Bech Third-Worlds It

Now it can be told. How Henry Bech, the scarcely read yet oddly respectable American author, permitted himself, out of loyalty to a country of which his impressions were almost entirely whimsical, to be used by the State Department as a cultural emissary to whatever little nation it could think of; this was in the Cold War's slush season, the years (1968--1972) before the Soviet Union and the United States realized that, far from wishing to win the minds and the hearts of the Third World, they just wished it would go away.

In Ghana, the Ambassador was 60 and slender and spunky, and wore a suit white as himself. He bade the driver on the road from Accra to Cape Coast stop at a village where a remarkable native sculpture did not so much imitate as duplicate in painted plaster an ornate, enigmatic tower. Green and pink, dec orated with scrolls and pineapples, the tower, as solid inside as a piece of marzipan, was guarded by life-size plaster soldiers dressed in uniforms that combined and compounded the devices of half a dozen imperial uniforms. Out of pasty plaster faces they stared with alien blue eyes out to the sea whence, first, the Portuguese came. The strange structure was weathering rapidly, but its cracks and crumbled corners were part of its aesthetic, like the reticulated glaze of a Chinese porcelain or the dribbles and stains in a Pollock. Its purpose, Bech imagined, was magical; but it was their Mercedes limousine, as it roared into the village at the head of a procession of raised dust, a tiny American flag flapping on one fender, that had the magical effect: The villagers vanished. While the little cultural delegation stood there, on the soft dirt, in the hot sun--the Ambassador, mopping his pink, gaunt, impressive face: Bech, nervously picking his front teeth; the cultural attaché, a curly-haired, informative, worried man from Minnesota; his assistant, a lanky black female from Charlotte, North Carolina, coifed in the only Afro, as far as Bech could see, in Africa; and their driver, a gleaming Ghanaian a full head shorter than the rest of them--the village's inhabitants peeped from behind palms and out of oval doorways. Bech was reminded of how, in Korea, the North Korean soldiers skulked on their side of the truce zone, some with binoculars, some with defiant gestures. "Did we do something wrong?" Bech asked.

"Hell, no," the Ambassador said, with his slightly staggering excess of enthusiasm, like a ringmaster shouting to the far rows, "that's just the way the buggers act."

In South Korea, at a party held in a temple converted to an official banquet hall, a Japanese poet was led up to Bech by a translator. "I have long desired," the translator said, "to make the acquaintanceship of the honorable Henry Bech."

"Why?" Bech thoughtlessly asked. He was very tired, and tired of being polite in Asia.

There was, this monosyllable translated, a smiling, steady answer. The translator put it. "Your beautiful book, Travel Light, told us of Japan what to expect of the future." More Japanese, translated as, "Young hooligans with faces of glass." This surely meant Bech's most famous apparition, the begoggled motorcyclists in his first, now venerated and wearisome, novel.

The poet in the kimono was leaning at a fixed angle. Bech perceived that his serenity was not merely ethnic; he was drunk. "And you," Bech asked through the translator, "what do you do?"

The answer came back as, "I write many poems."

God. Bech was tired. The jet lag built up over the Pacific was unshakable, and everywhere he went, a dozen photographers in identical gray suits kept blinding him. And Korean schoolgirls, in pigtails and blue school-uniform skirts, kept slipping him love letters in elevators. Two minutes off the airplane, he had been asked four times, "What are your impressions of Korea?" Where was he?

A thin ocher man in a silvery kimono was swaying before him, upheld by a chunky translator whose eyes were crossed in a fury of attention. "And what are your poems about?" Bech asked.

The answer was prompt. "Frogs," the translator said. The poet beamed.

"Frogs?" Bech said, his mind swimming. "My goodness. Many poems about frogs?"

"Many."

"How many?"

No question was too inane, here in this temple, to receive an answer. The poet himself spoke it, in proud English. "One hunnert and twelve."

The Cape Coast Castle breasted the green Atlantic like a ship; the great stone deck of the old slave fort was paved with plaques testifying to the deaths, after a year or two of service here, of young British officers--dead of fever at 22, 23, 25. "They thought that gin kept away malaria," the cultural attaché told him, "so everybody was reeling drunk most of the time. They died drunk. It must have been wild."

"Why did they come?" Bech asked, in his role as ambassador from the kingdom of stupid questions.

"Same reason they came to the States," the attaché said. "To get out from under. To get rich quick."

"Didn't they know"--Bech felt piqued, as if the plaques around him were a class of inattentive students--"they would die?"

"Dead men tell no tales," the Ambassador interrupted heartily, brandishing an imaginary whip. "They kept the bad news mum back home and told the poor buggers fool tales about black gold."

