Read Bech Is Back for Free Online Page B

Cricket Club flourished under new management; the portly men playing bowls and sipping gin were a shade or two darker than the British, but mannerly and jubilant. The bowling greens were level and bright, the gin was Beefeater’s, the laughter of sportsmanship ricocheted; it was jolly, jolly. Bech was happy here. He was not happy everywhere, in the Third World.
    A friend had fought in Korea and had told Bech, without rancor, that the whole country smelled of shit. Alighting from the plane, Bech discovered it to be true: a gamy, muddy smellswept toward him. That had been his first impression, which he had suppressed when the reporters asked for it.
    As the audience in Cape Coast politely yielded up a scattered, puzzled applause, Bech turned to the Ambassador and said, “Tough questions.”
    The Ambassador, whose white planter’s suit lacked only the wide-brimmed hat and the string tie, responded with a blast of enthusiasm. “Those weren’t tough questions, those were kid-glove questions. Standard stuff. These buggers are soft; that’s why they made good slaves. Before they sent me here, I was in Somaliland; the Danakil—now, those are buggers after my own heart. Kill you for a dime, for a nickel-plated spoon. Hell, kill you for the fun of it. Hated to leave. Just as I was learning the damn language. Full of grammar, Dankali.”
    Tanzania was eerie. The young cultural attaché was frighteningly with it, equally enthusiastic about the country’s socialism and its magic. “So this old guy wrote the name of the disease and my brother’s name on the skin of the guava and it
sank right in
. You could see the words moving
into the center
. I tried writing on a guava and I couldn’t even make a mark. Sure enough, weeks later I get a letter from him saying he felt a lot better suddenly. And if you figure in the time change, it was
that very day
.”
    They kept Bech’s profile low; he spoke not in a hall but in a classroom, at night, and then less spoke than deferentially listened. The students found decadent and uninteresting Proust, Joyce, Shakespeare, Sartre, Hemingway—Hemingway, who had so enjoyed coming to Tanganyika and killing its kudu and sitting by its campfires getting drunk and pontifical—and Henry James. Who, then, Bech painfully asked,
did
measureup to the exacting standards that African socialism had set for literature? The answering silence lengthened. Then the brightest boy, the most militant and vocal, offered, “Jack London,” and rubbed his eyes. He was tired, Bech realized. Bech was tired. Jack London was tired. Everything in the world was tired, except fear—fear and magic.
    Alone on the beach in Dar es Salaam, where he had been warned against going alone, he returned to the sand after trying to immerse himself in the milky, shoal-beshallowed Indian Ocean and found his wristwatch gone. There was nothing around him but palms and a few rocks. And no footprints but his own led to his blanket. Yet the watch was gone from where he had distinctly placed it; he remembered its tiny threadlike purr in his ear as he lay with his back to the sun. It was not the watch, a drugstore Timex bought on upper Broadway. It was the fear he minded, the terror of the palms, the rocks, the pale, unsatisfactory ocean, his sharp small shadow, the mocking emptiness all around. The Third World was a vacuum that might suck him in, too, along with his wristwatch and the words on the skin of the guava.
    At the center of a panel of the Venezuelan elite, Bech discussed “The Role of the Writer in Society.” Spanish needs more words, evidently, than even English to say something, so the intervals of translation were immense. The writer’s duty to society, Bech had said, was simply to tell the truth, however strange, small, or private his truth appeared. During the eternity while the translator, a plump, floridly gesturing woman, rendered this into the microphone, one panelist kept removing and replacing his glasses fussily and