The Writer and the World (34 page)

They all went back then to the Malik house. Chadee went to the kitchen and drank a glass of water. Yeates parked the jeep. Kidogo cleaned his cutlass. Parmassar and Abbott sat side by side on the kitchen steps.

The telephone in the kitchen rang. It didn’t awaken Malik’s wife or children. Chadee answered the phone. It was Malik, telephoning from Abbott’s mother’s house. Was everything all right? Malik asked. Chadee said yes. When Yeates, coming in just then, asked about the telephone, and Chadee told him, Yeates “blew”—he gave, that is, a sigh of relief. It was eight o’clock.

At half-past eight Malik came back with Jamal. Malik said, “Is the tree planted?” Agriculture, the commune, the life of labour: Malik always had his own coded way with language. Abbott wasn’t sure if anyone answered. Malik asked how deep the hole was, and everyone gave a different depth. He said they should put on a couple of loads of manure.

Agricultural conversation: that was all that Jamal could say he had heard, after his morning’s drive to Abbott’s mother’s house, and his cup of coffee with the old lady. Because it had apparently been decided that Jamal should be involved in no way. Jamal had to see nothing and hear nothing; and had to be able to say that Benson had just gone away, taking her things. That remained to be done: getting rid of Benson’s things. And Jamal was not to see; and the two English visitors at the commune were not to see or suspect; and Malik’s wife and two daughters, and Malik’s secretarial assistant, who was coming in that morning. Everyone had to see only another busy commune day.

It had been planned in detail. There were seven men in all (leaving out the English visitor), and their movements that morning and afternoon had been plotted in advance. Malik, after that agricultural conversation, announced a commune building job. They were going to Parmassar’s mother’s house, to help the poor lady rebuild her kitchen. It wasn’t far away. Abbott, Kidogo, Chadee, Yeates and Parmassar himself were sent ahead in the jeep. Malik and Jamal came later. They broke down the old kitchen and sketched out a plan for the new one. But they didn’t have cement and sand. Malik sent Chadee and Kidogo in the jeep back to Christina Gardens, to get sand and a bag of cement from his yard—it was a day of movement like this, movement and camouflage.

When they got to Malik’s yard, Kidogo disappeared, leaving Chadee to load the cement and sand by himself. Chadee loaded up, and looked for Kidogo. He couldn’t find him. It was one of Malik’s daughters who told Chadee that Kidogo was in Jamal’s house across the road. Chadee went to the house—where less than twenty-four hours before he had wished Benson a happy new year—and found Kidogo in Jamal’s and Benson’s bedroom.

Kidogo—doing his job—was packing Benson’s clothes and papers. He had already packed one bag and wrapped it in cloth; he was packing a second. He told Chadee to bring the jeep round. When Chadee went to Malik’s yard to get the jeep, he had a little fright. Malik’s secretarial assistant asked for a lift to the Arima taxi stand. Chadee explained about the sand and cement and said he would send Steve Yeates to give her a lift; and the girl didn’t insist. He took the jeep round to Jamal’s and Kidogo threw in the bags with Benson’s things.

Malik was waiting for them at Parmassar’s mother’s house. Chadee reversed the jeep right into the yard, and Malik and Kidogo took the bags
and put them in the boot of Malik’s car. The sand and cement were unloaded, and concrete was mixed for the new kitchen. Parmassar’s mother and sisters had prepared lunch for the working party. But Chadee didn’t eat; he just had some fruit juice. When he came out of the house after the lunch he saw that somebody had put some dry wood in the jeep. And then Malik and Yeates took the bags with Benson’s things from the boot of Malik’s car and put them back in the jeep.

Chadee, Abbott and Kidogo were told to go in the jeep with Yeates. As they drove off, Yeates said they were going “up the river” to burn Benson’s clothes. They stopped at a filling station in Arima and bought some kerosene, and they drove eight miles to Guanapo Heights, beside the Guanapo River. Yeates left the three men there, with the wood and kerosene and the bags. And he gave them a message from Malik: they were to keep the fire burning, because in an hour’s time Malik and his children were coming to the river to bathe.

