The Outcasts (4 page)

“No.”

“We are in the tropics.” Philips shrugged. “You must see it, and feel it. You must keep your temper. You must be patient.”

Morrison accepted the “must” provisionally. “This Ramesh: what's his first name?”

“Ramesh is his first name. His last name is Rampersand but everyone calls him Ramesh.”

A glistening scarlet butterfly flittered across the blue water and came to rest on a dusty potted palm. A small ginger cat was asleep on the diving-board.

“And we will have dinner soon with a man named Goray, who is of the government.”

But Morrison was too tired, and here came Gordon with their breakfast: ordinary bacon and eggs, except that the bacon was back-bacon and the eggs were overcooked. The two ate in near-silence, and then Morrison excused himself and slept.

That afternoon they bought his clothes in an arcade, a tunnel through a gloomy office-building, street to street, with squatting venders like malignant mushrooms, thriving in the cool shadow and bargaining in resigned boredom. The arcade was a haven because the prevailing winds, though they prevailed seldom, swept gently through it. Nothing else swept through it; they waded in empty tin cans, empty cigarette boxes, empty tobacco spills, empty peanut shells, gobs of spittle, broken bottles, poultry feathers, and shards of coconut shell.

Morrison liked the city. He even liked the offices of Schendel S.A., six rooms in a massive Victorian-Dutch-Colonial building with high ceilings and innumerable mysterious stairways. He met his fellow engineers, young graduates who complimented him insistently on his bridge and were rude to their clerks. He examined the books without real interest. He passed judgment on small projects, on blueprints, on renderings, on the lavatory, which had been refurbished. He had the joy of meeting black men named Isaacson, Utu, and Vieira-Souza. In the office and out he heard many languages, all softly spoken, purling, soothing. They entered him and he too spoke softly, and there was no hurry. He learned that there were six kinds of people: Europeans, blacks, Orientals, Indians, Amerindians and Portuguese, and he wondered what the Portuguese thought about that. Each night at sundown, as they drank on the second-storey terrace and contemplated the avenue and its burdens, its motion, its slaughter, each night at sundown a thin, silvery trill lamented the day, teeee-teeee-teee, from some corner of the ragged shrubbery. “Oh yes,” said the Indian waiter. “The six o'clock bee. Not really a bee,” he confided. “A bird. Oh my yes. A very small bird.”

When the waiter was gone, Philips said, “Oh my yes. Not really a bird either. Oh my no. Really a kind of cricket.”

“Why do you make fun of him?”

“I make fun of everybody,” Philips said. “In time I will make fun of you.”

“That's too easy. Who is Goray, exactly, and should I behave in any special way?”

“Exactly is too much,” Philips said. “Approximately is within my powers. Approximately, he is a man in his fifties, very clever and good, and an assistant, or deputy, to the minister of the interior, in whose jurisdiction lie our road and our bridge. Goray and Van Alstyne were friends, and he has taken a great interest in the project.”

“Oh.” He sensed that Philips knew what he was about to ask. “Am I to understand that he is …”

“Is?”

“Is on our payroll?”

Philips leaned back, and because he regretted the need for the question Morrison dismissed it for the moment and examined Philips's face, which had altered as he came to know it better. It was less round than he had thought, and the cheekbones were stronger; in moments of irritation there seemed a hidden force, almost a resentful aquilinity, like a shadowy skeleton within the flat nose. The mouth was not simply thick lips; it smiled pleasantly and unpleasantly, expressed scorn, approval, delight, greed, pride, faint melancholy.

“Yes,” Philips said. “Of course he is on our payroll. Under ‘personnel life and disability insurance,' which we do not carry. Now first, he is worth three times as much because he makes unnecessary
any
further contact with the government. Do you know what a blessing that can be?”

“I know.”

“And second, it is the way of things. Will you object?”

Morrison shook his head slowly and sipped a lovely cool sip of rum and coconut water. (He had recovered. In this he was resilient.) “It is also the way of things in Washington. Graft and nepotism. Have you any nephews?”

Philips smiled slightly. “But you object, all the same.”

“Don't you?”

