I want you to imagine an old man wearing only a sarong and a tight-fitting skull cap sitting cross-legged, back straight. Arrayed before him are dozens of leather puppets resting like so many butterflies on the ground. Sitting cross-legged, he dips their handles in a bowl of holy water, chanting mantras to purify them, a necessity before the play can begin. Suddenly he claps a wooden cymbal, the gamelan players begin, and two young women in ornate costumes come out to dance. When they finish, the puppets come to life, darting back and forth between the lamp and the screen while the old man tells their story in a high-pitched, singsong voice that mingles with the applause and laughter of the audience he can’t see. The business of the shadow theater is with bygone days, but in the skills of the dalang who fills his hands with puppets and curls the tips of his fingers into strings that open and close their eyes and mouths, in the presentation of these shadows that requires touching the puppets to the screen for their features to come into focus, in the way their bodies blur when he twists them to signal arrivals and departures, I could see a parallel to Conrad’s work and knew that if he could have been there he would have seen it even more complexly. I understood that what matters, all that matters, is the story unfolding on the screen. The dalang is only the medium through which it passes and comes to life.
Later, on the way back, as I turned into the hotel from the street, I could hear music from Dykinck’s bar, a Western tune that sounded watery and washed out after the gamelan. When I walked in, the sound grew suddenly louder, almost deafening, the atmosphere of the room had changed, its gloomy quiet replaced by a nervous erotic mix of music, the perfume of the bar girls, and the sharp scent of liquor. The tables surrounding the dance floor were all full but I saw an empty stool at the bar next to two women, one in a bright yellow sarong, the other in green, not the only prostitutes in the place by any means, but to my eyes the most appealing. The moment I offered to buy the woman in yellow a drink, her friend went looking for other fish to fry. When I told her I’d like her to go upstairs with me she smiled and told me how much it would be and I paid in advance, that being the custom of the country.
Hand in hand, we went up to the second floor and stopped on the veranda to watch the punts with lanterns dangling from their bows glide by like so many fireflies. I remembered standing just like that with Ayu, both of us half-drunk on the wavy colors reflected on the water, and I was still thinking of Ayu when we went inside. The woman disrobed as she walked around the room and then stood outlined against the open window, beautiful in the way Balinese women are, her body glowing bronze in the lamplight.
We made love in the tent of the mosquito netting, which made the bed seem like a bower, the thin shadows cast by its strings patterning her face and shoulders, disappearing in her black hair fanned out over the pillow, raven-black hair, the color of Ayu’s. I closed my eyes then, and the feel of the woman’s hands on my shoulders reminded me of Ayu’s touch as did the sound of her breathing. There were a few moments when Ayu seemed to have returned to me and her spirit inhabited that other woman’s body—moments when the dream of her seemed to become a shadowy reality. But I could not hold on to Ayu no matter how hard I tried and she left me with this woman in my arms, this woman and her discarded yellow dress that lay like a tired ghost on the floor.
VI
* * *
Maps of The World
I THINK THAT I should take a minute or two to catch up with my life, Ford, my writerly life whose quiet and stasis contrast so wildly with the adventures I’ve been recounting. In this regard, I can’t help citing something you wrote in your dedicatory letter to Stella Ford that prefaces The Good Soldier: “I was astounded at the work I must have put into the construction of the book, at the intricate tangle of references and cross-references. Nor is that to be wondered at, for though I wrote it with comparative rapidity, I had it hatching within myself for fully another decade. That was because the story is a true story . . .”
That happens to be exactly how I feel about the work I’ve done during the last two months I have spent aboard the junk. When I went down to the Old Port for a break from the pressures of writing this memoir, I had no idea that I would stay on her so long, but I wrote the whole of the last section aboard, having discovered that she offered an excellent vantage point for looking back over all those years. Events I had forgotten came back, lay about in profusion, rather like the drifting prayers that had dotted the bay. I suppose I need to be on the water rather than looking down on it.
