Continent

by Jim Crace

  Except, that is, when in the fourteenth month the daily swab taken from Puppy indicated a slight rise in its acid levels. My father took more swabs. He repeated the analysis. His findings were identical. My mother’s own secretions – the charts are here to prove it – showed no increased acidity on that or subsequent days. But, on the second day, Puppy’s small breasts were swollen, her cheeks were hot, the glands in her throat and armpits had hardened, her genitals had darkened. And her acids had doubled in strength. ‘This is it,’ said father, now hot and overwrought himself. ‘She’s in heat.’ ‘Good, good, good,’ he said to Puppy. ‘You will be famous.’ She smiled at the repeated words and at my father’s unusual turbulence, his breathlessness, his solicitude as he sat her at the chair of his desk and drew from its drawer his thermometer and his stethoscope and his speculum. My mother closed the door upon them and went to read and sleep elsewhere in the house.

  AND THAT is the end of the story. Except for two columns of figures with dates, an entry or so in my father’s journal, a small figure in a single photograph, the cantankerous memories of a nonagenarian (whose loquacity stops there, at the closed door of my father’s study), where is the evidence that this girl, this Puppy, followed my parents’ donkeys from the forest to the city, that she lived in this creaking house, serving at the table and on the study couch? Search, if you will, amongst the papers and paraphernalia of the Zoea archive at the Institute. Nine hundred items from lecture notes on elephant musts and the monogamous gibbon to the manuscript of The Secret Life of the Tiger Crab chart my father’s lifelong reconnaissance of breeding chemistry and behaviour. Yet where are those people of the forest? And where is Puppy and those days of swabs and patience? My mother could not say. She soon forgot the conversations which had sustained us in the early phases of her illness. And once my sisters had returned to their families and left me, the spinster, here alone to cope, my mother would speak only of more recent years, the money that my father’s book brought in, the thankful respites of his trips abroad, his burial on the beach with the wind and the distinguished mourners and the bouncing of the shingle as it fell upon his casket throughout the weeping and the obituaries. She had been a widow a long time, she said, and she had no continuous memories of my father now, just snapshots from the family album.

  While mother slept, I sat at my father’s desk with those three disquieting snapshots – the beach, the women, the veranda – and searched for a better ending to my mother’s story. His journal spoke of his ‘dear wife’, his ‘loyal companion in research’, ‘the angel who is mother to my girls’. But, otherwise, the notes were obsessively academic and dry. His dedication to the natural sciences seemed unbroken, humourless, without restraint. ‘I have been asked to prepare a pamphlet on the forest phenomenon,’ he wrote finally in his diary for 1926, ‘but I am not happy to proceed. It seems to me that the evidence is thin and that the absence for a year or more of menstruation and estrus in P. was possibly contingent on late puberty or the disruptions of weight loss, anxiety and digestive complications brought about by her hasty relocation in the town. Moreover, travellers from the Institute have not been able to establish the whereabouts of P.’s village. The plantation has been abandoned and, no doubt, her people have either descended like so many others to work on farms or to offer themselves in service in the towns, or they have withdrawn further into the trees, where, perhaps, it would be a kindness to leave them. At some later time all this would warrant an amusing memoir of conclusions rashly reached by a natural scientist too eager and ambitious. I smile at my younger self, but, for the moment, Uca felix calls and we – my wife, my three girls – are repairing to the coast.’ And nothing more.

  I stood before the peeling mirror on the wall of his study and smiled at my older self. Thin and dry and squeamish. I looked again at that family photograph and wondered at the girl encountered there, in her torn and spermy dress, the slight and bony exception of the beach. My mother and my sisters were broad and tall with heavy hips and wide-set, comfortable eyes. Even the Uca felix were wide and swollen for the solstice.

  Then the bulbous women and the girl in the cotton dress and the service gloves, that slight, pale teenager with the empty tray and the smile and the fessandra blooms, looked out at me from the other fading prints. Who – in my position, with my dismay – would not hurry now to unearth those charts again, to match her dates and mine, to sit lifeless in that chair (where she had sat, her face flushed, her breasts swollen, her acids flowing), to shut both eyes and hear those doves take wing, vabap-vabap, the shingle and the crabs, the baying of the donkeys left alone and tethered in the ardour of the night, the closing of a study door?

