A Way in the World (21 page)

Phyllis’s friend was waiting, as he had promised, in the café with the red-painted metal tables and chairs. He was at a corner table and was reading the local paper. He was a handsome, sinewy man, in his forties, in features and physique and skin-colour more West Indian than African.

I felt, as soon as we began to talk, that there was something Phyllis had left out in her story of her married life here with the little chief. I felt she had liked this man very much and wanted, even at this distance and after all this time, to show him off to me. And there was a touch of vanity in him too, at being recognized as the man Phyllis had liked.

When he heard that Phyllis had given me some money
for him he lost control of his smile. It became a grimace; and he made a curious series of dismissing sounds. I felt he had had subsidies like this from women before. I felt it was a way of life he knew. And that expression—tight, unsmiling, unreliable—stayed on his face when I told him that Phyllis had said he would give me an idea of the true Africa.

He spoke of wise men he knew, both in the town and the villages, and the magical tricks they would perform for me, if he asked them. These men would disappear in front of my eyes. They would go through solid walls. They would slash their hands and blood would pour from the wounds; and then they would so heal the wounds that no scar would show. They would perform staggering feats of telepathy, entering houses and minds in many continents.

It wasn’t at all what I was expecting. I had thought, from what she had said, that Phyllis had developed some feeling for the antiquity of tribal ritual; and some idea as a result, stronger than any she had had as an
antillaise,
of her grip on the world. I might have read too much in what she said. This man was like the con-man of African hotel lounges, offering hippy-style magic to travellers. Perhaps she had known very little of Africa when she had become involved with this man. Perhaps memory had added to him. Perhaps she had become profounder in the other country. Or perhaps this man had answered so many of her needs here—comforter, lover, astrologer, magician—that she had not really been able to judge him.

I wanted to leave the man. But, after this talk of magic, he wanted to stick to me. He came out to the square with me and—strong, elegant, easy in his movements, very attractive—he began to walk back with me to the hotel. The beggars saw us and squawked at us; some of them raced up aggressively in their carts; the man with the padded stumps drove them away.

Phyllis’s friend said as we walked, as though he wanted
to live up to what Phyllis had said about him, “You get only the bad news about Africa in the European papers. The wars and the famines. But I will tell you. There are seven sacred spots in Africa. All the forces of the continent are concentrated on those seven spots. There is a holy man in each one of those spots. Every month these holy men meet and arrange the destiny of Africa.”

What was the implication of that? That we were on one of the seven spots, and that he was one of the holy men?

I asked, “How do these seven men meet?”

He made a gesture, making a circular sweep above his head with his index finger. “Telepathically.”

Was this magic African? Or was it part of a fantasy of Africa from across the ocean, a hippy-style fantasy about the powers of old cultures, something that had made its way back here and was now being offered as African to travellers, strangers and solitaries who needed this kind of magic?

Soon, I knew, I would be hearing from this man about the extra-terrestrial beings who had landed on a certain part of West Africa. And, indeed, he was beginning on that when we got to the entry to the hotel. He was frightened of the policemen there. He didn’t follow me in.

WE ALL
inhabit “constructs” of a world. Ancient peoples had their own. Our grandparents had their own; we cannot absolutely enter into their constructs. Every culture has its own: men are infinitely malleable. And perhaps Phyllis, with the fluidity of character which her African life had given her, enabling her to be many things to many people (critical of Africans, critical of Europeans, critical of West Indians and black Americans, critical of one group by reference to another), perhaps Phyllis, with her initial French-speaking limitations (Guadeloupe, Paris, West Africa), had established her own further construct of the world. Perhaps in that fluidity,
in that shiftingness, she had found freedom. Perhaps, as the years went on, she would recede more and more from her own background; perhaps logic would leave her. As much as the principal’s father’s Back-to-Africa escape (or struggle) had determined the principal’s twin natures, so Phyllis’s construct had been determined by her marriage to her little chief and, before that, by her flight from the French West Indies (so liberating to the black man who was the first to teach me French). She couldn’t go back to what she had left behind; she couldn’t absolutely undo anything she had done; that was part of her woman’s nature.

It was otherwise for Lebrun. He had always been on the run, a revolutionary without a base, always a failure in one way, in another way fortunate, never having to live with the consequences, of his action, always being free to move on.

