by Mark Dapin
‘A tiny bit,’ I lied. ‘And you?’
‘A tiny bit,’ he lied. ‘Okay, so it’s normal then.’
‘It’s normal,’ I agreed.
Several blocks away, a string of fireworks exploded. Bartholome jumped several inches into the air.
I liked the idea of being cleansed. The year before, I had shaken hands with somebody who had always intended to betray me, and ever since then I had felt my right hand was smeared with shit. On the day of the ceremony, we arrived at the museum with three bags full of tribute. Bartholome, concerned at our previous misunderstanding, asked the shaman to slow down his speech. ‘And the spirits also have to speak more slowly,’ he said.
The shaman sprinkled the sugar in a circle, and inside the circle drew the Mayan balanced cross. He placed one enormous slab of chocolate at each of the four cardinal points, and arranged the cigars and mysterious sundries into a kind of aromatic bonfire, which he lit using the rum.
The smell was sickly sweet, like incense and wine in a Catholic church. All the burning tobacco, which is sacred to the Maya, gave the impression of a crowd. I knelt before the fire, and the shaman called up the spirits.
My nahuales were sad because I would not accept my dilemma. Nothing I had said had convinced them I was not a killer. The first three spirits asked me to reconcile with my victims.
I threw a handful of cuilcos (which turned out to be plant resins) into the fire.
The shaman asked the spirits to touch us, to let us experience their power. I felt hot, but then I was kneeling in front of an open fire. Kame, the nahual of death, was still pissed at me, but Tizikin the eagle was happy because I was going to get all the money, property and travel I wanted from life. I suspected Tizikin was happy every time he met a foreigner.
Different nahuales required different coloured candles, tossed into the fire rather than lit at the wick. Blood red candle wax melted like lava, and flowed into the courtyard like the tongues of Volcán Fuego. There were spirits in the flames. Anyone could see them. They changed shape and danced, and beckoned me towards the fire.
The shaman told me to burn my pink candles, and beg forgiveness from the nahual who protected women.
I thought of everything I had ever done wrong, and for a moment I swore I could smell my ex-wife’s perfume in the air. Like Bartholome – who was waiting with my camera in his pocket, to photograph the spirits when they materialised – I wanted to believe.
The shaman completed my cleansing by dusting me from my forehead to my knees with five sacred leaves, then he filled his mouth with agua florida, a kind of medicinal water, and spat it all over me.
The ceremony took an hour and forty-five minutes. On the shaman’s instructions, I ran around the fire three times, five times, then thirteen times more, but I did not see the gods, I did not hear the gods and I did not feel the gods.
I was dizzy, I breathed incense, and there were flames at my feet. Was that a spiritual experience? Maybe it was. Bartholome felt nothing, either. He was disappointed but philosophical.
‘Many people have the ability to feel the presence of spirits,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it’s a privilege, perhaps it’s bad luck.’
I was still furious in Guatemala, partly because of ACP NZ, and partly because I had given up both complex carbs and alcohol, in the hope of losing my by now customary ‘Ralph gut’. I suffered chicken rage and mild DTs, but channelled it all into exercise. I spoke Spanish all day, and watched Spanish-language television in the evening. I tried to think in Spanish, but I could only think stuff like, ‘The fly is fresh’ or ‘Your nahual demands contrition’, so I returned to English in my head.
I planned to meet Claire in London then go on to Spain, where I would talk like Hemingway with bullfighters and bar-owners, and order the correct dishes in tapas bars. After a month with Bartholome, my Spanish was good enough to allow me to carry on a three-hour conversation with a Guatemalan woman on my flight out to Los Angeles. Even the passport officer at the airport complimented me on my skill.
I changed planes at LA to a flight to London via Frankfurt, I had a drink, fell asleep, and woke up as the flight descended. My ears were pounding, and I tried to equalise the pressure by pinching my nostrils and blowing hard through my nose. My left side cleared, my right side did not. Ever.
I landed in London, feeling as though my knees were shackled, my feet bound, and my head was under water. By the time I reached my hotel, I could not stand up. I tried to check in at reception without standing up, a practice that raises eyebrows even in the squalid Bayswater pubs I frequent.
