M/F Page 7
If He is found now, He is found then. If not, we do but go to dwell in the City of Death. Chandeleur was sitting up now, gripping the settee, his feet raised and poised a foot or so above the cabin floor, which was all slopped in bilgewater. He seemed to be reading the bilge, a stupid adenoidal costive lout reading a comic on the floor of the toilet. I said:
– She’s filling up.
– Who? What?
– We’d better start pumping.
The cabin lights went down to an orange whisper. Chandeleur first gave a little orgasm scream and then said:
– Jonah.
– Wet’s got into the batteries. Who’s a Jonah, me?
– We never had this trouble before.
– Screw you, oysterballocked poetaster. Help me get the pump.
– That’s not fair. Alfred Kazin liked my poems.
– Screw you just the same, Godshirt.
Everything happened then. The vessel failed to ride, cracked round to starboard, fell on her beamend, plunged down down down. Before the almost no-light fuffed out, every damn thing in the ship came rioting and galloping down the cabin’s port side, tins of beef stew, glugging open brandy, caulkers, wrenches, pans, plates, the charlie noble, claw rings, chinkles, chiveys, cheese, kye, dead men, a ditty box, a fanged dog, sextants, bullivant’s nippers, splines, whisker poles, whifflows and so on, or perhaps not, me being no seaman. But I remember the noise, human and chunky against the swirls of the sea-and-wind’s burly. Broached to, broadside on, or something. And absolute swinging drunk dead dark. There was still a candle inside my skull, of course, enough light to show an imagined smirking face, my own, saying: This is what you wish, no? The death of form and shipwreck of order? Then something hit me, very sharp, like a table angle, and that inner pilot was doused as I went down into slosh and debris, the belly of Jonadge, black damp whaleboned gamp.
I came to in sickish cold light – dawn and a convalescent sea. The unbelievable fever was burnt out, quite. I was flat on one of the settees, and it squelched like a bathsponge to the ship’s rhythm. I was all alone. Chandeleur must be on deck or overboard; Aspinwall, grim and triumphant, at the helm as ever. My stormgear was still on and I did not feel wet. I felt for the pain and found it buried in my hair, a nasty little gash. My probing stiff fingers were answered by stiff dry gory elflocks. The cabin was still a mess of smashed and battered whifflows, but the floor had been pumped to mere moistness. My belly, Jonadge’s belly, growled a crass demand: bub and grub. My head, I found on waking, did not hurt overmuch. I got up and saw Chandeleur’s mystical shirt, damp and unwearable till the sun should be stoked some hours, lying among the debris. I took in a new text like an oyster. Then I went out on deck, ready for a grim meeting.
The mainsail was up. Aspinwall at the helm turned to look at me, still in oilskins, a red scar saltdried on his right cheek, all unspoken reproach. But what the hell had I done wrong, for God’s sake? Chandeleur was in a thick sweater that was evidently dry, stowed in one of the high waterproof lockers probably. He had lost his pebble glasses and blinked and blinked in the strengthening light. I said:
– It wasn’t my fault I got that crack on the skull.
– Landfall? Chandeleur asked Aspinwall, his eyes screwed up towards the inching sun that was our goal.
Landfall, indeed, a half-note’s rest on that grotesque circular leger line. In an hour or two or three I could perhaps be ashore and away, dry, warmed, with no money in my pocket but the Caribbean daytree ahead with fruit for plucking. I didn’t feel too bad, all things considered. I would, I knew, no longer be expected to assume that I was welcome to sleep on board, nor would I wish to. On my own, the hell with the two of them, fags, fruits. Chandeleur stroked his fagfruitfriend’s oilskin fondly, saying:
– You were wonderful, Frank.
– I know.
– Look, I said, ignored, I did my best, didn’t I? That storm wasn’t my idea, strange as it may seem. I worked, didn’t I? More than can be said for –
– Leave him alone, Aspinwall’s back said.
– Aaargh, I began to say, and then I caught the after-image of that text I’d just seen on Chandeleur’s shirt: The fear of solitude is at bottom the fear of the double, the figure which appears one day and always heralds death. Who’d said that? St Lawrence Nunquam? Cnut of Alexandria? Damn it, I had no fear of solitude. I went below to confirm that I’d actually seen that, but it was not to be found. I picked through the shirt as for lice, but it wasn’t there.
