The Ventriloquist's Tale

by Pauline Melville

  The next morning, they moved between the boat and the shed, packing bows, arrows, warishis, the axe, gun and hammocks. Danny’s tension showed in his abrupt jerky movements. He gashed his shoulder open on a jagged branch as he slithered down the bank with the cooking pot and a cutlass.

  The day after Father Napier’s return, Beatrice and Danny’s canoe beached further along from the landing at Waronawa.

  The land surrounding Waronawa turned into a vast lake, deep enough for the children to swim at the back. Beatrice and Danny were absorbed back into the household. Nothing was said about their long absence. The silence was like the flood waters. It seeped everywhere through the settlement. It covered the landscape. Sometimes Beatrice felt herself floundering in this ocean of silence. But, despite everything, she held on to the conviction that her relationship with Danny was indestructible.

  McKinnon spent as much time as he could away from Waronawa. As soon as he returned from a fishing trip or a visit to Brazil, he would invent another excuse to leave. Maba and Zuna went about their business, seeing to the children and household affairs. Once, when they went to bathe, they discussed Danny and Beatrice as they bobbed up and down in the water.

  ‘I don’t know why he would want to look in his own family and not outside in the village like everyone else,’ said Mamai Maba, standing on the ground near the lake and towelling her hair with rough, spasmodic rubs. Zuna came out of the water.

  ‘These things happen. No one could stop it,’ Zuna sympathised. Nevertheless, the muscles at the bottom of Zuna’s stomach clenched with the obscure pleasure of knowing that both Beatrice and Danny were Maba’s children and not her own.

  Danny was unable, for long, to endure the snide comments from the other young men of the settlement.

  ‘Hello, oily face,’ said one of them. ‘Do you know how the moon got his dirty face? I’ll tell you one of these days.’

  Sometimes, they disappeared fishing without him.

  ‘Have they gone already?’ he asked a small boy who stared at him without blinking.

  ‘Yes. They does ’smart you,’ replied the boy with a sly smile.

  Danny packed up and left. He went over to Brazil to work as a balata agent. His employers, two Brazilian traders, thought themselves lucky that they had found someone who could speak Wapisiana and Macusi and could handle himself so well in the bush.

  Sam Deershanks had fallen in love with and courted Wifreda despite her bad eyesight and crotchety, keep-to-herself manner. She, for her part, remained as steadfastly indifferent to him as she had since he came to live there. He worked hard, joined the fishing expeditions and proved to be an expert deer-hunter, always finding the good bush-islands where the deer had been cut off by the floods.

  Wifreda still suffered from guilt at being the one who had discovered Beatrice and Danny together. When the couple returned, she became flustered and did not know what to say to her sister, although Beatrice coolly resumed her chores as if nothing had happened. Just before Danny went away, Wifreda, having shown not the least sign of interest in Sam Deershanks, suddenly went off to live with him in the north savannahs. They set up house at a place called Pirara. McKinnon gave them a few head of cattle to start them off. No one knew why she went because initially she did not appear to like him one bit. And they made an odd couple, with him so tall and her short and peering around with her poor eyesight.

  For the first few months that they were together, Wifreda regularly tore up the few pieces of mail that got through to him from America before he could read them. Often she would not speak to him for days. But Sam Deershanks persevered and suddenly, she relented and fell in love with him and they remained devoted from then on.

  Waronawa settled back into its old routine dictated by the seasons and the stars.

  One baking-hot afternoon, five months into the dry season, Beatrice gave birth to a son. The birth was not difficult and Beatrice felt like an anaconda whose elasticated jaws dislocate to swallow prey – except that this process was happening in reverse and she was disgorging something. Maba helped her and took the placenta and buried it in a termite’s nest. The only thing wrong with the child was that his navel string would not dry up. It remained soggy. Eventually, Mamai Maba showed Beatrice how to burn some charcoal, heat her thumb and finger with it and pinch the spot. Within an hour the navel string dried up.

  The child had the same heart-shaped face and sloe eyes as his parents. They never gave him a name. Everyone called him Son or Sonny. Beatrice was enchanted by him. She swung in her hammock, feeding the baby and smiling.

