Brazzaville Beach

by William Boyd

  “Have you told Eugene?”

  “No. I was going to try and recover the body. To be sure. Anyway…” I stubbed my cigarette out and changed the subject disingenuously. “I hear the book’s due out soon.”

  She glanced sharply at me for an instant, then relaxed. “Yes. We’re correcting proofs…” She paused, then said reflectively, “It’s going to be very big, I think. Ten languages already. But good for us all. After this war, you know, we’ll be back on the map.”

  “I’d love to see it.” I said this as offhandedly as I could.

  “So would everybody. But you know Eugene. Nothing is seen till he’s ready.”

  She rose to her feet and we said our good nights in a perfectly friendly manner. I didn’t know why I should have thought this, but I knew that the growing friendship between me and Ginga would go no further. I was sure that from then on she would never fully trust me again.

  PULUL

  Cruelty. (Kru.elti). n. (1) The quality of being cruel; disposition to inflict suffering; delight in, or indifference to, another’s pain; mercilessness, hard-heartedness.

  When Hope thinks of Mr. Jeb’s slow death, she remembers most vividly the way Pulul sat on the old chimp’s back, twisted his leg until it broke, and then tried to bite his toes off. It was a cruel act; it looked cruel. But did he know what he was doing? “Delight in, or indifference to, another’s pain.” If it was cruel, then it was deliberately done. If it was deliberately done, then blind instinct has to be ruled out; some level of cognitive awareness must be involved.

  Hope knows (how do you know?) that this was the evil in the chimpanzee. Pulul wanted to inflict pain, as much as possible.

  “I don’t want to talk about it!” John shouted at her. “Don’t you understand?” His hands were clamped to the back of a kitchen chair. He began to bang it on the floor in rhythm as he repeated himself. “I don’t want to talk about it! I don’t want to talk about it!”

  “All right! Shut up!” Hope yelled at him. “Just shut up!”

  They faced each other across the kitchen table. She had spent the night with Meredith in Oxford and had come back to London on an early train. John had been out. So she phoned the college and was told that he was in his room working and didn’t want to be disturbed. He came back in the evening at about half past seven. He greeted her as if nothing had happened. “How was the party?” “How were your folks?” She allowed him to keep this up for a minute or two and then demanded an explanation of what had gone on at the lake. At which point he began the crescendo of evasion that culminated with them both screaming at each other.

  “All right,” she said quietly. “We won’t talk about it.” She went over and put her arm round him. “I was just worried about you, that’s all.” She kissed his face and felt the tension in his body begin to ease and his breathing slow. He pulled back the chair he was still holding and sat down on it.

  “Christ,” he said wearily, “I’ve got to take it easier. Got to relax.” He rubbed his eyes, hard, with the heels of his hands. Then he let his head fall back, exposing his throat, and exhaled. He began to rotate his head to and fro in semicircular movements to ease the knotted muscles on his shoulders. Hope stepped round behind him and began to massage his neck with her fingertips.

  “So anyway,” he said, “how was the party?”

  “Horrible.”

  She told him how awful it had been, inventing freely, not bothering to recount her premature departure and the night at Meredith’s.

  “Ralph was miserable. My mother was tense as hell about his drinking. Faye and Bobby…God, I feel sorry for that girl.” She stopped her massage and went to pour herself a drink.

  “You were well out of it,” she said over her shoulder.

  “Bobby Gow,” he said, thoughtfully. “What a cunt.”

  “Bobby?” She was surprised at the muted vehemence.

  “Yes. He’s a stupid, screwed-up, English cunt and he’s married another. What do you expect?”

  She had not turned round. She kept her gaze fixed on her wineglass. She had never heard him talk like this before.

  “Well,” she began, careful not to provoke him, “I think she wanted a life, a kind of life that was completely different from Ralph and Eleanor’s. I think that’s it.”

  “Ralph and Eleanor. Don’t get me started on them. Pair of repulsive, hideous—”

  “Why don’t we nip out? Get a bite to eat?”

