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HOW TO DISAPPEAR
a memoir for misfits
Duncan Fallowell
TERRACE BOOKS
A TRADE IMPRINT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS
Terrace Books
A trade imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press
1930 Monroe Street, 3rd Floor
Madison, Wisconsin 53711 -2059
uwpress.wisc.edu
Copyright © 2013 by Duncan Fallowell
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any format or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews.
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fallowell, Duncan.
How to disappear : a memoir for misfits / Duncan Fallowell.
p. cm.
Originally published: London : Ditto Press, 2011.
ISBN 978-0-299-29240-9 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-299-29243-0 (e-book)
1. Fallowell, Duncan-Travel. I. Title.
PR6056.A56Z46 2013
823’.914—dc23
[B]
2012040153
Typeset in Plantin Rounded
To my old friend Pedro Friedeberg whom I’ve never met
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
How to Disappear
CHAPTER ONE Sailing to Goz
CHAPTER TWO The Curious Case of Bapsy Pavry
CHAPTER THREE Waiting for Maruma
CHAPTER FOUR Who was Alastair Graham?
CHAPTER FIVE Beyond the Blue Horizon
Acknowledgments
HOW TO DISAPPEAR
CHAPTER ONE Sailing to Gozo
We are held for two days in Catania port by storms of unusual violence, and all Mount Aetna and much of the town have disappeared in a turbulence of drenching cloud. Lit by lightning, a baroque dome or a line of statues or a towerblock might briefly flash out at an unexpected angle; but thunder can barely be heard above the roar of winds whose force whips the rain into diagonals, stinging the face on deck or blasting smears against the portholes when we’re inside. Our ship has the protection of the basin, but immense waves, so uncharacteristic of the Mediterranean, break against the far side of the harbour wall, sending displays of foam up to a great height. These sudden bouquets of whiteness are snatched by the gales and are dispersed into the maelstrom, so that the sea seems to explode and vanish upwards.
Ever phlegmatic, the crew play cards in the saloon while the passengers, few at this time of year (only a couple of dozen on a ship which could take hundreds as well as their automobiles), stare out with listless eyes at the dim chaos. Occasionally someone dashes down the gangplank, along the harbourside and into town, to buy the chewy almond cakes for which Catania is famous. In due course he will reappear, sodden but triumphant, with a bow-tied parcel in a dripping plastic bag. The cakes, not too sweet yet dusted in a talcum of sugar, are tenderly satisfying, especially when taken with tea. Alas, the tea on offer at the ship’s bar is without doubt the most repulsive I’ve ever come across, its taste a mixture of filth and antiseptic, its colour a perturbed grey. And the coffee’s not much better.
On the third morning one awakes to peace. All violence has departed and the city, beneath a blue sky, is meticulously exposed by sunlight of butter-yellow. Somewhat darker and behind it, but not forbidding, Aetna slides gracefully to the heavens; while during breakfast on board nobody speaks, everyone muted by tranquillity or tedium. The gluelike hours move slowly forward until at last, after half an hour of premonitory throbbing and squirting through its flanks, the ship sets sail for Malta at 1 pm.
We hug the Sicilian coast, cruising southwards. Squinting passengers take the air on deck. Unexpectedly, blocks of flats appear on the shore, followed by the cluster of old Syracuse which is our only stopping point before the open sea. At the very mention of ‘Syracuse’ an enchantment arises in one’s mind: palace and opera house, cathedral and cafe, ancient gold stone and young gold flesh, palm fronds, handbag snatchers, wonderful food alfresco on warm velvet nights, and death in carnival costume; all the heady and crooked cliches of the south jostling softly together – the locus of another story – not this one.
The ship, in the smartly painted blue-and-white of the Tirrenia Line, is an unavoidable spectacle when it ties up alongside the esplanade. This is known as the Foro Italico and is marked out by a string of pom-pom trees overlooked by a precipice of grand houses. Scootering children greet our arrival, then stand dumbly and stare up at the floating bulk while seven more passengers join the ship. Four of them, bent by heavy bags of foodstuffs, turn out to be residents of Gozo and are English.
