Gerontius

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  At present we’re steaming placidly under an inverted bowl of seething meteorology. I’ve never seen cloudscapes like these (Molly says triumphantly that this is what she came for & now will I believe her? and Fortescue eyes them with the proper awe of somebody who’s shortly going to be flying through them). It’s a most extraordinary effect they create – ab origine – & one sees fairly commonplace things as for the first time, or at least shorn of their associations. There was a breathtaking rainbow after luncheon: an unbroken arch planted in the jungle & filling much of the sky. I waited for the associations to come, for the delicate melancholies wh. follow summer storms in England when the sun breaks out again & lights up a line of elms & a silver-white church spire against purple-black sky & a rainbow suggests itself – smiles breaking through tears &c – and the whole thing becomes too watercolourist for words … Nothing. None of it here. Just the elements at play, just primordial physics. Most refreshing in its way tho’ I don’t think I’d care to live with it, never being quite sure if it was a vision of the past or the future but certain in either case that the hand of man was nowhere to be seen. Fortescue, who is the hand of man in person, tells me there’s sthg. in America called ‘Skywriting’ when they go up in aeroplanes & write messages across the sky in smoke. He says it’s terribly difficult since unless you’re very skilful your own ‘prop-wash’ rubs out the letters as you make them. Seeing the rainbow today he said that it was theoretically possible to go up and write the word ‘Rainbow’ in giant letters in an arch in an otherwise rainbowless sky (say in the middle of a cloudless summer’s day). Personally I can’t see the point but it did strike me as an unexpectedly original & imaginative thing for him to have dreamed up. I asked if it wd. be possible to write a line of music in smoke & showed him what it wd. entail but he thought by the time one had flown back & forth drawing five parallel lines everything wd. have run together & doing uprights & dots on top of that completely impossible. I informed him that it was nothing of the sort – that I’d written all my music in smoke & that it was fast blowing away.

  Later still

  Smoke or not the Music Makers still left a wound. It’s better than anyone knows about the apartness of the artist but all they can find to say is that it’s a pot-pourri of self-quotations, as if I’d run out of inspiration & concocted a potboiler from the scattered corpses of previous works. They laugh knowingly when they catch Handel at it as if he were an unscrupulous old rogue, so I get tarred with the same brush. Oh bitter, bitter. I lived with MM on & off from about 1903 and it was most carefully constructed using relatively few quotations (& always reworked). Perhaps what people don’t like is it’s autobiographical & they simply don’t like ME. I wrote out my soul in the Vln conc., Sym II & the Music Makers & I can’t disguise it, why shd. I? Maybe they don’t like O’Shaughnessy & maybe it isn’t a brilliant poem but if they’re too brilliant they don’t set well. Look at the rot Schubert set so wonderfully. In this case though O’S expressed perfectly in the first 6 lines that sense of the artist’s loneliness which is what the ‘Enigma’ theme was doing in 1898. I therefore couldn’t have done better than use my own music again – oh the memory of that feeling was so intense – nor in 1912 cd. I not feel the bitter truth of the Tasso quotation I’d put on the full score of ‘Enigma’ 14 yrs earlier. ‘Bramo assai, poco spero, nulla chieggio.’ I had longed for much, I had hoped for little, I had asked for nothing – and got it!!

  The pretty settlement of Santarem was reached at the mouth of the Tapajós whose waters, the pure dark green of molten bottle-glass, flowed out into the tawny flood of the Amazon but refused to mix. Instead the entire surface of the confluence became mottled with bi-coloured whirlpools, an effect which delighted Molly although she said sadly that it could hardly be painted since no-one in Europe would believe it.

  They were past the halfway point between Pará and Manaos. From now on the Amazon became as exotic as anyone aboard the Hildebrand could have wished. Anything edible thrown over the side was generally taken within a few seconds by creatures from below which defied identification. Enough was generally glimpsed to send a frisson through the more nervous: a flash of scaly plates, a vast armoured head, prognathous jaws, teeth. Some of the fish were immense, as could be seen when they rolled leisurely out of the ship’s path exposing for a moment a grey-green flank the length of a scraped pig.