  She was not even excessively troubled when, a few months later, Danny returned with a handsome, young, square-faced Brazilian woman called Sylvana, who smoked a pipe and made lace. He built a house at Wichabai and she lived with him there.

  Beatrice was so taken up with her baby son that, when Danny rode over and brought Sylvana to see her and the child, she did not really mind. She did not even ask whether Danny had told Sylvana that the baby was his son. It did not seem to matter. It had vaguely occurred to her before that both she and Danny might have to wed other people, for the look of things, but that, in reality, they would be married to each other for ever. Sylvana did not appear to be an obstacle.

  Mamai Maba watched Beatrice anxiously but she seemed perfectly contented. Then, three weeks after Danny’s return, Beatrice went into a sudden depression. The household woke up one morning at cock-crow to find that she and the baby had gone missing.

  Beatrice left in the middle of the night carrying the baby in a sling. A couple in a bullock cart gave her a ride all the way to Annai. She had suddenly felt agitated and restless and decided to go to Georgetown. She waited at Annai until she could organise a boat going downriver.

  Usually, when any of the McKinnons had reason to visit Georgetown, they would get out of the boat at the dangerous parts of the journey and walk along the side of the bank past the falls and the rapids until the boat could be manoeuvred to a suitable pick-up point.

  This time Beatrice decided not to leave the boat. The bowman looked questioningly at the attractive young woman as she climbed into the craft with her baby. The journey was hazardous. She smiled and told him that if they overturned he must save the baby and not worry with her.

  The great leaden river stretched out on either side of her. Overhead spread a vast chaos of clouds with patches of silver curdled sky. Beatrice felt the wooden seat of the boat dig into the small of her back. She took a deep breath. The river could decide whether she should live or die. It gave her an enormous feeling of liberation, this decision not to decide. It made her feel completely calm. She would toss everything into the lap of the river.

  As they progressed, she felt increasingly exhilarated. Each time they approached one of the thundering falls or rapids, she ducked her head against the spray and sheltered the baby’s head with her hand. But she felt poised on top of her life as though she were riding it. The boat bucked and dived and smacked down on the waves. It shot between and over rocks and gushing waters. The baby lay across her lap, utterly relaxed. They journeyed like that for days in a state of benign indifference.

  The boat reached Bartica without mishap. It was something of an anti-climax. Beatrice wandered around the tiny town with its few rum shops and hotels and semi-derelict shacks. Then she decided she would not bother to continue to Georgetown and she returned to the Rupununi.

  It was after she got back that Beatrice noticed that the baby sometimes slept with his eyes open. Other than that he grew. He was very quiet, hardly ever making a sound. When he started to crawl, they had to stop him licking limewash from the walls and eating sand.

  The Wedding

  Danny and Sylvana were to be married. Father Napier had arranged it. He would come to the south savannahs and conduct the ceremony himself at the house at Waronawa. Then he intended to continue his journey to Wai-Wai country where he would confirm those he had baptised three years earlier.

  For days, food was prepared
. Piles of cassava bread were cooked. The men brought back deer, labba, powis and bush-hog from hunting trips. The meat was smoked. Three of the tame guinea fowl were killed and four suckling pigs.

  The day before the wedding, Beatrice, hot, dusty and sweating, lugged four rice sacks filled with sorrel up the stairs. Her black hair had been cut to shoulder-length and she wore it loose although it meant she had to keep tucking it behind her ears. She was plump. Her figure had filled out and become heavier so that her plain white blouse and pink skirt were a tight fit. Her wide eyes flashed as she laughed at something one of the vaqueiros had said.

  The sun shouldered its way into the room behind her and spread itself across the floor. The whole room was filled with the smell of guava jelly which had been boiling on the stove before being ladled into jars and brought upstairs.

  ‘How much more sorrel do we need?’ she asked Wifreda, who had ridden over from Pirara with Sam for the wedding, leaving her two small sons behind.

  ‘Two more sacks,’ replied Wifreda, studying her sister’s face to see if she could detect anything from the expression. There was not the least sign of discomposure.

