A Way in the World

3. New Clothes: An Unwritten Story

SOME WRITING ideas go cold on you when you try to work them out on the page. Other ideas you simply play with in your mind, and don’t do more about, perhaps because you know you won’t get far. Most of these unattempted ideas fade; but one or two can stay with you. This is an account of an idea that has stayed.

The first impulse came to me in the first or second week of 1961, when I was in the Guiana Highlands, an Amerindian no man’s land on the frontiers of Venezuela, Brazil and what is now called Guyana.

I hadn’t been to South America before, had never travelled in wilderness. I had never, in fact, done any kind of serious travelling; and the writing wish that came to me was less an idea for a story than an excitement about where I was.

Once for nearly a whole day I was in a small boat on a highland river, moving upstream through tall, cool woodland. The river here was the merest tributary of a tributary. It was shallow, widening out sometimes over a cluttered rocky bed, with occasional deep pools where fallen trees or branches made perfect reflections, together with big fissured boulders. These boulders, grey, scoured clean, were sometimes so neatly cracked apart — like some kind of enormous petrified fruit — that they became things of beauty in themselves. The river water was reddish (from rotting leaves and tree-bark), transparent in sunlight, and clean enough to drink.

Brightly coloured birds followed our boat. We had a man with a gun with us, an Amerindian. He fired at the birds, for sport. After every shot he looked down at the boat, at no one in particular, and gave a nervous laugh. The birds didn’t take fright; they stayed with us; you could hear their wings flapping steadily on.

Once or twice during the day we stopped at an Amerindian village. At these village sites the river bank was higher, with a ramp or path zigzagging down to where the village dugouts were tied up. The people were pale, with black hair. Animated among themselves, exchanging food and goods and news, they managed at the next moment to be distant with the rest of us: holding themselves with an extraordinary stillness on their tree-shaded bank, and looking down without expression at the boat.

That was the setting. I would have liked to do something with it, but every piece of invention that came to me seemed to falsify what I had felt as a traveller.

Six or seven years later, when I was writing another kind of book, I did some detailed reading about the area. I went back to the earliest records, concentrating on the period between 1590 and 1620. Among the Spanish documents were accounts of the formal foundation of Spanish towns in Amerindian wilderness, reports of expeditions (most of them ending in death or despair), petitions of colonists to the king (read by the king or an official perhaps a full year later): curiously informal and fresh, these old Spanish cries from the other end of the world, the complaints and deceptions of hungry, quarrelsome, self-righteous, stoical people.

I looked also at the accounts of foreign adventurers. Foreigners — other Europeans — were barred by Spanish law from the Spanish empire. They risked death or the Inquisition if they were picked up. But this was a neglected corner of the Spanish empire, and the interlopers, as they were called, kept on coming, from France and Holland and England. Most came to trade (bringing in African slaves, taking out salt or tobacco); but a few had the idea of setting up colonies or kingdoms of their own, and came to find allies and subjects among the Indians.

I wondered at the fortitude of all these people. I remembered what I had first seen of the continent, a very small corner of it, from the low-flying aeroplane in the last week of 1960: miles of muddy wild beach with collapsed big trees where perhaps no traveller had set foot and no tourist ever would; tight forest; the vast half-drowned confusion of meandering rivers. It would have been achievement enough to get there and survive. The people whose words I was reading went there to intrigue, to look for gold, to fight.

A story shaped in my mind, over some years. But it never clothed itself in detail, in the “business” necessary to a narrative, even though this business fades as the narrative moves on — much as the oil or alcohol that carries a longer-lasting perfume fades.

My idea remained an idea, and (partly working it out for the first time) I write it down here.

THE NARRATOR is going up a highland river in an unnamed South American country. Who is this narrator? What can he be made to be? This is often where fiction can simply become false.

To make the narrator a writer or traveller would be true to the actual experience; but then the fictional additions would be quite transparent. Can the narrator be a man in disguise, a man on the run? That would be true about the region. In 1971 Michael X, the Trinidad Black Power man, after he had killed two people in Trinidad, went to Guyana (physically like the country of the narrative) and made for the interior, to hide. And many years before, one of the last men of the Frank James gang, looking for a sanctuary outside the United States, fetched up in the Guiana savannah country, lower down from the forest. (So I had heard when I went there on my own journey. Local people were proud of the connection; and I, too, thought it glamorous, having seen as a child the Tyrone Power and Henry Fonda films about Frank and Jesse James.)

A man on the run would have been true to the place. But narrative has its own strictness. It requires pertinence at all times, and to have given that character to the narrator would have introduced something not needed, a distraction, something that wouldn’t have tied up with what was to come at the end of his journey.

