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

by Doris Lessing

  It was getting dark. Up a hill, through trees, they could see the lights of the institute. They took wire-cutters and walked quietly as if they were off to visit the living-quarters of the institute, where most of the employees lived, but went past there, and into the forest that surrounded the institute. Neither of these children of wild places feared anything in the forest. They padded quickly along a path their feet seemed to know was there, passed the main buildings of the institute, leaving them behind, and then, ahead, a few hundred yards, lights burned on a separate group of buildings. From them came yelps, calls, cries. This was a bad place: Teresa knew it, and Alfredo whispered, ‘I don’t like coming here.’

  Where was Ben? They stood at the edge of the trees, looking at the scattered buildings and did not know where to go. Then Teresa heard it, a low intermittent rattling, bang, bang, bang, and a rattle again. ‘There he is,’ said Teresa, ‘he’s there,’ and she began running across the space of flat dust to the building. As they ran, the sound grew louder, the rattling bang. It was dark now. The light on this building was at the front, and they stole around to the back and saw windows. They were open. A foul smell came out. First Alfredo and then Teresa scrambled up over the sill. A low light was burning on the ceiling. In tiers of cages were monkeys, small and large, arranged so that the excrement from the top cages must fall down on the animals below. A bank of rabbits, immobilised at the neck, had chemicals dripping into their eyes. A big mongrel dog, which had been carved open from the shoulder to the hip bone and then clumsily sewn up again, was lying moaning on dirty straw, its backside clogged with excrement. (This dog had been cut open six months before and from time to time the wound was unpicked to see what its organs were doing, it was subjected to this drug or that, and then sewn up again like a hessian sack. The edges of the wound were in fact partly healed, in crusts, and through them could be glimpsed the palpitating organs.) From cages monkeys stretched out their hands and their human eyes begged for help. Teresa saw nothing of all this. She was looking at Ben, kneeling on the floor of his cage, bang-banging his head on the wire. He had not been drugged: Professor Stephen wanted him uncontaminated. He was unclothed, this creature who had been clothed since he was born. In the corner of his cage was a pile of dung.

  ‘The alarm,’ Teresa said to Alfredo, who began looking around for the wire, and at her voice Ben sat up and howled, his face lifted towards her. ‘Be quiet, Ben,’ whispered Teresa. ‘We’re going to take you away.’ His eyes—what was wrong with them? In the feeble light they seemed like dark holes, but they were blanked out with terror and misery. ‘Ben, Ben, be quiet, you must be quiet.’ He quietened but his breathing was like groaning. Alfredo had found the wire for the alarm and had cut it. Then he vomited: the smell, that smell—and it was so hot in here.

  He began cutting a big hole in the wire of Ben’s cage, which was for a strong animal—thick wire. Teresa was looking at a cage where a white cat was lying stretched out, a mother cat. Wires led into her head from an instrument fastened to the wire of the cage. Four kittens sucked at her: each had wires on its head. The cat looked at Teresa and the accusation in its eyes made her want to put her hands over her own eyes. There was a big hole in Ben’s cage. ‘Quiet, quiet, be quiet, Ben,’ whispered Teresa, and put her arms around him to hold him. He was filthy and shivering, a poor helpless defeated creature who now—surprising them—made a leap out of her arms and out of the window and into the dark. He was running for the forest, and Teresa and Alfredo ran after him. ‘Stop, Ben! There are people, don’t go further, come here.’ She and Alfredo moved cautiously about under the trees, in the dark, and could hear nothing. Yet she knew Ben was there. ‘I’m going to sit down here, Ben. And Alfredo too. He’s a friend. Come here to me. And we’ll take you to Alfredo’s house and then we’ll go right away.’

  A silence. Little forest noises. Behind, in the building they had left, monkeys set up a howl, a terrible sound, from that hell which is multiplied all over the world, everywhere human beings make our civilisation.

  ‘Ben, Ben, come here to me, Ben.’

  It was the smell that told them he was coming.

  ‘Will you take me to the people who are like me?’ they heard.

  ‘Yes, yes, Ben, we will,’ said Teresa, desperate with his desperation.

  He was there, by them, crouching, trembling.

  ‘Now, come quietly, quietly, Ben. Don’t make a sound, Ben.’