‘Is Gozo like Sicily?’ I ask.
‘Not in the slightest. Sicily is civilisation.’
Really? At times in Sicily I have felt far from the security of the word ‘civilisation’ whose very syllables rumble so elegantly along like the roofscape of a classical ideal; and I’ve found myself instead in a place where I could not walk or talk freely and where at any moment I might be ambushed. When Coleridge came up to Syracuse from Valletta around 1805 he also had mixed feelings. Syracuse he found decayed and the population deep in ignorance, swarmed over by Catholic priests as numerous, he wrote, as an Egyptian plague. But, as always in Sicily, there was voluptuousness too: at the opera, he noted, and in the cakey palazzi, and in the fertile spaces between ancient ruins where, to Coleridge’s surprise, Indian hemp and the opium poppy grew happily and were harvested by the Syracusans for their narcotic properties. Which was right up his street, for not only was Coleridge addicted to laudanum but I read somewhere that he invented a cocktail consisting of aconite, angostura, and leopard’s bane.
‘Where will you be staying?’ asks one of the Englishmen.
‘I fancied the sound of the Duke of Edinburgh.’ This hotel is in Victoria, Gozo’s capital.
‘Ah…’ comes the response.
‘What do you mean, “ah”?’
‘Do you like character?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you’ll love it.’
‘I haven’t booked or anything.’
‘At this time of the year it will be empty.’
He turns back to his companions, leaving me to purse my lips and look at nothing, swimming a little inside, which I recognise as the careen of the unknown, of a dubious situation up ahead which is to be faced alone. It is succeeded by a short, corrective burst of adrenaline. We sail south-south-west. Everything is fine for an hour and a half or so – then without warning the ship slides down a steep bank of water into a lurching swell. At first it is almost amusing, in funfair fashion, but one by one the passengers turn avocado-green and disappear into their cabins. On deck a pregnant woman collapses in disorientation. With her legs buckling this way and that, head lolling and eyes rolling as though in the final throes of mad cow disease (her ballooning cargo of unborn flesh threatening to take off in yet
another direction), she is helped below by companions.
Usually I do not suffer from sea-sickness beyond a slightly queasy sense of surprise. I do what one is supposed to do: use the horizon to maintain at least one constant in a world of liquefying references. But eventually I too begin to feel uncomfortable and decide to go below for something to settle the stomach. On the way I pass a splattered mess which looks like half-digested almond cake mixed with tomatoes, and in the cabin my ‘prosciutto e formaggio’ bread-rolls take on a lurid, lysergic repulsiveness. My tummy is also oppressed by the distant explosion of plates beyond the cabin door. The plates are smashing like firecrackers as they slip on to the hard floor of the abandoned buffet. I force down some food and lay my head on the pillow – the very worst thing one could do. Within this tiny coffinlike retreat, all is rectilinear; all reference points are fixed; and yet the entire cabin is pitching about in the most drunken manner. This disjunction between the evidence of one’s eyes (fixity) and the evidence of the other senses (lurcherama) produces swooning of the mind and nausea. Really it would be best to go back up on deck but I lack the resolve and am tossed biliously on the bunk, wondering why the hell I ever left my cosy flat in Notting Hill or the freezing flat in Palermo.
