As Anne was stripping the doona from its cover, she couldn't resist the urge to smell the old cotton sheets. She made sure no one was watching her bend down to the empty bed, least of all her husband Bob. She closed the door behind her and drew the curtain so that the smell could envelop her, so that it could enter her, consume her - the sleep and the dreams and the soft skin.
Perhaps she hoped to recollect memories of Paul's baby skin or find a piece of hair short enough it could only be his? This, she told herself, was a necessary act of recognition, something every mother needed to do to familiarise herself with her grown-up son who now shared his life with a woman other than his mother.
How unfortunate then that her nose failed her! There was nothing. Nothing that could be vaguely construed as Paul-remnants. To her disappointment she had to conclude that it could have been anyone, even a stranger, sleeping in that bed. There was just the anonymous smell of sleeping bodies and greasy body hair. His was just a body like anybody.
As she was about to give up this futile attempt of turning back time through the act of sniffing sheets, her nose got a whiff of something else. She looked around to double check that no one had entered the room and then she picked up the doona to press her nostrils deeper into the sheet. She took a deep breath. The exercise was so strenuous that she had to throw the doona aside as she snorted and gasped for a gust of fresh air. She found a new unsniffed spot on the doona. She tried the pillows, too. Slowly and painfully she began to discern a smell. She inhaled deeper. And deeper. The smell began to take on a shape. Something tangible, manly. She had a vision of a throbbing amoeba washed ashore on a barren beach. At first she mistook the smell for herself until she realised that as much as it might have belonged to her once upon a long, long time ago, it was now the exclusive property of her husband.
She pictured him kneeling against the empty bed of the young woman who was to become his daughter-in-law. Now, his moans were almost audible. Her younger self would have thought the idea quite comical, the ageing taking turns at the altar of youth. Now, all she could do from stifling her scream was to bury her head in her hands and sob.
Monday, March 24, 2008
Monday, February 18, 2008
Alice Can Wait
It was tea-time. Saleem, because he was not born English, but had to learn to be it, took his tea strong and brewed in the pot. Bryce, on the other hand, was free to take his tea any way he liked it. His idea of a good cup of tea was hot water into which he dipped a teabag (any kind, he wasn't fussy) for about 2 seconds and then immediately took it out again, leaving about half the water a brownish colour.
These habits had been observed in the lounge of the five-star hotel where Saleem and Bryce, together with a dozen other prominent authors, were staying. Observed, that is, by other authors, not by outsiders – for the comings and goings of some of the world's most prolific writers assembled under the auspices of "The Adelaide Writers Festival" passed relatively unnoticed by the local population. The year was 1984 and the presence of Saleem and Bryce was the highlight of the festival. Their books Noon Children and In Santa Cruz were invariably forced to share the display table, the news, the camera. What happened next can thus best be explained through the process of osmosis. After a week of forced association and constant comparison, the creators of these two novels decided, like their characters had before them, to embark on a journey. At the end of the week the two men rented a 4-wheel drive land rover, bought supplies, and set out into the desert north-west of Adelaide.
Bryce was fidgety. He had been planning this trip to the Simpson Desert ever since he first began his study on nomads several years earlier in Africa. Not that he objected to Saleem as a person, but he was averse towards company in general. He liked to travel alone, finding it easier to bond with those he met (other travellers, locals, eccentrics) when he didn't have to worry about someone else. Worrying was what you did when you had company and he didn't like the way it slowed him down. Of course, Saleem was a first-class migrant, a professional wanderer. Bryce only hoped that they wouldn't have to talk books the way writers tend to do when they are together; especially not Saleem's book since he would then have to admit that he hadn't actually read Noon Children. He felt awfully embarrassed about it and could provide no excuse except the usual – too little time, etc.
He needn't have worried: Saleem wasn't going to talk books if he could help it. He was fed up with books and the whole circus he had come to associate with it. Not that the book-world didn't have certain advantages. Being a famous author brought about lots of things that would otherwise never come his way, or at any rate not in such abundance. Money was one such thing, women was another. But these two accessories had made it quite difficult for Saleem to find the time to write and think. One day he was a migrant from India, and the next he was a trophy of the empire. The West had seduced him – made him into nothing short of a rock-god. To ensure his unfailing commitment to the East, he had sworn to do something different next time. Something a little less cutesy: Islam. His agent was against the idea. She said religion never sold, particularly not that kind. Saleem won her over, got his advance and all he needed now was a place of peace and quiet.
After a whole day on the road they stopped at a small crossroads to rest. Bryce, showing no signs of fatigue, wrote in a black notebook made out of moleskin. Meanwhile, Saleem prepared the fire. They wanted to get to Alice by nightfall the following day so after having shared a meal consisting of tinned beans and grilled meat, they laid under the stars, and fell asleep.
When Saleem woke up the following morning, Bryce was already consulting his notebooks.
-Are you working on your new book? he wanted to know, feeling the familiar pang of agony and envy that came with seeing another author at work.
-Well, several really. I'm nearly finished researching Aboriginal cartography. I was hoping to talk to a couple of fellows in Alice, but it's going to be difficult. They don't like strangers.
-You mean they don't like white men?
He had to ask. And then he felt another pang in his stomach. Could it be that Bryce was bringing him along to soften up the "black fellas"?
-White men, black men, yellow men. They don't like any strangers whatever colour.
Bryce went to clean up their plates from last night. He used leaves from the ground as a brush. Saleem followed Bryce's movements. Watch out for the snakes, he wanted to shout, but thought better of it at the last moment. Bryce was like a local: competent, practical, unafraid. For the first time that he could recall, Saleem wished he wasn't so English. It made him feel like a fraud now that he was in the company of an Englishman who was more like a bushman at heart. Bryce turned to tell Saleem to smother the fire they had made to boil water for their tea. Within ten minutes they were back in the land rover leaving behind them a cloud of dust, some burnt gum tree, and a pile of chewed bones.
After a couple of hours Saleem was beginning to feel relaxed for the first time in months. Nothing bothered him. He felt more at home in the dust, the distance, the heat, the silence than he had in any city of Europe. He let his imagination take him to other distant and dry lands; to the East of his memory. He imagined the roar of an aeroplane and saw two men falling, falling through space, yes, and they would talk on their way through the sky; a nice Muslim, a young man brought up the English way and an angel who sees the world through the Prophet's eyes, yes.
He was woken up from his reverie by the extraordinary stillness. They were parked in the shade of some rocks. Bryce was watching him, amused.
-How long have I been asleep? asked Saleem. He abhorred the thought of being watched like an insect when he wasn't aware of it, though he himself had done it often enough to lovers on sleepless nights.
-Not long. You nodded off sometime after we turned left off the track.
-What about Alice?
-I'm following the directions an old Aboriginal man gave me in Adelaide. I bought him a few drinks and he told me certain things.
Saleem followed Bryce's movements as he began to collect branches and stones to build the fire. He was wearing shorts and hiking boots.
Later that night, after hours of driving, Bryce was telling Saleem the names of the star constellations above them. Bryce didn't think of himself as a selfish man. He liked the sound of his own voice, but he was also convinced that as long as he had things to impart to other men, it was his duty to do so. Knowledge had to be accumulated and released. Knowledge was compressed energy that had to flow. A mind at rest was a diseased mind, just like a body that didn't move was an unhealthy body. Even Bryce's imagination travelled extensively. It took him to borderless, esoteric landscapes of simmering craters. At times, he longed to suspend time so that he could exchange air and water for these globules of anti-matter. Globetrotting was simply not enough. He longed for the day when it would be possible to traverse time, space, and most of all: the body. Meanwhile, writing novels was as close as he ever got to transcendence. In his youth, he had tried to summon the spirits of dead people; his father's notably, but also his great-uncle's and even the one of his old friend from school who had died in a car crash when he was only nine. None of these sermons had, alas, yielded any success. Thinking back at these embarrassing fiascos, Bryce had the sudden urge to tell Saleem about his desire to travel through life and death. He was sure Saleem would sympathise with his endeavours. With his exotic Eastern background he was bound to see the beauty of such a journey.
-Imagine, he was now in the process of telling Saleem, what impact it would have on our personal lives, and literature too! If infinite transgression determined our approach to everything around us what, if anything, would keep us in the moment?
-Surely there are other needs, other than spiritual I mean, which come into question: hunger, cold...
-Granted, but if the soul and the mind operate under the laws of boundless mobility, they will see that the body is satisfied. The body is the motor of the soul. Nomads wander to feed their stomachs, but above all, the journey satisfies the spiritual needs of these people.
-But don't you find that we don't live enough in the moment and until we do...
-Frankly, no. The present is overrated.
It then crossed Saleem's mind that perhaps the distinguished British author had rather wanted to be alone or at any rate somewhere else or with someone else than the present moment provided. Because that thought permeated him to his very bones, it rendered all further conversation impossible. He pondered how to terminate the discussion without seeming rude. At last he settled for an ill disguised yawn, which had the desired effect of Bryce informing him how tired he was.
When Bryce stretched himself out on the warm ground, he thought he could hear voices. His study of aboriginal customs had made him increasingly aware of the sacredness of the land. How could he be sure that he wasn't violating some unwritten law by camping right here? It was the middle of nowhere, but he had been told that the spirits could be everywhere. That thought made it impossible for Bryce to go to sleep. Unnerved by his own thinking, he was now sure now that the air vibrated with something invisible to the human eye. His instincts told him that tonight would bring them something out of the ordinary. He wanted to share his premonitions with Saleem, but when he looked over to his side he couldn't be sure he wasn't sleeping because his back was turned to him.
Saleem watched the fire turn to coal until there was nothing left of it but the heat that was spreading out of the stones around it. Then he turned his eyes outwards; towards the sky and beyond. This total abandon to the elements made him think of an episode from when he was a little boy living in Pakistan. He had gone for a picnic with his family near a river. It was a humid and hot afternoon and the rich food had made his parents nod off. He remembered being terrified of the snakes and other animals as he made his way down the hill, but rather than causing him to give up, the fear added to his excitement. By the time he approached the banks of the river, he felt like an explorer who had reached his goal. With a new sense of confidence and pride, he waded out into the water, though it was never his intention to go far, since he couldn't swim. When he got to about one arm's length into the water, he lost contact with the ground.
Bryce was dreaming about water when he was woken up in the middle of the night. He tried to recall what it had been. Someone drowning or maybe a running tap or a leaking bottle? He told himself that it was quite normal to be dreaming of water when you were in the middle of the desert. It was while he was attempting to record his dream in the black notebook, its pages lit by stars, that he saw them. At first they looked like rocks that were slowly gliding towards Saleem and himself. Bryce's initial thought was that they were a sign from his father. At last, he thought, his spirit has come back to communicate with me. He felt no fear, only an intense exhilaration and curiosity. He got on his feet and was about to walk towards them when Saleem woke up and staggered towards Bryce like a sleep-walker.
-Who are they? he whispered.
-I don't know, but I'm going to find out. You stay here. Wait for me.
-I'm coming with you, Bryce.
Bryce didn't want to waste his time by protesting so he just nodded, gave him a torch and the two men proceeded to make their way into the darkness. They walked side by side and kept their eyes on the creatures ahead of them. By now, Bryce could see that they weren't rocks or bushes or anything else out of the landscape. But nor were they human beings. There was a clear space of night air between them and the ground.
