The Ventriloquist's Tale

by Pauline Melville

  The group of four girls waved and shouted their hellos as they approached, panting and laughing and grimacing, holding on to each other like a multi-legged animal as they scrunched up the snowy path, their dragon breath curling away behind them.

  As they walked towards the museum entrance, Olive Ransome, a podgy, square-faced girl with a galaxy of spots, started to question Beatrice about Horatio Sands.

  ‘What did he say when he came to tea?’ The girls at the hostel were allowed to have visitors to tea on Sundays.

  ‘He just said: “I wish I could see more of you,’” replied Beatrice, shrugging her shoulders with indifference.

  They all shrieked and collapsed in giggles. For the next few weeks, ‘I wish I could see more of you’ became a catch phrase that could set any of them off into gales of laughter.

  Olive Ransome was particularly envious that Beatrice had mysteriously found her way on to the magic escalator that led to marriage. When Beatrice looked into her eager, resentful face, she almost decided to go ahead with it just to annoy Olive.

  They hurried into the warmth of the museum and stood in the usual place in front of the glass case. Beatrice studied the shrunken head. The colouration of the three-inch head was still vivid, almost like stage make-up, giving it an unusual sense of animation. The complexion retained its ruddy brown. The strong, prominent cheeks looked to her as if they had been rouged with annatto. The black hair shone. The familiar lips stayed open in a conspiratorial smile. The face reminded Beatrice of her grandmother.

  How amazed these girls would be if they knew I had a son, thought Beatrice.

  ‘Where does she come from?’ asked one of the girls.

  ‘I don’t know. Down south, somewhere,’ replied another.

  Beatrice grew to like Horatio Sands. He worked on the third floor of the same building as her. She was on the first floor in the audit department of the Canadian Pacific Railway, adding figures in a ledger. Once, Horatio had stopped her in the foyer of the building in Dominion Square.

  ‘I’m always standing behind you in the lift,’ he said as he introduced himself. He had a long, raw-boned face that was slightly lopsided. The cheekbones seemed to slant one way and his jaw the other, making his face look as though it was always asking a question.

  He offered to buy her a coffee in the Blue Counter, a cake department in one of the big stores in St Catherine Street. The first time Beatrice visited the luxurious pink Ladies’ Toilets, she thought she was in a palace. The attendant spoke to her in a French patois that she did not understand. She stayed there for a while, breathing in the scent of essence of violets and admiring the mirrors and the pink-and-silver-frosted décor of the surroundings. When she returned, she found that Horatio had ordered pecan pie and ice-cream for her. She felt a certain warmth towards him. He repeated the same jokes often. People teased him about his name and he would put one hand over his eye and pretend to be Nelson.

  Going to the Blue Counter became a regular event.

  Sometimes she and Horatio visited other sights in the city. Once, when they went inside Notre-Dame Cathedral, Beatrice felt faint and had to sit down on one of the back seats. The fan vaulting of the high ceiling reminded her of the great arching cathedral of mora, greenheart and silk-cotton trees in the forests back home. Seeing over her head this icy forest petrified in stone made her feel that she too was dead and fossilised. She asked Horatio, without explaining why, if they could leave.

  Sometimes a travelling theatre company arrived in town. Staff at the nearby theatre would brush the dust-covered seats and the place would be opened for a week. The girls from the hostel would rush to watch the play, usually a melodrama with someone dying on the scaffold. Then the theatre would shut down again for months. Other times they went to the picture-house.

  Once, when spring had almost come and the ice in the St Lawrence River crushed and began to melt, a travelling circus came to town with a fun-fair.

  They all bought tickets.

  As soon as they entered the enclosure, the roaring of a beast and the dank, animal smells of the circus unsettled Beatrice. Jostling crowds also made her uneasy. The girls stood in front of a cramped cage. A sickly tiger, full of mange, cowered in a corner. Beatrice felt the faint warning signs of an approaching migraine.

  ‘I don’t think I’m going inside to watch the circus. I have a headache coming on. I’ll stay outside around the fun-fair and meet you afterwards.’ Horatio asked if she would like him to stay with her but she said no and he joined the others at the ticket queue.

