The Scorpion-Fish Read online

  GRASSY SPACE

  Yes, broad-bladed, sharp-edged, common grass. From here you can see the narrow little streets of the Fort, with their majolica-coloured weather-boards, nestling around a baroque church.

  BOARDING HOUSE, 22 HOSPITAL STREET OUR PLACE

  On the diagram, a dark, cross-hatched rectangle. An exclamation mark. The boarding-house faces an immense banyan tree, a dazzling white lighthouse, and the sea stretching all the way to the South Pole without breathing another word.

  They had been on the Island for several months, lodged here for several weeks, and had been married ten days ago. That ‘our place’ had made me cry. Paul et Virginie.

  I switched off the engine, sounded the horn and the landlord leapt out of the doorway like a cricket from its hole. He had let down his chignon to brush the black, wavy hair that hung to his loins. Behind this rippling mane of devil’s hair I saw a demure little face, puffy from sleep, and two liquid black eyes that watched me attentively. With his tightly draped sarong he looked rather like a virgin martyr from one of those Flemish altar-pieces, only dusted with soot. Another glance or two, then he buckled his belt, joined his hands in the Indian manner and bowed, murmuring ‘such a fearless gentleman’. My friends — where were they, by the way? — must have enlarged on the picaresque and hazardous nature of the journey. Sickness apart, it had been a pleasure.

  For all its accuracy, their map is not complete. In the ‘grassy space’ you will find a terrible hospital, red with betel-spit, from which — even at siesta time and in the slackest hours — rises a continual cry. Malaria, yaws, bilharzia, amoebic dysentery, bloodshot eyes and trembling bodies. It is heralded by a notice on a twisted stake, with the legend ‘zone of silence’, a notice I had merely registered in passing, quite heedless in what I might now call my youth. In geography, as in life, a careless prowler can end up in a silent zone, those dog latitudes where empty sails doom an entire crew to scurvy or to madness. It is rare, though, that anyone bothers to warn you of its proximity.

  IV

  The 117th Room

  End of March

  This morning I took over my friends’ room. They had spent three months here painting amidst crazy colours and laughter while their love was new, had exhibited in the capital where the response was indifferent, sluggish, then returned to Europe defeated by the climate, to put into dry store in our hidden, beautifully grassy cantons the multicoloured treasures harvested here, before they could go rotten. Had departed thinner, their eyes flecked with yellow, at the end of their tether. They had left me the following provisions:

  — a little canvas on which a steamer made its getaway, the stern bellying out and the stacks circled boldly with black and sienna, as children always draw them.

  — three issues of Paris-Match and a bunch of bananas, still green, hung on the wall from a nail so stout that it might be the fourth nail from the Cross which people sometimes fool themselves they’ve discovered.

  — an illustrated map of their bathing places, enough to make any adventurer jealous, with giant tortoises, mermaids and dolphins.

  — a list of addresses — contacts and potential friends: interminable names where the W’s had homed in like wasps, to find nothing but thin air. Too often here the climate — or poverty — comes between intention and action, and nothing gets done.

  — a primus stove and an oil lamp, whose sturdy compactness is a real blessing.

  How much I’ll miss their company, God bless them!

  This morning I can complete the map that led me to this boarding-house several weeks ago.

  You cross the veranda, powdered with fine sand by gusts of wind. Up the spiralling wooden stairs to the right. There are five steps; the last one creaks and I know that living here, I won’t often hear it creak. This is it; from now on, this is it.

  Have you a cheap room, my pretty?

  It’ll cost you less than the sun, my friend!

  And the bugs?

  Lots of bugs, thank God!

  — Dylan Thomas

  The room costs a rupee a day. The sun costs nothing: it lights up the room, strolls across the floor and founders on the walls, roughcast in an incredible ultramarine, which the humidity decorates with darker patches. As for our mediocre bed-bug (Cimex lectularius), nature has not equipped it well enough to brave what lies in wait for it here, Thank God!

  Eight paces long, four wide. The floor polished to black. The smoked beams which disappear into the shadowy roof remind you of an upside-down hull, or the flies of a small, burnt-out theatre. Under a canopy of varnished tiles, a balcony from which you can see the well in the courtyard, the ridge of a roof, the slow, mesmerizing undulation of the blue horizon.

