Guerrillas

4

THIS MAN fills my whole mind to the exclusion of all other trivial concerns and I don’t know how I can get to see him again. He’s suffered so much in England, I don’t believe he will want to see someone like me. Over here they see him only as a hakwai, but a woman of my class can see what he really is, I can understand what all those other people in England saw in him. They say he was born in the back room of a Chinese grocery, a half black nobody, just a Chinaman’s lucky shot on a dark night, that’s a good laugh, but I can see that he is a man of good blood, only someone of my class can see that, to me he is like a prince helping these poor and indigent black people, they’re so shiftless no one will help them, least of all their own.

He’s the leader they’re waiting for and the day will come, of that I’m convinced, when they will parade in the streets and offer him the crown, everybody will say then, “This man was born in the back room of a Chinese grocery, but as Catherine said to Heathcliff, ‘Your mother was an Indian princess and your father was the Emperor of China,’ we knew it all along,” and that was in the middle of England mark you, in the days when they had no racial feeling before all those people from Jamaica and Pakistan came and spoiled the country for a man like him. They will see him then like a prince, with his gold color.

I drive past his solitary forbidding house many times and often late at night I see the lamp burning in his study, he’s wrapped up in his thoughts and I have no wish to intrude and aggravate his impatience because I know he’s writing that book he has a contractual obligation to write. One day I summoned up the courage to telephone him, my heart was beating when he answered, I put the phone down, though I’m dying to hear that soft and cultivated voice, that dark brown voice as it has so aptly been described by many …

Jimmy put aside the pad and considered Bryant, sitting on one of the furry chairs and trying to read the newspaper without making the sheets rustle.

Bryant wasn’t a reader. But Stephens made a point of reading the newspapers every day, and Bryant was copying Stephens. Stephens read newspapers in his own way. He especially read the evening paper. Stephens didn’t pay much attention to the foreign news or the big stories about politics; he concentrated on the police items, which were longer in the evening paper, fresher, and with those casual details, usually edited out of the same stories in the morning paper, that he looked for. Stephens could tell, from the names of districts, from the description of an incident by police and eye witnesses, from the places where motorcars were stolen and where they were later found, what his friends and enemies were up to. This was how Stephens read the evening paper, like a private circular. And this was how Bryant tried to read the paper, going through the finely printed paragraphs of little facts, half hoping that in this way he might get some news about Stephens.

Now that he had stopped writing, now that he had broken the mood and was aware only of the desolation outside, Jimmy felt enervated by his writing. He considered Bryant, the twisted face, the little pigtails, the lips working as they shaped the words, the thin legs in their old blue jeans; and Jimmy was as sad for Bryant as he was for himself.

He got up. He walked about the blue carpet. He went to the bedroom and stood near the telephone on the chest of drawers. He hesitated. Then he dialed, and waited.

Adela said, “Roche residence.”

He didn’t speak.

“Roche residence.”

He put the telephone down. He went back to the living room and sat at the desk.

This man possesses me. He’s a loner; I can see that. Over here they’re jealous of him, cut him down to size, that’s their motto, it’s all they know, leave him in the bush to rot, and in England too they tried to destroy him, talking of rape and assault, he became too famous for them to stomach, they thought he was just a stud, that’s how they wanted to keep him, send him back to rot. But he’s a man not easily destroyed, he’s surprised them I bet, he’s a man once seen never forgotten.

And then one day scanning the paper as usual for news of his doings I see that he’s going to address a big gathering of the Lions, local and foreign big shots, everybody of course wants to know what he has to say about the issues of the day. He’s addressing this meeting at the Prince Albert Hotel one lunchtime and I make it my business to be there at the appointed hour.

I see his name and photo on a board in the lobby and I notice that everybody is in a state of suppressed excitement, the waiters themselves are congregating in hushed groups outside the room where he’s addressing the assembly. In the end I heard one set of applause, it seemed there would be no end to the acclamations, and one of the waiters cried out “But that is man,” and then he comes out with all those big shots local and foreign hanging on to his every word, they’re in their suits, he’s so casual in his well-creased trousers and his Mao shirt, but very respectable and polite, with a kind and relevant word for everyone, casual his clothes might be but they reveal the lines of his lithe, pantherlike body.

