Guerrillas

  Meredith was about forty. He had been in politics and had briefly even been a minister; but then he had fallen out with the party and resigned. He spoke of himself, and was spoken of, not as a rejected politician but as a political dropout; and this made him unusual, because politics here was often a man’s only livelihood, and political failure was a kind of extinction. More than once a new minister, rising too high too fast, had come to live on the Ridge, chauffeured and guarded, embarrassing everyone, his children isolated and subdued in a large garden, carrying the slum on their faces and in their manner, until, as suddenly as they had been called up, the family had been returned to the darkness below, broken by their taste of luxury. But Meredith had other resources. He was a solicitor; and he enjoyed some celebrity for his weekly radio interview program called Encounter, in which he exploited his position as a political dropout and showed himself tough and cynical and no respecter of persons.

  He was happily married, with a baby daughter; and he seemed able to separate his political anxieties from his private life, where he gave the impression of being at peace. In the hysteria of the Ridge—and against what Roche had first seen as the loudness and gush of Harry de Tunja—Meredith had been a restful man to be with. It was odd: Meredith, in his lucid analysis of most situations, striking off damning points on his stubby fingers, could be gloomier than anyone. But whereas other people were enervated or made restless by their anxieties, Meredith seemed untouched by his own vision of imminent chaos. Roche had once heard him say, speaking of the breakdown of institutions on the island, “We are living in a house without walls.” Yet Meredith lived as though the opposite were true. In his delight in the practice of the law, which he said exercised him totally, extended all his gifts, in his delight in his radio work, in his pleasure in his family (his wife came from an established mulatto family), in his housebuilding and homemaking, there seemed to be a certainty that the world would continue, and the place he had made for himself in it. And to Roche, new to the island, this combination of political concern and private calm had been restful.

  But the relationship had not survived Jane’s coming. To Jane, not looking in those early days for what was restful, and even then having no taste for the political or economic complexities that Meredith liked to analyze, Meredith was “suburban.” And Meredith, holding a doll in one hand, and leading his infant daughter to the garden gate to wave good-by to Jane after her first visit, did appear too domesticated and settled: Roche could see that. Jane also decided that Meredith was boring; and then she decided that he was ugly. Roche said she was being trivial. She knew it; but, noticing the effect she had made, she insisted. “I can’t get over his looks.” And what had only been one of her offhand, unconsidered judgments—that Meredith was suburban—she had, perversely, cherished into a settled attitude. Between Jane and Meredith there had quickly grown up a muted mutual antagonism; and Roche, although he knew the antagonism to be artificial, issuing from Jane’s casual, instinctive cruelty toward people with whom she was not concerned, this cruelty part of her laziness, her refusal to be bothered, Roche was affected.

  As the two men drifted apart, as they ceased to be easy with one another, Roche began to see Meredith’s personality—the personality that had attracted him and seemed so restful—as a creation. In Meredith’s domesticity he began to see an element of exaggeration and defiance. He began to detect the strains behind the personality. In Meredith’s capacity to enervate others without appearing to be touched himself Roche began to have intimations of Meredith’s own hysteria, of the rages, deprivations, and unappeased ambition that perhaps lay behind that domesticity he flaunted. Meredith’s character, once dissected in this way, could no longer appear whole again, could no longer be taken for what it appeared to be. Roche began to be wary of Meredith. And he moved then toward Harry de Tunja, who continued to be as he always had been and, surprisingly, turned out to be just as he appeared: a man without secrets, who made his private anxieties public, a man whose manner never varied, whose business life flowed into his social life.

  “SO PAMELA couldn’t make it, eh,” Harry said, leading Meredith out of the dark living room to the porch. Harry’s thick-soled canvas shoes flashed white at the end of his slender brown legs and appeared comically large. “Everybody behaving as though what happen between Marie-Thérèse and me is like a wedding in reverse. Some people on the groom side, some people on the bride side.”

  Meredith, coming onto the porch, and acting out his entrance, said with a heavy local accent. “I hear she giving the feller hell, man, Harry. She after him to acquire landed-immigrant status.”

