The Ventriloquist's Tale

by Pauline Melville

  The burning house sagged and slowly subsided into a pile of blazing timbers. It was clear that none of the three children inside could have survived. Eventually, Maba and Zuna took Shibi-din’s wife into their house and the last of the villagers went to bed.

  In the soft, clear light of early morning, where the house had stood, the mass of hot white ashes and charred timbers still smoked. Some of the men were trying to keep the dogs at bay with sticks. The dogs were padding excitedly around the embers, trying to snatch the sticky, tarry log which lay there. It was all that remained of the six-month-old baby.

  The settlement awoke to find that Shibi-din had taken a horse and left for Brazil. If ever it was unclear who was to blame in such a case, Koko Lupi would come and rub bitter-cassava leaf on the corpse and the culprit was supposed to run out of the village within two hours. But this time everyone knew who had done it.

  Maba and Zuna stayed up with Aro all that night of the fire. They told her she could stay with them as long as she wanted. She stared silently ahead, her eyes enlarged and straining from their sockets like those of a young deer. But Maba and Zuna were Shibi-din’s sisters and she began to distrust them because all in-laws, finally, are not to be trusted.

  Maba got hold of Beatrice and told her to stay with Aro all the time and not leave her for a minute. Beatrice was the only person she could tolerate. Beatrice sat beside her and said nothing until Aro was ready to leave.

  Two days later Aro set off south to walk to Baidanau where she had relatives. She took a little bag of tasso and farine with her. Beatrice went with her to keep her company for the first part of the journey. They walked in single file over the barren land, along the trails, Aro humming a sad chant as they wove their way through the sentinel termite nests, in silence until midday. Then it was time for Beatrice to turn back if she was to reach Waronawa again before dark. They said goodbye and Beatrice watched Aro’s plump figure depart in the distance before she herself turned for home. It pleased her to know that her presence had been a comfort to Aro.

  Danny was distraught at the loss of his Uncle Shibi-din. He wanted to follow him over to Brazil. He picked out some bows and arrows, slung his hammock over his shoulder and prepared to follow him. He said he could fend for himself until he found Shibi-din. Eventually, he was dissuaded from going and moped around the house for months.

  Then it was time to collect up the cashew nuts. Most people on the settlement went to camp on the bush-islands. There everyone drank themselves into oblivion on the fermented cashew liquor in one endless party. Dancing. Singing. Mass vomiting sessions. Fights and quarrels broke out. Someone always pulled a knife. No one was ever killed. After two weeks of camping, everyone packed up and went home.

  To Beatrice, the dry season seemed to go on for ever. Whole groups of families set off, for the fish-poisoning. When they reached the side of the creek, Maba, Zuna and the rest of the women pounded the poison plant. They mixed some grated bitter cassava and mixed it with kunami leaves. Then they rolled it into pellets. Soon after it was sprinkled on the creek, the fish started rising to the surface and leaping out of the water. The men and boys just scooped them up in whatever containers they had to hand. They were cooked right there on the fire.

  McKinnon got stung by a sting-ray. In agony, he pulled himself out of the water and went over to the fire where Zuna held his foot as near the flames as possible, using the one pain to distract him from the other.

  A German man appeared from nowhere on horseback, shimmering like a mirage in the hot air. He was exhausted. His legs from ankle to knee were swollen and covered in sores. Burst saddle blisters meant that his trousers stuck to him with pus and blood. He lay in the house craving oranges. The children picked hundreds of oranges and grapefruits for him. He ate nothing else. After about six weeks, he got on to his horse and rode off again.

  At Waronawa, the men and women always bathed separately but the children bathed together. In the days before she went to the convent in Georgetown, Beatrice stood beside the waters while the other children shrieked with fun as they bathed in the lake. The lake was sheltered on the far side by reeds and bamboo. White clouds scudded across the sky over their heads. The children played dog and labba, diving and chasing each other in the water.

  Beatrice began to feel detached. She experienced a sort of loneliness. The other children seemed to be avoiding her.

  ‘Why won’t anyone speak to me?’ she asked her cousin Gina.

  ‘You’re going away to become a coastlander,’ said Gina, slyly. ‘And we don’t like them.’

