The Blue Afternoon

by William Boyd

  “It’s good to talk to you, Pantaleon,” he said sincerely. “It’s good for me, anyway. Gets my mind off…things.” He gazed back at the meaningless mass of struts and wires in the nipa barn. “I’m mightily impressed with your machine, your Aero-mobile. Let me know if I can help, in any way.”

  “Actually, you might be able to, Salvador. Do you want to go for a beer?”

  “Another time, my friend. I have to get back.”

  Carriscant left Pantaleon at his barn as he said he was about to start fixing the fabric to the wings and intended to work into the night. He retraced his steps to Santa Cruz and picked up a carromato that took him the short distance to Sampaloc.

  Sampaloc was little better than a slum, one level up, perhaps, from the squalor that was Tondo, but all the same it presented to the eye a mean scatter of wooden shacks with galvanised iron roofs and unpaved narrow lanes noisome with filth and sewage. Gardenia Street was its one mark of distinction, a short cobbled avenue of shops that had been converted into makeshift bars and cafes. These establishments still retained the canvas awnings of the old shopfronts, great skirts of material that projected out from the facade on a metal beam and then hung almost to the ground, designed to produce maximum shade. The effect was to curtain-off the interior from the casual passerby but one could see and hear, in the gaps between the shopfronts, the glow of coloured lights, the sound of music and the laughter and noise of men’s voices. This partial shrouding was more enticing, Carriscant found, than any overt display of licence.

  He sat in a small bodegon on the outskirts of Sampaloc reading a newspaper and drinking many cups of coffee until the gathering darkness outside necessitated the lighting of the oil lamps. Once he felt he could venture out with some hope of maintaining his anonymity he set off down Gardenia Street. It was busy with men, American soldiers and sailors, and the air was loud with English voices, a disorientating and unsettling experience for him. He realised that he had not heard so many English voices since he had boarded his ship at Liverpool for his trip home in 1897. As he wandered up and down the length of Gardenia Street he felt a sudden clutch of melancholy seize him as he mentally contemplated his younger self all those years ago. He remembered his rapt astonishment as he walked the streets of Glasgow at the commencement of his medical studies. How he would take the horse tram from Gilmorehill, with the new university on its crest and the Infirmary at its foot where he worked and studied, and travel into the centre of town. All these people in their heavy dark clothes. He would walk about the thronged streets dazed with the noise of the traffic and the gabble and blather of English in his ears. Paving underfoot, every square yard, hard stone. The iron wheelrims of the trams and the cabs and the drays clattering and ringing. Writing everywhere, names and advertisements on every vertical surface, it seemed. In one shop a window filled with 200 straw hats. It seemed to bring a presentiment of sun, of the tropics, to this solid square city, with its tall, ornate, sootblack buildings, muscly with commerce and civic pride.

  How different from his home, Manila, the low green odorous city on its lazy steamy estuary, clustered round the vast, crumbling, weedshagged walls of Intramuros. A dome, a spire here and there, peering above the trees and the plain of white tin and terracotta roofs. The heat, the damp, the crawling pace. Life moved at the speed of a caraboa cart, people said, one mile per day. And now here in Sampaloc he heard those loud white voices again, different accents but with the same bustling swaggering confidence. Here too commerce held sway. He felt a brief pang of nostalgia for the life he had known before the Americans came. The late start to the day, the city stewed in humid lethargy, the siesta, then the polite curiosity, the discreet and civil flirtations of the paseo…But he shook the mood off him as his more immediate needs reimposed themselves and he decided to enter an establishment called “The Thichupwah Ice-Cream Parlor”, one of the street’s larger and more substantial buildings. On its second floor, above the awning, there was a crazy-looking wrought-iron balcony and through the open windows in some of the rooms Carriscant could see the flitting shapes of what he took to be women moving to and fro.

  He pushed past the canvas awning and opened the door on to a large noisy room, blurry with smoke, filled with American servicemen, most of them in uniform. Many games of cards were in process and the unselfconscious shouts of bid and counter-bid almost drowned the noise of the large phonograph in the corner, playing ‘My Kentucky Belle’ for the few listless couples shuffling about the small wooden dance floor at the rear. Carriscant pushed and weaved his way through the tables to the bar where a large sign said ‘American Beer. 40 cents, Mex’. He ordered a Schlitz and glanced carefully and, he hoped, casually around him. Behind the bar a white woman with a pinched face never designed to be painted in the way it was asked him if he wanted to dance. She spoke English with an unlocatable foreign accent. Polish, for all he knew, Corsican, Walloon.

