The Drifters by James A. Michener
‘Age seems a part of courage,
But no part of its genesis.
Father is far more fearful than I.’
We were now in the narrowest part of the passage, and Britta studied the walls which deflected the bulls to the left. She touched them, smelled them, then looked ahead to where Bar Vasca threw its pale light into the empty street.
‘And here we are at the hospital … where the circle ends,’ she said softly. ‘Last night I was lonely and thinking only of myself. I felt I had to escape Tromsø at any cost … I was scared … when he said the word Ceylon, it broke my heart.’ She covered her face and mumbled, ‘Tonight I am more lonely than I can bear. Thank God, you had the kindness to walk with me. But this night my sorrow is for others … the human race … all of us … you growing old and watching younger men come along with different ideas … Mr. Holt afraid of everything except the bulls … how he hates Cato and Clive, and they could save him.’ She pressed the tears from her eyes and said, ‘Now you must take me to the hospital again.’
I was relieved to find that the guard was the one I knew. I told him that the señora was back, and he let us in. As we climbed the stairs I saw that Britta was nervous, but I could hardly have guessed what she had in mind.
When we entered the room she laid her handbag on a chair, and without speaking, kicked off her sandals and proceeded to undress until she was completely naked. She then walked to the bed and said, ‘Mr. Holt, you are a man who has been sorely wounded and I am here to care for you.’
Holt, astonished at her beauty and her daring, placed his hand over his bandages, but as she drew down the covers she said, ‘I do not mean that wound, Mr. Holt. I mean the terrible wound in your heart.’ Placing her hand on his chest, she said, ‘This wound I shall cure.’ She kissed him on the lips, lay down beside him, pulled up the covers, and motioned to me that I should leave the room.
XI
MOÇAMBIQUE
God writes straight, but uses a crooked line.
Men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty billows of the sea, the long course of rivers, the vast compass of the ocean, and the circular motion of the stars, and yet pass themselves by.—St. Augustine
My old man made a tragic mistake. Took wash-and-wear clothes with him to Europe. After one week Mom said she’d be damned if she had come to Europe to wash his laundry. He started doing it himself, and when she saw how good he was she made him do hers too. When they got home she said that since he was so expert he could do the wash regularly. With the money she saved this way she’s going to Asia next summer. Hasn’t decided yet whether Pop ought to go along or not.
Where did non-violence get Martin Luther King? In the end.
If one family of dinosaurs survived on earth, some son-of-a-bitch from West Oklahoma would claim he had a right to shoot the male.
A barbecue pit in Alabama held this beauty contest and elected a cute colored chick to be Miss Barbecue 1970. So when she got back to her room she said, ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of us all?’ and the mirror snarled, ‘Snow White, you black bastard, and don’t you forget it.’
Young men should travel, if but to amuse themselves.—Byron
Nature is the balm that will cure all the ills created by those who have abused nature.
The isle in which we dwell, though it be small,
Is a safe anchorage for the region round.
Quilóa and Mombassa here must call,
Sofála too, when o’er these waters bound.
And since ’tis necessary to them all,
We seized the isle for our own stamping-ground,
And to answer everything of which you speak,
The name by which it goes is Mozambique …
But it were good a little here to bide
And take the sweet refreshment of the land.
What’s needful, he who over us holds sway,
And who himself will greet you, will purvey.
—Luis de Camões
I pity the man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba, and cry, ‘Tis all barren.’—Laurence Sterne
The elephant came crashing through the trees, standing shoulder-high to the topmost branches, a beast of such magnitude that he stupefied me. I asked myself, ‘What right have I to aggrandize myself with a mechanical toy like a rifle so that I can equal this towering beast?’ and my folly became apparent, and I could not pull the trigger. ‘Fire! Fire!’ shouted the hunters, but I could not, so one of them had to do it, and this gigantic element of nature staggered forward a few feet and collapsed like a mountain from which the core of gold has been stolen. At the camp they reported that I had made a very poor showing …
Support mental health or I’ll kill you.
A fox abused a lioness that she brought forth but one whelp at a time, whereas the fox produced seven. ‘True,’ confessed the lioness, ‘but when I produce a whelp it is a lion.’
Help bring back white slavery.
I was not in Moçambique that August day when the Greek freighter deposited the yellow pop-top on the quayside at Lourenço Marques, but later I heard how each of the new arrivals reacted.
Cato, with his first step ashore, fell to his knees and kissed the stones. When the others said they were surprised that he thought so much of Africa, he said, ‘I pay homage to the slaves that were sent in chains from this port.’
Monica threw her dark head back to feel the sweet, warm breeze of late winter. She looked at the flowering trees about to bud, then studied the variety of human beings—African, Portuguese, Indian, Chinese, Greek, Rhodesian—and shivered. It was the same Africa, immense and unforgiving, and it pressed down upon her as heavily as ever.
Joe simply stared. The dockside was more modern than he had anticipated. The presence of a chugging train confused him as did the modern cargo gear and the Mercedes-Benz taxis. What he could see of the surrounding city looked European. ‘This isn’t what I was led to expect,’ he said.
