A stiff breeze makes his baggy shorts flap like flags, and dries his tears a bit. In passing I quickly do the same, stuffing his dirty handkerchief back into his pocket in a ball. Our sympathetic silence is worth all the conversations I could have here. And anyway, what could I say to him? He’s at the end of his voyage, I’ve hardly begun mine. He has good reason to weep. Arak, arak, who is happy in this little town?
XV
Circe
‘The stunned buffalo is slow to learn his lesson,’ says the grocer whenever one of the old men of Indigo Street leaves her shop, lifts her chin to call on Heaven as her witness, tucks it back into her formidable chest, and sighs like an empty wineskin. No doubt this proverbial phrase refers to the ravages of the sun, but she applies it to her Sinhalese customers, who peck at their food and root about in the merchandise, hemming and hawing over the weight of an egg. She thinks they are pathetic, a sentiment they return. Contempt is one of the few feelings the heat stirs up, and there is enough of it in this little quarter to make the world go round.
She is the grocer, and her stall is at the corner where the street meets an alley leading to the Aeolus Tower. To enter, you part a fringe of dried fish suspended from the lintel, which smells — I regret to say — like shit. Other odours inside — cinnamon, cloves, freshly-ground coffee — make you forget the first; of all the places in the island, this is where I feel best. The walls are lined with sticky golden tins of molasses or palm-oil. Chewing tobacco hangs in heavy black hanks over pyramids of fly-speckled eggs, and the stacks of bananas piled against the blue walls glow like lanterns. Not forgetting the tins of ‘Rising Sun’ tea, left over from Japan’s forays into Indo-China, the jar of barley sugar in coloured spirals, and the loaves of sugar wrapped in strong brown paper, which the grocer breaks off musically with a little pointed hammer.
Colossal, black-skinned in a gleaming white sari, she sits at the heart of her possessions, sweat beading her low forehead, ensconced on a bag of lentils behind a set of scales. By stretching out her arms, or with the help of a hooked stick, she can serve you without getting up; as she almost never stirs, her vitality finds expression in a number of beauty spots with sprouting hairs on her face and neck. Her eyes are black, often mischievous. This great sow’s playful society is a hundred times preferable to that of the zombies on my street, who are so wrapped up in their moth-eaten, unreal world of mysteries that they wouldn’t even recognize the sound of a fart.
Beside the spectral, deliquescent beauty of the Fort — all that trompe I’œil that can only presage ruin — nothing is more reassuring than this little centre of commerce, managed with suitable fierceness by a gossip of her range. I would give a rupee without haggling just for its shade: you can almost feel its texture, which reminds me of the bazaars of Afghanistan.
‘Salaam Aleikhum.’ Once across the threshold I wipe my forehead with a handkerchief, add up on my fingers, flick the tins to make them clink, caress the bursting sacks. I too have my place to sit, and when the mood takes me I order arak, which she pours into two enamel beakers; we drink in silence, backs propped against bins which no spells could conjure away. Indeed this place is so full of benign materiality that I’m constantly astonished that it hasn’t sunk into the ground like a millstone, on such a chimerical island.
Time drifts by in daydreaming, in swirling tepid alcohol round the mouth with sighs of relaxation which take the place of conversation. I just have to close my eyes to see Crusoe in a goatskin hat, leaving the shop with his purchases — tallow candles and black powder — Friday at his heels.
I open them: did she see it too?
A young girl’s smile reveals her formidable teeth, her gargoyle face is haloed in a lovely light, almost black. Through her half-closed lids filters a look in which I discern more fellow-feeling — and a hint of compassion — than I dared hope for here. I feel it, but can’t account for it: as though she were trying to pass on something beyond words, a ‘sesame’ from far away. Here they think that spontaneous relations are the result of a past karma. Had we known each other in the age of maritime empires, when ‘the only cold objects in this town were pearl, sandalwood, the moon’? Had we shared a royal bed? Perhaps my landlord was right to say that even though I went through life wide-eyed, I was blind.
