Travels With My Aunt

  ‘Are you drawing any conclusions?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s not my job,’ he said. ‘I’m no expert. I just report the facts and any data – like the gins and the weather – that seem to have a bearing. It’s for others to draw the conclusions.’

  ‘Who are the others?’

  ‘Well, I thought when I had completed six months’ research I’d get in touch with a urinary specialist. You don’t know what he mightn’t be able to read into these figures. Those guys deal all the time with the sick. It’s important to them to know what happens in the case of an average fellow.’

  ‘And you are the average fellow?’

  ‘Yes. I’m hundred per cent healthy, Henry. I have to be in my job. They give me the works every so often.’

  ‘The CIA!’ I asked.

  ‘You’re kidding, Henry. You can’t believe that crazy girl.’

  He fell into a sad silence as he thought of her, leaning forward with his chin in his hand. An island with the appearance of a gigantic alligator floated downstream with its snout extending along the water. Pale green fishing boats drifted downstream faster than our engines could drive us against the current – they passed rapidly like little racing cars. Each fisherman was surrounded by floating blocks of wood to which his lines were attached. Rivers branched off into the grey misty interior, wider than the Thames at Westminster but going nowhere at all.

  He asked, ‘And she really called herself Tooley?’

  ‘Yes, Tooley.’

  ‘I guess she must think of me sometimes?’ he said with a sort of questioning hope.

  3

  IT was two days later that we came to Formosa on a day which was as humid as all the others had been. The heat broke on the cheek like little bubbles of water. We had turned off the great Paraná river the night before near Corrientes, and now we were on the Paraguay. Fifty yards across the water from the Argentinian Formosa the other country lay, sodden and empty. The import-export man went ashore in his dark city suit carrying a new suitcase. He went with rapid steps, looking at his watch like the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. It certainly seemed an ideal town for smugglers with only a river to cross. In Paraguay I could see only a crumbling hut, a pig and a small girl.

  I was tired of walking the deck, so I went ashore too. It was a Sunday and quite a crowd had collected to see the boat come in. There was a pervading smell of orange petals, but it was the only sweet thing about Formosa. One long avenue was lined with oranges and trees bearing rose-coloured flowers, which I learnt later to be lapachos. The side-streets petered out a few yards away into a niggardly wild nature of mud and scrub. Everything to do with government business, justice or amusement lay in the one avenue: a tourist hotel of grey cement on the water’s edge had been half-built, for what tourists? little shops selling Coca-Cola: a cinema which advertised an Italian Western: two hairdressers: a garage with one wrecked car: a cantina. The only house of more than one storey was the hotel, and the only old and beautiful building in the long avenue proved, as I came closer to it, to be the prison. There were fountains all down the avenue but they didn’t play.

  The avenue must lead me somewhere, I thought, but I was wrong. I passed the bust of a bearded man called Urquiza who, judging from the carved inscription, must have had something to do with Liberation – from what? – and ahead of me I saw rise up above the orange trees and the lapachos a marble man upon a marble horse who was certainly General San Martín – Buenos Aires had made me familiar with his features and I had seen him upon the sea-front at Boulogne too. The statue closed the avenue as the Arc de Triomphe closes the Champs Élysées; I expected some further avenue beyond, but when I reached the statue I found the hero sat on his horse in a waste of mud at the furthest limit of the town. No strollers came so far, and the road went no further. Only a starving dog, like a skeleton from the Natural History Museum, picked his way timorously across the dirt and the rain pools towards me and San Martín. I began to walk back.

  If I describe this ignoble little town in such detail, it is because it was the scene of a long dialogue I held with myself which was only interrupted by a surprising encounter. I had begun, as I passed the first hairdresser, to think of Miss Keene and her letter of shy appeal which surely deserved a better response than my brief telegram, and then in this humid place, where the only serious business or entertainment was certainly crime, and even the national bank had to be defended on a Sunday afternoon by a guard with an automatic rifle, I thought of my home in Southwood, of my garden, of Major Charge trumpeting across the fence, and of the sweet sound of the bells from Church Road. But I remembered Southwood now with a kind of friendly tolerance – as the place which Miss Keene should never have left, the place where Miss Keene was happy, the place where I myself no longer belonged. It was as though I had escaped from an open prison, had been snatched away, provided with a rope ladder and a waiting car, into my aunt’s world, the world of the unexpected character and the unforeseen event. There the rabbit-faced smuggler was at home, the Czech with his two million plastic straws, and poor O’Toole busy making a record of his urine.

