The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel (18 page)

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Authors: Rahul Bhattacharya

BOOK: The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel
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I read the book I’d borrowed from Clarence and Suzette, an old imperialist travel account of these parts by Evelyn Waugh. An hour later de Jesus arrived on a bicycle, left it in the room, and we walked towards the village. There was a white horse on a dark patch of grass. Men without shirts sat with ease on benches under the wonderful streetlights. Young children of all colours cycled oblivious of night.
We ate pizza at a brightly painted brick wall. Across, children were doing: dodge ’em cars! Young girls were playing football versus young boys on an indoor pitch with lights. In the socialist way it was free. It was going on ten. ‘Watch,’ said de Jesus, ‘watch how the youth spending out their energy. They gon go home and sleep now instead of doing crime.’
We ate soursop ice cream, we kicked pebbles. We walked the long way home and de Jesus made off on his bicycle into the free streetlit village of Bonfim, looking very much like a ball on a pin, and I slept my first night in Brazil.
My concrete box faced east. Soon after dawn hellish tongues darted in through the curtainless windows and licked the flesh. There was nobody at the reception, no scope for ice, coffee, water. At seven sharp de Jesus arrived on his bicycle to fetch me for breakfast.
In the morning Bonfim had the feel of a mad empty prairie town. The revelations of the evening had run their course. On this open road, in the malevolent sun, with smouldering grass and that suspicious unmoving white horse, it was a place of the mind. There was incest in those brick and concrete homes, stick-ups in the closed cafes, tatous waiting for the dust to die.
We walked a long time in the savannah heat, strolling the cycle, till we reached a flathouse of gentle blue on a street of brutal red sand. We ate a stellar breakfast of fried eggs and calabresa, seasoned sausages, a single one of which, as I found when I took a frozen pack back to Sheriff Street, when fried with onion and married-man pork constituted a whole meal. In the background a Portuguese soap opera played, watched by members of a family whose relationships to one another I couldn’t quite work out. They spoke both Portuguese and creolese, the latter with a whole different accent so that it was really not creolese any more. As I too had picked up some creolese I reflected I too must sound as ridiculous.
We settled in the veranda with Brazilian coffee which was strong and real. At the faintest sigh of air the sand blew and people spent their days sweeping it out. Our benefactor, elderly Aunty Mimi, spoke lovely, measured English with immaculate pauses and cadences. She talked softly and wisely and watching her sit there, considering the sand from behind her spectacles, I felt she knew everything. She did not have to say much to capture big themes. Bonfim, and even the city of Boa Vista a couple of hours away, they used to be nothing, and she summed up the contrast in development by invoking a mere four words: ‘When Georgetown was Georgetown … ’
I went off to discover the backyard, which yielded the excellent psidium, a fruit not wholly unlike guava I suppose, and hinting at an even greater jam. I was joined in these pursuits by a goldenbrown child with long dark curls, nude but for an underwear of Brasil yellow. We had lengthy stream of consciousness conversations where he spoke in Portuguese and I responded with an assortment
of sounds and faces. He dragged a baby palm frond from across the yard and slapped me with it. He jumped into my lap and whispered and shouted in my ears. There was no more beautiful and vibrant child in the world, and we were happy for at least an hour.
At last de Jesus emerged from the house. Resting his tree-trunk calves on a stump, he looked at me with his green eyes and said in the manner of an emperor:
‘So you step into Brazil as you did wish.’
‘Yes. Thanks, bro.’
‘The truck not going for a couple of days. You wan go back Lethem or check out Boa Vista?’
‘Check out Boa Vista!’
‘Licks gonna share if they catch we.’
‘What could happen?’
‘They could put you in jail.’
‘Leh we go.’
At the bus terminal de Jesus spotted a federal. We hurried out of there and headed for a shared taxi. The road was smooth, straight, wide and without challenge of any sort. Every ten minutes we might pass a bus. A woman beside me did sudoku without once needing to look up. The driver appeared to be asleep. He had the reddest face I ever saw; beside him de Jesus looked positively bleached. The land remained flat, but the vegetation thickened with manicole and ité and every now and then we saw big black and white birds which de Jesus said were called niggercups.
Alighting at Boa Vista, de Jesus gave me a fist bump and said: ‘Boa Vista!’, to which I said: ‘Boa Vista!’ We took a lotacao into the city and walked to a hotel.
A clean governmental vibe had the hotel. There was socialism in the flask of coffee at the reception from which any passer-by could help himself to a plastic cup. At the rear was a pool, where we lounged with Nova Schins to Portuguese pop driven by accordion. When we headed out, plucking fruit from low-hanging berry trees, it was to the meat that awaited at the churrascaria.
Every part of cow and pig was barbecued and racked upon iron rods, and waiters swished them through the large hall with the martial splendour of samurais. Now came a man with ribs, now with tongue, now with the rump, now with pure fat. Brazilians pointed with humid elegance to a portion of the rod and with equal elegance the waiter sliced a piece on to a separate meat plate. People had poetic noses, troubled brown eyes. There were black people and white people and mostly all the in-between shades. De Jesus said ‘it have no Indo-Guyanese and Afro-Guyanese and that kind of thinking here,’ and I said, of course, for it would have to be Indo-Brazilian and Afro-Brazilian even if it came to it. He grunted placidly, which he did when amused. The eaters were graceful and their gluttony casual. They drank a litre of soda with their meal. De Jesus himself threw down two and a half litres of Brazilian Fanta which had real chunks of orange in it, and boasted that when he was a young man he needed five litres of liquid with each meal and another five in between meals. No wonder you move to the land of many waters, I said, eliciting another placid grunt. He heaped his plate with crystals of farine without which no meal for him was a meal. I stayed clear of it. It wore out my enamel.
We took a lotacao and beat about what appeared to be the city centre. There were snackettes with high barstools upon which men sat and read newspapers in serenity. Others sat in the tree-shaded squares playing chess and dominoes, the latter without the Caribbean noise and, de Jesus said, with different rules too. Women had flaming yellow perms, braids made up in buns, oval bellybuttons. Golden arms. The shops were numerous and first-world. There were enormous watermelons in huge supermarkets, hip gaming cafes into which mohawks entered. The scale of the city was large, its avenues broad, its conception European, and afterwards I found out it had been modelled on Paris.
In the evening we walked along a main promenade, and here, enclosed in worthy fences and under floodlights were: a concrete football pitch, a sand football pitch, a handball pitch, a basketball
court, a tennis court. And a go-kart circuit. And mud-bike tracks! Everything except the last two was free, and indeed socialism was carried to such lengths that the medals podium was built to not three but five places.
At the completion of this series, the promenade opened out into an Arc de Triomphe – like gate. Here, on a stage, was a man in bicycle shorts and before him hundreds of all-encompassing hotties. Free aerobics class! The hotties moved on to be replaced by a new set, and on the stage one bicycle-shorts conductor swapped with another. Free dance class. Somewhere were also children bouncing on free trampolines.
Coming from India it was such a marvel to me. And later at night, as de Jesus pulled punts and I read of a two-bit missionary flea-stop called Boa Vista whose inhabitants looked ill, discontented and fleshless, my mind went to bespectacled Aunty Mimi saying ‘When Georgetown was Georgetown …’ and to the minivan of smuggled fake Nikes hurtling down the bruck-up trail of startling red mud through the Cooperative Republic of Guyana.
 
