Guerrillas

  The junked cars; the little houses in Mediterranean colors set beside the road at the edge of fields of tall grass. The factories, set in ordered grounds behind fences; and then the rubbish dump, the endless town, the pitched roofs of separate little shops and houses jammed together, the rusting corrugated iron, jalousies and fretwork, the greenery of back yards, the electric wires, crooked walls, broken pavements, unswept gutters, the slogans: Black Is Basic, Don’t Vote; and then the ride up to the Ridge, the pavements giving way to grass verges, the houses getting bigger, still little clusters of shacks about them, but then no shacks at all, just wide roads, big gardens, big houses, and vegetation hiding the city and the plain she had just left; going up to where it still felt like early morning, with sometimes, as the road twisted higher, a view of the hazy flat land below, indistinguishable from swamp and sea.

  A concrete wall, stepped down a hillside, two strips of concrete at the side of a lawn still in shadow; an ivy-covered bungalow, but more than a bungalow, a great spreading house, overlooking a green hillside splashed with red. A shuttered room, the redwood louvers creating total darkness; a black maid, coffee. And Jane began to fall asleep to confused images of her journey, of Negroes, stewardesses and the Americans, airport buildings at night and the morning drive through the green land; the noise of the plane still with her, like something obliterating the life she had left behind, exhaustion and strain becoming part of her sense of violation, of having made the wrong decision. She awakened to darkness; she was momentarily confused. Then, tilting the redwood louvers, she had been startled by the light.

  That was only four months ago. And that day and night and morning of travel, that succession of images that were like dreams, remained the most vivid of her new experiences. When she had arrived everything was green and the flame of the forest was in bloom. Drought had since occurred, the worst drought, she had been told, for forty years. The hills had turned brown; many clumps of bamboo had caught fire; and the woodland on the Ridge had acquired something of the derelict quality of the city. Trees had been stripped; vegetation had generally dried and thinned; and neighboring houses could now be seen. But the city and the flat land remained as unknown as it had been on that first day; and nothing had happened to alter the conviction she had had, at the moment of arrival, that she had made a wrong decision.

  It was what she had half expected. She had come to expect that her decisions would be wrong; and she had begun to feel that it was part of the wrongness of the world.

  In London Roche had seemed to her an extraordinary person; and she had prided herself on her perception in picking him out. He had appeared to her as a doer; and none of the people she knew could be considered doers. They grumbled—journalists, politicians, businessmen—responding week by week to the latest newspaper crisis and television issue; they echoed one another; they could become hysterical with visions of the country’s decay. But the little crises always passed, the whispered political plots and business schemes evaporated; everything that was said was stale, and people no longer believed what they said. And failure always lay with someone else; the people who spoke of crisis were themselves placid, content with their functions, existing within their functions, trapped, part of what they railed against.

  She was adrift, enervated, her dissatisfactions vague, now centering on the world, now on men. One evening in her house, before dinner, this happened. She was with her lover, a left-wing journalist whose views no longer held surprise for her, whose insincerities and ambition she had grown to understand and whose articles she no longer read. His beauty was something she loved, but only as she might have loved a picture: the body that promised so much offered little. She went cold when he was on her; she turned away when he tried to kiss her; she was dry and he had trouble entering. Abruptly, she made a movement and threw him off and he stood beside the bed exposed and vulnerable. Without any attempt at taunting, she drew up her right knee and lit a cigarette. He said, “Why did you do that?” She said, “Because I wanted to.” She was slapped, so hard that her jaw jarred, her cigarette fell from her hand; and then she was slapped again. Her face flamed; she began to cry; and in one swift action, rescuing her cigarette from the bed, she got up, gathered the sheet around her, and went to the bathroom. She allowed her tears to flow but was careful to make no sound. She was expecting a knock at the door: she intended not to reply. She heard his footsteps in the bedroom, heard them in the passage; but then the footsteps went down the carpeted stairs, and she heard the front door closed. She stayed in the bathroom for some time, waiting for a ring at the door, waiting to be rescued. But he didn’t come back; and then she discovered to her dismay and disgust that she was moist.

  It was not long after this that she met Roche. He had just published a book about his experiences in South Africa. He had been arrested, tortured, tried, imprisoned, and then, after international protests, deported, his assets in the country frozen. He had made little impression on her at their first meeting. But later she had read his book, and she had then approached him through his book. And this was soon to strike her as strange, that she should have assumed from his book and the experiences he described in it that she knew him.

  Roche had appeared to her as a doer, unlike anyone she had known. He talked little; he had no system to expound; but simply by being what he was he enlarged her vision of the world. He seemed to make accessible that remote world, of real events and real action, whose existence she had half divined; and through him she felt she was being given a new idea of human possibility. It pleased her that there was nothing extraordinary about his appearance, and that some people wondered what she saw in him: this small man in his mid-forties, sad-faced, with sunken cheeks, deep lines running from his nose to the corners of his mouth, and with eyes that were slightly mocking and ironical.

