2

The round black head bobbed like a rotted melon, with sunlight beating off the ashen hair; the body dangled. Not much nose left, two fingers missing; a mis-made marionette, even the eyes dulled and uncaring. He hung on one rude crutch at the hotel gate: the porters had not come yet to drive him away. His bad hand begged patiently. He spoke in a language Morrison did not know; but Morrison understood. Morrison could not look away, and for several seconds they stood in the morning light, a rest in the staccato of a wide avenue, breathing the city’s brown breath. The black man seemed to focus then; his eyes brightened, and he looked into Morrison’s with interest, as though he had waited many days for a man who would not turn away. But Morrison did turn away. He found a small bill and pressed it into that hand, his own fingers crawling and tingling at the touch, and then he turned away, and went back to his room, and washed. When he came out again the man was gone. “There are not many,” Philips said later. “There is a small colony on an island offshore but we have few trained people. We need our doctors and nurses for the healthy. They are almost all white and with independence many of them left.” He shrugged. “Are there many in America?”

“We have hospitals for them.”

“Ah yes. You keep them out of sight.”

That was on the third morning. The hotel squatted beside the main avenue between a night club and a commercial building. There were two storeys of it around a square patio and in the patio was a swimming pool. The rooms were perfectly anonymous and of no country, implacably modern and indistinguishable from rooms in Paramaribo and Lagos, Jakarta and Manila, Bombay and Kingston: plaster, tile, fixtures, bureau, desk, air-conditioner, sterilized tumblers. Prints of exotic flora. Letterhead stationery: Dear Mother, here I am in Persepolis and there is plenty of toilet tissue. Microscopic bars of gift-wrapped soap. Black plastic ash-trays. We are turtles and not travelers, and all over the world identical shells await us.

The avenue outside was broad, parted by an esplanade of grass and flowering shrubbery. In daylight traffic was ceaseless, bicycles and cars and trucks and dogs: small smooth-coated hounds of no breed and various muddy colors. They were everywhere, and they had learned to move with traffic as their ancestors had moved among panthers and snakes; they loped carefree among the wheels, pausing here and there to piss or dung, and they were often killed, leaving pellets and corpses for the beetles and scavenger-birds outside department stores, airlines offices, government ministries and barber shops. The scavenger-birds were officious and awkward, not carrion crows but much smaller, citified, pecking and ripping and fluttering up in raucous clouds to escape cars and trucks; bicyclists avoided them, veering fastidiously around the maggoty meat. The streets reeked of heat and flesh, flowers and exhaust, dung and the river; on the first day Morrison absorbed the reek, on the second he liked it, on the third he forgot it.

He was in khaki and sneakers by then, his nose and forearms lightly sunburnt. He ignored beggars if not lepers; his education had begun. That first morning they had ordered bacon and eggs at six o’clock, and he had been curious: peccary bacon? bird-of-paradise eggs? A young and very small Indian bellhop whose name was Gordon had taken his bag and shown them to a ground-floor room maintained, in honor of his northern eminence, at a temperature of sixty degrees. His sweat dried like ice in seconds. When he asked Gordon to still the machine, Gordon favored him with a sparkling bow, as though Morrison had complimented the country on its superlative climate. Philips and Morrison returned to the warmth of the morning air and took a table beside the pool. The sun was not yet high enough to brighten the patio, nor was it needed; in ninety-five degrees of heat they sat beside the still waters. “What do we have to do in town, and when do we go to the site?”

“In two or three days,” Philips said. “You must buy clothes. Khakis, sandals, a hat, underclothes, and so forth. We will inspect the road on the way out. Although there is not much to be done if you do not approve. You will live in a caravan, as you know, and our field office is also a caravan; a trailer, as you say. They are better than tents. Your blueprints and papers are filed there. The camp is some four miles from the site.” He went on. They had thirty men now, most unskilled, some who knew carpentry and concrete, and the best craneman in the country, who had mastered all the heavy machinery available. The men slept in hammocks. Late every Saturday they boarded lorries and were brought to the capital for their weekend.

“And they are brought back on Monday drunk and maimed.”

“No,” Philips said. “Hung over and maimed.”

“Who’s the foreman?”

“Ramesh. An Indian, about sixty, very capable. Softspoken and always calm, a bit of a philosopher. You may be disturbed by the relatively slow pace. Was that mentioned?”

“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?”

“No, no,” Morrison said, when he could talk. “I was remembering my mother. ‘Bernard,’ she said, ‘there are some things we do not discuss at the table.’”

The guitarist drifted off and came back with a full glass. He was not bothering to smile.

“So they bought tractors,” Goray said. They were drinking brandy. The room was hot and full of smoke and music. So was Morrison; also too much food and too much drink. Possibly too much Goray. “All very modern. A revolution in agriculture. Of course they were spending money, which we do not have, for the equivalent of labor, which we have too much of. And then the tractors were used only a few weeks a year.” Equivlint of laybah, he said. Few wiks a yah. “And then petrol and oil are expensive. And mechanics are scarce. So the tractors rusted and died. But in isolated spots the harvest went up that year, so the other farmers believed that they could not be better farmers without expensive equipment.”

