Seven-Tenths (35 page)

It is well known in these parts that fish choose not to speak in order to risk nothing worse at men’s hands. Being wrenched from the depths into thin and bitter light to drown slowly in air is bad, but not bad enough to merit speech. Suffering put into words merely takes up an additional burden of pathos. Even being laid alive on coals may induce them to writhe but to utter only occasional squeaks of steam. Hereabouts, people say fish are wise not to give tongue and express a reasonable protest at such treatment. If they did, they would lose the last refuge of dignity which stoicism confers: the right to die unobserved by the faces poised over them, fanning and chatting and waiting for their supper. To enter a mild reproach would excite their captors’ amazement and curiosity so that henceforth the fishermen would bring their catches to the point of speech in delighted competition to see whose was the wittiest, whose the most touching. Sensibly, the fish remain silent lest men either patronise them or redouble their torture. Nor do they mourn either themselves or their fellows. By such means, it is said, they keep their spirits intact.

As the
Medevina
slowly circled the fisherman, we appreciated how in the end he had learned from a lifelong identification with his prey. His own muteness surrounded and exalted him. He was sitting deep in a tiny boat which was anyway lower than ours, his buttocks wedged below water level, in a sense already partly submerged. Objects found in mid-ocean sometimes look larger than they are, as though defiant at being so consummately dwarfed. This fisherman’s silence girt him about like the ring of ornamental chains surrounding a great monument in a public park. And as the chains mark off a space where the horizontal becomes the vertical, delineating a change in the mode of looking as well as a boundary
preventing intrusion, this man’s towering privacy and immobility kept us at a distance until we could work out a way to approach him. He had a paralysing effect. The very fact that there was nothing to be done left us with everything to decide. (In these parts, then, the spirits of stoical fish rise up from their driftwood pyres and eddy about the eaters, listening to the mirth and chatter, trying to understand their executioners. Some float off down the beach to the sea, where they creep out across the water and wait for the time when they can be reabsorbed. This needs complete darkness, the black of an overcast and moonless night. If, as so often happens, the sea is bright with the reflected light of galaxies, the fish-spirits hang sadly above the surface, unable to return to their world. With the first real darkness, though, they slip below, where at once they turn into the tiny phosphorescent granules foreigners mistake for dinoflagellates. Gradually they sink, and are re-born into fry of their original species.)

From afar the fisherman had been sitting reflectively in a dreamy cloudscape. Now that we were close, the angle of vision had changed and the pinkening city with its ever-excluding portals had receded, leaving him starkly present and casting his own shadow. He had acquired power. His first act had been to summon us to him from over the horizon, his second to have thrown us into confusion. Now he presented us with a dilemma. The things which people said (and which you will certainly be able to recall since you yourself said some of them) included:

‘We don’t know who he is.’

‘We haven’t the time.’

‘If we touch him we’ll have to get rid of him.
And
the boat. They’ll pin it on us.’

‘How do you know he was murdered?’

‘We can’t just leave him.’

‘I say leave him.’

‘He must have a Christian burial.’

‘Are you a priest, then?’

‘How do you know he isn’t a Moslem?’

‘Ho, are you an imam?’

‘We really haven’t the time. The sun’s setting.’

‘At least let’s find out who he is. We can let his family know.’

‘Volunteering, are you? Perhaps he died of AIDS. You want to touch him?’

‘We can’t just leave him.’

‘We haven’t the time.’

‘It’ll bring us bad luck if we don’t.’

‘It’ll bring us worse if we do.’

‘I say turn back.’

‘We haven’t the time.’

And meanwhile we kept describing slow circles in the water around this monument, following our own fudged wake in a circularity of thought.

(Other spirits of the grilling fish do not immediately return to the ocean, but continue to hover about the fisher-folk. They are not looking for a chance of revenge. They are held to be the Earth’s original inhabitants, and, as such, are too ancient and wise to indulge in human passions. Instead, they look for sleeping children under the age of five. Unseen, they slip between the parted lips and take up residence in their little hosts. Such children can always be told apart, for they are constantly in the water and cannot live anywhere but by the sea. They will become fishers themselves; they have no choice. And sooner or later, by one means or another but usually by drowning, the fish/man-spirit returns below the waves. Thus an endless cycle is joined, of man and fish alternately pulling each other up into the air and down into the deeps, locked into a sublimely inscrutable continuity. No one claims this process does not involve suffering.)

Even in these regions the dead are encountered with a frisson. People under the influence of startlement usually say nothing unexpected; in terms of what is expressed, death merely jars loose the predictable; this alone being the evidence of something else held in abeyance. Nobody observed of our fisherman that he was the colour of clouds. Hypostasis had caused his blood to sink so that the upper half of his body was wax-pale. Still less did they say his spirit had powerfully engaged with us and, no matter what we did now, was setting the terms of our entire trip and maybe even those of future ones.

