by Paul Theroux
Being poor was the promise of success; the anticipation of fortune, a fine conscious postponement, made the romance, for to happen best it would have to come all at once, as a surprise, with the great thud a bag of gold makes when it’s plopped on a table, or with the tumbling unexpectedness of thick doubloons spilling from the seams of an old wall you’re tearing apart for the price of the used wood. One rather fanciful idea I’d had of success was that somehow through a fortuitous mix-up I would be mistaken for a person who resembled me and rewarded with a knighthood or a country estate; it was as good as admitting I did not deserve it, but that it was far-fetched made my receptive heart anticipate it as a possibility. It might, I thought, be a telephone call on a gray morning when, fearing bad news, I would hear a confident educated voice at the other end say, “Brace yourself, Mr. Flowers, I’ve got some wonderful news—”
Wonderful news in another fantasy was a letter. I composed many versions of these and recited them to myself walking to the 8-A bus out of Moulmein Green in the morning, or killing time in a hotel lobby when a girl was finishing a stunt upstairs, or dealing out the porno decks, or standing on the Esplanade and staring at the ships in the harbor.
One started like this:
Dear Mr. Flowers,
It gives me great pleasure to be writing to you today, and I know my news will please you as much . . .
Another was more direct:
Dear Flowers,
I’ve had my eye on you for a long time, and I’m very happy to inform you of my decision concerning your future . . .
Another:
Dear Jack,
I am asking my lawyer to read you this letter after my death. You have been an excellent and loyal friend, the very best one could hope for. I have noted you in my will for a substantial portion of my estate as a token thanks for your good humor, charity, and humanity. You will never again have to think of . . .
Another:
Dear Sir,
Every year one person is singled out by our Foundation to be the recipient of a large cash disbursement. You will see from the enclosed form that no strings whatever are attached . . .
Another:
Dear Mr. Flowers,
The Academy has entrusted to me the joyful task of informing you of your election. This carries with it as you know the annual stipend of . . .
There were more; I composed as many as thirty in an afternoon, though usually I stuck to one and phrased it to perfection, working on it and reciting every altered declaration of the glorious news. The last was long and rambling; it was only incidentally about money, and it began, My darling . . .
No man of fifty-three wants to look any more ridiculous than his uncertain age has already made him, and I am well aware that in disclosing this fantastic game I played with myself, the sentences above, which prior to a few moments ago had never been written anywhere but in my head, much less typed under the embossed letterheads I imagined and pushed through the mail slot of my semidetached house on Moulmein Green—I am well aware that in putting those eager (“Brace yourself”) openings in black and white I seem to be practicing satire or self-mockery. The difficulty is that unchallenged, squatting like trepanned demons in the padded privacy of an idle mind, one’s lunatic thoughts seem tame and reasonable, while spoken aloud in broad daylight to a stranger or written before one’s own eyes they are the extravagant ravings of a crackpot. You know what I want? I said to Leigh, and told him, and was made a fool by his look of shock; I should have kept my mouth shut, but how was I to know that he was not the stranger who would say, “I’ve got some good news for you, Flowers.” He might have thought I was mad. Madness is not believing quietly that you’re Napoleon; it is demonstrating it, slipping your hand inside your jacket and striking a military pose. He might have thought I was crude. But the beginner’s utterance is always wrong: I used to stand in Singapore doorways and hiss, “Hey bud” at passers-by.
Crude I may have been, but mad never; and I would like to emphasize my sanity by stating that even though I dreamed of getting one of those letters (It gives me great pleasure . . . ) I could not understand how I would ever receive one, for I imagined thousands, paragraph by glorious paragraph, but I never mentally signed them, and none, not even the one beginning My darling, bore a signature. Who was supposed to be writing me those letters? I hadn’t the faintest idea.
