The Means of Escape (8 page)

‘She used to burn sage plant, to drive out the evil.’

‘And now?’

‘Now we give her something modern, something from the English warehouse, Zheyes Fluid.’

And this is my cousin, Dimi said aloud to the sea, the sky and the clouds, or rather this is my great aunt’s cousin’s great niece. Corpses possessed, the houses exor
cised with Jeyes Fluid. This is the Fener, I am a Greek, I am among Greeks, and yet I might as well be in Tibet.

He left Evgenia by herself to drink her coffee and crossed over on the next ferry to the Pera. At the end of the week his friends from London should be arriving – Haynes Williams, Philip Cassell and his sister Fanny, and Haynes’ new wife who was rather older than Haynes and would act, presumably, as a chaperone to the whole party. All four of them were artists, all of them intended to sketch picturesque oriental subjects. ‘We must meet your aunt,’ they had said, ‘we must meet this young cousin of yours. If you asked her, she might like to model for us.’

‘She mustn’t feel afraid of us!’ said Mrs Haynes in a faint shriek.

Haynes wanted to have a go at the graveyard of Karaca Ahmet by moonlight. It would be a selling subject, he thought, for a steel engraving. Mrs Haynes dressed rather smartly, which must cost him a good deal.

They had booked rooms in the Hotel Jockey, in a street just off the Grand Rue. They would have preferred the Fener, so as to be as near to Dimi as possible, but in the Fener there were no hotels. All who came there were Greeks, and every Greek could find a relation of some kind, however distant, to stay with. The Hotel Jockey, unfortunately, was quite without character. Dimi checked the price per night and per week. He told himself that he was looking forward to the arrival of his friends.

That evening the house still smelled a little of disinfectant, but it was splendidly lit, almost like his father’s house in Holland Park. Evgenia took up her correct place in the ante-room, ready to help receive the guests. She was in white, which suited her less well than her Turkish outfit. She looked older, and wore European shoes.

As dusk fell a few elderly men – but each of them accompanied by more than one elderly lady, so that the salon soon filled – came in from the houses round about. Everyone talked about what had occupied them during the day, before the great city sank into the twilight of unsatisfied desires. The men, who had their little mannerisms, talked about profit and loss. The ladies surrounded Dimi, gently reminding him, or more often telling him for the first time, of family relationships. Only one guest circulated between the sexes. Perhaps, indeed, that was his function. He was apparently an indispensable man, prepared to laugh or be laughed at, just as the fish beneath the Galata Bridge were ready to eat or be eaten.

There were too many women at the soirée. It was interesting, however, to talk to old Mme Sevastopolo, a relic, a skeleton, thinner even than Tantine, who when she had last been in London, as a child, had seen Byron’s coffin passing through the streets. ‘The doctors killed the great poet,’ said Dimi. ‘That wouldn’t happen now.’

Mme Sevastopolo looked at him in surprise. ‘Why not?’

While they stood talking Babikian began to flit from dish to dish, sampling a little of everything.

‘He looks as though he had known what starvation is,’ said Dimi.

‘Oh, I think you aren’t right,’ Mme Sevastopolo replied. ‘In my experience those who have starved are never greedy,’ and then, looking round the salon, ‘But where is Evgenia?’

‘She left us quite a few minutes ago,’ said Babikian. ‘But Mr Christiaki will be able to tell us exactly.’ Taking Dimi by the elbow, softly urging and squeezing, he persuaded him into one of the many little alcoves along the opposite side of the room. ‘How well do you know your cousin?’ he asked.

‘Not well at all,’ said Dimi. ‘She was a child when I last saw her.’

‘A touch of eccentricity there. So pretty, but perhaps even a little mad. But what would you say is the most noticeable change in her, beyond the development of the breasts? They, of course, are remarkable. I am speaking to you as an artist.’

Dimi trembled. ‘I don’t know whether you think I find you amusing, Babikian.’

‘Oh, you must call me Baby, otherwise people may think you take me seriously.’

The soirée did not last long. By eleven o’clock there was a stir among the faded guests, who wished before they left to say goodnight to Evgenia, although they all lived in the Fener and might expect to see her every day. Still she did not come, but Tantine made no apologies. The visitors’ servants began to emerge from the kitchen
to light their lanterns and dip their hands in the water of the holy well. Mme Sevastopolo embraced Dimi and asked him, when he got back to London, to visit the graves of her relatives. ‘They are all interred at Shooter’s Hill. Perhaps you know this hill?’