Saleem was determined not to let Bryce see his anguish, determined not to be a lesser man, worse, a lesser Englishman than he. By this stage, he too had also realised that these creatures were not ordinary human beings. In a way, he was strangely relieved that they weren't because that meant that combat was out of question. One didn't physically fight ghosts. Ghosts were mind stuff. And Saleem had learned over the years to have supreme confidence in the strength of his mind. After all, he was a writer. He was able to manipulate reality to his liking; give new names to old things and twist and bend the present for the sake of fiction. Nevertheless, the prospect of an encounter with real ghosts was not a pleasing thought. He had to take comfort in the fact that he was in the company of Bryce. Together they would find a way to get around this awkward situation.
When the two men stood opposite the creatures they were struck by the familiarity of their shapes and outlines. But how could that be? they thought as they looked closer. They were a motley crowd, huddled together like extras on a film set. All in all, they were a very bland group, save for the fact that they were floating in the air. In spite of their dullness, however, Saleem and Bryce had the nagging feeling that they knew or at least ought to know some of these characters the way they were bound to recognise even the most distant relatives. Bryce tried to pick a face in the crowd that reminded him of his father's, but no matter how much he looked he couldn't find a single personality trait of his in the dark. Saleem scrutinised the women in the crowd and tried to match a face with that of someone whom he had had lovers' arguments with in the past, thinking that she might now be dead and back to haunt him.
At last, one of them spoke up.
-We've come to remind you of our existence. There was a time you knew us well, you thought about us daily, sometimes for weeks, months even. You knew us intimately. You gave us shape, personality and words to speak. We had something to live for, a purpose, something to do. You gave us a path to follow, people to meet. Things happened to us! And now? What have we become now? Look at us! Take a good look! Do you still not recognise a single one of us?
Intrigued, Bryce did what he had not thought polite to do prior to this little speech and lit up the mass with his torch. Together with Saleem he peered into the group whose faces peered back at them, impervious to the sudden brightness.
-I think I do know that one to the right, he pointed to an old man who stood there scratching his beard absent-mindedly. He looks a little like a character I was thinking of for In Santa Cruz, but it got too crowded towards the end. I simply had to dispense with him. I had no other choice. The plot would have become too contrived with him in it.
-Prick! came a voice from the group.
-But he would only have become a character! protested Bryce.
-Only a character! Some of us dream of becoming only a character. You should know better than that!
-They've turned into bloody parasites, that's for sure, said Bryce under his breath.
Saleem wasn't able to react because at that moment he had discovered a myriad of little brown-faced children in the group who turned their angry faces to him. After a while of hard thinking, he recognised them as the faceless characters that his most recent protagonist had engaged telepathically with. They were the noon children themselves. He tentatively addressed them as such.
-Noon children, why have you come tonight?
-We've come to seek justice. You didn't give us names, not a word!
-But there were a thousand of you! How could I? There was no room... You played a metaphorical role...
-Metaphor or no metaphor, we demand that you give us a place in your next book. We want redemption.
-Hear, hear! came the muffled sound from the crowd.
-Until we find a page to live in, we will wander the earth like homeless souls.
-And what happens if we don't give you one? challenged Bryce.
-Then we will wander your mind and your imagination until you do. You will have no sleep, no rest and write no books until we are finished with you!
As they made their way back to their camp, they were submerged in thoughts. Even as apparitions go, these had been most unusual. At least ghosts had once been the embodiment of a human being at some point in the past, but these had not even made it to the pages of a book! Saleem and Bryce were both intimately aware of the hardship of their profession. Writing was at best gruelling, but as long as they produced something at the end of the day, they considered it worth their while. But that was while they were unaware of these spirits restlessly orbiting the world; these cast-outs, these rejects of the imagination condemned to the junk yard of deserted narrative in the Simpson Desert. Given any other circumstance, their nomadic existence would have appealed to Saleem and Bryce, who themselves had crossed the earth many times over, but this was something else. These spirits were – as much as they were wont to admit it – aborted figments of their imagination and consequently, their responsibility. The mere thought of having to find a home for these poor sods in their future novels wore them out, but both Bryce and Saleem knew they had no other choice if they wished to be left alone. Bryce secretly feared he would never be able to finish his book on nomads and Saleem's only desire was to return to his beloved England where ghosts were confined to attics and basements.
In the end, the two writers decided to cut their journey short and return to Adelaide.
-I'm sorry about Alice old chap, Saleem said.
-Alice can wait, muttered Bryce.
These habits had been observed in the lounge of the five-star hotel where Saleem and Bryce, together with a dozen other prominent authors, were staying. Observed, that is, by other authors, not by outsiders – for the comings and goings of some of the world's most prolific writers assembled under the auspices of "The Adelaide Writers Festival" passed relatively unnoticed by the local population. The year was 1984 and the presence of Saleem and Bryce was the highlight of the festival. Their books Noon Children and In Santa Cruz were invariably forced to share the display table, the news, the camera. What happened next can thus best be explained through the process of osmosis. After a week of forced association and constant comparison, the creators of these two novels decided, like their characters had before them, to embark on a journey. At the end of the week the two men rented a 4-wheel drive land rover, bought supplies, and set out into the desert north-west of Adelaide.
Bryce was fidgety. He had been planning this trip to the Simpson Desert ever since he first began his study on nomads several years earlier in Africa. Not that he objected to Saleem as a person, but he was averse towards company in general. He liked to travel alone, finding it easier to bond with those he met (other travellers, locals, eccentrics) when he didn't have to worry about someone else. Worrying was what you did when you had company and he didn't like the way it slowed him down. Of course, Saleem was a first-class migrant, a professional wanderer. Bryce only hoped that they wouldn't have to talk books the way writers tend to do when they are together; especially not Saleem's book since he would then have to admit that he hadn't actually read Noon Children. He felt awfully embarrassed about it and could provide no excuse except the usual – too little time, etc.
He needn't have worried: Saleem wasn't going to talk books if he could help it. He was fed up with books and the whole circus he had come to associate with it. Not that the book-world didn't have certain advantages. Being a famous author brought about lots of things that would otherwise never come his way, or at any rate not in such abundance. Money was one such thing, women was another. But these two accessories had made it quite difficult for Saleem to find the time to write and think. One day he was a migrant from India, and the next he was a trophy of the empire. The West had seduced him – made him into nothing short of a rock-god. To ensure his unfailing commitment to the East, he had sworn to do something different next time. Something a little less cutesy: Islam. His agent was against the idea. She said religion never sold, particularly not that kind. Saleem won her over, got his advance and all he needed now was a place of peace and quiet.
After a whole day on the road they stopped at a small crossroads to rest. Bryce, showing no signs of fatigue, wrote in a black notebook made out of moleskin. Meanwhile, Saleem prepared the fire. They wanted to get to Alice by nightfall the following day so after having shared a meal consisting of tinned beans and grilled meat, they laid under the stars, and fell asleep.
When Saleem woke up the following morning, Bryce was already consulting his notebooks.
-Are you working on your new book? he wanted to know, feeling the familiar pang of agony and envy that came with seeing another author at work.
-Well, several really. I'm nearly finished researching Aboriginal cartography. I was hoping to talk to a couple of fellows in Alice, but it's going to be difficult. They don't like strangers.
-You mean they don't like white men?
He had to ask. And then he felt another pang in his stomach. Could it be that Bryce was bringing him along to soften up the "black fellas"?
-White men, black men, yellow men. They don't like any strangers whatever colour.
Bryce went to clean up their plates from last night. He used leaves from the ground as a brush. Saleem followed Bryce's movements. Watch out for the snakes, he wanted to shout, but thought better of it at the last moment. Bryce was like a local: competent, practical, unafraid. For the first time that he could recall, Saleem wished he wasn't so English. It made him feel like a fraud now that he was in the company of an Englishman who was more like a bushman at heart. Bryce turned to tell Saleem to smother the fire they had made to boil water for their tea. Within ten minutes they were back in the land rover leaving behind them a cloud of dust, some burnt gum tree, and a pile of chewed bones.
After a couple of hours Saleem was beginning to feel relaxed for the first time in months. Nothing bothered him. He felt more at home in the dust, the distance, the heat, the silence than he had in any city of Europe. He let his imagination take him to other distant and dry lands; to the East of his memory. He imagined the roar of an aeroplane and saw two men falling, falling through space, yes, and they would talk on their way through the sky; a nice Muslim, a young man brought up the English way and an angel who sees the world through the Prophet's eyes, yes.
He was woken up from his reverie by the extraordinary stillness. They were parked in the shade of some rocks. Bryce was watching him, amused.
-How long have I been asleep? asked Saleem. He abhorred the thought of being watched like an insect when he wasn't aware of it, though he himself had done it often enough to lovers on sleepless nights.
-Not long. You nodded off sometime after we turned left off the track.
-What about Alice?
-I'm following the directions an old Aboriginal man gave me in Adelaide. I bought him a few drinks and he told me certain things.
Saleem followed Bryce's movements as he began to collect branches and stones to build the fire. He was wearing shorts and hiking boots.
Later that night, after hours of driving, Bryce was telling Saleem the names of the star constellations above them. Bryce didn't think of himself as a selfish man. He liked the sound of his own voice, but he was also convinced that as long as he had things to impart to other men, it was his duty to do so. Knowledge had to be accumulated and released. Knowledge was compressed energy that had to flow. A mind at rest was a diseased mind, just like a body that didn't move was an unhealthy body. Even Bryce's imagination travelled extensively. It took him to borderless, esoteric landscapes of simmering craters. At times, he longed to suspend time so that he could exchange air and water for these globules of anti-matter. Globetrotting was simply not enough. He longed for the day when it would be possible to traverse time, space, and most of all: the body. Meanwhile, writing novels was as close as he ever got to transcendence. In his youth, he had tried to summon the spirits of dead people; his father's notably, but also his great-uncle's and even the one of his old friend from school who had died in a car crash when he was only nine. None of these sermons had, alas, yielded any success. Thinking back at these embarrassing fiascos, Bryce had the sudden urge to tell Saleem about his desire to travel through life and death. He was sure Saleem would sympathise with his endeavours. With his exotic Eastern background he was bound to see the beauty of such a journey.
-Imagine, he was now in the process of telling Saleem, what impact it would have on our personal lives, and literature too! If infinite transgression determined our approach to everything around us what, if anything, would keep us in the moment?
-Surely there are other needs, other than spiritual I mean, which come into question: hunger, cold...
-Granted, but if the soul and the mind operate under the laws of boundless mobility, they will see that the body is satisfied. The body is the motor of the soul. Nomads wander to feed their stomachs, but above all, the journey satisfies the spiritual needs of these people.
-But don't you find that we don't live enough in the moment and until we do...
-Frankly, no. The present is overrated.
It then crossed Saleem's mind that perhaps the distinguished British author had rather wanted to be alone or at any rate somewhere else or with someone else than the present moment provided. Because that thought permeated him to his very bones, it rendered all further conversation impossible. He pondered how to terminate the discussion without seeming rude. At last he settled for an ill disguised yawn, which had the desired effect of Bryce informing him how tired he was.