  The bed is a wooden frame laced with ropes. A table with a drawer, a chair, a shelf holding a Buddha the size of my fist, whose watchful face is half eaten away. That’s all. It is neat, solemn, enigmatic, and perfectly in tune with the modesty of my life here.

  To settle into a room for a week, a month, a year, is a ritual act on which much will depend, and it should not be undertaken lightly. Do not clutter up a salutary frugality, do not interfere with or above all disturb the balance of tones. In a room worthy of the name, the colours have taken time to evolve: through use and reciprocal tolerance they have achieved the desired, creative dialogue. This blue and this black have become a combination that owes nothing to chance. I unpacked my meagre belongings on tip-toe. Spread out on the bed, the faded lavender of my sleeping bag works wonders. In the darkest corner, where the stairs emerge, I placed my guitar, its light tobacco hue lending a touch of gaiety to the composition, a Cubist air. Thumbtacked above the table, a stack of white paper: I like to scribble with a thick lead pencil if an idea suddenly comes to me. Took down the steamer sailing in the wrong direction and replaced it with the photo of a Goanese Christ torn out of an Indian art magazine long ago. The thorns are as long as your thumb. He is all black with blood, doubts, cares, just before he cries ‘Eli sabacthani’. A little Catholic Lusitanian tragedy isn’t excessive: I’m in need of protection and this wily little Buddha cannot cater to all needs. The bare bulb at the end of its flex gives no more light than a ripe mango, and shivers miserably. To clothe it I bought from the bazaar a Chinese lantern — left over from the Buddhist New Year — in the shape of a peacock. On my return, I found on the shelf a blush-pink crab, strayed far from its palm-tree or native sewer, which greeted me frantically with its great claw. I put it at the top of the stairs and it zigzagged down, gesticulating all the way, as if to say enough was enough.

  I am writing now under this flickering blue and yellow striped light, not that it sheds much. On the table, the oil lamp and a pot of black tea to hand. Perfectly settled to work myself gaily into the ground, waiting for better health. I have three months’ money left, and life before me. It’s up to me to call the shots. I can begin my inventory of the world wherever I like, whenever I like. With Bosnian music or the Great Mogul, Gobineau or the wasps of Kandahar, the wild tulips of a Kurdish spring or Montaigne. I have the entire bloody cultural shambles to reduce by magic in this incubator.

  Why not start with Montaigne: I need familiar things to balance everything that still puzzles me here. Let us coax him towards these oriental Indies, which never concerned him, obsessed as he was with the ravages of the Spanish in the Americas and the wretched Montezuma. Let’s remind him of that Portuguese Jewish mother he kept in the background, whose family must have been up to their necks in Indonesia’s cloves and commerce. See him crunching coriander seeds, his doublet flecked with curry, his cheeks hollowed by yellow fever. What might he not have written about the abominations of Alfonso D’Albuquerque, fed like a bird by his Indian concubine amidst rowdy, sallow brats. Besides, he is a man for all time by virtue of that invincible cheerfulness of his, which underlies every disillusioned remark. Not a page goes by without his mocking himself. I take out of my bag the first English translation of his Essays, by John Florio (1610), and a pocket dictionary stouter
than a bible, except that humidity has warped the binding. It falls open at the same two pages and at two words — top left hand, where the eye falls — that I have learnt despite myself, and will doubtless never have the chance to use:

  p.246

  BREAD-POULTICE a soft mass of bread spread on muslin — the memory of which had surely faded even before Dickens.

  p. 342

  HOLLYHOCKS what we would call ‘roses trémières’ or ‘passe-roses’.

  So that’s that.

  If we are to believe the Preface, this Florio — a most learned Florentine philologist, who emigrated to England — was never highly regarded by his colleagues, products of the Oxford morgue! They dismissed him as a wop, with his hair waved and greased, and no doubt responded to his questions by merely clearing their throats. I don’t care, I take to him whoever he was, especially in this sturdy cloth binding by ‘Murray & Sons’, spotted with mildew. His English is hawthorn-green, and the two languages then enjoyed a warmer relationship than they do today. He mocks philosophers: ‘Will they not seek the quadrature of the circle even upon their wives!’

