by Ted Simon
They ceased to recognize my presence. They lost interest to the extent that they did not even bother to feed me. Then I saw that without them I was nothing. Worse than nothing; a dog that cowers at the feet of a brutal master grateful for any acknowledgement, whether it comes as bones or blows. I became disgusted with myself and loathed them for showing me to myself in such a shameful light.
So they demonstrated their power to me in the end, in a careless, offhand way, without really trying. They were indifferent to the Consul, to the Sunday Times, to their own government even. But they found me mildly irritating, and spat me out. Some other time their attention might be attracted and they would suck me in again. I felt a great and malignant shadow hovering over me and I wanted only to crawl under a stone and hide.
The Consul's brother Charles drove me back to Sao Raimundo and the priests offered me a room in their own house. I felt it was wrong for me to stay there, but they were quite confident and it was so much what I wanted, that I could not refuse. As soon as I was alone I went to the dining room and looked under the refrigerator. The belt was there, among ringlets of dust, as I had left it.
I could not shake off the sense of fear and revulsion. It was as though I had been squeezed too hard. Although the pressure was off, I had no resilience left to resume my former shape. Never before had I been unable to find the resources within myself to respond. I cowered inside my shell like a shrivelled homunculus, and I was worried that it had affected me so deeply.
But nothing actually happened to you, I told myself angrily. What is this nonsense? It was only twelve days. Now get on with life.
But I couldn't. It was important to write an account of the experience quickly and send it off, but everything I wrote seemed false and trivial. I tried all the tricks I could muster to find a different perspective, to climb out of myself just for a moment. Physical exercise. Detective thrillers. Getting out among crowds of people.
Progress was slow. I watched a lot of television on a big colour set, in a recreation room upstairs. It was a World Cup year and Brazilians were in a frenzy about football. The Brazilian sugar monopoly was one of the main sponsors of football on TV, and its advertisement, a growing mountain of sugar, seemed to be on the screen constantly. It was one of the first things I laughed at, because the country had been struck by a sudden and severe sugar shortage, and Brazilians cannot drink coffee without it.
Or I sat in the cane rocking chair talking to Walsh, or stood in the dark of the balcony watching the huge fruit bats swoop round the jack fruit tree and scoop out the pulp. Sounds of music and laughter drifted in from the neighbourhood and oil palms in a backyard plantation brushed the night sky with their feathering silhouettes.
During the day, with paper and the parish typewriter, I burrowed into every available corner of the house, hoping that a change of space would unblock my mind. I no longer thought much about the aesthetic merits of the building. It provided shelter and safety and that was all I cared for.
For a while I worked in an office just inside the front door, with a hatch opening on the hallway where I could watch the mothers come for a gossip and to help with the duties of the parish. They had little crushes on particular priests. Sometimes they telephoned and then they would do their utmost to get their favourites on the telephone, while the priests in turn defended each other fanatically.
When I was alone in the house I sometimes answered the phone.
'Sao Raimundo,' I announced in my best Portuguese.
'Quern estd falando?" sang the shrill, intriguing, matronly voices.
'Padre Eduardo,' I replied gravely. That perplexed them for a while, but the flurry of sounds that followed would be too much for me usually, and I would wait for a pause to say 'Si, si' and put the receiver down.
On the third day I tried the game in reverse. The phone rang and I got the question in first: 'Quern estd falando?'
A woman's voice answered: 'Franziska. Can I speak to Ted please.'
I felt sick inside and would have told her to go to hell if I had dared.
'How are you?' she said, and 'Are you happy to be free?' 'Of course.'
T have been thinking about you. Have you thought about me?' I have been thinking of many things.' It was a noisy line. We both had to shout.
I would like to see you. Will you come here?' 'Where?'
'At my home. When I finish working. When you will come?' T am very busy writing.' 'Tomorrow I am free.' 'Alright.'
What the hell do you think you're doing, I asked myself as I took the address. You can't seriously expect to make love to a woman who carries a gun in her purse and works for the forces of evil?
