Titus, after weighing the pros and cons, took the line that money from minerals was bad money – bad for whites and bad for blacks. It had corrupted Australia and given it false values and false standards of living. When a company got permission to put seismic lines through his country, he gave them the scorn of his passive non-co-operation.
This attitude was not calculated to win him friends, either among white businessmen or ambitious blacks in Alice. It was also the reason for the present dispute.
Around 1910 Titus’s grandfather, in dealings with a Loritja clan who, now living on the Amadeus Mission, call themselves the Amadeus Mob, had exchanged two sets of unmarked tjuringas. The exchange gave each the right of access to the other’s hunting ground. Since the tjuringas had never been returned, the agreement was still in force.
One day, at a time when the mining company despaired of dealing with Titus, a deputation from Amadeus turned up in Alice to say that they, not he, were the ‘owners’ of the country and its songs – and were therefore entitled to mining royalties. What they had done was to tamper with the tjuringas; engraving them with their own totemic designs. They had, in other words, forged the title deeds to Titus’s birthright.
Titus, who knew of Arkady by reputation only, had sent a message for help.
Arkady, at his briefing in Alice, had been assured that this was simply a squabble about money. But Titus, it turned out, didn’t give a hoot for money. The crisis was much more dangerous since, by altering the tjuringas, the Amadeus Mob had attempted to re-write the Creation.
Titus told Arkady how, at nights, he heard his Ancestors howling for vengeance – and how he felt forced to obey them.
Arkady, for his part, realised the urgency of getting the offenders to ‘withdraw’ their sacrilege, but could only think of playing for time. He suggested Titus take a holiday in Alice. ‘No,’ said Titus, grimly, ‘I’ll stay.’
‘Then promise me one thing,’ Arkady said. ‘Do nothing until I get back to you.’
‘I promise.’
Arkady was sure he meant to keep the promise; but what he found so shocking was the idea that, from now on, Aboriginals themselves were going to twist their own law in order to line their pockets.
‘And if that’s going to be the future,’ he said, ‘I might as well give up.’
That evening Estrella insisted on cooking an ‘estofado for the roofing man’, and while we were waiting in her caravan we heard a few pecks of rain on the roof. I looked out to see, hanging over Mount Liebler, a solid barrage of cloud with bolts of lightning fizzling at the edges.
A few minutes later, the storm broke in sheets of water.
‘Christ,’ said Arkady, ‘we’ll be bogged in here for weeks.’
‘I’d like that,’ I said.
‘Would you?’ he snapped. ‘I wouldn’t.’
First, there was the Titus business to attend to. Then there was Hanlon. Then Arkady was due in Darwin in four days’ time for a meeting with the railway engineer.
‘You never told me,’ I said.
‘You never asked.’
The trip-switch of the generator then failed, and we were left in semi-darkness. The rain slammed down for half an hour or so, and stopped as abruptly as it started.
I went outside. ‘Ark,’ I called, ‘you must come out.’
A pair of rainbows hung across the valley between the two mountains. The cliffs of the escarpment, which had been a dry red, were now purplish-black and striped, like a zebra, with vertical chutes of white water. The cloud seemed even denser than the earth, and, beneath its lower rim, the last of the sun broke through, flooding the spinifex with shafts of pale green light.
‘I know,’ said Arkady. ‘Like nowhere else in the world.’
It poured again in the night. Next morning, before light, he shook me awake.
‘We’ve got to get going,’ he said. ‘Quick.’
He had listened to the weather forecast. There was worse weather on the way.
‘Must we?’ I said, sleepily.
‘I must,’ he said. ‘You stay, if you want.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll come.’
We had tea and tidied the caravan. We wiped the mud stains from the floor and scribbled a note for Wendy and Rolf.
We drove off through the puddles along the airstrip and joined the road that comes from Lake Mackay. The dawn was murky and sunless. We came off a ridge of higher ground . . . and the road disappeared into a lake.
‘Well, that’, said Arkady, ‘is that.’
