I Came, I Saw

by Norman Lewis

  A single incident stands out from the doldrums of this experience. The majority of our fellow passengers were from the interior of Arabia, and few had seen the sea until they reached Makalla or Aden to board the dhow. Fortunately however for us, when reduced to a diet of unleavened bread, we were carrying two sailors for Bahrain, originally pearl-fishers who now worked the coast, transferring from dhow to dhow and receiving in lieu of regular wages a very small percentage of the sale of the cargoes they handled. Despite a lack of proper tackle, these men set themselves to fish and caught a large and ferocious-looking barracuda destined to be cooked and divided up in the usual way. The big fish was left to leap and twist on the deck, and Ladislas, horrified at the violence done to it, pleaded for it to be thrown back into the sea. I remembered that he objected to the taking of animal life, living virtually on eggs, but he was the first man and probably the last I had ever known to be deeply distressed — on the verge of tears — at the plight of a fish on the hook.

  In the end Hodeida was reached, a crystalline sparkle of dwellings on the dun Arabian shore, and soon a canoe paddled out to us bringing out a splendidly jewelled and be-daggered harbour master who announced that His Majesty the Imam Yahya had ordered a house to be prepared for us in the town, and that a committee of notables would shortly come out to take us ashore. They had been delayed by their civic duty to witness a public execution about to take place in a space reserved for this purpose on the sea front, clearly visible from the dhow. The delay had arisen, as we learned, over the necessity to obtain a confession of guilt before an execution could be carried out. This, it was explained to us, was always forthcoming as the accused man’s penis was tied up and he was induced to drink water, while the waiting headsman and the notables passed the time playing a simple game of chequers invented to combat the tedium of such occasions.

  We were anchored rather more than a quarter of a mile off shore, from which distance little was to be seen other than the confused comings and goings of the crowd of onlookers that had gathered. Our captain who believed that attendance at such spectacles was a pious observance to be bracketed with a visit to the mosque, asked to be allowed to raise anchor and move the dhow in a couple of hundred yards closer to the shore. Most regretfully the harbour master told him that this was a request it was beyond his power to grant.

  We watched, seeing nothing of the drama concealed by distance, and could judge only that it was at an end when, restless and sated, the sea-front crowd began to disband. Shortly a boat left the shore, making in our direction. It carried four motionless white-robed figures, and was moved by six negro slaves. In a moment the three dignitaries of the reception party, with their accompanying interpreter, were helped aboard, and settled themselves on the banked-up cushions ready on deck. They wore turbans curled like elaborate caracols, moved in a slow, almost dreamy fashion, and their skin was of that absolute pallor of people living in hot climates who never uncover themselves to the sun. The interpreter intoned a verse from the Koran, and this was followed by silence while the notables watched us a little sleepily, with thin, measured smiles, and an odour of camphor spread from them as they fanned their nostrils with delicate white hands to disperse the fetor of the dhow.

  Kishr was brought; we sipped it and waited, while the notables summed us up slyly and caressed the jewelled hilts of their daggers, then at a sign from their leader the interpreter posed a direct question. Where were the articles we had brought? His employers were ready to inspect them.

  Articles? There seemed to be some mistake. We had brought no articles but our personal baggage. A muttered conversation followed between the four men, and the interpreter tried again. The articles ordered by His Majesty, he insisted, for which a price had already been agreed, payment to be made as stipulated in golden sovereigns.

  Now it was clear enough that we were the victims of a terrible confusion. The Yemeni had expected a cargo of arms, and the permission we had received to go to Hodeida had been intended for someone quite different. The harbour-master’s face became clouded with coldness and suspicion. Further questioning by the interpreter had produced no motive to justify our presence there. We had no machine-guns for sale, we had shown no interest in hides or coffee. We desired to exploit no mines. What, then, did we want?

  The notables and their interpreter rose to their feet, unfolding their bodies with the suppleness of cats. They pressed our hands and, drawing folds of lawn with gestures of exclusion across their faces, turned away. The slaves who had been swimming with a vigorous dog-paddle round the dhow struck out for their boat, clambered in and were ready with the oars.