In any case, I sealed the junk this morning and decamped for the bungalow, reasonably satisfied with the work I’d accomplished. I hired a betjak at the foot of the Old Port and on the way home asked the driver to stop at an open-air market. I wandered through narrow lanes between stalls overflowing with fruit and vegetables, spice stands displaying baskets of cumin, oregano, paprika, turmeric, red and yellow and green chilies, fresh fish, live chickens, a bewildering array of food various enough to satisfy any taste. Scattered here and there were stalls offering handicrafts, jewelry, dinnerware, Wayang puppets new and old, clothing, the detritus of Batavian lives forever separated from their original owners, some of which will journey with tourists and sailors and diplomats to the ends of the earth, where they will be enshrined on mantels and tabletops, occasions for memories and the odd story or two, while others will be stuffed into drawers, stored in attics and cellars, seeing the light again only when their owners die and they are sold again or given away.
At one stall a pair of old Wayang puppets caught my eye. Some of their paint had flaked off and they had no provenance as far as the woman knew—from the look of them I thought they might be traceable to a renowned dalang—but I bargained for them anyway, settling on a price that was probably higher than I should have paid. After I returned to the bungalow and put away the food, I drove two nails into the south wall and put them up facing each other, the white wall doing service as a screen. Even though they are motionless they remain wonderfully intense, Ford, like clouds charged with lightning awaiting the conditions that will free their energy.
Soon after I sat down opposite them with the pages I had written on the junk, I saw the puppets as a reflection of you and me in the parlor of the Pent, the firelight throwing our shadows on the walls. We are like them, I think, inhabiting our own white space, our story perhaps less potent than the clash of gods and the creation myths of the Wayang but secularly powerful, as compelling for us as the tales a dalang tells to the hundreds gathered around him, hanging on every word he utters.
On the whole, I think that I have filled you in on everything you need to know, Ford. Now I want to return to the Nellie, picking up the story during the last few days of that fortnight.
BACK TO THAT awful summer of 1924. You may remember that the heat in London broke quite unexpectedly. Within a day, the yellow haze that had choked us drifted across the Channel, where it bedeviled the French. Trees and foliage looked greener, and with the sky blue rather than chrome yellow, a sense of distance and dimension returned. At night the lights of the city were no longer dim so that when I looked across the estuary I could see again the stuttering glow of houses and the tiny sequins of their windows reflecting on the water.
The Nellie had come with a full range of forged steel tools, screwdrivers, knives, hammers, saws, three planes, drills, bits, paint scrapers, good horsehair brushes, cans of paint, special varnish from Copenhagen, good tools with a pleasant heft and feel that made even the most inconsequential task pleasurable. I had rebuilt the second damaged section of her deck, a tricky job that had entailed laying new teak planks along one edge of the starboard side. On the last Tuesday of the fortnight I had carried cans of varnish and brushes and solvent up from the cabin with the intention of finishing the job. With everything set out, I decided to pay an early visit to the post office, where, as usual, I found nothing from Conrad. Back on board I started varnishing the new planks, each brushstroke darkening the wood and bringing out its grain, when I noticed some mov
ement out of the corner of my eye that caused me to look up. It was a boy on a bicycle turning off the road onto the dock. He pedaled slowly, studying the names of the boats, and when he was a little closer I could see that he wore a telegraph office hat and carried a leather pouch slung over his shoulder. Well, Ford, the moment he stopped opposite the Nellie, I was convinced that he had a message from Conrad. The only reason I could think of for him to send a telegram was that Fox-Bourne had agreed to publication.
I put the brush in the varnish can and cleaned my hands on a rag soaked with solvent. Happy as I was for Conrad, as I watched the boy heading for the gangway, I found myself thinking of how Fox-Bourne must have suffered on the way to his decision. Think about it. After years of believing that he was shielded by the Official Secrets Act, Conrad’s cover letter must have dropped him to his knees. And that initial shock would have been nothing compared with the anguish of reading the book. The only equivalent I could think of was walking barefooted across a deck strewn with broken glass. Once he would have started to read he could not have stopped. You know why. As Viereck said, it’s human nature to be drawn to our own image, no matter how unflattering. Conrad had guessed correctly about the fellow, and I realized that the testimony of my own experiences on this earth should have warned me against jumping to conclusions about how he would react, that the pride he felt in Conrad vouchsafing him the power of choice would have fed his moral vanity, one of the few things I know of that will make a person act against his perceived best interests. I imagined Fox-Bourne pacing the bridge of the Brigadier, or the living room of his house, his conscience tugging at him from one side while from the other there was the equally powerful tug of silence. Like everyone who has brushed up against something unsound in his own character—who hasn’t?—he knew the clamor would ease if he could just hold on, and that was what fascinated me, Ford. The telegraph boy, who had reached the deck by then, proved he couldn’t, but why?