It was pouring by the time we got back to Cullen. Rolf was standing outside the store, in a rainproof poncho.
‘Ha!’ he leered at me. ‘Thought you could sneak off without saying goodbye? I haven’t done with you. Yet!’
Arkady spent the rest of the morning on the radio. The reception was terrible. All the roads to Alice were closed and would be for at least ten days. There were two seats on the mail plane – if the pilot would only make a detour.
Around noon there was a message that the plane would try to land.
‘You coming?’ said Arkady.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll stay.’
‘Good for you,’ he said. ‘Make sure the kids don’t monkey around with the Land Cruiser.’ He parked the vehicle under the trees, by our caravan, and handed me the key.
At the dispensary, Estrella had a woman in agony with an abscess. She would have to go to hospital in Alice, and would have to have my seat on the plane.
Another storm seemed to be brewing behind Mount Liebler when the crowd began waving at a black speck coming from the south. The Cessna splashed down on to the runway, spattering the fuselage with mud, and taxied towards the store.
‘Get a fuckin’ move on,’ the pilot bawled from the cockpit.
Arkady gripped my hand. ‘See you, mate,’ he said. ‘About ten days, if all goes well.’
‘See you,’ I said.
‘Bye ’bye, Little Monster,’ he said to Rolf, and escorted the moaning woman to the plane.
They took off, easing out of the valley just ahead of the incoming storm.
‘How does it feel’, Rolf asked, ‘to be stuck here with me?’
‘I’ll survive.’
For lunch we had beer and a salami sandwich. The beer made me sleepy, so I slept until four. When I woke, I started rearranging the caravan as a place to work in.
There was a plyboard top which pulled out over the second bunk to make a desk. There was even a swivelling office chair. I put my pencils in a tumbler and my Swiss Army knife beside them. I unpacked some exercise pads and, with the obsessive neatness that goes with the beginning of a project, I made three neat stacks of my ‘Paris’ notebooks.
In France, these notebooks are known as carnets moleskines: ‘moleskine’, in this case, being its black oilcloth binding. Each time I went to Paris, I would buy a fresh supply from a papeterie in the Rue de l’Ancienne Comédie. The pages were squared and the end-papers held in place with an elastic band. I had numbered them in series. I wrote my name and address on the front page, offering a reward to the finder. To lose a passport was the least of one’s worries: to lose a notebook was a catastrophe.
In twenty odd years of travel, I lost only two. One vanished on an Afghan bus. The other was filched by the Brazilian secret police, who, with a certain clairvoyance, imagined that some lines I had written – about the wounds of a Baroque Christ – were a description, in code, of their own work on political prisoners.
Some months before I left for Australia, the owner of the papeterie said that the vrai moleskine was getting harder and harder to get. There was one supplier: a small family business in Tours. They were very slow in answering letters.
‘I’d like to order a hundred,’ I said to Madame. ‘A hundred will last me a lifetime.’
She promised to telephone Tours at once, that afternoon.
At lunchtime, I had a sobering experience. The headwaiter of Brasserie Lipp no longer recognised me, ‘Non, Monsieur, il n�
��y a pas de place.’ At five, I kept my appointment with Madame. The manufacturer had died. His heirs had sold the business. She removed her spectacles and, almost with an air of mourning, said, ‘Le vrai moleskine n’est plus.’
I had a presentiment that the ‘travelling’ phase of my life might be passing. I felt, before the malaise of settlement crept over me, that I should reopen those notebooks. I should set down on paper a résumé of the ideas, quotations and encounters which had amused and obsessed me; and which I hoped would shed light on what is, for me, the question of questions: the nature of human restlessness.
Pascal, in one of his gloomier pensées, gave it as his opinion that all our miseries stemmed from a single cause: our inability to remain quietly in a room.
Why, he asked, must a man with sufficient to live on feel drawn to divert himself on long sea voyages? To dwell in another town? To go off in search of a peppercorn? Or go off to war and break skulls?
