Gerontius

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Afterwards he insisted on walking back alone to the ship while Molly and Fortescue went off to the Bosque. He had given them dinner: that was what could be reasonably expected of an older companion. Beyond that there was no intercession between his memories and their prospects. A great horned beetle cracked into an electrolier and fell stunned at his feet. He turned it onto its front with the ferrule of his cane. ‘Buzz off,’ he told it kindly, ‘otherwise you’ll get squidged.’ Somewhat to his surprise it did spread its black shards and drone heavily upwards into the lights.

  VII

  We seem to have crossed the Atlantic. At all events I dined tonight on dry land somewhere or other. Everybody assures me it’s a place called Pará & certainly the props (newspapers & playbills in Portuguese, peculiar trams, beetles, lianas, fireflies etc) seem calculated to give the illusion of being in Brazil. Rather more convincingly Pyce assures me Captain Maddrell has never yet made a navigational error – at least not of the size required to miss a continent. I’m forced to conclude that this apparent seaside town by which we’ve moored is the very riverside city for which we’ve been heading.

  I’m English; or I’m European. I’m used to boundaries. I love those maps of English counties with their age-old lines of demarcation wiggling along the middle of a river or following a line of hills or skirting the non-existent property of some long defunct Duchy. Thus the counties have acquired distinct characters of their own. Everyone knows exactly where Worcestershire ends and Shropshire begins, even where there are no signs. Since this journey began, however, certainties of that kind have been more than a little eroded. First there was Madeira – neither Europe nor Africa. Then there was the Equator, a notional fence whose mythic position had to be celebrated by mummers. Next I awoke to find the ship far out to sea but afloat on fresh river-water. And finally I’ve dined tonight surrounded by human tides whose racial distinctions are every bit as blurred. In short everything in this part of the world is intent on flowing into everything else. Matters haven’t been clarified by the ridiculous disembarking of Kate & Dora. Who were they? No-one seems to know. They were whisked away by dumpy little dagoes to every sign of mutual satisfaction. They were rather splendid & I’d begun to like their peculiar double act. The journey home is going to be lonely.

  Very early next day Edward walked off the ship into a morning full of pastels. Out in the roads and in the port itself the ships’ paintwork and liveries shone against a pale blue wash of sky. Each rope and mast stood out with dense clarity in air which sparkled with its saturation of water molecules. The ropes mooring the Hildebrand wore metal cones, their open bells facing the quay, to fend off the large black rats which could be seen everywhere burrowing into piles of litter or browsing along the stretches of muddy foreshores strewn with vegetable waste.

  He had not drunk so much as a cup of coffee yet, had woken full of energy which translated itself while he was dressing into a sudden desire to breakfast ashore. Having first asked directions he made the short stroll into Old Pará whose narrow streets of coloured colonial houses were filled with oblique sunlight. He bought a copy of O Jornal do Pará out of curiosity and found a café where, indicating that he would have the same as his neighbour, he was served with hot bread and a cup of thick strong chocolate. With surprise he noticed the paper’s date: it was the first of December.

  As he read slowly but – thanks to Latin and Italian – not wholly uncomprehendingly through the headlines a feeling suffused him out of nowhere which made him look away at the pavement with filling eyes. It was a sensation he hadn’t had for scores of years, from so far back he couldn’t associate it with any particular event but could only identify it happily, sadly, as that of being young. The brightness of the morning sunlight outside, the pungent and unexpected taste of the chocolate, the crackle of foreign newsprint between his hands, the ancient street whose houses and passers-by he could not have assigned to any definite corner of the globe – all of them started the ghost of that excitement at finding oneself alive and free which can suddenly break like day in the foreign ports of one’s youth with promises of endless enchanting occurrence.

  Then the unfairness of so clear a revisitation shook him with pain. Ghosts of the past self had no business sliding back out of hiding after decades of absence, cheerfully untouched by the tolls and ravages of a lived life. It was a cruel trick which just for a moment had dangled the jauntiness of twenty-six before the man of sixty-six. Not that his life in those days had been so very lighthearted, either: painfully in love with Lena, more than a little poor, many years from recognition. But those are quite usual conditions at twenty-six. Beneath them lie all sorts of energetic tides and all manner of surges which suddenly leap out of ambush in a foreign café early one morning. (Thus a cat will without apparent reason break its purposeful step to pat the air and frisk among shadows.)