  “With you?” he asked, not thinking. One of her front teeth was badly chipped, and the armpits of her thin cotton dress were dark with sweat.

  “Any of the girls. I cost extra.” She smiled, showing a lot of gum, and gestured at the girls sitting on a bench by the dance floor waiting for partners. “Fifty cents for a dance. Two dollars, Mexican, for a dance upstairs. The white girls cost five dollars.” She smiled at him again. “I’m ten…You American?”

  “Yes. Thank you.” He could barely pronounce the words.

  He left the bar and made his way through the yelling gamblers towards the dance floor, beyond which, he saw, was a flight of stairs. Amongst the half dozen women not dancing were three white ‘girls’, two thin, one plump, all with unnaturally coloured hair. The plump girl was a pure white-blonde, her hair piled untidily on top of her head, with a few uncoiling ringlets hanging down, reminding him, unfortunately, of the flypaper in Dr Cruz’s laboratory. The other girls were indias, dressed in lurid versions of their traditional clothes: wide-sleeved abaca blouses and bright shawls round their waists over ankle-length calico sayas. They all waved fans against the fug and heat, causing the paste bracelets on their wrists to wink and gleam in the light and click in uneven rhythm to the plangent scratchy music. One of the girls wore her dark hair down, glossy and congealed with coconut oil. She was small with unusually full lips and heavy eyebrows which gave her an air of unlikely seriousness. Carriscant watched as she snapped her fan shut and reached it behind and round her to scratch an itch on her shoulder blade. He walked round the dance floor towards her, having made his decision, his hand reaching in his pocket for money.

  He spoke English. “Two dollars,” he said, gauchely, like an ignoramus, showing her the notes, “upstairs.” In the moist heat of the room he could smell the coconut oil on her hair, sweet and spicy.

  She took the money, folded it away somewhere gracefully, discreetly. “You come me,” she said, “we room five.” She set off immediately across the dance floor towards the stairway. A swaying couple cut directly across Carriscant’s path and he had to pause and then negotiate their maladroit shuffle before he could follow his girl. His girl…“You come me, we room five.” It was all so clear-cut, a matter of plain business dealing, no fuss, no pretensions. He was always struck by the simplicity of this exchange, its no–nonsense straightforwardness—money in return for the short loan of a body—on the few occasions he had resorted to it before. By the time he reached the foot of the stair, however, the girl had already ascended. And coming down, adjusting his belt, was Dr Saul Wieland.

  “Well, if it isn’t the esteemed Dr Carriscant,” Wieland said loudly, showing both rows of teeth in a yellow grin. “That your little chicken I just patted on the keester?” Wieland was drunk, as usual.

  “What are you talking about?” Carriscant held himself stiffly, arms by his side.

  Wieland had reached the foot of the stairs, and lounged on the banister. He was a small man, in his fifties, with folds of jowl, like wattles, overlapping his stiff collar. He had a shaggy untrimmed moustache and an odd loose pout
ing mouth with wet lips.

  “I won’t tell Mommy. Relax.” He lolled forward and patted Carriscant’s elbow, reassuringly.

  Somehow Carriscant managed a contemptuous snuffle of a laugh. He reached forward and took hold of the handle of the door in front of him.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Carriscant said. “I’m here to attend my cook’s mother. She has a hernia. Good evening to you.”

  With that he snapped down the handle and swung the door open, stepping through confidently and closing it behind him. He heard Wieland say, with grotesque sarcasm, at the closed door, “Oh, so sorry, I’m sure.” Carriscant did not pause further, in case Wieland should try to come after him. He walked down the corridor, past an opening that led to a cramped dark kitchen, and then out of a rear door that gave on to a long narrow high-walled yard. One side was lined with chicken coops and he could hear the soft clucking of the roosting hens and smell the nutty, brothy reek of their accumulated shit. He felt his way carefully to his left and squinnied through the gap in a shutter. He could see Wieland sitting at a table with three other white men in civilian clothes, one of whom was dealing out a pack of cards.

