And so there sat Teresa, her head on her hand, thinking of how as a child running about in the dust she had no idea that so soon she would have such a load on her, and Ben sat at the table with her, grieving, ‘I want to go home.’ And sometimes Teresa put her arms round him, ‘Poor Ben,’ and even, ‘You’re a good boy, Ben.’ Even while she said this she reminded herself that this was a bearded man who, his passport said, was thirty-five, even if he had told her he was eighteen. People treated him as if he were younger than that, and he behaved like an obedient child, she thought. People behave as they’re treated. She changed her manner towards him, asking him like an adult person to do little things for her, make her a sandwich, or coffee; she believed she saw a difference in him because of it.
He did not always sit with her. The door between the big room and his bedroom usually stood open, and she knew what he was up to. Usually he lay on his bed, or sat on it, trying out the dark glasses. In the afternoon the light came hard into his room so sometimes it seemed Ben was in a quivering pool of water. To him it seemed that splinters and needles of brightness tried to dart into his eyes, fill his head with dazzle. He tried on the glasses, pair after pair, and always ended up with the darkest of them: Richard had bought him two more pairs. Then he attempted to do without, while the white heat of the day moved about on the wall in patterns of brilliance. ‘Why are my eyes so different?’ he fiercely asked, addressing something that could be called Fate, Destiny—the painful emotions summoned up in him by the old lady’s and Teresa’s Poor Ben. But why, why why was he so different?
Meanwhile Alex and Paulo were far away in the hills, which they had reached by means of a tiny aeroplane, from a town that itself was served by a plane once a day. They had wanted to drive up into the hills but it had rained so much the roads were bad. They had landed up in a little hotel, or guest-house that Paulo remembered from a previous reconnaissance in this area which was visited by the occasional prospector, or anthropologist, or geologist. It had four rooms and was surrounded by a deep verandah on which the two men sat working on their script. They had tramped over a good many hills, with Ben in their minds—Ben and his people. The trouble was that while that vision of Ben’s tribe he had experienced in the hotel in Nice was fresh in his imagination, so that he often referred to it, as a check, Alex more often saw Ben as he was now, a miserable angry creature who both he and Paulo believed was probably ill. Ben made Alex feel guilty, and he had times of regretting bringing Ben out to Brazil, and even the whole idea. It was not working. When things worked, and would go on well, then that is what they did: there was a momentum, everything fitted and intermeshed, people, events, an article in a magazine or a book casually picked up contributed to the process, and it was by this fortuitousness that you knew you were in a lucky streak. But with this project—this film—everything ground and bumped along, or came to a halt together. How many times had they restarted the script, believed it to be good, but then doubts began and they knew it wasn’t? Alex now knew that it had been the powerful presence of Ben that had been impetus enough to carry them along. Ben as he had been. But now Ben was the block, a lock on their creative imaginations, when they thought of him what they heard was the bump, bump, thud, thud, of his head on the wall. They did joke that the sound was like that of minestamps: they could hear the stamps from a little mine near the guest-house. This joke was their attempt to bring Ben back into something congruous, that could feed their ideas.
They had not only wandered over a good many hills and minor mountains but had visited a tribe of Indians, and it was from that meeting that began the process that was—at first tacitly but now openly—removing Ben from the film.
They had gone by plane—the third, a four-seater—away over forests and rivers, and had landed in a rainforest where there were people who were not hostile, but pleased with what they had brought…Paulo advising. There were two small radios, with batteries—a good many of these in thick plastic bags to keep out the hot wet—tinned food, clothing, knives. Paulo had done the talking: he knew a few words of the local language, while Alex sat silent, but his eyes were hard at work. What faces! What bodies! What a beautiful people these were, living their still uncorrupted life on the edge of a river. It had been these people who, in an early version of their script, had invaded the territory of Ben’s tribe, and then…but Paulo and he had been unable to decide what then.
