by Norman Lewis
Tony was the most intelligent, interesting and active member of the Royal Family, but even he may not have been wholly able to escape the syndrome consequent upon an over-long exposure to the inanities of palaces.
Most of the Latin American countries celebrated the feast of San Cipriano, patron of jugglers, magicians and the black arts, of which we had heard that something could be seen on the following night. In Salvador, Brazil, where the living came closer than elsewhere to the dead, it had been amalgamated with the day of All Souls, and was one of the most spectacular folk manifestations of the western world. But in Lima, we were assured, it was a hole-in-the-corner affair reflecting little of its impressive and rather sinister past. The voodoo performers of old had been wiped out by the police in combination with the Church. These were no longer secret, orgiastic meetings at which the gods of fire and water were worshipped. Here and there mediums in their trances still listened to the voices of those beyond the grave, but no-one any longer paid much attention to what they had to say. So in these days, was there anything worthwhile to be seen of the old carnival of death? we asked our driver, and he thought not. He had heard of a procession of devil-worshippers wearing masks in one of the remote barrios, he said, and he offered to take us to the place.
The slums of Lima were said to be the most extensive in Latin America and we made a cautious and difficult incursion into the labyrinth of shacks saturated with the shallow elation and deep melancholy of the poor. The lights of distant cooking fires and weak oil-lamps pricked through the gloom. With extreme care the driver skirted the banks of open sewers, young children mewed round us like kittens, boys beat drums, and the howling of dogs marked out a black horizon. There were no enchanters or processions here. We turned back into the town, finding ourselves immediately in a tiny, run-down square surrounded by tall wooden houses, and here, where the lights had come on again, a small but dense crowd had gathered to watch something that was happening, or had happened, out of sight from the car.
We pulled up and got out, pushing our way through to the front of the crowd where we found a boy of about twelve lying spreadeagled on the ground, and evidently unconscious. He had fallen, we were told, from the roof of the three-storey building under which he lay. A small, hushed murmur reached us from people commenting on this happening in an undertone, otherwise this could have been a church congregation. No-one moved.
I broke the silence. ‘Have they phoned for a doctor? Is the ambulance coming?’
‘No phone here,’ a man said. ‘No ambulance. No doctor.’
‘Is the boy going to be left lying here? Why’s nobody doing anything?’
‘Nothing we can do. The doctors don’t come out as far as this.’
It was only at this moment I realised that all the men had taken off their hats. ‘We’re here out of respect,’ the man said.
Tony was looking over my shoulder. I picked the boy up in my arms. The crowd opened up for us and I carried him to the car. I was trying to hold him in such a way that his head was supported in case the neck-vertebrae had been damaged. ‘We’re taking him to hospital,’ I told the driver.
It was a long drive through mean streets and under fogged stars. The hospital lay on the frontier of a development area with nothing in it finished through lack of funds, a bleak rectangular block among a thicket of pipes, wire and corrugated iron.
‘No-one about,’ the driver said. ‘Very late. Maybe all gone home.’ I sensed an undercurrent of relief. Nothing had to be done. He had been born in one of the slums where resignation was interchangeable with hope. We lowered the boy into the back seat where he lay shoring softly, and made our way to the door.
We rang the bell. A wan, dust-blurred light showed behind the window, there was a scraping of footsteps, followed by the clunk of a bolt being drawn, then a cautious face appeared in the opening of the door.
This, as the door opened inch by inch, we saw to be a woman dressed in a garment that was something between a nun’s habit and a nurse’s uniform. I explained what had happened and she shook her head. ‘No-one here. Come back tomorrow,’ she said, and was about to close the door when Tony pushed past her and I followed. ‘This boy is dying,’ I said. ‘He fell from the top of a house.’ She joined the tips of her fingers together, shook her hand violently, then drew an imaginary line in front of my face. ‘Everything locked,’ she said. ‘Nothing we can do at this time of night’ She had set her teeth, and now thrust forward her jaw.
I translated this for Tony’s benefit and he said in a loud voice, ‘I insist on seeing a doctor. We will not go away until a doctor comes. Tell her to bring a doctor immediately.’
His words, clear and firm, had an immediate effect. The woman’s clenched fingers opened, and her jaw muscles relaxed. When she spoke it was in a different and reasonable voice. ‘It will take half an hour for the doctor to come,’ she said.
‘Go and get him,’ Tony said. ‘Tell him we are waiting here, and that he must come at once.’
There was no doubt that she understood, and that she had surrendered to an imperative that was not to be evaded. She gestured to us to fetch the boy from the car and by the time we had carried him through the door she was ready with a trolley, in which he was laid in such a way that she could support his head, while we wheeled him down a passage into what was unmistakably the casualty ward.