  The memory of this feeling persisted as he wandered back towards the river. An infrequent tram screeched slowly past trailing an electrical smell of ozone and the scent of whetted knives from binding brake shoes. At the glassless windows (fitted, however, with oilskin blinds which could be lowered in downpours) were men in brilliant white shirt-sleeves on their way from their suburbs to banks and offices and godowns, many holding folded handkerchiefs delicately to their moustaches to keep out the dust, others lightly fanning themselves with newspapers. Several of them disembarked at an imposing bank or bourse from whose pediment a lopsided spray of flame-coloured blossoms trailed from the cleft in which it had taken root. The effect of this brilliant weed was artlessly to add a seductiveness to the cracked temple of mammon which dominated the mango-lined boulevard as coquettishly as any Latin beauty with a carnation over one ear. It served also to remind that this was a vegetable town, a town owing its existence and prosperity to sap and lignum, to nuts and fruits and juices. Beyond the last tram-stop began a continent’s-width of vegetation stretching clear to the Andes. Down at the wharves stirred a forest of dead trees and lianas: the masts and rigging of the river-steamers, fishing smacks, liners, cargo and tramp vessels without which Pará would swiftly languish and return to the jungle. In every crack in each wall something had taken root. The very pavements bunched and heaved around the mangoes as if a primaeval creature were patiently surfacing. In the gardens he passed were scarcely any bare patches of soil except here and there where a gardener in cotton trousers and sunhat had begun his day’s labour, the sweat already glistening on his mahogany torso as he deployed his hoe without evident haste.

  The remembered sense of being young now manifested itself in a different way. All of a sudden there came the conviction that he had not after all done anything yet. It was not that what he had done was of little account, not quite the glum modesty which had once made him say that setting any of his work beside a single Beethoven symphony put him in the position of a tinker surveying the Forth Bridge. It was maybe more akin to whatever had made Beethoven himself on his death-bed remark how funny it was that it now seemed to him he’d scarcely ever written a note. Nobody could say if Beethoven had meant this literally or whether confronting eternity he felt his whole output was an insignificance.

  In Edward’s case, though, it was literal. Amid this lethargic, alien bustle in a tropical city which had no doubt never heard of Gerontius he could hardly recall the composer he’d once impersonated. On what, then, had that twenty-six-year-old’s energy been expended in the intervening forty years? Only the echoes of great troubles and turmoils and upsets reached him now. Not a note written but whole hinterlands of emotion drained, tributary joining tributary until there was the impression of the sound of many waters, of a general sliding, of being a perilous bystander on a quayside watching a great river in spate, the turgid yellow swirls mere inches beneath his feet.

  Yet the very impersonality of a morning in Pará came to his rescue: the cheerful activity, the strangeness, the passers-by stopping at a vendor’s fronded stall to drink glasses of deep red fluid or eat brown slabs of compresse
d jam. What did it matter? He had done nothing. There was nothing to do. No matter how hard one worked there was nothing to be done. Rounding a corner he came face to face with Captain Maddrell and the Purser, resplendent in whites so pressed they appeared to have been cut from metal sheet. Caps off, straw hat lifted, good days given. He? Back to the ship. They? To Booth’s offices. Good-bye, good-bye. The formality and decorousness cheered him as he boarded the Hildebrand: they were part of this morning’s weird energy, of people doing things in harsh sunlight as though they nearly mattered. He rang for Steward Pyce.

  ‘I’ll be using the Captain’s day cabin for a little,’ he said. ‘I should like a pitcher of something cold to keep me company. A soft drink.’

  ‘Guaraná,’ said the Steward promptly. ‘When in Brazil, sir, do as the Brazilians. It’s wonderfully refreshing. I’ll bring you some at once.’

  And no sooner had Edward pulled the Captain’s deckchair to the rail where it could command a view of the wharf, the Customs House and the godown roofs with intermittent glimpses of white town and dark green vegetation than Pyce appeared with a tall jug at whose rim chunks of ice rang clear chimes. It was full of the reddish-brown liquid he had earlier seen drunk in the street. He sipped gingerly at the glass he was handed and then drank more deeply.

