by Ted Simon
I sat for a while, but it was an atmosphere that emphasized my solitude. Without the language and with no bike to establish my credentials I felt too shy to make contact. I was about to leave when my attention was seized by two guitarists sitting side by side against the wall of the arcade.
They had both begun to play, and one was singing. His voice sent Shockwaves through me. He took the syllables of the first line and hammered them out with distinct and equal emphasis, like blows on an anvil, before leading into the melody that completed the verse. Then his companion replied in the same manner. The effect was wonderfully potent. I felt the same astonishment that always overtakes me when with a few bold strokes something familiar is made strange and thrilling again.
For the first time since landing in Brazil I experienced something I could call beautiful, and it gave me a place at last in this strange new world and made me hungry again for life. I only understood afterwards the significance of that moment.
Suddenly immersed in the tropical poverty of Latin America I was struggling not only with personal problems but with moral and ethical questions of great complexity. How poor is poverty? How rich is rich? Should priests tend bodies or souls? In whose interests were they acting? Would the Indians be better or worse off in a democracy? Can a democracy function with an illiterate population? What kind of aid helps, and what kind is useless, and what kind corrupts?
Yet underneath all this clinical questioning, what concerned me really was a much more direct and personal doubt. What I wanted to ask was 'How can I or anyone possibly live a good life amidst all this squalor and humidity and decay and indifference? Where is the point of it? What is there to lift up the heart and the spirit? What can an individual pit against the power of nature and the apathy of others? Where is the value that lasts?'
I badly needed some ground in which to root my feelings, and the singers gave it to me.
I had heard Father Walsh say, with honesty and due consideration, that he could not rate beauty very high in his scheme of things, and I had reproached myself for letting it bother me. When there were people sick and starving and homeless, how could it matter whether they ate off china or plastic, whether their roof was tile or tin, whether the priests lived in a harmonious and pleasing home or a soulless echoing institution? Wasn't it enough that these men gave themselves utterly to the poor, and taught them how to grasp at just a few of the material benefits of the Machine Age which had left them so far behind? Wasn't there enough beauty in the hearts and actions of these raw-boned foreigners to offset all the ugliness of their new pragmatism?
I saw peasants coming from hand-made houses to receive help from men who lived in squared-off boxes lined with inert substances and lit from corner to corner. Naturally they would fix on this bright new rectangular life as their ultimate ambition. While in my world millions of descendants of Europe's peasantry were longing to struggle out of those
same sterile spaces and back to something resembling a life with natural things.
Was the whole 'underdeveloped' world queuing up to be put through the sausage machine, to come out uniform and plump and covered in the same shiny plastic skin? It was not the first time I had seen the human condition in such mean and aimless terms. The same depressing vision had overwhelmed me in the slums of Tunis, the tin huts of Ethiopia, the shanties around Nairobi and the black township of Soweto. Try as I would to imagine a rosier future, I could see only ever-increasing numbers of people determined to seize on the resources of the earth and pervert them into greater and greater heaps of indestructible concrete and plastic ugliness, only to look and learn and retreat in penitent dismay before the next wave of 'developing' citizens. And there seemed to be nothing that I or any individual could do that would make a lot of difference to the outcome. I met many who shared my pessimism, and some who felt personally insulted by it, but I never heard anyone propose a convincing alternative.
It was my weakness to become obsessed by these gloomy abstractions. I made it my duty to save the world, and each time I failed I felt as lifeless and meaningless as the grey army of unborn billions whose future I was trying to settle.
Again and again I had to be taught that one single life-giving act is worth more than a million speculations. Once, in Ethiopia, I was restored by nothing more than a smile. As I rode out of Gondar a woman walked towards me dressed in pink and carrying a parasol. When she saw me approaching (and I was an unusual, perhaps frightening, sight there) her face was transformed by the most extraordinary smile I have ever seen. It shone, it beamed towards me with such life and depth that I was her son, her lover, her saviour all in one. She bowed quickly but deeply several times as I passed, but maintaining that same radiating quality of happiness, so that I was raised to the Gods for a long, long time.
In Fortaleza it was those two men with their urgent, sad voices who reminded me what life was about and what made it worth living.
I met the manager of the Bank of London next morning. He was a fair-haired, youngish man who seemed to exude without effort all the qualities of superior competence that the man at the Banco do Brasil had tried so hard to project, but of course I was heavily biased. In his studiously furnished sanctum we drank sweet black coffee. He asked intelligent and flattering questions about my journey and described his life in Brazil. He enjoyed Fortaleza and was physically comfortable there, and being with him raised my morale another notch. I expected that we would meet again some evening and I looked forward to being drawn into the life of the city while I waited out the formalities. Meanwhile it was clear that the problem of the guarantee could be safely left with him.
To encourage my rising optimism I treated myself to the luxury of a restaurant with clean linen and flowers on the table. The weather conspired with me and waited until I had taken my seat before sending the midday rain smashing down on the flagstones outside. I revelled in the freshness of the prawns, and discovered stewed cashew fruit. The rain continued. I smoked several cigarettes and copied the menu on a paper napkin, determined now to begin learning the language. Still it rained, and eventually I could put the visit to the police off no longer. In a corner of my mind they continued to agitate and disturb my peace. I wanted to be shot of them.
