The Man Who Went Down With His Ship

by Hugh Fleetwood

  No wonder, she told herself, the boys had been able to break their drug habit here. And I wonder, she asked herself, as the car sped down a steep incline into a shadowed valley, whether this sudden sense of freedom and happiness has anything to do with my consciousness of being, as I once was before, a white woman in a predominantly brown land. An over-civilised product of European culture who only really feels at home amidst those who have not yet altogether accepted that culture; or those who, if they unwittingly, involuntarily have, are in two very different minds as to whether this acceptance is a blessing or a curse. In a country like England, where almost everyone, for good or ill, is a product of the same culture, I cannot feel myself superior; and find it difficult to maintain a sense of bad faith. A sense that is perhaps as essential to me as blue skies and warmth; and tropical flowers and gorgeously feathered birds …

  However, not even these doubts that came to her, not even these troughs in her soaring spirits could really bring her down to earth. And by the time she had parked in the main square of San Cristóbal, noted with alarm that despite the near freezing temperature a good number of the inhabitants of the place were walking around bare foot and decided to stay the night there and go off and find the boys in the morning, she felt as if she were flying steadily above sea level at at least the same altitude as the city itself. An altitude that was, according to her map, something over two thousand metres. High enough, she told herself, as she was shown to a room in a big old hotel built round a covered and echoing courtyard, and watched, unable not to smile now, as an eleven or twelve-year-old boy prepared a fire in the grate and set a match to it. High enough.

  And one way or another she was still at something over two thousand metres the following morning, when, after what seemed to her a very English breakfast of oatmeal, eggs and bacon, and toast and marmalade, she set off for Las Frechas. A place about which the boys had read in some obscure ‘counter-culture’ or ‘alternative’ magazine and to which they had written explaining that for several years they had been addicted to heroin. They had, they said, without wanting to sound too dramatic, reached the stage where either they broke the habit or accepted the fact that very soon they would be dead. They had received a letter, in reply, written in English but signed by a Mexican, telling them that not only had Las Frechas not been set up as a drug rehabilitation centre, but that there were no ex-addicts among the twenty-three community members. Moreover, there was no one who had any practical knowledge of dealing with the after-effects of drug addiction and the taking of drugs of any kind, including tobacco and alcohol, was strictly forbidden on pain of immediate expulsion. If, however, the boys wanted to come for a month’s trial period, the letter had gone on, they were welcome to. Though they should accept the fact that as well as drugs of all kinds being prohibited, there were few modern amenities apart from electricity and running water. That, too, they would be expected to do a full day’s work on the land the community farmed, or in the kitchens, or in the school and infirmary that was run for needy local children. And finally, they must accept that if they came to this particular place, notwithstanding the community rules, they would be living in an area in which drug-taking, albeit not heroin, had played a certain role in the local culture for centuries; and they might well find themselves exposed to temptations they wouldn’t encounter elsewhere. ‘I am not saying that if you come,’ the letter had concluded, ‘you will be like ex-alcoholics living in a boat on a sea of gin; but you will have to accept the fact that here, in a certain sense, as a non-drug-taker you will be the cultural exception, rather than the rule.’

  A point which, Gloria reflected as she negotiated curve after curve in the road, far from putting the boys off, had finally decided them in favour of Las Frechas, as opposed to any of the other communities to which they had written.

  ‘You see, if we can do it there, Mummy,’ David had told her, ‘we can do it anywhere. Also, I think it’s better if we do go somewhere as far away as possible from our own, let’s say culture. I mean if we are, as everyone is in his or her different way, a product of our culture, well, we’re not terribly successful products, are we, and who knows if we won’t be more successful if we try to fit in some other culture? Even if, of course, you never can really.’

  Yet though she was so high, both when she left San Cristóbal and an hour or so later when she drove up a rutted track, parked in a grassy clearing and, making her way towards a cluster of huts and houses, met a young fair-haired man who directed her to what he said was the visitors’ house and told her, yes, of course David and Michael were here and he would go and call them immediately, within five minutes of meeting her sons she not only felt that she was most definitely back at sea-level, but that her wings had been broken in the descent.

