The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel (24 page)

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Authors: Rahul Bhattacharya

BOOK: The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel
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We turned around. After twenty minutes a long collapsing taxi passed us. He could not help with comida.
He dropped us to the posada.
The simpleton was watching television, satisfied in his small dim world. He was oblivious to our pleas for food. ‘Comida?’ ‘Pan?’ I put fingers to my mouth and made a miserable face. He looked at me without motive.
We seemed to be on to something when our entry into the kitchen jolted him out of his seat. We waited for him to settle again before the television. A few minutes later we sneaked into the kitchen.
In the fridge there was a hunk of bread, a small bowl of red beans, another of beef bones in gravy.
We took them to the room. We ate it cold. It occurred to me we could be eating the simpleton’s dinner. Also, that she was eating wrenk.
In moments the food was done. The room, site of passion a few hours ago, was dry as husk. She looked stonily resentful. Her face was naturally expressive; when she turned like this, it was deliberate.
I felt responsible for our plight. Yet, we’d both together browsed the guidebook and found Coro. It was a World Heritage Site. The pictures of those walls, the gay cafes on cobblestone! I was struggling as much as her. I felt hunger more acutely than she did. Besides,
there was something about the situation, the stolen food and the ghost town, at least mildly amusing.
‘Is twice already I make you starve,’ I said, recalling the day on the ferry. ‘I am sorry.’ It was a tactical sorry, aimed at getting something out of her, a return consolation, a lightening up, anything.
Her response was to turn wistful.
‘We would sport so hard on Ole Year’s. Everywhere you look people sportin. I remember one time we go to like seven limes. Start from Sandy Babb Street, Kitty, to the seawall, up the coast at Mon Repos, come back down to Lamaha Street …’
‘You missing Guyana,’ I said. Though I really meant: ‘You missing him.’
‘Nah. Those times gone, man.
‘I must call Brian tomorrow,’ she added after a few minutes.
We talked a little.
Her answers came in one or two words.
From hunger I took sips of the apple wine. She refused any.
‘I changing,’ she said at last, and got off the bed.
The bathroom was large. Her elaborate nightly ritual I think she performed inside, for she was gone a very long time – I can’t be sure because, waiting, sipping from the apple wine, I fell asleep. It wasn’t still midnight.
SHE bit my ear early in the morning with the words, ‘Leh we eat.’ In truth, we had long passed the critical points of hunger. Like survivors of a storm we savoured the morning. In the crossed rays and shades of the bathroom she took a cleaner’s satisfaction in ridding my hair of Coro debris. With less diligence but more pleasure, I polished her soles, her toes. She was slippery in soap. A new year, new promise, its brand new loving.
The streets were sick with light, the colours were burning off the walls. The leaves blew dry in the plazas. At the terminal, a woman grilled submarines, layering tomato and lettuce with three kinds of cheese. ‘I could have eaten four, you know,’ she said, munching on her second, ‘if we ate last night.’
What a funny, brutal place was Coro. From nowhere people had arrived for the lone bus of the morning. Where were you last night, I wanted to shake each one and ask. With their bags and children they ran from one bay to another and another, attempting to predict which one the bus would dock in. They were Indian scenes; and it was an Indian squeeze in the bus, a too-full bus, standers and splayed legs and luggage in the aisle like spilled geometry boxes.
We passed palm, scrub, hicktowns, possible oilfields of what felt
like a Soviet scale. Apparently we were going to Valencia. From there I didn’t know. I only knew we were far out west and Guyana was east. Through the half-tints which turned the mad day into something autumnal and viscous, it was possible to imagine rosy futures. We could go to Merida in the Andes, from there cut through the animaled savannah towards Guyana. Or hit Caracas for one last fling. We could make for the beaches, skinnydip at night and wake on sand wrapped in a single sarong, or head to the far colonial riverport of Ciudad Bolivar. And six hours later, at Valencia, the decision was made for us. It was still holiday season. Buses were barely plying. There was one to Puerto La Cruz. From there, the tout said with a double thumbs up, ‘Ciudad Bolivar.’
The bus was hours away. We waited. On the tarmac we ate barbeque pinchos. Cats skittered for crumbs under empty Venezuelan skies. Our tenuous grip on the new year was slipping. Soon it was dark.
Thankfully the next service was high-luxury. We took the upper deck, right up by the windscreen. The continental highway opened out before us, smudged with dreamy flashes of headlight. The air conditioning, the comfort of the seats, it encouraged tenderness. ‘You hands cold!’ she whispered, pulling my hands under her sweatshirt. We blurred in and out of sleep.
At a silly hour of the night the bus pulled into Puerto La Cruz. People must have got off along the way, for we were the only ones to disembark.
We settled on a dark bench. We bought café marróns from a man with a worrying TB cough. We waited again.
In hushed voices we spoke of Guyanese politics. ‘Is only the barons who keep shopping cheap in their stores,’ she argued. ‘Nobody could afford toaster or washing machine if cocaine don’t keep thing cheap.’
The night grew colder and colder. We hugged up tight, hanging on for morning. We made giggles about little things, the worst bits of
Rainbow Raani
. She told stories, of her neighbour Girlie who used to hurryfuck Larry the sand-n-polishman through the
palings at nights till one day a dog mashed his ass. I told her of Uncle Lance, and the people he told me about. I even told her of Baby, the whole affair, the first person with whom I’d shared it. Immediately I regretted it.
‘You stupid bad, you know.’ That was her conclusion. ‘You get mix up in this kind of thing and you get nothing out of it.’
I get everything from it, I wanted to tell her, all understanding, all motivation, but I said nothing.
Presently we fell asleep, sitting, shivering mildly into one another, prongs of a tuning fork.
 
