Foreign Land (3 page)

She signed her letter:
Lots of love, Sheila
.

T
here was no twilight in Bom Porto. Day stopped and night began in as much time as it took to walk the length of the Square of the Liberators of Africa. It wasn’t much of a square, either: the banks of flowers and shrubs planted by the Portuguese had died of drought since Independence, and only a handful of dwarf acacias and spiky palms still managed to hold out in the red volcanic dirt. The old saltwater fountain was dry and choked with dust, the bandstand had lost its top and the wooden park benches had been carried away to feed suburban cooking fires.

In the middle of the square, the statue of Dr Da Silva had been redecorated by the army. The bronze doctor on his plinth had a fine walrus moustache and a chestful of medals. He stared grimly out over the city towards the Atlantic as if he was searching the horizon for the puff of smoke that would mean rescue. A bronze African woman in a turban crouched at his feet. With her left hand, she cuddled a plump bronze baby; with her right, she pointed admiringly up at the doctor, whose seaward gaze blandly excluded the woman and her child. The engraved lettering on the plinth read:

The words were difficult to make out now, since they lay under a collage of later, more exuberant messages,
VIVA PAIM! VIVA ARISTIDE VARBOSA! VIVA A REFORMA! VIVA O POVO!

Long life to the people … George would be happy to wave his hat in the air for that. He entered the square from the Rua Fidel Castro, a zippered squash racket swinging at his knee. He carried an oilcloth shopping bag that he’d stolen from Vera, and wore a smart white gimme cap with a ten-inch brim. This had been bought from Filomeno for a pack of Marlboro cigarettes. On the front in red letters it said

George liked Bom Porto’s easygoing, festive Marxist-Leninism. The further you went into the Wolof, Negro interior of Montedor, the more the politics of the country lost their good humour. By the time you reached the mountain town of Guia, 200 miles inland, they were inward and paranoid, with rumours of liquidation and torture. But in this coastal, Creole city, the security police were an amiable gang of sloppy drunks, hardly anyone belonged to the Party, and no-one whom George knew had disappeared. No-one, that is, unless one counted Jose Ribeiro, which George didn’t. Ribeiro—who used to spread his fantasies like a contagious itch—had simply made his own bad dreams come true.

Night fell to the sound of music in Bom Porto. As the sun went out and the sea went from blood to tar, someone switched on the crackling speakers in the palms and the square filled with the noise of an elderly Brazilian dance band. When George first came here, the band was real, the benches were comfortable, and the tropical greenery was a fairytale forest full of secret places for lovers to hide in. Nowadays, the square was little more than a scorched rectangle of red ash, yet no-one seemed to notice. People still came, summoned by the darkness; and by the beginning of the second scratchy rumba the crowd was as thick and vivid as a poppy field. Young men climbed on to the shoulders of Dr Da Silva and dripped canned lager over his distinguished skull; girls in flouncing skirts did private, spinning dances on the bandstand.

George eased his way through. His height, topped by his Holsum cap, made him as prominent a figure as a uniformed policeman in a playground.

“Hey—how ya doin’, Mister George!”

“Hi, man, what’s new?”

Arms were laid around his waist. Wherever George went, he wagged his cap, politely clowning for his friends in the crowd.

“Hello, Mario, how are you? Anna Luisa! God, you’re looking stunning.”

“Well, George, whaddaya know!”

Everyone spoke to him in movie American. In this Portuguese cake slice of Africa, English was the language not of colonialism but of romance. George was a Bom Porto institution: he gave everybody a chance to try out their few shards of magic-English.

“Have a nice day, okay?”

“Meester!” called a small boy, a stranger to George. “New York!” the boy said. “Boss-town! New Bed-ford Massachusetts!”

“First rate,” said George.

“First rate,” said the boy, returning George’s voice to him. It sounded painfully like the voice of a Wodehouse toff. It was a pity that he could not speak like George Raft.

