My Life With Eva

by Alex Barr

  If there’s a power cut the overhead fan stops and the heat builds.

  “If parts would come we could fix a few generators.”

  “The days are endless, Raj.”

  Sunday. A work day, because Friday is Sunday here. After his usual breakfast of fûl beans, scrambled egg, and milky coffee, Dermot goes out, walking fast beside the river. It rained again in the night, washing down the dust, and the air is clear and fresh.

  He reaches the head post office and stands for a moment before going in. Normally he’s afraid to hesitate, in case he loses his sense of purpose, but this is just the brief silence between movements of a concerto. On the outside wall of the building are two neon tubes in a V, unprotected from weather. Dermot smiles at a boy in an openwork skull-cap on a donkey. The boy salutes and rides by, his load bumping on the beast’s sweaty flanks.

  In the lobby with its row of dimly-lit phone cubicles, Dermot joins the crowd at the counter. He books a call to Claire and waits. An hour goes by. He’s in a trance, one more body in a crowd.

  The counter clerk says, “Mr Smeeth, cubicle two.”

  Dermot turns and hurries out.

  Suddenly there are three under the evening fan. Dermot imagined Russian women with sweet round faces like Matryoshka dolls, but Valentina’s is a blade. Her eyes, dark and wide, move from him to Raj and back, as if either might solve some enigma.

  “Where were you working before?” Dermot asks.

  “Finland.”

  “In what capacity?” Raj asks.

  “Educational.”

  “And before Finland?”

  “Morocco. Bulgaria.”

  Her tone is flat, as if Bulgaria is just like Morocco, and Morocco just like Finland.

  Raj is fascinated by her. Under the blaze of her questioning look he lowers his eyes, but when she moves he studies her intently.

  “She favours you,” he says later over whiskey and halva, when Valentina has gone to bed.

  “She just thinks I follow her broken English better.”

  “Yet Russian,” says Raj with the nearest to bitterness Dermot has heard from him, “is closer to Hindi than to English.”

  Ramadan. Raj is in India touching base with his head office. Dermot and Valentina cross to an island in the river. The cheapest ferry trip in the world, according to the boatman. The earth is pungent after rain. They walk along quiet humble streets between earth walls, then the banked edges of irrigated fields, and look back at the city skyline. Pale rectangles, plum-coloured minarets. At dusk smiling men breaking their fast beckon them to share fresh lemonade.

  Back at the rest house Dermot and Valentina sit at the table under the fan, sharing a bottle of sparkling water. It’s warm and tastes unpleasant. Valentina’s eyes search his face. He knows what’s expected. To ask about her hopes and fears, her lovers, tell her she looks nice, then take her to bed. Only fair. It would balance Claire’s betrayal.

  But a cloak of lead has descended. Dermot sees every stage of what’s supposed to happen, in tiny increments like Achilles and the tortoise. The uncovering of bodies, the sweat-sticky coupling, the post-coital anxiety over whether they respect each other and how it might all develop. All he wants is the stage where bodies lie close drained of passion and conversation, but there are too many steps to reach it. He can almost understand why Claire slept with Daniel.

  He pats the hand Valentina has stretched towards him and says, “I have to leave you now. Goodnight.” Her eyes are huge, her face a hatchet.

  From his room he looks down at the street, drowned in shadows. The shops are blank, with steel shutters like prison doors. It’s late, very late, before he sleeps.

  The earth steams with the ancient smells of Ur and Mohenjo-Daro. In a sea of semi-darkness the stalls are islands of electric light. Between them squat people with few things to sell—belts, extension leads, handfuls of cigarettes. Snatches of music swoop like Arabic writing. A fingerless beggar really does say baksheesh, andhe gives her a banknote, limp with the sweat of many hands.

  By the meat market the odour is sickening. The primitive squalor fits his thoughts. Men in white robes and bulky head cloths slap one another’s hands in greeting. He’s fascinated by a heap of dung—which may even be human—and the jewelled backs of its attendant flies. He gazes long. A gentle tap on his shoulder. It’s Raj.

