The Guyana Quartet by Wilson Harris

Author:Wilson Harris
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571368082
Publisher: Faber & Faber

IV

Magda almost swooned. She caught herself just in time. After all she was a strong woman, she told herself. Her body and limbs looked like dark resolute stone (Abram had said so to her one day when he arrived to sleep with her). The involuntary smile of recollection felt like a grimace. Her brow and cheeks were a black fantastic mood of mahogany, her eyes narrow and unbelieving slits. She recalled the ancient glimmering look of reluctant resignation on her father’s dead face. It swam before her – the crafty obdurate Hong Kong expatriate, the remote coffined brow of the man who had been her father. She remembered the violent news of how he had been killed in a devil of a brawl in a Georgetown gambling saloon. She was twelve years old then, and had just started going to high school. Her Negro mother was lucky to pick up a Pomeroon man and they left the city for good to seek their fortune in the Pomeroon river and bush. Magda had survived everything until she had matured into the toughest and best whore in the river district – from Jigsaw to Pickersgill. She swore her child would have the chances she had never had. She had scrimped, and saved, and had her men to send Cristo to college. And now look what had happened! She wanted to deny strenuously the true and enormous bizarre history passing before her mind’s eye like the repetitive blows and stabs of a fabulous injustice. She put her hand in the region of her heart in the way Abram used to do when he was in pain. Her voice almost suffocated in her throat but she still succeeded in crying: “Cristo, Cristo, I want the living truth! How Abram really come by he dead? Is the same old ungodly fight all-you had? Boy, if is the first time in me whole life I want you to explain the living truth. You, my son, kill a man old enough to be your father? Is true?” Cristo had never heard such dark irrational vehement words on his mother’s lips. He looked at her as at a new woman animated by revolutionary furies he had never seen or suspected. She was going out of her mind. Unless – could the troubling vision be his? He trembled. The months he had spent with Abram in Jigsaw Bay had unhinged him and he had begun to see a terrible and accusing mask in the place of flesh and blood.

“Abram died a natural death,” he said slowly. “Not a blow passed between us. . . .” He became irresolute. He blurted out: “Not a blow passed from him to me or from me to him. He collapsed, I swear, without a blow being struck, his hand on his chest, and his face all screwed up like a devil. He was trying to say something but he couldn’t. That’s the God’s innocent truth.”

Cristo became restless under his mother’s masked stare. He felt he had not told the whole story and had deliberately misrepresented something.

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