Free Visitants by Randolph Stow Page A

little room, the only one in the house with glass, was not built to be opened. The air held the heat of the day before, and it smelt of mildew.
    He lay on yellowed sheets, in a grey bed, puffing the smoke of his nailrod tobacco at a ceiling that was a mirror-image of the floor. He lay inside a cube of grey boards whose lines went round and round him like a cage. I thought that if it had been me, I would have been out and away from a room like that as soon as I was conscious. But not him; he sprawled there in his underpants like a zoo animal that had given up.
    ‘You sure you can breathe?’ I said.
    He turned his head on the yam-coloured pillow and just looked at me, impartially, in a way I was used to.
    ‘You don’t like it here?’ he said at last.
    ‘Yeah, I like it. Man, it’s interesting.’
    ‘Good. You ready for Kaga?’
    ‘Well, I’ve showered and so on. I don’t see any feverish activity in here.’
    ‘It’s the Sabbath,’ he said, leaning over to an up-ended kerosene case beside the bed and stubbing out his cigarette in the clam-shell that was there for the visitors. Then something caught his eye through the dusty window, the light on the pink frangipani flowers outside, and he lifted his head and looked at them, intently. He would do that. His eyes all of a sudden opened to something, his face changed. He concentrated like no one else I have ever seen, on things I never saw at all.
    ‘Nice,’ he said. ‘Wish the window would get broken. The flowers might kill the mould.’
    ‘Alistair,’ I said, ‘why would Mak think that you’re going away?’
    He looked round at me over his shoulder, still with that intentness on his face. ‘Mak said that?’
    ‘He said it. But it’s not true, is it?’
    ‘You know it isn’t,’ he said. Then he turned his head again, but I heard in his voice that he was smiling to himself. ‘Mak thinks I’m going troppo.’
    ‘So do some people at Osiwa. If you’d just take some sort of ordinary care of yourself—’
    ‘Ah, the people at Osiwa,’ he shrugged. ‘What would they do without me to talk about?’ He rolled back on the pillow and examined the ceiling, his hands behind his head. ‘Troppo,’ he said to himself. ‘
Ma non troppo. Agitato ma non troppo
.’
    ‘What are you raving about?’
    ‘Troppo,’
he explained. ‘Too much.’
    ‘I know what it means,’ I said. ‘Jesus, you talk to me as if I was some bush-kanaka just come in from the back of Wabag.’
    ‘All right,’ he said, ‘if you know so much, have you ever heard a piece of music marked
troppo agitato
?’
    ‘I don’t think it’s possible,’ I said.
    ‘I think it is. I want to hear it. At the end, all the instruments would be in bits.’
    ‘I’ll bet it’s been done,’ I said.
    ‘Ah, but this would be tropical,’ he said. ‘I can see it,’ he said. ‘The glue would melt in the heat, and the wood would warp, and the strings would rot away with damp and snap, one after another. The brass would turn green, and mildew would be growing on the woodwinds. When it was finished, the instruments would be thrown in a heap, and they’d begin to sprout and turn into the trees they were made from. And reeds and vines, and the wind would blow through them and the birds would come. That part I’d mark
finito
, or
troppo troppo
.’
    ‘You know something?’ I said. ‘This is a University-refectory-type conversation you’re having.’
    Then he made the noise that he made sometimes when I actually got through to him, that went something like: ‘Wo-o-oh,’ grinning at me from the pillow and looking pretty much like anyone else.
    Watching him, I tried to remember what he had been like when I first set eyes on him. Was he better, had I done him any good? And it seemed to me that he was, that I had. Because that first evening he had been far gone, like one of his cracking instruments, ready to fly apart. I remembered standing by a shutter in the big room, our living-room at Osiwa,