As soon as the last group of them moved away, still talking, the men’s voices higher than the women’s, Babikian a kind of
alto continuo
to be heard above the rest, the bright lights were all lowered, not for reasons of economy, but to return the house to its usual state of half-mourning, the seclusion of the Fener.

The next day his aunt asked him whether it had crossed his mind that he might marry Evgenia.

N
one of the native inhabitants of San Tomás de las Ollas saved any money and this was a moral imperative, although it worked differently from ours. We would think it a sign of respectability to ‘put by’ now so as not to be an encumbrance to our relatives later. We wouldn’t wish to be a burden to our folks. Mrs Clancy put it this way at the get-together, the chicken-fry, which she, as the wife of the representative of the local manager of Providence Williams Marketing (Central American Division) gave from time to time to the American and European community; and in this she showed herself a sympathetic hostess because all the community were much occupied with assurance and its twin sister death, but the native inhabitants, although they too thought about death, had little interest in either saving or assurance. If they accumulated a little money by chance they used it to employ a less fortunate member of their family to do something they found disagreeable and did not wish to do themselves. The benefit to their
relatives came earlier but was not less welcome for that.

All this serves as an explanation of a visit Mrs Sheridan paid one morning in October to her chauffeur Pantaleón – or rather to his wife – for it was a visit of congratulation on the birth of a new baby. Mrs Sheridan was the widow of a banker who had invested in silver mines (but the mines were nationalised now); her house, with faded shutters and faded pepper trees, was pointed out to strangers on the corner of the main square.

Pantaleón did not ‘live in’ and was not required to work on saints’ days, so that, as Mrs Sheridan did not drive a car, it had taken some organisation for her to make the call at all since in San Tomás it was not possible to travel in a car some days and walk on others; you were either a walker or a driver and it would not have done to come to the
vivienda
in Calle López Mateos on foot. She had had to ask Señor Azeula, an engineering executive with Mr Clancy’s firm, to call for her.

‘Thank you, Don Salvador,’ she said as they arrived opposite the crumbling, well-like entrance.

‘I’ll stop by for you in ten minutes,’ said Mr Azuela, always available, clever but difficult to like, with his gold teeth and blue suit, opening wide the car door.

Mrs Sheridan walked steadily, not picking her way, out of the entrance shadow across the brilliant sun of the courtyard. Pantaleón’s wife was not at the communal stone wash-tub and Pantaleón himself was not to be seen. Directed by enthusiastic neighbours, Mrs Sheridan found him in the tiny inner patio, sunk in a basket chair, his
face covered with soap; an elderly man was shaving him with a cut-throat razor.

‘Don’t get up, Pantaleón,’ she said but he had done so already, knocking over the chair. His gentle Indian face under the mask of white suds creased with distress. Mrs Sheridan shook hands with the elderly man, who wiped his hands on the seat of his trousers for the purpose – ‘my uncle’; and with two other quarter cousins, not at all young, who had been cleaning respectively his right and left shoe.

‘I am temporarily employing these people so that they can share in a little good fortune I have had,’ Pantaleón explained in his grave majestic voice. ‘It is not a matter of charity, of course. They are people of substance in their way; my uncle has a stall in the market.’

Mrs Sheridan knew that Pantaleón’s wages were adequate and suppressed the thought that perhaps they were too generous.

‘It was Rosario I really wanted to see, and your new son,’ she said.

‘My wife is out shopping,’ Pantaleón replied.

‘At the mercado, carrying a heavy basket! It’s only ten days since the baby was born,’ protested Mrs Sheridan.

‘She is not at the mercado – she is at the supermercado and my brother-in-law’s niece is accompanying her to push the wire basket.’

‘And baby?’

‘The baby is indoors with my little cousin – the great niece of the señor uncle who is shaving me.’

Mrs Sheridan was used to the impact of the living room which, with its gleaming chromium bed, Virgin of Guadalupe framed in plastic lace, tall earthenware pitcher of water, sewing machine and worn stone grinder showed the Indian genius for accepting from an overriding culture only what suited it best. In the rocker, with its cushion of embroidered electric-blue silk, sat a girl of perhaps eight years old holding in her arms a baby wrapped in a shawl.

