The Scorpion-Fish Read online

  THE SCORPION-FISH

  NICOLAS BOUVIER

  translated from the French by Robyn Marsack

  To Eliane

  Thomas

  Manuel

  and to Claude Debussy

  this old, old story

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  I Cape Comorin

  II The Customs Officer

  III Galle

  IV The 117th Room

  V The Capital

  VI The Bus

  VII The Zone of Silence

  VIII Indigo Street

  IX Four Grains of Hellebore

  X Scorpio and Pisces

  XI A Pinch of Curiosity …

  XII Showing Tonight

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

  XIV Homage to Fleming

  XV Circe

  XVI Padre

  XVII A Gentleman Companion

  XVIII Remember to Remember

  XIX This Morning …

  XX The Last Enchanter

  Afterword

  Copyright

  All the same, you can’t just come and go without breathing a word

  — Kenneth White

  I

  Cape Comorin

  The One was born of heat and

  in Him awakened love, the

  first seed of awareness.

  — The Rig Veda

  The sun and I had been up a long time when I remembered that it was my birthday, and that in the last of the bazaars I’d come upon the previous evening, I’d bought a melon. I made myself a present of it, scraped it down to the rind, and washed my sticky face in the dregs of tea from my flask.

  I had fallen asleep at once, beside the car under a solitary pipal tree, facing the yellow dunes which border the Adam Strait, and the sea flecked with white horses. It had been a wondrous voyage down India. Today I would leave the continent I loved so much. The morning, rich with expectations, was lighter than a bubble. To all its suggestions, my answer was: yes. I packed my bag mechanically, watching the slender black figures in wisps of crimson, bustling around a small sugarcane mill a stone’s throw from my bivouac. A girl dressed in a sarong of the same red brought them some food. I shaded my eyes the better to see her magnificent bare breasts in the sputtering light. Above the surf I could hear warm, quick voices and the grating of wooden calenders. Time stood still. In this graceful patterning of echoes, reflections, shadows of dancing colour, there was a supreme and transient perfection, a music I recognized. Whatever we mean when we speak of Orpheus and his lyre, Krishna and his flute; something clear, natural, simple; the return to ancient springs. Once you have heard it, you always yearn to hear it again.

  Sixty kilometres from the Cape the road suddenly comes to an end in the sand, like someone breaking off a sentence. Then you notice a wooden shack, so unlike a station that no guide ever mentions it. And a small narrow-gauge train, all hardwood and brass, shining like a cauldron from the passengers’ little cigars, and the constant rubbing of hands and buttocks. My neighbours: all black, seasonal workers from Madras going down to the plantations on the Island, squatting amidst their bundles of flowery cloth, faces framed by their stork legs. As I didn’t take up much room or crush their belongings, the boldest of them asked me in English if I were an Indian from Nepal. India is so vast — seventeen alphabets, more than three hundred dialects — that you can never be sure. And I was tanned, salty as a chip, a bit shrivelled with jaundice too. Even before I could reply, they forgot about me. They all assumed the same vacant, docile expression because the frontier was approaching, and they had to cross it with out-of-date, illegal papers, sealed in sweat. At the Cape Comorin terminus they made their way in columns of four to the huts, hazy in the midday heat. Like them I joined the queue for a visa. Craning my head I saw in the shed’s blue shadow a Tamil nurse, busy vaccinating the throng with a graduated syringe as big as a baby’s bottle. For each client he changed the needle and injected whatever dose he thought appropriate. No shot, no visa. I certainly didn’t need one, but what was one more vaccination set against an argument with a southern Indian official? The colour of my eyes indicated that I was a foreigner, and so I wouldn’t complain afterwards the nurse gave me a large helping, three times my neighbour’s dose. With serums as with money, the rich get richer. Ten years’ immunity at least. Against what? I didn’t care. I had two years on the road in my veins, and happiness makes you over-confident. I still had to learn what against, little by little.