 
THE sounds – buses pulling in and pulling out, the grunt of touts, the shuffle of travellers – the sounds came before the light, and the sun rose from a strange place and recalled the fresh morning on these same streets here, when we were going westward.
An early bus, full of agrarians with ruddy flesh, wearing hats and moustaches, the men too. They were in a farmer’s convention. The hostess conducted a quiz for them with trinkets as prizes. At a makeshift clinic they all climbed off the bus and received injections.
We fell asleep again, in a terrible exhaustion.
 
 
WE lost each other a second time. On the steep blazing inclines of Ciudad Bolivar, we were knocking about from posada to posada, rejected by each, directed finally towards one with a possible vacancy, when she flung her bag to the ground.
‘I ain’t walking.’
We’d been on the road two hours short of twenty-four, four buses including the local. It was not a time for cajoling.
‘It ain’t walking to us.’
‘Is the blasted bag,’ she said, landing a kick on it.
Her eyes were shot. There was a rash on her legs, from a spider she said.
‘Just a few minutes more. We’ll have our own bed and room again.’
‘We got to take a taxi.’
‘You seen one?’
‘I ain’t walking.’
‘Wait, then. I’ll go see if they got room or not.’
‘And leave me alone with the bags? You ain’t feel no shame at all?’
Now that was a provocation.
‘I gon carry
all
three bags with me.’
I did. It was an act of dumb pride. She sat on the abandoned steps of a corner and left me to my foolishness.
I struggled with the bags, grunting. There was room at the posada. I went back to fetch her. And I got lost in that slopey maze. I passed places that I knew I had passed already. The colours on the walls swirled before my eyes. The strawberry corner of our estrangement was elusive. When I did find it she was no longer there. What the
fuck
.
It was forty-five minutes before we saw each other, she walking downhill, eyes still shot, I uphill, a hopeless moment.
 