  Danny did not appear to suffer the same doubts about going to Georgetown. His ferocity sometimes alarmed Beatrice. He had lassoed two of his younger brothers and tied them to a tree till nightfall despite their shrieks of fright. He never seemed to give a thought to the fact that he would soon be leaving.

  Now he was preoccupied with new company. Some Wai-Wai were passing through on their way to trade on the Rio Negro. He spent most of his time with one of the boys, Wario. They disappeared off fishing together.

  They walked for miles until they reached the foothills of the Kanakus where someone had reported seeing a harpy eagle. Wario’s hair was long. He still wore a lap and feathers. The bow he used was so large that Danny did not have the strength to draw back the string. He was impressed to see Wario manage it effortlessly and send arrows skimming over the top of a huge ite-palm tree as he aimed at a sloth. They made their way uphill through tangled forest to the top of a small waterfall where they built a hide in the trees and waited for the white eagle.

  They waited for three days but saw no sign of it. Then they returned to Waronawa.

  McKinnon was clearing out rusty tackle from one of the outhouses. The oldest of the Wai-Wai men, who wore two scarlet macaw feathers that pierced his nose and hung down like a mandarin’s moustache, accosted him and pointed to two rolls of cloth, one plain and one patterned, that had been brought from Georgetown and were stored there.

  ‘It’s the same spirit that makes both of these?’ he asked McKinnon, in halting Wapisiana, pointing at the rolls of cloth.

  ‘Yes,’ said McKinnon, who went on lifting the heavy tackle down from the walls. The place smelt of musty old leather. He could not be bothered to explain about the manufacturing of cloth.

  ‘We’ve heard there is a man in the savannahs who knows about this spirit.’

  ‘You mean Father Napier. He is in the north savannahs at the moment. I’ll tell him to come south and see you when you’ve come back from the Rio Negro.’

  McKinnon was happy to divert Father Napier away from Wapisiana territory for as long as possible.

  The next day, the Wai-Wai set off in two long canoes, anxious to reach the Rio Negro and trade before the rains set in.

  The first warnings of thunder cracked over the Kanaku Mountains. Families went out to clear and burn fields in the forest. After the first rains, everyone planted their cassava, corn, tobacco, hill rice and beans.

  Then the storms came. Lightning ran along the iron-ore deposits between Darukuban and Shiriri Mountains. One afternoon, Zuna saw the lightning roll over the ground in a luminous crackling ball and settle in a sandpaper tree.

  A woman came gasping to the ranch-house. She claimed to have seen the little man of the savannahs who blows tunes on a stone pipe and kills your children. Maba, Zuna and Auntie Bobo quietened her down and she quickly went off again to check on her own family.

  The rains and then nothing.

  That year, the wet season seemed interminable to Beatrice. The rains came and stole the land away completely. The settlement was cut off and isolated. The house looked on to one vast lake. Beatrice saw an enormous jabiru bird wading through the water at the back of the house. Egrets and cranes huddled in the trees for protection against the violent winds and storms. Nobody visited. The road to the north savannahs was impassable. The younger children got on her nerves. Jaguars and pumas crept nearer. One of the horses got mauled. Cattle sores became infeste
d with worms. And the kaboura flies were everywhere, biting at their fiercest. Danny was always off fishing somewhere, but for the first time in her life Beatrice had grown tired of fishing expeditions.

  Finally, September came. The sun became stronger and they were able to travel.

  Convent Days

  Two ancient nuns, arm in arm, heads leaning towards each other, twittered like birds as they came through the cloisters to welcome the three McKinnon sisters into the cool world behind the convent gate.

  The girls had travelled with their father for six weeks by bullock cart, on horseback and by river. Danny had been dropped off at a house in Queenstown to lodge with a family there. His sisters were not to see him again for three years.

  Only at the last minute did Danny seem to realise what was happening and that he would no longer be able to go fishing.

  ‘But what will happen to all the fish?’ he asked his father, in distress at the thought of leaving the creeks and rivers full of fish.

  ‘They’ll still be there when you get back,’ laughed McKinnon.

