Guerrillas (10 page)

Jane’s irritation had returned. Her eyes were moist; to Jimmy it seemed that she was either about to cry or to lose her temper.

She said, “I don’t know why everybody feels obliged to tell me that story. I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard about the origin of the Sablich fortune.”

“Massa’s firm.”

“But not mine.”

Jimmy said, “Look. I don’t want us to be friends.”

And she was instantly alert, on the defensive.

He noted that. He said, “In England I had too many women friends.”

She understood his meaning. He studied her eyes alone.

He didn’t give her time to say anything. He jerked his chin toward the park. “When we were at school we used to come to play there some afternoons. Cricket and football. The white people would watch us. And we would act up for them. When I was in England I met a girl who had been here as a girl. She passed through with her parents and they stayed at the Prince Albert. All she remembered of the place were the little black boys playing football in the park outside the hotel. We worked out the dates. And I realized she must have seen me. That I must have been one of the black boys. What do you make of that?”

“Was she one of the women with whom you were not friends?”

The woman courted, ready to be courted.

He said, and he spoke solemnly, “I was nervous about seeing you this afternoon. I don’t notice hair. I don’t notice clothes. What I felt about you I felt as soon as I saw your eyes. They looked as they look now. Half screaming.”

She was unwilling to let the topic pass. She said, “Why were you nervous?”

“I thought my imagination might have been playing tricks.”

“Was it?”

He didn’t reply. He pressed for the waiter. “Bryant is waiting for us. He wants to give you back your dollar. The car will bring you back.”

She would object. But he knew now that she was going to come.

THE DOORMAN stopped leaning against the iron pillar of the portico and blew on his whistle. Across the road, the driver, sitting on a park bench with other drivers in the half-shade of a big tree, stood up, short and very fat, and shook out the seat of his trousers. The big American car turned wide in the road and entered the semicircular hotel drive.

Through the haze of heat and rum punch Jane noted the size of the car. It was absurd, pathetic; she could have giggled. The doorman opened the door; Jimmy tipped him. It was pathetic and absurd. The car seat was hot; the sun burned her arms. They turned toward the city center, away from the dustiness and glare of the park and the view of the red-scarred hills, into a deader heat; the wind that came through the windows was warm. Black asphalt streets, still residential-looking; white or yellow-white buildings; shadows contracted and black. Beyond the blue-tinted windscreen, a pale sky.

The car was so wide they sat at far ends of the seat. Jimmy sat erect and formal, his left foot on his right knee, his narrow trousers riding up above his thin nylon sock, his right hand resting on his exposed lower calf. Jane sat directly behind the driver. The driver’s bright blue shirt, of a shiny synthetic material, showed the black skin below and a white reticulated vest; on his neck, half hidden by his shirt collar, was a thick roll of black flesh with scattered springs of hair; a blue light, from the tinted windscreen, fell on his bare fat arms.

Jimmy said, “The Tennis Club.”

She didn’t turn to look. She was aware only of buildings close to the road: no openness there, no sign of courts. But the area was
like that: new buildings standing in the grounds of old, open spaces everywhere filled in.

Jimmy said, “That girl I was telling you about, her father was in Intelligence. When he came here he went to the Tennis Club one day. I think it was the championships or something. Of course, no blacks allowed. He got mad when he saw the local whites behaving as though there wasn’t a war on. He felt that the Vichy people in Martinque could seize the island at any time. He asked one of the players—the boy was sitting next to him, very cool and don’t-care-a-damn—whether he didn’t think he should be fighting for the mother country. The boy said, ‘I prefer playing tennis.’ ”

Jane was only half listening, sitting at the far end of the seat, withdrawn, in a haze of rum punch and heat which was like a sense of the adventure she had committed herself to. Half amused at the reference to that girl, unnamed, whose father had been in Intelligence, knowing it to be something laid out to catch her attention, she yet allowed herself to wonder about the girl; she yet allowed herself to play with the images he had set floating in her mind.

