The Ventriloquist's Tale

by Pauline Melville

  The next day, Chofy and Marietta climbed the open wroughtiron steps of the public hospital up to the intensive care unit.

  A sickly breeze of ill-health seemed to waft over them as the nurse, a few paces ahead, let herself through some plastic swing doors. Neither of them had mentioned Rosa since the night Marietta arrived in the house. An iron silence crushed the subject out of existence. Both parents focused entirely on Bla-Bla.

  The Cuban doctor stood at the top of the stairs. He looked tired. His white coat was grubby and creased. He breathed in and raised his shoulders trying to find a way of saying what it was necessary to say. The couple stood three steps below him.

  ‘Mr and Mrs McKinnon. I am very sorry. There was nothing more we could do for your son.’

  The East Indian nurse who had come out with him, her large, liquid eyes swimming with sympathy, took them each by the arm and led them into a spacious storage cupboard stacked with shining aluminium pans and kidney dishes.

  ‘Would you like to wait here a minute. It’s not so public. We are just getting him ready.’

  ‘Ready?’ Marietta queried.

  ‘There are just one or two things we have to do, dismantle the tubes and equipment, and then you can come and see him.’

  She left Chofy and Marietta standing in the storage cupboard in silence. Chofy held Marietta awkwardly around her broad shoulders. He could feel her entire body shaking.

  When they entered the room, Bla-Bla looked tiny in the bed. The nurse had tried to smooth down his jet-black hair but it still stuck up in front like two crossed fingers. His top lip was curled back in a sort of snarl.

  ‘It’s not right for him to be so still,’ whispered Marietta. ‘He ran everywhere.’

  As Chofy stared at the stern and exhausted little face, he felt a crushing pain in his chest and his arms seemed to lose their life. The expression on Bla-Bla’s face was a sneer of accusation. It seemed to accuse him of many things: of abandoning his family, deserting his son, of not being able to keep the land safe for his children. With shock, he felt that he had lost not only a child but a whole continent.

  In the corner of the room by the window stood Bla-Bla’s small bow and four arrows which had accompanied him from the time of the accident. Marietta went and picked them up. Bla-Bla had made the arrows himself. The dark flight feathers belonged to a powis bird. Stuck in the cotton binding at one end of the bow was the two-inch-long red feather of a scarlet macaw. She pulled it out and fixed it in Bla-Bla’s hair, just behind his ear. Then she reached under the sheet and felt for his hand.

  ‘He’s so cold. If only I could warm him.’

  The nurse was waiting tactfully in the doorway. Eventually, she asked if they needed help with the burial arrangements.

  Marietta turned and drew herself up to face the nurse directly.

  ‘We could not leave him to bury here. This town has nothing to do with us. We do not belong here. He will come home with us.’

  The nurse looked enquiringly at Chofy.

  ‘But you know we have to do things fast because of the heat.’

  ‘Go to that house where your friend lives.’ Marietta turned to Chofy and spoke with determination. ‘And see if she will help make the Hawk Oil people fly us out.’

  Chofy tore through the streets. He heard his own breath whistled as he ran. Some vindictive force seemed to have deliberately employed people to act out scenes of everyday happiness and relaxation around him. Shopkeepers chatted in doorways. Street vendors smiled. A cyclist whistled as he glided past. Children in brown school uniform skipped along the dried-grass verges. The whole town felt to be on holiday.

  Chofy bounded up the stairs of the house two at a time. When he found Rosa at the top, he could not bring himself immediately to say his son was dead.

  ‘We have to ask the Americans if they will carry us back to the Rupununi,’ he said quickly, out of breath. ‘You must help.’

  His tongue felt like a pebble in his mouth as it twisted round the unfamiliar words.

  ‘My son is dead.’

  He gasped with the effort of saying it. Rosa tried to put her arms around him but he was rigid and unresponsive, his face impassive. She tried to kiss him. His face was as stiff as leather. At that moment she knew that it was too late to reveal her own love in the way she had been planning to do when the time was right. Nothing keeps in the tropics, someone had warned her. Bad timing. Events had foreclosed on the possibility. The doors had shut in her face. Love trumped by disaster.