The letters were fantasy, but the impulse was real: a visceral longing for success, comfort, renown, the gift that could be handled, tangible grace. That momentary daydream which flits into every reflective man’s mind and makes him say his name with a tide, Sir or President or His Highness—everyone does it sometimes: the clerk wants a kingship, it’s only natural—this dubbing was a feature of my every waking moment. I wasn’t kidding; even the most rational soul has at least one moment of pleasurable reflection when he hears a small voice addressing him as Your Radiance. I had a litany which began Sir Jack, President Flowers, King John, and so forth. And why stop at king? Saint Jack! It was my yearning, though success is nasty and spoils you, the successful say, and only failures listen, who know nastiness without the winch of money. If the rich were correct, I reasoned, what choice had they made? Really, was disappointment virtue and comfort vice and poverty like the medicine that was good because it stung? The President of the United States, in a sense the king of the world, said he had the loneliest job on earth; where did that leave a feller like me?
The theatrically convulsed agony of the successful is the failure’s single comfort. “Look how similar we are,” both will exclaim: “We’re each lonely!” But one is rich; he can choose his poison. So strictly off my own bat I gave myself a chance to choose—I would take the tycoon’s agony and forego the salesman’s. I said I wanted to be rich, famous if possible, drink myself silly and sleep till noon. I might have put it more tactfully: I wanted the wealth to make a free choice. I was not pleading to be irresponsible; if I was rich and vicious I would have to accept blame. The poor were blameless; they could not help it, and if they were middle-aged they were doubly poor, for no one could see their aches and no one knew that the middle-aged man at that corner table, purple with indigestion, thought he was having a heart seizure. That man will not look back to reflect unless he has had a terrible fright that twists his head around. Characteristically, he will look back once, see nothing, and never look back again. But Leigh and his hopeless last words gave me such an awful shock that driving out of the crematorium with Gladys I took a long look back—with the recent memory of imagining what my own last words might be, Is this all? mumbled in a hot room—and thought of nothing but what had brought me to Singapore, and the sinking ships I had boarded since then.
It was a bumboat. I jumped off the Allegro and there I was, sitting at the stern of a chugging bumboat, making my way toward Collyer Quay. It might have been cowardice; in me, cowardice often looked like courage by worrying me into some panicky act. I ran, and it looked like pursuit; but it wasn’t that—it was flight.
The bumboat touched the quay. The Chinese pilot pressed a finger in salute to the hanky that was knotted around his head like a tea cosy.
Having learned the trick of survival and reached a ripe old age, most fellers can look back on their lives and explain the logic of everything they’ve done, show you the pattern of their movements, their circlings toward what they wanted and got. Justifying their condition, they can point without regret to the blunt old-type exclamation marks of their footprints, like frozen ones in snow, and make sense of them. If the footprints are a jumble and some face in retreat the feller might say with a wild accompanying cackle that he had his shoes on backward and appeared to be walking away as he advanced. The explanation is irrefutable, for old age itself is a kind of arrival, but I could not say—being fifty-three in Singapore—that I had arrived anywhere. I was pausing, I thought, and there was no good reason for any of my movements except the truthful excuse that at the time of acting I saw no other choice. The absence of plot or design insp
ired my forlorn dream that magically by letter I would become a millionaire. My life was a pause; I lived in expectation of an angel.
My vision was explicit, and no guilt hampered it; I wished away the ego of my past—I would not be burdened by my history. But I had a fear: that I might turn out to be one of those travelers who, unnerved by the unconscious boldness of their distance—the flight that took them too far—believe themselves to be off course and head for anything that resembles a familiar landmark. Only, up close, they discover it to be a common feature of a foreign landscape on which identical landmarks lie in all directions. They chase these signs, their panic giving the wheeling chase some drama, and very soon they are nowhere, travelers who never arrive, who do not die but are lost and never found, like those unfortunate Arctic explorers, or really any single middle-aged feller who dies in a tropical alien place, alone and among strangers who mock what they can’t comprehend, the hopeful man with the perfect dream of magic, burned to ashes one hot day and negligently buried, who was lost long before he died.
