The Ventriloquist's Tale

by Pauline Melville

  ‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ she said.

  Danny continued walking.

  ‘So what if it was,’ he replied, grinning over his shoulder at her with a look half defiant and half proud.

  Beatrice remained silent as she absorbed the news with a mixture of fury and mysterious pleasure.

  They sat far apart, without speaking, under some trees near to where the river had eaten into the bank. Full of resentment, Beatrice hugged her knees and stared out at the glinting amber waters. She was resentful because, reluctantly, and although unwilling to show it, she knew she had already forgiven him.

  After a while she stood up. When she looked round, Danny was approaching her through the trees, moving so smoothly he appeared to be gliding on ball-bearings. As he came nearer, his eyes, which had grown dark and deliquescent, exerted a lodestone attraction over her which brought about an unexpected loss of will.

  He took her by the hand and led her towards the river. She winced as the sharp stones in the sludge underfoot dug into her feet. They hung their clothes on a monkey-cup bush and waded naked into the water. Screwing up her eyes against the light, she looked to where Danny stood mid-river, the sun behind him, ripples slapping against his brown waist. The water was a deep tan with shifting patches of orange gel. He waited for her to join him.

  First they swam breast-stroke downriver to where the trees met overhead and the bare tree roots reared out of the water into great twisted arches above them. Kingfishers swooped and dived along the banks beside them.

  Then they turned around and Beatrice hooked her arms over his shoulders and let him pull her back upriver against the current. Danny swam rhythmically, enjoying the feel of her breasts pressing against his back in the warm, silky waters.

  All the rest of the afternoon they spent lazing in the river. They looked at each other steadily, eyeball to eyeball. As the sun lost its intense heat they continued to bathe. The waters turned the colour of blood. A little water-snake, delicate with blue and silver markings, wriggled sideways past them towards the bank. They both dipped and rose from the water, slicking back their black polls of hair.

  ‘Dog and labba,’ said Danny and jumped on her, holding her arms and forcing her underwater. She exploded back up out of the river, bursting with laughter.

  Afterwards, without speaking, they found a spot under the trees, set back from the swampy tangle of the river’s edge, where there was a spongy carpet made from undisturbed layers of orange and brown leaves. The overpowering, glutinous smell of the bush filled the air.

  Danny spread her slim legs open like a wishbone on the ground. Slowly, he lowered the whole of his weight on to her so that she felt deliciously trapped. He sucked each breast in turn. Tiny currents of electricity ran down to a dark centre, the same dark centre that the sun had first penetrated all those years ago, a centre which seemed to be both inside her and outside her, a centre indistinguishable from the circumference. He pushed himself inside her and moved his hips in a slow, circular motion. She could feel him like a baffled root in the darkness seeking moisture, striking out and always trying to go deeper.

  The pleasure started at the outside of the circle transcribed by this blind seeker. It felt to her as if a potter was running his thumb around the top edge of a spinning, wavering, moist clay pot, like one she had seen at the convent, so that the rim grew sometimes bigger and sometimes smaller. For a long time, she waited, and then she squeezed and the pleasure came unstoppably from the outer rim to the dark base and burst outwards from there.

  Danny could feel her contracting round him. He felt as if he were being swallowed. As if she were drinking him down. And he ejaculated into the black pit.

  When they got back to Waronawa, everything was in a furor. Wifreda’s sore throat had developed into a huge abscess in her throat. She lay motionless in her hammock, her head turned towards the wall, her throat spiked with pain. The back of her tongue was covered in what looked like a white fungus with spots. She was beginning to have difficulty in breathing. Maba looked down her throat and remembered the strange white fungus she had seen on the path years ago. Immediately, she thought that some enemy had turned into this fungus on purpose to harm Wifreda. Koko Lupi was out of reach, further south in Aishalton. Zuna sent a vaqueiro to ride over and fetch Father Napier, in case he had medicine, but they thought he was too far away to come in time. In the end, Danny took a knife and lanced the abscess and after a few days of spitting blood, Wifreda recovered.