The reason for that – for the leaving – is simple. It’s curiosity. Through the long, coal-black nights of an English winter, I have sat on the floor in front of the fire and pored over the atlas, imagining the world. The large sumptuous legends of escape – Gobi, Venice, Angkor – rarely set my imagination on a roll. They are overplayed. But certain small names have a miniature allure, as of a dream which is exotic but manageable, like a fantastic charm on the bracelet of life. Malacca, Noto, Swaziland, Cochin, Ootacamund, Akaroa, Galle, Diu, Petropolis, Eigg, Curasao. Often there is a misfit quality to these places, crumbling backwaters whose day has gone, and if they manage to convey the impression that the clock stopped in 1929 I can get very excited: curiosity and the pursuit of novelty does not exclude the past. Far from it. Nostalgia is often the route to rebirth. That is what the word ‘renaissance’ means, rebirth, and the Renaissance in Europe was the rediscovery of the old classical world, a discovery which enabled Europe to escape from the suffocation of the Middle Ages into a healthier light. Nostalgia isn’t a hankering for the past as such, but the desire to retrieve a loss. Sometimes it’s purely the name, the very configuration of letters, which suggests the ideal, forgotten stopping place, especially if it contains a ‘z’ (Cadiz, Zanzibar) or an ‘x’ (Buxton, Xanadu). If they are positioned in warm climates they have to be visited out of the hot season because an endless battle with the sun severely curtails the psychic space which these resorts are intended to supply. And one mustn’t catch some gruesome bug – that’s not the idea at all.
In these respects Gozo appeared to have everything. An island off the north-east coast of Malta, it was integral to that British colony and occasionally visited by Governors from Valletta for recreation. Its capital Victoria was named in honour of the Queen on the occasion of her Diamond Jubilee in 1897, and in Victoria town there is listed only one hotel – the Duke of Edinburgh. Gozo’s history is very old. Odysseus was shipwrecked there and entertained for seven years by Calypso, the nymph-daughter of Atlas. But there are remains of enigmatic temples built two thousand years before Homer. And it is said to be greener, sleepier, more seductive than its parent island of Malta. The inhabitants can speak plenty of English, make red wine, crochet lace, and drive on the left in the deep dark south of Europe within winking distance of Arabian Africa.
Meanwhile back in the cabin, I’m still going through it. The particular distress of sea-sickness is not only the sick feeling but the way it mimics certain forms of insanity. Confused perception, the arousal of subconscious fears, dissociation, and so forth. Vomit I do not however, and as suddenly as we fell into it, we are out of the plunging pull of water. Apparently the crossing is nearly always bad, this being the narrow and only sea-channel between the large bodies of the east and west Mediterranean; but to-day it has been made a great deal worse by the storms. Somehow the transition itself, to placidity, is unnoticed; there only comes a moment when it dawns on one that an agony has passed, that one is OK, that one is hungry. It is very difficult maintaining atheism at sea: I give thanks to God in abject, tearful fashion and polish off the ham & cheese rolls.
With fearsome bangs on doors, the stewards pass down the corridor saying pack up, we’ll be in port within the hour. And already night has fallen. Walking out on deck I face into a cold black wind and discern by degrees a fanlike glow in the distance like a sunrise in hell. This is the first hint of valiant Malta, a rocky riverless island which despite blockades and dreadful bombardments never surrendered to the Fascists in the Second World War. In 1942 King George VI awarded the entire citizenry the George Cross, which emblem has been incorporated into the national flag. Its population is reportedly of Carthaginian origin and the native language is of the Semitic family.
The approach and entry to the Grand Harbour of Valletta is a marvel I have not been prepared for. With the wind dropping and the water calming at every stage, bastion upon bastion of the greatest fortress in the world, tier upon tier climbing from knuckles of rock and floodlit a coppery orange, unfold their battlements and turrets in a slow, seemingly endless series of tableaux on either side of the channel. Above the wavy curtains of these massive walls, blue floodlight bathes classical buildings set among palm trees whose branches show up like tiny green herringbones. Sea-approaches are always magical – the finely graduated decoding of a mystery – and this approach to Valletta must be the most awe-inspiring in the Old World as that to Manhattan is in the New. Silently on smooth, jet-black water, the ship advances, saluted everywhere by this serrated magnificence.
Tucked on to a stone terrace is the Grand Harbour Hotel, a far smaller affair than it sounds. A young man of immense girth attends the night desk and his trusting comportment is very noticeable after my period of living in Palermo tensions. He puts me in Room 67, tiny, with a view over luminous castled water. I sprawl on the bed, letting mental pictures sift themselves. Sleep comes slowly.
