Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph

by Ted Simon

  The uniformed police in Brazil, as in most Latin American countries, was at a much lower level, staffed largely by semi-literate ruffians who busied themselves with petty crime, extortion and gratuitous violence The agentes were above all that and had a more sophisticated function in controlling fraud, smuggling, drugs, vice, forgery and so on, but I was concerned more with its other job of enforcing the political repression of Brazil on behalf of the army.

  Brazil was a dictatorship ruled by army generals. Their main priority after taking power in 1964 was to depoliticize the country, meaning to stop anyone engaging in, or talking about, or even thinking politics. Football, yes; the Samba, si; Politics, ninety million times No. Political opposition to the generals was punished by imprisonment, deportation, torture and death.

  Naturally such a government would watch most carefully over an area

  like the state of Ceara, where so many had so little to lose and where there might be real potential for subversion and revolt. It was into this high-tension grid that I had stumbled off the Zoë G in my outlandish dress, with my strange vehicle, my cameras, my telex messages, my quixotic mission, my passport full of Arabic text conveying hints of terrorism, and my much advertised promenade into the interior.

  Facing the door, with my back to the wall, I watched the agentes assemble around me. There was a bitter humour in my predicament, and I made the most of it. Which of them, I wondered, would be the one to pull out my fingernails or attach electrodes to my genitals? What about that fresh-faced young fellow over there in the sky-blue pants and fawn shirt with the tidy auburn hair? I watched him set down a pile of books, draw a small automatic from under his shirt front and pop it in his drawer, perch one buttock on the edge of the desk and, rather stylishly, light a cigarette swinging his well-shod foot. Surely not!

  Or this older man with the wavy grey hair, the comfortable paunch and the face of a family doctor who sat at the desk marked 'TOXICOS'? Ridiculous! I became fascinated by this unusual view of humanity. Was any of them capable of real menace? It wouldn't be the girl across the room, typing. She was the complement to Franziska: shorter, fairer, plump and softly appealing.

  Well, how about the fellow at the DOPS desk? Surely he would be my man. The Department of Political and Social Order; a bland title for the administration of terror and thumbscrews. He was another man of mainly European descent, probably German. I watched him talk and smile, watched his blue eyes and, to my disgust, I found I liked him.

  I could keep the game up no longer. They all looked like reasonable people. More than that, there was something familiar about them, their restlessness, a touch of vanity, a subdued energy suggesting that they were just marking time, that their real business was elsewhere. The parallel came to me immediately. It was the office of a daily newspaper where I had once worked; a roomful of reporters fiddling reluctantly with their expense sheets, waiting to be sent on a job. The comparison was faultless and rather disturbing. Clearly there was little to fear from these people, they were the glamorous, acceptable and perhaps naive face of the machine. If I needed torturing there would be specialists to do the job, somewhere else. From the corridor I had already noticed steps and an open well leading to a gloomy basement area where I imagined the cells to be. Hurriedly I put them out of my mind.

  The agents behaved as though I were invisible, and I guessed they were used to finding all sorts of riff-raff lodged there for the night. I hated, hungry and filthy as I was, to be present among a group of well-dressed, freshly washed and breakfasted people gathering for their morning's work, to be totally ignored by them, to have to submit to the status of an 'untouchable' and yet be obliged by fear to remain and endure it in silence. I learned a rare lesson in the nature of serfdom.

  The chairs had all been seized and I was forced to stand. After two hours frustration made me reckless. A rough-featured sergeant figure had come in from time to time and finally I told him, as best I could, that I wanted to see the inspector. He dismissed me with the usual grunt and turned towards the door. Incensed, I followed him, insisting loudly. He turned again, his face working with rage, and shoved me back against the wall, roaring 'fica!' Then he performed a brilliant mime which demonstrated in a few seconds that I was a spy who took photographs and therefore beneath contempt.

  Nobody in the room appeared to have noticed anything untoward. My hopes slipped even further.