She had driven through the city many times and had long ago ceased to see it. Now, in the excitement that amounted to stupor, the feeling of a dissolving world, she found herself catching at details: the top galleries of old-fashioned Spanish-style buildings overhanging pavements where ragged beggars sat vacant, beside old women selling muddy-looking cakes and colored sweets and sweepstakes pinned to boards. In this sense of being transported out of herself, transported out of a stable world into something momentarily unstable, lay the adventure. She had been half prepared for it. What she hadn’t been prepared for, what gave her little twinges of alarm, was this feeling of a sudden descent into the city itself, until then unknown, unexplored. And yet, with another part of herself, she continued to be amused by the absurd motorcar and her position in it, by the glances that the car and she in it and Jimmy with her were getting. Such a misunderstanding; so absurd.

Jimmy was saying, “Now, they’ve all gone. Canada, England, America. Australia. They’ve all gone.”

The tennis players. So strange, this elegy for them, in the heat. He spoke, she noted, as from a great distance. As though he had been left behind.

They came to the main square, once an area of trees and asphalted walks, now full of parked motorcars and rough wooden booths. The reggae shrieked from a dozen amplifiers, now above the roar of motorcars and trucks, now below it. Diseased pariah dogs wandered about; some lay prostrate on the crowded pavements; and she studied one, dead-eyed, with a growth like raw flesh protruding out of its mangy yellow fur. The sea, when they came to it, gave no feeling of air and lightness: the fine red powder of bauxite, sheds of corroded corrugated iron, the reek of the burning rubbish dump, everything here—hillside, forest, sea, mangrove—turned to slum.

Excitement grew on her, studying these things as though she had never seen them before, taking them in detail by detail. And now, as they began to race along the highway, past the shacks on the hillside and the long red avenues of the redevelopment project, every little house casting an identical angled shadow, as they raced, the hot air and the noise of the car, the sense of speed, were like the things she was surrendering to: the little delirium, of which she thought she remained in perfect control, knowing that it would soon be over, that the world would become solid again, and her own vision clear.

Jimmy spoke occasionally, making little comments on what they passed. His words were indistinct and she didn’t concentrate on what he said. The little delirium became the adventure; this was what she wanted to stay close to and be contained within, this dizzying mood, of which, curiously, his presence formed no part: the exaltation produced by the heat, the drive that was coming to climax, and that vision of decay piled on decay, putrefaction on putrefaction.

She fixed her gaze on the driver’s neck, on the black roll of almost hairless flesh within the collar of the transparent shiny blue shirt, and on the subsidiary roll above, lost in little kinky springs of hair, as black as the skin.

“Where did those come from?”

Jimmy was speaking to her directly. They were now well out of the city, in the factory area, driving beside the charred verges and the sunken fields in which lay the wrecks of motor vehicles.

She fingered the silver necklaces he was pointing to. “Morocco.” She was going to say: Someone gave them to me. But she didn’t say that. She said, “They cost about sixpence. They were given me by a lover.”

He was still sitting erect at the end of the seat, formal and buttoned up, embarrassed by the drive and her silence, and giving little licks at his lips. As buttoned up as he had been when he had first presented himself to her at Thrushcross Grange, but now distinctly absurd.

She added, “He didn’t believe in gifts of great value. He didn’t want money to come between us.”

He caught her tone. He said, “Something for the girl who has everything.”

Yet when they turned off the highway into the abandoned industrial park, and there was only bush and foundations of buildings among bush, her excitement began to quicken into something like uncertainty. And when the car stopped in Jimmy’s yard, and there was only silence in the heat, with the bush bounding every view, and she noticed the short squat driver with his powerful fleshy arms, she began to feel dismay.

Excitement was dying; she could exercise clear judgment again. The house was as she had remembered it: the horrible blue carpet with the meaningless black and yellow splashes, the books on the shelves, the photographs, including that one with the girl or woman—with the father in Intelligence?—torn out. It had happened so often to her, who had known so many men, who had found so many men to be candidates: this altering of the character of a room or a house which, at first seen and judged in a detached way, then all at once became another kind of room, full of a man’s intimate attributes. And this room now repelled her; and from her new lucidity she tried, swiftly, seeking to reestablish her balance, to re-create the chain of happenings that had brought her here, that had so altered the nature of the day for her.

