Bech Is Back (4 page)

In the dank igloo, Norma had placed the final sheaf of five hundred sheets, trim and pure, in the center of the table. She seated herself on her side of the table, ready to pull. Groggily Bech sat down, under the dome drumming with the downpour. The arrows on the top sheet pointed inward. Clever female fingers slipped under a corner, alert to ease it away. The two San Poco taximen returned, their shirts sopping, and stood along one curved wall, silent with awe of the cultural ritual they were about to witness. Bech lifted a pen. All was poised, and the expectant blankness of the paper seemed an utter bliss to the author, as he gazed deep into the negative perfection to which his career had been brought. He could not even write his own name.

I
N
G
HANA,
the Ambassador was sixty and slender and spunky, and wore a suit white as himself. On the road from Accra to Cape Coast, he bade the driver stop at a village where a remarkable native sculpture, with uncanny mimetic sympathy, created in painted plaster an ornate, enigmatic tower. Green and pink, decorated with scrolls and pineapples, the tower, as solid inside as a piece of marzipan, was guarded by life-size plaster soldiers dressed in uniforms that combined and compounded the devices of half a dozen imperial uniforms. Out of pasty plaster faces they stared with alien blue eyes toward the sea whence, beginning with the Portuguese, the white men had come. The strange structure was weathering rapidly in these tropics. Its purpose, Bech imagined, was magical; but it was their ambassadorial limousine, as it roared into the village at the head of a procession of raised dust, a tiny American flag flapping on one fender, that had the magical effect: the villagers vanished. While the little cultural delegation stood there, on the soft dirt, in the hot sun—the
Ambassador, mopping his pink and impressive face; Bech, nervously picking at an eyetooth with the nail of his little finger; the cultural attaché, a curly-haired, informative, worried man from Patchogue; his assistant, a lanky black female from Charlotte, North Carolina, coifed in the only Afro, as far as Bech could see, in all of Africa; and their driver, a gleaming Ghanaian a full head shorter than the rest of them—the village’s inhabitants peeped from behind palms and out of oval doorways. Bech was reminded of how, in Korea, the North Korean soldiers skulked on their side of the truce zone, some with binoculars, some with defiant gestures. “Did we do something wrong?” Bech asked.

“Hell, no,” the Ambassador said, with his slightly staggering excess of enthusiasm, like a ringmaster shouting to the far rows, “that’s just the way the buggers act.”

In Seoul, at a party held in a temple converted to an official banquet hall, a Japanese poet was led up to Bech by a translator. “I have long desired,” the translator said, “to make the acquaintanceship of the honorable Henry Bech.”

“Why?” Bech thoughtlessly asked. He was very tired, and tired of being polite in Asia.

There was, this rude monosyllable translated, a smiling, steady answer. The translator put it, “Your beautiful book
Travel Light
told us of Japan what to expect of the future.” More Japanese, translated as “Young hooligans with faces of glass.” This surely meant Bech’s most famous apparition, the begoggled motorcyclists in his first, now venerated and wearisome, novel.

The poet in the kimono was leaning at a fixed angle. Bech perceived that his serenity was not merely ethnic; he was
drunk. “And you,” Bech asked through the translator, “what do
you
do?”

The answer came back as “I write many poems.”

Bech felt near fainting. The jet lag built up over the Pacific was unshakable, and everywhere he went, a dozen photographers in identical gray suits kept blinding him with flash bulbs. And Korean schoolgirls, in waxy pigtails and blue school uniforms, kept slipping him love letters in elevators. Two minutes off the airplane, he had been asked four times, “What are your impressions of Korea?”

Where was he? A thin ochre man in a silvery kimono was swaying before him, upheld by a chunky translator whose eyes were crossed in a fury of attention. “And what are your poems about?” Bech asked.

The answer was prompt. “Flogs,” the translator said. The poet beamed.

“Frogs?” Bech said. “My goodness.
Many
poems about frogs?”

“Many.”

“How many?”

No question was too inane, here in this temple, to receive an answer. The poet himself intervened to speak the answer, in English. “One hunnert fifateen.”

The Cape Coast Castle breasted the green Atlantic like a ship; the great stone deck of the old slave fort was paved with plaques testifying to the deaths, after a year or two of service here, of young British officers—dead of fever at twenty, twenty-two, twenty-five. “They thought that gin kept away malaria,” the cultural attaché told him, “so everybody was reeling drunk most of the time. They died drunk. It must have been some show.”

“Why did they come?” Bech asked, in his role as ambassador from the kingdom of stupid questions.

“Same reason they came to the States,” the attaché said. “To get out from under. To get rich quick.”

“Didn’t they know”—Bech felt piqued, as if the plaques around him were a class of inattentive students—“they would die?”

“Dead men tell no tales,” the Ambassador interrupted heartily, brandishing an imaginary whip. “They kept the bad news mum back home and told the recruits fool tales about black gold. That’s what they used to call this hellhole. The Gold Coast.”

The Ambassador’s party went down to the dungeons. In one, a shrine seemed operative; bones, scraps of glass, burned-out candles, and fresh ash dirtied a slab of rock. In the deepest dungeon, a trough cut into the stone floor would have carried away body wastes and a passageway where the visitors now had to crouch once took black captives, manacled, out to the ships and the New World. Bare feet had polished a path across the shelf of rough rock. Overhead, a narrow stone speaking-tunnel would have issued the commands of the captors. “Any white man come down in here,” the Ambassador explained with loud satisfaction, “he’d be torn apart quicker’n a rabbit.”

