Jonathan Raban: Foreign Land: A Novel

Vera had had to inspect the new hospital there. George had driven her in the Port Authority landrover. With Vera preoccupied and George depressed, it hadn’t been a successful trip.

“Yes,” said George. “I met some of our new friends.”

“Oh, yeah?” Teddy said carelessly, sucking at his Sun Top.

He had been forced to leave the road to make way for a column of Soviet-built tanks. Montedor’s single American helicopter-gunship dickered in the sky overhead. Then, twenty miles short of Guia, they’d met a roadblock. The soldiers manning it had shouted to each other in Spanish. Though they wore the uniforms of the Republican Army of Montedor, they wore them with a kind of crispness and dash that was quite beyond the reach of the local militia.

“The Hispano-Suiza brigade,” George said. “At a road block.”

Teddy stopped sucking. “Who do you mean, George?”

“Cubans.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“I am not.” George was irrelevantly pleased at Teddy’s surprise. He’d supposed that Teddy would have already heard about the Cubans from Vera.

“At a road block? I think that is not possible.”

“Oh, they were Cubans. They weren’t making any secret of it, either.”

“Fucking Peres,” Teddy said. “In this country we have eleven military advisers, Peres says. You do not put eleven military advisers on a fucking road block. I would like to use your name, George. Do you mind?”

“Of course not. I didn’t see anything sinister or undercover in the thing. It was just a Cuban road block.”

“That man is a terrorist . We have no need of Cubans to solve the problem.” Over Teddy’s head there sailed, in sepia, the two-masted winner of the Dakar race in 1933.

The problem was that there were two kinds of Montedorians, as unlike as tigers and ocelots. Teddy was one kind: when you looked at his face you saw an odd crowd of different people there. His hair belonged to an African slave, his nose to a Portuguese slave trader, his mouth to a Syrian shopkeeper, his eyes to a British sailor. Teddy’s skin was a smooth khaki — the mongrel, camouflage, Creole colour. The other kind of Montedorian was as black as basalt. The Wolofs of the interior had their own language. They were nomads, farmers and hunters, where the Creoles were townsmen, fishermen, entrepreneurs. The Wolofs were Muslim, the Creoles Catholic. During the years of drought the gap between the two nations of Montedor, between the coast and the hills, had opened out from a fissure to a canyon. The Creoles suffered from bad nerves and insomnia: the command posts in the mountains, the tanks and road blocks, were supposed to help them sleep more soundly.

“Peres does not want my road,” Teddy said. “He says it is a danger.” At present, the cobbled three-lane highway petered out seven miles beyond Bom Porto. After that, it was just a narrow pathway through the shale. “We have the promise of money from the World Bank. I see the Egyptian again next week. It is not so much the road itself, it is the building of the road. It is a major employment project. I will have Wolofs working on that road. With Creoles. In the same gang. Communication” He pronounced the word the Portuguese way. Comunicão . The ão was a soft and nasal miaow.

“And all Peres sees is an army of hungry Wolofs marching down your road?”

“Peres is a monkey. He loves guns. He hates my Ministry. The guy has a theory … you know? … that bad communications are always the safest.”

George laughed. “Well, there’s something to be said for that. I was thinking rather along the same lines myself, earlier today.” He patted his jacket pockets, searching for his pipe, while Teddy watched him with a sour stare.

“Oh — nothing to do with your road. In quite another context.” There had been a letter from his daughter in the lunchtime mail. George had been rattled by it. For one diverting moment, he saw Sheila as a Wolof charging down a dusty mountainside with a long banana knife.

“That road is the most important piece of infrastructure in Montedor. We need communication like … like we need water.”

“I suppose we do,” George said, still thinking of his daughter.

“You are going to stay on, then?”

“No … I wish I could. I can’t, Teddy.”

“Sometimes I think you are a meatball.”

“Oh, so do I, old love. So do I.”

“You rapped with Varbosa?”

“Yes. It didn’t change things.”

“Special Adviser to the President on Foreign Trade … Sounds good.”

“You’ve got too many advisers already.”

“Not that kind, George.”

“I’d just be a one-man quango.”

“Say again?”

“Quango? Oh, it’s something that’s all the rage in England now, or so they say. A quasi-autonomous government organization. It’s a sort of bureaucratic racket. Designed to keep old troopers in gravy.”

“I think we have some quaggas here already.” Teddy flipped the top of a cigarette pack and began to write the word inside it.

“En, gee, oh,” George said.

“We will miss you here, George,” said Teddy. His voice had lost its usual overlay of cab driver Milwaukee.

“I’ll miss you too.” George picked up his glass of Chivas Regal and shielded his eyes with it.

“Perhaps you will not be happy there, I think. You will come back. Aristide will leave the door open on that job, I know—”

“It’d be nice to think so.”

“When I am President, you can be Minister of Defence. Peres I will post as ambassador to Youkay. The cold weather is good for that man, I think; maybe his nuts freeze off.”

Outside the club, the night was warm and palpable as steam. At the opening of the courtyard on to the street, the two men embraced for a moment. Teddy smelled strongly of Sun Top and more faintly of— Vera?

“I’ve got the Humber. You want a ride?”

“No,” George said, “I’ll walk, thanks.”

“Ciao, George. Next time, I knock you for a loop, okay?”

“If you say so. Goodnight, Teddy—”

The minister crossed the street to the waterfront where his car was parked on the cinders under a lone acacia.

“Hey-George?”

“Yes?”

“Come back and be a quango!”

The Rua Kwame Nkruma was homesick for Lisbon. Portuguese merchants had built it as the Rua Alcantara, a pretty daydream of steep terraced houses with front yards full of flowers, displaced by twenty-eight degrees of latitude. Gardens had burned dry, pastel stucco fronts were cracking up like icing on a mouldy cake, orange pantiles had tumbled into the street and wooden balconies were peeling away from their parent walls.

A few of the houses had been recolonized as government offices. Others had been used by the army as convenient hoardings on which to paint Party messages. In letters that were six feet high, the front of Number 12 said:

NO TO LAZINESS!

NO TO OPPORTUNISM!

YES TO LABOUR!

YES TO STUDY!

At night the street was dark and empty, the moonlit slogan as lonely as a film playing on the screen of a deserted cinema.

One jumpy electric light showed on the street, from behind the first-floor shutters of Number 28. The house was in rather better shape than its neighbours. The grizzled banana palm in the front garden was as tall as the house itself, whose bleached wooden columns held up a flirtatious structure of narrow balconies, carved trellises and fretwork screens. It looked like a place designed to keep secrets in. All the house now contained was George.