“No. If I had a nephew, the son of my brother or sister, would you want me to favor a stranger over him in the name of efficiency? If so, how far do you carry the principle? If I had a son who stole, would you want me to give him to the police? Or a wife who spoke against the government?”

“I never thought of it that way,” Morrison said lazily. It was a marvelous warm evening, and on the river a freighter hooted.

Leaving the hotel, they ambled up the avenue among couples and bunches at their soft evening laughter and gossip. Motor traffic died with the day, and sweeter smells drifted among softer sounds. The street lamps glowed weakly, haloed in moths, and now the buildings were dark, their day's work done; the shops closed at four. The two engineers strolled along the equator in May. On a dark side-street, the smells of cooking, spices; a reclining drunk hummed and keened in a shadowy doorway, and said as they passed, “Good night, sirs,” which Morrison knew by then meant “good evening.” “Good night,” they said. He was reminded of Italians waving good-bye when they meant you to come closer, and vice versa, and he asked Philips if he had seen that. No; but Philips told him how pleasant uninflected pronouns could be, so that “he tell he papa and
he
tell
he
papa” meant son to father to grandfather, and that a house was called a yard, pronounced yod, so that “she has gone home” came out “she go by sh'yod.” And here a bastard language had flourished, English-Dutch-local; had Morrison noticed the sticker on their dashboard? Yes; and Philips spoke it: “Lookoe yo oilie nanda watra befosie yo start na wagie.” Morrison made him say it again. “But the ‘yo' is spelled j-o-e,” Philips added. Lookoe joe oilie nanda watra befosie joe start na wagie. Lovely. Morrison laughed aloud. The warmth was an embrace, the breeze was a kiss. They passed a squat mosque, a bulbous minaret, and later a cemetery. “That is a Jewish cemetery,” Philips said. Morrison could see nothing; the stones and tablets were shapeless and obscure at night. “And so is that,” Philips said in a moment.

“Why two? Are there so many here?”

“One is for the European Jews,” Philips said. “I forget what they are called. The other is for the Sephardic Jews.”

“Segregation everywhere,” Morrison said, and Philips laughed.

Then they were standing before a plain wooden door with a lantern above it, a single bulb within a cube of leaded blue and green glass. In black block letters:
CHEZ TAFIAN.
When someone nudged his leg, Morrison started and shied; but it was only a billy-goat, staring up at him, long of face, bearded, yellow-eyed. Morrison said “Good night, sir” and the goat's lip curled. With his horns and yellow eyes and quivering nostrils he reminded Morrison of something, someone, long ago, mocking and contemptuous, haughty and unblinking.

Inside he saw no bar, no cashier, only a large room with almost bare whitewashed walls; in the back screens, and beyond them a dim garden. Philips led him to a table and Goray rose to welcome them, a man of average height but of over two hundred pounds; in his yellow shirt he was a sun. For Morrison he had a benedictory smile and a fat handshake; he bustled. “So! Engineer Morrison! Welcome, welcome.”

“Thank you.” Goray's brilliant smile demanded another. He was very black, and his imposing head sat on a short neck; a small, upturned nose lent his round face good humor, possibly because it had to support a large pair of horn-rimmed spectacles. His hair was graying. His bare forearms were thick around. So was his belly. As he sat down, his cane chair creaked softly in anguish.

There were a dozen tables and many other diners, all men. In one corner, alone, sat a man Morrison took to be a Portuguese: dark curly hair, hooked nose, mustache. Goray was still smiling. On each table stood a small lamp emitting dirty yellow light, and as Morrison made himself comfortable he was bewildered by the insane fancy that this was a reunion, that he had been—that the room itself—the wooden tables—raffia lampshades—the murmur, the tinkle and clink, the laughter—impossible. Buck up, Morrison. The tropics.

“This is where I always eat,” Goray said. “Plain and good and not expensive. A drink?”

Philips and Morrison took rum and water. Goray ordered a whisky-soda and named his brand. “So. This is your first time here?”

“Yes.”

“And what do you think of our country?”

“It will be the ruin of me.”