Perhaps he never knew the consequences of his words in the French West African dictatorship, when for the first time he found a ruler of a state who was ready to be his disciple, because the advice so matched the ruler’s own needs.

When the dictatorship collapsed and the desolate country was opened up, no one thought of calling him to account. He was not associated with desolation. He was, rather, the man who had held fast both to ideas of revolution and African redemption; and had not been rewarded for his pains. In the mess of Africa and the Caribbean he was oddly pure.

He was now very old, and famous among people who were interested in colonial and post-colonial history. But the people who wrote occasional profiles of him couldn’t really understand him. They had grown up in another world, and were simpler than he was. The profile-writers and the television interviewers, who promoted him with self-conscious virtue, were serving a cause that had long ago been won. They risked nothing at all. They had no means of understanding or assessing a man who had been born early in the century into a very hard world, whose intellectual growth had at
every stage been accompanied by a growing rawness of sensibility, and whose political resolutions, expressing the wish not to go mad, had been in the nature of spiritual struggles, occurring in the depth of his being.

They came with their interview files, and they asked all the questions that had been asked before. They asked especially about his mother’s uncle, the coachman of the English family who had gone from Barbados to London, and had found friends among the servants of the Tichborne house, who gave him tea and cake. Lebrun told the story again and again. Towards the end of his life, he sometimes forgot the point of the story. He had the old coachman say that in the old days black people and white people were one, and then he, Lebrun, searched for the thing that he knew followed but could no longer find. For the interviewer or the television producer it was enough, a text for today; not understanding that Lebrun’s anguish had begun there, with the old coachman taking him far back, almost to the times of slavery, as to the good times. But perhaps, too, in extreme old age, he had become a child again, looking only for peace.

PERHAPS A PLAY
or a screen play, or a mixture of both—that is how it came to me, an unrealizable impulse, a long time ago: the first set being a view in section of the upper decks of a Jacobean ship, the
Destiny
. The time, 1618. The setting, a South American river, grey when still, muddy when rippled. It is almost dawn. The sky is silver. The two-tiered set is in semi-gloom; but the tropical light is coming fast. The pre-dawn silence is broken by the sound of a heavy splash. A man has jumped overboard. After a while there are shouts from the decks of the ship, and the sound of running feet.

At the same time the light begins to show a thin and very old man in Jacobean undress in the captain’s quarters. This is Sir Walter Raleigh. He is sixty-four. He has been ill for many months; he has only eight months or so to live.

He has been a free man for just under two years. For thirteen years before that, he had been a prisoner in the Tower of London, because of some trouble with the king. He has been released in order to go and find the gold mines of El Dorado in Guiana in South America. He has always said that these mines exist somewhere on the banks of the Orinoco, and he has always said he knows exactly where the mines are.
Twenty-two years before, he had raided the Spanish island of Trinidad, which guarded the entrance to the Orinoco and El Dorado, and he had captured the Spanish conquistador, Berrio, the so-called governor of the province of El Dorado. He claimed to have plundered all the old conquistador’s knowledge about the golden territories. And he also claimed to have won over all the Indians of the region to his side. He has been let out to prove his point now, and he has accepted conditions that are like those of a game. If he finds gold, everything will be forgiven. He will be executed if he doesn’t find gold, or if he disturbs the Spaniards. Guiana is Spanish territory.

And now—in this land which in his mind and writings existed as a kind of Arcadia where he could be king of the Indians, ruler of a golden empire—he is a man under siege. The Indians avoid him. He cannot get the food he once wrote about, the sweet fresh-water fish from the fresh-water pools in the Pitch Lake. The Spaniards on Trinidad, few, but the advantage is with them, watch him. They have their muskets. They don’t fire recklessly. They wait, they take careful aim at forty paces, no more. He regularly loses one man, two men, when little parties go ashore to get pitch, good for caulking ships, or oysters, or food, or water. Food is running short for him.

