The Middle Passage (15 page)

The New Year Dance is a big thing in Lethem. It takes place in the hotel, and hand-written bills stuck to the door of the bar said that there was to be a Brazilian band, which was coming all the way from Boa Vista, two rivers, five hard hours and eighty miles away. Lorry-loads of Brazilians were coming as well, for each of these frontier towns, Lethem and Boa Vista, enviously regards the other as a place of vice and adventure; it had already been whispered to me that Boa Vista had brothels.

The Brazilians arrived in the middle of the afternoon and at once overran the hotel. The women besieged the bathroom, twittering and squawking; and when, hours later, it seemed, they had all repaired the ravages of the drive from Boa Vista, the bathroom was littered with tangles of hair and tufts of cotton wool. In the corridor there was an empty green-and-white carton,
Leite de Rosas –
perfume, I imagine – and
Industria Brasileira
, needless to say.

I had heard that in the old days these frontier dances were rough affairs and sometimes ended in brawls. Things were quieter now and I felt that Lethem regretted its former reputation, though the dance was still not considered by some to be suitable for respectable women. The earliest dancers were Amerindian, with the respectable looking on with aloof indulgence, as though they didn’t know why they had bothered with the long drive, the stay in the bathroom and the
Leite de Rosas
.

In the veranda, removed from the hubbub of the dance floor, I came upon a respectable Brazilian man and two respectable Brazilian women – Portuguese with a dash of Amerindian, like so many Brazilians in this part – sitting idly in Teddy Melville’s leather chairs. We attempted to talk. Attempted: they spoke Portuguese and knew little English, and I had only some Spanish. The man was an engineer. His wife, who had a grave, fine beauty, was a civil servant; his sister, unfortunately still unmarried, came from Belém and was spending some time with them. We exchanged addresses. They pressed me to visit Brazil, a great country. When I did so I was to come and see them. We wandered back to the dance floor, and separated.

The Amerindian women danced dourly, looking down at the floor, concentrating on their steps, and seeming to ignore their partners. They brought their bare feet flat down on to the ground, in a slight stamping action. I did not find them attractive.

I had tried hard to feel interest in the Amerindians as a whole, but had failed. I couldn’t read their faces; I couldn’t understand their language, and could never gauge at what level communication was possible. Among more complex peoples there are certain individuals who have the power to transmit to you their sense of defeat and purposelessness: emotional parasites who flourish by draining you of the vitality you preserve with difficulty. The Amerindians had this effect on me.

My most depressing memory of the Rupununi is of the Amerindian village to which Franker took me one day.
‘NOTICE’
, said a roughly written board outside.
‘WE DO NOT WANT ANY STRANGERS TO BE TRESPASSING ON THE VILLAGE, EXCEPTING THE PRIESTS, THE DOCTORS, AND THE DISTRICT COMMISSIONER, ORDERED BY THE VILLAGE CHIEF. FELIX.’
The notice was not government-inspired; its purpose was to protect the villagers from the importuning of certain politicians they weren’t going to vote for anyway. It was a small village of thatched huts and some rough wooden houses. The teacher, an Amerindian, lived in the largest wooden house, which was some distance from the village. And in another wooden house there was the school, empty now, but with maps and posters and time-tables on the walls, just like many other elementary schools. But this one led its pupils to nothing but confusion and self-contempt.

Father Quigly, the Roman Catholic missionary, was passing through the village; he had spent the night in the school, and his hammock was still hung across the room. As he spoke to us, men and boys gathered around, some in the schoolroom, some in bright sunlight outside, the young interested and expectant, the old not looking, as though they felt they had to express their courtesy to the district commissioner and were doing so merely by being present.

‘Faustino,’ Father Quigly asked, ‘you want to go to Georgetown?’

‘Yes, Father,’ said a boy in grey flannel trousers.

Yet what would Faustino, and others like him who were dissatisfied with their village and with their condition as Amerindians, do in Georgetown? There they would be objects of contempt; some might become traffic policemen; but that was all. Father Quigly thought they should be given more say in the country, some sort of semi-responsible protected employment by the government.