  It was all right in the forest, they were well hidden, but they had to cross a bare space, taking the risk of being seen. Luckily most people were inside eating their evening meal. They could hear television sets, radios, voices. Alfredo said, ‘Now, run.’ And Teresa, ‘Run fast, Ben.’ The three ran, through the dark cut by lights falling from the houses, to Alfredo’s room.

  There Teresa pushed Ben into the shower, washed him, ran water until it was lapping clear around his feet, pulled him out, dried him, put on the clean clothes she had brought. Alfredo found orange juice for him, and fruit. He wanted to drink, but not to eat. His eyes were on Teresa, imploring her: like those monkeys’ eyes, she thought, though she had not taken them in at the time.

  ‘Why are they allowed to do that?’ she asked Alfredo.

  He was silent, and grim, and—she could see—ashamed, and said, ‘It’s science.’

  Ben was not trembling now, but he found it hard to look at them, and sat crouching on his chair, fists dangling, head poked forward, eyes still painful with fear.

  ‘We are going to drive you down to Rio,’ said Teresa. ‘Then tomorrow we are going on an aeroplane.’

  ‘To my people?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, helplessly, and did not dare even to look at Alfredo. What were they going to do?

  About midnight, when the houses of the institute’s workers were dark, and nothing seemed to be moving, they crept out, listening to a dog bark, and found Antonio waiting for them in his car. The four drove down to the city. It was late in the night when they reached the flat. The door had had slats nailed across it, presumably by the janitor.

  They told Ben to go to bed and try to sleep. He was not to be afraid. Meanwhile Alfredo, Teresa and Antonio conferred. Antonio had worked in the mines too. He produced his identity card, laid it on the table and said to Alfredo, ‘Is yours OK?’

  Alfredo brought his out from an inside pocket, and put it down beside Antonio’s. Teresa could see that there had been problems of some kind with these cards, but that now things were in order. They were looking at her, and now she took her card from her handbag and the three documents lay together on the table. She was thinking of Alex’s passport, and found these three sheets of inferior paper, the identity cards, insulting.

  ‘One day I want a real passport,’ she said to Alfredo. Antonio laughed in surprise, but Alfredo, having begun to laugh, stopped, seeing from her face she was saying something of importance. ‘I want a passport like a little book, like the foreigners have—like the Americans.’ Alfredo nodded, and waited for her to go on. She dismissed her identity card with a gesture of contempt. ‘It’s not good enough,’ she said.

  Alfredo pondered this, then said, ‘All right, I’ll make you one now.’ And he got up, found some paper in a drawer, folded it into a little book, brought it to the table, and sat down, looking sternly at Teresa, a biro poised. She was already laughing and Antonio was too.

  ‘Both crazy,’ said Antonio. ‘Loco.’

  ‘Name?’ demanded Alfredo, like an official.

  ‘Teresa Alves.’

  ‘Dona Teresa Alves. Your hair is black?’

  Later, through their lives, they would relive this scene, reminding each other, and telling their children, how Alfredo had found out first about Teresa, her life, about her—while Antonio sat smiling and nodding and Ben slept next door.

  ‘Dark brown,’ said Teresa, and held a lock forward for him to see.

  ‘Black in the shade and brown in the sun,’ said Alfredo. ‘I’ve noticed. I’ll put black.’ He wrote it and then: ‘Y
our eyes are black, I’d say, but they aren’t going to look into them. Shall I put black?’

  ‘That will do.’

  ‘You are—how tall?’

  She told him.

  ‘Nearly as tall as me. A good height. Do you have any distinguishing marks? They always want to know that.’

  ‘I have a small mole on my—lower back.’

  Antonio laughed.

  ‘On your bum?’

  ‘Yes, and another on my shoulder here,’ and she held her collar away from her neck and he peered at it.

  ‘I think we will keep these moles to ourselves,’ he said. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘I’ve got this scar where I fell chopping pumpkins for the goats, I fell on a sharp stone.’ She held out her arm: a thin white line ran down her wrist to the top of her palm.

  ‘They don’t need to know,’ said Alfredo. ‘Right, then. Height, hair colour, eye colour—that’s enough for them. What’s the name of your village?’

  ‘The same as yours. Dust village, dust province, dust country. But it was Aljeco.’

  ‘We’ll put that. Your birth date?’

