OxTravels

by Mark Ellingham

  Before darkness, Horse is picking his way up the dry stony bed of an arroyo. There are big boulders, bars of loose gravel, the soaring sides of a wide canyon. Then a sandy flat in an ox-bow bend. Tethering Horse means tying the rope around a piece of fall wood and burying it in the fine sand. I give him a nose-bag of corn, lay out the saddle and the blankets, collect firewood and make a blaze. I toast bread and melt cheese and open the tin of fish; brew coffee and cut it half and half with rum. Then I settle down fully dressed, wrapped in the serape and the coat, with the saddle for a pillow.

  Later I wake suddenly. A noise. There’s ice on the outside of the blanket. Horse has moved closer to me and the fire, a shadowy black bulk. His presence is a comfortable familiarity, the slight sound of his hooves grinding the sand down under him as he shifts weight, intensifying the silence. Emphasising the sudden yipping call from further up the arroyo. And the answering call from much closer, higher up amongst the rocks. Coyotes, first calling shyly, then drawn out yelps and singing back and forth, as they move towards each other. It’s been a hard, uncomfortable, discomfiting ride to get here, this far out, through a countryside that doesn’t like strangers. Not knowing what would make it worthwhile. It’s turned out to be this: a night of sierra wilderness – nature and the wild.

  THE RETURN on the fourth morning starts off on a straight line from the sierra across country to San Miguel. First the open country, following the dried water courses running south. Then the badly built walls and slack wire fences, again. Untwisting the wire to make a passage through. Then big open land, a rich man’s land, wired around with seven strands on concrete posts running clear across the route as far as the skyline on both sides. A heavy locked gate containing emptiness. A whole morning’s ride off course to round the edge of the property, where it meets the road. Back on the verge, Horse jogging along, easy-going, kicking up the dust and dried grasses and beer cans.

  I ride into the plaza in San Miguel in time to get Horse back to Raul before sundown. Dust-covered, trail-weary, wanting a beer. From the sidewalk a tall man steps out, wearing jeans, well-polished boots, casual shirt, a cowboy hat – though he’s not a cowboy. He takes in Horse, the blanket and bags on the saddle and the long coat and hat, and addresses me in English.

  ‘You’re not from here, no? You’ve been out riding? I have horses out in the country here, I like to ride out for a few days sometimes. I like to ride this country. How did you find it?’

  ‘It went well enough.’ I tell him how I hired the horse from the policía, rode out to the sierra past Arroyo de Medina, slept out three nights. Tell him it was a good trip, though too much of the land was fenced and I was forced along the roads and highways.

  ‘Sure,’ he says. ‘Most of the land is fenced now for cattle … the owners don’t want people riding their land … they leave the gates open, maybe, or they steal the cattle … the old story. And along the roads can be bad. Some bad people there. The sierra, too. Some people aren’t too friendly, some are unfriendly.’

  I tell him that nobody was too friendly – and I didn’t quite understand it. Normally when you’re riding, people like you for being on a horse, and doing the same thing as they are – you’re out in the same weather, dressed like them, need the same things – shelter, fodder for the horse, a drink. But I didn’t get that feeling. Didn’t feel welcome.

  ‘Well, you know the reason,’ he explains. ‘It’s because you’re thinking like you’re a cowboy, a vaquero, and people are going to like that. But here a man on a horse, a man alone on a horse just riding across country, a man they don’t know – isn’t going to be a good thing. That’s our history. Revolutions and outlaws and strangers on horses with guns. And a lot of the poorest people out there are indíginas, Indians. They still have memories, older memories, of men on horses. Spaniards, criollos, masters. You saw how they are, they don’t want to talk to you, they don’t look in your eye, no? For them you are like meeting a ghost. From the past, the bad past. For those people you were a ghost on a horse.’

  Where we stood I could see the black scorch marks and exploded cardboard tatters and smell gunpowder from the millennium tower. The twenty-first century is underway. It’s time to hand back the horse.

  The Beggar King

  AMINATTA FORNA (born Glasgow, 1964) is an author and television documentary maker. She has published two novels, Ancestor Stones and The Memory of Love.