Better, instead of a man on the run, have a narrator who is a carrier of mischief. A revolutionary of the 1970s, say. A man seeking the help of up-country Amerindians to overthrow the African government on the coast. Such a situation wouldn’t only echo the truth of more than one country in the region. It would also hold certain historical ironies.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, at the time of the Dutch and British slave plantations on the coast — the Dutch and British no longer interlopers on the Spanish Main, but sovereign powers — when slaves ran away to the interior, Amerindians hunted them down for a bounty. Now, at the time of the story, the Africans on the coast, descendants of the slaves, have inherited the authority of the old colonial government. They have a substantial educated and professional class. They are the rulers now; and the Amerindians are culturally what they were two hundred years before.

So for this narrator — who is more than a traveller looking for new sights — everything seen on the river has many meanings.

At the stern of the boat there is a man with a shotgun. From time to time he fires at the birds following the boat; and after every shot he laughs. It was perhaps with this sense of sport that his ancestors hunted down African runaways. Not with guns then, but with arrows — delicate little wands with the merest metal tip, not at all dangerous-looking, looking more like toys. They are still made: the arrows and quivers in the craft shops on the coast are exactly like the real things, fifty or sixty years old, that can be seen, coated with dust, in the ramshackle little museum — hardly touched since colonial days — in the capital.

And — perhaps, perhaps, the narrator thinks — this old instinct, this old attitude to the African, can be revived now, to serve a higher cause. Though when the boat stops at the villages, and the narrator considers the blank faces, the stillness of the staring people (after the first agitation), he has his doubts, comparing these withdrawn, passive river people with the Africans on the coast, and with the liveliness of revolutionary tribal people in other continents.

The once-a-week boat on this river is a cause for excitement at all the villages. At one shady village a woman comes down the zigzagging yellow ramp with a basket of food for the man with the shotgun: various things in tins and wooden bowls, separately tied up in cloth. The man doesn’t look at the woman when he speaks a few words to her; and later she comes down again with some cassava bread, two halves of a big stiff whitish disc about half an inch thick, with something of the appearance of granulated polystyrene.

The man breaks these halves into smaller pieces and wedges them between the bowls and tins and the side of the basket — roughly, as though the wrapping up of food in cloth is something that only women do. Later, when they are on the smooth river again, and the time has come to eat, the man unties all the dishes and — with sudden seriousness — breaks off small pieces of bread to dip into them. Cassava bread is part of every mouthful that he chews. It is the staple; it bulks out the meal.

The narrator asks for a piece, to try. The man laughs, pleased to be of interest. Below the unexpected sourness of the bread there is almost no taste.

The light alters; the mood of the day alters. The sun, more directly overhead, strikes down between the forest walls, and the river becomes full of glare. The river changes. The man with the gun, his meal finished, the dishes rinsed in the river and put back in the basket, is now sitting in the bow looking out for snags. He sits and watches and never stirs.

The narrator, with the sourness of the cassava bread lingering in his mouth, and a memory of its grittiness, thinks of the world’s staples. Rice and wheat and other kinds of grain are grasses. Cassava — a cousin of the red-leaved poinsettia — is more miraculous. It is a root, and it has a poison. It would have taken centuries for the remote ancestors of these forest people, after the crossing over of their ancestors from Asia, to have made their way down the continent to these forests and rivers. How many centuries more before the discovery of cassava? And how many centuries after that for the folk invention of the simple tools for getting rid of the poison?

Thinking like this, thinking of all the inventions of these isolated people, the narrator begins to think of the antiquity of the forest. Not new, not virgin. Those villages on the river would have been like the towns of the classical world, rising for millennia on the middens of their predecessors.

All at once, then, the light altering again, acquiring colour after glare, the river journey is over. It is about four o’clock, two hours to sunset. There is a new clearing in the forest, with a damaged stretch of low dirt-yellow bank — not the high bank of the Indian villages. There is no well-made ramp, just a number of crumbling chutes. After a day of river and sun and forest and Indian faces, the narrator is startled to see two almost naked white boys with bows and the small Indian arrows hiding behind the grass and boulder at the water’s edge. Not the arrows of the craft shops on the coast: the real arrows, from the forest. For a moment or two it is like being taken back to the beginning of things. Before white skins turned another colour, and yellow hair turned black.

There is no mystery: the children are from the new settlement in the clearing. They are playing at being Indians. The narrator is expected.

The narrator will stay for a few days here. The settlement is not his final destination. He will rest, take guides and go on. He will have to go on foot. The river cannot be navigated beyond this point. Beyond this are the boulders and the shallow rapids.

The settlement is the site of a religious mission. It is a newish religion, with a Christian basis. It has established itself in the country, both on the coast, where its followers are African, and in the interior, where it is getting Amerindian converts.

