“Not so much for you, I’d say.”
The man looked surprised.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re Canadian, aren’t you – from the west?”
The man laughed.
“And so I am! How about that – and how about you?”
“Oh, no– just did a bit of travelling, bit of fishing, did some exporting-importing. Real nice countryside up there, nice people. I miss it some. But you know, time… You got to keep moving sometimes.”
“I guess – I mean, I’m here aren’t I?”
The snake laughed and nodded and bought a paper, flipping it under an arm and walking, striding.
‘This is how men can live’, he told himself and smiled. He pushed his luck, enjoyed the moment, said hello to old men and young boys, tipped his hat to any woman. It was cold, but the sky was clear and he looked up to feel the sunshine on his face… then fixed his scarf – tugging it up.
He stopped when a policeman, buttoned up and jet black-coated, hat crammed down low and pink face squinting appeared. The Blue Man overcame his moment of doubt and strode to him.
“Officer, do you have the time?”
“Just on eight o’clock sir.”
“Thank you officer!”
Barely concealing his glee the snake continued down the street.
“This is my town – my town.” He hissed. Without realising, he was passing into a slightly better part of town, which clung around the edges of the Park.
He paused at the oak doors of a tiny art gallery. He ‘huffed’ with surprise and a smile. ‘This must be new’. He slipped in and pulled down his scarf, smiling his flat-lipped smile. His teeth were mostly a bridge – but an exquisitely crafted bridge that flashed white, standing out even against his pale lipless mouth.
The proprietor slipped out from behind a bookshelf and adjusted her glasses. She was a woman of about seventy, slim and grey haired. She looked at him and started but only for a fleeting second, then continued her approach.
“Good morning young man.”
“Madam.”
She laughed.
“Oh I run a respectable business here young man.” It was an old joke and he realised with it that her eyes weren’t so good. Not to suggest he was old, but the Blue Man was neither young nor old.
“It’s a nice place you have here.”
“I have noticed. You are an appreciator of art?”
She moved closer to him and still showed no discernible fear, a rare trait to which he warmed at once.
“I’m an appreciator of man. But art’s something else. People say it imitates life, but not any life I know. Art imitates God.”
He turned from her and stood in front of a vast navy-black canvas, matt finish and completely empty. Or full.
“Like this – I like it because it’s infinite and finite, like life and death. It reveals nothing, and promises everything.”
She turned and faced it, and they stood shoulder to shoulder.
“I like it too.”
“How’s your, ah, business?”
“Awful.”
“That’s too bad. But you’re new here, right, I am sure it will pick up.”
She turned to him.
“This store has been here twenty-seven years.”
He stared at her, then around the store.
“Right here? This very spot the entire time?”
She nodded.
The Blue Man paused. He strained and searched and started to panic.
How old am I?
He knew, of course, precisely, but the number seemed unrelated to him now – just an abstraction he couldn’t fit to the question. Answering ‘what is my age?’, on the other hand, is straightforward – mathematical. We can know our age without understanding how old we are.
He considered murdering the woman effortlessly, for no other reason than to leave a bit of terror in his wake. She was not frail, but she was old. It doesn’t matter how well you keep in shape, he thought, in the end – we become like glass, and then, like sand.
“Young man?”
He focussed, noticed he’d been silent for too long and smiled a forced smile.
“I choose, and so I am a man… Though not so young, I think.”
He looked over his shoulder.
“Gotta run, madam, nice place you’ve got here. Very nice. Might drop by again and again, and see you again and again.”
He burst out into the street and took a right, no destination in mind, but thoroughly pleased with himself.
* * *
Evo returned to the workers ‘village’, still stunned. The two men had led Evo back to where they’d found him originally – exactly the same spot. Evo marvelled at it, having become confused both to and from Omatec’s campsite, while these men knew the precise spot of their first encounter – as if born to it, which, of course, they were.
The ‘village’ was purgatory compared with where he had been and Evo wondered if it was Saha alone that made the difference. It was dusk now, and the crickets were singing like mad while the men swatted mosquitoes away, smoked and talked with one another.
There was talk of a strike. There had always been talk of a strike, Evo was told. It became an action in itself – to talk of striking. How do we express our frustration? How do we rage against exploitation? Talk of strikes! An older worker had told him on the first night, when he’d asked him if they were striking tomorrow. ‘Tomorrow? No, tomorrow we will work and then, all things being as they are, we will discuss striking. And the next day, we will work, and if the work pains us again and the bosses infuriate us again, we will discuss striking again.’
And they discussed striking almost with a smile, their agitation and animation something that fed off itself. It wasn’t for sport, the way the comfortable argue with one another or speak of tactics and action, but for their own health and sanity. In the absence of power or action, the absence of an idea of power or a plan for action can be devastating. They talked late, despite the ache of the day in their arms and legs, and slept heavily.
