by Ted Simon
I should have been excited by the prospect of landing, but I found that I was nervous. Maybe I had a premonition, though it did not figure consciously as such. I simply balked at the complexity of the process that lay ahead of me, knowing that the motorcycle would create difficulties and involve me in long and painful exposure to bureaucracy. I had two prejudices about Brazil; that the bureaucracy was totally corrupt, and that the police were violent and suspicious, particularly where journalists were concerned. Although I was not travelling as a journalist, my connection with the Sunday Times would have to be declared since they were guaranteeing the bond on the motorcycle. I felt wrong-footed. Vividly in my mind were accounts of police brutality and torture that I had heard in London. Like all strong prejudices they not only prepared me for the worst, they paved the way.
Captain Fafoutis already had the crew at work opening the hatches. Winches whirred. Derricks clattered into position. Deck hands hammered and shouted. There were four massive tarpaulins to lift, wedges to knock out, planks to throw about, girders to hoist and lower, and temporary hatch covers to position so that a sudden shower could not destroy the cargo in the holds. The ship rattled and banged from stem to stern.
At sea the Zoë G had begun to seem quite respectable, even passing fair, with her freshly painted green decks and white bulkheads, the rust and grime effaced and the filth of Lourenco Marques washed away by the Cape gales. Now her corsets were coming undone again. She opened her mouth and showed her blackened stumps, and the satisfied hum of her engine gave way to raucous dockside obscenities. At sea she was a lady, but in port she was a trollop.
Her holds were about to be raped of fifty thousand bags of cashew nuts, each bag weighing as much as an average man. It was supposed to be done in two days and the job meant hauling out the bags at the rate of eighteen a minute for forty-eight hours non-stop.
They had to be loaded on to lorries and carted off to a warehouse. Was anyone in Fortaleza capable of running such an operation? Captain Fafoutis shrugged. 'If not,' he said, 'they will have to pay penalty.'
The docks were more clearly in view. A row of big grey sheds, the silo, a cobbled quay, the rails running along it, the big travelling crane on its four stiff legs like a great creature frozen in pre-history. One other ship, smaller and rustier than the Zoë G, lay there tied up and lifeless. The sky was uniformly grey now, and heavy. Soon it would rain.
The ship winched herself alongside, a rough gangplank went down and the port doctor came aboard, followed soon after by a stream of
officials. I went back to my cabin to gather the last few things together, and felt a slight sense of panic at something being irrevocably over, felt the powerful attraction of this little floating universe of peeling veneer, frayed cloth, unvarying routine and familiar faces. The Captain's cabin, next to my own, became so dense with smoke and dealing that it oozed illegality like a prohibition honky tonk. I wanted badly to be part of what was going on next door, to be one of the gang.
I went out to look down on the quay and saw a small wooden table move past below me. It was covered by a transparent plastic pyramid which shielded a display of coloured souvenirs and shells. As it moved along the sandals of the man beneath it became visible, and he parked it against a wall and fussed over it with a duster. Another man in torn cotton clothing arranged custard apples against the colossal steel base of the travelling crane. They resembled green hand grenades, and he handled them with appropriate delicacy.
Lorries were already arriving from the dock gates, and stevedores poured into the ship over the gangplank. Within minutes the derricks began rumbling and the first net full of bags swung up from number two hold, with numbers one and three soon discharging too. The bags came up a ton at a time, with three lorries loading together, and a fleet lined up and waiting. Somebody, I saw, was determined to beat the penalty.
Eventually a deck hand came to fetch me to be interviewed by the police. I followed him to the gangway outside the Captain's cabin, where two men stood watching the unloading. They were ridiculously sinister, figures from a fantasy. They belonged to an age of crime which I thought had long since passed, and which to be truthful I thought had only been got up for films and television. The boss was a big ungainly man in a black leather jacket. He wore dark glasses with shiny metal rims, and his face was not only swarthy, pock-marked and scarred, but disfigured by lumps large enough to rival his natural features. He seemed to draw on two quite separate traditions of violence and could have been cast as a Hit Man for Himmler. His stunted and weasel-faced companion I could only describe as a side-kick.
However, they were quite civil, and asked me to fill in a form typed on a piece of rough paper. Among other things it had a space for my mother's Christian names. Then we went to my cabin to inspect my things. The big man was jovial enough but spoke no English, and the little man translated clumsily. They asked me several times about 'scuba'. They were determined that I had underwater diving equipment somewhere and my denials obviously surprised them. They seemed baffled and suspicious. After a little while they asked me to go ashore and have my passport stamped.
I walked along the quay, on firm ground again, absorbed in the strange illusion that the cobbles were sliding beneath my feet. Two more men in plain clothes received me in a wooden hut. Unlike the first pair they were not caricatures. The young one introduced himself as Samuel and spoke school English, mostly in the present tense. He had a hand-written list of details he was supposed to get from me, and they also included my mother's Christian names, which are a little unusual. I began to think of them assuming a life of their own and travelling for ever in Brazilian official channels. My father's occupation was also demanded again, and I replied with over-emphasis, 'He is dead!', as though they had been caught walking on his grave. This, I found, gained a little extra respect, though in reality I had hardly known my father.