It was the height of the deep vein thrombosis scare, and the staff, convinced I was suffering from ‘economy-class syndrome’, called an ambulance. Two cheeky cockney ambos took me to Paddington hospital (‘Australia? I’ve got a niece living over there. Luverley.’) and left me in the casualty waiting room.
There were about 400 people ahead of me (‘You’re lucky, mate. It’s pretty quiet for this time of night’) so I sneaked out and took a cab back to the hotel.
The next day, I could hardly hear. A doctor came to my room, gave me an injection that made me vomit, and sent me to a specialist. The specialist warned me I might be suffering from a brain tumour, and booked me in for a CAT scan. The specialist had also feared I might have a structural abnormality in my skull that would prevent me from flying again. I made confused, expensive, but quite pleasing plans to return to Australia via Eurostar, the Trans-Siberian Express and the Fairstar Funship.
My skull turned out to be the same shape as anybody else’s, and I did not have a tumour, or ‘the bends’, nor had my eardrum burst. I had suffered ‘total cochlear failure’, and lost 100 per cent of the hearing in my right ear, about 10 per cent of the hearing in my left ear, and gained a maddening cicada of tinnitus somewhere in between.
The specialist could offer no diagnosis beyond the desperately unhelpful, ‘It’s just one of those things’.
Claire and I flew to Barcelona, and meandered south to Andalusia. Wherever I went, it was very difficult to communicate with the Spanish, because I could barely hear them.
We hired a car for eleven weeks to drive around France. When people asked, ‘Did you face any special challenges driving around France?’ I said, ‘None at all.’ This, of course, was because I could not drive.
Passengering around France, however, I confronted several peculiar obstacles. While Claire lazed idly through her reflexive routine of pedal-pushing and steering, I was an electrical storm of activity, a tireless human whirlwind, dexterously changing the cassette with one hand and balancing the road atlas in the other, while simultaneously imaginatively interpreting French road signs, and offering invaluable advice such as, ‘I think you should’ve turned left back there.’
Were my efforts appreciated?
Is the Pope a Zoroastrian?
My navigation was denigrated and scorned from Toulouse to Verdun. I accepted every vilification with a heroic conviction that history would provide my vindication. In the Age of Discovery, the navigator was king. The name of Vasco da Gama lives on, but who remembers the colourless journeymen who sailed his ships?
Sticklers for detail may point out that Vasco da Gama could read a map – and in this respect, as in his predilection for many-sided hats, the great man and I differed. I could marvel at the magnificent inevitability of a road map’s arabesque, in which paths converged and conflated to form a decoration like the calligraphy around the dome of a mosque (but with McDonald’s restaurants and service stations marked at the appropriate points). I could not, however, relate the pleasing pattern on the page to the positions of roads and buildings in the corporeal world.
None of this mattered at first, because Claire could not drive the car. We crossed the Spanish border at Andorra, and picked up a Peugeot 406 at Toulouse Airport.
I approached the glossy woman at the airport desk and announced in extremely peccable French, ‘The car is here, brothel-owning lady, for us.’
Lucki
ly, she spoke English.
When we found our Peugeot in the car park, Claire could not release the handbrake. She pulled, she pushed, she pressed buttons. She grunted and sighed and almost cried. She handed me the manual and asked me what was wrong.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I can’t drive, and I can’t read French.’
When the handbrake finally and mysteriously released, it never stuck again, and we had no more trouble with the car for at least a day.
‘Remind me to drive on the right,’ begged Claire.
She immediately took the first corner out of the car park on the left, and I instantly forgot my sole task as passenger, leaving her to shout to herself, ‘Stay on the right! Stay on the right!’ like John Howard deciding his position on immigration. She attempted to indicate, but turned on the windscreen wipers instead. This happened every day for months.
We drove first through the heartbreakingly beautiful countryside of the Languedoc-Roussillon, to the walled medieval city of Carcassonne. I was in charge of interpreting signs, and was able to assure a sceptical Claire that ‘Aimez vous nos enfants’, accompanied by a picture of laughing schoolkids playing by the side of a road, did not, as she thought, mean ‘Aim at our children’.
