Gerontius

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘Certainly not. Why should I? I’m sixty-six and I’ve done a lot of work. I don’t have to go on doing it until I drop in my tracks. Look how much else there is to do –’ and he waved a hand at the sheets of sunlight lying elastically on the broad river ahead as if showing an inheriting son his future dominions.

  ‘Of course,’ said Molly apologetically. ‘I only meant, well, a few days ago you mentioned you were sketching something.’

  ‘Oh, just an idea now and then. A germ. A glimmering. Something might be made of it one day. Nothing serious. You, on the other hand, have been working quite hard I suspect. When you’re not downstairs boning up on Portuguese or Tupí or – what was that language you said everyone gets by with here? lingua geral? – you’re up on deck quietly sketching away. I admire that. Our friend Fortescue, too. I imagine he’s also done quite a bit of homework in his own quiet way.’

  ‘He has, yes.’

  Edward looked at her. ‘He strikes me as an admirable young man.’

  ‘So he does me,’ she said to the passing water which was now beginning once more to take on the marbled appearance of two immiscible liquids swirling in eddies of contrasting colour. The Hildebrand had reached the confluence of the Amazon and the Rio Negro. The black waters from the north, stained with the soil acids of the Guiana Shield, contrasted weirdly with the yellow-green Amazon which was already lighter here than it had been lower down because of the silt-laden white-water tributaries which poured into it from the west. The ship ploughed across this treacherous expanse of what seemed sinister oils before deserting the Amazon for the final nine miles of its outward journey.

  ‘That’s the way I’ll be going shortly,’ she said, pointing to the great stream they had left, to Iquitos and the Andes and the far Pacific Ocean.

  ‘You’re not scared?’

  ‘Of course. But fascinated. The one’s supposed to cancel out the other.’

  ‘It does with me,’ he agreed drily. ‘The question is, which?’

  Molly laughed. ‘But when you’ve been longing for something?’

  ‘Ah. Longing. I understand that all right. Look,’ he fumbled in a side pocket and produced his silver propelling-pencil, ‘I’d like you to have this. Go on, take it. Not very grand, I’m afraid. Just a memento.’

  She knew the more she demurred the gruffer he would become. ‘I’m honoured, Sir Edward. I’ll always keep it. Thank you very much. I don’t quite know …’ and she somewhat bemusedly read the inscription on its side: To Edward Elgar from his friends in the L.O.S. ‘Surely this is a very personal thing?’

  ‘Of course it is. What on earth would be the point in my giving it you otherwise? The man who ran the Liverpool Orchestral Society was the truest friend I ever had, Alfred Rodewald. That was the year he died – twenty years ago now practically to the day. Well, one can’t go on forever looking back. Take it – it’s not a bad one. It’s done me well.’ And he turned away and walked off leaving her staring at the nearer of a pair of stone lighthouses falling astern.

  Suddenly in sunlight across an expanse of water Manaos rose up as a sizeable town, all white houses and towers. The trees and vegetation which split up the red of its tiled roofs appeared by contrast a brighter green than the surrounding forest. As they approached with a blare of C which lost itself over the waters and rebounded feebly from the low red earth cliffs the passengers lining the Hildebrand’s decks could make out individual features. Dominating everything with civic extravagance was the dome of the Opera House glittering in its topee of blue and gold Alsatian tiles. On the foreshore a series of floating wharves supported an extensive shanty-town of dilapidated huts in addition to cranes and the monster hardware associated with modern commerce. It seemed altogether extraordinary to find a city of this size so remotely situated; the decrepit dwellings merely emphasised the mercantile solidity of the buildings behind.

  And now the movement of people became apparent on the distant dockside: men in white shirts, women with parasols, gathering to wait in the shade of sheds and godowns for these visitors from another world. Edward stood largely unmoved watching the frenzied muster of tattered children with trays around their necks, the silver winking of ice-cream carts. Drifting round in the thermals over the town the inevitable cloud of urubus circled, sifting with their slitted nostrils the rich boiling of metropolitan odours for the delirious perfume of carrion. And now names were sliding across his vision, names in bold capitals over the warehouses: BOOTH STEAMSHIP COMPANY LTD, JOAQUIM SOARES and, on a pair of huge white doors in a blue matching that of the sky, the great legend PUSSELS CRONIFER GmbH.

