What Am I Doing Here?

by Bruce Chatwin

  ‘Yes, Monsieur Jacques.’

  ‘This is an English gentleman and we must find him a very special bottle of champagne. You have Krug?’

  ‘No, Monsieur Jacques. We have Roerderer. We have Bollinger, and we have Mumm.’

  ‘Bollinger,’ I said.

  Jacques pulled a face: ‘And in Guerini’s time you could have had your oysters. Flown in twice a week from Paris . . . Belons . . . Claires . . . Portugaises . . . ’

  ‘I remember him.’

  ‘He was a character.’

  ‘Tell me,’ I leaned over. ‘What was going on?’

  ‘Sssh!’ His lips tightened. ‘There are two theories, and if I think anyone’s listening, I shall change the subject.’

  I nodded and looked at the menu.

  ‘In the official version,’ Jacques said, ‘the mercenaries were recruited by Dahomean émigrés in Paris. The plane took off from a military airfield in Morocco, refuelled in Abidjan . . . ’

  One of the whores got up from her table and lurched down the restaurant towards the Ladies.

  “66 was a wonderful year,’ said Jacques, decisively.

  ‘I like it even older,’ I said, as the whore brushed past, ‘dark and almost flat . . . ’

  ‘The plane flew to Gabon to pick up the commander . . . who is supposed to be an adviser to President Bongo . . . ’ He then explained how, at Libreville, the pilot of the chartered DC-8 refused to go on, and the mercenaries had to switch to a DC-7.

  ‘So their arrival was expected at the airport?’

  ‘Precisely,’ Jacques agreed. ‘Now the second scenario . . . ’

  The door of the Ladies swung open. The whore winked at us. Jacques pushed his face up to the menu.

  ‘What’ll you have?’ he asked.

  ‘Stuffed crab,’ I said.

  ‘The second scenario’, he continued quietly, ‘calls for Czech and East German mercenaries. The plane, a DC-7, takes off from a military airfield in Algeria, refuels at Conakry . . . you understand?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, when he’d finished. ‘I think I get it. And which one do you believe?’

  ‘Both,’ he said.

  ‘That’, I said, ‘is a very sophisticated analysis.’

  ‘This’, he said, ‘is a very sophisticated country.’

  ‘I know it.’

  ‘You heard the shooting at Camp Gezo?’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Settling old scores,’ he shrugged. ‘And now the Guineans have taken over the Secret Police.’

  ‘Clever.’

  ‘This is Africa.’

  ‘I know and I’m leaving.’

  ‘For England?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘For Brazil. I’ve a book to write.’

  ‘Beautiful country, Brazil.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘Beautiful women.’

  ‘So I’m told.’

  ‘So what is this book?’

  ‘It’s about the slave-trade.’

  ‘In Benin?’

  ‘Also in Brazil.’

  ‘Eh bien!’ The champagne had come and he filled my glass. ‘You have material!’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘I do have material.’

  1984

  THE LYMAN FAMILY

  A Story

  I have a friend called Jack who has been writing articles on the alternative society for the Boston Globe. Mel Lyman, who is, I believe, a scion of Old Boston, spent time in California as a guitarist. He has returned to his native city where, in the thrall of lysergic acid, he has persuaded himself and the ‘Family’ that he is Christ.

  The Lyman Family publishes a broadsheet called Avatar. It usually contains a photo of the Saviour, with his triangular jaw and crooked grin, floating through the galaxies in the lotus position. Here are some specimens of his prose:

  ‘I’m Christ. I swear to God, in person, and I’m about to turn this foolish world upside down.’

  ‘I am here as the World Heart and I am not alone.’

  ‘I am master of my own fate.’

  ‘What they fail to realise is that the 20th-century Saviour is going to outfox them all — yes – he’s going to crucify HIMSELF.’

  He has also put out an album for children: ‘Puff the Magic Dragon.’

  I was a bit apprehensive about going to the Lyman Family. The Saviour is very shy and doesn’t have any teeth at present. Besides, another friend who went there found his orange juice had been laced with LSD. He was taken into a ‘sacrament chamber’ where there was a light-show and stereophonic sound. At the end of the ‘trip’ the Saviour appeared in person.

