Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  He quickly tired of kicking his heels in Rio. He found its people “cowed and lacking in personality”, he wrote to Wyndham. His purpose in coming to Brazil was to visit the north where de Souza had lived before sailing to Ouidah. Five years before Bruce had written in his notebook: “I want more than anything to go to Bahia.” Bruce, who spoke little Portuguese, asked Acheson if he would consider accompanying him as interpreter. They arrived in Bahia shortly before carnival, after a 32-hour bus trip.

  They shared a room in a cheap, rat-infested hotel near the Pelhourinho, the old slave quarter. Acheson was amused by Bruce’s military-style shorts and by the sack of bran he carried in his backpack, “like horsefood”. He helped Bruce to make calls to writers and historians who could enlighten him on the slave trade. “He was ablaze at the connections between Bahia and West Africa.” Soon they were joined from Rio by Acheson’s partner, Fernando. They explored the city and its surrounds together, sometimes following the needs of Bruce’s research. The landscape was strikingly reminiscent of the coast near Ouidah, paths of red earth leading through plantations and here and there among the trees a tobacco planter’s crumbling home. “The architecture is wonderful,” Bruce wrote to Kasmin. “18th century rococo with genuinely Chinese overtones brought direct from Macão, whose towns look like the willow pattern.” They visited a cigar factory, a Germanic fortress of stained cement. They saw the sticky, man-high cane fields that had sweetened the tobacco for the Kings of Dahomey. And one night in a fetish house overlooking the sleepy river town of Cachoeira they witnessed a ceremony of candomblé that differed litde from the voodoo rituals in Ouidah. Candomblé, writes John Ryle, is “a world where women and homosexuals are privileged, where the doubly disadvantaged can be given high status”. Bruce described it in a letter to Kasmin: “the ‘daughters of the god’ trance-dancing in colossal white lace crinolines and the boys – girlie boys – in silver and lace all shuddering as the Shango (the god) hit them between the shoulder blades and one boy twisting and whirling off the platform his silver thunderbolts glittering down the mountain and coming back up again and collapsing into the arms of the ‘mother’ – a middle-aged white lady with spectacles, hair in a scarf and the air of a bank manager’s secretary.”

  The Viceroy of Ouidah would celebrate this sexual abandon – Amazonian, uninhibited, challenging, feral: “Her shoulders shuddered at the first roll of drums. Then she spun around. She pirouetted. She strutted. Her arms pumped the air, her feet kicked the dust. Sweat poured from her breasts and a musky perfume gusted into the Brazilian’s face: not once did she let her gaze fall away from him.

  “The drummers stopped.

  “She stood before him, on tiptoe, swaying her hips and languidly laying out her tongue. Her arms beckoned. She bent at the knees. Then she arched her spine and bent over backwards till the back of her head brushed the ground.” One senses in his dancer the frenzied expression of long-withheld sensuality.

  Bahia during carnival was “searing with sexuality” says Acheson. “Bruce cruised around and often went off on his own to make conquests.” Once, returning to the hotel, Acheson and Fernando had to wait downstairs because their room was occupied. A paragraph in Bruce’s notebook records an encounter. “He came in off the street – same still Africa look. Hard belly-bones, eyes not watching and watchful. Moustache. ‘Transar,’ he said. Lay on bed, removing pants – mouth soft. Flat chest smooth. The curl of hair on belly like warts compacted. Go on to clamp down any show of affection.”

  Bruce’s Viceroy shows this fierce detachment on coming to Bahia: “His green eyes made him famous in the quarter. Whenever he flashed them along a crowded alley, someone was sure to stop. With partners of either sex, he performed the mechanics of love in planked rooms. They left him with the sensation of having brushed with death. None came back a second time.”

  Bruce used the “patchiness” of his material as his excuse for recasting de Souza as a bi-sexual wanderer. He attributes to his fictional creation his own impulses, desires and abhorrence of domesticity. De Souza’s Bahia phase is the time in which he puts away his masks and becomes fully himself.

  “The lineaments of his face fell into their final form.

  “His right eyebrow, hitched higher than the left, gave him the air of a man amazed to find himself in a madhouse. A moustache curled round the sides of his mouth, which was moist and sensuous. For years he had pinched back his lips, partly to look manly, partly to stop them cracking in the heat: now he let them hang loose, as if to show that everything was permitted.”

