The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel

by Rahul Bhattacharya

  We met a broad boulevard heralded by two drunks on inverted crates as though they’d grown out of them. There was a lit cornershop. Its front shutter was down, but they were making the final transactions of the year through a side grille, a pa and son, with every movement you could see the son turning into the pa. There was something eerie about them, as if they knew our gravest secrets. We bought a bottle of apple wine. Comida, I said to them, gesturing to my stomach. They pointed in a direction and we obediently set out towards there. The suggestions were worthless. I looked up the guidebook again. Closed. Closed. Closed. It was the land of the dead.

  We drank the manzana vino, which tasted like wine and cider both. We wandered off the broad avenues and into the streets. Neither sound nor light emerged from the homes we passed. They felt like they had been built as haunted houses. Sometimes we tried to push our faces through window grilles like robbers. Once or twice a car with loud music passed us. Somewhere behind a crimson wall a confidential orgy must be soaked in a pit of grapes.

  Older and older streets appeared, pale and cracked. An hour into our futility a great wind began to blow, pulling dead leaves and bits of paper off the ground into our eyes. Her mane, having long shrugged off the effects of ironing, conflagrated into an electric storm, streaks like lightning. She looked sassy. We were back on a boulevard, and in a hotel doorway an Arab-looking man in bright white sneakers pointed down the road. He held up his fingers one by one. ‘Five blocks. You go five blocks. Enjoy.’

  We walked fifteen. The wind blinded us with debris. We made turns. Lured into the chase again – I found there was something addictive to this futility.

  We strayed into the oldest ancient streets. These were affluent now. Here and there black cars gleamed like polished hearses. Otherwise the same deserted howl rang through them. Yet we walked, curving along, crazy in the blowing night, until we chanced upon a vision: a sliver of miraculous light streaming out of a door left ajar. At the threshold one could hear the sound of people, maybe even the tinkle of glass. The sound of the chatter was refined. I could not tell if it was a restaurant or a home. What was indisputable was there were humans inside.

  As the prettier one, it was decided she would go in to see. I could see bits of the courtyard as she entered, the edge of an ice sculpture, canapés, backs of suits, strapless shoulders. She returned in a few seconds with word that ‘place fancy’. It wasn’t clear if it was a restaurant or a home.

  But the sortie had alerted the Coro gentry to our presence. A bearer arrived, followed by a large man in a black tuxedo and shining waxed hair. His face was fair, fleshy, full of folds. He had beady, diverging eyes. I knew the type, the fleshy tycoon: it was universal. He studied us with the particular self-confidence and self-indulgence of a man who’d made his fortune on the strength of sizing things up quickly. He had such distracting eyes, not quite ‘looking London, going Tokyo’, but just a little obtuse, so that he seemed to be addressing your ears. He spoke in an American accent. He was amazed to find us here. I conceded our own amazement.

  How I wished the magnate, the possessor of this fabulous colonial house and many others, this baron of petroleum, would say, come on in compadres, come on in and partake of my banquet. And precisely such a wish appeared to be in the fulfilment when he announced in a loud voice, as though for an audience: ‘Since this is your first time in Venezuela … ’ – I began to smile and blush, I thought of asparagus and prawn, of lovely pig, of champagne, strawberry dessert, almost started to say, that’s so nice of you – ‘ … I would like to offer you a drink.’

  He went inside and returned with two plastic cups. Rum and coke. ‘The finest rum in Venezuela.’ Yuh mudderskunt, yuh jackarse, yuh pattabrain, I wanted to tell him, yuh ever taste a Guyanese rum, the greatest fockin honey in this universe that you coming out here with this piece of lil plastic fuckery, get the fuck outta here yuh piece of shit.

  We accepted it and thanked him several times and departed, rum in one hand, manzana vino in the other.

  After two hours of walking like this, through slim streets and bigger avenues, past minor unpeopled plazas lit with harrowing fairylights, we were on the outskirts of town. A black road and a closed gas station. We’d walked Coro over. Our legs were aching, our hunger was debilitating. The world never felt so large as in little Coro and we were on the perimeter of the earth poised to walk off the edge.

  We touched hands, but there was a static dissonance between us. At the start of the hunt we had been chatting. The last thirty minutes were completely silent. She was negotiating the space between disappointment, anger and helplessness, each kept in check by the other. And I, for the first time in our entanglement, I felt I’d bitten off more than I could chew.

  We turned around. After twenty minutes a long collapsing taxi passed us. He could not help with comida.

  He dropped us to the posada.

  The simpleton was watching television, satisfied in his small dim world. He was oblivious to our pleas for food. ‘Comida?’ ‘Pan?’ I put fingers to my mouth and made a miserable face. He looked at me without motive.

  We seemed to be on to something when our entry into the kitchen jolted him out of his seat. We waited for him to settle again before the television. A few minutes later we sneaked into the kitchen.

  In the fridge there was a hunk of bread, a small bowl of red beans, another of beef bones in gravy.

  We took them to the room. We ate it cold. It occurred to me we could be eating the simpleton’s dinner. Also, that she was eating wrenk.

  In moments the food was done. The room, site of passion a few hours ago, was dry as husk. She looked stonily resentful. Her face was naturally expressive; when she turned like this, it was deliberate.

  I felt responsible for our plight. Yet, we’d both together browsed the guidebook and found Coro. It was a World Heritage Site. The pictures of those walls, the gay cafes on cobblestone! I was struggling as much as her. I felt hunger more acutely than she did. Besides, there was something about the situation, the stolen food and the ghost town, at least mildly amusing.

  ‘Is twice already I make you starve,’ I said, recalling the day on the ferry. ‘I am sorry.’ It was a tactical sorry, aimed at getting something out of her, a return consolation, a lightening up, anything.

  Her response was to turn wistful.

  ‘We would sport so hard on Ole Year’s. Everywhere you look people sportin. I remember one time we go to like seven limes. Start from Sandy Babb Street, Kitty, to the seawall, up the coast at Mon Repos, come back down to Lamaha Street …’

  ‘You missing Guyana,’ I said. Though I really meant: ‘You missing him.’

  ‘Nah. Those times gone, man.

  ‘I must call Brian tomorrow,’ she added after a few minutes.

  We talked a little.

  Her answers came in one or two words.

  From hunger I took sips of the apple wine. She refused any.

  ‘I changing,’ she said at last, and got off the bed.

  The bathroom was large. Her elaborate nightly ritual I think she performed inside, for she was gone a very long time – I can’t be sure because, waiting, sipping from the apple wine, I fell asleep. It wasn’t still midnight.

  8

  SHE bit my ear early in the morning with the words, ‘Leh we eat.’ In truth, we had long passed the critical points of hunger. Like survivors of a storm we savoured the morning. In the crossed rays and shades of the bathroom she took a cleaner’s satisfaction in ridding my hair of Coro debris. With less diligence but more pleasure, I polished her soles, her toes. She was slippery in soap. A new year, new promise, its brand new loving.

  The streets were sick with light, the colours were burning off the walls. The leaves blew dry in the plazas. At the terminal, a woman grilled submarines, layering tomato and lettuce with three kinds of cheese. ‘I could have eaten four, you know,’ she said, munching on her second, ‘if we ate last night.’

  What a funny, brutal place was Coro. From nowhere
people had arrived for the lone bus of the morning. Where were you last night, I wanted to shake each one and ask. With their bags and children they ran from one bay to another and another, attempting to predict which one the bus would dock in. They were Indian scenes; and it was an Indian squeeze in the bus, a too-full bus, standers and splayed legs and luggage in the aisle like spilled geometry boxes.

  We passed palm, scrub, hicktowns, possible oilfields of what felt like a Soviet scale. Apparently we were going to Valencia. From there I didn’t know. I only knew we were far out west and Guyana was east. Through the half-tints which turned the mad day into something autumnal and viscous, it was possible to imagine rosy futures. We could go to Merida in the Andes, from there cut through the animaled savannah towards Guyana. Or hit Caracas for one last fling. We could make for the beaches, skinnydip at night and wake on sand wrapped in a single sarong, or head to the far colonial riverport of Ciudad Bolivar. And six hours later, at Valencia, the decision was made for us. It was still holiday season. Buses were barely plying. There was one to Puerto La Cruz. From there, the tout said with a double thumbs up, ‘Ciudad Bolivar.’

  The bus was hours away. We waited. On the tarmac we ate barbeque pinchos. Cats skittered for crumbs under empty Venezuelan skies. Our tenuous grip on the new year was slipping. Soon it was dark.

  Thankfully the next service was high-luxury. We took the upper deck, right up by the windscreen. The continental highway opened out before us, smudged with dreamy flashes of headlight. The air conditioning, the comfort of the seats, it encouraged tenderness. ‘You hands cold!’ she whispered, pulling my hands under her sweatshirt. We blurred in and out of sleep.

  At a silly hour of the night the bus pulled into Puerto La Cruz. People must have got off along the way, for we were the only ones to disembark.

  We settled on a dark bench. We bought café marróns from a man with a worrying TB cough. We waited again.

  In hushed voices we spoke of Guyanese politics. ‘Is only the barons who keep shopping cheap in their stores,’ she argued. ‘Nobody could afford toaster or washing machine if cocaine don’t keep thing cheap.’

  The night grew colder and colder. We hugged up tight, hanging on for morning. We made giggles about little things, the worst bits of Rainbow Raani. She told stories, of her neighbour Girlie who used to hurryfuck Larry the sand-n-polishman through the palings at nights till one day a dog mashed his ass. I told her of Uncle Lance, and the people he told me about. I even told her of Baby, the whole affair, the first person with whom I’d shared it. Immediately I regretted it.

  ‘You stupid bad, you know.’ That was her conclusion. ‘You get mix up in this kind of thing and you get nothing out of it.’

  I get everything from it, I wanted to tell her, all understanding, all motivation, but I said nothing.

  Presently we fell asleep, sitting, shivering mildly into one another, prongs of a tuning fork.

  THE sounds – buses pulling in and pulling out, the grunt of touts, the shuffle of travellers – the sounds came before the light, and the sun rose from a strange place and recalled the fresh morning on these same streets here, when we were going westward.

  An early bus, full of agrarians with ruddy flesh, wearing hats and moustaches, the men too. They were in a farmer’s convention. The hostess conducted a quiz for them with trinkets as prizes. At a makeshift clinic they all climbed off the bus and received injections.

  We fell asleep again, in a terrible exhaustion.

  WE lost each other a second time. On the steep blazing inclines of Ciudad Bolivar, we were knocking about from posada to posada, rejected by each, directed finally towards one with a possible vacancy, when she flung her bag to the ground.

  ‘I ain’t walking.’

  We’d been on the road two hours short of twenty-four, four buses including the local. It was not a time for cajoling.

  ‘It ain’t walking to us.’

  ‘Is the blasted bag,’ she said, landing a kick on it.

  Her eyes were shot. There was a rash on her legs, from a spider she said.

  ‘Just a few minutes more. We’ll have our own bed and room again.’

  ‘We got to take a taxi.’

  ‘You seen one?’

  ‘I ain’t walking.’

  ‘Wait, then. I’ll go see if they got room or not.’

  ‘And leave me alone with the bags? You ain’t feel no shame at all?’

  Now that was a provocation.

  ‘I gon carry all three bags with me.’

  I did. It was an act of dumb pride. She sat on the abandoned steps of a corner and left me to my foolishness.

  I struggled with the bags, grunting. There was room at the posada. I went back to fetch her. And I got lost in that slopey maze. I passed places that I knew I had passed already. The colours on the walls swirled before my eyes. The strawberry corner of our estrangement was elusive. When I did find it she was no longer there. What the fuck.

  It was forty-five minutes before we saw each other, she walking downhill, eyes still shot, I uphill, a hopeless moment.

  THE truth about travel and relationships is much the same. To ride the highs one must hate the lows, or at any rate feel some form of passion for them. Else what is the point? Frustration rationed is frustration wasted.

  So it was that gratification followed. It was the stillness, the stillness after the motion. Our room was a simple rectangle. It had a window of amber glass, filtering sunlight to the texture of honey. A door opened to the roof-terrace, all to us. From here one could look at the bright clay tiles down the slope, the wrought iron grilles, the changing colours on the walls, jade, opal, corn, crimson.

  In the room and on the roof we luxuriated for two days. We slept like babies. We fucked with long intuitive pacing. We got Alizé Gold Passion and pizza and had them on a sheet under the waning moon.

  Still, heavy Angosturan days. Alizé on fresh fruit and ice. An absence of strain, which was loaded. I could not tell if our understanding was secure or non-existent.

  Outside, the city had resonances. It was old like Coro, the same lyrical air blowed through it. It was a lookout point, this hill. Somewhere there was a fort. The slopes went down to the riverfront. Orinoco, in the very name you could feel the proximity of the looted Caribbean, ruthless doomed conquistadors and their hunt for El Dorado, Raleigh and his stupendous hallucinations. You could feel the proximity of Guyana, a river that was large and dirty, though this was the narrows of the Orinoco.

  Despite the proximity Guyana meant nothing, not even the word. In the morning, while she readied herself for the day, I went out searching for a way back over the border. Nobody had a clue. Travel agents stared at their computers and offered tickets to Georgetown, USA. The guidebook said nothing. The only good tip came from a Trinidadian waiter at a pastelleria, a phone number for Gomattie, a Guyanese vendor in the city of San Felix.

  When I returned home she’d soaked all the clothes. She glistened naked among them. ‘Look how nasty they get.’ We washed them, spread them on the roof to dry in the Indian way. The domesticity: from afar someone might have thought us man and reputed wife. Time together is so frightening. One is running out of points to make. One is unravelling all the while, stripped to basics.

  I learnt her suspicion extended to detergent. She held that it coloured water grey to fool people about how much it cleaned. Her suspicions were not to be misunderstood. I was realising that she believed in things. She believed in top-loading detergents vs front-loading detergents vs hand-washing detergents, in garbage liners as opposed to plastic bags. Arguably no escapery in her. Her quitting the job, that wasn’t to be misconstrued. Her ambition was different from mine, not the flimsy ambition of journeys but of destinations. In five years I wasn’t sure if I would be anywhere, but she probably would. She was formidable. She knew childbirth. If we were in battle I suspected I would lose.

  She was prepared to tackle the world because the world to her was not absurd. To think the world absurd is a priv
ilege. Those who do so consider themselves enlightened. In fact, it only means their struggles are shallow. Sooner or later the real world will rain down upon them. That, or we shall go slowly mad, or seek recourse in meditation, narcotics, writing.

  Laundry, amber light, silent streets: stillness which was mounting. And then, on a drunken second night, the bottom fell out.

  A lavish meal in a posh courtyard, Bailey’s and whiskeys in a bar of Europeans. We were staggering through the slopes, laughing with liquor, the ochres so pale in the moonlight, washed out like shells. She squealed as I almost fell into a dry gutter, scratching my arm. Staggering and squealing, we tumbled arm in arm into our room on the roof. I sang a folk song Uncle Lance used to sing.

  Ah Nora darling, don’t you wake me fore day morning. She turned me towards her.

  Me go give you polish furniture, me go give you pressure cooker. ‘My grandfather would sing that,’ she said softly. She looked at me with a look I shall never forget, deep affection, in that instant like adoration, and I was consumed for a long moment by the thought of what really was going on between us, when she caught me offguard.

  ‘You carryin me back to India, right?’

  ‘Of course, jaan.’

  ‘Be serious, man.’

  ‘It’s not a nice place. I don’t think you’ll like there.’

  ‘I could decide that for myself.’

  ‘Well, leh we get to Guyana first nuh.’

  ‘I knew it! I knew it! All you is the focking same.’

  ‘What do you mean!’

  She pulled away.

  Me go give you cement bed gal, me go give you miniskirt gal, I sang but the mood had changed. I tried to look at her, but she averted her bitter brown eyes. The Alizé had swigs left in it. The sour was tingling on a corroded tongue. I tried to offer her some, went around to her from the other side of the bed. Ah Nora darling, don’t you wake me fore day morning, I sang again, but there was no response at all.