Saint Jack

by Paul Theroux

  The next day I awoke as if after a binge, with that feeling of physical and mental fragility, exposure, distraction—the knowledge of having done something shameful which refuses to be summoned up: of having revealed my closest secret which now everyone knew except me! And then I remembered Leigh, not as a corpse; it was an uncharitable intrusive thought, something connected with the smile he wore when he had asked, “How do you manage?” A picture of his dead face followed.

  So more as an act of penance than out of any curiosity, I opened his suitcase and picked through it. Each thing I found made me sad; nothing was concealed. There were tags and labels on the case, the traveler’s campaign ribbons, KHAO YAI MOTOR LODGE, HOTEL BELA VISTA—MACAU, and the luggage tag from the airline with the destination lettered sin. Here was a sock with a hole in the toe, a pathetic little sewing kit, some salt tablets, a packet of Daraprim, very wrinkled pajamas with a white-piping border, his human smell still upon them. In a paper bag from the Chinese Emporium there were a set of screwdrivers, a new shaving brush, some Lucky Brand razor blades. There was a wrapped parcel of batik cloth from another shop, probably a present for his wife, and stuck to the parcel were two receipts for the cloth, but giving different prices, the lower faked price to fool the customs official in Hong Kong and avoid a few dollars’ import duty. At the bottom of the case was a detective novel with a grisly title that described Leigh’s own death, an eerie coincidence italicizing the improbable fraud of one, the pitiful condition of the other. He was in the morgue drawer, and here was his poor bundle of effects: this was all.

  I dressed, practicing how to tell his wife what had happened. The suitcase caught my eye; I opened it again and sorted through it quickly, lifting everything out a second time and shaking the clothes. There was no money in it! I had told the desk clerk at the Strand he was dead, but only later picked up the suitcase. After I had left with the passport they had gone up to his room and robbed him.

  The phone crackled; Hing fretted beside me; Gopi watched. I said, “Listen carefully. Yesterday I was with your husband at the Botanical Gardens. Wait a minute—listen. It was a beautiful day—”

  It was a suffocating day, producing the feverish symptoms of a fatal illness in me. I had picked up my car at the garage, we had all met at the mortuary, and we followed behind the hearse—polished and sculpted like an old piano—attempting funereal solemnity by keeping our faded elderly cars in file, my chugging Renault, Yardley’s blue Anglia, Hing’s Riley (he sat in the back seat with Little; a Malay drove), Mr. Tan and Wallace Thumboo in an old Ford Consul, Yates in his boxy Austin, and the others trailing, impossible to see in my rear-view mirror. We hit every red light, getting hotter and sicker at each stop, and we lost the hearse (I could see Yardley irritably pounding his palm against the steering wheel) at one junction when it speeded up and ran on the yellow.

  Gladys was with me. I had guessed in advance that only men would be there, and that didn’t seem right. Also, I had to drop her off at a hotel immediately afterward, an appointment of long standing I had only noticed that morning in my desk diary. Gladys was fanning herself absent-mindedly as I drove, and quickly against her chin at stoplights, making that fluttering I dreaded, the papery burr of beating cockroach wings. I told her to knock it off. That and the heat oppressed me. We were not in sunlight, but sweating in the mid-morning Singapore veil of dim steam that makes a gray tent of the slumping sky and nothing on the ground solid. There was nothing worse, I was thinking, than a cremation on a hot day in the tropics. It had all the inappropriateness of a man puffing on a pipe in a burning house. I vowed that I would spare myself that fate.

  The crematorium off Upper Aljunied Road was a yellow building, with a chimney instead of a steeple, on a low hill, in a treeless Chinese cemetery, a rocky weedy meadow of narrow plots, stone posts as grave markers, figured like milestones turned on a lathe, an occasional angel, and worn cement vaults with peeling red doors, set in scorched hillocks: a whole suburb of trolls’ huts, clustered there in the kind of chaotic profusion that matched their lives, sleeping families on shophouse floors, and now, head to toe, beneath those posts and stones. Here and there was a high vault with a roof, fenced in from the others, the graveyard equivalent of a towkay’s mansion, which might almost have borne a nameplate, The Wongs, Chee’s Tower, or Dunroamin. All this was hazy in the steamy air and when I looked back, obscured by the dust cloud our procession of cars was raising on the road that wound up to the crematorium. The chimney was not smoking. Some distance away, in the middle of the cemetery, a ghostly white-shirted party with umbrellas open stood slightly bowed before a vault mound. They could have been praying, but they weren’t. Stooping reverentially, they began to let off firecrackers.