  There is a certain sort of black rock-stone to be found on the banks of savannah creeks. The rocks lie scattered all around. If you take one in your left hand and one in your right and circle them round each other, they become magnetised and it is impossible to prise them apart.

  Danny and Beatrice became as inseparable as the savannah rocks.

  No one suspected what was happening because nothing is less suspicious, nothing is more innocent than a brother and sister carrying out certain tasks together. It was a secret perfectly camouflaged by the surroundings.

  Just like the brown and black patterns in the artwork on the woven baskets and sifters and matapees, where it is not always possible to tell foreground from background and the animal symbols are disguised by being embedded in a geometrical whole, Beatrice and Danny were miraculously concealed by their home setting.

  For Beatrice, the affair became an addiction. They made love whenever they could, wherever they could. It was not as often as either of them would have liked. Danny had a horror of being discovered. And to Beatrice’s irritation, the younger children popped up everywhere and she was expected to carry them with her. Whenever she and Danny tried to sneak down to the river, it seemed that some vaqueiro would be watering his horse or someone would be bathing or a couple would be paddling their canoe nearby.

  Sporadic showers had already turned the savannahs a fresh green. It will be worse when the rains set in properly and the land floods over, she thought. There will be nowhere to go then.

  During one week, they managed to slip out to one of the tanning sheds and make love there. Beatrice stood with her back against the supporting beam near the plank wall by a trough full of soaking hides. It was dark inside and the air was bitter with the smell of mari-mari bark. There was the constant sound of dripping as water leaked from the trough into a bucket. Above that was the sound of the beam creaking and their breath coming in gasps.

  Beatrice watched Danny carefully, sideways from the corners of her eyes, when he was in the house. She liked the way he leaned against the door jamb, one brown shoulder raised higher than the other, one hip jutting out, his bottom lip pulled over the top one as he worked to string a bow or to make one of the blunt arrow-heads he used for stunning birds.

  She was happy to watch him doing anything. To Beatrice the other youths at Waronawa seemed callow and dumb compared with Danny.

  ‘You lookin’ at me too much,’ snarled Danny when they were on their own. And Beatrice knew it was true. It even alarmed her, the way she seemed to have lost her own will. Sometimes she felt numb, like one of the walking dead the girls at the convent had told her about. Numb but exhilarated. The attraction was both inexplicable and irresistible. And growing stronger.

  Both Maba and Zuna were pleased to see Beatrice settling back into savannah life. McKinnon was always busy with cattle or fencing or mending buildings. He barely paid any attention to his children. Often he was away in Brazil. Occasionally he went gold prospecting in the Acarai Mountains, more for the adventure than the gold.

  Beatrice and Danny stood on the flat rocks at Orinduik where Danny had come to try and trade for balata. The rocks shone with pink jasper. They had been bathing in the stepped, cascading falls that form part of the Ireng River.

  ‘No in-laws to trouble we,’ grinned Danny after they had made love in the gap between the waterfall and the rockface. Beatrice was brushing off the bits of grit and stone that clung to her back.

  ‘Ow. Kaboura flies.’ She slapped at her arms and legs as
she sat on the rocks.

  Beatrice sat in the running water. When they made love, her insides felt as if they changed pattern like a kaleidoscope or the expanding and contracting geometrical pattern of a snake’s skin. She was about to tell him this. Then she looked over to where he stood in the spray of the waterfall and knew that it would be of no interest to him, so she kept it to herself.

  ‘Yes,’ repeated Danny, almost to himself. ‘No in-laws to trouble we. We’d be fools not to.’ He flung a rock in the water. It suited him to be able to ignore Beatrice when they were at home and treat her just like anyone else in the family.

  Six months after they had arrived, the coastlanders who had come to cut lumber were packing up to go home. One or two of them had considered staying behind to bleed balata but then changed their minds. The initial excitement they had felt at being in the interior had worn off. Life was not comfortable. They sometimes felt awkward in the community, as if they did not quite belong, and they began to miss Georgetown, the Saturday afternoon rum sessions, the noise and the races.