  Beatrice’s bare feet thudded across the floor as she went to fetch more sorrel from the racks outside where it was drying in the sun.

  Even in the face of Danny’s marriage to Sylvana, Beatrice was able to behave in an open and cheerful manner because she believed that she and Danny were an indivisible couple. She nursed the secret knowledge to herself that nothing could sever their relationship. Not absence. Not even the fact that they both might marry other people. They were brother and sister. The relationship was by nature indissoluble.

  She scooped the piles of sorrel that looked like faded rose petals into the sacks, convinced that if she were ever to say to Danny: ‘Leave everything and come with me now,’ he would do so. He too was keeping up a pretence to the outside world. This marriage was an act. An imitation of the real world. A decoy.

  The wedding was not a stumbling block. Even if she were never to see him again they would still belong together. As long as she and Danny were joined in their private union, then either of them could go anywhere and do anything – marry, beget children – it would all be a kind of masquerade, a joke on the rest of the world. It would be their way of fooling the enemy. Their public behaviour was merely an act. Their real union was magical and indestructible. They had a child as a result of it.

  In this way, Beatrice kept herself calm over Danny’s forthcoming marriage. She even joined happily in the preparations for it. But she decided to speak to him all the same. She thought that they should make a pact. She made up her mind that there should be another wedding in which they married each other before Father Napier conducted the Catholic one. They should have their own wedding in which they made their vows in Wapisiana. The real wedding.

  The bridal couple rode over from Wichabai in the morning. Heat bounced off the red-earth tracks. Gnarled, stumpy, sandpaper trees clawed at a barren sky. They had to shade their eyes where the sun blazed off the lake which had dried out at the edges. The bamboo scratched and rasped in the quiet morning as they rode past the pond towards the house.

  Sylvana wore a cerise dress which she had made herself from a pattern given to her by a dressmaker in Boa Vista. She sat on the veranda drinking sorrel, her rocking-chair creaking on the wooden boards. For the occasion, she had braided her crinkly hair with coloured ribbons. Everyone noted with satisfaction how happy she looked. She had the air of a sensible, strong young woman, outward-looking and practical. A good match for Danny, they thought, as she sat with her thick ankles crossed, smiling round at everybody.

  Beatrice was flushed. She stood on the veranda, in a fresh yellow blouse with short, fluttering sleeves and a plain black skirt, talking vivaciously to Sylvana in Portuguese. She could feel herself talking too much. It was impossible for Beatrice to tell from Sylvana’s demeanour whether she knew what had happened between herself and Danny. Sylvana seemed perfectly relaxed. She smiled and pointed up at a scarlet macaw sitting in the guava tree.

  ‘Stare too long a red macaw and you go bald or mad,’ said Beatrice with a slight giggle, immediately feeling that she had said the wrong thing.

  Sylvana, who was descended in a direct line from Portuguese shopkeepers, looked puzzled.

  ‘It’s just an Indian superstition,’ said Beatrice dismissively. ‘You want more sorrel?’

  Sylvana shook her head in refusal. And then Beatrice could not resist a moment of proprietorial knowledge.

  ‘I expect Danny is off drinking ’kari somewhere,’ she said with the air of a sister who will always know her brother better than anybody.

  In the distance, the sun caught the top of the Kanaku Mountains as they rose from the savannah floor.

  Everyone was waiting for Father Napier to arrive. Mamai Maba and Mamai Zuna, both wearing bead and feather necklaces over their cotton dresses, came out and joined McKinnon on the verandah. The children, their hair combed with butter-nut oil, ran around in items of European dress instead of naked. Five musicians had arrived from Brazil, stiff and exhausted from the eight-hour ride, and strolled around the compound in waistcoats and gaiters, preparing themselves for yet another drunken spree.

  Beatrice urged Sylvana to have more drink.

  ‘It have plenty. It have plenty.’ She gestured cheerily towards the inside kitchen. Sylvana gave in, laughing, and said yes. Beatrice went off to fetch more sorrel.

