A Way in the World (9 page)

Such a simple ambition, but so far away, and at the moment so unlikely: the narrator finds himself moved by these boys in a way that goes beyond his political cause.

Mateo says, “You know that kanaima come for Lucas, sir?”

The narrator says, “Lucas?”

Lucas shaves with his sharp knife at his paddle, and throws the shaving into the fire. “I was walking. From very far I see something on the track that didn’t have to be there. But I don’t think. I go on, and see the thing that wrong. Was a little white flower. By itself. I turn and run. But was too late.”

It is on Lucas’s body—lying beside him—that the narrator’s hand falls later that evening in the hut. He is moved now by more than appetite, the excitement of the earlier evening: the passivity of the boy adds to the narrator’s mood, builds up to tenderness, made deeper by a feeling of being unable to help, tenderness that turns to a melancholy like the melancholy he had seen earlier in Lucas’s face in the firelight.

Some time later Mateo sits up abruptly. He says, “Sir, you must take Lucas with you to England.”

It is something that would have just struck Mateo, the narrator thinks: it is a way Lucas might be saved. The narrator doesn’t answer.

A long time later Mateo says, “Sir?”

The narrator says, “Yes.”

The word has no meaning. It is just a sound, an acknowledgement. But Mateo gives a contented sigh and settles down to sleep.

The boys are all friendliness the next day. They do not talk loudly over the narrator as on the day before; they do not abruptly leave the narrator and the line of march; they try to bring the narrator into all that they do. Their faces are brighter, less resigned-looking. One of the things the narrator has come out to do is to win the trust of people like Lucas and Mateo. But this trust is of another sort. He feels undermined by it; at the same time he doesn’t see how he can reject it. And it is as if some exchange has been made, as if something of the oppression that has left the boys now sits on the narrator’s shoulder.

He begins to feel, too, that the journey is lasting too long. They are meeting fewer people on the forest path now, and there are fewer tins and printed cardboard boxes strapped up in their back-packs. But the boys reassure the narrator. It’s all right; he is not to worry; they are looking after him.

So for two or more days they walk and camp: make-believe in the evening (the leaf shelter in the forest, the little fire, safety in the night), turbulence and doubt in the day, day and night now like two sides of the narrator’s spirit, one growing out of the other: the narrator at night wishing that make-believe could be all, the complete reality, and then in daylight wondering how he could disengage from the trust the boys have placed in him. More: almost without his being aware of it, the daylight doubt is widening. He begins to wonder—at first in a lightheaded way, and as though the idea is quite absurd—what would happen if he were to withdraw from what he has undertaken to do.

At last, at about noon one day, after four or five hours of marching, they arrive. They turn off the path and go through the forest and up to a little plateau where there is a village of old grey-brown grass huts, some of them open with tree-branch poles, some conical and closed.

Lucas and Mateo are home. People call out to them: they call back: animation such as, many days before, at the start
of his travel in the deep interior, the narrator had seen at the village landing-stages on the river.

The narrator is taken to the hut where he is to live. There is an overpowering smell of earth and stale tobacco. People who have lived in the hut before have left pieces of cloth and whittled wood wedged between the trimmed rods of the frame and the old grass of the roof. The narrator becomes very tired. He sleeps almost as soon as he lies down, relieved to be at last alone.

When he gets up he finds that the light is the light of mid-afternoon, the sun about to decline: the time when on previous days they would have stopped marching, and Lucas and Mateo would have been building their shelter: a toy version, as the narrator now sees, of the huts here.

After days of forest and gloom, the smoke from the cooking fires in front of the open kitchen hut seems to the narrator to be remarkably blue, a colour on its own, not a tone of grey or brown. The narrator is also aware that the ground below his feet feels hollow: footfalls even some distance away make a dull drumming sound. The ground has been disturbed or built up in some way. The narrator, considering the plateau or platform of the village open space, feels that the site is old, that for some way down the earth would contain debris or relics of scenes, repeated through the centuries, like the one around him now.

Some of the women are making cassava bread. Finished rounds are on the grass roof. At the side of the kitchen hut hangs the long plaited tube which can be twisted or wrung by means of a horizontally fitted stick, to squeeze the poison out of grated cassava: a poison caught in a wooden dish on the ground. Because this poison is valuable: it can preserve meat for up to a year.

On the ground is a cassava-grater. It is a beautiful object: sharp chippings of granite fixed in hardened pitch, the pitch set in a shallow rectangular trough in a flat piece of wood.
The pitch would have come from far away; a precious lump would have been imported; so, too, the granite chippings. The pitch would have been boiled into a liquid, then poured into the hollow in the wood; as it cooled, the granite chippings would have been set in it one by one.

The narrator looks up. The women and girls are delighted by his contemplation of this kitchen object. The narrator thinks, “I love these people.” Then he questions himself, “What do I mean by that?” Looking at the women in the blue smoke, he thinks, “I want no harm to come to them.”

Lucas and Mateo appear. Without their loads and travelling hats, and in fresh clothes, they look like young men of some standing in the village. They take the narrator down to the river. There is a deep part where he can dive, they say. They go down with him, when he is ready. They will not leave him alone; they will not do that with the kanaima prowling about; they will offer him their protection.

The sun is going down. The water, reddish from leaves, gets darker as the light goes. The water is cool, too cool for the man-eating small fish, the boys or young men say.

The narrator sinks into the red water. The pool is as deep as the young men say. Soon the light fades from the water. Soon it is utterly black. Soon it is of a black so deep that it is without colour: it is nothing, however much you concentrate on it. In this nothing the narrator feels he has lost touch with his body; water blocks sensation. He is just his eyes concentrating on nothing; he is just mind alone, a perceiving of nothing. He is quite frightened. He somehow gets in touch with his will again and pulls himself up, to the yellowing light.

