The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel (23 page)

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Authors: Rahul Bhattacharya

BOOK: The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel
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Caraca days of altitude and sunshine at twenty-two degrees. The central districts cool and lime, the streets selling mounds of yellow panties,
Bush Assassino
scrawled on walls, music stalls sampling Alphaville and a-ha, wheelchair queues awaiting state concessions for the handicapped. And the plazas, plazas upon plazas, the mandatory Plaza Bolivar with the statue of the besworded liberator, plazas with stone fountains, with tribal flautists, Latin Americans. The plaza where we first lost each other.
We were on steps, I between her legs. She sketched. I drifted into sleep on her sunny thigh.
She prodded me to show the sketch: the pillared cafe on the far side, the edge of the fountain, a boy with a dinky car. It obliterated movement and crowd, yet it caught the essentials so that when I gazed up I could not for a moment see what she’d omitted. I asked her if I could have it.
‘I’ll keep it with the bird,’ I told her. ‘You know, I always thought about the crayons. Was because of the baby.’
She smiled.
‘He draw nice too. He got to learn to loose up he fingers. Mummy workin with him.’
I visualised the homely scene. I could see a bottomhouse in the country, sun outside, a clothesline, a bench of old 2×4s, a drawing child, an observing mother, a teaching grandmother.
I asked something that had been on my mind.
‘What happens if the big man find out about me?’
‘He gon take a gun and bust a hole in your head.’
‘Oooh. Exciting.’
I laughed. She didn’t. She ran her pencil on the back of my neck.
‘Why does he care?’
‘Cause he a fockup. He want me always to be there for him.’
‘Why don’t you ask him to fuck off? Give him back his house and ask him to fuck off.’
‘Is easy to say. Who going to look after the maintenance?’
‘You still love him?’
She thought about it for a while.
‘I don’t know. I give up on all that now. I just want to leave Guyana.’
‘And the baby?’
‘Is for he I want to get away.’
She played with my hair, looking into it as if for something.
I became consumed by her predicament, the tug of her strands – her youth, her dependence, her independence, her responsibility.
‘You ever wish you had waited awhile for the baby?’
Her fingers froze on my head.
‘What you mean?’
I didn’t answer. I could feel her posture stiffen.
‘You mean I shoulda throw away the baby?’
‘That’s not what I’m saying.’
‘Is what you meant.’
‘No, it’s not. I just wondered what—’
‘What. Be a sweetman when time right and then ask for kill the—’
‘It’s not killing.’
‘It is fockin killing.’
‘I’m not even saying that.’
‘You are.’
‘I’m not, and I didn’t.’
‘You are.’
‘I’m
not
. I just wanted to know, you were so young then, I just thought if you ever feel it happened too early—’
‘The baby ain’t a piece of toy, you know. He got a fockin right to live, you know.’
It was far too sharp.
‘He does. But you not there for him right now, are you. And you don’t know where the fucking big man is.’
She tossed the pad off her lap. She was on her feet.
‘You a real fock-up, you know. A real fockin fock-up.’
She stood there a few moments. I looked away. What a misrepresentation. She began to walk off. I determinedly faced away, fixing my gaze at a far end of the square; children with paper masks ran after one another. I could sense her getting further away. I did not want to have anything to do with it. When I turned she’d covered a good distance. She was walking past the central fountain. She had a moment of hesitation. She looked to see if I was coming. I wasn’t. I was wishing for her to come back, I was challenging her to go on.
She turned and quickened. The sun caught her brilliant highlights. She was a blur of skin and clothes. She was merging with other blurs. She was a point. And then indiscernible. I stayed rooted to the spot, blandly looking at the sketch in my hand.
 
