Visitants

by Randolph Stow

  He turned his head, with that peculiar, guileless expression on his face and laughed at me. ‘Ah, Mak,’ he said. ‘You’re so abominable, you’re irreplaceable.’

  ‘We’re all irreplaceable,’ I said. ‘The Bible tells us so. As for abominable, I don’t know what it means.’

  In the middle of the room Saliba broke away from Dalwood and ran for the passage, holding the blackened stubble together with her hands. From the doorway she screamed one word at Dalwood, who stood, huge and bewildered and pleased with himself, like a lighthouse among the waves of grass-skirted women.

  ‘Tokakaita!’ she shouted. ‘Insatiable fornicator.’

  Then she thundered away. We heard her laughing as far as the veranda steps.

  SALIBA

  That night Naibusi woke and called for me. She called from inside the hut: ‘Saliba, are you there?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am here, outside the door. I cannot sleep.’

  In the light of the moon the house was nearly white, with black lines. The trunks of the palms were white too, and the branches were like feathers, white and black.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Naibusi called.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I am looking at the house, that is all. Misa Dolu’udi has put out his lamp.’

  Naibusi rolled over on her mat and laughed, inside the dark hut. ‘Ki!’ she said; ‘you cannot sleep because of the young Dimdim?’

  ‘Ku sasop’, Naibus’,’ I said. ‘I cannot sleep because I am crying for my skirt.’

  ‘I have a skirt and will give it to you,’ Naibusi said. ‘Now come and lie down. It is the middle of the night.’

  ‘Very well,’ I said. ‘Thank you truly, Naibus’.’ Then I said: ‘Naibus’, Misa Kodo cannot sleep, like me. He has not put out his lamp.’

  As I told Naibusi that, Misa Kodo came to the window of his room. He was there all black against the light of the lamp, looking out. I thought that he was looking towards me, and stepped back quickly into the door. But truly he could not have seen me, and why would he have tried? No. He was only standing there, staring out, with his forehead on the glass of the window that does not open. And all the time a big black moth that came from the frangipani flowers was beating and beating against the glass to get in.

  DALWOOD

  When you wake the air is already clammy, the sheet sticks to your back, but if there is a breeze your skin when you get up clenches as if with cold, and you feel new because the morning is so new. In this room, with the shutters open on the sea, there is always that dawn breeze, always the sound of palms, so that you hear the coolness at the same time as you feel it crawling over your hide. And that is the reason, I suppose, that the old man is up and about before anybody, and wanders in here to lean on the sills and watch the sea.

  When I opened my eyes he was there. I woke because he was there, and I lay in the musty camp-bed taking him in by the grey-blue light. I had to remember him, he was still strange, still a bit weird to me then. Stooped in front of the shutter, in shorts, with dead-white delicate skin, he made me think of some fragile kid, the kind that might grow up to be a genius if the big kids allow him to survive. That is the look he must always have had, of being breakable. I can guess that because I have seen his son, the only child, after all, he has ever fathered, who is as pretty as an angel and nearly forty.

  I got up to join him, the grass matting cool under my feet and the breeze that had swept the night heat from the room cold on my sweat. When I came to the shutter beside him, he started and jerked about.

  ‘Avaelal?’ he said. His eyes seemed for a moment as big and round as his glasses, baby-blue. Then: ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Yes, yes. Young Dalwood.’

  ‘Sorry. I thought you’d heard me.’

  ‘Getting a bit deaf, old man,’ he said. ‘Forgot you were here, as a matter of fact. Sleep all right?’

  I told him yes, stretching and shivering a little in the air from the wide shutters. ‘You don’t stay long in the sack.’

  ‘It’s the only time of day,’ he said, ‘for old men.’

  The rank grass under the palms was warming up with the morning, and the smell of it came in puffs into the room. Butcher-birds called and echoed. In spite of the breeze, the sea, of that turquoise of calm lagoons, looked congealed, like ice, and the white Igau sat fast in the mirror of her own shadow. On the islet behind her the palms in grey-green waves dipped and rolled.

  ‘Campbell and I planted that lot,’ said the old man, pointing. ‘Fifty-one years ago, it must have been. Before your father was born, I dare say.’

  ‘Campbell?’ I said. ‘Who is Campbell?’

