The View from Mount Dog

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  She read desultorily for an hour; the ship’s library was not well stocked. Restless and feeling guilty for leaving the place in which Paul had installed her, Christine then gathered up her shawl and book and went outside. The sky was still greyer, the bangs of wind still colder and more violent. From far overhead and slightly forward the sound of the exhausts blew back from the funnels. Paul had explained that the ship had recently been converted from coal- to oil-burning, and seemingly this had reduced one of the funnels to redundancy, all the exhausts having been routed through the other. Up here the wind’s buffeting carried noise and smuts in gusts: now the exhausts seemed no more than a distant hum, now they leaped out at one with a deep furry blare. Despite the deck-hands’ regular sluicings the forward-facing parts of the superstructure were filmed with black deposits, the granules of carbon sticking to the salted paintwork. Seagulls were crying round the rigging, one was perched on the masthead. Their melancholy cries were quite unlike the raucous assertions of identical gulls in Marseilles, Genoa, Piraeus, Jaffa, Alexandria…. She heard in them the difference between harbingers and contented inhabitants.

  She crossed the deck, pausing uncertainly at the head of the companion way. No, she decided, don’t pry, don’t pester the poor boy. So she walked on down the deck past the rows of lifeboats to a kind of saloon whose real purpose or title she had never learned. Perhaps it was a still-room or buttery of sorts, if they had such things on board ships. At any rate one could get tea or coffee at almost any time, and she now went in, stepping decisively over the brass strip on the coaming, the door-closer shutting out wind and gulls and yelling exhausts. Inside it was quiet and empty. Behind the small bar a mess-waiter was polishing glasses. She vaguely recognised him.

  ‘Good morning, miss,’ he said. ‘Turned cold out there now, hasn’t it? They say there’s some nasty weather off the starboard bow, but no need to worry, it’s mainly the Channel that’s copping it.’

  She smiled at him, not displeased at the ‘miss’ until a sort of invented dignity caught up, but this only made her smile more. She turned away and sat down at a table by the window.

  ‘What’ll it be, miss, to keep out the cold?’

  Was it difficult always to be so affable? she wondered. ‘A pot of coffee would be lovely.’

  ‘Coming right up.’ He began bustling, whistling so quietly it was almost an ostler’s hiss.

  The peculiar thing about this room, she now remembered on catching sight of it, was the staircase leading up into it from the First Class dining room below so that on occasion it could be used as an annexe. She recalled the last time she had been there: the evening they sailed from Alex when Paul and she had spent so long leaning over the rail watching the mythical coastline of Egypt deepen from rose-and-ochre to shades of invisibility that they had not heard – or perhaps had elected to ignore – the dinner-gong. They had been late; to their surprise the dining room was already full. The Steward was abject in his apologies; since they hadn’t appeared he had assumed they had chosen to dine at second sitting and had given their table to new arrivals. He stressed these words rather archly, and looking round Christine could see several faces she did not know, very brown with brown hands and pale wrists which gleamed nakedly as cuffs were shot. ‘Egyptian Civil Service,’ the Steward explained sotto voce as if referring to mental patients. ‘They normally go from Port Said by their own line. Now it’ll be malesh and mafeesh all the way to Southampton.’ Then Paul had apologised for their lateness and said that, though they were both extremely hungry, they would come back for second sitting, whereupon the Steward showed them the staircase leading to the deck above. ‘We can’t have that, sir; we can’t have our guests forced to starve by Johnny-come-latelys’ – Christine did think he was rather overdoing it – ‘so if you’d care to dine upstairs we would be more than happy to oblige you.’

  They had gone upstairs; and much to their amazement that room, too, had begun to fill until at one point halfway through the soup Paul was disconcerted by the sight of passengers in evening dress standing awkwardly at the head of the stairs.

  ‘I say, those poor blighters are in for a long wait.’

  ‘Not more than an hour at the most,’ said Christine. ‘And they can go and have cocktails in the bar meanwhile.’

  ‘Even so.’

  Five minutes passed and then a distinguished-looking couple appeared at their table-side.