There is an alternative theory, of course. There always is. Justus Forfex (Giusto Forbici), quoting Alzina (1688), tells of a belief ‘…
que el alma nacía y moría nueve veces
…’ The soul becomes progressively smaller with each cycle and after the ninth incarnation could fit a
longon
or coffin the size of a rice grain. The body, on the other hand, changes into water at night but by day lives with the soul. This lone fisherman’s soul was patently unshrunken, monstrous in its presence, so he must have been in an early stage of his nine lives; while his unburied body equally clearly yearned for the water which oncoming night was already darkening about and beneath us. Meanwhile, our fear and uncertainty made us dither and go on drawing and redrawing the tedious outline of the problem he had set us.

During this debate the captain stopped the engine to save fuel. The ring of silence which surrounded the dead man expanded. The dark triangle of his hat pointed at the city still expanding in the sky behind him in recklessly unplanned development. By now it was a fantastic conurbation full of immense gargoyles and gothic high-rise blocks, all stately plasticity and picked out in salmon and silver. Its vistas of serene collisions offered the same haunting promises of ways into its interior through a labyrinth of crevasses towards an illusory heart. As with a starfield, all patterns and perspectives were relative to the viewer’s position. Seen from the other side of the horizon it would have been a different city or not even a city at all, nothing but lumps of vapour and scattered bags of dew. In any case it was a city built entirely of water. Its towers were water, its colonnades were water; its arches, lintels and architraves were slowly tumbling water. Its foundations were planted in more water, a polished ocean still placidly reflecting the liquid mass of its construction. This dual image now met itself in scarlet at the horizon in a way that suggested the dissolution of one into the other in a huge collapse of red rain somewhere far over the planet’s shoulder.

At one point the
Bhavisyottarapurana
exclaims ‘Water! Thou art the source of all things and of all existence!’ This intuition probably influenced Thales of Miletus when he became the first Western philosopher to attempt a rationalistic account of the phenomenal
world. He took the received idea of there being four elements which composed all matter and reduced them to one by claiming to show that earth, air and even fire derived ultimately from water. Being a philosopher, Thales was keenly aware that not every liquid
was
water, for it is reported that by buying up olive presses the year before a bumper crop he made a killing in oil. This would have been in about 580
BC
. Approximately 2,565 years later, the captain of our boat resignedly tied a T-shirt over his mouth and nose and lowered himself from the prow into the dead fisherman’s craft, which skidded lightly away with him to a distance of several metres. For a second his masked head passed across a slum district of the aerial city.

We watched him gingerly approach the sitting figure from behind. Maybe his stealth was from having to keep his balance in a tiny craft designed only for a single occupant, his high centre of gravity making the bamboo outriggers alternately rise and smack. From where we sat, his hesitant progress looked as though he feared the fisherman might suddenly turn at the touch of a hand on his shoulder. In the silence we could hear our captain’s low mutter behind the mask: Catholic prayers or else respectful requests for permission from the sea spirits clustering around the little boat. Perhaps he was simply talking to the fisherman into whose face he was peering, apologising and asking forgiveness for crouching down to put his hands briefly into the pockets of his shorts. When the fisherman had set out on his last voyage the shorts would have been loose. Now his distended stomach made it hard to perform this intimate search. In a moment the captain was rinsing his hands over the side and standing up again.

‘Nothing,’ he called. ‘Not even a cigarette.’

‘No blood?’

‘Not a mark on him that I can see. There’s nothing in this boat except for him and this fishing line’ – he lifted a short length of thick bamboo around which the nylon filament was wound. ‘Oh, and a baler.’ Delicately, he stretched past the man and retrieved a red plastic pot, the ubiquitous 1-litre engine oil container with its top cut off. Then he hesitated before again reaching between the sprawled legs and straightening up with a piece of paper in his hand. He put
this in the pot and made his way back to the stern, where he lay and began paddling with both arms. So light was the skiff and so calm the sea that he and his dead passenger were soon alongside. Our captain reached up and swung himself on board the
Medevina
. At his involuntary kick the fisherman once more scooted away, adrift and rocking.

The scrap of paper was blank. It had been torn from a school exercise book, lined in alternate pink and blue feint. Creases suggested it had been screwed around a small contents – pills perhaps.

‘Heart medicine,’ somebody said.

But you will remember a voice at once said, ‘No,’ and faces turned at the speaker’s apparent certainty. ‘No, because there’s no bait, is there?’, which made the captain glance sharply towards the drifting back beneath the straw hat. ‘Who goes fishing without bait? What does a bare hook catch?’