Samuel also asked about my diving equipment, but seemed content to hear that there was none. He then gave me the same form to complete as I had already filled in on the ship, and it included all the questions he had just asked me. I did it without comment. It seemed pointless to object to frontier officials wasting one's time, since they are perfectly placed to waste as much of it as they wish. One just tried to make sure that patience was not seen as servility, a fine distinction.
In all this life-consuming rigmarole of irrelevancies, common to all frontiers, one new fact stood out clearly; the idea of going round the world on a motorcycle meant nothing to these men. It was doubtful even whether they believed me, and their disbelief disturbed me more than it should have done. I expected people to look at me and know that I was genuine. Without this tribute I became cold and defensive. How else could I explain my presence, my strange clothing? Like a real cowboy stumbling accidentally into a fancy dress party I wanted to shoot to prove my gun was loaded.
My passport kindled some interest. It had already been stamped through fourteen pages of visas in Africa, and the police lingered long over the Arabic and Amharic scripts. Finally, on page nineteen, I got my stamp: BRASIL ENTRADA 22.05.74 TURISTA, signed Joao Z de Oliveira Costa.
'Can I go now?' I asked.
'You are free to go anywhere,' said Samuel. This proved quite soon to be a wild exaggeration.
My cabin was still locked as I had left it, but I saw immediately that someone had been searching my things. A tube of salt tablets was lying loose on the bed. Whoever had looked did not care whether I knew. Nothing appeared to be missing. Had they been looking for drugs? Or was it another attempt to discover my diving gear? I began, even then, to think I might be walking into a trap, but the idea seemed hysterical and I tried to dismiss it.
With Captain Fafoutis I shared a taxi into town, and we followed the shoreline round the bay. I had never been anywhere that looked so wet. It was not the quantity of water that impressed me, but rather the way it seemed to have permeated everything. It covered the road in lakes, partially concealing great subsidences. In other place
s sand bars lay across our path, swept down from the dunes on the left. The buildings alongside seemed sodden to the point of dissolution, their stone surfaces eroded and spongy, their plaster long since fallen away. We drove a long way, slithering and bouncing. The people on the sidewalks, moving along their own obstacle course, did nothing to lift my spirits. Their tobacco-coloured skin was all that distinguished them to my jaundiced eye from the population of any industrial suburb, with their downcast faces and ill-fitting, mass-produced clothing.
The shipping agent's office was of the old-fashioned brown variety. With different furniture it could as well have been a bedroom or a salon. The agent, an elderly man, listened impassively as though I were a young nephew reciting my homework. My loose shirt and jeans, and the funny belt with the pouch on it did not qualify me as a serious client.
'The customs need a bank guarantee against the importation of the motorcycle,' I told him, 'and this guarantee is being provided by the Sunday Times in London. You have heard of it, perhaps? The newspaper?'
His expression indicated mounting distaste. I hurried on.
'The guarantee was lodged in Rio de Janeiro. Now I must tell them to have it transferred here to Fortaleza.'
The agent began to turn away towards the door.
'So I would like, with your help, to send a telex message, unless . . .' I caught sight of a telephone, 'unless perhaps I could telephone.'
This last remark seemed to penetrate where nothing else had.
'Impossible,' he said.
T would reverse the charges, of course.'
'It is impossible,' he repeated with a voice like a rubber stamp.
The telephone was one of those ancient models with the mouthpiece on a stalk like a bakelite rose. It did not seem adequate for reaching London, and I let the idea go.
'Well, when can I get a telex message off?' I asked.
'You will not get through,' he said.
'Why not?' I asked.
'Impossible,' he said. 'You must use the telex.'
'Yes,' I said. T would like to send a telex message. Do you have telex?'
'Of course,' he said.
'When can I use it?'
'It is too late,' he said. 'Please wait.' And he left the room.
I sat down in a brown chair and considered how much time I should
donate to this useless exercise in order to make sure that the agent did not actually block my progress. I roughed out a short message to the Sunday Times, and allowed the agent to enter and leave the room once without demanding his attention. When he returned ten minutes later I felt I had shown enough humility and asked him where the telex machine was. He avoided the question and left the room again, but an elderly clerk was obliged to remain and I harassed him with questions about time differences and routing details until, in frustration at not being able to understand me or dispose of me, he took me downstairs to the street and into another office a few doors along. Within this office was yet another smaller office, and when the door was opened, icy air struck me, freezing my sweaty shirt to my skin.
Where before I had seen only brown wooden desks, I now saw green metal filing cabinets. A young man in a tight-fitting suit, and a shirt with shootable cuffs was using a telephone of recent design. Through the hum I heard a pronounced 'clack' that focussed my eyes immediately on a bright new telex machine chattering its pre-taped message to its remote counterpart across the globe.
Walter Sa was a grave and fashionable young man who spoke good English and, apparently, also got things done, for he was the man in charge of beating the penalty at the Zoë G. He agreed immediately to send my message. He warned me that there might be no line open until later, and I should not expect a reply before the following day.
