The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

Acclaim for
PETER CAREY’s
The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

I would like to thank Kenneth de Kok who guided me through the shoals of Dutch and Afrikaans, translated some of my dialogue, and provided me with the name Voorstand; Charles Poulbon of Perth, Western Australia, who first alerted me to the joys of pigeon racing; Ronni Burrows of Ronni Reports for her highly efficient research on a number of arcane subjects; and Dr Brian Waldron who read a very early draft and was therefore Tristan Smith’s first diagnostician.

I owe especial thanks to Alison Summers, my wife, whose careful reading and thoughtful questions helped me to discover, chart and report the emotional and geographical territories of this novel.

Republic of Efica

‘In foreign countries,’ Bruder Mouse said, ‘they put animals in cages and keep them locked up and kill them.’

‘You can’t frighten me,’ said Bruder Duck. ‘There’s a great world out there and I plan to see it. I’m going to fairs, and puppet shows, and I’m going to cross oceans and have all sorts of adventures.’

‘You want to be fat and rich,’ said Bruder Mouse. ‘You want to find gold.’

‘It’s true,’ said Bruder Duck, ‘that if I chanced to stumble over a nugget I would thank the Lord for my good fortune and if I found an object of value I might buy cheaply, I would not refuse the blessing.’

‘But what of the issue?’ said Bruder Mouse.

‘What issue?’ said the Duck, who was busy eating the cheese pudding again.

‘That they have Sirkuses in foreign countries, where they put God’s creatures in cages. They have butcher shops where they sell our Bruders’ flesh.’

‘If what you say is so,’ said the Bruder Duck, ‘then I would change their minds.’

‘How would you do this?’ asked the Mouse.

‘I would do doody and fall over,’ said the Duck. ‘I would make them laugh.’

From
Bruder Duck’s Travels
, Badberg Edition

My name is Tristan Smith. I was born in Chemin Rouge in Efica – which is to say as much to you, I bet, as if I declared I was from the moon.

And yet if you are going to make much sense of me, you have to know a little of my country, a country so unimportant that you are already confusing the name with Ithaca or Africa, a name so unmemorable it could only have been born of a committee, although it remains, nonetheless, the home of nearly three million of the earth’s people, and they, like you, have no small opinion of themselves, have artists and poets who are pleased to criticize its shortcomings and celebrate its charms, who return home to the eighteen little islands between the tropic of Capricorn and the 30th parallel, convinced that their windswept coastline is the most beautiful on earth. Like 98 per cent of the planet’s population, we Eficans may be justly accused of being provincial, parochial, and these qualities are sometimes magnified by your habit of hearing ‘Ithaca’ when we say ‘Efica’.

If I say ‘Voorstand’ to you, that is a different story entirely. You are a citizen of Voorstand. You hold the red passport with the phases of the moon embossed in gold. You stand with your hand over your heart when the Great Song is played, you daily watch new images of your armies in the vids and zines. How can I make you know what it is like to be from Efica – abandoned, self-doubting, yet so wilful that if you visit Chemin Rouge tomorrow morning we will tell you that the year is 426
^*
and you must write your cheques accordingly.

If you were my students I would direct you to read
Efica: from penal colony to welfare state
,
^†
The Caves of Democracy,
^‡
and Volume 3 of
Wilbur’s
The Dyer’s Cauldron.
^*
But you are not my students and I have no choice but to juggle and tap-dance before you, begging you please sit in your seats while I have you understand exactly why my heart is breaking.

My maman was one of you. She was born in Voorstand. She was able to trace her family back to the ‘Settlers Free’ of the Great Song. Had things been different I might have been a Voorstander, like you, and then there would have been no trouble. But when my maman was eighteen she came to Chemin Rouge to be a model in a fashion advertisement.

She became famous, within Efica, for her role in a local soap opera, and then she was notorious as a founder of the Feu Follett
^†
Collective, a small radical theatre group which was always in trouble with our local authorities for its opposition to the country of her birth.

Let us say it straight – Felicity Smith was very critical of her own people. It was because of this, she changed her name from Smutts to Smith: she did not want to be a Voorstander. She was outraged at the way Voorstand manipulated our elections, meddled with our currency, threaded all that shining cable we never understood, miles of it, great loops of it, through the dry granite caves which honeycombed our southern provinces. She did not like the way your country used us. If this is offensive, I am sorry, but it was her belief. It was honestly held. Indeed, it was passionately held. She was not reasonable or balanced or fair. Yet for all the
passion
she expanded, for all the ceaseless
paranoia
, for all the very real Efican government agents who came snooping round the theatre, their electronic pencils dancing like fireflies in the dark, it is hard to see how the Feu Follet Collective was a threat to anyone – it was a small, dirty, uncomfortable theatre at the back of that warren of bachelor flats, stables and dressage rings which had once housed the Ducrow Circus School.
^‡

When, at the end of her life, my maman found a way to really
threaten the status quo it was not through the theatre but in the dirty old fairground of baby-kissing politics. In comparison the notorious Feu Follet was toothless. It had no money, no advertising, too much boring Brecht. My maman sometimes said that if it had not been for the spies, who after all paid full price for their tickets, they would have long ago gone out of business. That, of course, was a joke. The unfunny truth was that the Feu Follet would never have survived if it had not been for its circus matinées and Shakespeare productions, the latter chosen to coincide with the selection of that year’s high-school syllabuses.

I was born in the Scottish Play, at the end of a full rehearsal.

There was no great rush of fluids, but there was no mistaking what was happening when her waters broke and my maman quietly excused herself and walked out of the Feu Follet without telling anyone where she was going.

When she came down the brick ramp in Gazette Street, things started happening faster than she had expected. Oxytocin entered her bloodstream like a ten-ton truck and all the pretty soft striped muscles of her womb turned hostile, contracting on me like they planned to crush my bones. I was caught in a rip. I was dumped. I was shoved into the birth canal, head first, my arm still pinned behind my back. My ear got folded like an envelope. My head was held so hard it felt, I swear it, like the end of life and not its glorious beginning.

My maman had never had a child before. She did not understand the urgency. She walked straight past the line of empty red and silver cabs whose Sikh taxi-men, unaware of the emergency taking place underneath their noses, continued to talk to each other from behind their steering wheels, via the radio. As she crossed the Boulevard des Indiennes to the river she already felt distinctly uncomfortable, as if she were holding back a pumpkin, and yet she would not abandon her plan, i.e. to walk quietly, by herself, along the river to the Mater Hospital. She had long ago decided on this and she was a woman who always carried out her plans.

It was a Sunday morning in January and the syrupy air smelled of dried fish, sulphur and diesel fuel.