  She hesitated, uncertain whether she wanted him to know how much younger she was than she had said.

  He saw her reluctance and said, ‘I’ll put the same as mine. Now we’ll need a photograph.’

  And now he handed the little package of folded paper to Teresa with a bow. ‘Your passport, Dona Teresa.’ And she got up from her chair, took the thing from him, and curtsied to him.

  They passed the time, chatting, and Antonio said he would follow them to Jujuy, and to the mines. He would be happier out of Rio for a bit. When the light came they drank coffee and the two men went off to arrange flights.

  Teresa went in to Ben, found him awake, and said he must be brave and patient. If anyone came to the flat, she would be sure they would not come near him. She was going to lock him in, and this must not frighten him. She said all this because she was pretty sure ‘they’ would come after Ben, and with the door broken there was no way to keep them out. She took him juice, said it would be best if he slept, and on no account to make a sound if anyone came.

  It was not long before she heard the men outside. She opened the door saying, ‘Do you see what your thieves did to this door?’ —putting them in the wrong, though they looked, she thought, like policemen chasing a criminal. ‘Sit down, please,’ she said, and sat herself, noting that both were staring at Ben’s door.

  Luiz sat at the head of the table, taking the commanding place from force of habit. The American was opposite Teresa, the protuberant cold eyes prepared for anger.

  Teresa began at once: ‘That was a bad thing you did. You stole him from here. He is not your property.’ She was speaking to Luiz, but he said, ‘I am not to blame. I had nothing to do with it. That part of the institute has nothing to do with Brazil: it is under separate international control.’ And he waited for Stephen Gaumlach to speak. He did not: he had twisted himself to stare at Ben’s door.

  ‘But you are both here,’ said Teresa, seizing the—to her—nub of the situation.

  ‘I am an old friend of Professor Gaumlach’s,’ said Luiz.

  ‘But you knew those men were coming to get Ben.’

  ‘I am apologising—on Professor Gaumlach’s behalf,’ again directing his colleague with a look. It was ignored. ‘Instructions were exceeded. The door should not have been broken in.’

  ‘If you expected us just to give Ben to you then why did you send criminals? They were just street criminals.’ And before either man could say anything—the American seemed to feel no need to—‘And you put Ben into a cage like an animal, without clothes.’

  ‘I’ve told you,’ Luiz Machado said. ‘That had nothing to do with our institute. But it was obviously a misunderstanding.’

  Teresa said, ‘I think the misunderstanding was that you did not expect us to find him like that.’

  Here Luiz nodded, acknowledging that she was right, and that, too, he was impressed by how she was standing up for herself: she knew—must know from Inez—how important he was.

  Now Stephen Gaumlach spoke, as if he had heard nothing of their argument. ‘You can’t keep him. You don’t understand, do you?’

  ‘I know you want him for your experiments. I know. I’ve seen with my eyes…’ And she indicated her eyes with her two forefingers.

  He leaned across the table to her, fists clenched, his face dark with rage. ‘This…specimen could answer questions, important questions, important for science—world science. He could change what we know of the human story.’

  And now Teresa felt attacked direct, into her great respect, her reverence, for knowledge and for education; that area, like a window into an unknown sky, where she could have bowed down and worshipped—and she burst into tears. She told herself, furious, that she was tired and that was why she was crying, but she knew the truth. As for Luiz, he believed this ignorant girl was frightened because she was challenging authority, and was going to get into bad trouble because of it. Knowing Professor Gaumlach as he did—he did not much like him—he saw Teresa rather as he might a mouse that has decided to stand up on its hindlegs and threaten a cat.

  As for the professor, he was irritated that Teresa was crying.

  Both men thought she was defeated: there was a great deal she could have said in accusation that she had not—laws had been broken in ways that could easily have serious consequences. But it was not calculations of a legal sort that made her say what she did now. It was the hateful bullying face in front of her, those cold angry eyes, while in her mind’s eye she saw Ben howling naked in the cage, she saw the white cat, with faeces dripping down on her fur from the cage above. She said in Portuguese, ‘Voce e gente ruim.’ The hatred in her voice did reach her antagonist, if he did not understand her words. Now she said in English, ‘You are bad people. You are a bad person.’