My heart is in my mouth, I don’t know whether he will recognize me and whether it will be right for me to accost him, but then he said, “But isn’t it Clarissa,” and I said, “So you remember me.” The big shots fall back and I’m very proud indeed to be seen in the company of this famous man who is so essentially modest. He said, “Of course I remember you, I owe you a dollar.”

A little smile comes in his eyes and I’m amazed, because nothing is hidden from this man’s gaze, he must have seen how frightened I was that day at the Grange and I suppose that even now when he’s talking to me he can see the terror in my light-colored eyes, because when I’m with him I feel like a mesmerized rabbit, I just want to give up and when I revive he will bring water in his own cupped hands and I will drink water from his tender hands and I will not be afraid of him anymore.

He was enervated, sick with excitement. He could feel that his pants were wet. He was tormented and deliciously saddened by that dream of beauty. It had come to him years before, when he was a schoolboy; it had only been a story, but it had become like a memory of something seen. It was a Monday morning story at school, a story that had penetrated the back yards of the city over the weekend and had then been brought to the school by various boys, who told the story as it might have been told by the older women of the back yards, awed rather than shocked at what had happened, fearful of the punishment about to come to all, and half protective, half resigned.

It was the story of the rape of a white girl at the beach by a gang. The girl had bled and shrieked and fainted. One of the men had then run to a brackish creek in the coconut grove and had tried, using his cupped hands alone, to bring water to the girl.

The boy from whom Jimmy had first heard the story that Monday morning — and in the boy’s voice could be detected the accents of the women of the back yard where he lived — the boy had told of this episode of the water as part of the lunacy and terror after the event. But to Jimmy it was the most moving part of the story, and it had stayed with him, in a setting that had grown as stylized as a tourist poster: the soft light and blurred shade below the coconut palms, the white sand, the sunlit breakers, the olive sea and blue sky beyond the crisscross of the curved gray coconut trunks, the bleeding girl on the front fender of the old Ford, the cupped hands offering water, the grateful eyes, remembering terror.

He could write no more. He wakened from his dream to the emptiness about him, to the interior he had so carefully prepared, for an audience that didn’t exist. He was restless; he could have screamed like the girl on the Ford fender. At such a time he needed crowds, adventure, encounters, something in which he could forget himself. There was only the stillness of the bush and the abandoned industrial park.

He went and stood beside Bryant’s chair, Bryant the loveless, the rejected, the lost. Almost like himself. Yet even in Bryant what beauty was concealed. He put his hand on Bryant’s shoulder and his fingers touched Bryant’s neck. Bryant said, “Jimmy,” and let the paper fall. Such beauty, if only it could be known. His hands moved down inside Bryant’s jersey, felt the nipples twitch and harden, felt the well-defined chest and then, moving lower, felt the firm molding of Bryant’s stomach. Bryant began to swallow; his stomach muscles tensed and dipped. Lower, past the navel, to the hard curve, the springy hair, a man after all, the concealed complete beauty.

“Jimmy, Jimmy.”

But then, almost roughly, he withdrew his hands, and went to the bedroom and the telephone.

Jane answered. “Hello.”

He didn’t say anything.

“Hello.” She spoke the number.

“Jane? Jimmy Ahmed.”

“Oh yes.”

She was caught: he could tell.

He said, “What an English way you have of answering the phone. Only people in England answer the phone like that.”

“You mean giving the number?”

“How are you?”

“Harassed. And hot.”

Mock irritation: she was going coy, was beginning to act.

“Jane. I’m coming in to town tomorrow. I am under an obligation to meet some business executives at the Prince Albert. They are giving me lunch. Could you be there at two o’clock in the lobby? You know the Prince Albert?”

“What do you want to see me for?”

“We can talk about England. It will make a change after the business executives.”

“Do you want me to come alone?”

“You can bring massa if you like. But I want to give you your dollar back.”

He began to wait for her response; he wanted to laugh, to break the tension he sensed developing. He wanted to say: Bryant’s a bad boy. But then, sternly, he put the telephone down.

The stern face remained when he went back to the living room. But his restlessness had been appeased. Bryant recognized the new mood; he picked the paper up and began to read again. And Jimmy felt his head grow clear; he had the clearest vision of the world.