  We knew that we should never enter the Yemen.

  Never, to sum up, was a journey richer in experience, and the fact that the avowed object of the expedition remained unfulfilled was of little importance, because such was the scope of power of Ladislas’ imagination that he wrote a fairly convincing account of his adventures in the Yemen all the same (The Riddle of Arabia, London, 1939). For more than two months we had lived in the dazzling simplicities of the Middle Ages, and I had learned to do without all those things that distinguished modern times from the long past. In addition I was forced into an encounter with Arabic, filled immediately with a respect verging upon awe for the richness and subtlety of its vocabulary and the brilliant mathematics of its grammatical construction. The form spoken in Aden was rustic and deformed and sullied with many intrusions, yet it awoke the desire for a closer acquaintance. I came back with a great collection of words with no currency in any other Arab country. In an attempt to remedy this and introduce some order into confusion I began a course at the School of Oriental Studies, always realizing that there would never be time enough to explore more than a corner of this vast linguistic tapestry.

  Chapter Twelve

  IN MY ABSENCE ERNESTINA had been involved in some mysterious accident which had left the slightest possible change in her facial appearance, and a white scar across the septum of the nose just above the curve of the upper lip. Something in her spirit had changed, too. There was a slight scar there as well, which I could only hope would soon disappear. Florence, Franco’s widow, still an occasional visitor to Gordon Street and an eager imparter of ill-tidings, was happy to suggest to me that she had been knocked down by a bus in a suicide attempt. It was significant that all reference to the small evidence of physical mishap was scrupulously avoided in the Corvaja household. I had long since been trained never to ask a potentially embarrassing question.

  It was a time of some stress for the Corvajas as a whole. Eugene had gone off to the Spanish Civil War to drive an ambulance on the Republican side, which seemed doomed to defeat, and after the success of the Corvaja parents’ return to Italy something had gone wrong with their plans for further visits which might have led in the end to a permanent move back to Sicily. One night, a month or two after the trip to Rome, the doorbell had rung and Ernesto’s agent, Di Luca, who had come hot-foot from Palermo, was on the doorstep. Di Luca, with his stained eyes, his small, wistful face, and the arch-conspirator’s high-crowned black hat, was always the carrier of weighty news. He spoke in the thickest Sicilian dialect, of which I was only ever to understand a single word sangue (blood), when at the time of our first meeting he kissed my hand and mumbled a conventional formula of allegiance. All Ernesto said on this occasion, after he had left, was, ‘I have changed my plans.’ The Corvajas, too, had watched Mussolini’s badly-trained and ill-armed legions on the march again, and from conversations with such leading fascists as Count Giordano they were sure that war was coming and that Italy would be dragged in.

  Ernestina’s loss of satisfaction with life was symbolized by an increasing obsession with comedy in all its forms. Like so many in those days she had made a brief incursion into psycho-analysis, been assured by the analyst that she was without creative power, and been recommended to accept life as a spectacle. Now she was more isolated than ever, because a close friendship of many years’ standing had come to an end.
The friend, an Anglo-Indian girl, had moved into Gordon Street, being welcomed by the Corvajas as another daughter. Now Ernestina discovered that her friend had had a longstanding relationship, kept secret from her, with an elderly lover. It was a deception she was unable to tolerate, and although such were the rules of Sicilian hospitality that the ex-friend continued to live under her parents’ roof, the pair no longer spoke to each other.

  The spring of 1939 came, and with it I made my brief incursion into the world of serious motor-racing. Between us my friend Arthur Baron and I had bought a wreck of the Bugatti in which Mervyn White had been killed in the Ulster TT. This was a Type 51 and a celebrated car, for, driving it, Earl Howe had for a short time held the Brooklands lap record of 136 m.p.h. Arthur rebuilt the car with certain improvements and we entered it at the opening meeting at Brooklands on 17 March.