  I passed the end of a street called Rua Dean Furnes which petered away like all the others into no-man’s-land, and I stayed a moment outside the governor’s house, which was painted with a pink wash. On the verandah were two unoccupied chaises-longues and the windows were wide open on an empty room with a portrait of a military man, the President I suppose, and a row of empty chairs lined up against the wall like a firing squad. The sentry made a small movement with his automatic rifle and I moved on towards the national bank where another sentry made the same warning movement when I paused.

  That morning in my bunk I had read Wordsworth’s great Ode in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. Palgrave like Scott carried signs of my father’s reading in the form of dog-eared pages and knowing so little about him I had followed every clue and so learned to enjoy what he had enjoyed. Thus when I first entered the bank as junior clerk I had thought of it in Wordsworth’s terms as a ‘prison-house’ – what was it my father had found a prison, so that he double-marked the passage? Perhaps our home, and my stepmother and I had been the warders.

  One’s life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father’s library had not contained the right books. (I don’t think there was much passionate love in Marion Crawford, and only a shadow of it in Walter Scott.)

  I can remember very little of the vision preceding the prison-house: it must have faded very early ‘into the light of common day’, but it seemed to me, as I put Palgrave down beside my bunk and thought of my aunt, that she for one had never allowed the vision to fade. Perhaps a sense of morality is the sad compensation we learn to enjoy, like a remission for good conduct. In the vision there is no morality. I had been born as a result of what my stepmother would have called an immoral act, an act of darkness. I had begun in immoral freedom. Why then should I have found myself in a prison-house? My real mother had certainly not been imprisoned anywhere.

  It’s too late now, I said to Miss Keene, signalling to me desperately from Koffiefontein, I’m no longer there, where you think I am. Perhaps we might have comforted ourselves once and been content in our prison cell, but I’m not the same man you regarded with a touch of tenderness over the tatting. I have escaped. I don’t resemble whatever identikit portrait you have of me. I walked back towards the landing stage, and looking behind me I saw the canine skeleton on my tracks. I suppose to that dog any stranger represented hope.

  ‘Hi, man,’ a voice called. ‘You in number one hurry?’ and Wordsworth was suddenly there a few yards away. He had risen from a bench beside the bust of the liberator Urquiza and advanced towards me with both hands out and his face slashed open with the wide wound of his grin. ‘Man, you not
forget old Wordsworth?’ he asked, wringing both my hands, and laughing so loudly and deeply that he sprayed my face with his happiness.

  ‘Why, Wordsworth,’ I said with equal pleasure, ‘what on earth are you doing here?’

  ‘My lil bebi gel,’ he said, ‘she tell me go off Formosa and wait for Mr Pullen come.’

  I noticed that he was every bit as smartly dressed now as the rabbit-nosed importer and he too carried a very new suitcase.

  ‘How is my aunt, Wordsworth?’

  ‘She pretty OK,’ he said, but there was a look of distress in his eyes and he added, ‘She dance one hell too much. Ar tell her she no bebi gel no more. Ef she no go stop … Man, she got me real worried.’

  ‘Are you coming on the boat with me?’

  ‘Ar sure am, Mr Pullen. You lef everything to old Wordsworth. Ar know the customs fellows in Asunción. Some good guys. Some bad like hell. You lef me talk. We don wan no humbug.’

  ‘I’m not smuggling anything, Wordsworth.’ The noise of the ship’s siren summoned us, wailing up from the river.

  ‘Man, you lef everyting to old Wordsworth. Ar just gone tak a look at that boat and ar see a real bad guy there. We gotta be careful.’

  ‘Careful of what, Wordsworth?’

  ‘You in good hands, Mr Pullen. You lef old Wordsworth be now.’

