Small Lives, Big World

by R. M. Green

  Unfortunately, Diego’s coach sustained a broken axle bumping across a dry river bed just as Pablo and his gang, on their way to the capital to see what pillage and plunder might be on offer, were settling down to camp for the night on the opposite bank. The three servants fled into the scrub, the gold was taken and the wife and daughter raped and shot by the gang. Pablo Menendez himself slit the governor’s throat and removed his little finger on which he wore the signet ring of the Imperial Court and thus became a national hero. He probably could have even been the second president of the country had the founding president of the republic, Oscar Martinez, not decided to make himself president for life and have Pablo and a sundry collection of other popular figures, intellectuals and military men shot for treason before he himself was thrown off the balcony of the presidential palace by a lawyer called Hernando Borosa, (the man who did become the second president of the republic, for about three months).

  The Plaza General Menendez was where most of the embassies were in the capital and Henri thought if he had been so successful using his languages and business skills in his uncle’s laundries back in Hong Kong, then there was nothing stopping him doing the same thing here. Only this time, as sole owner, he would see his large family secure and wealthy with their fate in their own hands. And now, fortune smiled on the Cheungs and Henri, with the help of the saintly Ah Lam and his eight boisterous children, forged a new life and a successful business providing laundry services for a dozen embassies and consulates, three major hotels and even the presidential palace for state dinners and other grand occasions.

  By the outbreak of the Second World War, Henri had moved out of the second storey of their first home, which he had bought some eight years previously, and into a lilac-painted house with a large garden in the affluent suburb of Miraflores (and there is hardly a single capital city in the whole of Latin America that doesn’t have a wealthy suburb called Miraflores) and had three laundries managed by his older children, and those of his children still of school age were studying at the private Academia San Ignacio. The entire family had converted to Catholicism and spoke Spanish in society but enjoyed delicious Cantonese food and cheerful Chinese chatter at home and all the children learned English at school. An extra blessing in the form of a son arrived in November 1941. He was the youngest child by some ten years but was the absolute apple of his father’s eye and Henri felt his life was complete. All his other children had Chinese names (and typical Chinese features save the girls who had blue eyes) but since his youngest child had been born, as he had, far from Hong Kong in the land where Henri’s Belgian mother had eventually fallen in love with his father, Henri insisted in giving the boy a name from his mother’s side of the family. So, it was that little Pascal, named for his grandmother’s brother who had been a baker in Liege and who had died aged forty from syphilis, was baptised in the church of San Francisco one sunny Sunday morning with the scent of magnolias hanging sweetly in the still, warm air. It was a Sunday to remember. It was the 7th December 1941: the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour.

  In 1938 there had been, coincidentally, general elections in two neighbouring and often antipathetic countries. To the north in Santa Elena, a ‘populist’ government modelled on the Fasciti in Italy, complete with its own mini Mussolini, President General Florian Gatillo (and having a surname that means trigger was apt as the Generalissimo went everywhere with a pair of silver Colt revolvers on his hips which he had a tendency to use indiscriminately) had bullied his way to power with the help of thuggery and Italian money, and the new government was planning to convert the long-disputed port of Buenafortuna into a naval base at the disposal of friendly Axis powers. Buenafortuna was right on the border between Santa Elena and the land in which poor Pascal had so recently been born; the two countries had fought several skirmishes and two outright wars over the last hundred years for its ownership. Buenafortuna had changed flags so many times that in 1936, the then governor of the province, Hector Bartolo, went to Washington DC and asked the Americans to intervene to stop the dispute and guarantee the independence and safety of the lands and peoples in his region in return for granting the Americans the right to keep a permanent garrison in the city and a few gunboats in the port as well as a lucrative trade monopoly for the excellent bananas produced in the region. The Americans agreed but did not act with any particular urgency, so by the time the Americans sent one civilian vessel with an advance party of sixteen soldiers from the Quartermaster Corps, armed only with service revolvers, the new government of General Gatillo had seized full control of Buenafortuna and rumour has it that the General himself dispatched the well-meaning and unfortunate Governor Bartolo with a single bullet in the eye. The Americans were treated kindly and with due dignity but after two days were politely but firmly shown the door and withdrew to whence they had sailed. At about the same time, to the south, the old enemy of Santa Elena chose its new president. An American-educated, millionaire Baptist and a disciple of Henry Ford won a landslide with over 80% of the vote and in his native region bordering Buenafortuna, some say over 100%. President Manuel Cordoba promised to put meat on the table, halve the price of tortillas and provide jobs to all men over fifteen and make his nation proud once more. Of course, none of these things came to pass but it made a great election campaign. Practically the first thing President Cordoba did was cable his millionaire industrialist friends in the USA and within three weeks, a flotilla of one warship, six gunboats and several ancillary vessels steamed into the small harbour at Chichamura some five miles down the coast from Buenafortuna.

