Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

‘He’ll cut your fucking liver out,’ Wally said to Jacques.

‘I’m sorry to have distressed you,’ Jacques said.

Wally grunted.

We travelled on a little way, bumping over the rutted road.

‘You just don’t go talking to strangers,’ Wally said, ‘because you think they look like something in a vid.’

‘Mollo … mollo,’ I said. ‘Let’s … just … forget … it.’

But when Wally got mad about something he could not let it go.

‘When you travel with us,’ he said, ‘you do what we say. You’re too young. You don’t know shit from jam.’

Jacques said nothing.

We left the banana grove behind and were now walking between fields of onions. Ahead we could see what may have been a chemical factory and a highway. The rain was beginning to fall again. We had no umbrella.

‘They’re following us,’ Wally said. The more he talked, the angrier he got. The angrier he got, the faster he walked. The faster he walked, the more his glistening head craned forward and the more hunched he became, and all the time he talked downwards to the road in his humming Efican accents. ‘I can’t believe you did that. Now they know we have money.’

Jacques stopped pushing. The chair stopped. It was a moment before Wally realized, and when he turned he was five yards ahead.

‘I know you’re upset,’ Jacques said. ‘But it is ridiculous to keep blaming me.’

‘Look,’ Wally said, pointing a finger at him.

‘They saw us come across the border,’ Jacques said. ‘They didn’t need to talk to me to know I was a tourist. Besides, you’ve never been out of Efica either. You’re just as excited as I am.’

‘Look,’ Wally said, stamping his foot. ‘Look behind you, you damn fool.’

It was the Presence with the scimitar sideburns. He was right behind us — small, neat, his hands clasped together in a rather beseeching way.

‘You are walking the wrong way,’ he said to Jacques. ‘There is nothing there, no hotel, nothing but some small boys who will rob you.’

‘We know,’ Wally said, coming back to take charge.

‘You need a hotel,’ the Presence said. ‘You are poor mens, I know, you do not want it too expensis.’

‘That’s right, camarade,’ Wally said. ‘Not expensis.’

‘You want to go to Voorstand, let me help you. I make a good price with you.’

‘Vat es der geld?’ Jacques said.

‘Keep out of this,’ Wally said to Jacques. ‘Just keep out of it.’

‘We make the price,’ Aziz said to Jacques. ‘You cannot say what is a good price. We make it, together. You understand? You say one thing, I say the other. We make the price. It is something mens do together.’

‘We don’t do it that way in Efica,’ Wally said. ‘You give us a fair price, the hotel plus the guide.’

‘You are from Africa?’

‘Not Africa — Efica.’

Aziz pursed his lips, shook his head. ‘One old man,’ he said, ‘one sick man, one …’ He looked at Jacques. ‘One other, not so experienced perhaps.’ He had small soft hands and delicate wrists. He smelled kind of soapy. He kept walking with us. ‘First, you need a nice hotel. Not too expensis, but clean.’

‘We’ll … look,’ I said. ‘Tell … him … we’ll … look.’

‘Der enkelamade es der berzoomin,’ Jacques said to the Presence, ‘Derf hotel es becoomin nacht anajadin.’ *To Wally he said, ‘Is that OK?’

Jacques knew that neither of us spoke the language, but when he asked his question his manner was as polite as if he were inquiring about the water temperature of his bath.

Wally paused a moment. He looked at Jacques with his brow pressed down upon his cloudy eyes.

‘Yes,’ he said at last, ‘that’s fine.’

*

Long the butt of jokes in Amsterdam, the so-called Vuilnisbelt pidgin of Zeelung has recently begun to be seen as a language in its own right. For more examples of the rich and poetic usages of Vuilnisbelt (lit: Garbage Dump) Dutch see

Songs of Zeelung and South East Voorstand

by Prick Van Kooten (Potter Press).

Once we were on our way to the hotel, it was as if that clear sharp moment of rebellion had never occurred. It was the original Jacques who travelled with us in the back of that dirty old flat-bed truck — professional, solicitous, attentive to our needs, even before we could express them. He propped his dos-sack behind Wally’s sore spine. He produced glucose tablets, sun-screen, a ground-sheet to save our clothes from the bouncing farm muck which littered the tray. He had moist towelettes. He kept his sneakers clean.

What should have been a short journey was interrupted by two flat tyres and some problem with the fuel-supply line. Such were the delays along the roadside that by the time we finally arrived at our destination it was dusk and we were too weary to understand where we had come to — it may have been Sint Vincent, the border town, or Gelukfontein, an industrial centre inland and to the north.

The hotel turned out to be a store owned by relatives of Aziz. It was not what we had expected, but we were too exhausted to protest. Jacques and Wally carried me down the steps into the store. The metal concertina grille was padlocked shut behind us. We sat, and blinked.

Women in black dresses were in the process of dragging large rolls of bedding out from between delicately stacked cans of fish and cooking oil, but when I was brought in, still sitting in my chair, everything stopped. Bright lights were produced — three noisy gas lights, each with its own blue gas cylinder and long metal neck. Insects with long iridescent wings clustered around the light. Tristan Smith was illuminated without apology, but when I turned my big pale eyes on my hosts they quickly flicked their own eyes away, leaving me alone in my wheelchair, like some wet squid washed up amongst the seawrack on the beach.

From out the back, men came to stare at me and argue with Aziz. They were so like Aziz they could have been his brothers — they had identical sideburns terminating in a concave sweep, a crescent which indicated skill with a cut-throat razor. They had narrow hips and little backsides. They carried guns in their trousers, slid under the waistband, with the barrels pointing down to their coccyx. They had dark hands with pale palms which they held expressively when speaking. Their voices were feathery, caressing. The children, with their fine straight noses and their dark darting eyes, bore a resemblance to almost everybody who came in and out of the shadowed doorways of the store.

Diesel fumes drifted down from the roadway through the concertina doors and mingled with the foreign odours of dry fish and spices. Wally sat down on a sack of something, resting his head in his hands. Jacques must have been as weary as any of us, but the instant we arrived, he was on the job.

If he despised my anxiety, he also had the imagination to push my chair into the shadow, to give me some privacy before he began to explain to Aziz that this unusual beast was his employer and it was his job to give me a hot bath at this hour.

They seemed to say that this was not possible.

But Jacques, still wearing the layers of shirt and coat, his eyes bloodshot from diesel smoke and dust, insisted. I did not understand the language, but I was once again impressed by both his politeness and his tenacity. Twice he managed to make them laugh. He was obviously witty with their language and you could see they liked him for it, but there was, it seemed, some problem with the propane gas — there was not enough propane, or there was propane, but they could not spare it for hot water.

‘Don’t … worry … mo-ami,’ I said.

When I spoke, all eyes turned on me, almost all eyes — not Jacques’: he was the nurse, it was his job to bathe me at six p.m. and he planned to do it.