XVIII
Remember to Remember
Last night the cat woke me with a start, bringing down with a crash the pan in which I’d left a fish-head. Early this morning, the landlord: ‘Ba-o-u-vie-rr Sahib’; here, a name has neither substance nor credibility unless it has eight syllables; twelve or fourteen give a man status. Mine, with only three, looks like a poor man’s wallet, or a dog-end smoked down to the fingers. Moreover, my way of life is frugal. To spare me one extra humiliation, the landlord lengthens my name and rolls it out interminably on his tongue. He is a staunch worshipper of Shiva, who would choke rather than steal a rupee; kindness comes naturally to him and his karma doesn’t cause me any concern. He gave me a long telegram and a money order: the best magazine on the Island had awarded me its annual prize for the four articles it had published, and asked me for a fifth on Azerbaidjan to be sent urgently. Payment in advance. The editorial pundits congratulated me especially on my ‘knowledge of the East’. They are spindly, mahogany gentlemen, with jackdaw eyes and silvered temples, who quote Krishnamurti or Ruskin in their writing and murmur of Mahler over breakfast. Knowledge of the East? I still don’t know what kind of trap I’ve fallen into, nor why I obstinately stay here. Anyway, it seems that work done in this cauldron is real enough to be printed and prized. I suspect that Father Alvaro is somewhere behind all this. For a moment I glimpse his thin black ghost, lost at the top of the steps, and then chase the image from my heart. If it is humanly impossible to repay a debt, it’s better to forget it altogether. One thousand rupees — enough to get to Japan, get my strength back, to live there for a while.
I re-read the telegram, then went to soak for a minute in the pool in the courtyard, amidst the half-drowned cockroaches. Day was dawning. The last cock-crows and sounds of morning ablutions. A few steps away, sighs of ease rose up from the latrines; in the black square of a window cut out of the door I could make out an even darker face, a beaded forehead, immobile in dreaming concentration, gazing at me without seeing.
I counted the days and replied that they would have the piece on Tuesday, which has interrupted the diary I’ve been trying to keep. Since that moment nothing has happened except the following: writing in long-hand, dashing as far as the lighthouse to refresh myself in the sea-spray, typing up what’s done so far; going out again for cigarettes; rewriting, two hours’ sleep, rereading, revising; then a nocturnal stroll when the town is silent and beautiful in its heady scent of jasmine, with a plan as big as a poster tucked into my shirt. Work progresses in the cheap restaurants still open, deleting, correcting, refining to the point of exhaustion, feeling like an assassin sharpening his knife. Finding an epithet while crouching over the slop bucket, seeing an adjective in the shaving-mirror, here and there — pacing up and down my room — a word like a fresh egg laid in the straw, a subheading just as a glass slipped from my hand and broke, something clarified in the ripples of a Buddhist harp from the loudspeakers in the street. The day filters into the text as through a sieve. An hour’s English from time to time to make a change from the ideas that will not let go: each word sends me back to a face, a smell, an echo of Tabriz. It’s two years since I stamped my feet there, waiting for spring. I would need a reedy clarinet and the muffling of a week’s uninterrupted snowfall to do justice to that unforgettable hibernation, so deeply buried. I’ve only a torrid, louring sky, and a vocabulary sapped by this hot-house temperature. It isn’t the moment to undertake anything difficult: I hang on from one night’s rain to the next, tossed like a spar by the effort of reconciling these two geographies in my head. In brief snatches of sleep I glimpsed the town in battle-order, black and chilled with its gnarled orchards, emerging from the finished text. The night dripped away interminably. Through the doors open on to the landing I could hear my neighbours, groaning, chuckling, monologuing in their restless sleep, like coals heated to glowing …
Sunday
… Images which I thought well and truly lost came back to me so fast that my pen could hardly keep pace with them. The only distraction: an ant trail which has linked my floor with the ceiling since yesterday, and passes right in front of my table. A reddish, sinuous ribbon, forming two one-way roads. They have taken it into their heads to lug up the vertical track the corpse of a little gecko, foolish enough to have crossed their path. Pulling from above, pushing from below, hundreds are occupied with the little animal, its gleaming remains sheathed in the velvet of worker-ants. It fell down several times, a loss of hard-gained ground for them. They spent a day or two on a level with my typewriter, and sometimes I paused to chivvy along the roadworks with the tip of my pencil. In the menacing silence of the siesta, when not an eyelid batted in the town, I seemed to hear their foreman’s whistles, the curses of the crane-drivers, the winches humming. I hoped to have finished before they disappeared into the recesses of the roof with their burden. These are the great ‘oecophyle smaragdines’, who have never visited me before: marvellously streamlined, polished like Marshal Lyautey’s boots, very vain about their slim figures. They are the upper crust, and snobbish with it: the last work in equatorial ant ecology. All the other ants hate and attack them.