The Ambassador's party went down to the dungeons. In one, a shrine seemed operative--bones, scraps of glass, burned-out candles dirtied a slab of rock. In the deepest dungeon, a trough cut into the stone floor would have carried away body wastes and a passageway where one must crouch led the captives, manacled, out to the ships and the New World. Bare feet had polished a path across the shelf of rock. Above their heads, a narrow stone speaking tunnel would have issued the commands of the captors. "Any white man come down in here," the Ambassador explained with loud satisfaction, "he'd be torn apart quicker'n a rabbit."

The cave-shaped historical site echoed, even smelled, of the packed, fearful life it had contained.

"Leontyne Price was here a year ago," the cultural attaché said. "She really flipped out. She began to sing. She said she had to."

Bech glanced at the black girl from Charlotte, to see if she were flipping out. She was impassive, secretarial. She had been here often before, it was on the Ghana tour. Yet she felt Bech's glance and suddenly, there in the dungeon dimness, gave it a dark, cool return.

In Venezuela, the tallest waterfall in the world was hidden by clouds. The plane bumped down in a small green clearing and jauntily wheeled to the end of the airstrip. The pilot was devil-may-care, with a Cesar Romero mustache and that same Latin, all-giving smile, under careful eyes. Bech's guide was a languid olive woman employed by Creole Petroleum Corporation, or the government ministry of human resources, or both. She struck Bech as hard to touch. Her brown eyes were retained in their eggshell lids like great drops of a perilous, sardonic liquid. Bech and his guide stepped from the plane into tropical air, which makes all things seem close; the river that flowed from the invisible waterfall was audible. At the far edge of the clearing, miniature brown people were walking, half-naked, though some wore hats. There were perhaps eight of them, the children among them smaller but in no other way different; they moved single file, with the wooden dignity of old-fashioned toys, doubly dwarfed by the wall of green forest and the mountainous clouds of the moist, windy sky. "Who are they?" Bech asked.

"Indians," his lovely guide answered. Her English was flawless; she had spent years at the University of Michigan. But something Hispanic made her answers curter than a North American's would have been.

"Where are they going?"

"Nowhere. They are going precisely nowhere."

Her emphasis, he imagined, invited Bech to question deeper. "What are they thinking?" he asked.

The question was odd enough to induce a silky blink.

"They are wondering," said the señorita then, "who you are."

"They can see me?"

They had vanished, the Indians, into the forest by the river, like chips of pottery lost in grass. "Perfectly," she told him. "They can see you all too well."

•

The audience at Cape Coast grew restive during Bech's long address on "The Cultural Situation of the American Writer," and afterward several members of the audience, dressed in the colorful robes of spokesmen, leaped to their feet and asked combative questions. It was (continued on page 144)Bech Third-Worlds It(continued from page 106) Bech's turn to provide answers. "Why," asked a small bespectacled man, his voice tremulous and orotund over the microphone, "has the gentleman speaking in representation of the United States not mentioned any black writers? Does he suppose, may I ask, that the situation of the black writers in his country partakes of the decadent and, may I say, uninteresting situation he has described?"

"Well," Bech began, "I think, yes, the American Negro has his share of our decadence, though maybe not a full share--"

"We have heard all this before," the man was going on, robed like a wizard, his lilting African English boomed by the amplifying system, "of your glorious Melville and Whitman, of their Moby Dicks and Scarlet Letters--what of Eldridge Cleaver and Richard Wright, what of Langston Hughes and Rufus Magee? Why have you not read to us pretty posies of their words? We beg you, Mr. Bech, tell us what you mean by this phrase"--a scornful pause--" 'American writer.' "

The noise from the crowd was rising. They seemed to be mostly schoolgirls, in white blouses and blue skirts, as in Korea, except that their skin was black and their pigtails stood straight up from their heads. "I mean," Bech said, "any person who simultaneously writes and holds American citizenship."

He had not meant this to be funny and found the wave of laughter alarming. Was it with him or against him?

In Korea, there was little laughter at his talk on "American Humor in Twain, Tarkington and Thurber." Though Bech himself, reading aloud at the dais beside the bored Belgian chairman, repeatedly halted to get his own chuckles under control, an echo of them arose only from the American table of the conference--and these were contributed mostly, Bech feared, as tactical support. The only other noise in the vast pale-green room was the murmur of translation (into French, Spanish, Japanese and Korean) leaking from earphones bored Orientals had removed. Also, a yipping noise now and then escaped from the Vietnamese table. This table happened alphabetically to be adjacent to that of the United States, and one of the delegates happened to be crazy. A long-faced man with copious black hair cut in a bowl shape, he yipped and doodled to himself throughout all speeches and rose always to make the same speech, a statement that in Vietnam for 20 years the humor had been bitter. Humor was the conference subject. Malaysian professors cracked Malaysian one-liners; the panel on Burmese scatology was very dignified. There was never much laughter, and none when Bech concluded with some deep thoughts on domestic confusion as the necessary underside of bourgeois order. "Y a-t-il des questions?" the chairman asked.