  Frau von Pussels had been posting a notice on the board in the cool lobby of the Schiller Institute when she heard the C announcing the Hildebrand’s arrival. ‘Donnerstag,’ she said to herself, glancing up at the rest of the cards and announcements tucked symmetrically behind the lattice of ribbon which criss-crossed the baize board, ‘schon gut.’ Elsewhere – very far away – there were clocks and calendars. In Manaos there were boats and seasons, in addition to the daily thunderstorm at ten past noon.

  In the five years since her husband had died Frau von Pussels had taken to spending most of her time in the Institute she had helped found thirty years previously and which she had effectively run ever since. She preferred it to her own house, an overlarge modern villa built at the expense of her husband’s parent company in Hamburg in a style thought suitable for the founder-manager of a mercantile concern which nowadays had five other branches in South America. She found the villa soulless and – although she would never have said so – in most awful taste. It was prettily sited on a knoll overlooking the river but she liked none of the views inside the house itself. Additionally, the architect had installed some new system designed to cool the air without overhead fans. This mechanism was concealed under the floors and despite his assurances that it would be completely silent it rumbled faintly, making ornaments buzz on polished tables and giving one the impression of being on board ship. Nor, as far as she could determine, did it make the house a single degree cooler; but since she was embarking on her fourth decade here she had long since grown acclimatised and it made little difference to her whether the system worked or not.

  The premises which housed the Schiller Institute were by contrast quite old, having been built by one of the earlier Portuguese settlers. The house was large and dark but to her mind not at all gloomy. Rather, it was sombre and fragrant, being lined with dusky forest woods of immense weight and hardness. The waxed floorboards in the hallway near where she was standing were each a metre across and lay like sheets of a fabulous glowing metal, creakless and so close that a playing card might not be inserted between them. From the half-open door of the salon came the repetitive sounds of the Nepomuceno boy quietly tuning the Institute’s tropicalised Bösendorfer. A shaft of brilliant Brazilian sunlight lay across the hall and from the shrubbery outside the front door came the faint sounds of tussling birds. She gave one of those involuntary little sighs which, once sighed, made her wonder whether perhaps she had forgotten to breathe for the last five minutes. She realised she was quite happy – no, that was absurd at sixty-two with a dead husband and a dead son – unexpectedly contented would be a better way of putting it. Everyone knew human lives petered out, but here in this stout house on foreign soil there was every evidence of a culture which would outlive. Here were busts of Schiller and Goethe, of Beethoven, Leibnitz and Bach; here was a library; here were the tones of a piano being brought up to scratch for tonight’s recital. And here – she glanced once more at the board to make quite sure all the cards were straight – were the talks and slide-shows and lectures by residents with particular skills and by visitors of distinction and accomplishment. It was all a small and proper part of the only thing which finally mattered: the handing-on of a tradition, the transmission of civilisation.

  The notice she had just posted was for one of the Reverend Miles Moss’s popular talks which he often gave when passing through Manaos. The
Reverend Moss was the Anglican Chaplain on the Amazon with a parish stretching two thousand miles from Pará to Porto Velho. His real distinction, however, lay in his enthusiastic moth-hunting. He was at present in Manaos and had told her he had just discovered three new varieties of hawk-moth, one of them in a garden not a hundred yards from the Institute. He was witty, eccentric, charming in a fashion which made her feel something lopsided in him to which she was attracted. She had insisted on his speaking before he quit town to return to Pará in time for Christmas at the end of a month’s parochial duties upriver. The Reverend Moss was above all one of those gifted professional amateurs the English seemed to produce in such numbers; he was a considerable authority and in international entomological circles was held in the highest regard. His own collection was magnificent, his work – which from time to time was published by Lord Rothschild – systematic and pioneering. He was also an exhibitor at London’s Royal Academy. What could better symbolise the passing-on of European civilisation than taxonomy itself ? Classify, classify, classify; that was the painstaking but ultimately sure way of making sense of the natural universe. Things proceeded, the unknown became known, the darkness retreated.