  Then there was a break. First, an orderly came in with a tray of coffees, and the agent nearest me offered me a cup. And then, suddenly, Ian Dall, the Englishman from Antonio Sa's house, came in with the DOPS inspector. He walked straight across to me and shook my hand.

  'I've come to help with your statement,' he said. 'They thought it would be better - that it would be better if the Fathers stayed away from it. They hope you understand. How are you? Are you alright?'

  He seemed reluctant to say more. I tried to tell him how I was. It was impossible. Somehow it all translated into 'not bad'. Anyway, all the misery of the previous sixteen hours lifted at the pleasure of seeing him.

  'Do you know what's going on?' I asked him. 'Are they going to let me go? I can't make out what's happening. It's terrible not being able to talk to anyone. I can't even get breakfast . . .' I heard myself talking and it began to sound rather pathetic, so I stopped.

  T think it will be alright,' he said. 'They don't seem very concerned. I expect it will be over soon.'

  We walked, a civilized little group of three, to the Inspector's office. We might just as well be walking out into the street, I thought, so why don't I? But I didn't. There was a lot of talking and repetition, and the Inspector passed several sheets of longhand to a secretary and then took us to a bigger office where the Superintendent, Dottore Xavier, lounged in a bigger revolving chair with armrests.

  This man evidently spoke some English, and enjoyed practising phrases, but for the most part Ian translated from the Portuguese. He made an eloquent statement about security and his role in protecting Brazil from the international conspiracy of the Communist press. I said the Sunday Times would hardly be considered part of a Communist conspiracy. He made some reference to he Monde which Ian found unnecessary to translate.

  'Mr. Simon will have to stay until we have replies to our enquiries.' 'Am I under arrest, or what?' I asked.

  'You are only detained,' he said. 'You will have full privileges.' 'What privileges? How about starting with breakfast?' The good Doctor appeared shocked that I had missed my breakfast. Why, he declared, I could be taken out to restaurants for meals if I wished. I had only to ask. And policemen would buy things for me, like cigarettes or sandwiches. I had only to give them the money. And yes, I could have clothes and washing articles brought from Sao Raimundo. And of course the British Consul would be told. Indeed this very friend, Senhor Dall, would no doubt perform that service straight away. One might have thought I had deliberately chosen to sulk in a corner instead of coming out to have fun with the rest of the boys.

  'The trouble is,' said Ian, T have to go back to Maranhao. My bus leaves in three hours' time.' My yo-yo heart flopped again. 'But I will manage it somehow. There is a Vice-Consul here. He's a marine biologist called Matthews. I'll do my best. The police have already offered to drive me to the bus station to save time.'

  I could not help my spirits rising once more. They had fallen so low that they flew correspondingly high. Some notice seemed to have been taken of me at last. I was an individual again, with rights and an identity. We returned to the Inspector's office where the typed statement was waiting for my signature. Ian translated it, and it seemed alright. Prominent in the first paragraph were my mother's Christian names, correctly spelled. There were three pages in triplicate, nine signatures in all. I took a pen to the first page and found, to my horror, that it went entirely out of my control and produced an unrecognizable scribble. I had to work very hard to get my signature back, and even then I thought it looked more like painstaking forgery. I was very aware that the Inspector seemed to
regard this as quite normal.

  As Ian left he tried to encourage me again, but I felt his uncertainty. T think it will soon be over,' he repeated.

  I was put back in the general office. It was lunchtime. The staff began to drift away. I waited for someone to take me to lunch. The room emptied. An orderly came with a dish of rice and beans. This time there was no chicken.

  T want to go out,' I said angrily. 'Where's the Superintendent?' The orderly shrugged and left. My morale collapsed yet again. It was all lies, that stuff about privileges, meals, clothes, all talk to sweeten the Englishman. All fantasy just to get my statement and send Ian Dall on his way. Dall was my last chance of contact with the outside world, and he was taking a bus to a place hundreds of miles away on the Amazon. What could he say to the police if they took him to the bus and said:’ Leave the Consul to us.' Nothing. And the priests? What could they do? Nothing.

