In The Last Act, William Tegg quotes a nineteenth-century ship’s surgeon, Dr Clarke, who described leaning out of his cabin window one day idly watching an officer fishing when ‘the corpse of a man, newly sewed in a hammock, started half out of the water, and continued its course, with the current, towards the shore. Nothing could be more horrible: its head and shoulders were visible, turning first to one side and then to the other, with a solemn and awful movement, as if impressed with some dreadful secret of the deep, which, from its watery grave, it came upwards to reveal.’ In explanation, Dr Clarke went on to cite one of his medical contemporaries who wrote that ‘in a certain stage of putrefaction, the bodies of persons which have been immersed in water, rise to the surface, and in deep water are supported in an erect posture, to the terror of uninstructed spectators. Menacing looks and gestures, and even words, are supplied by the affrighted imagination, with infinite facility, and referred to the horrible apparition.’
So we stood in the lightening dawn and stared at the sea. Hardly any of us doubted the unknown fisherman’s power to haunt. If meeting him once had seemed fated, his finding us again had been uncanny. Nobody would have been much surprised, though petrified, had he miraculously started up out of the waves, pointed a dripping finger and anathematised us all. But a long minute passed and nothing more menacing occurred than a couple of abrupt disturbances in the water some way off to suggest the restless prowling of predators. Then the entire boat was enveloped in a reek of corruption that made everyone clap his hands across his cloth-wound mouth. It was so intense it suggested a physical presence, as though the deceased had secretly joined us again, his identity concealed by a mask. On an inspiration a bottle of rum was passed around, the liquor liberally splashed on the cloth protecting mouth and nose. Pulling himself from this collective trance of disgust, the captain tried to start the engine. On the third attempt it caught; and in the welcome blare of machinery we moved slowly from under the primitive cloud and set a course for home.
As soon as the masks were ripped off and lungs were filling with morning air, a discussion broke out between those who believed the appalling stench was the manifestation of an evil spirit and others who thought that when the corpse had reached a sufficient depth, pressure would have ruptured its decomposing tissues and released the pent-up gases in one stinking bubble. Either that, or a shark had attacked it, which would have produced the same result. This debate was still going on when there were fresh cries from the stern and once again the engine was cut.
It seemed that even now the dead man was not finished with us. Someone had noticed that the pile of polystyrene cool boxes containing the lobsters had become shrunken and lopsided beneath its protective shroud of tarpaulin. On investigation it was found that the leaked petrol had melted the bottoms of the two lowest boxes and that all the lobsters in them were dead or contaminated by fumes. One by one the mate began throwing them over the side. Each small splash represented wasted time, wasted danger, wasted effort and diminishing pay for everyone aboard. Finally, the last of the spilt fuel was mopped up and the surviving boxes restacked on a base of boards scrounged from elsewhere in the boat. The two bottomless and soggy boxes were balefully thrown overboard where, light as they were, they drifted cantedly astern as we resumed our course. They remained visible a long while, brilliantly white in the rising sun like children’s coffins floating in our wake.
VII
Do you remember this?
Uneasy weather. Beneath blusters of warm wind, the empty metallic ringing of crickets. Uneasy place, too. A little coastline familiar in its every indentation, recently condemned to death, or at least to transfiguration. (The toad developers. Restlessly they gobble up beaches and excrete hotels, restlessly they move on.) You were in a doze, half watching the never-settling terns pick morsels out of the surf when you thought the dead fisherman walked out of the sea and stood in front of the sun. He was bones but he wore the same recognisable clothes and had even found his conical straw hat. The T-shirt was faded, the Boysen paint ad illegible. It was huge now, draped across his clavicles as though on a hanger. The baggy shorts hung off his hip bones. Yet when he began his harangue he enunciated clearly even though his tongue was missing. He was neither maledictory nor exalted, but sneering.
