The Ventriloquist's Tale

by Pauline Melville

  Trips to the south savannahs on the other side of the Kanaku Mountains were less frequent. Father Napier felt increasingly that McKinnon was an obstacle to his progress. He thought McKinnon deliberately tried to obstruct his communications with the Wapisiana people.

  Certainly, McKinnon did not like the priest’s influence. He believed that the Wapisiana did not need a missioner. Once he even wrote to the Bishop in Georgetown suggesting that Father Napier was overdoing it and needed a holiday. But the priest returned with the persistence of a mosquito. Soon he was constructing churches in the south savannahs. Eventually, McKinnon accepted the situation with good grace and always offered hospitality to the priest when he was in the area.

  ‘The Wai-Wai have been asking to see you for some time now,’ McKinnon reminded him.

  ‘I shall get round to them as soon as I can.’ Father Napier studied his diary and decided to go in January. He would have to leave enough time to get there and back before the rains set in. It would be a long trip south, deep into the forest in an area he had never visited before.

  People noticed that Father Napier’s eyes, when he spoke to them, seemed to be increasingly fixed on something distant, an imaginary citadel.

  An Affair

  The time came for Beatrice, Alice and Wifreda to leave the convent for good. They stood outside the tall metal gate with their bags packed, waiting for the horse and cart which was to take them to where they would catch a boat upriver. The girls had said goodbye to the Mother Superior who had given them each a rosary. Alice was finishing her schooling early because she could not bear to be left behind on her own. It had been arranged that Danny would stay for another few weeks to do a course in basic mechanics. He would travel back on his own later.

  As soon as they reached Annai and saw the sprawling, golden landscape of the savannahs, Beatrice’s heart lifted. They set off for home by bullock cart as the sun was rising over the Makarapang Mountains in the east. In the distant south, the sun’s rays caught the top of the Kanaku Mountains. Even the butterflies seemed drunk on the streaming sunshine.

  They were all overjoyed to be back. Beatrice leaned over the side of the cart to feel the breeze on her face.

  Maba did not stop pounding the clothes on the flat rocks by the river as Beatrice came running down towards her. She looked up and her round features cracked open into a big smile. It was not the custom to embrace. But she stood up half frowning and half smiling to inspect her daughter. Beatrice felt a mixture of shyness and embarrassment when she greeted both Maba and Zuna, as if she had changed. She noticed for the first time how weather-beaten the faces of the two mamais were in contrast to the cool, untouched flesh of the convent nuns.

  As soon as she had discarded her shoes and put on a cotton dress, Beatrice ran over to see her cousin Gina.

  Everything was as she remembered it. Gina looked the same only a little fatter. She was in the benab grating cassava and squeezing the mushy pulp through the matapee with her mother and sisters. Sunlight filtered on to their faces from the thatch roof as they worked. The shadows and the faces blended. The whole scene struck Beatrice as one of relaxation and ease, of melting into the background. Gina’s mother leaned against the shed posts chewing on a mango seed, grinning at her. The warm ochre light, the untreated beams covered with palm leaves, the soft laughter, the familiar, mild, yeasty tang of cassava, Beatrice soaked it all in, relishing the contrast with the harsh lines and edges of the convent building she had just left, with its smells of disinfectant, and the cantankerous noise of mechanical implements, school bells and harsh piano playing. She sat on a bench and wriggled her toes in the warm dirt.

  Gina smiled at her and continued pulling at the matapee which hung from the roof, her fingers sticky with the pulp. A young man Beatrice recognised from the settlement ducked under the low thatch and helped himself to a bowl of shibi.

  ‘I’m married now,’ said Gina, nodding over at the boy. ‘He lives with us now. His hammock is next to mine at home.’

  Hammock, the symbol of marriage. Beatrice felt both jealous and dislocated as if she had been left behind in the march of things, as if convent life had retarded her in some way. No one asked her what the convent was like. No one was interested.

  Instead of staying to help with the work, Beatrice talked for a little while about what had been happening at Waronawa in her absence and then returned to the house.