On the coast, among the Africans, it is even popular, because it promotes the idea of voluntary service as a two-way traffic, a form of international exchange. This means that the local country doesn’t simply receive foreign volunteers. Favoured local people who accept the religion can be sent abroad as service volunteers, to Europe, the United States, Canada, and even West Africa. Since few people on the coast have the means to travel (and most of the black population want to migrate to northern countries), there are any number of Africans, among them the relatives and friends of local politicians, who want to be volunteers and go abroad.

So the church has some authority and, in this country which is officially hostile to white people, the service volunteers who come from abroad have a good deal of freedom. These are the people who have been infiltrated by the revolutionaries. The disguise is almost perfect. Both groups have the same kind of dedication; both talk about racial brotherable; both talk about the wastefulness of the rich and the exploitation of the poor; and both deal in the same stern idea of imminent punishment and justice.

The narrator is one of these infiltrators. Who the others are at this mission station he doesn’t know. They will declare themselves to him in time. Now, at this moment of arrival, shouldering his rucksack, allowing himself to be marched off as a prisoner by the boys with the bows and deadly little Indian arrows, he is concerned to act only as a religious volunteer.

He is led to a cabin in the centre of the clearing. It is a rough timber cabin, but it is on tree-branch pillars about four feet high, and it easily dominates the other, smaller cabins which are flat on the rough ground. The clearing is still littered with the finer debris of felled trees, still with the marks of bush-clearing fires, and the salty smell of those fires. On three sides the forest wall, with many tall, thin, white-trunked trees close together, looks freshly exposed.

The narrator is expecting some kind of welcome, after his long journey. But the heavy white man, in jeans and washed-out tee-shirt, who comes out of the kitchen shed at the back of the central cabin, simply says to the boys, “Take the man to his house.” It is a foreign voice, central or eastern European, overlaid by American or Canadian intonation; and the narrator doesn’t know whether the abruptness has to do with the lack of language or whether it comes out of aggression. As the narrator walks away the man calls out: “Dinner here at five-thirty. That’s the rule here.”

That gives the narrator just over an hour. The cabin to which he is taken is small and roughly floored. Four Indians are sitting or squatting on the floor, among their bundles. One is darning, one is making a toy (a tribal back-pack), and the other two are just waiting — their food is being got ready somewhere on the station — and they are as passive and un-noticing as the Indians on the river. The cabin smells of tree-bark and sawn wood and dirt and oil and rotting leaves; and just as all the colours in a paint box if run together make a dead brown, so all these smells combine with the salty smell of the dead bush-fires outside to make a very deep smell of stale tobacco.

After a wash in the river — the water is cool: the sun is going down fast — it is time for the narrator to go to the big cabin. There are eight people there, all of them passing as service volunteers, all of them foreigners from different countries, no Amerindians. So in spite of the jeans and the beards and the casual clothes, the big cabin has a colonial feel.

They have a language problem. The heavy man with the rough manner, who is the head of the station, comes from Czechoslovakia. He doesn’t say so directly; it comes out from what other people say; there is some talk of the town of Pilsen. His wife or friend, the one woman at the table, and no doubt the mother of the boys, doesn’t speak English at all.

She is a big woman, with very blond hair. She is not good-looking, and she says nothing; but she is the only woman at the table, and there is something about her that draws attention: this big woman with the shiny high cheekbones, the heavy twisted mouth, oily now with food, the big smooth hands, the big, ugly red feet.

In this strange colonial setting where, as the narrator thinks, she has no competition, this woman radiates sexuality in a way she wouldn’t at home. There is something else. In this setting, where she is without language, the woman has become her sexuality: to look at her and her thin cotton dress is to be aware of nothing else.

The narrator recognizes that the revulsion he feels is a way of fighting his fascination. With what? With appetite: this woman, newly out of her country, with all its disciplines and narrowness, has become all appetite. The same, he thinks, is true of her husband; and when he looks up at the big man he catches his assessing gaze.

There is much talk at the table while the daylight lasts. Afterwards, in the yellow light of the hurricane lantern, which throws enormous shadows on the rough-sawn timber walls, everyone is more subdued; and the narrator feels isolated from everyone else.

The dinner ends. To step out from the house and the light of the hurricane lamp is to step out into blackness that feels for a second or so like a blow. Little yellow lights in the cabins all around. The forest is singing: the noise is like something imagined, something in the head. It is only half past six. Ten or eleven hours of darkness before it gets light again. Using his flashlight to pick his way back to his cabin, the narrator gets the smell of stale tobacco as he enters. That was the smell of the food he ate; it was the smell of the river water; it is the smell of the forest; it is his own smell now. He wonders whether he will ever get used to forest life. But then, thinking of the big silent woman, and excited by that idea of appetite, he falls asleep.

