One evening we were sitting in the lobby of our hotel, the Balikcilar, a heavy joint — all shiny marble and knobbly stonework — when the divan we were sitting on was kicked by the gods from beneath. It felt as if this chunky leatherette banquette had transmogrified into a waterbed. The quake lasted for about a minute, then the lobby emptied in seconds — this was a region where people knew about earthquakes — and John and I found ourselves standing on a roundabout idly contemplating a bizarre bed of decorative cabbages.
At the time the tremor failed to impinge. After all, we’d been in the grip of vicarious religious fervour ever since arriving in Turkey. It wasn’t until the following evening, after a three-hundred-kilometre drive into Cappadocia, when we saw on the BBC World Service that the earthquake had felled a minaret back in Konya and killed six people. I now found myself in the bizarre position of having escaped death in a natural disaster, only to be informed of the fact by people a thousand miles away in the Aldwych.
But, anyway, Cappadocia itself was also bizarre. This was an unleavened landscape that looked as if it had been crumbled and then kneaded by history itself. Up here on the high Anatolian plateau troglodytes had been tunnelling into the ground for millennia: there were meant to be whole cities constructed souterrain, in which the natives had waited out the depredations of whichever invading army — Greeks, Romans, Persians, Ottomans — happened to be marching through at the time. Perhaps, I mused, it was one such legion of transients, cleverly tricked into tramping along a handy fissure, whose ghosts were now perturbing the earth?
Central Turkey had the look of antiquity about it. Even the modern settlements had the appearance of rime, as if their substance had crystallised out of the crust they stood on. Yet as subsequent earthquakes in Ankara and along the shores of the Black Sea would so disastrously confirm, contemporary Turkey was a society whose urbanity was constructed out of dangerously substandard concrete; powdery, friable stuff, readily pulverised by the slightest shake. Personally, I blamed the oblong shape of the country. After Nepal, Turkey is the most oblong country I’ve ever visited, but a glance at any reasonably good map will soon tell you that oblong countries have a high incidence of natural disasters and usually fairly grim human rights records as well.
Chile, Israel, Togo, Portugal. . this list is by no means exhaustive — or even fair — but when it comes to whacko theories there’s no reason why psychogeographers can’t get in on the act. Anyway, to get back to Cappadocia, it had been a gruelling day’s drive. As we’d ascended the plateau from Konya in our rental Fiat, I’d begun to notice a peculiar, prismatic distortion beginning in my left eye, which then spread gradually to the right. It was as if some sadistic ocular surgeon had inserted a prism into my retina, which was refracting the harsh light into swirling, kaleidoscopic patterns. I couldn’t bear to tell John about it, because he might insist on driving. I don’t do passenger.
There was this, and there was also the knowledge that this wasn’t the first time I’d experienced the distortion. In fact, it had happened a couple of times before when I’d been climbing Scottish mountains. I’d be fine up to 3,000 feet, and then bingo! my eyes would turn into children’s toys. Within hours of my descent a kind of clarity would return. Sitting that night in the lobby of our troglodyte hotel, watching the earthshaking news from Bush House, it impinged on me that perhaps my eye problem was also an act of God. God wanted me to stay down, or even go lower; that way I wouldn’t escape the retributive ruckling of his premier creation.
Hitler in Rio
São Paulo was — to adopt an idiom — way too much. The ride in from the airport through asteroid belt of the favelas, and then the planetary scale of the urban mass itself. Sitting in a restaurant atop the highest building in the city, I could see what looked like a snaggle of teeth on the horizon some twenty miles away, but when I scrutinised them carefully I saw that they too were equally vast edifices. The comprehension gap was as disorienting as the culture shock. In my four-star hotel I couldn’t find one staff member who spoke more than rudimentary English or French; if you wanted to get anywhere here you needed Portuguese or German.
I couldn’t get my plastic to work in the cash machines, so one afternoon I set out to find a bank where I could draw some money. I walked and I walked. As well as being illimitable São Paulo seemed to have little or no comprehensible street plan. It was like an unholy miscegenation between London and Los Angeles: mighty metropolises, grey and golden and exhaust-stained, humping at the place of dead roads. In some dusty square, metal-tortured boulevard or another, I fell in with an elderly German who spoke sinisterly good English. I say sinisterly because everything about him was sinister to my paranoiac mind. What was he doing here? Why did he talk about himself so circumspectly, but want to know all about me? I could almost visualise the death’s head badges of the SS on his faded Hawaiian shirt.
The minibar in the hotel was no help. It was called the Selfbar — so I took it personally and downed the lot: the scotches, the vodkas, the gins and the Amazonian armpit aguardientes. Then I howled down the lift shaft. My Brazilian translator, the redoubtable Hamilton dos Santos, seeing the state I was getting into, suggested a little R&R in Rio. I flew there on a Varig flight for which there was no internal security. This was ten years ago, and perhaps things have changed since, but in those days the explanation Brazilians gave me for the lack of metal detectors at their airports was that everyone insisted on packing guns.
It was drizzling in Rio when I arrived, and the scuzzy grey shanty towns on the surrounding peaks threatened to topple on to Copacabana. In place of the sparkling strand of my imagination — crowded with promenading, steatopygous lovelies, their café-au-lait buttocks cloven by itsy-bitsy G-strings — I found instead three men in anoraks fishing the angry Atlantic while seated on collapsible stools. Shit! I admonished myself; I need never have left East Finchley after all!
If São Paulo was threatening, Rio was terrifying, but I had nothing to read, which is the most frightening thing of all when abroad. I went out with my money in my sock to find an English-language bookshop and couldn’t, anywhere. Eventually I discovered one a bus ride away at a shopping mall in an outer suburb. They had three shelves of airport dross and one copy of William L. Shirer’s magisterial The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I snapped it up.
I spent the next week snuggled up to the tiny zinc-topped bar of the tiny café opposite my hotel, assiduously working my way through Shirer. In the scary atmosphere of Rio the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis seemed almost gemütlich. I’d also, sensibly, switched to beer. Gradually, day by day, I felt the chaotic life around me beginning to assume some kind of coherence. I noticed that the street urchins, the hawkers, the washerwomen, the service workers for the skyscraper hotels lining the beach — the whole population of this quarter in fact — all knew one another and looked out for each other. Every individual had its niche in the living reef, and if a new creature came into the area its character — and potential to be a threat — was instantly noted. Far from being a soulless adjunct to the dubious delights of Copacabana, in this, the off-season, I could appreciate the tightly knit community I found myself in.
On the final night I spent in Rio I broached the language barrier and fell in with a couple of good-time girls. I say ‘girls’ advisedly, because although they looked younger than me, such were the concertinaed demographics of Brazil that one of them turned out to be a grandmother. Anyway, by a combination of signs and pidgin English I managed to convey to these two the extent of my sociological observations of Copacabana. ‘Oh yes,’ Vittoria replied, ‘we know everyone here, and if anyone new comes and we don’t know their name, they get given a nickname so we can easily identify them.’