  The car had performed excellently in minor events throughout the 1938 season, but on the day of my Brooklands debut the weather was bad, with mist and rain, and poor visibility, and I lacked the experience to handle an extremely powerful car in these conditions. On the second lap of the mountain circuit, I skidded, struck a sand bank, and nearly went over the top of the banking — an eventuality which, as far as I know, no one ever survived. Recovering, but going too fast, I was faced by the anarchy of several cars completely out of control at the fork ahead, and when I applied the brakes I spun the car several times before stalling the engine and coming to a standstill.

  We consoled ourselves with assurances of the valuable experience gained. The truck, the car and the weather had each taught us lessons. Unfortunately they were lessons from which we were destined never to profit. This was the end of car-racing for us, when it had hardly begun. Very soon Brooklands was to put on its wartime camouflage, and when it emerged it was a race track no longer. I never sat at the wheel of a Bugatti again.

  Now Ernestina was seized by a desire to go to Cuba, where a friend of her Spanish schooldays had taken refuge to escape the Civil War. They exchanged excited letters, and the friend begged her to come out. I waited for this mood to pass but in vain. Ernestina read everything she could lay her hands upon about the promised land, and her obsession became steadily more acute.

  She was having treatment for nervous tension. ‘Humour her,’ the doctor said knowingly. ‘If you can raise the wind, go. My uncle used to be a ship’s doctor, and he was there once. It’s a weird sort of disease-ridden hole. Probably change her mind when she sees it. Get it out of her system.’

  It took some months to get together the necessary cash, then in July 1939 we were off by third-class passage to New York. All the New Yorkers were convinced that war was now inevitable, and many wore large badges of the electioneering kind, that said ‘KEEP AMERICA OUT’. So universal was this lack of enthusiasm in the United States for embroilment in European affairs that the stewards on the Grace Line boat we took down to Havana admonished us, as English, on the dangerous likely outcome of British aggression. We entered Havana harbour, and suddenly all was forgotten. This was a different planet.

  A norther, lifting the sea, had thrown a great curtain of spindrift over the city’s façade, over the bay’s curve of lean houses, granite-grey, pink, coral, pistachio as their owners had painted them in the colour of whichever political party they supported. Moon-faced negroes with dislocated joints were dancing down the Malecón, in and out and around the long cannon pointed out to sea. Music from drums banged at us from all sides as our carriage rattled through the streets. An altar with a black-faced madonna rocked on the seat at the driver’s side. He took us to an apartment house of the cheaper sort, where we were asked to wash our feet before we entered. Then the lady of the house brought us sweet, tasteless fruit that stained our lips with indigo, and her son, standing by, played a flute while we ate it.

  Much of the day we spent in the Central Park, watching. When we sat on a bench and kept quite still, doves no bigger than sparrows would alight on our arms, even our heads, in the search for crumbs. A bus rumbled by, every one of its passengers wearing an animal mask. An official hero of some old revolution, as a label he wore proclaimed, raised his cocked hat as he passed. A family dressed as if for a wedding escorted a manacled lunatic on a day-pass from the madhouse. Smoke spiralled everywhere from the finest of all cigars, and above us in the trees at least a thousand canaries, released to bring song to the city, twittered and chirped. Some time that afternoon I heard a sound recognizable only from American gangster films, the unmistakable heavy, slugging rattle of a Thompson sub-machine-gun. Following the crowd movement, we came upon three men in tattered clothing sprawled in their blood on a perfectly kept and weeded path. Their story was announced without excitement in the evening newspapers. There was an election on, they had agreed to sell their votes for a dollar apiece, then gone back on their bargain and demanded one twenty-five. For this, pour encourager les autres, a politician had killed them.

