The Scorpion-Fish

by Nicolas Bouvier

  I limped around the unlit streets for ages, afraid of finding myself back at my miserable hotel. With a great clatter the last little Chinese cafés were pulling down their iron curtains covered in splashy ideograms. Rats dashed between the peelings and the moon sailed over the brilliant, dark foliage. It felt as hot as broad daylight.

  Madame de Sévigné …? What an ass!

  The clinic

  The day before yesterday, as I ate my bread in the morning, I noticed that it seemed to be eating me. Blood was pounding in my swollen gums, forming a line around each tooth, along the course of each nerve, like an anatomical diagram. High fever and continual vomiting. To make the most of this capital where I’d got nothing done, I went to have my blood and lungs checked, and to have two bad teeth pulled in a free clinic in the northern suburb. A tall villa, blind and decrepit in a garden that nature was gently repossessing. I found two doctors, two nurses, three dozen or so jolly yokels eaten away by various diseases. They seemed to have decided to end their lives there, where the food was sufficient, they were assured of company, and would be given some relief if not actually cured. A little court of miracles where, after a shocked moment, they fussed over me as though the arrival of a western sahib was a guarantee of the quality of their treatment. Not a hint of formality, just a friendly routine. At the end of the afternoon, the x-rays taken during the day were passed through an ancient magic lantern and projected on to a sheet for our edification. Moth-eaten lungs, choked bronchial tubes, spines eaten by osteosarcoma. We were all there to see the show, to see offal and worn-out anatomies file past with oohs and aahs and sshs, excited and grinning as though at the cinema. We were far from the centre of town and there weren’t many distractions. When my own lungs appeared, obviously those of a wealthy person, scarcely darkened or damaged, there was almost an ovation. As though I’d got a hole in one. In short, all these sickly people were rejoicing to see me so well-equipped to survive them. It was the moment I chose, bathed in triumph, compliments, thumped on the back, to faint like a diva overwhelmed by flowers … I came round, already tucked up in a clean bed, a dark, preoccupied face with large pores bending over mine. Stethoscope, bifocal glasses in which the room appeared upside down, borne up on a kind of swell. I heard a voice which said, each syllable as distinct as coins jingled in a pocket, ‘Nev-er-think-you-are-a-lone,’ then some talk of typhoid with a colleague out of sight, and of keeping me here for a bit. He was mistaken, I’d had my vaccinations and would be back on my feet sooner than he thought. But two days in fresh sheets would be welcome. Saw a cockroach run over the doctor’s wilting collar, finger the air with its antennae as though asking my advice, plunge into the neckline of the shirt — and fell calmly back into the darkness.

  The doctor wasn’t lying: there’s no risk of being alone here. There is always a coming and going of coughing, toothless people around my bed. The broad-beamed gossips, their eyes glazed by trachoma, wipe my forehead with their handkerchiefs. An old man with trembling lips shoves towards me the betel-plug he had hardly begun to chew. Others are content to sit back on their heels and smile. Through the padding of fever I see these old, vacant faces light up like stations. They have the compassion of people who have nothing more to lose, and I gratefully accept it. All the same this swarm of solicitude — they even accompany me to the lavatory — is tiring. When she wants to give me an injection, or when she sees that it’s all too much for me, the nurse shoos away my escort like flies. They disperse then, limping and puffing. This rout makes me laugh and it also reminds me somehow — in a flash of nostalgia for Burgundy — of a family of mushrooms gobbled up by slugs.

  The patient in the next bed is the only one who does not share the general lightheartedness. He is an astrologer from the south of the Island, therefore almost my kinsman, who speaks a refined English, considers that he has really come down in the world by being here, and never misses an opportunity of letting us know it.

  He specialized in race-horse horoscopes (there is even more betting here than in my town), which he used to sell — hand-in-glove with the bookmakers — to punters always in hot water. He had neglected to read his own: the day before yesterday a vicious mare’s shoe had smashed his chest. This kick, unpredicted in his stars, had left him with not many hours to live. As horses weren’t admitted in visiting hours, he felt that I was hogging the limelight and cheating him of his proper death; he longed for company too, and someone to close his eyes, which is only natural. The nurse obliged him that very night.