When Bryce stretched himself out on the warm ground, he thought he could hear voices. His study of aboriginal customs had made him increasingly aware of the sacredness of the land. How could he be sure that he wasn't violating some unwritten law by camping right here? It was the middle of nowhere, but he had been told that the spirits could be everywhere. That thought made it impossible for Bryce to go to sleep. Unnerved by his own thinking, he was now sure now that the air vibrated with something invisible to the human eye. His instincts told him that tonight would bring them something out of the ordinary. He wanted to share his premonitions with Saleem, but when he looked over to his side he couldn't be sure he wasn't sleeping because his back was turned to him.
Saleem watched the fire turn to coal until there was nothing left of it but the heat that was spreading out of the stones around it. Then he turned his eyes outwards; towards the sky and beyond. This total abandon to the elements made him think of an episode from when he was a little boy living in Pakistan. He had gone for a picnic with his family near a river. It was a humid and hot afternoon and the rich food had made his parents nod off. He remembered being terrified of the snakes and other animals as he made his way down the hill, but rather than causing him to give up, the fear added to his excitement. By the time he approached the banks of the river, he felt like an explorer who had reached his goal. With a new sense of confidence and pride, he waded out into the water, though it was never his intention to go far, since he couldn't swim. When he got to about one arm's length into the water, he lost contact with the ground.
Bryce was dreaming about water when he was woken up in the middle of the night. He tried to recall what it had been. Someone drowning or maybe a running tap or a leaking bottle? He told himself that it was quite normal to be dreaming of water when you were in the middle of the desert. It was while he was attempting to record his dream in the black notebook, its pages lit by stars, that he saw them. At first they looked like rocks that were slowly gliding towards Saleem and himself. Bryce's initial thought was that they were a sign from his father. At last, he thought, his spirit has come back to communicate with me. He felt no fear, only an intense exhilaration and curiosity. He got on his feet and was about to walk towards them when Saleem woke up and staggered towards Bryce like a sleep-walker.
-Who are they? he whispered.
-I don't know, but I'm going to find out. You stay here. Wait for me.
-I'm coming with you, Bryce.
Bryce didn't want to waste his time by protesting so he just nodded, gave him a torch and the two men proceeded to make their way into the darkness. They walked side by side and kept their eyes on the creatures ahead of them. By now, Bryce could see that they weren't rocks or bushes or anything else out of the landscape. But nor were they human beings. There was a clear space of night air between them and the ground.
Saleem was determined not to let Bryce see his anguish, determined not to be a lesser man, worse, a lesser Englishman than he. By this stage, he too had also realised that these creatures were not ordinary human beings. In a way, he was strangely relieved that they weren't because that meant that combat was out of question. One didn't physically fight ghosts. Ghosts were mind stuff. And Saleem had learned over the years to have supreme confidence in the strength of his mind. After all, he was a writer. He was able to manipulate reality to his liking; give new names to old things and twist and bend the present for the sake of fiction. Nevertheless, the prospect of an encounter with real ghosts was not a pleasing thought. He had to take comfort in the fact that he was in the company of Bryce. Together they would find a way to get around this awkward situation.
When the two men stood opposite the creatures they were struck by the familiarity of their shapes and outlines. But how could that be? they thought as they looked closer. They were a motley crowd, huddled together like extras on a film set. All in all, they were a very bland group, save for the fact that they were floating in the air. In spite of their dullness, however, Saleem and Bryce had the nagging feeling that they knew or at least ought to know some of these characters the way they were bound to recognise even the most distant relatives. Bryce tried to pick a face in the crowd that reminded him of his father's, but no matter how much he looked he couldn't find a single personality trait of his in the dark. Saleem scrutinised the women in the crowd and tried to match a face with that of someone whom he had had lovers' arguments with in the past, thinking that she might now be dead and back to haunt him.
At last, one of them spoke up.
-We've come to remind you of our existence. There was a time you knew us well, you thought about us daily, sometimes for weeks, months even. You knew us intimately. You gave us shape, personality and words to speak. We had something to live for, a purpose, something to do. You gave us a path to follow, people to meet. Things happened to us! And now? What have we become now? Look at us! Take a good look! Do you still not recognise a single one of us?
Intrigued, Bryce did what he had not thought polite to do prior to this little speech and lit up the mass with his torch. Together with Saleem he peered into the group whose faces peered back at them, impervious to the sudden brightness.
-I think I do know that one to the right, he pointed to an old man who stood there scratching his beard absent-mindedly. He looks a little like a character I was thinking of for In Santa Cruz, but it got too crowded towards the end. I simply had to dispense with him. I had no other choice. The plot would have become too contrived with him in it.
-Prick! came a voice from the group.
-But he would only have become a character! protested Bryce.
-Only a character! Some of us dream of becoming only a character. You should know better than that!
-They've turned into bloody parasites, that's for sure, said Bryce under his breath.
Saleem wasn't able to react because at that moment he had discovered a myriad of little brown-faced children in the group who turned their angry faces to him. After a while of hard thinking, he recognised them as the faceless characters that his most recent protagonist had engaged telepathically with. They were the noon children themselves. He tentatively addressed them as such.
-Noon children, why have you come tonight?
-We've come to seek justice. You didn't give us names, not a word!
-But there were a thousand of you! How could I? There was no room... You played a metaphorical role...
-Metaphor or no metaphor, we demand that you give us a place in your next book. We want redemption.
-Hear, hear! came the muffled sound from the crowd.
-Until we find a page to live in, we will wander the earth like homeless souls.
-And what happens if we don't give you one? challenged Bryce.
-Then we will wander your mind and your imagination until you do. You will have no sleep, no rest and write no books until we are finished with you!
As they made their way back to their camp, they were submerged in thoughts. Even as apparitions go, these had been most unusual. At least ghosts had once been the embodiment of a human being at some point in the past, but these had not even made it to the pages of a book! Saleem and Bryce were both intimately aware of the hardship of their profession. Writing was at best gruelling, but as long as they produced something at the end of the day, they considered it worth their while. But that was while they were unaware of these spirits restlessly orbiting the world; these cast-outs, these rejects of the imagination condemned to the junk yard of deserted narrative in the Simpson Desert. Given any other circumstance, their nomadic existence would have appealed to Saleem and Bryce, who themselves had crossed the earth many times over, but this was something else. These spirits were – as much as they were wont to admit it – aborted figments of their imagination and consequently, their responsibility. The mere thought of having to find a home for these poor sods in their future novels wore them out, but both Bryce and Saleem knew they had no other choice if they wished to be left alone. Bryce secretly feared he would never be able to finish his book on nomads and Saleem's only desire was to return to his beloved England where ghosts were confined to attics and basements.
In the end, the two writers decided to cut their journey short and return to Adelaide.
-I'm sorry about Alice old chap, Saleem said.
-Alice can wait, muttered Bryce.
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
The Samosa or the Betty?
Jessie never thought of it as "losing my virginity." To her it was more like "losing my religion" as in R.E.M and bashing yourself up against a padded wall in an MTV studio. Ever since the age of twelve when her mother passed on a dog-eared copy of Fear of Flying, Jessie has sworn a silent oath never to stand on tippy-toe for any man, let alone get horizontal with him. Both feet planted securely on the ground, Jessie followed the pastel-coloured-boy-meets-girl-dramas of her classmates with the interest of a reformed addict whose guide to moral welfare is popular music. That is why when Sam, complete with her Cure regalia, introduced herself in the corridor between classes, Jessie agreed to extend the introduction.
From beneath her black, shiny hair, Jessie glimpsed dark eyeliner, purple lipstick, and a layer of white powder. "Look, sorry to bother you like this," she said, "but my brother is like really keen on you and maybe you'd consider meeting him. I know it's silly, and I wouldn't normally do this to you or any other woman, but he's getting on me fucking nerves," she blurted out and pulled at the split ends of her fringe to reveal more black, purple and white.
Sam was the first ever to have called Jessie a "woman." There was no one else in her limited circle of friends who had made the connection between Jessie's widening hips, enlarged chest and womanhood. Jessie always thought it would have been another ball game altogether had there been a father to share the responsibilities of child rearing with her mother. It wouldn't even have to be a father in the biological sense. Jessie wasn't fussed; she knew what decade she was living in. Just a male around the house would have made all the difference. As it was, Jessie's mother shunned the opposite sex and as far as she was concerned there hadn't been a male involved from the start, not even during conception. But Jessie's mum had been no Mary. In her distant youth, Jessie's mother had been a prostitute. She was now an organic food retailer. That was her joke. Her cracking the ice. Trafficking dead meat had made her a vegetarian. Something along those lines. Jessie usually got nauseous at that point of her mother's narrative and turned up the volume on her Walkman for lyrical support.
On their way to the smoking pit, Sam pointed out the obvious: "I hope you're not racist or anything. This isn't suntan." Jessie was about to reply something equally obvious when Sam added, "And if you think I'm dark you should see my brother! Me dad's from India and mum's a Yank, but we both got dad's colour. And, yeah, we've got a corner store, but here's where we are different 'cause we don't sell groceries, we're into videos – mostly porn, Packie-porn with sing-song music and women hiding behind the trees. My brother's not into that kind of music though. He plays the guitar and fancies himself a bit of a rock star..."
Halfway through that bit of genealogy, Jessie and Sam found themselves in the smoking pit getting assessed by the smokers. One of them isolated himself from the group and approached them languidly, almost reluctantly. Brother and sister exchanged looks and then brother broke the silence and offered Jessie a cigarette that she had to refuse, not knowing the mechanics.
Blowing a thin circle of smoke over her head, he asked what her name was.
At this point, it must be inserted that Jessie did suffer a terrible blow shortly after her birth that by those inclined to make things out of things like this would definitely constitute branding. She was given the name Jezebel, otherwise known as the Whore of Babylon.
"That's fucking brilliant!" croaked Sam and gave her a tap on the back.
"I'm Johnny," said her brother.
"No it's not!" said Sam with a sadistic smile on her lips. "It just so happens that this guy's ashamed of who he is, isn't that right, Jaweed?"
Jezebel who had been ashamed of who she was for as long as she could remember, lent him a sympathetic smile which was more like something you would find pasted on the face of the chronically ill.
"Let's get the fuck out of here!" said Johnny and flicked the cigarette on the ground.
Johnny was a poet, but until he could make money on his songs, he worked in his father's business. Only sporadically did he go to school. What Sam had said about their father's video shop proved to be somewhat of an understatement. He didn't actually own one shop: he owned a whole chain of them. Together with Johnny Jaweed's uncle, he catered for the movie consumption of the entire Indian community in London. He owned his fortunate disposition to excellent contacts with the production companies in Bombay. Thanks to them, his customers were guaranteed new releases at the same time as their relatives back home. In fact, sometimes they were watching Indian films before they had even been released in India.
Despite or perhaps because of his success, Johnny only referred to his dad in the most derogatory terms as he represented everything that Johnny tried to get away from – his Indian origins and the family enterprise. The lack of communication between his father and himself was fortunately well compensated for through Johnny's relationship with his mother. Vivienne adored her son more than anything else on the face of the earth to the point that she would secretly take money from her husband to support her son's opulent lifestyle. And Johnny Jaweed adored her back, in an angular, robust sort of way.
When asked what it was about his mother that inspired such devotion, Johnny needed only one word: "artist." Her artistry consisted of two achievements: having acted as a body-double for a famous Indian actress in Bombay in the early 70s and having had a song dedicated to her by Billy Joel. As it were, her career was unexpectedly cut short through meeting and falling in love with an assistant director.