By the time I had found a taxi my clothes were wet. I was still unsuitably and obtrusively dressed. My shirt sleeves were long, my jeans too hot and heavy. I still had no sandals, and my shoes and socks quickly became soaked in the streams of water gushing over the pavements and gutters, but I expected the afternoon sun to dry me out.
Samuel received me with profuse apologies, looking younger than ever.
'Now you come for Policia Federal. It is nothing. Some questions only. Nothing. I am so-o-rry. I will be your friend.'
We sat side by side in the back of a shabby black police car and returned the way I had come, as Samuel continued to soothe me.
'Policia Federal is not very long away. I shall like to talk you more for my English.'
I saw the cathedral pass by, and then the car stopped before a white villa set back from the road with a flower garden in front.
It was a large and irregular building distinguished from its neighbours by a web of aerials above the roof. We walked down a red-tiled corridor to a small reception area at the back. I was surprised by the clean and prosperous look of it all, as though they were doing good business. We sat on modern black plastic cushions and gazed at wood panelled walls, and waited.
We waited more than an hour. Finally a young woman came up to me. She was slim, pretty, hardly more than a girl really, and dressed for a holiday or a date with a boyfriend. She seemed very composed, and smiled easily at me.
'I am Franziska,' she said. T will interpret for you. Please come.'
This can't be so bad, I thought irrelevantly, as she led me into a very small office. It seemed to be full of men packed in cigarette smoke. I was seated at a desk facing a small, tough-looking fellow in shirt sleeves. Franziska sat on my right between two other men, her green
mini skirt well above her shapely coffee-coloured knees. I smiled at her. She looked grave, but not too grave.
Then the man across the desk began shouting. He made me quite nervous. He sounded very belligerent indeed. Franziska began to translate.
'He says "You have been to Iguatu. You have been taking pictures. Who were you with? What pictures did you take? Who were you talking to?" '
Franziska's nicely modulated voice did nothing to dispel the brutal impact of the little man as he sat staring angrily at me, or the menace of the other two who seemed to be counting my vertebrae. There was obviously no point in denying anything or refusing to answer. I admitted the charge, explained as graciously as I could, and added with genuine innocence: 'Why not?'
I got no answer. The man bellowed at me again.
'Are you a journalist?' said Franziska.
It is one thing to have this put as a polite question, and quite another to be accused of it as if it were a capital offence. I felt the first twinge of hopelessness and fear, because it was a question I was incapable of answering honesty and credibly. Yes, I had been, and maybe I would be again. But now, on this journey? No, I was not.
My older passport, which identified me as a journalist, was tucked into the linen money belt at Sao Raimundo, together with a correspondent's card that had been useful in Cairo. If I had had those with me I would never have dared to deny the profession. Was I or wasn't I a journalist? Was it better to tell the truth and risk being made to look a liar, or tell a lie and have it believed? I remembered vividly being told in London that foreign journalists were often given short and painful shrift by the Brazilian police. I decided to tell the truth.
'No,' I said firmly, T am not a journalist, but my journey is supported by the Sunday Times, and I write articles about my personal experience.'
Now came the problem of the telex. That bloody telex, I thought savagely, sending me off to Iguatu. Any minute now they'll produce a copy of it. And why, oh God, was I stupid enough to go? And I thought about being watched at Iguatu and wondered where else and for how long they had been watching me. So I decided to show them the telex straight away, like the frank and forthright fellow I was, hoping I could confuse them over the wording of it.
The telex was tucked inside my working passport. With it, unhappily, was a black and white snapshot taken by Father Marcello, showing the Jaguaribe river in full flood beneath the bridge. As I drew out the telex, the photograph fell on the desk.
If there is one thing dictatorships hate (and with reason) it is foreigners taking pictures of their bridges. The interrogator seized upon it. Pointless, again, to deny what it was, who it had come from. I began to feel terrible. How could an innocent snapshot begin to assume such sinister significance? Yet it undoubtedly did. And now the priests were tangled up in this too; Marcello in Iguatu; Walsh in Fortaleza because he was mentioned in the telex; even Oxfam was there as an incidental reference. I was astounded by the complexity of the situation, although the game had scarcely even begun. I realized later that even the most elaborate fictional spy plots would be childishly simple compared with the real thing.
Franziska struggled to translate the telex. I explained that what it really meant was that the Sunday Times had already had a story about Iguatu. The message was for my information only, and I had gone there merely to satisfy my curiosity because the opportunity offered itself. It sounded too complicated to me. I did not think that they would believe a word of it.
The little fellow was getting more businesslike now, and not bothering to frighten me any more. (I was frightened enough.)
'Where is the film and camera?'
'At Sao Raimundo.'
He had Samuel in and told him to take me to the priest's house to get the camera and film, 'todos as cosas' - 'all the things' - and bring me back.