There were pretty girls, one in particular, the most delicately beautiful creature Alex had ever seen. She was about fourteen, they were told, and would soon marry. This tribe was not averse to being in a film, but limits were imposed, one being that none of the youngsters could be taken away from here to the temptations of a big city—which, for these people, was a town an hour’s plane ride from here, whose name the film-makers had trouble in finding on a map.
That girl…She was in both their minds; they confessed to being overwhelmed by her. They returned to their verandah, and the guest-house that was run by an elderly man and woman who asked every morning what they wanted to eat, but it always turned out to be chicken and rice and beans, and hot spices, and chicken again. They drank beer chilled in a refrigerator run on batteries, for the power up here was chancy, and it often failed. The two threw aside all their earlier versions of the script and began again, with the tribe and the girl as a starting point. It is not true to say that Ben disappeared entirely. At first this girl was being forced to marry a wild hill man who had found gold and with it wanted to buy the girl, and this man did retain some of Ben’s characteristics as perceived by Alex, mainly a rough stupidity. Then the suitor lost his crudeness, and was handicapped only by a crippled leg, which the girl cured—so you could say that Ben’s actuality dwindled into a gammy leg. In the end there was a film, and it did quite well. The girl became a television star and was to be seen every day on the screens in Rio. This was a kind of happy ending, and the girl certainly thought so, at least at the beginning of her career: when she was older she was not so sure.
Meanwhile Alex telephoned Teresa from a town where they had to fly to get the use of a reliable telephone. Alex said he would be here for another week or so. It was very cheap living here and they wanted to visit a certain tribe again. Please would Teresa stay in the flat, look after Ben, and prepare him for the news that he would not be in the film.
Teresa was indignant and did not conceal it. Ben should not have been treated like this—just scooped up and then dropped. She was delighted too, but concealed that: she knew Ben would be damaged even worse if they put him in a film, that is, if he could deal with it all. She was cool, discussing terms and conditions. Money was running out. Well, said Alex, she could use Ben’s money, and Alex would replace it. And how was Ben? ‘He’s—fine,’ said Teresa, telling Alex nothing, nor intending to. ‘He is fine.’
‘Great,’ said Alex.
‘Shall I tell him you will take him home soon?’
‘Yeah, yeah, I told him I would. But I’ve been thinking, Teresa. If he likes Rio, he could stay. What do you think?’
‘He wants to go home,’ said Teresa, and her voice was tearful.
‘Fine, fine, that’s OK. Tell him we’ll be back soon.’
Teresa told Ben that he would not be in the film, because she knew that would make him happy, but not that Alex would be back soon, because she knew Ben feared him.
Two weeks had gone, then three. There was a domestic routine. In the morning Teresa went out to get fresh bread, and she made coffee for herself, and poured fruit juice for Ben. She tried to make him eat more, but he had lost his appetite and was thin and wretched. Teresa loved to be on the beach, but Ben could not go there, nor be left too long by himself. She went with him, not to the hotel tables where she had achieved her step up from absolute poverty, but to another where she was not known. He wore his dark glasses, and a Panama hat she had bought him, which he pulled down low over his eyes. They sat there a couple of hours, drinking juice, and watching people. Teresa was interested in Ben’s reactions
: he might seem to shrink away, while his white stretched grin appeared in his beard. ‘What is it, Ben?’ ‘He’s bad,’ Ben would say. ‘He hurts me.’ ‘But I am with you, Ben.’ She strained to see what in this apparently harmless person might be frightening Ben, but could not. Or his small pleased smile might appear, and she saw another equally unthreatening person—usually a woman. ‘You must be careful, Ben, when you smile at girls.’ ‘I like her,’ Ben might say. And once, ‘I think she likes me?’ After such excursions Teresa felt that she had survived dangers and was pleased to be back, where she made a steak to tempt him, and a sandwich for herself. In the long hot afternoons they lazed, and her friends might drop in, one or two, but in the evenings it was not unlike how it was with Paulo and Alex; but now people came in with a bottle of wine, or some meat to cook, or fruit—this place could no longer be a cornucopia of hospitality, for Teresa did not have the money for it, and would not spend Ben’s, more than she had to. And Ben did not retreat to his bedroom, but stayed, and even sat on with them at the table. He was not included in the talk, which kept moving off from what he knew, but he took in what he could, which was more than Teresa or the others suspected. They all laughed a lot, but frequently he wondered what they found so funny: to him it was often frightening. More and more he remembered the old woman, her care for him, her kindness; he even thought of the cat as a companion he had lost. Ben knew Ellen Biggs had died, but that did not prevent him from thinking about her, as someone who would welcome him if he arrived at her door.
