Contact! (13 page)

‘Very well, I will sing you a very old Tamil song, a tragic song'–and half closing his eyes, and assuming an unmistakably tragic expression, there in the sunshine outside the court in a high wavering voice he sang several verses of a very, very old Tamil song. I played it back to him.

‘Very well,' he said, ‘now you have my voice. What will you give me in return?'

But, bless his heart, I was gone by then.

Temper of the South

The temper of the South is inescapable in Houston. You can sense the swagger of it in the postures of the cattle people come into town for dinner or convention: hulking rich men in Stetsons and silver belt buckles, paunchy with their generations of beer and prime steaks, lacquered observant women in bangles, talking rather too loud as Texans are apt to, the wives greeting each other with dainty particularities (‘
Why, hi, Cindy. My you're looking pretty!
') the husbands with spacious generics (‘Well, boy, what's things like in East Texas?')

And you can sense the poignant charm of it in the faded white clapboard houses of the Fifth Ward, stilted above the dust of their unpaved streets. There the black folk still idle away the warm evenings on their splintered porches, as in the old story books; there the vibrant hymns still rise from the pews of the Rose of Sharon Tabernacle Church; there the
garbage still blows about the garden lots, and you may still be asked, as I was, if, ‘Say, ain't you Miss Mary's daughter from the old store? Bless your heart, I used to be one of Miss Mary's best,
best
customers…'

Monty

Late one evening during World War II I was walking up Arlington Street towards Piccadilly when there emerged from the door of the Ritz General Sir Bernard Montgomery (not yet a Marshal or a Lord). A policeman saluted as he scuttled down the hotel steps and into his waiting staff car, but I thought there seemed something almost furtive about his movements. I expect he was really in haste to get back to the War Office, or even into battle, but if he had been another kind of general I would have guessed he was hurrying to an assignation down the road in Soho!

Confrontation

Through the crowd waiting for their luggage at the Toronto airport carousel there staggered ever and again a middle-aged woman in a fur hat and a long coat of faded blue, held together by a leather belt evidently inherited from some earlier ensemble. She was burdened with many packages elaborately stringed, wired and brown-papered, she had a sheaf of travel documents generally in her hands, sometimes between her teeth, and she never stopped moving, talking and gesticulating. If she was not hurling questions at expres
sionless bystanders in theatrically broken English, she was muttering to herself in unknown tongues, or breaking into sarcastic laughter. Often she dropped things; she got into a terrible mess trying to get a baggage cart out of its stack (‘You–must–put–money–in–the–slot.' ‘What is slot? How is carriage coming? Slot? What is slot?') and when at last she perceived her travelling accoutrements–awful mounds of canvas and split leather–erupting on to the conveyor, like a tank she forced a passage through the immobile Canadians, toppling them left and right or barging them one into another with virtuoso elbow work.

I lost sight of the lady as she passed through customs (I suspect she was involved in some fracas there, or could not undo the knots on her baggage), but she represented for me the archetypal immigrant, arriving at the emblematic immigrant destination of the late twentieth century, and I watched the confrontation with sympathy for both sides.

The spy's discomfort

Roller skating was then all the rage around the Lake of Geneva. Whole families skated along the promenade. Dogs rode about in rollered baskets and youths whizzed shatteringly here and there, scattering the crowds with blasts of the whistles that were held between their teeth. I lunched with a spy of my acquaintance. What kind of a spy he is, who he spies for, or against, I have never been able to discover, but he has all the hallmarks of espionage about him, divides his time between Switzerland and the East, wears raincoats and speaks Greek. We ate little grilled fish at the water's edge and
discussed the state of the city. Uncomfortable, he thought it, and getting worse. Security getting tougher? I conjectured. Banks turning difficult? Opposition hotter? No, no, he said testily, holding his hands over his ears, nothing like that: only those damned roller skaters.