  It was all quite simple and almost bloodless. President Cordoba’s friends and sponsors back in Washington passed a House Resolution recognising the historical right to the city and port of Buenafortuna and despite protestations from the Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese and of course, Santa Elena governments and the shooting of an American navy doctor in the arm (the doctor just happened to be out collecting butterflies on the border) by a local farmer who thought he was after his chickens, the Americans took possession of Buenafortuna in the name of President Cordoba and his noble people in August 1939.

  By 1942, Buenafortuna was a heavily fortified city with 1,200 American troops and several destroyers, and it commanded a strategically vital position between North and South America. Santa Elena was thus rendered neutral and contributed nothing to the Axis war effort save a tranquil holiday resort for Italian officers and deserters. To this day, the best pasta in the Americas can be found in Santa Elena.

  So President Cordoba had his beloved port back and had the comfort of a large and friendly force of United States soldiers and marines on his doorstep. Rather too friendly given the alarming rise in cases of gonorrhoea and the dark-skinned children with blue eyes born in the area until 1960, when the six-term sixty-six-year-old President Cordoba, wearing black silk stockings and a red corset, had a stroke while being flogged by his valet, Felipe and the Americans in turn were expelled by the newly ‘elected’ People’s Revolutionary Party of Alfredo Gozo who claimed Buenafortuna in the name of the people and set about turning it into the largest drug trafficking port between Cali and Miami, in the name of the people, naturally.

  The disastrous side effect on the Cheung family of this political situation and the arrival of the Americans in 1939 was not felt until seventeen days after Pascal was baptised and the Japanese flattened Pearl Harbour when President Cordoba issued a decree expelling all German, Italian and Japanese citizens or those of such descent going back three generations and the repossession of their assets for use in the fight against the powers of totalitarianism. Some 4500 bewildered people found themselves one intensely hot New Year’s Day morning on the quay at Buenafortuna being loaded like cattle onto four freighters bound for Spain. Two of the freighters never made it, torpedoed by U-boats, victims of mistaken identity. One limped into Cadiz three weeks later with several hundred passengers stricken with typhoid and the fourth, for reasons only k
nown to the captain, landed in Luanda, capital of the Portuguese colony of Angola. Baby Pascal Cheung was on board this boat along with his father, mother and eight brothers and sisters. None of the Cheung children had married and the oldest boy, Wei-Shan who was 22 was quite relieved to be leaving as he had just found out his girlfriend, Frida, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a Swiss hotel manager and his Venezuelan wife, was two months pregnant. As it turned out, he needn’t have worried since Frida’s parents decided to take the family to Argentina a month later and were killed when their ship hit a mine in the River Plate. Despite frenzied protestations to the Ministry of Justice, the US Embassy and the British Consulate and showing passports and birth certificates to prove that he was not of Japanese citizenship or descent, Henri Cheung was told he and his family would have to leave. In truth, the deputy Minister in charge of the newly created department of Alien Affairs, Rolando Garcia knew full well the Cheungs’ antecedence but they looked so ‘oriental’ and therefore could not be trusted. Besides, Rolando had an eye on the Cheungs’ lilac house with the pretty garden for his mistress, Hortense who was born in Alsace to a German mother and a French father who later became an official in the Vichy government but whose loyalty was beyond question once she became Rolando’s paramour. In March 1945 after Hortense suddenly died of a burst appendix, they found a radio set hidden in one of her hatboxes which she had regularly used throughout the final three years of the war to communicate with Berlin. Rolando took the news badly but rather than marching out to the pretty garden of the lilac-painted house and doing the honourable thing with a revolver, he fled over the border disguised as a nun and ran a religious bookshop in Santa Elena until he died in 1957.