A single switch provided relentless illumination of our surroundings. It was clear that the ward had been instantly abandoned at the end of the working day and that the nursing staff, the orderlies and porters, and those who did the clearing up, had dropped everything and fled in a dash for freedom. Hair-clippings, bloodied swabs and the debris of food were strewn across surfaces of cracked tiles. A hosepipe like a moribund serpent curled across the floor, its nozzle in a shallow, pinkish pool which proved that a final sluicing-down had not been well done. A small man in a surgeon’s coat came through the door at the end of the ward and approached us. He had a white, lightly tobacco-stained beard, and hands almost as small as a monkey’s. He bent over the trolley, lifted an eyelid, and felt with a tiny hand for the heartbeat. His expression was kindly and concerned. ‘Is unconscious,’ he said in English. He shook his head.
‘How bad is he?’ Tony asked. ‘Can you save him?’
‘Is necessary an operation,’ the doctor said. ‘But first X-rays and observation. We cannot work in dark. When we have information, operation can take place. Now no radiologist persons, no specialist doctor.’
‘So there’s nothing whatever to be done?’
‘Tonight nothing possible. This operation very difficult, only one specialist doctor can make this operation. Tomorrow at eight you may telephone for news. But now nothing.’
Tony was extremely concerned about this incident. We rang the hospital first thing in the morning but were unable to speak to anyone who could tell us what was happening, nor, for a while, to anyone who could even locate one patient. Some hours later we were able to speak to a doctor who could only say that no operation had taken place, and such were the problems of Spanish medical terminology that only one thing seemed clear: that in this case any operation would be a difficult one. Tony had formed the opinion—perhaps not unreasonably in a situation where this boy, had we not intervened, would have been left to die by the side of the road—that even now his chances of survival were slight, and he approached Anthony Walter with a suggestion. This was that the patient should be flown to England for the operation, and while Mr Morgan agreed that it would be a nice thing if it could be done, it was inevitable that the question should arise of who was to bear the cost, and I concluded that the idea was dropped.
Peru had not been an outstanding success, for we had seen little of the real country. A journalist may pass unperceived among the crowd and is sometimes rewarded by experiences from which the foreign traveller is carefully steered away. Tony’s appearances in the headlines ruled out this possibility so that in the end what came to be written about Peru was hardly more start
ling than the information offered in the average travel brochure.
A few days later it was time for me to move on. Tony appeared in no hurry to return to London, deciding in the mean while to visit an uncle in the Caribbean, where he invited me to join him, but I had commitments elsewhere. Minutes before my plane took off from Lima Airport I was subjected to a baffling experience. A stewardess called me to the plane’s open door where three Indians stiff in well-pressed suits, begloved and with highly polished shoes waited to see me. The man in the centre held a cushion on which rested three tiny white strips of bone. It was a moment of acutely mixed emotions in which embarrassment predominated. There was no way of knowing what these men wanted with me although it was clear that their presence was allied to the drama of the injured boy. It was evident, too, that an operation had taken place, but what had been the result? These obsidian Indian faces gave no clue to the answer. This was a ceremony in which I was invited to join, but was it in mourning a death or of thanksgiving for salvation? No-one in this plane, the stewardess at my back assured me, understood Quechua. This was a silence that could not be broken. Could it be that these slivers of bone had been brought as an offering in gratitude for my action, which I should accept? Since I would never know, all I could do, stiffening the muscles of my face in an attempt to match an Indian absence of expression, was to touch the bones with the tips of my fingers which the Indians watched unblinkingly. Then we all bowed and withdrew.
I suspected that the Indian boy’s fate was the one episode of the Peruvian journey that would always remain in my mind. Had he survived the operation, or had he died? Despite all subsequent enquiries the enigmatic presence of the three Quechuas—still visible as tiny, motionless figures at the edge of the runway as the plane took off—was never solved.
Chapter Fourteen
WRITING IN THE INFLUENTIAL El Mundo (Madrid) back at the end of the sixties, a well-known Spanish journalist expressed the opinion that Spain had gone through greater changes in the previous twenty years than in a whole preceding century, despite the disastrous civil war it contained. This he attributed to the influence of mass tourism upon all aspects of the national life. In 1950, with the war at an end, Spain was a country drained of resources of every kind. To some extent its culture had been preserved by poverty and isolation, but this, too, began to lose its uniqueness as the great flood of foreigners poured in exhibiting life-styles so different from those of the Spanish themselves. Most foreigners remained untouched by their brief contact with the Spanish way of life, but the delicate and subtle culture of the host country suffered increasing damage by its exposure to alien customs.
The social life of Farol, simple as it had seemed to me back in the fifties, proved on closer inspection to be like the mechanism of a fine watch in comparison with that of my own country. The people here were bound together by a network of blood relationships, age-old traditions, a religious philosophy which although strong was only in part Christian, and continuous emotional investment in each others’ lives. Courtship and marriage customs were more intricate than ours. At betrothal, for example, a boy would be expected to set about building with his own hands the matrimonial home, and five to seven years would normally pass before this was completed, and the marriage could be celebrated.
This was the institution most undermined by sudden contact with the outside world. There was no divorce in Spain, and in so far as affairs existed outside marriage they were conducted with the utmost reticence. The thing that most amazed the Spanish when the foreigners from the north first came upon the scene was the openness and flexibility of their sexual relations. These freedoms they were bound in the end to envy and copy, often with disastrous effect.