Admiral's walk

Split in Croatia is a naval base, and when I was driving out of town I stopped at the traffic lights near the fleet headquarters. A very senior naval officer started to cross the road. He was loaded with badges, braid and medal ribbons, but wearing as I was a floppy old hat and a less than spotless blue shirt, just for fun I saluted him. His response was Split all over. First he faltered slightly in his steady tread. Then he brought his hand to the peak of his cap in a guarded and cautious way. And then, as the lights changed, I started forward and he scuttled with rather less than an admiral's dignity to the safety of the opposite pavement, he turned round, all rank and propriety discarded, and shared my childish laughter.

True gents

At Three Rivers, stopping for a hamburger, I found that I had locked my car keys in the boot. Small-town Texas swung instantly to my rescue–well, eased itself slowly off its cafe stools, tipped its Stetsons over its eyes, strolled into the car park and stood meditatively eyeing the problem, saying
things like
Huh
or
Kindova problem there
. In easy stages they approached the task, sniffing it, feeling it, and when in the end they got the hang of it, enlarged the right aperture, unscrewed the right screws, and found that the keys were not in the boot at all, since I had left them on the Dairy Queen counter, they seemed not in the least disconcerted. Deftly reassembling the mechanism, tilting their Stetsons back again, they drifted back into the cafe murmuring, ‘You bet, lady, any time.'

The Low Riders

In Santa Fe the Spanish culture is relentlessly pressed upon by all the influences and temptations of the American Way. Often in the evenings the cultists called the Low Riders cruise through town. They are the public faces, I suppose, of young Hispanica, and as they drive slowly about the streets in their weirdly low-slung limousines, wearing wide hats and dark glasses, radios booming, unsmiling, proud,
stately
one really might say, who knows what resentments or aspirations of their race they are trying to declare?

The call of conscience

On the Bund in Shanghai one evening a youth with the droopy shadow of a moustache confronted me with a kind of dossier. Would I go through his examination paper for him, and correct his mistakes? But I had been pestered by students all afternoon, and I wanted to go and look at the
silks in Department Store No. 10. ‘No,' said I. ‘I won't.'

At that a theatrical scowl crossed his face, screwing up his eyes and turning down the corners of his mouth. He looked then, with that suggestion of whiskers around his chin, like a Chinese villain in a bad old movie, with a gong to clash him in. I circumvented him nevertheless and, ah yes, I thought, if the Gang of Four were still around, you would have me up against a wall by now, with a placard around my neck and a mob to jeer me, not to consult me about participles.

But my conscience pricked me, and I went back and corrected his damned papers after all.

A lesson

I helped a blind lady over a street crossing near the Gare de Lyon. She looked particularly irritable, cross and demanding, but though born and bred in the 12th arrondissement, turned out to be diffidently gentle. It was a lesson to me not to misjudge the hard-mouthed, sharp-eyed, fast-shoving, middle-aged Parisian housewife. I took the lady first to the post office, then to the pharmacy, and when I left her she said: ‘Now I give you back your liberty.'

After a Mexican dinner

Theatrical characters, it seemed to me, filled the main square of Oaxaca when we strolled down there for a drink after dinner: nut-brown women cloaked in red, and dapper old gents with silvery moustaches, and gaggles of students
like opera choruses, and small policemen with nightsticks, and rumble-tumble infants everywhere, and a blind guitar player doing the rounds of the coffees shops, guided by his urchin familiar, and a gringo hippie or two, and barefoot families of peasants loaded with shopping bundles and making, I assumed, for the mountains. The faces were mostly dry and burnt. The movements seemed kind of airy, as though tending towards weightlessness. Among the trees some children were blowing up long sausage balloons and letting them off with a squirt of air into the night sky, where they rotated dizzily off into the darkness like so many flying serpents.