Felix, the village chief, in whose name the bold sign barring strangers had been written, didn’t appear interested. While we spoke he sat slumped and round-shouldered on a bench, staring at the floor, his short legs, loosely trousered, dangling. Later in his trance-like way he took us to his hut. It was dark and dirty and dusty and disordered, like most Amerindians’ huts. The sight of exposed food in the midst of dust and mud has the same effect on me as the screech of chalk on a board; I could scarcely stay to admire the Wai-Wai grater – sharp bits of stone stuck into a board – which I had been told was a rare and desirable souvenir. I felt then that reverence for food – rules for its handling, interdictions – was one of the essentials of civilization.

The music went on all through the night. I awoke intermittently to it: it was comforting, like the sound of rain; but there were also curious grunting noises such as one hears in Japanese films. And in the morning there was silence. The Brazilians, band and dancers, civil servant and engineer, had got into their lorries and had gone back to Boa Vista. There were empty beer bottles around the dance floor, in the veranda, in the road; and little groups of Amerindians were contentedly regarding the chaos to which they had contributed.

In the dining room there was a new guest. He was a trader, Syrian by origin, who had come in by a small plane that morning, on the way to Georgetown. He tried over coffee to persuade me to become a trader and live in Brazil. I mentioned difficulties: with transport from Georgetown to Lethem at nine cents a pound, I said, trading couldn’t be very easy.

‘Whatsa trouble?’ he said. ‘You pay one dollar in Georgetown. So? So you pay another dollar for the transport. So you charge three dollars. Whatsa trouble?’

In Boa Vista that week there was a fair of some sort – cattle or agriculture – and the Lethem officials had been invited. Hewson, the young English agricultural officer who wore correct khaki but went about barefooted by preference, was going with two of his assistants, and he agreed to take me along. We didn’t need passports to get into Brazil but we had to ford the Takutu River. It was less than a hundred yards across at the fording point, and sticks marked the route over the treacherous little sandbanks in which the Land-Rover would be trapped if it halted at all. When the Land-Rover began to sink and the water level rose, I tried to remember that the river was forded twice a week by the big lorry from Boa Vista.

At last we made the bank. We were in Brazil. The ground carried no marks of difference, nothing to confirm that we were in Brazil. The savannah was as flat and bright and bare, the sky was as high, and the ground was as hard as on the other bank. The road stretched between bristling tussocks of coarse brown-green grass: two parallel white tracks separated by a strip of low, chassis-brushed vegetation. And as we penetrated deeper into Brazil I felt as a fact, what the maps had already told me, that the savannah was really Brazilian and the British Guianese portion of it trifling.

We passed small settlements of thatched houses and sometimes we were stopped by people, Amerindian with a dash of Portuguese, who sang out requests for
pasagem a Boa Vista.
‘No passage, no passage,’ Hewson said; and they withdrew without showing rancour or disappointment, to wait for goodness knows how long for some vehicle that would take them to Boa Vista, whose lights, here in the savannah, must have seemed very bright indeed. One of those who stopped us was a very old, white-headed Negro. One is so used in the New World to hearing Negroes speak English that it is startling to hear them speak anything else; it is to see afresh the condition of the Negro, who in the New World has been made in so many images. In this savannah the old man was demonstrably an alien, an exotic who yet knew nothing else, neither of landscape nor language.

Suddenly, and incredibly, there was a large unpainted concrete building. It was marked
POSTO MEDICO
in clumsy blue letters, and on the walls there were election posters with photographs of well-dressed politicians with unreliable faces. This was a hospital. But it had no equipment, no doctors, no patients: Brazil, a great country, administering every section of its great area, on paper.

Wherever you look in the savannah you see a mountain range, low and faint and far away. Without these ranges the flatness would be insupportable, particularly when even the sandpaper trees disappear, and the twisted branches of one dead white tree at the side of the road, remarked long before you come to it, cinematically frame and give scale to the emptiness. And then you see, not a mountain range, but a single hill, neat, abrupt, isolated; you cannot take your eyes off it; it grows, it spreads; it is not neat at all. It isn’t a hill which is known to people; its little slides of rock, the appearance and fading of its scant vegetation, do not matter; it has only this landmark existence.