In the course of the next few days two of the infiltrators reveal themselves to him. There should be a third, the regional commander. He will not reveal himself to the narrator, but the narrator has a good idea who he is.

The narrator finally gets his orders. He is told where he has to go. It is just a name to him. Indian guides will come to take him there.

There will at the end be about a dozen agents like the narrator, and a dozen bases in the forest. On a given day there will be a dozen incidents; the rivers will be watched at strategic points; the few airstrips will be overrun; the forest area, the greater part of the country, will be effectively cut off from the African-ruled coast. The country doesn’t have the military resources to re-occupy the forest; elements of the foreign press will ensure that there is sympathy for the Indian cause, and lessen the possibility of outside intervention.

The narrator is relieved to be moving on. The mission Station is oppressive to him, because of the Czech couple, and because of the glumness of the Indians. For this the narrator blames the Czechs. There is nothing like joy in the Czechs. Authority, and being out of their setting, have only released appetite in them. It is this quality of appetite that has given them away to the narrator.

There are daily religious services for the Indians; there are regulated hours of work. On some evenings in the open space in front of the big cabin — with a smoky brushwood bonfire (to keep away the insects) adding to the stale tobacco smell — television videos are shown. American thrillers, with a black slant. Not as harmless as they appear: they are part of the anti-African indoctrination of the Indians. The Indians are shocked by the guns and the fighting and the speeding cars; they sigh and call out. Sometimes, to break the tension, someone plays a flashlight on a black face; there is laughter; then many flashlights play on black faces on the screen; and the film is made harmless, becomes a film again, and animation makes the Indians like people with possibilities again.

The guides eventually come. They are two young Indian boys, Lucas and Mateo. The narrator leaves with them one morning. One boy walks ahead of the narrator, one behind him.

Soon they come to a wide forest trail, and there they are never absolutely alone. In the forest gloom it seems that there is always someone in the distance: someone always breaking out of the camouflage of leaves and shadow. Some of them are carrying big loads in their back-packs or back-panniers, models for the toys which the Indian in the narrator’s cabin had been making: a flat timber frame with flexible woven walls at the sides and the bottom, the walls laced up over the load with forest-made twine. A further cord or rope attaches both sides of the pannier to a band over the carrier’s forehead. So head and back bear the strain of the load. The carriers’ backs are bent, and at the same time they lean forward against the pull of the band on the forehead. It seems painful; the carriers are dwarfed by their loads; but it is a posture with a balance of forces — a posture that fits the device, which must have evolved over the centuries — and it enables the carriers to walk for hours.

This forest trail is very old, the narrator reflects. How far back would it go? Would it go back to the colonization of the forest by the remote ancestors of these men? Or would some climatic change have intervened?

When the porters or load-carriers (perhaps carrying their own things) pass, they grunt out greetings to Lucas and Mateo, and sometimes from below their taut forehead bands they look up at the narrator. Their faces are the faces of old men. The narrator thinks of the peasants and carriers in Japanese woodcuts; the resemblance is quite remarkable. And just as in woodcuts by Hokusai of rural scenes everything belongs — straw and roofs, trees and the timber of bridges — and nothing is imported, so here in this scene in which he is walking, almost everything belongs — except for the narrator himself, the clothes and canvas shoes of Lucas and Mateo, and the tins and sometimes the printed cardboard boxes in the carriers’ loads. A hundred years before, the narrator thinks, everything in this scene would have belonged; and a hundred years before that.

They stop for a while to rest and eat and drink a little. Lucas and Mateo use their machetes to trim a place for the narrator to sit. As they walk on again, the narrator surrenders to the idea of the antiquity of the forest and this trail. He begins to wonder about the idea of time that men must have in this setting.

When men know their world well; when they know every tree and flower; all the foods and poisons; all the animals; when they have perfected all their tools; when everything exists in balance, and there is nothing from outside to compare, what idea can men have of the passing of time? It is the things we pass that give us an idea of speed. When there is nothing to compare, men must exist only in their own light and the light of the people they know — the narrator thinks of the dim lights in the blackness of the mission clearing, thinks of the play of his flashlight and the others’ as they pick their way back to their cabins. Beyond that, backwards and forwards, there must be nothing.

The narrator wrestles with this difficult idea, very strange in the bright light. While the sun is still high the march ends. It is the rule. Two hours before sunset. They camp beside a stream. The sun strikes through the shallow reddish water; inches below the surface webs of light dance over the crushed grey and red rock at the bottom. Beauty; but it is only Lucas and Mateo who have made it safe. Lucas and Mateo are like people to whom the forest is home. Very quickly now, using their machetes, they trim slender tree branches, sharpen one end, bury it in the earth, and put up a low shelter, roofed with the fronds of the wild banana.