  He suddenly took my fingers and pressed them. ‘You got that picture, Mr Pullen?’

  ‘You mean of Freetown Harbour? Yes, I’ve got that.’

  He gave a sigh of satisfaction. ‘Ar lak you, Mr Pullen. You allays straight with old Wordsworth. Now you go for boat.’ I was just leaving him when he added, ‘You got CTC for Wordsworth?’ and I gave him what coins I had in my pocket. Whatever trouble he might have caused me in that dead old world of mine, I was overjoyed to see him now.

  They were carrying the last cargo on to the ship through the black iron doors open in the side. I made my way through the steerage quarters where women with Indian faces sat around suckling their children and climbed the rusting stairs to the first-class. I never noticed Wordsworth come on board, and at dinner he was nowhere to be seen. I supposed that he was travelling in the steerage and saving for other purposes the difference in the fare, for I was quite certain that my aunt would have given him a first-class ticket.

  After dinner O’Toole suggested a drink in his cabin. ‘I’ve got some good bourbon,’ he said, and though I have never been a spirit-drinker, preferring a glass of sherry before a meal or a glass of port after it, I accepted his invitation gladly, for it was our last night together on board. Again the spirit of restlessness had taken over all the passengers in the ship, and they seemed touched with a kind of mania. In the saloon an amateur band had begun to play, and a sailor with hairy legs and arms, dressed inadequately as a woman, had whirled in a dance between the tables, demanding a partner. Now in the captain’s cabin, which was close to O’Toole’s, someone was playing the guitar and a woman squealed. It wasn’t what you expected to hear from a captain’s quarters.

  ‘No one will sleep tonight,’ O’Toole remarked, pouring out the bourbon.

  ‘If you don’t mind,’ I said, ‘a lot more soda.’

  ‘We’ve made it. I thought we were going to be stuck fast at Corrientes. The rain is damn late this year,’ and as though to soften his rebuke of the weather there came a long peal of thunder which almost drowned the music of the guitar.

  ‘What did you think of Formosa?’ O’Toole asked.

  ‘There wasn’t much to see. Except the prison. A fine colonial building.’

  ‘Not so good inside,’ O’Toole said. A splash of lightning was flung over the wall and made the cabin lights flicker. ‘Met a friend, didn’t you?’

  ‘A friend?’

  ‘I saw you talking to a coloured guy.’

  What was it that made me cautious, for I liked O’Toole? I said, ‘Oh, he wanted money. I didn’t see you on shore.’

  ‘I was up on the bridge,’ O’Toole said, ‘looking through the captain’s glasses.’ He changed course abruptly. ‘I can’t get over you knowing my daughter, Henry. You can’t imagine how I miss that girl. You never told me how she looked.’

  ‘She looked fine. She’s a very pretty girl.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘so was her mother. If I ever married again I’d marry a plain girl.’ He brooded a long time over the bourbon, and I looked around his cabin. He had made no attempt, as I had made the first day, to make it a temporary home. His suitcases lay on the floor filled with clothes; he had not bothered to hang them. A razor beside the wash-basin and a Bantam book beside his bed seemed to be the extent of his unpacking. Suddenly the rain hit the deck outside like a cloudburst.

  ‘I guess winter’s here all right,’ he said.

  ‘Winter in July.’

  ‘I’ve got used to it,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen the snow for six years.’

  ‘You’ve been out here for six years?’

  ‘No, but I was in Thailand before this.’

  ‘Doing research?’

  ‘Yeah. Sort of …’ If he was usually as tongue-tied as this it must have taken him a long time to unearth every fact he required.

  ‘How are the urine statistics?’

  ‘More than four minutes thirty seconds today,’ he said. He added glumly, ‘And I haven’t reached the end,’ lifting the bourbon. When the next peal of thunder had trembled out he went on, obviously straining after any subject to fill the pause, ‘So you didn’t like Formosa?’

  ‘No. Of course it may be all right for fishing,’ I said.

  ‘Fishing!’ he exclaimed with scorn. ‘Smuggling is what you mean.’

  ‘I keep on hearing all the time about smuggling. Smuggling what?’

