by Peter Carey
They seemed to say that this was not possible.
But Jacques, still wearing the layers of shirt and coat, his eyes bloodshot from diesel smoke and dust, insisted. I did not understand the language, but I was once again impressed by both his politeness and his tenacity. Twice he managed to make them laugh. He was obviously witty with their language and you could see they liked him for it, but there was, it seemed, some problem with the propane gas – there was not enough propane, or there was propane, but they could not spare it for hot water.
‘Don’t … worry … mo-ami,’ I said.
When I spoke, all eyes turned on me, almost all eyes – not Jacques’: he was the nurse, it was his job to bathe me at six p.m. and he planned to do it.
I turned to Wally, but Wally was sleeping, sitting on a sack of corn flour. He had unlaced his precious canvas shoes, removed his socks, and exposed his big pale wrinkled feet. His big high forehead was propped in his dry hands.
‘Tell … them …’ I said to Jacques. ‘I … don’t … need … a … bath …’
Six pairs of dark eyes returned to stare at me, the creature in the chair. I placed my large red-knuckled hands across my mouth, but as my mother would have said, That does not help at all.’ Ashamed of my ugliness, I made myself worse – a praying mantis with red knuckles.
A grey-haired old woman crossed herself and then held a tea towel across her mouth. The men looked down at their bare feet and shook their heads.
No one looked at neat little Jacques. They all stared at the thing in the wheelchair until I was forced to stare back at them like I had once stared at Ultras in motel dining rooms.
While the lamps roared, the men began to argue again, their soft voices sliding upwards in glissandos of ever increasing indignation. The foreign insects gathered in suiciding swarms around the hissing lamps.
I stared out past my audience into the shadowed recesses of the store. In the corner, there was a large red table stacked high with car batteries. Beside it, there sat a pretty dark-haired girl of perhaps seventeen. While her family brought their attention to the problem of the amount of propane a bath would consume, how to price it, what to charge, she began to pull a blue plastic brush through her long straight hair. She closed her eyes against the blue-white light of the propane lamps. She put her oval face a little to one side.
I stayed in my wheelchair carrying my big knobbly knuckles in my lap. The girl brushed her long shining hair. I watched her, my heart aching at what I could not have – the small flat ears, the straight, slightly haughty nose, the high round forehead, a slight asymmetry in her lips, the dark hair on her pale olive arms, the green and yellow geometric print on her cotton dress. She knew she was being watched. She felt my eyes.
‘All right,’ Jacques called to me. ‘Bath-time. Warm water.’
I did not wish the girl to see me nod and dribble. I put my forefinger along my cheek, my thumb under my chin.
My nurse wheeled me into a dark passageway, then bumped me down a step on to a cracked concrete-floored veranda which was piled high with cardboard cartons and sacks of flour. There were candles burning inside punctured tin cans, placed on top of the cartons. Banana trees pressed in from the outside and rested their torn leaves on the piles of produce. The air was sweet with honeysuckle, rancid with sewage. Jacques set up the expanding travel bath – clips, locks, five pages of directions. He filled it with water, folded a towel, and placed some soap in a saucer. Then he turned to me and began to undress me.
‘Towel,’ I said.
‘No one wants to see your porpoise.’
‘To … hide … the … jon … kay.’
‘What?’
‘Jon … kay.’
‘Oh – jon-kay. Sorry.’ He held up the towel so that as I stepped out of the chair he could arrange it around my shoulders. I held it closed around my neck, staring out into the strange-smelling night, while he slowly, secretly, like a photographer changing his film inside a black bag, began to peel off my bandage inside the cover of the towel, and let the Voorstand Guilders fall in soft parcels beside my curtained calloused ankles.
My skin was so sore, my limbs so tired. When the bandage was removed we let the towel fall on top of our money and Jacques lifted me, naked as a worm, into the bath. The water was hot and stung my torn skin, but it smelt of roses, and I could hear the brothers’ voices, perhaps arguing, perhaps not.