  Like the Viceroy, Bruce identifies with strangers and craves their simple lives and pleasures – “yet he could never join them.” Acheson comments on Bruce’s attraction to muscular young black men and marmelucos, or mulattoes, whom he admired for their “marvellous” flat chests. “What he had a horror of was domesticity. One boy invited Bruce to his tiny place. Bruce described with a shudder a meal he’d prepared, the mundaneness. ‘I don’t want that’.”

  To Kasmin, Bruce wrote from Bahia: “I have to say Brazil is very fascination [sic].” He down-played his enjoyment to Elizabeth: “I am heartily sick of it,” he wrote on the same day. “Full of folklore, bad art, intellectuals in search of Atlantis and smart folks who go to candomblé in jangling earrings. I am staying with the missionaries of the British Church and when got down I retire [to] the graveyard where I read while marble personifications of sleep mourn our English gentlemen, victims of yellow fever.” He planned to see Elizabeth in Lisbon in April. “Perhaps we could meet in the Hotel Seite Aix in Cintra – the most beautiful-looking hotel in the world.” But he could not promise this until “the wretched proof comes”.

  His page proofs of In Patagonia, for which he had been waiting since December, had been mislaid in the Brazilian post. “Everything’s gone wrong! Where was it we were hexed?” he asked Kasmin. “Somewhere I have it in my mind you said we’d been hexed. Well, not only the arrest, the visa withdrawn, the traveller’s cheques stolen, the bronchitis (from the Beach Hotel of Cotonou), the bags sent to Cairo instead of Rio, the ten day pointless wait, now Tom’s proof of Patagonia has got lost in the post between Rio and Bahia just when I have to go off north.”

  Two days later, the proofs arrived. He wrote to the copy-editor to say the hex had been “unstuck for me by a gypsy cabocha or fortune-teller who prophesied, after a certain amount of greasing, that it would arrive today – which it did”.

  The title was still not resolved. Bruce revealed to Acheson the same insecurity over his work as he had with Nicholson Price in Nigeria. “He asked advice about the title. He couldn’t bear the idea of ‘Journey to Patagonia’.” This self-doubt increased along with his frustrations over his new book. Even with Acheson to translate, he was not finding fresh or relevant material. The problem, as in Ouidah, was the absence of archives: all documents on slavery had been lost in a large fire in December 1890. Traces of Francisco de Souza were hard to come by. In Ouidah, he wrote, “the de Souzas are convinced they still have a fortune in Bahia.” One trouble was that in Bahia Souza was a name as common as Smith. (There are 27 pages of de Souzas in the Bahia telephone directory.) “In the souzala or old slave quarter the blacks are all de Souzas! But then everyone is a de Souza or has de Souza cousins in Brazil.” He was further hampered by the lack of a tradition of oral history. He was able to find information on de Souza’s banker, who made his first fortune from salt-dried beef and died in a colossal palace. But about Francisco de Souza, his family and fortunes and the house in which he grew up, nothing. “None of the black de Souzas are aware of the big House in Brazil from which de Souza was expelled as a boy and which he reconstructed in Africa.”

  After correcting his proofs, Bruce decided to head north through the cactus scrub of the sertão to San Luis de Marañon. His purpose, he told Kasmin, was to investigate the fate of Ghézo’s mother, Princess Agontimé, “who was sold into slavery and was got back by de Souza”. The story as told to Bruce in Benin was that when Cha Cha
became Viceroy he promised Ghézo he would find his mother and bring her home. For a while, the famous slave princess Agontimé supplanted the Viceroy as the focus of Bruce’s research.

  The Brazilian north yielded little. Acheson had returned with Fernando to Rio. Without a sympathetic companion Bruce succumbed to the lassitude, “the terror of Brazilian life”, which he saw afflicting everyone around him. “What to make of a town in which the bookshop offers: Isaac Deutscher’s Life of Trotsky. The Theatre of Meyerhold. The Life of André Malraux. The Forbidden Loves of Oscar Wilde and not a single Brazilian novel.” In Picos, a truck-stop town in Piaui, the poorest province in Brazil, he stayed in the Charm Hotel, from the facade of which the letter “C” had dropped off. In Crato, where moths covered the walls of his room “like flint arrowheads”, he wrote: “Got down by the heat. Would find it impossible to write a sentence here.” Steady reference was made to “the boredom of waits”. The aimlessness weighed on him. “The boredom is infectious; that is the trouble.” One day while waiting for a boat in Alcantara he wrote: “Terrible fear my talent has deserted me. This the most unlively journal.”

