The Complete Henry Bech by John Updike

Author:John Updike
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141954936
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-08-07T00:00:00+00:00

Bech Third-Worlds It

In Ghana, the Ambassador was sixty 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 with uncanny mimetic sympathy created in painted plaster an ornate, enigmatic tower. Green and pink, decorated 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 towards the sea whence, beginning with the Portuguese, the white men had come. The strange structure was weathering rapidly in these tropics. Its purpose, Bech imagined, was magical; but it was their ambassadorial 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 and impressive face; Bech, nervously picking at an eye-tooth with the nail of his little finger; the cultural attaché, a curly-haired, informative, worried man from Minnesota; his assistant, a lanky black female from Charlotte, North Carolina, coiffed in the only Afro, as far as Bech could see, in all of 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 Seoul, 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 honourable Henry Bech.’

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

There was, this rude 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.’

Bech felt near fainting. The jet lag built up over the Pacific was unshakeable, and everywhere he went, a dozen photographers in identical grey suits kept blinding him with flash bulbs.

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