The Scorpion-Fish Page 8
‘My son,’ replied the apparition at once, ‘I’ve been too hot to pray for a very long time.’
It was a voice out of comic opera, resonant and hollow like a cicada’s, with a strong Italian accent.
With a nicotine-stained finger, the little creature beckoned me to join him. I climbed the uneven slabs, cracked by banyan roots and littered with grey crabs, and sat down beside him. He was wearing a ten-year-old’s pointed, buttoned boots, a two-day beard; his grimy soutane floated out around him as though there wasn’t a body inside, or as if it had been broken into pieces a long time ago. He rummaged for a cigar, rolled it against his ear, struck a sulphur match on the sole of his shoe and held out the glowing cigar to me.
‘I am Father Alvaro,’ resumed the crabbed voice, ‘over eighty years old, fifty in the service of the Society. No one prays here, I’m in a good position to tell you. No one can pray, the sky is too full, the air too heavy, it doesn’t work here. Even our young ones, with all their energy … they do try very hard, but when I see their satisfied looks, I know very well that they’re putting them on. Every year we send them to Ampitya, to our seminary two thousand feet up in the hills, so that they have a glimpse of the One they address. Without such a retreat, they couldn’t go on. As you will have noticed, this climate isn’t favourable to deep-rooted beliefs. As for me, it’s years since I’ve been up there, but at my age you cope with solitude better. I’ve believed in God for so long, it’s His turn to believe in me …’
The chuckle that shook his frail body ended in a smoker’s cough. ‘Mind you,’ he went on, ‘I’ve had some good years: twelve in Srinagar, eight in Darjeeling, air like champagne. I never prayed better, effortlessly, for hours on end without a break. Indeed our superiors had to remind us of our duties: after all, we are a militant Order. Especially early in the morning, everything would go right then. Perfect reception on both sides, no interference, not a single misunderstanding. I would demand a lot; I was given even more … even things I’m ashamed of today … Yes! Heaven is inexplicably indulgent towards youth. [I didn’t agree with him on that score.] The only wish not granted was to stay up there. Good places, believe me, and how I regret them every day! Oh well, I’ve had my share. Everyone gets a turn to go to the ball. I hope those up there don’t forget me in their petitions.’
With his dry, spotted little hand he made a gesture as though dismissing something irksome, and began to rock to and fro, without paying any attention to me. At the end of this dreadful day it was a godsend to happen on someone who spoke of God as a balloonist, and of mystical outpourings as a telegraphist. I love the tricks of a trade, the knack, specialists who care for their work: now I had found one, perhaps even a famous one, and in a field where they can be numbered on one hand. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity without his giving a good account of himself.
‘To hear you, Father, one would say that you had lost your faith here,’ I said, to revive the conversation.
‘God only knows,’ he replied in a piqued tone. ‘From now on it’s His affair, not mine.’ The ambiguity of his response was worthy of the Society he had served so long.
‘However,’ he resumed, nudging me lightly as though imparting a racing tip, ‘the less you bring to the Island, the less she takes away.’
Again I heard that creaking laugh, then the cough. He hadn’t even finished clearing his bronchial tubes before I had dropped off, sitting on my step, without assessing the relevance of his remark. I was dreaming. I drifted down towards long-forgotten landscapes. I saw hedges, swathes of drenched hay, sparse wild-cherry trees puffed out with mistletoe, where blackbirds pecked at the richly fermenting cherries; a caravan of basketmakers camouflaged with green, tucked away in a willow grove …
A gust of sea-wind roused me, brought me down to earth on the steps of a church 6º north and 77º east. I wiped my sweating face with my forearm, and glanced sideways to check that my companion was still there. His soutane ballooned in the breeze, and he now floated a good head and shoulders above the top step, the body-axis swaying slightly in its black corolla, the comic boots dangling in the air. He was gazing at the sea, smoking one of his foul cigars, not paying the slightest attention to his levitation, which seemed to me rather inconvenient, if modest. He had simply risen a bit, like a bottle-imp in its container. A little tricorne of cuir-bouilli had replaced his curé’s hat. He was murmuring incoherently and seemed to have forgotten me completely. I noticed that in my sleep I had grabbed hold of his soutane, and that I was still gripping a small wad of lustrine.