  Such were not, of course, Frau von Pussels’ actual thoughts as she approved the neatness of the notice board. They were the basis of a rationale which underpinned her dedication to the Institute and its principles and indeed her public person here in this remote enclave. She had long been the wife of Otto von Pussels and a pillar of Manaos’s cultural life. She was now the widow von Pussels who, once she had emerged from mourning, could beat no retreat. In any case she had nowhere to go unless it were back to an unfamiliar Germany defeated by war and humiliated by treaty in one of whose anonymous military graveyards lay the remains of their son Eusebius. No, there was no retreating. But the sheer barbarousness of the war had undercut everything, including her own confidence in the civilisation she loved. The machineries of mass destruction had been unprecedented yet there had been scarcely any hesitation in using them. The ethical humanism of centuries, the flower of European culture, had stood wiltingly by while on all sides men climbed into cockpits and tanks and submarines, threw poison chemicals at each other, shredded nature and human beings with impartiality. If Frau von Pussels was not alone in having lost some of her faith she was equally in the company of all those who re-asserted the values of their battered civilisation. She was gently, indomitably marked by that human tendency which, seeing how nearly a building was toppled, praises it for having been so soundly constructed; but she had come perilously close to blaming it for the inherent weakness which almost overthrew it.

  Young Nepomuceno had practically finished. He was now vamping in various keys the tunes which only piano-tuners play: pieces seemingly passed on by rote through a guild, since no tuner she had ever met was any sort of pianist. As she passed the doorway, which exhaled a scent of pot-pourri and the mildewed felting inside the opened Bösendorfer, she again experienced a tingle of pleasure at the calm and purposefulness of it. Here in the middle of however many million square kilometres of jungle, dotted with naked savages still occupied with blowpipes and shrinking each others’ heads, a cultivated young man had just tuned a very beautiful musical instrument on which later that evening an Italian girl was to play Scarlatti, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Busoni. It was going on. It was proceeding. The darkness would have to take a further step backwards.

  In at the front door, catching her in a white blast of light at the foot of the grand staircase, came Raymundo the messenger boy. Raymundo, a handsome mestiço lad in his teens with glittery black eyes, had various duties about the Institute in reward for which he was fed and clothed and given a converted pigeon-loft to live in. This was an airy den of which he was greatly proud and for two years he had been showing the kitchen girls the rooftop panorama it afforded of the town. One of his duties was to go down to the dockside and obtain a passenger list of every sizeable ship which visited Manaos. He offered one now, the pages very white in his brown hand.

  ‘Our latest visitors?’ Frau von Pussels asked him in lingua geral. ‘You’re a good boy, Raymundo.’

  ‘It’s the Hildebrand, senhora.’

  ‘I know it is. I ought to recognise its hooter by now.’ She took the list with that pleasurable anticipation such things give in out-of-the-way places. Now and then people one knew turned up unexpectedly, but more often there were visitors whose names were familiar and who could be persuaded to give a talk, a lantern-slide show, a recital. She had a considerable knowledge of who was who in the arts and sciences of the Western world and in turn had herself become a minor celebrity whose name was widely known as that of a person one could not leave Manaos without visiting. Now she smoothed out the sheets of the Hildebrand’s passenger list and froze, one shoe caught in a puddle of light on the tread of the first stair. There was a long silence.

  ‘Es musste passieren,’ she said half aloud.

  ‘Senhora?’

  Realising she had been staring through the boy she smiled and shook her head, dismissing him. She scanned the rest of the list but there were no other names she knew. Her foot in its light-puddle turned slowly and as slowly rose to the tread above as if leaving glue. In the empty space where it had been the mineral flecks in the white marble sparkled like exploding particles of dust. She went up to her office and opened the shutters enough to permit the energetic half-light of an excluded tropic day to bring the room and its furnishings to life. Sitting at her desk she wrote a careful letter in English on the Institute’s headed writing-paper.