  ‘I love you,’ she said anyway, rather tamely, as they ran downstairs. It fell on deaf ears. A few phone calls later a Land Rover pulled into the yard of the house. The plane was leaving at four o’clock. If the legal niceties could be tied up, they would collect up Auntie Wifreda and fly the whole family back.

  Rosa kissed him goodbye at the gate. Chofy seemed embarrassed.

  ‘I’ll let you know what happens. I love you,’ said Chofy perfunctorily. ‘I must see that Marietta is all right.’

  ‘But I’m going back to England in three weeks. You don’t even have my address.’

  ‘Write to me care of the Amerindian hostel,’ he said, dully. ‘The warden there is trustworthy.’

  He scrambled on board the vehicle. An American with a scrubbed pink face and tufted eyebrows was driving. He pushed back his baseball cap as they waited for the iron gates to be opened.

  ‘Jeez. I’m real sorry to hear about your son. Jeez, that’s a tragedy. We’ve fixed for the boys at the other end to meet the plane with a Range Rover and take you wherever you need to go. Was the little guy insured? If he was insured you can bet Hawk Oil will give you a whole heap of compensation. They’re a good company like that.’

  Chofy made no reply.

  Marietta and Tenga had fetched Auntie Wifreda who stood with her face towards the sun in order to feel the heat. They were all waiting outside the hospital. The American helped them to collect Bla-Bla’s body which was small enough to lie in the aisle of the fourteen-seater plane.

  During the journey, Auntie Wifreda began to notice a dim fuzzy light replacing the blackness. By the time they reached the Rupununi, she had difficulty focusing, but she could see. She said nothing, not wishing to express any pleasure in the circumstances. The first thing she saw was Marietta’s broad flat cheekbones and expressionless face as she stared out of the plane window at the Rupununi River winding below. When the plane landed on the airstrip, another of the Americans’ sparkling new vehicles was waiting to transport the family to Moco-moco.

  Bla-Bla was buried at the back of the house. The priest was in the south savannahs, too far away to get there in time, and so they wrapped Bla-Bla in his hammock and put his bow and arrows in with him and put him in the earth.

  Afterwards, the whole place felt evil as if poison dripped from the thatch. Even the parrots stayed quiet. The dogs moped around the house. Auntie Wifreda rested in her hammock for the first few days and then got up and went fishing as usual. The eye which had been operated on was completely clear and functioned normally. The other eye retained its waterfall but she was able to manage better than before.

  Marietta did the chores and tended the cassava farm, but Chofy could tell that the life had gone out of her.

  Even in the short while she had been away, her parents had not been able to cope with the cassava farm and weeds had sprung up.

  When Chofy and Marietta were clearing these weeds one morning, Marietta turned and said to him: ‘If you want to we will split.’ Her voice sounded flat, disinterested.

  ‘I don’ think I want that,’ he said, thoughtfully.

  Once he was out in the open again, the sight of the vast plains, the grasses leaning with the wind and the familiar ridges of the Kanaku Mountains soothed Chofy and steadied him somewhat. The great, unchanging open spaces gave him time and a frame in which to think. Despite the grief and guilt, in the savannahs his son’s death seemed contained within a certain order of things and not just an extra, random confusion, as
everything was in the city. From a distance, the affair with Rosa began to seem like a sort of bewitchment, something unreal.

  There was a lot of work to be done on the house. He threw himself into it. The roof needed re-thatching. Two of the bloodwood beams had split and parts of the structure needed to be fixed. He decided to use parakaran wood for houseposts. That was the hardest sort of wood.

  Auntie Wifreda seemed to draw strength from having her feet back on the rust-red earth of the savannahs. She undertook chores with an astonishing vigour for one of her age. Three weeks after the burial, she took the tin trunk that served for her dressing-table and opened it. Inside were Father Napier’s diaries, mouldy but protected from wood-ants by the metal container. The trunk also contained a copy of Dombey and Son that Evelyn Waugh had left with her at Pirara.

  Without opening the diaries, she lugged all six volumes of them outside, made a bonfire and threw them on. The growing pile of ashes reminded her of the days when she used to burn fowl feathers for Sonny during his moon-fits. She picked up the copy of Dombey and Son and was about to throw it on the flames when she changed her mind. Perhaps the school could use it.

  ‘What are you doing?’ complained Marietta as she saw the diaries go up in flames. ‘We could have used that paper to wrap things.’

  ‘We should have done this a long time ago,’ replied Auntie Wifreda, grimly. It was planting time. In the cool of the dawn, Marietta dug a fresh bed for the cucumber seedlings. All round, tender tips of green sprouted and buds uncurled tiny clenched fists. In the afternoon, she and Chofy borrowed two horses and rode over to Marietta’s parents’ place to see about starting up again with one or two cattle. The rains were beginning. The savannahs had turned green. The air was sweet, the breeze fresh.

  On the way, they stopped by a fast-flowing creek. In the middle stood two smooth boulders, rounded like turtle backs.

  ‘Turtles. Keepers of the secret,’ said Marietta, out of habit.

  They rode the horses down into a wide creek that reached up to mid-flank on the animals. The creek water was pearly grey. The leaves of the trees did not quite meet overhead, leaving a tracery of blank sky visible above them. Without warning, Chofy’s head was reeling, his ears full of water, and he was spluttering upside down in the creek. His horse clambered up the bank and bolted for home.

  Marietta doubled up with laughter.

  ‘You been away too long. Don’ you remember that horse? You have to do his girth up tight because he pushes his belly out when you saddle him and then draws it in when he’s crossing a creek and throws you off so he can get home early.’

  Chofy, soaking wet, stood on the bank and dabbed at his bleeding head with a leaf while Marietta sat on the ground and cried with laughter.

  The wing of Rosa’s plane dipped sideways almost immediately after take-off, just as the sun rose over the three counties of Berbice, Essequibo and Demerara. Rosa stared out of the window. The forest below looked like a bed of parsley. One or two clouds dotted beneath the plane made the pinky-brown Demerara River look as though it were flowing through the sky.

  Dazzling white light glinted along the side of the silver wing, turning it momentarily into the flaming sword of the cherubim protecting the Garden of Eden.

  Wormoal was on the same plane. He leaned across the aisle.

  ‘I’ve had a very successful trip,’ he said, beaming through his glasses. I’ve got most of the information I needed. I think I know as much as it’s possible to know about the eclipse mythology in these parts.’ He patted his briefcase triumphantly and returned to reading some papers.

  Rosa turned to gaze out of the window, half expecting to be able to see Chofy weeding or planting below. She had been made desolate by his departure. It was not until he had left Georgetown that she realised what she had lost. She went and left her name and address at the Amerindian hostel as Chofy suggested but she hardly expected to hear from him. The rest of her time at the Mynheer Nicklaus Lodge she felt restless and miserable.

  When she arrived in England she would have to try and keep herself occupied. There would be endless distractions there: films, friends, concerts, lectures, work, a hundred ways of passing the time. Her stomach churned at the thought of lost possibilities. In an effort to recover her composure, she turned back to the hermetically sealed existence inside the plane, pulling out a folder of work from her bag.

  ‘Evelyn Waugh – a Post-colonial Perspective,’ she wrote on the front of her notebook as the plane flew on towards Trinidad.

  As the plane drew gradually further away from the coast of Guyana, Marietta bathed vigorously in the creek, creaming the water with soapy froth as she washed her hair. She climbed out on to the red scree, rubbed herself with a towel, dressed and went to feed the chickens before coming to where Auntie Wifreda lay in her hammock. She recounted her dreams as usual.

  ‘This time I dreamt about eggs. Eggs everywhere. Chickens laying in the bushes. In the trees. On the ground.’

  ‘That is life coming back after all your problems,’ said Auntie Wifreda. ‘Fertility and growth. Food too. It means hope and coming back to life.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Marietta, and then, practical as ever, added: ‘Or maybe I was just thinking about eggs.’