  It took the Cheung family over three years to reach Hong Kong. Of the eleven family members who landed at Luanda in late January 1942, nine reached Hong Kong in May 1945. From Luanda, they trekked to Johannesburg and then onto Cape Town where they settled for a time among the small Chinese community and Henri, who had managed to smuggle a few thousand dollars aboard the ship which was enough to encourage the captain to sail towards the relative safety of Africa, opened a restaurant which just about kept their heads above water. Sadly, in early 1944, Henri died from a blood clot on the brain that was thought to have been caused from a fall from a stepladder while changing a light bulb in the restaurant. Ah Lam heroically kept the restaurant open and her brood fed and clothed for two more years at great cost to her health, but managed to return with her family to Hong Kong on a Chinese cargo ship whose captain had been a frequent diner at the restaurant. Wei-Shan stayed on in Cape Town and kept the restaurant, married the daughter of a tailor from Shanghai and raised a family. Ah Lam and her eight children, having landed in Hong Kong, were able to stay with the captain of the cargo ship who was very fond of Henri’s oldest daughter, Wu-Han, whom he eventually married and the Cheung family went back into the laundry business again albeit in a very small way. By 1960, Ah Lam was able to reflect on a very successful fifteen years as owner of three small laundries, mother-in-law six times over, with two weddings on the horizon and grandmother to seventeen. When Pascal married aged eighteen, Ah Lam retired and signed her business over to her children and went back to Cape Town to live with Wei-Shan and his wife and five children, and to be near her beloved Henri, who was buried in the Chinese cemetery on Signal Hill. Pascal, Ah Lam’s only natural son, was a sweet-natured, rather shy child who was not particularly blessed with brains or good looks and was often bullied at school and never fought back. Thankfully, several of his older siblings ensured that Pascal was left alone most of the time. Showing no particular aptitude for school, or much social grace, or any of the Cheung entrepreneurial spirit, Ah Lam would often despair about the fate of her youngest child. The best she could hope for, she often said to herself, was that he would settle down to a job in one of her laundries, perhaps delivering clean sheets to the few guest houses that were customers and maybe marry a nice, dim-witted girl who would look after him and know that he would not beat her. The only discernable talent that Pascal displayed was carving wood.

  He started whittling when he was very small and by the time he was eight made his own wooden toys; soldiers, a little sailing boat and presents for his older brothers and sisters and little baby cousins from pencil boxes to elaborate, gaily painted dolls and spinning tops. When Pascal was sixteen, he was out one day taking a parcel of freshly laundered sheets to a small inn frequented by commercial salesmen from the mainland, when he met the hostel owner’s daughter, Chan-Juan, who was almost fifteen and who had been born with a dark purple birthmark covering almost half of her face. Pascal didn’t even notice the birthmark; he was enraptured by Chan-Juan’s smile and her silvery laugh. As soon as Chang-Juan turned seventeen, they married with the full blessing and to the great relief of both mothers-in-law. Pascal delivered the laundry and Chan-Juan, who was a superb cook worked as a chef for the Hong Kong Police.

