The Leper's Companions (14 page)

The passing of time was punctuated by the blowing of whistles and trumpets to announce the need to eat or pray, to rise or go to rest. When there was a fair wind the figure of Saint Christopher with his black-rimmed eyes was spread out against it. When there was no wind the oarsmen struggled to keep the ship moving.

Among the passengers there was a continuous babble of talk and laughter and sudden quarrel, the playing of musical instruments, the cheering and clapping when someone demonstrated the steps of a dance or how he could remain
balanced on his head to the count of twenty. Above that was the sound of the sailors, who sang to each other to distinguish their voices from the general hubbub. They sang out instruction, reassurance and warnings of approaching danger. The oarsmen sang the rhythm of their oars and at night the steersman sang something like a lullaby, a little lilting tune that he repeated over and over as proof that he saw nothing to be afraid of.

Sometimes the leper would wrap himself into his white felt cloak and would go and sit out on the deck all night long, listening to this song, watching the flicker of a single torch, the bright scattering of the stars, the sudden bursts of phosphorescence in the water. He felt empty of all emotion and curiously insubstantial, as if his body was nothing more than a thin shell that could be blown away with a single breath. His entire past life seemed as distant as some far landscape in which nothing could be distinguished beyond a vague outline of shape and color. It seemed to him now as if many years had gone by since he left the city, or even as if he had never been anywhere else but here on a ship in the night and there was no dawn to be expected to bring an end to it and no other place in the world apart from this one.

And when the dawn did come he would emerge gray and quiet from a listless eternity and would go and join the others in the business of the day. But his companions noticed that he had become very removed from them and that he no longer told them any of the stories of his life. They watched him and wondered where his thoughts were taking him.

One morning the soothsayer and the pilot were seen in earnest conversation. Together they examined a map of the coastline that was covered with the tiny scratchings of fast currents and hidden rocks. They both observed how the shadow of the mast fell across the deck and how a flying fish had landed sharp and breathless on the wooden boards, just at the conjunction of light and darkness. That is what made them decide it would be wise to stop at the next island which they could already see approaching.

And so the ship was brought into the shelter of a wide sandy bay. Some waited to go ashore in a little boat, while others were too impatient and waded waist deep towards the unfamiliar luxury of land.

Everyone was eager to unwind their cramped bodies and they spread out quickly in all directions. Although there had been a fishing village here in the past, and a few ruined houses bore witness to that fact, the island was known to be uninhabited.

A creaking chorus of frogs announced where there was fresh water. The asphodels were in bloom, their fat bulbs lying haphazardly on the stony ground, and their white flowers looking somehow cold and unskinned at the end of a long stalk. A cloud of bee-eaters flew into the air with sudden fright and for a moment they appeared like a rainbow of vivid colors. Wild sage was growing everywhere, its pungent scent released by the trampling of feet. There was also a small spreading plant called porcella, with leaves tasting of nasturtium; everyone gathered it by the handful
and ate it eagerly, like cattle turned out to grass after a long winter.

The leper set off on his own towards the center of the island where he could see a grove of umbrella pines. He had the feeling that he knew where he was going even though he had no recollection of ever having been here before. The scent of the sage, the taste of porcella, the color of the birds, the white tenacity of the asphodel and now the sound of pinecones splitting to release their seeds, it all reverberated like nostalgia for something he had forgotten.

He reached a stone wall built around a little field in which young barley was growing. This surprised him, because he knew that no one was supposed to be living on the island. Beyond the field there was what looked like the ruins of a house, but when he got closer he saw the dried body of an octopus hanging with stiffened tentacles from a branch fixed between a crack in the wall. There was no other sign of life; no dog to bark a warning or chickens to scatter in a panic of anticipated slaughter. Just the planted barley and the caught octopus.

The leper went inside the house. It was a single room, in which the bed was a pile of soft pine branches, the table was a piece of wood balanced on stones and there were fresh ashes in the open fire. Half a loaf of bread was on the table and the leper picked it up and broke a piece off, tasting that it had been made from the ground roots of some plant and not from barley or wheat.

He could sense that someone was watching him. He went
searching around the outside of the house and eventually caught sight of a man dodging among the concealment of the trees. He was naked but partly covered by the length of his hair and his beard. Once he had been seen he began to laugh a shrill nervous laugh like the warning cry of some bird.

The leper sat down with his back to the stone wall of the house and waited. Slowly the laughing man drew closer and closer, until he sat crouched in front of him, shivering and staring and only occasionally breaking out into a spasm of high-pitched laughter. “I'm the only man in the world left alive!” he announced in a language the leper could understand easily. “I'm the only man in the world left alive!” repeating the words, and with no others to follow, as if he had forgotten everything else that could be said.

It was only then that the leper remembered how he had been to this island before on his previous journey and he had felt so isolated, so cut off from existence that he had considered staying here, occupying the ruins of a house, catching what fish he could from the sea, maybe even cultivating the scrap of a field where wild barley was growing. He realized then that he could have been this same man who sat shivering with loneliness in front of him.

He returned to where his companions were busy making a fire. He said nothing to them about his meeting. He said nothing to them at all, but sat with them in the silence of his own thoughts.

T
he leper was lying on his mattress in the fusty darkness of the hold. The blanket rough on his bare skin. The smell of cat's piss in his nostrils. The bilgewater slopping backwards and forwards underneath him. The struggle of the wind in the sails. The sense of the ship as some vast warm-blooded animal into whose belly he had been swallowed.

Something rustled close to his ear; a cockroach perhaps. Something else pattered with nervous delicate feet over his legs—that must be a rat, there were a number of rats living in the hold and they were learning not to be afraid since nothing much could hurt them. They chewed at shoe leather even when the shoes were being worn and made nests in piles of old clothes, their pink babies squeaking for food.