French warning signs are infused with drama, verve and emotion. A plaque on a bridge near Chamonix illustrates the quite complex idea of ‘Don’t-throw-bottles-over-the-side-of-the-mountain-because-they-might-hit-somebody-sweeping-up-the-snow’ with a silhouette of the snow-sweeper throwing up his arms in helpless terror at the sight of the casually murderous glass vessel bearing down on him.
A ‘Don’t-touch-this-thing-or-you’ll-get-electrocuted’ sign on the Côte d’Azur combines the comic strip line of Pop Art with the nightmarish howl of German Expressionism. The strikingly detailed figure of the man-who-ignored-the-sign-and-touched-the-thing sizzles and dances at the point of a lightning bolt. He is wearing his zoot suit and flat-heeled boots. The message is clear: he is being executed for his poor fashion sense.
I digress, as Claire often did when she followed my directions. We travelled along winding roads to the Cathar hill fortress of Peyrepertuse. The Peugeot did not take to the climb well, grinding and scraping and generally making strained, tortuous progress. When we reached the castle car park, steam was streaming from under the bonnet, as if the engine were about to explode. We tried to open the hood, but we could not find a trip switch. I examined the manual, but it was still written in French.
I could not really help, because I cannot drive and I cannot read French.
I searched my Collins pocket dictionary for ‘bonnet popper’, while the driver searched the car and found it by the pedals. By the time we got it open, the smoking had stopped anyway.
A typically alarmist French sign warned us against leaving anything in the car. A giant, hooked hand, an evil black claw, swooped towards a shattered window to grab a camera. We packed whatever we could into our daypacks and carried it all to the ruin in the afternoon sun. My bag – including a laptop, power pack, tape recorder, cassettes and Discman – weighed about six kilos (which is 10 kilos when you’re climbing).
On our first day in Toulouse, I met a man wearing a beret. This and each subsequent time I saw a beret, my heart throbbed with simple happiness, as it did whenever I spotted somebody carrying a baguette. Since every person seems to carry a baguette between the hours of 7 am and 11 am, especially in Provence, mornings were a constant fount of moronic joy. I was especially pleased if I noticed a man in a beret carrying a baguette.
I never actually came across a man in a beret carrying a baguette and wearing a hooped matelot shirt and a waxed moustache, leaping in the air with the sheer exhilaration of being French, but there was one illustrated on the jacket of my Instant French! cassette. This cassette, while unexceptional, proved extremely popular during our first days in the car, since we had no other tapes.
I had assured Claire that all new cars came equipped with a CD player ‘as standard’. I had bought fourteen new CDs to listen to on the Peugeot’s non-existent CD player, and no music cassettes to slide into its actually existing tape deck. We were forced to default to Instant French! with its not-very-useful constructions such as, ‘He disappeared ten years ago’, in case somebody should ask us what happened to Typesetting Bob.
Provence, even without a soundtrack, was glorious. Colours are deeper in the Provençal sky, food is more delicious from its fields. Tomatoes are redder, grapes grow to the size of golf balls, olives swell like dates, garden peas are sweeter, and strawberries are riper.
Lettuce, curiously, is the same old crap.
We finally discovered the CD player in Fréjus-St Raphael on the Côte d’Azur. It was hidden in the boot, safe from the giant, disembodied claw that menaces parked cars.
In Aix-en-Provence, where Cezanne repeatedly painted the looming Mount St Victoire, I exercised the passenger’s prerogative to get drunk at dinner. Unfortunately, I did not fulfil the passenger’s obligation to remember the name of our hotel or its address. I studied Cézanne for my history of art degree, and could tell Claire that Mount St Victoire had inspired a major step in the move towards non-representational painting, but I could not tell her where it was in relation to our bedroom.
Like every city in France, Aix (as we who know it call it) is protected from tourists by a huge, looping ring-road that ensures its heart is impenetrable to all but the most determined visitors. We missed the exit for our hotel, and had to drive once around the city to get back to it. Then we realised we had been following the wrong signs, and it was not our hotel anyway, so we had to drive all the way around the city again.