“Please, sir,” the boy said, “are you Mr. Malone?”
“I am,” I answered.
“I have a telegram for you.”
Undoing the clasp on his pouch, he removed an envelope and handed it over. The question of why Fox-Bourne hadn’t been able to wait for his crisis of conscience to pass faded as I impatiently opened the envelope, anticipating some clever remark from Conrad, a gentle dig at my shortsightedness. But there was nothing of the kind. Instead, a few terse lines from Jessie informed me that Conrad had died of a heart attack the previous day. They had been at home, and he had seemed fine an hour before it happened. The funeral was to be in Canterbury on the weekend.
I felt as though I had fetched up against something hard, like a good-sized chunk of marble or a mainmast, the blow causing my head to fill with the echo, a kind of obdurate ululation, a sound appropriate to death. To the best of my recollection, I was aware of nothing else. As I look back now, I think the flatness of my response was due to the collision of the victorious narrative I had blithely concocted with Jessie’s, which shattered it. I stared at her words, all in capital letters, thick, black, indisputably authoritative, her sentences shorn of everything but cause and effect. Conrad was dead. Only minutes earlier he had been alive in my mind. I had forgotten about the boy, but suddenly he was a presence again, the unwelcome messenger, bringer of sad tidings and heartache, a thin boy of thirteen or fourteen charged with a terrible responsibility, whose work made him a daily witness to anguish. While I was fishing around in my pocket for some change, intending to send him on his way, I felt the need to speak to the little chap. It seemed indecent for the two of us to stand there without acknowledging what had happened.
“My friend has died,” I said.
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“He was a great writer.”
“Of what, sir?”
“Stories, novels. Maps of the world.”
“Maps, sir?”
“To show us where we’ve been and where we’re going.”
I handed him some coins.
“Will you be wanting to reply, sir?”
“No,” I told him, “not just now. Thank you for riding all the way out here.”
As I watched him return to his bicycle the Powers favored me with a vision of Conrad disappearing into the weave of ropes and masts and I couldn’t help but wonder if he had known that death’s hand was resting on his shoulder. If he had, had that contributed to his need to tell me his story, get it off his chest before it was too late? No answers, of course, but the questions settled like seeds in my mind.
I hadn’t budged since reading the telegram. My eyes swept over the deck, coming to rest on the can of varnish with the brush sticking out of it. It seemed an odd thing to mark a passage in my life but that was exactly what it did. I thought again of how Conrad had been alive to me when I put it down, how I had imagined his witty quips. I was left with the brush in the can, the two colors on the deck, the section I had been working on glowing like ice under a winter sun. I finished the job, Ford. In some odd way I can’t explain, the work was comforting.
Afterward I walked up to Sebold’s shop and used his phone to call Harrison. When his secretary said that he was in an important meeting I told the man I didn’t care if he had an audience with the pope, I damned well had to talk to him. While I waited I gazed out a large window that framed the river traffic, a familiar scene for someone who has spent years living on the water, the movement and sounds and drifts of smoke coming together in a kind of visual elegy not only for Conrad but also for our past with the old gang. Change lies at the heart of our lives. It is one of the undisputed things we can count on. And yet we are never prepared for the swing of the wheel when it comes, are we? It always occurs as a surprise and I’ll wager that is true for the most pessimistic of us, the most disappointed. I suppose it is a blessing but it makes the moment when we see the change more poignant, for we still feel as we reach out that we’ll take hold of something solid when it turns out to be a shimmering mirage.