They light a little fire. Lucas and Mateo prepare their own food; the narrator prepares his own, using the river water. The sun begins to go; very quickly it falls out of the sky. The evening melancholy, the long hours before daylight, cast a gloom on the narrator.

Mateo is whittling away at a toy dugout-paddle.

The narrator asks Mateo, “What does your father do?”

A foolish question to ask in the forest: the narrator feels it as soon as he talks.

“My father dead.”

“How did he die?”

Mateo puts down his paddle and throws a twig on the small fire and says, “Kanaima kill him.” Mateo speaks like a philosopher, like a man resigned to grief.

The kanaima is the spirit of death of the forests. It inhabits the body of a living man. Somewhere in the forest is the killer who looks like a man, looks like Mateo and Lucas and all the others, and kills all men. In a world without time, where men live only in the present, by their own light, as it were, all a man’s life is spent in this fear. Without the kanaima, a man could truly be happy; might live forever.

Impossible to enter this way of perceiving. The narrator asks, the little twig fire dying down, the night stretching out ahead, “Are you married, Mateo?”

The other boy answers, “How can he be married?”

And Mateo says, “Indian girls foolish. They know nothing.”

The narrator is filled with shame and grief for the people of the forest. They are very far away, these people who can see everything in the forest, who have so many talents, and have perfected so much in their isolation. They are beyond reach. They are further away than any group the narrator has known; perhaps even the revolution will not reach them. Everywhere else, in Asia, Europe north and south, Africa, tribes and peoples have been in collision since the beginning of time. These people, after the migration of their ancestors from Asia, have become people entirely of themselves, without resilience or the talent to adapt. Once their world was broken into, they lost their wholeness.

The little fire dies down. Lucas and Mateo stretch out away from the hut. The forest sings; from time to time, for some reason, the singing subsides for a split second and the river sound is heard. The narrator tries to imagine himself living in that setting for some years; for the rest of his life; for five hundred years. He feels an artificial touch of stress. He takes a sip of whisky from his bottle.

One of the boys sits up straightaway and says, “You drink rum, sir?”

“Not rum.”

“You give us rum, sir.”

“No rum.”

The boy lies down again, sighing like a man.

The narrator is awakened by the sound of rain, falling loudly on the wild-banana fronds of his hut roof. He awakens to his earlier stress, his own feeling of dislocation.

One of the boys is standing in the darkness outside. He says, “Can Lucas and I come here, sir?”

They come in, and the narrator is enveloped in the smell of stale tobacco, enveloped in the idea of appetite: appetite the antidote to stress.

He lets his hand fall on the body next to him, not knowing to whom it belongs. The boy is passive. Appetite grows on the narrator; and even while his fallen hand opens, against the hardness of the body, a finer version of a body like his own, a body therefore more than half known, the narrator’s thought is of the grossness of the big blond woman at the station now a day’s march away. Appetite, appetite: the passivity of the boy feeds it.

When he gets up in the morning the narrator finds himself alone in the little leaf-and-branch shelter. He has a moment of alarm. But the boys are higher up the river, preparing for the day. The narrator still doesn’t know which of the two had been beside him.

The time comes to leave. With their machetes Lucas and Mateo — following some forest rule, perhaps — cut down the little shelter. So protecting during the night, but so flimsy, really.

The march begins. The narrator is no longer at ease, no longer the man he had been. The path moves away from the upland river to the forest. Such beauty there; but something of the safety and wholeness of the previous day has left the narrator. Something nags; he never has to search far for the reason. As often as he rejects it, as often as he applies his mind to it, unease returns, to come between him and the moment; and below all of this now, and adding to his agitation, there is the idea of his cause, the starting point of the journey.

Tossed about, sickening inwardly in a familiar way as the day wears on, he ceases to look about him. He walks mechanically between the two boys, fixing his eyes on the heels (in dirty canvas shoes) of the boy in front of him.

The boys, on the other hand, are today more animated, cutting switches with their machetes, flicking leaves and small insects from the path, sometimes using their machetes to cut, very swiftly and neatly, light trail-marks on trees, talking loudly in their own language over him, as it were, as though it is important to make a human noise in the forest. There is a different swing to their gait; it is as if they were alone. They call out from afar to the people they see on the path; and sometimes, seeming to follow abrupt hunches of their own, they leave the path and — holding themselves still at a particular spot, as though they wish not even to disturb the air just then — they stand looking at something or for something.

In mid-afternoon they halt for the day. Today, though, the boys make no sign of building a shelter. Instead, they leave the narrator in the camp-site and they wander off — always the two together — and come back and wander off again. The day before, the narrator hadn’t expected a shelter; today he does. He feels disregarded; it spoils the moment, the view, the yellowing light.