No matter how hard I tried, I could not think of the name of the place – I still cannot – and all I really wanted to do was sit and be drunk, occasionally repeating, ‘I can’t drive and I can’t read French’ but even I could see this was not particularly helpful.
We eventually found it by accident. It was five minutes from the restaurant, and it took us an hour and a half to get there. This demonstrates the time travellers can save by having their own transport.
We bought books to enhance our cultural experience, novels and nonfiction about French life. I purchased Lolita, mistakenly believing it was set in Paris. We crisscrossed France, my much younger girlfriend and I, driving from motel to motel, like Humbert and Lolita except without so much sex.
The further we went, the more stuff we acquired. As well as the books, we collected clothes, souvenirs, more CDs, and piles and piles of travel brochures. Lolita, of course, bought shoes.
At one point she had five pairs. I did not mind giving her footwear a bit of a holiday, but I could not see why we had to keep the empty boxes. I opened one to demonstrate its uselessness, to find it was stuffed with old plastic bags. Charmingly domesticated Claire had re-created the kitchen plastic bag drawer in the cramped confines of the car boot!
By the time we reached Paris, my job had become largely mechanised. The driver had found the Michelin website, into which she could key in the starting point and destination of any trip, and it would spit out the fastest, most scenic or least toll-heavy route. Its directions had a sickening accuracy – ‘Travel NW for 180 metres (0.2 minutes), then NNW for 335 metres (0.33 minutes)’ – unlike my own, ‘Turn there! No, there! I mean there! There, where we just passed . . .’
I felt as useless as an ashtray on a skateboard, a learning centre, or a plastic bag drawer in a car.
We met up with my brother. He was surprised I could not speak fluent French. Didn’t I study it at school?
‘Ouvrez le chien,’ he reminded me, helpfully.
Open the dog.
It was the first time I had really seen him since he started living with Jo, but we managed to hardly mention the fact. Instead, we got drunk, sang the old songs and told the old stories, two actors playing the same parts even though the scenery has shifted behind them.
My brother was invaluable in the car, since he can both drive and read maps, so he
took over the passengering. Watching him at work, falling into all the same traps as I did, I was able to formulate the Five Immutable Rules of Passengering in the much the same way as I had put together the Ten Immutable Rules of Magazine Publishing:
(1) Never apologise, never explain.
There is no answer to any question that begins, ‘Why didn’t you . . .?’ Except, of course, ‘Because I’m a halfwit.’
(2) Never give up.
As soon as you throw down the map and announce, ‘I’ll tell you where we bloody are! We’re lost is where we fucking are!’ the driver will calmly turn the next corner and you will be facing the Champs Elysées.
(3) Never blame the map.
The map is not wrong. You are wrong.
(4) Never hesitate.
When the driver yells ‘Left or right? Left or right? Left or right?’ you might as well just choose one. It is your indecision that is infuriating.
(5) Never attempt to enlist the driver in your own misreading of the map. Do not ask, ‘Doesn’t it look like that to you?’ because it will not look like that to her; it will look exactly as the cartographer intended. Besides, she has been driving all day and she is tired and it is the only thing she has asked of you this whole trip, and if you cannot just do one tiny thing . . .
AFTERWORD
I was very good at making men’s lifestyle magazines. This seemed strange to me, because I had never been much good at anything else. I would not advocate getting beaten unconscious and left in an alleyway as a prerequisite for success in men’s publishing – although I can think of a couple of executives who would benefit from the experience. I would not suggest anybody send their son to a boys’ school – let alone a rubbish one – but it did teach male values: the need for vicarious violence, symbolic rebellion, constant humour. No-one – least of all soldiers – should grow up in a garrison town, but at the time it was as exciting and glamorous as New York. I watched the army swagger and sneer, afraid of the town, afraid of women, afraid of each other, and I learned something about men. Men don’t grow up in all-male societies. Schoolboys who never have to deal with women never mature. The military is a bunch of kids, still living by playground rules. Men in prison are stunted, bewildered, incomplete people.