  Dermot pumps his hand like mad.

  “Back from India! Good to see you.”

  “I think parts do not come?”

  “Correct. And your furniture?”

  Again the dancer’s gesture. “It is promised.”

  They stroll along together. Raj is visiting a shop in the Goldsmiths’ quarter.

  “And how is that Claire?” he asks.

  “No letter. And no, I haven’t phoned.”

  “Interesting.”

  ‘What’s interesting, Raj?”

  “That I find you looking into a pile of ordure. Instead of into yourself.”

  “And if I did,” Dermot says sarcastically, “what would I see?”

  But they’ve arrived. Outside the shop an argument is in progress between Raj’s friend and an angry customer. In Hindi, with occasional bursts of English. Raj explains that English is for emphasis. The dispute shows no sign of ending. It seems both parties are enjoying it. Raj and Dermot drift away.

  The air is unusually humid after the rain. The risen moon slides among the fans of palm trees.

  “Fear,” says Raj suddenly.

  “What?”

  “You would see fear inside you.”

  “Fear of what will happen if I phone Claire?”

  Raj shrugs.

  “What do you think will happen?” Dermot demands.

  Raj walks on deep in thought, shoes flapping as usual. Dermot is on edge for his answer. The oracle!

  “Tell me, Dermot,” says Raj at last, “when you came here, were you knowing what would happen?”

  Dermot thinks angrily, Where is that Eastern wisdom?

  The police wielding lathis force back the crowd.

  “Come,” says Raj. Firmly, because he sees Dermot is reluctant. Embarrassed. Letting in a brown man and a white man before the black locals is a vestige of colonial days.

  The film has subtitles in Arabic and English. The hero is a police detective but looks like a playboy. He never gets angry. With men he’s blunt, matter-of fact—if they don’t co-operate there’ll be consequences. Sometimes he drawls in English, ‘You are very big wicked man.’ With women he’s kind and charming, but firm. If they get angry he shrugs—they have to accept him as he is.

  And he dances! And sings! In front of a crowd of dancers in shiny costumes, grinning at the camera, hands expressive. Dermot sneaks a look at Raj. His companion’s dark eyes are moist. Dermot looks away quickly. The night is warm, his shirt clings to his back with sweat, but it’s good to be in the open and the bench under his thighs feels very solid.

  They stroll back to the rest house.

  “Surely,” says Dermot, “a song and dance routine is odd in a detective story.”

  Raj holds one hand upright at right angles to his lips—thinking mode. “Tell me, Dermot,” he murmurs, “why you became an engineer.”

  “I like solving problems. Problem solving is the essence of being human.”

  Raj nods gravely. “Agreed. But what of insoluble problems?”

  “What about them?”

  “Are they not windows into the divine?”

  He laughs at Dermot’s puzzled look. They walk on.

  “Now tell me, Dermot, when solving problem, do you sometimes stand back, away from problem, to rest?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “That is your dance.”

  And Raj laughs again, for quite a long time.

  Dermot is still thinking about the film. It ends with the detective picking up a phone. He hesitates. The call is to a politician. Is it wise? Ominous music. But the hero dials, and someone answers.

  Snaps

  “Well
I sure hope we find them,” the American woman says.

  “Right,” says her husband with a stern look at Carlos. Who in turn peers through the taxi window at the scrubby, half-tropical landscape, trying to look like someone who Knows Indians.

  The Englishman is quiet. He can’t get over how much this feels like a Sunday morning. Not just the old kind, the newspaper-and-croissants kind, with a walk by the river with his wife, but the oldest kind. When there was a sense of aimlessness and space, of not knowing what would happen next. Of strolling home from church with Bonesie and Rob, going miles out of their way, just in case they crossed the path (by pure accident) of Ann Bell and Jennifer Coates.