  ‘My partner,’ he said, ‘once upon a time. He stuck it out for a year. Then he took a trip with a trader, haven’t heard from him since. Funny way to treat a friend.’

  ‘Perhaps he died,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, probably. It was easy,’ he seemed to remember suddenly, ‘to die in those days.’

  I looked round at him for a clue how to take that remark, and went on looking. Apart from his glasses and Bombay bloomers he was naked. I thought of the White Rabbit, skinned.

  ‘So he came with you in the beginning,’ I said. ‘The two of you built the house.’

  ‘No, we had a camp then,’ the old man said, ‘on the islet. But he would have, of course. We meant to, if he’d come back. I waited a fair time, a year, I think. Then I crossed over the lagoon and built here.’

  ‘Just you by yourself? You and the Kailuana people?’

  ‘There was one foreigner, my houseboy, Naibusi’s husband. He was a mainland man. But no white man, no. There’s never been another white man on Kailuana.’

  All that time he went on gazing at the islet, as if it was a place he could never get to again.

  ‘You must have missed him,’ I said. ‘Your partner, Campbell.’

  ‘I suppose, at first,’ he said, not much interested. ‘Because, you know, he was a white man. But soon that didn’t matter. When I built the house, I meant it—d’you know?—to show him that I wouldn’t need white men any more.’

  He had not sounded for some time as if it was me he was talking to, but all of a sudden he turned his head and glittered at me, through the thick lenses. He bared his mail-order teeth. ‘You’re a white man,’ he said. ‘Cawdor’s not.’

  ‘What am I supposed to make of that?’

  ‘Almost not. Not for much longer.’

  He was looking very significant. I pored over the tight old face, trying to make out what he might be hinting. ‘I don’t get you,’ I said; and the bottled eyes, still on me, seemed to become for a moment almost fatherly, almost concerned. ‘I wouldn’t,’ he said, ‘invest too much in Cawdor. He’s a hobby with you. But he’s going away.’

  ‘Alistair?’ I said. ‘You’re joking. Going where?’

  ‘Just—away,’ the old man said, with a shrug. ‘I don’t know how else to explain it.’ And by saying that he must have thought that he had rounded off the conversation rather neatly; and, besides, he was finished with me and the sea. ‘None of my business, after all,’ he said, wandering through the splintery room towards the passage to the veranda. ‘Can’t be bothered. That’s what age does, old man, if you want to know. No curiosity any more.’

  ‘Mak,’ I said, ‘what are you getting at? Has he told you he’s going?’

  But he only called back from the doorway: ‘Kaikai on the veranda in half an hour.’ Then I heard his bare feet scuffing off over the grass mats, and was left staring at the last thing he had passed by, his little library of advanced sex, which it had been a mistake, apparently, to see as a sign of curiosity.

  SALIBA

  Benoni and Naibusi and I were sitting on the veranda beside the table where the Dimdims eat their food. Naibusi and I sat on the floor, but Benoni was sitting on Misa Makadoneli’s chair, because he is of the family of chieftains and must keep his head above ours. But he was not proud, and had brought us betelnut which we were chewing, and talked to us while he smoked a cigarette.<
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  Naibusi was cutting up sticks of tobacco very fine with the bread-knife. She was putting the shredded stuff into a Dimdim tobacco tin.

  ‘Old woman,’ said Benoni, ‘I want a stick of tobacco.’

  ‘Not one stick,’ said Naibusi. ‘That is forbidden.’

  ‘Misa Makadoneli does not count all his tobacco,’ said Benoni.

  ‘Truly, he does,’ said Naibusi, laughing. ‘But it is not his tobacco. Misa Kodo will smoke this here.’

  ‘No!’ cried Benoni, showing his teeth. ‘Misa Kodo will smoke trade tobacco?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Naibusi, ‘always. And he chews.’

  ‘I think,’ said Benoni, ‘I think that Misa Kodo is one of us. Some people say that he is a black man truly.’

  ‘That is gammon,’ I said. ‘His face is dark because of the sun, but I have watched him under the shower, through the hole in the cookhouse wall, and his arse is white like shells.’

  ‘Your shame, Saliba,’ said Naibusi.

  ‘Why should I not watch the Dimdims?’ I said. ‘All the women watch the Dimdims. Wa! Misa Dolu’udi has a cock as big as this.’

