The Scorpion-Fish

by Nicolas Bouvier

  The account of my trip to M— and the welcome reserved for me there at least recaptured some muchneeded attention at the boarding-house. I had found a subject, indeed a notorious one, to enliven the sluggish conversation. In fact my friends were obsessed with occult tricks. This little town baked in sun and salt inspired them with a fear which made them garrulous at sundown, over the spilt arak sticking brass beakers to the dirty table, unlocked their grievances and stories of perils barely escaped. Even my Trotskyites at the ‘Oriental Patissery’ were always interested in the mishaps and powers of these neighbours who — they assured me — ‘could stretch out a finger and touch the moon’. Tonight they asked me what there is in my country in the way of ‘jadoo’ (black or white magic). I was at a loss to reply, I prevaricated … ‘Well, boots squeak if they haven’t been paid for … Sorcerers fly astride broomsticks.’ This evidently struck them as rather feeble, and what’s more, not very sensible. Why encumber yourself with a broomstick when here it’s enough to murmur a mantra to whizz through the night in a twinkling? It’s this mechanical, utilitarian spirit that has blinkered and impoverished the west ever since Archimedes and Leonardo. They think that we lost our psychic powers by inventing the wheelbarrow or the capstan, and that nothing could survive the invention of the steamship. As for the timid claim for boots … here, the thief’s feet rot in his sandals before he has even turned the corner.

  XII

  Showing Tonight

  The last evening shower had been sliced down as though by one stroke of a scythe. The sea flattens out. My balcony is dripping. The steamy town has returned to its uneasy slumber, and its smell reaches me in little gusts like a sleeper’s breath. Citronella, dried cod from the grocery, the flat stench of the latrines in my courtyard, where the spiders are crunching on cockroaches. In the sea swell’s silences you only need to prick up your ears a little to hear the creaking of insect carapaces.

  Not a shadow, not the merest flotsam or jetsam of an idea. The day didn’t want anything to do with me. I hadn’t been able to salvage a scrap of it and my aching head was hot. If my legs would carry me, I would go as far as the battlements to take advantage of the fugitive freshness. I know that behind me the Fort’s little streets regained, as they do every night, their trance-like beauty which had so seduced me from the beginning. It’s true that we’re really spoilt here, with the blurred lantern of the Southern Cross and the mellow colours concealed in the darkness. I don’t let myself take anything more on board. I have enough shadows in my mind and this melancholy, aimless show is just too much for a solitary spectator, especially since I’ve become so shaky. All the same, I should like to know what someone is plotting at my expense, and where this perverse stubbornness comes from that keeps me here. The night is full of prancing stone unicorns, and rusting anchors with the arms of the House of Orange lie on the battlements, so heavy that only the hyacinths can bury them. And here I am, each elbow in a pool of sweat, soliloquizing in this empty theatre — where monologues will never carry any weight — looking at the skate-head simmering on my primus without seeing it. It’s inconceivable that no one should have written a drama worthy of this equatorial Palladian setting, that no one has performed a tragedy or an opera against this old colonial backdrop, cropped by young goats, that plumed hats haven’t swept the dust in homage to a Desdemona or a Cressida! And beneath the most theatrical sky on the planet, with effects and edifices of cloud that make Veronese and his school look like amateurs! I wish someone would present me with a play instead of dazing me with the décor, vacillating between aromas and stenches, loneliness and expectancy. Those apoplectic merchants on whom Franz Hals lavished his vermilion at least hired writers. But here, not a thing. No programme. The director must have been carried off by fever, the actors sent to the bottom in an ‘Oost Indische Companiee’ ship, their trunks stuffed with masks, swords, togas, mantillas. All that finery consigned to salt, released in silvered clusters to float past the flabbergasted fish, setting them to dream of a shapely foot, sharpened daggers, noble histrionics. Hardly had it surfaced than my theatre disappeared. Closedown. I remain alone, cardboard king of these slim-hipped people tightly swathed in sarongs, who go up and down my streets with measured tread, enormous tough-skinned fruits balanced on their heads. Former extras? Prop men? The strike must have gone on too long for them to retain any memory of working. My balcony drips; I dream. It’s only a bit of youth and Europe passing.