  ‘It’s the national industry of Paraguay,’ he said. ‘It brings in nearly as much as the maté and a lot more than hiding war criminals with Swiss bank accounts. And a darn sight more than my research.’

  ‘What have they got to smuggle?’

  ‘Scotch whisky and American cigarettes. You get yourself an agent in Panama who buys wholesale and he flies the stuff down to Asunción. They are marked “goods in transit”, see. You pay only a small duty at the international airport and you transfer the crates to a private plane. You’d be surprised to see how many private Dakotas there are now in Asunción. Then your pilot takes off to Argentina just across the river. At some estancia a few hundred kilometres from BA you touch down – they nearly all have private landing grounds. Not built for Dakotas perhaps but that’s the pilot’s risk. You unload into trucks and there you are. You’ve got your distributors waiting with their tongues hanging out. The government makes them thirsty with duties of a hundred and twenty per cent.’

  ‘And Formosa?’

  ‘Oh, Formosa’s for the small guy working himself up on the river traffic. All the goods that arrive from Panama don’t go on in the Dakota. What do the police care if some of the crates stay behind? You’ll buy Scotch cheaper in the stores at Asunción than you will in London and the street boys will sell you good American cigarettes at cut-rate. All you need’s a rowboat and a contact. One day though you’ll get tired of that game – perhaps a bullet’s come too close – and you’ll buy a share in a Dakota and then you’re in the big money. You tempted, Henry?’

  ‘I didn’t have the right training at the bank,’ I said, but I thought of my aunt and her suitcases stuffed with notes and her gold brick – perhaps there was something in my blood to which a career like that might once have appealed. ‘You know a lot about it,’ I said.

  ‘It’s part of my sociological research.’

  ‘Did you never think of researching a bit deeper? The frontier spirit, Tooley.’ I teased him only because I liked him. I could never have teased Major Charge or the admiral in that way.

  He gave me a long sad look, as though he wanted to answer me quite truthfully. ‘You don’t save enough money in a job like mine to buy a Dakota. And the risks are big too, Henry, for a foreigner. These guys fall out s
ometimes and then there’s hijacking. Or the police get greedy. It’s easy to disappear in Paraguay – not necessarily disappear either. Who’s going to make a fuss about an odd body or two? The General keeps the peace – that’s what people want after the civil war they had – and a dead man makes no trouble for anyone. They don’t have coroners in Paraguay.’

  ‘So you prefer life to the frontier spirit, Tooley.’

  ‘I know I’m not much good for my girl three thousand miles away, Henry, but at least she gets her monthly check. A dead man can’t write a check.’

  ‘And I suppose the CIA aren’t interested?’

  ‘You shouldn’t believe that nonsense, Henry. I told you – Lucinda’s romantic. She wants an exciting father, and what’s she got? She’s saddled with me. So she has to invent things. A report on malnutrition’s not romantic.’

  ‘I think you ought to bring her home, Tooley.’

  ‘Where’s home?’ he said and I looked around the cabin and wondered too. I don’t know why I wasn’t quite convinced. He was a great deal more reliable than she was.

  I left him with his Old Forester and returned to my cabin on the opposite deck. O’Toole was port and I was starboard. I looked out at Paraguay and he looked at Argentina. The guitar was still playing in the captain’s cabin and someone was singing in a language I couldn’t recognize – perhaps it was Guaraní. I hadn’t locked my door, and yet it wouldn’t open when I pushed. I had to put my shoulder to it to make it give. Through the crack I saw Wordsworth. He faced the door and he had a knife in his hand. When he saw who it was he held the knife down.

  ‘Come in, boss,’ he said in a whisper.

  ‘How can I come in?’

  He had wedged the door with a chair. He removed it now and let me in.

  ‘Ar got to be careful, Mr Pullen,’ he said.

  ‘Careful of what?’

  ‘Too much bad people on this boat, too much humbug.’

  His knife was a boy’s knife with three blades and a corkscrew and a tin-opener and something for taking stones out of horses’ hoofs – cutlers are conservative and so are schoolboys. Wordsworth closed it and put it in his pocket.