  Epilogue

  I am busy lying in my hammock, warming my behind over the embers of silverballi wood – the smoke of which is supposed to make people quarrelsome, but makes me amorous – waiting for some high-octane chiquita, some little Miss Hotbody to pass my way and spot my bronze, barrel thigh hanging enticingly over the side. Although it’s no use any woman winding her arse in front of me unless she fulfils three conditions: she has a good job, a Porsche and can make love swinging through the trees on a rope of liana.

  The moral of the story? Listen, before I even began, I stowed my conscience under a bush so that it could not hamper me in any way whatsoever.

  I will say one thing, however. There are three strands of insanity in this world: love, religion and politics, each one so dangerous that it has to be kept in an institution; religion in a church or a temple like a mad dog; love confined to marriage, escaping at society’s peril; politics chained to parliaments because of the genocides and wars that take place when it gets loose.

  There is something obnoxious about modern politicians, don’t you think? Not far to the south of where I come from there is a tribe of people for whom physical beauty is the main criterion for access to political power. Travellers come across them lying in their hammocks preening themselves, decked with feathers from humming-birds and macaws. The men wear their hair long. No one in that community would dream of taking notice of someone as ugly as most current Heads of State. Not only do we Indians know how to make ourselves attractive. We are also brilliant at divining what you would like to hear and saying it, so you can never be really sure what we think. Another art suited to politics. Ventriloquism at its zenith. My grandmother taught me to rely daily on the pleasures of artifice and, more importantly, the tactics of warfare – surprise, deception and disguise, that art of mixing the visible with the invisible.

  Armed with her advice, I travelled through Europe in search of the parrot who was supposed to be my heart. I got into all sorts of trouble. (Where I’m known, they think well of me. Where I’m not, who gives a shit?) I would have gone to university but I could find no courses where they studied the resemblances of animals in human faces; the effects of electro-magnetic fields on human behaviour or the relationship between banquets and death.

  Let me take a minute here to extol the inventiveness of death. What could be more creative? Each death unique like a fingerprint. At home we regularly have a rendezvous of carcasses of the dead so they don’t feel left out. All those who have died since the last feast are regularly dug up, disinterred and brought along. Some are dried and withered, others have what looks like a sort of parchment on their bones. Some seem to have been baked or smoked. Some are turning to putrefaction, others swarming with worms. They are all diligently
carried to the clearing and seated round the fire. In this jolly company, I always relate stories of a certain rapscallion, a character born from silence, who is driven mainly by trickery and the desire to eat meat, a character whose antics would be enough to make a corpse laugh.

  You see, for us it is the sort of death you die that determines your afterlife, not the sort of life you have lived. You have your ideas of reincarnation upside down. We progress through life towards the perfect state of being an animal – the nirvana of responding only to desires. Animals that behave badly – a jaguar, for instance, that hesitates before the kill – would slide down the scale to become human.

  People get things the wrong way round. Take phobias. Psychologists look in the past for the explanations instead of the future. Phobias are warnings. If you are frightened to go to the top of a high building, it is probably because you are destined to fall off one.

  Where was I? Yes. In Europe. It was while I was in Europe that I nearly became fatally infected by the epidemic of separatism that was raging there. The virus transmutes. Sometimes it appears as nationalism, sometimes as racism, sometimes as religious orthodoxy. My experience in the rain forests of South America provided me with no immunity to it.

  It was very infectious. I felt my mouth twitching with unaccustomed fervour. Chameleon-like I marched amongst them. The Serbs, the Scots, the English, the Basques, the Muslims, the Chechens – everybody was at it. I crammed my mouth full of Belgian hand-made chocolates to avoid speaking out and giving myself away. I saw that the desire to be with your own kind exerts a powerful attraction.

  In an effort to rid myself of the affliction, I used my ventriloquial gifts to reproduce the voice of a dissenting heckler (for safety’s sake always making it sound as if it came from a considerable distance away from where I stood).

  I succumbed. Suddenly, I longed for the golden savannahs and the streaming sunshine. I reminded myself that I come from a people who enjoy gentle loving, slow fucking and good company. We stroll about, swim, hunt, drink parakari, joke, fuck slowly in a hammock, saunter off into the bush for a good shit and then fuck some more. Aw, what a fucking life!