1 1

The light from the bus moved uncertainly down the road until finally the two vague circles caught some indistinct object on the side of the road where it curved out in front. The bus had come to a stop. Its confused rattle had given place to an endless spastic shudder, as if its pieces were held together by too much rust ever to fall completely apart.

The driver climbed down onto the road from his seat, took a crumpled packet of Tuskers from his shirt pocket, stuck a bent cigarette in his mouth, and lit a match. The head refused to catch, however; there was only the humid orange glow as the driver resignedly threw away the stick and took out an¬ other. After the third try a yellow flame sputtered briefly. The driver caught it quickly with the end of the cigarette before it died, cleared his throat and spat out a generous gob of mucus against the tire, and began unhurriedly to inhale his smoke.

Inside the bus the conductor took down his bag and slowly rubbed his neck just above the patch where the long strap had been pressing down. Then he sat down heavily with his legs dangling down the front steps and closed his eyes. The pas¬ sengers shuffled up the center aisle and began to lower them¬ selves gently down, one after the other, into the darkness of the dawn.

When the soft scraping of sleepy feet on the hollow metal of the steps had stopped, the conductor sat up, his eyes wide open, took his bag from off the floor, drew from within it his day's

2 The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

block of tickets, and, laying this on the seat beside him, poured out all the money he had collected so far beside it. Then, check¬ ing the coins against the tickets, he began to count the morn¬ ing's take. It was mostly what he expected at this time of the month: small coins, a lot of pesewas, single brown pieces, with some fives, a few tens and the occasional twenty-five. Collect¬ ing was always easier around Passion Week. Not many pas¬ sengers needed change; it was enough of a struggle looking round corners and the bottoms of boxes to find small coins somehow overlooked. So mostly people held out the exact fare and tried not to look into the receiver's face with its knowledge of their impotence. Collecting was certainly easier, but at the same time not as satisfactory as in the swollen days after pay day. There was not much in it at a time like that. True, people were still only bodies walking in their sleep. But what could a conductor take, even from a body that has yet to wake, when all this walking corpse holds out is the exact fare itself, no more, no less ? Much better the days after pay day, much, much better. Then the fullness of the month touches each old sufferer with a feeling of new power. The walkers sleep still, but their nightmares in which they are dwarfs unable to run away and little insects caught in endless pools, these fearful dreams are gone. The men who dreamed them walk like rich men, and if they give a fifty-pesewa coin they look into the collector's eyes to see if he acknowledges their own importance. They do not look in their palms to see how much change is there. Much better the swollen days of the full month, much better.

The conductor separated the money into little piles and saw that there was not a single fifty-pesewa coin. No wonder. The coins had yielded nothing. He had not thought they would, but then sometimes a simple check like that could reveal hid¬ den profit. It was not very likely though, that he would make

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born 3

anything from the coins today. There was something still. Someone had at this time of the month held out a cedi for his fare. He had looked into the face of the giver, and sure enough, the eyes had in them the restless happiness of power in search of admiration. With his own eyes the conductor had obliged the man, satisfied his appetite for the wonder of others. He had not lowered his eyes: that would have brought the attention of the potent giver down to the coins in his palm, and the magic would have gone, and with it the profit. So the conductor had not lowered his eyes. Instead he had kept them fastened to the hungry eyes of the giver of the cedi, and fed them with ad¬ miration. He had softened his own gaze the better to receive the masculine sharpness of the giver's stare. He had opened his mouth slightly so that the smile that had a gape in it would say to the boastful giver, "Yes, man. You are a big man." And he had fingered the coins in his bag, and in the end placed in the giver's hand a confusing assortment of coins whose value was far short of what he should have given. The happy man had just dropped the coins into his shirt pocket. He had not even looked at them.

The cedi lay there on the seat. Among the coins it looked strange, and for a moment the conductor thought it was ridicu¬ lous that the paper should be so much more important than the shiny metal. In the weak light inside the bus he peered closely at the markings on the note. Then a vague but persistent odor forced itself on him and he rolled the cedi up and deliber¬ ately, deeply smelled it. He had to smell it again, this time standing up and away from the public leather of the bus seat. But the smell was not his mistake. Fascinated, he breathed it slowly into his lungs. It was a most unexpected smell for some¬ thing so new to have: it was a very old smell, very strong, and so very rotten that the stench itself of it came with a curious, satisfying pleasure. Strange that a man could have so many cedis pass through his hands and yet not really know their smell.

