The Ventriloquist's Tale

by Pauline Melville

  ‘All right. Why do I do everything for you? And always give in to you? Because you give me a permanent erection, that’s why.’ He came over to the sofa and put his arms round her and laid his head on her shoulder, breathing in the smell that always aroused him.

  ‘I think about you all the time. I want to build a house. I want to build a house for you and till the land and put up a fence. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I want to paint the house I build … I don’t want to live without you,’ he sighed.

  He had almost called her Marietta. He had spoken just those words to Marietta twenty years earlier.

  ‘I’m so weak for you,’ he said, resting his head on her shoulder and nuzzling at her neck.

  Baboons Making Coffee

  That year in the Rupununi, rodeo took place later than usual on the Easter Sunday and Monday because Easter itself was late.

  Marietta had begun the long walk from Moco-moco to Lethem at dawn while it was still cool. She carried about twenty empty woven baskets to sell, some cylindrical, some in the shape of a howler monkey’s voice-box. Strung together, they weighed little and bobbed on either side of her like water wings. Bla-Bla had gone ahead the night before and slung his hammock in trees outside the stockade. He was competing in one of the children’s events and wanted to be there at dawn to take the horse he was riding down to the river and bathe him.

  It was halfway through the morning when Marietta arrived. Reggae music boomed out from the entrance. Ducking under the barrier in order not to pay, Marietta made her way over to the stalls. A large tent twenty yards away housed the bar where people already stood or sat drinking. An influx of Brazilians had arrived and some coastlanders sprawled at the tables.

  Events had already started. Marietta had missed the wildcow milking competition and the children riding a greased pig. The stockade where the events took place was a huge area fenced off and consisting of nothing but arid clods of dry, dusty, pale-brown earth. Motor bikes stuttered as people came and went from the fair. Cheers and jeers erupted from the onlookers in the stand as the vaqueiros rode wild bulls or broncos like sailors trying to keep upright in a storm-tossed sea. Onlookers leaned against the fence blinking away the dust and sweat from their eyes.

  It was the first rodeo Marietta had ever attended without Chofy and she missed him. In some ways, she had found life easier in the Rupununi when Chofy was not there. After the long stretches of silence punctuated with quarrels that had been the recent pattern of their marriage, it was initially a relief to be without him. But now she could have done with some company. Her father and grandfather had stayed at home to help with the cassava farm.

  A Macusi man she vaguely recognised from Shulinab staggered up to her drunk as a snake, black hair shining, his breath smelling hot and sour, and put his burning hand on her arm. He must know Chofy isn’t here, she thought. That’s why he’s behaving like this. She shook him off and left her baskets to be sold on one of the stalls. More than half the people at the rodeo were strangers to her these days.

  A loudspeaker announced the under-elevens’ horse race. Marietta made her way over the lumpy ground at the back of the stockade to where Bla-Bla’s race would take place. He was riding a neighbour’s horse. The young riders were out of sight a mile away down the strip of land that formed the course. A steward ushered the spectators back so that they would not be trampled. Marietta felt a flutter of excitement. The first sign of the juvenile riders was a small puff of white dust in the distance. Then after a few moments, the ground beneath their feet began to vibrate and Marietta tried to push forward to see. Three minutes later, the horses were in sight thundering towards them. Craning forward through the flying dust, Marietta caught a momentary glimpse of Bla-Bla’s furiously eager little face, his eyes slitted against the dust, his bare feet thumping the sides of his horse. He was biting his bottom lip and lashing the horse wildly with a piece of snake-whip bush. They went by too fast for her to see who had won.

  ‘I brought third,’ a panting Bla-Bla announced to his mother, proudly, his hair spiking up, his face red.

  ‘Why you din’ come first? You too fat, that’s why. Horse can’t carry you. You eat too much. I don’t want to hear about no third,’ said Marietta and Bla-Bla went off to cool his horse in the river, pleased with himself all the same.