What did Jacques really think of the creature it was his task to care for? It would be a good time yet before the truth would be revealed. For now he did his job, washing me in a way that did not make me feel ashamed. He was gentle, careful. I closed my eyes. I felt the warm water, inhaled the oddly perfumed soap. The banana trees rustled, and the leaves scratched at the tops of the cardboard boxes. The air on my face was warm, almost oily, and I realized, with some shock, that it was not triggering any phobic tremors. Perhaps it was physical tiredness, but it was most unexpected – to feel safer in this foreign land than I had inside my own home.
When the bath was done, he towelled me dry. He laid me on another towel and oiled my red bandage-sore back and then my stomach. I opened my eyes and saw, behind his shoulder, an audience.
The girl with the long hair stood in the doorway, a child in her arms. I was half drunk with massage, numbed, sleepy. She stared straight at me, expressionless, and my porpoise, I could not help it, slowly stood erect before her gaze. Our eyes met for a second. She did not shudder and contort her face but stared at me with an open kind of wonder. When she turned, she turned in her own good time, not modestly, but politely. She turned and she went away.
In the morning, when we were leaving in the truck, this same girl came out and gave me a small white flower. That’s all. Wally argued about the cost of the accommodation. Jacques translated. The girl gave me a flower, and then we went.
Jacques rode in the cabin. Wally and I rode in the back of the truck, amongst hundreds of pumpkins. She saw me naked. From the total disinterested goodness of her heart, she gave me a flower. Then we rode in the back of a truck, quietly, in the world.
8
I sat in my wheelchair surrounded by green pumpkins, the flower clasped in my big bony hands, and everything I saw – the big-leafed trees, the dark little shops, the lolly-pink advertising signs – was new. The air was sweet and rank with diesel. Talcum-fine dust covered my skin. The sky was overcast, but soft and velvety. I sniffed the flower, brushed its fleshy petal on my upper lip.
‘Here,’ Wally said. ‘Here, give it to me.’
I shook my head.
‘I’ll take care of it,’ he said.
The truck sounded its horn and blew a neat column of black exhaust up into the pearl-grey sky.
‘It’s … OK …’
‘It’s just a weed,’ he said. ‘Look out-it’s sappy.’
If it was a weed, it was a pretty one. It had fleshy creamy petals like a frangipani, and the stalk was – as he said – sappy. That flower was precious to me. It produced in me the most exquisite melancholy, a kind of yearning, a profound unhappiness, an erotic kind of grief.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘It’s dripping. You’ll get dirty.’
‘It’s … OK …’ I said.
His back pained him, always, but now he stood up in the lurching truck, for no other reason than to take my flower away. I pulled it out of his reach. The poor old fellow tottered and fell backwards into the pumpkins. It must have hurt him, but he did not cry out or curse. When he had himself seated again there were ochre clay marks on his white canvas frippes, and his ear lobes were very red.
My dab could not leave his frippes like this. He balanced himself on a large green gourd and set to cleaning himself with his handkerchief, spitting and rubbing, fastidious as a cat.
The truck was what we call a Teuf-Teuf. Its rings were bad, its timing out. I could feel its broken springs through my spine.
‘You … should … sit … in … the … cabin,’ I said. ‘Let … Jacques … sit … out … here … wit
h … me.’
‘Just throw it out,’ he said.
‘Sit … up … front … keep … your … trousers … clean.’
‘It doesn’t mean nothing,’ he said, spitting on the corner of his handkerchief. ‘She gave you a flower, that’s all, a weed.’
‘I … know … mollo … mollo.’
My dab folded his handkerchief carefully and jutted his chin at the landscape – red and yellow clay, bright green foliage, creepers with orange and red flowers growing over collapsing ramparts.
‘It’s … pretty … here …’
‘Pretty?’ he almost spat. His grey eyes, when they turned to me, were filled with upset. ‘You don’t even know their language.’
‘The … creepers … the … trees.’
‘Throw the fucking thing away,’ he said. ‘She couldn’t even talk to you if she wanted to. There’s no one here to sew you up if you go slashing yourself. Just remember that.’
‘That … was … six … years … ago.’
‘Give me the flower, Tristan,’ he said. ‘Don’t do this to yourself.’
