Requiem with Yellow Butterflies

by James Halford

  And yet, what a thing to have been alive at a time when it’s possible to move across the world in this way: to have hiked the Valley of the Winds on a hot clear Sunday; to have seen a real Namatjira gum tree blazing white against a molten-red cliff face; to have raced the darkness back to Alice, nearly running out of petrol trying to find our friends’ party in the outskirts; to have slept side by side in borrowed swags on the patio; to have wallabies startle us awake near dawn, nibbling our toes; and to have gazed together at the teeming desert sky:

  ‘Look, R, a shooting star!’

  Finally, we were descending into Brisbane again, back from the centre to our coast-hugging lives. I had a lecture to write on a grim contemporary novel by an exiled Salvadoran living in Pittsburgh. R would return to her conservation report on Queensland’s Brigalow Belt. The world was mashed together in odd combinations now: the Mexican ecologist surveying threats to biodiversity in central Queensland, the Australian academic working on Latin American literature. We held hands as the plane drifted down through a patch of turbulence and looked out at the city. R found it hard to understand, having arrived only a few years back, why everyone born in Brisbane wanted to leave.

  ‘Nearly home,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, nearly home.’

  It wasn’t the same backwards, inward-looking place it had been 30 years ago when my parents moved north from Victoria. But the sand islands and the blue sparkle of Moreton Bay and the brown river winding through the city’s heart remained. All these places had older names and histories I’d just begun to learn about – a task for a lifetime, for many generations, not for a week off work. Out in the west was the green expanse of the D’Aguilar Range, and nearby, in a labyrinth of sleepy subtropical streets as familiar as my reflection in the glass, I could see the roof of Mum and Dad’s place. In the shimmering heat, the streets and suburbs looked newly made.

  Porto Velho & Brasilia

  In the jungle there was once a monkey who wanted to be a satirical writer.1

  – Augusto Monterroso

  We chugged upriver at about 5 knots aboard the Dois Irmaos, a three-storey passenger ferry shaped like a giant wedding cake. From our hammocks on the middle deck, Valentina and I watched dense vegetation slide by for hours. It sometimes seemed we had dreamed our entire lives and had awoken for the first time. At remote riverside settlements, children ran from their thatched huts down to the muddy bank, waving as our boat passed. Maybe they were dreaming us, those kids, and all the outside world? In the canteen on the upper deck, we ate beef, rice, beans and salad three times a day, washed down with fruit juice at breakfast, and a cold can of Brahma at lunch and dinner. Then we’d return to our hammocks and read or listen to music. I was done with Faulkner and, at Valentina’s insistence, was reading a collection of Spanish-language children’s stories from the Ecuadorian Amazon to improve my language skills. The problem was we’d passed into Lusophone Brazil.

  Every few hours, the boat stopped at one or another settlement to unload cargo. To break up the sameness, we’d go downstairs to watch the dock workers lug iceboxes full of river fish or stacks of crudely made wooden chairs down the gangway.

  ‘Do you ever miss work?’ I asked Valentina.

  ‘Never. If I could find a way to stay on this boat forever I would.’

  ‘I think I do. It’s been five months.’

  ‘But you study. You read a lot. You send your stories and articles to magazines. Isn’t that enough?’

  ‘I don’t think it is. I think I need a job.’

  ‘Your work ethic will make you miserable. You need to learn to just be.’

  Back in my hammock, I fell asleep, listening to her pencil squeak on the page as she underlined verb forms in a Portuguese edition of Aristotle’s Poetics – working away.

  In the afternoon of the second day, Valentina shook me awake in my hammock.

  ‘Passport check,’ she said, pointing out a federal police officer in a black uniform, making his way down the line of gently rocking hammocks. Sleepily, I patted the waistband of my shorts, feeling for the bulge of my passport in the money belt I wore underneath.

  It wasn’t there.

