Labels and Other Stories

by Louis de Bernières

  After his wife died Joao was in a state of shock that must have jerked something open in his mind. Apart from the feeling of his wife’s palpable presence and his feeling that he could continue to converse with her about no matter what, Joao began to have dreams at night. He did not tell anyone about it because he did not want to acquire the reputation of a sorcerer, but he dreamed very clearly that there were going to be free elections in Brazil just a week before they were announced and that they were going to be chaotic. He dreamed that Paulo was going to cut himself on the leg with a machete, and in fact Paulo cut his hand with a knife, which was nearly right. He dreamed that a macaw told him that Macunaima the Hero Emperor of the Virgin Backwoods was in the area, and later on he saw in the forest a strange man with only one leg being followed by flocks of macaws.

  One morning Joao had a very vivid dream just before waking. The dream was that two mighty tyrants had fallen and that the whole course of history was about to change. He awoke with the feeling that this was a mightily important dream, and for once he decided that he had to tell someone. If history was about to change it was obvious that the powerful and important people of the world ought to be informed of it so that they could plan in advance as to the best way of coping with it. He knew from school that the two most powerful countries in the world were the United States and the USSR, and his first thought was that the leaders of these two countries ought to know about his dream.

  But after he had awoken properly, eaten some cassava, and thought about it all over again, it occurred to him that perhaps his dream might have been a false one, like the one he had had about the earth crashing into the moon on St Esteban’s Day. Joao did not want to make a fool of himself by informing the most powerful people in the world of something that had not happened, and he thought that perhaps it would be better if he kept his peace and let them discover it for themselves, if it had happened.

  But when he went down the ladder to go fishing, he discovered that washed up on the bank were two dead fish in perfect condition. One was an arowhana, the kind that looks after its babies in its mouth and leaps out of the water to pick beetles from overhanging branches, and the other was a tucunare with a false eye on its tail so that other fish would think that it was swimming backwards and get confused.

  Joao bent down and picked them up, one in each hand. He thought that really this was too much of a coincidence. He was very happy to have such incontestable evidence of the truth of his dream, and he resolved not only to inform the leaders of the USA and the USSR, but to send them the evidence as well.

  But this gave him a problem, because he realised that he could not send two fish to each president, since that would be four fish altogether. He thought of killing two more fish, and perhaps sending one true fish to each president with one false one each. But then he thought that they might have very clever people who could tell the difference, and he thought that maybe that would damage his credibility, so Joao decided to send them both to the President of the United States, with a request that he should pass the information on to the other president.

  Joao built a small fire with dry wood, and when it was well established he piled it with damp wood and aromatic leaves. He hung the two fish above the smoke, and revisited the fire at regular intervals to check that it was still good and smoky. He sniffed at the air and listened for the croaking of the frogs in order to check that it was not going to rain, and took a piece of dried palm up into his hut. He wrote: ‘Dear Gringo Presedent. I want to tell you that two tirants have fallen, wich is very impootant. Please tell the Presedent of the ussristos. Here are two fish wich are prufe. respecfully, Joao.’

  When the fish were well smoked, had turned brown and shrivelled the correct amount, Joao rubbed them with salt, put salt in their mouths, and wrapped them tightly in palm leaves, enclosing his letter, and then tied the bundle with creeper. On the package he wrote, ‘To the Gringo Presedent.’ Tucking it under his arm, he went to find Paulo, who was going into town. He gave the heavy bundle to Paulo, along with some money for the stamp, and asked him to post it in the town when he got there. Paulo accepted the parcel with a smile, and agreed.

  Paulo was not the best choice for this mission. Like so many others in that place he had grown up with a casual dishonesty that never meant any harm, but which has effectively paralysed progress for hundreds of years. He was also as curious as a monkey. In short, he spent the money as part of the payment for a prostitute, and he opened the parcel. He gave one of the fish to a woman he was trying to butter up in one of the villages, and the other one he ate himself, sitting on the riverbank whilst he watched a cacique making a nest.

  It served Paulo right that he caught erysipelas from the prostitute, but Joao was never the wiser. It gave him great confidence that he had played a vital part in the affairs of the world, and this was reflected in his ever greater progress at school and the consequent admiration of the young teacher. All the same, it is doubtful whether Joao had given Paulo enough money to send the parcel, it is doubtful that it ever would have got through US Customs, and infinitely doubtful that the president would ever have received the package. If he had done so, it is certain that he would not have understood the connection between two dead fish and the fall of two tyrants.

  In any case, he had known about that by other means almost as soon as it had happened.