  Her memoir, The Devil that Danced on the Water, recalled her dissident father and one of her countries, Sierra Leone. She lives in London with her husband, Simon, and Maude, a wall-eyed lurcher. www.aminattaforna.com

  The Beggar King

  AMINATTA FORNA

  In the year 2000 I returned to Sierra Leone, the country of my childhood. It had been nine years since my last visit. The war had endured for the same length of time and would endure for two more years. I had gone home in search of my family, and truths concealed for a quarter of a century, for a book that I was writing. In the six weeks I spent in the wreckage of the land I still called home I saw up close the final verdict of an oppression that had begun in my childhood years by a population who had nothing left to lose.

  War had torn through the country like a tornado. Freetown had been invaded by different rebel forces twice: in 1997 and in 1999. The first time my mother managed to escape, first by sea and then by air. My sister waited under the cold lights of the Stansted airport arrivals hall for her plane to land. She stepped from the plane in the same dress she had been wearing the day she had fled the house, her luggage a single handbag lent by a friend who sheltered her before she found passage on a refugee ship bound for Guinea. My sister phoned me later to say she had arrived safely, adding that she had seen a childhood friend at the airport, his clothes stained with dried blood.

  Just over a year later the government declared the war over and my mother returned to Freetown. She wanted, she told us, to be home by Christmas. The second invasion was far bloodier, more enduring than the last; this time there was no way out. The people were caught between the mountains and the sea, like rats in a barrel. The last of the expats had left two years before, so no foreign government was inclined to send a ship.

  WHEN I SET OUT myself for Freetown, in 2000, with my husband, Simon, we left from Heathrow amid a plane full of tourists to the Gambia. There we waited for two days before an ageing West Coast Airlines plane, piloted by Russians, took us on to Freetown. It was the only airline prepared to land in Sierra Leone and was doing most of its business taking people out of the country. Flying in, we felt like reverse-refugees. From the air I stared out of the window and wondered how it would be to crash into the mangrove swamps below. (Three years later the very same plane went down taking with it everyone on board.)

  Nothing in Freetown was as I remembered it. The people stumbled through the streets like the survivors of an earthquake, with glazed expressions and awkward gait. They grasped at strangers and familiar faces alike, as if waiting for the earth to open up and swallow them again, like convalescents wandering their hospital grounds. Yet, the bars and nightclubs heaved, and after hours people dodged the curfew patrols – though the soldiers were under orders to shoot on sight – for the chance to forget for one or two hours longer.

  WHEN THE TIME came to return, we rose before first light to reach Hastings airport, where it was claimed that a plane would arrive to take us the first leg of the journey out of Freetown. That was how it went. A rumour would start and people would pursue it until it turned out to be false.

  Outside the locked gates of the airport we found a crowd. Those in front gripped the bars of the gate and peered through them to the empty tarmac of the runway, upon which an unseasonal rain had created pools of water. The airport hut was dark, nothing moved. Nobody turned when we arrived. They stood facing the runway, like worshippers facing the dawn, as though focusing their collective energy upon the airport building, willing the plane to come. Behind them was piled vast quantities of luggage, enough for a lifetime.


  We sat on our suitcases in front of a low wall and waited. I didn’t believe a plane was coming to get us, but I said nothing, partly out of some kind of superstition, partly because I was ashamed at how desperate I had become to leave the place.

  Around eight a street performer appeared and began his routine. Nobody watched except me. I recognised him and became excited. Here was someone from the past. He used to perform at a club by the beach where my family spent our Sundays. I had been perhaps his greatest admirer, so much so that my father, in a fit of parental indulgence, had hired him to perform at a birthday party. I even knew his name: Musa. There in front of the airport he performed a routine that must have been as elaborate as it was joyless. He was over sixty, yet he flipped this way and that, stood on his hands to pour water from one glass to another; quite literally he bent over backwards to entertain. He never smiled.

  When he was done I went over, gave him some money and prodded at his memory. He smiled as he answered my questions and accepted my gift: ‘Thank you, Ma. May God bless.’ He claimed to remember me too, but he was lying. It was there in the way he nodded: too fast, too readily. And the fact that he never looked at me.