  After Caracas, I’d made half-a-dozen photocopies of my passport ID page, so I would never again be caught without it. Removing one of these paper copies from the secret stash down my pants, I tried to imitate the other passengers’ nonchalance, passing it to the Brazilian policeman without getting up from my hammock. His eyes flicked doubtfully between the photo and my face.

  ‘He-no-look-you.’

  His Portuguese, warped by tropical fug, lethargy and hard living, was incomprehensible to me.

  ‘¿Perdón?’

  I was sure he’d now ask for the original.

  ‘Ele não se parece como você,’ he said, handing the paper copy back to me and moving away down the line.

  ‘What did he say?’ I asked Valentina, whose language skills, honed on Aristotle, left mine in the shade.

  ‘He said it doesn’t look like you because you’ve grown your beard and your hair long.’

  My relief didn’t last. Once the policeman was out of sight, I ripped off my money belt and checked all my cash and cards were in place. Even supposing some skilful, fleet-fingered thief had managed to shove his or her hand down my pants without waking me, surely they would have taken the bundle of reales, as well as my passport? No, I must have dropped it, it must be lying on the deck somewhere. Or I had absent-mindedly slipped it into the side pocket of my pack then forgotten where I’d put it. I checked the floor beneath my hammock on all fours. I piled mountains of unwashed clothing onto the deck in full view of the other passengers, emptied every pocket of my pack. And still it wasn’t there. Valentina helped me explain the situation to one of the deckhands. No, they hadn’t seen it; nothing had been handed in to them.

  The worst scenario was the only possible one. I must have dropped it, without noticing, while embarking. The last time I’d seen it was at a passport check in the Manaus port office. We were late for the boat, last in line, dripping with sweat, freighted like cargo vessels with packs, hammocks, guitar, drinking water, snacks. The bus to the docks was already full, the driver was honking the horn. When the port official handed us our passports, we gathered our bundles and sprinted. It was easy to imagine, in retrospect, how the passport could have dropped from my hand, unnoticed, in the scramble.

  ‘Ask him if we can call the port in Manaus,’ I said to Valentina. ‘It has to be there.’

  ‘Yes, of course we can call,’ said the deckhand, ‘but not until we reach Porto Velho. It will only be another three days.’

  I was sitting in the prow, strumming my little yellow guitar, as we finally meandered into port at sundown on the fifth day. In the west, a towering grey column of cumulonimbus blotted the fiery orange sky. The Brazilian passengers rose from their hammocks, stretching their limbs, and flooded the rooftop bar, where forró blared from the speakers at ear-splitting volume. Everyone but Valentina and I drank beer and danced. Soon, they formed a clapping circle around an especially energetic couple. A curvy Afro-Brazilian woman in tiny denim shorts clamped her legs around her partner’s waist, throwing her head back, sweeping the deck with her long hair as she was spun in furious circles. While we lumbered down the gangway with our heavy packs, the first fat drops of rain fell. At the end of five days of stillness, we found ourselves running through unfamiliar, muddy streets. Arriving at the hotel just as the sky opened, we leaned, puffing in the doorway, and watched the main street turn into a fast-flowing torrent. It would all have been impossibly exciting, were it not for my missing passport. Without it, I couldn’t cross the border with Valentina. Instead, I’d need to find my way to the nearest Australian embassy, 2500 kilometres away, in Brasília.

  ‘Jimmy,’ Dad joked when I told him via Skype, ‘do you think you could have lost it somewhere more remote?’

  ‘Come see me in Buenos Aires,’ I said to Valentina at the Porto Velho bus station. ‘I want to
hear all about Bolivia.’

  I realised, as we embraced, that it was the first time we’d intentionally touched, though we’d been sharing hotel rooms, double beds and tents for weeks. It was a stiff, sexless, Northern hug. We were not Latin Americans and never would be.

  ‘Take care of yourself,’ she said. ‘Watch out for cops. They can tell you’re nervous by looking at you. You should take up meditation.’

  ‘I’m going to have plenty of time for it.’

