The Ventriloquist's Tale

by Pauline Melville

  ‘Not much really. I had gone to work on the Brazilian border. Oh I spent the happiest days of my life there. Riding. Outdoors. There’s nothing so sweet as the savannah breeze.’

  Rosa settled down to what she realised might be a circuitous route to any information about Waugh.

  ‘I worked for one of the McKinnon family – Wifreda. The McKinnons were a big Amerindian family. Well, Amerindian and some European. But they were mainly thought of as “buck” people. I met Wifreda when she came on her annual trip to Georgetown for supplies. She was looking for someone to come and teach her children. There were no schools or anything like that there. And some of the McKinnons had become quite prosperous through ranching – although they never really stopped living Indian-style.

  ‘Well, I was young and adventurous and so I volunteered. I went up the cattle trail. Wifreda McKinnon was still young then, although she had six children. She was a typical Indian. She din explain anything to me. Watch and copy is the Indian way. They don’ ask questions. You’re expected to find out for yourself. All she said to me was: “Don’ carry much. Wear boots because of the tics.”

  ‘Well, half the bloody horses died on the journey. We had to light fires at night because of the tigers. At one point we saw the creek water still shaking where a tiger had crossed just ahead of us. We had saltfish and cocoa in the morning and then nothing till rice and saltfish at night. The longest day’s walk was twenty-one and a half miles through the bush. You have to keep up. Nobody waits for anybody. Sometimes we walked through mud from ankle to knee. When we came to the savannahs, I rushed to soak in one of the creeks. I was so dry, there was no saliva in my mouth.

  ‘Wifreda McKinnon barely spoke all the way. Later, I learned it was shyness. She was all right with other Indians but with strangers she went quiet. I found her a shut up, silent sort of character. And her eyes were bad. Sometimes she would stumble and the other Indians would laugh. They have a cruel side to them, you know.’

  Rosa tried to turn the conversation back to Evelyn Waugh.

  ‘Oh yes.’ Nancy bit off the green embroidery thread with her teeth. ‘Well, one day this Englishman turned up out of the blue on horseback. He said he was a writer and looking for material. Later we heard that he had come that far because he had trouble with a woman. I remember he arrived on an Ash Wednesday.’

  Rosa fiddled with her pen.

  ‘What else do you remember about him?’

  ‘Not a great deal. We felt sorry for him. Poor man. He was so out of place. He sat out in the open that first day and that was when I gave him a haircut. Nobody really knew what the hell he was doing there. Danny McKinnon, Wifreda’s brother, was obliged to sit and listen to him reading out loud for hours – Dickens, I think.’

  Rosa noted that down.

  ‘For all that he was looking for material, he missed one story that was under his nose.’

  ‘What was that?’

  A tone crept into Nancy Freeman’s voice which Rosa recognised as the reluctance of someone giving in to her better judgement and forgoing the pleasure of muck-raking.

  ‘We … ell. I’m not sure that I should say too much about that. You say you are going there?’ She said cautiously.

  ‘Yes. I’m going to see if there is anyone left who remembers him. I’m going next month.’

  ‘If you find any of the McKinnons they will be able to tell you about Mr Waugh. The other business had to do with Danny McKinnon and one of his sisters. Her name was Beatrice. Wifreda confided in me. Perhaps you shouldn’t enquire about it. It might cause trouble. I don’t know why Mr Waugh didn’t write about that. He certainly knew about it.’

  ‘Perhaps it was not Evelyn Waugh’s sort of story.’

  ‘Perhaps not. But it interested me. I only met Beatrice McKinnon once, many years later. You see, when I first arrived in the Rupununi she had already left and gone to Canada – because of this … matter. People even said that she might be liable for criminal prosecution. But the Rupununi was so remote, the law didn’t really reach there. She only came back to the country once, as far as I know, and even then she did not return to the Rupununi.

  ‘I met her on that one occasion. I had already left the savannahs by then and gone to live in Berbice. Word came upriver that a Mr and Mrs Horatio Sands were returning to the country and would be staying with the Superintendent of Public Works.

