FIRST MATE PRADHAN was at the top of the gangway, waiting for me.
“Well, what did you think of her?” he said. “I presume she insisted on analyzing your nose? Was it illuminating?”
I answered somewhat vaguely. Then he told me about his own experience with Dr. Chafak and about her analysis of his nose.
“She claimed my nose indicated that no medicine would do my ulcer any good if I didn’t really want to be cured,” he said. “Have you ever heard such nonsense?”
Of course, I nodded sympathetically.
AT TEN THE NEXT MORNING, the Charybdis sailed out of Isla Perdida. Aside from the stevedores who cast off our lines, the islanders paid no more attention to our departure than they had to our arrival. Having already resumed my major duty of swabbing the deck, my work took me alongside two big wooden crates that had been loaded at the island and were tied down on the foredeck. The canvas shroud on one of them flapped loosely, so I was able to see these words stencilled in large block letters:
SMITH’S
HYDRAULIC PUMPS & VENTILATOR SYSTEMS
CAMBERLOO
CANADA
Camberloo? Wasn’t that the name of the university where Dupont had studied for his medical degree? How curious it was to see, stencilled on this wooden box on the deck of a rusty freighter in the middle of a southern ocean, the name of the Canadian town I’d first heard from Dupont’s lips. What a small and strange world.
DURING THE FOLLOWING weeks, as the Charybdis made its slow and steady way towards La Guaira, the seaport of Caracas, I made my own way slowly and steadily towards a decision regarding my future: that when we reached port, I would retire from the life at sea. It had been enjoyable in some ways, but its rituals were too confining. By definition a sailor touches only the margins of the real world. I felt I was now ready for the hinterland.
Accordingly, I warned the bosun I’d be signing off at La Guaira. He was grateful for the courtesy. Crew members would often just quit without notice, giving him problems in finding replacements.
“It’s a pity you’re leaving,” he said. “You’ve got the makings of a real sailor.”
First Mate Pradhan and his wife were sorry to see me go, too, and I felt sad about that: they’d been very kind to me. Some of the first mate’s sadness was no doubt on behalf of The Ulcer, which had been like a silent fourth guest at all our meals.
The night before we sailed into La Guaira, we shared a farewell dinner and talked about what I might do ashore.
“Your money won’t last long, you know,” said the first mate.
“So you should find some useful work quickly,” said Mrs. Pradhan. “If you don’t find something that keeps your mind occupied, you’ll start moping. That’s the problem with life at sea — it gives you too much time to think.”
She was referring, of course, to my tragic love affair. I didn’t dare tell her that now sometimes when I tried to remember Miriam’s face, it almost completely evaded me.
“There’s always a need for English-language tutors,” said the first mate.
“Srinivas is right about that,” said Mrs. Pradhan.
Why not? I thought. After all, I’d almost become a teacher once before, in another world, in what seemed another century. Maybe I’d give it a try.
3
And, indeed, after a few restless, lonely days in a cheap Caracas hotel room, I ventured out and managed to get myself hired on a three-year contract as an English tutor with InterMinas, a big mining conglomerate. My job was to travel to the sites of various mines and teach advanced English to Spanish-speaking mine managers and supervisors. They already knew fundamental English but needed to improve their skills to communicate better with their mainly gringo owners and the big investors who occasionally flew down from the north to inspect their fiefdoms.
Those hours of class preparation I’d done at Duncairn and never used now proved useful.
The mines themselves were often located in the most inhospitable areas of the southwest, where jungle ran into mountain. The scorching sun, drenching rains, and hostile insects together made life especially hard for the mine workers.
I became the most itinerant of teachers, travelling between assignments mainly on small planes, or diesel trucks, or occasionally on narrow-gauge railways that had been converted from use in sugar-cane fields to the task of transporting ore. But the most relaxing mode of travel for me was in dugout canoes. I’d just lie back and rest as I was paddled along muddy jungle rivers. Like my earlier journey on those roads in Africa, I imagined these primal forests sliding by on either side like bookcases in some endless library filled with lookalike books.
As for the types of mines: most were open-pit or strip mines because the minerals were near the surface and tunnelling wasn’t required. Hundreds of miners would crawl around, day and night, picking at the red earth in the broiling heat like flies on a massive sore.
Some of the mines, however, were underground. The miners who worked in them were of that universal type I’d seen on their way to and from work in Duncairn. They were small, wiry men doing a dangerous job that made them a close-knit group. But to the owners, the men’s safety seemed of little importance, so deaths and maimings were daily affairs.
No matter the type of mine, the administration offices and the supervisors’ bungalow residences all had the same cinderblock walls and corrugated tin roofs. As a visiting tutor, I was usually allocated a room in one of these bungalows for the length of my visit.
In proximity to each mine, a shantytown of sorts would spring up, consisting mainly of long bamboo huts that were split into flimsy apartments for the married men and dormitories for those without wives. Hospitals and churches were really just adaptations of the same bamboo structures, as were the entertainment establishments: movie theatres, brothels, liquor stores, cockfighting rings, and mescaline dens.
I sampled some of the offerings now and then.
THAT FIRST CONTRACT passed slowly, and I soon began to wonder if I was the right kind of man for this work. I didn’t mind the teaching, but I couldn’t help being afraid I might die of some exotic illness, as so many did in this part of the world. If so, my body would probably be buried in a shallow grave in the jungle, where it would be disinterred and ripped apart by nightmare creatures. Soon the weeds would protrude from the gaps in my bare, gnawed ribcage.
The thought of such an end led me on jungle evenings, to the accompaniment of a billion chirruping insects, to write a journal for the first time in my life. In it, I recorded the true story of myself: my upbringing in the Tollgate, the violent deaths of my parents, my love for Miriam Galt and the breaking of my heart in Duncairn, my subsequent illness — or whatever it was — in Africa, my voyage of recovery on the Charybdis, then this present work as a tutor. If I were to die in obscurity, someone might stumble on the journal and know I once existed. The thought of that consoled me to such an extent that I might have resigned myself to my lot.
Then Gordon Smith appeared.
GORDON SMITH
1
I’d just spent several weeks at the La Mancha gold mine conducting conversation tutorials when he arrived, late one afternoon, in a company jeep used to bring passengers from the little airfield that had been slashed out of the jungle a few miles away. From the open-walled hut where I held my class, I saw the mine’s general manager get out of the jeep, then this other man.