by David Nobbs
I had a good journey back and when I got home I found a letter from a friend who’s living in Peru. It was full of good news, he’s doing well with his government project, loves the country and is in friendly correspondence with his ex-wife, so that cheered me up no end and prevented my return home being an anti-climax, as these things sometimes can be after a weekend of your hospitality.
Well, I won’t bother too much with my news, as I hope to see you the weekend after next and will tell you it all then.
Have that Scrabble board ready. I think my luck’s about to change.
With much love as always,
Henry
Apartado 823
Cajamarca
Peru
Sept 6th, 1982
Dearest Hilary,
I’m writing this as the train rumbles through a land halfway between mountain and jungle, beside the Urabamba, a tributary of the Amazon. Lampo and Denzil are sitting opposite me. They send their love. I send more than love. I send a shriek of desire.
When we meet I’ll tell you of the sights we have seen on this almost memorable holiday. We travelled on the second highest railway in the world. Our beautiful train, so beautiful that the excited station staff at Arequipa kept it for two hours before letting it go, wound across the desert, up over the arid mountains, past rare oases and shy, gentle vicuña, past lakes seething with bird life, down to Puno on the shore of Lake Titicaca, the world’s highest navigable lake.
I’ll tell you of Puno, where the restaurants are full of strolling bands who play the haunting music of the zampona (pan-pipes), the little pipes of the antara, the cane flutes called quena, the twelve-stringed charango with body made of armadillo shells. They even make music with a comb stroked against the side of a gourd. They play music fervent with lyrical sadness, sometimes hauntingly yearning, sometimes ferociously triumphant. Every note sings to me of love and absence.
I’ll tell you of the long train journey from Puno to Cuzco, through the altiplano, the great upland plain of the Andes, empty save for isolated thatched stockades and adobe villages. Waiters set tablecloths throughout our third-world train, and without leaving our seats we ate stuffed avocado, beef casserole and a banana. Eat your heart out, InterCity Catering. A lone Indian on horseback watched gravely as a whole trainload ate their bananas. What did he think?
I’ll tell you of the almost memorable town of Cuzco, Spanish elegance built upon foundations of massive Inca stonework that has stood undamaged for five hundred years although no mortar was used, such was the perfection of the masons.
I’ll tell you of the almost memorable four-hour train journey from Cuzco to the foot of the great mountain on which the almost memorable Inca city of Machu Picchu was built, of the climb round hairpin bends on buses brought by train to this road that connects with no other road, built of materials brought by train, to the immaculately terraced, deserted city of the sky, high on its narrow rock several thousand feet above the curving Urabamba, mortarless stonework unflinching before four hundred years of winds.
Why were these great sights only almost memorable? Because you are not here, my impossibly wonderful love.
Henry
PS You’ll never guess who we met in Lima. Neil Mallet, who tried to destroy my journalistic career with deliberate misprints. He went white at the sight of Denzil and me. He’s working on an English-speaking paper in Lima. Hardly a glittering career, and I found I couldn’t hate him any more. Not all of us have to cope with the sackfuls of envy and inadequacy that were dealt to him. We all had a drink together, but he had to leave early to do his laundry. Plus ça change …
Sarajevo
Rua de Matelos
Altea
Costa Blanca
Spain
30th September 1982
Dear Henry,
I’m glad you enjoyed your holiday. I enjoyed living it through your letter.
Yes, I too am looking forward to our meeting. It’ll be nice to see my pen-pal. I wonder if you’ll look the way I imagine you!
I won’t look the way you imagine me. I’m quite a shadow of the person I was, Henry, and I don’t think you should be using phrases like ‘my impossibly wonderful love’. Even if I ever was wonderful, which I doubt, I’m not now. When I look at myself in the mirror, I see a kind of emptiness, a sense of there being nobody there. I doubt if I’ll ever again be able to cope with the great rousing excitements of life. Please, please, please don’t expect too much of me.