And it went on like that for some minutes. Behind him, abruptly, the thrum of a guitar; he turned to see a troubadour in black trousers and a red shirt picking his way through the room. He passed their table and went to a wicker chair, sitting with his back to the screen and smiling a performer's dead smile. He bore, aside from the guitar, what looked like a twelve-ounce tumbler of rum, and his first tune was very sad but crowded with notes.

With their third drink Goray said, “To the bridge. To the bridge. A brilliant bridge. Will it fall down?”

Morrison was shocked, and set down his glass. “Of course not.”

“No offense, old man. Tell him about Gimbo while I drink.” Goray grinned gleefully and took a long swallow. His fat hands moved swiftly, like a magician's, as Philips spoke, and there appeared as if from nowhere a cigarette case, a lighter, flame, gouts of smoke.

“Gimbo was the first bridge we built after independence,” Philips said. There was despair in his tone, but as he went on, it became wistfulness and then amusement. “No problem at all: a narrow river, a brook really, and all we needed was solid abutments and some twelve-meter girders. But we took it quite seriously, and built well. When we were ready for the girders we were all rather excited; I remember the craneman was sweating and shaking. You will meet him. We got the first girder up and swung it out and lowered it gently, slowly, more slowly, no one breathing, and when it was perfectly aligned we lowered it the last bit, and it came down, and down, and down, right through the gap, until it was practically in the water. So we hauled it up and measured the gap, which was just right, and then we measured the girder and it was eleven meters. All of them were.” He was smiling now. Goray shook with laughter; his chair creaked. “So we went after the contractor, a Syrian I believe, who had ordered these beams from abroad and wanted us to declare war immediately, because he had bought them from a socialist government and redress would be difficult. This reached our cabinet and we made representations, insulting a sovereign nation. We were preparing a formal protest when Goray had the idea of doing an inventory at the steelyard. The contractor—what was his name?” Goray shrugged happily—“had erected a long shed with posts every few meters marked to separate the different lengths of girder. And he had begun by stacking the girders to the left of the marker, but in time there had been confusion and some were stacked to the right, so everything in the ten-meter bay was nine meters long, and so on. In the thirteen-meter bay were all the twelve-meter girders we could use in a year. So we trucked the short ones back, a hundred and twenty-five miles through the bush, and replaced them, and made a formal apology, and thus averted world war three. Building a bridge is not so simple here.”

Goray giggled. “And I was promoted, for my brilliant suggestion. What do you think of that?”

“It's very funny,” Morrison said politely.

“And very inefficient and typical of a backward country.” Goray smiled still but the mirth was gone away.

“I've seen the phrase in the newspapers,” Morrison said slowly. “I never knew it was used in conversation.”

“It is better than ‘primitive,'” Philips said easily.

“Or ‘savage,'” Goray said not so easily.

“I believe the politicians now say ‘developing.'” Morrison's tone was light but his hands trembled. “You have no monopoly on mistakes.”

Goray glowed, and was lively again. “That is true,” he cried. “That is true. The only real democracy. An equality of ineptitude. Well! Now we can eat. Or would you like another?”

They liked another, and drank beer with the meal; Goray ate a stew of lamb and tomatoes, and Philips and Morrison had something called a cook-pot, finely chopped beef with peppers and spices. It required seas of beer. Goray's appetite was as awesome as his good cheer. He chewed and chattered, gestured and bubbled, belched and laughed. He mentioned Erasmus and spoke once in Latin. He talked of the distillation of sea-water and the glories of nuclear power-plants. He said that painting always foreshadowed political change, and told them why, and Morrison did not understand. Morrison swilled and listened. Soon Goray came back to his own country and went on about animism and sculpture. “That you may call primitive,” he said. “There it is all right because that is the accepted name for art conceived in the simple and natural spirit. However refined the technique, you see.” Morrison did not see, but nodded. “That spirit produced remarkable works, and not merely works of art. My people, for example, had traditional and effective sanitary arrangements when the English were still defecating in public parks.” He chortled. “Did you know that? In public parks. In London. And because it would have been embarrassing to be recognized, they turned their backs to the road. How elegant. The century of your Doctor Johnson. Your Mozart. Your American Revolution. In the public parks.” He gobbled his lamb.

Morrison roared laughter, and Goray paused. “You did not know that?” he said. “That strikes you as very funny?”