Visitants (17 page)

At last Misa Dolu’udi said: ‘Then aren’t you scared?’

‘No, no,’ Misa Kodo cried. ‘Oh Christ, no. Don’t you see?’

‘It can’t be,’ Misa Dolu’udi said again, and shook his head.

While the Dimdims were talking to each other, the rain began. One minute there was no rain, the next minute it broke like a wave. Metusela and Osana and all the people outside on the grass groaned and muttered and ran away. Soon there were only we few men on the veranda, and the chattering Dimdims.

‘Taubada,’ I said to Misa Kodo, ‘what is the machine?’

‘What?’ he said, and it was as if he had forgotten that we were there. ‘Oh. Well, truly, Beni, I do not know. I think it is a machine of the Americans, or perhaps of a people whose country is called Russia. I think it will not hurt us. I think they are benevolent, those people.’ And then he went on, talking quicker and louder and more excited: ‘If it comes again, run to me, tell me. I want to speak with those people. It is my very strong desire. If I talk with those people, my joy will be great, very great.’

‘Then,’ I said, ‘even you, even the Dimdims, do not understand this machine.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not even I.’

‘They are not Americans,’ I said. ‘You talk gammon, taubada. They are people from the stars.’

‘I do not know,’ he said. ‘I will not say. I am an ignorant man too, Beni. Like all the men in the world. We live on the world like an island. Who can say he has seen every ship that sails on the sea?’

‘You have lied to me, taubada,’ I said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I have said I am an ignorant man, and that is the truth.’

Then he got up from his chair, full of restlessness, and said: ‘My friends, let us talk again tomorrow. Now I want to be alone. My very great thanks.’ He stood by the table looking down at us, with his eyes wide and his face moved and dark, and he said those words as if he believed what he said. ‘My very great thanks.’

Now they are going to read from the book, where he slashed in the margin with a thick blue Department of Territories pencil.

He had the pencil stuck behind his ear. He lay reading, quiet in the bedroom, while I, at the table on the veranda, sat on alone, wondering what was in the business to stir him up like that. Him that I’d called anaemic because nothing thrilled him. I sat listening to his silence and the rain, measuring the time by the rum in my china mug.

The rain was a bead-curtain in front of the veranda. It drummed on the thatch. Suddenly two girls, hung with flowers and gasping, burst from the darkness and threw themselves on the boards near my feet. They crouched there, dripping and shining, and nodded to me casually, as if we were all where we belonged.

‘What do you want?’ I said.

But they didn’t understand, and only smiled in a businesslike way.

‘Alistair,’ I called out, ‘there’s a pair of females here. What do I tell them?’

‘Tell them you’re engaged,’ he called back.

‘You talk to them. Say it’s time they went to bed.’

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Are you ready?’ And while I jerked my thumb towards the wall, his voice came over it: ‘
O, vivila
!
A doki tuta bu ku masis’
.’

The women looked at each other, and then at me. And one of them said, shyly. ‘
Ambesa magim bi ta masis?
’

The translation came over the wall, deadpan. They say: ‘Where would you like us to sleep?’

‘With your mother,’ I shouted, standing up and pointing at the rain.
‘Ku los’.
Fuck off.’ Before they had moved I unhooked the lamp and went to the bedroom, leaving them alone with each other’s amazed faces.

Alistair was laid out on one of the neat bunks that Benoni had had built for us, wrapped in a tatty red trade-store blanket with a black tiger on it, nearly lifesize. ‘What are you doing in that?’ I said.

‘Feeling cold,’ he said.

‘You’ll be happy in hell,’ I said. But as I undressed I felt that it was, after all, a little cooler, and the air was so heavy with damp that it seemed surprising that the lamps could still burn. I put out the one on my bunk, and the insects that had come in with me went over to him and battered at his book.

‘They’ve gone?’ he said.

‘I think so,’ I said. ‘They’re probably under the floor now, looking up my leg.’

‘Osana sent them,’ he said.

‘Osana did?’ I said. ‘You’re kidding.’

‘It’s not the first time,’ he said. ‘Haven’t you noticed? It’s part of the Oust Cawdor campaign. He tells them we sent him to make a booking. He even pays them a bit on account. Poor stupid maries, it’s rough on them. They arrive here all primed for an orgy, and you start screaming and abusing them.’

‘Well, I’m sorry about that,’ I said. ‘I didn’t understand the situation. Do you feel like an orgy?’

