The Middle Passage (22 page)

Our journey was nearly over. Within minutes we were at Paruima. The village lay on our left; on the other bank a landing field had been cleared. Palmer, the English agricultural officer, a slightly-built man in his early twenties, wearing khaki trousers, canvas shoes and a large straw hat, was at the river bank to welcome us. He especially welcomed Dr Talbot: there had been much sickness in the mission and even the pastor and his family had been affected. Dr Talbot got out with his books and umbrella; he was staying at the house of the village captain. We went on a few hundred yards to the mission proper. And there on the bank, in bathing trunks, were two children, white and blond and freckled, altogether startling after a day of river and forest and Amerindian faces.

‘Who are you?’ the bigger boy asked, taking the words out of my mouth. His American accent added to the unreality of the encounter, and gave a touch of impertinence to a simple and legitimate inquiry.

His father, the pastor, youngish, tall, slim and with spectacles, came down the high bank to the edge of the black water.

‘The name’s Winter,’ my American said, holding out a blotched and surprisingly large hand. Hearing his accent against the pastor’s, I realized how exaggeratedly southern Mr Winter’s was.

We climbed up the bank. The mission, a complex of wooden buildings set in a circle, stood on a slope, at the end of a large clearing still spiky with tree stumps which suggested devastation rather than development. Large rocks, such as one had seen on the river, were embedded in the earth. In two or three places tree roots were burning: flameless, with thick white smoke.

The Americans appeared to be having an effect on one another. Mr Winter, no longer so solicitous about his parcels, was drawling on steadily and indistinctly as though getting rid of the talk he had bottled up for the last two days. The pastor’s manner became heartier and his accent more pungent. He invited us to dinner and said he wished he could do more for us.

‘If my wife wasn’t sick,’ he said, ‘we would have welcomed you in our home.’

Abruptly Mr Winter’s droning ceased. When the pastor, explaining, spoke casually of yellow fever, Mr Winter looked around as if for his polythene sacks. His face went surly again, and he said he didn’t like using other people’s rations.

We were to share a room in a rough unfinished wooden house that still smelled acridly of new tropical cedar. The pastor strung up my hammock. It gave me a little pleasure to find that for all his polythene sacks Mr Winter had no hammock. He had a palliasse and the only thing on which he could spread this was a low work-bench which was a foot or so shorter than himself. Stowing away his sacks, self-reliant once more, he dismissed the pastor’s regrets, and it was like an urgent dismissal of the pastor.

I wanted to go for a swim before the sun set. The pastor said the water was too cold for the saw-toothed perai, and in guarantee of this offered to walk down to the river with me. I was interested by the huge rocks in the ground. They were neatly runnelled, as though turned out from a mould – the effects of water, I supposed – and these runnels were set in similar but vaster excisions which indicated a previous grandeur and wildness. I asked the pastor about the age of the rocks. He said that the Adventists had dispensed with the ‘rigmarole of geologists’; the world was six thousand years old. The water was brown-black; and it was terrifying at dusk, in the forest silence, to dive into this liquid blackness. You didn’t see the blackness. You felt your eyes were closed; you were in a void.

Lights burned here and there in the houses at the foot of the black forest wall. The burning tree stumps glowed; their crackles carried. Our unfinished room was in darkness. Mr Winter had made his bed – it looked the size of a crib – and tented it with his mosquito net. He was having some coffee and sandwiches by the light of his electric torch. I took a sip of whisky, went over to the house of one of the Negro teachers – bookcases with religious books and schoolbooks, the family (including grandmother) eating silently at an oilcloth-covered table – and borrowed a lantern. Remembering my whisky breath, I asked the teacher whether smoking was forbidden. Grandmother looked at me. The teacher said the pastor was tolerant, but wondered whether I wouldn’t like to take this opportunity to stop. I promised to try, and hurried away with the lantern.

‘Why,
thenk
you,’ Mr Winter said. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, in complete darkness, fiddling with a transistor radio.

The pastor’s house, painted and grand from the outside, with a low white wooden fence, was pioneer-rough inside. It smelled comfortingly of fresh paint: comfortingly, because Mr Winter had mumbled about the contagiousness of yellow fever. The pastor’s family – pretty daughter, freckle-faced blond boys, and even little Deborah Sue, who brought out her doll, her doll’s pram and her teddy bear – was what, from books, films and American tourists, one expected an American family to be. Only their vegetarianism was unexpected. We had a nut meal out of a tin, biscuits, soursop; and we drank milk.