‘Easy – it’s so easy, isn’t it? The mellifluous prose? An ear for cadence and some good, heartwarming ethnic action – us brown fisher-folk doing our thing. Add to that the old chestnut, Death, guaranteed to bestow a borrowed solemnity on the emptiest writing.
‘So here we are in the South Seas, near enough, which despite everything still carries a feeble voltage of the exotic for your sort. They will ask: Was it true? Did that story really happen about the dead guy sitting in his boat? Did you actually …? And there’s no answer. That’s the splendid thing about tales: it’s neither true nor untrue, fact nor fiction. What it is, is words on a page ordered more or less skilfully. You might have witnessed these marine dramas scores of times or never once – there’s no knowing.
‘Still, there are more bothering things to pick up on, such as why you’re so intimate with people you don’t fully understand. Why, in short, are foreigners more significant to you than your own kind? I have to assume there’s something offensive to you about your own townee culture. No – don’t interrupt. You betray an attitude many of your fellows still share more or less unconsciously: that hoary old trope of pastoral virtue as the antidote to urban corruption, itself straight out of the classical authors. You describe the lives and deaths of my own people, fishermen and subsistence farmers, as being in some way “realer” than the so-called conspiracy entered into by your metropolitan man. “Realer” meaning, I suppose, more genuine, more in touch with those damned eternal verities because less padded, less insulated. You appear to be attributing to us a superior moral status which can only be due to our noble poverty even though there’s not a man, woman or child among us who wouldn’t opt for the contaminating comforts of wealth, given the chance.
‘How is it you foreigners feel so free to come half across the world to load us with your fantasies and anxieties when God knows we’re laden enough as it is? “Idyll” – that’s the word you’re always using to describe our workplace. That and “paradise”. Look at me’ (and here the figure raised his arms, bones greenish in the sun). ‘Do I look like someone who has recently passed through paradise? Do you? Besides, what’s wrong with cement hotels and casinos? There’s more future in them than in stick villages. We’d all like the chance of a job in one. Waiter, pool attendant, bell-boy, chef, maid … Toiling away, maybe, but toiling away in air-conditioning and for a regular wage. Me, I quite fancy being a croupier. Raking in cash has the edge over hauling in fish.
‘Where death’s concerned it seems that secularity’s blanket doesn’t quite cover everything, after all. So in the name of stoicism you invent a peculiar dignity in a corpse being weighted down and thrown into the sea. Let me tell you that my family, whose identity none of you ever bothered to discover, were worried sick about me when I never returned from my fishing trip. Now, of course, they accept I must be dead; but they’d still rather I was lying up in the cemetery where they can visit me instead of having no grave to put flowers on.
‘Your attitude to sea burial’s just an extension of that other business about virtuous nature being superior to the corrupt metropolis and all its works. A moth-eaten romanticism suggests that sinking gracefully into the mystic deep is somehow more appropriate for a person of sensibility – an ex-person, that is – than being raked out of a crematorium furnace into a jar and then scattered in a suburb. Since you allude to Sir Thomas Browne, you might take his point that it’s a waste of time worrying about what happens to your body. It’s just your bad luck that you’re alive too late to have a soul to fuss over.
‘And finally, you patronise everyone when you talk about a conspiracy to pretend death doesn’t exist. I can’t think why you don’t see your urban conspirators as stoical and gallant ins
tead of dismissing them loftily. I tell you, I admire people,’ the dead fisherman said. ‘I don’t care whether they work in boats or stock exchanges – most of the people you meet over the age of thirty have a private loss behind them: dead parent, dead friend, mortal reminders. If only you could stop talking and just observe instead, you might notice that nearly everyone is walking wounded. Yet still they manage to hold it together. We all know what’s in store, and aerobics and wallbars are no bad way of flipping it the finger.’