  Anyway, don’t rely on me to provide a scenario. Anything introduced into this setting decays with alarming speed. A continual fermentation decomposes forms in order to compose others even more complex and ephemeral, and ideas must suffer the same fate. How can you hold to a course amidst such metamorphoses? My mind goes off at tangents more and more often. Nothing for it to cling to: no seasons, the post paralysed by a union strike … and as for my useless neighbours! There seemed to be signs of reawakening in the first days of the monsoon; I saw them get together again, consult each other, eyes shining in a lively way that augured well; they even got a bit excited … over flying a kite as big as a bus! Was that all? Then their eyes clouded over, they resumed their interminable siestas on the veranda, scratching their crotches, flicking through tattered old magazines. Everything fell back into place. Except the great butterfly kite, buoyed up by the west wind, whose charming painted eyes we could see fluttering for several weeks.

  XIII

  ‘One is often in need of something very small indeed’

  Go to the ant, thou sluggard;

  consider her ways and be wise.

  — Proverbs 6:6

  For nicely finished executions, jobs done to a turn, consistency, sober massacres, and works of civil engineering beside which the Louvre is just a mud-pie, consider the insects. Certainly you can find fault with my Island, but a queen-termite can live here for a hundred years and give the world thirty thousand subjects a day. Find me a Bourbon or a Grimaldi who could do as much. As for militant action, devotion to the cause, not one of my Trotskyites could match up to them. Only a long association with this little world, when I am motionless in my chair struggling with fever or memory, permits me to be so authoritative. Despite a few bites and all the trouble these demonworkers have given me, the determination which characterizes the least of their undertakings inspires a sort of respect in me.

  Termes nocturnis

  Termes obscuriceps

  Termes taprobanis

  Termes monoceros whose soldiers

  have instead of a head

  a syringe of poison so enormous

  it makes them stagger

  like the drunks of T’ang poetry

  Termes convulsive whose colonies

  on certain solemn occasions

  are struck by St Vitus’s dance

  Utriusque Indiae calamitas summa

  you are the most ancient ornament of my Island

  its pride and its greatest concern

  and you other Lilliputians

  covered in horn and hard skin

  guests at a masked feast

  conceived by a demented Arcimboldo

  killers without argument or wastage

  without the field of honour or flowers in gun-barrels

  dynasties shattered in one night of carnage

  for some obscure grand plan or another

  what is there left for me to learn

  at your dark school?

  tiny foragers for life

  in your clay cathedrals

  do not forget me

  at your minuscule masses

  in the restless chanting of your wings

  pray for me.

  ‘One is often in need of something very small indeed’

  Of all my boarders, the cockroach is the most inoffensive and yet the most irritating. A good-for-nothing, it has no standing in this world or in the next. It is less of a creature than a sketch for one. Since the Pliocene age it has done nothing to improve itself. Not to mention its colour — chewed tobacco: nature d
idn’t go to any trouble there. Off it rides, erratic, aimless as far as one can tell, in its inferior and inadequate crash helmet. So cowardly when it comes to dying! Yet I haven’t squashed any for a long time, because their remains attract all kinds of much more dangerous grave-diggers. I even recognize some of them, the dirtiest and most neglected — a slight limp, a tattered wing — to whom I’ve given affectionate if mocking nicknames. Even today their carelessness — which costs lives — makes me smile. They sometimes topple over in the course of their panic-striken treks around my chair or across my table. All you can say about a cockroach on its back is that it’s done for, and knows it. You then see that quivering abdomen exposed to all the vigilant stings, claws, jaws, the greed which makes this house so animated; the flailing legs signalling their doleful departure, the convulsed terror of the antennae alerted by the rustle of an approaching marauder, or by the irritated flight of the ichneumon wasp, out to find a larder in which to deposit its eggs. There is more to this room than meets the eye; I feel lonely in it nevertheless and the cockroach — thank God! — isn’t reliant on friends. The life of insects is like ours in this respect: no sooner do you get acquainted than the roles of victor and victim are cast.

  XIV

  Homage to Fleming

  A fit of the blues. This morning on the way to the market I realized I was talking to myself — I’ve no idea what about — mimicked by a dozen tenacious urchins behind me, whom I didn’t even have the energy to shoo off. And things took a turn for the worse. A hundred rupees I’d hidden at the bottom of my sleeping-bag have vanished as if by magic and, just now, as I was trying to round up the ideas swirling at the back of my mind, there was a great ruction in the worm-eaten recesses of the roof. Five drops of blood starred the white page awaiting my pleasure. What accounts were being settled up there? I tell you, there’s something suspicious in the air. The commotion died away, then wafted on the silence, the smell of opium which my neighbours smoke in secret like schoolboys.

