by John Updike
“¡Caramba!” the escritor norteamericano wanted to exclaim, but he was afraid of mispronouncing. He was pleased to perceive, through the surges of his terror, that his cool guide was terrified also. Her olive face looked aged, blanched. Her great silky eyelids closed in nausea or prayer. Her hand groped for his, her long fingernails scraping. Bech held her hand. He would die with her. The plane dived and smartly landed, under a romantic full moon just risen in the postcard-purple night sky above Monte Avila.
The Ambassador held a dinner for Bech and the Ghanaian elite. They were the elite under this regime, had been the elite under Nkrumah, would be the elite under the next regime. The relative positions within the elite varied, however; one slightly demoted man, with an exquisite Oxford accent, got drunk and told Bech and the women at their end of the table about walking behind Nkrumah in a procession. In those days (and no doubt in these), the elite had carried guns. “Quite without warning or any tangible provocation,” the man told Bech, as gin-enriched sweat shone from his face as from a basalt star, “I was visited by this overpowering urge to kill him. Overpowering—my palm was itching, I could feel the little grid of the revolver handle in my fingers, I focused hypnotically upon the precise spot, in the center of his occiput, where the bullet would enter. He had become a tyrant. Isn’t that so, ladies?”
There was a soft, guarded tittering of agreement from the Ghanaian women. They were magnificent, Ghanaian women, from mammy wagon to Cabinet post, wrapped in their sumptuous gowns and turbans, their colorful, broad-patterned prints. Bech wanted to repose forever, in the candlelight, amid these women, like a sultan amid so many pillows. Women and death and airplanes: there was a comfortable triangulation there, he drowsily perceived.
“The urge became irresistible,” his informant was continuing. “I was wrestling with a veritable demon; sweat was rolling from me as from one about to vomit. I had to speak. It happened that I was walking beside one of his bodyguards. I whispered to him, ‘Sammy. I want to shoot him.’ I had to tell someone or I would have done it. I wanted him to prevent me, perhaps—who knows the depths of the slave mentality?—even to shoot me, before I committed sacrilege. You know what he said to me? He turned to me, this bodyguard, six foot two at the minimum, and solemnly said, ‘Jimmy, me, too. But not now. Not yet. Let’s wait.’ ”
In Lagos, they were sleeping in the streets. Returning in a limousine from a night club where he had learned to do the high-life (his instructress’s waist like a live, slow snake in his hands), Bech saw the bodies stretched on the pavements, within the stately old British colonnades, under the street lamps, without blankets. Seen thus, people make a bucolic impression, of a type of animal, a hairless, usually peaceful type, performing one of the five acts essential to its perpetuation. The others are: eating, drinking, breathing, and fornicating.
In Seoul, the prostitutes wore white. They were young girls, all of them, and in the white dresses, under their delicate parasols, they seemed children gathered along the walls of the hotels, waiting for a bus to take them to their first Communion. In Caracas, the whores stood along the main streets between the diagonally parked cars so that Bech had the gustatory impression of a drive-in restaurant blocks long, with the carhops allowed to choose their own uniforms, as long as they showed lots of leg, in several appetizing flavors.
In Egypt, the beggars had sores and upturned, blind eyes; Bech felt they were gazing upward to their reward and sensed through them the spiritual pyramid, the sacred hierarchy of suffering that modern man struggles with nightmare difficulty to invert and to place upon a solid material base of sense and health and plenty. On an island in the Nile, the Royal Cricket Club flourished under new management; the portly men playing bowls and sipping gin were a shade or two darker than the British, but mannerly and jubilant. The bowling greens were level and bright, the gin was Beefeater’s, the laughter of sportsmanship ricocheted; it was jolly, jolly. Bech was happy here. He was not happy everywhere, in the Third World.
A friend had fought in Korea and had told Bech, without rancor, that the whole country smelled of shit. Alighting from the plane, Bech discovered it to be true: a gamy, muddy smell swept toward him. That had been his first impression, which he had suppressed when the reporters asked for it.
As the audience in Cape Coast politely yielded up a scattered, puzzled applause, Bech turned to the Ambassador and said, “Tough questions.”