Chadee stood guard while Abbott and Kidogo got a fire going on the riverbank with the wood and the kerosene. They burned Benson’s clothes and papers piece by piece. Certain things couldn’t be burned. Chadee buried these a short distance away, digging a hole two feet deep. There was less of a rush now than in the morning, and the digging came more easily to him. Kidogo and Abbott left Chadee for a while; and Chadee, doing as he had been told, looked for more wood and kept the fire going. When Kidogo and Abbott came back they were carrying fruit in one of the bags into which Benson’s things had been stuffed earlier: it was an extra precautionary touch.

Shortly afterwards, keeping strict time, Steve Yeates drove up with the jeep, and he had brought a whole party: Malik, Malik’s two daughters, Jamal, and the young Englishman who was a guest in the commune. They all bathed in the river, and then they warmed themselves at the fire. No one asked about the fire. Malik didn’t ask Abbott or Kidogo or Chadee any questions.

Blood in the morning, fire in the afternoon. But to an observer who wasn’t looking for special clues, to someone on the outside seeing only the busyness with car and jeep and sand and cement, it would only have been a good commune day: constructive work in the morning, and then a bathing party in a tropical wood.

That bathing party, with the fire on the riverbank: it was the crowning conception of an intricate day. Like an episode in a dense novel, it served
many purposes and had many meanings. And it had been devised by a man who was writing a novel about himself, settling accounts with the world, filling pages of the cheap writing pad and counting the precious words as he wrote, anxious for world fame (including literary fame): a man led to lunacy by all the ideas he had been given of who he was, and now, in the exile of Arima, under the influence of Jamal, with an illusion of achieved power. Malik had no skills as a novelist, not even an elementary gift of language. He was too self-absorbed to process experience in any rational way or even to construct a connected narrative. But when he transferred his fantasy to real life, he went to work like the kind of novelist he would have liked to be.

Such plotting, such symbolism! The blood of the calf at Christmas time, the blood of Gale Benson in the new year. And then, at the end of the sacrificial day, the cleansing in the river, with Benson’s surrogate pyre on the bank. So many other details: so many things had had to be worked out. Neither Chadee nor Abbott (with their special anxieties) had been left alone for any length of time during the day; both men had always been under the eye of Kidogo or Steve Yeates. And Jamal had always been sheltered. He had been at Abbott’s mother’s house while Benson was being killed and buried; and he had been at Parmassar’s mother’s house, helping with the kitchen, when Kidogo was clearing away Benson’s clothes and papers from the bedroom that had been hers and Jamal’s.

It had been thought out over many weeks. And it worked. Benson had always been withdrawn, and now she was not missed. For a fortnight or more everybody in the two houses at Christina Gardens stayed together. The two English visitors remained, the woman Simmonds continuing in her “total involvement” with Steve Yeates; towards the end there was even some talk of a restaurant that she and Yeates might run together.

Chadee didn’t go home. On the evening of the murder Malik told him that he and Parmassar, the two Indians in the group, had become “members for life”; and that night, after he had gone with Steve Yeates to fetch his clothes, Chadee slept again in the bedroom of the servants’ quarters in Malik’s house. Later he was given a room in Jamal’s house, and he began to mow the lawn and do other yard jobs.

But then the commune Christmas party began to break up. The two English visitors went away. And—eighteen days after the murder—Jamal and Kidogo went away, back to Boston. Jamal acknowledged
Malik as the master, and Malik thought of himself as the master. But Malik had grown to need Jamal more than he knew. Without Jamal’s own lunacy, his exaltation, his way with words, his vision of the master, Malik’s fantasies of power grew wilder and unfocused, without art, the rages of a gangster. He thought of kidnapping the wife of a bank manager; he ordered Abbott to plan the “liquidation” of a family. And then, for no reason except that of blood, and because he was now used to the idea of killing with a cutlass, he killed Joseph Skerritt.