 
THE truth about travel and relationships is much the same. To ride the highs one must hate the lows, or at any rate feel some form of passion for them. Else what is the point? Frustration rationed is frustration wasted.
So it was that gratification followed. It was the stillness, the stillness after the motion. Our room was a simple rectangle. It had a window of amber glass, filtering sunlight to the texture of honey. A door opened to the roof-terrace, all to us. From here one could look at the bright clay tiles down the slope, the wrought iron grilles, the changing colours on the walls, jade, opal, corn, crimson.
In the room and on the roof we luxuriated for two days. We slept like babies. We fucked with long intuitive pacing. We got
Alizé Gold Passion and pizza and had them on a sheet under the waning moon.
Still, heavy Angosturan days. Alizé on fresh fruit and ice. An absence of strain, which was loaded. I could not tell if our understanding was secure or non-existent.
Outside, the city had resonances. It was old like Coro, the same lyrical air blowed through it. It was a lookout point, this hill. Somewhere there was a fort. The slopes went down to the riverfront. Orinoco, in the very name you could feel the proximity of the looted Caribbean, ruthless doomed conquistadors and their hunt for El Dorado, Raleigh and his stupendous hallucinations. You could feel the proximity of Guyana, a river that was large and dirty, though this was the narrows of the Orinoco.
Despite the proximity Guyana meant nothing, not even the word. In the morning, while she readied herself for the day, I went out searching for a way back over the border. Nobody had a clue. Travel agents stared at their computers and offered tickets to Georgetown, USA. The guidebook said nothing. The only good tip came from a Trinidadian waiter at a pastelleria, a phone number for Gomattie, a Guyanese vendor in the city of San Felix.
When I returned home she’d soaked all the clothes. She glistened naked among them. ‘Look how nasty they get.’ We washed them, spread them on the roof to dry in the Indian way. The domesticity: from afar someone might have thought us man and reputed wife. Time together is so frightening. One is running out of points to make. One is unravelling all the while, stripped to basics.
I learnt her suspicion extended to detergent. She held that it coloured water grey to fool people about how much it cleaned. Her suspicions were not to be misunderstood. I was realising that she believed in things. She believed in top-loading detergents vs front-loading detergents vs hand-washing detergents, in garbage liners as opposed to plastic bags. Arguably no escapery in her. Her quitting the job, that wasn’t to be misconstrued. Her ambition was different from mine, not the flimsy ambition of journeys but of
destinations. In five years I wasn’t sure if I would be anywhere, but she probably would. She was formidable. She knew childbirth. If we were in battle I suspected I would lose.
She was prepared to tackle the world because the world to her was not absurd. To think the world absurd is a privilege. Those who do so consider themselves enlightened. In fact, it only means their struggles are shallow. Sooner or later the real world will rain down upon them. That, or we shall go slowly mad, or seek recourse in meditation, narcotics, writing.
Laundry, amber light, silent streets: stillness which was mounting. And then, on a drunken second night, the bottom fell out.
A lavish meal in a posh courtyard, Bailey’s and whiskeys in a bar of Europeans. We were staggering through the slopes, laughing with liquor, the ochres so pale in the moonlight, washed out like shells. She squealed as I almost fell into a dry gutter, scratching my arm. Staggering and squealing, we tumbled arm in arm into our room on the roof. I sang a folk song Uncle Lance used to sing.
Ah Nora darling, don’t you wake me fore day morning
. She turned me towards her.
Me go give you polish furniture, me go give you pressure cooker.
‘My grandfather would sing that,’ she said softly. She looked at me with a look I shall never forget, deep affection, in that instant like adoration, and I was consumed for a long moment by the thought of what really was going on between us, when she caught me offguard.
‘You carryin me back to India, right?’
‘Of course, jaan.’
‘Be serious, man.’
‘It’s not a nice place. I don’t think you’ll like there.’
‘I could decide that for myself.’
‘Well, leh we get to Guyana first nuh.’
‘I knew it! I knew it! All you is the focking same.’
‘What do you mean!’
She pulled away.
Me go give you cement bed gal, me go give you miniskirt gal
, I sang but the mood had changed. I tried to look at her, but she averted her bitter brown eyes. The Alizé had swigs left in it. The sour was tingling on a corroded tongue. I tried to offer her some, went around to her from the other side of the bed.
Ah Nora darling, don’t you wake me fore day morning
, I sang again, but there was no response at all.
 
 
SHE didn’t wake me fore day morning, she didn’t wake me at all. She was already dressed when I stirred out of sleep. She’d taken the chair to the window, her wet hair pulled over to one side. She must have known when I woke: I rustled about with deliberate noise. She continued gazing into the shine of the terrace. The sun caught her in parts. Her burnished, braceleted forearm, her French nails, her crossed knees in the icy jeans from Carupano.
‘Marnin!’
It was a gamble.
She looked at me as one does an annoying child.
There was no further communication. In any case, another lady was on my mind, and she worried me. It was Gomattie, the Guyanese vendor in San Felix.
Gomattie was our only way back home. It occurred to me that in the languor of the previous days I had reposed too much faith not just in Gomattie but in things she had no control over. She was to have checked if the backtrack boat to Guyana was around. I had spoken to her on her home number. She didn’t have a cellphone. I was to meet her in the market at San Felix. For the first time I considered the possibility that it might not have worked out. My ticket to India and my Guyanese visa both expired in a few days, one year after I’d arrived.
We left for San Felix. Ninety minutes on the bus we sat like cardboard cutouts. She made sure she didn’t stray on to the armrest even. What was there to say? There was nothing to say.
At San Felix the taxi drivers refused us. They didn’t know where to take us. Market? Mercado? Covered market, Gomattie had said. Covered mercado? Half a dozen rejections from the taxi queue. By chance a passing taxi honked for us. Fortunately, he drove off as we entered.
Conversation began minutes later. Mercado? Covered mercado? He was driving in circles. I looked through the guidebook. Nothing for covered. Indoor:
cubierto
. Mercado cubierto? No recognition.
He pulled up and gestured for us to get out. The facts hit me: looking for a person one didn’t know in a city one didn’t know in a language one didn’t know. It was crusts of diamond in a pool of filth. She was beside me, looking precious, burdensome.
Mercado?
I said it to him like a prayer. Please,
cubierto
mercado? Gracias.
Mercado cubierto?
He was an unassuming sort of man. He drove again.

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