  Raymond no longer mooned after Beatrice. At first he had been puzzled at the way the flirtation suddenly fizzled out. She looked at him with complete indifference now and he wondered if he had imagined that there had ever been a spark between them.

  On the night the lumberjacks left, the McKinnon house felt particularly quiet. Wifreda, hot and unable to sleep, got up in the night and for some reason went to sleep on a chest under the window, in the tiny room adjoining the outhouse which the lumber-cutters had used for their bedroom.

  From the other side of the partition, she heard voices.

  ‘Come on top of me.’

  ‘Just a minute. Let me throw off this cover.’

  Wifreda crouched on the chest, then raised herself to peep over the dividing wall. It was too dark to see clearly but she could distinguish moving shapes and she heard the squeaking of the iron bedstead and the voices of Beatrice and Danny.

  ‘Your hands smell of guava leaves.’

  ‘I been feedin’ the turtle.’

  ‘What will happen to us?’

  ‘We’ll be all right.’

  ‘I want to be with you always.’

  ‘We can manage that. We could go to the Wai-Wai. I know people there. I could build a house for us.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Let me play with you like this a little.’

  When everything had gone quiet, Wifreda, too frightened of being discovered to get off the chest in case it creaked, fell uncomfortably asleep where she was and dreamed that she had been mysteriously impregnated by a ball of feathers while sweeping the kitchen.

  Two days later, Beatrice and Wifreda were at the back of the house making soap. The sky was overcast. Beatrice took a kerosene tin, mixed caustic soda with hot water from a pot on the embers and then poured the mixture on to the pig suet. It required concentration because the temperature in the two cans had to be the same for the soap to set. It was Wifreda’s job to test the temperature with her finger as the contents were poured from one tin to the other.

  ‘I know something about you,’ said Wifreda.

  ‘What?’ asked Beatrice as she examined the frothy liquid.

  ‘I hear you and Danny in bed together.’

  Beatrice went pale. She picked up the tin of hot liquid and flung it over Wifreda. Wifreda shrieked.

  ‘You see how your eyes is bad? If you tell anybody I goin’ make you blind,’ screamed Beatrice. ‘Blind like a termite.’

  When Beatrice told Danny, his palms sweated and sharp pins and needles ran up and down his arms. He watched Beatrice walk back to the house, looking at the ground as she went, her long black plait snaking to her waist.

  Danny could not understand what had happened to him. It was not as if he wanted to leave Waronawa and disrupt his life. But he knew he would, almost against his will. It exasperated him, this feeling that something was pulling him to act in a way that common sense warned him was foolish. He decided to stop his secret meetings with Beatrice. But even as he decided with one part of his brain, he knew in another that the affair would continue.

  That evening, when everybody had eaten, Danny heard himself saying casually that he was going to Wai-Wai country to look for a good hunting dog.

  The next morning, the sun scorched down as usual.

  There was no sign of either Danny or Beatrice and the old corial that was used for ferrying goods to and fro across the river had gone.

  The Master of Fish

  During the month of May, the slow dive of a certain constellation takes place in the night sky, headfirst and arching steadily backwards over the western horizon. It signals the advent of the rains and in the Rupununi district of the Guianas, in the red, parched savannahs, the fish-runs begin.

  The constellation is called Tamukang, the Master of Fish, because he orchestrates the silver battalions that come leaping along the rivers at this time. To Europeans, that same configuration of stars is known as the Pleiades, the Hyades and part of Orion. But the constellation of Tamukang does, indeed, look like the skeleton of a fish, head and backbone rolling through the singing blackness in a descent towards oblivion. The moaning winds, they say, are Tamukang blowing his flute. He remains out of sight until his resurrection over the eastern horizon in the months of August and September.

  It was one particular cluster of stars in the constellation, the one that the Europeans called the Hyades, that was thought to control the tapirs which were so plentiful during the rainy season.

