!Click Song

by John A. Williams

  So now the three of us are in a booth, inspecting each other with theatrical fondness, remembering the old days.

  16

  The sky was restlessly awesome—a vast inferno of color: here a boiling pale green simmering up to a faience blue; there a swirling curl of gold through which appeared a smear of red that tailed off to tendrils of orange and gold and brown. It was as though history had been distilled into color, as though dynasties had been wafted into the skies above their resting places down on the earth. Great fluffed clouds drifted through it all, now assuming the profile of a long-dead pharaoh, a slender maid carved from calcite, or a range of breathlessly high mountains resting on the base of the rays of the setting sun.

  Beneath us, the captain now announced, was the city of Alexandria, of Alexander and Philadelphus and Julius Caesar and lost, burned and stolen knowledge. Its lights, browned by the atmosphere between the plane and the ground, blinked weakly as it slid back under us. We began our descent for Cairo.

  We were arriving in Africa without Ted. The producer at 10 Columbus had decided that we should hire local drivers familiar with the roads. (This would be one of the better decisions he would make in all his years in television.) We would also fly. (My script called for shooting in Egypt, Ethiopia and then West Africa.) Therefore, we would not require a driver.

  We made the most of our stops in London, Frankfurt, Nicosia and Athens; now we had to get to work, with the cooperation of the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism, we hoped. That we were coming into Cairo at all was something of a miracle orchestrated by my threat to quit, the suggestion that the producer was a latent bigot (“Egypt after all is still a part of Africa, Rick”), and my implacable insistence that Ethiopia and Haile Selassie were very much a part of where I was going with the series, as I saw it. I exhausted him with arguments, history and his personal vulnerability. (“If the League of Nations had listened to Selassie, there might not have been a Spanish Civil War, perhaps not World War Two, and perhaps no concentration camps, Rick. But who was he? How did they regard him, Rick? He was a short little nigger, running a nigger country that no one gave a good goddamn about. Especially, they denied that any wisdom could be formed in the brain and mouth of this short little nigger, and so they did nothing. White people may have forgotten, Rick, but blacks have not.” Ah, yes, I really laid it on him.)

  The Comet was cutting back on power, suddenly, so that I felt stuck for a moment in the darkening sky, nudged by the finger of God. The pilot was immediately suspected of having pushed the wrong button, pulled the wrong lever. People turned to each other, whispering furiously, casting indignant glances up toward the cockpit. White Westerners never believe non-Westerners capable of maneuvering such intricate Rolls-Royce- or Boeing-produced equipment. But we stayed in the air, slid into our assigned pattern and landed at Cairo without incident.

  I took a very, very deep breath and closed my eyes and tried desperately to strain out the history I’d been taught and to see this land that I was about to touch perhaps for the first time in five hundred years with eyes and soul only mildly wounded by my sojourn across the ocean.

  I glanced quickly at Vernon; he seemed to be at peace. Dolph still dozed. Mark fretted.

  A representative from Tourism greeted us. Something had happened to our hotel reservations. We would not be staying in Cairo after all, but a little bit—“little bit, little ways”—outside. “Nice place.”

  A joint called the Mena House (right out of Kipling) he said, and mumbled something about Pyramids, Sphinxes … His presence didn’t hasten us through customs, and by the time we arrived in Gizeh it was approaching midnight.

  I was tired, but I could not control a humming undercurrent of waking sensibilities. A thousand teachers, five hundred thousand repros of Egyptian wall paintings, five hundred books complete with plates, had not prepared me for this Egypt: there were so many black people there.

  But one does not travel through Africa as much as it travels along the senses, sometimes tenderly, often brutally, always, however, igniting some dormant dream or nightmare, a déjà vu and slowly, very slowly, came the perception of an awesome arena in which had been played out the mightiest dramas conceivable.