2
THE BUMBOAT touched the quay. I vaulted to the stone steps and almost immediately, in a small but ingenious way, became a hustler. The word is unsuitable, but let it stand. It was an aspect of a business I understood well, for over the previous eleven months, soothed by Mothersill’s Pills, I had been crossing and recrossing the Indian Ocean in the Allegro, and at every port, from Mombasa to Penang, I had been appointed by the captain to perform a specific job for extra pay; that is, to take on supplies by contacting the ship chandler. I enjoyed doing this; it gained me admittance to a friendly family ashore, Ismailis in Mombasa, Portuguese in Beira, an Indo-French one in Port Louis, Parsees in Bombay. It was an entry into a world as mysterious for the sailor as the sea is for the landsman, the domestic life, drama in dry rooms that lay beyond the single street of seamen’s bars, the frontier that barricades harbors from their cities. At each port the ship chandler was our grocer, butcher, dhobi, fishmonger, hardware man; he would supply anything at short notice, but I believe that at Hing’s in Singapore—after I jumped ship—I could take credit for introducing a new wrinkle to one of the world’s most versatile professions. Later it was taken up by other ship chandlers and Singapore became a port in which even a large vessel could make a turnaround in six hours without the crew mutinying.
I look back and see a wild August storm, known in Singapore as a Sumatra: a high wind blows suddenly from the west and the sky gathers into unaccountable blackness, a low heavy ceiling, night at noon, the cold rain sheeting horizontally into the surf. That day I was standing in the wheel house of a rocking launch. It was warm and sunny when we left the quay, but fifteen minutes out the sky darkened, the cabin door banged, and rain began hitting the glass with a sound like sleet; we bolted the doors and breathed the engine fumes. Stonelike waves, each dark one with streaming ribbons of oil on its bumpy edges and topped with a torn cap of lacy froth, slammed into the starboard side of the launch, making the same boom as if we had run aground. I hung onto a canvas strap and wiping the steam off the back win! dow put my nose to the moaning glass.
We were towing a forty-foot lighter, the sort used for transporting bales of raw rubber; Chinese decorations were painted on the bow, evil white and black eyes, green whiskers, and a red dragon-fang mouth. The painted face with its scabrous complexion of barnacles rose and fell, gulping ocean, and the canvas cover, a vast pup tent pitched over the lighter, was being lashed by the wind; our towrope, now loose as the lighter leaped at us, now tight as it plunged and dragged, was periodically wrung of water, which shot out in a twist of bubbly spray as it stretched tight. A grommet on the corner of the canvas tarp tore free, and the tent fly burst open, unveiling our cargo, twenty-three smartly dressed Chinese and Malay girls, their scared white faces almost luminous in the gloom of the quaking shelter; they were huddled on crates and kegs, their knees together, holding their plastic handbags on their heads.
The visibility, what with the fog and rain and steamed-up windows, was very poor, and I had the impression we were thrashing in the open ocean, for no ships and not even the harborside could be made out. It was just after tiffin; no wharf lights were on. It was fearfully dark and cold, and I was dizzy from the cabin fumes. We might have been in the South China Sea.
“More to port,” I shouted to Mr. Khoo, showing him a circle I had drawn on the Western Roads of my harbor chart.
“No,” he said, and spun the wheel starboard.
“Don’t give me that!” I said, and went for him. The launch bucked and threw me to the floor. I could feel the launch turning, slowed by the weight of the lighter, and just under the whistling wind the screams of my girls. Mr. Khoo was taking us back.
I had seen seamen fight below decks during storms on the Allegro; it was something that made me want to strap on a life vest and hide near the bridge, like a child in a slum running from his quarreling parents. My fear was of seeing people enclosed by a larger struggle swept away and dying in a hammer lock. The storms encouraged fighting, and the fighting seemed to intensify the storm.
“Give me the wheel like a good feller,” I said to Mr. Khoo.