  ‘Well, I knew that Mrs Horatio Sands was Beatrice McKinnon. I was very curious about her because of what Wifreda had told me and because I had taught Beatrice’s son. I made sure that I was invited to tea. We were introduced. She looked like any Canadian matron but with an Indian build. Short and thickset. You often see that with Indians, the slimmest of girls turning into stout women. Her hair was still jet black and scraped back into a knot. Her husband was Canadian, a gangly, mild-mannered sort of man.

  ‘Late in the afternoon, she and I went walking out on a little patch of savannah. I told her I knew her family in the Rupununi, that I had lived with Wifreda for a while.

  ‘ “Oh, is that so?” she said and she stood still on the dry earth for a moment. Everything seemed to go quiet. I even thought the keskidee birds stopped singing. The sun was prickling the back of my neck. Then she continued to stroll, stooping every now and then to take up one of those small white savannah flowers – the ones that look like moonshine. Burial-ground flowers, I think they call them. I waited for her to enquire about her family – Danny or her son, or Wifreda or anyone. But she never said another word and after a quarter of an hour or so, we returned to the house.’

  The interview was clearly at an end. Rosa had imagined she would uncover a wealth of information about Evelyn Waugh and there was not much at all.

  Nancy Freeman saw her to the door.

  ‘I can’t remember any more. Oh, his feet were bad. He walked with a snake-wood stick. You must find the McKinnons. If Wifreda is still alive she would remember. I’ve lost touch with them all now.’

  Rosa lost her concentration and put the notebook away. She glanced through the window. Down below, Mr Aristotle Crane, the elderly carpenter who worked at the Lodge, was seated at his leisure, contemplating the world from a stack of lumber.

  She dashed off two postcards, one to her daughter who was a student in Manchester and one to her ex-husband in Holland. To pass time, she looked at a map and tried to find the Rupununi. Her eyes wandered from the mapped interior to the coast. Villages and plantations had names which reminded her of The Pilgrim’s Progress: Whim, Adventure, Perseverance, Makeshift. Then she put the map away and consulted her watch. Chofy McKinnon had said he would come to pick her up around now.

  A few seconds later, she looked down and saw him waiting at the gate in his brightly coloured shirt.

  Where the Frogs Meet to Mate

  The visit to Pakuri was nearly a disaster.

  All through the week, Chofy had alternated between euphoria and the desperate conviction that he had imagined everything, that Rosa could never find him attractive. All the same, he fantasised about the trip to Pakuri in great detail: how he would cut water-coconuts for her to drink; show her the kingfishers flying alongside the creek; bathe together with her by the landing. The daydreams always got stuck at a certain point and he had to go back to the beginning and start again. Imagination brings on the event, his grandmother used to say.

  The bush village of Pakuri nestled in forest some sixty miles from the coast. The truck was full of Lokono Arawaks returning home for the weekend. As soon as they had left the open savannah and the green tunnel of forest closed over them, Chofy worried because he thought he saw Rosa flinch with a sort of claustrophobia.

  ‘What does Pakuri mean?’ she asked.

  ‘Where the frogs meet to mate,’ replied a short man with protruding teeth.

  After a three-hour drive, the truck rumbled into a silent village with troolie-palm-roofed houses built on stilts in white sandy soil. As they climbed down from the vehicle, Chofy got cold feet. Instead of strolling acr
oss to the creek with her and going for a bathe as he had planned, in his nervousness he dumped Rosa unceremoniously with some women and disappeared to find his cousin and fortify himself with liquor.

  His cousin Tenga’s house was at the far edge of a second clearing. Tenga knelt outside plaiting rows of troolie-palm leaves for the roof of a neighbour’s house. Tenga was short, his face creased by the sun. His hands stank with the glutinous smell of the leaves. He stood up, wiped his hands on his jeans, winked at Chofy and nodded over to a tumbledown hut where they could buy rum.

  ‘Let’s go to Jonestown.’

  ‘Why do you call it Jonestown?’ asked Chofy, bemused.

  ‘Because people go in there and disappear,’ laughed Tenga.

  They began to toss back the sweet liquor.

  ‘How are things?’ enquired Chofy, relaxing as the rum cut a warm trail down to his stomach.

  ‘OK. I want to go back to the Rupununi. I miss my farine and my shibi. But my wife’s family are all here and she don’t want to leave.’ He sighed.

