A Guest of Honour (54 page)

“I hear that Shinza wants to be the Secretary—General.” Instinct told him to be bold; for the first time in his life he did not seem to have much else to go by.

He could not tell whether or not they knew about Shinza all along, whether it was the factor they balked at inwardly. “Shinza, eh?” the old man said. “And do you agree with that?”

Bray said offhand, “He was S.-G. before. If UTUC wants him. Nobody knows trade union work better than Shinza.”

“I want to talk to you about something.” The old man looked round at the others. They drifted off in a group, taking their time about it, holding their smart jackets over their shoulders. Bray and the old man got into the back seat of the car; although the doors were open it was no cooler than standing outside. There was a vase of wax roses in a holder beside the rear mirror. Semstu said, “Will it not be a bad thing …”

He might mean that it was bad to cross Mweta's will, or he might mean he did not like the idea of Shinza in office at this time. It would have made sense to have found out a bit more, from Shinza, about his more recent relations with the old man. “You want to know what I
think? I think Mweta needs Shinza in a position like that. He needs Shinza”—Bray made a measuring gesture—” ‘up there.' Shinza has become too far away.”

“Down in the Bashi, yes. It's far. And Shinza understands the trouble—he was in the mines himself.”

“Exactly. Shinza is another pair of eyes and ears for Mweta, and he knows what he sees and hears, too.”

“The man they sent down to the brickfields”—Semstu's tongue—click cracked like a whip in disgust. “He had passed his school, yes—”

Bray let him alone to think a minute.

“Goma's been worrying me about the vote. All the time he comes to me.”

“Well, it's important. The five Tisolo branches, you know.”

“But I was worried it was a bad thing … because Mweta wants to choose.”

“I don't think it's a bad thing.” Even in Gala, he heard the English habit of authority and self—assurance in his voice; just as a whore turned respectable retains a professionalism in her manner towards men.

Semstu talked on, about Goma— “his head is pressed into his shoulder like a vulture, it's hard to trust a man who looks like that bird”; jealousy of Mweta, jealousy of Shinza— “someone must have talked between them”; the comfort of the Luxurama seats, the first Congress—did Bray remember?—when the police had seized the agenda. When all this preamble was over and he could do so with independence, he said, “You can tell Goma I will do it.”

“All five branches?”

“All five.”

That was all there was to it. He saw himself saying to Shinza, that was all there was to it. I have done my errand. As easy as that. He went to the café where he and Shinza had eaten sausages but was not hungry. His feet and hands had swelled, after the chill of the Luxurama, standing in the heat. His watch stuck to his wrist and gave way from wet flesh and hairs with a sucking pull as he shifted it. The artificial fruit juice was moving round and round in its container, bright and cloudy. The Greek proprietor and his wife were drinking Turkish coffee in tiny cups. “Could I have a cup of
that?'

The little man had two dimples in his greenish—pale face as he
smiled at the big Englishman. “Oh, we don't sell this kind of coffee, it's what we Greeks drink ourselves.” “I know. I like it very much. Could I have a cup?” The man was amused. “Oh if you want. I'll give you.” The pregnant wife, very young, with wisps of black hair showing in the white arches of her underarms, fetched a cup, unsmiling. In the cupola between the body and the arm he tasted always the sweety—scentedness of something smeared there to disguise sweat, and the slight gall, as of an orange pip bitten into, of the sweat itself, and his tongue, moving one way smoothly, felt the nap of shaven hair—roots when it moved the other. The coffee was boiling hot, thick and delicious. Rebecca had not been in his mind at all; only this one part of her, suddenly, claimed him with an overwhelming sense of reality of its own. Cunt—struck, they call it—never mind that it wasn't the right part—he thought deeply lovingly, not minding what they called it. He was at once swollen in the other way, too. He ordered a bottle of soda water because the man wouldn't take money for the coffee: it was he, Bray, who had done him the honour of appreciating the customs of the country—a country thousands of miles away.