  The door had been left open and I saw the Superintendent coming down the corridor. I shouted at him and he surprised me by coming in.

  'Don't you like our home cooking?' he asked silkily. It was a rhetorical question. His smile was very close to a sneer, and he left quickly. I was speechless with black fury. The food was irrelevant. It struck me forcibly after he had gone that even if the prison served truffles and caviar I would prefer to be out for five minutes to buy my own rice and beans. There is no relish like freedom.

  I was heavily inclined to expect the worst, and when a strange agente came for me in the afternoon and took me down those grim steps to the basement I really thought the worst was about to happen. But it was only to have photograph and fingerprints taken.

  'Do you play the piano?' asked the agente, with a grin. Perhaps it was meant as a compliment, but I could hear it only as a threat conjuring up an image of broken fingers.

  The agent who took my photograph told me happily that he had developed my pictures. 'Very nice,' he said, 'good pictures.' As we walked up the stairs another man stopped on his way down, and grinned. Everything was a joke to these fellows.

  'You will be deported,' he said. T have seen your passport. Visa is cancelled.'

  As the afternoon dragged on I tried to understand what was happening. My real problem was that I had no way of knowing what was likely, no experience of the country, no feel for the way things usually happened there. On the other hand I did know that anything was possible. They could free me or, if they wanted to, they could kill me. There was no point in denying it. The question therefore was: 'Why should they want to kill me?' Not gratuitously. That would be hardly worth the trouble it might cause. If they wanted to get rid of me they would simply deport me, as that last agent had promised they would, but for some reason I was not ready to believe that, quite.

  No, I had raised the spectre of death and now I would have to deal with it. They would kill me either by mistake, or to cover up something else. They seemed to believe I was on some kind of revolutionary mission. They would look for evidence. They would find nothing conclusive, for there was but they would turn up the hidden passport and that would excite their suspicions even more. So they would come to me for evidence. I would have to deny it. I couldn't invent it if I tried. They would have to use torture. That too would be a miserable failure. And then? It might well be too embarrassing to let me go; easier by far to feign an accident, say I disappeared, rather than have me fly home to tell my story.

  During the following twenty-four hours I could conceive of only two possibilities: I would be deported, or I would be tortured and killed. As time passed I became increasingly pessimistic. I could get nobody to talk to me or listen to the simplest request. The staff left for home. I got another bowl of rice and beans, and then . . . nothing. By the end of the evening I knew my attempt to reach the Consul had failed, and the implications of that were overwhelming. It became impossible then to believe that the way they were treating me was merely through accidental neglect. It had to be deliberate. I could no longer accuse myself of paranoia.

  The walls were still soaking. During the day it was not noticeable. After nightfall I began to freeze again. By morning I was shivering, slightly feverish and had a cold. It was Saturday, and as the minutes built up into hours I realized that the office would be empty for the weekend.

  I searched for any means to relieve the monotony. I tried to recite poetry, and was appalled by how little I could remember. I counted the titles on the walls and on the floor (including fractions). I tried to work out a feasible plan of escape. It occurred to me that this might be expected of me (from the top of a filing cabinet I might have clambered over the wall, but into what I had no idea). I began to look for secret surveillance, a closed circuit TV lens, perhaps. All the time I was aware of my fears being almost entirely self-induced, and that in itself made things worse, for I could not shake them off.

  Real terror came over me in waves, about once an hour. I found I could not sustain it any more than I could sustain hope. My thoughts might be mercifully far away and then some trick of the mind would produce, say, a mental glimpse of the lumpy-faced policeman on his hands and knees at Sao Raimundo with his hands under the fridge; and suddenly sweat would pour off me as the thought carried me on to unmentionable consequences.

