Guerrillas (11 page)

“I haven’t seen him, massa,” Jimmy said into the telephone.

Jane tucked her arms below her chest.

“I know, massa. I know. Massa, I’ll telephone you back.”

He put the telephone down and came back across the scatter of clothes to the bed. Jane, still face down and with her arms below her, was as if asleep. He put his hand on her hip. She didn’t respond. He lay down beside her and she didn’t move. He lay on top of her, and again had only the feeling of flesh below him, again missed the sense of knowing the shape of her body. She remained still. Sudden anger swept over him. He seized her shoulders, lifted himself off her, and sought to enter her where she was smaller. She shouted: “No!” and turned over so violently that she threw him off, her elbow hitting him on the chin. He raised his hand to strike her; but then, with closed eyes, she said strange words. She said: “Love, love.” He lay upon her clumsily; he was swallowed by her wide kiss; he entered her and said, “I’m not good, I’m not good, you know.”

“All men say that.”

And then, just like that, without convulsions, his little strained strength leaked out of him, and it was all over. And he raged inside.

He rested his head on her shoulder, on her blouse, smelling, too late now, her sweat.

She said, “Love, love.”

He shrank, and unwillingly he slipped out of her. He shifted off her and lay face down on her arm.

She said, “Do you always make love in your Mao shirt?”

There wasn’t even mockery in her voice. She was already quite remote. And when he opened his eyes to look at her, he saw that her right leg was drawn up, that the part of herself she had forbidden him to touch with his hand was displayed, as though she were alone. That drawn-up leg, so slender above the knee, and held slightly to one side: there was something masculine about
the posture, something masculine about the hand that stroked that leg now. And she was looking at leg and hand. But how carefully she had tanned herself! With what care she had rendered that leg hairless! The skin looked abraded; but already there were the beginnings of new hairs.

She said, “What did Peter want?”

“Something about Stephens. That boy who used to be at the Grange.”

She said, twitching her arm below his head, “I’m getting up.”

He was close to the edge of the bed. He got up and stood beside the bed in his Mao shirt.

She got off the bed on her side, moving with quickness now, swinging both legs to the floor at the same time. And then, with one large gesture, she pulled the yellow candlewick bedspread off the bed, knocking the bedside lamp over; and, before he had time to consider her nakedness, she with her instinct to conceal herself after an act of casual sex, to reduce the man to a stranger again, she wrapped the spread about herself; and then, nimbly, in spite of the big bedspread, she moved about the room picking up everything that was hers, everything she had seemingly so casually discarded, almost as items that might be abandoned, her shoes, her bag, her trousers and her pants within the trousers; and, with everything that was hers, having cleared the room of her presence, she went into the adjoining bathroom, as though she had been there many times before, and slammed the door shut.

Half naked, Jimmy considered the room. He had lost the moment; he began to know again that emptiness he had lived with for so long; he began to feel that great pain in two places above his groin. He heard her using the lavatory, heard her flush the toilet. Later she tried to flush it again, but there was no water. He began to dress; and it was only then that he noticed, where Jane had lain on, the bed below him, a great damp patch on the white sheet, a great circular patch that had soaked through the candlewick spread. So that her body seemed independent of her manner, her words, her attitudes; and yet he had lost the moment.

And when, presently, she opened the bathroom door, she was dressed, her hair rearranged; and she was cool, almost a stranger
again, someone who would have to be wooed all over again, someone who had surrendered nothing. Through the open bathroom door Jimmy saw the yellow candlewick spread hanging over the low tiled wall of the shower area, untidily tossed, wet. The starved woman had had many lovers, nevertheless; she was as inexperienced as a girl, yet she was spoiled; and, without knowing it, she had developed the bad temper, and the manners, of a prostitute, one of those prostitutes who after defeat and degradation celebrate a triumph, revenging themselves on the maid of a brothel hotel, creating work for that creature, the low punishing the lower. So cool she looked now; so triumphant. He was full of hate for her.

He said, “The car’s still here.”

She said nothing.

But he walked out with her. In the car port at the side of the house she saw the driver in the blue shirt and the boy with pigtails. She opened the door for herself, got into the car, and waited for the driver.

She said, “I hope you get what you wanted from the executives.” Almost without looking at him.

The pain in the two places above his groin grew and grew after she left. He longed for the feel of Bryant, for Bryant’s warm firm flesh and his relieving mouth and tongue.

THE LITTLE delirium had gone; it had begun to die even before she had reached Jimmy’s house. Now, in the car, sitting again behind the driver, and studying the little roll of hairy flesh above the bigger roll of almost hairless flesh, hardly aware of the desolation through which she drove, aware only of the heat, she knew something like distress. Distress as a settled mood, bearable, not a pain. She had memories of sensations; but images of the house and the bedroom broke into those. Words began to go through her head, words addressed to no one in particular, yet words that she fancied herself speaking with tears, like a child: “I’ve looked everywhere. I’ve looked and looked.”