  Free shave today

  ‘You most certainly got God knows what nasty bug,’ said the doctor, ceremoniously pumping me by the hand. The enormous banyans which surround his benevolent institution scarcely stir against a grey sky saturated like a sponge. Fortunately this diagnosis, like the treatment I’d received, was free. More than the calcium or the aureomycine, it was what I’d heard him say as I came to, and the liveliness of his gently dying patients, that put me back on my feet again. Two days in their company had made me lighter than a smoke ring.

  To travel: putting your head on the block a hundred times, picking it out of the bran tub a hundred times to find it almost unchanged. You hope for a miracle, but you shouldn’t expect one beyond the wear and tear of the life with which you have a rendezvous, against which you’re wrong to kick.

  This morning I shaved off the beard I’d worn since Iran: the face hidden beneath had almost disappeared. It is empty, sanded down like a pebble, a bit chipped around the edges. I can’t fathom anything beyond this erosion: it’s like an exclamation mark, or a question posed with wild-eyed courtesy, whose sense I’m not sure I’ve grasped. A step towards the minimal is a step in the right direction. How many years before I really get the better of that self which stands in the way of everything? Ulysses spoke truer than he knew when he cupped his hands and shouted to Cyclops that he was ‘No man’. You don’t travel in order to deck yourself with exoticism and anecdotes like a Christmas tree, but so that the route plucks you, rinses you, wrings you out, makes you like one of those towels threadbare with washing that are handed out with slivers of soap in brothels. You leave far behind the excuses or curses of your birthplace, and in each filthy bundle lugged about in crowded waiting rooms, on little station platforms appalling in their heat and misery, you see your own coffin going by. Without this detachment and lucidity, how can you hope to convey what you have seen? Become a reflection, an echo, a current of air, silent guest at the edge of the table before uttering a word.

  I cleaned my razor carefully, as though seeing it for the first time, and set off once more for Galle.

  VI

  The Bus

  ‘You must adjust yourself to general stagnation.’

  — Ministry of Transport, April 1955

  In the long-forgotten time when piety still mattered on the Island, when parakeets spontaneously broke into sutras, you wouldn’t often have seen a bonze taking to the road. They used to move around by magic, tucking up their robes, mounting the winds, spinning like crimson cannonballs towards the Golden Isles or the Himalayas, unless they chose to plunge into the earth with a terrifying bang.

  As their wickedness has long since deprived them of these powers, much against their will they have been reduced to using public transport, for which they have to pay like anyone else. He who has lost his virtue will cling all the more to his privileges. Their frustration knows no bounds. Thus the great pontiffs of the Monastery of the Tooth-Relic (a crocodile tooth, Buddha’s having been stolen and burnt in the sixteenth century by Portuguese infidels), who rank above all the others, have an old, highly acrimonious quarrel with the union of bus conductors: the pink bus linking my town with the capital all too often displays traces of it. At least three times a year it is blown up, momentarily shaking off the lethargy which I’ve begun to distrust, since it’s apparently only the calm in the eye of the storm.

  All the same, it’s a good old bus, as long as you’re not fooled by the sleepy appearance of the professional
pickpockets who are always on board. While you are absorbed in looking at the shoreline praised by Thomas Cook, your watch disappears, your wallet evaporates, the contents of your inside pocket go up in a puff of smoke, and occasionally even people vanish into thin air, on account of those explosive toys that are all the rage for a few weeks. The bonzes hide them under the great folds of their yellow robes, then put them in the luggage rack and get out at the next stop pretending to be rapt in meditation, just before the grand finale.