Love in the new style provoked its disruptions, but once again, money was the root of all evils, for it was easy money that the foreigners brought with them. Hotels and bars to accommodate the newcomers opened in Farol, and in these the tourists spent what to the Spanish seemed inconceivable sums of money. One of my friends was a carpenter who carried out minor repairs to houses and boats. His wage, fixed by the fascist state at a time when the peseta was 30 to the pound, was 34 pesetas a day.
A young fisherman might average 20 pesetas, and a senior who managed a boat with a crew perhaps 40 pesetas. Due to the sudden tourist influx there was a demand in Farol for waiters. Although it was a form of employment at first considered demeaning, an evening’s tips for a fisherman prepared to grit his teeth and take it on could amount to more than he earned in a week in his battles with the sea. Slowly but inevitably, proud men who like their ancestors had gained their living from the sea, learned the correct and inconspicuous way of holding out their hands for tips.
Next, the wholly new phenomenon of inflation made its appearance in Spain. The horde of affluent foreigners put up prices, producing a new kind of poverty squeezing out all those men left in useful occupations, and compelling them to surrender to easy money. Suddenly my friend of old, Dr Seduction, became impoverished when the fishermen (now waiters with the usual stomach trouble) could afford the taxi-fare to have themselves treated at Figueras, where medical science was known to be more up-to-date, even if enormously more expensive. In Farol of old, although there were no social classes, the best of the fishermen were much respected for their skills. Now they were fewer and poorer, but suddenly a class based upon wealth had been created. These were the families owning sea-front property, once considered of little worth but now saleable for development at astronomical figures. It was these families who suddenly came into prominence and learned to enjoy all the privileges and satisfactions of bourgeois society. In a decade Spain had at last caught up with the rest of Europe.
In the late seventies I slipped back to see what sort of a mess development had made of Farol. The first problem was to establish the position of the original village, of which I was to discover no trace had been left. A complicated one-way traffic system led eventually to a wide beach, once locally famous for its hundreds of thousands of translucent pebbles of various colours strewn through the sand, avidly collected by the children and stored in glass jars as ‘precious stones’. Part of this was now the municipal car park, and if this happened to be full, as it was on the occasion of my visit, the only remedy was to follow the helpful arrows and park outside the town. Fish were no longer caught in Farol and all the handsome old fishing boats painted in purple and yellow were no more. Skiffs with glass bottoms carried visitors to view ‘aquatic gardens’ furnished with coral from the south seas fastened to the sea-bed, now cleared of its original rocks.
It was the same story wherever I went. In 1983 I visited Thailand for the Sunday Times, travelling through much of the country, including Chiengmai where thirty years earlier I had stayed at the headquarters of the Borneo Company. Again, the change was vast. At the time of my first visit the only tourists were a handful of foreigners who did the rounds of the pagodas in a maximum of two days before catching the train back to Bangkok. Now the local newspaper announced with some pride that 120 tourist agencies had opened in the town to cope with the huge influx of visitors, largely on trekking holidays into the once remote and ‘wholly unspoiled’ areas along the Burmese frontier to the north. An inevitable bottle-neck had developed, for there were far more foreign visitors than the total population of the twenty or so primitive villages to which they were to be taken. Cases arose where several parties bound for the same hamlet renowned for its isolation and the strangeness of its customs might find themselves in a queue while the villagers dealt with those ahead of them with all the speed they could muster. Business was stimulated by a variety of devices. There were up-market tours which included the smoking of a pipe of opium with a headman. The trouble here, I was told, was that only the poorest quality opium was provided, frequently producing alarming effects. There was a shortage of headmen, too, since most villages were too poor to support such ceremonial personalities. In case of emergency, some impressive-looking fraud would be quickly imported from Chiengmai to
go through the motions of authority, or the tourist guide might make a point of carrying with him an old-fashioned mandarin-style gown hired from an antique dealer to dress up a poverty-stricken villager as a tribal authority.
Imposture, then, was the backbone of this business, and Chiengmai now both created and participated in a myth which sadly diminished the grace and style it had earlier possessed. The tours had now actually run out of genuine villages, which meant that by the coming season more imitations would have to be built. They were also on the point of running out of genuine mountain people to occupy them. In this case, I was informed, they might turn to Burmese refugees, or even to the most presentable beggars to be recruited from the city and rigged out in mountain-style garb.
A social and aesthetic climate in which fake peasants are paid to be photographed by foreigners in fake villages diminishes the attractions of any country, but the worldwide reputation of this once most charming of lands has been tarnished by the sex-tourism for which it has become notorious. The Thais have always exhibited realism in sexual matters and few brands of satisfaction are more easily obtained. It is probably this openness and liberality that has helped to protect them from the inversions and perversions self-inflicted by so many other peoples, in particular the Nordics arriving in droves in search of pleasures banned elsewhere by law.