Awoken by the sun before he heard the plantation bell, Evo walked briskly, filled with trepidation of an intensity he didn’t know was possible. Work began with barely a murmur.
In its component parts the day was the same as ever: the routine established; the small tricks for making things easier; the small breaks to avoid excessive strain from repetition; the day-dreaming while muscular memory does its work. Evo had forgotten those small tricks – and even stopped observing them unconsciously (as so many workers observed them, and had since the first ambitious ape decided he would be king - the perennial survival mechanism of the alienated) - but still, as though hypnotised by bliss, carried on. This state was interrupted by an intrusion in his field of vision, the white serpent Stefano, whose ghastly combination of plump but armed and bristling weakness made him a menace, less predictable than his crude father, who at least was tempered by having, at some stage in history, lifted a finger to do something other than point.
There is a special kind of sociopathy of the privileged; whose detachment from the flesh and blood life led by mortals leaves them without the basic elements to be expected of a human being. Evo didn’t know the man-child, Stefano, the reptile prince, by anything more than sight and reputation: but that was enough. Today he had an odd expression on his hairless face, of… surprise rather than anything else. Evo stopped and motioned to Emilio. “Something is happening.” Stefano stood on the porch, watching the fields… but he paced, and Stefano never paced, rather, he slithered, slow and easy. But today, he looked uncharacteristically animated.
News soon spread that the old man was sick. Evo could see no suggestion of grief in his heir, only a touch of anxiety – perhaps anticipation. Work went on and Stefano appeared on the vast porch again and again. Evo wondered why he didn’t stay inside with the old man, to give him some comfort in his last moments, something that every one needs, no m
atter how great their wealth or how great the crimes they committed to acquire it. Instead Stefano came out more frequently as time grew more precious to the old man, as though feeling some need to fill his lungs with life, while the dying patriarch filled the house with mortality.
Stefano was arrogant but lazily so, as he’d grown up soft in his father’s shadow. He lacked strength, not from coddling but from the complete lack of necessity. The old man’s cold religious distance, punctuated with rare interventions of severity, had alienated Stefano who now struggled to find anything resembling grief. However, he was unprepared for change and this, at least, made him find his father’s impending death unfortunate.
Emilio twigged first. He whispered “the old man is on the way out. He at least was reliable”. Evo tried to study Stefano. The workers knew precious little about him, and Evo – newer than most – knew even less. Virtually none of them had seen him as a child, the heir flew from carriage to door and back now and then as he attended schooling in the city and other events and rituals unknown to working people until he was about thirteen, and only then emerged onto the porch to watch the fields, unaccompanied.
An older worker had once told Evo that at first the boy king would amble out as though the air might contaminate him. Then, there was a degree of sympathy for him - who knew what garbage his parents were putting into the boy’s head, and how badly prepared for the world it would leave him – tempered by fear of what he may become, but there was also some element of hope that Stefano would prove to be a better man than his father. These hopes proved unfounded.
The old man was self-made, and the self-made like to think that much of them remains the same. It doesn’t. The humble origin is drowned in pride, but the fantasy has a power of its own – and in the case of the old man his desire to believe blunted his edge. Stefano was not self-made, and knew only the world manufactured by his father.
One week after the death of the old man Stefano stood on his porch – stood, not sat, though a severe wooden chair stood empty behind him – and watched the work 100 yards away. He stood for what seemed to be an hour. Evo watched him as best he could while working, waiting for a movement or a gesture. He could not see Stefano’s face well, but imagined there was no change of expression either. He could hear others muttering:
“Look at him. Like a tree stump.”
“More like a stone.”
But for Evo, the stationary young master reminded him of something else. Years earlier Evo had read of the catacombs of Palermo, where the well to do had their preserved bodies dressed in finery and posed in death as they were in life. Artist etchings of the entombed were included. The lure of this macabre cult was lost on Evo, but today he understood it. Motionless, Stefano would escape Death’s attention. Unlike his father he could survey his land in perpetuity, and be master of all he surveyed. Evo felt pity and revulsion, and decided he would not look at the mummified prince again.
It was only when Evo began to feel thirst that he realised what Stefano was really doing. Waiting for the water girl. Waiting for Saha. Evo looked up, and Stefano was still there. Unchanged. Evo had moved, the angle was different but the snake remained the same. Finally, the Stefano placed his hands on his hips, turned his back and retreated inside.
Evo wondered if it was the heat, or his hatred of the landlord’s family, or the vividness of his visit to Saha’s village still in his mind, or his fevered imagination, but he knew she was in danger.
Stefano had called over the foreman but never left the porch, refusing to meet the man half way. Evo watched carefully, watched Stefano’s mouth move, watched the look in his eyes, blocked out the noise around him. He discerned the word water, and the one that stood out most – mulatto.
Weeks passed and Saha made no appearance. Others brought water, different girls in what Evo suspected was a deliberately random sequence. He wondered why. Had Saha’s father foreseen danger? Omatec didn’t know what Evo had overheard, or thought he’d seen, but he’d made an impression on Evo as a man who understood the world, or, at least, the worst of men.