  ‘I have a cock as big as this,’ said Benoni.

  ‘You lie,’ I said. ‘Let me see.’

  ‘Ku la!’ cried Benoni, putting up his hands and pretending to be frightened. ‘I am not a polisimanu.’ All the men in the villages pretend to be frightened of the women in Misa Makadoneli’s house, because of that night last year when we tore off the rami of a mainland policeman and raped him.

  ‘Saliba,’ said Naibusi, ‘you have a bad tongue.’

  ‘I have not a tongue as bad as Misa Kodo,’ I said. ‘He knows that we watch him from the cookhouse when he is under the shower, and he turns his back and shouts shameful things.’

  ‘What does he say?’ asked Benoni.

  ‘I will not tell,’ I said. ‘His shame, to talk like that to a woman.’

  ‘Truly,’ said Benoni, ‘you are a crazy person, Salib’.’

  He leaned his arms on the Dimdims’ table and yawned, and then stretched his neck to look over the veranda rail at the Igau below. In his hair he had a hibiscus flower, and on his chest the boar-tusk necklace that is worth more yams than a man could count.

  ‘I am bored,’ he said. ‘When will Misa Kodo get up?’

  Benoni is a most beautiful man. If he would sleep with me, I would tell everyone from Muyuwa to Dimdim.

  ‘By and by he will get up,’ said Naibusi, still chopping Misa Kodo’s tobacco, and rubbing it between her palms and packing it away. ‘Let him sleep. I think he is ill.’

  ‘He is different,’ Benoni agreed.

  ‘I will speak to him,’ Naibusi said. ‘I will tell him he should swallow quinine, then he will be well.’

  I was going to say something to Benoni, to make him laugh, about Naibusi and her Dimdim magic, when I heard the old man’s feet in the passage, dragging a little on the mats the way that they do. So I hissed to Benoni instead: ‘Ku la. Misa Makadoneli bi ma.’

  ‘Truly?’ whispered Benoni, and he stood up quickly and was going to go away down the steps. But Misa Makadoneli came suddenly out of the passage and saw him.

  ‘You stay,’ Misa Makadoneli called out, and he sounded angry, because he has made this law that nobody may come on his veranda unless he says yes. ‘You stay. What man are you?’

  So Benoni did not go away any more, but turned at the top of the steps to face Misa Makadoneli, looking very beautiful and tall against the sea.

  ‘I,’ he said in a loud voice. ‘Benoni, taubada.’

  I looked at Misa Makadoneli, who is so little and shrivelled and white and old, and wondered that he was not ashamed to stand before Benoni. But he was not. He was only angry, and you could see how he hated Benoni. Because Benoni had been away to the Navy at Manus and spoke Pidgin and was respected in every village and did not respect Misa Makadoneli.

  ‘Benoni?’ said Misa Makadoneli, looking very fierce, and for a moment his glasses flashed like windows in the sun so that you would have thought he had eyes of fire. ‘What do you want here, Benoni?’

  ‘I want to talk to my friend,’ said Benoni, ‘Misa Kodo.’

  ‘Talk with him in the village,’ said Misa Makadoneli. ‘I do not wish to see you in my house.’ Then he stretched out his arm, which is like the shoot of a yam before it has escaped to the light, and said: ‘Go, adulterer.’

  Benoni just smiled at Misa Makadoneli. ‘Very good,’ he said, but still his back was turned to the steps.

  Then Naibusi spoke to Misa Makadoneli. She did not look at him, and her voice was so quiet that I did not think he would hear, yet he heard. ‘Taubada,’ she said, ‘do not abuse him. He is a good young man, and later he will command all the villages.’

  ‘That man?’ said Misa Makadoneli, pointing at Benoni like a turd on the path. ‘He will command nothing. His uncle has said it, Dipapa has said it. He is unclean. He has slept with his uncle’s wife.’

  I shouted at Misa Makadoneli: ‘Taubada, you talk gammon. Dipapa is too old to sleep with a woman, and Senubeta is an age like me. That old man has never slept with her. He did not marry her for that. He has thirteen wives so as to have fifty brothers-in-law to fill his yam-house. I do not understand your mind. Do you want Senubeta never to have a man? I think truly she did love Benoni.’

