Near the entrance, a weary nurse with a full bosom was clapping her hands and calling: ‘Jacka … Jacka,’ to another man who could not be persuaded to come in but who stayed just outside the door, whipping a team of invisible horses, turning them to right and left, the obstacles, terrors and dangers in his path clearly visible from the changing expressions on his face.
As soon as they entered the main wooden building, a patient glided towards them, a graceful East Indian man who spent his time making a political speech which never halted and which had no end. Every day, this man could be heard as he left his own block, addressing his unseen audience quietly and persuasively.
When he saw Father Napier and his escort, he immediately came forward to include them in this intimate address, ornamenting his speech with charming gestures, every movement and every facial expression seeming to be in deadly earnest. It appeared to make no difference whether he faced a real audience or not. Sometimes he mounted the stage of the little theatre and, whenever people grew tired of the fluent speechifying, the warders would lead him gently from the platform and he continued talking as if nothing had happened, all the way back to the dormitory.
But Father Napier spoiled all this by becoming violent.
All patients wore the same coarse white blouse and trousers. A piece of coloured cloth on the right arm showed to which block they belonged. As soon as he had been relieved of his priest’s garments and dressed in these, Father Napier smashed all the window shutters and jumped out on to the dry grass below. After that, he was put into what people called the ‘Snake Pit’.
The cage was twelve foot by twelve foot and another twelve foot high. One wall was composed of strong bars, the other three made of jalousies. The lowest jalousie was ten inches from the floor. A cold sea breeze blew all night. During the day, he was a spectacle to be gazed on by passers-by. He longed to be able to speak with someone, but those who came to stare all went away when he tried to engage them in conversation.
He determined to escape. Once at Waronawa, he had read one of McKinnon’s books describing an escape from the Bastille. He would do the same. The mattress in the cage had a hole in it. At night, Father Napier tugged and pulled at the coconut fibres inside until the watchman caught him.
At six-thirty in the morning, he was taken to the public bathroom where inmates washed under the pumps. There he was forced to take off his clothes and march through the crowd. When he had washed, he was taken out down some steps and thrust into the cage again. This time they had taken away the mattress and blanket. The same operation was conducted each day.
One of the effects of the poison was that he had no saliva in his mouth. He needed fluid desperately. The sago, green plantain, sweet potatoes and sloppy rice, he found himself unable to stomach. He implored them to give him milk. He burned with heat and he burned with cold. He burned until he believed he was the sun travelling on its journey to the north-east, seeking milk and salt, and finally giving in to the forces of darkness. He felt that he had been captured, like the sun, and was being held in a dark pot, waiting to hear the crack of Chico’s gun that would shatter the clay and release him, pale from incarceration, to make his way back into the sky.
One night, during a violent storm, the thunder did, indeed, crack fiercely over Canje Creek and Father Napier crowed and skipped round the cage in glee, expecting imminent release.
After sunset, when the cold wind from the river plagued him, whipping at his legs and ankles, he did not allow himself to sleep. Imitating the sun’s journey to Iken, he walked around the cage all night. The rain blew in, wetting the floor and making him slip and slide as he struggled on his journey. One night, he slipped eight times and knocked his head against the wall of bars.
Every night in the cage he got worse.
One night, exhausted, he fell. Looking up he seemed to see the giant, sandstone, perpendicular cliffs of Mount Roraima in the savannahs. There it stood, outside the bars of his cage, never free of the clouds which shifted and evaporated and formed odd shapes as he watched. He found himself effortlessly climbing the slanting ledges and wooded gullies of the flat-topped mountain.
Everything became clear. He remembered that he was destined to build a railway from Georgetown to Roraima and on the top of Mount Roraima he would construct a great city and the Pope would come and live there with his entire court. The Pope would embrace him for his vision and inspiration. Flinging himself in exultation on the flat top of Mount Roraima, he fingered the rough, stony surface of the mountain. He lifted his head and noticed the yellow, rocky desert, littered with boulders.
Suddenly, he realised he had been tricked. He was not on a mountain at all. He was standing on the flat stump of what had been an enormous tree. It had been chopped down. He looked up. He was utterly exposed to his enemy. The sun was bent on destroying him. The pale, metallic sphere in the sky was a shield behind which … Father Napier began to scream. He felt his skin turn to sharp-edged crystals. He screamed to the sun for mercy.
The night watchman came and stood outside the cage and fingered his chin as he spoke.
‘O Lor’. How the man punish,’ he said kindly, shaking his head as the stark-naked priest crawled, weeping and pleading, slithering from one side of the wet wooden cage to the other desperately trying to escape from the mighty deluge that would, any minute, erupt from the severed trunk of the tree.
In July of that same year, Father Napier was sent back to England on the steamer Orinoco that travelled via Madeira and Le Havre to Plymouth.
At some point on the long journey home, the priest undertook the painful task of setting fire to his own memories, leaving behind only arched structures, charred ruins, smoking vaults and empty spaces in his head. Members of his family who came to meet him at the docks were shocked at the change in him. He was vague and unfocused and could hardly remember anything of his many years’ ministry in the Rupununi.