  They cross a bridge, heavy tree-trunks laid crosswise with planks. Under it a small ravine. Carlos scans the overcast sky, the tops of the grey-green palm trees, for clues. The driver turns left into a large clearing, and pulls up in front of a large shed-like building. It has plank walls and a tin roof. The Americans think of the hut at Fifth and Maple where they used to take LaVerne for ballet. In that strange, disturbing area just off the main centre, not quite yet decayed enough to tear down.

  The husband balances his camcorder on his knee and wipes the sweat off his palms onto his shirt. His wife looks away, silently disapproving. “There’s no-one here,” she tells Carlos. The building seems deserted. Carlos too is sweating. He’s brought them all the way from Quito to see these damned Colorado Indians. Booked them into the hotel he’d come to every weekend if he could afford it, only to find they aren’t impressed. Sauna, swimming-pool, disco—what more can they want? They complain that the disco keeps them awake. He wonders what hotels in America are like, or Britain. At this rate he’ll never know.

  He and the taxi driver approach the door. The driver knocks.

  Carlos asks, ‘Who lives here?’

  “The brujo.”

  Carlos wonders aloud how to render this in English. Witch-doctor? Herbalist?

  The driver grins. “You should know, being a tour guide.”

  “I’m not a guide, I’m an engineer.”

  “Just moonlighting, eh? Well this could be a bad day. They may have just had a party. They drink and dance for days, then spend more days sleeping it off.”

  “Damn. I have to find them.”

  A young man in jeans and T-shirt answers the door. The son of the brujo. He has pale skin and fair hair, a contrast with the driver and Carlos. He directs them to another house. As they walk back to the taxi the driver says, “He could pass for a gringo.”

  “If he spoke English.”

  They drive on. Carlos, to entertain his party, points out banana and palm trees by the roadside. The American points his camcorder. His wife asks what kind of palm they are. They aren’t neat and bushy like the ones in California. The lead shoots pop up from the rest with a leggy look, crowned with four leaves like small windmill sails. Also they aren’t labelled like the ones in the arboretum.

  “What species are those?” she asks.

  Carlos says, “We call them palmas.”

  She thinks, He doesn’t even know the word ‘palm’ in English.

  The road gets worse. They cross a small river in which people are bathing and washing clothes. Everyone peers from the taxi, but the scene looks very ordinary.

  The Englishman thinks of small rivers in France, he and his wife wading among the boulders, cooling off in the deep pools, laughing and pushing each other off balance. The light coming through leaves. Now she can hardly move. Her joints are going. They thought this trip would distract her from the pain, that the heat would help, but it isn’t that warm on the Equator. She’s hobbling around their apartment back in Quito.

  “You go,” she said. “I’ll stay.”

  “Not on my own.”

  “You won’t be on your own. You’ll be with Carlos.” And when he hesitated, “For God’s sake, go.”

  Last night, at the disco, he and Carlos watched some young women dancing. The Americans stayed for one drink, then went to bed.

  “Ask one to dance,” said Carlos.

  Seeing himself through their eyes, the Englishman feels old. He remembers his wife at parties deep in the past, weaving herself into the music, a blur of ankles. These girls are hardly moving.

  Carlos adds, “Please, they like Englishmen. They think we Ecuadorian men are a lost cause.”

  “Never. Ask one yourself.”

  Carlos, his olive skin a little flushed, leans towards him. “I used to have an English girlfriend. I would like to go to UK, do a Master’s.”

  The Englishman doesn’t know what to say. He feels he should offer him a room in their house. The children have left, the house is half empty. A haunted house, full of memories.

  The taxi suddenly swings into another clearing, past a sign in Spanish: ‘Tourists Welcome’. Carlos watches his party anxiously. To his relief the Americans’ eyes light up: this is what they came for. A house in the local style, thatched with palm leaves. They get out quickly with relief, with a multiple thud of doors. The husband sweeps with his camcorder the enclosing ring of foliage, a dark, deep-green mass receding into mist, a mist that hints at reserves of tropical heat. He takes in bright scarlet flowers, cocoa trees, banana trees, shrubs of all kinds. And can’t believe his delight when the shot comes back to the house, and there is the Indian.

