A Way in the World Read online

  That gives the narrator just over an hour. The cabin to which he is taken is small and roughly floored. Four Indians are sitting or squatting on the floor, among their bundles. One is darning, one is making a toy (a tribal back-pack), and the other two are just waiting—their food is being got ready somewhere on the station—and they are as passive and un-noticing as the Indians on the river. The cabin smells of tree-bark and sawn wood and dirt and oil and rotting leaves; and just as all the colours in a paint box if run together make a dead brown, so all these smells combine with the salty smell of the dead bush-fires outside to make a very deep smell of stale tobacco.

  After a wash in the river—the water is cool: the sun is going down fast—it is time for the narrator to go to the big cabin. There are eight people there, all of them passing as service volunteers, all of them foreigners from different countries, no Amerindians. So in spite of the jeans and the beards and the casual clothes, the big cabin has a colonial feel.

  They have a language problem. The heavy man with the rough manner, who is the head of the station, comes from Czechoslovakia. He doesn’t say so directly; it comes out from what other people say; there is some talk of the town of Pilsen. His wife or friend, the one woman at the table, and no doubt the mother of the boys, doesn’t speak English at all.

  She is a big woman, with very blond hair. She is not good-looking, and she says nothing; but she is the only woman at the table, and there is something about her that draws attention: this big woman with the shiny high cheekbones, the heavy twisted mouth, oily now with food, the big smooth hands, the big, ugly red feet.

  In this strange colonial setting where, as the narrator thinks, she has no competition, this woman radiates sexuality in a way she wouldn’t at home. There is something else. In this setting, where she is without language, the woman has become her sexuality: to look at her and her thin cotton dress is to be aware of nothing else.

  The narrator recognizes that the revulsion he feels is a way of fighting his fascination. With what? With appetite: this woman, newly out of her country, with all its disciplines and narrowness, has become all appetite. The same, he thinks, is true of her husband; and when he looks up at the big man he catches his assessing gaze.

  There is much talk at the table while the daylight lasts. Afterwards, in the yellow light of the hurricane lantern, which throws enormous shadows on the rough-sawn timber walls, everyone is more subdued; and the narrator feels isolated from everyone else.

  The dinner ends. To step out from the house and the light of the hurricane lamp is to step out into blackness that feels for a second or so like a blow. Little yellow lights in the cabins all around. The forest is singing: the noise is like something imagined, something in the head. It is only half past six. Ten or eleven hours of darkness before it gets light again. Using his flashlight to pick his way back to his cabin, the narrator gets the smell of stale tobacco as he enters. That was the smell of the food he ate; it was the smell of the river water; it is the smell of the forest; it is his own smell now. He wonders whether he will ever get used to forest life. But then, thinking of the big silent woman, and excited by that idea of appetite, he falls asleep.

  In the course of the next few days two of the infiltrators reveal themselves to him. There should be a third, the regional commander. He will not reveal himself to the narrator, but the narrator has a good idea who he is.

  The narrator finally gets his orders. He is told where he has to go. It is just a name to him. Indian guides will come to take him there.

  There will at the end be about a dozen agents like the narrator, and a dozen bases in the forest. On a given day there will be a dozen incidents; the rivers will be watched at strategic points; the few airstrips will be overrun; the forest area, the greater part of the country, will be effectively cut off from the African-ruled coast. The country doesn’t have the military resources to re-occupy the forest; elements of the foreign press will ensure that there is sympathy for the Indian cause, and lessen the possibility of outside intervention.

  The narrator is relieved to be moving on. The mission Station is oppressive to him, because of the Czech couple, and because of the glumness of the Indians. For this the narrator blames the Czechs. There is nothing like joy in the Czechs. Authority, and being out of their setting, have only released appetite in them. It is this quality of appetite that has given them away to the narrator.

  There are daily religious services for the Indians; there are regulated hours of work. On some evenings in the open space in front of the big cabin—with a smoky brushwood bonfire (to keep away the insects) adding to the stale tobacco smell—television videos are shown. American thrillers, with a black slant. Not as harmless as they appear: they are part of the anti-African indoctrination of the Indians. The Indians are shocked by the guns and the fighting and the speeding cars; they sigh and call out. Sometimes, to break the tension, someone plays a flashlight on a black face; there is laughter; then many flashlights play on black faces on the screen; and the film is made harmless, becomes a film again, and animation makes the Indians like people with possibilities again.

  The guides eventually come. They are two young Indian boys, Lucas and Mateo. The narrator leaves with them one morning. One boy walks ahead of the narrator, one behind him.