The music from the speakers mixed with the dry toss and rustle of the acacias. The northeast trade wind, blowing off the Sahara, funnelled through the square like the blast of a giant hair-dryer. It tasted rancid on the tongue, and you could smell in it dead dogs, rotten fruit, kerosene, wood smoke, sweat, mintballs and sewage. It was extravagant, travel stained, African air; meaty stuff, that George chewed on as he walked.

An albino youth pointed at his squash racket. “Ilie Nastase—okay!” He made a thumbs up sign.

“Okay,” George said. It was like the smells of the trade wind: by the time they reached Bom Porto, all cultural messages got scrambled.

Dr Ferraz was promenading stiffly past the bandstand: George ducked his head low and dodged into the crowd. Ferraz had told him to knock off the weekly squash sessions with Teddy—had burbled on about dicky valves, as if George was a defective wireless. Well, Emanuel Ferraz, who took no
exercise more strenuous than his evening hobble to the bar of the Hotel Lisbào, looked pretty bloody sickly himself. His long-faced warnings were typical symptoms of old man’s envy: he wanted George to join him in the geriatric set and wasn’t above inventing imaginary diseases to scare his patients into premature old age. Even so, George took good care to hide his squash racket from the doctor. He hove-to in the lee of a bearded palm tree until Ferraz was gone.

At the end of the square, he turned left into a street of one room cottages built of loose rocks. Their windows were empty of glass, and they were lit by paraffin lamps that threw the shadows of their inhabitants out into the street. George trampled through moving silhouettes. A yellow dog with swollen tits emerged from a pile of rubbish and fell in alongside.

“Go on,” George said. “Home, dog. Home.” He raised the squash racket. The dog howled and showed her teeth. At the end of the street she was still there, limping hopefully in his wake., He waved the shopping bag at her: “Shoo!” She stared at him, her eyes ripe with incomprehension and mistrust. George reached down into the dirt and pretended to pick up a stone. The dog fled into the dark, the bald sore on her rump bobbing like a rabbit’s scut.

George crossed a sloping no man’s land of thin red shale and reached the waterfront. The Atlantic tide here on the Bight was too feeble to scour the harbour clean, and the sea was wrinkled, oily and malodorous. The last of the tuna skiffs were being hauled up onto the beach, and men and boys were carrying out dead’fish as big as silver aero engines.

Nearly a mile across the water, the bunkering station lit the whole bay with a hard white blaze. Beyond the perimeter fence with its elevated look-out posts (George had christened it the Berlin Wall), the gas and diesel silos formed a magnificent illuminated castle of fat towers and slender aluminium battlements. Along with its other burdens, the wind carried the sound of the electric generators: George heard them humming and throbbing in his back teeth. The bunkering station was the
biggest thing in Bom Porto and the finest landmark on the 600 miles of coast between Dakar and Freetown. When George had seen it first, there had been two derelict coal chutes, a rusting diesel tank and a shack marked OFFICE where Miller used to lie on his plastic sofa reading his month old copies of the
Hull Daily Mail
. Now it was such a glory that the army kept it permanently defended with four gun emplacements, two Churchill tanks and a mobile rocket launcher.

The Curaçaoan tanker
St Willebrordus
was still on discharge in Number One. George could see the insect swarm of stevedores on the quay, and he felt widowed by the sight. But Raymond Luis had to learn to handle things on his own. There were five weeks left. George saw them as one might view the dismal, far too brief remission of an illness: he dreaded this reckoning with the small pains and indignities that went with letting go. He still hadn’t faced up to it, even though it had been nearly a year since the President had smilingly picked up his stone. Home, George.

He turned into the courtyard of the Club Nautico. Teddy, already in his squash kit, was waiting for him.

“Sorry, Teddy,” George said. “Am I late?”