  FIVE

  Sins and Virtues

  I USED ONCE to have a calligrapher’s booth in the marketplace. Bridegrooms came and I blessed their marriage certificates with the name of God in gold-leaf. I provided decorative alphabets for elementary schools and delicate pillow-prayers on silk for the superstitious. The old came to my booth and detailed their sins and virtues. I inscribed them into a list on parchment soaked in ambergris and sealed them into a tube of bamboo. So when the old were dead, their Sins and Virtues were burned with them.

  I was the only calligrapher in the city who possessed the franchise to profit from Sins and Virtues. It provided great business but precluded me from marriage and fornication. That was the custom and the regulation. The sin-lister must be free from sin.

  Later, when business superseded religion as the preoccupation of our people, I decorated shop fronts and designed letterheads for ambitious greengrocers and ice-vendors. I prepared boastful posters for the first cinema, ornamental scrolls for lofty institutions and fancy gate-plates for embassies. My work on parchment was etched and woven and carved into more durable materials by craftsmen in Europe. I extended my booth and employed an apprentice to mix my inks and to deliver my work. But that was long ago. Now I am nearly dead. The acacia which my uncles planted in their village at my birth (its name in Siddilic signifies ‘Patience’) has almost lost its leaves. Only one branch draws sap. The rest is the home of ants.

  I DO NOT now go into the market. I spend my days almost entirely within the walls of this echoing and lizard-infested house. I start work each day at my Morning Desk, which faces eastwards towards the river. At noon I dine on some delicacy – a modest snack of grilled perch or, when they are seasonable, locusts. I no longer eat red meat or drink wine. My head and my stomach are too vulnerable. A little honey water is sufficient. Or some sweet mint tea. I sleep for an hour or so beneath my one fan. My house gecko joins me, lying across my bare chest like a damp medallion.

  In the afternoon I move to my Afternoon Desk, facing into the sun of the courtyard and the evergreen of the oleander. I burn a stick of fine cinnamon to keep the devils at bay. An old habit. I work until moonrise and then eat again: some tomatoes or beans with a little sour bread, followed by a mango or guava or a fruit milk-shake from the machine at the shop on the corner. I change my white day clothes – now soiled with pips and juice and crumbs – and put on heavier evening wear for my third work shift at the Evening Desk in the inner room. If I want some ink, perhaps, or some small delicacy, then I send Sabino, who was my boy apprentice and is now my factotum, to the market and to the new air-conditioned stores.

  I myself have withdrawn from the marketplace. I am now too grand for marriage certificates and shop fronts and lofty institutions. What I did for the price of an olive in my youth I will not now consider even for an orchard of olive trees. I have made my small fortune and, in what time there is left, I am looking for inner meanings. I am the last and certainly the most distinguished of calligraphers in the old Siddilic script but I am done with weaving and ennobling letters, of chasing their edges into the corner of the page. Now I am a doodler. Every leaf of gold-foil counts for me as an acacia leaf. I am in no hurry to use up my supply. I work three shifts from habit, from boredom and to exercise the arthritis in my hands. My mind is elsewhere, searching ou
t material for my last work, to be burned at my funeral.

  THEY CALL my craft Art these days and pay great sums for it. Last month a collector from Chicago offered Duni the ironmonger three thousand dollars for his ancient shop front with my flaking age-old letters. I went down to the marketplace on Sabino’s arm to witness the dismantling.

  ‘We’ll take great care of it, sir,’ the American told me, cracking my frail hands between his own. ‘We’re going to restore it, right? We’re going to give it a fresh lick of paint and we’re going to put it on show in the Museum of Ethnography. The people of America will be able to see your work. Back home, artists and historians are just beginning to appreciate the subtleties of Siddilic. This is such a beautiful piece.’ He stood back and admired Duni’s shop front. ‘Wonderful,’ he said. ‘Sir, I am proud to be acquainted with you.’

  Three thousand dollars! Duni had paid me for the work with cooking pots. ‘DUNI EMPIRE’, I had written on his instruction, ‘POTS, TOOLS, SEEDS, BICYCLES AT FAVOURABLE PRICES. TOILET SUPPLIES’. I pray for the people of Chicago.

  WORD HAS spread that Americans are buying up shop fronts. Enterprising businessmen have purchased them and are storing them for museums and universities abroad. Old ladies have been digging in their treasure trunks for old marriage certificates marked in gold by my brush. Embassies have placed guards on their gate-plates. The cinema manager is cursing his lack of foresight. Back-street charlatans have turned their energies from pimping and fortune-telling to forgery. The market is full of false shop fronts: fake greengrocers, tinkered tailors.

  Visitors from America and Europe can buy mass-produced pillow-prayers in warped and clumsy Siddilic. In the marketplace, as in Chicago, the ancient characters of Siddilic have lost their meaning. The only care the forgers take is with my signature and, because their hands are young, these signatures are now better than my own.

  Sabino is growing rich on the pickings from my waste-basket. Dollars cannot tell doodles from the name of God.

  THERE HAS been some excitement in my small street. A government minister has come expressly to see me. First of his entourage to arrive was his head of protocol, a young gum-chewing aide-de-camp. He was a stickler for procedure. First, he distributed with a sweep of his arm a handful of coins to the beggars and children of our quarter. He shook some hands. He kicked some backsides. Nothing was too much trouble for him. He would be back in twenty minutes, he explained, with the Minister and with more handfuls of cash. Ministerial protocol demanded an eager crowd.

  I was taking my siesta. ‘Do not wake your employer,’ he instructed Sabino. ‘The Minister likes surprises. But tidy the house.’ He placed one of his men outside the front gate to my house and another in the back yard. Then he radioed from his army jeep that the street was now ready for the Minister’s casual arrival. I slept peacefully and dreamt of my booth.

  Sabino conducted the Minister into my room. I woke to their whisperings and shufflings and the scrape of the proffered chairs. But I kept still and listened. The Minister sat, chewing some of his aide’s gum, and waited for me to stir. My gecko backed furtively up my chest towards my throat. The Minister was a patient man. He enjoyed the advantage of arriving unannounced and being kept waiting.

  I tired quickly of dissembling. I opened an eye – quite an effort for an old man long past winking – and focused first on my gecko, then my toes with their fossilized toenails and finally the Minister. Our smiles were hollow.

  ‘No, no, please don’t get up,’ he said. ‘We can talk here.’ He watched my white lizard, now shuffling squat-legged down my stomach towards the dark safety of the bed sheet which draped my legs and loins.

  ‘You live modestly for such a wealthy man,’ he said at last.

  ‘Wealthy?’

  ‘A millionaire by now, I should say.’

  I said nothing. The Minister was talking monkey-shine.

  ‘You have been selling your work abroad at great profit.’ He took from the inner pocket of his handmade suit a thick wad of paper and tossed it onto the bed.

  ‘Evidence,’ he said. ‘There is an article about you in the New York Times by a man who spent many thousands of dollars on your shop signs and pillow-prayers. There is a list there of over a hundred foreigners who have paid great sums for your works in the market and have taken them out of the country.’

  ‘I have sold nothing for nearly ten years,’ I said. ‘I live on my savings. If any of my works are for sale then they are being offered by their owners, the people I worked for many years ago. Not me. Not guilty. I’m too old and lazy to be interested in trade.’

  The Minister was convinced. Nothing about me or my house suggested wealth or dishonesty.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘It has to stop. It is illegal. The country’s resources are being illegally exported under our noses. We are being exploited. You too are being exploited. Collectors in New York are growing rich while your own people are scratching for termites. So … it has to stop.’

  I shrugged. I had nothing to say. Export control was his affair.

  ‘Tell your friends in the marketplace,’ he said, ‘that the next one caught selling your work to a foreigner will be in contravention of our trade and export laws. We’ll have to find a place for them in the penal village. Anyone who has works of art to sell must sell them to the government. It is a matter of principle.’

  He stood up sharply and towered above me as I reclined beneath the sheet and lizard. ‘A travelling exhibition is to be arranged of your work. And an auction sale is to take place …’

  He sat at the end of my bed and mentioned Paris and Vienna and Toronto and Sydney and, of course, Chicago. He looked pleased on my behalf. ‘Naturally, this is a partnership,’ he explained. ‘You gain, we gain. We gain foreign currency from the sale of your work. Your government will have some … discreet money. We will pay it into a safe bank account. In Europe. In Switzerland. That’s by far the best. So, you see, if there is an emergency – some medicines are required, for example – then we have the money to buy them. Everybody gains. For you, there is security in your old age. A government house.’ I shook my head. ‘A car, then, whenever you need it, with a driver. Good food. Comfortable clothes. Fame. We will provide it all.’

  ‘I like good food,’ I said. ‘I like comfortable clothes. A driver and a car would be most useful. Don’t imagine that I am ungrateful or unpatriotic. But there is nothing to exhibit. All my work has gone. It has either been burned with the dead or eaten by parchment lice or shipped off to America by export racketeers. There are a few ornamental gate-plates outside embassies and that is all.’

  ‘What we want,’ insisted the Minister, with the single-mindedness of a deaf man, ‘are canvases decorated in Siddilic script. Ornamental pieces, works of art, not shop signs and the like.’

  ‘But there are none.’

  ‘Make some. You are a craftsman. It should be simple.’

  ‘If it were that simple,’ I said, ‘then you would not need to come to me. You could buy what you wanted at every booth in the market. It would be like shopping for potatoes.’

  ‘Well, make an effort then. Meet the grand challenge.’

  ‘I’ve outgrown challenges.’

  ‘Try,’ said the Minister’s head of protocol.

  ON FRIDAY I visited my uncles’ village in some comfort. I now have a ministerial car at my disposal. And a driver. We swept across the scrub at the end of the Italian road and bumped on the saloon’s hydraulic suspension over the last few kilometres to the village. Never before had I been so cool. It is cold at night, of course, in the house. But here in the car I was cool and dry in sunlight. Outside, the sun blistered the paintwork. Goats were too parched to lift their bodies and scurry away.

  ‘Air-conditioning,’ said the driver. He peeked in his mirror to enjoy my response. I nodded. I looked impressed.

  ‘Electric windows,’ he added. The windows on either side of me hummed down like melting sheets of ice and the daytime heat curled into the car
.

  ‘Stereo cassette,’ he said and pushed more buttons. A woman sang to me in English. ‘Electric windscreen wipers.’ A soapy spurt of liquid ejaculated from under the car bonnet onto the windscreen, turned the dust there into mud, and was whisked away by the silent twin-armed wipers. I am an old man and my problems are multiplying. I had never been so hot and cold, so cosseted and so bothered.

  ‘Reclining seats,’ said the driver, ‘for siesta.’ The leather cushions beneath me began to hum and tip. My legs were lifting, my back was falling, all at government expense.

  THE PEOPLE at my uncles’ village were not impressed. All they wanted was tobacco. The driver handed out a packet of cigarettes. But nobody wanted a light from the car’s automatic cigar-lighter. Nobody wanted to smoke. They wanted to hoard their fortune. The driver gave out ice cubes from the icebox in the car. Children held them and watched them slowly disappear, like fool’s gold. Nobody remembered my uncles, though our family name was familiar. They pointed me towards the trees. They were superstitious enough to respect the acacia of old men. They waited patiently for the firewood.

  I COME once a year – once a year only – to pay my respects at the acacia in the village of my uncles. I come after my birthday and tie a twist of white linen to a branch, a strip of cloth every year.

  The tree was now a ragamuffin of flapping tatters, from white to grey to nearly black. There was more linen than leaf. In the old days I came by donkey and then later by bus and now by air-conditioned limousine. In the distance, beyond the walls of the acacia wood, I could hear the stereo cassette of my driver and the shrieks of the children. A touch of reality amongst the reveries.