The Middle Passage (16 page)

Darkness hid the dust and the absence of buildings. In all directions and as far as the eye could see Boa Vista blazed with electric lights that seemed to mark the boulevards, squares and crescents of a metropolis offering rich sensual pleasures. I wished to avoid the dustbowl, however, and was making for a short street of disintegrating wooden shacks to the right of the hotel, when Hewson’s assistant, deflecting me slightly, said with embarrassment, ‘The women in that street are
bad
.’

‘Bad?’ I said.

He became extremely confused. ‘Well, they are bad,’ he said, and I thought disingenuously. Then, as though explaining matters to a child, he added, ‘You see,
bad
men go to that street to meet these
bad
women.’

I didn’t press the point. We walked across the dustbowl to an asphalted street. The flat surface, so rare in the city, had been put to extensive use; it was covered with enormous election slogans in white paint. After we had had a beer in a dingy bar that smelled of dog-dirt – all the bars, I later discovered, smelled of dog-dirt – Hewson’s assistant left me, and I decided to call on the Brazilian engineer and his civil servant wife whom I had met in Lethem.

They lived in a small white house in a street crammed with small white houses. Like all the houses in that street, and like most of the buildings in Boa Vista, it was marked with the letters P.N., which stood for National Patrimony, the Brazilian way of saying Government Property.

I surprised them enjoying the cool of the evening in their dusty yard below a mango tree, from one branch of which a pendent light bulb of powerful wattage burned fiercely. Never was a city so prodigal of light, so strung with electric wire. I called from the unpaved pavement and they, shading their eyes against the electric glare, uttered cries of disbelief rather than delight. The sister-in-law from Belém sat at a sewing-machine, working bits of material she had bought in Lethem. The engineer was wearing the clothes I had seen on him the night of the dance: white trousers and a striped green shirt. His wife, the civil servant, wore fluffy bedroom slippers. I thought these unsuitable for the dust, which was inches thick, a chaos of footprints, every one of which was thrown into black-and-white relief by the powerful light.

At their subdued cries of welcome a number of people came out of the small house of the National Patrimony: an entire and separate family, it seemed, but the civil servant, whose gravity I now interpreted as melancholy, introduced them as members of her husband’s family. The husband himself was sent to get beer; and she, going into the front room – which instantly incandesced, dazzling rays leaping across the inchoate street and through the side window into the yard – returned presently with a bottle of white liquid, a special Brazilian drink, she said, that she had prepared herself. It turned out to be soursop, which grows in every backyard in the Caribbean islands and requires no care. We drank the soursop squash; when the engineer returned with the beer we drank it quickly, to prevent it going warm; and we talked as best we could.

None of them were natives of Boa Vista, which they told me was a joke among Brazilians, who looked upon it as somewhere behind the back of beyond. They feared I was getting a poor impression of Brazil; had I seen pictures of Brasilia? Then the engineer asked whether I had read Shakespeare. In the original? He regarded me with envy and wonder. He was fond of books himself. Yes, his wife said, he
was
a great reader. ‘Camoëns, Dante, Aristotle,’ the engineer said, ‘Shelley, Keats, Tolstoy.’ And for a full minute we exchanged names of writers, the engineer greeting every name he recognized with an ‘Ah!’ Yes, he said at the end, reading was a great thing; it improved man.

Mangoes fell among us as we spoke; the resulting laughter bridged the gaps in the conversation and gave it animation. Before I left, the civil servant said she would be very glad to show me around the next day. I said this would be very nice, but what about her job? She smiled and shrugged; she would call for me at the hotel at nine.

On the way back through the dead, lunar-bright city, I walked down the street of brothels. Miniature black streams, glinting in the light, had cut deep channels through the hard dirt. In one or two decaying wooden shacks there was music, not loud, and a few people were dancing, not riotously. The women were fat, not young, and nondescript. They didn’t look clean and had made so little attempt to look ‘bad’ that I couldn’t be sure they were prostitutes; the appearance and allure of prostitutes vary so much from culture to culture. I went straight on to the hotel. When I turned the light on in my room cockroaches ran off in all directions. The mosquitoes didn’t move. I closed the window against the odours of the garbage in the empty lot and rubbed myself all over with insect repellent, adding another smell to the warm mustiness of the room. The label on the bottle promised me protection for at least four hours.