Kate and Jack both managed to get over for a few days. We’re blessed in our children, and that at least gives me hope that there was and is something worthwhile between us. Camilla sends her love via them, which is nice. I know that you write to them all and are disappointed that they aren’t managing to get to Peru, but they’re all very involved in building their own lives.
With a heavy heart, I have to report that Benedict has been sighted in Portugal – in Albufeira, in fact. My informant – that makes me sound like a policewoman – saw him in a restaurant in unsavoury company and looking as if he might be drugged up. The informant is reliable. He’s none other than my own dear Daddy. The Mathesons have a villa there and invited us both. I didn’t go as I thought Daddy needed a break from me.
I feel depressed by my country. It’s strange that we’re both among Spanish peoples at this time. The Spaniards here feel that the Falklands War was the last dingy death-twitch of our imperialist illusions. (Not that Spain wasn’t imperialist!)
I despair over Benedict. Should I go to Portugal? Do Nigel and Diana really care? I’ve never before been so sad that you are so far away.
With love,
Hilary
Apartado 823
Cajamarca
Peru
Oct 14th, 1982
Dear Nigel,
I’m writing this from Peru, where I’m running a government aid programme which will eventually cover the Andes with cucumbers. I’m writing because I’ve just heard from Hilary that Benedict has been sighted in Albufeira and I wonder what you’re planning to do about it. I gather he looked as if he was on drugs. I feel so helpless here, as I won’t be back in Europe till November next year. We’re all responsible for the boy, Nigel, and we’re all in some way to blame. We’ve got to try to save him.
Lampo came over recently and we chatted over late-night glasses of rum about the old days at Dalton. If he knew I was writing, I’m sure he’d join in sending best wishes and hoping that you’re getting real satisfaction out of serving your wonderful constituents in Thurmarsh! I’d love to be a fly on the wall at one of your ‘surgeries’.
I suppose you were very bullish over the Falklands and spoke proudly of our troops. We know our troops are good. We don’t need wars to prove it. Would that our politicians were as good as our troops.
With all best wishes,
Henry
Furze House
Sandy Lane
Nethercott
Buckinghamshire
3–11–82
Dear Henry,
Thank you for your letter. Yes, I heard that Benedict had been ‘sighted’ in Albufeira. You say we’re all responsible. Well, as his father I accept my share, but I have responsibility for all sorts of people, especially Felicity, who doesn’t enjoy the most robust of health. The very mention of the boy is liable to give her ‘an attack’. I’m responsible to my partners, and this is a very busy time. I’m responsible to my government in Parliament. I believe in our policies (including the defence of the Falklands. How twisted you are). I can’t let the side down through sudden trips to Albufeira to chase my son, who may well be there on holiday and gone before I arrive. Above all, Henry, I am, as you rightly point out, responsible to the great British electorate, to my constituents, the people of Thurmarsh. And yes, I do try to serve them well. I’m a good constituency MP. I’m not by inclination a kisser of babies, but now I kiss some horrendous specimens. You’d hardly recognise me.
I simply cannot chase the boy every time there’
s a sighting. He’s an adult, he can choose his own life, and nobody, frankly, can force me to like him just because he’s my son.
In any case, I believe Diana has gone over to Portugal to hunt for him.
When you get back to England, it will be time for you to think very seriously about pensions, if you have not done so already, and, knowing you, I will be surprised if you have. Do get in touch. I can suggest all sorts of ways of providing that ‘nest-egg’ that we all need. You will not do better elsewhere.
I hope your Peruvian venture continues to prosper.
Yours et cetera,
Nigel
Flat 5
36, Nantwich Crescent
London NWI
17th November 1982
Dear Henry,
I haven’t written earlier as I decided to pop over to Portugal as soon as I could. I’ve been into every bar and restaurant around Albufeira and have found no sign of Benedict. I’ve also tried most of the other resorts on the Algarve. No joy. Probably he was just on holiday there.
I’ve got an exciting bit of news. Well, it’s exciting for me. There’s no reason why it should be exciting for you. I’m engaged. I’m marrying a Swiss dentist with three teenage children living with him! My parents are not pleased. In retrospect, you seem to them to belong to a golden age! But Gunter and I are very much in love and we are going to be very happy in his tidy little house above Interlaken.