  The brochures tell you that the Island is an emerald hung on the neck of the subcontinent.

  The Arcadia of Victorian honeymooners, for whom it was a must. A paradise for entomologists. A chance to see the ‘rayon vert’ — when the last ray of the sunset appears to turn green, and secret sympathies are revealed — at an attractive price.

  So far so good. But three thousand years before Baedeker, early Aryan rites were rather more hermetic. The island is the home of magi, enchanters, demons. A dusky gem risen from the ocean deeps, under the influence of perturbing planets. Many references to it are prudently prefaced and ended with this formula:

  poison of the ichneumon

  and of the moray

  and of the scorpion

  turned towards the South

  thrice I reduce you to water.

  We shall see.

  II

  The Customs Officer

  The dirt road to Murunkan winds down between reservoirs built by ancient dynasties. The trees that got the better of this curious arrangement of tanks and locks have long since died, and today their polished skeletons gesticulate above black waters. Here and there a mauve patch of bougainvillea flutters in the midday haze. It’s not enough to compose a landscape: this stretch of shattered mirrors, silenced, tarnished, suggests the pit of memory, or a finger placed on an invisible mouth.

  Because of the ruts I was driving very slowly. Waterturtles on mossy stones raised their flat heads to see the car go by. In an hour I had only come across one scrawny peasant trotting along the verge, his feet splayed out, carrying on his head a green fruit that stank so richly, was so grotesquely shaped, that I wondered if it was some kind of crude fake, or a comic prop. I thought I’d lost my way and was about to turn round when, through the sweat pricking my eyes, I saw a flash of silver borne by a figure planted purposefully in the middle of the road. He was a big fellow, out of breath, with hair sprouting from his ears, in the impeccably pressed uniform of a customs officer. Rolling his eyes, he asked if I was going to Negombo. He was carrying a swordfish in his arms, still shimmering, heavy enough to make him sag at the knees. Without waiting for a reply, he dumped it in the back of the car. I kept a great Nepalese sabre there, which he nonchalantly began to finger.

  ‘Strict-ly-for-bid-den-to-have-this-kind-of-weapon-on the Island,’ he intoned, in that southern accent which dices up English words ready for frying. To this tactless opening gambit, I retorted that it was also forbidden to get into my car with a huge, smelly fish which hadn’t been paid for. After two years in Asia I had begun to form my own ideas of how customs officers lined their pockets. It would have taken more than words to dislodge this one. He was quite content with my little joke, favoured me with an indulgent smile, and busied himself importantly with settling into the passenger seat. It did not even creak. The impression of bulkiness he gave derived more from his inflated opinion of himself than from his actual weight. He adjusted the rear-view mirror so that he could straighten his parting with a pocket-comb. I wasn’t entirely sorry to have this smug man in my hands, and without more ado told him exactly what I thought of his colleagues on the mainland: incompetent pests, parasitic, lavish with their st
upidity — even stupidity should be used carefully — and with those useless forms you found cut up for toilet-paper an hour after filling them in. As I ranted on, I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye. He nodded: wholly self-absorbed, he had heard nothing at all. Only the words ‘customs officer’ had got through.

  ‘You’re quite right,’ he said, ‘truly excellent lads. You’ll see they’re even better here: all neat, well fed, respectful.’

  Modesty prevented him from citing himself as an example, but did I realize my luck in meeting a person of his quality — and on my very first day on the Island! He was bowled over by my good fortune. Had anyone told me I was born lucky? In the living quarters he shared with his colleagues and their families, his wife — ‘a stunner’ he declared in passing — would prepare me a curry I would remember if I lived to be a hundred. His English was like him, pompous, inflated, periphrastic. I thanked him for his generosity, adding that while I liked curry, southern curry was a bit too spicy for my palate. He took as much notice of this as of my previous declaration.