  They had never talked about South Africa or discussed his book; about the torture and the imprisonment she preferred not to think. He came from the more important world; and she thought he had a vision, like hers, of her own world about to be smashed, and that he acted upon this vision. He was a doer; his book and his life proved that; and she assumed that his old life was claiming him, that it was to some new and as yet unsuspected center of world disturbance that he was going, when, suddenly, not stopping to enjoy such reputation as his book had given him, he had decided to leave London, to take this unlikely and not well-paid job on the island with a firm that sounded like a firm of colonial shopkeepers.

  She had already committed herself to him and to what she conceived to be his kind of life. She had already committed herself to following him out as soon as she had arranged for her house to be let. Then one day something happened that awakened doubt. Roche laughed; until then she had only seen him smile. Roche laughed, and the corners of his mouth rode up over the receding gums on his molars, which showed long, with black gaps between them. It was like a glimpse of teeth in a skull, like a glimpse of a satyr; and she felt it was like a glimpse of the inner man. She had thought him distinguished-looking, and had begun to find him beautiful. This was like a glimpse of a grotesque stranger. She allowed the irrational moment to pass; she was committed. But then, at the moment of arrival, doubt had come to her again. In these relationships some warning, some little hint, always was given, some little sign that foreshadowed the future. And now the thing foreshadowed was with her.

  She knew now, after four months, what she had known on that first day: that she had come to a place at the end of the world, to a place that had exhausted its possibilities. She wondered at the simplicity that had led her, in London, to believe that the future of the world was being shaped in places like this, by people like these.

  The Ridge was self-contained, shut off from the city; and at first the hysteria in which her neighbors lived had interested her. Here, where she had come as to the center of the world, the talk was of departure, of papers being fixed for Canada and the United States: secretive talk, because departure was at once like betrayal and surrender.
No one was more of a Ridge man than Harry de Tunja, no one seemed more local and settled. But overnight these virtues became alarming, and offensive, after it had accidentally come out that, during his many business trips to Canada, Harry had also been securing his status as a Canadian landed immigrant.

  Harry’s air-conditioned den, fitted up like a bar, with a little illuminated sign on the shelves that said Harry’s Bar, with a collection of Johnny Walker figures and other bar objects, was an established meeting place. The temperature was low enough for cardigans and pullovers; the lights were dim; psychedelic bar advertisements from various countries created the effects of shifting circles or bubbles or fountains. Here, in an atmosphere of extravagance and holiday rather than of crisis, with Harry standing behind his bar, people were used to talking about the air conditioning and the degree of coldness achieved that evening and also about the local situation.

  Jane had at first waited for details of that situation to become clear, for the personalities of whom people talked, the doers and demagogues down in the city, to define themselves. But the personalities were so many, the principles on which they acted so confusing, and the issues so evanescent, that she had soon lost interest, had closed her mind to talk of new political alliances that so often seemed to come to nothing anyway, and to analyses of new political threats that could also quickly disappear. Nothing that happened here could be important. The place was no more than what it looked. And Roche didn’t occupy in it the position she thought he did when—it seemed so fresh—she had given his name to the Americans in the customs hall of the airport and had awaited their astonishment.

  She saw that Roche was a refugee on the island. He was an employee of his firm; he belonged to a place like the Ridge; he was half colonial. He was less on the island than he had been in London, and she still wondered at the haste with which he had thrown up his life there. She doubted whether half a dozen people on the island had read his book. Of course he had a reputation, as someone who had suffered in South Africa. Without this reputation he would not have been employed by Sablich’s, and he certainly would not have been given a work permit. For this reputation there was respect, but there was also something else: a curious attitude of patronage.

  It was strange that there should be patronage for Roche, and regard, almost awe, for someone like Mrs. Grandlieu. Mrs. Grandlieu was of an old planter family. She was an elderly brown-skinned woman; and at her cocktail parties and dinners she always did or said something to remind black people of the oddity of their presence in her house, where until recently Negroes were admitted only as servants.

  Mrs. Grandlieu’s accent was exaggeratedly local. She spoke the English her servants spoke; it was part of her privilege, and her way of distancing herself from the important black men, some with English accents, whom she asked to her house. At these gatherings Mrs. Grandlieu always managed to say “nigger” once, as if only with a comic intention, using the word as part of some old idiom of the street or the plantations which she expected her guests to recognize. She might say, of something that was a perfect fit, that it fitted “like yam fit nigger mouth”; and the black men would laugh. Once Jane heard her say, of someone who talked too much, that his mouth ran “like a sick nigger’s arse.”

  Yet the people who considered it a privilege to be in Mrs. Grandlieu’s house, assumed an exaggerated ease there, laughed with her at her antique plantation idioms, and avoided the racial challenge that she always in some way threw down, these very people could be tense and combative with Roche. They knew his South African history; they felt safe with him. But it was as if they wished to test him further, as if each man, meeting Roche for the first time, wished to get some personal statement from him, some personal declaration of love. Such a man might begin by attributing racialist views to Roche or by appearing to hold Roche responsible for all the humiliations he, the islander, had endured in other countries. Jane had seen that happen more than once.