  The sky was colourless overhead. The grinding thump of the reggae music irritated Marietta. Rodeo felt empty and pointless without Chofy there to discuss the events. She collected the money from her basket sales and waited for Bla-Bla to return. Then they went close up to the fence to watch the tug-of-war, last event of the day. One team consisted of twenty-four coastlanders or settlers and some Brazilians. The other consisted of twenty-four Wapisiana vaqueiros from the south savannahs. The Indians were half the height and weight of the coastlanders. They did not seem to have a chance.

  As soon as the tugging began, Marietta found herself yelling for the south-savannah team even though it seemed hopeless. First one group and then the other was pulled past the central marker. After about five minutes the coastlanders began to quarrel and shout conflicting instructions to each other, sometimes letting the rope go with one hand in order to gesticulate. The Indians at the other end of the rope never said a word but every time the coastlanders gave an inch or let up for a second, they dug their heels in and pulled together. Ten minutes later, the impossible had occurred and the tiny south-savannah vaqueiros, used to handling wild cattle, had pulled the other team in disarray towards them until they collapsed in a heap.

  Marietta and Bla-Bla stood on the trail with three other Wapisiana women just outside the rodeo, all of them smiling. Marietta had a slight headache. Although pleased by the victory, she felt dispirited somehow and wanted to get away from the music, the crowds, the booming loudspeakers and the scree scree of the referees’ whistles. It was as if she no longer belonged in her own landscape. The small group of women chatted happily, feeling good to know that they could talk quietly in Wapisiana and that passing outsiders would not be able to understand them. The wind was getting up. Marietta looked up at the sky.

  ‘When it start properly, it go be rain for months,’ she said. The others nodded. They said their goodbyes. The further away she was from the rodeo, the more peaceful Marietta felt. They left Lethem behind and started the long walk over the savannahs. A goat was eating from a bush by the side of the track. When they were nearly home, Marietta and Bla-Bla stopped to wait for an alligator which was stepping across the road towards the creek. Then they went on until they reached the gateposts and walked down the slope to the house.

  Just before daybreak the next day, Marietta called Bla-Bla to get up while she started to make bakes. It was the beginning of the new school term. To her surprise, Bla-Bla had settled down and attended school regularly after his father left. His father’s absence seemed to have made him more responsible. One of his jobs was to grind corn and feed the fowls in the morning before school. While it was still dark, they went to fetch water from the creek. Bla-Bla led the way, yawning, a bucket in each hand. Daylight grew stronger and on the way back, trying not to spill water, Marietta pointed out the morning mists hanging in the Kanaku Mountains.

  ‘Look,’ she said, nodding in the direction of the mountains and laughing. ‘Baboons making coffee.’

  Bla-Bla grinned. She looked at the sky and began to hurry.

  ‘Come. Come quick. Rain,’ she said.

  As she spoke, the air seemed to boil and turn grey. Heavy drops of rain started to plummet down and the two of them rushed into the house as fast as possible without spilling the water. Bla-Bla shot out again and made a dash for the latrine. He dived inside, pulled down his pants and sat naked and shivering on the warm wooden board with a hole that formed the seat. A lizard scuttled into the wattle sides of the latrine. Lightning flashed. Rain pelted down on the roof. Thunder rumbled, reverberated and then crashed overhead. Bla-Bla ducked at the sound. Frightened by the violence of the storm, he put his hands t
ogether and decided to pray. All he could remember was something he had learned the previous term at school that felt to him like a prayer. As the air grew darker and took on a bruised, greenish hue, he rattled off what he had learned out loud:

  ‘Always speak quietly and courteously,

  A quiet voice is a mark of refinement,

  If you have to interrupt anyone speaking

  Always say excuse me, please.

  Cover your mouth with your hand when you yawn.

  Cover your mouth with your hand

  And turn your head aside when you cough.

  ‘Amen,’ he added. His hymn to manners finished, Bla-Bla cleaned himself with a piece of stick and waited for the storm to abate. Torrential waters hammered on the leaf roof over his head. When he was unable any longer to withstand the terror of the storm, Bla-Bla scampered, heart thumping, through the lashing spears of rain for the house. Inside, he took off his shorts, wrung them out and sat on the floor.