After the note the conductor began smelling the coins, but they were a disappointment. Not so satisfying, the smell of metal coins. The conductor started stuffing them into his bag, first checking everything against the tickets to make sure how much he had gained. He felt reasonably contented. It would, he hoped, be a good day for him, Passion Week or no Passion Week. Again his nostrils lost the smell of the cedi's marvelous rottenness, and they itched to refresh themselves with its ancient stale smell. He took the note, unrolled it this time, and pressed it flat against his nostrils. But now his satis¬ faction was mixed with a kind of shame. In his embarrassment he turned round, wishing to reassure himself that the bus was empty and he was alone in it.

A pair of wide-open, staring eyes met his. The man was sit¬ ting in the very back of the bus, with his body angled forward so that his chin was resting on the back of the seat in front of him, supported by his hands. The eyes frightened the conduc¬ tor. Even the mere remembered smell of the cedi was now painful, and the feeling in his armpit had suddenly become very cold. Was this the giver turned watcher already? Had his own game been merely a part of the watcher's larger game? Vague fears of punishment drove their way into his mind. He had not thought it possible that so many different shapes of terror could come to him in such a little time. And now the crime seemed so little and so foolish and the possible punish¬ ments so huge that he could only pity himself. He was about to go down as the victim of a cruel game.

The watcher only continued to stare. He did not need to hurl any accusations. In the conductor's mind everything was already too loudly and too completely said.

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born 5

"I have seen you. You have been seen. We have seen all." It was not the voice of the watcher. It could not be the voice of any human being the conductor knew. It was a large voice roll¬ ing down and everywhere covering empty spaces in the mind and really never stopping anywhere at all. So this was it. The watcher. What could a poor man say to their voices? What was there to reply to tricks and the deception of the innocent ?

And so words and phrases so often thrown away as jokes reveal their true meaning.

And fesus wept. Aha, Jesus wept.

In his own moment of despair the conductor did not weep. He opened his mouth and uttered the fullness of his outrage. "What?"

But, perched on his seat in the back of the shuddering bus, the watcher did not stir. Only his eyes continued their steady gaze, and the conductor felt excruciatingly tortured as they drilled the message of his guilt into his consciousness. Outrage alternated with a sweaty fear he had never before felt. Some¬ thing, it seemed to him, was being drained from him, leaving the body feeling like a very dry sponge, very light, completely at the mercy of slight toying gusts of wind.

Then, very suddenly, the silence of the watcher filled him with an exhilarating kind of hope, and looking back into the moment just lived through, the conductor wordlessly chided himself for the childishness of his fears. For, after all, how had he so frightened himself into thinking of the watcher as the bringer of his doom ? Why had he placed the silent one above himself? Was it not likely, most probable, indeed, quite cer¬ tain, that the watcher was himself also a man of skin and fat, with a stomach and a throat which needed to be served ?

Calmly, the conductor slipped a hand into his shirt pocket and took out a packet of Embassy cigarettes. He had not thought he would have to open it so soon, but now there was

6 The Beautyfid Ones Are Not Yet Born

a cause. The soul of a man was waiting to be drawn. An im¬ portant bargain was hanging in the air. The conductor cleared his throat and ate the phlegm.

"Brother," he said, inclining the prized cigarettes toward his desired accomplice, "brother, you care for jot?" Still the star¬ ing eyes seemed to be holding out for a better price. The con¬ ductor felt some of the first fear come back. He began walk¬ ing as calmly as he could to the back of the bus.

"You see, we can share," he said, as he came up to the man. But only the unending rattle of the bus answered and absorbed his words. The man in the back seat just sat and his eyes just stared, even when the conductor brought his cigarettes to within about a foot of his face. The giver's discomfort now gave place to keen curiosity, and he bent down to look into the staring face, a conciliating smile upon his own.

Then a savage indignation filled the conductor. For in the soft vibrating light inside the bus, he saw, running down from the left corner of the watcher's mouth, a stream of the man's spittle. Oozing freely, the oil-like liquid first entangled itself in the fingers of the watcher's left hand, underneath which it spread and touched the rusty metal lining of the seat with a dark sheen, then descended with quiet inevitability down the dirty, aged leather of the seat itself, losing itself at last in the depression made by the joint. The watcher was no watcher after all, only a sleeper.