  THE CROWD WAS GROWING. We began to fear being overtaken by numbers so rose and joined the crush at the gate. A woman next to me wept silently, her head bowed as the tears poured out of her. Sierra Leone had been a country where public tears never failed to attract the sympathy of strangers but nobody put out a hand to comfort her. I’m afraid to say I behaved no differently. Among so many sad souls, what was one more? The minutes passed. The young woman wept on.

  Then at the rear of the crowd, came a man’s voice, calling loudly: ‘So, here you are. What are you doing here?’ People kept their faces averted, locked in the act of willing the plane to land. ‘Come home,’ he boomed. ‘Come home with me.’ I am guessing at what he said, because at first I wasn’t listening to the words and nor had I turned to look at him. But somebody nearby tittered and this caught my attention.

  ‘Please, I beg you.’ I turned around and saw a young man: slim, dressed in a plain white cotton robe with a white embroidered round hat. He looked as though he was on his way to the mosque. He was strikingly handsome: bright-eyed and burnished of skin, with dimples in his cheeks.

  ‘Don’t leave me. Don’t go away. Whatever I have done we can make better. I will change. I can become a different man.’ Now he had caught our attention. People craned their necks to see who he was talking to, murmured and whispered.

  The handsome young man racked it up a notch: ‘If you get on the plane you’ll be taken away from me forever. If you go to America, you’ll never come back. Take me with you.’ He was addressing the weeping woman, speaking his words to her back. By now people were openly curious. The young man continued: ‘That other woman means nothing to me.’ And as an afterthought: ‘Well, not a great deal.’

  A burst of laughter from the crowd. Suddenly we realised we were watching a street performer, who had picked as his victim the weeping girl. He shook his head and continued: ‘But the other three, they meant very little. And as for the rest, nothing at all!’

  The crowd hooted. The young man had us laughing, but it seemed unfair to pick on this unhappy young woman. Her head was bowed, her shoulders continued to shake. With the back of her hand she wiped away her tears. The street performer dropped to his knees and spread his arms: ‘See how I beg you. Look at me. I won’t move until you give me just one glance.’

  Everyone looked at the girl, whose back remained turned. I looked at her too. Then I saw the shaking of her shoulders no longer came from sadness, but from laughter. She was helplessly crying and laughing as one. Slowly she lifted her head, turned and faced the young man. Her face was soaked with tears, but she smiled.

  We went wild.

  Footsteps, a shout: the manager of the airport building. He was angry, on the brink of rage. He gestured threateningly at the young man, who leapt to his feet, took his hat from his head and passed it into the crowd. Delayed by a locked gate and hampered by an impossibly large bunch of keys, the manager swore, raised his fist and proceeded to give vigorous chase as the young man danced through the crowd. We closed around him and at the same time passed his hat from hand to hand, stuffing it with money.

  When he had made his way to the edge of the crowd the young man made a run for it. Soon enough the manager broke free of us too. Now they were out in the open. The manager charged. The young man skipped out of range. Somebody held out his hat. The young man darted sideways to receive it. The manager lumbered after him, an ox in pursuit of a cat. Rage had the better of him. He screamed at the young man and at us, too. He would not tolerate beggars outside the airport building. The young man, by now standing atop a low wall shouted: ‘I am a beggar, true. But am I not the King of Beggars?’ It was all very Errol Flynn.

  There was much cheering and clapping. The Beggar King bowed, leapt from the wall and was gone. We followed the manager into the airport building. He was angry with us, but processed our papers all the same. Sheepishly we followed his orders to the letter. An hour later a plane landed. We boarded it and left, some among us forever.

  AS FOR ME, I have been back to Freetown many times since and I often see street performers, have come to recognise many of them by face or the nature of their routine. I have even seen Musa again, contorting his body into impossible shapes for the amusement of the new arrivals who came in the wake of war: the UN soldiers, the armies of aid workers and consultants, the profiteers. But I have never again seen the Beggar King.

  Some years after the war I came across these lines from Bertolt Brecht: ‘And is there singing in the darkness? Yes, there is singing in the darkness.’

  And sometimes, just sometimes – there is laughter too.