The Portuguese was softly blurred. He was reading a newspaper and smoking a black cigar. The guitarist had tilted his chair against a post and was sitting on the back of his neck.

“Some of them—it goes back a long, long way, before the migrations—knock out two front teeth, upper or lower. Not just a barbaric custom; no. Lockjaw. In case of lockjaw they can still be fed. You must not make the mistake of thinking us primitive.”

Morrison looked to Philips for help; Philips avoided his glance. “Developing,” Morrison said.

“Ah yes.”

It was banana brandy. Goray loved it. Morrison tried to resist but now Philips’s eyes warned him.

“You people are afraid of life because you think that happiness demands punishment. So you forestall the fates by taking on the miseries of other people. People that you do not honestly care a fig for. You become crusaders, and annoy everybody.”

“Well, I don’t know.” Morrison was very uncomfortable. His own country, after all. Did he talk about Goray’s country that way? No. By God. No. “Anyway that sounds out of date.”

“Ah, no. There is a missionary here, one Montgomery …”

The Portuguese was gone but the room was still quite smoky. The guitarist was sitting on the floor, and now all his tunes were sad tunes. His woman had run off to Rio. There were no women in the restaurant. Waiters yawned.

“You have been asked to love your neighbor as yourself, which is plainly impossible. All your religions and philosophies ask the impossible. So you feel terrible in public about everything and make speeches about saving other countries from fates worse than death. That way you need not admit that you do not love them at all. Frankly I can think of no fate worse than death.”

“I’m just an engineer.” Philips would not help him. God damn Philips.

Plink plink. The guitarist lay flat, plinking.

“All right. Just one more. We leave in the morning, you know.”

Goray poured.

“You are évolué. You are beyond death. Instead of death you have hospitals and flowers and heaven. Here we still have death. That is why you cannot win your small wars. Because you are fighting people who know death. You refuse to know it.”

“I know death,” Morrison said. “I have been up to my ass in death.” The room had tilted slightly, or perhaps it was his chair. He seemed to be smoking, or at any rate holding, a very bad cigar. “Covered with blood. Amputated arms and legs stacked in a corner.”

“Not the same,” Goray interrupted.

“I would bloody well like to know why not,” Morrison bellowed.

On the bare white ceiling a green lizard flicked his green tail. Plink.

“I don’t know what the hell to say to you. Except that you’re wrong. A lot of us do care. You seem to know a hell of a lot about a place you’ve never been to.” Morrison knocked over his glass: tinkle, ooze.

The room was almost empty. At one table a waiter slept, gray head pillowed on his crossed arms. Goray was huge. He puffed smoke. The lizard was gone. The horizontal guitarist stared dully toward them; with his thumb he plinkplinkplinked. Morrison rubbed his eyes. “All right,” he said. “Just one more.” Philips! Philips!

“Unless you admit that you are not more than momentarily perturbed by distant cruelties, you will always be capable of committing them. Until you admit that you do not really weep for Hiroshima, you will make no start on preventing another.”

“God-damn right I don’t weep for Hiroshima. It saved ham a mill—half a million lives.”

“Nagasaki, then.”

“That too.”

“They were ready to surrender.”

“They why didn’t they?”

“You had to forestall the Russians.”

“Not me. I was in a hospital in France. And what’s wrong with sore—with forestalling the Russians? I don’t want to kill people!” Morrison was suddenly shouting; the old waiter stirred. “I hate killing! I never killed anybody and I don’t want to kill anybody!”

The guitarist was flat on the floor and apparently unconscious. The room heaved and buckled. Goray swam toward him and away. Morrison was covered with sweat and his own hot fat.

“Well, I know that you would not hesitate to drop one on a colored country. I suppose you might even drop one on a white country. And then enjoy an orgy of self-recrimination.”

“You must hate us,” Morrison said. Tears rose to his eyes; they brimmed. Ridiculous. “We did hesitate. We do hesitate. Who’s we? I hesitate. There. I sure God hesitate.”

“But who are you?”

Morrison brightened. “Now that’s a question I can answer. I am Bernard Morrison, master of civil engineering and acknowledged worrier. Full of banana brandy, and sure of only one thing in life: it is time to go home. I know that. In my blood and my bones I know it. And my belly.”

Goray was gone and the night was starry; stars swooped and swam. Morrison’s arm was around Philips’s shoulders, and when he looked down there was the billygoat, sneering and yellow-eyed.

“The devil,” he said. “That was it. When I was a boy, they told me what the devil looked like, and there he is.”

“Just a little he-goat,” Philips said soothingly.

“You’re a great help. Where were you when I needed you? You let that fat bastard tromp all over me.”

“This way,” Philips said. “Easy now.”

Outside the hotel Morrison shook him off.

“Forty years ago,” Philips said, “they hanged his father for political reasons.”