‘Constantly,’ he said.

‘I’ve never had one,’ I said. ‘Why don’t we?’

‘That would be the happiest night in Osana’s life,’ he said. And he went on reading.

‘Hell, I didn’t mean it,’ I said. ‘It was just stupid talk. It’s this place, these islands. Everything’s sex.’

‘And yams,’ he said. ‘Sex and yams. I spent a long time learning the language before I realized that was all there was to talk about.’

‘I wish I was going somewhere tomorrow,’ I said. ‘I wish I was going to Paris, or Las Vegas, or Bangkok.’

‘You’re going to Obomatu,’ he said, ‘with me. To do a new census book, you lucky bugger.’

I lay down on my bunk and watched him across the room. He had been reading most of the time when I was talking to him, but I was used to that.

I suppose I was drunk, that must have been why I thought all of a sudden of a story I’d heard in Moresby, and it seemed funny enough to snigger at.

‘What appears to be the trouble?’ he said, not looking up.

‘Just a wet joke,’ I said. ‘There were these two troppo patrol officers living in a resthouse, week after week. One day a trader came to see them. “Tell me something,” he said, “what do you two fellas do about sex?” “About sex?” they said. “Oh, we lower the flag and have a glass of rum about sex.”’

‘Very good,’ said Misa Kodo, in the best Misa Kodo manner.

I started to giggle, not because of the story but because of him. ‘You know this one?’ I said. ‘There were these two troppo patrol officers sitting in the middle of a village, and a pigeon flew over and dropped a turd on the head of one of them. The VC gets very upset about this, and he says: “Oh, taubada, I’ll go away and get a piece of paper.” When he’s gone, one patrol officer turns to the other and says: “That’s the stupidest kanaka I ever struck. By the time he gets back here with the paper, that bird will be miles away.”’

‘You’re a ball of fun tonight,’ Misa Kodo said. ‘It must be a riot, being two troppo patrol officers.’

‘Did you take the vitamin pills?’ I said. ‘No, you didn’t. Or the anti-malarial. That’s why you’re cold, you’re getting malaria, you stupid bastard. What have you eaten today?’

‘You’re pissed,’ he said. ‘Go to sleep. Let’s not have all that.’

‘I want to see you fit,’ I said.

He looked up at me at last, calm. ‘I’m pretty fit,’ he said. ‘And I’m glad you’ve got Saliba. Because there’s something a bit sad about two troppo patrol officers worrying over each other’s vitamin pills.’

‘You’re not human,’ I said. ‘Okay. I don’t care if you live or die. Just leave a note that it wasn’t my fault, that’s all, on account of public opinion.’

Then I rolled over and turned my back on him, and did mean to go to sleep. But he must have gone on looking at me, and at last his voice said, thoughtfully:
‘Tomitukwaibwoina yoku.
You are a benevolent man.’

‘Goodnight,’ I said.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I want to read you something. Tim? Listen.’

I heard the rain on the thatch. The rain on the thatch, and the insects bumping and scrabbling against the pages of his book. And his voice, rising, growing sharper as he read.

In the following years, three comets were seen; and not long before the coming of the Spaniards a strange light broke forth in the east. It spread broad at its base on the horizon, and rising in a pyramidal form tapered off as it approached the zenith. It resembled a vast sheet or flood of fire, or, as an old writer expresses it, ‘seemed thickly powdered with stars’. At the same time, low voices were heard in the air, and doleful wailings, as if to announce some strange, mysterious calamity! The Aztec monarch, terrified at the apparitions in the heavens, took council of Nezahualpilli, who was a great proficient in the subtle science of astrology. But the royal sage cast a deeper cloud over his spirit, by reading in these prodigies the speedy downfall of the empire.

Such are the strange stories reported by the chroniclers, in which it is not impossible to detect the glimmerings of truth. Nearly thirty years had elapsed since the discovery of the islands by Columbus, and more than twenty since his visit to the American continent. Rumours, more or less distinct, of this wonderful appearance of the white men, bearing in their hands the thunder and the lightning, so like in many respects to the traditions of Quetzalcoatl, would naturally spread far and wide among the Indian nations. Such rumours, doubtless, long before the landing of the Spaniards in Mexico, found their way up the grand plateau, filling the minds of men with anticipations of the near coming of the period when the great deity was to return and receive his own again.