  Great butterflies drifted across the river and over the decks drawing small gatherings of onlookers wherever they randomly alighted on a straw hat, an awning, the edge of a sticky glass. They flew away again with that tropical flight so different from the fluttering of European species: the few flat strokes and then the wobbling glide carrying them off across the surface of the water where they might settle on the emerald raft of an uprooted tree, sharing it perhaps with a motionless jewelled bird until both had flowed away astern. At night the lighted decks attracted even huger moths, some of which were the size of wrens but with colour and figurings as brilliant as those birds were dowdy. This time their presence was usually announced by squeaks of dismay and a rush for head-scarves. Edward would stand at the rail, often with an immense night creature perched on his lapel or his sleeve, its folded or shimmering wings leaving all manner of gorgeous dusts on the creamy linen. At this he would gaze fondly until it flew away, murmuring ‘I say, you are a beauty’ or ‘They’ve dressed you up to look more fearsome than you are.’

  Once the ship stopped for an hour opposite a tiny settlement which from midstream was no more than a handful of orange oil flares, the only lights on a dark continent. A pilot had to be picked up and because of silt banks the ship stood off and dropped anchor while the transfer was made in a batalõe. Without the sound of water along her plates and with her engines quiet the Hildebrand was suddenly at the centre of emptiness. Standing at the rail on the side away from the settlement Edward could see practically nothing, there being no moon, except where soundless flashes lit the horizon or from closer overhead gave a mauvish impression of dark and endless vegetation. For the first time strange calls became audible from the distant bank. Behind the mechanical frogs and the sizzle of tree crickets came cries which, had he been his own ancestor, would have bristled his pelt the length of his spine. The screams – of jaguar? monkey? of hunter? prey? – had that curious hollowness of jungle sounds which appear to be simultaneously the cry and its echo. It was easy to believe that the density of the vegetation and the night which stuffed its chinks conducted sound as effectively as water, so that these howls and lonely barks might be coming from boundless distances, the night air like a membrane bringing him news of savageries beyond the horizon. Suddenly the ship felt very small and frail anchored there in the middle of it all with water on either side as meagre insulation. The conviction came over him again that this voyage he was making was a journey backwards in time; what remained to be resolved was how much of that time was bounded by his own few decades. What lay all around was elemental and pagan: it was in no way gentle. Here there was no kindly-eyed Pan like a Victorian uncle with shaggy thighs and hooves who would cradle small lost river-creatures as in Kenneth Grahame’s animistic vision.

  ‘You can’t write out of nothingness,’ he murmured at the water, the pink-blue flashes, the screaming wilderness. ‘You have to write out of a culture. Without men there is no art, no hearts to be touched, no eyes to weep. There are only cells.’ Even so, he thought briefly of his own creature on a tower and wondered what dawn it was witnessing, leaved in hectic crimson. He was glad when a shudder through his soles announced the quickening of the engines and the ship’s eventual getting under way, unaware (until he went below to better-lit regions) that the temporary pall of coal-smoke drooping heavily in the windless air over one rail like a lock of greasy black hair had left his linen jacket encrusted with smuts.

  After the settlement of Obidos they passed over the deepest point in the Amazon so far known. The figure of one hundred and twenty feet was known also to Steward Pyce who circulated with the news, g
enerally being thanked for his pains. But people were less intrigued by fact than they were by rumour. It was learned that they would shortly be passing an island on which was supposed to be a lost city. The very phrase echoed with mystery and adventure and indeed figured prominently in the titles of several books in the ship’s library. There was speculation as to how a city might come to be lost in the first place, it sounding more like a case of remarkable carelessness rather than anything more dynamic.

  ‘Surely there’s a stock historical scene,’ said Edward, ‘when a wounded man on a wounded horse drags himself back inside the shattered ramparts and says “All is lost! The city is lost! Flee for your li …” and an arrow takes him plumb in the wishbone.’