At the docks the customs put thirteen men on the job of discharging my motorcycle. They were keen to show me where the police had cut the saddle open to explore the foam rubber underneath, 'Looking for bombs!' they said contemptuously, but I said no, they were after Scuba equipment.
There was no love lost between the two services. As a victim of the Policia Federal I was an honoured guest and treated to an elaborate coffee ceremony in the chief's office. They were all brown men in brown offices with brown ledgers. Theirs was the old, suffocating kind of bureaucracy that I detested, but they only imprisoned things, not people, and for once I appreciated their more human qualities.
Having the bike back was an important step towards freedom. I arrived at Franziska's house feeling stronger than I had the day before. Among her own family it was almost possible to forget what she was. She radiated innocence, and they all treated me with great affection. There was never a hint of how we had met, or that I might be in any way a dubious character, but while my insecurity was soothed a little, a new problem arose. I had no idea what the moral customs were here. A respectable Catholic family in a provincial city, I thought, would have rigid standards of behaviour, and if I violated their sense of propriety . . .?
Underneath it all the same question lay, sapping my puny confidence. How could I be sure that a woman scorned, or a woman outraged, would not think to avenge herself through her connections? Or perhaps the whole thing was set up, and not necessarily by her? Even while I was certain that these were fantasies, I had come so recently from a world of fantasy that they inhibited me terribly, and yet undeniably she was attractive, and far from silly, and her attitude towards me was directly inviting.
It was too ridiculous. I wanted to break through the web of suspicion, but I was scared. I touched her, familiarly but awkwardly, because my heart was not strongly in it. There was a brief flash of fury.
'If my father sees you he will be very angry.'
I felt like a puppy having its nose tapped. Embarrassed I retreated into platitudes and neutrality. I could not figure it out. Undoubtedly it should have become a love affair, but it always faltered on the brink.
I took a week to finish my piece for the Sunday Times, and I had to re-live all the agony to do it. I was greatly relieved when it was written, but by then I had developed an infection of the gut which slowed me down for several more days. It was the first illness of the entire journey. In Africa my health had been perfect although I had eaten and drunk everything that came my way. There is nothing worse for health than imprisonment and frustration.
Franziska and I met several times, but my fear continued to make me as shy as a fourteen-year-old. My last days in Fortaleza were the beginning of the festival of Sao Joao, a week of celebration throughout Brazil. We went to a dance on the beach where I felt sure I would be able to overcome my faint-heartedness. A big crowd sang and danced and drank at wooden tables under a broad tiled canopy. The moon was full, the air warm on the skin, the coconuts swayed on the shore. Everything was auspicious . . . until I saw her friends from the office, two policemen I had last seen when I was their prisoner. I even caught a glimpse of the guns in their waistbands, and my ardour froze to ice again.
We sat for a while, much later, side by side on the beach listening to the waves. I longed to touch her smooth long legs, to feel her skin
against mine, but I was paralysed, thinking:
'Once I start, where will it end?'
I knew it would be our last meeting. We found a taxi after walking a long way, and in the taxi I kissed her for the first time and knew it would have been alright. But by then it was too late.
The priests had all been summoned to a Diocesan conference at Maranhao, a long way away. Father Walsh had told me they would all be leaving in three days' time. He did not say I would have to leave, but it was obviously time to go. I was hoping they had not had to invent the conference to get me out of the house.
I was packing the bike in the backyard on the morning they left for the bus station; wonderful, kindly men whom I would be most unlikely to see again. An hour or two later I left myself. The thought of going made me nervous. I saw myself as a target for every idle policeman on the two thousand miles of road to Rio, and it was not unlike the very first departure in London. In some ways I felt even more vulnerable than I had then.
At the first police checkpoint on the highway leaving the city they checked me out but gave me no trouble. I had an impressive temporary driving licence, with an utterly villainous picture of me taken for it, and they liked that. Still the cloud of anxiety travelled with me down the highway. Then gradually the familiar movement, the sound of the engine
and the rush of air built up my confidence as nothing else could. I sat up and took notice of the bright green forested hills, and the streams and lakes that reminded me of Tanzania.