Jimmy said, “Your eyes look half screaming.”

She turned to him almost with irritation, her eyes moist, as if with tears.

He put his hands on her shoulders, and he was astonished at her response. She fixed her mouth on his, her lips opened wide. He was taken by surprise and couldn’t react immediately; and as her tobacco-tasting tongue and her lips—that healed wound—did what they thought they had to do (no secrets here, and words no longer helped, no bravado about lovers who brought gifts from Morocco), as the action of her mouth became insipid to him and then meaningless, he thought, first of all, and without surprise: But she is starved. And then: But she is like a girl, she knows nothing, she is looking for everything in the kiss, she believes she has to be violent to show that she knows.

Her blouse was wet below the arms; he had not noticed that before. Her breasts were pressed against him, so that he was hardly aware of them as breasts, only as flesh. She had given him so little time. He would have liked, as it were, to witness the moment, but now he felt he was losing it. He edged his mouth away from hers at last and, holding her tight against him, drew breath. He felt that the moment had gone and was irrecoverable.

He said, with odd formality, still holding her, “Shall we go into the next room?”

She said quickly, in a whisper that held nothing of intimacy, “Don’t ask stupid questions.” And immediately she disengaged herself from him.

Coolly, with that slightly dragging step he had noticed as she had walked across the lobby of the Prince Albert, and still with her shoulder bag, she went into the bedroom, ahead of Jimmy, as though she knew the way. A maroon carpet with a large bright flowered pattern, a yellow candlewick bedspread on a double bed, bedside tables with imitation-wood graining, a lamp, a dressing table, a telephone on a chest of drawers: it was like a bedroom display in the window of an English furniture shop, and it looked as artificial. The carpet lay loose on the terrazzo floor, the ocher-washed concrete walls were bare, and the light in the room was hard and even. The open windows gave a sense of stillness and
heat: a hot pale-blue sky, limp bush, not even the tops of the spiky palms moving.

Very quickly, ignoring the hand he placed on her wet armpits, she put her bag on the dressing table, eased off her shoes, and undid and rolled down her trousers and pants together and, still with her blouse on, lay on the middle of the bed and turned her face to the wall, as though he were not in the room. Her speed alarmed him; he feared he was losing the moment again. He felt isolated by her indifference and began to fear that he might be losing her as well. He saw the white of her belly and the tan on her legs. She had very little hair on her groin; perhaps she shaved; and the cleft was like a dumb, stupid mouth.

Without undressing he lay down beside her and again he was swallowed up by her hard big kiss, her mouth opened wide. He put his hand on her groin, felt the thin hair and moved his fingers lower. She took her mouth from his, slapped his hand away, and said, with the irritation that now accompanied all her words, “Don’t tease me.” He sat up and undid his shoes. And already she was withdrawn; and again he felt alarm. He took off his trousers and pants. Then the telephone began to ring. He sat still. He heard it ring and ring.

Jane said, “Answer it, for God’s sake.”

He got up and she saw him black and barely tumescent, little springs of hair scattered down his legs; his hair was more Negroid down there. And now, only in his Mao shirt, and looking absurdly like one of the children of the shanty towns, who wore vests alone, their exposed little penises like little spigots, he walked to the chest of drawers and took up the telephone.

From somewhere in the house, in the sudden stillness after the ringing stopped, could be heard footsteps, the sound of rubber soles on concrete.

Jimmy shouted through the door, “It’s all right. All right.”

As soon as Jane heard the voice at the other end of the telephone she recognized it.

Jimmy said, “Yes, massa.”

Jane turned over on her belly and shouted, whether with
laughter or rage it was hard to tell, “Put that in your next classified communiqué.”

She sprawled face down on the bed, her blouse tight over her shoulders, her legs apart and graceless, her hips very wide, her pale buttocks flat and spreading, smoother than her tanned legs.