6
Senta Euphorbia, martyred under Domitian, jogged along Main Street, or the Strèta Rijal, eight feet high, in meticulously carved soft wood. A sure sign of amateur art is too much detail to compensate for too little life. Eyelashes of blackened hog-bristle were glued to her wooden eyelids, and I could see the pink swell of a tongue in the mouth that was half open in her last pain and first glimpse of the ultimate. Her red robe billowed, all in wood, except where the great phallic spike of her martyrdom had called forth blood to tack the cerement to her body. The blood was there, lovingly painted, though the wound was decently hidden. Her sturdy plinth was fixed to a four-poled litter; she was borne by four men in claret habits with hoods. Her way was cleared by a brass band, the players in dark mufti, whose instruments flashed silver like sudden points of her pain: it played a slow trite march with sentimental harmonies. Behind her ambled priests in surplices, behind them toddled wide-eyed children in a kind of scout costume. Two women near me wept, whether for the saint’s agony or for the sweet innocence of the children I could not tell. I was wedged in the middle of a crowd that smelt of clean linen, garlic and musk.
I needed money; I needed somewhere to stay. I had walked the mile or so from Purta, where the Yacht Harbour was, to the centre of Grencijta, having had my passport merely nodded at and my lack of luggage unremarked. The officials on the quay had assumed I was a limb of the Zagadka II, meaning that the Zagadka II was my warranty of probity, meaning property. Aspinwall and Chandeleur seemed to confirm this. Relieved that I was leaving them, aware that a landed Jonah was harmless as a stranded whale, they were willing to wave me off, but not with the enthusiasm that could be taken for a farewell. They would be seeing me later, they seemed to say. But they would not really, ah no. A real farewell to those two faggots. And so I walked, my headache renewed with the heavy sun, away from the sea and the go-downs down a wide road to Grencijta, noting that bunting, holy slogans (Selvij Senta Euphorbia) and constellations of light-bulbs had been maimed by that storm, as strong on the coast here as it had been at sea. But now the sky was maria-blue, with not a cloud, and the gulls planed at their ease.
Senta Euphorbia,
Vijula vijulata,
Ruza inspijnata
Pir spijna puwntata,
Ura pir nuij.
A chorus of marriageable girls now appeared, all in white save for a busklike splash of red in the front, chanting that prayer. This was the old language of the Castitans, derived from the Romance dialect spoken by the first settlers, who themselves had gone to settle on the Cantabrian coast from some nameless place in the Mediterranean. They had been enslavers, but that curious wave of British Muslims, that had colonized Ojeda also, had freed the slaves and, becoming lax in their faith under this sun, had been absorbed by the Christianity of the island, though not before they had iglooed the frozen honey of the local stone into mosques. It was to the Dwumu, or great mosque-cathedral, in Fortescue Square that the procession now moved. And who had Fortescue been? A British governor of the time of the British raj or rigija, now ended. That rule had left, I discovered, a public works department, the English language, a thicket of laws, but no democracy.
To my surprise, but everybody else’s joy, the procession now turned brusquely secular. The enharmonic chord, or chordee, that was responsible for the modulation was a huge wooden phallic spike, painted red seeming to ooze from its crown like the jam of a caramel cream, and this was held in the arms of a Punch-like clown who leered from left to righ
t as he shambled along in his clumsy boots. Behind him came floats with young people’s tableaux – The Jazz Age (Eton crops, Oxford bags, Nöel Coward cigarette-holders, a horned gramophone), Prison Reform (lags drinking champagne with silkstockinged wardresses on their knees), Castitan Agriculture (a papier-mâché cornucopia spilling bananas, pomelos, pineapples, corncobs and jackfruit, with plumplimbed girls striking poses in the scanty garments of Ceres), The Fruits of Our Seas (Neptune and court with a huge netted catch, including a still-writhing octopus), Silent Movie Days (megaphoned director in knickerbockers, camera cranking, Valentino, Chaplin, etc.), God Bless His Excellency (blownup photograph of a fat handsome face with clever but insincere eyes, garnished with flags and saluting Ruritanian children), and others I seem to have forgotten. Then came a circus band ripping off a redhot march with glissading trombones. This did not clash with the solemnity of that earlier march, since the subfusc bandsmen had already piled instruments at the entrance to the Dwumu, Senta Euphorbia being within and probably jogging towards the altar. Then elephants.
– Elephants? I said, astonished. Faces turned gleefully to say:
– Elefanta’s Circus, Fonanta’s Circus, Bonanza’s Circus, Atlanta’s Circus.