Every day in October at this time a strange transformation of elements took place. The sky was no longer colour or space but weight of heat; it pressed down upon figures, trees, and buildings. The streets of two o'clock in the afternoon looked squat and beaten. He felt his height hammered towards the ground, where only the big red ants moved lightly and freely. He took a taxi the few blocks back to the Luxurama. The taxi drivers of the capital were in the euphoria of good business—Congress brought plenty of customers to town. The driver wore a white golfer's cap and sunglasses, and at the traffic light played the drums with flat palms on his thighs in time to loud music from his radio.

The foyer had almost emptied itself back into the auditorium already; Bray saw that he could slip in without seeing the Shinza contingent. He didn't want to talk about Semstu. But Shinza himself came out against the stream of delegates going in; he was hurrying somewhere with papers in his hand.

“Well, how did you get on with your old friend Semstu?”

“You will have the Tisolo branches.”

A parody of his own thought, it came from Shinza: “Easy as that.”

Bray said nothing. Shinza was in that state when the imminence of a decisive event becomes unbearable and the mind seizes upon some trivial detail to be completed, some half—phrase to be added, putting into the performance of these useless things all the urgency that is turned back by the event itself: here; now; carrying with it the oracle of its outcome. Whatever the bits of paper were, he held them as if they were his destiny, his eyes already impatiently past Bray, his lips clamped with a sort of smile on a dead cigarette. “I wish they'd trust me easily as they trust you.”

“They trust me because I haven't got any power. That wouldn't be much good to you, would it.” He took from his pocket the little gas lighter Rebecca had given him, and the tiny flame spurted with the roll of his thumb: “Here.”

“You haven't got a box of matches for me?—I'm out.” Mechanically, Shinza bent his dark fleecy head and relit the cigarette.

“Keep this.” A few scribbles of white, like threads of white cotton you'd pick off woolly cloth, there on the crown. Bray had never had with Shinza the sense of affection he had with Mweta, the affection that of course meant a certain physical affinity, too, which is to say a tolerance for the other person's body, its essences and characteristics. That was partly what the girl meant when she said once that he “loved” Mweta; he would have used Mweta's razor or put on a garment of Mweta's (not that he could ever fit into anything Mweta wore!) as unthinkingly as he would use a towel streaked with the black stuff that washed off Rebecca's eyelashes. But with Shinza, who knew him so much better than Mweta did—Shinza, matched with him in mind, locked with him in generation—between Shinza and himself there was something of physical hostility. He remembered once more the moment the day he had first seen Shinza again, with the boy—child he had begotten on a young girl, feeble in his hand. A moment of pure sexual jealousy. And no woman involved; no individual woman, only woman as the symbol by which a child was fathered. Well, the genie was out of the bottle these days; his feelings, that whole flood of nervous responses, had somehow pushed forward into daily use, overwhelmingly available and alert, a kind of second intelligence. Looking down on Shinza's head for a second, he thought, was that when it began—when
he
was holding his son?

Someone had forgotten to turn up the houselights in the Luxurama
and only the red exit lamps glowed. After the daylight he saw little in the dimness and was aware of all the eyes there, turned not upon him but in quiet tension upon what was to come. There was not much talk. He felt his way to a seat. Then the lighting was corrected and everyone was discovered by it in a kind of dreamy impatience, waiting for the Executive and Central Committees and the President to file in.

Mweta had put on the robe he had worn for his investiture. It left his neck free of collar and tie for the October heat—but that didn't prevail in here. The robe made him look much taller and the muscles running to a V at the base of his throat showed in a streak of shine along the smooth black skin as he turned his head. Shinza was hunched at the table, his raised shoulders keeping out his neighbours, his two fists supporting his chin and covering the lower part of his bearded face. Bray kept looking at him to see if he would look up; to make him look up. He felt curiously anxious that Shinza should do so, anxious about what the delegates were thinking of this image. Shinza did not move. The familiar gesture with which he fished in his breastpocket for a cigarette was missing.