I held on. Surely this old, sun-baked, genial cricket knew one or two things I’d have need of before long. I had no friends here, so there was no question of letting the wind take this one. And we were approaching the worst hour of night, just before dawn, when — according to the initiates of the boarding-house — the air bristles with evil influences and restless shadows speeding home after delivering some foul blow. The sea was unsettled now, but beneath the sound of the surf you could hear from the direction of the Fort the rapid, frightened tom-tom of the exorcists’ drums, which had begun to scare me. Seeing my neighbour shake his head, I guessed they annoyed him even more.
‘Father Alvaro …’ He didn’t move.
‘Padre.’ This time I almost whispered. He slowly turned his head, smiled (revealing a few stumpy teeth), as though seeing me for the first time. ‘Padre, do you believe in the Devil?’
‘Without a doubt, my son, I’m no longer a child; but not enough to give him as much due as they do here, and above all, not enough to give him a face. The Evil One’s best-kept secret is that he’s formless: to give him a shape is to fall into his first trap. That’s all you see around here, them and their fantastic, flimsy stories, their gossiping ghosts, their flirtations with death, their racket and commotion …’
He tried to control his censure but the force of it lifted him by another hand’s breadth: his boot-soles were now on a level with my eyes, and I had to crane my neck to hear his subsequent soliloquy — which wasn’t addressed to me anyway. He spoke as though trying to convince himself about something like a thorn in his heart. In his view, God’s business was not so botched here as rumour had it. After thirty years on the Island, he knew its devilries. He had rarely come off worst, and of all the pupils that had passed through his hands, magic had only robbed him of one — but that one, alas, among the most promising. A fifteen-year-old Tamil, who had been spellbound to the pipal tree growing in the centre of the courtyard. Each night he walked out of the dormitory in his sleep, and dawn found him with his arms around the trunk, his cheek against the bark, rings under his eyes, asleep standing up. He effortlessly broke the ropes with which they tried to bind him to his pallet. Perhaps they could have sent him away, but the Fathers did not want to admit defeat. The diocesan exorcist hurried down from the capital and intoned the prayer of Leo XIII over the head of the possessed. When prayer had no effect, they tried taking a strong line, and chopped down the tree in question. The seminarians were most indignant, as they always hung it with garlands and lanterns on the feasts of the Virgin Mary. The child was dead the next day. I might have known this form of enchantment to be common here, not expensive to work but very difficult to undo; as Alvaro himself acknowledged, it is more sensible to love trees than to love people. Thus it was not something he thought worth reporting to his superiors.
Another night — years and years ago — a Portuguese in black doublet with aiguillettes had stopped him near the Klippenburg Tower, saluted very politely, brushing the dust with his cap, and asked him to pronounce absolution: he had died without the Sacraments three hundred and fifty years before, defending the town against the Dutch. A very natural request: ‘Of course I absolved him, the poor devil! Charity demanded it, and I’ve never been stingy with signs of the Cross. He immediately went up in smoke, murmuring his Pater Nosters. Still trailing around in our midst, despite the assurances given by Christ — and especially by the Society — to even the most tormented souls!
The Island must have turned his brain. I said to myself going home: But really, still having to deal with such absurdities at my age! These soldiers are deafened by the sound of their own boots, always march past the essentials. Still, poor man, and in that ridiculous hat! [He couldn’t see himself, in Punchinello’s tricorne.] You see what these rumours come down to: nothing, or nearly nothing. You mustn’t fill your head with such stories. I do realize that there’s more than one way to despatch someone to the next world … exactly! yes … oh well …’ he muttered, as if to get rid of me.
