Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

At first I used my profits to make the Feu Follet safer. I engaged a security guard. I put bars on the windows, installed an electronic security system. But then I began to seek safety in money itself. You might say that Mammon became my maman. I do not need to point out what a betrayal this entailed.

Of course it was not just Tristan Smith who was scarred by the events of 20 January. All these years later Efican politicians have not forgotten what happens to those who oppose our great and powerful ally. Even the Blue Party has become, to say the least, pragmatic. Thread all the navigation cable you wish inside our caves. Leave your poison water wherever it suits you. Our government will give you no trouble.

Following my maman’s death, I sought wealth in a way that would have upset her dreadfully, but life is never simple and I remained loyal to some of her ideals while I betrayed others. So even while I rode the powerful surges of the Bull Market I was active in the January 20 Group *and I wrote my pamphlets and letters to the editor.

And this, I can only assume, is why, two days after my twenty-second birthday, you refused me a tourist Stempel. This is why you still suspect that a great political cause had me drag my blinking share-trader’s face out into the bright sun. You still want to know why, why really , did I abandon my safe house and trundle down the No. 25 wharf in my wheelchair. What is the real story? Why did I allow myself to be thrown from a heaving fishing trawler on to a Morean Beach at dawn?

I, of course, would rather tell you how Wally, Jacques and I crossed what you like to call ‘the great historical sea’ and how we entered your Voorstand by tunnel, in the company of thieves, how we met Leona the facilitator, how we saw the altars to the Hairy Man beside the highway, how we crossed the great plains of Voorstand, across the mighty earthworks, dams, lakes, and saw the huge Sirkus Domes rising from the earth, everywhere, like mushrooms after rain.

We had some high old times before the thing came unstuck in Peggy Kram’s trothaus, higher than Drs Laroche and Eisner ever thought when I was born. Love, joy, adventure — all these things are there ahead of me, and you too, but I know, I am avoiding your question.

You want to know why I left the place where I was safe. Why I felt it necessary to smuggle Wally Paccione into Voorstand in the first place.

To tell you this I must — I am sorry — walk you back into the dark closed world of the Feu Follet at a time when it smells not only of death but also of rotting sawdust, of stale orange peel, of spilled wine, of old ham sandwiches. I will seat you in a Starbuck. I will do the show — act out for you the parts of WALLY, ROXANNA, TRISTAN too.

The year is 382. It is March, and the wet season has just finished. Felicity has been dead for nearly two months.

The lights come up to reveal ROXANNA and WALLY dancing. TRISTAN watches them from his chair.

*

‘If we let ourselves imagine this is solely a question of military defence, we are deluding ourselves. Our greatest defence is our culture, and the brutal truth is — we have none. The terms of our alliance with Voorstand means we are prohibited (for instance) from placing a 2 per cent tariff on their Sirkus tickets to subsidize our theatre. They call this unfair trade, yet we know that every ticket we buy to the Sirkus weakens us, swamps us further, suffocates us. If we wish to escape the vile octopus, our escape must be total. For some time we will need to be poor, defenceless and, yes, bored.’ From ‘What will we do?’ by Tristan Smith.

*

Literally, Pin-ball Wizard, a derogatory term for the traders who were held responsible for the computer-driven selling frenzy which produced the crash of 7 May 393.

*

Radical nationalist group named in commemoration of Felicity Smith’s death. In

387

two of the group’s members were charged with possession of firearms and sentenced to jail for five years, in one case, and seven years, the other. From that time on the group was thought to be toothless.

It is eleven o’clock in the morning and the streets of Chemin Rouge are white and blinding, sticky with the smell of honeysuckle. The bougainvillaea is puce and purple on the sagging veranda roofs, and the papaya are once again orange enough to tempt the crows to strike their beaks deep into their seed-jewelled bellies.

Inside the dusty, darkened Feu Follet, ROXANNA dances with WALLY. She wears a red dress which is tied around the neck and which shows the small black mole in the middle of her soft white back. She wears small gold heart-shaped earrings with little red stones in their centre. She has black high-heeled shoes with a complicated series of straps which secure them to her sturdy unstockinged ankles. She rests her crisp, permed hair against her partner’s white cotton shirt. They are now a couple. They have walked though a fire and each has been imprinted by the other just as you see the warp and weft of dress fabric scorched into the skin of people in intensive care.

They dance while I, YOUNG TRISTAN, watch them. It is so long ago. I am another person, sitting in my club chair with my skinny arms held tight around my chest. My white gold-flecked irises never leave them as they dance. It is a foxtrot, no music, sawdust on the floor.

Inside the ring is the crumpled pink tissue Roxanna has used to wipe my spittle from her face.

Beyond the tissue, half lost in the folds of the black velvet curtain which separates the theatre from the foyer, is the reason I have spat at her — the picnic carton. In the carton is bright orange cheese, a loaf of fresh white walloper, apples, jelly beans, croix cakes, a bottle of very cold beer wrapped in sheets of newspaper, glasses. She has a folded blanket. She has altered my dead maman’s red sundress and imagines no one recognizes it. Wally has his nose against the skin behind her ear. She can feel him inhallng her, like he does when making love, breathing in the air out of her pores.

I say nothing. I have stared at the dress when she walked in, but I say nothing. I sit in the middle of the ring on the club chair they have placed there for me. I hold a banned book in my lap. It is called Without Consent — Voorstand’s Secret Agencies in Action.

Since my maman’s murder I will not sleep in a room with a window. That is one problem.

Roxanna is going crazy, that is another. Also: she has promised God that she will do whatever is needed to diminish my pain. She is giving herself to my restoration.

I have barely left the theatre since my maman died. If that is what I want, that is fine with Roxanna. After all — she is my nurse. In real life, however, the building presses on her, sits on her. It is like having a fat spanker pressing on your face. She has asked God to please give her air, but what can He do?

She is twenty-five years old, had thought herself past saving, but on that night of the murder she felt herself turn into something shining. She took me, the other me — YOUNG TRISTAN — the whimpering child — she took me into her bed, rocked me in her arms, bathed me, towelled me, sang to me, oiled my dry, scaly skin, made up my terrible face with blue and gold and silver. She was a nurse, a nun, someone finally to look up to.

Then the dry hot weather arrived, two weeks early. You could feel the warm, salty northerly on your skin and you could stand on the steps of the Feu Follet and see, across the tops of the high weeds in the vacant block across the street, the skipjack boats heading out of the port three miles away.

She prayed for my health, she packed me a picnic, with jelly beans and croix cakes. I agreed to go. I thought I could go. Then I stood on the steps and my breath stopped breathing. I thought I would faint. I could not go. When she tried to pick me up against my will, I spat right in her face.