He is glad to see the boys. They wait while he dresses, and then they walk him back up to the village. The best protection against the kanaima is company: once the kanaima is seen by a third party, the kanaima’s power is lost. Yet the need for company also reinforces the kanaima’s power. And
the narrator feels that, like Lucas with the flower on the path, he has had a brush with his kanaima: an emotion, a moment, that will come back to him in dreams and states of blurred consciousness, something he will now not lose touch with, and which when it returns will carry with it the setting and all the extreme emotions of the last few days, including the emotion of this moment: the love for these people, which contains the wish that no harm should come to them, and is already as a result more pain than love.

It is pain rather than love which now suffuses the narrator’s vision, and corrupts everything that he sees. It is all like something he has already lost: the late afternoon light, the friendly women and children, the very blue smoke. And now all the half-formulated doubts, mere impulses, of the last few days harden into a determination to turn his back on these people, to put them out of his mind.

Hard to formulate, harder to carry out. The narrator cannot simply go away. He doesn’t know where he is. He will need guides to go back, people who will make the forest safe for him. Alfred, the village captain or headman, wouldn’t let him go just like that. Alfred would worry about the consequences, worry about what reports would get back to the coast. There would also be the Czech at the mission settlement. He wouldn’t let the narrator get away so easily.

So the narrator will have to stay. He will have to stay and get started with the organization and the other things he has been detailed to do. Perhaps later, when activity begins, it might be easier for the narrator to leave. To leave the forest, the country, the movement.

But now he will have to stay, for some weeks, some months. The people of this village and others will get to know him very well. He is already a stranger, an extraordinary being. And they, people without writing and books, depend completely on sight and memory; they have greater gifts that way. They will commit an infinity of details about
him to memory: his voice, gait, gestures. He will exist in the minds of these people as he will exist nowhere else. And after he has gone away they will remember him as the man who stayed long and wasn’t straight with them, who promised many things and then went away.

There is an hour or so to go before sunset. Lucas and Mateo come to take the narrator to the village captain. They say they will interpret.

The narrator says, “But they told me Alfred spoke English.”

Mateo says, “This isn’t Alfred.”

“He is my uncle,” Lucas says. “My father brother.”

The uncle is not very old. He is in an open hut, a place of reception rather than sleeping, with a hammock for himself in one corner, and with low hardwood stools, each carved out of a solid piece of wood, for visitors. He is of a beautiful colour, the pores clean and separate on his fine skin. He is wearing new jeans and a flowered shirt: clearly the cloth-seller from the other side makes regular visits.

What he says in his language, which Lucas and Mateo turn into their own kind of English, is like this: “I heard from Alfred that Lucas and Mateo had gone to get you. But I never believed you would come. This sort of thing has been going on for so long. So much talk, so little done. But now you’re here. I hope you will act carefully. You came the hard way. There is another way, an easier way. It is through the savannah. My wife’s father told me he heard from his father that once some people were coming through there to look for gold.”

“Djukas?” the narrator asks, using the local word for the descendants of the African runaways who had settled in some parts of the forest.

“Djukas, people from the south—I can’t remember what my wife’s grandfather said. These people were coming to look for gold. And I don’t have to tell you what that would
have meant for us. Do you know what the villagers did? It was the dry season. They set the savannah alight. It blazed up for miles. My wife’s grandfather said birds were always a little ahead of the fire, picking up the snakes and other little animals running away from the fire. The same fire burned every one of the men coming to look for gold. After that everybody had to leave the villages and hide in the forest for two years. Do you think it will be like that this time? Are you sure you know what you are doing? We are brave people. But—” He breaks off. Then he says, “Where do you come from?”

“England.”

“Lucas told me. My grandfather went to England. Did Lucas tell you?”

Lucas licks his top lip, and looks down.

“He went with an Englishman who liked him, and wanted him to learn English. He spent three years in England. They wanted him to marry an Englishwoman. That was part of the original idea. They even found a woman, but then at the last minute, before they came back, she became frightened. The plan was that they would come back and build
houses
here.” He used the English word, but in his pronunciation it sounded like part of his own language. “One of the things my grandfather said about England when he came back was that the captain of the country was a woman. Was that true?”

“It was true.”

“I am glad to hear it. Some people said he was making it up. Some people didn’t even believe he had gone to England, though he came back with printed books to show. He came back and waited for the English people to come out here and build
houses.
Every year or so somebody came out. Not by the way you came, but by the other way, the savannah way I told you about. They always brought the same message to my grandfather: next year, next year. Is that the kind of message you will be bringing us?”

“No,” the narrator says. “It’s going to be different this time. We are different people.”

“People began to mock my grandfather. They said he was going to get us in trouble with the government for nothing at all. One time when an Englishman came out there was an eclipse of the moon. You know what people do when that happens? They shoot flaming arrows at the moon, to light it up again. My grandfather was ashamed. He told me so. He begged the Englishman to forgive them for behaving in that childish way. But the Englishman only laughed and said that there would be no trouble with the government. What you have just said. He said that the place was good for
houses.
It is what I hear people are telling Alfred now. And then something happened. There was a war or something, I suppose, and English people stopped coming. Nobody came even to say ‘next year.’ But my grandfather never stopped believing that they would come back. He went foolish with that belief, but there are people who still believe that. Lucas believes. And I’ll tell you something. Kanaima has come for Lucas. You know that. He must have told you. He told me he told you. And when kanaima came for Lucas, he said, ‘I will get away. I know that. I will go to England. My grandfather’s friend will send for me.’ And now you have come. Did Lucas tell you? They used to send clothes for my grandfather. Not our kind of clothes, but modern clothes, for the
houses
they were going to build. I still have some of them. Let me show you.”