In the excited state of their imaginations, prodigies became a familiar occurrence. Or rather, events not very uncommon in themselves, seen through the discoloured medium of fear, were easily magnified into prodigies; and the accidental swell of the lake, the appearance of a comet, and the conflagration of a building, were all interpreted as the special annunciations of Heaven. Thus it happens in those great political convulsions which shake the foundations of society,—the mighty events that cast their shadows before them in the coming. Then it is that the atmosphere is agitated with the low, prophetic murmurs, with which nature, in the moral as in the physical world, announces the march of the hurricane:

When tidings were brought to the capital of the landing of Grijalva on the coast, in the preceding year, the heart of Montezuma was filled with dismay. He felt as if the destinies which had so long brooded over the royal line of Mexico were to be accomplished, and the sceptre was to pass away from his house for ever.

‘You’re asleep, of course,’ Alistair said. I heard him move in his bunk, reaching towards the lamp. Then the pressure hissed out of it, the light drained away, and the rain seemed all the louder because of the darkness and because we would not talk any more.

‘I heard you,’ I said, inside the mosquito net I had arranged around me. ‘I don’t understand you, that’s all. Whose side are you on—the Martians?’

Then he said something that was covered by the rain. I couldn’t hear the words, but I heard the tone of his voice, excited, as if he was impatient with waiting for something. I pulled back the net and called across the room: ‘What was that?’

And he shouted, in the roaring dark, while the rain came faster and the palms thrashed. ‘We’re not alone,’ he shouted. ‘Ah, you thick lump, can’t you see it? We’re not alone.’

When I woke in the morning the rain was still falling as it had been when I went to sleep, and I said to the policemen: ‘We shall not go today to Obomatu. Sleep some more,’ I told them. ‘I am going to sleep, and no work can be done without me.’

One of the policemen, Esau, said in Pidgin: ‘What is your work, bighead? Masta Alistair does your work.’

‘You shall see,’ I said. ‘Wait a little, Esau. You shall see.’

When we had eaten we ran to the resthouse through the rain. There were no people about it, only the two Dimdims and Kailusa and Biyu on the veranda. Even an ignorant village like Wayouyo could not be interested in Dimdims when the weather was like that. The people had stayed in their houses, and the smoke from under their yam-pots climbed from the eaves into the rain, making the air of the village blue and the grove cloudy.

‘It’s nine o’clock,’ said Mister Dalwood to the three policemen and me.

Mister Dalwood sat in a chair on the veranda with an impatient face. But Mister Cawdor, in his chair, was reading a book and took no notice of us when we came.

‘It is the rain, taubada,’ I said to Mister Dalwood. ‘We had much trouble because of the rain.’

‘Bullshit,’ said Mister Dalwood, speaking carefully, and the policemen laughed.

Biyu was waiting behind Mister Dalwood’s chair. Biyu looked out across the clearing and said: ‘It rain, taubada,’ and then was so pleased with himself that he could not stop smiling, because he had said it in English.

‘Is it?’ said Mister Dalwood. ‘Hey, everybody. Biyu says it’s raining.’

That made the policemen laugh again, and the stupid Biyu was filled with shame and went away, and even Kailusa, who did not like him, seemed sorry.

Suddenly Mister Cawdor closed his book with a noise and looked angry at Mister Dalwood. He said: ‘Listen, will you stop trying to score off the kid.’

‘Well, he’s such an idiot,’ Mister Dalwood complained. ‘Anyway, hell, who pays him?’

‘Some time I’ll have to tell you about shame in this part of the world, Mister Cawdor said. ‘That’s if you don’t want to see him shinning up a palm and jumping off.’

When Mister Cawdor said that, Mister Dalwood went red like a flower and seemed more shamed even than Biyu, though no one had laughed at him. He said: ‘Yeah. Sorry. You don’t tell me enough.’ And Mister Cawdor looked at him for a moment quite kindly, and then opened his book again.

‘You’re all right,’ Mister Cawdor said, while he read. ‘For a Dimdim, anyway.’

Mister Dalwood did not answer, but gazed at his shoes and moved his shoulders like a modest man.

The policemen had not understood what the Dimdims said, but they saw Mister Dalwood’s shame and were interested and sorry for him. Policemen and boat-boys are always fond of Mister Dalwood, because he is so childish and so strong. So the policemen went and squatted down beside him, and whenever he looked towards them they smiled very kindly, till I thought that Mister Dalwood would jump up and knock their heads together in his bad-temper.