The Victorian novelists were right to make such children die; symbolically they were right since beauty of that kind is impossible in human beings beyond nine or ten. The girl’s face had a golden waxy pallor and the modelling was so slight that there were hardly any shadows on it – even the lower eyelids made almost none. The round head was set with doll-like precision on the tiny neck that seemed ready to snap and as it turned towards Mrs Sheridan the pale and golden lights changed on the perfectly circular cheek. The child’s golden stud earrings flashed and the very long eyelashes, which had a dusty or mealy look, opened slowly to contemplate the visitor.

‘What is your name?’ asked Mrs Sheridan.

‘Esperanza, señora.’

‘And you’re Pantaleón’s cousin? You’re a relation of his?’

The child stood absolutely transfixed, turning on her a dark bright stare from the huge eyes of the undernourished. It was not an Indian stare – not blank, not withdrawn. Mrs Sheridan, who had lived thirty-six years
in San Tomás and was not a fool, recognised that she was treading on delicate ground, that of legitimacy.

‘And where do you live?’

‘In the mercado.’

‘But where do you sleep?’

‘Under the stall: my great-uncle is from Chiapas – from the mountains: he doesn’t like houses.’

Esperanza traced something on the floor with her slender dirty foot – whitish, not blackish, with the eternal white dust of the
mesa.

‘But we are going to live here now, with cousin Pantaleón. He is paying to have mattresses made for us; they are being sewn now by his sister-in-law’s great-aunt.’

Mrs Sheridan again felt surprised, and ashamed of her surprise.

‘Will you like living here?’ she asked.

‘Yes, I shall like living with the baby. His life is my life.’

She lifted a corner of the shawl and Mrs Sheridan looked at the red-brown miniature face, still as an idol’s. Now she was closer to the exquisite little girl she noticed too an odour of fish and guessed what stall it was the great-uncle kept. The baby winked suddenly and blew a solitary shining bubble which broke without a sound.

‘I do hope he’s strong and healthy,’ said Mrs Sheridan.

The little girl carefully replaced the shawl.

‘
Venimos prestados
,’ she said, ‘Our lives are only lent to us.’

Colonel Terence Kvoa lived at the Quinta Maria de los Desamparados, way above the town in its thick shelter of vines, choyotes, climbing pink geranium and organ-pipe cactus. The road out to it was a stony and featureless thirty kilometres and many of Mrs Clancy’s friends had said to her that it reminded them of the Holy Land, but once you were out there the Quinta, with its sounds of deeply moving foliage and falling water, was beautiful. It had seemed sad that all this might be largely wasted when the Colonel departed stateside for an operation for cancer of the throat, but now he was home again and, although he had not yet recovered his voice, he lay stretched out on the white wicker chaise longue well assured and insured, gentle, hospitable and long-suffering.

‘There isn’t any skill a man can’t master, once he’s learned to discipline,’ said the new, youngish doctor. ‘That’s where your Army experience can’t help but come in handy, Colonel. Now, this question of speaking without actually allowing the passage of air through the mouth – well, a lot of people might think that’d rule a lot of the vowels and consonants out altogether; but that’s because they’ve never orientated themselves to the idea of using the resonance inside the mouth and chest. You take that talking bird, Colonel.’

The Colonel, caged in the white painted chair, looked up to where his tame starling hung among the high flowers and leaves of the first-floor balcony. The guests, Mr and Mrs Clancy, Mr Azuela, several of the business community, gazed up as he did to the lightly swinging cage.

‘
Salud, Salud, Salud,’
raved the high-hung starling; the whole cage shook at the stream of pure liquid bubbling sound. ‘Pretty Georgie Porgie, pretty
pajarito
, pretty boy. My God I can’t bear it. My God I must get out. My God I must go home. Pretty boy,
Salud, Salud, Salud.
Estraight home,
Salud.’

‘Plenty of people will tell you that a bird can’t pronounce those “s” sounds,’ continued the doctor, ‘but there’s proof positive that it can be done and you don’t see that bird’s beak open a crack. The “st” sound it can’t quite manage – not one Spanish native speaker in a hundred can say that sound and not make it “est” and you can’t expect a bird raised here to do any better.’