  Danny came into the kitchen. It was dark in there and his clean white shirt gleamed although his face was barely visible. Beatrice could just see the birthmark on his temple that always reddened when he had been drinking parakari.

  ‘I’m glad I ain’ going to be married to you,’ she teased him in Wapisiana.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you too own-way and sometimish.’ She giggled and went over to kiss him. She hugged him tightly. He pulled away.

  ‘Watch my clean shirt,’ he said.

  ‘That girl have you stupid or what?’ She held on to his hands, unsettled by the way he was looking at her, with his eyes screwed up as if he were trying to see her at a distance. ‘Is you goin’ suffer for it.’

  ‘Suffer for what?’

  ‘Is we should be marry. We should marry in secret this minute here and now. A pledge for life. In Wapisiana. The real wedding. It would only take a minute. Let us do it now.’

  Danny gave that evasive chuckle she had known from childhood, a high, almost girlish laugh that meant he was embarrassed.

  Just then, Alice burst in through the door chasing Freddie, their youngest brother. She was scolding him in Wapisiana.

  ‘Freddie did business in the bedroom,’ she explained breathlessly, trying to grab hold of him. ‘An’ he din even wipe himself.’

  ‘I din see no stick round there,’ pouted the little boy defiantly. He ran out with Alice behind him.

  ‘I been talking to Father Napier,’ said Danny. ‘This business between us must done now.’ And then he added with that ancient cruelty that exists between brother and sister, ‘Was just a childish thing that happen. A little thing. We caan’ go on behavin’ like children.’

  Beatrice was taken aback.

  ‘You could have two wives like Daddy,’ she cajoled. ‘I would be your first wife. Sylvana the second.’

  ‘One man. One wife. You went to school. You know that. We got to behave like big people now,’ he sneered as he pushed her away and walked out of the kitchen.

  Standing there on her own, Beatrice’s mouth went dry and a high-pitched zinging noise sounded in her ears. The quiet of the empty kitchen protected her momentarily from the noise of the gaiety and excitement outside.

  The children had been shouting a welcome as they rushed to accompany Father Napier up the sloping ground from the river. She could see his black-clad figure shimmering in the heat as the children vied to help him carry the familiar tin trunk that always caught the rays of the sun.

  She stepped back into
the dark wooden doorway, into the familiar smells of home. As she watched the priest walk towards the house, a tree of ice seemed to grow up inside her, up from her feet, through her own trunk, branching along her arms and up into her head. It grew and spread and settled. McKinnon went out to greet him and she saw the two men disappear up the steps, and then heard them going along the veranda over her head and into the house.

  Outside, the wind tugged a few small clouds across the blue emptiness. The sun pushed its way into the centre of the sky as if manoeuvring into the best place to watch the wedding.

  ‘Where is she?’ whispered Mamai Maba to Zuna as they waited for the ceremony to begin upstairs.

  ‘Must be she hidin’ sheself,’ replied Zuna.

  And, indeed, Beatrice found herself unexpectedly shrinking back into the kitchen. She remembered that she had been supposed to fetch Sylvana some sorrel drink. She stared at the red sorrel juice lying motionless in several pans and gourds on the table. Nothing had prepared her for this. For the first time, she experienced an icy grief and sense of desolation. A plaintive Wapisiana chant went round and round in her head. She used to hear it as a child when somebody died, before Father Napier’s zealous frenzy had converted so many villages to Catholicism.

  The breeze from the open door cooled the damp patches on the front of her blouse. The squeak-squeaking of the upstairs shutter twanged at her nerves. Everything had gone quiet. The ceremony must be underway.

  She had missed the wedding. It was over. Someone wound up the phonograph. Music trailed out of the upstairs windows. She could hear the tump-tump of a dance line caterpillaring round the room. There was a yell as the phonographs packed in and the musicians took over. She could hear laughter as people helped themselves to rum, parakari, guarana and cashew liquor. The party started to liven up. A slim youth with bad teeth rushed into the kitchen looking for sorrel. He was laughing and smiling at Beatrice, assuming that she was in the same mood as himself. He went out, spilling some drink from the calabash in each hand.