order of things. Maba, particularly, treated his enthusiasm for innovation with squeaks of lighthearted derision.

  It was confusing for McKinnon. He settled in to the life well at one level, but every now and then he caught a glimpse of a world he did not understand at all. He tried to discuss things with his father-in-law who was something of a philosopher and who explained to McKinnon that there was no point in trying to do anything about everyday life. It was an illusion behind which lay the unchanging reality of dream and myth.

  ‘We look for the mask behind the face,’ he said, shaking his finger and laughing. McKinnon decided he would be better off just concentrating on the practicalities of life.

  All the same, he could not help being disappointed at the apathy which greeted his experiments. When he first developed photographs of the Kanaku Mountains and showed them to people, he thought they would be astounded. But no one took much notice. He asked Maba why there was so little interest in the photographs. She laughed in an embarrassed way, sensing that her own people had disappointed him.

  ‘It is because they are not required,’ she tried to explain about the photographs.

  Similarly, he once found her running in panic down the trail to the house. When he asked her what was the matter, she took him and showed him a white fungus growing on the path.

  ‘What’s the matter? Is it poisonous?’ he asked.

  ‘No. It is not poisonous. But it doesn’t need to be there.’

  On the other hand, people welcomed anything he brought back from town that proved useful: knives, fish-hooks, axeheads, gunpowder and bolts of cloth for making cotton trousers and skirts. Nobody could understand what drove him to keep trying out new things or why he continually pottered about when he could have been lying in his hammock. But he was tolerated with equanimity. People could see that it pleased him to have these plans.

  ‘These plans – they help him to avoid seeing what life is really like,’ said Maba’s father, who knew that the books McKinnon brought back would soon be attacked by woodants, blotched by cockroaches, perforated by bookworms or eaten by scale-moths.

  In Georgetown, the gossip was that McKinnon was now more Indian than European. The upper classes of the colony despised him when he arrived from the bush in a leather vaqueiro hat. They reserved for him that particular hatred which colonists have for one who they feel has betrayed his race and class. They said he was useless at animal husbandry and that his cattle roamed uncontrollably without supervision. Because he worked in the Indian manner alongside family and friends, tending livestock without the usual division between employer and employee, they feared what such an example might do to the colony. Fortunately, he was in such a remote part of the hinterland, he could more or less be forgotten. One man who travelled back with him as far as the Potaro River returned and reported how McKinnon would light fires like an Indian to signal his approach and avoid confrontation with other Indians who might be hostile.

  ‘He gone buck,’ they sneered behind his back.

  McKinnon must have brought the measles back with him when he returned from Brazil. Both Beatrice and the new baby caught it.

  Maba took Beatrice into the bedroom. It was the only room that contained a bed. McKinnon preferred to make love in a bed rather than a hammock or down by the river. It had taken him eight weeks to transport the iron bedstead and mattress from Georgetown. He had also introduced tables and the idea of using plates instead of eating from leaves. His two wives grumbled at the extra work.

  Maba put the child on the bed. Zuna stood by cradling the baby. Maba knew that the illness stretched like a web over her daughter but was not sure whether it extended up the walls and over part of the floor as well. Because she was not sure of the boundaries of the illness, she kept everybody else out of the room until she could call the piaiwoman. Beatrice lay still, her face swollen and spotted, her black hair plastered down with perspiration. Maba bathed her incessantly to keep down the fever.

  Koko Lupi arrived in the afternoon. She was well known for her sulky temper
and her talent for quarrelling and drinking as well as her ability to fly. Children stared at the goitre on her neck, her black teeth, and her claw-like hands as she examined Beatrice who lay stewing in fever. Immediately, she pointed out that the clustered rosettes over Beatrice’s body were like the imprints on a jaguar’s hide. She instructed that the room be kept pitch dark. Every crack or crevice where light could enter was covered. Zuna had laid the baby down next to Beatrice. People crowded into the room and settled down in the dark. The room was stifling. Koko Lupi lifted Beatrice first and blew on her with tobacco smoke, first on her head, then on her breast, belly, hands and feet. Then she did the same with the baby, chanting a healing tareng all the while.