  You can see Roxbury Hill for miles because a tall monument crowns it, built to commemorate Boston’s gallant defence against the British. A hundred years ago this was a fashionable neighbourhood: now it is in the black section. The houses of the Lyman Family adjoin an area of rough ground below the monument.

  It was a windy winter afternoon. Smutty icicles hung from the eaves. All the doors and windows were boarded-up, and the doorbells ripped out. The garden was surrounded by a high wall, roughly built of re-used stone blocks, column bases, pilasters and fragments of decorative marble which the Family had looted from the grander houses of Roxbury Hill. The wall had the superficial appearance of an early Christian church built out of Roman ruins.

  Jack led the way to a wooden trap-door in the garden. He hammered out a signal and it opened. We climbed down some steps, past the guard, into a subterranean passage. Arranged in a rack there was an arsenal of repeater rifles with telescopic sights. The passage took us into the nursery.

  It was a warm and comfortable room, and small children were playing despondently on the floor. There were no toys. A mother-to-be in a cotton house-coat had spread herself on the stairs. She didn’t move.

  Jack showed me into the kitchen.

  ‘Burgeoning domesticity,’ he said. ‘They do all their own woodwork.’

  A small boy, about four or five, rushed in from another room and hugged my knees.

  ‘Daddy,’ he shouted, ‘Daddee . . . !’

  I unclasped his arms and knelt down.

  ‘I’m not Daddy,’ I said.

  ‘Oh!’ He walked away in silence.

  ‘That child’s drugged,’ I said to Jack.

  ‘Sure he’s drugged,’ he said.

  On the wall there hung a poster of Charles Manson, in brilliant day-glo pink, with a lighted candle beneath it.

  It was a Saturday, and on Saturdays the Lyman Family watches the ball game on television.

  ‘They’re all in Number 6,’ volunteered the mother-to-be, and still she didn’t move.

  Jack and I, following the arrows as bidden, threaded our way along another underground passage and came up under the Viewing Room. We had arrived just in time for the opening of the Super Bowl game in the Tulane Stadium, New Orleans. On the screen the drum-majorettes were marching; the band played ‘America, America’, and the Lyman Family — thirty or more of them – sitting on a tier of benches – were bawling their heads off: ‘America! America!’

  When not used for viewing, the room converts into a school for children. Two charts plotted the axis of American History. The Stars and Stripes hung from the ceiling. The Third Coming was for white Anglo-Saxons only.

  There were three televisions, one in colour. We sat on one of the benches.

  ‘Who are you?’ asked the boy on my left. He was in his late twenties, fair-haired with watery eyes and pimples.

  ‘I’m from England,’ I said. ‘I’ve come with Jack here.’

  ‘Who’s Jack?’ he said, disagreeably.

  ‘He’s a friend of Wayne.’

  ‘Well, that’s all right then.’ He continued to munch his popcorn.

  ‘Oh! I’m glad you’re here right now,’ he burst out abruptly. ‘You’ve certainly picked the best time to be here. It’s so beautiful when we’re all together watching the ball game. You really get an idea how beautiful it is to live in a commune. I came back from Wisconsin fo
r the ball game. I couldn’t miss it. Man, I’m glad to be back. I am certainly glad to be back.’

  The Saviour was sprawled over the biggest, plushest armchair like a movie mogul. An angular girl nestled her curls in his lap. From time to time he flicked himself into the lotus position on the wing of the chair. He operated the three TV sets with remote-control switches. He had scraped his hair forward to conceal the beginning of baldness.

  A member of the Family complained he couldn’t see the screen because the Saviour’s reading-lamp was in the way.

  ‘Too bad,’ said the Saviour. ‘I have to see to write. How about a beer everybody? How many beers in the fridge?’

  ‘Zero beers,’ a voice called from the back.

  ‘Zero beers! Somebody’s going to be sorry. Very sorry!’

  On the Saviour’s left there was a table cluttered with almanacs, note pads and a chart pinned to a board. Now and then he picked up the board and jotted down a few quick notes.

  The Kansas City Chiefs were in red. The Family cheered wildly as they ran onto the field. The Minnesota Vikings were in white with rainbow stripes down the sides of their trousers. The Family cheered again.

