Guerrillas (6 page)

Still everybody has their uses, even Mr. Peter Roche, I call him massa but he doesn’t see the joke. He’s the great white revolutionary and torture hero of South Africa. He’s written this book which I don’t think you would know about, but over here of course he is a world-shaking best-selling author, and now he is working for one of our old imperialist firms, Sablich’s great slave traders in the old days, they now pretend that black is beautiful, and wait for it they employ Mr. Roche to prove it. I play along, what can you do—

He broke off. The charm did not work. Words, which at some times did so much for him, now did not restore him to himself. He was a lost man, more lost than he had been as a boy, in his
father’s shop, at school, in the streets of the city, when he saw only what he saw and knew nothing.

Bryant, sitting quietly in the furry chair, had been watching him. The empty Ovaltine mug stood on the glass-topped table. Bryant’s eyes had cleared; expression had come back to his face and he was calmer; his pigtails looked limp.

“Bryant, did you ask the lady for money?”

“Jim?”

“Did you ask her?”

“Jimmy, you know it isn’t the sort of thing I does do.”

He offered comfort to others, but he needed their comfort more. He went to Bryant, the very ugly, damaged from birth, who expressed all that he saw of himself in certain moods. He embraced Bryant.

IT WAS fashionable here, in the new houses on the Ridge, to have instead of glass windows louvers of redwood which, when closed, created total darkness. It was in this darkness, the louvers closed to keep out insects, that Jane awoke in her own room every day, and recaptured for a moment something of the mystery of her arrival. The long airplane journey through the night: the noise of the engines that obliterated past and distance; the memories—more like dreams than memories of actual events—of getting off at various airports, brilliantly illuminated; excitement then going, fatigue deadening response; so that, just hours away from London, she felt she had entered another life.

The strangeness had begun at the London airport. They had all boarded the plane; then there had been a fog alert and they had all got out; then they had got in again and there for five hours they had stayed, on the ground. London was outside; but they inside were already in another world, of passengers and stewardesses, stewardesses who, on the ground part of London and not noticeable, in the airplane became English and exotic, wearing a particular uniform. Change came to the passengers as well: the restless and the assertive began to stand out, mainly men who had taken off their jackets and slackened their ties; and among the black passengers differences of clothes, manner, and speech became more pronounced.

London all afternoon; New York at some time of the night or early morning. Some Americans got on, and two men sat in the empty seats beside Jane. She was too tired to mind, too tired to do more than note the pornographic books, their titles printed small on plain white covers, that both men were always reading whenever she awakened from her doze. Nassau airport: the transit lounge closed, a dim light in a kind of corridor, a half-embarrassed Negro, a workman in spite of his jacket and tie, trying to pick up a red-haired girl. Later, in the plane, Jane had reached out for Easy Lay, now resting in a seat pocket; but the American beside her, to whom the book belonged, had put his plump hand on hers and taken away the book, saying, “Not for little girls. It’s the hard stuff.” Awake again, connected sleep no longer possible, bright light in some windows; trays, brisk stewardesses now with aprons over their uniforms, so that their character changed again. The American said to Jane, “You need intensive care.”

After the landing—black men in khaki uniforms, continuing a loud conversation of their own, hurrying into the plane to spray it—after the sting of insecticide and the shock of light and heat, the Americans had taken Jane with them through concrete corridors to the immigration hall, her clothes getting sticky as she walked, her eyes registering the bad French signs. They had taken her to the head of the queue that had already formed; and they must have been important men, because they were let through without formality, and Jane had been let through with them, without handing over her disembarkation card or showing her return ticket or having her passport stamped.

In the customs hall, waiting for her luggage, Jane had begun to be more alert. She had begun to think of one of the Americans: He is a candidate. He had given his local address; she noted it was not in the city. He asked where she was staying and who was meeting her. She mentioned Roche’s name, speaking it as a famous name, casually, and expecting that it would get some response, of surprise or apprehension, from the Americans, whom she now judged to be business types. But they hadn’t heard of Roche or the firm he worked for.

And the surprise, disappointment almost, which showed on
their faces when, leaving the customs hall, they saw Roche, under medium height, without a jacket and slenderer than he had appeared in London, almost thin, leaning against an iron rail, indistinguishable in dress and posture from the taxi drivers and the freelance porters among whom he appeared to be lounging at the exit gate, this disappointment, this abrupt coolness of the Americans, communicated itself to Jane and almost immediately became her own response to the meeting.

It was not their custom to kiss or embrace in public.

Roche said, “You travel with big people.”

“They spent all the time on the plane reading pornography. The hard stuff.”

“They are the bauxite company. They own the place.”

“They got me through immigration. I didn’t have to show my passport or return ticket or anything.”

“I hope that doesn’t create problems when you’re leaving.”

“I need intensive care.”

They drove through a flat green land, already hot, the windows of the car open. The hills to the right were breathtaking, green below a blue haze, the folds of the ridges soft in the morning light. The vegetation was new to her, all a blur of the brightest green. She thought: Later. Later I will get to know this.

The junked cars; the little houses in Mediterranean colors set beside the road at the edge of fields of tall grass. The factories, set in ordered grounds behind fences; and then the rubbish dump, the endless town, the pitched roofs of separate little shops and houses jammed together, the rusting corrugated iron, jalousies and fretwork, the greenery of back yards, the electric wires, crooked walls, broken pavements, unswept gutters, the slogans:
Black Is Basic, Don’t Vote;
and then the ride up to the Ridge, the pavements giving way to grass verges, the houses getting bigger, still little clusters of shacks about them, but then no shacks at all, just wide roads, big gardens, big houses, and vegetation hiding the city and the plain she had just left; going up to where it still felt like early morning, with sometimes, as the road twisted higher, a view of the hazy flat land below, indistinguishable from swamp and sea.

