He did not always sit with her. The door between the big room and his bedroom usually stood open, and she knew what he was up to. Usually he lay on his bed, or sat on it, trying out the dark glasses. In the afternoon the light came hard into his room so sometimes it seemed Ben was in a quivering pool of water. To him it seemed that splinters and needles of brightness tried to dart into his eyes, fill his head with dazzle. He tried on the glasses, pair after pair, and always ended up with the darkest of them: Richard had bought him two more pairs. Then he attempted to do without, while the white heat of the day moved about on the wall in patterns of brilliance. 'Why are my eyes so different?' he fiercely asked, addressing something that could be called Fate, Destiny — the painful emotions summoned up in him by the old lady's and Teresa's Poor Ben. But why, why why was he so different?

Meanwhile Alex and Paulo were far away in the hills, which they had reached by means of a tiny aeroplane, from a town that itself was served by a plane once a day. They had wanted to drive up into the hills but it had rained so much the roads were bad. They had landed up in a little hotel, or guest-house that Paulo remembered from a previous reconnaissance in this area which was visited by the occasional prospector, or anthropologist, or geologist. It had four rooms and was surrounded by a deep verandah on which the two men sat working on their script. They had tramped over a good many hills, with Ben in their minds — Ben and his people. The trouble was that while that vision of Ben's tribe he had experienced in the hotel in Nice was fresh in his imagination, so that he often referred to it, as a check, Alex more often saw Ben as he was now, a miserable angry creature who both he and Paulo believed was probably ill. Ben made Alex feel guilty, and he had times of regretting bringing Ben out to Brazil, and even the whole idea. It was not working. When things worked, and would go on well, then that is what they did: there was a momentum, everything fitted and intermeshed, people, events, an article in a magazine or a book casually picked up contributed to the process, and it was by this fortuitousness that you knew you were in a lucky streak. But with this project — this film — everything ground and bumped along, or came to a halt together. How many times had they restarted the script, believed it to be good, but then doubts began and they knew it wasn't? Alex now knew that it had been the powerful presence of Ben that had been impetus enough to carry them along. Ben as he had been. But now Ben was the block, a lock on their creative imaginations, when they thought of him what they heard was the bump, bump, thud, thud, of his head on the wall. They did joke that the sound was like that of minestamps: they could hear the stamps from a little mine near the guest-house. This joke was their attempt to bring Ben back into something congruous, that could feed their ideas.

They had not only wandered over a good many hills and minor mountains but had visited a tribe of Indians, and it was from that meeting that began the process that was — at first tacitly but now openly — removing Ben from the film.

They had gone by plane — the third, a four-seater — away over forests and rivers, and had landed in a rainforest where there were people who were not hostile, but pleased with what they had brought ... Paulo advising. There were two small radios, with batteries — a good many of these in thick plastic bags to keep out the hot wet — tinned food, clothing, knives. Paulo had done the talking: he knew a few words of the local language, while Alex sat silent, but his eyes were hard at work. What faces! What bodies! What a beautiful people these were, living their still uncorrupted life on the edge of a river. It had been these people who, in an early version of their script, had invaded the territory of Ben's tribe, and then . but Paulo and he had been unable to decide what then.

There were pretty girls, one in particular, the most delicately beautiful creature Alex had ever seen. She was about fourteen, they were told, and would soon marry. This tribe was not averse to being in a film, but limits were imposed, one being that none of the youngsters could be taken away from here to the temptations of a big city — which, for these people, was a town an hour's plane ride from here, whose name the film-makers had trouble in finding on a map.