Because she is Tamil and Muslim, and immobilized by her size, the grocer is the butt of a dozen urchins’ tricks: they egg each other on, thumbing their noses at the doorway, or pull the tail of her goat, who spends the day tied to a post by the door. They’re the same ones who have hopped along behind me ever since I arrived, whining ‘Mister-what’s-your-name, Mister what’s-your-country?’ No doubt their parents send them out, and their precocious, stupid tricks show them well suited to following in parental footsteps. It would take more than that to disturb the grocer, who treats them like blowflies. When she is in a lenient mood, she just swears at them, with a manic volubility that always amazes me. (A drum roll seems slow compared to Sinhalese.) When her patience runs out, or the goat complains, she hooks one of her tormentors and draws him in without so much as lifting her bottom, and tweaks his nose until he’s crying and bloody. The victim yells, they’re off in a mad rush, and you hear the sea’s murmur in the silence. Since I have already tried in vain to cuff these scabby kids, I watch without flinching as she sends them packing, but not without pleasure. She winks at me, takes her time getting to her feet, sweeps away the sand that always covers the floor and the zig-zag, bloody prints of twenty small bare feet, and prepares two pellets of betel. We chew it slowly and spit it out in long arcs, never missing the doorstep.
In a street where everything collapses and fades, her freshness, her corpulence, the prosperity of her little business, are an affront. And her being a Tamil is especially provoking.
The Tamils, who in the past lived in the north of the island, constructed water tanks and produced several dynasties celebrated for their administrative ability. They didn’t invent Heaven, it’s true, but they have always believed in and applied redoubtable feminine persistence, have had an exalted view of family ties, and cultivated the practical, stay-at-home virtues which made their businesses successful from Zanzibar to Penang. Like the Elizabethans, they knew how to combine a passion for profit with fiery, vehement poetry. Their magic is barter and spices; their dreams are of doubloons and pearls, fallen from the decks of schooners in coffers. All of their chronicles eulogize the riches of warehouses, the skills of jewellers, the sagacity of shoe-makers or horse-traders — who marry the king’s daughter — with a lyricism elsewhere reserved for the love of men or the power of gods. Their old merchant spells preserve all their efficaciousness here, where garlands of pimentoes, boxes of cigars tied with red thread, amadou lighters hanging in bunches by black-and-green flecked wicks, create a kind of musical harmony.
To the advantage of being Tamil, the grocer adds that of being Muslim. Before Albuquerque sent their vessels full of vindictive ghosts to the bottom, the Arabs had terrorized the west coast of my Island for many years, killing, raping, and occasionally converting the hellblack Shiva worshippers. If the grocer weighs accurately, counts fairly, and knows how to respond generously when circumstances require, she owes it to Mohammed. Judeo-Christianity and Islam, which install one exacting and jealous God directly above merchants, undoubtedly favour commerce. Not so Hinduism or Buddhism. When a shopkeeper abandons his takings and his family without any warning, to go and meditate in the mountains for say two years, it is unusual for him to find anything on his return. When time is cyclical, not linear, what’s the point of sticking to your books and fiddling with your balance sheet? When the till, admittedly a pernicious illusion, is treated as such, then business certainly goes downhill. The grocer stacks up, polishes and disposes of her wares, whose materiality is incontestable. Those who might attack her — and some dream of doing so, by evil spells or letting rodents loose — probably wouldn’t gain the upper hand. Like everyone here she is something of a magician, but she lacks that rage an
d feverish irrationality which weakens this town. She does just enough to parry blows and defend her interests. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if one part of her clientele — albeit small — should come from the other world. I have enough confidence in her to suppose that they would be perfectly proper Spirits, a trifle mischievous and capable of rendering an occasional service; quite different from the pests who infect other businesses in the town, where you sense them lurking in the shadows like crabs. On my most recent visit, when I was overcome by drowsiness and her back was turned, a dishevelled djinn as tall as a riding-boot rose out of the ground at my feet with a clap of thunder, seized a jar of pickles, nodded and disappeared by the same route. As the ground closed up and I wondered whether I’d been seeing things, she replaced the vanished jar without batting an eyelid, and ticked the column reserved for that customer on her slate.