  The Saviour frantically scribbled notes and consulted the almanac. I noticed that the Family were focused on Him rather than on the ball game. It then dawned on me that this was some kind of divinatory exercise. He had consulted the horoscopes of all the players and would predict the result of the game. There seemed to be some significance as to who passed the ball to whom.

  The Minnesota Vikings and the Kansas City Chiefs rambled about the field, which had been dyed mauve and yellow.

  ‘I’ve had a wild conviction,’ the Saviour screamed with prophetic fury. ‘It just came to me. Minnesota will lead Kansas 13-10 in the first half.’

  It soon became apparent that the wild conviction was misguided. The Minnesota Vikings failed to score but the Kansas City Chiefs scored with convincing regularity.

  ‘It’s that rule,’ he shrieked. ‘That damn rule! I’ve been hating that rule all season. I hate that rule. I HATE THAT RULE! Why doesn’t someone do something about it? It stops me getting through.’

  Half-time was called: the Saviour was thoroughly depressed. Jack and I followed the Family members as they dispersed through the house. On the door of the community living room there was a notice. TAKE YOUR SHOES OFF. DON’T DIRTY THE CARPET.

  The carpet was new and bright red. The walls were dark red, and the furniture dark, late nineteenth-century and art nouveau. The curly-headed blonde was scraping at the varnish of the dining-room table.

  ‘What did I tell you?’ Jack said. ‘Home handicrafts.’

  The Saviour and his bodyguard bore down on us and asked Jack, unpleasantly, why the hell he’d come back. He acknowledged the explanation and turned to me.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘An English friend of mine,’ said Jack.

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Bruce.’

  ‘What’s your sign, Bruce?’

  ‘Taurus.’

  ‘Taurus? D’ya mean Taurus?’

  ‘Yes. May 13.’

  ‘You’re a liar, Bruce.’

  ‘I was born on May 13.’

  ‘Look at him.’

  The bodyguard, in a black sweat-shirt, flexed his biceps.

  ‘He’s Taurus. Now look at yourself. You’re a wimp!’

  I was very relieved when a big-breasted girl interrupted the interview.

  ‘Where am I going to sit for my neck massage?’ the Saviour asked.

  ‘Here on the chaise-longue,’ she answered sullenly and began the work.

  In another room Jack and I talked to another of the girls. She said the Family were saving up to buy Him a new set of teeth:

  ‘He lost his own set when he went on speed.

  ‘A trip with Him’, she droned on, ‘is a very moving and beautiful experience. If you’ve never been on acid before, it would be that much more beautiful . . . and the most beautiful moment of all is when he rescues you . . . you then know he’s the Saviour. And I used to think he was mad!’

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ I said to Jack.

  I overheard three young men discussing guard duty — against the blacks.

  One of them escorted us down the passage, opened the trap-door, and we were out in the cold.

  The sun had left an afterglow and the buildings of downtown Boston were turning from ultramarine to black.

  ‘Whew!’ I inhaled the freezing air. ‘Never again!’

  From the New York Times the next day:

  ‘Kansas City was all Chiefs and no Indians in the field today as the American League Champions upset the Minnesota Vikings 23 — 7 in the Super Bowl game at the Tulane Stadium.’

  1988

  UNTIL MY BLOOD IS PURE

  A Story

  There was another Englishman staying at the Hotel Beauregard. His khaki trousers were big in the seat and narrow at the ankles. He spent a lot of time talking to the boy at the reception desk. The boy wore a thick silver namebracelet around his very slender wrist, and was acting coy.

  The Englishman was writing a history of the German Colonial Empire. He had been investigating the activities of the Black African Nazi Movement, here in Douala, in the late Thirties. Black men in black shirts with red armbands and black swastikas. The idea made him very excited.

  The owner of the hotel, Monsieur Anatole, was a man in his sixties who always wore a grey double-breasted suit and two-tone shoes. He was a member of the Bamiléké tribe. He also owned a fleet of taxis and the Confidence Trading Company. Monsieur Anatole had the idea of going to Rhodesia to fight for his black brothers. He told me he would go, personally, to Rhodesia, and thumped his hand hard on his chest, and held it there.