  To find a little peace, she paid some money and slipped through the flap of an adjacent blue-and-white-striped tent where she could be sheltered from the popping electric fairy lights and jangling music.

  Inside the tent was quiet. There was a smell of sawdust and a chill in the air. Beatrice was the only customer. She went and sat on one of the benches set out for the audience. Then she realised what was generating the chill in the air.

  Two trestles had been placed on the ground with three planks resting on top. On the planks stood a hollow, coffin-shaped block of ice, large enough to contain a human body. The top and sides were about six inches thick and it was open at one end. Apart from patches of frostiness, the ice was mainly transparent, clear enough at any rate to see that it was empty.

  Beatrice sat down on the front bench directly facing the coffin. A considerable amount of time passed before the tent flap opened and another woman came in. The bench creaked as the woman seated herself at the other end of it. It took another twenty minutes before the organisers decided there were enough people for the show to begin.

  There was a moment or two of shuffling behind the tent flaps, which were then clumsily pulled aside to reveal two men in tailcoats escorting a short, fat, but muscular Native American Indian woman with shoulder-length black hair, wearing nothing but a beaded head-band and a yellow swimming costume. The woman stepped forward in a businesslike way, threw up her arms, circus fashion, and bowed to the smattering of people. The audience stared with the concentration of farmers at a cattle auction.

  At this point, the show-masters invited everybody up to touch the ice coffin, to inspect it thoroughly in order to ensure that no hoax was being perpetrated. Beatrice stepped forward and touched the ice. Her fingers reddened. It was certainly real ice. She put her face down and gazed through the open end. In places, patches of frost caused a deeper opacity. The coffin breathed its chilly breath on her and she stepped back. The audience returned to their benches.

  The performer spat on her hands and rubbed them together before exposing her arms so that people could see there was no covering of any sort, just bare flesh. The yellow costume cut into her fat brown thighs. She kicked off her high-heels and allowed her two male escorts to lift her and slide her, feet first, into the icy coffin. The spectators watched intently as the two men sealed up the open end of the coffin with another square block of ice, packing handfuls of snow from a bucket into the cracks.

  All eyes were fixed on the coffin. The woman lay motionless inside. The audience remained silent except for the occasional shuffle. After a while, Beatrice began to worry that the woman’s air must be in short supply. In a minute or so, surely, she would be unable to breathe. Beatrice could almost feel the anguished burning of the flesh on ice. She tried to see whether the woman was still breathing. Astounded and horrified, she stared at the woman in the ice tomb. The circus artist must surely be released now or die, she thought, and then lapsed into a state that felt like eternity without passage of time.

  She had no idea how long it was before the two men began to scoop the snow and ice from where they had packed it to seal the cracks. They took away the square block of ice from the end of the coffin. Beatrice took an enormous, involuntary gasp of air as the woman slid out and bowed to the audience. She felt as though she herself had been freed.

  As she went out of the tent, she caught sight of the Indian woman standing near the entrance, laughing and drinking a glass of b
eer.

  Beatrice looked over at the woman who raised her glass and smiled, her fat cheeks pushing her eyes into narrow ovals which nonetheless radiated warmth. The smile made Beatrice suddenly elated.

  She hurried off to find her friends. Horatio was looking for her with two hot meat pies in his hand. Beatrice took hers and stamped her feet to get warm. Her headache had vanished. Everything looked bright. It was possible to survive the ice coffin and emerge unscathed. For the first time for months she felt lively. The feeling spilled over into a renewed affection for Horatio.

  Beatrice married Horatio Sands in the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Waverly Street. To his family’s distress, he became a Catholic in order to marry her.

  Horatio knew little about Beatrice except what she had told him, that she came from the Rupununi district of the Guianas in South America. But Horatio could never remember where the Guianas were, even after she had shown him on a map. And she never spoke about it much. He found he could never keep the geography of the place in his head. It somehow slipped away from him.

  For two years they worked hard to furnish their home. They had moved to an apartment in Hutchinson Street. It had three rooms and a thick, wooden verandah which she liked.