  It wasn’t, as she had feared back in London they might, that the boys objected to seeing her there. On the contrary, they came running up to the visitors’ house, on the verandah of which Gloria was now sitting, shouting ‘Mummy, Mummy’, and threw their arms around her and kissed her, and jumped up and down as if they were five year olds. Nor, as she had also feared, that they precisely objected to her announcement that she too had decided to move to Mexico: ‘But right on the other side, in Vera Cruz for the moment.’ Though this did give them pause and make them, if not appear their age (they never appeared that, whatever happened; David, small and dark, looking at most like a seventeen year old, and Michael, plumper, paler, but also on the short side, like a vague and distracted fifteen year old), at any rate grow up a little and behave like preoccupied adolescents. No, what really seemed to offend them and, as they looked at her with not just suspicion but near loathing, made her think that if anything she had underestimated their opposition, was the fact that she managed to convey to them with self-deprecating little smiles, meaningful sighs and immense circumlocutions, that she wasn’t just moving to Mexico and to Vera Cruz in particular, but that she was ‘giving up everything’ in order to do so. She was abandoning the cause for which she had fought all her life: the cause of justice, the cause of equality, the cause of liberty. And she was doing it—and that was the great mockery, the great contradiction, the thing they really found it impossible to understand or forgive—in the name of that very freedom to which she had always been so devoted.

  You are betraying everything you have ever fought for, she understood their looks and their words to say. You are betraying everything that is good in the world and everything that makes the world worth living in. Worst of all, she read in their furious little faces, you are betraying us and making nonsense of the sacrifice we have made. We didn’t mind being victims, they reeled somehow on, though expressing themselves in quite another way, as long as our being victims served some purpose. What we did, our very defection, was a challenge to the wrongness, the wickedness of the world and was all just a part of your battle against—well, let’s call it evil, for want of a better word. For you to come here now and calmly announce that you’re going to sit by the seaside in some hot provincial Mexican town and do nothing for the rest of your life—and do nothing with Paul, who’s not only a worm and a depressive but who beats you up!—that just undermines everything. That even makes our continued stay here impossible. You were fighting on our behalf. You were carrying the torch for us, until we found the strength to bear what the world, what our culture, had thrust upon us, and picked up the torch ourselves. You were our conscience, our morality, our goodness. So if you now say to hell with conscience, morality, goodness, we’re left without anything, and all we can do is return to the world and … and, they allowed her to understand, either risk going back onto the drugs that they had managed here to free themselves from, or doing, or attempting to do, what formerly she had done.

  To begin with, as they shrieked at her, standing on the verandah practically stamping their feet, utterly ignoring the other members of the community who came and went from the house (who utterly ignored them), Gloria was so stunned by this attack and so appalled to find her
self lying broken-winged on the ground that she hardly knew what to do or think. She simply writhed around, trying to defend herself from these two terrifying little birds of prey who were swooping down on her. Trying, too, to keep in mind that she wasn’t in fact a bird herself, but was rather a tall, auburn-haired woman with a faintly grand manner who was standing on the verandah of a guesthouse in some extraordinary community miles from anywhere, being berated by her sons, sons transformed into self-righteous, weather-beaten little prigs by their efforts to stop taking drugs, merely for wishing to be happy. Being berated, moreover, while those same sons were living some fantasy existence that they liked to think was outside their culture, but was of course as much a product of it as they themselves were. They have no right to tell me I cannot give up, Gloria tried to insist to herself; they have no right to talk to me like this.

  After ten minutes or so she managed to get a grip on herself, however; and after another five minutes or so, during which she had now, as she stood there towering over them, lips indeed pursed and head indeed at a suitably tragic angle, allowed tears to run out from under her dark glasses and trickle down her cheeks, she managed also to get a grip on them. At any rate, to the extent of persuading them to sit down on the bench that ran along the back of the verandah, while she sat down on a rocking chair; and then to put their objections to what she had done calmly and not scream them at her for all the world to hear. She didn’t, however, get them to alter the nature of those objections; and she didn’t, for a moment, get them to stop behaving, as she saw it, like two spoiled and insufferable brats.

  They told her it was people who gave up who really condemned people like them to drugs and vagrancy and criminality, and that it would have been better had she never started her fight against ‘the system’, or even actively supported it, than abandon it at half-time.

  They told her they weren’t really thinking about themselves at all, but about her: they knew her, and loved her, better than she knew herself, and what they were trying to do was save her from herself; from the desert of non-commitment into which she was casting herself.

  And they told her, again and again, scarcely bothering to disguise the intended blackmail, that if she did stick to her plans and did indeed settle down with Paul—with Paul, they kept repeating in tones of disbelief and contempt—in Vera Cruz, their loss of faith in her, their disappointment in her would in all probability drive them away from here and back to England; where they would be in the gravest danger of returning to their bad old ways.