That girl . She was in both their minds; they confessed to being overwhelmed by her. They returned to their verandah, and the guest-house that was run by an elderly man and woman who asked every morning what they wanted to eat, but it always turned out to be chicken and rice and beans, and hot spices, and chicken again. They drank beer chilled in a refrigerator run on batteries, for the power up here was chancy, and it often failed. The two threw aside all their earlier versions of the script and began again, with the tribe and the girl as a starting point. It is not true to say that Ben disappeared entirely. At first this girl was being forced to marry a wild hill man who had found gold and with it wanted to buy the girl, and this man did retain some of Ben's characteristics as perceived by Alex, mainly a rough stupidity. Then the suitor lost his crudeness, and was handicapped only by a crippled leg, which the girl cured — so you could say that Ben's actuality dwindled into a gammy leg. In the end there was a film, and it did quite well. The girl became a television star and was to be seen every day on the screens in Rio. This was a kind of happy ending, and the girl certainly thought so, at least at the beginning of her career: when she was older she was not so sure.

Meanwhile Alex telephoned Teresa from a town where they had to fly to get the use of a reliable telephone. Alex said he would be here for another week or so. It was very cheap living here and they wanted to visit a certain tribe again. Please would Teresa stay in the flat, look after Ben, and prepare him for the news that he would not be in the film.

Teresa was indignant and did not conceal it. Ben should not have been treated like this — just scooped up and then dropped. She was delighted too, but concealed that: she knew Ben would be damaged even worse if they put him in a film, that is, if he could deal with it all. She was cool, discussing terms and conditions. Money was running out. Well, said Alex, she could use Ben's money, and Alex would replace it. And how was Ben? 'He's — fine,' said Teresa, telling Alex nothing, nor intending to. 'He is fine.'

'Great,' said Alex.

'Shall I tell him you will take him home soon?'

'Yeah, yeah, I told him I would. But I've been thinking, Teresa. If he likes Rio, he could stay. What do you think?'

'He wants to go home,' said Teresa, and her voice was tearful. 'Fine, fine, that's OK. Tell him we'll be back soon.'

Teresa told Ben that he would not be in the film, because she knew that would make him happy, but not that Alex would be back soon, because she knew Ben feared him.

Two weeks had gone, then three. There was a domestic routine. In the morning Teresa went out to get fresh bread, and she made coffee for herself, and poured fruit juice for Ben. She tried to make him eat more, but he had lost his appetite and was thin and wretched. Teresa loved to be on the beach, but Ben could not go there, nor be left too long by himself. She went with him, not to the hotel tables where she had achieved her step up from absolute poverty, but to another where she was not known. He wore his dark glasses, and a Panama hat she had bought him, which he pulled down low over his eyes. They sat there a couple of hours, drinking juice, and watching people. Teresa was interested in Ben's reactions: he might seem to shrink away, while his white stretched grin appeared in his beard. 'What is it, Ben?' 'He's bad,' Ben would say. 'He hurts me.' 'But I am with you, Ben.' She strained to see what in this apparently harmless person might be frightening Ben, but could not. Or his small pleased smile might appear, and she saw another equally unthreatening person — usually a woman. 'You must be careful, Ben, when you smile at girls.' 'I like her,' Ben might say. And once, 'I think she likes me?' After such excursions Teresa felt that she had survived dangers and was pleased to be back, where she made a steak to tempt him, and a sandwich for herself. In the long hot afternoons they lazed, and her friends might drop in, one or two, but in the evenings it was not unlike how it was with Paulo and Alex; but now people came in with a bottle of wine, or some meat to cook, or fruit — this place could no longer be a cornucopia of hospitality, for Teresa did not have the money for it, and would not spend Ben's, more than she had to. And Ben did not retreat to his bedroom, but stayed, and even sat on with them at the table. He was not included in the talk, which kept moving off from what he knew, but he took in what he could, which was more than Teresa or the others suspected. They all laughed a lot, but frequently he wondered what they found so funny: to him it was often frightening. More and more he remembered the old woman, her care for him, her kindness; he even thought of the cat as a companion he had lost. Ben knew Ellen Biggs had died, but that did not prevent him from thinking about her, as someone who would welcome him if he arrived at her door.