Mulatto. Saha was mixed race? It hadn’t occurred to him. There was a serious danger. Sometimes mulatto children and young women were taken from their people, ‘adopted’ or forced into the worst kind of slavery. Stefano struck him as the worst kind of obsessive – the kind that has hitherto had every hunger satisfied.
The season was drawing to an end, and with it, Evo’s work at the plantation. He wondered how he’d ended up here, doing this work. He’d brought big plans with him on the ship, and they’d turned to dust. There’d been a parcel service, but sickness and poor weather and tough terrain had killed his mules. There’d been an attempt at a newspaper, but businesses were not interested in trying to sell their goods to illiterates through the press. The silver he’d brought with him, everything he’d been able to scrape together back home, was gone. ‘It’s a trough,’ he said ‘and I’ll climb back up again’.
Emilio slapped him on the back at the workers’ camp. “You look miserable, but listen, at the end of the season, there is extra pay.”
“Extra pay!” Luis laughed. “What is done is a few pesos are scraped from the top of what we were owed every week, and then dumped on top of the final week’s pittance!” Emilio shrugged “better late…”
“No! It sits with the master of the house, collecting interest or being invested, and then we get a few coins and call it a bonus.”
Evo shrugged. The pay had been bad each week, but pay for such work was always bad. He hadn’t counted on anything extra and had been saving desperately. This could change things – could get him back on to a new plan. A new vision.
As the day approached, Evo’s ideas became brighter and brighter. He would buy a new shirt and slacks, make his way back to Saha and speak with her father. He would convince Omatec that he was a serious man, who would take Saha far enough to be safe from Stefano, but still in contact with her people. He wondered if Saha could read. He had no idea. It dawned on Evo he knew nothing about her. The whole situation was absurd.
It was the final day. Pay day. It seemed strange, the light, like twilight but at noon. Evo wiped the sweat from his brow. The foreman appeared. Word spread that he and the pay clerk would come to the ‘village’ in the evening. Hours later, Evo sat on a fallen log near the edge of the cluster of tents and shacks. He sat alone, looking at the sky, which stubbornly resisted the night.
In the centre of the camp, consternation was erupting. Soon, Luis approached him, shaking. “There is no leaving payment. None. A new idea from the new master. Just a week’s peanuts and goodbye. Listen!” The shouting became louder. Evo approached where the foreman stood alongside the pay clerk. The workers were not angry in the conventional sense, their voice were strong but their faces were etched with despair. Most of these men had come back every season for years. And they knew if this stood, it would remain.
This time there would be more than talk of a strike. This time there would be more than a strike.
The manor was not far from one of the edges of the plantation. It was clear now why the foreman and clerk had waited until the men had reached their ‘village’ before delivering the news, and equally clear why they’d bought five armed heavies with them. Pancho emerged from among the despairing faces with a huge grin. “I’ve just eaten, so let’s go for a nice evening walk” he announced. He strode in the direction of the manor. No one failed to follow him.
The foreman and his entourage scurried ahead and formed a bristling line in front of the gate where the short stone path to the manor’s porch met a dirt track, flanked by a six-foot high iron fence.
Pancho stopped and held a hand up to the mass of men behind him, who halted. Insects chirped. The silence was broken by the cocking of a gun.
Pancho’s already huge grin somehow grew, threatening to break open his face, and he said, not shouted, simply said: “No”.
Then he held forth, pacing as he talked, the men gathered
behind him. In the beginning they were nervous, but he took them with him as he berated the foreman with the courage of a man who had completely given up hope. The boss and his clan had grown extremely rich over generations from the sweat of working men, he said, and those who knew best the art of politics had grown rich along with the boss. He punctuated the air with his finger – not pointing at the foreman but at the sky. The murmur in the crowd grew louder. Pancho told the foreman to go back to the boss and tell him the workers would not depart from the manor until the end of season payment was reinstated. The clerk had vanished without anyone noticing, and returned to mutter in the foreman’s ear.
“There is no change,” the foreman’s word rang clearly. “You will leave now.”
He stepped behind the row of armed men, along with the clerk, and pulled his watch from his pocket.
Pancho laughed.
“Our broken backs have filled your wallets.”
Pancho turned to the workers.
“At worst, five of us will fall before we are upon them.”
With this simple phrase, the crowd charged. Only two shots rang out as the clerk and foreman ran desperately back to the house. A bell began to peel, and moments before the men began to batter down the front door, Stefano was seen racing to the rear gate on a white horse.
* * *
Robert awoke to an urgent thumping on his apartment door, and was barely awake as he pulled it open to find Comely there – calm and immaculately shaved and pressed. He knew it was early, even for him, and wondered why Comely looked like he’d been up for an hour – but still well-rested – and why he was pounding on his door as though there was a fire, but smiling gleefully.