  Soon they come to a wide forest trail, and there they are never absolutely alone. In the forest gloom it seems that there is always someone in the distance: someone always breaking out of the camouflage of leaves and shadow. Some of them are carrying big loads in their back-packs or back-panniers, models for the toys which the Indian in the narrator’s cabin had been making: a flat timber frame with flexible woven walls at the sides and the bottom, the walls laced up over the load with forest-made twine. A further cord or rope attaches both sides of the pannier to a band over the carrier’s forehead. So head and back bear the strain of the load. The carriers’ backs are bent, and at the same time they lean forward against the pull of the band on the forehead. It seems painful; the carriers are dwarfed by their loads; but it is a posture with a balance of forces—a posture that fits the device, which must have evolved over the centuries—and it enables the carriers to walk for hours.

  This forest trail is very old, the narrator reflects. How far back would it go? Would it go back to the colonization of the forest by the remote ancestors of these men? Or would some climatic change have intervened?

  When the porters or load-carriers (perhaps carrying their own things) pass, they grunt out greetings to Lucas and Mateo, and sometimes from below their taut forehead bands they look up at the narrator. Their faces are the faces of old men. The narrator thinks of the peasants and carriers in Japanese woodcuts; the resemblance is quite remarkable. And just as in woodcuts by Hokusai of rural scenes everything belongs—straw and roofs, trees and the timber of bridges—and nothing is imported, so here in this scene in which he is walking, almost everything belongs—except for the narrator himself, the clothes and canvas shoes of Lucas and Mateo, and the tins and sometimes the printed cardboard boxes in the carriers’ loads. A hundred years before, the narrator thinks, everything in this scene would have belonged; and a hundred years before that.

  They stop for a while to rest and eat and drink a little. Lucas and Mateo use their machetes to trim a place for the narrator to sit. As they walk on again, the narrator surrenders to the idea of the antiquity of the forest and this trail. He begins to wonder about the idea of time that men must have in this setting.

  When men know their world well; when they know every tree and flower; all the foods and poisons; all the animals; when they have perfected all their tools; when everything exists in balance, and there is nothing from outside to compare, what idea can men have of the passing of time? It is the things we pass that give us an idea of speed. When there is nothing to compare, men must exist only in their own light and the light of the people they know—the narrator thinks of the dim lights in the blackness of the mission clearing, thinks of the play of his flas
hlight and the others’ as they pick their way back to their cabins. Beyond that, backwards and forwards, there must be nothing.

  The narrator wrestles with this difficult idea, very strange in the bright light. While the sun is still high the march ends. It is the rule. Two hours before sunset. They camp beside a stream. The sun strikes through the shallow reddish water; inches below the surface webs of light dance over the crushed grey and red rock at the bottom. Beauty; but it is only Lucas and Mateo who have made it safe. Lucas and Mateo are like people to whom the forest is home. Very quickly now, using their machetes, they trim slender tree branches, sharpen one end, bury it in the earth, and put up a low shelter, roofed with the fronds of the wild banana.

  They light a little fire. Lucas and Mateo prepare their own food; the narrator prepares his own, using the river water. The sun begins to go; very quickly it falls out of the sky. The evening melancholy, the long hours before daylight, cast a gloom on the narrator.

  Mateo is whittling away at a toy dugout-paddle.

  The narrator asks Mateo, “What does your father do?”

  A foolish question to ask in the forest: the narrator feels it as soon as he talks.

  “My father dead.”

  “How did he die?”

  Mateo puts down his paddle and throws a twig on the small fire and says, “Kanaima kill him.” Mateo speaks like a philosopher, like a man resigned to grief.

  The kanaima is the spirit of death of the forests. It inhabits the body of a living man. Somewhere in the forest is the killer who looks like a man, looks like Mateo and Lucas and all the others, and kills all men. In a world without time, where men live only in the present, by their own light, as it were, all a man’s life is spent in this fear. Without the kanaima, a man could truly be happy; might live forever.

  Impossible to enter this way of perceiving. The narrator asks, the little twig fire dying down, the night stretching out ahead, “Are you married, Mateo?”

  The other boy answers, “How can he be married?”

  And Mateo says, “Indian girls foolish. They know nothing.”

  The narrator is filled with shame and grief for the people of the forest. They are very far away, these people who can see everything in the forest, who have so many talents, and have perfected so much in their isolation. They are beyond reach. They are further away than any group the narrator has known; perhaps even the revolution will not reach them. Everywhere else, in Asia, Europe north and south, Africa, tribes and peoples have been in collision since the beginning of time. These people, after the migration of their ancestors from Asia, have become people entirely of themselves, without resilience or the talent to adapt. Once their world was broken into, they lost their wholeness.

  The little fire dies down. Lucas and Mateo stretch out away from the hut. The forest sings; from time to time, for some reason, the singing subsides for a split second and the river sound is heard. The narrator tries to imagine himself living in that setting for some years; for the rest of his life; for five hundred years. He feels an artificial touch of stress. He takes a sip of whisky from his bottle.

  One of the boys sits up straightaway and says, “You drink rum, sir?”

  “Not rum.”

  “You give us rum, sir.”

  “No rum.”

  The boy lies down again, sighing like a man.