Big, healthy, rich, still hot-blooded; it needs nothing more to set envious tongues wagging. Thus my landlord accuses her of getting rid of her husband — a layabout, a mediocrity whom he could only defend half-heartedly — by dubious means (you know what that implies here), and shies away when I try to find out more. In the Tamil matriarchy on the mainland, all you have to do is put your husband’s slippers outside the door three times in order to divorce him. That custom has never prevailed here. It’s true that I’ve never seen the gentleman in question in the bazaar or in the shop, though everyone talks about him. I get the impression that she has somehow shrivelled him up, or shut him away, poor chap, so that she wouldn’t be discredited by his tittle-tattle. Perhaps he’s in the indigo biscuit-tin, on the top shelf; sometimes she glances at it out of the corner of her eye, and I hear a noise like the squeaking of an enraged cricket. But quinine makes my ears buzz. Or perhaps, reduced to pigmy size, he fulminates and gesticulates to his heart’s content right under her tremendous backside. One breed of termites on our Island (Euternes fatalis), which is in the process of reducing the boarding-house to dust, has a queen thirty-thousand times larger than the king: he spends his life as a concierge on the edge of her vulva. So I won’t relinquish my hypothesis without reliable information. The next time she gets up from her beanbag, I’ll creep up and see whether this scoundrel isn’t rushing around in its creases, shaking his fist. I’d be delighted to pick up the little runt between finger and thumb, and tell him exactly what I think of his evil tricks. Cockroaches, dung-beetles, scorpions, centipedes: I’m used to this change of scale, to talking to minuscule creatures. I no longer hide my sympathies. I like this colossal woman, she’s the genuine article. For flights of fancy and flirting, the grocer keeps a scorpion-fish, which swirls around in a cucumber jar prettily arranged with coral and fine sand, placed at the corner of the counter. She feeds it on grains of brown sugar, crushed flies, morsels of bread. It’s a young male in fine fettle, who twirls round at the smallest gesture of encouragement, displaying a sepia-flecked parasol of poisonous barbs. When she thinks herself alone, she leans her cheek against the glass and makes faces at him, and he responds with generous quivering. I have found her at this game several times; I hold my breath and retreat on tip-toe, jealous as a discarded suitor. But there’s no law against dreaming. If she ever surprised me spying, perhaps she would give me her mascot …
… You can’t imagine how tiring life can be here. This observation, tensed between the real and the occult, is agonizing. My head aches, rebelling against such an ordeal. I often weep without knowing why. The post office nonchalantly loses those letters from Europe which are my life-blood. So I only have the last one, where you say that this trip isn’t doing me any good, that the Island is destroying my nerve, that no one will be moved by the kind of thing I write to you, that western readers aren’t ready for it. That’s all very well, but I travel in order to learn, and no one has ever taught me the things I’m discovering here.
XVI
Padre
When I filled it up again, my teapot overflowed with frothy black lees. Tea, which is the Island’s main concern, is also its best weapon against evil spells. Tea counteracts the general languor and torpor. Its faint bitterness always suggests one more step in the direction of limpidity, reminds us that our spirits are still swathed in rags, like the feet of beggars in days gone by.