Later, on further reflection, having discovered the cause of our misfortunes, he wished to understand the reason for them, he found one very good reason: namely, the natural unhappiness of our weak mortal condition; so unhappy that when we gave to it all our attention, nothing could console us.
One thing alone could alleviate our despair, and that was ‘distraction’ (divertissement): yet this was the worst of our misfortunes, for in distraction we were prevented from thinking about ourselves and were gradually brought to ruin.
Could it be, I wondered, that our need for distraction, our mania for the new, was, in essence, an instinctive migratory urge akin to that of birds in autumn?
All the Great Teachers have preached that Man, originally, was a ‘wanderer in the scorching and barren wilderness of this world’ – the words are those of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor – and that to rediscover his humanity, he must slough off attachments and take to the road.
My two most recent notebooks were crammed with jottings taken in South Africa, where I had examined, at first hand, certain evidence on the origin of our species. What I learned there – together with what I now knew about the Songlines – seemed to confirm the conjecture I had toyed with for so long: that Natural Selection has designed us – from the structure of our brain-cells to the structure of our big toe – for a career of seasonal journeys on foot through a blistering land of thorn-scrub or desert.
If this were so; if the desert were ‘home’; if our instincts were forged in the desert; to survive the rigours of the desert – then it is easier to understand why greener pastures pall on us; why possessions exhaust us, and why Pascal’s imaginary man found his comfortable lodgings a prison.
FROM THE NOTEBOOKS
OUR NATURE LIES in movement; complete calm is death.
Pascal, Pensées
A study of the Great Malady; horror of home.
Baudelaire, Journaux Intimes
The most convincing analysts of restlessness were often men who, for one reason or another, were immobilised: Pascal by stomach ailments and migraines, Baudelaire by drugs, St John of the Cross by the bars of his cell. There are French critics who would claim that Proust, the hermit of the cork-lined room, was the greatest of literary voyagers.
The founders of monastic rule were forever devising techniques for quelling wanderlust in their novices. ‘A monk out of his cell’, said St Anthony, ‘is like a fish out of water.’ Yet Christ and the Apostles walked their journeys through the hills of Palestine.
What is this strange madness, Petrarch asked of his young secretary, this mania for sleeping each night in a different bed?
What am I doing here?
Rimbaud writing home from Ethiopia
Picós, Piauí, Brazil
Sleepless night in the Charm Hotel. The sleeping-sickness bug is endemic to this region, which has one of the highest infant-mortality rates in the world. At breakfast-time, the proprietor, instead of serving my eggs, thwacked his fly-swat on to my plate and removed a mottled brown insect by the leg.
‘Mata gente,’ he said gloomily. ‘It kills people.’
The stucco façade is painted a pale mint green with the words CHARM HOTEL in bold black letters. A leaking gutter pipe has washed away the letter C, so that it now reads . . .
Djang, Cameroon
There are two hotels in Djang: the Hotel Windsor and, across the street, the Hotel Anti-Windsor.
British Embassy, Kabul, Afghanistan
The Third Secretary is also Cultural Attaché. His office is stacked with copies of Orwell’s Animal Farm: the British government’s contribution to the teaching of English in Afghan schools and an elementary lesson on the evils of Marxism, as voiced through the mouth of a pig.
‘But pigs?’ I said. ‘In an Islamic country? Don’t you think that kind of propaganda might backfire?’
The Cultural Attaché shrugged. The Ambassador thought it was a good idea. There was nothing he could do.
He who does not travel does not know the value of men.
Moorish proverb
Miami, Florida
On the bus from Downtown to the Beach there was a lady in pink. She must have been eighty, at least. She had bright pink hair with pink flowers in it, a matching pink dress, pink lips, pink nails, pink handbag, pink earrings, and, in her shopping-basket, there were boxes of pink Kleenex.
In the wedges of her clear plastic heels a pair of goldfish were lazily floating in formaldehyde.
