I said, ‘I don’t understand what this gentleman wants.’
‘His hobby is reading hands. He says he’s never had the opportunity to read an American’s.’
‘Tell him I’m English.’
‘He says the same applies. I don’t think he sees much difference. We are both Anglo-Saxon.’
There was nothing I could do but hold out my hand. The old man examined it with extreme care through the magnifying glass. ‘He asks me to translate, but maybe you’d rather I didn’t. It’s kind of personal, a fortune.’
‘I don’t mind,’ I said, and I thought of Hatty and her tea-leaves and how she had foreseen my travels in her best Lapsang Souchong.
‘He says you have come from a long way off.’
‘That’s a bit obvious, isn’t it?’
‘But your travels are nearly over.’
‘That can hardly be true. I have to go back home.’
‘He sees a reunion of someone very close to you. Your wife perhaps.’
‘I have no wife.’
‘He says it could be your mother.’
‘She’s dead. At least …’
‘You have had a great deal of money in your care. But no longer.’
‘At any rate he’s scored there. I was in a bank.’
‘He sees a death – but it’s far away from your heart-line and your life-line. It’s not an important death. Perhaps a stranger’s.’
‘Do you believe in this nonsense?’ I asked the American.
‘No, I guess not, but I try to keep an open mind. My name’s O’Toole. James O’Toole.’
‘Mine’s Pulling – Henry,’ I said. In the background the old man continued his report in Spanish. He seemed not to care whether it was translated or not. He had pulled out a notebook and was writing things down.
‘You a Londoner?’
‘Yes.’
‘I come from Philadelphia. He wants me to tell you that yours is the nine hundred and seventy-second hand he’s studied. Sorry, nine hundred and seventy-fifth.’ The old man closed his notebook with an air of satisfaction. Then he shook hands with me and thanked me, paid for the drinks, bowed and departed. The magnifying glass bulged in his pocket like a gun.
‘Mind if I join you?’ the American asked. He wore an English tweed coat and a pair of old grey flannel trousers: thin and melancholy, he looked as English as I did; there were small lines bitten by care around the eyes and mouth, and like a man who has lost his way he had a habit of looking this way and that with anxiety. He had nothing in common with the Americans whom I had met in England, noisy and self-confident, with the young unlined faces of children romping and shouting to one another across the nursery floor.
He said, ‘You going to Asunción too?’
‘Yes.’
‘There’s nowhere else on this trip worth a visit. Corrientes isn’t too bad – if you don’t spend a night. Formosa – that’s a dump. Only smugglers get off there, though they do talk of the fishing. I guess you’re not a smuggler?’
‘No. You seem to know these parts well.’
‘Too well,’ he said. ‘You on vacation?’
‘I suppose so. Yes.’
‘Going to see the Iguazú Falls? Lots of people go there. If you do, better stay on the Brazilian side. Only good hotel.’
‘Are they worth a visit?’
‘Maybe. If you like that kind of thing. Just a lot of water if you ask me.’
The barman obviously knew the American well, for he had made him a dry Martini without a word said, and he drank it now morosely and without pleasure. ‘It’s not like Gordon’s,’ he said. He took a slow look at me, almost as if he were memorizing my features. ‘I took you for a businessman, Henry,’ he said. ‘Vacationing all by yourself? Not much fun. Strange country. And you don’t speak the language – not that Spanish is any good outside the city. In the country they all speak Guaraní.’
‘Do you?’
‘A smattering.’ I noticed he asked questions more than he answered them, and when he gave me information it was the kind of information which I could have obtained from any guidebook. ‘Picturesque ruins,’ he said, ‘old Jesuit settlements. They appeal to you, Henry?’
I felt he wouldn’t be satisfied until I had told him more. What was the harm? I wasn’t carrying a gold brick or a suitcase stuffed with notes. As he said, I was no smuggler. ‘I am visiting an old relation of mine,’ I said and added, ‘James.’ I could see he wanted that too.