  When you arrive in the bus following one of these pyrotechnic feats, it has to be seen to be believed: ice-cream coloured cases and umbrellas strewn everywhere, some even dangling from palm trees; large chignon combs far away from the heads that will not need them anymore; and the wounded in sarongs, carmine, violet, cinnabar — marvellous colours for a Deposition — lined along a road sparkling with crushed glass. Two cops, rolling their eyes, count them over and over again. In the middle of the road, a pair of round, metal-rimmed spectacles lifts its arms in the air, an enormous insect, angry and fragile, in search of a nose flown off the Devil knows where.

  VII

  The Zone of Silence

  When my legs are steady enough, when my head doesn’t buzz too much, I leave my room and go to feed myself on milky tea, bananas and soggy slices of bread and jam — in this climate the bread is no tougher than we are — at the little café belonging to the witness. Since he had been witness for a western-style marriage, my Fort neighbours gave him the name and I adopted it too, as his other, real name has over fourteen syllables and I need to save my strength if I want to get out of here one day.

  It’s less than a hundred metres from door to door. The small café is dark, friendly, filled with a blue half-light that seems almost tangible to those coming from outside. Do come in, sit down for a moment, in silence if possible — the chair facing mine is always empty — and get an idea of it yourself. On the ceiling and the walls, crêpe-paper garlands and old chromium plates of the Buddha. On the counter, photos of the family. In one of them you see men with hair drawn back into chignons, pith helmets in hand, during their service in the Malaysian army. In the other, the witness and his young wife under a banyan, surrounded by a crowd of relations with heavy, vacant expressions. He has the air of a snipe that’s just been snared; she, a black pudding with thick braids, has an orange-blossom crown drooping above her bovine stare. A Christian marriage: in a slightly faded corner of the picture you can make out a Jesuit, all shrivelled up with amoebiasis.

  The tables are covered in poppy-patterned oilcloth, continually perspiring, mopped up by drunken flies. My table is against the window, underneath the racing calendar. It’s often consulted because here, even dockers earning eighty rupees a month gamble their wages on horses they never see, who eat more often than they do, and gallop in the clear air of faraway hills for elegant young ladies.

  And let’s not forget the ancient slot-machine at the back of the cafe; it has ended up here after thirty years of service in Brighton, and is always surrounded by a few gangling boys with burning eyes. It is the principal attraction of this place, which I find good for writing, for summoning my ghosts and shades. All the better because no one disturbs me. The almost palpable surprise which greeted me on the first few days has already disappeared. It’s a question of language first of all: after two months I’ve got just enough to be able to do my shopping. A matter of topics too: I don’t bet on the races, and as for everything else, my neighbours know better than I what it costs to think here. A matter of prudence, in the end, since they’re all convinced that I wouldn’t have landed up here except under duress, shunned by my own kind after some shameful escapade. Our relations are thus reduced to a reciprocal tolerance, hesitant and shy. Flat calm: I could drown in it, nose in saucer, without anyone other than the cockroaches being aware of it for ages. But it’s fine as it is: these thin-hipped figures, these colours conspiring and harmonizing in the shadows, this place unlike any I’ve known, a lair where I take the double pulse of the town, that of the men and that of the insects.

  Here men’s lives are slow, futile, complex, shot through with rare flashes of white-hot anger which usually end on the gallows in front of the Fort. I don’t know how many communities — Pariah fishermen, Tamil shopkeepers, modest Sinhalese rentiers, Afghan moneychangers, Hindus, Christians, Buddhists, westernized minor officials — scornfully rub shoulders, yet very rarely find the nerve to come to blows.