For the first time that day he asserts himself. When the boys come back he says, “Lucas, build the hut.”

And it is really very easy. The boys obey, with no change of mood: they might have been waiting for his order. Talking in their language, in their new loud way, as though it is important to make noise, they cut and trim branches. The sharp blades ring as they slice through sappy wood, and in no time the timbers are ready, the uprights forked at the top, and sharpened at the end where they are to be buried in the soft forest earth. Quickly then, almost without searching — as though in their wanderings they have taken stock of everything and now know exactly where they have to go — the boys fetch the wild-banana fronds and the big, hollow-ribbed, heart-shaped leaves to hang on the roof frame.

When they are finished they lay the narrator’s pack in the shelter. It is like a delicate attention; but then the narrator sees them get their own packs and set them down next to his: the three packs lying, quite formally, side by side, in a repetition of the previous night’s arrangement: as though that was also contained in the narrator’s orders.

They light a fire. The flame hardly shows in the afternoon light. They separately prepare their food, the boys theirs together, the narrator his. The light fades fast, the fire shows, and then, abruptly, night comes. The forest begins to sing. Soon it is like a noise in the head.

Lucas whittles at his toy paddle. He asks the narrator, “Where you come from?”

“England.”

Mateo asks, “Why you come here?”

The narrator gives the reply he has been trained to give: “I will tell Alfred. He will tell you.” Alfred is the headman of the village where they are going.

Lucas says, “You want to build houses here?”

“Alfred will tell you.” And to cut the questioning short the narrator asks, “How did kanaima kill your father, Mateo?”

The faces of both boys, tanned, shiny, reflecting the fire, become very serious, resigned.

Lucas speaks first. “Kanaima was looking for him. He had a sign.”

“But then he forget,” Mateo says. “One day a cloth-seller come. My father want to look at the cloth. He don’t know that kanaima come with the cloth-seller. When my father was looking at the cloth kanaima hide in his room. When my father come back with the new cloth kanaima kill him. That is all. Afterwards we burn the cloth.”

They all look at the fire.

Lucas says, “You live in a house in England?”

There is such an emphasis on the word the narrator wants to say no, he lives in a flat; but that would be confusing. So he says yes.

Lucas says slowly, as though he is repeating a lesson, “I want to live in a house.”

Such a simple ambition, but so far away, and at the moment so unlikely: the narrator finds himself moved by these boys in a way that goes beyond his political cause.

Mateo says, “You know that kanaima come for Lucas, sir?”

The narrator says, “Lucas?”

Lucas shaves with his sharp knife at his paddle, and throws the shaving into the fire. “I was walking. From very far I see something on the track that didn’t have to be there. But I don’t think. I go on, and see the thing that wrong. Was a little white flower. By itself. I turn and run. But was too late.”

It is on Lucas’s body — lying beside him — that the narrator’s hand falls later that evening in the hut. He is moved now by more than appetite, the excitement of the earlier evening: the passivity of the boy adds to the narrator’s mood, builds up to tenderness, made deeper by a feeling of being unable to help, tenderness that turns to a melancholy like the melancholy he had seen earlier in Lucas’s face in the firelight.

Some time later Mateo sits up abruptly. He says, “Sir, you must take Lucas with you to England.”

It is something that would have just struck Mateo, the narrator thinks: it is a way Lucas might be saved. The narrator doesn’t answer.

A long time later Mateo says, “Sir?”

The narrator says, “Yes.”

The word has no meaning. It is just a sound, an acknowledgement. But Mateo gives a contented sigh and settles down to sleep.

The boys are all friendliness the next day. They do not talk loudly over the narrator as on the day before; they do not abruptly leave the narrator and the line of march; they try to bring the narrator into all that they do. Their faces are brighter, less resigned-looking. One of the things the narrator has come out to do is to win the trust of people like Lucas and Mateo. But this trust is of another sort. He feels undermined by it; at the same time he doesn’t see how he can reject it. And it is as if some exchange has been made, as if something of the oppression that has left the boys now sits on the narrator’s shoulder.

He begins to feel, too, that the journey is lasting too long. They are meeting fewer people on the forest path now, and there are fewer tins and printed cardboard boxes strapped up in their back-packs. But the boys reassure the narrator. It’s all right; he is not to worry; they are looking after him.

So for two or more days they walk and camp: make-believe in the evening (the leaf shelter in the forest, the little fire, safety in the night), turbulence and doubt in the day, day and night now like two sides of the narrator’s spirit, one growing out of the other: the narrator at night wishing that make-believe could be all, the complete reality, and then in daylight wondering how he could disengage from the trust the boys have placed in him. More: almost without his being aware of it, the daylight doubt is widening. He begins to wonder — at first in a lightheaded way, and as though the idea is quite absurd — what would happen if he were to withdraw from what he has undertaken to do.