With the same conventions that carried it from any one piece of business to another, Congress came to the motion: “That the People's Independence Party Congress views with grave alarm the intention to make the position of Secretary—General of the United Trades Union Congress a personal appointment by the President of the State, instead of an appointment voted by election within the United Trades Union Congress membership, as it has been since the birth of trade unions in this country. The People's Independence Party moves that the President be respectfully informed that such usurpation of democratic procedure is contrary to the spirit of the State and the principles of free labour upheld by the People's Independence Party and the United Trades Union Congress, on which the State was founded; and that the President be requested to affirm the unalienable right of UTUC to elect its Secretary—General.”

The legalistic jargon, the chairman controlling the order in which voices might be heard, the people sitting with that bit of paper, the agenda, token of the taming of their wildest and most urgent thoughts translated into symbols on cheap white paper; this ancient form of human discipline—frail cracked amphora, handed down by the
Greeks, that it was—held. All the festive
bonhomie
of the gathering at its first meetings had worn off by now. Suits were rumpled with sitting and the smokers went through pack after pack, enduring the alternation of boredom and tension. In spite of the air—conditioning, or rather, circulated coldly by it, there was the smell of the herd, man—herd, brought about not by physical exertion but the secretions of determination, resentment, apprehension, nervous excitement, coming, Bray thought, from myself and all the others. We don't speak, I don't know what they're thinking on either side of me, our arms touching on the chair—arms, but we give it off, this message that we no longer know how to read as animals do.

The first speaker to the motion had been carefully chosen: the trade unionist Sam Gaka was a man of the kind dubbed “painfully sincere”—that is, given a particular, insistent grasp of a certain set of facts without relating them to a hierarchy of other facts. In any society where it was possible, he would have been apolitical; here he simply failed to understand what his political position was. He was a believer (almost in the evangelical sense) in corporate trade unionism—the restriction of union activities purely to professional questions of the employer—employee relationship. And so, although corporate trade unionism was something that UTUC could never have practised, since from the beginning UTUC had been part of the nationalist political struggle, with the employer/white-colonial one and the same force against which the worker/black-subject had to assert his demands/rights, and although corporate trade unionism was something that UTUC could not practise now, because an underdeveloped country had to be able to “call upon” its workers in the old political sense to fight the State's struggle for economic emancipation—he was able to argue for the election of the Secretary—General from the “pure” position of corporatism. For those who recognized it, gave a name to it; to the majority he was simply saying that UTUC's members, representing the whole working force of the country, must always know the best person to speak for them to the government, that the whole idea of trade unionism was based on the workers' selection of their own spokesmen, etc.

Clever Shinza, Bray thought, to pick this man. But there were statements to be twisted from this politically unaligned context, too. Ndisi Shunungwa, present Secretary—General of UTUC, was able to
speak from another advantage—everyone knew he himself had been elected to office, yet he was reminding Party members that the man to be appointed in future by the President would not be an outsider—there were provisions that this could not happen—he would be a member of the executive of UTUC, and therefore someone freely elected to speak for them by the union members themselves, else how would he be in UTUC at all?

Basil Nwanga's huge backside blocked the view of the men in the seats on either side of his as he rose. “Mr. Chairman, that's all right as the nice and tidy answer of an incumbent who maybe feels confident he'll stay where he sits if the Secretary—General is appointed instead of elected”—his sharply affable voice went on at once before the chairman could raise any objection— “Well, of course, personal views are not what interests us, we must decide on facts, hey, and the one that got left out here is that in UTUC itself there are people who represent different ideas in the trade union movement. It's only the majority of members of UTUC who have the right to decide which man, representing which ideas, will serve the workers best as S.-G. If the appointment comes from outside it can only be seen to favour one set of views above another. It must be like that. —There will be trouble in the unions. Let the workers elect their own man—it's the duty of the Party to support this right—” He spoke jerkily, in his heavily accented English that broke up sentences into unfamiliar stress—patterns, but he had a youthful bluntness that released spontaneity. Applause came like thrown pennies as he lowered his bulk out of the way again. Someone stood up to ask why the matter was being discussed at a PIP Congress at all—wasn't it something for the trade unions to argue?—but was at once ruled out of order, to triumphant applause meant not for him but as self—congratulation on the part of the supporters of the motion.