After days of forest and gloom, the smoke from the cooking fires in front of the open kitchen hut seems to the narrator to be remarkably blue, a colour on its own, not a tone of grey or brown. The narrator is also aware that the ground below his feet feels hollow: footfalls even some distance away make a dull drumming sound. The ground has been disturbed or built up in some way. The narrator, considering the plateau or platform of the village open space, feels that the site is old, that for some way down the earth would contain debris or relics of scenes, repeated through the centuries, like the one around him now.
Some of the women are making cassava bread. Finished rounds are on the grass roof. At the side of the kitchen hut hangs the long plaited tube which can be twisted or wrung by means of a horizontally fitted stick, to squeeze the poison out of grated cassava: a poison caught in a wooden dish on the ground. Because this poison is valuable: it can preserve meat for up to a year.
On the ground is a cassava-grater. It is a beautiful object: sharp chippings of granite fixed in hardened pitch, the pitch set in a shallow rectangular trough in a flat piece of wood. The pitch would have come from far away; a precious lump would have been imported; so, too, the granite chippings. The pitch would have been boiled into a liquid, then poured into the hollow in the wood; as it cooled, the granite chippings would have been set in it one by one.
The narrator looks up. The women and girls are delighted by his contemplation of this kitchen object. The narrator thinks, “I love these people.” Then he questions himself, “What do I mean by that?” Looking at the women in the blue smoke, he thinks, “I want no harm to come to them.”
Lucas and Mateo appear. Without their loads and travelling hats, and in fresh clothes, they look like young men of some standing in the village. They take the narrator down to the river. There is a deep part where he can dive, they say. They go down with him, when he is ready. They will not leave him alone; they will not do that with the kanaima prowling about; they will offer him their protection.
The sun is going down. The water, reddish from leaves, gets darker as the light goes. The water is cool, too cool for the man-eating small fish, the boys or young men say.
The narrator sinks into the red water. The pool is as deep as the young men say. Soon the light fades from the water. Soon it is utterly black. Soon it is of a black so deep that it is without colour: it is nothing, however much you concentrate on it. In this nothing the narrator feels he has lost touch with his body; water blocks sensation. He is just his eyes concentrating on nothing; he is just mind alone, a perceiving of nothing. He is quite frightened. He somehow gets in touch with his will again and pulls himself up, to the yellowing light.
He is glad to see the boys. They wait while he dresses, and then they walk him back up to the village. The best protection against the kanaima is company: once the kanaima is seen by a third party, the kanaima’s power is lost. Yet the need for company also reinforces the kanaima’s power. And the narrator feels that, like Lucas with the flower on the path, he has had a brush with his kanaima: an emotion, a moment, that will come back to him in dreams and states of blurred consciousness, something he will now not lose touch with, and which when it returns will carry with it the setting and all the extreme emotions of the last few days, including the emotion of this moment: the love for these people, which contains the wish that no harm should come to them, and is already as a result more pain than love.
It is pain rather than love which now suffuses the narrator’s vision, and corrupts everything that he sees. It is all like something he has already lost: the late afternoon light, the friendly women and children, the very blue smoke. And now all the half-formulated doubts, mere impulses, of the last few days harden into a determination to turn his back on these people, to put them out of his mind.
Hard to formulate, harder to carry out. The narrator cannot simply go away. He doesn’t know where he is. He will need guides to go back, people who will make the forest safe for him. Alfred, the village captain or headman, wouldn’t let him go just like that. Alfred would worry about the consequences, worry about what reports would get back to the coast. There would also be the Czech at the mission settlement. He wouldn’t let the narrator get away so easily.
So the narrator will have to stay. He will have to stay and get started with the organization and the other things he has been detailed to do. Perhaps later, when activity begins, it might be easier for the narrator to leave. To leave the forest, the country, the movement.
But now he will have to stay, for some weeks, some months. The people of this village and others will get to know him very well. He is already a stranger, an extraordinary being. And they, people without writing and books, depend completely on sight and memory; they have greater gifts that way. They will commit an infinity of details about him to memory: his voice, gait, gestures. He will exist in the minds of these people as he will exist nowhere else. And after he has gone away they will remember him as the man who stayed long and wasn’t straight with them, who promised many things and then went away.
There is an hour or so to go before sunset. Lucas and Mateo come to take the narrator to the village captain. They say they will interpret.
The narrator says, “But they told me Alfred spoke English.”
Mateo says, “This isn’t Alfred.”
“He is my uncle,” Lucas says. “My father brother.”
The uncle is not very old. He is in an open hut, a place of reception rather than sleeping, with a hammock for himself in one corner, and with low hardwood stools, each carved out of a solid piece of wood, for visitors. He is of a beautiful colour, the pores clean and separate on his fine skin. He is wearing new jeans and a flowered shirt: clearly the cloth-seller from the other side makes regular visits.
What he says in his language, which Lucas and Mateo turn into their own kind of English, is like this: “I heard from Alfred that Lucas and Mateo had gone to get you. But I never believed you would come. This sort of thing has been going on for so long. So much talk, so little done. But now you’re here. I hope you will act carefully. You came the hard way. There is another way, an easier way. It is through the savannah. My wife’s father told me he heard from his father that once some people were coming through there to look for gold.”
“Djukas?” the narrator asks, using the local word for the descendants of the African runaways who had settled in some parts of the forest.
“Djukas, people from the south — I can’t remember what my wife’s grandfather said. These people were coming to look for gold. And I don’t have to tell you what that would have meant for us. Do you know what the villagers did? It was the dry season. They set the savannah alight. It blazed up for miles. My wife’s grandfather said birds were always a little ahead of the fire, picking up the snakes and other little animals running away from the fire. The same fire burned every one of the men coming to look for gold. After that everybody had to leave the villages and hide in the forest for two years. Do you think it will be like that this time? Are you sure you know what you are doing? We are brave people. But—” He breaks off. Then he says, “Where do you come from?”
“England.”
“Lucas told me. My grandfather went to England. Did Lucas tell you?”
Lucas licks his top lip, and looks down.
“He went with an Englishman who liked him, and wanted him to learn English. He spent three years in England. They wanted him to marry an Englishwoman. That was part of the original idea. They even found a woman, but then at the last minute, before they came back, she became frightened. The plan was that they would come back and build houses here.” He used the English word, but in his pronunciation it sounded like part of his own language. “One of the things my grandfather said about England when he came back was that the captain of the country was a woman. Was that true?”