Guerrillas Read online

  It was the wrong word. Jane, fumbling after him, worked out what he meant: plaything.

  She said, “Playboy. That was the impression the papers gave.”

  So, in London, she had heard of him. He said: “Hmm.”

  Roche said, “I didn’t see Stephens. What’s happened to him?”

  “I suppose he’s run out on us, massa.”

  Jane said, “I want to hear more about England.”

  Roche said, “I’m asking him about Stephens.”

  Jane smiled and crossed her legs.

  “These people want overnight results, massa. Stephens was the wild one. You thought you were sending me a worker. You didn’t know you were sending me a little boy who wanted to kill me dead. He thought he should be here.” He waved his hand about the room. “Everybody wants to be a leader.”

  Roche said, “So Stephens has left?”

  “I don’t know, massa.”

  Jane said, “It must be a hard life, here.”

  “I don’t know about a hard life,” Jimmy said. “To me it’s life. It’s work. I’m a worker. I was born in the back room of a Chinese grocery. I’m a hakwai Chinee. You know what a hakwai is? It’s the Chinese for nigger. They have a word for it too. And that’s what they thought I was going to be when I got back here. ‘Oh, he’s a big shot in England and so on, but over here he’s just going to be a hakwai. Let him start up his movement. Let him take on the niggers. Let him see how far he’ll get. This isn’t England.’ They thought they were trapping me. Now they see they’ve trapped themselves. Eh, massa? They’ve got to support me, massa. Sablich’s and everybody else. They’ve got to make me bigger. Because, if I fail—hmm. I’m the only man that stands between them and revolution, and they know it now, massa. That’s why I’m the only man they’re afraid of. They know that all I want in my hand is a megaphone, and the whole pack of cards will come tumbling down. I’m not like the others. I’m not a street-corner politician. I don’t make any speeches. Nobody’s going to throw me in jail because I’m subversive. I’m not subversive. I’m the friend of every capitalist in the country. Everybody is my friend. I’m not going out on the streets to change the government. Nobody is going to shoot me down. I am here, and I stay here. If they want to kill me they have to come here. I carry no gun.” He raised his bare arms off the chair and held them up, showing the palms. The short sleeves of the drab-colored tunic rode down his pale, firm biceps and revealed the springs of hair in his armpits. “I have no gun. I’m no guerrilla.”

  He stopped abruptly and lowered his arms. The words had carried him away; he had spoken too quickly and hadn’t ordered his thoughts. He hadn’t said the right things; he had mixed too many things together. His eyes went hooded; his lower lip jutted. His hands lay flat on the arms of the chair, fingers stiffly together.

  Jane said, “Was your wife English?”

  Jimmy stood up. His eyes were more hooded; his lower lip had begun to curl. On his smooth forehead creases appeared, and the skin below his eyes darkened. He said, “Yes, yes.”

  Roche saw that it was time to go.

  “EVERY TIME I meet Jimmy,” Roche said, as they drove away, “I make it a point to lose my temper with him at least once, to bring him back to earth. He was unusually excited today. I suppose it was because of you.”

  “He was showing off a lot.”

  “There’s always a little truth in everything he says. That’s the odd thing.”

  “That ghastly shed. Those moronic-looking boys. All that shit in the field.”

  “Did you give that boy any money?”

  “No.”

  “Once you allow them to blackmail you it’s hard to have any authority with them.”

  Jane said, “Harry de Tunja was saying that Jimmy was sinister. I found those boys infinitely more worrying.”

  “Just playing bad, as they say. But they’re only dangerous if you start playing with them. That’s another reason why I always try to lose my temper with Jimmy.”

  “Is it true about the rape and indecent assault in England? Was that why he was deported?”

  “I don’t have any reason to doubt it. But you have to work with what’s there.”

  Jane said, “I wonder what little Doris made of it all.”

  “Doris?”

  “I was thinking about the wife. I think she must have been a Doris, don’t you?”