I hope your project is going well. You didn’t tell me much about it. Now that I’m happy, I wish you nothing but good. You were a good man to me for most of our life together.
With love,
Diana
Apartado 823
Cajamarca
Peru
Jan 5th, 1983
Dear Diana,
I’m actually writing this in our project office in Baños Del Inca, a village outside Cajamarca. It’s summer here, and women are washing clothes in the hot streams and leaving them to dry on the grass beside the streams. Steam is rising everywhere.
I was very pleased – and excited – to hear your news, not least because it amuses me no end to hear that I’m now part of a golden age. It’s nice to be appreciated, even in retrospect. I’m truly delighted and hope you’ll be very happy. I’ve nothing but feelings of great warmth for you, darling Diana, and I hope your life with Gunter will be utterly delightful. May you have happy sex, tinkling cow-bells and perfect teeth for many years to come.
Our project proceeds very slowly. We’ve only managed to build six greenhouses. People keep trying to live in them, and then the glass was broken in one of the first terrorist attacks in this area for many years. Sendero Luminoso, the Maoist terrorists, are becoming more active and threatening the fragile stability of this lovely land. At the moment I’m busy giving our staff driving lessons so that we can start to use our Range Rovers, which are sitting in a field. This summer we’ll swing into action.
I do hope you make proper contact with Benedict soon and will do anything I can to help at any time.
From my window I’ve just seen a group of women in jeans and tee-shirts going into the parish church, and one of them looks very like Anna, Hilary’s friend, who once pretended to be a nun. I can’t remember if you ever met her.
Outside the church a man is playing beautiful but mournful music on an instrument called the clarin. It’s ten foot long and can’t go on public transport so it’s never travelled beyond Baños Del Inca and Cajamarca. Yet another reason for coming to this fascinating spot.
With love and all best wishes,
Henry Pratt,
Unpaid publicist,
Baños Del Inca Tourist Board
Apartado 823
Cajamarca
Peru
Jan 6th, 1983
Dearest Hilary,
Just a quick one. The most incredible thing happened yesterday. I met Anna, and she’s a nun! I know I like irony, but this is ridiculous!
I saw this group of women in jeans entering the church and one of them looked very like Anna. I went across and, lo and behold, it was her. The whole group were Canadian worker nuns, very cheery, very casual. I was invited to join them and we had a very jolly time in the priest’s house next door, a very friendly place where we (including the nuns) drank very strong gin and tonics. We all repaired to a little booth-like restaurant in a row of such restaurants, simple wooden tables and seats, and had the national speciality, which I regret to say is guinea pig, and which I regret to say is delicious cooked with saffron.
There we sat, as darkness fell over the high sierras and the pretty village with its steaming streams, and we laughed, ate, shared leftwing political assumptions, and I felt so full of memories, of our first meeting in Siena, of my disastrous date with Anna, of my early evenings out with you, and I was overwhelmed with love.
Anna says that she turned to God in selfishness and cowardice, in retreat from emotional chaos, found peace first and then strength and decided to devote her life to service. She’s utterly happy and looks beautiful now that the slight smugness and coarseness that marred her beauty have gone.
Is it possible that there is a God for Anna but there isn’t for me, and that that is what God is – a relative reality?
It’s interesting to reflect on how much Anna’s pretence of being a nun reflected a need that she hadn’t yet acknowledged.
It’s wonderful to think that we are now in the year in which you and I will meet. Oh blessed 1983.
With deepest love,
Henry
Crete, March
Grabbing an early break in the sun. Many thanks for your letter. Glad to hear Anna looks well and is enjoying G and T! It makes her seem not quite so lost to us. That other order was just too religious for us to stomach.
With love, Peter and Olivia
The Amazon Rain Forest
Aug 24th, 1983
My darling Hilary,
It is night. It is dark. I sit behind my mosquito nets in my simple hut in a travel lodge on the banks of the Amazon, about thirty miles from Iquitos. I listen to the cruel pageant of nature’s fertile night. Grunts, croaks, hoots, squeaks and screams. I can’t sleep. I have to write to my beloved. I have to confess.