A concrete wall, stepped down a hillside, two strips of concrete at the side of a lawn still in shadow; an ivy-covered bungalow, but more than a bungalow, a great spreading house, overlooking a green hillside splashed with red. A shuttered room, the redwood louvers creating total darkness; a black maid, coffee. And Jane began to fall asleep to confused images of her journey, of Negroes, stewardesses and the Americans, airport buildings at night and the morning drive through the green land; the noise of the plane still with her, like something obliterating the life she had left behind, exhaustion and strain becoming part of her sense of violation, of having made the wrong decision. She awakened to darkness; she was momentarily confused. Then, tilting the redwood louvers, she had been startled by the light.

That was only four months ago. And that day and night and morning of travel, that succession of images that were like dreams, remained the most vivid of her new experiences. When she had arrived everything was green and the flame of the forest was in bloom. Drought had since occurred, the worst drought, she had been told, for forty years. The hills had turned brown; many clumps of bamboo had caught fire; and the woodland on the Ridge had acquired something of the derelict quality of the city. Trees had been stripped; vegetation had generally dried and thinned; and neighboring houses could now be seen. But the city and the flat land remained as unknown as it had been on that first day; and nothing had happened to alter the conviction she had had, at the moment of arrival, that she had made a wrong decision.

It was what she had half expected. She had come to expect that her decisions would be wrong; and she had begun to feel that it was part of the wrongness of the world.

In London Roche had seemed to her an extraordinary person; and she had prided herself on her perception in picking him out. He had appeared to her as a doer; and none of the people she knew could be considered doers. They grumbled—journalists, politicians, businessmen—responding week by week to the latest newspaper crisis and television issue; they echoed one another; they could become hysterical with visions of the country’s decay. But the little crises always passed, the whispered political plots
and business schemes evaporated; everything that was said was stale, and people no longer believed what they said. And failure always lay with someone else; the people who spoke of crisis were themselves placid, content with their functions, existing within their functions, trapped, part of what they railed against.

She was adrift, enervated, her dissatisfactions vague, now centering on the world, now on men. One evening in her house, before dinner, this happened. She was with her lover, a left-wing journalist whose views no longer held surprise for her, whose insincerities and ambition she had grown to understand and whose articles she no longer read. His beauty was something she loved, but only as she might have loved a picture: the body that promised so much offered little. She went cold when he was on her; she turned away when he tried to kiss her; she was dry and he had trouble entering. Abruptly, she made a movement and threw him off and he stood beside the bed exposed and vulnerable. Without any attempt at taunting, she drew up her right knee and lit a cigarette. He said, “Why did you do that?” She said, “Because I wanted to.” She was slapped, so hard that her jaw jarred, her cigarette fell from her hand; and then she was slapped again. Her face flamed; she began to cry; and in one swift action, rescuing her cigarette from the bed, she got up, gathered the sheet around her, and went to the bathroom. She allowed her tears to flow but was careful to make no sound. She was expecting a knock at the door: she intended not to reply. She heard his footsteps in the bedroom, heard them in the passage; but then the footsteps went down the carpeted stairs, and she heard the front door closed. She stayed in the bathroom for some time, waiting for a ring at the door, waiting to be rescued. But he didn’t come back; and then she discovered to her dismay and disgust that she was moist.

It was not long after this that she met Roche. He had just published a book about his experiences in South Africa. He had been arrested, tortured, tried, imprisoned, and then, after international protests, deported, his assets in the country frozen. He had made little impression on her at their first meeting. But later she had read his book, and she had then approached him through his book. And this was soon to strike her as strange, that she
should have assumed from his book and the experiences he described in it that she knew him.

Roche had appeared to her as a doer, unlike anyone she had known. He talked little; he had no system to expound; but simply by being what he was he enlarged her vision of the world. He seemed to make accessible that remote world, of real events and real action, whose existence she had half divined; and through him she felt she was being given a new idea of human possibility. It pleased her that there was nothing extraordinary about his appearance, and that some people wondered what she saw in him: this small man in his mid-forties, sad-faced, with sunken cheeks, deep lines running from his nose to the corners of his mouth, and with eyes that were slightly mocking and ironical.

They had never talked about South Africa or discussed his book; about the torture and the imprisonment she preferred not to think. He came from the more important world; and she thought he had a vision, like hers, of her own world about to be smashed, and that he acted upon this vision. He was a doer; his book and his life proved that; and she assumed that his old life was claiming him, that it was to some new and as yet unsuspected center of world disturbance that he was going, when, suddenly, not stopping to enjoy such reputation as his book had given him, he had decided to leave London, to take this unlikely and not well-paid job on the island with a firm that sounded like a firm of colonial shopkeepers.

She had already committed herself to him and to what she conceived to be his kind of life. She had already committed herself to following him out as soon as she had arranged for her house to be let. Then one day something happened that awakened doubt. Roche laughed; until then she had only seen him smile. Roche laughed, and the corners of his mouth rode up over the receding gums on his molars, which showed long, with black gaps between them. It was like a glimpse of teeth in a skull, like a glimpse of a satyr; and she felt it was like a glimpse of the inner man. She had thought him distinguished-looking, and had begun to find him beautiful. This was like a glimpse of a grotesque stranger. She allowed the irrational moment to pass; she was committed. But
then, at the moment of arrival, doubt had come to her again. In these relationships some warning, some little hint, always was given, some little sign that foreshadowed the future. And now the thing foreshadowed was with her.