  “It wasn’t the Dorises who went for Jimmy in London. You have the world in front of your eyes, and yet it’s funny how your mind prints out comic strips all day long. To call someone Doris isn’t to have a point of view. You’re not saying anything. To talk about Doris and the shit in the field doesn’t add up to a point of view.”

  “Perhaps I don’t have a point of view.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t pretend you had. You remember how you stopped the conversation at the Grandlieus’? You thought you were being so concerned, talking about the shantytowns and the horrible little black animals crawling about in the rubbish. You thought you were talking about things no one had seen before you. You thought you were being so much more concerned than everybody else. But you were saying nothing. It was just a cheap way of showing off.”

  “Well, I’ve stopped seeing the shantytowns now.”

  They were on the highway. The sun was slanting into their faces. The hills smoked; but, in spite of the continuing still heat, the light on the hills had altered, had turned from the light of midday to the light of afternoon. The yellowing smoke haze above the hills held hints of the sunset to come; already, high in the sky, the end-of-day clouds had begun to form.

  They came to the factory area: traffic, blackened verges, factory buildings still looking impermanent in the flat landscape of the old plantations, ornamental trees and smooth-trunked young royal palms standing on browned factory lawns like things rescued from the forest. Here and there, deep in the fields behind the factories, were automobiles in the trunks of which men were loading bundles of cut grass, fodder for the cows and other animals they still kept, the pens sometimes to be seen at the back of the huts and houses on the highway.

  There was a man running steadily on the road ahead of them, indifferent to the traffic and the fumes: an elderly Negro, long-necked, lean-faced, in black running shorts and a soaked white vest. He was a well-known figure, a disordered man, who at odd times of day and night took to the roads and ran for miles. And Jane thought that that was something else she had stopped seeing: people like the runner, people like the wild men who lived in the hills, among the new developments, or down in the city, in the back yards of certain thoroughfares: derelicts, a whole parallel society.

  She said, “Is the government really afraid of Jimmy?”

  “The government’s’ afraid of everybody. And Jimmy is right. They’ve got to build him up and pretend they are supporting him. The doer. And Jimmy has this English reputation. He can’t just be got out of the way.”

  “What a strange idea he must have of England.”

  “I suppose he understood it well enough for his purpose.”

  Jane said, “You don’t sound as though you like him.”

  “It isn’t a matter of liking. And I don’t mind Jimmy. He’s like the others. He’s looking for someone to lead.”

  “Of course, he’s having everybody on, isn’t he? And everybody’s having him on. Everybody is pretending that something exists that doesn’t exist.”

  Roche said: “You have to work with what’s there.”

  “But he must know those fields are in an appalling state. Doesn’t he know that? Or is he just mad like everybody else?”

  Slowly in the thickening traffic, and always with the sun in their eyes, they came, through the suburbs, to the city: to the burning rubbish dump, with its mounds of fresh garbage; to the new housing estate, with its long red avenues now full of men and women and children; to the market, where refrigerated trailers stood in the unpaved forecourt; to the sea road, where there had once been talk of a waterfront cultural center, of
walks and restaurants, a theater and a marina, but where now red dust from the bauxite loading station settled on everything. The road was bumpy here, irregular at the edges; on the unmade sidewalks, tufted with hardy grass, there were sections of concrete pipes on which slogans had been daubed, and old flattened heaps of gravel and other road-mending material, mingled now with bauxite dust, yellowed scraps of newspaper, and bleached cigarette packs.

  Jane said, “What’s a succubus?”

  Fine red dust powdered Roche’s dark glasses, so that he looked unsighted. He said, “It sounds like an incubus. But that must be wrong.”

  “That was what Harry de Tunja said, when I told him we were going to Jimmy Ahmed’s. He said that Jimmy was a succubus.”

  “It sounds like a grub of some sort. Something you have to carry. A kind of leech.”

