Ben, in the World: The Sequel to the Fifth Child

by Doris Lessing

  Alfredo and Teresa stood close together, looking at each other. Their eyes spoke clearly, saying they were going to defend Ben, and that they were angry about what was happening; saying, too, that they liked each other, very much. If Ben had not been there, humped over the table, banging his fists down again and again, probably the two would have been in each other’s arms, or at least something would have been said. This strong understanding they had, as if they had known each other always, ended in their marrying, some months in the future. So their story at least has a happy ending: things turned out well for them.

  Alfredo went off, and Teresa and Ben sat at the table, and Teresa cooked for him, steak, and more steak, because he was hungry.

  She was so anxious she did not sleep much, because she knew bad things were being planned. She could hear Ben moving about his room, but at least he was not banging his head on the wall.

  Next morning there was a telephone call: Luiz Machado was coming to discuss Ben. Teresa told Ben this and now she did hear the thudding on the wall. She sat at the table, quite still, for some time, and her breathing was shallow and scared: then she began smoothing her long black hair as if it were life itself she was trying to bring into order, and so she waited, telling herself that now she must be strong, and stand up for Ben—and for herself. It felt to her that even the thought of these powerful people made her want to faint, or to run away; she was being expected to confront what she had held in awe all her life: the educated, clever all-knowing world of modern knowledge. Who expected her to? She, herself. Alfredo. And poor Ben.

  Luiz Machado was not alone, for with him came one Stephen, another American, Professor Stephen something or other—she couldn’t get the name: Gumlack, or Goonlach—and this one was a tall thin bony man, with a face all big bones, and a big mouth pushed forward by his teeth. His eyes sat inside hollows of bone, prominent eyeballs that seemed to jump out at her when he blinked. He came from some famous institute in the States: she knew it was famous because when he presented the name to her he expected her to recognise it and knew too that because she did not respond she was being classed as an ignoramus.

  Ben came into the room, and she understood the two men expected her to dismiss him so they could discuss him and then give her orders. She said to Ben loudly, because she was afraid her voice would shake, ‘This is Luiz Machado—you met him, Ben, and this is Professor Stephen…Gumlack…’

  ‘Gaumlach,’ he said promptly, showing he was irritated.

  ‘Professor Gaumlach,’ she repeated carefully. ‘He comes from America, like Alex.’ To them she said, ‘Alex brought Ben here to make a film with him.’ To Ben she said, ‘Sit down, Ben. It’s all right.’

  The two men were put out, she could see. She was triumphant: she wasn’t going to dismiss Ben, as she had been in her time, like a servant.

  A brief silence, then Professor Stephen Gaumlach leaned forward, and said, ‘This is very important, very important indeed.’ His lips mouthed the words, moulding each one as it came out, rolling them towards her like cold marbles. His eyes were cold, fanatic, obsessed. Seldom had she disliked anyone as she disliked this man. ‘You must see that, Teresa—’

  ‘My name is Teresa Alves,’ she cut in.

  This took him aback. He sat blinking. Recovered himself, went on: ‘Miss Alves, this is probably the most important discovery of my entire life. You’ve simply got to understand this. This is a unique opportunity. This…Ben, is unique.’

  ‘Ben Lovatt. His name is Ben Lovatt.’

  This really did silence him. The big protruding mouth poked forward at her, in annoyance, and he looked for help to Luiz Machado who was listening, detached, calm, urbane.

  Ben listened, grinning, glancing about as if in the corners of the room might open an escape route—into woods perhaps where only he knew the turnings, the ways out into safety. He was thinking, But there are people like me, Alfredo told me there are; he would have said this aloud, if he were not so frightened.

  Teresa said calmly, ‘If Ben agrees, that is all right. If he doesn’t, then you must not force him.’

  Professor Stephen’s orator’s mouth opened to object, as he forcefully leaned forward, raising his hand, but Luiz smiled agreeably and said it was not a question of force. This in Portuguese, for her; but in English, for his colleague’s benefit, he said, ‘He must be made to understand the situation.’ Back to Teresa, in Portuguese, ‘You do not understand how very important this is. This is Professor Gaumlach’s area of research. He is a world authority. This is important for the whole world.’

