African morning. A terrible beauty is born. The sun with its claws barely sheathed, a sky nacreous and turquoise, the grass of the playgrounds and coarse private lawns heavily dewed with candy-floss. The children on bicycles or walking, the boys in yesterday's white shirt and trousers, the girls of the Faith in blue wide skirts to the ground, white tunics hiding budding breasts but not the straps of brassieres, the Christian girls demure in check frocks, all with books in baskets. The shine of bicycles in the sun, the lurch of departmental lorries. The river with its wharf by the schools, the launches unloading more children. The un-lovely trees and the spiky plants showing pure green in the mild light. The cars gleaming townwards. Here and there a pie-dog shot by the Municipal Dog Catchers, lying by the monsoon drains for later collection. Mountains with dense green hair in the distance veiled coyly like the women of the Faith. The women of the Faith off to the market for fish and unsucculent legumes. The tower of the radio transmitter high away on a hill, the polished golden breast of the Mosque. Nando Tasca walking to work.
He breathed heavily in anger. He had expected a lift from Lydgate, but Lydgate's car was not outside his house. Other cars passed him, some of the white executives waved, but no one stopped for a poor old unshaven Italian man. And that feckless son of his lay in bed, his right eye nearly closed, an obscure pain in his right arm, his back aching, a shoe lost. And that Indian liar with spectacles (what did a workman want with glasses anyway?) still to be seen. Nando Tasca had gone to the house of Lydia Lydgate, convinced by that plausible message, and had found it in darkness. Assuming that the party would begin late, he had sought drink at the house of Mr. Mudd. Mr. Mudd's black servant had given him beer in the kitchen and played scales to him on a kind of xylophone. He had gone then, still seeing no lights, to the Residency, but had been turned away from the front door. At a window he had sung an amorous song and had been surprised to see and hear the U.N. Adviser's wife and daughter scream slightly and run away down a corridor. In gloom he had gone to the servants' quarters and become involved in a very lively little party. He himself had sung a Potok song and clapped his hands to the dancing. The U.N. Adviser, he had been awed to note, ordered his beer by the four-dozen case. He had become confused, attempted dalliance with a small slim black girl who eventually turned out to be the wife of the Number One House-boy, and, very late, been sent home. Only when he arrived at his own house to see a groaning Paolo on the bed did he remember the real purpose of his trip up the hill. And the discovery that Paolo had been fighting brought on an attack of rage so violent that he saw a kind of dance of red globules and scarlet spindles and the light seemed to go out. His store of rare dialect words was drawn on so heavily that at last he stood dumb, almost gibbering. And Paolo went on groaning.
African morning, something that Nando Tasca had never really seen before. Rather, he had seen it supervene on night at the maudlin close of some all-night whisky party: then it had been a great gaudy candelabrum lighting him to bed. But now it lashed him to work. As he walked he heard early morning radio music and, as he neared the Mosque, the quarrel of two radio announcers:
"You're just awful. I'm to announce the next programme. It says so here." "Get off the air, you nasty thing. What will the listeners think?"
Nando Tasca arrived at the great Mosque, sweating in the shirt he had worn last night, the fresh sweat re-awakening the old sweat that lurked, nearly dry, in the shirt's armpits. Thirst took him to the coffee-shop opposite; there he drank two large beers and felt better. Perhaps the workmen could be trusted to get on with the en-marbling without his supervision. Perhaps Paolo would be able to work tomorrow. (A doctor, of course, was out of the question. A doctor might order a month's rest and a special diet.) But time was short. Already workmen were erecting archways over the streets; already light bulbs — sleeping now — spelled out on the Government Building a pious Arabic slogan. No time could be wasted if the terms of the contract were to be fulfilled. Nando Tasca drank one more large beer, offered to the world an old man's eructation, wiped his chin with his hand and heard a sort of marching sound of stiff bristles, then walked over to the Mosque.
Inside that huge barn, where bats already nested, he was surprised to find only two workmen — the subtle Indian with glasses, the squat moron with the cleft palate. "Where are the others?" he cried. Echo caught up his stern question: "Others? Others?"
"Ah," said the Indian. "Good morning, Mr. Tasca. I expected you this morning. Your son, I take it, is still not very well. That, I'm afraid, is the trouble with the others. They have gone to the State Hospital, to the out-patients' department. It is likely that they will have to wait there all day. The doctors will have a lot of work."
"And who started this fighting, eh? That's what I want to know." Sudu, in that basso voice, seemed again a violent language. But Nando Tasca added, in fierce English, "What you tell a bloody lie a to me for?"
"I beg your pardon, Mr. Tasca?"
"You know a English. Why you tell a me there a bloody party? There no a bloody party."
"There was a mistake," said the Indian in Sudu. "The party is tonight."
"You a bloody liar. Come on start a work."
But something seemed to be wrong with the marble-cutting machine. Nando Tasca suspected sabotage, yet he said nothing, tugging, heaving, fiddling, groaning, swearing.
"Something is wrong with it, Mr. Tasca."
"I know a there a something bloody wrong." And, in Sudu, he said, "Where is the book?"
The book of instructions was brought from the hiding-hole it shared with plans and sketches and empty bottles. Nando Tasca, who had never seen it before, stared at it in horror. He remembered enough of the German occupation to realise that these portmanteau-words and odd sharp barks were of the German language.
"This," he said, "I cannot read."
"It is written in the white man's language."
"You a bloody fool. This a bloody German."
"Germans are white men."
Nando Tasca threw the book down and tried to kick the machine. "You," he said to the Indian, "go away."
"But there is a lot of work to be done."
"You go away. Him," he said, pointing at the staring man with the cleft palate, "him and me do the work."
"Do I still get my pay? I have a wife and eight children to support."
"You a get a your bloody money. Now go away." And he repeated the order in Sudu.
Nando Tasca and the man with the cleft palate spent the day filling various blanks with cement. But only, of course, on the floor. Nando Tasca knew his work: he had not spent thirty years in the trade for nothing. When the cement was dry he would paint it over with brown paint and a wire brush. It would look sufficiently like marble. What right had they, anyway, heathens with more money than sense, to have their false religion graced with good Catholic marble? But tomorrow Paolo would have to be well. He would have to be kicked out of bed and forced to mend the marble-cutting machine. It was not easy to play this trick on the walls.
"You," he said to his assistant, "not say anything about this to anyone. Capito?"
"Hn,” said the man. It was an ambiguous answer.
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