Words shot out angrily from the conductor's mouth with an explosive imperiousness that woke the sleeper.

"You bloodyfucking sonofabitch! Article of no commercial value! You think the bus belongs to your grandfather?"

The sleeper awoke and looked up at his accuser, understand¬ ing nothing of the words at first. He licked the wetness around his chin, but the operation was unsuccessful. The mess was

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born 7

more than he had realized, and he had to wipe it off with his palm. He looked at his hand, all covered with his own viscous ooze. The conductor, now thoroughly furious, stood above him, sternly pointing to the seat in front.

"Are you a child? You vomit your smelly spit all over the place. Why? You don't have a bedroom?"

The man looked down on his glistening offense. Shame dwarfed him inside and he hastened to clean it. For some rea¬ son, perhaps out of sheer absence of mind, he thrust his right hand into his trouser pocket. When the hand emerged, it dragged after itself not a handkerchief, but the gray baft lining of the pocket, together with a small mess of old bus tickets. Apologetically the man stuffed the lining back into its hiding place and looked at the seat with his mouthwater on it. In a moment he made up his mind. Sitting deliberately on the seat, he leaned against the back leather and, moving his trunk side¬ ways a few times, wiped the moisture off.

The conductor laughed a crackling laugh. "So countryman, you don't have a handkerchief too."

The man did not answer. He looked at the seat and saw that it was as dry as it could be under the circumstances. But the conductor's ridicule had turned to hostility again.

"Well," he shouted above the death rattle of the bus, "get out!"

The man had already started moving out of the bus, saying not a word. As he got on to the bottom step, the conductor, sitting down on a seat next to one of the windows, looked out of the bus and shouted his farewell to him, "Or you were wait¬ ing to shit in the bus?"

The man's foot hit the street and he moved slowly down the side past the front of the bus, peering ahead in the misty dawn air. The conductor's voice rolled out its message, enveloping

8 The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

the man with it. As he walked by the driver, the driver coughed, a short, violent cough which ended with a hoarse growl as he cleared his stuffed throat. Then he collected his full force and aimed the blob far out in front of him.

The man who had come out of the bus felt the accompany¬ ing spray settle on his cheek and on one side of his upper lip. He looked back in the anger of the moment, only to see the driver unrepentantly preparing his throat and mouth for one more effort. He quickened his pace somewhat.

The shimmering circles of dim light coming from the sta¬ tionary bus, focused with oblique haziness on the side of the road, caught in their confusion what seemed to be a small pile of earth with a sort of signboard standing nonsensically on top of it. As the man got closer, the mound assumed a different shape and the signboard acquired the dimensions of a square waste box.

The thing had been a gleaming white when it was first in¬ stalled, and that was not so very long ago. Now even the let¬ tering on it was no longer decipherable. It was covered over thickly with the juice of every imaginable kind of waste mat¬ ter. But once the letters had said in their brief brightness:

K. C. C. Receptacle For Disposal Of Waste

That was printed in blue. Underneath, in bolder capitals exe¬ cuted in lucent red, was the message:

Keep Your Country Clean By Keeping Your City Clean

The box was one of the few relics of the latest campaign to rid the town of its filth. Like others before it, this campaign

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born 9

had been extremely impressive, and admiring rumors indi¬ cated that it had cost a great lot of money. Certainly the pa¬ pers had been full of words informing their readers that dirt was undesirable and must be eliminated. On successive days a series of big shots had appealed to everybody to be clean. The radio had run a program featuring a doctor, a Presbyterian priest, and a senior lecturer brought down from the University of Legon. The three had seemed to be in agreement about the evil effects of uncleanliness. People were impressed. Judging by the volume of words printed and spoken, it was indeed, as the Principal Secretary to the Ministry of Health stated at the durbar held to round it off, the most magnificent campaign yet.

It was at the durbar that the little boxes had been launched. In the words of the principal secretary, they would be placed at strategic points all over the city, and they would serve, not just as containers for waste matter, but as shining examples of cleanliness.