The Ambassador, whose white planter’s suit lacked only the wide-brimmed hat and the string tie, responded with a blast of enthusiasm. “Those weren’t tough questions, those were kid-glove questions. Standard stuff. These buggers are soft; that’s why they made good slaves. Before they sent me here, I was in Somaliland; the Danakil—now, those are buggers after my own heart. Kill you for a dime, for a nickel-plated spoon. Hell, kill you for the fun of it. Hated to leave. Just as I was learning the damn language. Full of grammar, Dankali.”
Tanzania was eerie. The young cultural attaché was frighteningly with it, equally enthusiastic about the country’s socialism and its magic. “So this old guy wrote the name of the disease and my brother’s name on the skin of the guava and it sank right in. You could see the words moving into the center. I tried writing on a guava and I couldn’t even make a mark. Sure enough, weeks later I get a letter from him saying he felt a lot better suddenly. And if you figure in the time change, it was that very day.”
They kept Bech’s profile low; he spoke not in a hall but in a classroom, at night, and then less spoke than deferentially listened. The students found decadent and uninteresting Proust, Joyce, Shakespeare, Sartre, Hemingway—Hemingway, who had so enjoyed coming to Tanganyika and killing its kudu and sitting by its campfires getting drunk and pontifical—and Henry James. Who, then, Bech painfully asked, did measure up to the exacting standards that African socialism had set for literature? The answering silence lengthened. Then the brightest boy, the most militant and vocal, offered, “Jack London,” and rubbed his eyes. He was tired, Bech realized. Bech was tired. Jack London was tired. Everything in the world was tired, except fear—fear and magic.
Alone on the beach in Dar es Salaam, where he had been warned against going alone, he returned to the sand after trying to immerse himself in the milky, shoal-beshallowed Indian Ocean and found his wristwatch gone. There was nothing around him but palms and a few rocks. And no footprints but his own led to his blanket. Yet the watch was gone from where he had distinctly placed it; he remembered its tiny threadlike purr in his ear as he lay with his back to the sun. It was not the watch, a drugstore Timex bought on upper Broadway. It was the fear he minded, the terror of the palms, the rocks, the pale, unsatisfactory ocean, his sharp small shadow, the mocking emptiness all around. The Third World was a vacuum that might suck him in, too, along with his wristwatch and the words on the skin of the guava.
At the center of a panel of the Venezuelan elite, Bech discussed “The Role of the Writer in Society.” Spanish needs more words, evidently, than even English to say something, so the intervals of translation were immense. The writer’s duty to society, Bech had said, was simply to tell the truth, however strange, small, or private his truth appeared. During the eternity while the translator, a plump, floridly gesturing woman, rendered this into the microphone, one panelist kept removing and replacing his glasses fussily and the rich Communist studied his own right hand as if it had been placed by an officious waiter on the table—square, tan, cuffed in white and ringed in gold. But what, the man with the restless spectacles was at last allowed to ask, of Dreiser and Jack London, of Steinbeck and Sinclair Lewis—what has happened in the United States to their noble tradition of social criticism?
It’s become sexual display, Bech could have said; but he chose to answer in terms of Melville and Henry James, though he was weary, weary to death of dragging their large, obliging, misshapen reputations around the globe, rag dummies in which the stuffing had long ago slipped and dribbled out the seams. Words, words. As Bech talked, and his translatress feve
rishly scribbled notes upon his complicated gist, young Venezuelans—students—not too noisily passed out leaflets among the audience and scattered some on the table. The Communist glanced at one, put it face down on the table, and firmly rested his handsome, unappetizing hand upon the now blank paper. Bech looked at the one that slid to a stop at the base of his microphone. It showed himself, huge-nosed, as a vulture with striped and starred wings, perched on a tangle of multicolored little bodies; beneath the caricature ran the capitalized words INTELECTUAL REACCIONARIO, IMPERIALISTA, ENEMIGO DE LOS PUEBLOS.