  ‘Oh, lost in that sense. I hadn’t thought of it like that, not actually sacked.’

  ‘You can see why – at least from an adventure-novelist’s viewpoint. There’s got to be a treasure and there’s got to be a mystery. Neither of those can survive a really decent sacking.’

  ‘More than that, there’s got to be a more or less intact city.’ Fortescue revealed himself as no stranger to the genre. ‘The whole point is the place must look as though everybody woke up on a Tuesday morning and said “This is the dullest town in the whole of South America. I’m off” and simply left. Then after a few months the jungle moved back in and a year or two later nobody could have found the place even if they’d looked for it.’

  ‘But why wouldn’t they have taken their treasure with them?’ asked Molly.

  ‘That’s easy,’ said Edward who was entering the spirit of this fictive city. ‘The people did take their treasure with them but since they were poor it didn’t amount to more than a few personal belongings. A retirement clock, a cigar-cutter, Aunt Ada’s amber necklace. That sort of thing. The real treasure belonged to the priests: vast golden idols, ingots of green Amazonian gold, silver, unknown minerals and gems of hypnotic beauty and enormous weight. But how could they carry them? The people had already left and they themselves were hopelessly weakened by years of debauchery and excess compounded by a monotonous diet of human hearts. They had to abandon it all where it lay and hurry crossly after their departed congregations in flapping white robes and jaguar-teeth necklaces. But they got hardly any distance before falling prey to deadly orchids whose scent alone lured men to screaming dooms, and anacondas whose glowing yellow eyes swayed thirty feet above them on necks of such sickening girth that the priests died of fright even as the huge jaws opened and a sticky rain of venom sprinkled their grinning faces.’

  ‘Enough!’ cried Molly. ‘More than enough! It’s quite obvious you could have made an excellent living as an adventure writer had you not been a composer.’

  ‘Much better. And don’t imagine the irony escapes me.’

  Interested passengers scanned various lumps of land they passed but few of these appeared large enough to conceal a city. Shortly after Parintins they noticed various bifurcations in the main stream, many of which seemed to be substantial rivers in their own right. It was not until Edward was shown a chart on the bridge that he appreciated how the next one hundred and sixty miles of left-hand bank represented the northern ‘coast’ of the gigantic Tupinambarama Island which had claims to be the world’s largest river island. Even Fortescue, when Edward pointed this out, stopped scanning the distant shore with his binoculars as if hoping to glimpse a white gleam of hitherto-unnoticed temple among the myriad acres of foliage.

  A few pink and white barracas standing in a clearing announced Itacoatiara. It was hard to imagine that such a small gathering of sheds and bungalows should be the entrepôt for the entire Madeira River which joined the Amazon eighty miles further on. The Madeira led off south-west through some of the world’s least-known territory towards the Mato Grosso and Bolivia and uncharted headwaters in the far Andes. The very sight of the confluence was enough to intensify Edward’s sense of the unimaginably remote, piling as it did the additionally undiscovered on the already undiscovered. It was extraordinary to think of men four or five hundred miles up that river looking not upstream to Porto Velho but wistfully back to this shanty-town of Itacoatiara as marking the nearest real link with the outside world.

  And suddenly nearly four days had gone by since they left Pará and they had nearly reached their destination. There was a sense of people surreptitiously stretching themselves as after an overlong sermon, ready to get to their feet and feel what it was like to be on the ground in the heart of this jungle which had accompanied them unbroken every one of the thousand and forty-two miles from the sea. Molly and Fortescue were clearly excited and relieved their apprehension by saying well, if it didn’t ‘work out’ at least there was a regular steamer service back to England. Since they were neither of them the sort to permit themselves an easy return from anything on which they had set their hearts it intensified Edward’s sense of imminent desertion. It was not hard to imagine disasters that were less possibilities than likelihoods: Molly’s wasting fever and irreversible decline up a tributary in a bungalow ticking with termites; Fortescue’s crash-landing leaving him with a broken leg, a Webley revolver and six rounds.