  They turned off at last into the city proper. This was the area of the merchants’ warehouses, and there were many rum shops. From each rum shop came a din. This was once part of the city center. But the city no longer had a center. With the coming of the motorcar, in numbers, the hills had been opened up and developed as self-contained suburbs, with their own shopping and entertainment plazas; and the peasants who had cultivated and impoverished the hillsides had sold out and moved down to the flat land. To go up to the Ridge was to go up to a more temperate air; it was to lose the feel of the city and see it as part of a larger view of sea and mangrove and great plain. It was to see it, as it could be seen now, as part of the colors of the late afternoon, smoke haze and pink cloud rising from the edge of the sea to blend with the glory of gray and red and orange clouds.

  An amber light fell on the brown vegetation of the hills. But in that vegetation, which to Jane when she had first arrived had only seemed part of the view, there was strangeness and danger: the wild disordered men, tramping along old paths, across gardens, between houses, and through what remained of woodland, like aborigines recognizing only an ancestral landscape and insisting on some ancient right of way. Wild men in rags, with long, matted hair; wild men with unseeing red eyes. And bandits. Police cars patrolled these hillside suburbs. Sometimes at night and in the early morning there was the sound of gunfire. The newspapers, the radio, and the television spoke of guerrillas.

  The house was set on a large bare lawn, cut out flat from a piece of irregular hillside, with a natural wall of earth on one side. Tawny where it remained grassed, and almost bald near the earth wall, the lawn was now gold where the low sun touched it; every bit of grass and every little clod of clay cast a shadow, so that the whole surface was dramatized. The house was nearly as wide as the lawn; it was low, on one floor, and the wood-tile roof projected far over the rough-rendered concrete wall, on which a kind of ivy grew. From the open porch at the back the land sloped down to a dry gully and woodland. The city lay far below, a small part of the flatness. The rim of the sea still glimmered, but elsewhere sea and swamp were darkening to the color of the great plain.

  “So bogus,” Jane said. “So hidden away. The High Command. All the publicity. All that food. Of course, it’s a perfect cover for the guerrillas, isn’t it?”

  THE SKY went smoky and the evening chill fell on the hills. The hidden city roared and hummed, with ten thousand radios playing the reggae, as they so often seemed to do. As though somewhere the same party had been going on, with the same music, month after month. The same party, the same music, at the foot of the hills, in the thoroughfares across the city, the redevelopment project, the suburbs beyond the rubbish dump. The same concentration of sound, the same steady beat of people and traffic and radio music which, dulled during the day, at night became audible. As the fire on the roadsides, invisible in daylight, could now be seen, little smoking flares beside the highways.

  At Thrushcross Grange it was dark and quiet. The sky had darkened to the deepest blue and then had gone as black as the forest walls. Every footstep and every shuffle resounded in the hollow hut; every sound, bouncing off concrete and corrugated iron, was sharp, reminding the boys of the emptiness and the night outside; and they, who in the towns never spoke without raising their voices, here spoke quietly, almost in whispers. The two oil lamps threw shadows everywhere.

  Once, even when the hut was less finished, when the walls were unplastered and the glass louvers hadn’t been fitted, the hut had been noisier and gayer. That was when Stephens was there. But Stephens had gone, and other boys had followed him; and now more than half the beds were empty, with bare mattresses that looked alike, and with only the newspaper and magazine pinups glued to the wall above (the yellow glue making what was printed on the other side of the paper show through) speaking of the boys who had occupied those beds.

  The boys who had left were boys who had places to go back to; somewhere in the city they had mothers or aunts or women they called aunts. Those who had stayed had nowhere to go. They were like Bryant, boys spawned by the city, casually conceived, and after the back yard drama and ritual of their birth gradually abandoned, attaching themselves as they grew up to certain groups and through the groups to certain houses that offered occasional shelter or food.

  Bryant grieved for Stephens. Stephens had made Thrushcross Grange a happy place. Stephens talked a lot; Stephens read books; Stephens had ideas and a lot of common sense. Little Stephens, with the funny blob of a pimply nose: funny, until he began to talk. Stephens didn’t have to stay in a place like the Grange; he had a mother and a house. But Stephens had come to the Grange because of his ideas; and that had made a lot of the boys feel better. Bryant didn’t understand all the things Stephens said; he knew only that he felt happy and safe being where Stephens was. Stephens knew how to give a man courage. And now Stephens had gone away. He hadn’t gone back to his mother’s house in the city; Bryant had checked. No one knew where Stephens had gone.