As the weeks pass, and no news comes from the south, from that tributary of the Orinoco up which he has sent half of his gold-mine expedition, he feels bereft. The skiff he sent afterwards up the river to get news—with a captured Indian as pilot—hasn’t returned. The conviction grows on him that knowledge of what has happened up river has spread around these Indian villages. The Indians all speak Spanish now. They have no reason to ignore the Spaniards for the sake of Raleigh. Raleigh has stayed away for twenty-two years, after all. And again it was to get news, as much as to get fresh food, the fish from the pools in the hard asphalt of the Pitch
Lake, La Brea, and the delicate, “fat” flesh of the “pheasants” of the country, that he allowed the second of the three Indians he captured—secret Spanish-speakers, and possibly in league with the Spaniards in Trinidad and on the mainland—to go ashore, leaving his friend behind as a hostage.

A soldier knocks on his cabin door and comes in and says that Martin, the third Indian, has escaped.

“Well, well,” the old man says. “Who was on watch?”

“Piggott.”

“I feel I should put Piggott alone in a skiff and send him up to the Orinoco.”

“We can lower a boat and try to get him back. The Indian.”

“I don’t see what good that will do.”

“It won’t be easy, but we can try.”

“Of course it won’t be easy. By the time you lower your boat and put on your armour he will be in the woods. Once he’s got a tree between you and him, that’s that. You couldn’t keep him on the ship. You certainly won’t be able to catch him in the woods.”

“We were going to hang him today, because his friend didn’t come back from the village. The men didn’t like that. They feel now that everything they do will rebound on them. They’ve had too much bad luck already.”

“That reminds me. Go and tell the surgeon to come. I must have my draught. Why aren’t you wearing your breastplate? I gave those instructions. We should be ready at all times. Metal is hot, but a poisoned arrow will be much hotter.”

“I was putting it on when the Indian jumped overboard.”

“What scum.”

“I’ll go and call the surgeon.”

“These mariners and soldiers. Their friends and families sent them to sea on purpose. Wanting them only to drown or disappear. Sometimes I think the people they gave me
were born only to eat rations. They stole my last apples. I was keeping a few in that sand barrel. They found out and stole them. I went to a lot of trouble to pack them in good clean white sand before we left England.”

The sky gets brighter. A hot day, already. The surgeon comes to the cabin, to give the old man his draught. They talk about Martin, the Indian who has escaped. They agree that it is better for the man not to have been hanged. The threat was made only to encourage the other Indian to come back, before they sent him—as they thought—to his village to trade English goods for food and perhaps news. Clearly, though, the man didn’t mind sacrificing the friend or fellow tribesman he’d left behind on the ship.

“Your draught,” the surgeon says.

“There is a balsam that can be collected in those woods,” the old man says. “In 1595 I got quite a bit from Wannawanare’s people. This time I had just got about a little nutful when I went ashore. The sweetest thing you ever smelled. Like angelica. For twenty years that smell has been with me. But then they opened up on us.”

“You have to forget about things like that now. We won’t be allowed to land.”

“And the oysters. Little ones growing on the roots of the mangrove below water. You could hack away a piece of mangrove root and bring away a dozen oysters, all alive. Sweet oysters, sweeter than anything you ever tasted. And the rain water in the hollows of the Pitch Lake. You can taste the tar in it, but that is part of the sweetness of the water.”

“You torment yourself, and other people, by talking of those things. Sweet things. How many of them you promised us when we were coming out! You talked a lot about a cassava liquor.”

“I remembered it from 1595. Right here. On this Guiana coast. The Indian women chewed the cassava and spat it out into a vessel. In England women are the brewers, and so they
are here too. Or were. I don’t know what happens now. I haven’t gone to their villages. The chewing of the cassava was woman’s work, because long ago they found out that woman’s saliva caused cassava to ferment fast. You wouldn’t imagine it when you saw a group of them sitting flat on the ground and chewing and spitting into a hollowed-out piece of tree trunk, and giggling when they saw you looking at what they were doing. The first time I saw Moriquito’s women doing it, it looked so strange, I stopped and asked, and they all roared with laughter, and I thought they were joking. But when it was ready it made the clearest and the sweetest liquor you ever tasted. Sweeter than any nut, finer than any ale. On drinking occasions the chiefs took their leisure in their hammocks, swinging from side to side in the shade of trees in their villages. Because it’s cool there, in the woods, not as hot and sweaty as it is here on the ship in the Gulf. And the women served this nectar to their chiefs, filling tiny cupfuls at a time with little ladles. Such women. Plump, and as fine as any well-bred woman in England. White skins, regular features, black hair.”