  Yesterday the milk inspector, who lives in the room next door — you only get powdered milk here, so there’s nothing for him to inspect — came to propose we go looking for women together, in a cheap restaurant in the hills that someone had recommended. The inspector, who is my father’s age, is consumed by an erotic daydream that gives him no rest. To persuade me he traced their curves in the humid air with his small hands; if I believed them, these witches would be reminiscent of the great Ponerine ants: tightly corseted, with well-filled bodices, strong hips, muscled thighs, gigantic jaws. For this sortie he had retouched his scuffed shoes with violet ink, slipped into tennis slacks with fine blue stripes, bagging at the knee. ‘In this town,’ said the oldest Island chronicle, ‘there was nothing firmer than the breasts of young girls, more shimmering than their eyes, more curved than their lashes, more dusky than their nights.’ The inspector’s eyes were bloodshot with the arak he had been drinking in the evening. I knew quite well that this was a matter of poor, gap-toothed girls, humiliated, perhaps sick, or girls who only existed in his imagination. All the same, I got worked up myself. I dream of eyes outlined in kohl, coal-hot voices against my ear, sandalwood buttocks to which a thousand dreaming hands have given a patina, of a tuft as glossy as horsehair, nicely rounded and split. Well, I’ve been living alone too long and if I must return to the world of men, why not by this route? I accepted. I was tired of the spectacle of my insects endlessly copulating or devouring each other. Living with this microcosm from day to day is not without its alarms and dangers: these interlocutors who perch on my fingernail, gesticulating, or whom I pester with my pencil, may end up giving me a fever. Down with wild entomology! Enough of seductive ideas pinned up on my blue wall or sprouting like peas in my sick head. After all, sometimes even Buffon must have taken a break from zoology to tumble a duchess, and Fabre interrupted his entomology to have a bit of fun with a maid … Three cheers for Fleming, and so much for the carriers of syphilis! As night fell, we swaggered off, but he lost the way to the back-alley. We went in circles round the hills, where the rain softened the roads and soon affected his carburettor. Returned, pushing the car, soaked, frustrated, empty-handed. The boarding-house clientele laughed us to scorn. You should have seen them, sprawling in the unravelling cane chairs, teeth bared in stupid expressions, sniggering over nothing in particular, quarrelling in their castrati voices, wheedling, or quavering insults at me as always when they’re emboldened by alcohol. They resent me because they know that one day I’ll leave, whereas they never will. The drunkest even went to get a machete, which he brandished in my face: he had had too much to be dangerous, but I gave him a good clout all the same. The landlord took advantage of it to confiscate his weapon while taking him to task. God knows I didn’t come here to throw punches, and violence — my own as much as others’ — always frightens me. But if I hadn’t reacted, the latent hostility I sensed might have taken an unforeseen and certainly unpleasant turn.

  Anyway for the past two weeks my colleagues had found another victim, easier to pick on: a skeletal old man, permanently drunk, reeling about in a pair of shorts far too big for him. Because he keeps falling over and knocking himself out, he has almost no skin left on his knees. This grazed old man is a real artist of decline. The excellent English, shot through with a tonic dark humour, which he speaks in his rare lucid moments, leads me to suppose that at other times, in other places, he led a less degrading and humiliating life. These days, it must be said, he spends most of his time weeping as he looks out to sea, gripping the veranda balustrade; the whole edifice trembles each time a sob shakes his shoulders. This makes the boarding-house simpletons snigger behind their fans of playing-cards. The grief of others is a diversion which costs them nothing. If I’ve rightly understood the hiccupped confession he made to me the other day, his downfall began with a Dutch tortoiseshell clock, which he had stolen from his wife to give to his son-in-law, who promised that he could emigrate with them to Australia. Of course, for reasons I could understand, they had gone without him. He hadn’t dared to go home since this theft, and preferred to drink away his tiny pension here. Maybe I should keep him company, as he shows me a respect he doesn’t accord his tormentors. He knows that I understand; perhaps he has seen in my eyes that one day I’ll end up like him. ‘Honour my ugly wife by visiting my ugly house,’ he said to me the other day, sketching a low bow that unbalanced him and gave him yet another graze. This old man has one advantage at least over the spectres who live here: he knows what’s eating him. It’s the business of the clock, and the vision of Australia. We have to find a label for the body blows and treachery life holds in store, give our bad luck a specific form — it’s a problem whose importance I’ve overlooked until now. Every so often it occurs to me that it’s just what we’re put on earth for. His chastened, knacker’s-yard appearance at least gives some substance to the theatre of shadows in which we live. Despair is better than no feeling at all: it is palpable and persistent, more so than joy, which never lasts longer than we can bear. When I go out he is almost always at his vigil, eyes on the sea, as if weeping could draw continents closer.