  ‘You keep saying so,’ she said, in Portuguese. Then, aloud, in English, ‘But I am in charge of Ben. Alex Beyle left Ben Lovatt in my charge.’

  She knew that Luiz at least would know about Alex from Inez; was very much afraid he would also know by now that Alex did not intend to use Ben. It was one thing for Ben to be on the payroll of a film company, even if only in prospect, another if he were some poor derelict, with nowhere to go.

  She said aloud, ‘Ben must decide for himself.’

  Now the two men were looking at each other: they were making silent decisions, she knew.

  Suddenly inspired, she said, ‘Ben has his own passport.’

  She was amazed at herself for not thinking of this before.

  The men were brought up short by this announcement: they had certainly not expected it.

  She said, ‘He is a person of Britain.’ She did not know the word citizen. ‘You can’t make him do anything.’

  A short silence: this was because the men’s silent colloquy, the decisions agreed to, had not been overthrown by hearing of Ben’s legal status. Luiz got up, and so did the American. They said goodbye to her, formally, ‘Dona Teresa’ from Luiz, ‘Miss Alves’ from Professor Gaumlach. And they left, not looking at Ben.

  Later Alfredo rang to say that things were not good. He had been ordered to drive down to Rio, talk to Ben, and if he refused to go with him back to the institute, he must use force if necessary.

  ‘They can’t do that,’ said Teresa. ‘How can they do that?’

  ‘I said no,’ said Alfredo. ‘I told them, no. And now I have no job.’

  ‘Then come here if you have nowhere to go,’ she said. She was trying to find out if Alfredo was married, or had a woman, had a place to go, and Alfredo said, ‘It is lucky I am not in the institute’s accommodation. I am living with a friend in his house,’—telling her what he knew she was asking. ‘But I will come and see you tomorrow, Teresa.’

  When he arrived next morning the door of the flat was open and broken and neither Teresa nor Ben was inside.

  What had happened was this. When she and Ben had finished breakfast, both nervy, jumpy, expecting something to happen but not knowing what, Teresa said she had to go out to the shops. She told Ben to stay inside, and not answer the doorbell, unless it was Alfredo. Ben obediently sat himself at the table, and when the doorbell rang shouted, ‘Is it Alfredo?’ But then there were knocks, many of them, increasingly peremptory and noisy. Ben was silent, knowing that he should not have said anything at all. There was an assault on the door, and two men rushed in, put their arms into his on either side, gagged him while he struggled, and ran him to the lift, and then out of the lift to a car. There they wound up the windows, tied Ben’s wrists, his knees, his ankles, and let him thrash about in the back of the car while they drove fast up into the hills. Once they had to stop because Ben had been sick and the gag was choking him with vomit. They took out the gag, poured some cheap wine—the only liquid they had—to clean his mouth, gagged him again, with the same piece of cloth, and at the institute drove at once not to the place he had been in yesterday, but to the ‘other’ place, which Alfredo had been told not to let him see. It is not difficult to hire people for this kind of work anywhere in the world and in Rio it is certainly not more difficult than in other places.

  When Teresa returned with her shopping she found the door open and smashed and Ben gone. This slammed into her di
aphragm and she could hardly breathe. She collapsed on to the table, her arms spread out, her head on an arm. Her first thought was, Alfredo is coming, he will help. She did not know he had been and had left and was driving as fast as he could back to the institute to find out what was happening. Then she thought, Perhaps Alex will come. But he had telephoned two days ago to say he was off on another trip to visit the tribe. ‘My Indians’, he had called them.

  It never occurred to her that she might telephone the British Embassy and say that a British citizen had been kidnapped. She did not know a citizen of a country had such rights, knew only that a passport gave you an identity which officials respected. She had often leafed through Alex’s passport, with its many visas, thinking: Perhaps one day I’ll have one like this. I’ll travel to these countries too.