At last, at about noon one day, after four or five hours of marching, they arrive. They turn off the path and go through the forest and up to a little plateau where there is a village of old grey-brown grass huts, some of them open with tree-branch poles, some conical and closed.

Lucas and Mateo are home. People call out to them: they call back: animation such as, many days before, at the start of his travel in the deep interior, the narrator had seen at the village landing-stages on the river.

The narrator is taken to the hut where he is to live. There is an overpowering smell of earth and stale tobacco. People who have lived in the hut before have left pieces of cloth and whittled wood wedged between the trimmed rods of the frame and the old grass of the roof. The narrator becomes very tired. He sleeps almost as soon as he lies down, relieved to be at last alone.

When he gets up he finds that the light is the light of mid-afternoon, the sun about to decline: the time when on previous days they would have stopped marching, and Lucas and Mateo would have been building their shelter: a toy version, as the narrator now sees, of the huts here.

After days of forest and gloom, the smoke from the cooking fires in front of the open kitchen hut seems to the narrator to be remarkably blue, a colour on its own, not a tone of grey or brown. The narrator is also aware that the ground below his feet feels hollow: footfalls even some distance away make a dull drumming sound. The ground has been disturbed or built up in some way. The narrator, considering the plateau or platform of the village open space, feels that the site is old, that for some way down the earth would contain debris or relics of scenes, repeated through the centuries, like the one around him now.

Some of the women are making cassava bread. Finished rounds are on the grass roof. At the side of the kitchen hut hangs the long plaited tube which can be twisted or wrung by means of a horizontally fitted stick, to squeeze the poison out of grated cassava: a poison caught in a wooden dish on the ground. Because this poison is valuable: it can preserve meat for up to a year.

On the ground is a cassava-grater. It is a beautiful object: sharp chippings of granite fixed in hardened pitch, the pitch set in a shallow rectangular trough in a flat piece of wood. The pitch would have come from far away; a precious lump would have been imported; so, too, the granite chippings. The pitch would have been boiled into a liquid, then poured into the hollow in the wood; as it cooled, the granite chippings would have been set in it one by one.

The narrator looks up. The women and girls are delighted by his contemplation of this kitchen object. The narrator thinks, “I love these people.” Then he questions himself, “What do I mean by that?” Looking at the women in the blue smoke, he thinks, “I want no harm to come to them.”

Lucas and Mateo appear. Without their loads and travelling hats, and in fresh clothes, they look like young men of some standing in the village. They take the narrator down to the river. There is a deep part where he can dive, they say. They go down with him, when he is ready. They will not leave him alone; they will not do that with the kanaima prowling about; they will offer him their protection.

The sun is going down. The water, reddish from leaves, gets darker as the light goes. The water is cool, too cool for the man-eating small fish, the boys or young men say.

The narrator sinks into the red water. The pool is as deep as the young men say. Soon the light fades from the water. Soon it is utterly black. Soon it is of a black so deep that it is without colour: it is nothing, however much you concentrate on it. In this nothing the narrator feels he has lost touch with his body; water blocks sensation. He is just his eyes concentrating on nothing; he is just mind alone, a perceiving of nothing. He is quite frightened. He somehow gets in touch with his will again and pulls himself up, to the yellowing light.

He is glad to see the boys. They wait while he dresses, and then they walk him back up to the village. The best protection against the kanaima is company: once the kanaima is seen by a third party, the kanaima’s power is lost. Yet the need for company also reinforces the kanaima’s power. And the narrator feels that, like Lucas with the flower on the path, he has had a brush with his kanaima: an emotion, a moment, that will come back to him in dreams and states of blurred consciousness, something he will now not lose touch with, and which when it returns will carry with it the setting and all the extreme emotions of the last few days, including the emotion of this moment: the love for these people, which contains the wish that no harm should come to them, and is already as a result more pain than love.

It is pain rather than love which now suffuses the narrator’s vision, and corrupts everything that he sees. It is all like something he has already lost: the late afternoon light, the friendly women and children, the very blue smoke. And now all the half-formulated doubts, mere impulses, of the last few days harden into a determination to turn his back on these people, to put them out of his mind.

Hard to formulate, harder to carry out. The narrator cannot simply go away. He doesn’t know where he is. He will need guides to go back, people who will make the forest safe for him. Alfred, the village captain or headman, wouldn’t let him go just like that. Alfred would worry about the consequences, worry about what reports would get back to the coast. There would also be the Czech at the mission settlement. He wouldn’t let the narrator get away so easily.