  ‘I’ve brought a woman here.’ Chofy could not resist introducing the subject casually but with elation. ‘She’s paying. That’s the only way I could afford to come.’

  ‘What kind of woman? A tourist?’

  ‘No. She’s come to do some work. Research.’

  Tenga grunted.

  ‘They’re the worst. It’s like a zoo here. People come and stare at this village because it’s the nearest to Georgetown. We smile and give them gifts, little pieces of craft and so. We who don’t have shit, find ourselves giving things to these people. We don’t show them what grows fastest here — the children’s part of the burial ground.’

  The two of them began to get drunk. Tenga became more resentful.

  ‘We Amerindian people are fools, you know. We’ve been colonised twice. First by the Europeans and then by the coastlanders. I don’t know which is worse. Big companies come to mine gold or cut timber. Scholars come and worm their way into our communities, studying us and grabbing our knowledge for their own benefit. Aid agencies come and interfere with us. Tourists stare at us. Politicians crawl round us at election times.’

  Tenga spat on the ground. Chofy tried to change the subject.

  ‘Do you remember when Granny used to spit on the ground like that and say, “If you not back by the time this dry you in trouble”?’

  But Tenga refused to be deflected.

  ‘Amerindians have no chance in this country.’

  ‘I don’t agree,’ said Chofy earnestly, his eyes glazed with the rum. ‘I think we have to mix. Otherwise we have no future. We must get educated.’

  Tenga poured out more liquor.

  ‘Let them get educated our way.’

  Chofy raised his glass to his lips.

  ‘We can’t go backwards. Guyana has to develop.’

  Tenga was staring at Chofy with suspicion.

  ‘I’m not Guyanese. I’m Wapisiana. How’s Marietta?’ he asked suddenly.

  ‘She’s doing fine. And Bla-Bla too. He’s out all day. Comes back at night like a bird.’

  Chofy did not look him in the eye. He prayed that Tenga would not mention Marietta when he met Rosa. It would spoil everything.

  ‘You say we should mix,’ said Tenga bitterly. ‘What to do? We’re destroyed if we mix. And we’re destroyed if we don’t.’

  Chofy shook his head in disagreement and swallowed down more rum.

  ‘But sometimes they try to help, these outsiders.

  The two men had lapsed into speaking Wapisiana.

  ‘Even when an outsider tries to help, he messes us up,’ said Tenga, baring his teeth in a drunken grimace. ‘But he will never leave us alone. That he will never do. He sits on our back. He is full of sympathy for our suffering, at the burden we have to carry. He offers to help. He will do anything he can – except get off our back.’

  Tenga gestured round the little shop where they sat.

  ‘Look at this shop. Before it opened, people used to fish and share everything with the other families here. Now they take the fish to sell in Georgetown for money to buy things in the shop. And did you see the well outside? Some people came and asked us what we wanted. We didn’t know. We just said a well. They built it for us. But people missed going down to the creek to fetch water and talking to each other. It destroyed the social life of the village. And the well water tastes different – horrible – like iron. Then somebody shat in the well or children threw rubbish in it and half the village got poisoned.

  Chofy noticed the sun was setting and felt anxious about Rosa.

  ‘I better go chase down this woman and see if she’s all right.’

  ‘The worst thing is when they come and marry us,’ Tenga said maliciously as Chofy went through the door.

  Abandoned by Chofy and feeling awkward, Rosa remained sitting shyly on a bench sandwiched between several other women who spoke in Arawak. After a couple of hours, weariness overcame politeness and her head began to nod. A fat woman nudged her and asked her if she would like to go inside and lie down in a hammock. There was no sign of Chofy. Rosa crawled into a hammock and slept.

  When she awoke it was dark. She came out and crossed the clearing to join the other women who had by now drifted to sit outside on the steps of neighbouring houses. The sand made walking difficult and slow.

  The schoolteacher had brought out his guitar. Somebody kept beat on a hand-drum while he plucked the chords of ‘Knock-knock-knocking on Heaven’s Door’ slowly and mournfully under the stars with people joining in a melancholy chorus. Two or three shadowy couples danced together on the white sands which shimmered between the houses. A sense of desolation hung over the village.