I began to remember who I was and what I had already done and the strength came pouring back into me. By the end of the day I had crossed from Ceara into the state of Pernambuco, and somewhere about there the cloud detached itself and floated back to Fortaleza. After a month of misery I felt free. At last.
I was travelling south from the Equator down the east coast of America on a parallel track to my journey down the east coast of Africa. It was a magnificent geography lesson. If Ceara resembled Tanzania, then inland Bahia was similar to Zambia, while Minas Gerais, the next great state on the southward trail, was startlingly like Rhodesia, with those same massive rectangular rock formations, old gold mines, gem stones, broad skies, dry air, and peaceful lambent evenings. As an introduction to the size and diversity of Brazil it was breathtaking.
The life of Brazil, though, seems to derive little from life in Africa, even with such a large proportion of Africans descended from former African slaves. There have been Europeans here for hundreds of years, imposing themselves on the native Indian population, building churches, fighting over the spoils, interbreeding, creating complex hierarchies, becoming rich and destitute, leaving the traces, layer upon layer, of their passions and virtues.
When the first foundations were still being laid in Salisbury and Lusaka, the Portuguese palaces and cathedrals in Brazil were already ancient, and the coastal states were peppered with thriving communities. The towns portray their history. In the centre they aspire to the church.
Great efforts were made and many lives expended to cut, haul and lay the stone that paves the roads and clothes the buildings. Radiating outwards the roads soon turn from cobble to dirt, and the houses shrink and decay until they meet the modern highway system where a newer kind of wealth makes a new stand in cement and girders and asphalt, garages, bus stations, and newly dilapidated hotels.
The streets are muddy in the rain and smell of garbage and urine, laced with coffee and cigar smoke. Buses and lorries splash through on broken suspensions, spouting black exhaust, their wooden coachwork gaudy with fairground colours and slogans: 'A woman is like a truck. She goes faster when you put your foot down'. In the evening the streets swarm with people of every colour except pure white (for the pure white keep apart); but during the hot, dry and dusty afternoons, the streets sleep.
It was a hot, dusty afternoon when I came to Senhor do Bonfim, a small inland town in Bahia, a day's ride from Salvador. I came early, wondering whether to stay, and walked through narrow streets looking in on barber shops, billiard saloons and people sipping coffee in 'butiquinos'. The week of Sao Joao was just ending. Loudspeakers on street corners broadcast music, announcements and advertisements by the town trades people.
I liked it, found a room near the railway, parked my bike in the street, dragged my luggage up to the first floor and flopped down on the bed to doze for a while. Birdsong and chatter invaded my half-waking state, followed by other, stranger sounds. There was a noise like muffled tin cans falling in a heap coming repeatedly from the yard beneath the open window. Then I heard an even stranger wailing musical sound, winding up and down the scale, now loud, now faint, as though blown from a long way off by a fickle wind. I opened my eyes lazily and saw a blue figure of a man, legs and arms outstretched, float up to the sky to disappear above the upper edge of the window frame. Such benign mysteries, I thought, are what make travelling infinitely worthwhile. Everyone else in the hotel knows exactly what these sights and-sounds are, but I am free to imagine anything I choose.
It was easy afterwards to spot the turkeys in the yard, and to guess that the balloon man was something to do with Sao Joao, but the skirling music remained a mystery. At dinner downstairs I heard it again. The hotel owner came towards me, agitated; something to do with the motorcycle. It was in danger, he said.
I went outside to look. The music was growing into a metallic howl, but I saw only the usual small boys gathered round the bike, prodding it and staring fixedly into the speedometer. The music had the eerie quality of an approaching storm. Then there came round the corner, at the bottom of the street, preceded by a pack of dancers in violent motion, a most spectacular thing. A thing emitting light and sounds on a scale of intensity I had never known, so intense that it took a while to focus on its various parts and identify it.