  ‘The strongest curry you’ve ever eaten!’ He finished with a roar of laughter and a mighty slap on my thigh. Then he began to sing to himself like a kettle, quite unselfconsciously, a prince among men. For a moment I hoped he would evaporate into thin air.

  The countryside had changed. The road was merely a deep slice between walls of green jungle, bisected by the straight flight of parakeets, like arrows from a crossbow. The car zigzagged lazily between fresh, steaming piles of elephant dung, the size of beehives. I suddenly wondered if my boastful passenger could manage as much, pictured him squatting by the road, his forehead creased with effort, and began to chuckle while he gazed at me with perplexed suspicion.

  Negombo, late afternoon

  Bright, flimsy, scattered bungalows. Glazed tile roofs. Little baroque churches, decrepit beneath the plumes of coconut-palms. On the sea front, a network of canals ringed an old, star-shaped fort, like a drawing by Vauban, whose leathery weather-boarding glowed in the cinammon light. Invisible children’s excited cries, and in the pale light three fluttering kites spotted from the corner of the eye, making one peer up at the sky.

  The living quarters were one vast, humped straw hut, blackened like a pipe, half supported on piles sunk into the shore of a coral lagoon.

  The customs officer’s wife: a small creature, stubborn and voluble, feet firmly on the ground, spoiling for a fight. His own arrogance vanished when it came to introducing me. She began to harangue him in vehement Tamil, and I couldn’t make out whether it was the swordfish or me that she found so provoking. Both, no doubt. She eyed me scornfully, pouting with annoyance, as if to say ‘another of that rascal’s finds’. He stood there downcast; the two thumbs hooked in his belt like d’Artagnan hardly disguised his unease, I suspect he had tried to pass me off as a scrounger he couldn’t get rid of, but I didn’t mind, it was a pleasure to see him disconcerted and I had to laugh again. When she realized we were both making fun of him, and that I was surreptitiously eyeing her blouse, she suddenly changed her attitude, and with a gracious smile invited me to supper and to stay the night. Her curry was all that he had promised. I got up from the table, throat on fire, nostrils flaming, temples pounding. Washed my face in a battered pail swarming with cockroaches, then the little woman led me to my bed, a large rattan rocking-chair on the veranda overlooking the bay. All I had to do was unroll my sleeping bag.

  The night was majestic; the sea stretched out in silence. A few steps away, perched in the corner of the balustrade, a peacock was sleeping, head under wing. From time to time a shiver ran through his variegated plumes from head to tail, as though he were trapped in a bad dream. The room behind me was noisier than a box of birds. The customs officer and his colleagues were playing dominoes by the light of an oil lamp, constantly topping up their little glasses. The company began to wind down and childish, strident laughter greeted each double six. When one of the players got up to empty his bladder, I saw an immense shadow wavering in front of me on the veranda. Fever — yesterday’s vaccinations or a return of malaria — and the dancing fireflies above my head made me giddy: one of those moments that robs a traveller of his purpose. I was rather nonplussed, wondering what I was really doing here. That peacock now, I looked at it, scenting I don’t know what treachery. For all its fanned tail and insufferable cry, the peacock isn’t real. It is more of a motif than a bird, invented in Mogul miniatures and taken up by fin-de-siècle decorators. Even in the wild — and I had seen whole flocks of them on the Deccan roads — it lacks credibility. Its clumsy, low flight is disastrous: it always looks as though it’s about to impale itself. At full speed it scarcely rises to chest height, as though it can’t escape the nature into which it has strayed. In fact you feel that its true fate is to crown enormous pastries, out of which burst musical gnomes in jesters’ caps. To my dying day I shan’t understand why Linnaeus ever admitted it to his system of classification …