Eduardo Duarte, who had lived in the United States and made even the President of the Republic call him Teddy, after Mr Kennedy, made a show of inspecting his wristwatch-cum-electronic calculator. “Eleven minutes,” he said. As Minister of Communications, he was a stickler for timetables. “You have time for one drink. What do you want? A Chivas Regal?”

“No thanks,” George said. “I’ll go and change.” Teddy himself drank nothing but a Vitamin C cocktail called Sun Top which he puritanically sucked through a straw; he always tried to make George start the evening with a slug of Scotch in the hope of slowing up his game.

“I got a confession to make, George. I feel real good tonight. And I am going to hit the hot shit out of you, baby.”

“Oh, yes?” said George. “You and whose sister?” Cheered, he went off to the changing room. In singlet and shorts, he replaced his Holsum cap and took a secret nip from the bottle
in his shopping bag.

After Independence, there were very few yachtsmen left in Montedor, and the Club Nautico was well on its way to becoming a draughty ruin. The club notice board still had the 1974 regatta results pinned to it. They were illegible. Red dust blew around the floors of the high vaulted rooms. Red dust had settled on the imitation Louis Quinze furniture and worked its way deep into the leaky leather armchairs. At weekends, the staff of the foreign consulates used the club as a base for their dinghy cruises to the islands; but on most weekdays it was left to the cockroaches and the house skinks, and to the Armenian barman who himself resembled a large domestic reptile in his greasy tailcoat.

Now the Armenian was stirring the dust on the cement floor of the squash court with a broom made of palm fronds.

“Is good now?” he said to George.

“Fine,” said George, raising a tiny desert storm round his ankles.

“Okay, George,” Teddy said, “ready for your lumps?”

His game was fast and flashy. Twenty years younger and a full foot shorter than George, he had been toughened by five years of athletic stuff in the mountains, where he’d been a PAIM guerrilla. On the squash court, though, it was George who was the guerrilla. He knew the jagged cracks in the wall where the spiders lived, the bulges of dry rot, the useful fist-sized crater caused by a stray bullet in ’75. He aimed at every deformity he could reach; and when his luck was in, he could bring the ball back off the front wall at a variety of perverse tangents.

The two men grunted and spat. Their plimsolls squeaked on the cement. The ball made noises generally confined to the balloons in comics:
wham! thwack! pow! blatt!

“Sonofabitch!” said Teddy.

Pee-oung! splat! whang! fupp!

“Oh, kiss my ass, George—”

Teddy pranced, sprang, dived, stretched, jack-knifed, like a hooked tuna, while George husbanded his wind. Sweat was
dripping into his eyes, and the back of his singlet was soaked through.
What kind of a fool goes in for this young man’s game at sixty?

He heard Ferraz gloating somewhere out in the suburban outskirts of his brain. He smashed a winner specially for the doctor.
If you don’t think about it, it won’t happen
.

“Oh, motherfucker!”

George, probing for the crater in the front wall, was a late, refined specimen of West Coast Man. The region had created its own system of natural selection, and George had the right genes. Eighty years ago, when malaria and haematuric fevers had made quick work of putting Europeans through their African entrance exam, it had been the fat men who died first. Their ships put in to Lagos, Dakar and Bom Porto, and the fat men went out on the town. They had just enough time to write their first letter home before the shivers started. Then they passed blood in their urine. In a fortnight, maybe three weeks, they were dead. The mattresses they left behind were so sopping with perspiration that they had to be left out in the sun for two days before they could be burned.

The fat men were buried in long columns in the cemetery on the hill over the bay: American whaling captains, Portuguese army lieutenants, English cocoa merchants, French mineral prospectors. But the thin men toughed it out. On the Coast, the
branco
or
toubob
(in the Wolof interior) was an attenuated, ectomorphic specimen who left the tallest locals somewhere down around his chest and shoulders. George, at six foot four, was all knuckles, knees and elbows. Any self-respecting mosquito would have scorned him as a poor ship’s biscuit of a dinner, and helicoptered off in search of something fleshier.