I had spent the day piecing together my tattered Anatolian recollections and Hittite learning for a journal in the capital, whose compassion and fees enable me to survive here, without pausing once. Behind my eyelids I had seen autumn in Bogaskoy, the hoarfrost on the clover, and the swarm of mitred dignitaries — with their round eyes and pear-shaped noses — sculpted three thousand years ago out of the rocks surrounding the village. And held between the custodian’s black fingernails, little tablets delicately engraved with cuneiform, listing, for example, the penalties imposed on a honey-thief: five strokes of the cane, a pannier of nuts, a pannier of medlars. Benign pastoral edicts beside which the lex talionis, the code of the Levites and Assyrians, rattles like a box of rusty nails. Trying to pin down such remote images before they evaporate in this sauna; to remember the old salubrious rhythms, the ancient complicities with their smell of humus, which you perceive without having to explain. A sense of absolute freshness — the older, the fresher — a harmonization of forms and formulae to ward off the formlessness all around me. Intent on the design, flushing out the right word here and there, hooking — like a trout — an instant’s freedom. That was worth a few green stains of Turkish candour on my cracked, Ming-blue walls. But it was no good, the heat always wins in the end. The hour came when the Buddha on my shelf, touched by the setting sun, lit up with an alcoholic glow and began to laugh openly at my efforts. The moment came when something snapped inside my head, while the folk nesting in the worm-eaten beams made raucous preparations for their nocturnal campaigns. Their day was just beginning; mine had come to an end. I gazed abstractedly at the sheets covered in crabbed lines, arrows, words circled in red, the zig-zag of crossreferences: minor successes in the great war at twilight, from which I emerged more defeated every day. I had to leave the room and return to the night. I crossed the Fort and then the market, downhearted, scuffing the rotting fruit fallen between the stalls. Once clear of the town, I went along the coast and down towards the tip of the Island, counting on weariness to put an end to the aimless turning-over of junk in my head, to wrap me up and hand me over to sleep. Half an hour to the beach, where I used to go swimming every morning for the first few weeks. A big half-moon of sand under troubled stars. The sea a saucer of milk, lazily rocking. I almost went to sleep floating on my back, coming to when a hollow in the swell let me hear the muffled fall of a coconut, or the echo of bare footfalls on the road above. Back to the beach, where the small fry rejected from the nets were dying, still quivering with venom. My cheek on the keel of a fishing boat, I drew on a cigarette, looking at the lighthouse flashing its beam all the way to the Antarctic. The thought of those tracts where the sky could splinter into a thousand pieces without anyone ever knowing was a void I could do without, empty as I was. If I’d come here for solitude, I’d certainly chosen the right island. If I was out of my depth, I had learned to manage by polishing my memories. There were enough places, moments, faces to keep me company, to fill the sea’s mirror, to lighten the day’s weight with their illusory presence. That night, I became aware with indescribable panic that my private cinema wasn’t working any more. Almost no one appeared on the screen, or only their shadows, blurred, dog-eared, plaintive. Voices and scents had departed. Something had made off with them while I was working myself into the ground. My sole nest-egg was gone, and in its train I saw a time coming when I wouldn’t even have real pain, only fears. It was all very well to prod at old failures, they wouldn’t budge. No doubt this hunger for pain is what keeps us young, because I suddenly felt quite old and lost in the enormous beauty of the beach, a poor little scribbler fucked up by the Tropics.
There aren’t any lasting relationships here, and nothing really belongs to us. I knew that. The dark lac
e of the coconut-palms, scarcely stirring against the darker night, reminded me of that, just in case I had forgotten.
You can’t travel without experiencing nightmare moments when all the things you’ve relied upon file past and betray you. Beyond this terrifying deprivation, on the other side of this zero of existence and at the end of the road, there must still be something: something out of the ordinary, a real Kohinoor surely, if it’s so hedged about and guarded. Perhaps it’s the original lightness of being, known once and recovered in flashes, which we always grope for in the blind-man’s buff of our lives.
Let all of us turn into shadows
as from today.
— Maurice Chappaz
Jogged back, heart in mouth. Citronella and jasmin wafted from the Fort. That potent scent, this Island! How long had I been here? The crumbling away hadn’t stopped, before I reached my room I’d have forgotten my own name.
The moon began to extricate itself from the clouds. Passing a baroque church that I’d always found locked, I made out a black shape in a large, broad-brimmed hat, sitting on the top step, blowing smoke-rings and apparently looking in my direction. It was well past midnight. I pinched myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming, cupped my hands round my mouth and called out in a tone of scarce-concealed defeat: ‘Father, pray for me. I can’t remember anything any more, it’s too hot.’
The Scorpion-Fish Page 7