Harrison’s irritated voice startled me out of my reverie.
“What the devil is so all-fired important?” he said.
“Conrad’s dead,” I answered, delivering the news in telegraphese. “Yesterday. Heart attack. The funeral’s Saturday.”
Harrison could do no better. We were like two men who had had the wind knocked out of them, capable of speaking only in whispers. I doubt that we talked more than a minute or two, just long enough for me to offer to call Barnes and Kepler. He thought it was a good idea for all of us to go up to Canterbury together.
WELL, FORD, MY memory of the next few days is as blurred as things seen through the window of a speeding car. I helped a friend with some brazing work. Otherwise I stayed busy on the Nellie, dawdling over repairs I could have finished in half the time. The hours dragged out interminably or passed in an instant. I would look up and see a ship that seemed not to have moved in an hour. One that had loomed nearby would be reduced to the size of a pinhead in the blink of an eye. When I thought about Conrad it was through the screen of the story of the Brigadier. Always I wondered about his nameless book. At night, when I didn’t feel like visiting a pub, I read in my bunk, wrapped in an ancient afghan my dear old aunt had knitted. For reasons that escape me now, I was going through McCauley again and found some relief in his recording of the Empire’s fall.
I took to walking, wandering down lanes and through squares, moving farther away from my part of the city. There was a sense of relief in venturing into new neighborhoods, even run-down places where voices came from windows or alleys, sounds of the unknown that I welcomed because they helped me keep my feelings in check. I felt as though I were looking for something the way you do in dreams, without knowing whether you’re pursuing a person or an object or a place. This was especially true late at night when the streetlights played tricks, beckoning but revealing nothing. Still I was compelled to go on, half convinced that I was closing in on something, an idea, a way of understanding, a thread I might follow back to
its source.
That Friday before the funeral I stayed aboard, in no frame of mind to go out in public. The previous night I had gotten my good suit out, brushed it, and hung it up to let the wrinkles fall out. It swayed on the hanger whenever the Nellie moved, the trouser legs approximating a man shuffling along, an image that brought to mind thoughts about my own mortality and that of the old gang, and left me uneasy over how swiftly time was passing for all of us.
Fortunately there was enough in the way of housekeeping to stay busy, and when I finished tidying up the cabin I put some fish and oysters and vegetables into a pot for chowder, seasoned the mixture, and decided to read while it finished cooking. I chose a little Conrad for the comfort of his voice. All his books were on my shelves, including those I had bought from Thomas and Sons. I tipped out Under Western Eyes. It had been waiting for me at a post office in Sydney when I had arrived at the end of a voyage that had been spoilt by a brush with the tail end of a typhoon. Razumov’s tribulations, his determined slogging toward the light, had taken hold of my imagination for three solid days and nights. I wanted to revisit the book, but as I took it down my attention drifted from the heavy volume with its stout boards and cream-colored cloth with the title and his name in thick black letters to my remembrance of the Fox-Bourne manuscript, which might prove to be the finest thing Conrad had ever written, the last labor of an old man steeped in his art, the equivalent of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. He had put all his skill, all his passion into that story, and because of that it seemed as precious as a last will and testament. I had seen other manuscripts of his whose pages bore deep impressions from the pressure of his pen, the marks of a living hand that made the paper curl and emit a brittle sound when it was touched. By the time I finished dinner—it was an excellent chowder as I recall, thick and spicy—the manuscript had assumed the status of a relic, like a bone of a saint displayed under thick glass. I made up my mind to see that it was preserved and properly disposed of, which meant that Fox-Bourne would have to return it directly to Jessie or to me as an intermediary. After I recovered from the funeral I would track him down. When I found him, I would make it clear that as an old and devoted friend of Conrad’s I would respect his decision concerning publication, tell him that I didn’t give a damn whether the story ever came to light, that the important issue, the only one that mattered, was preserving the text. The only difficulty I could foresee lay in convincing him that he was safe. I was certain that Jessie would be willing to vouch for my discretion. With that out of the way, I saw no reason why he would object to returning it.
Sailors on the Inward Sea Page 18