The dining room was large and high and lighted by many windows; it would have looked like a gymnasium if the enormous L-shaped table hadn’t made it look like a partially dismantled college hall. I found one man there next morning. He welcomed me with the warmth of one made frantic by solitude. In Spanish he told me he came from Rio, was a trader (I suppose he meant smuggler) and had been three days in Boa Vista waiting for a plane. He had been to the single cinema, he had made the round of the bars; there was nothing else to do and he was going mad. I asked whether he had gone to the brothels. Yes, he said joylessly, he had; and was going to say more when there was a brisk metallic fluttering behind us. We turned and saw a bird, or so it seemed, beating its wings against a glass window. The man from Rio got up, walked to the window and put his hand over the creature, stilling its agitation. ‘Cockroach,’ he said, putting it in his trouser pocket. His bright eyes dimmed as soon as he got back to the table, and he spoke as one appealing for sympathy. Yes, he had been to the brothels; last night, in fact; but the women were
viejas, feas y negras
, old, ugly and black.

Being shown around by the civil servant meant missing the fair, which might have given me another view of Boa Vista; Hewson said later that it was impressive. The civil servant came for me shortly after nine, after she had finished her work for the day. Like most of the civil servants in Boa Vista, she said, she had little to do. So we started tramping through the hot dust. The smell of dog-dirt was inescapable, as was the sight of starved mongrels locked in copulation, their faces blank and foolish. Few of the thin children I saw were without some skin disease; one or two were deformed. We went to the primitive printery which produced the ragged government gazette; most of the people there appeared to be doing nothing. We went to a small insanitary market in which everything apart from some Amerindian straw fans had been imported; a maternity hospital, run by nuns, which was admirably ordered and clean; and lastly to the Government Palace, the nerve-centre of the administration.

The palace was a large, undistinguished concrete building, full of civil servants, typewriters, files and silence. In a carpeted room I was shown the governor’s desk, huge and untenanted (I imagine he was at the fair). On the wall there was an enormous coloured map of Brazil, which revealed the size of the country – what a minute portion of it we had covered yesterday! – and the remoteness of Boa Vista. Two large white albums lay on an occasional table. The civil servant urged me to open them. I expected charts and maps and photographs of industrial projects. I found beauty queens in high heels, from all the states and territories of Brazil: Miss Rio Branco, Miss Amazonas and so on. With the civil servant and a secretary smiling tolerantly at me, I turned over photograph after glossy photograph, beauty queen after beauty queen, proving my manhood, unwilling to offend Brazilian womanhood. Under a glass case in a corridor there was a model of a beautifully planned city, ideal in its simplicity and symmetry. This was the Boa Vista of the future. I couldn’t recognise it and asked where on the model was the building in which we stood. No one could tell me.

We went back to the house of the National Patrimony for a drink. A pedlar called, offering contraband fabrics from British Guiana at a high price. Something was bought; the man was dismissed; and then the engineer came in. His clothes were stained with paint and his wife apologized for him, explaining that he had spent the morning repairing and painting their motor-car. We separated for lunch. Mine was unsatisfactory. No fish, because Boa Vista is a town of civil servants, ranchers and smugglers, and no one found it profitable to go fishing in the Rio Branco. No vegetables, because the Japanese immigrants weren’t producing enough or because there weren’t enough Japanese.

In the afternoon we went with the engineer’s sister to the shacklike office of the Brazilian airline to arrange for her flight to Belém: it seemed that civil servants and their families could fly all over Brazil without paying. After the airline office our sight-seeing was over. I was glad. I had had enough of sun and dust and starved mongrels. We turned into a street of small white houses. And there, before us, was the engineer.