  The bonzes in yellow robes, more feared for their evil spells than respected for their virtues, come down once or twice a week from the big monasteries in the hills to fill their bowls, their purses, and to ogle the languid female livestock. Their impudence goes a long way back; even in the oldest island chronicle the principal merit of the ‘good kings’ is their offering feasts to these scroungers. They have always been the public face of ‘Religion’ here, Pharisees under parasols, with their coquettish fans, heads shaven like police spies, and their guile. A good Buddhist can only be distressed by them, images of a distorted, cheapened faith, magic gone sour. They throw themselves at women — everyone admits it — who often dare not resist a robe; fortunately, a jealous peasant occasionally pumps lead into one of these lotharios, and that certainly makes him reconsider the life he has labelled an illusion. It always results in beautifully orchestrated funerals, with psalms, canopies, little bells, relics, litanies, an interminable procession of hypocrites — the very same who doubtless rejoiced over the despatch — and I insult them when I pass, one fist raised gaily in the unbelievable heat. They look back with enough malice to turn me into a mere puff of steam, a risk I run anyway as soon as I move.

  But to return to the café. The table next to mine is occupied at meal times by the clerks, my only interlocutors. Half a dozen chaps in their late twenties who ‘work’ in the customs office, court or post office, and whose English is better than mine. They’ve all read Jane Austen, and they club together to buy a racy magazine called Whispering, which they pass around according to seniority in the course of the week. You can imagine the state in which it reaches the last man. They wear straight trousers and vie with each other in condescending to their fellow creatures in sarongs. ‘White collar people’, they dub themselves complacently. A distinction they cling to but which makes no sense here, where everyone ceaselessly washes, rinses, scours, rubs his tongue with pumice stone to remove impurities, where the smallest scraps of cloth are bleached and dried at least twice a day. This continual cleansing amounts to a kind of fetish, as if in the town, on the island, in life, there were a very ancient stain, impossible to wipe out. With my two showers a day, I am unsavoury by comparison. They are ‘white collar people’, valiant champions of the polished shoe, the sharp pleat, the western pocket, yet noisy as crows; their souls are somewhat empty, gradually denatured by three or four successive occupiers. They may keep changing their manners and their dress to suit the fashion, but in the end it is no use, those who succeed are the genuine article: Flanders lace, English cloth. What remains after this race to out-dress and outguess, where you ditch your identity entirely, or lose part of it, or at the least finish up bathed in sweat? (In this hothouse atmosphere, the ‘chief justices’, black as pitch, wear wigs on the bench.) A few small matters which our Albuquerque, de Ruyter, Lord Clive, all boiling with ague or dazed with opium, had neglected to consider. Take debts, for example. What helps to fill my friends’ lives are the little debts they run up in order to drink or bet on Saturdays. They are a form of distraction, these debts: modest as they are, the interest accumulates, so you take your umbrella and go off to pacify the moneylender. Or he comes to pester you, and you slip away under the pretext of a bout of malaria, or a relative’s death — in short, create a little bustle to pass the time. A debt is like a sickness, something you contract, which follows you around and almost takes you by the hand, something you can complain of and talk about endlessly. For it should be remembered that worry is better than no feeling at all. In any case, it makes you forget
the week’s desk and the bulging dossiers peppered with fraying scraps of paper, where the writing looks like half-moons dotted with powder-puffs, and the upside-down question marks never elicit replies: I’ll vouch for that.

  ‘Hi! splendid! … Let’s make it a day! … Too bad for you old chap!’ Each midday as they sit down I’m allotted my pat on the back; they snort, stick out their chests, favour me with a manly, phlegmatic look. As if we had a lifetime of cricket behind us, had been at Sandhurst, shared a litter of pugs, won the doubles together at Wimbledon. Close your eyes a moment to help us! This pathetic Edwardian pantomime has really one purpose: briefly to transform this eatinghouse, as black as a pot, into one of those exclusive clubs (can you hear the ice-cubes tinkle in the glasses, and the voices almost suffocated by distinction?) to which neither they nor I would ever gain access. An absolutely galactic distance separates us from such a dream of freshness, vast lawns, and studiously cultivated self-control. Members only and dress for dinner. Even with my scanty knowledge of England, it makes my heart sink. Here we are prostrated by the heat. Then let’s dream, between the cockroach, the over-ripe banana and the mended collar. Dream on, gentlemen; my best wishes go with you. I have other fish to fry, because it’s you I’m interested in.