The Ventriloquist's Tale

by Pauline Melville

  In the street outside, a rum-soaked man sat on the grass verge. He heard the nun’s voice and mimicked it.

  ‘Yes, out de light. Out de light. But who goin’ out de moon?’ He cackled. And, indeed, the convent and the surrounding streets were flooded with moonlight, a light that soaked all colour from the saman trees and the tall, emaciated royal palms of the capital city. The man staggered to his feet and tottered towards the convent. He stopped to pee in a ditch.

  ‘Who goin’ out de moon?’ He mumbled before crumpling into a heap on the roadside where he lay amongst the white stones till morning.

  The moon stared down with its carnal, dirty face.

  Sister Fidelia peeked in at Beatrice, whom she adored, and went back downstairs. When she had gone, Beatrice got up and looked through the shuttered windows at the moonlit scene below. A huge toad sat panting and puffing on the path beneath the window, the markings on its back clearly visible. Beatrice felt that it had come to cheer her up. After a while it turned and hopped away into a ditch.

  The ragged man who lay like a collapsed puppet beneath the window reminded her of Shibi-din after he had been on a drinking binge.

  Beatrice climbed back into bed and wondered what was happening at Waronawa. When they left, the roof was being re-thatched. That meant that the men had to be up before sunrise while the dew was still on the leaves. Once the sun had dried them out, it was impossible to weave them. The leaves had to be cut on a night when there was no moon because the insects that lay their eggs in the leaves do so by moonlight. If the leaves are cut then, the eggs will hatch later and destroy the roof.

  She remembered being told once that Koko Lupi could fly long distances and find out what people were doing and bring back news. But here she was utterly cut off from home. The thought made her feel as though she were choking on sand.

  That night she dreamed she was on the Rupununi River, leaning over the side of a canoe. Someone behind her was paddling. The black, glass waters swelled beneath the boat and she broke the solid, curved chunks of water by trailing her fingers over the side. Seeds floated on top of the river, slowly near the bank and faster mid-stream. She could feel the deep eddies pulling and tugging beneath the boat. Whoever was paddling leaned forward and whispered something in her ear from behind her left shoulder. The voice was familiar. The breath of the speaker warmed her neck.

  Trees closed in overhead and the colour of the water changed to burnt sienna. Reflections in this mahogany water were brown and orange. Everything, down to the tiniest insect, was uncannily reproduced. The images remained perfectly still even though the river moved through them like time.

  Beatrice wondered how water that moved could throw back such a clear image. The foliage was mirrored so exactly that it seemed impossible to know which was the real world.

  Suddenly, she was lying on her back at the bottom of the river, blissfully happy. Above, she could see the canoe which now looked like a parrot flying through the sky. Then ripples from the boat started to shake the images to the core. Everything disintegrated and she woke up to the brilliant light of morning.

  The school vibrated with the scandal. Sister Fidelia was being moved to another establishment in Mexico. A mountain of empty rum bottles had been found under the mournful nun’s bed. She had been secretly consuming huge quantities of spirits.

  A whole class had been present, on their way back from the gymnasium, when Sister Fidelia slid down the banisters from the top of the great circular staircase to the bottom, her habit hoiked up round her waist. Two other nuns rushed to help as she collapsed at the bottom.

  Catching sight of Beatrice in the group of astonished pupils, she burbled: ‘Ah. There’s Beatrice McKinnon … now she has it … she understands the secret magnificence of death.’ Then she started to sing: ‘ “Oh Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling,’” before passing out cold while one of the nuns ushered the girls away.

  Very little disturbed the smooth routine of convent life, but about a year later, there was more news of Sister Fidelia.

  Mother Superior, a tiny, wizened woman in her seventies, assembled the whole school in the gymnasium and stood on the dais in front of them.

  ‘Good morning, girls. Today we have need of your prayers. Most of you will remember Sister Fidelia who left us to serve God in Mexico. Today I have received a letter from her asking for our help. I shall read some of the letter to you:

  Dear Mother Superior and all at St Joseph’s,

  Well, the Lord help us but an awful tragedy has occurred here and we need your prayers.

  A month ago, I mentioned to my class that there was to be an eclipse which would be visible in our part of the world and if any of the children wanted to watch it, I would take them to the park to see it. I warned them that they must not look directly at the sun as it would not be good for their eyes.

  Two volunteered. Miguel and his sister wanted to see the eclipse. I picked them up from their home – one of those pretty, white-painted houses with bougainvillaea that makes me wish I could paint – and we set off for the local park in the suburbs of Mexico City.

  Having been warned not to watch the eclipse directly, the children obediently – and I must say they were as good as gold about this – watched the eclipse in the pond where they normally sailed their toy boats. I stood and waited with them. We checked the time. The eclipse was due to start in four minutes.

  The pond waters were still and dark, lapping against the stone surround. Reflections were clear and I reckoned we would get a good sighting. Miguel took his sister’s hand, God bless him, and they both gazed at the water.