I turned my head away from him.
‘I knew this was going to happen,’ he said. ‘There’s going to be women everywhere. You’re going to have to learn to deal with it. Look at me. You know what I’m talking about.’
What he was talking about was Phonella.
Phonella was my nurse from ages twelve to sixteen. It was because of Phonella we agreed not to hire women again. It was because of Phonella that we had Jean-Claude, lived all those years with sour-smelling men: whiskers, sweat, nothing in the vases. When the incident with Phonella occurred I was sixteen years old and she was twenty.
Phonella was passionate about the ruins of Angkor Wat. She had clear unblemished blue eyes and wild curling red hair. She was kind and soft with me, but when my porpoise stood on end she thought I needed to make pipi. I thought I was aware of myself, but I had no idea who I was. I fell in love with Phonella, completely, hopelessly. I could barely sleep for thinking of her. I woke at dawn, just waiting to see her sweet triangular face again.
‘Girls like that, they do things and never think about the consequences. She gives you a flower – she doesn’t think what it means to you. She’s not thinking you’re a man. It isn’t on her mind.’
‘Shut up,’ I cried. I threw the flower at him. It was a poor twisted sappy thing. It fell into his lap and he picked it up and, as the truck swayed and growled up the steep rutted road towards the high saw-tooth silhouettes of the Mountains of the Moon, he dropped it over the side. The truck ran over it, I guess, squashed it, broke it.
‘You wouldn’t want to live here, son.’
I was too hurt and ashamed to speak.
‘It’s not so pretty.’
‘I … don’t … want … to … live … here.’
It was then we smelt the burning rubber. A tyre had blown but the condition of the road was so bad that no one – certainly not Aziz – detected it before the tyre was ripped to pieces and the truck was running on its rim. Wally stood – remember, it was not an easy thing for him to do – and began to strike at the cabin roof with his walking stick. The truck continued to roar and crash towards the border and Wally – hoping to attract the driver’s attention – began to pitch pumpkins over the cabin. Three pumpkins later, the truck stopped, and Aziz presented himself at the tail gate, his eyes dark, shaking his finger, but not about damage to the truck.
These are not my pumpkins,’ he said.
‘Pumpkins? Wally jumped from the tray and landed on the roadside with a small cry of pain. Tor Chrissakes, mo-ami,’ he said, grimacing, and holding his hand against his coccyx, ‘can’t you smell? You’ve got a blow-out.’
‘They are my brother’s pumpkins,’ said Aziz.
‘You don’t drive on a blown sock,’ Wally said to Aziz. ‘Do you understand, Aziz? You fuck the rim. The rim, mo-ami.’
The roadside was no longer deserted. Behind Aziz there had appeared, from nowhere, three men with coarse black trousers, grubby white shirts, bare dusty feet and wide black hats. One of these men had a brand new wheelbarrow. Another (whose sideburns echoed Aziz’s) carried an antique military rifle. There were also several small children, four or five of them – I did not count.
There was no house or vehicle they could have come from, but they were there, and together they stared, not at the smoking torn rear tyre, not at hunched-over Wally or handsome Jacques, whose white sneakers were enclosed in plastic bags. They stared at me, the monster in his wheelchair on the back of the truck, rocking back and forth as he tried to free himself from his nest of pumpkins.
‘You have to pay for the pumpkins,’ Aziz now said to Wally.
‘For Chrissakes – you blew a sock. I was trying to get you to stop before you shredded it.’
‘No,’ said Aziz. The tyre is flat.’
‘Yes,’ said Wally. ‘The rim is wrecked as well.’
The man with the rifle stepped forward so that, had he not been a good foot taller, he would have stood shoulder to shoulder with Aziz. ‘We are poor peoples,’ he said. ‘He have only one tyre.’
Jacques spoke quickly to the man and listened carefully to his answer. ‘He means there’s no spare,’ Jacques said. ‘They wrecked their last spare yesterday.’
They gathered in a semi-circle, staring at the remnants of the ruined tyre.