  ‘I told you what would happen if she went away,’ said Gina.

  Beatrice had forgotten how to work. Initially, she found it difficult to settle back into the rhythm of it. She and Wifreda had to fetch water and then water the fruit trees, inspect the backs of tobacco plants for caterpillars, weed cassava plots, skin and chop up deer or labba or agouti, gut fish that the men brought in, wash clothes, spin cotton, help with hammock weaving, prepare farine, cut strips of beef to dry in the sun for tasso and deal with the younger children’s ailments.

  Danny arrived back. He said nothing and just nodded at his sisters but his eyes shone with the pleasure of being home. Maba noticed that he was taller than most of the other young men of his age in the settlement. That must be the European in him, she thought critically. His shining black hair no longer stood up in a tuft but had grown and fell forward over his eyes.

  Somehow, Danny had managed to slide through his schooling without being touched too much by it. His teachers considered him to be agreeable enough – if rather on the silent side. He never hurried. He had his mother’s sloe-black eyes and copper complexion. His gift was for making and mending and his hands were always busy with something, whittling arrow-heads mainly.

  Beatrice listened to his voice one night through the partition and wondered when it had become so deep. It was dark brown and slow, like molasses.

  ‘Don’ trouble me,’ he was warning his younger brothers as they jumped all over him, teasing him, ‘or I’ll dash you down from the bullock cart one day when we’re riding.’

  But they were laughing and squealing.

  ‘Do it again, Danny,’ they said at whatever he was doing there in the dark.

  Beatrice wondered if Danny too felt odd at being back. But if he did, he never showed it. He seemed to settle in as if he had never been away, fishing and hunting with increased confidence, handling his father’s guns as well as his own arrows and bow.

  McKinnon had asked a group of black coastlanders to come and help him cut lumber. They made an enormous difference to the settlement. They brought jazz.

  At nights after work, these young men would clown around, dancing and singing and playing the buffoon upstairs in the McKinnon household. They formed an orchestra. The tallest of them, whose name was Raymond, made a bassoon from brown paper, and a double bass was made from a kerosene tin with a bow of Indian rubber and a triangle from a piece of bent metal. People from the settlement came to dance and the lumber-cutters, carefree and full of laughter, called the way the Indians danced ‘the Rupununi shuffle’ and in contrast to it, demonstrated their own snake-hip dance style with great good humour.

  Several of the older men from the settlement grumbled privately and said that these intruders were too noisy around the place and frightened the fish. They did not like their loud voices and how they waved their arms around when they talked. But they gave no outward sign of this discontent and were always friendly to their faces. The piaiwoman, Koko Lupi, however, made no secret of her hatred for the newcomers. When she came in from the outskirts of Waronawa, she told everyone that she had poisons to make them impotent if necessary. Impotent for ever, she stressed.

  Raymond took a shine to Beatrice. He asked her to dance in the evenings whenever he was not playing one of the instruments and he looked at her with longing from his warm brown eyes with their short, curly lashes. He raised his eyebrows and winked at her as he twanged away at his kerosene-tin double bass.

  One night, Beatrice was trying to imitate Raymond’s jitterbugging footwork. Danny watched them idly. He was seated on a rough old shaman
’s stool with a jaguar head hewn at one end and an alligator head at the other. The musicians had cracked open a bottle of rum. Danny swirled some around in a cup and tossed it back. He had already been drinking parakari. Now he alternately swigged parakari and rum. He was trying to whittle a perfectly round ball out of wallaba wood as his uncle had once shown him. But his fingers and thumbs were uncoordinated because of the liquor. In the end he let the knife and the ball drop to the floor.

  Beatrice was swirling around in front of him. Her hair flew out behind her. Whenever she mistimed a step, she stopped for a minute, put her hand in front of her mouth and giggled.

  For some reason he could not understand, the sight of Beatrice twirling round with this black boy made Danny feel sick and miserable. He wanted to drag her away. The whole business made him dizzy. He tried to snatch at her skirt as she whirled past him, but missed. He got up and tried to dance like the black boys but his body did not move in the same way. Embarrassed and feeling foolish, he sat down again. He drank more of the sour parakari from a calabash and it dribbled down his chin. Someone passed him some fermented cashew liquor. He gulped it down.

  After a while, Danny’s eyes narrowed into two obsidian slits in his brown face. He looked glazed. He threw up in a dark corner of the room and staggered out into the fresh night air, half stumbling down the stairs. After a while Beatrice came out on to the top of the stairs.

  ‘I’m shamed of you,’ he said in Wapisiana.

  ‘Too bad, isn’t it?’ she replied in English, which infuriated him. She saw his face looking up at her, closed and impenetrable as she had often seen it when he was a child. For a minute she wanted to comfort him. Then Raymond came out to look for her. He gave a gentlemanly bow, took her gracefully by the hand and led her back inside.

  Danny swayed along the trail, under the stars, to the lake, burning with envy and some unidentifiable misery. He wanted to kill something. Demolish or destroy something. A night-hawk flew past and he threw a rock at it, wildly off target. When he reached the edge of the lake, he squatted there, listening to the quiet movement of the water in the rushes and wondering if he could cut his hair short all over and look like the negro boys.

  Raymond felt himself melting whenever he looked at Beatrice. She, in turn, leaned against the wall by the door and giggled at whatever he said, more than his words warranted. On one side, a strand of her long black hair had become unfastened and stuck damply to her neck. She looked up at him flirtatiously from her wide eyes. The dancing had made her breathless.

  Then Maba called her. She needed help to wash the wares. Both Wifreda and Alice had gone to stay with friends on the other side of the village and she was on her own. Beatrice turned with a flourish of her skirt and said a mischievous good-night to Raymond. Then she went to help rinse the wooden plates which clacked as she put them away.

  When they had finished the work and before they went to bed, Maba and Beatrice made their way to the latrine fifty yards away, carrying a kerosene lamp and stepping carefully along the short trail.

  They took it in turns to use the latrine, one waiting outside while the other took the lamp inside. From where Raymond lay in his room, he could hear their soft voices in the night.

  ‘No moon,’ said Beatrice’s mother as they made their way back. ‘A good night for fishing.’

  Beatrice climbed into her hammock. The night was hot. Without moonlight, everything was inky black. It was well into the night and she was already more than half asleep when she heard the door creak. She opened her eyes, but it was so dark that it made no difference whether her eyes were open or shut. She could see nothing. Alert, she waited. After a few seconds of dead silence, she heard soft steps in the room. Someone lifted up the mosquito net that fell to the ground round her hammock.

  A warm hand began to move gently over her left breast, cupping and kneading it while the thumb stroked her nipple. After a while, the hand moved to the other breast and explored that in the same way, as if making a careful map of her body. She could hear somebody’s slow and regular breathing.

  Then she felt a mouth on hers, lips pressing down firmly and methodically as if they had ajob to do, printing something all over her face. The hand moved down her body, seeking the underground entrance, and played with her there for a while. The hammock swayed a little.

  Darkness and anonymity relieved her of any shyness. The beam to which the hammock was tied creaked and the hammock swung violently as he climbed in on top of her. She clung tightly to the sides of the cotton hammock as she felt him shift and lose balance, almost throwing them both out.

  The back which she held on to with both arms was as smooth as Aishalton rock. She felt him nuzzling into her neck. Something about the head brushing against her ear puzzled her for a moment but she concentrated on twisting herself sideways, letting one leg hang over the edge of the hammock so that he could come inside her more easily. The weight of both of them wriggling to lie slantwise rocked the hammock making her feel as though she were flying through the night. She clung on tightly; the top half of her body arced backwards over the side. Her hair brushed the floor. As he fucked she felt a dark, aching pain mingled with the far-off intimations of that familiar pleasure, but she was too alert and too curious to lose herself in the sensation and it faded away.

  She liked the fact that Raymond had not said a word. After he was spent, he lay breathing hard on her chest. The hammock came to a standstill. Two minutes later, she felt a kiss on her neck. Then the hammock rocked violently as he swung himself out, slid under the net like a larva leaving its cocoon and a minute later was gone.