Monday
I don’t know where the days went. I had even forgotten the post. At noon the typewriter jammed. Took it to the watchmaker, a half-blind old man who’s often to be found crouched over his bench, magnet in hand, sifting through the dust for lost screws or springs. He loosened several nuts, tremblingly shook the machine over the gutter, and the ballbearings scattered like mercury into the astonished crowd. Impossible to find replacements here. The watchmaker had a typewriter, as security against a debt, but refused to let me take it away. So I had to go on with my article at his bench, with a dozen or so heads peering over my shoulder, spitting betel juice in graceful trajectories a hair’s breadth from my ear. I kept to my plan, but no sooner did I go to replenish supplies from the tobacconist next door, and the watchmaker dozed off, than the onlookers tapped the keys and amused themselves copying out one phrase after another from the old Paris-Match I use for a blotter. Rereading it on my return, I discovered to my amazement that the musicians of my Armenian tavern were ‘accompanied by photographer G. Reyer and our reporter D. Lapierre’. I retyped the ruined page, and the afternoon went by without my lifting my head. At midnight I crossed the Fort, light as a feather, to put the envelope on the pink bus bound for the capital. Tuesday night. Four days had never passed so quickly. Twenty-five pages: I didn’t know whether they were any good, but they were as close as I could make them to what I’d lived. Dawdling back from the bus station, barefoot in a semblance of coolness, carried away, head whirling with scraps of ideas about China, voodoo, the accordion, love … all sorts of things! I paused at each corner to jot down these shreds, holding the paper against the wall with one hand. The end of the haemorrhage. Sat down under the banyan tree next to the boarding-house, taking the sea-breeze and wondering if this dictation would continue. A bad sleep on account of the oyster-coloured storm clouds, veiling and unveiling the full moon. At daybreak I bought a pineapple, a small skate, some cigars and a quart of rum. Swept the room and pinned up a clean sheet of paper on my blue wall to trap the day’s ideas, and also to cut across the ant-tracks, which were making my head spin. Their columns split when they reached its edge, afraid of the whiteness, and formed a kind of fur border around the sheet: markedly like a funeral announcement, on which the name is yet to be inscribed. Chewing away, I said to myself ‘not mine, not today’. Only then did I recall the post. I had a letter from Europe, which I was going to read in the dockers’ cafe: amidst the dark, glistening faces, the loincloths, thin black legs with sticking-plasters, quids of tobacco glued to scraps of newspaper, and the slot-machine; in the amber light which gilds all that squalor, I came across this phrase: ‘north of Grenoble it was raining. The grass was high. There were jays in the walnut trees.’ I found it oddly moving, the mention of grass. Here, where vegetation stops at nothing, where orchids spring up like clover, t
he grass is coarse and tasteless. As though it grows too quickly to bother taking shape. Europe may have many drawbacks, but it has incomparable grass: the jewelled meadows drawn by Dürer, or painted blade by blade by those medieval illuminators — great wanderers, surveyors of orchards, highwaymen of henhouses — and usually a mere background to martyrdom, carnage, war: Jerusalem or Troy in flames, against a carpet of forget-me-nots. Rain? Well, it rains here too: marvellous tornadoes that sweep the empty bottles from my balcony. My roof leaks everywhere, I keep stopping work to put out buckets. In a moment it ceases and it’s fine again. Even at the cinema you don’t see such effects, they would cost too much. It pours down on the banyan, the lighthouse and the sea — which is muffled, mute, subdued, all the way to the Antarctic.