The name was not clear. After the elephants, Jumbo, Alice and a baby with its lithe proboscis clinging to mother’s tail, there came tumbling augustes and a couple of joeys banging drums. Then there came two lions in one cage and a tiger and tigress in another, a truck with a pair of performing seals, both balancing striped beachballs, and a lovely flight of white liberty ponies with their waving ballerina mistresses. And then the crowd grew silent.
A gaunt woman in a terracotta robe, her face glowing faintly as with henna, strode alone in a kind of tragic pride. Around her head circled fluttering birds, mynahs, parakeets, starlings, all chattering or screaming human language – fracted words drowned in the band-noise. The aura of the woman seemed numinous or sorcerous; hence the crowd’s silence. A speaking bird is a kind of enchanted man. The woman sternly looked into the crowd, first left then right, and it seemed that our eyes met an instant and in hers was a speck of instant and angry recognition. But she strode on, and the moment of quiet and disquiet was exorcized by the open-faced wholesome finale – the Castitan football eleven that had, I was to learn, defeated Venezuela in the Central American Cup Final. They trotted along, as in roadwork, in their orange-and-cream jerseys, their grinning captain bearing the silver trophy aloft like a monstrance. Cheer after cheer after. We had come a long way from Senta Euphorbia.
The watching crowd now flooded on to the road to become the joyful wake of the festal convoy. It was chiefly children with comic hats and false noses, blowing kazoos and rasp-berrying hooters, young guffawing men in jeans with iron crosses or swastikas dangling from their necks, giggling girls in white or yellow or duckegg blue. The older sort smiled and jostled good-humouredly on the sidewalks towards Fortescue Square, or else streamed into the drinkingshops. I was thirsty too. I had just ninety American cents.
The shop I entered was a cavern as long and as narrow as a railway coach. Drinking, on this island of very fierce sun, was always an activity of the dark: the sun in the wine was never acknowledged, on laughing boulevards, to the sun’s face. I could hardly see, I groped my way through drinker’s noise, stumbling over feet. One man’s noise was louder than any other’s:
– How did he get where he is, eh? You all know damned well what I’m talking about, and if there’s any presidential spy leering in the shadows he can do his worst. Because I’m past caring. Because the truth is the truth and can’t be gainsaid not by any amount of state falsification or the jiggerypokery of hirelings.
– Come on now, Jack, said a man in a white apron, a ghost in that dark from the waist down. Finish what you’ve got there and get out on the job.
– The job. The prostitution of fragmented truth, that’s all it is. But nobody asks the right questions ever, oh no. What did our beloved President do with those two little girls on the night of June 10th, 1962, in a house that shall be numberless in a street that shall be nameless? Why did the fleet of Cadillacs appear so soon after the door-to-door collection in aid of the orphans? Why did James Mendoza Callaghan so suddenly and unaccountably disappear in the autumn of 1965? Those questions and questions like them, never, oh no. And I know all the answers, boy, oh yes.
I could see him now, a blubbery wreck of an intellectual in a dark suit complete with waistcoat, sitting alone at a table from which liquor dripped. Customers interrupted him:
– Knock it off, Jack, the police are around. All right, let’s have no trouble today of all days. Christ, a man comes in for a quiet drink. Clever, but look where his cleverness is going to land him.
I stood at the counter and ordered a glass of white wine. I asked the aproned man:
– What was all that about the prostitution of fragmented truth he was talking about?
– Eh? Who? Him? Goes round the towns on feasts and marketdays putting on his little show. Donj Memorija or Mr Memory.
He then turned on him, still loudly seditious, and addressed him fiercely in the first, or alternative, language of the island:
– Chijude bucca, stujlt!
– Explain the unaccountable disappearance also of the editor of the Stejla d’ Grencijta after a very mildly censorious leading article.
– What sort of a show? I asked.
– Answers them all. Todij cwéjstijonij. Shut your big fat black mouth, you troublecauser. Else I shall have to send for the polijts.
– Is it a total coincidence that the deputy chief of police was once His Excellency’s bumboy?
– Tacija! Knock it off! Kick the idijuta out!