As for Gretchen, she reveled in the exotic beauty and said to the others, ‘That was a great decision we made in Pamplona.’
Gretchen wanted to drive, but on the trip in to the city, found it difficult to keep left, and this prevented her from seeing much of Lourenço Marques. The others found it one of the most beautiful capitals they had visited. Its boulevards were wide and ran in straight lines far into the interior, and the buildings that edged them were clean and solid. Joe tried to guide her from a map he had picked up aboard ship, leading her through the residential area to the luxury hotels, huge structures that would have been at home in Nice or Cannes, each with its own swimming pool and tennis courts.
‘I keep trying to convince myself this is Africa,’ Cato said.
They now got mixed up in a network of concrete superhighways, from which they extricated themselves with difficulty, but ahead they saw that sign which is so reassuring to motorists in Europe and Africa: Camping. Swinging off the road, Gretchen stopped the car at a flower-surrounded office and asked, ‘Is this where we register?’
‘Your passports,’ the Portuguese official said. Then he raised a barrier that allowed them entry to a spot which they would remember as a most gracious introduction to a new continent.
When I later caught up with them, Gretchen told me, ‘It lay smack on the shore of the Indian Ocean, so that when you got up in the morning you saw the sun rising from the water, and when you went to bed at night you could see the lights of passing ships. There were casuarina trees everywhere and so many flowers that the place must have been run by gardeners.
‘In and out among the trees wove a network of paved roads, with places to park at unlikely points. We chose a beauty. We could see a cluster of distant islands. And all this for less than a dollar a day.’
‘She hasn’t mentioned the best part,’ Monica said. ‘We’d be leaning against the pop-top, and out of the trees would descend a horde of tame monkeys to chatter about local affairs and beg for food. They were really extraordinar
‘The part I liked best,’ Gretchen said, ‘was the rondavels. If you left the part of the camping reserved for caravans, you came to an area filled with little round huts, each painted a different color. They were patterned after old African-style houses, and when you got tired of sleeping in your car, you could rent a rondavel. It was super.’
The rondavels, I learned later, caused some embarrassment, because after they had slept in the pop-top for two nights, Joe suggested that they needed more room, so they went to the office, where the attendant, seeing from their passports that they were not married, made an elaborate joke out of finding a pink rondavel for the two girls and a blue one for the boys. Gretchen was about to inform him that this wasn’t what they had in mind, but Monica interrupted to say, ‘That’s good.’
When the attendant left, Cato and Monica moved into the pink one, leaving Joe and a self-conscious Gretchen standing before the blue one, uncertain as to what they should do next. On the Greek freighter, life had been simple. Since original plans had called for a party of five, three cabins had been reserved, and when Britta stayed behind, it was logical for Monica and Cato to use one, Gretchen one, and Joe one. This embarrassed nobody, since it was recognized in the group that Gretchen was in some nebulous way attached to Clive, so Joe had paid her normal attention during the long trip and felt neither inclination nor obligation to do more. The two nights spent ashore had presented no problem, since everyone was accustomed to the close quarters in the pop-top and did not interpret them as an invitation to emotional involvement.
But now it seemed as if Gretchen and Joe must share the blue rondavel with its double bed, and Gretchen backed away. In obvious embarrassment she moved to the doorway of the hut and said in a low voice, ‘Hadn’t you better bring my things from the Volkswagen?’
Joe asked, ‘Your things?’ and she nodded. When he trudged back to the pop-top, after having delivered them, he muttered, ‘And I was the guy who proposed the rondavels.’
On the afternoon of the third day Gretchen surprised the others by saying, ‘I’ll stake you to dinner at the Trianon.’ So that night Cato spruced up and the girls wore their sauciest miniskirts, but Joe appeared in his normal outfit. With a collective ‘Oh, brother!’ they got him out of his Levis and sheepskin vest, but his boots he insisted upon wearing, and with ordinary trousers, shirt, tie and blazer he didn’t look too bad.
When they filed into the posh dining room, everyone stared at them—partly because of the very short miniskirts, partly because of Joe’s wild hair and beard, but mostly because Cato was obviously a white girl’s escort. Unfortunately, they were seated near a stiff-necked Boer couple from South Africa who took an extremely dim view of everything and muttered audibly about niggers who ought to be kept out of decent places.
Under this provocation, Cato and Monica became completely obnoxious. ‘If you please,’ Cato said haughtily to the head waiter, ‘send us the wine steward.’ When the sommelier came, Cato asked in a voice somewhat louder than necessary, ‘Have you a really good white Burgundy … perhaps a Chablis?’ He stroked his beard and said in a confidential tone, ‘But it must be very dry … very dry indeed.’
The head waiter now started the rumor ‘He’s a distinguished official from the United Nations,’ whereupon Monica said in a clear voice, ‘Isn’t it amusing that all over the world people use the United Nations as an excuse for being forced to do what they should have done fifty years ago?’