  ‘Good evening, sir, madam,’ said the man with a grave nod to Christine. ‘I am extremely sorry to intrude but I was wondering if by the remotest chance you would consent to share your table? My wife is, well, in a certain condition and … but do forgive me – Major Sholto Perceval … my wife Humility. Ghastly name, I know, but I can assure you she doesn’t live up to it.’

  Paul made the introductions; Christine heard herself add: ‘We’re just married, you know’ – a remark clearly addressed to Paul.

  ‘My dear Mrs Fennessy,’ said the gallant Major, ‘we owe you the profoundest apology. We should neither of us dream of imposing. We spent our own honeymoon not that long ago in Port Said, which is scarcely the most ideal spot, and we know only too well the value of privacy. Permit us to withdraw at once.’

  But Paul would not hear of it and Christine found herself going along with his hospitable gestures, summoning waiters to bring napkins and cutlery, reassuring the Percevals that, far from being an intrusion, their presence was all that was needed to complete the evening’s pleasure. His thoughtfulness again, of course, although she conceded it might as well have been an undiscriminating desire to be liked. Then she felt mean: how could he possibly have wanted to be liked more by total strangers than by his own new wife? As a matter of fact the evening had then gone off very well: the Percevais were an amusing and well-travelled couple, and by the time it came to leave the table one of those shipboard friendships was well under way and was even now closer than ever. None the less, Christine had permitted herself a small resentment at the alacrity with which Paul had sacrificed their privacy and, once this had taken up residence, she appeared powerless to suppress it completely. It worried her.

  A movement beyond the window caught her eye. A long figure in a wind-whipped coat with the collar up was sidling – that was the only word for it – in and out of the davits. He was not so much blurred as darkened somewhat by the smuts on the window, which gave him a shadowed, melancholy air. He stopped outside, his back towards her, leaning on the rail and gazing downwards as if trying to gauge something. My God, it’s a suicide, she thought. In a moment that man’s going to jump. The whole mise-en-scène of emergency suggested itself in a rush: her uncertain cry of ‘Man overboard!’, the whistles and sirens, the stampede to the rail, the throwing of lifebelts, the shuddering of engines at Full Astern…. And in that instant she recognised Paul.

  Christine was paralysed. The conviction was so strong she was about to witness a man doing away with himself that she could not relate this in any way to her husband. As the figure at the rail continued to stare down, his hair lashed by the gale into a series of wandering crowns like long grasses on a hillside, the power to think began to return to her. Why? Why now? Poor man, was he so very unhappy? To her surprise she found it quite thinkable that he might be, in the same way that she knew she or anybody else might be. Unhappy, yes, but so unhappy as to be driven to that? And why here, as if to taunt her with the spectacle? Then she remembered that he thought she was still sitting patiently far away in the reading room at the other end of the deck and on the other side of the ship, and that even had he glanced round he would still scarcely have seen her through the dingy glass.

  She was raising her arm to beat her knuckles on the pane to distract him long enough to reach the door when with an almost furtive gesture he produced from under his coat one, two, three, four round objects. And in the moment she recognised them and knew what he was really doing the entire construct in her mind fell apart with an almost audible sense of things tumbling into a long abyss. The objects were,
she knew, two-ounce tobacco-tins with screw-on lids and they were full of his used razor blades. On first discovering the tin he was currently filling in the dressing-table drawer she had thought of his habit as being some quaint relic of bachelorhood; perhaps all men did it. Maybe old blades had some kind of value for something she could not guess at. But then she had come upon three more identical tins, all containing heavy clots of higgledy-piggledy blades fused together with rust and long-dried soap and whiskers, and had asked him outright why he had brought them on honeymoon with him.