‘You haven’t given me enough,’ the younger boy said, when the nut was being served.

‘Hey,’ said the pastor rallyingly, ‘you are supposed not to like this stuff, remember?’

The pastor told me the mission had been started twenty-five years before at the foot of Mount Roraima on the Venezuelan side of the border. When the authorities, under Roman Catholic pressure, asked them to leave, they came over the border to British Guiana, and the Amerindians followed.

We were in the region of the world’s greatest waterfalls – the highest, in Venezuela, was some 3,000 feet – and the pastor thought I might like to go to the Utshi falls. At seven hundred feet Utshi was unimportant, no higher than Kaieteur, but it was only six hours away.

On the way back from the pastor’s I stopped at the Negro teacher’s. He had a Chinese boy with him, one of my neighbours in the unfinished house. Neither of them liked the idea of the walk to Utshi. They spoke of snakes, tigers and wild hogs. Wild hogs hunted in packs and the only way to escape was to race up a tree, and the straight branchless trees of the forest weren’t easy to climb. I remembered a vivid story by a Guianese writer in which a boy had been attacked by wild hogs and eaten from the feet up, eaten so swiftly that he didn’t collapse and appeared only to be growing shorter.

Earlier that day, in the Kamarang dispensary, I had asked Dr Talbot about conditions at Paruima. ‘City life,’ he said disapprovingly.

‘With juke boxes playing only hymns,’ I said. Agrippa had laughed, but Dr Talbot said,
‘No llames bocazas al cocodrilo hasta que cruzes el río.
Don’t call the crocodile big-mouth until you cross the river.’ But I wasn’t far wrong, for I was awakened in the morning by the raucous hymn-singing of the Chinese boy in the next room. So it went on all day: people humming only hymns, and the Chinese boy bursting into loud devotional song at all moments.

After so much talk about contagious diseases I woke up feeling slightly unwell, aching all over, besides, from my night-long struggle with the hammock. Mr Winter had also spent an uncomfortable night in his tented crib, trying to sleep with his knees drawn up.

‘Why, good morning,’ he said miserably, sitting on the edge of his bed in his underclothes. ‘How – did – you – make – out – in – your – hammock?’ He spoke so slowly that I strained for the words, always expecting the next one to be very important. ‘I remember,’ he went on, ‘the first time
I
slept in a hammock.’

I stopped tying my shoelaces and listened.

‘It was—’

I waited.

‘—pretty difficult.’

I didn’t feel easier when the Chinese boy said he too had had yellow fever, or when Palmer came over from the village and said Dr Talbot wasn’t very well. Mr Winter and I drew closer together. I became as fanatical a water-boiler as he, and even this was not wholly reassuring, for we had to use the mission kettle and the communal mission range. I abandoned my good resolutions and throughout the day took prophylactic sips of whisky. Mr Winter didn’t accept my whisky; instead, he took certain pills and secretly and constantly drank hot coffee. ‘I sure do like a cup of coffee,’ he said, when he was on his tenth or twelfth cup.

In the mission they were preparing for the Saturday sabbath, cooking and baking in advance. The mission store was full of Amerindians, among them the boatmen, waiting to be paid and to spend their pay. Downstairs, among the mammoth banana bunches that grew in this part of the world, a man was strumming the guitar. He was a Spanish-speaking Amerindian from Santa Helena in Venezuela. We talked a little and then he followed me wherever I went, speaking only when spoken to and at other times simply enjoying our silent communion.

Mr Winter had spent the morning collecting samples of earth, which he had laid out on squares of white paper on the narrow carpenter’s work-shelf in our room. This, I learned, was the purpose of his visit. ‘This soil is mighty interesting,’ he said, his voice touched with what was almost glee. ‘Mighty interesting.’