A young man, Asiatic, in floppy colorless shirt and slacks, stood up with fear electric on his face and began to scream. Scream, no, he was intoning from sheets of paper held shaking in his hands. Fear spread to the faces of those around him who could understand. Bech picked up the headset before him on the dais and dialed for the English translation. There was none, and silence also gaped in French, in Spanish, in Japanese. From the uplifted, chanting sounds, the young man was reciting poetry. Two policemen as young as he, their faces smooth as their white helmets, 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.

On the stage at Nairobi, a note was passed to Bech, saying, Crazy man on yr. right in beret, dont 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 as one character in a Beckett play addresses another, said, "Your books, they are weeping, but there are no tears."

On a stage, everything is hysterically heightened. Bech, blinded by lights, deafened by the resonating of every word he spoke, was enraptured by what seemed the beautiful justice of the remark. At last, he was meeting the critic who understood him. "I know," he said. "I would like there to be tears," he added helpfully.

Insanely, the young 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 and savanna; the East Africans were a leaner and more severe race than that which had supplied the Americas with slaves. "The world," he began, and hung in the pause with utter confidence that the sentence would find its end, "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. They make us ask ourself the question, 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 shame. 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 man and a black.

In Caracas, the rich Communist and his beautiful 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 bougainvillaea flowered; the drinks--Scotch, arepa--materialized on glass tables. Bech wanted to enjoy the drinks, the Moore, the beauty of rich enclosure, but he was still unsettled by the flight from Canaima; the devil-may-care pilot had wanted to land at the unlighted mid-city airport, rather than at the international airfield 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 mosaic. "Caramba!" the escritor norteamericano wanted to exclaim, but he was afraid of mispronouncing. He was pleased to perceive, through the surges of terror, that his cool guide was terrified also. Her olive face looked aged, blanched. Her great eyes shut. Her hand groped for his, her long fingernails scraped. At least he would die with her. The plane dived and smartly landed.

The Ambassador held a dinner for Bech and the Ghanaian elite. They were the elite under this regime, had been the elite under Nkrumah, would be the elite under the next regime. The relative positions within the elite varied, however; one slightly demoted man, with an exquisite Oxford accent, got drunk and told Bech and the women at their end of the table about walking behind Nkrumah in a procession. In those days (and no doubt in these), the elite had carried guns. "Quite without warning or any tangible provocation," the man told Bech, as gin-enriched sweat shone from his face as from a basalt star, "I was visited by this overpowering urge to kill him. Over powering--my palm was itching, I could feel the little griddle of the revolver handle in my fingers, I focused hypnotically upon the precise spot, in the center of his occiput, where the bullet would enter. He had become impossible, you see. He had become a tyrant. Isn't that so, ladies?"

There was a soft, guarded tittering of agreement from the Ghanaian women. They were magnificent, these women, from mammy wagon to cabinet post, fertile and hopeful, wrapped in their sumptuous gowns and turbans. Bech wanted to die, there, in the candlelight, amid these women, like a sultan amid so many pillows. Women and death and airplanes: There was a comfortable triangulation there, he drowsily perceived.

"The urge became irresistible," his informant was continuing. "I was wrestling with a veritable demon; sweat was rolling from me as from one about to vomit. I had to speak. It happened that I was walking beside one of his bodyguards. I whispered to him, 'Sammy. I want to shoot him.' I had to tell someone or I would have done it. I wanted him to prevent me, perhaps--who knows the depths of the slave mentality?--even to shoot me, before I committed sacrilege. You know what he said to me? He turned to me, this bodyguard, six foot two at the minimum, and solemnly said, 'Jimmy, me, too. But not now. Not yet. Let's wait.' "

•

In Lagos, they were sleeping in the streets. Returning in a limousine from a night club where he had learned to do the high-life (his hostess' waist like a live, slow snake in his hands), Bech saw the bodies stretched on the pavements, in the stately old British colonnades, under the street lamps, without blankets. Seen thus, people make a bucolic impression, of a type of animal, a hairless, especially peaceful type, performing one of the four or five acts essential to its existence.

In Seoul, the prostitutes wore white. They were young girls, all of them, and in the white dresses, under their delicate parasols, they seemed children gathered by the walls of the hotels, waiting for a bus to take them to their first Communion.