  The airless room began to stink of smoke. Koko Lupi took a swig of parakari from a calabash, gargled with some tobacco juice and spat on the floor. Then she set about calling down certain spirits to heal the children. There was the sound of leaves rustling and branches creaking. Making noises from her throat like a drum roll, the piaiwoman called down a liana vine spirit for the other spirits to climb down. The baby whimpered.

  A few moments later there was the clear sound of a great otter wailing and then the chatter of a macaw. Neither of these seemed to be what Koko Lupi wanted because she yelled at them to go away. After a long wait, there came the unmistakable sound of a jaguar’s throaty snuffle and a phenomenally deep roar rumbled round the room. These noises alternated with the piaiwoman’s voice clearly pleading with the beast, scolding it and flattering it and remonstrating with it, telling it to go away and stop troubling the children. The crowded room was silent. Everyone could hear the jaguar pad up to the bed, snort, roar and pad away again.

  The session lasted several hours. After it was over and everyone emerged dazed into the daylight, Beatrice was allowed to stay in the bed for a few days until the jaguar prints faded. McKinnon was relieved to see both children recover. He had been leaning back against the wall during the healing ceremony. Privately, he thought that the ceremony was just as likely to produce results as praying to a Christian god.

  Beatrice remained weak for a long time afterwards. Her mother noticed that she was more serious and played on her own at the back of the house. The illness left her with a slight cast in her right eye which looked outward more than it should have done. Maba was not unhappy about this. Secretly she had worried that her daughter was too beautiful. Some of the other women had been jealous and she had seen one poking at Beatrice with a stick. She preferred Beatrice to have a slight flaw. As Beatrice grew up, the cast which pulled her right eye slightly to one side made her look, when she talked to people, as if she constantly desired to escape elsewhere.

  After a few months, Beatrice was back to being her happy-go-lucky self and Wifreda had also recovered completely. Beatrice and Wifreda developed different temperaments as they grew. Beatrice was outgoing and congenial. Wifreda had a closed-in face and clung to her own mother.

  Maba and Zuna had overlapping pregnancies. Alice arrived next, then Joachim and Laurie and eventually four others. By that time, nobody could remember very well who belonged to which mother. Besides, in the Wapisiana language the word ‘mamai’ for mother and aunt was the same. There was no distinction. The family structure was entirely different from anything McKinnon had known.

  McKinnon constructed more buildings and outhouses to accommodate the extra infants. He also built a little store house where people came from miles around to barter goods.

  Danny and Beatrice ran wild. All the children grew in a way that reminded McKinnon of the game of grandmother’s footsteps that he used to play when he was young. Every time he looked round they seemed to have secretly grown taller. Danny particularly grew headstrong and wicked with a radiant, malignant wildness both playful and deadly.

  ‘I want to burn it. I want to burn it,’ he would say, eagerly holding a moth in the flame of a lamp.

  Maba and Zuna tried to restrain him in various ways.

  ‘I goin’ to spit on the ground. If you’re not back by the time it dry, you’re in trouble,’ Maba would tell him and then chop at his legs with a cutlass if he disobeyed. One day, he came in inconsolable after a fight and flung himself in a hammock and refused to eat for two days.

  Nobody could get out of him what was wrong. Then one of the other children told Maba. Danny’s cousin had been taunting him that McKinnon was a white man and not a Wapisiana. Danny refused to look his father in the face. He took his hammock and went over to his grandmother’s benab.

  ‘I’m a Macusi. They don’t like me either,’ grumbled his ancient grandmother sourly. She was sitting on the ground in the doorway spinning cotton. The flesh hung from her upper arm in minute concertina folds and swung to and fro as she worked the spindle. Danny remained sulking in the dark, watching. She embarked on a story designed to make him feel better but also to foster in him a dislike of his father whom she had always distrusted.

  ‘Long time ago, the sun was a person like us. He spent all day clearing and burning a field to plant. His face shone with work. One day when he went to the stream to bathe, he saw a mysterious whirlpool gurgling in the centre of the stream. When he looked close he saw a small woman with long hair playing, smacking the water with her hair, splashing about and bathing.