In the end not many of the boxes were put out, though there was a lot said about the large amount of money paid for them. The few provided, however, had not been ignored. Peo¬ ple used them well, so that it took no time at all for them to get full. People still used them, and they overflowed with banana peels and mango seeds and thoroughly sucked-out oranges and the chaff of sugarcane and most of all the thick brown wrapping from a hundred balls of \en\ey. People did not have to go up to the boxes any more. From a distance they aimed their rubbish at the growing heap, and a good amount of juicy offal hit the face and sides of the box before finding a final resting place upon the heap. As yet the box was still visi¬ ble above it all, though the writing upon it could no longer be read.

10 The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

As he passed by the box, the walker put his hand in his right trouser pocket and pulled out the debris of used tickets and threw everything on the heap. At the curve in the road he stopped a while, his gaze directed downward as if he was try¬ ing to make up his mind about something. When he began to cross over to the other side of the road, his eyes were still fixed on the tar in front of him, and he walked quite slowly.

Abruptly the headlights of a fast-advancing car caught him in their powerful brightness. In that hasty second the man was far too startled even to move. Instead, he raised his eyes in a puzzled, helpless gesture and got in them the full blinding force of the light. The scrape of braking tires on the hard road and the stench of burning rubber hit him, bringing him out of his long half-sleep. Just in front of him the car stood with its tires sharply arced toward the safe center of the road. It was a shiny new taxi, and it was still bobbing gently up and down from the sudden halt. The man recovered from his numb¬ ness, and took the few remaining steps to the side of the road. There, away from the overpowering glare of the headlights, he saw the dim outline of the taxi driver's head as it thrust it¬ self out through the window. For long moments of silent in¬ credulousness the taxi driver stared at the man, doubtless look¬ ing him up and down several times. Then in a terrible calm voice he began, "Uncircumcised baboon." The taxi driver spoke as if the words he was uttering expressed only the most banal of truths. "Moron of a frog. If your time has come, search for someone else to take your worthless life."

The man took a step forward in order to be closer to the taxi driver, and said apologetically, "I wasn't looking. I'm sorry."

But the apology only seemed to inflame die taxi driver's temper. "Sorry my foot," he said with a cutting softness in

II

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

his voice. "Next time look where you're going." He started his engine running again, and as the car began to ease itself for¬ ward, he exploded in a final access of uncontrollable ire, "Your mother's rotten cunt!"

The engine's smooth sound rose evenly as the car gathered speed, gradually dying down as the distance absorbed the speeding vehicle.

The man moved a little less slowly now, keeping to the dark earth beside the gutter that ran the length of the road. He passed by the gloomy building of the Post Office, and his pace quickened involuntarily as he began descending the steep little hill beyond that. Across the road at the bottom the street lamps perfunctorily gave a certain illumination to the shapes of the row of old commercial buildings, and their light bounced dully off the corrugated iron shelters in front of the shop gates be¬ neath which the watchmen slept. He passed by the U.T.C., the G.N.T.C., the U.A.C., and the French C.F.A.O. The shops had been there all the time, as far back as he could remember. The G.N.T.C., of course, was regarded as a new thing, but only the name had really changed with Independence. The shop had always been there, and in the old days it had be¬ longed to a rich Greek and was known by his name, A. G. Leventis. So in a way the thing was new. Yet the stories that were sometimes heard about it were not stories of something young and vigorous, but the same old stories of money chang¬ ing hands and throats getting moistened and palms getting greased. Only this time if the old stories aroused any anger, there was nowhere for it to go. The sons of the nation were now in charge, after all. How completely the new thing took after the old.

Behind the firms the dim mass of Yensua Hill rose from the ground. Where its form ended, it was now possible to see the

12 The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

sky, still dark but not so dark as the earth beneath. On top of the hill, commanding it just as it commanded the scene be¬ low, its sheer, flat, multistoried side an insulting white in the concentrated gleam of the hotel's spotlights, towered the use¬ less structure of the Atlantic-Caprice. Sometimes it seemed as if the huge building had been put there for a purpose, like that of attracting to itself all the massive anger of a people in pain. But then, if there were any angry ones at all these days, they were most certainly feeling the loneliness of mourners at a festival of crazy joy. Perhaps then the purpose of this white thing was to draw onto itself the love of a people hungry for just something such as this. The gleam, in moments of hon¬ esty, had a power to produce a disturbing ambiguity within. It would be good to say that the gleam never did attract. It would be good, but it would be far from the truth. And some¬ thing terrible was happening as time went on. It was getting harder to tell whether the gleam repelled more than it at¬ tracted, attracted more than it repelled, or just did both at once in one disgustingly confused feeling all the time these heavy days.

