The Ventriloquist's Tale

by Pauline Melville

  Sonny sat at a desk apart from the others. When she asked the class to write their full names at the top of a page, he just wrote: ‘Sonny’. Miss Freeman queried it with the others.

  ‘Everyone should have a handle to his name,’ said Miss Freeman, smiling.

  But he had none. They called him Sonny. Other than that he had no name. He didn’t know who he was or where he came from. Sitting at his desk, he was a slender figure who, unlike the others, gave her no problems. Yet he was a rebel in an unusual and delicate sense. He was a rebel through absence. He managed to be there and not to be there at the same time. Sometimes he slept, eyes wide open.

  He rarely spoke and when he did it was no more than a whisper. But he answered and was obedient, responding sometimes with a faint smile as if something was amusing him.

  Gradually, Nancy Freeman discovered that what Sonny wanted more than anything else was to keep himself secret. In an era of discovery, revelation and the examination of every aspect of life, an era when every part of the world was being photographed, filmed, rediscovered, analysed, discussed and presented to a voracious public; when communications and networking were speeding up, when all previously inaccessible tribes were being brought out into the open, investigated and put on display, all Sonny wanted was concealment, secrecy and silence.

  He seemed to be permanently in some inner state of lunar excess. It was no use pushing him. Mostly he tried to avoid people. On the rare occasions when he spoke, his observations were curious, detached and intelligent. Whenever an adult spoke emphatically to him, he seemed impressed and listened carefully. The way he listened unsettled people. He seemed to listen more to the stresses than the meaning of the words, as if trying to detect a subterranean rhythm, an ancient and recurring beat which would give him a clue as to what the speaker really meant. Sometimes he responded with delight, as if he had discovered the true meaning of what was being told to him. This disturbed the speaker who might have been saying something quite inconsequential or might even have been scolding him. People were disconcerted. It made the speaker feel as if he were not in control of what was being said.

  Most people thought that Sonny wasn’t all there.

  At first, the new teacher tried to befriend him. Later, she came to understand that Sonny was alone by choice. Love, friendship, intimacy of any sort produced in him a sense of suffocation. He veered away from it. Any contact seemed like a violation. Solitude enraptured him. He had undertaken some inner, tremulous journey and he pursued his course with the joy and delicacy of a tracker. People made well-meaning attempts to get Sonny to participate in the world. But for him, nothing could equal the thrill of withdrawing from it.

  One morning, as the sun streamed in through the windows, Miss Freeman was trying to teach multiplication tables and English grammar amidst tears and sulks and the sound of scraping chairs. The door opened and Wifreda came into the room, frowning so that her low hairline came even closer to her eyebrows. She seemed a little flustered.

  ‘Nancy, a Mr Evelyn Waugh, or some such body, has arrived here. He wants a haircut. Leave the schooling for the moment. He’ll probably stay a day or two and then beat it back down to wherever the hell he came from.’

  Wifreda was usually anxious in the presence of strangers although she was always as hospitable as the savannahs required.

  Nancy Freeman turned to the class and said, without much hope of being obeyed: ‘There’s a white man here and he will be very vex if you don’t sit down quietly and learn your sums.’

  Through the window, the children stared at the white man who had dismounted from his sweating bay horse in the yard. One of the Macusi vaqueiros, a stocky man with a limp, came and took the horse to be watered. The visitor with a compressed face and shrewd eyes waited, leaning on a snake-wood stick. Clearly, his feet hurt him. He was looking round with unmitigated horror at his surroundings.

  Nancy, in her friendly, breezy way, brought out a chair and gave him a haircut there and then on the expanse of ground between the house and the green waters of the Pirara River.

  Later that night, when the evening meal was finished, the whole family went outside and walked up and down in the moonlight, reciting Sorrowful Mysteries aloud, as they had been taught by the new priest. Mr Waugh asked if he could join them, explaining that he was a recent convert.

  Wifreda slung up a hammock for the guest and hoped that Danny, who was staying at Pirara just then, would not get drunk and become obnoxious. But Danny, always unpredictable, listened to the visitor in an unusually polite and sociable way as the two men reclined in hammocks on the outside verandah with a bottle of rum on the ground between them.