  He had been embarrassed, then breezy, as if he knew it was actually more irrational than the explanation he gave: that he never could bring himself to throw used blades away for fear that the dustmen might cut themselves, or children find them and lacerate themselves, or animals unearth them and suffer terrible injuries. And the more he elaborated his fears the more the razor blades stopped being flimsy pieces of metal which could have been effectively disposed of in thirty seconds with a bit of thought and the more they took on the nature of time-bombs: supremely dangerous by-products of his own masculinity which could at any moment burst out of hiding and slash and maim and kill. To go around casually disseminating such things was, he explained, incredibly thoughtless and antisocial. How often had he used that expression! Christine had at first listened gravely, then had been mightily amused without – she hoped – letting it show and lastly had tried rationality. Surely, she said, the problem of what to do with used razor blades was faced daily by millions of men all over Britain, Europe, the world…. She could hardly suppose they all hoarded them against a sea-voyage yet she had never in her whole life heard of anybody accidentally injured by coming upon a worn blade as opposed to using one clumsily. For one thing they lay too flat…. But she soon recognised this was being too reasonable: he thought she was not giving him enough due for being a responsible social animal. He became defensive, he blustered. Finally he had walked out and spent several hours in the engine-room.

  At that moment the mess-waiter appeared with her coffee. As he rested the edge of the tray on Christine’s table he glanced up and also saw Paul through the window. He must have noticed her staring, for he said: ‘Now what’s that queer fellow up to, I wonder?’ in a musing, conspiratorial sort of way.

  ‘I thought at first he was going to jump but he isn’t, it’s all right. He’s going to throw something overboard.’

  ‘You sure of that, miss?’

  ‘Perfectly. He’s my husband.’

  ‘Oh, I do beg your pardon, madam. I’m sure I meant no offence.’

  ‘None taken. He does look rather furtive, doesn’t he? Like some criminal disposing of evidence’ – for at that moment Paul, after a quick look to right and left along the deck, began throwing the tins as if reluctant to part with them one by one into the stream of wind roaring alongside the ship.

  ‘You may make light of it, madam, but we’ve had things happen you wouldn’t believe aboard this ship. Some strange objects have gone over the side of the old Mooltan in her time, I can tell you; things as are hardly fit for a lady’s ears to hear about.’

  But Christine, as if already inured to all such terrible details, was not listening. She was counting – one, two, three, four – and as each tin vanished she again experienced further stages of that interior crumbling. Just for a moment, just for a half-second when she had recognised Paul and still thought he might be going to jump, she had felt her little nugget of resentment change to … what exactly? Relief? A sense of reprieve? But in the next half-second it had changed back again and now, as each tobacco-tin was launched into the void, the nugget grew. And for the second time that morning she could not prevent herself making a temporal leap, that awful elision whereby she slipped to the spent end of her life with a devastating wrench of sadness to see what would become of it. But she found she had known all along; and she gazed at the dark, elderly back of her boy-husband through the window and raised the coffee untastingly to her lips.

  The Madonna of Parazuela

  One can only see what one observes, and one only observes things which are already in the mind.

  Alphonse Bertillon

  I

  Outside the bullet-pocked walls of the Palace of Governors half a million servings of beans and maize fritters were nearing noontime readiness and the attentions of the population of San Sacramento. Inside the Palace the monthly meeting of the Generals was drawing to a leisurely close. As with most other such meetings not a great deal had been discussed and much of that consisted of hoary topics: how best to deceive the current batch of IMF spies and visiting auditors from the World Bank about the true state of the Parazuelan economy, and what might be done further to undermine the credibility of the three-member delegation from Amnesty International. Now it was time for Any Other Business, which was usually chit-chat while tunics were buttoned, peaked caps found, swagger-sticks sorted out and holsters unfastened preparatory to going outside.

  ‘I suppose we’d better brace ourselves for that ghastly little Jew again,’ said General Mendez.

  ‘Which particular one?’ asked the Generalissimo.

  ‘That ex-Mossad fellow who lives in Munich. Silverstein? Silberbein? Feigenbaum? The one with the bee in his bonnet about Nazis in hiding. Hadn’t you heard, then? I gather someone has written another book saying that Horst Wessel is alive and well and practising medicine in some poverty-stricken barrio here.’