  She did not address this to Luiz, and this was not because he had absolved his institute from all blame, nor in her mind were thoughts of a political kind—this American was a member of the most powerful nation in the world, that kind of thing: she was not interested in politics. No, she disliked Stephen, she hated him, as instinctively as she judged Alex Beyle a kindly but weak man who was good to her while he was around but forgot her the minute he left. She knew that for this famous professor to insert wires into a cat’s head, and her kittens’ heads, and measure her feelings as she tried to feed them while dirt dripped on to her white fur, to make monkeys sick—she could see now only too clearly the little paws stretched out to her for help—he would do anything at all and never think of what it cost the animals. He was a monster of cruelty.

  But she was still weeping because of the conflict that was tearing her apart.

  Luiz said, ‘You say that Ben is owned by—what did you say his name was?’

  ‘Inez—she’s your friend, isn’t she?—she must know the name. Alex Beyle. He’s an American film-maker and Ben will be the star.’

  ‘I understood that there will be no film?’

  ‘That isn’t certain. Alex is in…’ She named the little hill village where Alex and Paulo were working on their script, or scripts, knowing that it was not likely Luiz would know it. ‘He is off on location now. The weather is bad. The telephone is not good. I shall tell him what has happened when he telephones me, and I’ll say you want to talk to him about Ben.’

  Her voice was steady now. She got up. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.’

  Slowly, the two men got up. Luiz, as always, was calm, was smiling. As for the other man, staring at Ben’s door, he looked like a red ant—she knew now what the resemblance was that had been bothering her to recognise it.

  She said, ‘Ben is asleep. He is not well after what was done to him.’ And she stood in front of Ben’s door.

  ‘You must not take Ben out of the country,’ said Stephen, threatening, seeming to loom over her.

  ‘He can go where he wants. He has a passport
,’ she said.

  Luiz said to Stephen, ‘We should go.’ His voice told both Stephen and Teresa that there was a plan in his mind.

  The two men left. Teresa wept, from relief; she was shaking all over because of what the confrontation had cost her. She knew that these men—she did not distinguish between them, saying this one is responsible, that one is not; they both had power, and were alike, for her—would do something soon to make possession of Ben legal. This time it would not be a kidnap: they would have the law behind them: Ben would be arrested on suspicion of something or other.

  Teresa used the interval before Alfredo and Antonio returned to pack clothes for Ben, going quietly in and out of his room so as not to wake him—he was moaning in his sleep. She put in a warm jersey and a cap, and did the same for herself.

  When Alfredo and Antonio came back they heard from her what had happened, and knew they should hurry.

  ‘Quick, Ben, we’re going on an aeroplane, far from here,’ Teresa said, while he sat up in his bed, frightened, and then all eagerness. ‘To my people? Now?’

  ‘Come on, Ben,’ said Alfredo. The look Teresa and Alfredo exchanged confessed their helplessness: how could they put an end to this eager hopefulness? Yet they must, they would have to.

  Teresa left a letter on the table for Alex, saying that she and a good friend were taking Ben to a safe place—she was careful not to say where, because she knew it would not be Alex who would read that letter first. She had told the janitor to report the break-in to the police, and to board the door up more securely.

  And so they left Alex’s place, and in the street got into Antonio’s car: he would take them to the airport. There he said goodbye, but he would see them soon in Humahuaca, which was where Alfredo would find work; it was a couple of hours’ drive from Jujuy.

  This was a big aeroplane, of the kind people use to go from continent to continent, but at São Paulo they changed to a smaller one, with very different people in it who had a look of being engaged with the work of the world. This plane flew lower, bringing the landscape up towards them, and its shadow flitted about over rough terrain where people like Teresa were walking and looking up to see an aeroplane, in which none of them could hope to travel, pass overhead. But once Teresa had thought she would never be in an aeroplane. Ben was looking down, and with interest. Apart from that first little hop over London with Johnston this was the first time he had been awake on a plane and ready to notice what was around him. At first he found it hard when Teresa said, ‘Look, that’s a big river down there,’ or, ‘That’s a range of hills.’ He asked, ‘A river? That’s a river?’ Or, ‘Those are hills? They look flat.’ Then his mind adjusted and he took it all in and was pleased and proud that he was understanding. But that little grin of his, not the wide scared one, told Teresa and Alfredo what he was thinking about.