  For the first few weeks, all three girls felt sick in the pit of their stomachs. What depressed Beatrice most was wearing shoes. Her feet weighed so heavily, dragging her to the ground. The school uniform felt as restraining as one of the harnesses that hung in the outhouse at Waronawa.

  The convent smelled strangely of polish and disinfectant. Beatrice peeped into the large rooms which reminded her of empty, unused caves. Although afflicted by shyness at first, she managed to speak English more confidently after a while. Wifreda remained reticent – ‘as closed as the Japanese art of paper-folding’ was how one of the nuns described her, ‘a real buck girl’. Alice the youngest had to struggle to prevent herself bursting into tears whenever she caught sight of one of her sisters and begged to go home.

  Beatrice soon found a way of surviving and consoling her sisters. She convinced herself and them that they were Wapisiana spies. One morning after prayers, she grabbed both of them to explain in Wapisiana that they were all on a special mission and had been sent to learn the secrets of an enemy camp. Their task was to learn about the coastlanders and report back to the Rupununi. They would have to be brave and careful because they were in hostile territory.

  ‘Go to your classrooms, please, girls,’ said Sister Fidelia, shooing them along.

  In some way, they all felt comforted by this idea. Beatrice instructed them that they were like warriors who had been sent there in order to infiltrate and learn how to pretend to live like the enemy. They must merge in with their surroundings, copy the coastlanders while somehow keeping themselves intact. She told them that any creature, be it a bird or spider or even a flea, might be bringing a message from the Rupununi. Whenever they could the girls met, out of sight of the teachers, and spoke in Wapisiana, taking pleasure in the fact that nobody else could understand them. The nuns watched bemused as the three sisters walked, always in single file, through the grounds, a habit from following the narrow trails of the savannahs.

  ‘This life here will be like a shell,’ said Beatrice, ‘that will hide us but that we can take off when we leave.’ They called themselves the three turtles – keepers of the secret.

  The convent catered for seventy young girls. It was well furnished and considered to be amongst the best of the schools available. The Venezuelan Ambassador sent his daughter there as did many of the coloured upper classes. There were three classrooms with backrests for the pupils, a gymnasium, four dormitories and a sanatorium. Water tanks provided drinking water. Tuition included English, Portuguese, Italian, French, music and drawing. Every so often, the girls would give a concert and the tinkle of the piano, the thump of feet and the spatter of parental applause could be heard issuing from the open windows of the gymnasium into the warm air of the cloistered garden with its ginger-lilies and hibiscus.

  Gradually, Beatrice was introduced to the complicated colour-coding that afflicted Georgetown society. Behind the natural friendships that sprang up at school lay the poisoned knowledge of who was ‘high-yellow’, ‘high-brown’, ‘red’ or ‘black’.

  Beatrice caused confusion. She was not black and she was not white. People circled her warily, not certain where to place her, proffering friendship and then arbitrarily withdrawing it. One of the most forthright girls in the class took the opportunity to consult with her parents on the matter. She came back triumphantly and stood on a table in the classroom to make the announcement: ‘The McKinnons are bucks.’ She said this firmly, as if that put an end to the matter. It then became permissible to taunt them. But despite the occasional sniggers behind her back, Beatrice was the most popular of the three sisters.

  There were bewildering new excitements. She met a girl who had been to New York where people’s noses and ears froze in winter and could be snapped off. She learned to draw. A girl in her dormitory brought back a kaleidoscope from England. Beatrice loved to look through it and see the endless, breathtaking transformations of patterns.

  The nuns discussed the new arrivals in the staff-room. They found Beatrice the most intelligent and outgoing. She was also the prettiest, they agreed, with her heart-shaped face and wide black eyes, even though one of the eyes wandered a little. True, she giggled rather a lot, partly through spasms of shyness, but it was not, the nuns agreed, enough to be a nuisance.

  In singing class, Beatrice stood next to Maria de Freitas, a tone-deaf Portuguese girl whose sallow face was covered in butter-boils. The two girls shared a worn song book which had ‘Boosey and Hawkes’ printed on the cover. The nun struck up the first chords on the piano.

  ‘ “It was a lover and his lass.’”