  “Can’t they stop those little bastards?” said Yardley, rushing up to me after we parked. Our dust cloud descended, sifting down on us. He looked at Gladys and suppressed another curse. “We can’t have that nonsense going on during the service.”

  The Chinese mourners were lighting packets of fifty with the fuses knotted. The noise carried in steady burps; there were flashes and delayed bangs.

  “Bloody—” Yardley turned and stalked away growling.

  “To amaze the gods,” Gladys said. “Very lucky to have big noise. Also can make devils piss off.”

  The other fellers came over to us.

  “Are you okay, Jack?” asked Coony.

  “I hope it doesn’t rain,” said Smale, leaning back and squinting at the sky.

  We looked at him.

  “It’d ruin it,” he said nervously. “Wouldn’t it?” Was he thinking of the fire that could be doused, or was it that fear of excessive gloom that fellers associate with rain at funerals?

  “It won’t rain until October,” said Yates.

  The two Hings were in white, their terrifying color of mourning, white cotton suits and straw hats, carrying umbrellas, looking wretched. Mr. Tan wore a black tie. Because of the appointment, Gladys wore a bright green dress and carried a large handbag; her face was a white mask with wizard’s eyes. Big Hing cracked his umbrella open, shook it, and walked in oversized shoes toward the building, holding the umbrella upright, but bouncing it as he walked. The rest of the Chinese followed him.

  I asked the hearse driver what we were supposed to do. He said four of us were to carry the coffin into the chapel; the priest would take care of the rest. I objected to the word “priest” to describe an effeminate Anglican cleric of perhaps thirty, blushing in the heat, his cheeks pink, and wringing his hands by the crematorium door; in his white smocklike surplice he eyed Gladys disapprovingly, like a spinsterish intern about to check her for the clap. I beckoned to Yardley and the others and said, “Look alive.”

  I had known most of them for fourteen years; I had drunk with them nearly every night at the Bandung. Only that. I had never seen them all together, assembled in daylight away from the Bandung. So I was seeing them for the first time. They were strangers who knew me. The bad light of the Bandung had been kind to Yardley’s liverish pallor, a tropical sallowness in an unlined face; Frogget looked bigger and hairier, and his tie was frayed; Yates I noticed had freckles, and his glasses had slipped down his nose from his perspiring; Smale’s hair was reddish—I had always thought of it as brown; Coony’s hair was combed straight back, the shape of his head, and his lower lip, which always protruded when his mouth was shut, was dry for once. None of them was standing straight; they were self-conscious in their suits, in unfamiliar postures, and Yardley’s leaning—one shoulder higher than the other—made him appear unwell.

  It might have been the old-fashioned rumpled suits I had never seen them wear, dark gray or black, wrinkled, smelling of moth balls and spotted with mildew like soup stains: an old ill-fitting suit makes the wearer seem shy. The wrinkles were not in the usual places, the consequence of sitting or reaching, but were in unlikely places, across the chest of the jacket, pinches on the back and sleeves, drawer folds, creases from storage, the cuffs bunched up; the tro
users were more faded than the jackets and this mismatching together with the seediness of the suits reminded me of something Yates had once whispered at the Bandung. “Tell me, Jack,” he said, “don’t we look like the legion of the lost?”

  It seemed disrespectful to smoke near the crematorium, so we were all more edgy than usual. The hearse driver and his assistant slid the coffin out and Yardley, Frogget, Smale, and myself carried it across the dusty compound to the entrance where the rest stood behind the cleric. I thought I heard Yardley mutter, “He’s damned heavy,” but he might have said, “It’s damned heavy.” It was. I was afraid we might drop it. The others had been up drinking the night before and I had not been able to sleep. I knew they were worried about dropping it too, because they were carrying it much too fast.

  “Wally,” I said.