He spent the last years of his life in the austere, but secure headquarters of the Jesuits in Edinburgh. Occasionally, he gave talks to the novitiates on his experiences amongst the Indians of Guiana. He had one photograph which always aroused interest, showing about thirty alligators resting on the rocks alongside the Ireng River. Mists hung about them and they all had their mouths open as though in ecstasy. Father Napier did not like to field questions after these talks. He would pack up speedily and return to his single room.
One lasting fear remained with him. He could not bear to hear the organ played. It was as if those swelling, vibrating chords unfastened the earth beneath his feet revealing a chasm. This meant, to his bitter disappointment, that he was unable to attend many of the services in church, a longed-for haven of peace and calm. He received special dispensation and attended mass only when he felt able.
Some months after he had arrived there, a novitiate knocked on the door of his room and said that a Mr Alexander McKinnon had called to see him. There was no reply from inside the room although the novitiate knew that Father Napier was in there. He knocked again but there was only silence and the visitor was told that Father Napier was unable to receive him.
Star-Field
Beatrice was swimming in the lake at the back of the house. The water felt like satin. It was nearly the end of the afternoon and the sky was dull and cloudy. The next day she was due to leave the Rupununi for good.
Eventually, even she had agreed that she would have to go. Whereas people had tolerated, although not particularly liked, her relationship with Danny, when they began to suspect her of being a kanaima, they were appalled and attitudes towards her changed altogether. It was not unknown for a brother and sister to live together, usually just outside the village. Nobody approved of it, but nobody tried to stop it. But Kanaima was the spirit of revenge, either in the form of an assassin with practised methods, or in the form of any animal or object into which the assassin had sent his life-force. Vengeance attacks were more terrifying than incest.
When the rumours about Beatrice started to spr
ead, she resigned herself with surprising patience to her fate. It became well known that she had visited Baidanau. She had been sighted making her way there across the savannahs. Then Aro, the woman to whom she had given the beans, became nervous about being blamed and reinforced the rumours by insisting that Beatrice was a kanaima, that she had turned herself into a rattlesnake and poisoned both the priest and the little boy, Linus.
Once that was being whispered around, it was impossible for her to stay. Even the people in the settlement at Waronawa looked at her askance.
Everything at Waronawa was changing. McKinnon had already left.
He had ostensibly gone to the Great Exposition in Wembley, England, for a month, taking four Wapisiana men with him to exhibit their crafts. The Wapisiana had returned without him. They said that he had gone to live in Scotland permanently. A short while later they heard that he had married ‘officially’.
Maba and Zuna, when asked how they felt about this, laughed and shrugged.
‘We had him when he was young. We had the best of him. Someone else can have what little there is left.’
Before leaving, he had arranged for Beatrice to stay with some acquaintances of his in Montreal. The authorities in Georgetown had been enquiring about certain irregularities in the savannahs. Some years before, McKinnon had been made travelling magistrate for the district – a post which he largely ignored, having always been impressed by the Indians’ ability to keep order without government. The idea that he might now be expected to investigate his own daughter’s actions disturbed him. He was not bothered about any poisoning. He was more worried that the incest would be revealed.
On his rare visits to Georgetown, one man had been hinting that he would like to buy him out. McKinnon grabbed the opportunity. He could not sell the land because he did not own it, but he sold the man nearly all his cattle. He left the family with the house he had built and a hundred head of cattle. Then he set sail for England.
Beatrice floated in the water. She was thinking about Sonny. It had been decided that Sonny should stay behind and be raised by Wifreda alongside her own sons. He had Beatrice’s pale complexion and heart-shaped face. His black eyes were the shape of dolphins. Although he was now about five, he hardly ever spoke. Beatrice loved him but felt that he should never have been born – that she had expelled a beautiful secret out of her body that should have remained there. He was a secret made flesh. Sonny turned away from all embraces, even his mother’s, and did not seem particularly attached to anybody. He showed no distress when she told him she was leaving.
She stood up in the water which reached up to her breasts and started to wade to the edge of the lake where the bamboo and reeds grew. Then she turned again, floating on her back and kicking her legs, hoping vaguely that the giant red macaw that was supposed to live under the waters would come up and drag her down, but nothing happened. It was difficult to believe that she was leaving all this. Maba had said things would quieten down in time and people would forget. Beatrice was not so sure. Even Auntie Bobo, whom she had known all her life, had turned away from her and walked off when she saw her coming.
Not that Beatrice felt that she had done anything wrong. Whatever had happened between Danny and herself still felt so natural that she could not believe there was anything bad about it. Perhaps in that underwater world that Maba had told her about as a child, she would be united with Danny again. She dipped under the water until she could breathe no longer and was forced to surface. She could not find the entry to it. She and Danny had been expelled into everyday life. Danny had accepted it more easily than she had. Nothing that she learned at the convent ever made as much sense to her as what she had learned at Waronawa.