  ‘He grabbed her by the hair.

  ‘“Let me go and I’ll send you a wife,” she yelled.

  ‘He let her go. The next day he saw a white woman approaching across the field. She did various jobs for him and then he told her to go to the stream and fetch water. She went with her gourd but as she bent down to fill it, her fingers softened and lost their shape, then her arms and then her whole body. She collapsed into a little heap of clay. The woman had been made of white earth.

  ‘When the sun went to look for her, he only found some murky water and had to go further upstream to drink.

  ‘“Useless,” he said.

  ‘The next day, a black woman appeared. He sent her to fetch water. She brought water back and they ate together. When the meal was finished, he returned to work. She went to light a fire, but as she blew on it, her face melted, then her arms then her whole body. She had been made of wax.

  ‘The sun was livid. He went and threatened to dry up all the water in the stream. The water spirit hid and called to him she would send someone else.

  ‘As he stooped over his work the next day, a reddish, rock-coloured woman appeared. She lit the fire and didn’t melt. She fetched water and didn’t melt. She went away that night and came back in the morning to prepare food for him. He found that she didn’t dissolve or melt or break apart. She became attractive to him. When they bathed together he found that she was a reddy-bronze colour, like the bits of firestone found in river beds.

  ‘He wanted her to come to his house. She said she would have to ask Tuenkaron, the water spirit. That night she came back to sleep with the sun. They had several children. These were the Macunaima. The two eldest brothers, Macunaima and Chico, are our heroes.

  ‘Now,’ said Danny’s grandmother, ‘come into the doorway and look at your arm in the sunlight.’ Danny came grudgingly. ‘You’re a reddish brown. You talk Wapisiana. You belong in the savannahs with us.’ Danny continued to wind thread around the butt of an arrow while studying his arm.

  ‘I hope my father melts,’ he said. ‘Melts away altogether.’

  A Blast of Heat

  In 1905, when Beatrice and Danny were still playing in the dirt, a man arrived in the colony who was to have as far-reaching an effect on their destiny as they were to have on his. Father Napier, a Jesuit with a fine tenor voice, stood on deck, leaning with one elbow on the rail as the ship waited outside the Demerara bar to dock. He was a thin, nervous man whose top teeth protruded a little as if he had sucked his thumb too much as a child. He held back his fine, sandy hair with his hand to stop it blowing in his eyes as he surveyed the scene.

  The first sight of the place depressed him beyond belief. The coast ahead of him was flat and uninspiring,
fringed with low, green bush and divided by numerous inlets. He gripped the rail, feeling a little nauseous at the slight swell, and looked down. Sea waters the colour of pea soup slapped lethargically at the side of the boat. The smell of mud, fish and salt gave him a forlorn feeling and the blowing of a steady warm wind filled him with melancholy. The sun already seemed to have struck at his bowels.

  With a forced smile on his face, as if to encourage the other passengers alongside him at the deck-rail – lest they too felt disheartened at the prospects ahead of them – he braced himself to defy whatever hardships were to face him, arguing to himself that the greater the hardships, the greater the glory to God in overcoming them. He was here to serve the Master.

  Ignoring his presentiments and the oblique warning given to him by the Wild Coast, he made up his mind to pit himself against whatever befell him. It was his ambition to strike into the interior of the country as soon as possible, to evangelise the most remote regions of the empire. Whatever was of the utmost difficulty he would embrace.

  Before the ship even docked, he had mistaken an omen for a challenge.

  As the tide turned and the ship came in to dock on the current, Father Napier was overcome by the sickly, sweet smell of brown sugar from the wharves and downcast by the sight of several dismal harbour buildings clustered together. Large clouds of insects buzzed around the tin-roofed customs sheds.

  He returned to the cramped cabin below deck to collect his two small bags and lie down for a minute or two while the other passengers crowded off the gangplank. He prayed for the success of his mission. The prayer deteriorated into fantasies of his own heroism in the eyes of God. Thoughts of martyrdom and possibly even sainthood crossed his mind as he lay on his bunk. Hastily, he tried to suppress them. He prayed for humility. But the thoughts kept creeping back, leaving him with a warm glow inside.