Gerontius

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘That’s a whacking big island.’

  ‘It’s a whacking big place, Brazil. Never got used to it myself and I’ve made this trip dozens of times in the last five years. This water here, sir? ’T’isn’t sea-water, you know. That’s fresh water, Amazon water. You can drink it. In fact a bit further on’s the place where all the ships take on fresh water, including us. It’s pure Amazon water we’ll be drinking from now until Liverpool. They tell me it’s still drinkable two hundred miles out to sea but I can’t say I’ve tried.’

  ‘Good heavens … I say, Steward, can you get me some?’

  ‘Thought you’d say that, sir. I already have.’ And from the pocket concealed by the napkin he drew out the hip-flask.

  ‘You deserve a medal, Pyce. A small one.’

  ‘I’ve got one of those, sir. They gave me one a few years back.’ And he excused himself and walked away up the deck leaving Edward holding the flask at a loss for words. Cheeky the man undoubtedly was. And yet … Probably he had served with honour: why mightn’t he have done so? And yes indeed, probably anybody would prefer a half-sovereign to a medal.

  (‘I can’t eat my bloody sword,’ he had said to Alice in a rage not long after he had been knighted, ‘though I may yet have to fall on it if I can’t pay the bills. Who gives a fig for honours? What I need is cash, cash, cash. You pack me off to Court with my underwear in holes, my waistcoat slit up the back and my borrowed shoes with fabulous silver buckles a size too small. Every inch a gentleman, every foot a penance.’ But this minor bon mot, popping out as it did without the least volition, had made him laugh and Alice as well, even though she was the daughter of a Major-General, and for several minutes they had both howled helplessly at the irony of the whole stupid business.)

  He spent an hour or two with his microscope after first trying a drop of water on the tip of his tongue. To his surprise it was indeed sweet. And placing one slide after another under his instrument and lighting them with the strengthening sun he made out the diatoms and protozoa peculiar to fresh water. He much lamented not having his chemistry apparatus with him since he might have done a series of tests to determine the exact percentage of sodium chloride. After all, he thought, the man who’d gone to the trouble of taking out a patent on an apparatus for making hydrogen sulphide could certainly have managed that without relying on text-books.

  He still had difficulty believing that even a river as monstrous as the Amazon could impress itself on the Atlantic Ocean. He had done his desultory reading in the Library: had read the section of the geography book headed ‘Facts and Figures Pertaining to the World’s Greatest River’, had noted that at certain points it was so wide that one bank was invisible from the other, had deliberately not memorised the incomprehensible cubic mass of pure water which allegedly flooded out every second. But that was always the problem with facts and figures: they never made anything more comprehensible, merely tinged wonder with boredom.

  When he went back up on deck it was mid-morning and the passengers were disporting themselves in the usual manner while radiating a feeling of being only half attentive to the rope rings they were tossing at the distant peg or to the nearly-finished books they had to return to the ship’s library before disembarking. People kept glancing up as if by magic the vista of approaching coastline might have given way in the last five minutes to a harbour bar, a jetty, a waterfront. Ladies could be seen asking themselves how they might recognise the last reasonable moment, when it came, for slipping down and doing their hair once more. Yet it was not until early afternoon that on the eastern horizon an indistinct row of buildings appeared which was the town of Pará. By then the yellow-green water through which the Hildebrand glided was free of the long oceanic swells which had marked much of her recent passage. The oncoming ridges of water defining the meeting of river and sea had likewise been left behind. Here the surface was merely ruffled in places as light punches of hot wind dabbed locally at it among the blue-and crimson-sailed fishing boats they passed with waving arms and wordless hails.

  Beside him at the rail Molly appeared, her face transfigured.

  ‘You’re pleased to be back. That much one can tell,’ he said.

  ‘It’s the smell. I haven’t smelt this for over a year and it brings it all back like nothing else. What it says to me is that I haven’t made a mistake … Isn’t it funny how easy it is to imagine places one knows and loves, to see people and things in immense detail, to hear exactly the sound of a familiar clock or a particular door opening, and yet to be almost incapable of imagining smells? Why is that, do you think? It can’t be that they’re less significant, at least not for me because smelling something again brings everything else back in a rush … Pará’s not very inspiring from here, is it? But at the moment I love it. Did you know it had another name? It’s sometimes called Belém, which is Portuguese for Bethlehem.’

