Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

I am a passionate man, full of feelings and opinions, but I knew no woman wanted me and I knew no woman ever would. When I wanted to go back to Aziz’s store it was for two sane reasons: number one: I did not want to be stared at; number two: I did not want to sit out there in the open with all that money taped to me.

But Wally could not forget something that had happened six years ago, and I was therefore punished all over again, and the memory of the humiliation and pain, the darkness of the nights and days when I never wished to live again — the past all came back, while in the present we were compelled to exhaust ourselves, to push on toward the border in a ridiculous fashion, without dignity.

The convoy travelled in this order: first, Aziz with his rifle; second, Wally riding in the wheelbarrow; third, a squat broad-shouldered farmer with a black hat and bare feet, engaged to push the wheelbarrow; fourth, me in my chair; fifth, my stylish, uncomplaining nurse. Three children also followed for a little way, but by the time we came to the first stream, they had gone.

There was more audience for this silly spectacle than for any of my somersaults or tumbles at the Feu Follet, more than you might believe such a deserted-looking road could have delivered. All along the way there were knots of people standing — if they were waiting for something else, I don’t know what it was.

These people were extremely poor — you could see it in their skin, their clothes, but mostly in their dark, deep, recessed eyes and a sort of tension across their cheekbones that made them shine.

‘Goeie daag,’ Jacques said, not once, but many times.

No one answered him.

Occasionally a woman would cross herself. As we moved closer to the border the situation of these silent farmers seemed to become more desperate. They stood on their broad splayed bare feet staring at us, ammunition belts strapped diagonally across their chests, their eyes filled with awe, disgust, pity. They did not know that they were seeing 50,000 Guilders pass them by.

Aziz was angry to have been forced to leave the truck and now all his solicitousness had gone. He was cold and withdrawn. He strutted ahead of us, duck-footed, a second pearl-handled pistol clearly visible against his black trousers. He rarely turned around.

I could hear the distant crump of what may have been artillery, Jacques’ rasping breath as he uncomplainingly pushed my chair up the hill, the crunch of gravel beneath our tyres. Wally, balanced in a wheelbarrow which jarred his spine and rubbed the skin raw, twice lost his balance and was tipped out on to the roadside. The first time he leapt up cursing, fast as a crab on an open beach. The second time he lay there, dry-lipped and exhausted. None of the bystanders stooped to help him. Indeed they stepped back, pushing back in amongst a small stand of maize, damaging the new crop rather than touch the old vulture with the bleeding crown.

I could not assist him, a hateful feeling. I will not dwell on it. It was Aziz who did it, although he spoke to Wally more as employer to employee and, when he did bend to lift him, displayed a kind of disdain for his injured person which would have been unthinkable an hour before. He locked his fine olive-skinned arms under the old man’s, and lugged him upright. Wally’s white shirt and trousers were now filthy. Aziz’s mouth was fastidious. His dark eyes were furious. It was all to do with being forced to abandon his truck, the damage to his pumpkins.

By noon he had led us into even less hospitable country and, apart from a solitary farmer with a rough-handled hoe on his shoulder, we had no more witnesses to our journey. All this, I now know, was exhilarating for Jacques. In fact, I knew it then. I could feel it in my chair. His hands were blistered, his lips white and dry, but his eyes were small, bright, burning in the secret shadow of his brow.

The road was slowly rising and we switched on my electric motor to give my nurse some rest. It had perhaps three hours’ range in this country, slipping, growling against the gradient and the loose rocks. Jacques walked behind me, steadying the chair. The country was becoming more open. The vegetation had thinned until you would have to call it desert — khaki grasses, small clumps of fleshy cactuses with long nicotine-yellow spikes. White limestone broke through the yellow clay of the road surface, which was also deeply scoured along its edges. The chair lurched and crashed, but I was not frightened.

As we came closer and closer to Voorstand, my irritability also seeped away. Colour crept into the soil, first in pinks which became more and more bilious, then in acid greens. We stopped to rest beneath butts as gorgeous and sickly as melted ice-cream. In the distance we could see the snow-capped Mountains of the Moon, inside Voorstand itself. Twice we saw the ice-cold lines left by fighter planes across the cloudless sky.

We pushed on, towards the Sirkus Tour of Saarlim.

Soon the air began to have an afternoon chill, and the road degenerated further — we had to find a path downhill over dangerous gutters and between strewn boulders.

Jacques called and pointed down into a gully beside the road, and there, in the gloom of the valley, I could make out what at first appeared to be a wireless station (antennae, satellite dishes, guy wires), but I soon saw was a series of huts all secured to the ground by a complicated series of guy ropes.

‘Kan ons kakshtoop?’ Jacques called to Aziz.

‘What are you saying?’

‘I asked, is there somewhere where we can take a shit,’ Jacques said.

The road became softer, sandier. We came across a wide white glistening flat towards the cabins where the red and yellow Voorstand flag — the big moon, the sixteen stars — hung limply in the air. Standing below the flag was a figure dressed in navy blue — an overweight pink-white woman of perhaps sixty or seventy, dressed in a metallic flecked pant suit. She wore a peaked hat with gold braid. She had tightly curled blonde hair. She wore bright blue-framed glasses and shining leather lace-up shoes.

‘Ah-zeez,’ she called, as we approached. ‘Ah-zeez, where in the Christ have you been?’

She turned on her heel and we bumped along behind her, towards the huts. As we went she talked, but she did not once turn her head.

‘You ain’t going to have them out the other side till three a.m.’ The accent would have been familiar to you — she was a Voorstander, a trader, one of your people, a lone entrepreneur on the very edges of your law and land. ‘When you make an appointment,’ she said, ‘you got to keep it. Next time, Ah-zeez, I’ll just footsack you. I got other stuff to do out here sides this, you hear me?’

Aziz inclined his head in what may have been a sarcastic version of a bow.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘I thank you.’

‘Excuse me,’ Jacques said. But she turned and led us into a small hut which proved to be nothing more than an ante-room. We passed up a small wooden ramp (me still in my chair and Wally still clinging to his wheelbarrow) into a little dusty cave with whitewashed walls. There were a number of rusty folding chairs facing a small lectern and it was obvious that we were intended to sit there. Wally climbed out of the barrow and sat in the front row rubbing at his hands and elbows.

‘OK’ I asked him as Jacques pushed me in beside Wally. ‘You … want … to … rest … here?’

His eyes were dull, exhausted. ‘I just want to get there,’ he said. ‘How about you?’

‘I … just … want … to … get … there … too.’

Jacques sat behind us in the second row. The farmer who had pushed Wally’s wheelbarrow took his hat off and sat in the back row. Aziz remained at the door.

The woman took off her braided cap and placed it on the lectern.