  Overhead, the stars hung in the sky, so brilliant that they seemed to have come deliberately close enough to watch the two men. The writer looked at Danny’s slanting eyes which glinted in the moonlight. His cheeks were puffy through drinking too much. Evelyn Waugh was reminded, disconcertingly, of Josef Stalin.

  ‘What brought you so far from home?’ Danny asked.

  Evelyn Waugh frowned a little waspishly.

  ‘Domestic matters,’ he replied, after a pause. And then added, rather peevishly: ‘My marriage ended. I prefer not to talk about it.’

  ‘Same here,’ said Danny.

  And for a moment, the overlapping desire not to talk brought them into intimacy, the stoic silence of the Indian grasping hands with the natural reticence of the English upper middle classes.

  As if he had already said too much, the writer added: ‘However, I now can’t wait to return to England. I find it excruciatingly dull in this part of the world. Nothing appears to happen here. What do you find to do?’

  ‘Not much,’ said Danny.

  Sitting a few yards away was the ancient figure of Koko Lupi, watching them but not joining in. She had been summoned from the south savannahs by Wifreda because Sonny was having fits. Sonny had always been entranced by the moon. He liked to sleep, eyes open, bathed in moonlight. But from the onset of puberty, he had suffered fits when the moon was full.

  ‘The moon come for he,’ said Koko Lupi and prescribed that Wifreda burn fowl feathers under his nose and then make him drink water containing the ashes of the feathers.

  When he asked her, Koko Lupi informed Mr Waugh that she had flown there.

  ‘Pretends to fly,’ wrote Waugh in his diary afterwards.

  In the house later that night, Mr Waugh asked Danny if he would like to hear him read some Dickens. He had brought a copy of Dombey and Son with him. Although Danny could be cruel, there was something about the stranger that he liked. And so he fetched a light – a wick floating in beef fat – and some more rum and two glasses which he put down on the small table and listened patiently for as long as Mr Waugh cared to read. Mr Waugh sat with one leg up on the wooden arm of his Berbice chair, holding the book at an angle to catch the feeble light. After a while, Danny’s attention faltered as he remembered the occasion, long ago in his childhood, when another white man had come and played Mozart sonatas on a violin.

  ‘Shall I stop?’ said Mr Waugh, noticing the loss of concentration.

  ‘No. Please go on,’ said Danny politely. ‘Please to carry on.’

  In the first light of morning, there was a creaking sound as the writer, clad in his pyjamas, turned heavily in his hammock, uncomfortable and chilled. He imagined having to stay in such a place for ever. He nearly fell out as he reached down to the floor to pick up his notebook and pen. ‘The plight of a civilised man trapped amongst savages,’ he wrote, and then added a series of question marks to remind him of the savages he had left in his own land.

  As he prepared to leave, he stopped packing to write in his diary: ‘Wrote bad article yesterday but have thought of plot for short story. Could call it “The Man Who Liked Dickens”.’

  Outside, Danny cranked up the truck with violent turns of the handle. He had promised to give Mr Waugh a lift over to St Ignatius to meet the new priest. After Father Napier’s departure, there had been no Catholic
priest in the Rupununi for many years. The new one, just appointed, had attended Stonyhurst College in England and knew several of Waugh’s acquaintances.

  The writer felt less bleak. Up until then the entire journey had been like an unendurable, self-inflicted penance. That shared moment of silence with Danny McKinnon had helped. Somehow he felt that he had turned the corner. The fact that he had conceived an idea for a piece of fiction was a good sign.

  The morning that Mr Waugh left, all the children had waved him off and nobody had returned to the schoolroom. Nancy Freeman waited in the empty room for a bit and then reluctantly abandoned all idea of teaching that day and strolled down past the giant mango trees towards the river. There, through a secluded patch of trees, she saw the figure of Sonny. She approached quietly to within a few yards of him and watched him perform an amazing feat with his arrows and bow.