Mr. Khoo threatened me with a sharp elbow and held tight to the wheel. The wipers were paralyzed on the window; I swayed and tried to see.
“Do you know what this is costing me!” I shouted.
“Cannot,” said Mr. Khoo, refusing to look at me.
“Drop the anchor, then,” I said. “I’ll do it.”
I unbolted the door and stepped into the wind. Up ahead, the rusty brown silo of a ship’s stern loomed, a light flashed, and I made out the name, Richard Everett, Liverpool.
“Oh boy, there she is!”
Mr. Khoo gave a blast on the horn; he was crouched at the wheel. He looked up at the freighter, twisting his head. I stayed on deck, waving to faces framed by yellow bonnets. It was too rough to use the ladder; some men in slickers and boots were pushing a cargo net over the side.
The launch still pitched. Mr. Khoo worked the lighter close by circling the launch around and nudging it against the side of the Richard Everett, and I had the satisfaction in a storm during which other lightermen waited at the river mouth by Cavanagh Bridge, of seeing my girls hoisted up, three at a time in the hefty cargo net, all of them soaked to the skin, fumbling with collapsed umbrellas and shrieking at the gale. The crane swung them on board and lowered them into the hold. There was a cheer, audible over the storm and wind, as the cargo net descended.
I went up myself with the last load of girls and to the sound of steel doors slamming in the passageway, had a brandy with the first mate, and played a dozen hands of gin rummy; the light softened in the porthole and then the sun came out. He paid me fifteen dollars a girl. He had asked for them on consignment, but I insisted on a flat rate. Two hours later, in sparkling sunshine, we were on our way. I rode in the lighter with the girls. We took down the canvas roof and May played a transistor radio one of the seamen had given her. Some of the girls put up their umbrellas, and they all sat as prim as schoolteachers on a Sunday outing. Junie wore a sailor hat. We cruised slowly back, enjoying the warmth and the light breeze, and docked at Pasir Panjang behind a palm grove—I could not risk arriving at Collyer Quay or Jardine Steps with that cargo.
It was not my first excursion. I had been doing it for several months, usually small loads. Sometimes only two in a sampan rowed out from Collyer Quay to an old tanker, the girls disguised as scrubwomen in faded sam-foos, with buckets and brushes and bundles of old rags, to fool the harbor police. I had always made it a practice—I was the first in Singapore, perhaps anywhere, to do so—to have a girl along with me when I delivered groceries and fresh meat and coils of rope, just in case. The girl was always welcome, and came back exhausted.
The storm made me; it became known that I was the enterprising swineherd who took a lighterful of girls out at the height of a Sumatra that swamped a dinghy of Danish seamen that same day. A week later a crewman on the Miranda butt
onholed me: “You the bloke that floated them pros out to the Everett?”
I told him I was, and stuck out my hand. “Jack Flowers,” I said. “Call me Jack. Anything I can do for you?”
“You’re a lad, you are,” he said admiringly, and then over his shoulder, “’ey, Scrumpy, it’s ’im!”
I rocked back and forth, smiling, then took out my pencil and clownishly licked the lead, and winked, saying, “Well, gentlemen, let’s see what we can scare up for you today . . .”
The Sumatra had come sudden as a bomb, darkly filling the sky, outraging the sea, pimpling it with rain like lead shot, wrinkling it and snarling it into spiky heaves. I never let on that it hit us when we were halfway to the Richard Everett or that I had put my last dollar into releasing those girls and hiring the launch and lighter, and that to have turned back—no less perilous than going forward—would have disgraced me and ruined me irrecoverably. If we had sunk it would have been the end, for none of the twenty-three girls knew how to swim. I had not known the extent of the risk, but it was a venture—probably cowardly: I was afraid to lose my money and scared to turn back—that had tremendous consequences. The mates on the Miranda were the first of many who praised me and gave me commissions.
And Hing’s business boomed.