  ‘I tremblin’,’ he said. ‘When is Daddy coming back?’

  The school Bla-Bla attended was more than a mile away. It consisted of one long room on stilts under a palm thatch. The room was divided into three sections by two blackboards on easels – so it was always possible to hear a low hum from one of the other classes.

  Bla-Bla set off carrying a shuttlecock made from a corn-cob with feathers stuck in one end. In his pocket, he kept a kokerite seed with the perfectly bored circular hole that means it contains a little white grub. On the way, he snapped off a twig from the wet sucubera tree to squeeze the white paste from it that can be used for glue and stuck some seeds on to his shuttlecock for decoration.

  Bla-Bla had discovered that it was possible to enjoy school. After mid-morning break every day, his class had a reading lesson when they took it in turns to stand up and read out loud. The book was passed to him. He had just stood up to do his best when the sound of bare feet thumping up the wooden steps to the schoolroom distracted everybody. The whole class looked towards the door. To his astonishment, Marietta came marching right in. She saw Bla-Bla standing up in the class. Because she was a little embarrassed, she ignored the schoolteacher and spoke straight to him in Wapisiana. It was forbidden to speak Wapisiana or Macusi at school.

  ‘Bla-Bla. You know where is the parrot?’

  She was frowning with worry and sweating from the walk. The parrot was her favourite. It had gone missing and she’d searched the house, the nearby fruit trees and down by the creek before walking all the way to the school.

  Everyone giggled except the dapper black teacher from the coast, who did not understand the language and who, anyway, was eaten up with rage because his wife had left him. Unable to withstand the hardships of savannah life, she had returned to Georgetown and left him to work out his contract while she spent the money.

  Bla-Bla smiled at his mother. It made him feel proud and shy to see her familiar figure in the school. Some children had no parents, but everybody would know that he belonged to someone. He answered her in Wapisiana.

  ‘I haven’t seen the parrot, Mamai. Sometimes, he sits in the small mango tree at the back.’

  Marietta grunted and pounded back down the stairs.

  The blow took Bla-Bla utterly by surprise. It stunned and cut. The strap caught him on the side of the head but the blow seemed to coil round the root of his tongue. The teacher was asking him something angrily and telling him to speak English. But his English deserted him and he was unable to answer: the strap whistled and landed on the other side of his head and the top of his left shoulder. Instinctively, he held on to the desk but nearly lost his balance.

  Tiny electric shocks ran from his cheek to the fingertips of his left hand. He stared down at the wooden desk, speechless with misery. Since his father left, he had especially wanted to do well. He had done everything he could to please the teacher. The ugliness of the blows shocked him. The teacher told him to sit down and he did. The little girl who sat next to him was looking at him, her eyes full of worry.

  During the morning break, Bla-Bla stayed apart from the others and refused to speak, as if the blows had driven him back to some period before speech, as old as silence. It was not until he was walking home on his own at the end of the afternoon that he allowed himself to sob.

  Halfway home, on a hillside, he passed an elderly Macusi woman sitting outside her house which was open on one side like a shed. She had her back to the sun to save her eyes from the glare as she wove tibisiri baskets. Her husband plodded wearily up the hill with a gourd of water on his shoulder. Despite being Wapisiana, Bla-Bla felt oddly linked to them, as if they all shared the same hardships, as if some sort of fate bound them together. Nobody spoke. There was a sense of defeat in the air as the sun slid towards the west.

  He walked on towards home. From an early age, Bla-Bla had puzzled over how he could make things better for his own people. He sensed injustice in the way they were treated and it troubled him. Sometimes, in his hammock at nights, he imagined building defences around the village to keep intruders away. He planned battles and attacks.

  Suddenly, Bla-Bla missed his father badly and also Auntie Wifreda’s comforting presence in the house. At night, he used to accompany Auntie Wifreda to the latrine, carrying the big pole used for knocking down mangoes. He walked ahead with the pole and the kerosene lamp and she followed, sometimes singing a hymn and sometimes a Wapisiana song in her wavery voice.

