Guerrillas (27 page)

“HELP DE poor! I am very grateful. Help de blind! I am very t’ankful
.” The blind and legless beggar was back, red blank eyes in an upturned face, his chant steady and loud, gliding about his stretch of pavement on his little low cart.

Friday afternoon, and the city center had filled up again: the vendors of sweets and cigarettes and Turf Club sweepstakes; the middle-aged women with “belly-f” cakes and currant rolls in glass cases; the bicycles and the route taxis, the drivers from time to time putting out an arm and making an involved gesture, like a dancer’s gesture, to indicate their route; the coconut carts and vans. Water from a thousand waste pipes ran in the open gutters. But there were no school uniforms among the pavement crowds, and, though there were few policemen, no loitering groups. People looked about them as they walked, and some people walked as if on broken glass. They were rediscovering their city: the arrow daubed and scrawled everywhere, some shop windows still shuttered, some boarded up. One or two shops, smashed open and exposed, seemed to have been abandoned by their owners: the walkers moved away from those, as though part of the pavement had been roped off.

Roche stood outside Sablich’s parking lot and waited for Meredith.

Meredith was on time. He was driving his little blue car. Roche
had expected something more official. He wasn’t sure how he should greet the friend who had become the minister. For a minute, though, greeting Meredith, opening the car door, getting in, looking with Meredith for traffic before they drove off, it seemed that nothing had changed since Sunday. But as soon as they were in the stream of traffic, and the time had come to speak, Roche felt ill at ease. The words he had been hoping would come to him didn’t come. He was unwilling to say anything about the events of the week, remembering what he had heard from Harry, and from people in the Sablich’s office, about Meredith’s part in those events. He was silent a little too long; and then he saw that it was also too late to say anything about Meredith’s appointment as a minister.

Meredith said, “I’m glad we were able to do something, Peter. I’m sorry it was such short notice.”

The friend, the minister, the radio journalist.

They were driving to the radio station to record the interview for Meredith’s
Encounter
program. Meredith had mentioned it on Sunday; and Roche hadn’t forgotten. He had speculated about it; he had run through various kinds of interviews in his head; he had prepared. The recording had been arranged the previous day, and apparently in something of a hurry. And it had been arranged rather officially. Meredith’s secretary in the ministry, and not Meredith, had telephoned.

Roche said, “It may be our last chance.”

As he spoke, Roche remembered what Jane had said on Sunday. She had said that Meredith didn’t like Roche being on the island; but that when Roche had said he was leaving, Meredith’s face had fallen. Roche glanced now at Meredith. But Meredith’s expression hadn’t changed.

Meredith said, “Why?”

“I feel there’s nothing for me to do here.”

“Don’t say any more. We’ll save it for the studio. Otherwise we’ll lose it. When I spoke to you at Harry’s on Sunday I was thinking we might do something philosophical and offbeat. But it’s all become highly topical. That happens a lot of the time. If you chase the topical too hard you can end up being stale.”

Everywhere walls and windows were scrawled and daubed with the arrow. But the city showed little damage. Not many buildings had been totally destroyed by fire; and often, even in the streets of the Chinese wholesale food shops and the Syrian cloth shops, though a shop had been blackened at pavement level, its upper floors still looked whole.

Meredith said, “Miraculously, it still works.”

And for a moment he was like a friend again, like the man Roche had known in the earliest days. But the alertness was new: the small hunched figure at the wheel, the small gripping hands, child’s hands. The wounded, determined smile, hinting now at secrets, was new, and belonged to a new man—the man receiving looks from people in the streets, and acknowledging the looks with a slight movement of the head: a nod to someone who was looking for a nod, but, to someone who might resent a nod, nothing, just an involuntary movement of the head. He had been confirmed in his power; he was a minister in a government that had survived. But Roche thought that Meredith was still uncertain; he was still a man who thought he was presuming.

Roche had been embarrassed. Now he began to feel sickened.

Meredith said, “Jimmy sprang a surprise on us.”

Roche thought, but without anxiety: He’s prepared something for me.

Meredith said, “How is Jane?”