  The party all move towards him—apart from the driver of course, who’s seen it all. The Americans catch one another’s eyes and smile. The wife thinks how it would tickle LaVerne to see this guy, so unashamedly posing. Because she always enjoyed a spectacle, something to see, an old silver mine, a pretend gunfight, a valley full of weird-shaped mesas. Always so keen, bubbly, and bouncy.

  She’d say, “This gets an A. I never imagined it like this. Now what?”

  Because there was always something else to move on to.

  What’s great about the Indian, thinks the husband, is that he looks just like the photographs. The ones in the display at the Equator Monument. His hair really is this amazing shade of crimson. Shaved up the back and way above the ears, it’s like a bowl inverted on his head. Smeared with some sticky plant goo, so thick it appears polished.

  He seems quite at ease. Clearly poses like this every Sunday morning, in nothing but a yellow shirt (open to expose his chest and ample belly) and a smart striped wraparound in black and white. Standing with his feet at ten to two, with a faint grin, looking at the donkey-coloured earth in front of him. His legs are hairless and surprisingly white.

  The visitors stand round in a half circle. Carlos is pleased. He’ll interpret now, the fulcrum of the occasion. These people are in his power and will thank him. He met them on different days, in the tourist café on Avenida Amazonas. Made friends, offered this tour, agreed on a sum of money. Things here are so cheap for them that after meals, the hotel, buses, this taxi, he’ll have a fair sum left over. Also, they agreed to pay for him. When he told them the cost of the weekend, and added, “Also the same for me,” they nodded. But he isn’t just a guide, he’s a friend. One day, in the States or Britain, he’ll meet another of those fugitive long-legged girls with rosy skin.

  “You can question him through me,” he says.

  The Englishman looks at the slatted door of the house, at the gap above. Inside, darkness. Perhaps the Indian’s wife is in there, lying sick. After all, they have no real doctors. The house has been spoiled by the debris of progress. An ugly electrical fuse-box on one bamboo column. On the door a Lufthansa sticker, an Ecuador Tourist Board sign, and inexplicably, a coloured picture of a railway train. But also, more hopefully, a record of the past. A sepia photograph of soldiers and Colorados.

  He asks, “What’s the photograph?”

  The Indian explains, through Carlos, that the soldiers came to hunt some bad men who killed two Colorados. The American woman isn’t satisfied with this.

  “Killed them? Why?”

  She doesn’t like mysteries. Like the photos she found in LaVerne’s hold-all, strange bearded m
en, hawk-like women, LaVerne bunched in with them. Who were they? she demanded. Well, in the end they found out. After a fashion.

  Her husband says, “Tell him we know about many kinds of Indians. Many tribes. We’ve seen them in many places.”

  The Indian, hearing this translated, nods politely.

  The American woman says, “I guess he’s seen many kinds of Americans, dear. Carlos, how many of them are there?”

  Carlos answers without reference to the Indian. He knows from the taxi-driver. “One thousand. The young do not desire to be Colorados. They think they have a bad reputation.”

  “And do they?”

  “Not really.”

  The Indian continues to pose, unruffled even though questions have stopped getting through to him. Carlos wishes he himself could be so at ease, half-naked with just a wraparound. Sometimes, when he came from his bath with a towel round him, his girlfriend would pull it off, laughing. He’d always turn away instinctively, and she’d ask, “Why can’t I see you?” In the end she went back to Bradford.

  The American woman notices the Indian’s bead necklace. Maybe that was it with LaVerne, some kind of voodoo, the necklace those people gave her. She pokes at the fellow’s beads. “Where from?”

  Carlos interprets. “The sea.”

  The Englishman wonders how she can be so lacking in tact. The Indian is on the defensive now, just maintaining his dignity under the prodding. Something has gone slightly out of key, as it always does. Things start well and then decline. This man has appeared from a different past, unimaginable, running as a child through dark green leaves, playing with palm branches, speaking a fluid language. Only to emerge into this clearing to be judged by foreigners.

  Carlos worries that the Englishman looks bored. He indicates the banana trees around the clearing.