This grottolike historical site still somehow echoed with, even seemed still to smell of, the packed, fearful life it had contained.

“Leontyne Price was here a year ago,” the cultural attaché said. “She really flipped out. She began to sing. She said she had to.”

Bech glanced at the black girl from Charlotte, to see if she was flipping out. She was impassive, secretarial. She had been here before; it was on the Ghana tour. Yet she felt Bech’s
glance and suddenly, there in the dungeon dimness, gave it a dark, cool return. Can looks kill?

In Venezuela, the tallest waterfall in the world was hidden by clouds. The plane bumped down in a small green clearing and jauntily wheeled to the end of the airstrip. The pilot was devil-may-care, with a Cesar Romero mustache and that same dazzling Latin smile, under careful opaque eyes. Bech’s guide was a languid young olive-skinned woman employed by the Creole Petroleum Corporation, or the government Ministry of Human Resources, or both. She struck Bech as attractive but untouchable. He followed her out of the plane into tropical air, which makes all things look close; the river that flowed from the invisible waterfall was audible on several sides of them. At the far edge of the clearing, miniature brown people were walking, half-naked, though some wore hats. There were perhaps eight of them, the children among them smaller but in no other way different; they moved single file, with the wooden dignity of old-fashioned toys, doubly dwarfed by the wall of green forest and the mountainous clouds of the vaporous, windy sky. “Who are they?” Bech asked.

“Indians,” his lovely guide answered. Her English was flawless; she had spent years at the University of Michigan. But something Hispanic made her answers curter than a North American’s would have been.

“Where are they going?”

“Nowhere. They are going precisely nowhere.”

Her emphasis, he imagined, invited Bech to question deeper. “What are they thinking?” he asked.

The question was odd enough to induce a silky blink.

“They are wondering,” said the
señorita
then, “who you are.”

“They can see me?”

They had vanished, the Indians, into the forest by the river, like chips of pottery lost in grass. “Perfectly,” she told him. “They can see you all too well.”

The audience at Cape Coast grew restive during Bech’s long address on “The Cultural Situation of the American Writer,” and afterward several members of the audience, dressed in the colorful robes of spokesmen, leaped to their feet and asked combative questions. “Why,” asked a small bespectacled man, his voice tremulous and orotund over the microphone, “has the gentleman speaking in representation of the United States not mentioned any black writers? Does he suppose, may I ask, that the situation of the black writers in his country partakes of the decadent and, may I say, uninteresting situation he has described?”

“Well,” Bech began, “I think, yes, the American Negro has his share of our decadence, though maybe not a full share—”

“We have heard all this before,” the man was going on, robed like a wizard, his lilting African English boomed by the amplifying system, “of your glorious Melville and Whitman, of their
Moby-Dick
s and
Scarlet Letter
s—what of Eldridge Cleaver and Richard Wright, what of Langston Hughes and Rufus Magee? Why have you not read to us pretty posies of their words? We beg you, Mr. Henry Bech, tell us what you mean by this phrase”—a scornful pause—“ ‘American writer.’ ”

The noise from the crowd was rising. They seemed to be mostly schoolgirls, in white blouses and blue skirts, as in Korea, except that their skin was black and their pigtails stood straight up from their heads, or lay in corn rows that must have taken hours to braid. “I mean,” Bech said, “any
person who simultaneously writes and holds American citizenship.”

He had not meant this to be funny and found the wave of laughter alarming. Was it with him or against him?

In Korea, there was little laughter at his talk on “American Humor in Twain, Tarkington, and Thurber.” Though Bech himself, reading aloud at the dais beside the bored Belgian chairman, repeatedly halted to get his own chuckles under control, an echo of them arose only from the American table of the conference—and these were contributed mostly, Bech feared, as tactical support. The only other noise in the vast pale-green room was the murmur of translation (into French, Spanish, Japanese, and Korean) leaking from earphones that bored Orientals had removed. Also, a yipping noise now and then escaped from the Vietnamese table. This table, labelled Vietnam though it represented the vanishing entity called South Vietnam, happened alphabetically to be adjacent to that of the United States, and, in double embarrassment, one of the delegates happened to be crazy. A long-faced man with copious black hair cut in a bowl shape, he crooned and doodled to himself throughout all speeches and rose always to make the same speech, a statement that in Vietnam for twenty years the humor had been bitter. Humor was the conference subject. Malaysian professors cracked Malaysian one-liners; the panel on Burmese scatology was very dignified. There was never much laughter, and none when Bech concluded with some deep thoughts on domestic confusion as the necessary underside of bourgeois order. “
Y
a-t-il des questions?
” the chairman asked.

A young man, Asiatic, in floppy colorless shirt and slacks,
stood up with fear splayed on his face and began to scream. Scream, no—he was intoning from sheets of paper held shaking in his hands. Fear spread to the faces of those around him who could understand. Bech picked up the headset before him on the dais and dialed for the English translation. There was none, and silence also gaped in French, in Spanish, in Japanese. To judge from the uplifted, chanting sounds, the young man was reciting poetry. Two policemen as young as he, their faces as smooth as their white helmets and as aloof from their bodies as the faces in Oriental prints, came and took the young man’s arms. When he struggled and attempted to read on, to the end, Bech presumed, of a stanza, the policeman on his right arm neatly chopped him on the side of the neck, so his head snapped and the papers scattered. No one laughed. Bech was informed later that the young man was a Korean satiric poet.