“Jane has very much withdrawn into herself.”

“I imagine we’ve sunk even lower in her estimation.”

“She’s leaving us, you know.”

“One day, I suppose, we’ll go over the brink. It was a close thing, Peter.”

“Were the helicopters necessary?”

“I don’t know. The soldiers didn’t leave the airport. But I don’t know.”

The radio building, a new building on three floors, was set far back from the road. The in-gates and out-gates, on either side of a brick wall, were open. Inside, policemen with rifles stood behind a wooden barrier; they were the first armed policemen Roche had seen that day. Between the whitewashed curbstones of the in-lane
and the out-lane there was a garden: the ornamental blue-tiled pool empty; shrubs and plants dusty, growing out of dusty earth, but their flowers bright; clumps of the small gri-gri palm with their curving, notched trunks. The lane was black, freshly surfaced, the asphalt tacky in the heat. The parking lot, marked with new white lines, was in the shadow of the building. Meredith parked carefully, avoiding the white lines.

When they had got out of the car and were together again, walking to the entrance, which was at the side of the building, out of the sun, Roche said, “What about Jimmy?”

“He’s not present.”

“Not present? What do you mean? He’s been arrested?”

“That would be excessive. There are other people who will settle accounts with Jimmy. He’s in retirement. But you know more about Jimmy than I do.”

It was cool behind the glass doors. Meredith had lost his uncertainty. Here he was the journalist and the minister; he had stopped smiling and his manner was businesslike and official. The big brown woman at the desk stood up and was introduced to Roche. The policeman with the rifle stiffened and stared.

Meredith said to the woman, “We’ll use E studio.” He said to Roche, with a smile, “It has a nice view.”

They took the elevator and went up two floors. Meredith turned on a light in a dark corridor. They went a little way down this corridor, and Meredith pushed open double doors and turned on another dim light. The small room ahead was in darkness, the larger room to the left was bright.

Meredith said, “The studio manager’s not here. But I think we can go in. As you can see, it isn’t exactly BBC.”

He led Roche, through double doors, into the larger room. And when they were there he said, “Peter, do you mind waiting here for a little? I’ll go and see what’s happening to the SM.”

The double doors closed behind Meredith as he went out, and there was silence in the studio. The sealed picture window gave Roche a view of the city such as he had never had. In the city center there was nothing to be seen except other buildings. But, here, in what had once been a good residential area, no tall buildings
blocked the view, and Roche looked over roofs, silver or red, dramatized by the tall pillars and the dark-green fronds of the royal palm, to the sea, and to the hills that ran down, ridge after ridge, to the sea. The hills were bare and fire-marked, smoking in patches, but the sun was going down behind them, and the sea glittered. In the deep water behind those hills, doubtless, the American warships lay. But Roche, imagining the sunset soon to come, the hills and the royal palms against the evening sky, thought: It is, after all, very beautiful. It is a pity I’ve never seen it like this, and have never enjoyed it. And some time later he thought: But perhaps one never enjoys these things.

He was reducing his thoughts to words, formulating whole sentences. It was almost as if, in the silent room, waiting for Meredith, who seemed a long time, he had begun to talk to himself.

A silent room, a silent view: the picture window was made up of two panes of heavy glass, separated by a gap the width of the wall. The glass was radiating heat. Discovering this, Roche soon discovered that the room had a warm, stale, furry smell, as though dust and fluff were rising from the carpet.

The double doors were pushed open, and Meredith came in.

Meredith said, “The SM’s coming.”

“This studio’s stuffy.”

“The air conditioning can take a little time.”

They sat down at the round table with the microphone, the green bulb, the heavy glass ash tray.

Meredith said, “I have no notes. Let’s keep it like a conversation. What always matters is what you are saying or what I am saying, and not what you think you’re going to say next. Don’t worry about repeating or going back. Don’t worry about referring to things we’ve talked about in the past. Let’s keep it conversational, and let’s not pretend we don’t know one another. I’ll call you Peter and you’ll call me Meredith, if you want to call me anything at all. It’s going to be rough, you know, Peter.”