  ‘Saliba, enough,’ said Benoni, sounding ashamed because I spoke of such things, and I think also because he did not any longer love his uncle’s wife.

  ‘Yes, truly, enough,’ said Misa Makadoneli. ‘Go to the cookhouse, Saliba, to your work. You are insulting. And you, Benoni, go to your house, if you have a house. I know that Dipapa forbids you to live at Wayouyo.’

  ‘You are wrong, taubada,’ Benoni said, and he smiled at Misa Makadoneli. ‘My house is again at Wayouyo. My uncle has forgotten—those doings.’

  ‘I think you are lying,’ said Misa Makadoneli. ‘Dipapa told me you will never command the villages. He told me that when he dies there will be no chief. Dipapa is the last chief of Kailuana. Like me. I am the last King.’

  ‘That is my uncle’s word, taubada,’ Benoni said; ‘but it is not my uncle’s affair.’

  ‘Ssss,’ said Misa Makadoneli. ‘So it is your affair, ki?’

  ‘Taubada,’ Benoni said, ‘while my uncle is alive, he talks. While you are alive, you talk. When the time comes that you do not exist, that my uncle does not exist, you will not be talking, you two. If the people want a chief, there will be a chief. If they want a Dimdim King, there will be a King. The villages do not hear dead men.’

  ‘Do not quarrel with him, taubada,’ Naibusi said. ‘That is not gammon. Everything will be different when we are not here, you and I.’

  But the old man was passionate because a black man had spoken to him so proudly, and because he does love the people and wishes that the villages should always be like today and like yesterday. It is craziness, the craziness of old men. Better for him and Dipapa that they said in their mind: ‘We shall not command in the time when we are at Budibudi.’ But they hated Benoni’s thoughts, that he brought from Manus with his Pidgin, and their desire was that when they were dead the villages should turn to stone.

  ‘Benoni,’ the old man said, ‘go. You shall not speak with anyone in my house. You shall not walk on the ground of my village. You are not of a chief’s family, not now. You are a commoner and a shamed man. Go to your house.’

  But Benoni still smiled, and talked to the old man in a gentle voice. ‘Taubada,’ he said, ‘do not be afraid because of me. I am a benevolent man and like your nephew. Now you understand my mind.’

  Then Benoni turned and went down the steps. I saw his thighs, and then his shoulders, and at last his beautiful head, shining against the sea.

  DALWOOD

  I went down the passage and knocked on Alistair’s door. A grey door, like all the rest in the house, furry as a copper-stick, set a little askew in a grey wall.

  I was still hot with the MacDonnell, for he seeme
d to be one more who thought that life was all way above my head, and by then I would have liked the chance to say some of the things I was muttering in my mind. Such as that it was tough on the young, this generation-gap, because by the time I was his age and fit to be talked to, he would be a hundred and twenty-nine, and all that much more experienced.

  I heard Alistair behind the door shout something in the language, thinking probably that it was Naibusi or Saliba, and lifted the rust-eaten latch and went in. The window of the little room, the only one in the house with glass, was not built to be opened. The air held the heat of the day before, and it smelt of mildew.

  He lay on yellowed sheets, in a grey bed, puffing the smoke of his nailrod tobacco at a ceiling that was a mirror-image of the floor. He lay inside a cube of grey boards whose lines went round and round him like a cage. I thought that if it had been me, I would have been out and away from a room like that as soon as I was conscious. But not him; he sprawled there in his underpants like a zoo animal that had given up.

  ‘You sure you can breathe?’ I said.

  He turned his head on the yam-coloured pillow and just looked at me, impartially, in a way I was used to.

  ‘You don’t like it here?’ he said at last.

  ‘Yeah, I like it. Man, it’s interesting.’

  ‘Good. You ready for Kaga?’

  ‘Well, I’ve showered and so on. I don’t see any feverish activity in here.’

  ‘It’s the Sabbath,’ he said, leaning over to an up-ended kerosene case beside the bed and stubbing out his cigarette in the clam-shell that was there for the visitors. Then something caught his eye through the dusty window, the light on the pink frangipani flowers outside, and he lifted his head and looked at them, intently. He would do that. His eyes all of a sudden opened to something, his face changed. He concentrated like no one else I have ever seen, on things I never saw at all.

  ‘Nice,’ he said. ‘Wish the window would get broken. The flowers might kill the mould.’