When Jessie was first introduced to Vivienne by way of Johnny ushering her into the master bedroom, she thought the woman must have been suffering from a serious illness. Vivienne received her on a bed that was so big that Jessie had to get on it in order to take the hand that was extended to her. She was overweight, very pale, heavily made-up, and dressed in a purple, velvet pyjamas. She addressed her son "my little brown baby" and pouted her lips to him for a kiss that he duly gave her under loud protests, obviously meant for Jessie's benefit.
The master bedroom was the nerve centre of the family. This was where decisions were made, problems discussed, money distributed, and guests entertained. When Jessie was introduced, Vivienne's visiting sister from America happened to be at the other end of the bed.
"That's because there's nothing to see hon," explained Vivienne when Aunt Mazie asked why she hadn't been shown around London.
"Your mother's unbelievable, Johnny! The only place she knows is the milkbar down the street," said Aunt Mazie.
"Wrong, auntie! She has never set her foot there. They actually deliver her daily dose of smokes and cherry chocolates. She's the laziest woman on earth, aren't you mum?" jeered Johnny and squeezed his mother's fat foot that was poking out of the silk doona cover.
"Oh, shut up you two!" said Vivienne. "There, be a good boy and massage my toes a little."
Shortly afterwards, Johnny and Jessie excused themselves. Aunt Mazie gave them a knowing look and whispered something in Vivienne's ear after which they both burst out laughing. It wasn't the easiest place for petting, but you could get away with it, if you didn't mind the jokes and the looks. It was, in any case, considerably better than at Jessie's mum who interrupted every attempt at nudity with a stern knock on the door and the offer of fresh pumpkin muffins.
The walls at Johnny Jaweed's were painted in smoky colours, there were silk cushions to lounge on, embroidered cloths smelling strongly of incense were draped over every piece of furniture, an open fire burned even in the middle of summer, the heavy silk curtains were perpetually drawn, and there was the sound of sitar music occasionally pierced by Sam's melancholic rock.
On her sixteenth birthday, Jessie woke up and got dressed as usual and sauntered down to the kitchen where her mother was assembling barley burgers for lunch that day. The usual constellation of parsnippy women was coming over with their gossip from the latest dream-therapy session and their crushes on kineteologists with albino eyes.
"I've told everyone to bring something edible for you instead of presents. It's such a waste getting things you're not going to like anyway."
"Ta, I'm off to see Johnny," came Jessie's reply.
Wearing a more festive pyjama top, Vivienne had transferred into the kitchen where she was exchanging snippets about her own Sweet Sixteen with Aunt Mazie to whom Sam was dictating how to make samosas. Johnny looked suspiciously at the mixture his sister was enthusiastically filling in the dough.
"This," Sam stuck a sticky piece of dough in his face, "is where you come from!"
Johnny Jaweed duly contemplated the mass and then said: "Give me Betty Crocker anytime."
Vivienne smiled endearingly at her son who like her appreciated the finest of American culinary traditions.
"I can't believe you'd rather eat that filthy shit than something that belongs to your own culture."
Their father now looked equally endearingly at his hot-tempered daughter.
It occurred to Jessie that he and Vivienne rarely had to talk to each other when they had children who were young enough and had the strength to sort out the ethnic dilemmas in their place.
Despite the crudities exchanged, everyone was in a celebratory mood. Johnny's dad had taken the day off to be with his family and even Sam could not hide the softer side of her personality to Jessie who for a moment feared that they had all talked about her virginal predicament in greater detail than she would've wished.
Partly because she had eavesdropped on enough of her mother's conversations with her women's group to know that it only meant something if you yourself instigate it and partly because she wasn't about to repeat the samosa assembling under Sam's critical eye, Jessie took Johnny Jaweed's hand and led him to the bedroom where she stripped him of his clothes and laid him down horizontally on the single bed with the bed sheet made from a print of flying helicopters. It took another ten minutes before she extricated herself from his grip and another five until she was standing in the kitchen again with both feet once again firmly planted on the linoleum floor.
It was Johnny's dad who broke the silence by extending a plate of fried samosas to Jessie and inviting her to sample one. Jessie, for no reason at all, except perhaps relief and a sense of being at the beginning of a new refrain, began to giggle. A chorus broke out, led by Sam's guttural laughter, quickly followed by Aunt Mazie who popped a champagne bottle, and Vivienne who produced a Betty Crocker cupcake out of nowhere with the numbers one and six on it.
After two samosas, one Betty Crocker cupcake, and half a guilty thought about the barley burgers at home, Johnny's dad asked: "Eh, Jessie, what do you like most – the samosa or the Betty?” Vivienne, Sam, and Aunt Mazie looked at her expectantly. Not wanting to be partisan to any domestic cause over another, she was carefully thinking over her options when Johnny Jaweed came to the rescue:
"Can't you morons tell? – She loves them both just as much."
From beneath her black, shiny hair, Jessie glimpsed dark eyeliner, purple lipstick, and a layer of white powder. "Look, sorry to bother you like this," she said, "but my brother is like really keen on you and maybe you'd consider meeting him. I know it's silly, and I wouldn't normally do this to you or any other woman, but he's getting on me fucking nerves," she blurted out and pulled at the split ends of her fringe to reveal more black, purple and white.
Sam was the first ever to have called Jessie a "woman." There was no one else in her limited circle of friends who had made the connection between Jessie's widening hips, enlarged chest and womanhood. Jessie always thought it would have been another ball game altogether had there been a father to share the responsibilities of child rearing with her mother. It wouldn't even have to be a father in the biological sense. Jessie wasn't fussed; she knew what decade she was living in. Just a male around the house would have made all the difference. As it was, Jessie's mother shunned the opposite sex and as far as she was concerned there hadn't been a male involved from the start, not even during conception. But Jessie's mum had been no Mary. In her distant youth, Jessie's mother had been a prostitute. She was now an organic food retailer. That was her joke. Her cracking the ice. Trafficking dead meat had made her a vegetarian. Something along those lines. Jessie usually got nauseous at that point of her mother's narrative and turned up the volume on her Walkman for lyrical support.
On their way to the smoking pit, Sam pointed out the obvious: "I hope you're not racist or anything. This isn't suntan." Jessie was about to reply something equally obvious when Sam added, "And if you think I'm dark you should see my brother! Me dad's from India and mum's a Yank, but we both got dad's colour. And, yeah, we've got a corner store, but here's where we are different 'cause we don't sell groceries, we're into videos – mostly porn, Packie-porn with sing-song music and women hiding behind the trees. My brother's not into that kind of music though. He plays the guitar and fancies himself a bit of a rock star..."
Halfway through that bit of genealogy, Jessie and Sam found themselves in the smoking pit getting assessed by the smokers. One of them isolated himself from the group and approached them languidly, almost reluctantly. Brother and sister exchanged looks and then brother broke the silence and offered Jessie a cigarette that she had to refuse, not knowing the mechanics.
Blowing a thin circle of smoke over her head, he asked what her name was.
At this point, it must be inserted that Jessie did suffer a terrible blow shortly after her birth that by those inclined to make things out of things like this would definitely constitute branding. She was given the name Jezebel, otherwise known as the Whore of Babylon.
"That's fucking brilliant!" croaked Sam and gave her a tap on the back.
"I'm Johnny," said her brother.
"No it's not!" said Sam with a sadistic smile on her lips. "It just so happens that this guy's ashamed of who he is, isn't that right, Jaweed?"
Jezebel who had been ashamed of who she was for as long as she could remember, lent him a sympathetic smile which was more like something you would find pasted on the face of the chronically ill.
"Let's get the fuck out of here!" said Johnny and flicked the cigarette on the ground.
Johnny was a poet, but until he could make money on his songs, he worked in his father's business. Only sporadically did he go to school. What Sam had said about their father's video shop proved to be somewhat of an understatement. He didn't actually own one shop: he owned a whole chain of them. Together with Johnny Jaweed's uncle, he catered for the movie consumption of the entire Indian community in London. He owned his fortunate disposition to excellent contacts with the production companies in Bombay. Thanks to them, his customers were guaranteed new releases at the same time as their relatives back home. In fact, sometimes they were watching Indian films before they had even been released in India.
Despite or perhaps because of his success, Johnny only referred to his dad in the most derogatory terms as he represented everything that Johnny tried to get away from – his Indian origins and the family enterprise. The lack of communication between his father and himself was fortunately well compensated for through Johnny's relationship with his mother. Vivienne adored her son more than anything else on the face of the earth to the point that she would secretly take money from her husband to support her son's opulent lifestyle. And Johnny Jaweed adored her back, in an angular, robust sort of way.
When asked what it was about his mother that inspired such devotion, Johnny needed only one word: "artist." Her artistry consisted of two achievements: having acted as a body-double for a famous Indian actress in Bombay in the early 70s and having had a song dedicated to her by Billy Joel. As it were, her career was unexpectedly cut short through meeting and falling in love with an assistant director.
When Jessie was first introduced to Vivienne by way of Johnny ushering her into the master bedroom, she thought the woman must have been suffering from a serious illness. Vivienne received her on a bed that was so big that Jessie had to get on it in order to take the hand that was extended to her. She was overweight, very pale, heavily made-up, and dressed in a purple, velvet pyjamas. She addressed her son "my little brown baby" and pouted her lips to him for a kiss that he duly gave her under loud protests, obviously meant for Jessie's benefit.
The master bedroom was the nerve centre of the family. This was where decisions were made, problems discussed, money distributed, and guests entertained. When Jessie was introduced, Vivienne's visiting sister from America happened to be at the other end of the bed.
"That's because there's nothing to see hon," explained Vivienne when Aunt Mazie asked why she hadn't been shown around London.
"Your mother's unbelievable, Johnny! The only place she knows is the milkbar down the street," said Aunt Mazie.
"Wrong, auntie! She has never set her foot there. They actually deliver her daily dose of smokes and cherry chocolates. She's the laziest woman on earth, aren't you mum?" jeered Johnny and squeezed his mother's fat foot that was poking out of the silk doona cover.
"Oh, shut up you two!" said Vivienne. "There, be a good boy and massage my toes a little."
Shortly afterwards, Johnny and Jessie excused themselves. Aunt Mazie gave them a knowing look and whispered something in Vivienne's ear after which they both burst out laughing. It wasn't the easiest place for petting, but you could get away with it, if you didn't mind the jokes and the looks. It was, in any case, considerably better than at Jessie's mum who interrupted every attempt at nudity with a stern knock on the door and the offer of fresh pumpkin muffins.
The walls at Johnny Jaweed's were painted in smoky colours, there were silk cushions to lounge on, embroidered cloths smelling strongly of incense were draped over every piece of furniture, an open fire burned even in the middle of summer, the heavy silk curtains were perpetually drawn, and there was the sound of sitar music occasionally pierced by Sam's melancholic rock.
On her sixteenth birthday, Jessie woke up and got dressed as usual and sauntered down to the kitchen where her mother was assembling barley burgers for lunch that day. The usual constellation of parsnippy women was coming over with their gossip from the latest dream-therapy session and their crushes on kineteologists with albino eyes.
"I've told everyone to bring something edible for you instead of presents. It's such a waste getting things you're not going to like anyway."
"Ta, I'm off to see Johnny," came Jessie's reply.
Wearing a more festive pyjama top, Vivienne had transferred into the kitchen where she was exchanging snippets about her own Sweet Sixteen with Aunt Mazie to whom Sam was dictating how to make samosas. Johnny looked suspiciously at the mixture his sister was enthusiastically filling in the dough.