  From the Pyramids at Gizeh and Meroë, the emperor’s battered palace at Addis Ababa, to the old structures at Great Zimbabwe; from Katanga and the havoc the Belgians called independence, to the oil fields at Port Harcourt and the slave ports at Badagry, Cape Coast and Elmina (they never stop taking from Africa); and then, crossing the rivers, the Nile, the Blue Nile, the Niger, the Benue, the Congo and a hundred others, we passed over a dozen countries, all larger than the European nations that had only recently “freed” them. Yes, flew over their orange-brown plains and buff-colored deserts, their rain forests curled and napped like green hair; we sweated and cursed in our hired vans, at our drivers, who handled the cars as if they were Shango riding thunderbolts; we located in city and bush, shooting, interviewing, writing and rewriting. Everywhere Kennedy’s Camelot Corps, knights and damsels, poured into the continent as if, with sheer will alone, they would roll back five hundred years. But Africa absorbed them as it always had everyone else, everything else, conqueror or not, and remained Africa, victim, conjuror, a big, sly, patient, ancient black lady who had forgotten or concealed more knowledge than most other lands have yet to know. Its vastness intimidated; its rush away from its own theft-plagued civilizations to the ones that had enslaved it, puzzled, irritated. Cultural domination did not deploy divisions in the field; its troops were phantoms: Peugot. Triumph. Ford. Dunhill. 555. Benson and Hedges. Marlboro. Nestlés. Presley. Barclays. Chase. BOAC. Pan Am. KLM. Gordon’s. Johnny Walker. Bovril. BBC. VOA. Lucille Ball. Car 54 Where Are You? Carrier. Philips. Sundowners. Marilyn Monroe. Sidney Poitier. G. Mennen Williams. Averell Harriman.

  The West, with its terrible references, was wedged between us, me and the Africans, Vernon and the Africans. We skated on the surfaces of things frozen in our memories. All these people and all this land suborned by the usual coalition: the people with the money and the people with the madness. There had been too generous a nature in this land: You must not oppress the stranger. You know how a stranger feels, for you once lived in a strange land. See now how the stranger has abused your generosity!

  I had pondered these things at night, sweating, half-drunk beneath my mosquito net, listening to the million sounds of life, and thinking,

  All day long and all night through

  One thing only must I do:

  Quench my pride and cool my blood,

  Lest I perish in the flood.

  The Negro, that was the title I wanted for the show. The Negro, and how I wanted the inevitability of him to flash across millions of sets, leaving a shadow; wanted viewers to ponder what Locke, Spengler and De Tocqueville had predicted. For how could it be otherwise one awful day? To defeat this people utterly?

  Out of an aqualithic interior the African had come, a Ta-nuter so awash that rivers carved by their surging paths twenty-five thousand years ago still remained, flowing more slowly, meandering more deliberately. They had survived the pluvials, these people, and they had survived somehow unspeakable cataclysms now collected in a thousand myths. (Ouagadougou was lost four times and Ouagadougou was found four times.) And did the continent crack, leaving that awful wound, the Great Rift, and raising the Atlas Mountains? Did it crack while men watched, and did the waters dry up, leaving deserts and the Sudd and salt mines men would kill to control? Perhaps the survivors had already moved to the delta, and perhaps the mass cracked once more, isolating them, leaving them to nurture civilizations that would be assigned to others because these people were a generous people, giving their gods to the Greeks, who sailed them to Rome and to the corners of its empire: Shango, for one, becoming Hercules, Atlas, Thor, perhaps. These Africans even absorbed the mysterious Garamentes, who reappeared as Coromantees, some to remain, others to travel that woeful passage over the sea. Defeat these people? Look, there, shitting over t
he open sewer; but his folk mastered, indeed, may well have invented, iron and the use of copper, bronze and gold, while—it has been said so often before—Europeans were buggering each other in caves and painting themselves blue; and his land hosted both the pygmy Akka and the giant Wa-Tutsi and all the sizes in between, as if this land were the stage upon which a previous engagement called “civilization” was having a revival.

  I wanted this in my film.