I was too intent on the goldfish to notice the midget in hornrimmed glasses who was standing on the seat beside me.
‘Permit me to ask you, sir,’ he asked in a squeaky voice, ‘which of the human qualities do you value the most?’
‘I haven’t thought,’ I said.
‘I used to believe in empathy,’ he said, ‘but I have recently moved over to compassion.’
‘I’m glad to hear it.’
‘Permit me to ask you, sir? At which of the professions are you presently engaged?’
‘I’m studying to be an archaeologist.’
‘You amaze me, sir. I’m in that line of country myself.’
He was a sewer-rat. His friends would lower him, with a metal-detector, into the main sewer beneath the hotels of Miami Beach. There, he would prospect for jewellery flushed, accidentally, down the toilets.
‘It is not, I can assure you, sir,’ he said, ‘an unrewarding occupation.’
On the night express from Moscow to Kiev, reading Donne’s third ‘Elegie’:
To live in one land, is captivitie,
To runne all countries, a wild roguery
This life is a hospital in which each sick man is possessed by a desire to change beds. One would prefer to suffer by the stove. Another believes he would recover if he sat by the window.
I think I would be happy in that place I happen not to be, and this question of moving house is the subject of a perpetual dialogue I have with my soul.
Baudelaire, ‘Any Where Out of this World!’
Bekom, Cameroon
The names of taxis: The Confidence Car. Baby Confidence. The Return of the Gentleman Chauffeur. Le Chauffeur Kamikaze.
In the air, Paris–Dakar
Dinner last night at the Rue l’Abée de l’Epée. Malraux was there. A ventriloquist! He gave a faultless imitation of the door to Stalin’s office as it slammed on Gide’s face. He and Gide had gone to complain about the treatment of homosexuals in Russia, and Stalin had got wind of their intention.
Dakar
The Hotel Coq Hardi is also a brothel. Its owner, Madame Martine, owns a fishing-boat, and so we have langouste for dinner. Of the two resident whores, my friend Mamzelle Yo- Yo wears a mountainous puce pink turban and has piston rods for legs. The other, Madame Jacqueline, has two regular clients: Herr Kisch, a hydrologist, and the Ambassador of Mali.
Yesterday was Kisch night. She appeared on her balcony, bangled and gleaming, the Mother-of-all-Africa in flowing robes of indigo. She blew him a kiss, tossed down a sprig of bougainvillaea, and cooed, ‘Herr Kisch, I come.’
Tonight, when the Ambassador’s Mercedes pulled up outside, she flew out in a curvaceous, café-au-lait suit, a peroxide wig and white high-heeled shoes, shouting stridently, ‘Monsieur l’Ambassadeur, je viens!’
Gorée, Senegal
On the terrace of the restaurant a fat French couple have been stuffing themselves with fruits de mer. Their dachshund, leashed to the woman’s chair leg, keeps jumping up in the hope of being fed.
Woman to dachshund, ‘Taisez-vous, Roméo! C’est l’entracte.’
Internal burning . . . wandering fever . . .
Kalevala
In The Descent of Man Darwin notes that in certain birds the migratory impulse is stronger than the maternal. A mother will abandon her fledglings in the nest rather than miss her appointment for the long journey south.
Sydney Harbour
On the ferry back from Manly a little old lady heard me talking.
‘You’re English, aren’t you?’ she said, in an English North Country accent. ‘I can tell you’re English.’
‘I am.’
‘So am I!’
She was wearing thick, steel-framed spectacles and a nice felt hat with a wisp of blue net above the brim.
‘Are you visiting Sydney?’ I asked her.
‘Lord, love, no!’ she said, ‘I’ve lived here since 1946. I came out to live with my son, but a very strange thing happened. By the time the ship got here, he’d died. Imagine! I’d given up my home in Doncaster, so I thought I might as well stay! So I asked my second son to come out and live with me. So he came out . . . emigrated . . . and do you know what?’
‘No.’
‘He died. He had a heart attack, and died.’
The Songlines Page 17