Down from the C.F.A.O., the food stands opposite the Block were all deserted, save for long orange rinds with their white insides strangely visible in the darkness, like some kind of fat worms lying around on the lip of the gutter before the road, and the less discernible corn husks that had held together now long-swallowed balls of kenkey. The man stopped uncer¬ tainly as he came to the large building opposite the stands. The Block. This was the Block.

The building never ceased to amaze with its squat massive¬ ness. It did not seem possible that this thing could ever have been considered beautiful, and yet it seemed a great deal of care had gone into the making of even the bricks of which it

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

was made. Each brick had on it the huge imprint of something like a petal of the hibiscus flower slanted diagonally across it. Where the individual blocks met, a clear groove ran between them, so that from some angles the whole building looked like a pattern of vertical and horizontal lines. But this impression was to be had from certain chosen angles only. From most other points the picture made by the walls of the Block was much less pleasant. For years and years the building had been plastered at irregular intervals with paint and with distemper, mostly of an official murk-yellow color. In the intervals, be¬ tween successive layers of distemper, the walls were caressed and thoroughly smothered by brown dust blowing off the road¬ side together with swirling grit from the coal and gravel of the railroad yard within and behind, and the corners of walls where people passed always dripped with the engine grease left by thousands of transient hands. Every new coating, then, was received as just another inevitable accretion in a continu¬ ing story whose beginnings were now lost and whose end no one was likely to bother about. The spaces between the bricks were still there, but from most points they seemed about to get lost in a kind of waxen fusion. The flower patterns also had their crusts of paint, so that the whole thing gave a final im¬ pression of lumpy heaviness. Even in the daylight this impres¬ sion persisted, and was in fact made deeper by the unnecessary boldness of the cement relief lettering out in front:

Railway & Harbour Adminstration Block

MCMXXVII

The man disappeared through the gigantic opening in the front of the building and turned up the broad cement stairs to the right. He moved absently to the left of the staircase and reached for the support of the banister, but immediately after

14 The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

contact his hand recoiled in an instinctive gesture of with¬ drawal. The touch of the banister on the balls of his finger¬ tips had something uncomfortably organic about it. A weak bulb hung over the whole staircase suspended on some thin, invisible thread. By its light it was barely possible to see the banister, and the sight was like that of a very long piece of diseased skin. The banister had originally been a wooden one, and to this time it was still possible to see, in the deepest of the cracks between the swellings of other matter, a dubious piece of deeply aged brown wood. And there were many cracks, though most of them did not reach all the way down to the wood underneath. They were no longer sharp, the cracks, but all rounded out and smoothed, consumed by some soft, gentle process of decay. In places the wood seemed to have been painted over, but that must have been long ago indeed. For a long time only polish, different kinds of wood and floor polish, had been used. It would be impossible to calculate how much polish on how many rags the wood on the stair banister had seen, but there was certainly enough Ronuk and Mansion splashed there to give the place its now indelible reek of putrid turpentine. What had been going on there and was going on now and would go on and on through all the years ahead was a species of war carried on in the silence of long ages, a struggle in which only the keen, uncanny eyes and ears of lunatic seers could detect the deceiving, easy breathing of the strugglers.

The wood underneath would win and win till the end of time. Of that there was no doubt possible, only the pain of hope perennially doomed to disappointment. It was so clear. Of course it was in the nature of the wood to rot with age. The polish, it was supposed, would catch the rot. But of course in the end it was the rot which imprisoned everything in its ef-

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born !5

fortless embrace. It did not really have to fight. Being was enough. In the natural course of things it would always take the newness of the different kinds of polish and the vaunted cleansing power of the chemicals in them, and it would con¬ vert all to victorious filth, awaiting yet more polish again and again and again. And the wood was not alone.

Apart from the wood itself there were, of course, people themselves, just so many hands and fingers bringing help to the wood in its course toward putrefaction. Left-hand fingers in their careless journey from a hasty anus sliding all the way up the banister as their owners made the return trip from the lavatory downstairs to the offices above. Right-hand fingers still dripping with the after-piss and the stale sweat from fat crotches. The callused palms of messengers after they had blown their clogged noses reaching for a convenient place to leave the well-rubbed moisture. Afternoon hands not entirely licked clean of palm soup and remnants of Xen\ey. The wood would always win.