  After several hours of this Franziska came into the office and said she wanted to practise her English. I could have exploded at the absurdity of it, but I was far too suspicious. Every question she asked seemed loaded. Though I was grateful for the distraction and wanted to believe in her goodwill, I dared not. She brought out a tube of Vitamin C tablets and offered me some. I refused. God knows what might be in them, I thought. She promised to ask about being taken out to lunch and about the Consul, but when she left the rice and beans came as usual, and silence.

  The silence was broken in mid-afternoon by another strange event. The radio started a great noise of whoops and wails and crackling, as though someone had just turned up the volume. Then a voice spoke, loudly amplified, very slowly, repeating everything in phrases so that even I could understand most of it.

  'We have the films of the coast’ it said.

  (My black and white roll included pictures of the coast taken from Zoë G.)

  'Marcello . . . The Englishman ... to Rio . . . deportacao.'

  Up to that moment I had kept alive a last flicker of hope that my danger was all imaginary. At this point it died. Not only had they apparently deported Father Marcello, but they had wanted me to know it.

  From then on a dramatic change came over my hectic mental life. It feels immodest, even distasteful to say, after the event, when I am still so much alive, that I prepared myself for death, but that is undoubtedly what I did. There seemed no purpose in trying to guess any more. I might as well make my mind up about it, be ready to handle it as well as possible.

  Death itself, I soon realized, was not such a bad prospect. In a way I had invited it by embarking on this journey, and could hardly complain. My life, when I thought about it, had been full of interest. Not a very finished life, perhaps, but evolving nicely all the time, always changing and generally, I thought, for the better. It was not really death that bothered me then.

  It was pain.

  By chance, on the book shelf at Sao Raimundo, I had found a copy of Graham Greene's Travels with my Aunt and read it. Greene's stuffy suburban hero finds himself seized inadvertently by the police in Paraguay. A policeman hits him, but he scarcely feels it. Then there follows a sentence which, in my hypersensitive state, I must have stored for emergencies.

  'Physical violence, like the dentist's drill, is seldom as bad as one fears.'

  As a sentiment it might not seem very reliable, nor specially emphatic. The point was, though, it was a piece of objective, dispassionate advice. It was not a piece of my own fevered imagination, and I built on it as on a rock. I contemplated the possibility that the fear of torture might be worse than the torture itself, and it seemed possible. And given the laughable folly of doing the torturer's work for him, I managed someho
w just to let the fear go. Instead I composed a letter to someone I loved; not a very good letter, I realized afterwards, for it was surprisingly full of clichés and banalities, but it brought a delicious calm like the answer to a prayer. I owe Graham Greene a great deal for that afternoon.

  My newly found composure continued. I seemed to have discovered a way to endure, and I watched myself carefully to avoid slipping back into the old spasms of hope and despair. A few hours later, well after dark, I was seated at a desk, studying scraps of Portuguese on the waste paper from the bins, when the hatch slid open and a face appeared. It was a squarish face with a gingery beard and hair, and a weather beaten complexion.

  'British?' it asked.

  'Yes,' I replied, surprised.

  'Matthews,' it said. 'British Consul.'

  For an instant I believe I actually resented his interference. It was a stunning shock.

  'How do you do,' I said, and 'Won't you come in?' and 'I'm very glad to see you,' and other foolish phrases. Then the relief and joy swept through me like tidal waves.

  It was ridiculous. It made me long to laugh. This small, bristling, upright man had poked his head through a hatch, and I was delivered. Through him I was joined again to the world I knew, a world in which I had a certain value, where efforts would be made on my behalf. I could no longer vanish without trace. I had condemned myself to death on circumstantial evidence and the Honorary Vice-Consul had brought my reprieve. The very fact that the police had allowed Ian Dall to get his message to Matthews meant that all my fears might prove groundless. I was restored to life and it was a most bewildering experience. I stood blinking in the light like any newly-hatched creature.

  Henry Matthews was plainly not there to become enmeshed in an emotional drama. He was a busy, practical man who had just returned to Fortaleza after a long and tiring journey. He was determined to do his duty and then, as soon as possible, to get back to supper and bed with his family.