  ‘No, that’s not it,’ corrected General Ocampo. ‘This time it’s a reporter who swears he has proof that Hitler’s living in Parazuela. It was on the BBC’s World Service.’

  ‘Hitler? Oh, really, it’s too absurd. Whatever will they think of next?’ The Generalissimo pocketed the calculator on which he had done some depressing arithmetic during the economic part of the meeting. ‘The fellow would have to be a fossil. Wait till I tell old man Schicklgruber on Sunday: I’m lunching over at their ranch. They’ll love that. Anyone else got any funnies?’

  ‘Weird report from Tutuban this morning,’ said General Edmilson.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Tutuban. Iguaçu province, apparently; I hadn’t heard of it, either. Couple of kids claim to have seen the Virgin Mary.’

  ‘I expect it was Goering in disguise,’ said General Preciosa, who was reputed to have had a mean wit in his Military Academy days. Certainly everyone laughed.

  ‘If so, he really fooled the kids. They’re convinced it was the Virgin and they’ve convinced a lot of locals, too. In fact people are starting to go on pilgrimages to Tutuban from other parts of the province, and one or two are already claiming to have been cured of their horrid condition.’

  ‘Credulity, for example?’ suggested General Preciosa.

  ‘Don’t knock it,’ said the Generalissimo. ‘Without it this country would be ungovernable, even by us, to say nothing of the rest of Latin America. I just wish someone would discover a way of infecting the Gnomes of Zurich with the virus. And now, gentlemen, shall we adjourn?’ With some mutual saluting the meeting broke up.

  ‘But,’ said General Preciosa a couple of hours later, ‘but but but but….’ He was a little drunk but not very, having lunched well in a permanently reserved room above San Sacramento’s best Viennese restaurant. ‘But,’ he added thoughtfully.

  ‘But, Fernando …?’ prompted General Edmilson.

  ‘But what about Lourdes?’

  ‘Oh, dead. Has been for months.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Just that. She disappeared in a football stadium. With several hundred others, I believe.’

  ‘What on earth are you gibbering about, Manolo?’ asked his friend brusquely.

  ‘That protest singer woman. Maria Lourdes. You surely remember her? Dangerously popular; criminally off-key.’

  ‘Not her. The place. You know, Lourdes in France. Kids? Visions? Virgin Marys? Big Moneys?’

  ‘Oh, that Lourdes.’

  ‘Exactly. Do buck up, Manny, or I’ll have to buy you another tequila. I�
��ve had an idea which could do you a lot of good. You are Minister of the Interior, are you not? Well, then, who’s our Minister for Tourism?’

  ‘Minister for Tourism? Ah, now, let me see….’

  ‘There isn’t one,’ General Preciosa cut his friend off in mid-speculation, ‘as you very well know. It isn’t that Parazuela hasn’t got more than its fair share of potential tourist attractions, either.’

  ‘Certainly isn’t. There’s the Taquarí asphalt lakes, for a start. And the Glass Iguana of Teoxihuatl. Nobody knows how—’

  ‘Oh, do shut up; we had all that in high school, like several hundred other Parazuelans. No, the reason Parazuela is not on the world’s tourist itineraries is because for years we were considered far too dangerous for your average American matron, and I agree that forty-one presidents in nineteen years did look bad on paper. But now this country’s probably the most stable on the entire continent and we’re still being boycotted by those same American matrons because according to their press and despite the imminence of elections we’re a fascist Latin junta. Obviously there’s never going to be any pleasing them. So write them off; we don’t need them, either. But there’s a still-untapped source of tourism awaiting an enterprising Minister, were he to drink a little less and play his cards a bit more shrewdly.’

  ‘Ah…. Ah?’

  ‘Manny! Your story. Your own story about these stupid kids out in the sticks in Iguaçu. Can’t you see what a gift it is? You could really make it work in your favour. You remember old Raul going on this morning about how it was up to all of us to find ways of raising revenue so we won’t have to re-reschedule interest payments on the national debt? Well, then. A really watertight Madonna could be parlayed into quite a steady little source of foreign revenue, don’t you think?’