  “Oh God, Merry, man. You too?”

  Meredith was short and walked with a spring. He was slender but his body looked hard: he was heavier than he looked. He wore a white shirt with a button-down collar; it was unbuttoned at the neck but not too open, and it didn’t suggest holiday dress. The shirt was too tight over his solid shoulders, the collar was too close to the neck: a tie seemed to be missing.

  Still making his entrance, he stood on the porch, swinging his hands together, rapping a box of matches against a pack of cigarettes. He said, “Jane.”

  “Hello, Meredith.” She had rearranged her legs on the chair.

  Meredith said, “Peter, I want to see you.”

  “Is it good or bad?”

  “That depends on you. Don’t look so frightened. We’ll talk later. What have you been doing this morning?” He sat down on the aluminum-framed stool beside Roche’s hammock.

  Harry said, “The usual thing, nuh. We went for a walk on the beach. And we watched those people doing their business.” He made it sound a morning of pure pleasure. “Have you seen them?”

  Meredith took a glass of rum punch. He said, “There’s a lot of mad people in this place.”

  Jane said, “Are they mad?”

  Harry said, “They’re not sane.”

  “Jane doesn’t believe they’re sane either,” Roche said.

  “The visitor’s courtesy,” Meredith said. “Cheers. ‘We’re just like you. You’re just like us.’ What’s new with Sablich’s these days, Peter?”

  “I’m not sure I’m the person to ask,” Roche said. “I’ve decided to leave.”

  Harry looked alarmed. “But you never told me, Peter.”

  Meredith, sipping rum punch, smiled at Jane. “So you’re leaving us, Jane.”

  She said, “It’s the first I’ve heard of it.”

  Roche said, “I’ve only just decided.” He laughed and showed his molars. “It’s all these mad people I’ve been hearing about.”

  Harry, sitting in his hammock, and moving back and forth, the tips of his canvas shoes touching the terrazzo floor, said, “But this place is full of mad people, for truth. I was just thinking about it the other day. I was at the races, and I was buying some nuts from ‘Nuts and Bolts’—you know the guy? And it suddenly hit me that all those people selling peanuts and cashew nuts are mad like hell. I say it suddenly hit me, but I’ve known it since I was a child. I always knew those fellers were mad like hell. The funny thing is I never found it funny. And, you know, once you realize you have madmen running about the place, you start seeing them everywhere. It’s a damn frightening thing.”

  Meredith said, “You sound worried, Harry.”

  “In any other country those guys would be put away. I don’t know how we start the fashion here that the moment a guy get mad he must hook up two big baskets on his arms, put on tennis shoes and start walking about the place, shouting, ‘Nuts, nuts.’ ”

  Meredith said, “I will keep an eye on you.”

  Jane said, “It sounds the most marvelous therapy.”

  Roche said, “It will give a new dimension to swinging London.”

  “An overgrown idiot boy lived near my elementary school,” Meredith said. “He was white. A big boy. He couldn’t close his mouth. He used to point at us and say, ‘Bam! Bam!’ That was all he wanted to do, to play cowboys-and-Indians with you. You could
make him very happy if you bammed back. But that was committing yourself to a term-long relationship. We called him Bam. That was all. Nobody troubled him. He was just part of the scenery.”

  Jane said, “How very humane.”

  “Humane?” Harry said. “That is our downfall. We encourage too much slackness.”

  Meredith said, “I think we should ask Peter about that.”

  “I used to think we had to work with what was there. I don’t know what I think now.”

  “We don’t make enough allowance for the madness,” Meredith said. “Read the papers, listen to the radio, read any government report: you will feel that we’re all very logical, rational people and we know where we want to go. I suppose that was my mistake. I knew about the madness. I knew about it in my bones. I grew up with the damn thing, after all. Like you, Harry. But I pretended it didn’t exist. I don’t know how it happens, but the moment you start thinking or writing or worrying about resources and your five-year plan, you forget the madness. You forget about those people down there on the beach. A good politician should never do that.”