So the narrator will have to stay. He will have to stay and get started with the organization and the other things he has been detailed to do. Perhaps later, when activity begins, it might be easier for the narrator to leave. To leave the forest, the country, the movement.

But now he will have to stay, for some weeks, some months. The people of this village and others will get to know him very well. He is already a stranger, an extraordinary being. And they, people without writing and books, depend completely on sight and memory; they have greater gifts that way. They will commit an infinity of details about him to memory: his voice, gait, gestures. He will exist in the minds of these people as he will exist nowhere else. And after he has gone away they will remember him as the man who stayed long and wasn’t straight with them, who promised many things and then went away.

There is an hour or so to go before sunset. Lucas and Mateo come to take the narrator to the village captain. They say they will interpret.

The narrator says, “But they told me Alfred spoke English.”

Mateo says, “This isn’t Alfred.”

“He is my uncle,” Lucas says. “My father brother.”

The uncle is not very old. He is in an open hut, a place of reception rather than sleeping, with a hammock for himself in one corner, and with low hardwood stools, each carved out of a solid piece of wood, for visitors. He is of a beautiful colour, the pores clean and separate on his fine skin. He is wearing new jeans and a flowered shirt: clearly the cloth-seller from the other side makes regular visits.

What he says in his language, which Lucas and Mateo turn into their own kind of English, is like this: “I heard from Alfred that Lucas and Mateo had gone to get you. But I never believed you would come. This sort of thing has been going on for so long. So much talk, so little done. But now you’re here. I hope you will act carefully. You came the hard way. There is another way, an easier way. It is through the savannah. My wife’s father told me he heard from his father that once some people were coming through there to look for gold.”

“Djukas?” the narrator asks, using the local word for the descendants of the African runaways who had settled in some parts of the forest.

“Djukas, people from the south — I can’t remember what my wife’s grandfather said. These people were coming to look for gold. And I don’t have to tell you what that would have meant for us. Do you know what the villagers did? It was the dry season. They set the savannah alight. It blazed up for miles. My wife’s grandfather said birds were always a little ahead of the fire, picking up the snakes and other little animals running away from the fire. The same fire burned every one of the men coming to look for gold. After that everybody had to leave the villages and hide in the forest for two years. Do you think it will be like that this time? Are you sure you know what you are doing? We are brave people. But—” He breaks off. Then he says, “Where do you come from?”

“England.”

“Lucas told me. My grandfather went to England. Did Lucas tell you?”

Lucas licks his top lip, and looks down.

“He went with an Englishman who liked him, and wanted him to learn English. He spent three years in England. They wanted him to marry an Englishwoman. That was part of the original idea. They even found a woman, but then at the last minute, before they came back, she became frightened. The plan was that they would come back and build houses here.” He used the English word, but in his pronunciation it sounded like part of his own language. “One of the things my grandfather said about England when he came back was that the captain of the country was a woman. Was that true?”

“It was true.”

“I am glad to hear it. Some people said he was making it up. Some people didn’t even believe he had gone to England, though he came back with printed books to show. He came back and waited for the English people to come out here and build houses. Every year or so somebody came out. Not by the way you came, but by the other way, the savannah way I told you about. They always brought the same message to my grandfather: next year, next year. Is that the kind of message you will be bringing us?”

“No,” the narrator says. “It’s going to be different this time. We are different people.”

“People began to mock my grandfather. They said he was going to get us in trouble with the government for nothing at all. One time when an Englishman came out there was an eclipse of the moon. You know what people do when that happens? They shoot flaming arrows at the moon, to light it up again. My grandfather was ashamed. He told me so. He begged the Englishman to forgive them for behaving in that childish way. But the Englishman only laughed and said that there would be no trouble with the government. What you have just said. He said that the place was good for houses. It is what I hear people are telling Alfred now. And then something happened. There was a war or something, I suppose, and English people stopped coming. Nobody came even to say ‘next year.’ But my grandfather never stopped believing that they would come back. He went foolish with that belief, but there are people who still believe that. Lucas believes. And I’ll tell you something. Kanaima has come for Lucas. You know that. He must have told you. He told me he told you. And when kanaima came for Lucas, he said, ‘I will get away. I know that. I will go to England. My grandfather’s friend will send for me.’ And now you have come. Did Lucas tell you? They used to send clothes for my grandfather. Not our kind of clothes, but modern clothes, for the houses they were going to build. I still have some of them. Let me show you.”

He undid the bundle beside him. A wild-banana leaf, cured in some way, with its browned ribs giving the effect of papyrus, was folded over the garment. He lifted out the material, fawn-coloured, perished, but recognizably a doublet of Tudor times, new clothes of three hundred and fifty years before, relic of an old betrayal.