The people who came to visit Teresa were of a lower sort than Alex’s guests. No film directors and script writers, no well-known actors and dancers. These were small fry, on the fringes of theatre and television, theatre technicians, PR girls, an interpreter Teresa cultivated to learn more English from. A make-up girl had taught Teresa all she knew, and from a singer in a club sailors frequented she had learned some songs and how to play the guitar. No girls from the favela, no one who could remember Teresa as she had been, and not so long ago, either. Among these people was a young woman Teresa secretly thought of as her prize. Her name was Inez, and she was the daughter of a good family: her father was a university professor and she worked as an assistant in a scientific laboratory. Teresa had met her when a short TV film was being made about genes, inheritance—all that sort of thing—and Inez’s father was consulted. Inez was attracted by the theatre as only those can be whose lives have been in a groove since birth. She saw herself as doomed to predictability.
Teresa was in awe of this clever young woman who had been educated in a way that meant her talk was always astonishing Teresa with possibilities she could never have imagined. And Inez was fascinated by Teresa. Unlike Alex, who could not respond when Teresa told him she had walked hundreds of miles to reach Rio, Inez knew very well what Teresa had escaped. She had flown over the desiccating regions where the dust clouds lay so high in the air she had scarcely been able to peer down through them to the dry rivers and villages standing to their roofs in dust. She knew about the favelas. Teresa’s history filled her with pity, curiosity and uneasy guilt. It was not possible, in Rio, to escape poverty, always there, forcing itself on you at every turn of a street, in the shape of children without homes, the street gangs, who slept like abandoned bundles of old clothes on pavements, who swept down on fountains like flocks of birds, chattering and shouting, then drinking like birds with an eye always out for possible police who might lock them up or even kill them.
When Inez knew Teresa had a family in a favela, she asked if she could visit; she had always wanted to go right into a favela but was afraid, and with Teresa she would be protected. At first Teresa said no, afraid that this clever, fastidious friend might despise her, but then she said yes. She had a reason. She told Inez to wear shoes that could not be damaged, and herself put on jeans and a white shirt and flat shoes. The two young women took a taxi to where they could see the favela climbing up the hill, and then toiled up dirty paths through the shanties and shacks to the top, where they found Teresa’s father asleep on a bed made of plastic strips tied to a wooden frame found on the rubbish dumps, and the mother sitting under a little porch of sacks stretched on poles, the sick little girl on her lap.
The mother’s face did not relent, looking at her daughter, who handed her—without looking at her—an envelope with the money in it. She coldly greeted Inez, though she was impressed, Teresa knew, because no one could ever think of Inez as a prostitute, she was so superior. Her mother did not offer them anything, but Teresa went past the sleeping man to the shelf where water was in a plastic bottle, poured out two glasses for Inez and herself; but then there was nowhere to sit. Teresa could see Inez did not want to drink out of a glass she was bound to think of as contaminated. The two young women stood there, while the mother sat, fanning the sleeping child, and staring down over the higgledy shanty roofs. Then she did relent and asked Inez what she did, and Inez said she worked in a laboratory. The angry woman, determined not to smile, did lay the child down on its bed in a corner, and brought out two stools, gave one to Inez and one to Teresa. She asked where Inez had met Teresa—her voice on Teresa was a bitter accusation—and Inez said it was when Teresa was working on a television film. This is what Teresa had wanted to come out of the talk, and now it had: her mother was clearly softened, impressed, and when she looked at Teresa now, though she had been trying not to see this disgraced girl, as if she did not exist, her eyes were full of tears. At the moment of parting she embraced Teresa, which she had not done for a good two years now, and she wept, and so did Teresa, and the mother went on crying as she watched the two clean pretty young women go scrambling down the steep paths to the bottom of the hill.
