Travels with Myself and Another (14 page)

I went out immediately to sightsee. The small women of the East, Javanese and Indian, padded about barefoot in sarongs and sarees, wearing their fortunes upon them in gold and silver ornaments. Dutch ladies pedalled by on bikes. Creole women, enormous under starched skirts, balanced baskets on their heads. Girls, triumphant results of blended Malay and Chinese and African blood, flirted along to show off their clothes and hair-dos, copied from the last movie magazine. Black policemen in green uniforms directed the traffic: a staff car, a limousine, the Navy station wagon and scores of bicycles. Government clerks, of different well-miscegenated shades, in smart white suits and briefcases, eyed the women cautiously, as did Dutch and American soldiers properly clad for the city.

The people of Paramaribo were the best sight. But the shops, Javanese, Indian, Dutch, Chinese, were not to be downgraded, the most engaging was Jonas Home Industries where you could buy local products such as preserved tarantulas and native combs, apparently made of filed sharks’ teeth.

I was swooning with happiness by five o’clock when I settled on a ruptured cane chair in the lobby to listen to the going gossip. At five o’clock promptly the mosquitoes arrived. “Union mosquitoes,” a soldier observed. “They work from 5 p.m. to 5 a.m.” They were the biggest mosquitoes I had met anywhere and fearless, they zoomed in to cover one’s arms and legs and died feeding while others replaced those you had beaten to death. When the blazing sun went down, the air refused to cool despite nightly rainy season cloudbursts. The rain was lukewarm, encouraged the mosquitoes, turned the streets into quagmires which dried to deep dust a half hour after sunrise. Between five and six in the morning, there was a very faint freshness to breathe.

Within a day, I felt I had been living happily in the Paramaribo Grand Hotel for years, at home in the buzzing local life. Among my new friends were the Singer Sewing Machine Man, who travelled as much as anyone could in this country to collect payments on his merchandise, a Dutch missionary from somewhere in the interior, an English couple on holiday from a distant goldfield. But there was my job, I couldn’t simply frolic.

My job was Our Boys and bauxite and the war effort. I went out to the Base. The C.O. was twenty-nine, the Squadron Commander thirty; they were the old men and sometimes called Sir and both were wise and funny and knew how to run this stifling outpost so that the work got done and the men stayed sane and improbably content. The officers lived in the same sort of barracks as the men, the officers’ mess was separated from the men’s by a sheet curtain that was never closed. The officers’ club had ten minimally easy chairs, three worn card tables and a makeshift bar. I came to love the Base too and bought a pair of sneakers as chigger prevention.

When I told the chaps that I meant to write of their noble efforts and bauxite mines, they fell about laughing. They said that if I could write one sentence about a bauxite mine, they would give me a prize, the skin of an eighteen-foot boa constrictor that adorned the enlisted men’s club. The barman protested, “You can’t do that, it belongs to us.” “Balls,” said the C.O. “You know you guys would sell your grandmothers. Money, money that’s all you think about. What if I offer you fifty dollars?” “Nothing doing,” said the barman. “Don’t argue,” the Airforce Major said. “She’s not going to win any prize.”

Win or lose, they proposed to send me to the biggest bauxite mine in the Navy crash boat that patrolled the river, much quicker than the launch trip. I thanked them and asked if they would now please explain their noble efforts. The C.O. said that the Airforce was spoiled, no better than weaklings, they could get up in their planes nearly every day and cool off. The Airforce said that the Army lived in shameful safety, think of the awful danger they faced in the sky. “What danger would that be?” asked an Army lieutenant. “The engine might fall out,” said the Airforce.

The crash boat sped up a muddy river that wound through walls of jungle. After more than enough of this unvarying scenery it stopped at the river bank, where a lieutenant and driver and jeep waited. We drove a short distance inland. We did the bauxite situation up brown, in no time. He showed me the mine. It looked like an open gravelly field, dug at, chewed, ploughed. The driver gave me some clay, reddish with white streaks in it, which crumbled in my hand. ‘That’s what we’re here for,’ the lieutenant said with resignation. The plant to do whatever was done to that clay looked like a cluster of silos and barns, red with dust and silent. A soldier marched steadily around it.

“Interesting?” the lieutenant asked. He didn’t seem a day over seventeen.