  She could not think clearly for a while, and then remembered that Alfredo had not come, so he would telephone her to say why. She was too restless to wait calmly and moved about the room in a blind way, even bumping into a chair. She opened the window wider to let in more of the heavy warm air. Slowly Inez came forward and filled her thoughts. Yes, Inez: she telephoned Inez and when she heard her voice said, ‘Listen, it’s Teresa…’ And then, fast and decisive, ‘Don’t go away from the telephone, Inez, don’t do that.’ She heard Inez breathing, and knew she was afraid. ‘Where is Ben?’ she demanded. ‘They took him away. So where is he?’

  She heard a feeble, ‘I don’t know,’ and said in a cold voice that surprised her, ‘You know. You know. Is he where we were before?’

  ‘No,’ said Inez. There was a silence, during which both could hear the other’s breathing. And then Teresa said, ‘I will kill you. If you don’t help me I will kill you.’ And now Inez understood what it was that had attracted her about this representative of the hard wild life of the poor, why she had courted Teresa. The thrill of fear she felt at those words ran through her body and even hurt her eyes. She trembled, listening to Teresa. ‘You were my friend, my friend, Inez. And you did this.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ Inez managed to get out. ‘I didn’t know they planned to do this.’

  ‘But you know now, Inez. You know where he is.’

  Inez did know because she had seen the car that had Ben in it driving past. Everyone in the institute had known. People crowded at windows and heard stifled roars and bellows from the car. Some claimed they had seen Ben heaving and struggling. Inez knew—they all did—where they were taking Ben and she felt sick. She was not the only one. The laboratory assistant who had tested Ben was shocked. What she told the others had percolated through the institute. This yeti, this freak, was a polite sort of creature, almost like ordinary people: he should not be treated like this. What was happening was that the unease, the shame, most felt about what went on in the ‘other’ buildings, was being crystallised around this Ben, who—they soon all knew—had been kidnapped.

  Now Inez heard Teresa say, ‘You must come and fetch me. I must find Ben. I must come to where he is.’

  ‘I can’t,’ said Inez. ‘I can’t just leave my work.’ But she knew what she would hear next: ‘Inez, I mean what I am telling you. I will kill you. I will know that you are a bad person.’ And Teresa went on to order her to come into Rio, pick her up, and do it now. ‘Ben has a passport, Inez. They can’t do this. You tell them.’

  Inez was in the laboratory during this conversation. The assistant from yesterday listened, and said angrily to Inez, ‘Why are they doing this? He is not an animal.’

  Inez went out to her car, unobserved, so she believed, by the senior staff—by Luiz—and drove down to Rio, thinking that she might lose her job. She did not really believe she would. What was happening—it was illegal. She was pretty sure that the plan was to get this Ben—she had no feeling for him, did not even think of him as a person—away from the institute at some point, and then he would disappear. People disappeared. Luiz—no, not Luiz, that American—was counting on something, and she believed he was right: everyone in the institute would be so frightened of losing their job, their precious hard-to-come-by jobs, that they would keep quiet. As for herself, what crime was she committing? She was leaving her office in the institute for a couple of hours. She drove fast and found Teresa waiting. She had a holdall with some clothes for Ben and his dark glasses. She did not know what she was going to do when she—when they—found Ben. Just before Inez arrived Alfredo had telephoned to say that he had heard from the driver at the institute who was replacing him that Ben had been taken to the bad place. Alfredo told Teresa to come to where he was, a room in a house not far from the institute, in a village. They would decide how to rescue Ben together.

  The drive up into the hills was a silent one. Teresa watched Inez’s profile, kept towards her, cold, pure, hostile—and guilty. She was afraid of a trap: did Inez plan to kidnap her too? To stop her helping Ben? Suddenly—she had not known she was going to come out with it—Teresa asked Inez just this, and Inez began to cry, and said that she, Teresa, was unjust and cruel—Inez had not kidnapped Ben, had she?

  When they reached where Alfredo had said she must be set down, Inez stopped the car, and heard Teresa say, as she got out, ‘Tell them they have done a wrong thing. It’s wrong. The police could punish them. You tell them.’

  Inez had no intention of saying anything, hoping only that her absence had not been noted.