‘My friends call me Tooley,’ he said automatically, and it was quite a while before in my mind the coin fell.
‘Are you in business here?’
‘Not exactly,’ he said. ‘I do research work. Social research. You know the sort of thing, Henry. Cost of living. Malnutrition. Degree of illiteracy. Have a drink.’
‘Two is all I can take, Tooley,’ I said, and it was only at the repetition of the name that I remembered, remembered Tooley. He pushed his own glass forward for another.
‘Do you find things easy in Paraguay? I’ve read in the papers you Americans have a lot of trouble in South America.’
‘Not in Paraguay,’ he said. ‘We and the General are like that.’ He raised his thumb and forefinger and then transferred them to his refilled glass.
‘He’s quite a tough dictator, so they tell me.’
‘It’s what the country needs, Henry. A strong hand. Don’t mistake me though. I keep out of politics. Simple research. That’s my line.’
‘Have you published anything?’
‘Oh,’ he replied vaguely, ‘reports. Technical. They wouldn’t interest you, Henry.’
It was inevitable that when the bell rang we should go into lunch together. We shared the table with two other men. One was a grey-faced man in a blue city suit who was on a diet (the steward, who knew him well, brought him a special dish of boiled vegetables which he looked at carefully before eating, twitching the end of his nose and his upper lip like a rabbit). The other was a fat old priest with rogue eyes who looked rather like Winston Churchill. I was amused to watch O’Toole set about the two of them. Before we had finished our bad liver pâté, he had found that the priest had a parish in a village near Corrientes, on the Argentine side of the border, and before we had eaten our equally bad pasta he had broken a little way into the taciturnity of the man with the nose like a rabbit’s. He was apparently a businessman returning to Formosa. When he mentioned Formosa O’Toole looked at me and gave a little nod of confirmation: he had placed him.
‘Now I’d guess you to be a pharmacist?’ he said, leading him on.
The man had little English, but he understood that. He looked at O’Toole and twitched his nose. I thought he was not going to reply, but out the phrase came with all its international ambiguity, ‘Import-export.’
The priest for some reason began to speak of flying saucers. They swarmed over Argentina, so it seemed – perhaps if we had clear nights we would observe one from the boat.
‘You really believe in them?’ I asked, and the old priest in his excitement abandoned his little English altogether.
‘He says,’ O’Toole explained, ‘that you must have seen yesterday’s Nación. Twelve cars were stopped coming from Mar del Plata to Buenos Aires on Monday night. When a flying saucer passes overhead a car-engine stops. The reverend father believes they have a divine origin.’ He translated almost as rapidly as the other talked. ‘Recently a couple who were driving to Mar del Plata for the weekend were surrounded by a cloud. The car stopped and when the cloud dispersed they found they were in Mexico near Acapulco.’
‘And he believed even that?’
‘Sure. They all do. Once a week on the radio at Buenos Aires you can hear a programme all about flying saucers. Who’s seen them that week, and where. Our friend here says it may be the explanation of the flying house of Loretto. It was just picked up in Palestine, like those people on the road to Mar del Plata, and dumped down in Italy.’
They served us a tough steak and afterwards oranges.
The priest lapsed into silence and ate with a slight frown. Perhaps he felt in the presence of unbelievers. The businessman pushed back his plate of boiled vegetables and excused himself. I asked my neighbour what I had been longing to ask all through the meal: ‘Are you married, Tooley?’
‘Yeah. Sort of.’
‘You’ve got a daughter?’
‘Sure. Why? She’s studying in London.’
‘She’s in Katmandu,’ I said.
‘Katmandu! Why, that’s Nepal.’
The lines of anxiety deepened. ‘That’s a hell of a thing to tell me,’ he said. ‘How do you know?’ I told him about the Orient Express, but I left out any references to the young man. I said she was with a group of students, which was true when I last saw her. He said, ‘What can I do, Henry? I’ve got my work. I can’t go chasing round the world. Lucinda doesn’t know the worry she gives.’
‘Lucinda?’
