Bech Is Back Read Online Free PDF Page B

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. “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-Dick
s and
Scarlet Letter
s—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. Henry 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, or lay in corn rows that must have taken hours to braid. “I mean,” Bech said, “anyperson 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 that bored Orientals had removed. Also, a yipping noise now and then escaped from the Vietnamese table. This table, labelled Vietnam though it represented the vanishing entity called South Vietnam, happened alphabetically to be adjacent to that of the United States, and, in double embarrassment, one of the delegates happened to be crazy. A long-faced man with copious black hair cut in a bowl shape, he crooned and doodled to himself throughout all speeches and rose always to make the same speech, a statement that in Vietnam for twenty 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 splayed 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