"This," Sam stuck a sticky piece of dough in his face, "is where you come from!"
Johnny Jaweed duly contemplated the mass and then said: "Give me Betty Crocker anytime."
Vivienne smiled endearingly at her son who like her appreciated the finest of American culinary traditions.
"I can't believe you'd rather eat that filthy shit than something that belongs to your own culture."
Their father now looked equally endearingly at his hot-tempered daughter.
It occurred to Jessie that he and Vivienne rarely had to talk to each other when they had children who were young enough and had the strength to sort out the ethnic dilemmas in their place.
Despite the crudities exchanged, everyone was in a celebratory mood. Johnny's dad had taken the day off to be with his family and even Sam could not hide the softer side of her personality to Jessie who for a moment feared that they had all talked about her virginal predicament in greater detail than she would've wished.
Partly because she had eavesdropped on enough of her mother's conversations with her women's group to know that it only meant something if you yourself instigate it and partly because she wasn't about to repeat the samosa assembling under Sam's critical eye, Jessie took Johnny Jaweed's hand and led him to the bedroom where she stripped him of his clothes and laid him down horizontally on the single bed with the bed sheet made from a print of flying helicopters. It took another ten minutes before she extricated herself from his grip and another five until she was standing in the kitchen again with both feet once again firmly planted on the linoleum floor.
It was Johnny's dad who broke the silence by extending a plate of fried samosas to Jessie and inviting her to sample one. Jessie, for no reason at all, except perhaps relief and a sense of being at the beginning of a new refrain, began to giggle. A chorus broke out, led by Sam's guttural laughter, quickly followed by Aunt Mazie who popped a champagne bottle, and Vivienne who produced a Betty Crocker cupcake out of nowhere with the numbers one and six on it.
After two samosas, one Betty Crocker cupcake, and half a guilty thought about the barley burgers at home, Johnny's dad asked: "Eh, Jessie, what do you like most – the samosa or the Betty?” Vivienne, Sam, and Aunt Mazie looked at her expectantly. Not wanting to be partisan to any domestic cause over another, she was carefully thinking over her options when Johnny Jaweed came to the rescue:
"Can't you morons tell? – She loves them both just as much."
Monday, January 28, 2008
Becoming (stage one)
Paul Collard made his fame by playing the vampire in a play that originally evolved out of a creative collaboration with the grunge queen Nikita Virginblood. Virginblood was a writer and playwright known only to a few readers of the Gothic Daily. She preferred the darkness and the privacy of the wardrobe and the few times she ventured out into open spaces, she was accompanied by an entire cast of witches and blood-striped tigers, dancing bears and one-eyed eagles, androgynous vampires and multiplying spiders, talkative carcasses and decaying princesses – figments of her imagination which she wore like a heavy robe over her shoulders. Some thought that Virginblood and Paul Collard were brothers and sisters, others that they were lovers. Indeed, it was hard to imagine Virginblood form any ties with anyone other than those enforced through blood, but it was equally difficult to place Collard in a relationship that wasn't sexual.
Virginblood had originally written The Vampire as a series of encounters between a vampire and his victims of both sexes, but when it was time for Collard to find the budget for the project, it became clear that some essential rewritings had to be done, the crucial reason being that he hadn't been able to find any male actors who were willing to work for free. While the men were less charmed by this sorcerer, he had managed to seduce enough women into volunteering their services due to an abundance of charm and sex appeal. There was nothing else for Virginblood to do but to rewrite the script for an all female cast and so she grudgingly returned to the wardrobe to do her chore. The result of her work saw each scene graphically detailing Collard's seduction and destruction of a woman. After a series of bloody conquests, the vampire falls in the hands of a strong-minded journalist who sucks him dry as much as any vampire. Their encounter culminates in an electrifying moment of truth or dare as illustrated in the following dialogue:
The vampire: If you really want to know who I am you must do more than ask questions.
The journalist: I ask because that is what I do. My job is to ask questions. It's for others to give answers.
The vampire: To get something you must give something in return. That is the law.
The journalist: Is it right for me to assume that you have no answers?
The vampire: The answers are here. Right here. The vampire points to his own chest and the journalist draws closer to him. If you want to know, you have to become me.
The journalist: Gasp!
After the immediate success with The Vampire, Collard was only offered roles from the Gothic repertoire. While he began to tour around the world with his show "Collard the Fangs," Virginblood stubbornly refused to face the limelight. After a couple of years of playing various creatures of the Dark involving much blood splatter and many sets of false teeth, Collard had also had enough and decided to go subterranean, which is how he ended up in the North. Plenty of people worn out from the pressures of life come to the North to rest and the winter season, especially, is ideal for a retired vampire with its twenty hours of daily darkness and its closeted lifestyle. Collard, however, wasn't the kind of person who felt comfortable unless he was overworked. Within only a couple of weeks he grew listless and longed for a schedule beyond making it to the shop before its six o'clock closing time.
Our paths crossed when I instead of walking through the forest took the detour through the town. I was wearing a green velvet skirt, a white synthetic fur jacket, the red turban wrapped around my head that had become something of a trademark for me, as well as green sneakers and striped leg warmers. I still thought of myself as someone who had only recently returned home when in truth I had already been back for nine months. Collard rolled down the window to ask if I was interested in taking part of his amateur theatre group. We drove a couple of blocks to the local community centre and by the time I got out of the van I was convinced that my true calling in life was to become an actress.
"There's something about you. You have a very strong personality, but at the same time there's something indeterminate about you. It's not just that you're young, although that's part of it. That's definitely part of it," Collard closed the door from his assistant.
His assistant was a black-eyed girl in her mid-twenties called Mimi. She was also his fiancée. She had wavy dark hair with a fringe that had grown to her bushy eyebrows. Since most of her face was covered with hair, she had the appearance of a troll hiding in the moss. Her softness made you want to stroke her, but if you got closer and saw her smile you would invariably change your mind. She was so eager to give a pleasant impression that when she smiled her face was contorted as if she was about to have an epileptic fit. Apparently Collard had picked her up on his fangs tour. Like thousands of Goth chicks before her, she had gone backstage to let him sink his teeth in her pale neck, but at sunrise she had not whimpered away and subjected herself to the humiliating glare and rude comments of the stage guys – that was as close as they got to groupies. Instead, Collard had carried Mimi out on his shoulders like a trophy and indicated to the guys who were loading the trucks that they better make room for another passenger. What she had done to catch him in her web nobody knows. Some said she had used a love potion, others that her fangs were simply bigger than his, but what is sure is that from that moment she followed Collard wherever he went.
"I've never done any theatre before," I admitted.
"It's not about that. You have a different mask for every person you meet. Take right now, you're playing a role. That is theatre. You needn't know more. In fact, the less you know the better. Natural. I want natural."
"I have a friend, Mari," I volunteered, "she's an actress."
Collard had turned his back to me and was pulling his earring with one hand and lighting a cigarette with the other. He turned around and stood about a millimetre away from me, blowing smoke through his nostrils.
"You don't know who you are yet," he groaned miserably not able to contain himself anymore at my innocence. He took one deep puff from his cigarette before he threw it on the ground and crushed it with his heel. "You!" he thundered, "don't know where you belong! You think you are one person. You think you have one country. One friend. One boyfriend, one father, one mother – this is not true."
I stared at him thinking the best thing I could do was to run away from there after telling him to go to hell, but I was unable to move.
"The whole world belongs to you," he put his arm around my shoulder and kissed my forehead. "And you can be anything you want," he added.
Collard and Mimi were whispering to each other. It was the first meeting of the Amateur Theatre Company as we were called. I studied the people who came through the door, of which Esmer, a man in his late thirties going prematurely bald, was one. It turned out he was already a member of the Green Fingers, the Senior Ballroom Dancers, the Save the Cathedral Activists, and the University Film Buffs. Then there was Maria, a housewife with asthma. She had joined the group hoping to lose weight. Louisa was paralysed from the waist down and suffered from a speech defect. Martin seemed quite ordinary, apart from the fact that he would never shut up, and Ruth was only a kid. She had had her head pushed into the lavatories by the bullies at school. Linda was a girl my age and the one who aspired most of all to make it to Hollywood.
"For me," began Collard, "amateur theatre is where theatre is really at."
Mimi nodded seriously. Esmer took notes and Linda hung at every word that came out of Collard's mouth.
"I want it simple," Collard continued. "No costumes, no make-up, no props and, heaven forbid, no professional actors."
At this we all laughed self-consciously.
"You've come to the right place," said Martin the talker, "I don't think you're going to find a single professional actor in this part of the world. It's too cold to act."
"There's always the telly," said Maria and took a snort from her inhaler.
"Where are you from Mr Collard?" Linda dared to ask.
"I'm a descendent from a Walloon family in Central Europe, but I've been on the move ever since I can remember. I'm from everywhere," he said and looked at me with light blue eyes that shot out of his pale complexion like discuses. "Theatre is not about pretending," he continued. "No one will believe that you are really a tree when you stand with your arms protruding in strange directions dressed in brown and green felt – not even a kid will buy that. Costume is vulgar. You might as well be wearing a ballerina skirt with fairy wings on your back." He paused and then turned hastily around, pointing his finger at Esmer. "How would you be a tree?" he asked him.
"I would stand still and try not to move my eyes or anything," Esmer said.
"And you?" he pointed to Maria.
"Oh, I don't know. I never played a tree. I'd just breathe in I suppose," said Maria.
"What about you," he asked Ruth who looked petrified at him. She hadn't made a sound since the beginning of the meeting.
"I would disappear into the background," she whispered after a moment's silence.
"What about you Louisa?" Collard turned to the girl in the wheelchair.
"I couldn't be a tree because I am confined to this chair so I think I would have to play a bush perhaps a what are they called a rosebush or something," said Louisa.
Collard sat down on a chair with its back against his chest. He bared his crotch and the torn patches of his jeans. He looked at all of us individually. At last he spoke. "Have you noticed that all of you speak about the tree as if you're looking from the outside? You are looking at the world in a way that makes an object out of everything. As an actor you have to go inside the tree, you have to be it."
"Sir, you just said that wasn't possible," said Martin.
"I said it wasn't possible to pretend."
"But with all respect, sir, it's not possible to simply transform yourself into an inanimate object," objected Martin.
"It's no more difficult to be a tree than to be King Lear," said Collard. "But you have to believe and you have to show humility and respect. With belief, humility and respect you can be anyone and anything you want. Remember that!"
The theatre was a way of being in many places at once, and this it why it appealed to me. It was an extension of my letter writing but instead of being the writer of letters I was suddenly the postman. Words passed through me. Words that weren't mine, that only stayed with me for a short time until I delivered my lines. And then they were gone again. Words flowed through me.