  Her excited talk eased the images past his eyes. How had he imagined this continent? He hadn’t, to be truthful. One morning in a distant land which he felt he knew to the point of exhaustion he had quite deliberately selected a terra incognita. It was precisely because it had conjured up nothing in his mind’s eye more specific than a wilderness of trees concealing unknown mysteries that he had chosen Amazonia in preference to – for example – the Greek islands or the road to Mandalay. So now the muddy, unimposing skyline of Pará whose principal buildings, even at this distance, bore the Portuguese stamp familiar from Madeira filled him with neither surprise nor disappointment.

  ‘Did you know there was a sizeable English colony here?’ Molly was saying.

  ‘I’d rather gathered as much from our prankster friends. Business people, one would imagine, like their presumed husbands.’

  ‘Their poor, poor husbands … Wouldn’t you like to meet them?’

  ‘I would have done once. But in an odd sort of way my curiosity for how the rest of the world gets by has ebbed rather in the last few years. To be honest I no longer care very much. But I would wish them all well if I were the wishing sort. Do you know, I may not even get off here.’

  ‘Not get off ? It’s a long way to come not to get off.’

  ‘No, it’s really only a long way to come, which is why I came. You get off.’

  ‘Oh I shall. I know Forty wants to’ (he had no difficulty guessing the identity of ‘Forty’). ‘It’s not a particularly exciting place except it’s the gateway to the Amazon and that’s quite exciting enough for me. It’s wonderfully informal. You’d be shocked.’

  ‘Do you find me easily shocked?’

  ‘Well, disconcerted perhaps. Not actually shocked.’

  ‘I should hope not. There aren’t many thoughts one doesn’t have in a long life. In any case, when in Rome and so on. What is it one does when in Pará?’

  ‘Oh, for instance if you called on someone in the English colony here it would be thought perfectly in order if the lady of the house received you herself, asked you to take off your coat and sit with her in the drawing room in your shirt-sleeves.’

  ‘Deeply scandalous. But eminently sensible in this sort of climate.’

  ‘If you’re a good friend and go to someone’s house the first thing they’ll say is “Here’s the peg and there’s the bath”. They always say that here. It’s like a greeting.’

  ‘“Here’s the peg and there’s the bath”?’

  ‘Yes. Hang up your coat and have a nice cool shower before coming and talking. It’s a real courtesy.’

  ‘Sounds charming. But I can see it might be open to misconstruction were you to try and introduce the habit in England. Not that a lot of one’s guests wouldn’t be the better for a good tubbing.’

  ‘Gracious, Sir Edward, you must know some grimy people.’

  ‘I certainly used to. Academics mostly. I think it’s the dust they pick up from living in libraries. Cobwebs and so on. Decayed thought. Most contaminating.’

  ‘Maybe by the end of this trip you’ll find yourself wanting to come and live here.’ />
  Edward watched the slow glide of small but imposing buildings through the masts and rigging of moored ships. The Hildebrand had lost way: throughout their conversation he had heard intermittent bells being rung deep underfoot.

  ‘Dammit, it’s too late for that,’ he said. ‘Ten years ago, maybe … But then what would have been the point? One doesn’t up sticks and move half across the globe just because they dress informally. After all, I’ve spent as much of my life as I could in what my wife used to call “gardening clothes”. It wasn’t enough, of course. My God, the things she used to insist on my wearing. She once tried to make me buy a bicycling suit for bicycling. Never heard such nonsense. Whenever I wanted to go for a ride I used to have to hide my old grid in a hedge down the lane and creep out and leap on it when she wasn’t looking. She was worried about the neighbours. What neighbours?’ An extraordinary sorrow suddenly weighted his face into lines and Molly saw his eyes fill with tears. ‘Silly old girl. And if there had been any they wouldn’t have been trying to write The Dream of Gerontius. What did it matter?’