  Dear Sir Edward,

  News of your arrival has just reached me via the grapevine which, in places such as this, operates with the efficient self-interest of an isolated community greedy for contacts with the ‘movers and shakers’ of the world outside.

  In any event, welcome to Manaos. Since as a long-term resident here I am certain this is your first visit I wonder if you would permit me to offer my services in the capacity of a guide? From the rubric at the head of this somewhat bombastic stationery you will see that I hold some small position in what are loosely called ‘cultural circles’ here. But lest this conjure up for you the image of an earnest harridan with spectacles a-glitter with artistic fervour let me assure you that my late husband was a commerçant of not merely local standing and that one way and another access to virtually any door in these parts is guaranteed.

  Whether or not you care to avail yourself of this private offer of mine, might I anyway in my official capacity humbly request that you find a moment to pay our Institute a visit? You would be doing us a great honour and not least because internationally-celebrated artists are few and far between in these parts nowadays. You would also discover that our library here has a not inconsiderable section of Elgariana as evidence of a longstanding admiration for your music and yourself.

  Respectfully yours,

  Magdalena von Pussels

  She laid down her pen and re-read what she had written. Too effusive? Certainly it was a bit wordy, a bit long. Too much about her own and her husband’s credentials? And might not the tone – beneath the conventional phrases – be construed as slightly informal? That piece of self-mockery about the harridan, for example. There was also the quotation from O’Shaughnessy which maybe hinted at too intimate a knowledge … Above all, why hadn’t she the courage to identify herself ? She took up her pen, poised it to delete, expunge, alter, re-write entirely. Instead she addressed an envelope, folded the letter with a sigh and sealed it. It was too difficult. She could have written twenty versions but there was no single correct or even plausible way to write to a man one had not seen for forty years but whose career one had followed score by score, magazine article by magazine article, month-old press cutting by month-old press cutting.

  Downstairs in the hall she met the Nepomuceno boy just leaving with his little leather roll of tuning forks and keys.

  ‘It sounded very sweet to me,’ she said. ‘Are you happy?’

&n
bsp; ‘With the tuning … As good as I am able … But the action … Several notes were slow and sticky. The climate, you see. French chalk … Now …’

  She had long grown accustomed to the young man’s peculiar speech which one might have taken for hopeless diffidence until one noticed his gaze which never left the face of the person he was addressing. She had decided it was more a boredom with the effort required to compose whole sentences. Once the meat had been expressed the remains of the thought was allowed to run off. She had no idea what would become of him. Of his intelligence there was no doubt. He had an excellent ear but practically no musical talent. On the other hand Professor Almeirim spoke of him as a mathematical genius but one whose numerical arguments proceeded in much the same way as his verbal, something which might well disqualify him from serious consideration by the University of Rio de Janeiro’s Mathematics Department where his application was already lodged. Still, budding genius or brilliant dunce there was no reason why he might not at the age of nineteen be required to act as an errand-boy, so instead of summoning Raymundo once more from kitchen regions or pigeon-loft Frau von Pussels handed him her letter.

  ‘I’m sure you wouldn’t mind slipping down with this,’ she said firmly. ‘It’s rather important that it reaches the ship within the hour if possible and Raymundo …’ she let the thought trail away in the young man’s own style.

  ‘Certainly, Frau von Pussels. You can rely … I hope the recital …’

  The front door opened and closed with a silent blare of light. Somewhere in the distant regions the kitchen staff could be heard preparing the refreshments the Institute served in the garden to anybody who cared to drop in to use the library, read a German newspaper or simply chat over a cup of chocolate. She went into the salon through a drift of dust-motes, a beautiful spacious room stretching the depth of the house half filled with rows of jacaranda-wood chairs. She walked its length smelling polish and pot-pourri as well as an odour of burnt jam which drifted robustly in through the net curtains of a pair of French windows standing ajar behind the piano. The goiabada or guava jelly the kitchens habitually made just as habitually burned: it was now one of a lexicon of familiar Institute smells of which she had grown fond. Her own villa, by contrast, contained scarcely a single smell of the least emotional significance for her. Its rumbling machineries sometimes contributed a faint oily aroma which only added to the illusion of being on board ship.