He reckoned that was enough talking for one night. I didn’t. I liked this old man: you never stop looking for your father, and I had lost the face and voice of my real one along the way. I tugged on the soutane to make him come down: watching him float was giving me a stiff neck. A shred of material baked in grime and perspiration remained in my hand. Father Alvaro had vanished. His silhouette seemed to pass at high speed across the full moon, which was dimming, and I found myself alone at the top of my own stairs. There are some days — some nights especially — when you mustn’t try too hard to find out who composed the music; and you don’t look a gift-horse in the mouth. I heard myself laughingly repeat, ‘You mustn’t fill your head with such stories.’ I hadn’t laughed for several days, not even to myself. The conversation under the stars had comforted me. Dawn was festooning the sky with sumptuous blood-red. I cheerfully went into my room, expelled with the broom several hermit crabs, centipedes and scorpions of uncertain karma, pinned a big sheet of paper to the wall for the next day’s ideas, washed and got ready everything that needed to be washed and readied. I went to sleep in a room picked clean as a bone. That morning I had wished for a stranger’s hand to close my eyelids. I was inexplicably soothed, and happiness should be shared: I was alone, so I closed them myself. ‘How am I? Well, thank you, and me?’
The next day, well after noon, I asked the landlord whether the name Alvaro meant anything to him. He was in the process of repairing a net, and suspended his delicate handiwork for a moment. Without raising his eyes, he replied in a hoarse, muted voice that he hadn’t been seen for years, suppressed the question burning on his lips, and resumed his rhythm. I made inquiries at the capital’s diocesan office, without more success, then wrote to the Jesuits at the College of St Thomas on the mainland, where I had made friends. Father Mathias took over two months to reply. Gregor Mathias Impferfisch was a burly, rubicund Bavarian, who hid great delicacy of feeling and a sharp sense of humour beneath his rustic appearance. An incomparable Latinist and expert in Indian music. I remembered — was it really in this life? — asking him once where he had fished up such an improbable name. He had replied with a stentorian laugh that Beelzebub had forged it expressly for him, ‘with his long tongs’. The business that concerned me touched him sufficiently for him to write in German, his mother tongue. I had a hard job deciphering his tall, proud calligraphy, since he wrote in Gothic script. I burned that letter, deciding that certain things should only be read once, and I merely give its essentials here. Alvaro and he had in fact been classmates in the confines of Tibet and then in Kashmir. The enfant terrible of the little community seems to have been Alvaro. When he was about fifty, he had been defrocked for going to live with a native of a south Deccan tribe.
‘… One must learn how to turn venial misdemeanours to good account. From his savannah he used to send letters full of valuable information about the beliefs, music and dialect of this tribe, still not much studied. We used to gather round at night to hear them read aloud. We knew he’d come back to us. A woman may be an even match for God, but never for very long. Before the year was out he began to pine for us. The thorn in the flesh, ha ha! We killed the fatted calf on his return, especially as he brought back the grammar we’d hoped for …’
Sanctions had been light and purely a matter of form. It was he himself who, a little later, chose exile on the Island as an expiation no one would have forced on him. He died in September 1948 of a bronchial attack, in a retreat house owned by the Society on the Manar coast. His death caused a scandal because with his last breath he had refused the Sacraments that some young Bavarian simpleton wanted to give him. His little spotted hands had gestured as though dismissing something irksome; he mustered the strength to shout ‘kein Theater’ before collapsing on to his pillows as dead as could be, as if his body had been broken into pieces.
Six years ago! The letter finished with the words: ‘He was a man of whims, with a good head such as we appreciate in our Order, one of our best linguists too.’ Plus a collection of sardonic benedictions, addressed by the old crook to a heretic he had known.
The conclusion touched me more than it surprised me. In the interval I had met Father Alvaro on two further occasions, under the same moon at the top of the same steps, where he was glad to correct the articles I was writing in English for the capital’s journal. My work seemed to be close to his heart: he made very pertinent criticisms of both form and content. He had a superb vocabulary, especially for anything to do with abasement, renunciation, pain: ‘forlorn, unwanted, god-forsaken, derelict, crest-fallen’ etc. He always slipped away in his volatile, surprising fashion, abandoning me without warning, often right in mid-sentence, to float off like a speck of soot. I would gather up the pages scattered over the steps, now covered in minute spidery script, go home and spend the rest of the night revising.