  The Fall and Rise of

  a Rome Patient

  IAN THOMSON (born London, 1961) is a writer and journalist. He is the author of Primo Levi: a Biography (which won the W.H. Heinemann Award), Bonjour Blanc: A Journey Through Haiti, and The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica (which won the Ondaatje Prize and Dolman Travel Award in 2010). He is currently working on a history combined with family memoir, Darkness in Tallinn: World War II in Europe’s Forgotten City 1939–44. He lives in london with his wife and children. The photo above was taken in 1984 during his convalescence in Rome.

  The Fall and Rise of a Rome Patient

  IAN THOMSON

  One day in the autumn of 1984, after an unexplained fall, I woke up in a hospital in Rome acutely head-injured and disorientated. ‘I’m afraid you’ve had an emergency brain operation.’ A blurred but familiar face came into focus as the English woman who shared my flat near the railway station. I protested, ‘But why me?’ Then the face dissolved and I was out again.

  I was found sprawled on the kitchen floor of 195 Via Salaria with my breathing irregular and speech slurred. In Hitchcock manner the phone was dangling off the hook. The police suspected an intruder, yet nothing it seems had been stolen. I was twenty-three and newly arrived in Rome to work as a journalist and teach. The city struck me then as beautiful with the autumn light at dusk turning a dried-blood red. I was in a relationship with my flatmate, Gilly, and beautiful things were promised for the falling year.

  At the time of the accident, bizarrely, I had been on the phone to the Italian novelist Italo Calvino, whom I hoped to interview. I believe I was the only person in the flat that afternoon. The phone rang and I answered it. Then something hit me hard and the room spun so fast that I seemed to hit myself on the back of the head with the floor. Time passed after that in a blur of pain. By the time Gilly discovered me later that evening, handprints of blood had covered the walls and congealed on the floor where I lay in a stupor. I was bleeding profusely from my left ear, and my speech had become garbled or, in neuro-speak, aphasic. Later, Calvino told me un tonfo (a thud) had sounded at my end before the line went dead. At the time he thought it was a faulty connection.

  TODAY I CAN TAKE
STOCK of what happened twenty-five years ago in Italy. On the anniversary of the injury, 17 October 2010, I returned to Rome in order to meet the surgeon who had operated on me and saved my life. Since then I have learned much about the nature of my injury, as well as the fevers, frets and disorders that afflict our most precious and mysterious organ: the brain. Twenty-five years is no mean portion of a human life, however, and my memory of the events is consequently hazy at times.

  After neurosurgery I regained consciousness amid a tang of ammonia mingled with carbolic and slops. I was outside a latrine on the sixth floor of San Giovanni Hospital. A sign at the end of the corridor announced: TRAUMATOLOGIA CRANICA (‘traumatised crania’ – head injury unit). Like a bedlamite I had been strapped to some sort of a wheeled iron bed. Other patients were recuperating with me on trolleys in the corridor for want of space. Presently a group of nuns – Sisters of Mercy in coifs and black habits – swished past, each bearing a carafe of white wine. Was I in paradise? The carafes turned out to contain urine samples.

  Nuns were often to be seen in San Giovanni Hospital, adjacent to the baroque basilica of the same name. Along with priests and social workers they acted as paramedics owing to a nationwide shortage of trained lay nurses. Soon enough a couple of nuns came to provide me with a basin into which I emptied the previous day’s meal. I blasphemed in shock as a catheter was disconnected from under my sheets: ‘Madonna!’ Why had I blasphemed in Italian? (The pop star Madonna was then all the rage in Rome, but I cared nothing for her or her music.)

  The operation for an acute epidural haematoma – a build-up of blood between the skull and the brain’s outer membrane – had lasted two hours. During that time my flatmate was kept in the dark about my chances of survival. Instead she was told to remove her shoes lest her restless pacing up and down disturb the patients out in the corridor. Wretchedly for me, my parents were away in China and other family members were nowhere to be found. I was alone in a foreign city with no clear direction home. Surgery had left me with a cavity in the back of the skull where the haematoma had been evacuated. It was the size of a healthy tangerine as is usual for a craniotomy, or surgical removal of a section of skull.