  He had his back to her and did not know she was there. He shot one arrow high up into the trunk of the ite palm, almost out of sight at the top. Then he shot another into the butt of the first and then another into the butt of the second and so on until a fine arch of arrows formed from the trunk of the tree to the ground. He turned round, saw Nancy and smiled.

  It was a radiant, dark, dazzling smile that she never forgot, as he stood there in his white shirt and brown shorts. Then he walked away downhill towards the creek.

  She went forward to examine the arch of arrows but as she came up to it the whole structure collapsed with the arrows falling all awry.

  Nobody knew exactly what happened to Sonny. He disappeared a year or so after that. Rumours sprang up about his vanishing but nobody seemed able to pinpoint the time or place where he had gone missing. There were reported sightings of him here and there, sometimes in a certain village, or someone would say they had seen him pulling cassava in the mountains. He ceased to exist gradually as the reports grew less.

  Because of the rumours that his mother was a kanaima, nobody searched too hard for him. Some people said he had gone into the mountains to train as a kanaima himself. More than one person suspected he was a ‘turn-tiger’, that he was able to transform himself into a jaguar. Privately, Wifreda did not think so, but understanding his preference for solitude, she did think it possible that he had gone to live in one of the deserted jaguar caves beneath the great black boulders in the Kanaku Mountains.

  Sonny’s apotheosis came after several people swore they had seen him near Bottle Mountain, standing at the place where a number of trails all cross, the rising sun between two mountain peaks catching him in a prism of light so that he seemed to dazzle where he stood.

  The sight had so surprised one Macusi man out hunting that he had returned and tried to trace the prints of the figure he had seen. The hunter was a meticulous and practical man who was irritated by matters that had no explanation.

  As he examined the footprints, he saw that they were overlaid with splayed jaguar prints that appeared to go backwards. He assumed that someone was trying to play tricks with a severed tiger foot in order to put off pursuers. He followed the mish-mash of prints into the foothills of the mountains, losing them briefly where the grey stones bridged a rushing creek. He crossed the creek to the other side.

  It was there that he stopped trying to follow the vanished prints and began to follow the alluring sound of laughter.

  Following the sound of solitary merriment, he climbed up the steep narrow trail towards the waterfall, relishing the smell of dense wet vegetation. The sun slashed through tangled, broken leaves but he looked down, treading carefully over the rocks, shrubs and fallen tree branches that littered the ascent, and so he did not see a hammock slung over his head in the trees.

  He had never heard such gaiety. Soon, his ears were assailed by different sounds in turn, each seeming to come from the same place as the laughter – a toucan with its yelp like a puppy; the whoop-whooping of a tree-frog; and then the mouse-like chirpings of bats in broad daylight, which disconcertingly dissolved into giggles. The only constant was the waterfall clamouring in the background. Between each sound came a peal of such infectious laughter that the man could do nothing but stand there with a big smile on his face, listening. He started to giggle himself and shook his head. It’s either a parrot or some sort of ventriloquist, he thought.

  When he reached the small waterfall from which all the sounds seemed to originate, there was nothing there except a pile of carelessly abandoned clothes on the flat boulders in front of the fall. There was no sign of the owner whom he presumed to be swimming somewhere nearby. He examined the clothes; an elegant cream suit, the trousers supported by a solid belt of carved leather; a pair of expensive dark glasses with gold frames and a set of car keys whose metal had grown hot in the sun.

  He waited for a few hours until approaching darkness made him pick his way back down, profoundly disappointed not to have found the source of such numinous laughter.

  Wifreda waited anxiously for a while and then wrote to Beatrice in Canada about the mystery, saying that Sonny had just left and wandered off somewhere. Maybe he went to town, she wrote, or was killed by an animal or moved across to Brazil. Nobody knows. A body was found sitting in the river, face in the water as if looking for something, hair streaming, thumb and leg part eaten away. But nobody knew for certain who it was.

  Beatrice received the letter, concealed it from her husband and later tore it up.

  She wrote to Wifreda saying that perhaps it was just as well and thanking her for all she had done. She now had four children with Horatio. They had moved to a house in Ville St Laurent on the outskirts of Montreal. The children attended the local school. What with the routine of seeing to the children and looking after Horatio she barely had time to remember that other love which had flowed always under the grind of daily life; a sweet underground river that sometimes broke through to the surface and made its own music, but mainly stayed hidden, so that she only carried the echoes of its song.