‘You give me Guilders,’ Aziz said at last. ‘I go to Droogstroom and buy a new one. I come back tomorrow.’
‘OK,’ Wally said.
But I was the shapoh, not Wally. I was the one whose money it was. And I did not want to stay in the truck, being a freak on exhibition. ‘We’re … all … going … back,’ I called to Wally. ‘We’re … not … staying … here.’
Jacques began speaking to Aziz in creole.
‘Shut up,’ Wally shouted. ‘For Chrissakes, shut up everyone.’ Then to me he said, ‘Don’t make a dick of yourself. She just gave you a flower. She doesn’t want you. She just gave you a fucking flower.’
‘Shut … up …’ I hissed at Wally. ‘Don’t … talk … to … me … like … that … in … public …’ I was humiliated. My face was blazing.
‘How much further to the border?’ Wally asked Aziz.
‘Ten miles, fifteen.’
Wally left the semi-circle and came to the back of the truck tray. He brought his shining bony face up against mine. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m sorry how much this hurts, but I’m not taking you back near that girl.’
He turned. ‘We’ll walk,’ he said to Aziz. ‘Ask that man how much for the wheelbarrow?’
‘What about my truck, the pumpkins?’ Aziz said. ‘It is not possible to leave them here.’
The tall man with the rifle then said something to Aziz. Aziz said something back. They spoke earnestly, quietly, for some time. They might have been judges in chambers – such was their gravity. When they finished talking they stepped back a little from each other. Then Aziz gave the tall man his pistol and the tall man gave Aziz the rifle. Then they both crossed themselves and spat on the earth.
‘This will cost extra,’ Aziz said. ‘This is much more money.’
‘All right,’ said Wally. He did not ask how much. ‘No problem, mo-ami. No problem at all.’
Aziz watched him with his dark intelligent eyes. ‘It is ten miles.’
‘No problem.’
‘And I have to pay for the guard, and the pumpkins.’
‘No worries, mo-ami. We need to purchase his wheelbarrow as well.’
‘That’s … my … money … you’re … spending,’ I said.
‘I’m sorry,’ Wally said. ‘We’ll be in Voorstand tonight.’
My face never coloured evenly. When I was upset my nose streamed. I dribbled, and my head jerked and rolled. Wally picked me up. He was seventy-three years old. He curved his body around mine, and pinned my arms around my chest. ‘You want to get laid, son,’ he said, ‘it can happen in Saarlim. Anything can h
appen there.’
9
I am a passionate man, full of feelings and opinions, but I knew no woman wanted me and I knew no woman ever would. When I wanted to go back to Aziz’s store it was for two sane reasons: number one: I did not want to be stared at; number two: I did not want to sit out there in the open with all that money taped to me.
But Wally could not forget something that had happened six years ago, and I was therefore punished all over again, and the memory of the humiliation and pain, the darkness of the nights and days when I never wished to live again – the past all came back, while in the present we were compelled to exhaust ourselves, to push on toward the border in a ridiculous fashion, without dignity.
The convoy travelled in this order: first, Aziz with his rifle; second, Wally riding in the wheelbarrow; third, a squat broad-shouldered farmer with a black hat and bare feet, engaged to push the wheelbarrow; fourth, me in my chair; fifth, my stylish, uncomplaining nurse. Three children also followed for a little way, but by the time we came to the first stream, they had gone.
There was more audience for this silly spectacle than for any of my somersaults or tumbles at the Feu Follet, more than you might believe such a deserted-looking road could have delivered. All along the way there were knots of people standing – if they were waiting for something else, I don’t know what it was.
These people were extremely poor – you could see it in their skin, their clothes, but mostly in their dark, deep, recessed eyes and a sort of tension across their cheekbones that made them shine.
‘Goeie daag,’ Jacques said, not once, but many times.
No one answered him.
Occasionally a woman would cross herself. As we moved closer to the border the situation of these silent farmers seemed to become more desperate. They stood on their broad splayed bare feet staring at us, ammunition belts strapped diagonally across their chests, their eyes filled with awe, disgust, pity. They did not know that they were seeing 50,000 Guilders pass them by.