In Caracas, they stood along the main streets between the diagonally parked cars so that Bech, until the USIS men confirmed his worst suspicion, had the vague impression of a drive-in restaurant blocks long, with the carhops allowed to choose their own uniforms, as long as they showed lots of leg.

In Egypt, the beggars had sores and upturned, blind eyes; Bech felt they were gazing upward to their reward and glimpsed through them the Biblical pyramid, the hierarchy of suffering that modern man struggles with nightmare difficulty to invert, to place upon a solid material base of sense and health and plenty. On an island in the Nile, the Royal 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.

A friend had fought in Korea and had told Bech, without rancor, that the whole country smelled. Alighting from the plane, Bech discovered it to be true: a gamy, muddy smell. That had been his first impression, which he had suppressed when the reporters asked for it.

As the audience in Cape Coast politely applauded, Bech turned to the Ambassador as to a fellow conspirator 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 people 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, Danakil."

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. 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--who had seen the Tanganyikans as one with their beautiful animals--and Henry James. Who, then, Bech painfully asked, did measure up, or begin to, to the exacting standard 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 from having tried to immerse himself in the milky, shoal-beshallowed Indian Ocean and found his wrist watch gone. But 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 Broadway. It was the fear he minded, the terror of the palms, the rocks, the pale, unsatisfactory ocean, his sharp small shadow, his mocking solitude.

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 the rich Communist studied his own right hand as if it had been placed by an officious waiter on the table--square, tan, manicured, cuffed in white and ringed in gold. But what, the man with the restless spectacles was at last allowed to ask, of Dreiser and Jack London, of Steinbeck and Sinclair Lewis--what has happened in the United States to their noble tradition of social criticism?

It's become sexual display, Bech could have said; but he chose to answer in terms of Melville and Henry James, though he was weary, weary to death of dragging their large, obliging, misshapen reputations around the globe, rag dummies in which the stuffing had long ago slipped, a generation, nay, two, since their electric connection with the young Bech, a student, had been made, feebly utilized and allowed to go dead. Words, words. As he talked, and his translatoress feverishly scribbled notes on his complicated gist, young Venezuelans--students--not too noisily passed out leaflets among the audience and scattered some on the table. The Communist glanced at one, put it face down on the table and firmly rested his handsome, unappetizing hand upon the now blank paper. Bech looked at the one that slid to a stop at the base of his microphone. It showed himself, hugenosed, as a vulture with striped and starred wings, perched on a tangle of multicolored little bodies; beneath the caricature ran the capitalized words Intelectual Reaccionario, Imperialista, Enemigo De Los Pueblos and some words in quotes that he instantly guessed to be a statement he had once irritably given an interviewer, on Vietnam, to the effect that, challenged to fight, a country big enough has to fight. Though it was what he honestly thought, he was sorry he had said it. But then he was sorry he had ever said anything, on anything, ever. He had meddled with the mystery of creation: blasphemy. These realizations took the time of one short, not even awkward pause in his peroration about ironic points of light; bravely, he droned on, wondering when the riot, the demostración, his death, would begin.

But the students, having distributed their flier, stood back, numbed by the continuing bombardment of North American pedantry, and even parted, murmuring uncertainly, when the panel wound down and Bech was escorted by the USIS men and the rich Communist from the hall. They looked, the students, touchingly slim, neat, dark-eyed and sensitive--the fineness of their skin and hair especially struck him, as if he were a furrier appraising pelts. Had he known Spanish, Bech might have told them, like one of those dragons in Spenser craving to be eliminated from the lists of evil, how grateful he was for their attempt to slay him.

He lived. Outdoors, in the lustrous, shuffling tropical night, the Communist stayed with him until the USIS men had flagged a taxi and, in response to Bech's protestations of gratitude (for being his bodyguard, for showing him his Moore), gave him a correct, cold handshake. A rich radical and a poor reactionary: natural allies, both resenting it. To quiet Bech's fear, they took him to a tennis tournament, where, under the lights, a defected Czech beat a pigtailed Swede. But his dread did not lift until, next morning, having signed posters and books for all the wives and cousins of the embassy personnel, he was put aboard the Pan Am jet at the Maiquetía airport. His Government had booked him first class. He ordered a drink as soon as the seat-belt sign went off. The stewardess had a Texas accent and a cosmetically flat stomach. She smiled at him. She blamed him for nothing. He might die with her. The sun above the boundless cloud fields hurled through the free bourbon a golden arc that shuddered beside the plastic swizzle stick, upon the plastic tray. God bless America.