  After this we stayed for a while with Ernestina’s friends, the Castaños, in the new Vedado suburb. They were fascists living in Santander where Ernestina had been in school, and had managed to escape from this staunchly Republican town within days of the outbreak of the war. Now, following the Nationalist victory, they were making their plans for a return. In the meanwhile they enjoyed life in Havana, and had become hangers-on at ‘The Palace’, the name by which Batista’s ornate villa was generally known. At this time Fulgencio Batista — for some years the real ruler of the country — was at the height of his popularity, the idol of the crowds. The worst severity he had so far committed was to have a magazine editor who opposed him thoroughly dosed with castor oil, and it was only in later life that he became addicted to murder and canasta. The Castaños were overjoyed to have been invited to a party at which Batista and his guests retired after dinner to listen to attacks on his character, which always greatly amused him, made by a communist radio station he never interfered with in the slightest way.

  The dictator-to-be was a handsome, witty man, ready with a smile and a joke, and it did no harm to anyone to allow him to overhear a reference to his old nickname El Mulato Lindo, meaning ‘the handsome mulatto’. There was no nonsense about him. In the old days when he was a sergeant, biding his time to smash the generals, he had taken up with a washerwoman. Years later she bore him a son and then became his wife, and now Doña Elisa was still to be seen most mornings doing her shopping in Havana’s department store, Los Encantos.

  On one occasion the Castaños arranged for me to be presented at ‘The Palace’, but something went wrong with the timing of the appointment. A chamberlain alerted the President-to-be to my presence, and after a while, taken by surprise, he popped his head round a door. His face was concealed by the bandages soaked in lemon juice he often wore when relaxing, in the vain hope of reducing the swarthiness of his skin. Through this covering protruded a substantial cigar. He gave a flip of the hand and slipped back out of sight, and I withdrew.

  Thus life in Havana went on; a city always dressed for carnival in which the rich feasted in sedentary fashion and the poor danced and starved to music. On the first day by the purest of chance we had witnessed gross violence of the kind that was almost a national speciality. Thereafter, behind the mask of laughter, there were always small violences and tragic scenes in plenty, but soon we became inured to them — just as, by the coarsening of habit, a humane man may eventually come to tolerate the spectacle of a bullfight.

  All the pessimistic predictions about the outcome of this expedition so far as Ernestina was concerned went wrong, for she did not tire of the pleasures of Havana, and showed not the slightest desire to go back to England. Suddenly, in this environment, she had developed a flair for a social life she found stimulating, and was the centre of attraction at parties given not only by Spanish expatriates, but by native patrician families, gachupines (wearers of spurs) who felt themselves a cut above Cuban colonists, most of whom had a dash of Negro blood. At such gatherings she sparkled, being a lively conversat
ionalist, better read than anyone else in the room, and fresh with tidings from Europe, in the direction of which the eyes of all Cubans of the upper class were turned with yearning.

  Suddenly we found ourselves a success, members of the Yacht and Jaimanitas Clubs, invited to country homes, and lent by somebody with a fleet of cars an enormous Cadillac in order to be able to accept such invitations.

  Cuba, larger than one would suppose it to be, sprawls half across the Caribbean. Most of it remained off the beaten tourist track, and in these rural areas where the oldest inhabitants had childhood memories of the days of slavery, a strong servile whiff was still to be noticed. When we were shown the old slave-quarters of the great houses we visited, their dungeons, the fetters and the stocks, a kind of nostalgic pride was in evidence.

  We stayed on a vast sugar plantation near Bayamó, and the owner, displaying his trophies, drew our attention to a case identical to those in which he kept his butterflies, containing at first what appeared to be scraps of shredded leather, pinned in position as the butterflies were. He was a man with a gentle deprecatory manner, who seemed to find life itself uncivilized, and he explained with a rueful smile that these were ears cut from the bodies of revolted slaves in the days of his great-grandfather. We went on to the veranda and looked out across the ocean of ripening cane to the great purple hump of the Sierra Maestra, lying between us and the sea. ‘You can blame it on those mountains,’ the plantation owner said. ‘They had an unsettling effect on the field labour. They used to get away and hide in the woods, and the dogs had to be sent in to ferret them out. The best dogs came from England; the problem was to get to the quarry before they ate him. Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you that. That’s the way it was in a slave-owning society.’