  Whatever they told her, though, and in whatever manner they told it, they did not get her to change her mind; nor, really, come near to doing so. Their very attitude forbade it, their shining, noble little faces, their earnest, concerned little eyes, their coaxing, patronising little voices. The fact that she had sold the house, got rid of the furniture and in every way come too far to go back, forbade it. And the thing that forbade it most thoroughly of all was a voice inside her, firmer and louder than ever theirs could be, that told her that even if her decision should for some reason cause the boys to return to England—and, possibly to their drugs and to their deaths—she too had a life, she had sacrificed herself enough for them, and if she wanted to live that life she must do what she thought was right for herself now. And what she thought was right was what she was doing; and what she was convinced was wrong was her spending so much as one more day in a country that was not her own, trying to solve problems that were either insoluble, or would only be solved over hundreds of years by a historical process in which individual action counted for little or absolutely nothing.

  Furthermore, though they invited her to stay for a couple of days in the community, so they could discuss the matter more fully, and though she accepted their invitation, by the end of an hour on the verandah the boys had heard that voice inside her themselves, and realised that nothing they would be able to come up with would silence it or countermand its orders. It wouldn’t stop them trying and it wouldn’t stop them using weapons of pity, petulance and would-be Olympian disdain to see if those might succeed where anger and argument had failed. It would, however, and did make them behave with a modicum of grace thereafter towards her; and it would and did ensure that Gloria stuck to her promise to stay, and didn’t rush off to the car as soon as they were out of sight and drive away.

  In fact, Gloria felt over the course of those forty-eight hours she spent with them, she got on better with them in a way than she had for years. And the slight estrangement that their initial argument had caused and the resultant formality of their subsequent relations only served to make them get on better still. They took her, nervously and obviously hoping she would like him, to meet the bearded, youngish Mexican whom they claimed was the leader of the community; but who, treating them like foolish children who didn’t know what they were saying, laughed off their introduction and told Gloria there weren’t any leaders, or led, in this place. All decisions were taken jointly, he said, and if there were disagreements, the matter was discussed until everyone had accepted that this or that course was correct. They tried to explain the precise nature of the community to her; ‘that isn’t anything like a monastery, as you see there are men, women and children all living and working together but in which we live as simply as possible in order to achieve what monks presumably hope to achieve, and that is a relationship, if possible a oneness, with God. Even if’ (they had added hurriedly) ‘we don’t actually believe in God ourselves, or not what has been popularly accepted as God over the past two thousand years.’ (They had also added, somewhat condescendingly, that they quite understood it if she was feeling sceptical. Indeed, scpeticism was to be encouraged and they had felt sceptical themselves for the first few days here. ‘Only when you relax, and come to see how clogged up with petty vanity and sterile egoism you are, somehow that scepticism evaporates and all you are left with is this,’ sweeping their hands round to indicate the fields, fruit trees and animals, ‘and the realisation that though God doesn’t exist, in a sense and illogical though it sounds, God exists, and is simply life, the love of which, the more you truly feel it, confers on you a reality that up till then you’ve never experienced fully.’) And they tried, too, to give her an adequate explanation as to why all these people working away on the land, cooking and cleaning (and attempting ‘What was the expression?’ she couldn’t resist sniping, ‘to get in touch with God?’) were either Europeans, north Americans, or of European descent if they were Mexicans. ‘I mean,’ she said, looking at the Indians she saw around the place, some as brightly clad as those she had seen on the road to San Cristóbal, others in clothes that suggested that if there was any heavy labouring to be done it was they who did it ‘it is rather odd, isn’t it? That in what is an almost exclusively Indian part of the world there are no Indians in the community as such, and those who are here appear to be on hand only to lend a bit of local colour or do the dirty work. I mean in a way it smacks of—well, segregation, doesn’t it?’

  ‘No, no,’ was what they said to that. ‘There’s no segregation at all and any Indian who wants to join the community is at absolute liberty to do so. It’s just that they—well, most of them still instinctively understand what we used to understand instinctively but now have forgotten and that is, as we were telling you, how to get in touch with, have a relationship with what we have to call, for want of a better word, God.’

  Yet though she stayed willingly enough for those two days and though, by the end of her stay, she felt confident enough to say, only faintly condescendingly herself now, that while she didn’t really think that such a place was for her she was delighted that it had been so good for them, just as they were unable to make her reconsider her plans for the future, so she was unable to make them reconsider theirs if she persisted in doing what she had told them she was going to do.