*
You will remember that it was being able to see the terns again, still not settling at the surf’s edge but constantly making as though to alight, that woke you to his sudden absence. The fisherman had gone. Nothing now stood between you and the sun, and in its light the cantankerous and ungrateful old fool’s arguments became as shadowy as he. Ungrateful? Certainly. Hadn’t every last person on that famous fishing trip contributed to a monument for him? It had become a matter of propriety that none but the crew should have anything to do with it. The result was there for all to see: a modest cement plinth roughly the size of a milestone set among the palms, beyond the reach of any but the most freakish tide. On it was an inscription in the dialect saying ‘Remember an unknown fisherman lost at sea and found by God,’ then the date. It was signed ‘The crew of the Medevina.’ As for our not having bothered to find out who he was, we had told the headman the moment we reached home, who had informed the village policeman, who had notified the coastguard in town, who had spread the word to all the other coastguards for miles up the coast. We might have kept quiet about it. There were enough long arguments on the way home until the captain wisely decided it was a secret bound to leak out sooner or later. But the real reason for telling people was pure superstition. The crew agreed the dead man’s spirit would continue to haunt and jinx them unless he was publicly acknowledged and Father Demetrio held a Mass for him. It was scarcely our fault if, after all that, no news had ever come back about the man’s identity. As far as anyone could tell, he was unmissed.
When you considered the dead man’s tirade in detail, you thought it vulgar that he made his own kind out to be nothing but yearning materialists. He had implied that poverty reduced everything to mere stark need, abrogating all but the coarsest emotions. Were the poor not to be allowed melancholy, then? Nor the anxieties of love, the arresting queerness of being alive? Are we to deny people their subtlety because they are uneducated? Why shouldn’t shore dwellers’ tales and traditions be more than fables of crude optimism? Might they not, like other folklore, arouse uneasy doubts about striking it rich or moving away to a distant city in search of fortune, even as they adumbrated love’s essential impurity and the heartless equivocations of God?
After all, it is something to be able to sit on a shore beside a driftwood fire while overhead the constellations beam down their implacable playlets and underfoot the skeletons lie in strata yards thick. Briefly sandwiched between two voids, it is something. To lay fish across the coals as your children scamper up from the surf into the circle of firelight long enough to ask, ‘Aren’t they ready yet?’ before vanishing again with squeals: that is not nothing. What it is cannot always be thought of; yet for a flashing moment, the duration of a smile, it feels like the present. There is chatter, and the smoke drifts up, and the children’s voices come and go as they play in the dark at the ocean’s edge. And you, unhappy mister with the green bones and the smell of fathoms about you, you are dead and not part of this moment. Nor will you ever be again. Maybe that explains the rancour.
The dead fisherman was also mistaken about the significance of sea burial and a corpse’s fate. Browne wrote as a Christian; his essay was a declaration of faith. Catafalques and tombs, urns and cenotaphs – of course they were all vanities so long as the souls of the righteous were in the hand of God. Besides, at the sounding of the last trump the dead would be raised incorruptible, attire unspecified (but why not in ragged T-shirt with paint ads?). In any case, it meant one might as well economise on the burial and opt for a simple hole in the ground. But Browne was writing nearly three and a half centuries ago, and such doctrinal optimism is no longer open to us. The fisherman was simply wrong. The whole point of sea burial is that it is not monument or grandeur or the survival of even so much as a name. It offers the small consolation of an end which is all of a piece with what went before. By quite simple mathematics it is possible to calculate how, at any moment, the chances are overwhelming that there is in one’s lungs a molecule of air that was once breathed by Alexander the Great or Buddha or a dodo or even old Sir Thomas Browne himself (simply name a hero). From there it is a small leap to perceive flesh as wholly pervaded by particles belonging to anyone and everybody. The body is at once atoms of star-stuff and the world’s deceased, as well as those of the world’s living and the yet unborn. The democracy of this physics is comforting because it requires no leap of faith, only the perception of being a cloudlike formation constantly interchanging parts with friend and stranger, plant and beast, land and sea. Justus Forfex was ahead of his time.