Harry's

It was in 1946, when the war in Europe was hardly over and Venice was still under the control of the Allied armies, that I first poked my nose through the doors of Harry's Bar in Venice. I was in my twentieth year, and did not know what to expect. The room was smallish and unexpectedly cosy. At the tables were smoky looking, hooded-eyed, tweedy, sometimes hatted, heavily made-up but rather weatherbeaten persons I took to be members of the Italian aristocracy. Sitting at the bar were three or four officers, the British looking disconcertingly suave to me, the Americans dauntingly experienced. The conversation was low but intense, and everyone looked up as I made my entrance. The officers looked up in a cool, officer-like way, holding their glasses. The patricians looked up patricianly, rather disappointedly, as though they had been hoping for better things. But it was the contact I
made with the three pairs of eyes behind the counter that I remember best–the eyes of the boss sitting behind his cash till, the eyes of the two busy barmen in their white jackets. The expression in their gazes seemed to me generic to the place. It was at once interested, faintly amused, speculative and all but collusive. It put me simultaneously at my ease and on my guard, made me feel in some way a member of the establishment, and has kept me going back to Harry's from that day to this.

Only in London

I was sitting over my croissant and the morning paper in a coffee shop in Marylebone High Street when a tall elegant man in late middle age walked stiffly in and ordered a cup of coffee. He wore a long dark coat and a trilby tilted over his brow, and I rather think spectacles were inclined towards the end of his nose. He looked to me as though he had enjoyed perhaps rather too good a dinner the night before, but he emanated an air of unconcerned, if not actually oblivious, composure. I put him down for some mildly eccentric and very likely scholarly earl, of the Irish peerage, perhaps, and thought to myself that only in London could one still see such a genial figure, at once so urbane and so well used, more or less direct from the eighteenth century.

‘Know who that was?' said the proprietor, when the man had walked perhaps a little shakily out again. ‘That was Peter O'Toole. Remember him in Lawrence of Arabia?'

No thanks

I went to a place on the Rio Grande which was, I was told, a favourite place for illegal immigrants to cross into the United States. There were a few houses nearby, grazed about by goats, guarded by many dogs, but I found it a chill and spooky spot. It seemed full of secrets, and sure enough one of the neighbours told me that almost every night of the year people from the south clandestinely crossed the river there, and crept damp and dripping through the shrubbery into Texas. ‘You see that forest there,' my neighbour said, pointing to a confusion of shrubbery beside the water. ‘I'll bet you there's people laying there this very minute, waiting for dark, bad men some of them, from far, far away.' I peered at the bushes through my binoculars, hoping to see glints of weaponry, the smoke of marijuana rising, blackened faces peering back at me through the leaves. All seemed deserted, though. ‘Want to go over and see? See if there's men there now?' asked my informant helpfully. ‘No, thanks,' I said.

Glaswegians

George Square in Glasgow has a family feel to it. People talk to each other easily on benches. People share gambles, compare prices, take their shoes off to give their poor feet a rest. The five-year-old boy riding his motorized buggy around the benches smiles indiscriminately at us all as he blasts past yet again, and his father proudly tells us how much he paid for the machine. Sitting there among those citizens, looking at the civic statues, cursing the buggy boy, while the big buses
slide around the square and the City Chambers look paternalistically down at us, I seem to feel a comforting sense of community. Ay, well, responds a freckled woman sitting beside me, that's all very well, but life's not all statues in George Square–and what's a wee bairn doing with a contraption like that anyway, he'll do himself a damage in the end.

Wildlife

While searching unsuccessfully for kangaroos in the bush of Mount Ainslie, a wooded hill rising immediately above Canberra, I felt a sudden need to relieve myself. I was just doing so when I heard a padding and a shoving and a rustling through the bushes. Kangaroos at last? Very nearly. Crashing among the branches, as I was in the very act, a few feet away from me there appeared a very large, very bearded, white-shorted and energetically sweating Australian, doing his daily jog, I suppose, during the luncheon break from his duties as Executive Officer Grade Two in the Department of Inter-Administration. ‘Ho, ho, ho,' was all he said, as he bounded distinctly roo-like past.

Two in the morning

At two in the morning I decided that enough was enough, and clambering upstairs I knocked upon the door of M. le Propriétaire's private apartment. It sounded as though they were having a football match inside and, sure enough, when the door opened it was the hotelier's three-year-old son, all
flushed and tousled with hilarity, who first poked his nose through the crack. ‘A million pardons, madame,' came his father after him. ‘How can you forgive us? We were having–how do you say it–a little practice match!'