  Wally stood blocking the door, looking inside, with his back to us.

  “Wally!” I said again. He didn’t hear. His square head was turned away. My hands were growing moist and slipping on the chrome fixture I was holding, and I snapped, “Move it or lose it!”

  He jumped out of the way, and we proceeded inside and unsteadily down the aisle, panting, the six busy overhead fans in the room of folding chairs mocking our forced solemnity with practical whirrs. We placed the coffin on a high wheeled frame at the front of the room and took our seats with the others.

  After a few moments Yardley leaned over and asked, “What’s the drill?”

  I shrugged. It was my first cremation, and in that bare room of steel chairs, the only ornaments the photographs of the President and his wife, I could not imagine what was going to happen. We sat expectantly, the chairs squeaking and clanking. Hing loudly cleared his throat, so loud it made me want to spit, and as one person’s hacking inspires another’s, particularly in a still room, soon Smale and Coony were at it, coughing in shallow growls. Outside, the pooppoop of firecrackers continued; and beside me Gladys began beating her fan, scraping it against her chin. The cleric walked up the aisle, his starched surplice rustling. The coughing stopped; now there were only the fans, the chair squeaks, and the distant firecrackers.

  “Fellow brethren,” he said, looking at us with uncertainty and distaste; he clung to his Bible, holding it chest high, and nodded at everyone individually with his pink flushed face—making suspense. He took a breath and began. His sermon was the usual one, but he was young enough and had delivered it few enough times to make it sound as if he believed it: life was short and difficult, a testing time loaded with temptations; and he pictured God as the all-seeing bumptious neighbor, rocking irritably on his celestial porch and passing judgment. He talked about our weaknesses and then concentrated on Leigh’s soul, which he addressed with great familiarity. The worst religions, I was thinking, rob you of your secrets by reminding you that you’re all in the same sinking boat; harping on your sameness and denying you fancies and flesh and blood and visible hope, they reduce you to moaning galley slaves, manacled to a bloody oar, puking in a sunless passage and pulling blindly toward an undescribed destination; and constantly warning you that you might never arrive. “Believe in God,” the cleric was saying, and I thought, Yes, that’s easy, but does God believe in me? I liked my religion to be a private affair ashore, a fire by a stone, a smoky offering; one necessary at night, the light giving the heavens fraternal features to surprise me with the thrill of agreeable company. It was to make the authority of ghosts vanish by making holiness a friendly human act and defining virtue as joy and grace as permission granted.

  “—to judgment,” the cleric was saying, and as he spoke he jerked around several times to nod at Leigh’s coffin, as if Leigh was listening as long as his corpse was whole, and needed only combustion to get him to paradise. “We are all of us sinners, wallowing in the flesh,” the cleric said. Gladys stopped fanning herself. She sniffed and began to cry; and I hoped she was not planning to repent and back out of the appointment at the Palm Grove. She was the only person weeping; the Hings were impassive and pale, Mr. Tan and Wally limply crestfallen; Yardley and the others were sweating, but the sweat ran like tears and wet their faces and was almost like grief.

  My face was streaming, too, but I wasn’t crying; my thoughts were too confused for that. Leigh, alive, had reminded me of myself, and his death warned me about my own—a warning so strong it made me ignore his death for part of the time. But I was also thinking: Now he can’t tell anyone about my plans, my silk pajamas and cigars; and I felt childish relief mingled with adult sadness that he was out of the way. When the engines stop on a ship in midocean the whole ship ceases to vibrate and it makes a silence so sudden after three weeks of continual noise that you think your heart has stopped and you wonder for seconds if you’re dead. After those seconds you understand mortality, and the silence that terrified you is a comfort. Leigh’s death affected me that way, and at the cremation I felt peaceful. It seemed better that he was going to be reduced to ashes—a corpse made small and poured into a little pot was not a corpse; it was so tiny and altered you couldn’t reasonably weep over it. Cremation simulated disappearance; it really was like flight, a movement I knew well. Bodies decaying underground made people cry, but a dozen pots on a shelf, a bottled family, were uncharacteristic relics of the forgettable dead, who might have simply skipped off and left their urns behind, one apiece. Burning, as the cleric hinted—and here I agreed—was like deliverance; it was only bad on a hot day.