  And before she could divert him with tales of the lightweight, jazzily-striped pyjama jackets in which Englishmen in Pará nowadays received visitors of either sex, and of the white duck trousers and cotton shirts both groom and host had been wearing at a wedding reception she had attended, Edward turned abruptly and left her looking at the chipped stucco façade of the Customs House. He went below and let himself into his cabin. Compared with the past the territory of the present, as exemplified by the town beyond the Hilde-brand’s rail, was as null as cloud. But as the sounds of mooring came in with pinkish evening light through the open portholes he resolved at least to send a postcard to what little remained of the solid in his life and wrote a couple to Carice and a friend of the ‘am being wonderfully well looked after’ variety. Reassured by Molly’s account of sartorial licence he went up on deck in his lightest jacket, prepared after all for a gloomy foray ashore.

  But when he reached the outer fringes of the crowd of passengers eager to rush down the gangway like – as he observed to a bystander – First Class rather than Steerage sheep, he was taken up by Molly and Fortescue while Kate and Dora came to say goodbye.

  ‘The parting of the ways, Sir Edward.’ Kate extended a white-gloved hand. ‘I’m sorry it was so short.’

  ‘I, on the other hand, feel our acquaintance stretches back to nineteen hundred and three,’ said Dora, ‘and I’m even sorrier than she is that you’re going on and we’re getting off. There’re heaps of people here who’ll be dying to meet you when they know. The entire English colony will turn out and put up flags. You’ll have no end of a grand time in Chapeo Virado and São Jeronimo. That is, if you want one,’ she added.

  And all the while she was speaking he felt something ebbing out of her and Kate. Whatever assumptions he had made on the basis of a shared table, a shared class, a day on Madeira and many conversations, they were now seen to fit with a looseness which increased by the minute the two ladies who stood in mauve hats on the brink of the unknown town containing their homes. He had been disconcerted by the confidence and oddity of their humour as he always was by people who were sure of themselves. But the ebbing continued as they made their way fairly regally off the ship. He could not help noticing ungallantly how thick their ankles were above the strap shoes; nor that by the time they reached the quay – where they were both embraced with evident warmth by two very swarthy plump gentlemen – Kate and Dora had lost all claims to identity.

  ‘Well,’ said Molly, who had been watching with equal fascination. ‘They weren’t going to invite us to their houses, were they?’

  ‘You’d thought they might, too?’

  ‘Of course. Or at least they might have said it was impossible for them to be hospitable the first evening of their arrival so how about tomorrow? We’re going to be here three days. Even the offer of somebody reliable to show us Pará. Most extraordinary. And those men who met them.’

  ‘Is one to assume those are the husbands?’

  ‘They looked to me like mestizo cabbies.’

  ‘You warned me that Pará was informal,’ said Edward, ‘but you never said it was customary for taxi drivers to embrace their fares.’

  ‘I’ve much to learn,’ Molly told him. ‘It’s one of the reasons I came back, after all. Now, Forty and I have already been here so if you’d let us be your guides we can give you a first taste of South America. Or at least help you post your cards.’

  And so saying she took them and dropped them straight into a red steel post box welded to a nearby bulkhead, explaining they would be sorted and stamped aboard the Hildebrand and passed straight to the captain of a Booth’s steamer bound in the opposite direction, that being the quickest possible way. ‘The Brazilian post office will only try to get them on the same ship when they’ve sorted them, but they’ll probably miss it.’

  Almost as soon as his feet touched the quay the listlessness induced by the vacant, estuarine approach to the town and its impression of being a settlement on the low coast of nowhere, fell away. It was indeed difficult after two weeks at sea to dispel the feeling that he was in a maritime port, for here the River Pará was thirty miles wide and its far bank not to be seen. Once beyond the quay and in Frei Caetano Brandão gardens, strolling on rubbery legs through tropical vegetation in concentric gravel rings about the bishop’s statue, they heard through the strange leaves and festooned trees the sounds of a large town. The unmistakable grinding of tram-wheels reached them, the clanging of bells, the voices of a hundred thousand inhabitants coming back to life after the heat of the tropical day.