I should have thanked him cordially, relaxed, and left his refrigerated office to go about my proper business, which was getting used to the climate, seeing something of the strange city and learning the language. I did not. What I had already seen of the town depressed me. The strange behaviour of the police frightened me. I wanted to get away from both, but as long as the bike was locked up in the customs shed I could not move. I became obsessed by the need to speed up the process, and could think of nothing else. I sat for hours in the artificial atmosphere of Sa's office watching the clock, willing the channels to London to open, willing the message to arrive, willing the answer to return there and then. It was absurd. The message went out as expected at 4 p.m.; that was 7 p-.m. in London, and too late for a reply to be possible until the next day.
My back was stiff with tension, and the chill air had done it no good. I took a token walk up the hill into town, but my heart was not in it. Torrents of rainwater were rushing down the street, making a muddy river over wildly uneven surfaces of flagstone, cobble, cement and earth. Halfway up the hill was a bridge being either restored or demolished, it was hard to know which. Above me loomed a grey granite wall retaining the embanked garden of a colonial fort, and on the wall stood a soldier, wearing a waterproof cape and carrying a rifle. As I passed he gave me a
malevolent stare, locking on the wallet at my waist. So, I noticed, did others. I began to learn that in this part of America one thing you looked for on a stranger was a gun.
Then the clouds began to weep again, and I lost what heart I had and scuttled back to the ship in a taxi. The shower had stopped when I arrived. The storm covers were being removed from the hatches and the cashews were swinging out. The work continued under floodlights through the night. My dreams were modified to include the rhythmic rumbling of the derricks, and the pace of it kept my own anxiety alive.
In the morning, over an oily egg fried in garlic which I had come to appreciate, I learned that I would have to leave the ship that day. The Zoë G was expected to sail the following morning before dawn. I took a taxi back to the agent's office but there was no message, and I took another aimless walk into town. It was a shock to discover that the Spanish I had learned was no use at all. Even when I read out the Portuguese words from a menu at a fruit juice counter I could not make myself understood, a blow to my self-esteem because I had always been good at picking up the 'feel' of a language. In revenge I developed a senseless dislike of Portuguese and determined not to bother with it, telling myself that I would soon be in Spanish-speaking America and that to learn Portuguese was a waste of time.
As soon as I reasonably could, I returned to the shipping office and sat, frozen inwardly and out, waiting. They were patient and tolerant. I was offered frequent cups of cafesinho and bottles of Fanta.
Shortly before midday the message came.
It was in three parts.
The bank guarantee had been arranged with the Banco do Brasil in Rio de Janeiro.
I was introduced to Father Walsh at the Acao Social of Sao Raimundo, with an address and a telephone number.
It was suggested that I go to a town called Iguatu where there had been a serious flood disaster, and write about it.
I was delighted to have some information which might lead to the release of the motorcycle, for the bike was the key to my freedom. The introduction to the priest, who I gathered must be a Catholic missionary, promised at least a foothold on this slippery shore, and gave something more to look forward to than bureaucratic entanglements.
The reference to Iguatu scared me ... I had no doubt that telex messages were monitored by the police. In due course they would read that the Sunday Times had asked me to report on a flood disaster in the state of Ceara. 'This', they would say, 'is an odd way for a tourist to be carrying on. Let's ask him again where he's hidden his snorkel.'
Sá gave me the use of his phone, and I dialled the number in the telex. A woman's voice sang in my ear. 'Quern estd falando?"
The words meant nothing to me, and I asked for Padre Walsh. There were some scuffling sounds, and a man came to the telephone who by pure chance turned out to be Walsh. I explained how I had heard of him. In a brisk, young voice with a powerful Irish inflection he established quickly where
I was and what I needed, and arranged to meet me with a car an hour later.
'If I'm not there on the dot, don't worry. I'll be stopped somewhere on the way with my head under the bonnet. We have the most egregious collection of cars you'll ever see. I'll bring the jatao - that means jet liner-it's a flashy performer but it has black moods.'
The jatao was on schedule. Walsh leaned across the empty seat to shout my name through the window.
I liked the look of him immediately. He was a vigorous man of about thirty in a loose shirt and sandals with a friendly but shrewd face. I climbed in to the green VW and he suggested lunch before I had even begun to wonder how to mention it. We went to a fish restaurant on the beach. The food was delicious, the beer was good and cold, and Walsh was a grand talker. His speech came fast and furious and often his accent made it hard for me to catch, but by the end of lunch he had illuminated the political landscape of Northern Brazil, the church's history, the changes forced upon it and the present role, as he saw it, of a Catholic priest in Ceara. He was witty, comprehensive and wonderfully free of humbug or pious rectitude.
Perhaps the major surprise for a pagan like myself was that he concentrated so thoroughly on the pragmatic approach. As a reaction to the shameful history of the church's indifference to its poor flock, it was refreshing. When Walsh spoke about the church or his mission it was with the excitement of someone engrossed in a stupendous theatrical production, though whether as actor, director, stage manager or critic was unclear. Presumably the show was put on for the greater glory of God, but the presumption remained tacit. Walsh had one criterion for a smash hit, and that was 'Would it send the people away better off?'