  ‘I say, Steward, that hits the spot. What marvellous stuff. What did you say it was called?’

  ‘Guaraná, sir. The Indians here drink it for dysentery, beg pardon, Sir Edward. But as you can see if it’s aerated it’s really very refreshing. Practically everyone here in Amazonia drinks it.’

  ‘But what is it?’

  ‘Seeds, sir, of the guaraná plant. The natives dry them in the sun and roast them a bit and then grind them up into paste. You just add water and sugar to the paste.’

  ‘Well I’m damned. And you say it’s medicinal?’

  ‘Dr Barnard – he was our last ship’s doctor, sir – he found it in the British Pharma-coopia so it must be all right.’

  ‘You seem very knowledgeable, Pyce,’ said Edward as he offered his glass to be refilled.

  ‘I’ve been making this run some years, sir, haven’t I. It’s the sort of thing passengers like to know. I’ve even seen the Indians actually making the paste. It’s quite interesting how clever they are in their own way, seeing as how they’re savages. They were making models in this paste, little birds and snakes and alligators and things, then smoking them over a fire. That’s the way it travels best, apparently. You can buy it like that in Manaos. Many people take some home as a souvenir but it’s very hard to grate once it’s been baked. The Indians here use a fish’s tongue.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘It’s the local file, sir. Comes from the tongue of a fish whose name I can’t recall offhand –’

  ‘Thank God for that.’

  ‘– but we sometimes trawl for it with spinners over the poop. Largest freshwater fish in the world, sir. Three hundred pounds, the biggest we’ve ever caught. The galley didn’t half curse.’

  ‘And the tongue, Pyce?’

  ‘It’s like a file, sir, as I say. They dry it and grate up their guaraná with it. I don’t know any more about guaraná than that,’ added the Steward disarmingly.

  ‘It’s more than enough,’ Edward told him with a smile. ‘You may return in an hour or two with a fresh supply. If I develop, ah, dysentery as a result I shall know whom to hold responsible.’

  From his borrowed deck-chair he sipped and watched, sipped and watched. The sun climbed swiftly, leaching out of the town beyond the rail a variety of scents and stenches. From the open warehouse doors along the quayside drifted rich aromatics: hot jute bags of peppercorns, cocoa-beans stewing under corrugated iron, sacks of manioc farinha, sawn tropical hardwood exhaling resin and the spice of unlit cigars. The mud on the foreshore popped and hissed as it dried; the mats of decaying jetsam, impregnated with the town’s ordure, heaved gently as the rats in their interiors released a myriad trapped perfumes which drifted almost visibly across the wharves. In the clear blue funnel of sky above the town a loose cone of vultures revolved slowly. Low down in the ship’s side a gangplank led straight into one of the holds and up it half-naked navvies were disappearing with sacks on their backs directly beneath where Edward sat, iced guaraná in hand. It glittered. The people glittered, the town glowed and stank, the huge fecundity of its setting overwhelmed him.

  From his watch he decided it would now be about four-thirty on a winter’s afternoon back in England. Perversely he superimposed a familiar scene onto the dazzling quayside before him. An English village – none he could identify – drifted before his eyes. The sun was just setting, the rest of the sky a deep turquoise against which the gilded weathercock on the church tower was a blackish stencil. The air smelt like early frost and spent gunpowder. For the past hour, he thought, woodpigeons had been wheeling in across the plough behind the vicarage to roost in the overgrown thorn hedges into whose high and tangled thickets they were still vanishing. In the village store opposite the church the lamps had long been lit. Each time its door opened or closed a clear bell pinged a note audible from the village hall. A few homing villagers trudged by on bicycles with lamps leaving the reek of acetylene and carbide.

  But where was the observer, was Edward himself at this very instant? Many thousands of miles away with the blazing December sun almost directly overhead in a blue sky where vultures swirled lethargically, sipping an exotic drink and with a river beneath him containing logs and great armoured fish and flakes of gold. And for that moment he was content. He did not miss the immemorial English scene as he had a few days earlier while gazing at an empty ocean. With the glitter of this moment filling his ears and eyes and nose the far-off country which rose up in his mind (with its muted colours and spare sounds, with its church clocks and shop-door bells and its autumnal twilights falling soft as pigeons over thatched and peg-tiled roofs) engendered in him no nostalgia at all but only a traitorous happiness at being free of it all.

