(I still feel a little strange today, blurred at the edges, not myself. That curious, terrible wish not to be. Maybe I feel — but it seems so silly by sensible daylight with the brisk cross sounds of packing next door, and the squawking row going on in the kitchen — I feel as though I had waved to death, in that single moment of despair, and now it is still looking at me.
Rubbish, fuck off, get away! In future the rich will never die, the technology virtually exists already…)
After I wept he passed out in his chair, woke up in the early hours and crawled into bed, cold — I’d forgotten that flesh could feel cold — shivering, gloomy, begging my forgiveness, wanting to know that I still loved him.
I’ve heard it all before, alas. I’ve lived a long life, I’m not sentimental, and not at my best at two in the morning. I told him to go to sleep.
‘But I love you. I want to marry you.’
‘Two hours ago I was a fucking old bitch.’
‘I was drunk, I was mad, you’ll have to forgive me.’
‘I’ll have to go to sleep. We’re leaving tomorow.’
And so we’re leaving, still unreconciled. When he passes the doorway I can see his face, young and proud, divinely sulky, downcast eyes with that thick fringe of lash. He’s tall and slim but his cheeks are still round, smooth and faintly plump with youth, there was a sweetness about him I once loved, but he’s turned against me as all men do.
And then he calls from beyond the partition. ‘Shall I go down and ask them to send us up a snack? They might have some turtle eggs, if we’re lucky, a bit of charque, some beer…’
And here he is. He’s forgiven me for not forgiving him. Or else at all costs he wants to make friends. His mouth’s soft and timid, no longer sulky. His eyes drive mine down to the stained wooden floor, nameless stains and casual damage…
When I want something I want it all the time, just as long as I want it, which may not be for long, and I still have the passion for charque that I conceived when we first came to South America, although it’s on offer day in day out from the roughest vendors in the poorest mercado. They thrust the charque under my nose, hard black strips of sun-dried meat, salty and strong as bulls’ pizzles. I like to chew on those great dark thongs, but the hotel offers it already sliced up into delicate little appetisers.
‘Bring everything but the beer.’
‘I’ve done the packing. We can leave after lunch.’
— And I feel it tug at the corner of my heart, a small rush of hope at the thought of departure, an echo of all past hopefulness, all those leaps into the unlived future.
Outside the window, the hotel cock, whose internal clock is a torment to him, shrieks for the dawn at midday. It’s appallingly hot; our blinds are drawn, erratically brown wooden-slatted things that look as though they date from the 1950s… The sun makes white prison-bars on the floor.
‘I’m glad we’re going.’
We kiss.
‘So’m I.’
He does bring beer, after all. Below us, the fury dies away; they’ve accepted it, we are already gone, distress swoons into the stunning heat. The hotel sleeps. For them we are over.
Pathetic gringos who came to them with a feeble dream of buying a baby. They’ve seen it all, including us. We pass like the tiniest cloud at noon.
In case you’ve forgotten, I’m an optimist. Quite uncharacteristic, all this gloom. Christopher always praised me for it, unsinkable, unquenchable.
— Before we left, we were laughing together, Benjy and I, in that rickety room. The beer released us from opera. Besides, we were moving, weren’t we? Stepping out together, fellow-travellers…
Thank you, I thought, the pain has gone. The warm beer made me invulnerable, just a tiny bit clumsy but entirely happy as we climbed into the manager’s white-hot jeep and rattled off over the baking mud, paying extra for driving through the siesta.
I thought I might have caught one final glimpse of my family of daughters staring blankly after me, their narrow-eyed mestizo faces seeing only the jeep, not the mad pale lady, but there was no one, everyone slept.
I didn’t care, I was flying, I was drunk, it was all a dream, with another one tomorrow. We laughed so loud that the hotel manager, who must have heard our row the night before, turned round and stared over his white-flecked shoulder and scraped the side of a sleeping bus.
This ebullience got us to the railway station, and then the train itself took over, for I’ve loved foreign trains with a passionate love since the British railways withered away. Elsewhere in the world in the last decade the railways have boomed as governments turned against the motorcar… This particular line, which runs from Riberalta across the border into Brazil and down to Pôrto Velho, was dreamed up over a century ago as a way of making up some silly feud between Brazil and Bolivia — South Americans are always quarrelling, and totally unreliable, as Benjamin and I have found to our cost — the Brazilians, you see, never bothered to finish it, and the track would simply have rusted away if it hadn’t been completed a few years ago on nothing more than a gangster’s whim, a Bolivian cocaine baron buying good will, or so the maid told Benjamin, she was sly, she was always talking to him… How can you deal with people like that? Dreamers, idlers, gossips, crooks…
I’m glad we’re going. A toast to cocaine. The original line cost six thousand lives, one for every hundred sleepers. I discourage Benjamin from tiring me with facts but I admit that this has an epic dimension, as if our carriage were surging through the rubber forest on thousands of straining human shoulders, with me above them, urging them on…
Benjamin doesn’t like that image. Benjy has no imagination.
South American trains are wonderful. There are steam-trains (steam-trains!) still in service, or so they say, though I’ve never seen one; I’d adore to find one of those iron giants and rattle through the remains of the rain-forest. I’ve heard there are some at Pôrto Velho, if we manage to get as far as Brazil.
Even the diesel trains are marvellous fun. The vendors serve warm gassy drinks and pukacapas, picante cheese pies which somehow taste wonderful because you’re moving. People travel with sheep and garrulous chickens and shout to each other in the shuddering bursts of light and dark as we shoot through the trees, past a wall of fire into untouched stillness where a troop of macaques pauses, startled, the babies clinging to their mothers like bats, then the smoke sweeps everything back into darkness.
Not everything. I am left with the babies. Little soft paws which grope and cling.
And so the pleasure of the beer turned sour. If I’d had a gun, I’d have shot down the monkeys, aiming unerringly back through the flames. God will help me; I must be avenged.
But we stopped in the sun — someone dead on the tracks, a protester, they said, against the burnings — and the killing heat on the side of my head made me sleep, heavily, and dream black dreams, and when I woke up the rage was gone.
I swear I no longer felt angry, but the train had jerked at the wrong moment so I woke as I rose through a spiral of time, unsure which level I was on.
Someone was talking and kissing me.
‘Wake up, Alex. It’s nearly our station.’
‘— Christopher,’ I said.
I thought I was with Christopher, we were travelling, we were nearly there…
It wasn’t the initial confusion that hurt him. Benjy says he could have accepted that. It was what happened as I woke up properly, narrowing my eyes against the blaze, and he saw his reflection in my pupil, saw me register who was there, and the pupil contracted with disappointment.