The English words “Rolling Stone” leaped out at him. Some years ago in New York City he had irritably given an interviewer for Rolling Stone a statement, on Vietnam, to the effect that, challenged to fight, a country big enough has to fight. Also he had said that, having visited the Communist world, he could not share radical illusions about it and could not wish upon Vietnamese peasants a system he would not wish upon himself. Though it was what he honestly thought, he was sorry he had said it. But then, in a way, he was sorry he had ever said anything, on anything, ever. He had meddled with sublime silence. There was in the world a pain concerning which God has set an example of unimpeachable no comment. These realizations took the time of one short, not even awkward pause in his peroration about ironic points of light; bravely, he droned on, wondering when the riot and his concomitant violent death would begin. Any white man come down in here, he’d be torn apart quicker’n a rabbit.
But the Venezuelan students, having distributed their flier, stood back, numbed by the continuing bombardment of North American pedantry, and even gave way, murmuring uncertainly, when the panel wound down and Bech was escorted from the hall by the USIS men and the rich Communist. They looked, the students, touchingly slim, neat, dark-eyed, and sensitive—the fineness of their skin and hair especially struck him, as if the furrier eye of his uncle Mort had awakened within him and he were appraising pelts. By the doorway, he passed close enough to reach out and stroke them.
He lived. Outdoors, in the lustrous, shuffling tropical night, the Communist writer stayed with him until the USIS men had flagged a taxi and, in response to Bech’s protestations of gratitude (for being his bodyguard, for showing him his Moore), gave him a correct, cold handshake. A rich radical and a poor reactionary: natural allies, both resenting it.
To quiet Bech’s fear, the State Department underlings took him to a Caracas tennis tournament, where, under bright lights, a defected Czech beat a ponytailed Swede. But his dread did not lift until, next morning, having signed posters and books for all the wives and cousins of the embassy personnel, he was put aboard the Pan Am jet at the Maiquetía airport. His government had booked him first class. He ordered a drink as soon as the seatbelt sign went off. The stewardess had a Texas accent and a cosmetically flat stomach. She smiled at him. She blamed him for nothing. He might die with her. The sun above the boundless cloud fields hurled through the free bourbon a golden arc that shuddered beside the plastic swizzle stick, upon the plastic tray. In Korea, the girls in school uniforms would slip him notes on blue-lined paper reading, Derest Mr Bech Mr Kim our teacher assined your stori on being Jewsh in English clas it was my favrite ever I think you very famus over the world I love you. In Nigeria, the woman teaching him the high-life had reached out and placed two firm black hands gently upon his hips, to settle him down: he had been doing a jumpy, aggressive frug to this different, subtler beat. In the air, the 747 hit some chop and jiggled, but stayed aloft. Not a drop of his golden drink spilled. God bless America.
AUSTRALIA AND CANADA
CLEAN STRAIGHT streets. Cities whose cores are not blighted but innocently bustling. Citizens of Anglo-Saxon blood, British once removed, striding long-legged and unterrorized out of a dim thin past into a future as likely as any. Empty territories rich in minerals. Stately imperial government buildings. Parks where one need not fear being mugged. Bech in his decline went anywhere but had come to prefer safe places.
The invitation to Canada was to Toronto, to be interviewed, as Henry Bech, the exquisitely unprolific author, on the television program Vanessa Views. Vanessa was a squat woman with skin like orange cheesecloth, who nevertheless looked, on a twenty-three-inch screen, if not beautiful, alive. “It’s all in the eyes,” she explained. “The people with deep sockets do terribly. To project to the camera, you must have eyes set forward in your head. If your eyes turn inward, the viewers turn right off.”
“Suppose your eyes,” Bech asked, “turn toward each other?”
Vanessa refused to pick it up as a joke, though a female voice behind the lights and cameras laughed. “You are an author,” Vanessa told him sternly. “You don’t have to project. Indeed, you shouldn’t. Viewers distrust the ones who do.”