It was the murder of Skerritt that finally unhinged Steve Yeates, “Muhammed Akbar,” Supreme Captain of the Fruit of Islam. Yeates dealt in racial hate; he was pure in his hate; and he couldn’t understand why Skerritt had been killed. Every time he looked through his window he saw Skerritt’s grave; and the fast that Malik ordered after the killing of Skerritt didn’t help. They were all weakened and perhaps made a little light-headed by four days of fasting when they went on the excursion to the dangerous bay of Sans Souci; and Yeates, when he got into trouble with the strong currents, seemed at a certain moment to have decided not to listen to the shouts of people anxious to save him, not to struggle, to surrender. Abbott thought that Yeates drowned himself; and Abbott thought that before he went down Yeates gave a final wave with his left hand.

That was the beginning of the end of the commune. Blood didn’t keep them together for long. Abbott helped Chadee and Parmassar to escape; Abbott himself went to Tobago; Malik went to Guyana, and the house in Christina Gardens burned down.

Fifty-five days after the killing of Benson, Chadee took a police inspector to Guanapo Heights and showed where he had buried those things of Benson’s that couldn’t be burned. This was the police inventory, which Chadee certified:

Malik appealed many times against the death sentence. And it was only when legal arguments were exhausted, and the appeal was on the grounds of cruelty—on the grounds that, after the long delay, the carrying out of the death sentence would be an act of cruelty—it was only then that the point was made that Malik was mad. The point, if it had been made at the beginning, might have saved Malik’s life. But, for too many people in London and elsewhere, Malik had embodied, at one and the same time, the vicious black man and the good black cause. A plea of insanity would have made nonsense of a whole school of theatre; and among the people abroad who supported Malik there were those who continued to see his conviction for murder as an act of racial and political persecution. So Malik played out to the end the role that had been given him.

He was hanged in the Royal Gaol in central Port of Spain in May 1975, three years and four months after the killing of Benson. His wife sat in a square nearby. There was a small silent crowd with her in the square, waiting for the sound of the trapdoor at eight, hanging time. The body of the hanged man was taken in a coffin to the Golden Grove Prison, not far from Arima; and there barebacked prisoners in shorts carried the coffin to its grave in the prison grounds.

Chadee was sentenced to death, but this was later commuted to life imprisonment. Abbott, after his twenty years for the murder of Skerritt, was sentenced to death for his part in the murder of Benson. His was the true agony: he rotted for nearly six years in a death cell, and was hanged only in April 1979. He never became known outside Trinidad, this small, muscular man with the straight back, the soldierly demeanour, the very pale skin, and the underslept tormented eyes. He was not the X; he became nobody’s cause; and by the time he was hanged that caravan had gone by.

1979

THE CONGO
, which used to be a Belgian colony, is now an African kingdom and is called Zaire. It appears to be a nonsense name, a sixteenth-century Portuguese corruption, some Zairois will tell you, of a local word for “river.” So it is as if Taiwan, reasserting its Chinese identity, were again to give itself the Portuguese name Formosa. The Congo River is now called the Zaire, as is the local currency, which is almost worthless.

The man who has made himself king of this land of the three Zs—
pays, fleuve, monnaie
—used to be called Joseph Mobutu. His father was a cook. But Joseph Mobutu was educated; he was at some time, in the Belgian days, a journalist. In 1960, when the country became independent, Mobutu was thirty, a sergeant in the local Force Publique. The Force Publique became the Congolese National Army. Mobutu became the colonel and commander, and through the mutinies, rebellions and secessions of the years after independence he retained the loyalty of one para-troop brigade. In 1965, as General Mobutu, he seized power; and as he has imposed order on the army and the country so his style has changed, and become more African. He has abandoned the name of Joseph and is now known as Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga.

As General Mobutu he used to be photographed in army uniform. Now, as Mobutu Sese Seko, he wears what he has made, by his example, the Zairois court costume. It is a stylish version of the standard two-piece suit. The jacket has high, wide lapels and is buttoned all the way down; the sleeves can be long or short. A boldly patterned cravat replaces the tie, which has more or less been outlawed; and a breast-pocket handkerchief matches the cravat. On less formal occasions—when he goes
among the people—Mobutu wears flowered shirts. Always, in public, he wears a leopard-skin cap and carries an elaborately carved stick.