He was on a ladder. A cigarette hung from his lips and in his right hand he held a paint brush. He was painting the wall of a house of the Brazilian National Patrimony. He was one of three painters. What was I to do? If his wife, the civil servant, hadn’t told me that he had spent the morning on their car, I could have stopped and we could have exchanged smiles.

I didn’t see the engineer. I walked on. The two women fell fractionally behind; I heard low words being exchanged. In a moment I had passed the house; in another moment the women had caught up with me. We didn’t speak of the engineer. Had I made a mistake? Had I been unforgivably rude? At the gate of their house we said good-bye. They didn’t ask me in. I thanked them for their kindness. I wanted to make my words more than formal; but language lay between us. I was a complete stranger, and they had shown me much generosity. I walked wretchedly back through wide avenues of dust to the hotel, hoping I would never see them again.

I didn’t. A strong wind started across the savannah and the city centre was lost in dust. People walked with handkerchiefs over their faces. For the rest of my stay in Boa Vista the wind never dropped and the man from Rio and myself, imprisoned in the hotel, ate oranges and watched the dust storm.

*    *    *

César Gorinsky drove me back to Lethem. It was an admirable piece of driving. Night fell while we were still on the Brazilian savannah and we had to ford the Takutu by the headlamps of the Land-Rover. In the hotel next day there was quite a crowd waiting for the Georgetown plane: Rupununi children going back to school on the coast, a few holiday-makers who had been staying at various ranches, and some hollow-eyed Brazilian traders with their disreputable-looking suitcases.

Just as the bush had begun at Atkinson Field, so the coast now seemed to begin in the hotel. Even its politics were with us, in copies of a newspaper called the Sun, whose slogan was ‘A place in the sun for everyone’. The
Sun
was the organ of the United Force (‘Have Foresight – be a Forcite’), a political party that had been formed earlier that year by Mr Peter D’Aguiar, a Georgetown businessman of Portuguese extraction. The United Force was anti-Jagan, anti-Burnham, anti-left. It offered ‘unity and integration for the six races’ (Indian, African, Portuguese, white, mixed, Amerindian); and to these races it offered ‘more work more wages more industries more land more learning more money’. Something for everyone: ‘more money’, one imagines, for those threatened by ‘more wages’.

On the front page of the
Sun
I saw – Vol. 1, No. 8 – there was a photograph of Mr D’Aguiar smiling, pen in hand, behind a desk that carried a board with his name and the words ‘Managing Director’. A steel filing cabinet and a safe are at his back. Below the photograph comes Mr D’Aguiar’s New Year message, a gloomy one, belying the smile and the safe.

Now for the news. The front page story is ‘$5,500 Bonus for Wong & Khan Employees’. One hundred workers will benefit from this sum, and on page five there is a photograph of Mr Khan, his sleeves rolled up, smiling, shaking a worker’s hand and presenting a cheque. In the background someone who might be Mr Wong smiles straight at the camera. ‘The workers showered praise on Mr Wong and Mr Khan and the company,’ though it appears that ‘Mr Khan said that the workers were drifting in their cooperation with their fellow-workers, and hoped that as from the beginning of the new year, they will look at things from a different angle and will be able to share one common understanding’.

There is also an advertisement in which, despite Mr D’Aguiar’s gloom, ‘the partners and staff ‘of Messrs Wong and Khan ‘extends [
sic
] to all our clients and friends a very happy and prosperous New Year’; and, curiously, in a photograph on page eight Mr D’Aguiar himself is seen shaking hands and offering the season’s greetings.

The editorial, claiming that Dr Jagan is a communist, and that Mr Burnham ‘must be handled with extreme caution’ since ‘the stigma of Communism is not too easily removed’, gives credit to Mr D’Aguiar for putting forward ‘the only constructive plan for the development of British Guiana’. There are advertisements for the United Force and the
Sun
, I-Cee soft drinks and Banks beer (both D’Aguiar enterprises). And a speech of Dr John Frederick’s is reported: