As he stood there enjoying the fire, Ronquilho ran in through the gate, although stumbling badly, and disappeared into the monastery. No one expected to see him again, but he seemed to be fireproof, or perhaps his boots and cuirass offered some protection. Smouldering and giving off a pungent stench, he once again stood before Campos.
“She’s not there. They let her burn to death.”
The people gradually retreated back to the alleyways. It was dangerous to hang about for too long and Camões too slunk away, without realizing that he was being followed. Considering whether he should tell Pilar everything or keep back the fact that a man had gone into the burning building for her sake, he reached the place where the junks had been moored. But the junks had set sail. He stared along the empty harbour, and was grabbed from behind without having a chance to resist. He allowed himself to be carried off: he was beginning to resign himself to his fate, which henceforth would consist of nothing but transferring from one prison to another.
CHAPTER 6
IN THE AUTUMN OF 19… I was living half sick and completely destitute in a room on the top floor of a village hotel. If the shipwreck on the Trafalgar had not intervened, I could have remained all my life what I was: a radio operator, that is, a creature neither fish nor fowl, sailor nor landlubber, officer nor subordinate. I was not satisfied with my life that was no life, where you feel like a human toadstool if you spend all your time in a clammy, stinking cabin hunched on a worn-out office chair. But I was resigned to the fact that it would be like this to the end of my days or until my pension, from which even a frugal, sober man, such as I have become over those years of sedentary wandering, cannot live on shore, unless it be in some place of exile. Everything had remained as it was. My days were divided into a six-hour watch of listening, sometimes drowsily, sometimes intently, and six hours of dull, restless sleep.
The moments of rest and pleasure were the long nights’ sleep ashore, from early in the morning till late in the evening, and a visit to a brothel about once every three months.
No, this was not the good life.
But is that of a poor farmer in an Irish village, between the Atlantic on one side and the boggy meadows of the Emerald Isle on the other, any better?
In that lonely village my family and two others in turn formed a separate community, and within it I was alone. What had I, half grown, in common with my parents, frugal with words and miserly with kisses, with my brother, a born farm labourer, or my sisters, one of whom became pregnant by one of the other clan at the age of sixteen and no longer associated with us, the other dry and skinny, a milkmaid who did not look like a woman with her man’s gait and massive, raw red hands? Perhaps I would have been accepted by the others on my return from thirty years at sea and not despised as a member of the black jellyfish. Yes, that’s what they called my family and the two others. All of us had black hair and eyes, and were short and thick-set.
We weren’t Irish. We were the last scions of the accursed Celtic race that had lived here before the birth of Christ, said the parson. No, descendants of shipwrecked mariners from the Armada, said the schoolmaster, that is, cowards who had not fought, but had fled right around Scotland, constantly sailing the great galleons ahead of the fierce English vessels that were hunting them down.
So our forefathers had eaten the bread of charity there on that barren coast and had been the slaves of those who were themselves the vassals of the powerful distant English landlords. Some had nevertheless married the coast-dwellers’ least eligible womenfolk, but the children had looked like them and had been just as despised and subjected, short, black-haired and timid, and so it had remained.
With ten other survivors I had been put ashore in M…e…, the nearest harbour. I received no compensation for my lost belongings, and I had nothing but the emergency money sewn into my shirt, which wasn’t much. The din of the port, which did not stop even at night, threw me into a torment of insomnia, and I knew of a house in one of the narrow alleys that one could enter unseen and let oneself be transported by the smoke, but I felt that once there I would no longer be able to return to life, and so I called on my last reserves of strength.
One afternoon I left the town and stayed in a village three hours farther on, and spent the night there, ravaged by all the demons inside me (there were no ghosts in the room), and the next day was unable to continue. I was ill and confused and was running a high fever. Fortunately the good hotel-keepers kept me and over several weeks I came to myself after awakening from my clouded state.
I could not think of signing up for a ship, and anyway I had conceived an intense dislike of the profession. I had no aim to strive for.
I did not consider going back to Glencoe. I did not keep up a correspondence, like many sailors do who want to fool themselves when they arrive in a faraway foreign harbour with a piece of paper sent from a place where they were once at home, a piece of paper containing the invariable words written without heart or attention, as ridiculous formulae of a ceremony lacking all basis in reality.
The Irish on board hated the English, but I could not even draw closer to them in their hatred, since I wasn’t a real Irishman. But I couldn’t get on with the English either; I was even less of a real Englishman. So I was left alone and had only the occasional almost wordless friendships with the inhabitants of the Baltic coast and fjord fishermen who often find their way into tramp shipping when the catch is poor or their own poor country cannot fit out enough ships.
Yes, if the Trafalgar hadn’t run aground, if that cliff had not been on its slightly off-course route (the steering was bad and careless on that ship, one of the wettest I have ever known), things would have gone on like that until my old age. I would have muddled along, signalled along, listened along, until I had gone deaf, which in this business usually happens before you reach fifty.
The shipwreck had disrupted my life at this low, easy level. The impact could have helped me rise above it, and start a life of my own on shore after all. But I went under; the languor of my race, aggravated over the years, was dragging me down to the lowest point. I was only interested to know where that point was. And I started thinking about the how and the why and the whence. That is dangerous work for a person not firmly anchored by family ties; that is putting to sea without charts and taking soundings off an unknown coast.
I could live at this cheap hotel for a few months from my emergency funds if I spent nothing else. I did so and waited to see what would happen if I did nothing else. I stayed in that hotel, in that room for a long time. It had one great attraction for my body, which for years had been accustomed to heat: an open fire. When the sun set, I piled on the logs, set them alight and sat at it, in the attitude of devotion adopted by a sun-worshipper turned fire-worshipper. First I automatically dozed off. The evenings grew long and I tried all kinds of liqueurs. Were my efforts crowned with success? I will pass over that in silence, in my case not the “only true greatness”, but the admission of a humiliating defeat.
I cannot remember the date of my deepest decadence, but it must have been the year of the great earthquake that largely destroyed Lisbon. I remember that because it gave me the only feeling of joy I knew at that time. It was like the wreaking of a vengeance that had been waiting for centuries. It may seem odd and yet that was how it was. Every new report on the many victims and ever-mounting destruction gave me a thrill. When it was too dark to read, I picked up the newspaper and stroked the columns where the earthquake was reported, until my fingers became sticky with printer’s ink. Then I slung the paper into the fire and, as it blazed, I saw houses curl up, towers topple, people scorched. Then there was a crackle and it was over.
I slowly began to recover. From the only window I saw the sun languishing, the last brown leaves withering on the protruding branches of the beeches that moaned in my sleep at night. During the day I sometimes walked along the curve of the bay in the hope that the sun would once more shine fiercely over the foothills, but I never saw it again.
I had to content myself with the moon, which in the evening would sometimes accidentally slide out from among the clouds; then I would sit at the fire again and fall asleep, wake with a shudder in the night, stare at the glowing embers, too tired to undress, and would roll onto my mattress and go back to sleep.
One day a woman I had known in the past came to see me there. I didn’t know how she had managed to find me and I never asked. She simply stayed. Sometimes I possessed her, with my eyes squeezed shut, on the floor or the window seat, just as it happened, but I didn’t lose a minute’s sleep over her. It had become too raw to go out. I now constantly read a book on the history of the three empires, which had the advantage that you never finished it, since by the end you had forgotten the beginning. The woman—strangely!—did not feel I was living in the underworld; she was quite content like this. I sometimes told her that she might just as well go, but she stayed.
One afternoon there was less wind. I walked alone down the road to the big port city that—how long ago was it?—I had fled. Then I felt that the sickness that had taken hold of me and rendered me powerless as long as I was on shore had left me, but strangely I felt not relieved, but rather very lonely, as if a trusted friend had gone for ever without saying goodbye. I would never see him again in this world. Was that not a cause for happiness? But it was as if the wind were rustling through the gaunt palms which do not really belong at this latitude, just as I do not, and were saying: “Gone away, gone away…” I leant against a trunk for a long time and came back home late at night. Much later, one afternoon when she and the weather almost matched each other in colour: her dull blond hair had the hue of the fading wood, her eyes that of the sky beyond, her voice did not rise above the pouring rain—I crept away. The light was fading and her presence in the room was no more than that of a ghost. Perhaps mine was too, and she did not notice my leaving, but I felt that my strength was now sufficient to reach the port city.
The sun was still shining briefly above the horizon, like a life lived in vain that is about to be extinguished and flares up again for a moment for one last time, as if the draught is blowing up from the grave and fans it before it is smothered. The wind began to worry at the palms and leafed through their ranks. I remember a paradise that I had wilfully abandoned, a garden sloping down to the sea, evergreen towards the ever-rustling sea, a cool abode containing sufficient for the frugal needs of one blissfully happy. What was I still doing there? I would be bored there now, since in the meantime I have been damned, but not according to the rules of the barren hopeless faith that had been introduced to the coasts of Northern Ireland by the dominant British (who have it so cushy here on earth that they can paint the hereafter in colours as ghastly as they wish). This faith deprived the indigent coast-dwellers of the only thing that, even as a delusion, could bring them a little joy. In southern and central Ireland people live drunkenly and happily, in the northwest soberly and disastrously.
No, being damned means being bored everywhere, except in the most wretched places. That explains the consuming yearning for polar regions, deserts and endless seas.
I walked on again with my head empty of thoughts. The next morning I was in Me…e…. The whole day long I walked along the quay, and at night I slept behind a few chests, woke feeling shattered, almost determined to return to S… where there was at least a bed, an open fire and silence. But again I walked along the quays; a big ship was about to depart, the cranes had already stopped working, but the gangplank had not yet been pulled up, and a body was carried ashore on a stretcher. I pushed forward and heard “They can’t sail now, radios have just been made compulsory. We can’t find anyone qualified.”
Radio? How long ago was it since I had sat in a narrow cabin with headphones on and my hand on the key? It was very difficult in my tattered clothing to get through to anyone in command, but once I unfolded a few sheets of paper from my pocket—carefully, as they were falling apart—and my identity and status became known, I was welcomed and signed up on the spot. So I again left my old life behind me and assumed my previous one. Forward, or rather backward, to the deserted kingdoms of the Far East with a longing equal to the hate with which I had once left them.
I did my work moderately well, slowly, sometimes missing an important instruction, a letter or figure for a stock market or weather report. News reports did not have to be recorded in those days, but the Captain still required me to do so. He was one of those unfortunates who are physically at sea but whose thoughts are at home and on land, and was keen on the most trivial items. So I concocted bank robberies, anniversaries and elopements. I sometimes had the urge to insert old facts and dates as if they were new, such as the rounding of the Cape in 1502, but I restrained myself.
The Captain, who had at first given me a warm welcome, soon became more measured and gruffer, passing me without greeting; we often ignored each other completely, the only two denizens of the upper deck.
The heat of the Red Sea didn’t bother me. The Indian Ocean, storm-free, indeed almost totally calm at this time of year, stretched to every horizon like a soft grey layer of molten metal. But I felt comfortable in those hot, indistinct distances, which as it were blurred my own existence. Not until we had passed Colombo did I again have a feeling of oppression, as if I were reverting to my old ways, which I thought I had abandoned for good.
Up to then my work had been passable, but from now on it became definitely inadequate, as if I were deaf. No, not deaf, but other sounds kept buzzing around the signals I had to take down; did they originate in my middle ear or in the ether? I don’t know, but my fictitious reports were now noticed, as well as the fact that I had taken down courses and weather reports completely wrongly.
As a result I was paid off in Singapore with the offer of a second-class passage back, which I refused; with considerable effort I obtained two weeks’ subsistence pay. With a chest and a suitcase I slunk into the cheapest, hottest hotel in Singapore, European only in name, and sweated my way through the afternoons beneath a mosquito screen so full of holes that I had to watch out for mosquitoes on all sides. Time passed, my money ran out, and with my last few dollars I went to a concert that I was mad keen to see: a violinist whom I had heard in Brighton in the good old days. This extravagance was my salvation. In the interval I bumped into a British passenger, for whom I had managed to send off a coded telegram, quite against the rules (I was still good at transmitting!). I was about to pass him with a brief greeting; I knew by experience the great contempt in which the British hold half-castes—they always took me for one, because of my complexion and my eyes—but he seemed to realize my plight, caught up with me and spoke to me. The next day he helped me regain my self-respect by inviting me to stay with him in the most fashionable hotel in Singapore and advanced me the money for a new suit. (I have always resisted the notion, but it’s true: good clothes and a good shave do more to raise one’s morale than a whole night spent reading Goethe or Confucius, to say nothing of the Bible.)
Two days later I had a post on a small coaster that scavenged for cargo between second-rate ports, that was a regular visitor to Ningbo, but never went to Shanghai or Manila, the two metropolises so yearned for by the carousing and drinking seaman. The officers had fully adapted to the situation; except for the second officer, who collected porcelain and actually took the trouble to spend his wages on worthless crockery in antique shops, and the third officer, who had taken it into his head to find a virgin and to that end scoured the houses and flower boats, no one set foot on shore. The Captain went to and from his office by rickshaw; during the day traders came on board with everything a seaman needed, and at night they came alongside in their sampans to rent out their daughters. For most of them the shore was unknown territory; they lived on their ship as on a tiny asteroid, where life was different. True, they ate, drank and breathed, but they scarcely spoke or walked about. As if even the small space left on deck among the cranes and hatches was too much, they all stuck in their cabins, in the winte
r by a paraffin stove and in summer without a fan, drinking hot grog whether cold or hot, since there was no ice on board and in the heat a hot drink is better than a lukewarm one. Some played cards without a break for days on end and at first I joined in the cards and the drinking; I was soon able to withdraw from the former, for the valid reason that I had lost my wages for months in advance, while I continued drinking until the day I noticed my hands were trembling as I operated my instruments and that the roaring in my ears was almost drowning out the signals.
At that point I gave up drink too, felt like a wet rag for a week, and drank coffee day and night. Finally I was over it. Now I ought to give up smoking too. But what is life worth if one isn’t addicted to some vice or other, especially on a dirty iron ship with nothing on it, not a bush, not a bird, that is evidence of some other life? Actually, sailing should mean living in a perpetual state of intoxication, and indeed all the others obeyed this moral law, but I had to stay in contact with the outside world, and could not afford to let myself fall into a swoon, while a helmsman, as long as his eyes are open, can distinguish lights and plot a course, and a stoker, a veteran of service in the tropics, ninety-nine percent of the time nodding off on his bench, can still tell from a slight variation in the pounding of the engine whether something is wrong. Perhaps I am doing these gentlemen an injustice, but they did me one too, so I ask no forgiveness.
The Forbidden Kingdom Page 10