‘Perhaps he kept it in the baler and had finished it. In any case he’s fishing, isn’t he, Mots? He’s holding the line.’

Mots was stubborn. ‘Then where’s his catch? He’s not fishing. That’s not what he’s doing.’

‘He’s not
doing
anything.’

‘Yes, he is. He’s being dead, just as he intended. The paper contained poison. He came out here to die, only that. So naturally he brought nothing else with him. After a while he must have thrown the paddle away and just drifted. Boat empty, pockets empty. Why catch fish you’ll never eat?’

All the while the sun was sinking amid the city’s vermilion and cinnamon rubble. Soundlessly the towers and palaces had been shaking themselves down, flattening into featureless broad terraces of farewell colour through which the sun settled like a marble in oil. Behind us night’s tardy priest was hurrying up over the bent Pacific. In silence we watched the dead man darken until he became an outline, an emblem, a timeless and purposeful shape, the patient unmoving fisherman. Without warning, without word or grunt, our captain started the engine and in shocking blare we resumed our course.

There was no one aboard whose gaze was not fixed aft. For a great while, it seemed, our wake went on opening up between us without
the fisherman’s figure diminishing. Then suddenly he had shrunk from a monument to a miniature chessman, whittled away as much by the withdrawing of light as by increasing distance. There came a brief period when he would vanish and reappear as the invisible swell raised him high enough to catch a last smoulder. Then he descended into troughs and wells already pooled with night. Even when he dissolved entirely and was lost, our eyes still watched the place like Sir Bedivere straining for a last glimpse of his dead king’s boat.

‘I still think we should have buried him,’ a voice said at last above the engine’s din.

‘I don’t think he committed suicide at all,’ someone else said indignantly. ‘He was killed and robbed, like always. There’re lots of ways of killing a man without blood. Pirate scum. They stole his catch and everything else, but the boat wasn’t worth a tow so they just left him.’

‘But
we
oughtn’t to have left him …’

‘We didn’t have the time. We’re already late as it is.’

‘This trip was jinxed from the start.’

‘We had no time.’

‘No time.’

They say death has changed for modern man, that it has been deconstructed and, like him, become postmodern. Sometimes, when the day is bright and blue and hot enough to be quite empty, and the rocks shimmer in the sun, the conviction comes that at their heart human societies are just elaborate fabrications for suppressing a knowledge of death – conspiracies sufficiently complex and beguiling that the dark secret of our own mortality no longer obtrudes. This huge artifice protects the race against its Achilles heel: the certainty that all its affairs are nothing and soon it will be one with the dinosaurs. It is as though it had decided to club together and invent a series of wonderful tales, from Gilgamesh to cyborgs. The principle is that of the Arabian Nights, with everyone their own Scheherezade.

On the morning wind we seem to hear the creak of a million treadmills, the squeak of rowing machines, the trilling and drilling of an endless aerobics class. It is the dawn chorus of anxiety. Another kind of insurance is being enacted, that private/public investment in keeping fit and being seen to be keeping fit. Apart from exacting its own toll in humourless tedium, it turns ill health into a personal failure such that death is seen as just deserts for not having taken the trouble to be sufficiently alive. The body as machine, the unread user’s manual, the culpable lack of maintenance: they all form a nexus of irresponsibility and downfall. Someone fails to turn up at the gym as usual in their Lycra leotard. After a few days their name escapes us. It is understood there was always something more they might have done: another few metres’ jogging a day, many fewer beers and cigarettes, a further notch of health reached in order to carry on being fit indefinitely. (What was it we failed to grasp even as we hung punitively from wallbars? Can the mind be rotting atop its splendid torso?)

In what pathetic fragments we move, believing ourselves whole! The precious ‘I’ disappears for long stretches of each day and entirely vanishes during sleep. In one of our registers something never forgets that in default of the ocean deeps, a refrigerator door is always yawning for us as the prelude to spade or flames. Here, at least, the old mythologies no longer work as they did. It is not possible to envisage a private survival. We cannot believe as Sir Thomas Browne did, the same scriptures lying open before us with their panoply of promises. There can be no magic left in prophecies of paradise. That all life was held to have begun in a garden and – if we are good – will likewise end in one convinces nobody. The majority of the world’s people are now town-dwellers to whom rural metaphors are no longer instinctive. Since most people who imagine life after death think of their ordinary lives transfigured, a townee would find the myth of the celestial city more plausible than that of a garden paradise. And what might an urban paradise be? Strange that Scheherazade’s own name meant ‘city-dweller’ in Persian.