The following day it is warm, with a few detergent-white clouds in a flat blue sky, and I discover what that man on board must have meant by Sicily being ‘civilisation’: good food and stylish dress. Neither are Maltese attributes. But there is civilisation of another sort here: absolute safety in public places. I can walk where I want when I want. I can change money easily and quickly. The people are without suspicion or arrogance. None of that interminable Sicilian Arabo-Latin complication.
I also discover that the boat to Gozo leaves at lunch-time – soon! – and I scuttle aboard, slumping into a window seat with my luggage. The voyage isn’t long and moves north-west along the Maltese coast, chugging past miles of ugly cement buildings. Oncoming – the bare creamy rock of little Comino Island – a relief – it is undefiled – and soon after, I scan the distant lineaments of Gozo…which isn’t particularly green, and looks surprisingly built-up too, but the buildings at least are low. On the cliffs above Gozo’s harbour several gothic-revival churches are brilliantly inappropriate.
Struggling ashore with bags, I am at once hailed from a car window by a taxi-driver. He reminds me of those trendy young men one sometimes met with in India who combined the cultures of several continents in a very odd way. This one has long hair drooping over his shoulders in black tendrils and he calls me ‘mate’, ‘man’ and ‘sir’ all in the same stream of chatter. I sling my large bag in the back with no help from him and sit beside it with the smaller one on my lap. The driver certainly knows the Duke of Edinburgh Hotel – but he’s not impressed.
At a set of traffic lights on the harbour road we are obliged to stop and my attention diverts to a man standing in the street, one of more conventional appearance than the taxi-driver. This other man is about thirty years old, sturdily built with short curly hair, and he’s on the kerb staring straight through the window at me. N
o doubt about it – I’m being ‘clocked’. My skin prickles. His face has balanced features, but why its dark inquisitive eyes and somewhat irascible expression should be directed towards me I can’t imagine. So at once on this island there is contact and a sense of, not hostility exactly but of, well, disquiet.
The Duke of Edinburgh Hotel is out of a novel by Lawrence Durrell or Malcolm Lowry. I am captivated the moment its Italianate facade appears at the bottom of Victoria’s main street. The driver, pushing some of his tendrils behind one ear, tries to arrange future journeys with me but I tell him I’m going to rent a car, whereupon he says he has a friend who rents cars very cheaply and hands me a card with a phone number on it. As I pay the fare he adds ‘There is an excellent Country & Western night at Marsalforn.’ I notice he’s wearing cowboy boots. I never see him or his like again.
The hotel foyer is shadowy and noiseless, spacious and cool, with old brown furniture which looks as though it’s rooted to the floor. I expect someone to pop up from somewhere and ask me what I want but nobody does, so I slowly skirt the walls. To my amazement they are hung with typewritten testimonials, now yellow with age, from the British Royal Family, the Governors of Malta, and Winston Churchill’s private secretary, saying thank-you so much for this and for that, it was so very kind of you to do what-ever and how wonderful your hotel is. Once upon a time, it would seem, this was quite a place but now the hotel is desolate – not a soul around – nobody – nothing. A few keys on hooks behind a dusty reception-desk of varnished wood are the only clue that we might be in a place of accommodation. As with the man at the traffic lights, its interest verges on the sinister.
Peering about, I edge my way into a murky vestibule and along a corridor lined with framed photographs. They too are from long ago, from the dance-band days before the war and a decade or so after it. The men wear black tie, the women sparkly evening-dresses; bottles chill in silver buckets on white damask tablecloths; and couples dance. Obviously the photographs were taken here, in the ballroom presumably, which looks art deco. Maybe it’s through there…But I find myself in a bar, recently redecorated in the Gozitan Cotswold style – tapestry chairs and knobbly wooden tables – oh, a voice at my back has said ‘Hullo’. It’s not an unfriendly voice, and I do not jump, but turn round and reply ‘Hullo’.
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