  There was this that was also strange. The very people who avoided the subject of race with Mrs. Grandlieu probed Roche about South Africa. They wished to find out more about the humiliations of black people there; and they reacted with embarrassment, unease, or resentment when they heard what they had expected to hear. Jane had seen the cold hatred one evening when Roche had spoken of the climate, of the passion for sport, of the fine physiques of the white people. Roche had seen it too. Even when pressed—the word had got around—he never talked of that again.

  Mrs. Grandlieu challenged the black men in her old and old-fashioned house; they challenged Roche. Far more was required of Roche than of Mrs. Grandlieu; and Jane saw, over the weeks, that in spite of the real respect for his past, Roche had become a kind of buffoon figure to many. He was not a professional man or businessman; he had none of the skills that were considered important. He was a doer of good works, with results that never showed, someone who went among the poor on behalf of his firm and tried to organize boys’ clubs and sporting events, gave this cup here and offered a gift of cricket equipment there. He worked with Jimmy Ahmed, whom he took seriously, more seriously than the people who gave Jimmy money; he bribed slum boys to go to Thrushcross Grange.

  On the Ridge and elsewhere it was the privilege of the local people, black and not black, to be cynical about the future, about the politicians and politics. Roche, because of his past, because of that book that almost no one had read (and how far away that seemed, how much belonging to another life), and because of his job, was the man to whom some more positive view of the future was attributed. He was called upon to defend himself. But he never said much. He seemed indifferent to satire, indifferent to the looks that were exchanged when someone tried to get him to talk about his activities.

  So Jane saw that on the island, which in her imagination had once been the setting of action that would undo the world, Roche was a refugee. He was a man who didn’t have a place to go back to; he was someone for whom room had been made. His status on the Ridge was that of an employee of a big firm, high enough to be given a house, and as such he was accepted. He could be boisterously greeted in Harry’s bar; he passed as a kind of Ridge man, odd but solid. And he seemed to accept this role.

  It was his passivity that disappointed and repelled Jane. In the early days of their relationship his unwillingness to explain himself, his calm, had encouraged her to think that he had some long view, some vision of the future. There were still moments now when she thought, considering not her disappointment but his life, that he might be a saint, looking down from a great height on the follies of people and being limitlessly forgiving. But there was his satyr’s laugh, the glimpse of those long molars, black at the roots and widely spaced. Nothing escaped him, no look, no comment. That she had learned; and there were times when she thought that he was bottling up resentment, resentment at what had happened in South Africa, resentment at a life that had gone awry, and that one day he would speak and act. But she no longer believed him capable of passion. All that he seemed capable of was a cheap sarcasm, directed mainly at her. She had decided that there was no puzzle, that he was a man with nothing to revenge, that some part of his personality, some motor of action, had been excised.

  While she had expected something of him she had never asked about his experiences in the South African jail, not wishing to get him to talk about his humiliations. But one day, when in her own mind she had given him up and put an end to their relationship, she asked him whether he felt no bitterness about what had happened to him in jail; and she had been astonished by his answer. He said, and he might have been exposing a wound or speaking of a virtue or simply stating a fact, “You must understand I have always accepted authority. It probably has to do with the kind of school I went to.”

  SO THIS morning Jane awakened, as she had awakened in the middle of that first day, to the darkness of the room with the redwood louvers and to the knowledge that she had made an error, that she had once again seen in a man things that were not there.

  She we
nt down the parquet passage past Roche’s room, his door, like hers, left ajar for the sake of air. In the big and almost empty room at the back, a room without a function, part of the unfurnished spaciousness of the company house, she unlocked the folding doors that opened onto the raised brick porch. The metal table and the lager bottles and glasses were wet with dew; the empty cigarette pack was soaked and swollen; dew had collected like water in the seats of the metal chairs.

  The sun had not yet risen; and down below, beyond the brown hills, the plain and the silent city were blurred by mist, which was white over the swamp. She walked round to the front of the house. The lawn—or lawn area—was wet; dew was the only moisture it received these days, since the drought had set in and the watering of gardens had been forbidden. The wall of earth on one side showed what had been cut away from the hill to create this level place: grass and grassroots in a thin layer of topsoil, a kind of sandstone, red clay. The lawn surface near the earth wall was rubbled with little clods of clay.

  Jane thought how lucky she was to be able to decide to leave. Not many people had that freedom: to decide, and then to do. It was part of her luck; in moments like this she always consoled herself with thoughts of her luck. She was privileged: it was the big idea, the one that overrode all the scattered, unrelated ideas deposited in her soul as she had adventured in life, the debris of a dozen systems she had picked up from a dozen men. She would leave; she would make use of that return ticket the immigration officers hadn’t bothered to ask for the day she had arrived.

  She was lucky, she was privileged. And yet, as always in moments of crisis, and her crises were connected with these failures with men, she saw the world in crisis, and her own privilege, for all its comfort, as useless. She would return to London; that society which she had given up, and whose destruction she thought he had awaited, continued. She would be safe in London, but she would be safe in the midst of decay.