They all watched and they did not see the bird’s beak open a crack. The doctor explained further and told them – it was a semi-formal gathering – that the Colonel needed constant practice if his voice was to return at all.

‘Georgie Porgie. Get out you bitch,’ trilled the starling.

‘I think I represent the feelings of the Colonel’s circle of friends pretty closely,’ said Mr Clancy at last, ‘when I say we are determined to see him through this thing and that we confidently expect that by Christmas he’ll be a 100% talking member of the community. We confidently expect that.’

They faced the doctor with their good, unanimous eyes fastened on him and flashing through spectacles and contact lenses while above them the ragged mutterings of the starling died out in a long whirring trill, a clicking and whispering to itself and then silence. There was never
quite silence though in the Quinta Terence where there were so many movements in the spiked and creeping plants, servants shuffling across to throw water and sweep the patio five times a day, not bothering to pretend not to listen to what was said.

It was difficult to avoid the sensation of lecturing over the Colonel as if he were a lay figure. ‘It’s a great relief to feel you’re taking a hand in the treatment,’ the doctor said. ‘I want you always to let him take the initiative in a conversation: don’t start the talking – let him search for the words.’ The servants brought tequila, lime, salt and Montezuma beer, and the lay figure got up at last and poured and chinked the ice.

‘It’s certainly hard being called in at this late stage,’ added the doctor as they bumped away in his station wagon down the dry hillside. ‘Not that my predecessor didn’t leave everything in order. I’ve formed the definite impression that the Colonel came here to escape from something. He’s unfailingly kind and courteous but there’s a difficulty in getting through … when I asked him to sign the forms before the operation … we simply ask routinely that all patients understand where our responsibility ends and theirs begins …’

‘You mean if they die, their responsibility would begin there,’ said Mr Azuela.

‘You’re certainly wrong about the Colonel escaping,’ said Mrs Clancy. ‘He was married when he came here and very proud to bring his bride to the Quinta; I mean she was quite young … and you have to consider that
life can seem limited here … people can be homesick, and maybe feel trapped …’

‘I’m just wondering how much more my tyres will take,’ said the doctor. ‘This road’s a killer; do you know, it reminds me of the Holy Land?’

‘We can’t get close to them,’ said Mrs Sheridan. ‘I’ve been living here thirty-six years and I feel I can’t get in touch with them.’

Since Mrs Clancy was out, Mrs Sheridan was received in the cool, double height drawing room by her niece, a serious sweet-faced girl who had been training for a field trip with the Regional Centre for Fundamental Education.

‘They told us at the Centre that responsibility for contact rested entirely with us, as we’re guests in this country,’ the niece said. ‘You know we have six months’ theory and workshop practice before we go out to the mountain villages and they impressed on us that you could fail just as easily as you could succeed. You can go too fast speeding things up, like when one of our groups tried to get them to slap their tortillas twice with each hand instead of three times, but they didn’t take into account that this three-time rhythm had a definite soothing effect. Or you can react and go the other way and feel that there’s nothing to beat that cradle-to-the-grave pattern of peasant life, and then you can’t help them at all – you just get to be a cradle-to-the-graver yourself. Truly, although I’m not presuming to advise
you
, Mrs Sheridan, it’s just a
question of study – you have to study the Indian mentality so you can understand where they can’t be moved and where they’re prepared to stretch a point.’

‘So you’ll be going soon … to Oazaca, is it?’ said Mrs Sheridan. ‘You must meet Colonel Terence first …’ She was truly interested in what Mrs Clancy’s niece was saying but her mind seemed to drift across the high shadowy ceiling, circling back always to its first point: I have been here thirty-six years and I am still no more than a guest.

‘Pantaleón’s father and mother came down from a mountain village,’ she added. ‘He’s pure Indian, one supposes, but his little cousin didn’t look like him at all. She reminded me of a wax doll or a golden doll.’

As she left the house Mrs Sheridan met Mr Clancy rounding the corner of the
huerta;
he apologised for missing her in the usual half-shout which he kept for the open air. The garden was beautifully kept, with thick tropical grass in which the paths seemed like partings, and among the figs and bananas there were papery late roses, never quite fresh, never quite withered.