  The class sang heartily about a spring-time which they would never experience. The shutters stood wide open and the hall was filled with airy breezes. The nun playing the piano broke off when she heard the tuneless barking of Maria de Freitas. She looked round the class until she identified her.

  ‘Please to keep quiet and mime the songs, chile. Just mouth the words. You are throwing the whole choir off.’

  The nun started up again but they got no further than‘ “Hey ding a ding a ding, Sweet lovers love the spring,’” with Maria de Freitas obediently miming, when another deep bass voice joined them from the street:

  Monkey want snuff, O,

  Monkey want rum, O,

  Monkey very dry, O,

  Monkey want coffee, O,

  Monkey very tired, O,

  Five o’clock, Monkey, O!

  The music mistress was unable to halt the stampede of pupils to the window. A gang of labourers, laying the foundations for an extension on to one of the colonial houses opposite, was responsible for the chorus.

  Micklemas Crane, the foreman and an experienced carpenter, led the work chant. The men’s black skin shone with sweat and dust in the heat as they hammered the greenheart logs into the clay, slamming the fifteen-inch-square ‘monkey’ on to the logs to fix them in place. After a few minutes, the men set up the chant again and the girls leaned, giggling and waving, through the window. One of the men looked up and took the handkerchief off his head to wave back. The others ignored the schoolgirls.

  Exasperated, the nun banged down the lid of the piano.

  The dazzle from the metal hammers pierced Beatrice through the eye and she stepped back.

  ‘Ow. Get off my foot, dirty buck girl …’

  Beatrice turned to stare at the haughty brown face and frizzy hair of Nella Hawkins who, in return, screwed up her face into a hostile leer.

  Beatrice’s heart thumped with fright. At the same time she felt humiliated.

  ‘What is going on?’ enquired the music teacher as the rest of the class drifted back to their places, leaving the two girls staring at each other. Nella Hawkins rushed in with her story.

  ‘Beatrice McKinnon trod on my foot really hard.’ She began to limp back to where she had been standing in the choir.

  ‘Well. I’m sure it was an accident, wasn’t it, Beatrice?’ said th
e nun kindly.

  Beatrice remained silent and motionless. Some of the other girls began to snigger.

  ‘Usually we apologise when we do something like that, Beatrice. Say you’re sorry.’

  No words came. Beatrice could not get her tongue round the unfamiliar word that was required. She found herself unable to speak and walked silently back to her place.

  ‘Well, you must wait behind after the class and speak to me, Beatrice.’ The teacher turned back to the piano and the chorus struck up again.

  Beatrice’s mouth was already dry and her heart beating fast. She bent her head over her song book. When she looked up from the book, she saw that the left half of the nun’s face had disappeared and was swallowed up in blackness. The Ursuline habit consisted of a black gown with a white bib, white crown, black head-dress and a white bandeau.

  Beatrice blinked her eyes in case she was confusing these bands of black and white. But wherever she looked, the left half of her field of vision was blacked out. A cold sweat broke out over her body. She looked down at her book, hoping everything would return to normal. Only half the book appeared in front of her. She began to tremble. Then a brilliant, zigzag, star-shaped line appeared dancing inside her left eye, whether she kept the eye open or shut. The jagged line was like the lightning that ran along the ground from the peak of Darukuban to Shiriri Mountain heralding storms. She thought she was going blind. There was a mounting wave of nausea and then Beatrice McKinnon fainted on the parquet floor of the gymnasium.

  The sanatorium had recently been painted and smelled of linseed oil. Beatrice rested there for three days until the sick headache wore off. On the third night when she felt completely well again, she sat up in bed and listened as Sister Fidelia, who originated from Ireland but who had spent most of her life in the colony, made her nightly round of the dormitories.

  Sister Fidelia alarmed the younger girls because she had a face as long as a horse and a large birthmark, like a dried purple cow-pat, covering her right cheek. She suffered from melancholia and was frowned on by the other nuns who deplored her tendency to lapse into Creolese. Now, she swept along the corridor, past the gymnasium, rapping on the doors for them to put out the lights and calling: ‘Out de light now, girls, please. Out de light,’ as she began to ascend the wide, sweeping wooden staircase to the sanatorium on the top floor.