  Harry said, “But that’s a hell of a thing you’re telling us, Merry. This place could be a paradise, man, if people really planned. We could have real industries. We don’t have to let the Americans just take away our bauxite.”

  “I traveled out with two of the bauxite Americans,” Jane said. “They spent all their time on the plane reading pornography. The hard stuff. Easy Lay and Sucked Dry.”

  “We could have real industries,” Harry said, lying down in his hammock, his chest singing asthmatically, creating an effect of accompanying bird song. “Not this nonsense we have. One factory, one rich white businessman, one rich black politician.”

  “All this is true,” Meredith said. “But they may not want what you want for them. They want other things. The people down there by the river have other needs.”

  “Oh God, man, Merry, you know a lot of those fellers are just damn corrupt. You say so yourself. It make me so damn sad, seeing boys I go to school with going in for this thing. You always try to tell yourself, ‘Oh, this guy is still right. That guy is still okay.’ And then one day you see the feller with his belly hanging over his waistband, and you know he gone the way of all flesh. Jane, you know that? The moment you see one of these fellers getting to the belly-hanging-over-waistband stage you know how his mind working. You know what happen to him. It is the only thing you have to look for. The belly and the waistband. It make me so damn ashamed, man, to see those fellers at parties. Jane, they will take two drinks at the same time. And they will eat as though they’ve never seen food.”

  Meredith said, “They’re very hungry.”

  He had been looking at Harry with a fixed wounded smile. This smile, and the way he held his head, drew attention to the wide space between his nose and his mouth. This part of his face looked especially vulnerable: here could still be seen the bullied schoolboy he had perhaps been. And there was about his reply to Harry something of the pertness of the schoolboy.

  Harry crossed his legs in the hammock and looked out at the dazzling sea. “Twenty, thirty years ago, everybody was lifting weights. You would see people exercising in every back yard. You remember the body-beautiful craze, Merry? It was a lovely thing, man. It used to make you feel so good. You remember how those boys used to walk?”

  “ ‘Wings,’ ” Meredith said, and laughed. He put down his glass and acted out the posture: squaring his shoulders, raising his elbows, and letting his hands hang loose. “The gorilla walk. But those were the needs of those days.”

  Harry said, “We’re not talking the same language.”

  “You are pretending you don’t understand me,” Meredith said. His smile had vanished, and he spoke precisely, with an edge in his voice. “If those people down on the beach were a little saner, don’t you think they would burn the place down twice a year? Madness keeps the place going.”

  Jane said, “It’s very convenient for Mrs. Grandlieu.”

  “Convenient for everybody. Convenient for you and me and Harry and Peter and Sablich’s.” But the edge had gone out of Meredith’s voice. And when he spoke again it was with a rallying tone, in a local accent: “But still, eh, Harry? After Israel, Africa.”

  “Well, Merry-boy,” Harry said, floundering. “I don’t know. But if it say so in the Bible …”

  Roche said, “Does the Bible say anything like that?”

  Meredith said, laughing, and in the same rallying tone, “I suppose you have to look hard. But tell me, Jane, how did you get on with Mr. Leung’s son?”

  She said, “You mean Jimmy Ahmed?”

  He smiled at her. “At school I knew him as Jimmy Leung. Did you look into his eyes and understand the meaning of hate?”

  She was puzzled.

  “I was just quoting from an interview in one of the English papers. An interview by some woman. When she wrote about Jimmy she became all cunt.”

  Harry said, “Merry, man.”

  Meredith fixed a smile on Harry and, spacing out the words, said, as if in explanation, “She was all cunt.”

  Harry said, “I don’t know what kind of language I’m hearing these days.”

  “I was in London when this great Negro leader burst upon the scene. And I must say it was news to me. I had always thought of him as Mr. Leung’s son, trying to get into the Chinese scene over here and talking about going to China to advise Mao Tse-tung.”

  Roche laughed. “Is this true?”