  THE DEPOSIT

  It was the spring of 1982, and there was a war going on in the Falkland Islands. The whole nation was abuzz with it. In parliament the usual disconnected idealists were trying to kid themselves and every one else that United Nations diplomacy could solve the problem, and others were muttering about how diplomacy hadn’t been of any use in dealing with Hitler. Lord Carrington had resigned, the word ‘Exocet’ had suddenly entered into common parlance, hideous personal tragedies were in the process of unfolding, the Argentine dictatorship was about to collapse, and Mrs Thatcher and her government were about to glory in their finest hour.

  All of this was of no consequence to the tall young man who walked unsteadily, his eyes blinking rapidly and the right side of his face twitching. A junkie feels no hunger, but he was nonetheless dizzy with lack of food, not just because he had been travelling for two days without eating, but also because for many months the buying of sustenance had had to take second place to the acquisition of the white powder without which he could no longer function.

  It was astonishing how quickly his descent into dependency had occurred. Other people seemed to be able to shoot up once or twice, experience the bliss of the rush, and then never take heroin again. They could mention it in conversation, and everyone would be impressed by how cool they were, asking them things like ‘But weren’t you scared of getting addicted?’ whereupon they would reply, ‘Well, I felt terrible afterwards for quite a while. I mean, I can’t tell you how terrible you feel, and I thought of taking some more, but then I thought, “Hey, don’t be stupid, you’ve done it and now you don’t have to do it again.”’

  In Michael Henchard’s case, however, the bliss had been so paradisiacal, and the subsequent descent into hell so abysmal, that he had realised straight away that he would have to go out and score some more. Simultaneously, and without any apparent awareness of the contradiction, he had managed to persuade himself that of course he would be able to stop at any time, he could be cool about it when he had to jack it in.

  It was easy to score in Christminster, but it was impossible to continue to be a student there. You can’t study music at such a high level when you’re either stoned and in heaven or desperate with craving, being sick, hallucinating and having diarrhoea. He had spent all his grant money, he had shoplifted, he had raided the wallets of friends, he had stolen from his parents. He had even sold the carriage clock that had come down the family for generations, and the silver plate given to his father by his brother officers on the occasion of his wedding in 1953. The worst thing he did was to persuade his girlfriend, Susan, to try it, and when she’d got to like be
ing stoned, he persuaded her to sleep with the dealer in return for another bag. Then Susan went off with the dealer because she’d got completely hooked, and that way she could get high for free, at least until he tired of her and sold her on to a pimp.

  It was music that kept him going for a while. He had a very fine old violin, and a very great talent, and there was a hinterland between being stoned and being in hell that was just wide enough for him to be able to busk on Marygreen Street, outside one of the famous colleges. Here there would be Japanese and American tourists who had come to experience the atmosphere of the medieval buildings of that famous centre of learning, and here there would be enough young students from rich families, who might toss coins into his open violin case. He was fortunate that he was such a good player, because otherwise the police would have moved him on more often than they did. His appearance had become wild, and he was filthy and emaciated, his speech had degenerated into an ersatz and inarticulate transatlantic patois, but he played like an angel, and this was often enough to extenuate the officiousness even of the Christminster police.

  At night he slept behind the dustbins at the entrance to the underground car park near the Beaumont Hotel, wrapped up in a rug he had stolen from a car, hugging his violin tightly to his chest because his junkie friends knew it was valuable, and none of them, however much they liked him, would have hesitated for one moment to steal it if the opportunity had arisen.

  Finally he had been forced to leave Christminster altogether, because the friend who had originally given him his first high for nothing had inevitably become his supplier, and now he owed him a stupendous amount of money. He had been cornered down at his little patch behind the dustbins, and the dealer’s thugs had given him such a good kicking that he had been doubled up with pain for two days, almost unable to move. One of his front teeth had gone, he had a split lip, and he was sure that he had cracked some ribs. It was an effort to breathe. He was glad that he had had the presence of mind to hide the violin in a dustbin as soon as he heard the noise of footsteps coming down the ramp of the car park so late at night. They would have taken it, without a doubt, and quite probably they would have smashed it.

  Nonetheless, Michael Henchard had gone to his dealer to plead for one more day to pay, and for one more bag of smack, because he didn’t have any more, and if he didn’t have any, then how was he going to get his head together to go out and find the dough?

  It was after obtaining an extension of his debt and one more bag of smack that Michael Henchard took to the road. He left Christminster and walked all the way down Abingdon Road until he reached the roundabout on the southern bypass. He had no idea where he was going. He was fortunate that there were so many music lovers who drove cars, because more often than not it was the sight of the violin case slung over his shoulder that made motorists think that they could trust him, despite his miserable appearance. There were post-hippy types, too, with flowers brightly painted on the doors and roofs of their yellow Volkswagen Beetles and their Renault 4s, who would assume that he might be, ‘Like, in a band, or something cool like that, man’.