When the wine came, Cato really went into his act. He lifted the sample, looked at it against the light, then carefully sipped a little, swished it about his mouth, and studiously spit it into another glass. Then, reflectively, he leaned back and said, loud enough for the Boer couple to hear, ‘There’s something … something.’ He asked for a piece of bread, which he slowly chewed and swallowed. Only then would he try a second taste, which he savored like a connoisseur, finally swallowing it. ‘Very just,’ he said judiciously. ‘You may serve.’
In the kitchen the head waiter said, ‘That goddamned monkey knows his wine. His wife must be a millionaire,’ but the Boer gentleman whispered to his wife, ‘I’d like him to try that on me … just once. I’d wring his neck,’ and Cato whispered to Gretchen, ‘I hope you can pay for this wine … whatever the hell it is.’ Monica ended the act by saying loudly enough for several tables to hear, ‘You clown. You wonderful, stinking clown.’
At another table a distinguished-looking couple—he with white hair and clipped mustache, and she with bluish hair and delicate lace collar—kept staring at Cato, neither in amusement at his buffoonery nor in anger at his presumption, but rather as if they knew him, and after the wine had been served they dispatched a waiter with a note. It was addressed not to Cato but to the young lady in blue, and it read: ‘Forgive me, but are you not Sir Charles Braham’s daughter? My husband is chief justice of the Vwarda supreme court.’ It was signed ‘Maud Wenthorne’ and carried the postscript, ‘Perhaps we can have coffee in the bar.’
Monica read the note with confused emotions: it conjured up memories of pleasant afternoons in Vwarda when the English colony met for tea and talked of schools and summer rains and the most recent outrages of the Labour Government—in London, of course, not Vwarda. Those had been the splendid days, hanging at the edge of change, but swiftly they had turned into tragic days marked by tribal strife, expropriation, loss of jobs that had seemed secure, and the gradual expulsion of the white man. Monica’s father and the Wenthornes had seen much of one another, but Monica had been away at school in England and it was understandable that Lady Wenthorne should not recognize her for sure.
Monica felt a strong temptation to send back a note: ‘You are mistaken,’ for she did not want to reestablish contacts with Africa’s British colony, but to reject Lady Wenthorne, after she had been so kind in Vwarda, would be ungracious. Turning toward the other table, she smiled warmly and nodded, then passed the note to her three companions, replying noncommittally to their questions. To tell them all she knew of this distinguished couple would require a backward trip that she was ill-prepared to take; to tell them less than the whole story would be unjust; but her dilemma was solved by Cato, who said, ‘Isn’t he the cat who’s had all that trouble in Vwarda? Handed down a decision the blacks wouldn’t tolerate?’ Arrogantly he turned to stare at the chief justice in such a way that the latter had to know that this Negro was identifying him with the recent judicial crisis. Sir Victor blushed, then bowed and nodded his head a couple of times as if to say, ‘Yes, young man, I’m the one.’ At that moment he must have regretted his wife’s intemperate invitation to coffee.
The Wenthornes finished their dinner first and were waiting in the bar, where Negro servants in blue uniforms and white gloves moved sedately, serving small cups of very good Angolan coffee accompanied by sugar wafers. The judge and his wife sat in a corner at an ornate cast-iron table whose surfaces were lavish with scrolls and curleycues. A soft light emanated from unseen sources, and Gretchen thought: This must be one of the most civilized spots in the world today; but Monica thought: Here we go again … the grandeur of empire … this time Portuguese.
Lady Wenthorne acted as if she were presiding over a Victorian soirée, and the judge seemed the epitome of judicial elegance, characterized by that probity and nice regard for proper behavior which marks the best British judges. For example, when Cato asked pointedly, ‘Why did the Vwarda decision trigger riots?’ Sir Victor rose, excused himself and went ostentatiously to the men’s room, leaving his wife to answer the question. ‘Because a white judge had to reverse a black judge.’
‘Aren’t there any blacks on the high bench?’ Cato asked.
‘How could there be? No natives have studied law.’
‘You said the lower judge was black.’
‘By courte
‘But I understand that right now the superior judges are black.’
‘Yes. Since the riots, all the white judges have been kicked out.’
‘Then they did find black judges?’
Lady Wenthorne looked steadily at Cato and said, ‘They found black men … not black judges.’
Now Sir Victor returned, and this was a signal to drop the subject of the riots, so Monica asked, ‘Will you be returning to Vwarda?’ and he said with that calm which had characterized him on the bench, ‘A mission is arriving tomorrow. The president’s brother is in charge, I believe. We’re going to explore what might be done, because there’s an honest wish in Vwarda that I continue until the various benches have been filled and trained.’
‘I thought they were filled,’ Cato said.
It was remarkable—Monica made a great point of this when she told me about the affair later—how free of prejudice the Wenthornes were. They liked the black men, had worked with them all their lives, had done all they could to inspire young blacks to study law and medicine, and now they intuitively liked Cato and his imperative questioning. I’m afraid the benches are filled, sir,’ the judge said, ‘but all the leaders in Vwarda acknowledge they are filled with the wrong men—tribalists, corrupt bargainers, men without principle or probity. I doubt if the president and his brother want me to return, but they certainly want someone like me who is capable of cleaning up the mess. And I suppose, for better or worse, it must be a white man.’