 
CORO, the thirty-first of December. Not a soul trod the streets, not even a dog. These were streets of the like I had never seen before. Narrow, bare streets tunnelled by high looming walls of peeling paints, once bright oranges and greens worn down to suggestions
of their former selves. The doors were enormous and forbidden. The windows were of coloured glass, set behind baroque grilles. Underfoot were cobblestones and overhead a fading sky.
We had travelled all day to reach Coro, taken three buses. I had found her sucking on an orange ice lolly on a bench in Plaza Bolivar. I apologised; she conceded she could have handled it better. We kissed fingertips. It felt like the most intimate thing we had done. I suggested we’d been here long enough, perhaps too long so let us, jaan, go away somewhere nice for the new year. She agreed quietly it was a good idea.
Part of the reason I wanted to leave was to find more romantic accommodation. Our small, sun-starved room in Caracas had been much too harsh. Everything about it said: it’s a jungle out there, man must hustle. We’d made inquiries in the city centre, but the inns were full.
But here in Coro the posadas were abandoned. Their doors opened after minutes of knocking. Their walls were mustard and dim-lit, their furniture was old and rich, their open courtyards filled with sad pots. We walked on in simple wonderment and settled in the third such. It too felt like a place where ghosts rested with roses in their teeth, but with the crucial difference they were well-intentioned.
Our room had a fifteen-foot ceiling and a television. We watched jaunty salsa, and she tried to take me jauntily through the bits she knew. In retaliation I taught her the bits of yoga I knew. In the nude we did the tree pose, facing each other on single right legs, left legs bent into our thighs, palms stretched above our heads in a namaste. She stood tall on her toes. My nipples were lodged over hers, her breasts were smashed against my ribs. I was hard, pressing against her navel. ‘I ain’t feel like a tree at all, bai,’ she said through suppressed laughter. We collapsed into tangled limbs.
We had begun to go bareback. It happened first in a stairwell at the National Gallery in Caracas, and repeatedly thereafter. There was no thought to disease. I knew her now. I knew her like a quick addiction. I knew the bittersour smell of her armpits and her
vagina, the mingle of our fluids. I knew my nerve endings against hers. Did she feel it so? Was it true that a woman’s pleasure cannot be approached by a man? We were kissing big. Her breath was all over me. She was pressing my nipples till they hurt. She was bearing down, wining down.
We were wasted on the floor. Her hair was spread across my torso. It occurred to me that the one true intimacy we had was sexual. She would tell me about dicks and how they felt, about watching ‘blues’ with boys. She asked me things I had never been asked and I, surprising myself, answered.
With climax behind us, the dim energy of the posada was nibbling at our mood. In my miscalculating head in this courtyard here would have been violins, accordions, champagne, hands around dancing waists. But it was weak lights, large flower pots and the sound of the simpleton caretaker watching television in a dark corner. There was no food or drink. I was hungry.
She wore a new red and white top from Caracas that showed bellybutton and we made into those haunted streets again. Walking past the white cathedral, blinding as noonday snow even by night, we entered the Plaza Bolivar. Here were empty benches and closed shops bleached in sickly halogen. At the next cathedral, grand and lemon yellow, there was a service on. She said a prayer from outside, standing on the cobblestone with head bowed and hands clasped. She said her mother would like it. How vulnerable she felt at that moment.
We walked on. A ragged wind blew. The restaurants and cafes remained closed, the doors remained inscrutable. It occurred to me that perhaps when they said this was the capital in the sixteenth century, there was something to be gleaned from that. Maybe we were just a little late.
We met a broad boulevard heralded by two drunks on inverted crates as though they’d grown out of them. There was a lit cornershop. Its front shutter was down, but they were making the final transactions of the year through a side grille, a pa and son,
with every movement you could see the son turning into the pa. There was something eerie about them, as if they knew our gravest secrets. We bought a bottle of apple wine. Comida, I said to them, gesturing to my stomach. They pointed in a direction and we obediently set out towards there. The suggestions were worthless. I looked up the guidebook again. Closed. Closed. Closed. It was the land of the dead.
We drank the
manzana vino
, which tasted like wine and cider both. We wandered off the broad avenues and into the streets. Neither sound nor light emerged from the homes we passed. They felt like they had been built as haunted houses. Sometimes we tried to push our faces through window grilles like robbers. Once or twice a car with loud music passed us. Somewhere behind a crimson wall a confidential orgy must be soaked in a pit of grapes.
Older and older streets appeared, pale and cracked. An hour into our futility a great wind began to blow, pulling dead leaves and bits of paper off the ground into our eyes. Her mane, having long shrugged off the effects of ironing, conflagrated into an electric storm, streaks like lightning. She looked sassy. We were back on a boulevard, and in a hotel doorway an Arab-looking man in bright white sneakers pointed down the road. He held up his fingers one by one. ‘Five blocks. You go five blocks. Enjoy.’
We walked fifteen. The wind blinded us with debris. We made turns. Lured into the chase again – I found there was something addictive to this futility.
We strayed into the oldest ancient streets. These were affluent now. Here and there black cars gleamed like polished hearses. Otherwise the same deserted howl rang through them. Yet we walked, curving along, crazy in the blowing night, until we chanced upon a vision: a sliver of miraculous light streaming out of a door left ajar. At the threshold one could hear the sound of people, maybe even the tinkle of glass. The sound of the chatter was refined. I could not tell if it was a restaurant or a home. What was indisputable was there were humans inside.
As the prettier one, it was decided she would go in to see. I could see bits of the courtyard as she entered, the edge of an ice sculpture, canapés, backs of suits, strapless shoulders. She returned in a few seconds with word that ‘place fancy’. It wasn’t clear if it was a restaurant or a home.
But the sortie had alerted the Coro gentry to our presence. A bearer arrived, followed by a large man in a black tuxedo and shining waxed hair. His face was fair, fleshy, full of folds. He had beady, diverging eyes. I knew the type, the fleshy tycoon: it was universal. He studied us with the particular self-confidence and self-indulgence of a man who’d made his fortune on the strength of sizing things up quickly. He had such distracting eyes, not quite ‘looking London, going Tokyo’, but just a little obtuse, so that he seemed to be addressing your ears. He spoke in an American accent. He was amazed to find us here. I conceded our own amazement.
How I wished the magnate, the possessor of this fabulous colonial house and many others, this baron of petroleum, would say, come on in compadres, come on in and partake of my banquet. And precisely such a wish appeared to be in the fulfilment when he announced in a loud voice, as though for an audience: ‘Since this is your first time in Venezuela … ’ – I began to smile and blush, I thought of asparagus and prawn, of lovely pig, of champagne, strawberry dessert, almost started to say,
that’s so nice of you
– ‘ … I would like to offer you a drink.’
He went inside and returned with two plastic cups. Rum and coke. ‘The finest rum in Venezuela.’ Yuh mudderskunt, yuh jackarse, yuh pattabrain, I wanted to tell him, yuh ever taste a Guyanese rum, the greatest fockin honey in this universe that you coming out here with this piece of lil plastic fuckery, get the fuck outta here yuh piece of shit.
We accepted it and thanked him several times and departed, rum in one hand, manzana vino in the other.
After two hours of walking like this, through slim streets and bigger avenues, past minor unpeopled plazas lit with harrowing
fairylights, we were on the outskirts of town. A black road and a closed gas station. We’d walked Coro over. Our legs were aching, our hunger was debilitating. The world never felt so large as in little Coro and we were on the perimeter of the earth poised to walk off the edge.
We touched hands, but there was a static dissonance between us. At the start of the hunt we had been chatting. The last thirty minutes were completely silent. She was negotiating the space between disappointment, anger and helplessness, each kept in check by the other. And I, for the first time in our entanglement, I felt I’d bitten off more than I could chew.

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