*
When the terns had gone and sunset’s massive city was heaped on the horizon in cinnabar and madder, you will remember that the dead fisherman (even then puffing through your lungs and coursing in your blood) had not had it entirely his own way. Before he faded, you had got a word in, sharp with the triumphalism of the living. You told him there might once have been a pathetic resonance in the suggestion that he had committed suicide, but that you had no further need to be respectful towards a distress that would have vanished at the moment of death. You told him his arguments were nothing, vapour, just the constant opening of blind conversational alleyways which were as constantly closed off again, conceptual clouds. You informed him that you would use him entirely as you saw fit, together with his compatriots, the scenery, diverting cosmogonies, smells, sounds and words. The reason was simple. For as long as you were alive it was your world and your ocean.
VIII
You will remember how puzzled you were as a child to discover that an event is more like itself when anticipated or recalled than when it is happening. The sea’s deep discovery must also speak of things other than itself to ring on in the mind, the sonar pulses of inquiry bouncing back from hidden apprehensions. In like fashion, and according to taste, death needs stars and ocean for it to be real, to acquire proper echoes. Cut off from its grand inklings and sprawling starfields, it is wispish. Without playlets it has no weight. Without a little solemnity death is a kind of failure, recasting the handful of days as trivial and forecasting only a savage void. Yet as long as Little Turtle can see it and weep, the fatal life is acknowledged, safe in its moment. The ocean wraps the planet like a caul. Flinging grave, the mind’s capacious habitat: we are its children. Provided the sea takes us back, the bloat and decay are acceptable even if the deal remains raw.
Slowly you grew accustomed to this idea that the mind must always falsify things before they can become true. Otherwise, a gap opens between facts and the need to make them private. So you once wrote that even when you were seventeen, you yearned to be seventeen, a fancy that seemed perverse until you found it echoed in Bashō’s haiku:
Even in Kyoto, hearing the cuckoo’s cry,
I long for Kyoto.
All the unresting melancholy that the now announces – through its cuckoos, its breaking waves, its playground voices, the idea of Kyoto – pushes thought aside. Sitting at night alone on the ocean in a small boat ought to pare things right down. It does; but never to that point of inhuman Buddhistic virtue where one embarks on an immaculate passage into nothingness. The details of survival, of the sea itself, beguile; the playlets captivate. Not being fish, we mourn things, the present especially. The now is as irretrievably shut to fishermen as to poets. It is less accessible even than the past, peopled as that is with ancestors and our lost companions. We are filled with homesickness for no identifiable home, for the Kyoto in which we are writing which is not quite the Kyoto we l
ong to be writing in; for the birthday we passed through but never quite achieved; for the sunlit embrace of an end that will heal us from itself. Playing with time, we embellish the bonework of existence to our solitary taste.
One morning in early spring at an open casement in Arezzo we catch an impossible whiff of ocean. A figure in battered clothes steps out of the front door below carrying a single strapped bag. It is Giusto Forbici. He has the air of someone who will not return. Those cries on a lift of wind from beyond the station are the sound of gulls and surf, or maybe of children who foresee their deaths. That is not snow but petals drifting past the window, the cherries returning to gauntness and waiting for leaf.
Index
‘abiogenesis’ 1
Aborigines 1, 2
Acanthaster planci (crown-of-thorns starfish) 1
Achille Lauro 1
acoustico-lateralis system (fish) 1
Adam (husband of Eve) 1, 2
adipocere 1
Affray, HMS 1, 2, 3
Aflalo, F. G. 1, 2
Africanus, Julius 1
‘aged’ metal 1
Ainsworth, L. 1
air gun 1, 2
airsickness 1
albatross 1, 2
Albatross 1
Albert I, Prince of Monaco 1
Alexander the Great 1, 2, 3, 4
altus 1
Alvin (submersible) 1
Seven-Tenths Page 36