Inez was affected by the visit. She wept too, sitting with Teresa back in the flat, Ben watching. She said that she admired Teresa so much, oh, she could not bear to think of all those poor people, how clever of Teresa to have survived all that. She was sincere enough, and Teresa knew it, but she was thinking, And I have to thank you for something you’ll never understand. For Inez did not know Teresa had been a prostitute; if she had, probably she would have admired Teresa and disliked her own safe life even more.
Now there was a turn of events that would not have surprised Johnston and Rita. Inez worked for a biologist, a friend of her parents, who ran a department of the laboratory. She told him about Ben, describing him as a yeti. ‘Something like that, at any rate,’ but no one could say what he was. ‘He’s a throwback,’ she said. ‘At least, that’s what I think. You ought to have a look at him.’
Inez told Teresa that her boss—she put it like that, tactfully, not saying that she had known this ‘boss’ all her life, as a friend of her parents—would be interested to meet Ben. Teresa was at once on her guard. She was afraid. This immediate, honest and true reaction was swept away because of her awe at words like scientist, science: she knew nothing about all that, her education had not been much more than reading, writing and arithmetic, and a lot of religion. She knew she was ignorant, but not how ignorant: Inez’s education was to her a wonder, something distant and unreachable, and she marvelled that Inez knew scientists as colleagues the way she herself knew bar girls and actresses who were more often than not out of work, and singers who were glad to sing in clubs for their suppers and perhaps a few reais more. Inez was glamorous because she worked in a laboratory, and understood the secrets of the modern world. Teresa asked what this scientist was going to do with Ben, and Inez replied, ‘Just take a look at him.’ Inez knew she was being deceitful, but her education had taught her that truth, scientific truth, was more important than anything else: you could say that her education had as much religion in it as Teresa’s. She had a pretty good idea that ‘having a look’ at Ben would not be the end of it, but she felt powerful and useful, introducing this creature who was obviously a kind of scientific enigma, to someone who could solve it. She did not say any of this to Teresa, who knew she was being lied to, and that Inez’s cool smiling face was sudden
ly that of an enemy. Their friendship died at that moment.
Teresa insisted that the meeting must be one that wouldn’t frighten Ben, and so it was arranged that next Sunday Inez and her ‘boss’ and a few more friends, all known to Ben, would assemble. Ben was not told anyone special was coming. Meanwhile Teresa was in a seethe of anxiety, even while she assured herself that the situation could not go out of control: had she not set terms and conditions, had Inez not promised to respect them?
Teresa and her friends, with Ben, were already sitting around the table midday on Sunday when Inez arrived with Luiz Machado, a handsome urbane man of forty or so, smiling to set these people at their ease. He ran a department in the institute which investigated rainforest plants, one of many similar departments, and while something like Ben was not in his line, there was another department, ‘the bad place’ in fact, run by someone who would find Ben a prize. While Luiz Machado was determined not to be intimidating, it was evident he was not easy in this company. He had criticised Inez for being too friendly with Teresa and for going into the favela: she might have been killed or kidnapped, he said; and if she wanted to get herself a good husband (and he knew she did) then she should be careful: this low life she liked so much might put a discriminating suitor off.
His smiling brown eyes shed benevolence generally around the table, and then focused on Ben, a long, sharp inspection. Ben’s eyes seemed to darken as he stared back, and then began to dart about the room. He was making as good an impression as he ever could: Teresa had taken him to have his hair and beard cut, he was wearing a good shirt, one made for him, and he was smiling, the wide scared grin people misunderstood. The scientist reached out his hand to shake Ben’s, but Ben grinned.
Ben, in the World Page 11