The savannah landscape continually changes. In damp depressions there is bush which is like forest. But the pleasances are the creeks. The land around them is green, and palm trees are reflected in the clear water. We stopped at one to wet our faces and soak our feet; and while we were doing so a Land-Rover came around the greenery, shot across the shallow ford and raced away in a cloud of dust. This was César Gorinsky of the Rupununi, bound like us for Boa Vista. We followed but couldn’t catch up. Gorinsky knew the road, and the whorls of dust from his Land-Rover seemed to express his flamboyant skill.

The land grew greener. We passed a fazenda: a whitewashed house with blue facings set between banana trees and an orange orchard. Children watched us from the yard, and a signboard gave the name of the place: Good Hope. And all at once we were on the bank of the Rio Branco, a tributary of the Amazon. Small islands barred a direct view across, and the awesome breadth of the river could be gauged only by the straggling line of unremarkable white and brown houses high on the other bank, tenderly lit by the setting sun: Boa Vista, city of adventure, with a whole street of brothels. Between our bank and the nearest island white sandbanks rose out of the muddy water, and for a moment one indulged the child-like fantasy that it was possible to hop from one sandbank to the other and so on to the island, which was low and flat.

And now we saw the reason for Gorinsky’s speed. He had been hoping to catch the ferry, which took only two vehicles at a time; and he was second in the queue behind a brightly coloured Willys jeep
(Industria Brasileira
, even down to its tyres). The ferry had just left and would not be back for at least an hour. The driver of the Willys jeep, a Brazilian army officer, said with glum resignation that the service might even be suspended until the morning. We sat on the bank, eating oranges, the houses of Boa Vista growing mellower and mellower as the sun sank.

A small boat with an outboard motor came alongside, offering to take passengers across, and Hewson decided to send me over with one of his assistants. As we left, messages were shouted to the boatman to remind the ferry to come back. We zigzagged across the river, between the islands and the sandbanks, and it was twenty minutes before we reached the other bank. A multitude of women and children were bathing close to the shore. It was now dusk. Trees and moored boats were silhouetted against the bright sky and river. We climbed up the steep bank and came into a dirt street which was as full of holes and bumps as a construction site.

Boa Vista is a preposterous city: separate huddles of shabby houses along wide streets that have been marked out according to the design of a master town-planner. Only, the streets have not yet been built, except in short, abrupt and arbitrary stretches. The planners have planned for the year 2000, and what in that year will be magnificent avenues in the meantime connect nothing to nothing through red Brazilian dirt. One curious result is that though in terms of population Boa Vista is a small city, its distances are metropolitan, without the alleviation of a metropolitan bus service. Lamp standards line the well-planned desolation, part of the promise of the future, and a number of grand buildings, among them an abattoir and a hospital, both uncommissioned, have been put up, awaiting the future and an increase of population, which at present consists mainly of civil servants administering one another and smugglers who keep the civil servants supplied; the Brazilian Government, for reasons of economy and convenience, tolerating smuggling in this territory.

A taxi, an open Willys jeep – only jeeps can operate on these streets – took me to the hotel, one of the impressive buildings put up for
AD
2000. In that year, no doubt, it will occupy a commanding position in a splendid town centre, where smart and incorruptible policemen will control traffic through tree-lined avenues and fountains will play in well-kept gardens; but at the moment this town centre was an immense featureless dustbowl, across which gaily-coloured open jeeps packed with cheerful Brazilians regularly scuttled, whirling up clouds of red dust that blotted out the lamp standards and electric poles with which the town bristles and the houses, small in the distance, at the other end of the bowl. The hotel, new and pink, already felt like a ruin, like a relic of a retreating civilization. It smelt of disuse. Two barefooted children, dirty and shy, wearing clothes into which, following the Boa Vistan pattern, they had yet to grow, showed me to my room: a bed, a chair, a bulbless reading lamp, an ugly unshining wardrobe, a hot-water tap that didn’t run and had possibly never run, a window that overlooked a patch of wasteland where much garbage had been dumped. After this it seemed an impertinence when, on my way out, the man behind the desk asked for my passport. Abandoning Spanish, which I had used previously with him, I said in English and with some annoyance that I had none. He shrugged his shoulders, withdrew the request and went on picking his teeth.