 
WE returned the next day via the dust and grassland of Bonfim. We crossed the ever thinning Takutu, leaving Brazil to our backs, and soon we were in Clarence and Suzette’s yard, lying on hammocks between trees and strumming a guitar.
I felt I’d come out of a dream. The spool had unspooled slow. The senses had detected every change, yet they were unprepared – as there was rainforest and then there was savannah so there was Guyana and then there was Brazil. I walked about Lethem. Walking about, a little tangerine whisky in my head, I felt easy possibility. Boa Vista becoming Boa Vista, Brazzos dancing with fluid harmony under the Arc. The world was out there, to be partaken of, without observation, hindsight.
What an innocent little thing was Lethem. Mountains and grasslands and a football field dropped in between them. O to be
a child kicking a ball in that exact field, at this exact hour of low sun! I liked how the warm sand felt between my toes as I let my slippers sink in. I liked how people cycled in holidaying ways.
I walked further along and came to a little store which sold slippers.
And there, as it happens that men are bedazzled by a fleeting glimpse, so I was. The precise glimpse was a thin bra strap of shocking pink against smooth burntsugar skin. I responded with the involuntary utterance of something stupid, namely: ‘Nice colours.’
She whirls around. Her hair is full going to big, and streaked a long time ago so that only the copper tips glow on the whiplash curls as she turns.
‘What colours?’
Front on, there is the quality of a mane to that wild frizz, a brown that stops short of black. Beneath it her forehead is large, high rather than broad, moistened in the heat. Her eyes burn brown and bright, a touch intimidating.
‘The pink, uh … slippers you got there.’
She glances at the pair in her hands.
‘Is blue slippers.’
‘It’s nothing.’
‘You bin starin.’
‘I was just thinking it looked nice on your skin.’
‘So you
bin
starin.’
A mole on her collar bone, moles on her shoulders. Sweat on her chest. Breathing pores.
‘Not starin really. It just caught my eye. I mean, I might be starin now.’
Her face relaxed a little. The blaze in the eyes switched off. On cue, the cheekbones softened, the lips loosened. Their parting suggested warmth. On their edges the intimation of a smile.
‘People only stare in the zoo, that is what Aunty Horretta did tell me.’
‘Aunty who?’
‘Horretta.’
‘That’s a mighty name.’
‘Well, she nobody to you. So I look like anybody in the zoo?’
She was playing.
‘Like the macaws. They’re pretty.’
‘Them birds is a real festival …’
Re-al fes-ti-val. It was beautiful how she said it, slow, saturated, round-mouth.
‘ … I wonder if you would say tapir or agouti or one of them funny kind of thing.’
‘When I went by the zoo the tapir, it had a hard-on. Was like a fifth leg, it almost touch the ground.’
‘I seen donkey like that.’
‘But think how funny a tapir would look that way.’
She laughed. Some girls with their laughs can make you feel so close to them.
‘So I look like a macaw? Like I got a beak and feather to you?’
‘No. It’s just that someone took joy in making it.’
She threw back her head in complicit exasperation. Cleft between her nostrils.
‘Is the yellow-and-blue macaw I look like, or the red-and-green?’
‘Uh. Let me close my eyes and think.’
‘You must remember to open them again or I won’t be here.’
‘Shh … Yellow and … not blue … green. Yellow and green.’
‘It ain’t have any like that. Funny you say that though. Was green and yellow slippers I was looking for.’
‘Me too!’
‘You look like you full of lie.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘I don’t tell strangers.’
‘We still strangers?’
‘Well, you
is
kyna strange. I thought it was your eyes. But when you close them I find you was still strange.’
‘I should be in the zoo?’
‘Yes. Zoo a nice place for you.’
‘I’d like to be a manatee. They get so much respect. They got they own pond, and everyone come to feed them and stroke them. You live in Lethem?’
‘O lord, you ask plenty question.’
‘I was thinking how nice it must be to live in Lethem.’
‘Be nicer to live over so.’
She pointed towards Brazil.
‘What about over so?’ I pointed the other way.
‘Is nothing there. Sheer savannah.’
‘I thought the coast up that way.’

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