‘Her mother chose the name,’ he said with bitterness.
‘She calls herself Tooley now like you.’
‘She does? That’s new.’
‘She seemed to have a great admiration for you.’
‘I let her go to England,’ he said. ‘I thought she’d be safe there. But Katmandu!’ He pushed away the orange which he had so carefully sliced. ‘Where’s she living? I doubt if there’s a good hotel in the place. If there’s a Hilton at least you know where you are. What shall I do, Henry?’
‘She’ll be all right,’ I said without conviction.
‘I could send a cable to the embassy – I suppose there’s an embassy.’ He got up abruptly and said, ‘I’ve got to take a leak.’
I followed him out of the dining-room and down a corridor to the lavatory. There we stood side by side in silence. I noticed his lips moving – perhaps, I thought, he was having an imaginary dialogue with his daughter. We left the lavatory together and without a word he sat down on a bench on the port side of the deck. It was no longer raining, but it was grey and cold. There was nothing to see but some small trees growing at the edge of the dirty river, an occasional hut, and through the trees an expanse of brown scrub stretching to the horizon without a hill in sight.
‘Argentina?’ I asked to break the silence.
‘It’s all Argentina,’ he said, ‘till we reach the Paraguay river our last day.’ He took out a pocket-book and made some notes. They seemed to be figures. When he had finished he said, ‘Excuse me. It’s a record I keep. Kind of a study I’m making.’
‘Your daughter told me you were in the CIA.’
He turned on me his sad and anxious eyes. ‘She’s a romantic,’ he said. ‘She imagines things.’
‘Is the CIA romantic?’
‘A kid thinks so, I guess she saw some report of mine marked Secret. Anything’s Secret that goes to a government department. Even malnutrition in Asunción.’
I wasn’t sure which of them I believed.
He asked me with an air of helplessness, ‘What would you do, Henry?’
I said, ‘If you were really in the CIA you could probably find out how she was from one of your men there. You must have a man in Katmandu.’
‘If I were really in the CIA,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t want to get them mixed up in my private affairs. Have you any children, Henry?’
‘No.’
‘You are a lucky man. People talk about the age of reason. There’s no such thing. When you have a child you are condemned to be a father for life. They go away from you. You can’t go away from them.’
‘How would I know?’
He brooded awhile, staring out over the scrub which never changed. The boat moved slowly against the strong flow to the sea. He said, ‘My dad was all against the divorce – for the sake of the child. But there are limits to what a man can take – she began to bring her boy-friends home. She was corrupting Lucinda.’
‘She didn’t succeed,’ I said.
2
NEXT morning I missed O’Toole: he didn’t appear at breakfast, and I looked for him in vain upon the deck. There was a heavy mist over the river which the sun took a long time to disperse. I felt a little lonely without my only contact. Everyone else was settling into a shipboard relation: even a few flirtations had begun. Two old men paced the deck fiercely, showing off their physical fitness. There was something obscene to me about their rapid regular walk – they seemed to be indicating to all the women they passed that they were still in full possession of their powers. They wore slit jackets in imitation of the English – they had probably bought them at Harrods – and they reminded me of Major Charge.
We had pulled up at a town called Rosario during the night (the voices, the shouts, the noise of chains had entered my dreams and made them dreams of violence some while before I woke), and now the river, when the mist rose, had changed its character. The water was sprinkled with islands, and there were cliffs and sand bars and strange birds piping and whispering beside us. I experienced far more the sensation of travel than when I passed all the crowded frontiers in the Orient Express. The river was low, and a rumour spread that we might not be able to get beyond Corrientes because the expected rains of winter had not come. A sailor on the bridge was continually heaving the lead. We were within half a metre, the priest told me, of the ship’s draught, and he moved on to spread despondency further.