The two of them were caught in the curious minute before airtime. Bech, practiced rough-smoothie that he was, chatted languidly, fighting down the irreducible nervousness, a floating and rising sensation as if he were, with every second ticked from the huge studio clock, being inflated. His hands prickled, swelling; he looked at his palms and they seemed to have no wrinkles. His face felt stiff, having been aromatically swabbed with something like that strange substance with which one was supposed, thirty years ago, to color oleomargarine and thereby enhance the war effort. The female who had laughed behind the lights, he saw, was the producer, a leggy girl pale as untinted oleo, with nostrils reddened by a cold, and lifeless, pale hair she kept flicking back with the hand not holding her handkerchief. Named Glenda, she appeared harried by her own efficiency, which she refused to acknowledge, brushing aside her directives to the cameramen as soon as she issued them. Like himself, Bech felt, she had been cast by life into a role it amused her to not quite fill.
Whereas his toadlike interviewer, whose very warts were telegenic, inhaled and puffed herself way up; she was determined to fill this attenuated nation from coast to coast. The seconds waned into single digits on the studio clock and a muffled electronic fuss beyond the lights clicked into gear and Bech’s pounding heart bloated as if to choke him. Vanessa began to talk. Then, miracle that never failed, so did he.
He talked into the air. Even without the bright simulacrum of his head and shoulders gesticulating in the upper-left corner of his vision, where the monitor hung like an illuminated initial on a page of shadowy manuscript, Bech could feel the cameras licking his image up and flinging it, quick as light, from Ontario to British Columbia. He touched his nose to adorn a pensive pause, and the gesture splashed onto the shores of the Maritime Provinces and fell as silver snow upon the barren Yukon. As he talked, he marveled at his words as much as at the electronic marvel that broadcast them; for, just as this broadcasting was an airy and flattering shell upon the terrestrial, odorous, confused man who physically occupied a plastic chair and a few cubic feet of space in this tatty studio, so his words were a shell, an unreal umbrella, above his kernel of real humanity, the more or less childish fears and loves that he wrote out of, when he wrote. On the monitor now, while his throaty interviewer described his career with a “voice-over,” stills of his books were being flashed, and from their jackets photographs of Bech—big-eared and combative, a raw youth, on the flap of Travel Light; a few years older on Brother Pig, his hair longer, his gaze more guarded and, it seemed to Bech in the microsecond of its exposure, illicitly conspiratorial, seeking to strike up a mutually excusatory relationship with the reader; a profile, frankly and vapidly Bachrachian, from his collection of essays; and, wizened if not wiser, as pouchy as a golf bag, his face, haloed by wild wool that deserved to belong to a Kikuyu witch doctor, from the back of his “big” novel, which had been, a decade ago, jubilantly panned. Bech realized, viewing the montage, that as his artistic powers had diminished he had come to look more and more like an artist. Then, an even older face, the shocking face of a geezer, of a shambler, with a furtive wit waiting to twitch the licked and criminal lips, flashed onto the screen, and he realized it was he, he as of this moment, on camera, live. His talking
continued, miraculously.
Afterward, the producer of the show emerged from behind the cables and the cameras, told him he was wonderful, and, the day being fair, offered to take him for a tour of the city. He had three hours before a scheduled dinner with a Canadian poet who had fenced with Cocteau and an Anglican priest who had prepared a concordance of Bech’s fiction. Glenda flicked back her hair absent-mindedly; Bech scanned her face for a blip marking how far she expected him to go. Her eyes were an even gray shallowly backed by a neutral Northern friendliness. He accepted.
In Australia, the tour of Sydney was conducted by two girls, Hannah, the dark and somber prop girl for the TV talk show on which he had been a seven-minute guest (along with an expert on anthrax; a leader of the Western Australia secessionist movement; a one-armed survivor of a shark attack; and an aborigine protest painter), plus Moira, who lived with Hannah and was an instructor in the economics of underdevelopment. The day was not fair. A downpour hit just as Hannah drove her little Subaru to the Opera House, so they did not get out but admired the world-famous structure from the middle distance. A set of sails had been the architect’s metaphor; but it looked to Bech more like a set of fish mouths about to nibble something. Him, perhaps. He gave Hannah permission to drive away. “It’s too bad,” Moira said from the back seat, “the day is so rotten. The whole thing is covered in a white ceramic that’s gorgeous in the sun.”