  He uncovered no new fact about Princess Agontimé. Cha Cha, forbidden himself to leave Ouidah, had despatched an emissary to retrieve the royal slave, but Ghézo’s mother was never found. The only possible source of news as to where she may have ended her days was with Verger. Once in San Luis de Marañon, it had puzzled Verger to record certain voodoo expressions he had not heard before. In Abomey he made enquiries and was told that this was the secret language of the King’s court: only someone belonging to the royal family could know such expressions.

  On a hot day in Recife, in a dark house stuffed with books, Bruce called on the historian Gilberto Freyre. He must have hoped that this meeting with the author of two important works on Brazilian slaves would be more fruitful than his encounter with Verger two months before. It was not. Freyre had the air of a grand seigneur and there was something “vaguely second-rate” about his dress. “Interesting up to a point,” Bruce wrote. “An intellectual sponge perhaps.” He departed empty-handed.

  As Bruce left Freyre’s house, he was arrested for the second time that year. He asked a tidily dressed old man “with a big wart on his hand” for directions and had begun to walk down a track leading through a cane field to a wood when a Volkswagen drew up.

  “The Director wishes to speak with you.”

  “Director of what?”

  “The Prison.”

  Bruce was driven into an open prison and forced to wait. The prisoners had numbers on their clothes. He felt hot and angry. Presently, the Director returned from lunch, an enormous man with shiny black hair. He inspected Bruce’s rucksack, his passport. He leafed through his notebook and read a description of a church painting that troubled him. Bruce claimed in The Songlines that “the Brazilian secret police” took what he had written to be a description, in code, of their own work on political prisoners – and filched the notebook.

  The notebook, of course, survives. Alongside his account of his arrest is a description of the paintings. They were rather like his Aunt Jane’s watercolours of pierced and naked men. In a Recife church he had described a San Sebastian “with a neat arrow-head thrusting out of his ear and beautiful loin cloth whipping in the wind tied with a golden sash”. In more vivid torment was the negro slave Christ in the church of São Francisco in Ouro Preto. Narrow-waisted, yet with “voluminous curves of the body”, the negro Christ had his “throat cut like a meat-knife slit” so that the apple wood showed through. The Director felt he understood. According to Bruce, “I am a hippie or a missionary. A priest. The most dangerous of all. What was I doing? I explain.”

  But the Director remained suspicious.

  “How could you know Dr Gilberto Freyre?”

  “Phone him up.”

  “No.”

  Again, the Director opened the passport. Burkina Faso. A Marxist state. What was Bruce doing sniffing round a prison, he asked?

  “I didn’t know it existed.”

  It couldn’t have happened in a worse month. Didn’t he see the notice?

  Bruce replied that he was talking to an old man.

  “When did you learn Portuguese?”

  “In Brazil.”

  “In five weeks?”

  “Yes!”

  The Director told Bruce this was impossible. His vocabulary was remarkable. “You must be very clever Mr C., but I assure you it’s no use being clever with us.”

  The story exaggerated Bruce’s mastery of Portuguese. Towards the end of March he returned to Acheson’s flat in Rio. He remained in Brazil another week before flying to join Elizabeth in Europe, but in this time he embarked on an affair with the barman at the Othon Palace Hotel in Copacabana. One day he went for a drink with Acheson in the outside bar where they met João, wearing a green jacket. “He was not an educated Brazilian and didn’t speak English,” says Acheson. “Bruce had a go at Portuguese. They were chalk and cheese, but he was clearly smitten. He asked if he could use the flat to invite João back there while I was teaching.”