  Finally, we stood at last on a beach of Côte d’Ivoire. (The citizens could not register at the hotels nearby; they were for whites only.) Dolph was shooting me against the sea, on which, just as Mark had planned, there sailed near the horizon a vessel whose leaks and tattered sails the camera could not see. It was the shape in profile that Mark wanted. The ship sailed, I talked, and when the vessel was out of the frame and I had finished my lines, Mark yelled, “CUT!” and it was done.

  17

  It was sodden and gray in Barcelona. I was sitting in a café in the Rambla de los Estudios having a cognac, pondering the sense of freedom I felt. People flowed up to Plaza de Cataluña and down to Plaza Puerta de la Paz. Here and there in the movement of humanity I saw a Negro, always a man. If Monica was still in the business, it was too early. But I was restless in my hotel room. I had explained the situation earlier to my publisher, a young Catalan who wore French suits. He would check with the staff about a black family named Jones. Such a family, he assured me with a smile, would not be too difficult to detect in Barcelona. Failing that, he said, he would ask a friend, a police functionary.

  Because he said nothing about the Guardia Civil, I guessed that it would not be too cool to suggest contacting them. I strolled through the streets until I came to a car rental and then drove out to Sitges.

  Yanez was in the plaza, sleeping in his taxi, his arms folded over his chest. I hesitated before waking him and studied the car; it was the same old battered Seat.

  “Señor, Señor Yanez,” I said. “Wake up.” I held under his nose a freshly opened pack of Old Gold cigarettes. (No, I had not stayed with Philip Morris.) “Guardia Civil,” I snapped and he jerked awake, eyes popping.

  “Señor Douglass,” he said, rubbing his eyes and grinning sheepishly. He reached for a cigarette and I lighted it for him and got in beside him. We shook hands heartily.

  “You’ve returned.”

  “Yes, I’m looking for—” and here I pondered what to say. Yanez and his wife had called Monica Señora Douglass, knowing or, at the very least, sensing what the arrangement actually was. “Monica,” I said.

  “Not since you left have we seen her, my friend. Not once.” He shrugged and lowered his eyes. “The child? You’ve come because of the child?”

  I nodded.

  Then he nodded. He smiled. We sat in silence, I watching the dreary panorama of women dressed in black traveling to and from the market; women dressed in black on their knees scrubbing sidewalks in front of their shops; the men selling lottery tickets; the men standing talking in front of the estanco or slipping briskly into and out of the bodegas holding their bottles; the priests walking grandly down the streets, passing kids playing futbol; the two-man Guardia Civil patrol walking with measured stride through the plaza—nothing had changed.

  “Well, what will you do, Señor?”

  “Don’t know.” I gave him a copy of the Spanish edition of Clarissa. I wasn’t sure that Yanez and his wife read books, but what the hell. While I lived there I claimed to be a writer; now they had proof.

  Yanez looked at my picture on the back. He seemed impressed. He looked at me quickly, somewhat shyly, and then said as he stroked the book proudly, “Ah, who would have guessed it. And in Spanish, too.”

  He now offered me a Bisonte, took one for himself. He tilted his head back. “Business is bad, Señor Douglass. Franco, he makes the promises, you know, but nothing happens.”

  “How’s the hotel?”

  “If not for that”—he made an airy sound—“nothing.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s good that spring is coming soon. They say a lot of tourists will come this year. I hope so. Tell me, is it good to come again?”

  “It’s good to be back, yes.”

  “Is that your car?” He pointed at my rental.

  “Rented.”

  He slapped the steering wheel and laughed. “Well, this one still runs. Remember?”

  I smiled, remembering our trip in it. “Sure, I remember.”

  He turned toward me and put a hand on my shoulder. “Señor, it isn’t very likely that she’d come back to Sitges unless she had”—and here he briskly rubbed his thumb and fingers together—“lots of money, you know.”

  Yes, I guess I knew that, but I’d also thought that perhaps our time together had been special enough to have triggered in her the desire to be somewhere nearby. My pitiful vanity, my secretly huge ego, my adolescent efflorescenses powdering out. I nodded in agreement. “How’s your wife?”

  “Still complaining. Today she went to Castelldefels to see her sister. On the bus.”