There is pathos in the way religions of the book have become immovably beached on the littorals of faraway and long ago. To desert-dwellers, what more natural than to see heaven as a sublime oasis which owes its existence to nothing more mystical than
water
? Here we are, the deserving, eternally at peace in a lush garden, sprawled in the shade and recovering after life’s gruelling journey. ‘But the true servants of God shall be well provided for, feasting on fruit, and honoured in the gardens of delight. Reclining face to face upon soft couches, they shall be served with a goblet filled at a gushing fountain, white, and delicious to those who drink it. It will neither dull their senses nor befuddle them. They shall sit with bashful, dark-eyed virgins, as chaste as the sheltered eggs of ostriches’.
*
Ignoring the politics, we note only the continuing presence of physical appetites, the slaking of bodily desires. The twelfth-century philosopher and physician, Moses Maimonides, was impatient with this sort of naivety. ‘To believe so is to be a schoolboy who expects nuts and sweetmeats as a reward for his studies. Celestial pleasures can be neither measured
nor understood by a mortal being, any more than a blind man can distinguish colours or the deaf appreciate music.’

The essence of paradise will always be conflated with that of lost Eden since the future is unimaginable and the present unmythic. The very word ‘paradise’ comes from Persian via Greek and means a park. What could the modern world offer by way of a matching tranquil and timeless vision? Are we to recline for ever in some leafy municipal square, where the sun filtering through the trees dapples us in a bearable radiance, where traffic noise has ceased, where litter-free paths are strolled by the righteous eating ambrosial hamburgers? It doesn’t work. Nor does a southern Californian dream of bronzing our cancer-proof skin beside Hockney-blue pools, endlessly dating and mating and clinching deals. Besides lacking depth, such visions have no ecstasy. In any case, our bodily needs are now largely catered for. It is impossible to imagine any central image as simple and important as
water
which might resonate for us as a condition of life itself. And this is the triumph of material mastery, that it supersedes and blots out the symbolic to the extent that the only resounding things left are absences. Nature has fallen beneath
Homo
’s power, and in doing so has left him without an image of heaven.

In distant archipelagos there are often days of heat and dazzle powerful enough to wipe out thought, to leach away everything that is not planetary furniture: trees, rocks, clouds and water to the horizon. To people who skitter about these gulfs of ocean in pea-pod craft – a few sheets of marine plywood tacked together with copper nails – death is an imminent presence. So it is for those hacking at their stony fields high above the glittering shoreline. Subsistence throws things into bright relief. At the end of the day’s work either there are fish and maize cobs to be laid over charcoal or there are not. Infants are born, linger for a week, vanish into the ground. There are no hidden deals. Everything – shelter, food, water – is in the open. The facts are dealt with by private treaty. The woman pounding her washing on a stone in the stream, the plodder behind his buffalo knee-deep in a rice paddy, the lone fisherman far out in
the sun’s glare: each might harbour wistful dreams but none pretends to be proof against the cancellation which can descend in an instant, whimsically, without notice or reprieve. The beaches on which their children romp and tumble are composed of the dead. The whole landscape is a cemetery. Diatom, mollusc, foraminifer, cuttlebone, dog jaw, pig tooth, and all by the trillion ton. Daily they walk on the deepening past, mend nets on it, fall asleep on it, make cement blocks with it, shit into it. The sea turns over and over, a geological machine smoothly meshing its gears and grinding up time itself. At night it sparkles with energy. Sit beside it under the stars and fan the driftwood embers and watch very seriously the broiling fish as slowly they curve upwards from the heat. Not as dead as they look, some of them, for now and then one leaps off the coals the instant it is laid across them. ‘
Buhay pa!
’ and a child’s delighted scurry to retrieve it and place it on the fire again. ‘Lie down! Go to sleep!’ Companionable laughter. The incense of smouldering fish oil drifts across the constellations and brings the village dogs from far down the beach.

Despite the skinniness of this living, for all its rigour, there can exist in these rural and marine backwaters a certain ebullience. Not to sentimentalise it, it is that peculiar freedom which descends like a gift on those so constantly menaced that they slip off the burden of mere worry. A strange security results when death is so close a companion. It can be felt while crunching along a beach, a skeleton walking on skeletons with the time machine turning in step, wave-falls and footfalls. A gleeful levity at being so brief, at feeling so exempt. Freedom from what, then? Certainly not from the irreducible pact of living. Rather, from the heaviness of having to share in metropolitan anxieties, the contaminating conspiracy, the yearning. Freedom, too, from the corroding suspicion that the extra time bought by wallbars has already gone on wallbars. The Thousand and One Nights (
alf layla wa layla
) never meant a literal two-and-three-quarter years but was just an expression for a long time, the eternity spent in staving off the executioner by babbling at him.