The Amazon, though mighty, strikes me as a dull river, slow, brown and straight. I came to this lodge in a thatched boat with sixty seats. There was only one other occupant, a German travel agent with a haircut that made him look thatched. The business, mainly British, has slumped since the Falklands War and now, as the memory of that recedes, the increasing violence of Sendero Luminoso may stop any revival in its tracks.
We were taken on a jungle walk, the German travel agent and I. We saw no animals. There’s plenty of jungle. Why should they go where we are? I thought only of you, and the confession I must make.
We dined together, the only two customers in a restaurant designed for one hundred and twenty. After dinner it was cabaret time. The cabaret consisted of our waiters playing guitars. Darkness fell. The macaws went to sleep. The jungle awoke.
Tomorrow we visit an Indian village. They don’t use money, so we must barter. It was suggested that we buy cigarettes. I did. The German travel agent refused. ‘I will not spread this noxious weed,’ he said. ‘I will deal in fish-hooks. I have many fish-hooks.’
To what am I going to confess? A sultry affair with a laundress in Baños Del Inca? A mad hour of buggery with the German travel agent? No. To failure. Stark, utter, total failure. I haven’t fooled you, have I? The cucumber scheme has been a fiasco. A staff of six Britons and six Peruvians, owners of twelve Range Rovers that have never moved, has produced a total of 1,673 cucumbers, of which 884 were destroyed by South American diseases that I couldn’t identify, 211 were too small to sell and 176 were so grievously bent that it was kindest to give them a decent burial. 420 healthy cucumbers, and the Peruvians didn’t want even those. They have enough of their own, and don’t like them much anyway!
Another fiasco for Henry Pratt. I think it’s probably best
that we don’t meet after all. I can give you nothing. Nothing. You’ll be better off free of me.
Iquitos
The next day
Forget what I wrote yesterday, my darling. Perhaps I shouldn’t be sending it, but I am, because I want you to know the real me in all my moods.
This morning we went to the Indian village, the German travel agent and I. Our guide, Basil, rang a gong twice before we left. He told us that it was an Indian gong, used for signals. I later realised what his signal meant. ‘Only two of them today, chaps. Take it easy, eh?’
An hour’s jungle walk took us to a village of thatched huts on stilts, where three people in grass skirts, two men and a woman, met us. She was the first topless seventy-year-old Indian I’d ever seen. They had goods to sell, crocodile-teeth bracelets, poisoned darts without the poison, just the things for Cousin Hilda. For payment they wanted full packets of cigarettes. ‘Why do they want this noxious weed?’ asked the German travel agent. ‘Why do they not want my fish-hooks?’ He couldn’t even give the fish-hooks away. The answers to his naïve questions were: 1) They use nets; 2) Their children sell the cigarettes in Iquitos, which is why they need full packets, because of course they use money, how else do they buy the jeans we saw drying on the line? The grass skirts are for tourists only.
How tourism corrupts. How it destroys the world it wants to see.
We had lunch on the thatched balcony of the thatched lodge. The thatched boat arrived with no tourists. My trip was over, but the thatched travel agent had a two-day booking and was to be taken on a jungle expedition that afternoon.
He came to the boat to wave goodbye. As we set off up the slow muddy river, he shouted, ‘I will insist they give me the full expedition. I will not take short measure.’ We waved to each other, the German travel agent and I. I will never see him again. I don’t even know his name, nor he mine.
And I thought, I will not give in. I will not be defeated by this absurd and corrupting world. There will be no self-pity.
So tonight I write to say, I don’t feel so useless after all. My report will state that the whole scheme was absurdly unrealistic and badly conceived. I am not to blame. That will not be accepted, of course. Only my head will roll. Anthony Snaithe will admit to an unwise appointment, caused by falsely glowing reports about me from other people. But I know … I really do know … this one was not my fault.