A young red scorpion comes into my room, drunk with the humidity, soaked to its venomous tail, running out of breath in silly circles. The monsoon from the north-west. My whole bestiary is seized with drunkenness: it’s not just the claws and stings that shake in the nooks and crannies of my room. Even the termites have interrupted their devilish work, for the first time since I’ve been here. Stupid though they are, they are overcome by the gravity of this weather. For a moment they tremble from top to toe on their short legs, emitting a sort of hiss. Maybe they’re really singing. They’re right. I too flourish once more, all alone at the heart of my little inferno.
XIX
This Morning
The watchmaker has one eye milky from trachoma and a black magnifying glass attached to the other, which makes him look like a snail. I took him my watch which had stopped the day before yesterday. Good morning! But this morning he doesn’t answer: as though he is turned to stone by something installed on his bench amidst the tools and alarm clocks. Through the sweat pricking my eyes, I make out a reddish mass at elbow height, writhing and undulating like a column of flying ants, and producing a rapid, harsh panting. It is more than flesh and blood can bear. What treacheries this thing must have committed in a previous life, to be reduced now to such an abject state. A lump of bile rises in my throat. The watchmaker seems to know its cause. Without taking his eyes off the bench (like someone preparing to kill a tarantula), he indicates that I should stay outside, then sends me to look for the exorcist, who sleeps curled up like a dog between two tubs of laurel in the courtyard of the ‘Cosmic’ cinema.
He came back with me, yawning, as far as the shop, fanned the apparition with a banana leaf and asked its name. From the landlord, who appeared just then with a pair of rusty hair clippers, I was able to learn something about the haggling taking place. Apparently the watchmaker had been throwing his rubbish into an enclosure to which ‘the other one and his people’ claimed rights. (It is often on such slender, vague pretexts that they entrench themselves, in order to extort something from us.) At the end of the bargaining, where the watchmaker at each reply lowered the bid with a tiny shake of his head, they cut the throat of the scrawniest chicken they could find; the vile, bloodied swarm went up like smoke. By now a group of neighbours had gathered at the door, and comments were flying nineteen to the dozen. The exorcist received two rupees, which he tucked into his belt, and went back to his siesta, the decapitated chicken under his arm. The heat was appalling, despite the grey sky and filtered sunlight. My legs were wobbly and I felt sick. And I wondered what use the repaired watch could be. For a long while my relations with time had not been what they were. It sometimes took me several minutes to recall my father’s Christian name, and for over a month I’d been postponing the moment of writing to Europe. I was no more sure of what I’d find on my table than the watchmaker. I was afraid I had quietly slipped through to the other side of the mirror, and that this fear would sap such reason as I still possessed.
On the way back, the landlord assured me that the episode was basically a fraud and a swindle: the exorcist was hungry for a chicken, and wanted to exercise his power and mystify the watchmaker by sending him the little bag of horrors. (It’s true that for a man asleep, he got to his feet very quickly.) Apparently he has other tricks up his sleeve. The landlord wears a red thread around his right wrist to protect himself, and he isn’t easily deceived. He added that the demon who had appeared to him as plain as day, and to everyone else — I am the only one-eyed man in this kingdom — wore around his neck a Brahmin’s flecked cord, whose white had turned a nasty, ox-blood red. I retorted sharply that even if he were right, henceforth I intended to steer well clear of these tricks. Since I began to get glimpses of what my neighbours see every day, I haven’t felt any better for it, on the contrary. But I was wrong to take it out on this man, who only wished me well. He knows me better than I think and sensed I was on the point of cracking up. A few minutes later he came all the way up to my room, to present the baby daughter his wife had given him a few days before. She was set on a velvet cushion, like a jewel. A matt complexion, carbuncular eyes, and the longest black hair of any new baby I’d seen. He held her at arm’s length, his body swaying in prodigal content. With one finger I lightly stroked the tiny forehead, already beaded with sweat. The infant was absolutely still, absolutely real, absolutely human. Both of us were silent in front of this little miracle. In the courtyard someone was beginning to grease a bicycle, I could hear its wheel turning.
XX
The Last Enchanter
What becomes of the fist when
the hand opens?