The door out onto the deck had been closed because a
storm was rising and that meant there wasn't even a glimmer of light. The old man who lay on one side of the leper started coughing and groaning and then he was pissing into a tin pot and sighing to himself as he did so, as if his life was escaping with this release of liquid.

A cockerel started to crow, disregarding the fact that it was the middle of a starless night. A heavy object rolled across an uneven surface and came to a juddering halt just above the leper's head. He wondered what it was. Once again he remembered the six horses and their hooves grinding down on him.

He ran his hand over the mosquito bites on his calves, over a cut that hadn't healed, over the soft hollow of his own belly, the slipperiness of his scars, the density of his pubic hair. He brought the hand out from under the blanket but he couldn't see it even when he held it in front of his face. Nevertheless, he could imagine it: a pale, nervous, questing thing, with its five tentacle legs always trembling, even when he tried to hold them steady. He sent his hand to hunt blindly in the dark. It found the sticky damp of the wooden floorboards, then the smooth cold metal of the locked box of possessions. It went farther and reached the edge of the mattress on which Sally was lying, meeting with the warmth of an arm and a shoulder before withdrawing again.

You could tell how everyone crowded into this cluttered space was wide awake in anticipation of the storm's fury. They had seen the clouds thickening along the horizon. They had heard the captain giving the order to furl the sails.
The ship's two anchors had been lowered in the hope that the great hooks might catch hold of something on the seabed that would stop them from being swept along helplessly by the wind, but the water was too deep and the anchors had found nothing.

Now the wind was coming from all four directions at once, making the ship thrash from side to side and while it was being held in this trap the storm broke directly above it. The singing cries of the sailors were drowned by the roar of thunder and the crack of lightning. The ship groaned as the tarred seams of her sides split and salty water began to seep down the inside walls, spreading over the floor and soaking into blankets and mattresses, into bread and biscuits, old clothes and saints' bones.

One wave hammered urgently at the closed door of the hold, while the next broke through the splintered wood and raced down the stairs, rushing among the men and women who lay there helpless in the darkness.

Chests and boxes were smashed, bursting open and vomiting out their contents. Bottles broke and collided with piss pots and basins. Some of the pilgrims were able to cling to the central pillars for safety, the rest were swept like rubbish into loose heaps.

The leper was lying in a corner, barricaded by mattresses that were not his own, soaking wet and dizzy from something which had hit him on the head. People were crying and praying and screaming in a great soup of noise all around him, but he felt very relaxed, and almost contented. He was
not afraid. He thought that the ship was bound to sink and he was bound to die and he welcomed the idea of ceasing to be. It was after all something he had longed for ever since his first escape from Venice and now at last it was coming upon him and this was the end.

He stared into the darkness and it was as if his eyes were emitting beams of light so that he could see whatever they gazed on. He saw the hold filled with dark water like some underground cavern and bodies lying on mattresses all around him as if on little rafts. He knew every one of them because they were all the people he had ever known in his life; friends, lovers and chance acquaintances, all floating and tilting around him. Coming to say goodbye perhaps, or just to witness his departure. On one mattress he saw the elephant's skull which he had searched for as proof of his own veracity and on another there was an angel looking like a huge dragonfly, its wings bedraggled from the water. And Christ with bare feet and a man with a wide mouth and leaves growing out of his face and even a mermaid, her smile made lascivious by her sharp teeth. All companions of one sort or another.

The storm continued unabated for how long? Two nights at least, perhaps three. It was difficult to keep any track of time.

And then something happened. The leper was drifting in the circles of his own thoughts when he noticed the change. “Listen!” he said to himself and to anyone else who could hear. “Listen!” And although the waves and the wind were
still thundering and the ship was still groaning from the struggle, there was a silence like bated breath somewhere at the center of all the chaos.

Within that silence the leper became aware of the sound of hands clapping in a fast rhythm of celebration and then voices chanting “Holy, Holy, Holy,” softly at first, but with a gathering intensity.

He shuffled forward on hands and knees over the heaped bodies, the sodden mattresses, the broken boxes and through the swamp of dirty water. He clambered right over someone's face and hardly heard the muffled cry of protest. He aimed for the broken door. He climbed up the five steps and out onto the deck. A group of exhausted sailors were gathered together, clapping their hands and chanting while watching a ball of fire that was balanced in the ship's rigging.

It was not a threatening fire. It quivered and shook with something like tenderness or benevolence. The leper saw how it crept with a tentative bouncing movement along the stretched line of a rope, pausing every so often to gaze at the men who stood and stared at it. They were still chanting “Holy, Holy, Holy,” but more softly now, as if they were afraid of disturbing the blessing they could feel dropping down on them like rain.

It was Saint Elmo's fire, everyone knew that. The saint had seen them being battered by the storm and he had taken pity on them. He had sent his fire as a sign that they would come to no harm. They would all live.

The pilgrims began to creep cautiously up onto the deck
to witness this miracle of light. It stayed there waiting for them, moving with delicate curiosity from one part of the ship to another until everyone had been sure of seeing it. Then it was gone.

The storm was not quite over but it had lost its fierceness, and anyway no one was afraid because they knew that they were safe with the saint watching over them. The sailors set to work, singing to each other with renewed courage in their voices. The pilgrims sang as well while they tried to put some order into the confusion of their sleeping quarters.

Within a few hours the sea had become quiet and placid and a soft wind was blowing them towards a new island and the port of Modon. The leper felt very quiet too. It was as if he had died and had been brought back to life again.

T
hey left Modon after a few days and were on their way towards the island of Candia when a calm descended. It was like that moment in the fairy story when all life stops and nothing moves except for the thorny bushes which go on growing, thickening around the castle and putting an end to any possibility of escape.