I found a copy of The Vampire in the university library and began to carry it with me in the hope of finding the key to Collard's world within those lines. The vampire says that the only way to find out who someone is is by becoming that person. I read his urgent invitation to the journalist become me, become me over and over until it became my own private mantra. It became clear to me then and there that the reason why I wouldn't pay attention to the professors at university was not just because I thought I had heard it all before, but because they spoke of knowledge without experience. How would it be, I wondered, if the teacher in literature had lived a scene from Balzac or if the teacher in philosophy believed in Kant? How would it be if they instead of dividing thought and experience were to bring them together? Why this insistence on keeping two sources of knowledge separate from one another? I wanted to find a way to live a thousand years or more. To learn about men and women, old and young, and the attraction and repulsion that bring us together and pull us apart like the tide and the moon. I wanted to live and learn, to watch, love and hate. I wanted no stone to be left unturned. I wanted to be what I found, be that worm, feel the earth and breathe the light. I wanted to swim in a jar of cream until it turned to butter. I wanted to cross every ocean until I grew fins. I wanted to absorb every murmur, every whisper and the passing of time until I became time. And for those who wished to hear my song they had only to press their ear against my rock belly.
Linda and I were the most pious devotees of Paul Collard and although we never viewed the others in the group as serious competition for his attention, we were somewhat put off by the presence of Mimi. She was always nearby, quick to give Collard a hand or to soothe him whenever he threw a fit. Her love for him was utterly unselfish. She loved him unconditionally for what he was and she didn't expect anything in return. At times he roared at her as he did to everyone else, but she just smiled and went to fetch his cigarettes or made him a coffee. It was infuriating to observe. If only she had been not right for him or not good enough, not appreciative enough – how much easier it would then have been to hate her out of sight. As it were, we were forced to tolerate her existence while bitching about her foolish devotion to the man, her obvious lack of independence and her sickening willingness to be his servant – without getting the irony of what we were saying.
Linda and I saw a lot of each other over the weeks, but I held something back from her (I was always holding something back in those times, even when I was open and giving). At least I was a good listener, though, and I didn't give secrets away. When Linda spoke to me about how she would quit her secretarial job and follow Collard around the world, I fed her fantasises with bizarre and fantastical tales about changing destiny and beginning a new life. When she told me that Collard would transform her into a great actress, I spoke back to her in riddles and metaphors. I wasn't her friend, I was her storyteller. Although (or because) my language was like hieroglyphics to her, she loved to listen and weave her own dull life into the fabric of endless possibilities and good fortune. In short, although the stories were told by me, they became hers because she interpreted them whichever way suited her best. After a while I got so good at reading her mind that everything I said sounded like it was coming from deep within her self and she didn't even have to interpret anymore. I wrote a fairy tale about a shell that was found on a beach like that in El Capitan. It was a shell that reverberated with the sounds the listener most wanted to hear. Dona Selsa heard the sound of her son's voice, Mari the sound of her mother with the Finnish cheek bones, and Linda the promise of Collard's devotion. That's what I had become – her magic shell! And all the time I managed to conceal my own infatuation with Collard.
Virginblood had originally written The Vampire as a series of encounters between a vampire and his victims of both sexes, but when it was time for Collard to find the budget for the project, it became clear that some essential rewritings had to be done, the crucial reason being that he hadn't been able to find any male actors who were willing to work for free. While the men were less charmed by this sorcerer, he had managed to seduce enough women into volunteering their services due to an abundance of charm and sex appeal. There was nothing else for Virginblood to do but to rewrite the script for an all female cast and so she grudgingly returned to the wardrobe to do her chore. The result of her work saw each scene graphically detailing Collard's seduction and destruction of a woman. After a series of bloody conquests, the vampire falls in the hands of a strong-minded journalist who sucks him dry as much as any vampire. Their encounter culminates in an electrifying moment of truth or dare as illustrated in the following dialogue:
The vampire: If you really want to know who I am you must do more than ask questions.
The journalist: I ask because that is what I do. My job is to ask questions. It's for others to give answers.
The vampire: To get something you must give something in return. That is the law.
The journalist: Is it right for me to assume that you have no answers?
The vampire: The answers are here. Right here. The vampire points to his own chest and the journalist draws closer to him. If you want to know, you have to become me.
The journalist: Gasp!
After the immediate success with The Vampire, Collard was only offered roles from the Gothic repertoire. While he began to tour around the world with his show "Collard the Fangs," Virginblood stubbornly refused to face the limelight. After a couple of years of playing various creatures of the Dark involving much blood splatter and many sets of false teeth, Collard had also had enough and decided to go subterranean, which is how he ended up in the North. Plenty of people worn out from the pressures of life come to the North to rest and the winter season, especially, is ideal for a retired vampire with its twenty hours of daily darkness and its closeted lifestyle. Collard, however, wasn't the kind of person who felt comfortable unless he was overworked. Within only a couple of weeks he grew listless and longed for a schedule beyond making it to the shop before its six o'clock closing time.
Our paths crossed when I instead of walking through the forest took the detour through the town. I was wearing a green velvet skirt, a white synthetic fur jacket, the red turban wrapped around my head that had become something of a trademark for me, as well as green sneakers and striped leg warmers. I still thought of myself as someone who had only recently returned home when in truth I had already been back for nine months. Collard rolled down the window to ask if I was interested in taking part of his amateur theatre group. We drove a couple of blocks to the local community centre and by the time I got out of the van I was convinced that my true calling in life was to become an actress.
"There's something about you. You have a very strong personality, but at the same time there's something indeterminate about you. It's not just that you're young, although that's part of it. That's definitely part of it," Collard closed the door from his assistant.
His assistant was a black-eyed girl in her mid-twenties called Mimi. She was also his fiancée. She had wavy dark hair with a fringe that had grown to her bushy eyebrows. Since most of her face was covered with hair, she had the appearance of a troll hiding in the moss. Her softness made you want to stroke her, but if you got closer and saw her smile you would invariably change your mind. She was so eager to give a pleasant impression that when she smiled her face was contorted as if she was about to have an epileptic fit. Apparently Collard had picked her up on his fangs tour. Like thousands of Goth chicks before her, she had gone backstage to let him sink his teeth in her pale neck, but at sunrise she had not whimpered away and subjected herself to the humiliating glare and rude comments of the stage guys – that was as close as they got to groupies. Instead, Collard had carried Mimi out on his shoulders like a trophy and indicated to the guys who were loading the trucks that they better make room for another passenger. What she had done to catch him in her web nobody knows. Some said she had used a love potion, others that her fangs were simply bigger than his, but what is sure is that from that moment she followed Collard wherever he went.
"I've never done any theatre before," I admitted.
"It's not about that. You have a different mask for every person you meet. Take right now, you're playing a role. That is theatre. You needn't know more. In fact, the less you know the better. Natural. I want natural."
"I have a friend, Mari," I volunteered, "she's an actress."
Collard had turned his back to me and was pulling his earring with one hand and lighting a cigarette with the other. He turned around and stood about a millimetre away from me, blowing smoke through his nostrils.
"You don't know who you are yet," he groaned miserably not able to contain himself anymore at my innocence. He took one deep puff from his cigarette before he threw it on the ground and crushed it with his heel. "You!" he thundered, "don't know where you belong! You think you are one person. You think you have one country. One friend. One boyfriend, one father, one mother – this is not true."
I stared at him thinking the best thing I could do was to run away from there after telling him to go to hell, but I was unable to move.
"The whole world belongs to you," he put his arm around my shoulder and kissed my forehead. "And you can be anything you want," he added.
Collard and Mimi were whispering to each other. It was the first meeting of the Amateur Theatre Company as we were called. I studied the people who came through the door, of which Esmer, a man in his late thirties going prematurely bald, was one. It turned out he was already a member of the Green Fingers, the Senior Ballroom Dancers, the Save the Cathedral Activists, and the University Film Buffs. Then there was Maria, a housewife with asthma. She had joined the group hoping to lose weight. Louisa was paralysed from the waist down and suffered from a speech defect. Martin seemed quite ordinary, apart from the fact that he would never shut up, and Ruth was only a kid. She had had her head pushed into the lavatories by the bullies at school. Linda was a girl my age and the one who aspired most of all to make it to Hollywood.
"For me," began Collard, "amateur theatre is where theatre is really at."
Mimi nodded seriously. Esmer took notes and Linda hung at every word that came out of Collard's mouth.
"I want it simple," Collard continued. "No costumes, no make-up, no props and, heaven forbid, no professional actors."
At this we all laughed self-consciously.
"You've come to the right place," said Martin the talker, "I don't think you're going to find a single professional actor in this part of the world. It's too cold to act."
"There's always the telly," said Maria and took a snort from her inhaler.
"Where are you from Mr Collard?" Linda dared to ask.
"I'm a descendent from a Walloon family in Central Europe, but I've been on the move ever since I can remember. I'm from everywhere," he said and looked at me with light blue eyes that shot out of his pale complexion like discuses. "Theatre is not about pretending," he continued. "No one will believe that you are really a tree when you stand with your arms protruding in strange directions dressed in brown and green felt – not even a kid will buy that. Costume is vulgar. You might as well be wearing a ballerina skirt with fairy wings on your back." He paused and then turned hastily around, pointing his finger at Esmer. "How would you be a tree?" he asked him.
"I would stand still and try not to move my eyes or anything," Esmer said.
"And you?" he pointed to Maria.
"Oh, I don't know. I never played a tree. I'd just breathe in I suppose," said Maria.
"What about you," he asked Ruth who looked petrified at him. She hadn't made a sound since the beginning of the meeting.
"I would disappear into the background," she whispered after a moment's silence.
"What about you Louisa?" Collard turned to the girl in the wheelchair.
"I couldn't be a tree because I am confined to this chair so I think I would have to play a bush perhaps a what are they called a rosebush or something," said Louisa.
Collard sat down on a chair with its back against his chest. He bared his crotch and the torn patches of his jeans. He looked at all of us individually. At last he spoke. "Have you noticed that all of you speak about the tree as if you're looking from the outside? You are looking at the world in a way that makes an object out of everything. As an actor you have to go inside the tree, you have to be it."
"Sir, you just said that wasn't possible," said Martin.
"I said it wasn't possible to pretend."
"But with all respect, sir, it's not possible to simply transform yourself into an inanimate object," objected Martin.
"It's no more difficult to be a tree than to be King Lear," said Collard. "But you have to believe and you have to show humility and respect. With belief, humility and respect you can be anyone and anything you want. Remember that!"
The theatre was a way of being in many places at once, and this it why it appealed to me. It was an extension of my letter writing but instead of being the writer of letters I was suddenly the postman. Words passed through me. Words that weren't mine, that only stayed with me for a short time until I delivered my lines. And then they were gone again. Words flowed through me.
I found a copy of The Vampire in the university library and began to carry it with me in the hope of finding the key to Collard's world within those lines. The vampire says that the only way to find out who someone is is by becoming that person. I read his urgent invitation to the journalist become me, become me over and over until it became my own private mantra. It became clear to me then and there that the reason why I wouldn't pay attention to the professors at university was not just because I thought I had heard it all before, but because they spoke of knowledge without experience. How would it be, I wondered, if the teacher in literature had lived a scene from Balzac or if the teacher in philosophy believed in Kant? How would it be if they instead of dividing thought and experience were to bring them together? Why this insistence on keeping two sources of knowledge separate from one another? I wanted to find a way to live a thousand years or more. To learn about men and women, old and young, and the attraction and repulsion that bring us together and pull us apart like the tide and the moon. I wanted to live and learn, to watch, love and hate. I wanted no stone to be left unturned. I wanted to be what I found, be that worm, feel the earth and breathe the light. I wanted to swim in a jar of cream until it turned to butter. I wanted to cross every ocean until I grew fins. I wanted to absorb every murmur, every whisper and the passing of time until I became time. And for those who wished to hear my song they had only to press their ear against my rock belly.