  Helped by her friends from the hostel, she had chosen to decorate the place in rose and lavender. She kept the hardwood floors polished and protected by scatter rugs, but most of all she loved the electric bedside light which she had saved for and bought at Eaton’s. There was plenty about her new life that she enjoyed. It felt easy and comfortable, if a little unreal.

  Then one night as she and Horatio were returning, arm in arm, from the picture-house, Beatrice saw the Indian woman from the circus again. She was sprawled, drunk, in an illuminated shop doorway with abrasions and purple bruises all over her face. It was a freezing cold night but alcohol with its burning inner fire prevented her from feeling the cold. Her legs were splayed open and the coat she wore, which was made of some kind of animal hide, was unbuttoned and showed a thin cotton dress beneath. The woman appeared to recognise her.

  ‘Hey,’ she called out to Beatrice as they approached. ‘Hey. Are you Iroquois? What people are you from?’ She took a swig from a bottle and burbled a chant, the spilt liquor shining on her chin: ‘A dillar a dollar, a ten o’clock scholar. Why did you come so soon? Help me, dear. Please help me.’

  Horatio took a firm grip on Beatrice’s arm and guided her quickly past to protect her from any unpleasantness.

  The woman stared at Beatrice.

  ‘OK. OK. I understand,’ she mumbled, her head sinking on to her chest.

  That night, after Horatio had made love to her in his usual way, like a little boy holding tight to a comforter, Beatrice found herself unable to sleep. The lightweight love-making sessions required no real involvement on her part. Normally, she liked lying there afterwards in those freshly laundered sheets, enjoying her home and planning a next purchase after he had fallen asleep. But she was appalled that she had ignored the Indian woman in the street. It was a betrayal. She sat up in bed. Horatio was asleep. Shadows and lights from the traffic outside moved across the window-blinds. She wanted to get up but was frightened of waking Horatio. The neon light from the diner across the road flashed a pale red arc on to the wall beside the bed. She lay down again wide awake.

  Finally, she fell into a restless sleep. A distant train hooted slowly three times on its departure for the prairies and, in her dream, the sound somehow turned into the wail of the giant otters that she used to hear calling along the Rupununi River.

  The dream turned into a night terror. She was awake but paralysed, a giantess, unable to move or speak. Her thighs had become immovably heavy and turned into the banks of the Potaro River, covered in vegetation in which herds of peccary scurried and swerved. She turned into her own sexual landscape. The silent silver stream of the river between her legs carried in it the reflections of clouds and a flight of macaws. The river flowed on through the steep escarpments. She felt tugging undercurrents beneath its surface. Still the smooth stream of silver gathered momentum, racing towards the great falls where it dropped, thundering into the ravine below.

  Rainbows always hung in the mist at the top of the falls. She remembered her mother telling her that a rainbow was the spirit of a sickly boy. At intervals, the river was caught up as it flowed on out of sight, caught up once, twice and then less frequently, caught up by the bush-covered banks, glistening like a needle as it disappeared into the distance.

  And there suddenly was her mother, standing on the bank, shaking her head and screwing up her eyes against the sun as she spoke.

  ‘Boat run a falls. Caan’ come back.’

  Beatrice came to gradually. She was soaked in sweat. Her limbs felt like lead. She was still not sure that she could move. The refrigerator sighed and rattled in the kitchen. Eventually, she wiggled her toes. Relieved to find they worked, she tried cautiously to move her left leg. It obeyed her. Then she dared to turn and look at the outline of Horatio’s head. How odd, she thought, to be lying here with my head two inches from his and for my head to be still full of forest and savannah while his is probably full of the Montreal of his youth with its electric trams and toboggan slides. How odd that these two worlds should be lying inches from each other.

  She tried to look at him as he slept but it was too dark to see. Gently, she manoeuvred herself out of the bed. She tiptoed over to the door, wrapped herself in a dressing-gown and slipped silently into the parlour. The couch springs gave as she sat down and leaned back against the anti-macassar. She kept thinking about the woman. Perhaps, after all, the woman had been safer inside the ice coffin at the fun-fair than out of it. She wondered if it was better for her own people to preserve themselves within their own traditions or to allow change. For a long time she stared into the darkness. Life was easy the way she now lived. She had even learned to play tennis.