  Three years after they married, a son was born. Pascal carved the crib himself and the little boy was named in honour of his late father, Henri. Pascal continued working in what had become his brothers’ and sisters’ business and although technically he owned a small share in the family business, his mother granted full authority over his finances to his siblings on condition that they always look out for him. In their spare time, Pascal and Chan-Juan would play with little Henri and his collection of wooden toys, all exquisitely made by his father, and although not rich, not educated and not sophisticated, they were a very happy family unit. Little Henri turned out to be a precocious child and somewhat boisterous; often in trouble for being cheeky at school or stealing apples, getting into fights with boys twice his age and size in the neighbourhood or being caught playing dice in the street with drunken English sailors on shore leave. Henri had a great ear for languages and learned Spanish and French from his uncles and aunts and amused his parents with his skill in mimicry and accents. By the time he was thirteen; Henri could drink a pot of rum or smoke a pipe with the sailors while cracking risqué jokes in English and winning their money with loaded dice. But somehow, having inherited his father’s sweet disposition and his mother’s winning smile, Henri never quite got into the amount of grief he really deserved.

  So life continued and the Cheungs laughed, cried, celebrated, commiserated, enjoyed and endured as all families do. The year Henri turned seventeen, Chan-Juan developed a fever, a day later she slipped into a coma and two days after that, she died. The cause of the fever was never established and the disconsolate Pascal nearly took his own life. As it was, he wandered around the streets for days in a fog of grief, which ended in a very badly broken leg when he fell down a flight of steps. The leg really needed a pin but Pascal didn’t want one so when the plaster came off, he walked with a severe limp from that day. His brothers and sisters made sure he had money and one of his nieces or nephews would bring him a hot meal every day but Pascal retreated from the world and sat in his little parlour carving: no longer toys but strange, abstract figures reminiscent of swans or dolphins, or bizarrely shaped trees whose beautiful tortured forms were captivating yet eluded interpretation. No one who happened to drop by to visit Pascal was unaffected by the almost surreal carvings and all agreed that just when you thought you had grasped the meaning behind one, a flicker of a candle in the room, or a breath of wind or the slightest tilt of the head changed the dynamic of the wood and the moment of illumination was lost.

  Young Henri could see that he was the last of his father’s worries and ever gracious, took no offense, so one day a few months after his mother’s death, Henri kissed Pascal on the forehead and took his leave of Hong Kong, having got himself a job as a cabin boy on a British cruise ship, and sailed away to Australia where he spent the next seven years living on his wits and mostly, just within the law. At various times he was a tour guide, a croupier in a casino (but the temptation was too great for him not to spend all his money after his shift), a jade dealer, a medical orderly and finall
y a car dealer. It was this last job that caused him to leave Adelaide in something of a hurry when the police were investigating several complaints of cars whose milometers had been tampered with. Henri signed up on a Liberian-registered container ship, the Spirit of Colchis, whose captain paid next to nothing but asked no questions, a sort of merchant marine version of the French Foreign Legion. Since the captain of the ship, a Lebanese called Mook, spoke only French, Arabic and a few words of English, Henri with his fluent but rather vulgar English and his Cantonese, French and Spanish was of great use to Captain Mook and served as radio operator and interpreter on board for two years. During that time he had no home and spent only enough time on land to get a girl, get a meal, find a card game and usually get into some sort of trouble with an angry husband or father, or bar owner or gambling creditor.

  Henri was almost thirty years old when the Spirit of Colchis was steaming leakily away from its latest port of call in Havana, and he was sitting with Mook one evening playing chess over an enamel mug of rum, smoking a smuggled Montecristo. As usual, Captain Mook spoke French and Henri answered in English.

  “Just one more stop on this trip, and then the owners are scrapping the tub. We are to make for Montevideo after this and the breaking yard. The crew is to be paid off and dispersed and you and I have been offered a job on an oil tanker in Alaska.” Mook shivered and spat, then sighed and blew a forlorn smoke ring.

  Henri never looked at charts or manifests and barely noticed where they were unless it was somewhere with pretty girls, cheap booze and saps to fleece at dice or cards.

  “Fuck that! I’m not freezing my bollocks off on some floating time bomb! Anyway where is this final stop before the knacker’s yard? We should make it a real swansong to remember!”

  “Oh we can have a party alright, just be careful you don’t get shot by a drug dealer or stabbed by a hooker or worse! Buena-bloody-fortuna!”