Bech Is Back Read Online Free PDF

crossed in a fury of attention. “And what are your poems about?” Bech asked.
    The answer was prompt. “Flogs,” the translator said. The poet beamed.
    “Frogs?” Bech said. “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 intervened to speak the answer, in English. “One hunnert fifateen.”
    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 twenty, twenty-two, twenty-five. “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 some show.”
    “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 recruits fool tales about black gold. That’s what they used to call this hellhole. The Gold Coast.”
    The Ambassador’s party went down to the dungeons. In one, a shrine seemed operative; bones, scraps of glass, burned-out candles, and fresh ash 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 the visitors now had to crouch once took black captives, manacled, out to the ships and the New World. Bare feet had polished a path across the shelf of rough rock. Overhead, 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.”
    This grottolike historical site still somehow echoed with, even seemed still to smell 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 was flipping out. She was impassive, secretarial. She had been here before; it was on the Ghana tour. Yet she felt Bech’sglance and suddenly, there in the dungeon dimness, gave it a dark, cool return. Can looks kill?
    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 dazzling Latin smile, under careful opaque eyes. Bech’s guide was a languid young olive-skinned woman employed by the Creole Petroleum Corporation, or the government Ministry of Human Resources, or both. She struck Bech as attractive but untouchable. He followed her out of the plane into tropical air, which makes all things look close; the river that flowed from the invisible waterfall was audible on several sides of them. 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 vaporous, 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