At one of the stalls that had been set up behind the clearing I bought a satay and a cold drink from a man in a short-sleeved shirt and sarong. As I worked my way through the crowd, people looked at me curiously, smiling, as is always the case when a foreigner shows an interest in this art of the magic lantern. I found a place to sit between two families just as Hamoto mounted the platform and took his place behind the lantern. He was small even for an Indonesian, a leathery old man naked to the waist with skin the color of tobacco, long white hair kept out of his eyes with a tight-fitting cap, an unprepossessing chap who seemed quite unaware of the people watching him. He attended to the filigreed ringgits, whose handles he dipped in a bowl of purifying water, shaking off the excess before he laid them out in the order of their appearance, dozens of puppets overlapping like the feathers of a bird’s wing, their location so exact in his mind that he could pick them up without having to look. When he finished he lit the lantern. The screen turned white. He inserted the handle of a ringgit into a block and struck two wooden chocks together to announce that the show was beginning.
As the gamelan players struck up a melody on the xylophone, gongs, and drums, two young women danced in front of the screen, their costumes bright as peacock feathers, glistening with gold-colored threads, their long fingernails carving space for their bodies in the air. When they finished, Hamoto’s hands came alive. Two puppets gyrated in the space between the lantern and the screen. Talking in high-pitched voices, they rose and fell like dragonflies vying for position, their movements as synchronized with the music as the steps of ballerinas. Hamoto gazed through the flame at the characters; vision, fire, puppets, screen were inseparable, annealed by the ancient story. This was his power, I realized, this ability to abandon the everyday work and enter the life of the shadows of a mythic kingdom. No dalang I had ever seen had broken free so completely. I was deeply moved, Ford, and as I gave myself up to the old battle between light and dark the kampong began to fade away along with the people arrayed on either side of me. In the breezeless night the flame was absolutely still and gradually I became aware of another flame inside it that I recognized as the Nellie, burning. The smoke of cooking fires drifting across the clearing, the smoke of coconut oil lamps, the clove-scented smoke of kreteks glowing in the dark now smelled of teak, canvas, hemp, the Nellie’s bones and sinews. She looked exactly as she did when I watched from the dinghy except that now Conrad stood on her deck. He wore the same black suit, the same cap, the same monocle was fitted in his eye. Hamoto brought more puppets into his story. His voice changed half a dozen times. He was singing plaintively. Now over his voice I heard Conrad’s and realized that he was reciting, his voice a chorus of all the voices he had brought to life. As each word escaped his lips, it burst into flame and its sound and meaning turned to sparks flying away into the night, over Java, over the archipelago, destined for the great seas and the four corners of the earth.
And then I realized that what had eluded me all these years and in all these pages had passed before my eyes in that fading vision. Marlow and I were simply part of Conrad’s fire and he had ridden us just as his words now and hereafter would ride the air. I had my ending. I could almost feel Fox-Bourne’s watch slip through my fingers and disappear in the wake of the Brigadier, tumble through the fathoms past the eyes of curious fish to the ocean’s floor, where it would tell the time of his plunge until it rusted and the crystal came loose and the numbers flaked away to nothingness.
Satisfied, I crossed my legs and hunched forward, settling in to watch Hamoto’s shadows cast their spell through the long hours of the monsoon night.
Batavia, Java
1930
AFTERWORD
WHILE JOSEPH CONRAD and Ford Madox Ford appear as fictional characters in this novel, I have tried to interweave the real and the imagined, most obviously in having my narrator tell the story of Conrad and Marlow to Ford, who was uniquely situated to appreciate its ironies and sympathize with the creative dilemma I have imagined for Conrad. I have relied on the historical record to reconstruct Conrad’s disastrous journey to Poland at the beginning of World War I as well as his day at sea aboard the minesweeper Brigadier, which was made possible through the intervention of Lord Northcliffe. All the incidents that occur on the ship and at Lowestoft are imagined. The Nellie, of course, is Conrad’s invention, the great stage of Heart of Darkness. I like to think he would be pleased that she was passed on to Jack Malone.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LAWRENCE THORNTON is the author of five previous novels: Imagining Argentina, Under the Gypsy Moon, Ghost Woman, Naming the Spirits, and Tales from the Blue Archives. Thornton has won numerous literary awards and is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in California.
ALSO BY LAWRENCE THORNTON
Tales from the Blue Archives
Naming the Spirits
Ghost Woman
Under the Gypsy Moon
Imagining Argentina
Unbodied Hope: Narcissism and the Modern Novel
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2004 by Lawrence Thornton All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
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BOOK DESIGN BY PAUL DIPPOLITO
ILLUSTRATION BY ROBERT SWAIN CHARLES
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Thornton, Lawrence, 1937– Sailors on the inward sea : a novel / Lawrence Thornton.
p. cm.
1. Conrad, Joseph, 1857-1924—Fiction. 2. Authorship—Collaboration—Fiction. 3. Fiction—Authorship—Fiction. 4. Personal (Literature)—Fiction. 5. Male friendship—Fiction. 6. Seafaring life—Fiction. 7. Novelists—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3570.H6678S25 2004
813'.54—dc22
2004043340
ISBN 978-1-4165-6836-0
ISBN-13: 978-1-4391-0465-1 (eBook)
Sailors on the Inward Sea Page 24