“Oh, very.” We hadn’t got out of the jeep.

“I reckon you’re ready to go back now,” the lieutenant said. “I wouldn’t ask a dog to come to my tent for a drink.”

“Anyway there’s no ice,” said the driver. “War is hell.” He didn’t seem a day over sixteen.

Albina, on the Dutch side of the Marowijne river, was a trading post for gold and balata brought down in native canoes. Gutta percha is made from the latex of balata trees; also useful in war though I don’t know why. Arawak Indians and Caribs and blacks lived in villages around Albina. The Caribs were paralysed drunk after a bang-up funeral, you could smell cassava brew all over the place. A Dutch civilian got me across to the penal colony of Saint Laurent in French Guiana, telling the French guard that I was a tourist wishing to buy convict-made trinkets. He had warned me not to speak English so we talked ungrammatical German loudly and satisfied the guard.

French Guiana was a penal colony, Devil’s Island being the most infamous prison, and was such a disgrace in the twentieth century that the French ought to have shut up about their
mission civilisatrice.
Now it is abandoned so the French can boast with a better conscience. Convicts, dead-eyed skeletons in red and white striped pyjamas, cut wood in the jungle until they died of exhaustion and disease. One vertical wall of this prison rose from the river, full of piranhas and crocodiles; a ten-foot iron fence, tipped with spikes, closed in the town side. At dusk the fence was patrolled by guards with Mausers; if any prisoner came close to the fence they shot him. The guards’ faces suited their work; it was a vile place; I hurried to get out.

Some convicts actually had escaped to Albina chancing the river rather than die surely and slowly in St Laurent. Their dream was to join the Free French in West Africa but there was no transport. They were grateful to the Dutch who treated them like human beings. We sat in the dust smoking American cigarettes, and they told me that, since the Vichy government took over France, the Guiana authorities were trying to wipe out the prisoners by starvation and overwork and punishment. The Vichy French were apt pupils of the Nazis. No man could live more than three months when the punishment started. Half the men, about seven hundred, had died in the prison of St Jean de Maronie; many men were dying every day in St Laurent.

The Dutch officers and non-coms were older and less cheerful than the U.S. contingent, with reason, but the Dutch and Americans got on well, respected each other, accepted amiably their different manners and mannerisms. The Dutch had experienced the war in Holland and their families were still in the occupied homeland. They wrote through the Swiss Red Cross and you could tell it was a bad day by a man’s face if he had figured he ought by now to have a letter back and none came. The letters from Holland couldn’t say anything but as long as they arrived in familiar handwriting the men knew their families lived and that was enough.

They trained small Javanese and Indian troops on the square in front of the hotel, beginning every morning at five; late at night, lights burned in the Territorial Command offices. Surinam was the last land, except for the tiny Caribbean Dutch islands, where they could raise their own flag.

Having enjoyed myself mightily on this remote frontier, I wrote and mailed off my Surinam article and should have gone home but first I bought a map and was undone. There wasn’t much on the map as there wasn’t much in Surinam, the capital, a few settlements near the coast and several rivers. This map showed the Saramcoca river weaving from Paramaribo through green then white space, representing green jungle and the white unknown. The river was a blue line up to a small Christian cross where presumably the farthest traveller lay down to die. Beyond the cross, the river was marked by blue dots, suggesting an uncharted course through that big blob of white. The Saramcoca, enticing name, cried out to be explored. How could anyone expect me to miss such an opportunity; besides why need anyone know what I was doing? Exploring was a brand-new type of travel.

A black city slicker presented himself as guide, interpreter, and organizer. I don’t remember how this character entered my life. Perhaps through the owner of Jonas Home Industries to whom I had been talking about his merchandise; probably I said I wanted to go upriver and see for myself whence came these lovely bottled snakes, giant centipedes, and monkey-skull rattles. The city slicker claimed that his name was Harold; I never met anyone less like a Harold. For me, he was Mr Slicker. He wore such dark glasses that he looked eyeless, and a red bow tie and a sweat-stained crushed Homburg hat and a suit in the same state. I was sure he was syphilitic, heaven knows why. He was smarmy and generally repulsive.