Linda and I were the most pious devotees of Paul Collard and although we never viewed the others in the group as serious competition for his attention, we were somewhat put off by the presence of Mimi. She was always nearby, quick to give Collard a hand or to soothe him whenever he threw a fit. Her love for him was utterly unselfish. She loved him unconditionally for what he was and she didn't expect anything in return. At times he roared at her as he did to everyone else, but she just smiled and went to fetch his cigarettes or made him a coffee. It was infuriating to observe. If only she had been not right for him or not good enough, not appreciative enough – how much easier it would then have been to hate her out of sight. As it were, we were forced to tolerate her existence while bitching about her foolish devotion to the man, her obvious lack of independence and her sickening willingness to be his servant – without getting the irony of what we were saying.
Linda and I saw a lot of each other over the weeks, but I held something back from her (I was always holding something back in those times, even when I was open and giving). At least I was a good listener, though, and I didn't give secrets away. When Linda spoke to me about how she would quit her secretarial job and follow Collard around the world, I fed her fantasises with bizarre and fantastical tales about changing destiny and beginning a new life. When she told me that Collard would transform her into a great actress, I spoke back to her in riddles and metaphors. I wasn't her friend, I was her storyteller. Although (or because) my language was like hieroglyphics to her, she loved to listen and weave her own dull life into the fabric of endless possibilities and good fortune. In short, although the stories were told by me, they became hers because she interpreted them whichever way suited her best. After a while I got so good at reading her mind that everything I said sounded like it was coming from deep within her self and she didn't even have to interpret anymore. I wrote a fairy tale about a shell that was found on a beach like that in El Capitan. It was a shell that reverberated with the sounds the listener most wanted to hear. Dona Selsa heard the sound of her son's voice, Mari the sound of her mother with the Finnish cheek bones, and Linda the promise of Collard's devotion. That's what I had become – her magic shell! And all the time I managed to conceal my own infatuation with Collard.
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Dona Selsa or ‘why metaphors are embarrassing’
San Jeronimo is a sleepy collection of houses south of Acapulco. I walked into the hut that had an OPEN sign on it, looking for some information and something to eat. A woman eyed me up and down. Behind her loomed the display of lollipops and cigarettes and behind that were the private dwellings – open in the middle and quite empty except for a stove that stood directly on the dirt floor under the sun. There was corrugated roofing around the sides, part of it which made up the panel of a double bed which doubled as a wardrobe. A man was slouched in a torn armchair and some children were playing silently in the shadow under the roof.
After I had paid for a bottle of water and a packet of biscuits, I cleared my throat and said, "I'm looking for a writer. Julio Cortázar, you know him?" The woman was fanning away the flies from the lollies in silence. "He's a famous person," I added.
"No famous person here," the woman chuckled.
"What about the turtles?" I asked, remembering that there had been a mention of them in some text or interview with the author. "Do you know where I can find the turtles?"
"Ah yes, the turtles – not many left. They are very hard to find, very hard. But my husband will help you. Enrico! Enrico! Come here!" she called to the man in the armchair. "This lady wants to see turtles!"
For a small fee Enrico promised to drive me to the coast in his van. One of the young children came running after us and demanded to be taken along. The child slumped beside me on the passenger seat and after a short time of bumpy, hot driving on dirt roads he fell asleep on my lap as Enrico and I talked about the countryside while we passed villages smaller even than San Jeronimo. Most of them seemed completely deserted apart from a few forlorn-looking donkeys and some hens scattered here and there. Enrico stopped to talk to some men who stood in the shade of a tienda. When he was finished he informed me that the turtles had moved to another part of the beach further north. Since it was too long to drive there now, he said he'd take me someplace where I could stay the night.
We left the villages and the rainforest behind and Enrico let me off at the beginning of a small paved road. He pointed towards the direction of the water at the end of the road and said, "Just ask for Dona Selsa."
I extricated myself from the hot arms of the sleeping child, looked to where Enrico had pointed and said "hasta lluego."
The air was hot and sticky, but luckily I only had my small bag to carry. A couple of people were standing outside the sheds along the road. They were talking amongst themselves and didn't acknowledge their obvious surprise at seeing a foreigner in their village. Then a whistle blew and children stormed out of a building tucked away under the leafy trees. With the children it was different. They made no attempt at hiding their curiosity. A group of the more daring ones even trailed behind me, giggling and shouting things I didn't understand. At first I ignored them, feeling self-conscious and targeted but when they wouldn't give up, I at last turned around to face them. They cheered and, pointing to my face, started chanting ojos verdes.
A little girl broke out of the crowd and came over to me. "Dad will take you over the river," she said and pointed in the same direction that Enrico had pointed.
The little girl's father bared a toothless mouth and helped me with my bag. He rowed us over to a part of the beach where there were tables and hammocks and a roof made of straw. It was a strip of land that had broken off from the shore so that it now lay surrounded by water on both sides. A freshwater river divided it from the mainland and on the other side laid the Pacific. While the river was gradually pushing the land further away from the mainland, the ocean was chewing off bits from the other side, forcing more people to pack up and move inland.
A woman emerged from the shade. She was wearing a red scarf on her head, a soiled apron wrapped perfunctorily around her waist, and a blouse which had once been red but the sun had bleached pink.
"Bienvenida. Soy Dona Selsa."
She held my hand. Her skin was hardened by the salty air and her grey hair reflected in the sun. Behind her I glimpsed the ocean. I complimented her on her beautiful place, the peace and quiet. Apart from myself and Dona Selsa, there were only two other people – the man in the boat who, as I found out later, was her husband, as well as their young daughter. Dona Selsa showed me a hammock under the straw roof and after leaving me a mosquito net for the night, she retreated to her hut. Later, as I was walking along the ocean-side of the beach, I ran into her husband who was carrying a basket full of fish. Stray dogs were trailing behind him, undernourished and flea-ridden. He threw a fish at them which was caught by two of the less weak ones.
As a sign of hospitality, Dona Selsa had let me know that she could get hold of a chicken from the village, but she made the offer in such a way that left me no choice but to refuse. That night after a dinner consisting of tortillas and fried fish, I watched the silhouette of the man raking the sand against the moonlit sky. Dona Selsa was cleaning fish by the river and the little girl was pulling the tail of a skinny dog in the distance. I listened to the waves folding over the sand while watching the tall rainforest trees of the mainland sway gently in the night.
And so the days came and went. I was putting off leaving, suspecting that when I did, it would be for good. I wrote a lot and dozed in my hammock. Once or twice I thought about going for a swim in the ocean, but I only got as far as wetting my legs. No one else did any swimming there and so I stayed under the roof of El Capitan and resigned myself to watching the waves hammer down on the beach. The only times I ventured out of the shade was to accompany Dona Selsa on her walks to collect seaweed. She would then first apply a thick fruity mash on my skin to protect it against the sun, slapping it on my back in the same brusque manner that she rubbed the dirty clothes against the rocks by the river with red soap. In the evenings I ate fish, skin and bones and all, together with the tortillas that Dona Selsa rolled out with a Coca-Cola bottle.
When Sunday came the villagers gathered on the other side of the river and Dona Selsa's husband was hustling for customers. Dona Selsa herself had been preparing for the onslaught all morning with the assistance of her other daughters who had arrived the night before. One of them gossiped that they were getting a lot more guests than usual because everyone wanted to take a look at me, the foreigner.
"Don't you get a lot of tourists then?" I asked her.
"Well, once we had a bunch from the capital, but they didn't stay long. Mum doesn't like to have too many people here," said the young girl.
"But she must like the business?" I insisted.
"She wants to make a little money to pay for our education, but she doesn't want too many people to come. She says when we get electricity there'll be many more tourists and she doesn't want that. She says it's bad."
When the villagers left and took the rowdiness with them, El Capitan lay deserted once again and the sand was littered with bottles, cigarette butts and fishbone. The dogs were scavenging for pieces of leftover fish with their noses in the sand. Dona Selsa lit a paraffin lamp and sat down at one of the tables to count her money. The girls left one by one after a quiet chat with their mum who handed over carefully folded notes. I watched their father row them across the river, until I could see no more, only hear the splashing of the rows as they broke the surface of the black water. Dona Selsa murmured something and came over to my hammock, cigarettes in hand. We smoked in silence until her husband pulled up the rowing boat and returned to us. When she bossed him around about something or other, he playfully flicked the lit cigarette from her mouth and they laughed when it broke in half. While he cleaned up, she went to lie in the hammock beside mine. She put a pair of huge glasses on the tip of her nose and unfolded an old newspaper in front of her face. The fact that the paper was up side down was of no concern to her.
The girls returned only a couple of days later, in the middle of the week. This time they wore their best clothes because they were going to a wedding in the village and they offered to take me. My hair was in knots, I had sand all over my body and nothing good to wear, but one of the girls offered to apply make-up. We went into Dona Selsa's hut where she said there was a mirror we could use. As I was sitting on the ground in front of the mirror I noticed a small table with its legs burrowed deep into the sand in the corner of the hut. The table had been made into a shrine with a candle burning in front of an enlarged photograph of a man and a dozen figures of Virgin Maria in cheap plastic. It was one of those theatrical portraits that Mexicans love with an artificial background and various props surrounding the person. It was plain to see that the theme of the sea had seeped into the photographer's mind because gazing out of the photograph was the brown, serious-looking face of a man on a sailing boat. He was wearing a sailing cap and a blue marine costume a shade darker than the cloudless sky behind him.
Dona Selsa's husband took us over the river and we walked along a dirt road into the village. I barely recognised it although it was the same way I had arrived only some days ago. The girls bought soft drinks at the drinking stalls along the way and let themselves be admired by the drinkers who congregated there. I asked one of the vendors for a beer, but he shook his head and gave me a plastic bag with a clear liquid in it that burned my throat: mescal.
In the middle of the town square sat the bride in white looking as if she would burst into tears any minute. The bride sat against a tableau of clouds and thunder on a throne that was meant to look like it came straight out of the ocean. A large sheet of blue silk had been placed underneath her and children on either side were shaking it to make it look like waves slapping against her gown. There was a line of people queued up to pay their respects. I joylessly danced a couple of numbers of salsa with some of the village men. The mescal tasted inoffensive enough as it settled inside my skull like cotton wool. "The sea is everywhere," I thought as I watched the bride sink and rise in front of me.
Rather than wake up Dona Selsa’s husband who was crouched down and asleep in his boat, I swam across the river. It was only when I had got half-way between the mainland and El Capitan that I realised I couldn't tell what direction I was going. It was as if I was swimming away from the other side and out towards the ocean into nothingness. I panicked and stayed in one place, kicking my legs frantically to keep myself afloat. Then something long and slimy wound itself around my ankle and I yelled out. A voice called from the dark and I saw a small flicker of light ahead of me. I swam as fast as I could until I noticed that the light was coming from Dona Selsa's cigarette.
Dona Selsa later said that she heard my splashing and panting long before I had reached the beach. She called me a fool and a daredevil. Didn't I know there were crocodiles and drunken villagers around? She made me take my wet clothes off and wrap myself in blankets while she continued to scold me. She only paused to ask, "Where are you from, child?" as if the thought had just occurred to her that I wasn't a local because a local would never do something that silly.
I didn't know what to say. I thought about Mamma and Pappa. How could I explain to her where home was? How would she understand? What would the North mean to her?