Dusk descended as she floated there in the warm waters. Bats looped and flitted overhead. Her thoughts switched to Father Napier. About him she felt no guilt. When Danny had returned from Bartica and described his journey with the mad priest, Beatrice felt calm and peaceful as if some sort of natural justice had been executed and she had been the instrument of it.
It was now all but dark. As she was about to climb out through the reeds, a sudden fierce shower made her duck back under the water and wait till the rain stopped. The rain felt colder than the water in the lake so she kept as much of herself underwater as possible.
Night finally fell as the rain ceased. The rain clouds passed and the stars came out again. Danny came out of the house and shouted to her. He had left Sylvana and his two children at Wichabai and come to take her and her bags to Annai the next day.
‘You have your bags packed and ready? I want us to leave before first light.’
Wifreda had ridden over from Pirara to say goodbye and to collect Sonny. She was in the house with the rest of the family, her face tight and anxious. She did not like goodbyes. The thought of ever having to leave the savannahs filled her with dread. It was impossible for her to understand how Beatrice was so calm about it. Besides, she felt some guilt about the whole business, having been the cause of Beatrice and Danny’s elopement in the first place. And she experienced a sort of ache, in advance, knowing she would miss her sister.
Wifreda now had three sons of her own. She could not imagine leaving any of them. In fact, she had already decided not to have them educated in Georgetown but to bring in a teacher from outside for all the children at Pirara. But Beatrice had just frowned a little when she sorted out some things for Sonny and had handed them to Wifreda as if she were going away for no more than a weekend.
‘Coming,’ Beatrice shouted back to Danny. ‘Where are you?’
‘Here,’ he said. ‘Come and look over here.’
She pulled herself out of the water and felt for her towel on a bush. Wrapping it round her, she walked towards his voice. Then she saw what he meant.
A field of fireflies, caught by the sudden shower, had settled on the ground. They winked in the blackness, as brilliant in the dark underfoot as the stars in the sky above. It was as if the vast night sky had unfolded under their feet as well as over their heads and they were suspended in space. For a long time she stood there, feeling that she was where she was meant to be, standing in the sky with Danny.
Then Danny turned and she heard his padding footsteps as he walked back to the house. After a minute or two she followed him.
The Ice Coffin
It was not until her second winter in Canada that Beatrice came to understand that the devil has to do with cold, not heat as most people think. She stood on top of Mount Royal, wearing a fur muffler and hat, near to where the horse buggies waited to take tourists back down the mountain.
The few people who were about kept their heads down against the icy wind and flurries of fine snow, barely noticing the young woman in the grey Cossack hat who walked through the sleet over to the side of the concourse and looked out over the city. Although someone might just have noticed her remarkable eyes, black, wide-set and with a slight cast in the right one, that made her look involuntarily flirtatious.
Beatrice was contemplating whether or not to marry Horatio Sands.
She held on to the rail and looked out over the frosty city and the frozen river. Below her stood the huge grain elevators and the tiered, rectangular outlines of the white Sun Life building. Sparks from an electric trolley moved along the city streets like a firefly.
It was then that it occurred to her that what she had been taught at the convent was wrong. The nuns had told them that hell is one hot place, full of fires and conflagrations. She bit her lip and frowned as she surveyed the city spread out beneath her. It is not, she thought. It is a deep, dark coldness from which there is no recovery. There seemed to be no escape, in any direction, from the arctic blanket that covered Canada. The idea both frightened and comforted her. She snuggled down in the fur collar of her coat and waited for her friends.
Everything seemed to have brought her to a point where she was about to make a decision she had hoped to avoid. She could feel herself drifting towards marriage. And the odd thing
was that she felt she would be marrying to spite the world in some way. As if she would be saying to the world: There. See. Look what you made me do. The way some people’s suicide is an act of triumphant aggression. Although no one was forcing her to do it and nobody really cared whether she married or not.
Some children screamed and raced behind her towards the toboggan slide.
When she first arrived in Canada, Beatrice stayed with some acquaintances of her father. For a while, despite her initial shyness, she had sold silk stockings in their store. Then she found an office job with the Canadian Pacific Railway and moved into the YWCA. It was congenial enough there. Every night, the warden, a gentle, dreamy-eyed woman in her fifties, would come to their rooms and rap on the door saying: ‘It’s after eleven o’clock, ladies. Would you care to whisper?’
For the first six months or so Beatrice felt quite numb. Once, in a store window, she saw an assistant handling a mechanical doll that walked. The shop girl picked up the doll and put it down somewhere else where it continued walking. That’s how I feel, thought Beatrice, as though someone had picked me up and put me down somewhere else and I’d just continued walking.
Now, as she blinked away the fine snow that stuck to her lashes and stung her face, she could hear the laughter of the other girls from the hostel as they walked up the hill to join her.
Often, on Saturdays, they met at the café on the mountain and then went into the museum nearby to see the shrunken Indian head preserved in spirits. Beatrice found it as fascinating as the others, the small wizened head.
The Ventriloquist's Tale Page 23