  Beatrice levered herself up and looked towards the door but she could still see nothing. She put her hand over her mouth and raised her eyebrows, pleased and wanting to laugh. She thought she could have dreamed it but the hammock was still swinging. She felt contented. It was as though she had finally completed a long overdue chore. Now she was like Gina. She thought about Raymond and imagined being his wife and living in Georgetown. What especially satisfied her was that it had all happened without the awkwardness of speech. It made Raymond feel to her more like an Indian. Tomorrow she would pretend in public that nothing had occurred. It would be their secret.

  In the morning, she got up early and scrubbed the stain from the hammock with soap. The lumber-cutters had left at first light for the forest. Beatrice helped Maba and Zuna sieve mapir berries. At the table, she poured the purple-brown juice which tasted like cocoa over her tapioca porridge, spilling some down the front of her dress in a state of bleary-eyed dreaminess.

  The lumber-cutters returned in the afternoon by bullock cart bringing the felled trees.

  Beatrice finished picking lemons and, a little nervously, walked over to where McKinnon was instructing Raymond how to chop cedar wood to make shingles. He had decided to experiment with a shingle roof instead of ite palm. The sweet smell of the freshly cut wood made her nostrils curl. The two men were in the shade of the great spreading mango tree. McKinnon was explaining the exact size he wanted and how to cut it.

  She strolled over to Raymond, trying to look confident but unsure how to greet him. Raymond looked up from his workbench and grinned shyly at her as if appealing for her to come and speak to him. Immediately, she knew that something was not right. It was the look of a young man who was still hoping. He smiled and his brow wrinkled questioningly. She looked at his hairline and her stomach tightened as if someone had kicked her viciously in the belly.

  The hair was wrong.

  The head that had brushed against hers the night before had hair as smooth and straight as a bird’s feather, not the springy, tight, frizzy hair that sat on Raymond’s scalp like a moss cap.

  It had been one of the other boys. Feeling suddenly furious and tricked and as if Raymond was somehow to blame, she swung round and stomped off, her heart thumping with outrage. Raymond seemed green and stupid. She stalked back to the house.

  Rock-Stone

  ‘Danny says you must come and
plant corn.’

  Wifreda sounded miserable. She was peering through the doorway, her eyes watering with pain from a sore throat, and her voice was hoarse. Beatrice had been lying about and sulking in her hammock for days. No one knew what was the matter. Both mamais accused her of laziness. She swung herself crossly out of her hammock and went outside to see what Danny wanted.

  The first showers of the rainy season had begun. Between showers, the sun blazed down more fiercely than ever. On the savannahs, people were busy planting their corn, cassava, plantain and pumpkin.

  The field Danny had chosen to plant was the site of a disused corral some way from the settlement. Old horse-dung had made the land more fertile. For the last week he had been clearing the land, hacking at the dried, prickly undergrowth with a cutlass.

  The two of them walked the three miles there in silence.

  They set about planting the corn under a clear, blue afternoon sky. Danny went ahead with the hoe, smashing it down on the solid clods of earth and trying to make a furrow in the hard ground. Beatrice followed behind, patches of sweat darkening the underarms of her blue dress, the gritty soil scratching at her toes. She threw the seeds and pushed them in with a turn of her heel. By the time they had planted half the field, her face was streaked with light-brown dust where she repeatedly pushed her damp hair behind her ears with her hand.

  Halfway through the afternoon, they both stopped, out of breath. Danny leaned on his hoe. A lizard dashed for safety over the rutted ground. Danny was parched. Beatrice could see the flecks of dried spittle at the side of his mouth.

  ‘Let’s swim,’ he said.

  They went down to the river, far from the spot where most people bathed. She walked behind him. The brown grass was long, dry and sparse. A few waist-high sucubera bushes marked the faint trail. She wondered if it would trouble Danny to break the custom of men and women bathing separately unless they were married. Watching his smooth brown back ahead of her, she felt a curious sense of familiarity. Then suddenly, Beatrice understood. She stopped in her tracks.