  I set to work, each elbow in a pool of sweat, knowing very well that I’m cheating, scared, lashing myself to the mast like Ulysses. There are different things at stake here. The night gradually overflows in a silence broken only by goats cropping on the battlements, or the humming of God knows what creature beneath my roof. To give myself heart and revive my flagging courage, I count up the number of rooms I’ve lived in since my departure. This is the 117th. The next one could be a long time away. It’s probably as well to pause from time to time, to learn how to make one’s own music, to make the outer wings sing a little, don’t you think?

  V

  The Capital

  Before our trading posts, our plundering, our tall ships created this port and this town, there was nothing here but a large village of acrobatic coconut-pickers, fishermen tossed high in the spray, cinnamon peddlers governed by a Dutch pastor who wore a wig and no doubt treated himself with mercury. The old chronicles don’t tell us. No saint had ever turned up there. No genie worth mentioning had made it his den. It’s scarcely a place at all: only the heavy ships at anchor and the hooters of the tugboats, threading their way almost noiselessly between pyramids of watermelons and mangoes with their heady smell, provide a little nostalgia, a hint of reality. You could blow it all away without anyone — least of all me — minding very much. A few mean churches would remain, dagobas in the shape of a vulture’s egg, elephants hauling tree-stumps, for all the world like baffled oxen who are determined not to be tricked again, and the buildings of a former colonial order: court, banks, toll gate.

  Still, it is the capital, where until now I’ve failed in all my errands: the Japanese Embassy is closed for a ‘Festival of Flowers’, the freight company hasn’t anything going east before the autumn, and the journalists I hoped to see haven’t kept our appointment. Our new consul — fresh from Hong Kong — on whom I was rather relying, had been knocked down by a taxi the day he took up his post. I visited him in hospital. Multiple fractures. He was swathed in bandages like a mummy, adrift in morphine, dreaming of his longed-for retirement; he could offer only incoherent remarks apropos of Berne’s ingratitude and the mushrooms of the northern Vaud.

  My seedy hotel is much too dear for what it offers. From my attic I survey varnished tile roofs and a sea of saturated foliage foaming against the low clouds. Silly crows play in nooks and crannies, croaking all the time. Languid, arrogant boys. Long corridors gleaming with polish. Dark figures loafing about or motionless in front of their cups of tea, while families of flies busily move from their lips to their eyebrows. The basin hiccups out a trickle of rusty water; and most of the clients do not use the lavatories in the western way: they relieve themselves haphazardly, squatting over the bowl, and depart nose in the air, certain that an untouchable is just waiting for them to leave so that he can deal with ‘that’. They’re wrong: the evidence of their passage piles up around the bowl and gives it the look of the kind of decayed mouth you might find in a joke shop. I’d have done better to bed down under a tree but this time I lacked the heart for it, having neither the courage to go lower nor the means to go higher. Although every town has its lesson to teach, I don’t understand what is chanted at me here. I only find an inner frustration, and for the first time in a long while, fear of the morrow. I don’t know how to cope with these people who vanish and doors that close, or the remote capital itself with its smell of burning. How am I to face so much emptiness with the little I have become?

  Misalliance française

  ‘No, my dear fellow, not a crumb …’ He briskly tucks his chin into his shoulder, like a chaffinch, and looks sideways at me. His eyes are round, nut-coloured, his voice high. He is the head of the Alliance française to whom I’ve come to offer my services, to talk about the countries or the writers I love. An ageing adolescent, very chic in his shirt with all its pockets and his black and white checked trousers. My country’s interests here are only commercial; French is my mother tongue, my approach seems entirely reasonable. But it is ill-received because two fellow vagrants who gave a talk on Mexico last month decamped without a word, after running up a hotel bill which the director had to foot, and which had cleaned him out. He had had difficulty in getting Paris to swallow this story. He was-with-in-a-hair’s-breadth-of-dis-missal. The poor little man is still crestfallen on account of this trickery, and won’t be caught out again. He sucks in his cheeks while speaking, and occasionally jerks his wrist as though adjusting an invisible lace cuff. It’s not difficult to work out that more is going on here than meets the eye, and equally, that I’ve got off to a bad start. Through a lopsided shutter the sun shines right into my eyes, my legs are wobbly and bile wells up in my throat. Besides, if I’m to believe his blethering, the director detests travellers of my sort, doesn’t think much of Stendhal, Gobineau, Léautaud and my other companions, ranking no one above his divine Madame de Sévigné.