  “You know people over here. They believe that everybody in China is either like Charlie Chan or Fu-Manchu. I was with the BBC at the time, and they asked me to go and do a little three-minuter with this black rebel. I went to an address in Wimbledon. It turned out to be a bloody big house. I can’t tell you about the architecture or the period—I didn’t have those eyes at the time. You grow up in a place like this, you don’t know anything about architecture. To me a house was just a house. It was old or new, big or small, poor or rich. This was a rich, big house. And this was where the leader was living. With the woman who was managing him. I can see now that she was middle class or upper class or something like that. But all I saw then was a white woman in a big house. She was arranging all the publicity, and I sat down in that big drawing room and watched that man behaving like one of those toys you wind up. And that tall woman with the flat hips was looking on, very, very happy with her little Pekingese black. And he walked up and down yapping away. She was disconcerted by me. A real Negro. But you see how bogus the whole news thing is. That woman was the story. I really should have been interviewing her. But I just recorded the yapping and edited it down to three minutes for the evening program. That was my little contribution to the Jimmy Ahmed story.”

  Jane said, “Was she the woman he married?”

  Harry said, “You see what I mean about encouragement? Jane, why did people in England give that man so much encouragement? I can’t tell you the amount of nonsense we used to read in the papers.”

  Meredith said, “I regard him as one of the more dangerous men in this place.”

  Roche said, “He would be very pleased to hear you say that.”

  “He’s dangerous because he’s famous, because he has a lot of that English glamour still, and because he’s nothing at all. ‘Daddy, am I Chinese?’ ‘No, my boy. You’re just my child.’ The Chinese don’t have any hangups about that kind of thing at all. No encouragement there at all. And ever since then you can do anything you like with Jimmy Ahmed. Anybody can use that man and create chaos in this place. He can be programed. He’s the most suggestible man I know.”

  Roche said, “I’ve never found him so.”

  Meredith said, “You offered him the wrong things.”

  Harry, laughing before he spoke, said, “You offered him work.”

  “I didn’t offer him anything,” Roche said. “I only tried to help him do what he said he wanted to do.”

  “I know,” Meredith said quickly, nodding. “Land, the
revolution based on land. That was the London programing. But if you think Jimmy was going to come here and bury himself in the bush, you don’t know Jimmy. Jimmy has to go on and on. There’s a kind of—what’s the word? Not dynamism.”

  Jane said, “Dynamic.”

  “There’s a kind of dynamic about his condition that has to work itself out. In England it ended with rape and indecent assault. The same dynamic will take him to the end here.”

  Roche said, “How do you think it will end here?”

  “He might be a millionaire. He might be the next prime minister. It all depends on how he’s programed. In the kind of situation we have here anything is possible. One thing I’ll tell you: Jimmy isn’t going to end quietly in the bush buggering a couple of slum boys.”

  “That’s what Jimmy feels too,” Roche said. “I think you’re both exaggerating.”

  Harry said, “I don’t think so.”

  “Tomorrow,” Meredith said, “that man might say something or make some gesture or stumble into some kind of incident, and overnight he could be a hero. The white-woman rape, running away from England, the hater of the Chinese: he can touch many chords. I know. I just have to study myself. I don’t have to try too hard to remember how I used to feel when I was a child about the Chinese shops. Jimmy always talks about being born in the back room of a Chinese shop. And in England that sounded nice and deprived. But I used to envy Jimmy. And most boys were like me, eh. A shop—how could a thing like that ever go bust? A shop had everything. It was a place where your mother sometimes sent you to get things on trust. I used to pass the Leung shop four times a day. It was on the way to school. Jimmy’s mother was a very pretty woman. Brown skin, lovely features, Spanish type, with a mass of black hair under her arms. I can’t tell you how that hair excited me. Long before I could do anything about it. I never went through that queer phase you read about. I was always straight. I used to envy old Leung, and I used to think: You can get a woman like that only if you have money, if you have a shop. To me that was just a fact of life, that our women went to live with Chinese shopkeepers. There was nothing you could do about it. Nobody had to tell me anything: I knew that that side of life was closed to me.”