My prose earned me many compliments, but I couldn’t explain to anyone the sort of obligation I was under. Whatever progress I have since been able to make in this beloved language, I have never been able to write again with that mastery and sombre splendour. Twenty-five years later I cannot re-read those texts without a shudder; they stink of sulphur and solitude.
‘The world of shadows,’ the Father told me the last time I saw him, ‘revolves in terror without substance or pivot.’ I’d never before heard him sound so vehement and bitter. He was as dirty and unkempt as ever; a wen was beginning to grow behind his left ear. I hadn’t yet heard about his fate, that night, and I didn’t realize he was speaking so personally. If I had known, although I was equipped with neither faith nor Rule, I would certainly have given him absolution, poor devil, still trailing round in our midst with that ridiculous hat.
So be it!
XVII
A Gentleman Companion
I must go as I have something
to do: an insect is waiting to
do business with me.
— Saint-John Perse
When I saw it crossing the road, I thought it was a mouse. It turned out to be a dung-beetle of the tropical variety, horned, five times as big as the ones La Fontaine used to see at Versailles. Snuff-box size. He was pushing a ball of dung, afraid that the sea-wind would wrest it from him. I was in the barber’s chair, covered in soap. I pushed aside the razor at my throat and rushed into the street to catch him. He didn’t like this idea at all, and by way of greeting split my thumb open. I clenched my fist in pained surprise: he had a sudden spasm and pretended to be dead, clutching his ball all the while, like a statue on an imperial tomb holding the globe of the world against its stony heart. I took this marcasite fellow home — you make the best of the company on offer — and settled him with his parcel and a lettuce leaf in a ‘Four Roses’ cigarette tin, pierced its lid, and got on with my work. After half an hour, he decided that his fake faint had lasted long enough, and began to make such a racket in his lodging that it drowned the noise of my old Remington. He even began to lever open the lid and I saw, between two legs that gripped the sides, his obtuse great head appearing, enraged, metal-helmeted like those armoured creatures that haunted Hieronymus Bosch. I thought that I could hear in his body language, amidst the abuse, a demand for the complaints-book, and I couldn’t keep a straight face — for a long time there’s been nothing but insects to make me laugh — and my guffaw, which he quite wrongly interpreted as derisive, drove him absolutely beside himself. He made an insufferable grinding noise by the friction of two parts
of his armour, while staring at me furiously. I put him, together with his meal and luggage, in a quiet dark corner, beside the guitar. He wasn’t in any danger: none of my lodgers would dare pester this colossus, nor could they equal his comic talent which almost made him one of us.
I found him without difficulty among Lefroy’s plates — I don’t believe in chance any more — on the same page which had fascinated me enough to make me buy the book, several months ago. A male of the species ‘Heliocopris Midas’; the ball which seems such a source of anxiety contains his progeny. It is about these creatures that the author remarked ‘sometimes they fly in the rains’. Is that so? Sometimes? Lord, that’s Anglo-Saxon understatement for you! The first drop had scarcely hit the courtyard when he had taken to the air, as noisy as a bomber in distress, banging against everything until he landed splat on my table, knocked out by his journey. Then I put him back in his box for the simple pleasure of seeing him get out again. He spent a good week in my room, coming to take his greens from my hand, pottering about seriously in his corner, or rolling his dung-ball: black, correct, preoccupied, for all the world like a policeman in his Sunday best. The day before yesterday, a day of heavy rain, he installed himself on the balustrade of the balcony for as long as it took to mature his plan, then flew off heavily towards the banyan that overlooks the sea, and hasn’t returned. He bequeathed his family to me — and I haven’t a clue about children — I don’t even know where he’s concealed them. Sometimes, in this space which closes in and as time runs slower, I seem to hear that dung-ball, and the incubating larvae ticking away like an infernal machine. I must clear out: this room, this landlord — his eyes dilated by belladonna — this Island, must be nothing more than a memory by the time the machine bursts open.