  After a while, came the sound of an engine revving and somebody shouting. Chofy, now drunk, came weaving across the sands from the other side of the village. He helped Rosa climb into the vehicle.

  Men, women and children crammed into the truck. Most people smelled of liquor. A man with a broken nose took the wheel and drove. Chofy sat on the back flap of the jeep with some other men, casting frequent glances at Rosa.

  The vehicle hurtled along the rough track out of the village. Scrubby bushes slashed at them as they passed. Everyone held on to the side of the truck. After about an hour, they left the forest behind and emerged into a patch of savannah. The moon was high in the sky. The night air was warm.

  Stars reeled overhead. Bumping along, Rosa saw Orion sprawled out sideways along the horizon as if he too were drunk, a constellation hanging between his legs.

  ‘Mabukili,’ said the man next to her when he saw where she was looking. ‘The one-legged man.’

  Everyone swayed as the truck sped through the night.

  Chofy’s eyes had shrunk in his head. He sang out loudly in a sort of chant: ‘I’ve got an erection. Where shall I put it?’ He kept an eye on Rosa. People were laughing.

  ‘Not in me. Not in me,’ intoned the man next to him solemnly. He was a squat man with a Charlie Chaplin moustache, sitting with his arm round his wife.

  Rosa tried to doze. Chofy reached over and grabbed her hair, jerking her head up. She pulled away.

  ‘I’ve got an erection. Who shall I stick it in?’ A general hilarity overtook the passengers.

  ‘Put it down. Put it down,’ chanted the other man in a deep voice, imitating Paul Robeson.

  A ribald chorus started up. The men sitting in the back yelled in unison: ‘Don’t put no condoms on me. Don’t put no condoms on me.’

  The truck pulled up under the night sky so that anyone who needed to could take a piss. People jumped off and went a little way away into the bush. The journey resumed.

  The man drove wildly, heedless of safety. The rattling of the truck and its reckless advance frightened Rosa. It was as if everybody else somehow relished this headlong plunge towards oblivion, as if the journey somehow represented their path to extinction.

  By now they were going at breakneck speed.

  ‘We’re going to
die. We’re going to die,’ chorused the truckload of Indians to the stars above. It felt to Rosa as if they had surrendered all hope and were embracing destruction with a carefree abandon, exhilarated by the danger and inevitability of annihilation.

  Suddenly the truck came to the point where the track joined the main highway. The smoothness and quiet of the road after the rough track immediately had the effect of bringing everybody back to a different reality and the wildness went out of the journey. Still travelling fast, they burst through the toll gate without stopping and the gate-keeper’s oaths were snatched away behind them as they sped on. But the sense of playing with destiny had passed. They drove on to Georgetown in silence.

  The driver circled town, dropping people off at various destinations. He stopped outside the great white house where Rosa was staying. She climbed down. Chofy had already jumped down on the other side. The night was quiet except for the chirping of crickets and frogs. The two remaining occupants of the truck looked on with sleepy curiosity. The driver, dog-tired, drooped over the wheel, a dark bloom of sweat on his grey T-shirt between the shoulder blades.

  Chofy stood beside the vehicle. Rosa was aware of his brightly patterned shirt and his black hair and the heat of the night.

  ‘Can I stay?’

  The sound of the engine ticking over.

  ‘Are you drunk?’

  ‘I’m stone cold sober.’ He swayed slightly, tried to pull himself erect but still stood askew.

  Rosa remembered the man saying: ‘Wait until something happens and then go with it.’

  ‘Yes. You can stay,’ she said.

  Chofy’s heart uplifted and began to beat fast.

  The dogs set up a ferocious barking. Abdul the night watchman came out to open the gates.

  ‘Are you coming out again?’ he asked Chofy.

  ‘No. I’m staying.’

  Abdul stepped back with a look of theatrical disgust on his face.

  They climbed three flights of wooden stairs. The attic stretched the length of the house. Although the Demerara shutters were wide open, framing the black night, the attic still held all the warmth of the day. Chofy lowered himself stiffly on to the hard-backed sofa. He sat upright and shut his eyes, half overcome by alcohol and the jolting ride. He remained motionless.