  The narrator is awakened by the sound of rain, falling loudly on the wild-banana fronds of his hut roof. He awakens to his earlier stress, his own feeling of dislocation.

  One of the boys is standing in the darkness outside. He says, “Can Lucas and I come here, sir?”

  They come in, and the narrator is enveloped in the smell of stale tobacco, enveloped in the idea of appetite: appetite the antidote to stress.

  He lets his hand fall on the body next to him, not knowing to whom it belongs. The boy is passive. Appetite grows on the narrator; and even while his fallen hand opens, against the hardness of the body, a finer version of a body like his own, a body therefore more than half known, the narrator’s thought is of the grossness of the big blond woman at the station now a day’s march away. Appetite, appetite: the passivity of the boy feeds it.

  When he gets up in the morning the narrator finds himself alone in the little leaf-and-branch shelter. He has a moment of alarm. But the boys are higher up the river, preparing for the day. The narrator still doesn’t know which of the two had been beside him.

  The time comes to leave. With their machetes Lucas and Mateo—following some forest rule, perhaps—cut down the little shelter. So protecting during the night, but so flimsy, really.

  The march begins. The narrator is no longer at ease, no longer the man he had been. The path moves away from the upland river to the forest. Such beauty there; but something of the safety and wholeness of the previous day has left the narrator. Something nags; he never has to search far for the reason. As often as he rejects it, as often as he applies his mind to it, unease returns, to come between him and the moment; and below all of this now, and adding to his agitation, there is the idea of his cause, the starting point of the journey.

  Tossed about, sickening inwardly in a familiar way as the day wears on, he ceases to look about him. He walks mechanically between the two boys, fixing his eyes on the heels (in dirty canvas shoes) of the boy in front of him.

  The boys, on the other hand, are today more animated, cutting switches with their machetes, flicking leaves and small insects from the path, sometimes using their machetes to cut, very swiftly and neatly, light trail-marks on trees, talking loudly in their own language over him, as it were, as though it is important to make a human noise in the forest. There is a different swing to their gait; it is as if they were alone. They call out from afar to the people they see on the path; and sometimes, seeming to follow abrupt hunches of their own, they leave the path and—holding themselves still at a particular spot, as though they wish not even to disturb the air just then—they stand looking at something or for something.

  In mid-afternoon they halt for the day. Today, though, the boys make no sign of building a shelter. Instead, they leave the narrator in the camp-site and they wander off—always the two together—and come back and wander off again. The day before, the narrator hadn’t expected a shelter; today he does. He feels disregarded; it spoils the moment, the view, the yellowing light.

  For the first time that day he asserts himself. When the boys come back he says, “Lucas, build the hut.”

  And it is really very easy. The boys obey, with no change of mood: they might have been waiting for his order. Talking in their language, in their new loud way, as though it is important to make noise, they cut and trim branches. The sharp blades ring as they slice through sappy wood, and in no time the timbers are ready, the uprights forked at the top, and sharpened at the end where they are to be buried in the soft forest earth. Quickly then, almost without searching—as though in their wanderings they have taken stock of everything and now know exactly where they have to go—the boys fetch the wild-banana fronds and the big, hollow-ribbed, heart-shaped leaves to hang on the roof frame.

  When they are finished they lay the narrator’s pack in the shelter. It is like a delicate attention; but then the narrator sees them get their own packs and set them down next to his: the three packs lying, quite formally, side by side, in a repetition of the previous night’s arrangement: as though that was also contained in the narrator’s orders.

  They light a fire. The flame hardly shows in the afternoon light. They separately prepare their food, the boys theirs together, the narrator his. The light fades fast, the fire shows, and then, abruptly, night comes. The forest begins to sing. Soon it is like a noise in the head.

  Lucas whittles at his toy paddle. He asks the narrator, “Where you come from?”

  “England.”

  Mateo asks, “Why you come here?”

  The narrator gives the reply he has been trained to give: “I will tell Alfred. He will tell you.” Alfred is the headman
of the village where they are going.

  Lucas says, “You want to build houses here?”

  “Alfred will tell you.” And to cut the questioning short the narrator asks, “How did kanaima kill your father, Mateo?”

  The faces of both boys, tanned, shiny, reflecting the fire, become very serious, resigned.

  Lucas speaks first. “Kanaima was looking for him. He had a sign.”

  “But then he forget,” Mateo says. “One day a cloth-seller come. My father want to look at the cloth. He don’t know that kanaima come with the cloth-seller. When my father was looking at the cloth kanaima hide in his room. When my father come back with the new cloth kanaima kill him. That is all. Afterwards we burn the cloth.”

  They all look at the fire.

  Lucas says, “You live in a house in England?”

  There is such an emphasis on the word the narrator wants to say no, he lives in a flat; but that would be confusing. So he says yes.

  Lucas says slowly, as though he is repeating a lesson, “I want to live in a house.”

  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.