  At 11.15 a.m., just as I had told them it would, the dark edge of the moon began to bite into the sun. The children watched, fascinated by the double-edged disc floating in the pond. Naturally enough, in the time it took for the eclipse to be completed, it became dusk and then dark. Everything was quiet. Another child on the other side of the pond launched his sailboat to catch the chill breeze that sprang up. It caused ripples. Miguel and his sister continued to watch, enthralled. I kept an eye on them to make sure they didn’t look up. The phenomenon was nearly over. The morning became bright and hot again. I took the children home.

  Within an hour, both children were blind.

  The parents became hysterical. I feel so responsible. Since then it has been one long round of clinics, specialists, hospital waiting rooms and the eventual placement of the children in a school for the blind.

  Here, Mother Superior stopped and asked the school to pray for the two blind children and Sister Fidelia.

  Maria de Freitas, standing next to Beatrice, made her giggle by pulling her eye into a horrendous squint. Beatrice whispered in her ear that she thought there ought to be another saint in the Catholic canon – St Giggles.

  In the staff-room afterwards, the nuns gathered round to read that part of the letter which had been kept from the pupils:

  You can imagine how I feel. The newspapers have blown it all up and sensationalised it. I have been attacked in the press. Historians have raked up the story of the last solar eclipse in this region on July 16th, AD 789 when Quetzalcoatl, one of their pagan gods, headed east on a raft of serpents and had to leave Mexico because he made love to his sister. He is supposed to have risen up in the sky to become the evening star or some such nonsense. Now I feel ashamed that I should be the cause of their digging up all this rubbish.

  I feel like a cat in a swing-swong. And I had been settling in here so well too. Please remember the poor children in your prayers and me as well.

  Yours in Christ,

  Sister Fidelia.

  Some while afterwards, the nuns at the Ursuline convent in Georgetown heard of an incident at their sister convent in Mexico when the bells had boomed out for no reason in the middle of the night, with a slow, funereal tolling, disturbing the whole neighbourhood. Sister Fidelia had been found blind drunk tugging at the bell-rope and had been moved to a convent in Peru.

  The Evangelist
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  During those years when the older McKinnon children were away at school, Father Napier’s black soutane became a familiar sight on the savannahs, like a black crow on the landscape. Sometimes he travelled on horseback, more often on foot. Walking, he said, was good for prayer.

  In his first months there, Father Napier had set up his base at Zariwa, which he had given the Christian name of St Ignatius. He brought three boys from the nearest villages to live with him. They helped him with the chores and he trained them in the ways of God. They also helped him to build the first Catholic church in the Rupununi, a simple construction of adobe, wattle-and-daub and palm thatch.

  Father Napier developed an intense crush on one of these boys, whom he called Little Ignatius. Little Ignatius was slow, serious and shy. When Father Napier praised him, he lowered his eyes and flushed, not knowing how to respond. The priest saw this as a charming sign of humility in the boy and saw him as a symbol of the advent of real Christianity to the savannahs, rather than the Protestant heresy that had already been established at Yupokari.

  He experienced a mixture of pain and pleasure as the boy dutifully dug jiggers out of his feet with a pin. The Jesuit felt that there was a special communication between them. The boy was intelligent and trusting. Whenever Father Napier looked at him, he was flooded with a fierce joy that he attributed to an overflow of Christ’s love through him and into the boy. There was a particular thrill in bringing Little Ignatius to Jesus.

  And it was through Little Ignatius that he found a way to destroy Indian beliefs. The boy explained to him that all animals had a master or owner who protected them on earth as well as in the sky. This master might appear as an animal himself. He is also the master of the hunt and protects magical herbs that bring luck to the hunter and decides how many animals the hunter is allowed to kill, depending on whether there is a glut or a scarcity. You can find out when he is present because he smells strongly of the juice of these herbs.

  With that information, Father Napier, subtly, like a cancer virus mimicking the workings of a cell it has entered, gradually introduced to the Indians the idea of his own all-powerful master.

  At St Ignatius, the priest lived in a simple hut with a dirt floor. Men would come there, sit on the floor and say nothing, quite at ease. Sometimes they would eat, dipping into his pot. Once he discovered that they had looked through all his possessions although nothing had been taken. He remonstrated with them, raising his voice. Immediately, they all left. He came to understand that they did not like harsh voices. If he ever reprimanded any of them, they just disappeared.

  ‘They do not like people who shout and they have no memory for dates!!’ he wrote in his diary.

  From the start of his ministry, he undertook a series of arduous journeys, concentrating first on the Macusi in the north savannahs, building churches, converting whole villages at a time and founding new missions. He would start with the children, getting them to play games and sing hymns. Then he would progress to the adults. At one point, he calculated with pride that Little Ignatius had built a new altar every day for a month.

  Often he had to sleep under a tarpaulin, shivering with cold at night and roasted by the sun in the day. And, on more than one occasion, all his clothes and belongings became soaking wet when the floor of some half-built church, where he had spent the night, turned to mud. Nothing deterred him. As soon as one mission was complete and the Indians had received basic instruction and could chant and pray, he started out on the next, criss-crossing the savannahs. If the rivers could not be forded, he would get men to make a woodskin. If there were no trees to make a woodskin, he would get them to make a raft. When he could not find the right materials, he improvised.