The internal storm passed. The words spoke themselves more calmly, became a statement. She looked at the driver’s mirror: his little red eyes were considering her, and they held her return stare. She looked out at the fields; the junked automobiles beside the road; the men far away, small and busy, stuffing grass into the trunks of cars to take home to their animals; the smoking hills, yellow in the mid-afternoon light. But she was aware of the driver’s intermittent stare; and whenever she looked at the mirror she saw his red, assessing eyes. A whole sentence ran through her head, at first meaningless, and then, as she examined it, alarming. She thought: I’ve been playing with fire. Strange words, to have come so suddenly and so completely to her: something given, unasked for, like
an intimation of the truth, breaking into the sense of safety, of distance put between her and the desolation of that house.

They began to enter the town: safety. The rubbish dump was burning: unusually thick brown smoke, oily and acrid, which made her turn up her window: mounds of rubbish like confetti, trucks and men and women and children blurred in the smoke, lightening occasionally into yellow flame, the carrion corbeaux, nervous of men, restless and squawking near the wire fence. Fire: the smoking hills, the charred verges: it explained the words. But the explanation didn’t satisfy her, didn’t free her. All the way through the noisy afternoon city and then up to the Ridge, the air getting cooler, the plain dropping away behind her, lower and lower, she thought: I’ve been playing with fire.

At the end, the driver did not get out and open the door for her. When she got out she said, “Thank you.” He acknowledged that only by jerking his chin up and making a slight nasal sound. Immediately, lifting his squat, heavy body off the seat and twisting round to look back, one fat black arm embracing the shiny plastic cover of the front seat, he reversed at a great rate down the drive and through the gateway into the road, and was gone.

She was wet between the legs. The smell of the man was strong on her, tainting the perfume with which she had tried to cover it in the bathroom at that house. She fancied the smell was particularly strong on her fingers. She needed a bath. Through the redwood louvers the sun struck into the white-tiled bathroom, hot and dry. She closed the louvers and took her clothes off. But the taps didn’t run. Water was short and was turned off in the afternoons.

She was tired but she didn’t lie down on her bed; and when she had put on the trousers and blouse again she didn’t stay in her room. She walked about the bigger rooms of the empty house, and then she sat on one of the metal chairs on the back porch, waiting first for Adela, who started her evening duties at five, and then for Roche.

When he came she said to him, “There’s a man in that little house in the garden.”

Her anxiety seemed to make him calmer. He said humorously,
“Perhaps it’s one of Adela’s friends or relations. We must be careful.”

He walked down the sunlit concrete steps at the back, between the stunted cypresses. She watched him from the porch. He opened the door and then he looked up at her, the afternoon sun on his face, smiling, making gestures of puzzlement. She went down. The door swung open easily, the little house was empty. The wild man with the rags and the matted locks had taken up his tin and bundles and left. There remained only a vague warm smell of old clothes, dead animals, grease, and marijuana.

He said, “When did you see him?”

“Yesterday morning. But I was too frightened to tell you.”

“It looks as though he was much more frightened of you.”

At about six Adela called from the kitchen, “Water! Water!” and almost at the same time pipes and cisterns hissed all over the house. The light on the hills was golden and thin; the smoldering sky was growing dark; the evening haze covered the plain and the sea. She had a bath.

She said to Roche that evening, “Can I sleep with you tonight?”

He said, “Wouldn’t it be better if I get used to sleeping alone?”

“This isn’t for your sake. It’s for mine.”

He said no more. She took her pillows to his bed.

THE SITUATION is desperate, Roy, the people here have been betrayed too often, it’s always a case of black faces white masks, you don’t know who your enemy is, the enemy infiltrates your ranks all the time. Massa Mister Roche he’s very importunate in his inquiries about one of the boys they sent here, Stephens, a little gang leader from the city, a big coup for them, they thought he was going to take over from me, as though I was going to let that boy draw me out on the streets for the police to shoot me down. No, Roy, I’m staying here in my unfortified castle, the time will come for me to move, the people will come of their own accord to their leader. But the situation is getting desperate now, in the still of the night I lose my courage, I feel it’s a losing battle, they’re sending other agents, I don’t know how to cope …

He broke off. The words had circled in on the wound that was still fresh. He considered his violated room: the books, the photographs, the carpet, the upholstered chairs, everything so nicely put away. And there was the bedroom, with the stained bed, where he was still unwilling to go. The desolation! And where was Bryant? Bryant, with whom he could share the pain of the moment, in whose rejection he might annihilate his own. The night and the bush outside. The silence.

Here’s a laugh, let me tell you about it. The other day one of our church big shots, a bishop or something, he held a service
not in Latin or English but in some fancy language for the niggers, he said it was an African language, Yoruba or something, of course nobody here understands “head nor tail,” and wait for it, the message was that despair was the great sin. What a laugh, it’s like those Harlem movies about interracial sex they’re feeding the people on now to keep them quiet. These people live in a world of dreams, I don’t know how they believe people can stomach that kind of talk still
.

In my father’s house there are many mansions, I remember this from my schooldays, they’d “bust your tail” with licks if you didn’t go to church. But the house is full up now, Roy, there are no more mansions. I suppose like everybody else I fooled myself that there was a mansion waiting somewhere for me, but I didn’t really fool myself, you mustn’t believe that, even when I was a child going to school from the back room of my father’s grocery shop, knowing that back room as the only place I come from in this great wide world, it wasn’t mine, I always knew I was fooling myself, I didn’t believe there was or would ever be any mansion for me
.