There were two objects shaped like rockets floating ten feet in the air, and about thirty feet long. They were built entirely out of brilliant fluorescent light tubes. Beneath them, myriad clusters of coloured bulbs flashed on and off, each cluster being set into a loudspeaker. Rising above the glare of the rockets were three men in bright clothing, bowing and grimacing like marionettes high above us all and plucking furiously at tiny electric guitars. On sumptuous galleries below the rockets, running all the way round this phantasmic object, were floodlit drummers dressed in satin, gesticulating, like an animated freize, as they hammered away. All of it seemed to be borne along by a throng of hypnotized dancers jerking their elbows and twirling to the music which poured out in solid waves, having no beginning nor end.
The thing drifted past at walking pace, carving a great tunnel of light and fury out of the night, and like everyone else I was sucked into its wake. It came to rest beside a large ornamental park, with trees, pathways, and a fountain. All around were huts, lightly built of palm fronds on wooden frames, selling refreshments. Middle-aged peasant ladies in heavy bodices squatted by charcoal braziers roasting skewered meat and corn cobs. A roguish old man in a velvet jacket and gaucho hat operated a crown and anchor game, with heaps of toothpaste tubes and soap as currency. A raised wooden stage had been built in the park and, facing it, a bank of seats for ticket holders and notables. The rest of us stood among the trees or wandered round the stalls.
On the stage, a ring of dancers were performing comic dances, and a man in a striped shirt and bow tie stood in one corner with a microphone pretending to be an unusually crass American tourist and making absurd
comments in pigeon English. Of real tourists there were none, but the people of the town and round about were there in their thousands, enjoying themselves enormously, warming up to a climax which was clearly still to come.
A shockwave travelled through the crowd, and the dancers hastily left the stage. A sober official came to the microphone and said something urgent about the Togo Symbolico do Republico'.
'Fireworks', I thought. The police were making a lane through the crowd, pushing people back mercilessly to connect the stage with the outside world. There was a gr
eat air of expectancy. Whatever was coming would have to be sensational to justify it, after all I had seen already. The waiting dragged on. People came on to deliver speeches of thanks and tributes. We were all shuffling our feet, impatiently. A group of youngsters in gym clothes ran rather self-consciously from the road, through the cleared lane and up the steps to the stage, having much difficulty trying to keep in formation. On the stage some of them stopped. Others ran on the spot. Those who stopped, started again with embarrassment, just as those who had continued thought they had better stop. Then I saw that the front runner had a torch in his hand with a small flame, and a voice boomed out again about the 'Fogo Symbolico'.
The applause was the absolute minimum necessary to be audible; evidently everybody found it all much too symbolic, and I wondered how far down the road they had struck a match and lit the torch. Sao Joao went out with a whimper, and I thought I had never attended a greater anti-climax in my life. I went back to the hotel to kill mosquitoes and sleep, but there were not enough blankets and it became surprisingly cold. Between patches of sleep I tried to reconstruct that fantastic music, a continuous melody played at the speed of a banjo, with some of the feeling of an old barrel organ, thickened and amplified to a frenzy of excitement. For a while I thought I had it, but in the morning it was gone.
Only much later did I discover that I had met, in Senhor do Bonfim, one of Brazil's most celebrated institutions, the unique and illustrious Trio Electrico from Salvador which was the glowing heart of the Bahia Carnival.
For six more days I moved south towards Rio. I began to study Portuguese seriously, reading menus and advertisements, and learning the road signs by heart. 'Nao ultrapassar quando a ligna izquierda for con-tinua', I repeated again and again. The one I could not understand said 'Conserva as placas'. Often it was riddled with bullet holes. I learned later that it meant 'Do not destroy the road signs'. I recalled other odd signs from Africa: the one that greeted me as I was about to take a high viaduct over the Blue Nile Gorge, leaning out from the mountainside thousands of feet above nothing.