  ‘It’s the legs,’ said Fortescue. ‘That’s what makes everything so unreal. The ground keeps tilting. It does that after bumpy flying.’

  ‘I hadn’t expected to find trams here,’ said Edward.

  ‘Then you’ll be impressed that they’ve also got newspapers in both morning and evening editions.’

  ‘The existence of gossip here impresses me less than that of tramways.’

  Gently, like convalescents, they made their way towards the Praça da Republica which Molly claimed was the social hub of the town after nightfall. Despite the shops and stalls lit by electricity and naphtha flares; despite the broad, cobbled avenues with their polished steel tramlines leading off to the residential suburbs of São Jeronimo and Nazareth; despite every evidence of civic bustle, Edward was conscious of nothing so much as the jungle at his back. The Governor’s Palace, the Cathedral, the various private mansions they passed were all tethered by creepers to the surrounding earth. Unlikely blossoms hung about their columns while every bush twinkled with fireflies. In consequence he was even more struck by the classical grandeur of the buildings they passed. It seemed to him evidence of a commendable sense of priorities that the Brazilians should have put up such an imposing stone theatre, for example. Reading the bills with Molly’s assistance he gathered it was not permanently open as it would have been in London but received periodic visits from touring players, troupes, foreign opera companies. Towards Christmas, he saw, a French ensemble of which he had never heard was to give a series of concerts which included Berlioz’s oratorio L’enfance du Christ.

  Edward, having changed some money with the Purser beforehand, insisted that the others be his guests that night for, as he explained, once they reached Manaos they would doubtless become busy with their own affairs to the exclusion of social convenience.

  ‘It’s very good of you, sir,’ said Fortescue. ‘But I should hardly wish you to dine me under the false impression that I’ll be spending my first fortnight in Manaos too busy with rigging and fitting even to eat. There’s a limit to what can be done in a day’s work on a dirt airfield on the outskirts of a tropical town. When we knock off we knock off.’

  ‘The night cometh when no man may work?’

  ‘Absolutely. Nothing to say he can’t have a drink and a square meal.’

  They were daunted by the prospect of the English C
lub, so evidently the focal point of the colony. Already through the lighted windows half shrouded in leaves several of the Hildebrand’s passengers could be recognised. They chose instead the restaurant of the Grand Hotel, set on the boulevard beneath a glass-and-ironwork canopy, and from here they watched the passers-by and tried to guess their racial origins.

  ‘I think as colonisers the Portuguese must have been as unlike us as it’s possible to get,’ observed Molly. ‘They evidently had no taboo on marrying into the local population and, what’s more, neither does anybody else who comes here.’

  ‘Except the British,’ said Fortescue.

  ‘Except the British. Although it looks as if Kate and Dora might be breaking the mould … Why do you think it is? I don’t really understand this thing about racial purity,’ she confessed. ‘Personally I find this mixture of Indian and Portuguese and Italian and negro and everything else makes for a very handsome colouring.’ And indeed Edward was himself aware of remarkable skin tones beneath the mothy glare of the electroliers, of the light striking dusty bronze glints from heads of hair by no means a uniform tropical black.

  The food was good, the chilled Portuguese rosé excellent, the human stream diverting. Edward experienced it all like one behind layers of plate glass. There was about the street a peculiar lack of that stridency which he had found so much a feature of Naples and Smyrna. Pará was lively and in some way unrestrained, yet the soft hot night blunted the acuteness of sound by absorbing it into the folds of its curtain.

  The description Molly gave, piecemeal and graphic, of the economic disaster which not so long ago had hit Manaos and Pará with the collapse of the rubber trade seemed to him likewise to apply not to the people passing at his elbow but to another population altogether. Surely nobody he could see was in any way connected with world-famous Pará rubber. The beggars, stallholders, matrons with their children, the tram-drivers, potential drama-lovers examining the bills posted on the columns of the theatre – all seemed to have lives which bore no relation to the market fluctuations of a commodity. Molly’s information that after the initial slump the region’s fortunes had been partly retrieved by substituting cocoa and Brazil nuts as its chief exports remained for him information. He was left with his diner’s view of lives immeasurably removed from his own being lived in a place he had never been able to imagine.