  On the first day, which included many hours of waiting in the rain at the roadside whilst respectable people whizzed past, he managed to travel down the A34 to Wintoncester, where he spent a night in a bus shelter with a garrulous alcoholic. On the second day he went along the A272 and the A30 to Melchester, and from there he got a lift with an inexplicably charitable and respectable old lady in a venerable Singer Gazelle, who took him down the A354 to Casterbridge. All the way she talked at high speed and with complete inconsequence about the many relatives of hers who were acquainted with various baronets, deans and bishops, and did not notice that her passenger was white-faced and black-eyed with torment in the back.

  She pressed a one-pound note into his hands, and left him at Grey’s Bridge, where he read a bronze plaque set into the stones, that quaintly threatened deportation for anyone who wilfully damaged it, and then he set off up the hill into the town. He had decided that he would not take his last dose of smack until he reached the centre. Such arbitrary targets are routinely set, such decisions routinely made, and as routinely broken, by addicts of all complexions.

  He could tell that it was a beautiful old town, even though beauty in all its forms had recently become all but imperceptible to him. Ancient buildings lined the long hill of High East Street, and there was something gentle and consolatory about the way that the houses had settled into their foundations as if enjoying a nap after lunch. Outside a newsagent’s he saw a stand with a poster for the Sun newspaper on it, which read ‘GOTCHA!’ and he wondered briefly what it meant.

  Unsure of where he was going or what he intended to do, he crossed over Top o’Town roundabout, and had begun to walk along the Port Bredy Road, when he realised that he had come too far. He turned around and retraced his steps, not even noticing the large bronze monument on his left.

  What he did notice, however, was a small shop on his right, with ‘Farfrae’s Music’ painted above the window in Gothic script. In days past he would have been thrilled to have come across it. He would have gone in, regardless of the protests of whomever he was with, and he would have rifled through the violin section looking for duets. He would have wanted to know what kind of rosin was in stock, and whether or not there were interesting kinds of strings. He would have tried out every violin there, even though he had never in his life come across anything better than the one he had, and no one these days stocked anything except student ones from China. An initially truculent shopkeeper would inevitably have been won over by the extraordinary cantabile tone that the boy could produce even on the cheapest instrument.

  Now, however, Michael Henchard was thinking only about getting enough money to score another hit after he had used the one that was left. He had no idea where he could score, but junkies who find themselves in strange places, like homosexuals who can detect others just by the look in someone’s eyes, seem to have an instinct. He would go into the Three Mariners or the Greyhound Inn, and he would spot someone in the corner of a public bar, someone who looked out of place, someone marginal, and there would be a moment of recognition. Even if that person wasn’t a junkie themselves, they would know someone who was. Maybe there would be someone loitering in a dark street for no apparent purpose. The most important thing was to find the money first, and then he could work out a way to get the smack.

  Behind the counter of Farfrae’s Music was a young man in his mid-twenties, with a handlebar moustache, and golden hair that was brushed across his forehead and came down to the collar of his cheerful pink shirt. Donald Farfrae had the most musical of Scottish accents, from somewhere outside Edinburgh, and he knew many a sad Scottish ballad, which he could render in an expressive tenor voice. Every teenage girl in Casterbridge had a crush on him, some of them even taking up an instrument so as to have an excuse to while away the time in his shop. They would notice how his forehead shone when the light caught it, and how nicely his hair was cut, and the sort of velvet pile or down that was on the skin at the back of his neck, and how his cheek was so truly curved as to be part of a globe, and how clearly drawn were the lids and lashes which hid his grey eyes. When Michael Henchard entered the shop, Donald Farfrae was singing to himself, ‘It’s hame, and it’s hame, hame fain would I be, O hame, hame, hame, to my ain countree—’ He stopped abruptly, however, when he saw Henchard.

  No one would have been pleased to find Michael Henchard walking into an otherwise empty shop where they were the sole member of staff. It was bad enough getting alcoholics and the occasional tramp, but even so, none of these were as dreadful as some of the local music teachers. Not even the music teachers, however, could have been as bad as Michael Henchard, who was not only filthy, bedraggled, toggle-haired, cadaverous and wild-eyed, but also had about him an unpredictable air of violence, or even madness.

  ‘Can I help you at all?’ asked Farfrae, determined to remain cool, and make the best of it.

 
; ‘It’s this, man,’ said Henchard, placing the violin case on the counter.

  ‘What about it, sir? How can I be of assistance?’ Farfrae fervently wished that Henchard would just go away. He sometimes got characters like this in the shop, who, like malfunctioning satellites, were more or less lost and disorientated on the way to Glastonbury. They invariably talked in fake American accents. You could tell the junkies because they could hardly keep their eyes open, they were always in a dreadful state of health, they often smelled repulsive, and they could speak only in languid monotones. They normally bought a plectrum, or one top E string for a folk guitar. He noticed that Henchard had rows of festering scabs on his forearms. ‘O shit,’ he thought.