  The Macusi people found him tolerable, but puzzling, especially on the occasion when he insisted on reconsecrating the church after a young couple had spent the night there. They were confounded by his energy because it was the custom in the savannahs to do nothing that seemed unnecessary. But he always invented something else to do. They gathered around him, all the same, associating all sorts of material advantages with the adoption of this new god.

  One of the triumphs recorded in his diary was the conducting of an improvised Easter Sunday mass at Nappi. He constructed the paschal candle with the help of a tobacco tin. The candles were made of black beeswax. The tabernacle consisted of a kerosene tin lined with muslin. Every part of the service which should have been sung, he sung himself in his high tenor voice.

  Then disaster struck.

  ‘Come, Ignatius,’ he announced to his young follower. ‘We are going to have a special celebration in Christ’s name.

  He had decided to climb Mount Roraima and celebrate mass at the top. It was a three-week walk to the mountain in the blazing heat. Little Ignatius hesitated as he approached the black sides of the sacred, flat-topped mountain. It reared up ahead of him. They came closer to the base. Every time he lifted his head to see the top of Roraima, the mountain seemed to raise itself up further as if to outdo him, as if threatening to crush him if he came closer. The mountain felt alive.

  Father Napier pushed the boy hard. He made him carry on his back all the equipment for mass, as well as his own camera, a prospecting bag and kitchen utensils.

  On the lower slopes around the base stood the bleached skeletons of hundreds of trees. The cliffsides of the mountain were sheer and black with numerous waterfalls plunging down from the summit. They climbed up crevices and ravines, clinging on to tufts of grass and holding on by their fingertips to slippery fissures of rock. In some places, moss and streamers of greenery blanketed the damp tree trunks. Ferns grew at the base of these trees with fronds of jelly-like substance instead of leaves. Tiny black frogs plopped into pools in fright as they passed.

  ‘Come on. You can do it,’ said Father Napier with a surge of his old school-prefect cruelty as they neared the flat top of the mountain.

  They celebrated mass in eerie silence on top of the great plateau. When it was over, Little Ignatius guided the priest down through the wooded gullies on the south side of the mountain, despite being freezing cold and exhausted. Three days later, he died.

  The two men faced each other in the dark hut where the child’s body lay. The boy’s grief-stricken father tried to explain that the mountain was a special place and Father Napier should never have taken his son there. The boy’s mother and sisters, none of whom had any teeth despite being young, stood silently by the child’s stiff corpse.

  ‘The mountain was once a great tree,’ the father tried to explain through his tears. ‘On this tree grew every sort of fruit. The only creature who know its whereabout was the tapir.’

  Father Napier hid his exasperation. He too felt anguish at the loss of Little Ignatius, his favourite boy. The last thing he wanted to hear was this man prattling on about a tree and a tapir. He bitterly regretted being too late to administer the last rites. The priest frowned and bared his teeth with the effort of trying to understand the man who was speaking Macusi.

  The distraught man was pacing up and down in front of the priest. Three steps brought him to his son’s body, another three brought him back.

  ‘Two brothers, Macunaima and Chico, found a tic that had hitched a ride on the tapir. The tic wept bitterly because he had fallen off and was lost. He told the brothers that the tapir knew where the tree was and they followed it. When they saw all the fruits, they cut the tree down. A huge river burst out of the trunk and flooded the savannahs. The mountain was covered by a sea full of dolphins …’

  Here, the boy’s father broke down into uncontrollable sobs while the rest of the family stood by in embarrassment.

  Father Napier interrupted.

  ‘Little Ignatius is safely in the arms of Christ now.’

  The man looked frankly disbelieving.

  Father Napier felt a sudden claustrophobia in the dark hut and went outside for a walk. A few stunted coimbe trees and cashew trees stood between the house and the creek. He walked amongst them,
picking his way over the dry soil and through sparse, prickly bushes.

  When he looked back, he saw that the family had taken their few belongings out of the hut and set fire to it with the child’s body inside. The thatch blazed up in seconds and as he watched, the family walked away from him down a trail leading towards the Pakaraima Mountains, with everything they owned packed in warishis on their backs.

  By dint of a few weeks’ hyperactive evangelising, he managed to push responsibility for the affair to the back of his mind.

  No one ever saw Father Napier without his priest’s habit. Dressed in his black robe, he carried with him everywhere the tin trunk which contained his bible, the baptismal records of the newly converted and his own diaries.

  The Wapisiana people in the south savannahs discussed the priest’s ideas which they had heard about from the Macusis.

  One woman said that she had seen the priest trying to climb Bottle Mountain in the Kanakus, a tall, bottle-shaped peak that shone like crystal. It was the mountain where one of their legendary heroes was supposed to have imprisoned his son in a rock. She said the winds came and blew the priest back down again. The surface was slippery with agate, jasper and some green stone. She said too that she had seen a dazzling figure close by at a point where many trails crossed. When questioned closely as to whether it could have been the new Christ, she shook her head emphatically and said that the dazzling figure had been an Amerindian man. But some people began to say afterwards that perhaps it was Christ who was imprisoned in the rock.