  Carriscant had no desire to allow Wieland any further opportunities to glimpse him in the ‘Ice-Cream Parlor’ or to practise his scornful innuendo further and so he decided to wait until it was possible to leave unobserved. No-one, it seemed, had spotted him enter the yard so he was probably safe there for an hour or so. He moved further down into the darkness at the rear until he found a screened position against the wall. He pulled a section of old matting over and sat down upon it, snug in the angle the wall made with the solid wooden wheel of a caraboa cart. He stretched his legs out and rubbed his face, laughing at himself a little halfheartedly: so much for his ‘low flying dove’—she would be up there in her nest, wondering where her Americano had gone. Fool, he said to himself, fool, fool, fool…

  He woke up, his head canted against the rim of the wheel, the keening whine of a mosquito in his ear. He slapped it away and stood up, shakily, stiffly, stamping the circulation back into his legs. He could not believe he had slept like that…He moved to the light from the window and checked his pocket watch: 2.30 a.m. Music and chatter still emanated from the ‘Ice-Cream Parlor’ and peering in through a gap in the shutters he saw that the place was still crowded and, more irritating, that Wieland and his cronies were still engrossed in their gambling. This was absurd, he said to himself, now what was he supposed to do? To walk past Wieland at this time of the night would simply encourage more ribald speculation. He paced up and down the yard, thinking, disturbing the dozing poultry further. Wieland, at this rate, could be there until dawn. And Annaliese would have been in bed hours ago, he realised, no doubt further disgusted at his behaviour. He walked down to the foot of the yard, set an old box against the wall and hauled himself up on to its crumbling top. In front of him was only darkness, but a shifting sighing darkness that suggested vegetation—no glimmer of light was to be seen. He hoped that his pale grey alpaca suit would not become too soiled and that the drop down would not be too steep. Tensing himself, he pushed off.

  Mud.

  Up to his knees, he stumbled, reached out to steady himself and his hand went into the softness up to the elbow. He straightened, swayed and just held his balance. He took a couple of sucking, clinging steps, his hands held before him like a blind man. His fingers brushed leaves, thick, glossy, with a small serrated edge and he stepped forward, out of the filth of the path and up on to blessedly firm and drier earth around the bole of the tree. Mango, he thought. He turned to look back at the glow of lights from the rear elevations of the ‘Ice-Cream Parlor’ and the establishments on either side on Gardenia Street. The path he had dropped into must run along the backyards of the houses at this end of the street, recipient, no doubt, of every kind of slop and detritus imaginable and unimaginable. He was not going to attempt to walk out of this particular spot until he could see where he was placing his feet. He lowered himself carefully on to a wide exposed root: there was nothing for it but to sit it out.

  First light arrived just before 6. It had been a brain-deadening wait: he had smoked all the cigarettes he had on him—seventeen—had planned his future career in the smallest detail and had sung and hummed every melody, it seemed, he had ever heard, and still the slothful night crawled on. But now it was dawn and the mud on his clothes was almost dry. He rubbed his jaw feeling the roughness of stubble on his palm. Home, as quickly and discreetly as possible.

  The tree he had waited under was a mango, it turned out, part of a small grove that, once traversed, gave on to a prospect of misty cane and paddy fields and, beyond them, the low bluey mass of Manila’s northern suburbs, blurred by the smoke of morning cooking fires, a mile or so away. He set off, trudging down a path along the top of a dyke making for San Miguel and, he hoped, the first horse tram he could board.

  It proved more complicated going than he had expected. The path had joined a dirt track but he had taken a wrong turning, as he discovered when the track looped away northwards again, and he had to retrace his steps. Then he had to make a detour round a brackish meandering estero of the Pasig and pick his way southwards once more along the squelching fringes of more paddy fields before he saw, in the middle distance, the glowing terracotta roof and white walls of the Malacanan Palace through some woods ahead—Governor Taft’s official residence. Now he knew where he was. He consulted his pocket watch again: almost 8 o’clock: with a bit of luck he would be home within half an hour.