  The evening visit to the latrine was the only time Maba had to herself to think. One night, soon after Danny and Beatrice had disappeared, she came out of the latrine and walked up on to the rising ground away from the house. She stood on top of the slope and looked up at the infinitely slow, whirling lasso of stars in the night sky.

  She sought out the constellation of Tamukang. But Maba’s mind was not on fish as she scanned the skies. It was the small cluster of stars that represented the tapir which she strained her eyes to see. That morning she had heard one of the vaqueiros talking to another near the corral fence. She thought he was speaking deliberately loudly for her to hear.

  ‘His mouth calls her “sister” but his bottom half calls her “wife”.’ And he had laughed unpleasantly and slanted his eyes towards her. She shivered in the slight breeze. She had her own suspicions about Beatrice and Danny. Not that it was unheard of for a brother and sister to live ‘close’ as it was known. She would just have preferred it not to be her own children.

  What made her uneasy was that the patch of tapir stars seemed to be getting brighter as she watched. Everybody knew that the sniffly-snouted, short-sighted, night-trotting tapir was too lazy to mate outside its own family. The stars seemed to be confirming what she suspected.

  She turned and walked back to the house, planting her feet sturdily on the rough, sloping ground, avoiding the tufts of springy goat’s beard along the way. At home she mentioned her concerns to nobody, not even Zuna. Other men in the village had noticed the brightness of the ‘tapir’ stars and organised a tapir hunt.

  When McKinnon returned from a long trip away and discovered that Beatrice and Danny had gone to Wai-Wai country he thought nothing of it. There was another distraction.

  Everyone at Waronawa had been pleased to welcome the arrival of a stranger who seemed to fit in easily. His name was Sam Deershanks and he was part Sioux Indian from Texas. He was tall, with high cheekbones and a stoop.

  ‘What brings him to these parts?’ asked someone.

  ‘He came because of the railways,’ was the reply.

  ‘But there are no railways.’

  ‘That’s the funny part about it.’

  McKinnon enjoyed having another English speaker on the ranch. And it turned out that, although Sam Deershanks spoke little, he had a gift for handling cattle. He settled in well and soon it became clear that he had eyes for no one else but Wifreda.

  Wifreda buttoned up her face more tightly than ever
and ignored him completely. The more people teased her about it, the angrier she became.

  All the time that he had been away in Brazil, McKinnon had been longing to read the bundle of torn newspapers that he knew awaited him at home. Every six months or so, the out-of-date newspapers arrived from Georgetown, sometimes in unreadable condition, and generated enormous excitement in McKinnon. He would banish the children from the room upstairs and settle down to become engrossed in his only link with the world at large.

  It was now over twenty years since he had settled in the savannahs. His hair was already beginning to grow white. Maba laughed at him and said a fog was getting into his hair. Sometimes she or Zuna would cradle his head in their lap and try to pull out the white hairs. But they were becoming too numerous.

  He went upstairs, pulled the shutters to keep out the worst of the blinding sun and sank into a Berbice chair, resting his legs on the long arm. He cut the string round the newspapers and checked the dates. The earliest was a yellowing copy of The Times, dated November 12th, 1917. He started with that.

  First of all, he devoured avidly the detailed accounts of the Great War in Europe. He studied all the facts about the storming of Passchendaele; the bravery of the Canadian troops; the losses; the number of casualties.

  As he scoured the paper for the rest of the war news, another item caught his attention. It was a long article by the science correspondent of The Times with the intriguing title ‘The Weighing of Light’.

  He began to read slowly, savouring every morsel of information:

  It was my pleasure last Tuesday, in my capacity as science correspondent of this newspaper, to attend a meeting in the august and learned setting of the Royal Society.

  The meeting was called by Sir Frank Dyson, the Astronomer Royal, on behalf of the Joint Permanent Eclipse Committee. We were to be addressed by the distinguished mathematician and physicist, Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington.