The Tomorrow-Tamer

by Margaret Laurence

  Mr. Archipelago, appalled at his blunder, answered humbly.

  “Am I God, that I should judge a creature? It is not the chameleon that is ugly, but I, for thinking him so. And now, looking at him more carefully, and seeing his skin grow darker against that dark branch where he is, I can see that he must be appreciated according to his own qualities, and not compared with butterflies, who are no doubt gaudy but who do not possess this interesting ability. You are right–he is beautiful.”

  “I don’t get it,” Doree said. “I never said he was beautiful.”

  “Well, then, I did. I do.”

  “You’re what they call ‘round the bend’, Archipelago. Never mind. Maybe so am I.”

  “We suit each other,” he replied.

  The evenings were spent quietly. They did not go out anywhere, nor did they entertain. They had always been considered socially non-existent by the European community, while in the Africans’ view they were standard Europeans and therefore apart. Mr. Archipelago and Doree did not mind. They preferred their own company. Mr. Archipelago possessed a gramophone which vied in antiquity with the wave-machine. Often after dinner he played through his entire repertoire of fourteen records, mainly Italian opera. He particularly liked to listen to Pagliacci, in order to criticize it.

  “Hear that!” he would cry to the inattentive Doree. “How sorry he is for himself! A storm of the heart–what a buffoon. Do you know his real tragedy? Not that he had to laugh when his heart was breaking–that is a commonplace. No–the unfortunate fact is that he really is a clown. Even in his desolation. A clown.”

  Doree, sitting on the mock-Persian carpet whose richness was not lessened for her by its label “Made in Brussels”, would placidly continue to talk to her two favourite parrots. She called them Brasso and Silvo, and Mr. Archipelago understood that this christening was meant as a compliment to him, these being the closest to Italian names she could manage.

  After work, Mr. Archipelago’s scarlet waistcoat was discarded in favour of an impressive smoking-jacket. It was a pale bluish-green Indian brocade, and the small cockerels on it were worked in thread of gold. Although it was a rather warm garment, Mr. Archipelago suffered his sweat for the sake of magnificence.

  “You look just like one of those what-d’you-call-’ems–you know, sultans,” Doree had once said admiringly.

  He remembered the remark each evening when he donned the jacket. Momentarily endowed with the hauteur of Haroun al Raschid, he would saunter nonchalantly through the Baghdad of his own living-room.

  Frequently they brought out their perfumes, of which they had a great variety, bottles and flagons of all colours and intricate shapes–crowns and hearts and flowers, diamonded, bubbled, baubled, angular and smooth. The game was to see how many could be identified by smell alone, the vessel masked, before the senses began to flag. Mr. Archipelago did not love the perfumes for themselves alone, nor even for their ability to cover the coarse reek of life. Each one, sniffed like snuff, conjured up for him a throng of waltzing ladies, whirling and spinning eternally on floors of light, their grey gowns swaying, ladies of gentle dust.

  Mr. Archipelago and Doree got along well with their one servant. Attah regularly told them the gossip of the town, although they cared about it not at all. He tended to be cantankerous; he would not be argued with; he served for meals the dishes of his own choice. They accepted him philosophically, but on one point they were adamant. They would not allow Attah’s wife and family to live within the walls of the compound. The family lived, instead, in the town. Mr. Archipelago and Doree never ceased to feel sorry about this separation, but they could not help it. They could not have endured to have the voices of children threatening their achieved and fragile quiet.

  Outside the green wall, however, and far from the sugared humidity of the small shop, events occurred. Governments made reports and politicians made speeches. Votes were cast. Supporters cheered and opponents jeered. Flags changed, and newspaper men typed furiously, recording history to meet a deadline. Along the shore, loin-clothed fishermen, their feet firm in the wet sand, grinned and shrugged, knowing they would continue to burn their muscles like quick torches, soon consumed, in the sea-grappling that claimed them now as always, but sensing, too, that the land in which they set their returning feet was new as well as old, and that they, unchanged, were new with it.

  In the town, the white men began to depart one by one, as their posts were filled by Africans. And in Mr. Archipelago’s shop, the whirr of the hair-dryer was heard less and less.

  Late one night Doree came downstairs in her housecoat, an unheard-of thing for her. Mr. Archipelago was sitting like a gloomy toad in his high-backed wicker armchair. He glanced up in surprise.

  “It’s my imagination again,” she said. “It’s been acting up.”

  Doree suffered periodic attacks of imagination, like indigestion or migraine. She spoke of it always as though it were an affliction of a specific organ, as indeed it was, for her phrenology charts placed the imagination slightly above the forehead, on the right side. Mr. Archipelago brought another wicker chair for her and gave her a little creme-de-cacao in her favourite liqueur glass, a blinding snow-shadow blue, frosted with edelweiss.

  “It’s two months,” Doree said, sipping, “since the Webley-Pryces left. I don’t know how many are gone now. Almost all, I guess. I heard today that Bridgeford & Knight are putting in an African manager. The last perm we gave was nearly a month ago. This week only three haircuts and one shampoo-and-set. Archipelago–what are we going to do?”

  He looked at her dumbly. He could give her no comfort.

  “Could we go someplace else?” she went on. “Sierra Leone? Liberia?”

  “I have thought of that,” he said. “Yes, perhaps we shall have to consider it.”

  They both knew they did not have sufficient money to take them anywhere else.

  “Please–” He hesitated. “You must not be upset, or I cannot speak at all–”

  “Go on,” she said roughly. “What is it?”

  “Did you know,” Mr. Archipelago questioned sadly, “that if an expatriate is without funds, he can go to the consulate of his country, and they will send him back?”

  She lowered her head. Her yellow hair, loose, fell like unravelled wool around her, scarfing the bony pallor of her face.

  “I’ve heard that–yes.”

  Mr. Archipelago pushed away his creme-de-cacao, the sweetness of which had begun to nauseate him. His incongruously small feet in their embroidered slippers pattered across the concrete floor. He returned with Dutch ale.

  “I have never asked,” he said. “And you have never asked, and now I must break the rule. Could you go back? Could you, Doree, if there was nothing else to do?”

  Doree lit a cigarette from the end of the last one.

  “No,” she replied in a steady, strained voice. “Not even if there was nothing else to do.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “My God–” she said. “Yes, I’m sure all right.”

  Mr. Archipelago did not ask why. He brought his hands together in a staccato clap.

  “Good. We know where we stand. Enough of this, then.”

  “No,” she said. “What about you?”

  “It is very awkward,” he said, “but unfortunately I cannot go back, either.”

  She did not enquire further. For her, too, his word was sufficient.

  “But Archipelago, the Africans won’t let us stay if we’re broke. We’re not their responsibility–”

  “Wait–” Mr. Archipelago said. “I have just remembered something.”

  Beside his chair, a carved wooden elephant bore a small table on its back. Mr. Archipelago groped underneath and finally opened a compartment in the beast’s belly. He took out an object wrapped in tissue paper.

  “I have always liked this elephant,” he said. “See–a concealed hiding place. Very cloak-and-dagger. A treasure–no, a toy–such as Columbus might have brought back from his tr
avels. He was once in West Africa, you know, as a young seaman, at one of the old slave-castles not far from here. And he, also, came from Genoa. Well, well. There the similarity ends. This necklace is one I bought many years ago. I have always saved it. I thought I was being very provident–putting away one gold necklace to insure me against disaster. It is locally made–crude, as you can see, but heavy. Ashanti gold, and quite valuable.”

  Doree looked at it without interest.

  “Very nice,” she said. “But we can’t live off that forever.”

  “No, but it will give you enough money to live in the city until you find work. More Europeans will be staying there, no doubt, and we know there are several beauty salons. At least it is a chance. For me, the worst would be for you not to have any chance–”

  Mr. Archipelago perceived that he had revealed too much. He squirmed and sweated, fearful that she would misunderstand. But when he looked at her, he saw in her eyes not alarm but surprise.

  “The necklace and all–” Doree said slowly. “You’d do that–for me?”

  Mr. Archipelago forgot about himself in the urgency of convincing her.

  “For you, Doree,” he said. “Of course, for you. If only it were more–”

  “But–it’s everything–”

  “Yes, everything,” he said bitterly. “All I have to offer. A fragment of gold.”

  “I want you to know,” she said, her voice rough with tears, “I want you to know I’m glad you offered. Now put the necklace back in the elephant and let’s leave it there. We may need it worse, later.”

  “You won’t take it?” he cried. “Why not?”

  “Because you haven’t told me yet what’s gonna happen to you,” Doree said. “And anyway, I don’t want to go to another place.”

  He could not speak. She hurried on.

  “If I wasn’t here,” she said, with a trembling and apologetic laugh, “who’d remind you to put on your hat in the boiling sun? Who’d guess the perfumes with you?”

  “I would miss you, of course,” he said in a low voice. “I would miss you a great deal.”

  She turned on him, almost angrily.

  “Don’t you think I’d miss you?” she cried. “Don’t you know how it would be–for me?”

  They stared at each other, wide-eyed, incredulous. Mr. Archipelago lived through one instant of unreasonable and terrifying hope. Then, abruptly, he became once more aware of himself, oddly swathed in Indian brocade and holding in his fat perspiring hands an ale-glass and a gold necklace.

  Doree’s eyes, too, had become distant and withdrawn. She was twisting a sweat-lank strand of her hair around one wrist.

  “We’re getting ourselves into a stew over nothing,” she said at last. “Nobody’s gonna be leaving. Everything will be just the same as always. Listen, Archipelago, I got a hunch we’re due for a lucky break. I’m sure of it. Once I met a spiritualist–a nice old dame–I really went for that ouija-board stuff in those days–well, she told me I had natural ability. I had the right kind of an aura. Yeh, sure it’s phony, I know that. But my hunches are hardly ever wrong. Shall we shake on it?”

  Gravely, they shook hands and drank to the lucky break. Mr. Archipelago began to tell stories about the tourists with whom, as a boy, he used to practise his shaky English, and how nervous they always were of getting goat’s milk in their tea.

  They talked until the pressure lamp spluttered low and the floor beneath it was littered with the beige and broken wings of moths. Doree went upstairs then, singing a snatch of an African highlife tune in her warm raw voice. But later, Mr. Archipelago, queasy with beer and insomnia, heard once again the sound that used to be so frequent when she first came to this house, her deep and terrible crying in her sleep.

  They had had no customers at all for a fortnight, but still they opened the shop each morning and waited until exactly four o’clock to close it. One morning Tachie strolled in, prosperous in a new royal blue cloth infuriatingly patterned with golden coins. He was a large man; the warm room with its sweet cloying air seemed too small to hold his brown ox-shoulders, his outflung arms, his great drum of a voice.

  “Mistah Arch’pelago, why you humbug me? Two month, and nevah one penny I getting. You t’ink I rich too much? You t’ink I no need for dis money?”

  Mr. Archipelago, standing beside his idle transmutation machine and sagging gradually like a scarlet balloon with the air sinking out of it, made one unhopeful effort at distracting Tachie.

  “Can I offer you a beer, Mr. Tachie? A light refreshing ale at this time of day–”

  Tachie grimaced.

  “You t’ink I drink beer wey come from my shop an’ nevah been pay at all? No, I t’ank you. I no drink dis beer–he too cost, for me. Mistah Arch’pelago, you trouble me too much. What we do, eh?”

  Mr. Archipelago’s skin looked sallower than usual. His eyes were dull and even his crisp neat hair had become limp. Doree held out large and pitying hands towards him, but she could not speak.

  “In life as in death, the rent must be paid,” he said. “We have been dreaming, dreaming, while the world moved on, and now we waken to find it so changed we do not know what to do. We wanted only to stay and not to harm anyone, but of course you are right, Mr. Tachie, to remind us it is not enough. One must always have a product to sell that someone wants to buy. We do not have much of anything any more, but we will try to pay our debts before we move on. Perhaps a museum will buy my wave-machine after all.”

  Doree put her hands over her face, and Tachie, horrified, looked from one to the other, still unable to grasp the actuality of their despair.

  “You no got money–at all? De time wey I come for you shop, I anger too much for you. Now angry can no stay for me. My friend, I sorry. Befoah God, I too sorry. But what I can do?”

  “It is not your concern,” Mr. Archipelago said with dignity. “We do not expect you to let us stay. We are not appealing for charity.”

  But Tachie could not stop justifying himself.

  “I look-a de shop, I see Eur’pean womans all dey gone, I see you no got lucky. But I no savvy propra. I t’ink you got money you put for bank. Now I see wit’ my eye you tell me true, you no got nothing. But what I can do? I no be rich man. I got shop, I got dis place. But I got plenty plenty family, all dey come for me, all dey say ‘Tachie, why you no give we more?’ My own pickin dey trouble me too much. My daughtah Mercy, she big girl, all time she saying ‘meka you buy for me one small new cloth, meka you buy powdah for face, meka you buy shoe same city girl dey wear it–’”

  Mr. Archipelago peered sharply at Tachie.

  “Your daughter–facepowder–shoes–she, too, is changed–”cloth, but her face was thickly daubed with a pale powder that

  “I tell you true. Mistah Arch’pelago, why you’re looking so?”

  The balloon that was Mr. Archipelago suddenly became re-inflated. He began to spin on one foot, whistled a Viennese waltz, bounced across the room, grasped Doree’s hand, drew her into his comprehension and his laughter. Together they waltzed, absurd, relieved, triumphant.

  “Mr. Tachie, you are a bringer of miracles!” Mr. Archipelago cried. “There it was, all the time, and we did not see it. We, even we, Doree, will make history–you will see.”

  Tachie frowned, bewildered.

  “I see it happen so, for white men, wen dey stay too long for dis place. Dey crez’. Mistah Arch’pelago, meka you drink some small beer. Den you head he come fine.”

  “No, no, not beer,” Mr. Archipelago replied, puffing out his waistcoat. “Here–a flask kept for medicinal purposes or special celebrations. A brandy, Mr. Tachie! A brandy for the history-makers!”

  He and Doree laughed until they were weak. And Tachie, still not understanding, but pleased that they were in some lunatic fashion pleased, finally laughed with them and consented to drink the unpaid-for brandy.

  That evening they painted the new sign. They worked until midnight, with tins and brushes spread out on the dining-room table,
while Brasso and Silvo squawked and stared. The sign was black and gilt, done in optimistically plump lettering:

  ARCHIPELAGO & DOREE

  Barbershop

  All-Beauty Salon

  African Ladies A Speciality

  The men of the town continued, not unnaturally, to have their hair cut by the African barbers who plied their trade under the niim tree in the market. The African women, however, showed great interest in the new sign. They gathered in little groups and examined it. The girls who had attended school read the words aloud to their mothers and aunts. They murmured together. Their laughter came in soft gusts, like the sound of the wind through the casuarina branches. But not one of them would enter the shop.

  Several times Mr. Archipelago saw faces peeping in at the window, scrutinizing every detail of the room. But as soon as he looked, the curious ones lowered their eyes and quickly walked away.

  The hair-straightening equipment (obtained secondhand, and on credit, through Tachie) remained unused. Each day Doree dusted and set back on the counter the unopened packets and jars of dusky powder and cinnamon-brown make-up base which she had hurriedly ordered from the city when she discovered that the Africa Star Chemists, slightly behind the times, sold only shades of ivory and peach.

  Another week, and still no customers. Then one morning, as Mr. Archipelago was opening his second bottle of Dutch ale, Mercy Tachie walked in.

  “Please, Mr. Archipelago–” she began hesitantly. “I am thinking to come here for some time, but I am not sure what I should do. We have never had such a place in our town before, you see. So all of us are looking, but no one wishes to be the first. Then my father, he said to me today that I should be the first, because if you are having no customers, he will never be getting his money from you.”

  Mercy was about sixteen. She was clad in traditional cloth, but her face was thickly daubed with a pale powder that obscured her healthy skin. She stood perfectly still in the centre of the room, her hands clasped in front of her, her face expressionless. Mr. Archipelago looked in admiration at the placidity of her features, a repose which he knew concealed an extreme nervousness and perhaps even panic, for in her life there had not been many unfamiliar things. He motioned her to a chair, and she sat down woodenly.