"Oh, from far away," I said warily.
"From the city?" she queried.
I pointed to the ocean and further beyond to where the ocean and the sky meet, "from over there."
"But where's your home?" she wanted to know with the insistence of someone for whom home is everything.
"On the other side of the ocean," I specified.
She looked at me with amazement. Her eyes filled with tears and that's when she told me about the man in the photograph.
"One day," she began, "tough men from Mexico City came to the village. They liked my son. They made jokes with him and he laughed. He was just a village boy. He laughed at everything they said and in return they gave him drugs, made him feel like them, like city boys. Then one night, it was a night just like this after a fiesta in the village, he disappeared. My son walked straight there," she indicated with a nod behind her towards the ocean, "and he never came back."
I watched her lips move and the tears welling up in her eyes. I turned to look out at the black ocean to which I had only moments ago pointed. I wanted to curse it, hate it, but then I realised I had only myself to curse – my cruel, careless words. What did I know about what lay on the other side? What did I know about lighting a candle for my dead son? About keeping hope alive?
Dona Selsa pointed first at me and then at the photograph of her son and when she spoke, her face was turned to the ocean, the enemy.
"Now I know he must still be alive somewhere," she tenderly touched my cheek with the palm of her hand.
After I had paid for a bottle of water and a packet of biscuits, I cleared my throat and said, "I'm looking for a writer. Julio Cortázar, you know him?" The woman was fanning away the flies from the lollies in silence. "He's a famous person," I added.
"No famous person here," the woman chuckled.
"What about the turtles?" I asked, remembering that there had been a mention of them in some text or interview with the author. "Do you know where I can find the turtles?"
"Ah yes, the turtles – not many left. They are very hard to find, very hard. But my husband will help you. Enrico! Enrico! Come here!" she called to the man in the armchair. "This lady wants to see turtles!"
For a small fee Enrico promised to drive me to the coast in his van. One of the young children came running after us and demanded to be taken along. The child slumped beside me on the passenger seat and after a short time of bumpy, hot driving on dirt roads he fell asleep on my lap as Enrico and I talked about the countryside while we passed villages smaller even than San Jeronimo. Most of them seemed completely deserted apart from a few forlorn-looking donkeys and some hens scattered here and there. Enrico stopped to talk to some men who stood in the shade of a tienda. When he was finished he informed me that the turtles had moved to another part of the beach further north. Since it was too long to drive there now, he said he'd take me someplace where I could stay the night.
We left the villages and the rainforest behind and Enrico let me off at the beginning of a small paved road. He pointed towards the direction of the water at the end of the road and said, "Just ask for Dona Selsa."
I extricated myself from the hot arms of the sleeping child, looked to where Enrico had pointed and said "hasta lluego."
The air was hot and sticky, but luckily I only had my small bag to carry. A couple of people were standing outside the sheds along the road. They were talking amongst themselves and didn't acknowledge their obvious surprise at seeing a foreigner in their village. Then a whistle blew and children stormed out of a building tucked away under the leafy trees. With the children it was different. They made no attempt at hiding their curiosity. A group of the more daring ones even trailed behind me, giggling and shouting things I didn't understand. At first I ignored them, feeling self-conscious and targeted but when they wouldn't give up, I at last turned around to face them. They cheered and, pointing to my face, started chanting ojos verdes.
A little girl broke out of the crowd and came over to me. "Dad will take you over the river," she said and pointed in the same direction that Enrico had pointed.
The little girl's father bared a toothless mouth and helped me with my bag. He rowed us over to a part of the beach where there were tables and hammocks and a roof made of straw. It was a strip of land that had broken off from the shore so that it now lay surrounded by water on both sides. A freshwater river divided it from the mainland and on the other side laid the Pacific. While the river was gradually pushing the land further away from the mainland, the ocean was chewing off bits from the other side, forcing more people to pack up and move inland.
A woman emerged from the shade. She was wearing a red scarf on her head, a soiled apron wrapped perfunctorily around her waist, and a blouse which had once been red but the sun had bleached pink.
"Bienvenida. Soy Dona Selsa."
She held my hand. Her skin was hardened by the salty air and her grey hair reflected in the sun. Behind her I glimpsed the ocean. I complimented her on her beautiful place, the peace and quiet. Apart from myself and Dona Selsa, there were only two other people – the man in the boat who, as I found out later, was her husband, as well as their young daughter. Dona Selsa showed me a hammock under the straw roof and after leaving me a mosquito net for the night, she retreated to her hut. Later, as I was walking along the ocean-side of the beach, I ran into her husband who was carrying a basket full of fish. Stray dogs were trailing behind him, undernourished and flea-ridden. He threw a fish at them which was caught by two of the less weak ones.
As a sign of hospitality, Dona Selsa had let me know that she could get hold of a chicken from the village, but she made the offer in such a way that left me no choice but to refuse. That night after a dinner consisting of tortillas and fried fish, I watched the silhouette of the man raking the sand against the moonlit sky. Dona Selsa was cleaning fish by the river and the little girl was pulling the tail of a skinny dog in the distance. I listened to the waves folding over the sand while watching the tall rainforest trees of the mainland sway gently in the night.
And so the days came and went. I was putting off leaving, suspecting that when I did, it would be for good. I wrote a lot and dozed in my hammock. Once or twice I thought about going for a swim in the ocean, but I only got as far as wetting my legs. No one else did any swimming there and so I stayed under the roof of El Capitan and resigned myself to watching the waves hammer down on the beach. The only times I ventured out of the shade was to accompany Dona Selsa on her walks to collect seaweed. She would then first apply a thick fruity mash on my skin to protect it against the sun, slapping it on my back in the same brusque manner that she rubbed the dirty clothes against the rocks by the river with red soap. In the evenings I ate fish, skin and bones and all, together with the tortillas that Dona Selsa rolled out with a Coca-Cola bottle.
When Sunday came the villagers gathered on the other side of the river and Dona Selsa's husband was hustling for customers. Dona Selsa herself had been preparing for the onslaught all morning with the assistance of her other daughters who had arrived the night before. One of them gossiped that they were getting a lot more guests than usual because everyone wanted to take a look at me, the foreigner.
"Don't you get a lot of tourists then?" I asked her.
"Well, once we had a bunch from the capital, but they didn't stay long. Mum doesn't like to have too many people here," said the young girl.
"But she must like the business?" I insisted.
"She wants to make a little money to pay for our education, but she doesn't want too many people to come. She says when we get electricity there'll be many more tourists and she doesn't want that. She says it's bad."
When the villagers left and took the rowdiness with them, El Capitan lay deserted once again and the sand was littered with bottles, cigarette butts and fishbone. The dogs were scavenging for pieces of leftover fish with their noses in the sand. Dona Selsa lit a paraffin lamp and sat down at one of the tables to count her money. The girls left one by one after a quiet chat with their mum who handed over carefully folded notes. I watched their father row them across the river, until I could see no more, only hear the splashing of the rows as they broke the surface of the black water. Dona Selsa murmured something and came over to my hammock, cigarettes in hand. We smoked in silence until her husband pulled up the rowing boat and returned to us. When she bossed him around about something or other, he playfully flicked the lit cigarette from her mouth and they laughed when it broke in half. While he cleaned up, she went to lie in the hammock beside mine. She put a pair of huge glasses on the tip of her nose and unfolded an old newspaper in front of her face. The fact that the paper was up side down was of no concern to her.
The girls returned only a couple of days later, in the middle of the week. This time they wore their best clothes because they were going to a wedding in the village and they offered to take me. My hair was in knots, I had sand all over my body and nothing good to wear, but one of the girls offered to apply make-up. We went into Dona Selsa's hut where she said there was a mirror we could use. As I was sitting on the ground in front of the mirror I noticed a small table with its legs burrowed deep into the sand in the corner of the hut. The table had been made into a shrine with a candle burning in front of an enlarged photograph of a man and a dozen figures of Virgin Maria in cheap plastic. It was one of those theatrical portraits that Mexicans love with an artificial background and various props surrounding the person. It was plain to see that the theme of the sea had seeped into the photographer's mind because gazing out of the photograph was the brown, serious-looking face of a man on a sailing boat. He was wearing a sailing cap and a blue marine costume a shade darker than the cloudless sky behind him.
Dona Selsa's husband took us over the river and we walked along a dirt road into the village. I barely recognised it although it was the same way I had arrived only some days ago. The girls bought soft drinks at the drinking stalls along the way and let themselves be admired by the drinkers who congregated there. I asked one of the vendors for a beer, but he shook his head and gave me a plastic bag with a clear liquid in it that burned my throat: mescal.
In the middle of the town square sat the bride in white looking as if she would burst into tears any minute. The bride sat against a tableau of clouds and thunder on a throne that was meant to look like it came straight out of the ocean. A large sheet of blue silk had been placed underneath her and children on either side were shaking it to make it look like waves slapping against her gown. There was a line of people queued up to pay their respects. I joylessly danced a couple of numbers of salsa with some of the village men. The mescal tasted inoffensive enough as it settled inside my skull like cotton wool. "The sea is everywhere," I thought as I watched the bride sink and rise in front of me.
Rather than wake up Dona Selsa’s husband who was crouched down and asleep in his boat, I swam across the river. It was only when I had got half-way between the mainland and El Capitan that I realised I couldn't tell what direction I was going. It was as if I was swimming away from the other side and out towards the ocean into nothingness. I panicked and stayed in one place, kicking my legs frantically to keep myself afloat. Then something long and slimy wound itself around my ankle and I yelled out. A voice called from the dark and I saw a small flicker of light ahead of me. I swam as fast as I could until I noticed that the light was coming from Dona Selsa's cigarette.
Dona Selsa later said that she heard my splashing and panting long before I had reached the beach. She called me a fool and a daredevil. Didn't I know there were crocodiles and drunken villagers around? She made me take my wet clothes off and wrap myself in blankets while she continued to scold me. She only paused to ask, "Where are you from, child?" as if the thought had just occurred to her that I wasn't a local because a local would never do something that silly.
I didn't know what to say. I thought about Mamma and Pappa. How could I explain to her where home was? How would she understand? What would the North mean to her?
"Oh, from far away," I said warily.
"From the city?" she queried.
I pointed to the ocean and further beyond to where the ocean and the sky meet, "from over there."
"But where's your home?" she wanted to know with the insistence of someone for whom home is everything.
"On the other side of the ocean," I specified.
She looked at me with amazement. Her eyes filled with tears and that's when she told me about the man in the photograph.
"One day," she began, "tough men from Mexico City came to the village. They liked my son. They made jokes with him and he laughed. He was just a village boy. He laughed at everything they said and in return they gave him drugs, made him feel like them, like city boys. Then one night, it was a night just like this after a fiesta in the village, he disappeared. My son walked straight there," she indicated with a nod behind her towards the ocean, "and he never came back."
I watched her lips move and the tears welling up in her eyes. I turned to look out at the black ocean to which I had only moments ago pointed. I wanted to curse it, hate it, but then I realised I had only myself to curse – my cruel, careless words. What did I know about what lay on the other side? What did I know about lighting a candle for my dead son? About keeping hope alive?
Dona Selsa pointed first at me and then at the photograph of her son and when she spoke, her face was turned to the ocean, the enemy.
"Now I know he must still be alive somewhere," she tenderly touched my cheek with the palm of her hand.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