  At twilight on the evening before their arrival he chanced to be on deck at a moment when the ship’s course took her to within fifty yards of the bank. He was thinking of the fragment of work he had achieved: all too little in three weeks to justify his celebrating the Muse’s return. Happening to glance up he was immobilised by what he saw. On the bank was a small clearing and in the centre of the clearing stood a vast pole which on closer inspection was the trunk of a dead tree, most of whose branches had broken off into stubs. At the top of this pole stood a figure – undoubtedly a human figure – dressed in a white robe and appearing to stare out across the river, across the thousand-mile jungle to where the sun was setting. It was absurd, solemn, so unexpected in its congruence with his own reflections that he felt his heart actually pause. The ship went on. The motionless, rapt figure stared and stared and passed from sight as the forest swallowed the clearing in its general dusk.

  What vision was this? He was withdrawn at dinner and later embarked on an anguished night which soaked him in heat, plunging him in and out of insomnia and mild delirium until the two states became indistinguishable. There was no narrative, only a repeated motif of being on a series of journeys all of which left him stranded, alone and defenceless, in a variety of threatening landscapes. The word Somnaa echoed through these slept places: a native location, the name of a planet (for one of his journeys was on a deserted forest world circling an unknown golden star), a potion which had to be sought and taken to restore things. He would regain consciousness enough to find himself sitting on the edge of his bed drinking avidly from the water-bottle. In his last remembered bout of troubled slumber he was under threat of death in the lost city of Osmana at the hands of a Samoan witch-doctor or high priest wearing a necklace of jaguar’s teeth and girt about with monkey pelts and shrunken heads on strings. This man was offering Edward two gourds, one of which contained mosaná, a lethal poison prepared from the urine of temple bats, and the other which was empty. The terms were that if Edward were lucky enough to choose the empty gourd he must mime drinking the contents as if it were the mosaná and keep up the pretence by apparently dying in convulsions. This was to convince the audience, a hostile priesthood who were not in on the subterfuge. The high priest was supposed to be secretly on his side but Edward had heard too much about witch-doctors to be fooled. He knew the stories of perfectly healthy people dying simply because a witch-doctor had told them they would. He therefore suspected that in carrying out the mime he would be playing into this barbaric prankster’s hands; at some point he would willy-nilly begin believing in the inevitability of his own death and so die.

  When at first light Steward Pyce came in with a cup of tea he found his distinguished passenger half off the bed, flannel pyjama top rucked up under his arms and exposing a waxy white torso shiny with sweat and with some sparse grey hairs around the n
ipples. Edward, ragingly thirsty, scalded his mouth on the tea. Reaching for the water-bottle at his bedside he found it full to the brim, clearly untouched since the previous evening.

  ‘When do we reach this damned place?’

  ‘At about ten this morning, Sir Edward,’ said the Steward who was pottering attentively. ‘Did we pass a bad night, sir?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. It’s too soon to tell if I have passed it.’

  ‘Definitely you have, sir. It’s a beautiful morning. Amazon’s given birth. That’s the ship’s cat, sir.’

  ‘Good name. Is she particularly big, then?’

  ‘Less so now, sir.’

  ‘Do you know, Pyce,’ said Edward, putting down his teacup and passing a sodden handkerchief over his head and face, ‘if you spell Amazon with an “s” instead of a “z” and jumble the letters around they’ll spell Manaos?’

  Evidently he had not known. He went impassively out leaving a faint smell of brilliantine on the air. As Edward finished his tea he began idly jumbling the same letters afresh in his head until they soon began to bring back uncomfortable flashes of the night he had just spent.

  ‘I’ve enjoyed this trip,’ he said on deck after breakfast. ‘I suppose I ought to say I am enjoying it since for me it’s not yet even half over. It’s been wonderful to get completely away.’

  ‘You’ve not done much work, then?’ Molly asked.