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English translation. There was none, and silence also gaped in French, in Spanish, in Japanese. To judge from the uplifted, chanting sounds, the young man was reciting poetry. Two policemen as young as he, their faces as smooth as their white helmets and as aloof from their bodies as the faces in Oriental prints, came and took the young man’s arms. When he struggled and attempted to read on, to the end, Bech presumed, of a stanza, the policeman on his right arm neatly chopped him on the side of the neck, so his head snapped and the papers scattered. No one laughed. Bech was informed later that the young man was a Korean satiric poet.
    In Kenya, on the stage at Nairobi, a note was passed to Bech, saying,
Crazy man on yr. right in beret, don’t call on him for any question
. But when Bech’s talk, which he had adjusted since Ghana to “Personal Impressions of the American Literary Scene,” was finished and he had fielded or fluffed the obligatory pokes about racism, Vietnam, and the American loss in Olympic basketball, a young goateed African in a beret stepped forward to the edge of the stage and, addressing Bech, said, “Your books, they are weeping, but there are no tears.”
    On a stage, everything is hysterically heightened. Bech, blinded by lights, was enraptured by what seemed the beautiful justice of the remark. At last, he was meeting the critic who understood him. At last, he had been given an opportunityto express and expunge the embarrassment he felt here in the Third World. “I know,” he confessed. “I would
like
there to be tears,” he added, feeling craven as he said it.
    Insanely, the youthful black face opposite him, with its Pharaonic goatee, had produced instant tears; they gleamed on his cheeks as, with the grace of those beyond harm, of clowns and paupers and kings, he indicated the audience to Bech by a regal wave of his hand and spoke, half to them, half to him. His lilt was drier than the West African lilt, it was flavored by Arabic, by the savanna; the East Africans were a leaner and thinner-lipped race than that which had supplied the Americas with slaves. “The world,” he began, and hung that ever-so-current bauble of a word in the space of their gathered silence with apparent utter confidence that meaning would come and fill it, “is a worsening place. There can be no great help in words. This white man, who is a Jew, has come from afar to give us words. They are good words. Is it words we need? Do we need his words? What shall we give him back? In the old days, we would give him back death. In the old days, we would give him back ivory. But in these days, such gifts would make the world a worse place. Let us give him back words. Peace.” He bowed to Bech.
    Bech lifted enough from his chair to bow back, answering, “Peace.” There was heavy, relieved applause, as the young man was led away by a white guard and a black.
    In Caracas, the rich Communist and his elegant French wife had Bech to dinner to admire their Henry Moore. The Moore, a reclining figure of fiercely scored bronze—art seeking to imitate nature’s patient fury—was displayed in an enclosed green garden where a floodlit fountain played and bougainvillaeaflowered. The drinks—Scotch,
chicha
, Cointreau—materialized on glass tables. Bech wanted to enjoy the drinks, the Moore, the beauty of this rich enclosure, and the luxury of Communism as an idle theory, but he was still unsettled by the flight from Canaima, where he had seen the tiny Indians disappear. The devil-may-care pilot had wanted to land at the unlighted military airfield in the middle of the city rather than at the international airport along the coast, and other small planes, also devil-may-care, kept dropping in front of him, racing with the fall of dusk, so he kept pulling back on the controls and cursing, and the plane would wheel, and the tin slums of the Caracas hillsides would flood the tipped windows—vertiginous surges of