  The brief relationship, despite language difficulties, touched Bruce more deeply than he expected. A year later the image of the young man was still on his mind. He had asked Acheson to give João a present. Acheson had taken him a box of chocolates left over from Christmas. “I’m not entirely sure I approve of feeding João with Black Magic, unless he was going to the gym as he promised,” Bruce wrote. “To my eternal regret there has been a six-month silence now. My replies in Portuguese were quite inadequate, both in literary and emotional content, to this kind of thing:

  ‘Tenho pensado muito em voce de dia de noite a toda hora nao me esquece I do my love my beautiful, tenho vontade de te abracer te beijar sentir o seu corpe que tanto bem mefaz. Quando estafrio eu penso em sair de casa a sua procure para me esquentar aquecer meu corpo com o seu calor, mas logo me lembre que e impossivel te encontrar pois voce esta tao longe de mim.’*

  – which for rhythm and poetic expression could almost come out of the Song of Songs.

  Ah! the geographical impossibility of passion!”

  After three and a half months in Africa and Brazil, he had landed in Lisbon on 6 April. He found the city sad, communist posters everywhere. “One with sub-machine guns, hoe and spanner. Curious that they should have chosen the emblem of Cain.” He visited the Gulbenkian Museum, but was depressed by the works of art enclosed in a bunker of concrete. “Anything less suitable for showing off French furniture hard to imagine.” He missed João.

  He took a train to Spain, to spend Easter with Elizabeth and Gertrude in Guadeloupe. It was on this journey that he committed to his notebook one of his most naked moments. He is transported without warning to the wrenching farewells of his childhood. “In train beside the Tagus. Yesterday feeling disembodied from the flight and now to tears, for one of the only times in my life, from separation from J. My father always to be departing.”

  He was nearly 37 and, like his Viceroy, he could no longer hide.

  XXVI

  New York

  The Greeks have the idea that there were limits to the range of human behaviour and, if anyone had the hubris to go beyond those limits, he was struck down by fate. Well, one would agree.

  —BC to Michael Ignatieff

  TWO MONTHS AFTER RETURNING TO ENGLAND, BRUCE FELL helplessly in love with a 27-year-old Australian stockbroker. He met Donald Richards on 25 June 1977, at Paul and Penny Levy’s wedding in Oxfordshire. Among the guests was the artist Keith Milow. He introduced Bruce to a handsome Australian covered in hay. “We’d been rolling in the golden cornfield adjacent to the party,” says Milow. “Something clicked between them which I was not prepared for.”

  Millington-Drake, who would entertain Bruce and Donald on Patmos, described their meeting as “the big break in Bruce’s life”. Before, he had had passing affairs with men. “This was the first time he’d committed his life to a man. Bruce was infatuated with him.” />
  Donald had fled Brisbane where his father worked for a company making asbestos roofing material. Like Bruce, he was a boy from the suburbs who had managed to remake himself. Where Bruce was an extrovert, Donald was socially reticent but, unlike Bruce, uninhibitedly gay. “He was a sexy, whorey, homosexual who jumped into bed immediately and was terrific,” says Peter Adam. “It was the one area where he was very secure.”

  Donald used his sexuality to advance modest cultural ambitions. At Queensland University, the poet Val Vallis had introduced him to opera. “He was an elegant creature, the nearest thing to a well-bred cat. His movements were gracious without being effeminate, but he wasn’t ruggedly masculine either.”

  He was much brighter than people gave him credit for in London and New York. He won a Queen’s Medal and a first in History and Government, but his soft-spoken manner could camouflage his intelligence. “There is absolutely no way round the fact that he was a bore,” says Bruce’s doctor, Patrick Woodcock. “He was Mr Cliché. ‘There’s nothing like the English strawberry . . . Fred Astaire, you know, really was the most marvellous dancer.’ If you didn’t want to go to bed with him it was a difficult evening.”

  Deeply insecure on many levels, Donald had a talent for making useful people fall in love with him. “Donald certainly made use of his sexuality, many people did that,” says Adam. “But he had more to follow up. If he had an interesting social life it was also because he was good-looking, intelligent, young, from abroad.” After arriving in England on a scholarship, he reported back to a friend in Australia, Clinton Tweedie, how in London he lived with an aristocrat, “Sebastian Sackville-West”. In fact his lover was Sebastian Walker, the children’s book publisher, for whom Donald wrote two books: Know Your Dogs (“Like the evolution of the human race, the evolution of the dog has been a long and puzzling process”) and Know Your Cats (“Cats have personalities, just as humans do. In many cases their natures develop according to the kind of household they live in and the amount of care and attention their owners give them”). Donald lived with Walker in Alwyne Place in Canonbury. There was even a mock wedding. But he was not faithful.