  Without Stephens, and the boys who had left one by one after Stephens, Bryant didn’t like being in the Grange at night. He didn’t like being with the boys who had stayed behind. They were too much like himself; with them he felt lost. He wanted to be outside, among other people. He had the dollar the woman had given him, and some other money; and the money made him restless.

  Almost as soon as he had seen the woman he had decided to take the risk and ask her for money. He wasn’t sure that she would give; she might even complain; but as soon as he had seen the fright in her face, when he had called to her, he knew it was going to be all right. The little victory had set him apart from the other boys in the hut. But then he had begun to feel that the victory might somehow turn sour, and he became nervous. He didn’t talk; he kept to himself and behaved as though something had happened to offend him.

  They ate early, rice and a meat stew. When he was finished he took his plate out to the thatched lean- to at the back of the hut, dipped the plate in the bucket and put it on the wash stand. He didn’t go back inside. He walked round to the front and, avoiding the light from the doorway, went down to the road. Soon he had left the dim lights of the hut behind and was walking in the dark to the highway. He didn’t like the dark and the nighttime scuttlings and squeaks of the bush, but his excitement gave him courage. It was a three-mile walk. He walked fast and was sweating when he carne to the highway.

  He knew it wouldn’t be easy to get a taxi. Thrushcross Grange had a reputation; he remembered how, in the time of Stephens, on occasions like this, they had relished that reputation and sometimes acted up to it. The cars went by, four or five a minute, and their headlights picked him out: a young black man in jeans and a striped jersey, small and venomous in appearance, with his twisted face sweated and shiny, deliberately ugly with his pigtails, the pigtails like serpents, signals of aggression. He waved and the cars didn’t stop; and there on the highway, the bush all around him, he began to feel lonely and frightened, excitement turning to a sick sensation in his stomach at the thought of the evening being lost, going sour, of having to walk back unsatisfied the way he had come.

  At last a taxi stopped. It was nearl
y full; that was no doubt why the driver had risked stopping. He sat next to a fat woman and he could feel her shifting away from the contact of their shoulders. Fifteen or twenty minutes later the taxi turned off the highway and they came to a little town that had grown up around crossroads in the factory area. The taxi stopped near the center, at a shop with an illuminated clock, and Bryant got out.

  It was just after eight. Half an hour before the evening movie shows began, half an hour before the streets grew quieter, that precious last half hour of the evening when, with the relaxed groups on the pavements, the coconut carts doing brisk business, the cafes and the rum shops, the food stands and the oyster stands below the shop eaves, even a little religious meeting going, with the neon lights, the flambeaux smoking in stone bottles, the acetylene lamps like Christmas sparklers, so many pleasures seemed possible. But Bryant was wise now; he was no longer a child. He knew that these moments were cheating. He had money, he had to spend it; it was like a wish to be rid of his money, and it went with the knowledge that it was all waste, that the day would end as it had begun.

  He went into the green Chinese cafe, a barnlike old wooden building, two unshaded bulbs hanging from the ceiling, and asked for a peanut punch, banging on the counter as he did so and shouting “Ai! Ai! Ai!” for no reason, only to make a little scene, and to see the look in the eyes of the Chinese man in vest and khaki shorts behind the counter. The man hardly blinked. The peanut punch had gone rancid and bad; but Bryant didn’t spit it out. Instead, he put the waxed carton on the counter, paid, and went outside.

  He thought of the movies. He had seen most of the films: in these country movie houses certain films were shown over and over. When he was younger he used to go to the interracial-sex films with Negro men as stars; they were exciting to see but depressing afterward, and it was Stephens who had told him that films like that were wicked and could break up a man. He chose the Sidney Poitier double feature. He went into the shuttered little movie house with the noisy electric fans and was alone again, the evening almost over.