  None of the waiters at the Hotel Beauregard was a Bamiléké. But almost all the guests were.

  They drove down from the hills in Monsieur Anatole’s taxis, and came in powdered from head to foot with red dust. They made straight for the shower upstairs. When they came out, they were black and gleaming, and over the floor of the shower there was a thin layer of mud.

  After dark they put on tight white shirts and bright blue suits and went up onto the roof to drink Monsieur Anatole’s whisky. Later in the evening, they would lounge about the bar and look over the whores.

  The other foreign guest was a Chinese who went everywhere clutching a black attaché case.

  It was hot and airless in the bar. All the lights were red. The one white light came from the door leading into the hall, where the Englishman was still chatting to the receptionist. It was almost ten o’clock. The boy would soon be off duty.

  A man beside me was pretending to read a newspaper, but the pages glowed red and the print was unreadable. Over the bar there was an advertisement for Guinness and a slogan: Le Qualité de l’Homme Fait Son Trésor. In the Republic of Cameroon Guinness is thought to be an aphrodisiac. The barmaid wore a green plastic harp in her hair.

  The waiter had spilled a can of pineapple juice on the floor, the smell of pineapple mixed with the smell of disinfectant and the smell of Guinness and sweat. The seats were covered in warm red plastic. Your back stuck to it and came away with the sound of sticking-plaster.

  Three Bamilékés came in with two girls and sat at the next table. Like most Bamilékés, they were big men with very round mouths. They were swimming in sweat. Grey patches gradually spread over their shirts. They ordered two beers and a whisky, and soft drinks for the girls.

  The waiter moved clumsily. His arm muscles bulged out from under his shirt sleeves, and were netted with thick veins. He was a simple, placid boy and he smiled easily. He thought he had understood the order, but he came back and asked them to repeat it. One of the men went over it slowly, in French. His companion turned to me.

  ‘Lui,’ he pointed to the waiter. ‘Lui, il ne comprend pas. Il est sous-developpé parce qu’il a été né dans la zone britannique.’

  The waiter came from
West Cameroon, which was once a British Protectorate.

  His face puckered with furious concentration. He looked along his biceps muscle at the tray with empty glasses on it. Then he grinned. And the grin grew and grew and the red light caught his teeth and made them glow.

  ‘Sir!’ he said to me. ‘Dis people dey be fashun no fine. Dey was fashun by de Frenchman and dey hab no mannars.’

  There were five whores attached to Monsieur Anatole’s hotel — five permanents with rooms of their own – and several transients who took their customers out with them. Four of the residents were thin, but Big Mary was the biggest whore I have ever seen.

  Her shoulders heaved like a volcano when she laughed, and her smile lit up white and gold. She lumbered from table to table, wisecracking with the men, who creased up and cried out loud and hung onto their stomachs for laughing.

  ‘That,’ said one of the Roundmouths, ‘is the première putain du Beauregard.’

  ‘So I see.’

  ‘You like her?’

  ‘Not for me.’

  ‘Ha!’ said Roundmouth, who, having discovered I didn’t like fat women, assumed I did like thin women, and decided to take me in hand. He enumerated the charms of all present and selected for me a fifteen-year-old, all arms and legs in a dress of see-through pink. She sat alone in a corner, chewing something.

  I walked over in her direction and pretended to take a look.

  ‘Don’t touch them, Sir!’

  The Chinese was at my elbow.

  ‘Don’t touch them. There will be diseases.’

  The girl sat up, interested, and looked me up and down with sad, amused eyes.

  ‘Qu’est-ce que c’est?’ She thumbed the Chinese.

  ‘C’est un Chinois.’

  ‘What she say?’ asked the Chinese.

  ‘She asked who you were and I said you were Chinese.’

  ‘Mais qu’est-ce que c’est?’

  ‘Un Chinois,’ I repeated.

  ‘Chinois?’ she stuck out her lower lip. ‘Connais-pas Chinois! C’est garçon ou fille ou quoi?’

  ‘Garçon.’

  ‘Et ce n‘est pas beau,’ she said, definitely.

  ‘Did she ask you?’ asked the Chinese.