  The bus trip via Cuiabá took 50 hours. I spent them shivering in the freezing air-conditioning, reading to block out a noisy Chuck Norris triple feature on the TV, trying not to dwell on the passport situation. Outside, tree trunks flashed by with hypnotic monotony. Somewhere in an expanse of hours that seemed like days, we came upon a clearing as large as a city, an amphitheatre of scarred red gravel and clay beneath the sky’s blue dome. At its edges, bulldozers pushed deeper into the shrinking lungs of the earth.

  I arrived in the Brazilian capital on May Day, as I began my fifth month without a job. At the Pousada Nilza in the southern quarter, I took an overpriced room little larger than a cupboard. A planned city like Canberra, Brasília was built from scratch between 1956 and 1960, on a sun-scorched plateau in the country’s central west. From above, it is laid out in the shape of an aircraft’s fuselage, as if to reassure public servants arriving from Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo they are allowed to fly home again as soon as their work is done. This fly-in, fly-out bureacrat’s paradise was designed with the motor vehicle and the aeroplane in mind. Each day, I would smear myself with sunscreen and walk prodigious distances along the baking footpaths, sweating under the brim of my Ecuadorian peasant’s felt sombrero. Often, I was the only human figure in that landscape of cement, tar and glass. It was possible, in the face of Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer’s otherworldly and beautiful white modernist buildings, to imagine yourself on some other, more rational planet. But I was in no state of mind to give his science-fiction city a fair chance. Like everyone else, I wanted to get my business done, and leave.

  ‘You came all the way from Porto Velho by bus?’ the Brazilian clerk at the Australian embassy said in English. ‘How long did that take?’

  ‘About two days.’

  ‘You poor thing. And you’re all on your own?’

  ‘I am now.’

  The embassy couldn’t issue me a replacement passport on the spot, she said, because I was not carrying sufficient identification. With my Australian driver’s licence, credit cards and two compliant photos, I could obtain a three-month emergency passport that would let me cross into Argentina. But it would have to be issued in Washington and couriered down. That could take as long as ten days.

  ‘What about a visa?’ I asked the clerk. ‘The new passport won’t have one.’

  ‘You’ll have to talk to Brazilian immigration about that.’

  She scribbled an address on a scrap of paper and slid it under the plastic screen. It was for the local office of the federal police.

  ‘Are you all right? You look pale.’ ‘Never been better.’

  A week later, with my brand-new passport strapped securely to my body, I caught a bus to the Superintendência Regional, a treeless compound of blockish cement buildings and dead brown grass that never features in lists of Brasília’s architectural marvels. All week, I’d been reading horrific stories online about the Brazilian feds storming into Rio’s favelas with automatic weapons. But the local branch was different. I was escorted into a messy office where a plump, smiling man with a blond beard was watching a documentary on tortoises.

  ‘Animais maravilhosos,’ he said, slowly shaking his head. ‘Marvellous animals. Take a seat. The embassy called me about you. How do you pronounce your name?’

  ‘James.’

  ‘H-a-mesh. Good. I’m José. Let’s get this sorted.’

  To finalise the matter, José needed me to give him a step-by-step account of the circumstances in which I had come to be ‘clandestino’ in Brazilian territory. I would have to give him enough detail to file a two-page written report on the matter to his superiors. Unfortunately, his English was as basic as my Portuguese, and his Spanish wasn’t much better. We were forced to communicate painfully slowly in a mix of Portuñol and beginner’s English, with much frantic gesturing. To ask me my date of birth, he hummed the tune to ‘Happy Birthday’. Every few minutes, he’d get distracted from his muddled report by a fascinating fact about tortoises.

  ‘That Australian guy, the crocodile hunter, has one called Harriet in his zoo.’

  At last, he took my fingerprints, fined me 165 reales, and put the first stamp in my new passport.

  ‘Sorry, what does that mean? What do I do about a new visa?’