I fancied, turning around from the counter to look at the protesting faces, that I saw, peering in from the sun, the grinning face of Chandeleur and the stern one of Aspinwall. They were there a second or so only. My headache started throbbing again. Then there stood, much longer, the recognizable silhouette of the law framed on the threshold – tropical law, with starched shorts and briefsleeved shirt emphasizing the thin wiriness of a body schooled in violence. Holster, arms akimbo. The assembly, except for Donj Memorija, grew silent as if to listen seriously to music.
– Ask me a question, anybody, a question relevant to the sick times and leprous state we live in.
There was a response of frightened shushes. I got in with something sedative:
– Who was the short apple the father of?
– Eh? Eh eh? If the apple is a pippin, the pippin is Pépin le Bref, king of the Franks, father of Charlemagne. 714 to 768, if you want his dates. But that sort of question is as meaningless in these terrible times as as as –
I could see him peering at me with one eye, wondering who or what the hell I was, his ample hair dirtygrey, a triple round chin wobbling. The silhouette at the door moved in on heavy boots, and the features of the policeman began to emerge, as from a bath of hypo. The policeman said:
– Let’s hear more about these terrible times.
– Brutal state lackey, presidential claw, how is the world of bribes nowadays?
I thought I’d better get out. The policeman was not, as yet, interested in stopping me. I said to an old chewing man, who had a mess of bread and crumbling brawn on greased paper in front of him:
– Where does he do this job? You know, him.
– Dagobert Place where the fair is, said a younger man with a twitching left arm.
The policeman already had Donj Memorija up, more or less, on his feet, one hand on his collar, the other bunching the seat of his pants. I left, hearing:
– When you get back to headquarters ask what they did with Gubbio, Vittorini and Serafino Starkie. Unpared toenail of bloody repression –
I was out then, wrinkling my blind face in the sun. Dagobert Place? I was thumbjerked towards it or even shown by a vigorous semaphore signpost yardarming. A helpful people, with a lot of submerged energy. I went down a cobbled lane with a shut print
ingshop, turned into one where men, singing, threw caraway seeds on to round loaves that other men were painting with eggwhite, and then came to an oblong piazza with two playing baroque fountains (writhing stone musculatures in hell gaping and grasping for the tantalizing water), where stalls had been set up for a fair season. They sold the usual things – cutprice children’s vests, football boots, candyfloss – and had try-your-luck pennyrollers and gungalleries. Gay people mostly laughed in the faces of the barkers, strolling, licking cones. I saw a fairly quiet corner and claimed it. I needed a sort of platform so begged, in dumbshow because the stallman spoke only Castitan, a loan of three or four sturdy empty Coco-Coho (not so new then: the drink was already in the Caribbean) crates. I mounted my dais and called:
– Mr Memory Junior is here! Any questions! Anyanyanyany questions!
Shy and giggling, a sprinkling of youngsters was soon with me and yet not with me: they might as well be there as anywhere, but none would meet my eye or challenge. Then a middleaged man, not quite sober, called from afar:
– How can I stop my wife nagging me?
– Stop her mouth with kisses, I called back. Exhaust her with love.
There was laughter. The knot grew. A schoolboy tried something the others could not hear. I cried:
– I am asked by this young gentleman to say when television began. If he means the first public showing, the answer is July 13th, 1930, in England, by the Baird process.
The boy’s question had, in fact, sought the date of the founding of the multiracial University College in Salisbury, but I did not know the answer to that. Encouraged now, louder-voiced members of the crowd put their questions: the first Morse message? (May 24th, 1844); the Dunkirk evacuation? (June 3rd, 1940, anniversary of the death of Blood Circulation Harvey); the old name of Bulgaria’s capital? (Sardica, Triaditza to the Byzantine Greeks); the twelfth wedding anniversary? (Silk and Fine Linen); the autobiographical synthesis of Che Guevara? (born in Argentina, fought in Cuba, became a revolutionary in Guatemala); Death in the Afternoon? (champagne and pernod, well chilled); record for beer-drinking? (Auguste Maffrey, a Frenchman, downed 24 pints in 52 minutes); Beaufort 8? (fresh gale: twigs break off trees; progress is impeded); who said that the English think soap is civilization? (the German philosopher Treitschke); artemisia? (wormwood or old man); guanaco? (large species of llama, used as a beast of burden); International Henry? (= 1.00049 Absolute Henry); how to treat trypanosomiasis? (with tryparsamide or Bayer 205); cleaning off soot-stains? (try carbon tetrachloride); Edith Sitwell’s middle name? (Louisa); Derby winner of 1958? (Hard Ridden, C. Smirke up).