Unless off my rocker from heat, I can think of no explanation for venturing into the unknown with him as sole companion. Not that I would have wanted to involve a friend, not after China, but the cat would have been a great comfort. Mr Slicker was responsible for all equipment and provisions. I packed necessities like cigarettes and books in a basket, kept my room, and announced that I was going to visit friends for a while. It did not seem best to talk about exploring until after I had passed the burial cross on the map, and returned.

Mr Slicker and I set off in a taxi for a few hours, then embarked on the river in a hollowed-out tree trunk paddled by three blacks wearing loincloths and knitting needles stuck in their hair. I was miffed by the knitting needles. Couldn’t they tell the difference between a tourist out for local colour and a budding explorer? Mr Slicker, surprised by my disobliging remarks about the knitting needles, said these fellows always wore them, why did I think they’d bother to earn money if not to buy pretty hair pins? I was hauled aboard to sit on my hump of tent and mosquito net and we proceeded upriver.

Paddling is not speedy and the current was against us. Very slowly, we moved along the river, wide and brown like all rivers here and blocked in by jungle so dense you could see nothing except a high dusty green barrier on both sides of lifeless water. I heard some sort of birds making unpleasant squawks, but never saw them. Mr Slicker was full of dire instructions. I must not dip my hands in the river or they would be bitten off. I wasn’t hankering to dip my hands into what seemed like thick hot mud but didn’t believe him. To entertain the rich lunatic they were paid to paddle, the crew threw some mushy grub they had been eating into the water which at once boiled. The food was yanked below and the river flowed smoothly on, with all its charms hidden. I kept my hands to myself and wondered if these tree trunks ever capsized. Unwilling to admit it, I was less interested in exploring after the first day.

Mr Slicker spotted a place where the jungle had receded a few yards and there we camped for the night. Fussy and again dire, Mr Slicker told me to wriggle into my pup tent at sunset because of mosquitoes.

“I haven’t been jumping under my mosquito net in Paramaribo at sunset and there are millions of mosquitoes. Look at my arms.” My arms looked like measles.

“These here are badder, believe me, Moddom, they make you sick.”

“What do you think they do in Paramaribo? Half the place has malaria.” This week the Consul was laid low, last week the Censor had been shivering and shaking; the regular choice of disease was malaria or an indigenous dysentery.

“No, badder than malaria, believe me Moddom.”

Well hell, I didn’t want to sit by him, shrouded in smoke from the fire he had lit as mosquito repellent. It was hot enough without that. I couldn’t read anywhere. Hard ground was better than the hatch cover, but I wasn’t sure where I stood on the different merits of being rain-wet and cold or sweat-wet and suffocating. Mr Slicker hummed by the smoking fire. The knitting-needle boys, with whom I couldn’t exchange a word as they spoke a language of their own, must have dossed down in the hollow tree trunk. I was back in the well-known long nights.

Next day I was saved from staring blankly at jungle by a river village of blacks. They had hacked away a homeland and lived in pointed thatched huts, starkers, but greased and glistening and also stinking with rancid coconut butter, the local Elizabeth Arden skin cream. Mr Slicker explained that skin was the first attraction of a woman and I could see why since the ladies were mainly huge bottoms, like carrying your own pillow, and pendulous breasts. Little leather pouches, containing charms against evil spirits, hung between all breasts. A few of the men wore a brown cotton bag to hold their privates. I was surprised that a naked black man does not looked naked to a white-oriented eye. The men’s bodies were muscular and strong to the waist, from canoe paddling, with spindly legs. The village received me with much pinching, patting, tweaking, and howls of laughter; they treated me like a circus sideshow not an explorer.

The ancestors of these blacks, brought here as slaves, escaped to liberty in the bush. For two hundred years they had paid tribute to no government, obeyed no rulers except their own and lived independent of the white man. Nothing had changed except transplantation from African bush to South American bush. They didn’t even go in for knitting needles. It was not my cuppa, I was sickened by the circumambient body odour, but they seemed happy living as they liked in their own style, as they always had. Just freedom was enough.

Mr Slicker was deep in conversation with the Chief and didn’t notice my increasingly urgent signals for departure. I was tired of painful pinches and about to shout at him when he came over; every time I looked at his face I got a shock from those black holes instead of eyes. “The Chief says you tell Missy Wilhelmina he is sorry to hear she cannot go home.”