  They walked along the Brompton Road to an Italian restaurant they often went to. They were greeted with noisy welcome by the superhumanly jolly waiters. Hope often felt a spontaneous sympathy for these men. Whatever their cares and woes, their domestic tragedies or personal failures, they were compelled to contribute to and create this cheery ambience of facetious bonhomie, all “Ciao bella, ah, la bellissima signorina!” and “Amore, amore!” But tonight this carefree farce was exactly what she required and she was glad to see that the preposterous informality worked immediately on John. We need to be distracted for a while, she thought, have some other people around us, steer the conversation in different directions….

  The restaurant was crowded but a table was found for them near the back. Halfway through their main course John suddenly seemed to recall what he had said about her sister and brother-in-law.

  He apologized. “Christ. I didn’t mean that, really,” he said, earnestly. “It was unfair. Very unkind.” He screwed his face up. “But I think it’s good that I recognized that—don’t you? That I could, you know, look back and see that I was wrong?”

  “Look, it doesn’t matter. We all fly off the handle.”

  “But I can criticize myself. That’s good, isn’t it?”

  “Yes…yes. We should…we should all do that a bit more.”

  And then he began to talk about what had happened at the lake. He had enjoyed himself there so much, he said, and he had decided to spend more time with her. He didn’t need to do so much work on computers. It was good, he said, just to reflect, to let the brain work unprompted.

  “You see,” he went on, “I haven’t been coming down because I’ve been worried. Worried that I’m losing something.” Then he told her about the way mathematicians were divided: that out of ten mathematicians nine would think in figures and one would think in images. It was the ones who thought in images who produced the most startling work.

  “Take me,” he said. “I was always a figure man until I started working in turbulence. Suddenly it changed. I started seeing answers, solutions, in shapes. It was unbelievable.”

  He began to tell her about hydrology, about fluid dynamics, how no one could understand how turbulence arose from the differential equations for the flow of fluid. The erratic behavior and discontinuities threw the calculations out of the window. Everyone was attempting to tackle turbulence by analytical methods, by writing ever more complex equations, he said, trying to explain the hyperbolic activity of turbulent fluids and gases.

  “I was plugging away, too,” he went on, “and getting somewhere. My thinking…” He made a sweeping gesture with one hand. “My thinking was on the right lines, I could see that. But then suddenly there was a change. I don’t know how it happened, but I started looking at the shapes, the shapes turbulence made, and then things began to fall into place with all sorts of fascinating ramifications.” He paused. He had an odd look on his face, as if he were smiling and frowning at the same time.

  “The funny thing was, and this is what is worrying me, it only seems to have lasted six months or so.” He started to score the white tablecloth with the tines of his dessert fork. “I seemed to lose the knack. I would look at shapes and think figures.”

  Then he told her that in Scotland the digging he had done—for some inexplicable reason—had rejuvenated the imaging power.

  “Just the exertion, maybe. The physical effort.” He shrugged. “Or maybe just the fact that I was cutting a shape in the ground. A square, a rectangle. It all seemed to come back.”

  He paus
ed. She looked at his pale, worried face, his eyes on his plate of unfinished food. Frowning. Thinking. She saw the force of that thought distorting and buckling his features. He exhaled shakily, a catch in his breath.

  “But it’s going again, getting weak,” he said. “I just have to face up to it. I had the gift for a few months. On loan.” He shook his head, his nostrils pinched. “And the work I was doing, God, you wouldn’t believe…incredible.” He looked at her at this point and she saw his eyes were brimful of tears.

  “You see, at Knap, I thought maybe if I tried digging again, something might come back.” His voice had gone quiet. “You don’t know how terrible it is, to have something, that kind of power, and then have it taken away from you.” He made a strange sound—half grunt, half retch—in the back of his throat. “I try to force myself, force my brain to go on, but it’s not…” His entire body seemed to give a shudder and his face went bright red. He closed his eyes and pressed his chin into his chest. For a moment, Hope thought he was going to vomit.

  But he wept. He put his hands on the table, hunched forward and let the sobs blurt from him. He made a strange, panting, wailing noise, his mouth hanging open, tears, snot and saliva dripping from his face.

  “Jesus! Please, John!” Hope was round the table and crouching by him, her arm round his bucking shoulders. She was terrified by the sound he was making, as if it were a prototype form of weeping, unfamiliar and unrecognizable. “Johnny, darling, stop please! Please!”

  The whole restaurant had fallen immediately silent, disturbed and unsettled. Beneath her hands, Hope could feel the muscles of his shoulders locked and quivering. He was letting his sadness run from him, she thought. She could almost sense it coiling about her—a thin and ethereal flux—like a gas, a turbulent gas, flowing from his mouth, nose and eyes.

  Somehow, with the help of a couple of waiters, they got him up and draped his coat over his shoulders. The staff was concerned for him, but they wanted him out. As she led John through the restaurant, she was aware of the rapt and troubled faces of the other diners staring at them both. What was this abject misery, they seemed to be demanding? This was a man: why was he so afflicted? What shocking tragedy had reduced him so? To her shame, Hope felt a hot embarrassment envelop her like a shawl.

  The cool air outside was a help. John took a few unsupported paces down the street and then turned toward a dark shop window. He rested his forehead against the cold glass. Hope whispered to him—endearments, reassurances—and put her arms around him.

  “Ach, God, Hope,” he said. “I’m a fucking mess. You’ve got to help me.”

  “Of course I will, of course. You’ll be fine.”

  “You know, I think that was good for me. In a funny sort of way I feel better.”

  “Come on, let’s get you home.”

  Back at the flat she helped him undress. He seemed calm, but he moved slowly, like a man with terminal exhaustion. As he climbed into bed she saw that his face was slumped and set in unfamiliar angles and planes that made him look ten years older. His eyes were swollen and shadowed.

  “I’ve got to sleep,” he said.

  “You’ll sleep, don’t worry.”

  “No. My head’s boiling. I’ll just lie here thinking. I’ve got some pills in my briefcase.”

  She went through to the sitting room, opened his briefcase and took out some folders and notebooks. He carried pills for every eventuality, she knew, it was a habit he had acquired in the States. She found some Librium, antacid, antihistamines and some sleeping pills.

  She gave him two. The plastic capsules were yellow and white.

  “You and your damn pills,” she said with a resigned grin.

  “See? Sometimes they come in handy.”

  He swallowed the pills and pulled up the blankets to his ears. She crouched by the bed and stroked his wiry hair. She kissed him, reassured him, and made brief plans about his coming down to Knap to rest. Soon he began to drift away.

  “We’ll be OK,” he said loosely. “We’ll work it out.”

  She switched off the light, closed the door and went back to the sitting room. She locked the Librium and sleeping pills in a drawer of the bureau and made herself a strong scotch and soda. She sat down at the table and began to repack his briefcase. She was weary herself, aching-limbed, but with an odd background sensation of restlessness.

  Her eyes fell on the untidy clutter of John’s papers and printouts. Strange jottings and diagrams, scribbled calculations. Amongst the detritus she counted two napkins, a cardboard lid from a cigarette pack and the torn-off cover of a Penguin book. She looked at the crabbed, tiny figures: to think that someone can read this stuff, she thought, picking up loose papers, actually make sense of these numbers and squiggles…. She shook her head, ruefully. This was the magic she was in awe of, she had to admit, the runic language of the mathematician. It was uncanny, otherworldly. She picked up a scrap of paper torn from a memo pad. There were some words written on it—Euler’s gamma functn. def.—and below that:

  What kind of bizarre and extraordinary mind dealt in this type of discourse, used these symbols to communicate crucial ideas?…Idly, she turned the sheet over. There was another scribbled note here, not in John’s handwriting:

  Darling J,

  Come at four. He goes off to Birmingham for three (!) days, from tomorrow. Can you stay a night? Please try. Please, please.

  XXXXXXX

  THE ONE BIG AXIOM

  On Brazzaville Beach the time passes slowly, easily. On the days when I am not working I eat my meals, swim, read, walk, sketch, write. The day does not hurry by. The view is familiar, the seasonal changes, negligible. Brazzaville Beach during the rains is little altered. The palms are there, the casuarina pines…the waves roll in. This is my time, personal and private. Whatever is going on out there in the world, with its hurry and its business, is something else. Its progress is marked by time, too, by clocks and calendars—civil time—but on the beach the days move by to the tick of a different clock.

  Civil time, as the chronologists call it, has always been based on the rotation of the earth. But our sense of “private” time is innate. Neurologists think that this sense of time, which is always of the present moment, is conditioned by our nervous systems. As we grow older, our nervous systems decelerate and our sense of personal time dawdles correspondingly. But civil time, of course, tramps on remorselessly, its divisions constant and inexorable. This is why our lives seem to pass more quickly as we age.

  So I try to ignore civil time on Brazzaville Beach and instead measure my days by the clocklike systems in my own body, whatever they are. I am pleased with this idea: if I can ignore civil time as I age, and as my nervous system slows, the sense of the passing of my life will become ever more attenuated. I wonder, fancifully, if I have a notion here that I could call the Clearwater Paradox—after Zeno’s—with me, as Achilles, always slowing down, never quite able to catch the tortoise of my death, no matter how close I come.

  No. There is one thing we can be sure of—the one big axiom: when my nervous system shuts down entirely, and it will, my personal time will end.

  I dived in and swam a couple of strokes underwater, enjoying the moment of coldness and the silence. I kept my eyes closed because of the chlorine, opening them after I had surfaced, then turning on my back and swimming a slow backstroke to the shallow end. As I swam I saw Hauser climbing up to the top of the three-tier diving board. He was wearing very small cerise swimming trunks, almost invisible beneath the solid tureen that was his belly. He stood at the end of the board, rose on tiptoes and pretended to dive. I heard the faint jeers of the others and some slow, ironic handclapping. Hauser bowed elaborately and climbed down.

  My hand touched the end of the pool and I stood up. I smoothed my hair back with my hands and wrung the long hank dry behind my neck. As I did so, Toshiro, who was sitting on the edge, his feet dangling in the water, looked candidly at my breasts. I looked back at his, equally candidly. I had al
ways imagined Toshiro to be fit and muscled, but his torso was soft and pudgy, like an adolescent boy with puppy fat, his breasts pert cones with brown nipples.

  “Why don’t you jump in?” I said.

  “I can’t swim.”

  I waded over to the steps. “Do you want me to teach you? After lunch?”

  He looked surprised. “Well…yes, please. Can you?”

  “We can make a start. It’s ridiculous a man of your age not being able to swim.”

  I climbed out. Hauser, who had been the dummy hand, had rejoined the bridge game. Mallabar, Ginga and Roberta were staring at the spread fans of their cards. Some way off, Ian Vail sat in the shade of an umbrella reading a paperback. I returned to my lounger and dried myself down.

  We were on our “works outing,” as Mallabar had whimsically christened this trip. We had traveled fifty miles from the camp to the Nova Santos Intercontinental Hotel. The Nova Santos was only half completed when the civil war had begun, and further work had been abandoned since then. It was designed to be a luxury hotel, with five hundred bedrooms, olympic swimming pool, tennis courts and an eighteen-hole golf course, the first and most important symbol of the country’s rejuvenated tourist industry. Now it stood, a new ruin, waiting for the end of the war and for new funds to be available, a sad reminder of what might have been.

  The hotel was positioned on a small hill and looked out, over a view of monotonous orchard bush, northward to the dusty, distant slopes of the Grosso Arvore escarpment. The curving drive up to the entrance portico had been built, as had the portico itself, the lobby and reception area, and, mysteriously, the swimming pool. Everything else remained in the state it had reached when the money had run out. From my lounger, I could see the gray concrete bricks and the rickety bamboo scaffolding of a half-finished residential block. Already vines and creepers had climbed high up the three-story sides, and plants and weeds grew as high as the ground-floor window ledges. The area cleared for the tennis courts had been planted with cassava and yams by the families of the skeleton staff who remained behind, and the golf course consisted of a few sunbleached, termite-gnawed, black-and-white stakes hammered into the ground here and there. But the power lines that had been run out to the hotel from the national grid had never been dismantled, and the Ministry of Tourism paid the staff and kept the pool functioning, waiting for better days. The thick teak slab of the reception desk was burnished and gleaming with polish, and the cool terrazzo floors of the lobby were regularly mopped down and free of dust. One could even order a drink, as long as it was beer.