  ‘That stamp? Don’t worry about that. It means you have three days to leave the country.’

  ‘Or what?’

  ‘Or you’ll be deported.’

  When all the paperwork was finalised, he shook my hand, smiling hospitably, and said in his best English, without the slightest discernible trace of irony: ‘Welcome to Brazil.’

  Coetzee in Buenos Aires

  The heads of Antipodeans turn upwards.1

  – Murray Bail

  Late on a Monday afternoon in April 2016, I crossed Buenos Aires to hear J. M. Coetzee give a speech. The journey took two and a half hours. I left the cobbled streets, antique stores and tourist crowds of colonial San Telmo, rode the subway to Retiro Station, and caught a commuter train on the Mitre Line that took me about 25 kilometres north-west of the centre. As we departed the downtown area, broad boulevards and grand public buildings made way for factories, freeways and drab apartment blocks. I disembarked at Miguelete, the second-last station, which is located outside the city limits on the edge of the conurbano, the ring of industrial and working-class neighbourhoods surrounding the federal capital. Imagine a version of western Sydney with upwards of 10 million residents. Densely populated, growing fast, and vital to winning government nationally, Greater Buenos Aires is hugely important to the country economically and culturally. But because nearly 40 per cent of the population lives in poverty,2 and because it’s been the heartland of Peronism, the populist workers’ movement that’s dominated Argentine politics since the 1940s, the conurbano is often represented as a menace in the mainstream Argentine media. When I asked a group of students for directions to the university campus, they led me through a suburb of lowset cement buildings, pot-holed streets and rubble. We cut through an old railway yard where carriages lay rusting in long grass and squeezed through a gap in the chain-link fence.

  The Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM), a smallish public university with 23,000 students, just celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary. The location of the main campus brings a sense of solidarity with marginal communities and informs the university’s research agenda. There’s a large centre dedicated to studies of the global South. In 2014, the rector Carlos Ruta pulled off something of a promotional coup when he persuaded J. M. Coetzee to visit twice a year to direct a seminar series on ‘Literatures of the South’. The event brings high-profile South African and Australian writers and critics to Argentina to work with local postgraduate students and writers. It aims to develop comparative perspectives on the literatures of the three countries, to establish new intellectual networks, and to build a corpus of translated works from across the South through collaborative publishing ventures. So far, the project has led to the publication of new Spanish translations of the Australian writers Nicholas Jose, Gail Jones and Delia Falconer, the South Africans Zoë Wicomb, Ivan Vladislavić and Antjie Krog, and the Mozambican Mia Couto – all by the Argentine press UNSAM Edita – and to the publication of English translations of novels by the Argentine writers Mariana Dimópulos and Marcelo Cohen – published in Australia by Giramondo.

  After a harp and flute recital, and a ceremonious welcome from the vice-rector, Coetzee rose to speak before about a hundred people in a darkened auditorium. He was dressed in Nob
el neutral: a smartly cut black jacket but no tie, his white shirt buttoned tightly at the throat. His voice was soft, his accent shorn of any local indicator – there was no Cape Town, London or Adelaide in it. He read from his notes very slowly and clearly, pausing often, weighing each syllable. I didn’t notice him trip up once. About half the audience wore headphones to hear the simultaneous translation. It felt as though we had stumbled into a scene from Elizabeth Costello. In Coetzee’s 2003 novel, a celebrated Australian writer spends the twilight of her career travelling the world, from small-town Pennsylvania to a cruise ship bound for Cape Town, lecturing on traditional humanist subjects such as ‘Realism’ and ‘The Future of the Novel’. Costello’s journeys between indistinguishable centres of global culture act as a narrative frame for her lectures, and often ironise or unsettle their arguments. As the book progresses, she becomes increasingly unsure of her principal claims about the novel: its ability to imaginatively bridge the gap between self and other, its relationship to a national readership. ‘The word-mirror is broken, irreparably, it seems,’ she concedes to one audience.3