I began for the first time seriously to read Rob Roy, but the moving scenery was a distraction. I would begin a page while the shore was half a mile away, and when I lifted my eyes after a few paragraphs, it had approached within a stone’s throw – or was it an island? At the beginning of the next page I looked again, and the water was now nearly a mile wide. A Czech sat down beside me. He spoke English and I was content to close Rob Roy and listen to him. He was a man who having once known prison enjoyed freedom to the full. His mother had died under the Nazis, his father under the Communists, he had escaped to Austria and married an Austrian girl. His training had been scientific, and when he decided to settle in the Argentine he had borrowed the money to start a plastics factory. He said, ‘I looked around first in Brazil and Uruguay and Venezuela. One thing I noticed. Everywhere but in the Argentine they used straw for cold drinks. Not in the Argentine. I thought I’d make my fortune. I made two million plastic straws and I couldn’t sell a hundred. You want a straw? You can have two million for free. There they are stacked in my factory today. The Argentines are so conservative they won’t drink through a straw. I was very nearly bankrupt, I can tell you,’ he said happily.
‘So what do you do now?’
He gave me a cheerful grin. He seemed one of the happiest men I had ever met. He had shed his past fears and failures and sorrows more completely than most of us can do. He said, ‘I manufacture plastic material and let other fools risk their money on what they make with it.’
The man with the rabbit nose went twitching by, grey as the grey morning. ‘He gets off at Formosa,’ I said.
‘Ah, a smuggler,’ the Czech said and laughed and went on his way.
I began to read Rob Roy again while the leadsman called the sounding. ‘You must remember my father well; for as your own was a member of the mercantile house, you knew him from infancy. Yet you hardly saw him in his best days, before age and infirmity had quenched his ardent spirit of enterprise and speculation.’ I thought of my father lying in his bath in his clothes, just as later he lay in his Boulogne coffin, and giving me his impossible instructions, and I wondered why I felt an affection for him, while I felt none for my faultless mother who had brought me up with rigid care and found me my first situation in a bank. I had never built the plinth among the dahlias and before I left home I had thrown away the empty urn. Suddenly a memory came back to me of an angry voice. I had woken up, as I sometimes did, afraid that the house was on fire and that I had been abandoned. I had climbed out of bed and sat down at the top of the stairs, reassured by the voice below. It didn’t matter how angry it was: it was there: I was not alone and there was no smell of burning. ‘Go away,’ the voi
ce said, ‘if you want to, but I’ll keep the child.’
A low reasonable voice, which I recognized as my father’s, said, ‘I am his father,’ and the woman I knew as my mother slammed back like a closing door, ‘And who’s to say that I’m not his mother?’
‘Good morning,’ O’Toole said, sitting down beside me. ‘Did you sleep well?’
‘Yes. And you?’
He shook his head. ‘I kept on thinking of Lucinda,’ he said. He took out his notebook and again began to write down his mysterious columns of numerals.
‘Research?’ I asked.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘this is not official.’
‘Making a bet on the ship’s run?’
‘No, no. I’m not a betting man.’ He gave me one of his habitual looks of melancholy and anxiety. ‘I’ve never told anyone about this, Henry,’ he said. ‘It would seem kind of funny to most people, I guess. The fact is I count while I’m pissing and then I write down how long I’ve taken and what time it is. Do you realize we spend more than one whole day a year pissing?’
‘Good heavens,’ I said.
‘I can prove it, Henry. Look here.’ He opened his notebook and showed me a page. His writing went something like this:
He said, ‘You’ve only got to multiply by seven. That makes half an hour a week. Twenty-six hours a year. Of course shipboard life isn’t quite average. There’s more drinking between meals. And beer keeps on repeating. Look at this time here – 1 m. 55 sec. That’s more than the average, but then I’ve noted down two gins. There’s a lot of variations too I haven’t accounted for, and from now on I’m going to make a note of the temperature too. Here’s July 25 – 6 m. 9 sec n.c. – that stands for not complete. I went out to dinner in BA and left my notebook at home. And here’s July 27 – only 3 minutes 12 seconds in all, but, if you remember, there was a very cold north wind on July 25 and I went out to dinner without an overcoat.’
Travels With My Aunt Page 20