  Oh Montreal, Montreal. What was she to do there?

  As she fell into a doze with her head against the back of the sofa, she could hear Mamai Maba’s voice again.

  ‘Hot and bitter or cold and sweet. Everything in the world is divided up like that.’

  Singularity

  From the time of his arrival at Pirara Sonny showed no signs of missing his mother or anyone else for that matter. In some ways, Wifreda felt closer to him than she did to her own sons – he was even more unsociable than she was. Occasionally she found herself a little in awe of him. He seemed to be marked out by some terrible innocence. A compelling purity.

  Whereas her own boys ran wild, exploring and developing headlong into youth, Sonny remained absolute in his quietness and self-containment. He struck her as being like the seed of a kokerite tree which refuses to grow, as if growth was a weakness, a loss of integrity, as if everything was packed inside him and refusing to unfold lest it lose its perfection. There was always a feeling about Sonny that he walked around in his own moonlight. Wifreda was aware of a special responsibility in being his guardian.

  She punished the others when they teased him. At first, she tried to get him to join in with them, but he became distressed and withdrew even further into himself and so she just let him be. Sonny would spend weeks making his arrows and bow and then take them away on his own. Instead of shooting fish with them, he would practise, for months on end, with endless, obsessive patience, always using the same spot on an ite-palm tree for a target.

  As befitted someone conceived around the time of an eclipse, Sonny was a walking event-horizon. A singularity. No one knew what went on inside.

  The ranch at Pirara grew and prospered under Sam Deershank’s management. Both the Mamais now lived with Wifreda and Sam and spent most of their days, and some nights, fishing. The youngest of McKinnon’s sons, Freddie, had just achieved his heart’s desire and started work as a vaqueiro, chasing cattle under Sam’s watchful eye.

  Over the years, Danny spent more time at Pirara than at his own house at Wichabai. He had taken to d
rinking heavily and his wife frequently escaped with their children back to her parents in Brazil. Danny’s figure was no longer lean. Physically, he had burgeoned into a much heavier man than the slim youth who had obsessed his sister. His eyes had more or less disappeared, sunk into fleshy cheeks. Parakari and rum drinking had filled him out and his weight emphasised an increasingly coarse cruelty. Once when he was digging a new latrine with one of the vaqueiros, they quarrelled. The hole was deep. The man couldn’t scramble out.

  ‘Stay there and christen it with your own shit,’ yelled Danny as he walked away.

  He roamed around the country, trading balata. Sometimes he took Sonny travelling with him. Sonny never spoke on those journeys or showed any interest in where he was going.

  As Danny became increasingly unreliable, his Brazilian employers threatened to sack him. Sometimes he vanished for months at a time. There were rumours that he had other families in different forest villages. But he was too taciturn for people to challenge him about it.

  When he disappeared, he would go into the forest on his own and erect a rough bush-house. There he relaxed and felt more alive. He could see and smell better. No one troubled him about clothes for the children, the failure of cassava crops or medicine for his wife.

  Once there, he never gave his family a second thought. Nor did he think about Beatrice or the past. All he did was track a labba through the bush, or lie for hours on the damp ground trying to smoke an agouti out of its hole, or wait in the steaming heat at the edge of a creek for a fish to bite.

  One year when Sonny had grown taller than she was, Wifreda made her annual visit to Georgetown for supplies.

  While she was there, she hired a young woman to come back with her to the Rupununi and give the children some education. The new tutor was called Nancy Freeman. She was a young, lithe, light-skinned eighteen year old with a snub nose, two crinkly plaits and plenty of energy.

  School began in the house at half-past eight for all the children living on the Pirara settlement. Nancy Freeman often despaired. She battled to control Wifreda’s boys. Some mornings when classes were due to begin, she would see a horse pass the window with three of the boys astride it and she would not see them again for the rest of the day. When the boys got too unruly, she would call Sam Deershanks who had been midwife to all of them. Despite his threats, he turned out to be a big softie and would only use the strip of cowskin to lash the chair-leg that the culprit was sitting on.