  My thoughts stopped coming: the cleric had stopped talking. There was a clatter at the door; a scrape; a shuffle-thump, shuffle-thump. The cleric stared. We all turned. Gopi was cycling in, his shoulders heaving, making his sleeves flap. His eyes were big from the physical effort of his pedaling, and his shirt was stuck in a dark patch to his back. He took a seat at the front, alone, and he watched the coffin as if it was a magician’s box.

  The cleric, who might have thought Gopi was going to interrupt with Hindu wailing, quietly resumed, “Let us pray.”

  We knelt on the stone floor. Gopi had to look back to see how it was done. I was anxious for him, balanced on that wobbly knee; he managed by steadying himself on the chair next to him.

  A sound of enormous wheezing filled the room as we stood; it was not ours. A clapped-out harmonium had begun asthmatically to breathe “Jerusalem” at the back of the room. Yardley and the others seemed glad to have a chance to sing, and they did so with the hoarse gusto they gave the obscene songs Frogget started at the Bandung on Saturday nights. Frogget had a fine voice, higher than one would have expected from a feller his size and (Gopi and Gladys were both weeping for Leigh—why?) all the voices rang in the room, echoing on the yellow walls and drowning the fans, the firecrackers, and even the woofing harmonium with the hymn.

  And did those feet in ancient time

  Walk upon England’s mountains green?

  We gave the lines in the last part—Bring me my bow of burning gold, Bring me my arrows of desire—the sahib’s emphasis, trilling the r in the command resolutely.

  The cleric walked over to the coffin and sprinkled it and prayed out loud. I started thinking of the man out back, stoking the fire like a fry cook in clogs, stirring the coals in a black kitchen, sweating worse than we were and wiping his face on his shoulder, banging his poker on the furnace door to slam the hot ashes from the tip. What burial customs.

  It was over. The cleric flung his arms into the sign of the cross, a novice’s flourish of sleeves, and blessed us and said, “Amen.” The coffin was rolled out of the room through a rear door and we all went out to our cars.

  “You ready?” I asked Gladys.

  Her tears had dried. She looked at me. “This short time or all day?”

  Before I could answer Yardley was beside me asking, “You coming along? We’re going for a drink. The day’s a dead loss—no sense going to work.”

  “I’ll be there in a little while,” I said, and seeing Hing leaving, smiled and waved him off. Hing’s face was tight; he was unused to the lecturing at Chr
istian services and might have expected the brass band, the busloads of relatives, the banners and pennants and cherry bombs that saw a Chinese corpse to the grave.

  “Short time,” said Gladys. “Where I am dropping?”

  I did not reply. Yardley and Frogget faced the sky behind me. I turned to look. Smoke had started from the chimney, a black puff and ripples of stringy heat, then a gray column unimpeded by any breeze shooting straight up and enlarging, becoming the steamy air that hung over the island. Despair is simple: fear without a voice, a sinking and a screamless fright. We watched in silence, all of us. Coony ground his cigarette out and gaped; then, conscious that we were all watching the smoke, we looked away.

  “Who’s paying for this?” Yardley asked.

  “I am,” I said, and felt sad. But when I got into the little car with Gladys and started away, throwing the shift into second gear, I felt only relief, a springy lightness of acquittal that was like youth. I was allowed all my secrets again, and could keep them if I watched my step. It was like being proven stupid and then, miraculously, made wise.

  PART TWO

  1

  FOR AS LONG as I could remember I had wanted to be rich, and famous if possible, and to live to the age of ninety-five; to eat huge meals and sleep late out of sheer sluttishness in a big soft bed; to take up an expensive but not strenuous sport, golf or deep-sea fishing in a fedora with a muscular and knowledgeable crew; to gamble with conviction instead of bitterness and haste; to have a pair of girl friends who wanted me for my money—the security was appealing: why would they ever leave me? All this and a town house, an island villa, a light plane, a fancy car, a humidor full of fat fragrant cigars—you name it. I guessed it would come to me late: fifty-three is a convenient age for a tycoon; the middle-aged man turning cautious and wolflike knows the score, and if he has been around a bit he can take the gaff. It did not occur to me that it might never happen.