  In at the distant pair of dock gates turned a couple of imposing white figures who, as they neared the ship, became the Captain and the Purser. As he watched them vanish beneath the scuppers where his line of sight ended he caught a glimpse of Mr Maddrell’s face under the stubby visor of his cap. It was wearing the intransigent expression of someone not used to being crossed by either fortune or design. The officers had just been told by their company that there was no way of replacing Dr Ashe without delaying the Hildebrand indefinitely. There was no other English doctor in port suitable for the post. Dr Ashe would have to serve at least until the ship called back at Pará. It was only a matter of two or three weeks and by that time a feasible substitute would surely have been found.

  ‘Two or three weeks,’ the Captain had been saying as they walked along the quay, both men’s eyes busy with details of the Hildebrand’s moorings, gangway awnings and paintwork. ‘We’ve hardly been gone that time and the fellow’s already done incalculable damage. Imagine what he might get up to on this next leg, Gatesy. Well, if anything else happens I’ll have him in irons. He can hold his surgery in the forepeak.’

  ‘He’d certainly be the soberer.’

  The Captain marched a few steps. ‘Aha, that’s the size of it, is it? I didn’t know. I think, Gatesy, we’ve both been at sea long enough not to remember a good few men who needed a bottle to hand and I must say some of ’em seemed none the worse for it. I recall a First Officer who went on a bender once a month, regular as clockwork. Useless for twenty-four hours. But by God he was a fine seaman the rest of the time. Couldn’t get through a day without a bottle of rum inside him but you’d never have known it.’

  ‘What became of him?’

  ‘Oh, he went down somewhere. Titanic? Empress of Ireland? One of those, I think. I hope he had a skinful when he went.’

  ‘I’ve a feeling our own doctor isn’t in that category.’

  ‘Me too. Funny, isn’t it? You can tell. Three sheets in the wind. Chin up, Gatesy,
we’ve had worse aboard than a Bones who’s off his rocker.’

  ‘All passengers, Mr Maddrell. They were all passengers.’

  On a sweltering afternoon the Hildebrand slipped her moorings, saluted town and inhabitants with its customary C and steamed away. Edward, a pitcher of guaraná half empty by his side, watched Pará quickly turn back into a waterfront, then become a mere coastal settlement. But from far across the opening yellow-green expanse of water the loose cone of vultures continued to be visible as it turned and turned its black particles many thousands of feet up into the blue air above the invisible town.

  From then on the ship remained in sight of a shore which appeared now at hand, now at several miles’ distance, sometimes on the left when Edward glanced up and sometimes on the right. He lost track of the days and all sense of their navigational progress. He spent some time on the bridge where he often found a Brazilian counterpart to Mr Mushet, for all vessels of any draught had to take a pilot on board for certain infamous stretches since the Amazon was constantly shifting its shoals and sandbanks, and channels long in use might silt up within a matter of days. But most of the time he spent in the Captain’s deck-chair from where he watched the slow drift astern of a practically unbroken expanse of rainforest.

  Shortly before entering the Amazon proper they reached the Narrows, a stretch of a hundred and thirty miles of islands and islets, each with its tuft of virgin forest, which in places reduced the navigable channel to a rapid current barely two hundred yards wide. The river was now yellow-brown, the islands green. Each bend the ship rounded disclosed a new scene whose components were generally the same but whose details struck him afresh. There were trees such as he had never imagined. It was one thing to talk of venerable old oaks in England, but the venerable old trees in Amazonas would have made an English oak look like a toadstool. In places the forest canopy stood well over two hundred feet high and several species of tree had roots like flying buttresses: great triangular slabs of wood which from far enough away took on an architectural gracefulness. From the branches of these giants hung all manner of lianas and creepers like tethers to prevent the tree’s growing any further into the sky. Everywhere the sun beat in bright dapples: on the feather fronds of the assai palm, on the plumes of the miriti, on a myriad stalks and sprays. The light fell in sheets, drenching the burnished river and striking sudden red gleams of sandstone as if the recent erosion by floods were revealing stillmolten magma welling up from the planet’s core. Elsewhere in the creeks and igarapés which led off namelessly into the jungle and in the glades which opened beneath the canopy the darkness was startling in its density.