  He came to the creek. There, he jumped and slid down to crouch at the water’s edge. A houri fish lay at the bottom but the water was clear and the fish too alert for him to be able to ‘hold’ it as his father had taught him. He went a little way upstream and muddied the water so that, as the sediment moved down, it clouded over the fish in the same way that the clouds obliterate the moon at night. Then he walked silently back to the fish. Very gently, as the muddied water drifted over it, he cupped his hand and held the fish, docile now that it could no longer see, clasping it in a delicate, firm grip and lifting it from the water.

  When he reached home, he gave the fish to Marietta to cook and said nothing about what had happened at school. As soon as he came in the house, Marietta took the fish and sent Bla-Bla straight out again on the fourteen-mile walk to the post office to see if any money had arrived from Georgetown. He set off on the journey, collecting two friends on the way.

  They had walked for about five miles when a truck came flying towards them along the red road that was still drying out after the storm earlier in the day. The truck was heading towards their village, grit and red clay spitting up from the wheels. An East Indian with a cigarette in his mouth drove at speed. He was bringing the Americans from Hawk Oil to set up their seismic oil surveys. There was only one road. The boys were hot, tired and thirsty. They thought that if they could catch a lift – even if it meant going back to the village – they could come out again with the truck and get a ride all the way to the post office.

  They tried to flag the truck down as it passed. The driver laughed.

  ‘Walk, buck boys,’ he yelled as they roared past, the Americans grinning out from the back of the truck which splashed the boys as it roared by on the rutted track.

  The sun burned down in the silence left behind by the truck as it disappeared in the distance. It was Bla-Bla’s idea to make a trap for the men.

  A mile further down the road, there were shrubs on either side of the road where it narrowed. The boys looked for stones, flat and sharp enough for digging. They worked like demons until their hair shone with sweat. Overhead, a tiny but persistent washi bird attacked a much bigger chicken hawk on the wing to try and get feathers for its nest. After about two hours, and covered in dust, they had scooped out two deep holes in the parallel ruts of the track.

  A shower sent the boys scurrying to the side of the road for shelter. They stood under the glittering bush. Milky orange puddles filled the dips, holes and ruts in the road. Bla-Bla inspected their handiwork. The holes were about two feet deep. They covered th
em with branches and twigs and laid broad leaves on top. Then they scattered sandy earth on the whole lot.

  As they stood back to survey their work, Bla-Bla realised the truck was a four-wheel drive and would be able to dig itself out with the back wheels. So they dug a third hole. Waist deep. They covered it in the same way with leaves, sticks, bush and bits of rock.

  When the job was done, they walked the rest of the way to the post office, bought sweets for the return journey, hung around watching the men outside the abattoir for a while and sky-larked around, forgetting completely about the men in the truck.

  When they came home from school the next day, they heard the trap had worked. The truck had crashed. The men, livid with fury, had had to walk back to the village for help and stay the night there. The East Indian driver had arrived at Marietta’s the next day while Bla-Bla was still at school.

  ‘Bla-Bla, they’ll kill you.’ Marietta was frightened. ‘They said if they find you they will kill you.’

  But Bla-Bla denied knowing anything about it. All the boys stuck to their story whether they were questioned separately or together. The men never came back to the house.

  Dinner at the High Commission

  It was an hour before her dinner party at the High Commission was due to begin and Mrs Monica Bevan looked anxiously through the glass doors on to the lawn at the back. A downpour had left mirror patches in the waterlogged brown grass. She would not be able to serve brandy outside after dinner as she had planned.

  She checked the table. Each guest had a small crystal finger-bowl, the water scented with one or two petals of sweet-smelling orchids. Then she ran her eye over the condiments, a variety of pepper-sauces and small bowls of local salted peanuts. A silver epergne filled with fresh hibiscus and frangipani graced the centre of the table.