Roche said, “I’ve nothing to hide.” It was a line he had prepared.

A weak light came on in the adjoining cubicle and through
the glass window a very tall man wearing a white shirt and a tie could be seen. He smiled at Roche and Meredith and sat down before his instruments.

Meredith said, “The SM.”

Roche was perspiring. He said, “I’m smelling dust everywhere. It’s the kind of thing that would give Harry asthma in a second.”

The voice of the studio manager came through the speaker: “Can we have something for voice level, please?” For such a big man, his voice was curiously soft, even effeminate.

Meredith, lifting his head slightly, smiled, for the studio manager, for Roche; and Roche noticed that Meredith was perspiring all over the wide gap between his everted nostrils and his mouth. Meredith said to the microphone, “Every day in every day I grow better and better.”

The studio manager gave a thumbs-up sign, and Meredith said, “Peter?”

Roche said to the microphone, “You need to do some vacuuming here.”

The green light on the table came on.

Meredith said, “We’ll go into it straight away.” He said to the microphone, “This is the Peter Roche interview for Encounter.” He paused, and when he spoke again his voice was lighter and more relaxed than it had been so far. “Peter, you were saying as we were driving here to the studio that you didn’t think you had anything more to do here. Would you like to go into that a little?”

“I’ve begun to feel like a stranger. Recent events have made me feel like a stranger.”

“Do you feel more like a stranger now than when you came—seven, eight months ago?”

“I never thought about it then. I was very happy to be here.”

“But didn’t you think, when you were coming here, a place you’d never been, that you were going to be a stranger?”

“A stranger in that way, yes. But I thought that there was work for me to do. I thought that certain problems had been settled here, and there was work I could do.”

“You mean racial problems?”

“Yes, racial problems, and all the things that go with it. I mean not carrying that burden, not wasting one’s time and one’s life carrying that burden. I thought there was work I could do here. Work.”

“I see you gesturing with your hands. I suppose by work you mean constructive work.”

“It’s a human need. I suppose one realizes that late.”

“Creativity. An escape into creativity.”

“If you want to put it like that.”

“But some people will find it odd, Peter, people who know your background—and now you tell us of your need for creative work—that you should look for this with a firm like the one you chose.”

“Sablich’s.”

“You’ve mentioned the name.”

“It wasn’t what I chose. I would say it was what offered itself. And I liked what they offered. I didn’t know much about them when I took the job.”

“But you know now.”

“It doesn’t alter my attitude. I know they have a past here, and that people think about them in a certain way. But I also know they have done a lot to change. The fact that they should want to employ me is a sign of that change, I think.”

“Some people might say public relations.”

“There is that. I always knew that. But isn’t that enough? I was more concerned with the work they offered, and what they offered seemed pretty fair to me. In a situation like that I believe one can only go by people’s professed intentions and attitudes. If you start probing too much and you look for absolute purity, you can end up doing nothing at all.”

“I can see how some of our attitudes can irritate you, Peter. And we’re all guilty. We have a special attitude to people who take up our cause. It is unfair, but we tend to look up to them.”

“But I didn’t think I had to keep to a straiter path than anybody else. I’m not on display. I don’t know why people here should think that.”

Roche’s temper had suddenly risen. He was sweating; his shirt was wet. He turned away from the microphone and said, “The air here is absolutely foul.”

“The air conditioning doesn’t seem to be working efficiently,” Meredith said. He too was sweating. He looked about him, perfunctorily, and then he spoke to the microphone again.

“Peter, you say you came here for the opportunity of doing creative work, unhampered by other pressures. And you’ve done quite a lot. But in the public mind you have become associated with the idea of the agricultural commune. You know, back to the land, the revolution based on land. I don’t believe it’s a secret that it hasn’t been a success. Are you very disappointed?”

“It would have been nice if it had worked.”

“Did you think it would work?”

“I had my doubts. I thought it was antihistorical. All over the world people are leaving the land to go to the cities. And they know what they want. They want more excitement, more lights. They want to be richer. They also want to be brighter. They don’t want to feel they’re missing out. And most of them are missing out, of course.”