  He knew there was a ferry across the Pasig not far from the Palace and so followed a path that led directly towards it, abandoning the one he had been following. Another mistake, as it turned out, when the path terminated at a semi-demolished bamboo barn. He hurried on, nevertheless, cutting across the middle of a mogo bean plantation towards a thick grove of acacia trees. In his travels across country he had acquired a busy swarm of persistent flies, attracted, though he hardly dared to speculate, by some noxious ingredient in the Sampaloc mud that still daubed his trousers. He swatted wildly at them, tried vainly to outsprint them and then, pausing, removed his jacket and twirled it like a demented bullfighter around his head and shoulders as he went on his way.

  It was cooler among the acacia trees and the path was well trodden and the going easier. But as the sweat began to dry on his brow this relief proved to be temporary: he started to reflect on what had happened over the previous few hours and he began to generate a potent anger at himself. What could have persuaded him to go to Sampaloc, to a bordello? But then, having made his choice, why had he not been more worldly with Wieland, more of a man among men? What was so disgraceful, in that company especially, of admitting that one occasionally visited a prostitute? Really, he must have seemed absurdly, laughably prim, stalking off through that door like a virgin importuned by a leering cad. And look where his sudden attack of craven dignity had landed him: a mosquito-infested, shame-tormented, mud–encrusted, exhausting, cross-country—

  He actually saw—actually saw—the arrow as it flew towards his unsuspecting face.

  He had turned, alerted by a rip and flap of foliage, reflexively snapping his head to the right, and saw the missile fly at him. He could not remember if he had stopped or ducked or flinched but he felt the child’s breath of its passing on his cheek and then he heard the whungggg of its impact in the acacia tree beside him. He turned. Head high. Its white fletch still vibrating.

  He dropped to his hands and knees and scrabbled behind a bush, a little whimpering noise in his throat, waiting for other arrows to fly at him, waiting for his assailants to surge from the undergrowth, razor–edged bolos swinging sharp in the morning air.

  Silence. No twig-snap, no…Then he heard it, not far off. Laughter. Women laughing.

  He pulled the embedded arrow out of the tree trunk and paced back along its trajectory, feeling the anger in him distort his face, drawing it down almost as if he were trying to make a snarli
ng snouty point out of his features, to force his brows, nose, mouth, cheeks into a furious and threatening horn with which to gore his persecutors. The fear had gone, the terror was over: people were laughing at him, women were laughing.

  He pushed brutally through a dense dark screen of cogal bushes, scratching the backs of his hands, and found himself blinking in the brightness of a sunlit lawn. In front of him stood three round canted archery targets and beyond them stood half a dozen women, white women, in leg-of-mutton-sleeved blouses and long drill skirts, wearing straw hats against the sun, carrying bows, with quivers of arrows slung across their shoulders. One of them was actually fitting another arrow to her bow, drawing it back—

  “STOP!” he screamed, emotion cracking his voice. “Stop now, you bitch of hell! God damn you!”

  He strode out to confront them, brandishing the arrow.

  “One inch more and this would have buried itself in my head,” he shouted at them. “Less than an inch, you mindless idiots! Less than an inch and I would have been killed by your foolishness, your foolish stupid carelessness!”

  They stared at him, big-eyed, ogling, mouths gaping, completely astonished. He felt his rage begin to vent from him, as if a plug had been pulled, and self-consciousness rush in to fill the void. He saw them now, clearly: these were respectable American women—Good God—young women. What must he have looked like advancing out of the wood, covered in mud, unshaven, screaming his anger? Had he sworn? Oh God, he had a sudden terrible memory of using an oath, a foul oath.

  “Who is the person responsible?” he carried on gamely, not wanting now to lose the advantage his outrage gave him. “Who is the person who fired this arrow?”

  A woman stepped forward at once and he swivelled to confront her. A tall woman. Broad-shouldered. Pale strong freckled face. Some rare quality about that face, he thought, suddenly, throat tightening. Something he had never seen. Reddish brown hair held in a loose bun. The details came fast: she had a slightly hooked nose, he saw rapidly, with small arched nostrils, and he saw rapidly too, how the leather strap of her quiver separated the soft roll of her bosom into two distinct breasts.