  Behind me, the lamp was blown out. A strong, steady snore, mingled with the reek of curry, rose to the stars. I was happy to be alone, I needed to pull myself together. I felt more lost than for a long time. For two years the ‘continuity of the continent’ had provided something to hang on to. The landscapes, faces, accents, the size of onions and the flavour of the pancakes had never changed without some warning. As I went on my way the thousand details which compose one’s impression of a country yielded an unobtrusive, whispered, consistent lesson which I repeated to myself a hundred times, backwards and forwards. The pale greens and browns of the map reconciled dream with education. Where shall we go tomorrow? I had taken a fancy to this reliable schooling, and if there had been no political restrictions, I would have driven east through Burma and south China. Yesterday I had left behind the unfolded geography of India, that great lung of Asia. Tonight I was on an island. Islands pose and resolve problems in their own ways, and I had no experience of them. What you bring to an island may be transformed. An island is like that finger placed on an invisible mouth, and ever since Ulysses we have known that time passes differently there from elsewhere. I had to guard against staying on, jammed like a cartridge in a rusty gun. To take the car to Penang or Singapore would cost a fortune, and as yet I didn’t know how I’d make a living. It was March. I had spent the previous Christmas under a dark-lantern beside the car, on the Shivpuri road, surrounded by little grey monkeys who impudently came to tug at my shirt-tails. I wondered where I would spend the next one. The creaking of the rocking-chair kept me from sleeping. The curry had set my stomach on fire, and the little woman had not come to join me, as the bony, burning foot kneading my leg thoughout the meal had led me to hope. I repeated to myself the nursery rhyme from Desnos’ ‘Chantefable’:

  The pike

  makes plans:

  I will go to see,

  says he,

  the Nile and the Ganges

  and the Yangtze Kiang …

  and just before I fell asleep that other verse by Desnos came back to me: the palace shuts and becomes a prison.

  III

  Galle

  However much he reassured me, from one Poste Restante to the next, of their happiness here, I had watched that familiar handwriting deteriorate as he got carried away. It looked feverish, as though swollen by the heat, it suggested a sick liver and a troubled mind. The letter I must have re-read twenty times is a sheet of toilet-paper with a nasty watermark and a diagram. It says: ‘you are coming from up there, from the north [since leaving Oxiana I had been coming from the north for several months]; follow the dotted line, enter the town, follow the dotted line.’ Let’s go. At the top of the sketch, the word

  DESCENT

  It is hardly noticeable, just enough to put the car into neutral, the better to stare about and prick up your ears. Spinning out the pleasure; for months I’ve been trying to imagine this visit, this place.

  STATION

  All you can see is a roof of poppy-red tiles, a tall clump of coconut-pa
lms, three flourishes of smoke.

  LITTLE RIVER

  A stagnant canal with banks of black, crumbly soil, where thousands of crabs stationed outside their holes are sweeping the air with their right claws in a fishy, touting gesture. Try to learn more about them.

  BIG STRETCH OF GRASS

  Used as a football ground, bordering the ramp up to the fort. In the middle, a zebu lying down, its hindquarters immobilized by a dungy plaster cast, coughing fit to tear its chest under the blazing sun. It has tipped over its bucket of water and has nothing more to drink. To the right, hugging the coast as it veers south, a little market and a village of straw huts, ramshackle and unimportant, hazed over with the heat.

  HIGH WALLS

  In fact an imposing gate, topped by a stone escutcheon of two Dutch unicorns facing each other, eaten away by the sea salt.

  A LARGE BRICK HOTEL INSIDE THE FORT

  A vast pink Victorian bonbonnière, dilapidated, ghostly, with waiters in long white aprons, skinnier than runner beans; mahogany fans stirring dead dreams. I’ll go and dream there myself when I’ve filled my wallet again.

  Then it reads (here the writing gets really shaky):

  LONG BUILDING WITH PORCHES

  Which are the disused warehouses of the old ‘Oost Indische Companiee’, where they stored tortoiseshell, citronella and indigo. A dozen black goats and some emaciated urchins racing around and shouting themselves hoarse amidst the rubble.