  Teresa stood in rutted dust on the edge of a track, the sun beating down on her, and saw Alfredo coming from a little house. Their smiles at each other spoke from a dimension far from their anxieties over Ben, and he put his arm around her as he walked her to his room.

  It was now afternoon, about three o’clock. Alfredo knew where Ben was and told Teresa about it. He said they should go there as soon as it was properly dark. At night there was no one at The Cages—but there might be tonight, because of Ben. He was drugged, the other driver had said. He had heard Luiz and the American talking, in the car. Luiz was in two minds about what was happening: it was the word ‘passport’ that had reached him. Stephen was determined to keep hold of Ben. ‘He’s a bit mad, that one,’ said this man, Antonio, Alfredo’s friend. ‘He’s like a dog with a bone. He’s got it and he’s going to keep it.’ Antonio knew The Cages better than Alfredo did. He said a good pair of wire-cutters would be needed, and the first thing must be to cut the wire of the alarm, which went to the main office building where there was a guard all night. And after that, what did Alfredo intend to do? Alfredo told him. Antonio then said he himself must be included in any plan for getting away because he would certainly lose his so recently acquired job.

  Plans were what Teresa and Alfredo now discussed. If they could get Ben right away from Rio they believed pursuit would not follow. Alfredo told Teresa that if there was a pursuit then the British representatives in Rio must be alerted. Teresa listened with interest while she heard how citizens in foreign countries might be protected from local harm. She had never imagined such a degree of concern by a government for a little person, such as herself. But they were up against a madman, the American professor. She was not surprised to hear that Antonio had said he was mad: she had thought he was. She could easily see again that big protruding mouth, pushing out words at her while the green eyes stared unseeing, for the man’s attention was all inwards, on his obsession.

  ‘Is it important?’ she asked Alfredo. ‘Is it important to know what Ben is?’

  ‘They say he must be a throwback to—a long time ago. A long time. Thousands of years. They can find out from him what those old people were like.’

  The idea did attract Teresa, but it was in a different part of her from her passionate concern for Ben. She thought that she felt towards him like she would a child—something helpless, at any rate. She did not care about those old people. She loved poor Ben.

  During that talk, in the hot bare room, drinking Coca-Cola, they reminded each other that there was an immediate and shocking problem. Ben believed that Alfredo knew where Ben’s people were.

/>   ‘We’ve got to tell him,’ said Teresa, remembering Ben’s delight, and how his whole being seemed to enlarge and thrill with his thoughts about them. Even as she spoke she felt herself cringe away from telling him. To say it was all an illusion, only pictures on a rock wall…cruel, terrible. But he had to know.

  ‘Can we take him to see the rock pictures? That would be better than nothing, don’t you think so?’

  ‘When I was working in the mines near Jujuy I went into the mountains—high up, Teresa. I like that, being by myself in the mountains. But these are high, high, high, not like ours at home. Not many people go up there. One morning I woke up—it was dark when I went to sleep—and there right in front of me were pictures on the rock. The sun was shining on to them. When the sun is shining you can see them well, but when the rock face is in shadow you can walk right past and not see them…But we’ve got to get there.’

  Teresa knew how much money Ben had left. She had a good bit put away, but she wasn’t going to use one real more of that than she had to. Alfredo had savings. There was more than enough for three cheap flights. ‘No problem,’ said Alfredo. ‘I’ll tell my friend to come and fetch us in his car. I have friends. I worked in the mines for three years. I’ll get work again. I’ll keep clear of Rio for a little. I had to do it before—I’ll tell you, Teresa.’

  Both were thinking that if he stayed to work in the mines and Teresa stayed with him then everything she had built up in Rio would go for nothing. Would there be theatre, dancing groups, film-makers, in Jujuy? she asked. Alfredo’s answer was, ‘I earn good money in the mines. And they know me. I could stay a year and you could wait for me in Rio.’ This was the first time their understanding was put into words. ‘We can marry in Jujuy, so we can be sure—and a year goes quickly.’ Teresa was looking back on the three years she had been in Rio, so packed with events and people, and they seemed very long to her. ‘We can talk later,’ he said quickly, seeing her doubting face.