  Occasionally, she did think of the boy she had left behind, strange, beautiful and isolate. Then, for a while, life with Horatio and her other children would seem quite unreal.

  Part Three

  A Tapir for a Wife

  Auntie Wifreda thoughtshe could tolerate being blind as long as Beatrice’s face did not keep floating into the blackness. She tried to imagine how she would manage back at home in the Rupununi. Marietta and Bla-Bla would have to help her. It might be possible to use Bla-Bla as a sort of blind person’s walking stick. Perhaps one of the dogs could be trained as a guide dog. Nothing to be done about fate. At least she had been able to see for most of her life.

  When Chofy found out what had happened, he took her immediately to the hospital. The surgeon was puzzled.

  ‘As far as I can see,’ he said to Chofy privately, after examining both eyes, ‘the operation on the right eye was a success. I can find no organic reason for her to lose her sight like this. It might be stress. There is such a thing as hysterical blindness. Let her rest for a week and then bring her back and we will see where to go from there.’

  Chofy guided her up the steps to her room in Thomas Street. Auntie Wifreda felt her way around until she found the chair and sat in it.

  ‘You seem so calm about it all,’ said Chofy.

  Staring sightlessly straight ahead of her, Wifreda told him for the first time the whole story of his Uncle Danny’s affair with Beatrice; Father Napier’s madness; the existence and disappearance of Sonny; the eclipse and the threat that Beatrice had uttered to make her blind.

  ‘Like a termite,’ she said, as Chofy bathed her forehead and brushed her silver hair. Chofy finished and laid the hairbrush on the stool next to the bed. ‘Now you know why I don’ want to talk any more about eclipses or Sonny or Evelyn Waugh or any of it.’

  Chofy heated some food up for her on the stove outside.

  ‘Go,’ she said, when he had given her a plate of cook-up rice. ‘There’s nothing you can do. Just roll me a cigarette before you leave.’

&nb
sp; ‘How is your Auntie Wifreda?’ asked Rosa anxiously, when he returned.

  ‘Same way,’ said Chofy. ‘Do you believe in superstition?’

  ‘Absolutely not.’ Rosa sat up on the bed in mock outrage. ‘Nor in religion. I’m a complete rationalist.’

  He kept what he had been told to himself.

  Over the next few nights, when Chofy and Rosa had finished making love, and with the heat pressing down on them so that even the weight of the sheet was too much to bear, they lay talking, face to face, jacked up on their elbows, legs and feet twisted round each other.

  ‘But why were you living with your Auntie Wifreda anyway? Where were your own parents?’

  The chance to talk about himself was such a delicious luxury that Chofy continued into the early hours of the morning while she listened with great attention, trying to fight off sleepiness. He twisted himself round in the bed.

  ‘My father, Freddie, died in the Rupununi when I was seven. That was a disaster for me. Nothing felt the same after that. When he was buried at Sand Creek it was raining hard. The coffin rested in water and mud. All the village came. Apparently, it was only when I saw the earth being thrown on the coffin that I realised what was happening. I don’ remember too much but they said I jumped into the grave and they had to carry me away kicking and struggling.’

  ‘What did he die of?’ asked Rosa, frowning in sympathy.

  ‘Another Indian had accused him of stealing a horse. My father lost his temper and shouted at him to clear out. People said that the man came back and stole one of my father’s footprints and put it in the creek. People believe things like that,’ Chofy added hastily. ‘Soon my father became breathless and his foot swelled up like a football. Great, deep holes appeared in his foot-bottom. He peed himself and it fell into puddles like creek water. His leg swelled and then his body. He began to bleed from his bottom like he have a period. That’s one of the signs of kanaima. On the night he died, he said he wanted to sling his hammock outside to get more air. People said they saw a stranger, an Amerindian man nearby. Then he died. My mother was a Wapisiana from Sand Creek. She left after that and went over to Brazil and Auntie Wifreda raised me, with my cousin Tenga whose mother had died too.’