— Allan Watts
November
Back from the beach at dusk. Still that clash of tarnished colours, before they are absorbed into the darkness. Across the emptying bazaar. The last traders were packing up their stuff. Under the fishmonger’s awning a strolling musician played, his eyes closed. The coins tossed to him shone in the puddles nearby. It had started to rain. A love song, nasal chords of the vina, a high, plaintive voice. I closed my eyes too, and what I heard was the fatal drone of a wasp, hovering round a skirt slit to the thigh. A few steps away, on the waterlogged ground separating the market from the Fort, I joined the circle lingering round a bronzed old man, who had taken up the ‘tree’ position, balancing on his head. These wandering players from the mainland appear in our squares unpredictably, and then disappear. After checking his position, the old man slewed round lightly, threw his right arm behind his nape, rearranged his legs in the lotus position and remained thus, balancing on one hand until his jaw began to tremble. He was wearing steel bracelets round his ankles. He dropped back to earth, dreamily somersaulted twice, riskily, to reach his little pile of illusionist’s gear bundled up in a red cotton handkerchief. The fog rapidly forming in layers wrapped us round, turning the onlookers into blurred figures. I observed this old face, wrinkled and faun-like, with that almost ethereal beauty found sometimes in the Maharat country, always paired with a lean, powerful body. I thought enviously of the nights he had spent beneath the stars on his way here. The solitary temples in the hills, the approach of dawn as he stretched out beside a statue of Ganesh, daubed with red paint; cakes of cow-dung, dazzling smiles; dusty villages preserving the heat of the day, painted with flowers for a fleeting festival. I was looking at the nomad I had ceased to be, and dreamed of becoming once again. He took from his bundle six small knives with ebony handles and short curving blades, which looked like scimitars. No doubt he was going to throw them. It’s a difficult skill, healthy and liberating; I’d often tried it without much success. I had always dreamed of being skilful: I was trembling with impatience. He took them from their sheaths one by one, blowing on the blade each time, and then plunged them up to the hilt in his nape and throat, without drawing a drop of blood. Thus burdened, he made the rounds for our meagre offerings, waving his small wooden bowl, his eyes rolled up so that only the whites showed. The flesh of his neck was leprous and pallid, the expression on his unseeing face treacherous and sly. Contrary to the gesture I’d expected, this was a barely concealed threat. This gay gymnast was nothing but a crook, of the most sinister variety. When he drew level with me, something in my very depth
s clicked shut. I went dumb with terror. I pocketed the money I’d intended giving him, and made my way to my room. I hardly dared turn my head, as though that Judas’s pocket-knives were quivering in my own nape. I mentally pissed on his mother’s grave. My mind was clouding over, I wanted to weep. Passing the gateway I was so distraught that I ran smack into the bent, rusty signpost announcing the hospital — ‘zone of silence’ — and cut my brow. Tears are slow to come, but blood is less fussy. I wiped my hands across my streaming face, stopped to lick my palms — delicious, salty — and went on my way, leaving behind a sticky trace like the dying insects I’d often seen on my walls. I began to revive: I had touched bottom, I was coming up like a bubble. This head, opened up at last, poured out as in a dream the whole black illusion that had been festering there for far too long. Today I don’t want to recall all that flowed away so rapidly, to lose itself in silence. In front of the boarding-house, the heavy, restless sea was beating in exactly my heart’s rhythm. Stayed a moment, seated on the sea-wall, so as not to miss a drop of that miraculous outpouring. On returning to my room I began to pack my bag, spattering blood everywhere. The cut wasn’t at all important beside the mounting sense of exhilaration now flooding me. At that moment I was truly weeping, and tears had never seemed better. In the nooks and crannies of my lodging I could see pincers, stings and wings, pointing. All my menagerie were bidding me an anxious farewell. On the Dutch shelf, the scorpion-fish (she did give it to me after all) spread its poisonous parasol in every direction. Beside the jar, a little blush-pink crab folded his claws in a sign of mourning. I left on a table the money I owed the landlord and for the last time looked round this blue attic where I’d been a prisoner so long. It was vibrating with ineffable music.
The Scorpion-Fish Page 9