  At least, I thought, I wouldn’t have to pay the courtesy call and suffer her accusing glances.

  “Bad weather,” Yanez said, glancing at the overcast sky. “It’s all that atomic-testing business.”

  “Anyone living where I used to live?” I wanted to stop by there, walk down to the beach.

  “A fat lady from Switzerland. A painter.”

  “Ah, too bad.”

  “You can drive around there, of course.”

  “Of course. I have to go, Señor Yanez. I must get back to Barcelona.”

  He said, “Do you think it’s a boy? Would you look so hard for a girl?”

  I wondered at his question. “It’s mine, whatever it is,” I said.

  “Señor,” he said as I was getting out, “come back when you find him.”

  “Okay. Good luck.” I gave him the Old Golds. He waved when I started up and pulled away.

  There was a note at the hotel telling me to call my publisher at home immediately.

  “We have found for you,” he said breathlessly, “a family Jones that lives on the corner of Calle Balmes and Calle de Rosellon, you know where that is?”

  I assured him that I could find it and he gave me the address.

  “Señor Jones is a black man and his wife is Spanish. That is as you told me, correct?”

  “Yes.” I wondered if that was the only such Jones family they’d located.

  “We don’t have any other, I am sorry.”

  He invited me to dinner at the Petit Soley in the Plaza Villa Madrid. I accepted.

  Señor Jones, who looked, I guessed, the way Federico might look when he was grown, answered the door. He seemed at first startled to see standing under the weak light in his foyer another black man. Then he smiled. “You’re an American, I can tell that,” he said in English that reminded me of the way West Indians spoke. “Come in.”

  He was dressed as all men of his class in Spain dressed: a white shirt with slightly soiled collar, a tie, a sweater and a suit jacket over it. “Please come in. I don’t see many American black people here, although some do come to play music. Coo-tie Williams, Duke the Ellington, do you know them?”

  I was sitting where he had waved me. “Sherry?”

  I accepted.

  “Please bring two glasses of sherry,” he said in Spanish, and down along the tiled corridors a woman answered and minutes later she entered, looking very much like Monica, a shawl over her shoulders.

  “He’s from America, my dear,” Señor Jones said in Spanish.

  I had stood and now I gave her a little bow and she smiled. I saw that she had brought three glasses of sherry and, taking the last after serving us, she sat down.

  I told them my name and what I did for a living and that I had been in Barcelona four years ago. “I met your daughter then,” I said. “And I am looking for her now.”

  Señor Jones said briskly, “We do not know where she is. She has been away from
here over four years.” He stared into his sherry. I looked at Señora Jones. Was it possible (it always happened in fiction) that somehow mother and daughter got back in touch? She, too, peered at her sherry.

  I stifled a shiver. The marble floors gave off a sharp chill and they were not using an electric heater, at least in this room, nor a butano stove.

  “So you have heard nothing?”

  Señor Jones met my gaze directly. “Nothing. May I ask, Mr. Douglass, why is it that you want to find her?”

  That question, of course, had to come.

  “Where,” Señora Jones asked, “did you meet her?”

  “In the restaurant of the Majestic Hotel.”

  Señor Jones almost dropped his sherry. The Majestic was still a pretty grand place. “In the Majestic—”

  “Yes, Señor. I liked her very much and we had dinner two or three times more and she showed me around Barcelona.”

  “She has a child. Did she tell you?” Señora Jones said.

  “Ah, yes. Federico. He often came with us.” I knew that the señora would like to think of a third party, someone to watch over her daughter. “But,” I said, “you’ve heard nothing? You’ve no idea where she might be?” God, I thought, they don’t even know about the other child.

  “We had some—er—differences,” Señor Jones said. “She was an adult, you know, but young people can be so forward—”

  Señora Jones was nodding agreement. I could see in both their eyes that I might be their salvation. Respectability. Their savior from their daughter’s shame. It seemed like a good place to hand them a copy of Clarissa.

  “Yours? Yours?” Señor Jones said, whipping out his glasses and sliding them into place. His wife leaned over his shoulder.