It was dark and wet, but not raining. As the car rattled across town Samuel talked a little, gentle as ever, protested that he knew I was innocent of all wrongdoing, and let me think.
What did they mean by 'all the things'? Was Samuel going to search my belongings? Somehow I had to get those other documents hidden, but how? When we arrived, fate seemed to be going my way at last. The house was empty and locked, but I knew where the key to the back door was kept. I muttered something and dashed round the side of the house while Samuel waited patiently for me to come through and open the front door for him. On my way I got the money belt from my room and, looking around wildly for a hiding place, slid it under the refrigerator in the dining room. It never occurred to me that I might not be back that evening to recover it.
I let Samuel in and under his gaze I collected my cameras and six rolls of film that I had shot in Africa. He showed little interest in anything else, and I wished I had hidden the film as well. Before we left, Father Walsh returned and I told him what was happening. He showed only polite interest, and I could hardly blame him. I wanted him to stay detached, but his apparent indifference deepened my gloom, nonetheless.
At the villa I was taken to the head of the political department, notorious in Brazil by the acronym DOPS. An elegant man lounged back in a revolving chair and put his fingertips together. He had formed the unnecessary idea that my meeting with the priests had been somehow secretly prearranged. He asked me to explain the films. Five of them were
Kodachrome, and could not be developed in Brazil. I told him where they had been taken. Then, to my astonishment, he asked me to write out my mother's Christian names. He dictated a series of messages to Brasilia and Interpol and, still through Franziska, said I would have to wait until he got replies to his enquiries. 'Maybe this evening,' she said.
An orderly took me back to the entrance hall where an agent was always on duty, and then through some louvered doors into a large office. There were several desks and filing cabinets and an electric fan. Two other doorways, barred by locked wrought iron gates, led to the street and to a backyard. The agent in the hall could communicate with the office through a shuttered hatch in the wall. The floor, I noticed, was tiled and sloped gently towards a drain in the middle. Looking up I saw that the roof was really just a canopy raised three feet above the walls, and that the room must have once been an open patio.
The office was obviously in use, though its people had gone home, and I was alone. Somewhere nearby I could hear a telex machine, and a loudspeaker emitted messages in Portuguese or an occasional burst of Morse all interwoven with crackles and howls of static.
The orderly came back after half an hour with a small chipped enamel dish of rice and beans. There were some fragments of chicken and bone among the rice. Eventually the DOPS inspector came to confirm that I would be there for the night. He pointed to the corner where there were some collapsible beds with straw mattresses. He was polite but curt, and left quickly.
I could not decide whether my situation was mildly inconvenient or extremely serious. I tried hard to divine how it would seem to them. On the face of it, it was ridiculous to suppose that I would have ridden a motorcycle the length of Africa in order to engage in a spying mission in Brazil. But how would they confirm the truth? And for all I knew they might find the truth even more ridiculous. In my present position even I found the idea of travelling round the world on a motorcycle a shade absurd.
I was determined to remain optimistic. After all, I had been arrested before in similar circumstances, once in Tunis, twice in Alexandria, and each time I was turned loose again very soon. And, damn it, I was in an office wasn't I, and not mouldering in a cell? Yet even during the short time that remained before I thought I could reasonably hope to sleep, I found myself being sucked into a vortex of speculation which seemed to drag me always down towards doubt and fear.
As the evening wore on there was another crashing downpour of rain. Some splashed in under the roof, some rose up through the drain, and water rushed and gurgled all round the room and under the floor as though we were being swept to sea. I heard later that it was the heaviest fall of rain that Fortaleza had kn
own in sixty years.
It was a surprisingly uncomfortable night. I had only the clothes I had arrived in. My jeans were still damp, my shoes and socks almost wet, and my shirt sticky with the day's sweat. Two walls of the office were saturated with moisture by the deluge. The open doors and roof encouraged a night breeze which, normally, would be a blessing but was a curse for me. Though there was a mattress there was no sort of cover. The moving air was cold, and the exposed parts of my body were chilled even further by evaporation. I slept only for minutes at a time, with the noises from the radio room distorting my dreams into nightmare shapes. Eventually I put another mattress on top of my body. It helped a bit, stiff as it was, but covered me with a fine straw dust which stuck to my damp clothes and skin.
In the morning I felt grey and unappetizing. An orderly took me to a bathroom where there was a shower but no towel or soap. There were some scraps of lavatory paper to dry on, but they did not go far. It was useless to ask for anything, for it was all too easy for them to brush me off with a blank, uncomprehending stare. I did not feel strong enough to make a demonstration, thinking that quiet dignity might serve me better. I expected to be free again that day.
So, on an empty stomach, I watched the staff drift into the office.
The Policia Federal, it seemed to me, was like a Brazilian FBI staffed by agentes, men and women in plain clothes with a reasonable education who drew good salaries and were encouraged to study for higher qualifications. I saw them more often with textbooks than with guns, but the gun was always tucked away somewhere in a waistband or a purse, and the textbooks usually dealt with subjects of a slightly Machiavellian nature like 'Mass Communications in the Modern State.'