  ‘I’m not even paid anything for repairs to my typewriter,’ he whines, casually nudging the carriage until it jams, tinkling in the muggy air, ‘Dear fellow’ wasn’t what I was after: I wasn’t born a drone, and I had been proposing honest work. Those two scroungers had cut the ground from under my feet. I had a certain respect for them — if I catch up with them later (or even better, if they catch up with me somewhere), we’ll stick pins in an effigy of this minion. For the moment, I no longer have the heart to sell myself. Besides, looking at this hack, those commentaries, glosses, veronicas around dead writers suddenly seem to me an inferior kind of work, a bit suspect. Rather than clutching at such tatters of Europe, pussy-footing academic work, it would be much more valuable to return boldly to my inferno, to open my eyes and do justice to what is around me, to prick up my ears and detect the music that alone might harmonize experience, to sit down at the work bench. All the same, disappointment was knotting my stomach: I had really hoped to make a few sous and a few friends through this institution, and to leave with a bundle of books under my arm. But there is no question of my taking his precious volumes to my distant retreat: he insists on his revenge, he is categorical.

  ‘No, my dear fellow, not the slightest morsel …’

  ‘Of a fly’ (I too knew La Fontaine).

  ‘Or a little worm,’ he finished, with a young girl’s high-pitched giggle, then he left me to go off to lunch, with a spring in his step. And I — as I shaved this morning — had imagined us sitting down for a chat over a bottle of wine. I have no intention of seeing him again. My Huguenot education, which has half paralysed me, alas prevents my cheating a hotel but not my being sick, although talking about such matters is not encouraged. I politely put two fingers down my throat, my dear fellow, and vomit on his wall-to-wall carpet before finding myself on the street again. The torrid, noisy, inquisitive, ephemeral street; I don’t know quite how to cope with it, nor where it leads. The jewellers’ quarter. Here and there, behind the smiles that bar
the doorways, behind the tiny scales, the cat’s-eye rubies, topazes, moonstones lapped in silken paper sleep, gleaming and sparkling in secret. Gems patiently ripening their beauty in the dark are a lesson in constancy and deliberation. Transparent and radiant through wear. They encrust this fickle capital in linear time, and contribute just enough reality for Parliament to establish itself there without vanishing.

  I wandered about in the gathering dusk, finding my way to the publishing quarter to see what the best bookshop in town could offer me in French: La cousine Bette, the Speeches of Jaurès and — the enigmas of intellectual serendipity — Brillat-Savarin. On an island where hot peppers had killed all sense of taste before our infant Lord was playing among the wood-shavings and planes. Nothing to while away those sleepless nights. But further on, in a secondhand stall, I came across Indian Insect Life by H. M-Lefroy (MA, FES, FZS), Calcutta 1909. Another retired colonel? He must have won his medals at Khartoum before pinning down butterflies. A stout, cloth-bound volume, which must have passed through many hands and under several rickshaws before landing here. The binding still held, the stitching was good, the book was complete from title page to index. At the rate things were going, and as I felt my stay here might be lengthy, I would have more to do with insects than with people. The book was in that old collotype which produced such handsome results in Leipzig and Geneva, though the printers of Bengal did not seem to have mastered it perfectly. The plates were a bit blurred but legible. Opening it at random: a great beetle, drawn from behind, thus in frock coat, standing on its hind legs, pushing something before it. What? The picture shimmered under the acetylene lamp. In the text on the left-hand page you could read ‘Sometimes they fly in the rains’. I noted with pleasure that even H. M-Lefroy was not categorical. He was reluctant to commit himself, and left those insects a complete right to their arbitrary freedom. Let them fly in the rains to their hearts’ content. Shall we live to understand? Shall we ever meet again? Such questions, always left up in the air, seem to me superbly, quintessentially English; they take the measure of an existence whose purpose is often obscure. With the aid of this apparent stupidity, acknowledged and public, the British had been able to pillage India at their leisure, to love it to the point of madness, to be chased away by Gandhi for reasons that had nothing to do with logic, and to be held in great esteem there today. I bought Lefroy for three rupees and went off with the fat tome as ballast; it seemed to have been written just for me. The Gauls had thrashed us more than once without teaching us much; the Romans had thrashed us and left some tesserae, public baths and milestones, but it was the Irish Celts who taught the brutes we were to cross ourselves standing, to pray, to sing plainchant and to illuminate those manuscripts in which the world appears quite magical.