When, for want of a chair, I was lying in my hammock in the afternoon, the Negro woman from the adjoining room called out to me to look at the monkeys in the trees at the edge of the clearing. And there, indeed, they were, squeaking and jumping about. ‘They always come out at this time,’ the woman said. She wasn’t Guianese; she came from one of the islands; her husband was studying to be a minister. After I had confessed I was not a Christian, we talked about religion. She had once met a Hindu and had noted the great difference between Hindu views and Adventist views: the Adventists, for example, believed that the world was made in six literal days. They didn’t use tea or coffee because these drinks contained caffeine. Someone on the mission had tried using ‘Postum’, saying it had no caffeine, but the pastor had put a stop to that. She boiled some water for me, and I also asked for a little sugar. Then, remembering what she had said about the sickness at the mission (‘You got to be careful. Only those who mix have been ill’ – a remark which had unexpected racial undertones) I didn’t use the sugar, though I played with it to suggest that I had used a little. Instead, I opened my tin of condensed milk.

Later that afternoon I took a dip in the river. Mr Winter came down, in shorts, with his bucket, and threw water over himself. Some Amerindian women were washing clothes on one of the river rocks. I thought them picturesque, but they left Mr Winter more worried than ever. He said he thought the whole river was polluted. We walked back gloomily through the darkness to our room. There was no escape from Paruima except by the mission launch, and that was leaving in four days. For dinner I had processed cheese and a cup of coffee, the boiling water provided by Mr Winter. The Chinese boy was singing hymns loudly. Our lantern had no oil, and when I went over to the Negro teacher’s to get some, I found the whole family singing hymns. Lightless lantern in hand, I waited on the steps, watching the night fall over the clearing, the tree stumps glowing, gaining colour, the pastor’s house brilliant with light.

By eight, in the lantern’s glim, we had settled down, I in my hammock, Mr Winter in his crib, and we talked about the walk to Utshi, which I was starting on Sunday, after the Saturday sabbath. I had spoken to Palmer about the wild hogs. He said he had once run into a herd; the Guianese with him had fled in terror and damaged themselves trying to scale unscaleable trees, while he, who hadn’t heard the horror stories, had taken out his camera and photographed the herd as it ran past on either side of him: his mother lived in the home counties and liked to receive photographs of tropical forest and wild life.

‘I sure wish I was coming with you,’ Mr Winter said, at intervals. ‘Sure wish I was. But I’m too old. I would keep you back. I always fool around for the first hour or two. Let everybody else go ahead. I just go
foo
-lin’ around till I get my second wind. Say, do you know what’s good for energy on these walks? Parched corn. In Ecuador I always carried around some of that parched corn. Fool around. Eat a handful of parched corn. Fool around. Eat another handful of parched corn. Until I got my second wind. That was how I did it in Ecuador. I would keep you back, though. Sure wish I was coming. Seems a pity to come so far and not see those falls. Say, would you do me a favour? Could you send me a photograph of those falls?’

Saturday at the mission did feel like Sunday, with everyone in his sabbath clothes and very little going on. The Chinese boy remained in his room and sang lustily. Mr Winter offered me some ham for breakfast, and it was at last my turn to decline. He wanted to know why. I explained my semi-vegetarian upbringing, and he said that he himself didn’t drink for religious reasons.

‘We sure have made life complicated,’ he said. ‘You think they’d mind if I cooked some of this ham on their range? These people sure do mind if you do things they don’t approve of.’

‘I believe they do,’ I said. ‘And when I think of all my smoking—’

‘And all my coffee.’ His mouth opened slightly and a smile of pure mischief spread over his cracked face. ‘But I sure do like a cup of coffee. Want some now?’

Afterwards we walked over to the village and to our relief found Dr Talbot drawing teeth. His own teeth were off and he was in excellent spirits; he had only had a cold. Most of the Amerindians were at Sabbath School. Many of the men were in serge trousers and one or two wore suits. In an unfinished, still skeletal wooden house two youths were playing Sparrow calypsos on a gramophone.

At the mission in the evening the pastor’s sister put on an open-air show of colour slides and the Amerindians came over from the village, white figures strung along the forest road and mission grounds, everyone with his electric torch, so that when dusk turned to night the procession became one of bobbing lights. The early slides were of Holland. The audience gasped to see houses choked together, and there were exclamations of incredulity and pity when the pastor’s sister explained through an interpreter, proud retailer of marvels, that the tiny front garden was all the land most Dutch people had. Then came slides of Paruima itself. The audience laughed at every scene or face they knew. When the Negro teachers appeared on the screen, their features indistinct, the Amerindians played their torches on the faces as if to light them up. The intent was derisory, and disquieting.