And the sex was fun. The sex was marvellous. My darling was suddenly as eager as me, more eager than me, after years of coolness…
So this was the new beginning. Nothing is quite what you expect it to be, not Portugal, not the woman you love. We sat and giggled on the giant leather sofas, we fucked unprotected in the heavy bed; for the last week in Sagres, after Alex told her secret, we hardly seemed to go outdoors. My snapshots are all of Alex’s face, Alex smiling, Alex in tears, Alex’s face, which I now saw was mortal.
The American guests moved around us like extras, having unreal conversations in unreal voices.
‘Say. Did Henry the Navigator actually live here?’
Because we had a notional relationship with the barman, the Americans thought we had superior knowledge.
‘Pardon me. My wife would like to know, what does Ovindo Mondo mean?’
At least, that was what I thought I’d heard. The phrase meant nothing at all to me, though it vaguely evoked a brand of wine, or perhaps a Latin pop singer.
‘Sounds like a name to me,’ I said. ‘My wife’s good at the lingo. When she comes, I’ll ask.’
When she came, I asked, and she frowned, puzzled, went over to the Americans. They showed her something in a tourist pamphlet.
‘O fim do mondo,’ she exclaimed. ‘Is that what they call this part of the coast? “The end of the world.”’
‘Gee thanks, that’s great!’
She came back to me. ‘O fim do mondo. What a beautiful name.’
‘I suppose it was the end of all the earth they knew…’
‘So they sailed off the edge of the world; how brave.’
‘So did we. No beginning without an ending.’
And how sweetly, how passionately she kissed me, how tightly she held me in her arms, how many times she told me she loved me when she set off alone for Lisbon next day, on her way for the week in Malaga she insisted she needed to spend alone.
15. Alexandra: São Benedicto, Brazil, 2005
Thank God we’re in Brazil at last. Every time we move on I feel better for a bit. I began to have doubts at the border when I learned we needed yellow fever shots and the official started grinning a demented grin and assuring me he wished he could shoot me himself; then Benjy showed up and the creep backed off and we found they used an airgun to give us the shots, which was better after all than a dodgy needle. The motorboat puttered across the Mamore and we had arrived in another world; it felt positively… metropolitan, though now we’re back in the wilds again.
But the wilds of Brazil are less absolute. One shouldn’t be glad they’ve lopped down so much jungle, and the freshly cut areas are rather an eyesore, like a piece of burned skin through a magnifying glass, with singed stumps of hair sticking out of the redness… all the same it makes me feel safer, somehow, to know that human beings are on top.
In Bolivia I had nightmares for weeks after the little river trip we took, Benjamin and I and a Spanish-speaking guide, and there were piranhas and alligators and a colony of bats like great black ivy-leaves spread across a rotting stump.
‘Don’t they carry rabies?’ Benjamin asked.
‘Why did you bring me here?’ I hissed.
True, there were butterflies and orchids as well and pink river dolphins that seemed positively friendly. But it was all so chaotic. The guide seemed surprised to see the alligators and utterly amazed when the boat broke down and he couldn’t mend it for an hour and a half.
I should have seen then we were bound to fail, for nothing really worked in Bolivia, the jungle strangled everything. Even my hopefulness and energy. Now Brazil has put new heart in us.
The food. I’ve always liked my food. Food and sex are not unconnected. Afer Bolivia, the food is delicious. Wonderful fish in Pôrto Velho, fresh shrimp fried in olive oil and garlic, grilled dourado, vatapa — smelling of coconut, Africa, the sea. Food is a celebration again. And the meat is good for Benjamin. A big rare churrasco steak at night, plenty of cachaca to keep him cheerful and then two or three diabolically strong coffees, little cafezinhos, black as love, sweet and hot as Benjamin’s mouth — he was inside me most of the night. He’s still a good lover; I’ve no complaints there. I have plenty of complaints, but not about our sex-life.
São Benedicto is just right for us; a scruffy little town left beached by the gold rush. It was rich for a bit and now it’s poor with scrawny dogs picking scraps on the street. No gold left, and the people will leave, for the tin mine can’t employ them all. But they haven’t gone yet. They’ve been waiting for us. There are children everywhere; I see them everywhere, small and bright-eyed, playing in the dust.
Benjamin’s gone out to try the priest again — so he says, and perhaps it’s true. Priests know who they’ve recently advised against abortion. If you pay them well and convince them you’re Catholic — or convince them you’re Catholic by paying them well — they will put out feelers, promising nothing. The whole process is terribly slow; we’ve been through it numbingly often by now. Money is no guarantee of success. Only inexhaustible willpower can do it, and Benjy has been deficient in that. Perhaps the steak will pep him up.
The trouble with Benjy — one of the troubles — is laziness. Sleepiness. He should be ashamed, doing nothing all day, with all the talent Isaac said he had. When I first met him he was always full of adrenalin, just finishing one picture and starting on six others, with paint-spattered clothes and restless eyes, looking about him to eat the world. He pretends to go out and make sketches now, but he never shows me anything. There was one drawing of me, but that was appalling, entirely inept, made me look like a monster — for a second I was worried, but he just lacks practice. He sits around, listless, and drinks too much. It’s not right at his age, barely thirty, at the beginning of his life.
Christopher grew idle too, I remember. All my men seem to tire in the end… but at least he was older, he’d worked all his life. And he still sent back regular pieces to the travel pages of the English papers. I helped him to make them more colourful, crisper, but he did keep working, after a fashion.
Part of him itched to make films again, though the longer he left it, the further his contacts lapsed, and any practical hopes of doing it. But he was an avid cinema-goer. In any town with a cinema he’d disappear in the afternoons; almost any kind of film gave him pleasure, because it was good, or because it was crap, because it was eccentric, or typical. He always came back in a good temper.
And it gave me some time on my own. Once I met Stuart, that was very important, so I could be in a good temper too. In the end Chris grew less keen on going out and became addicted to video. Video films, video games. He could pretend to direct those electronic cartoons. In our last years together it was all Chris did: play computer games on borrowed screens or watch video films in dark rented rooms, and by then we no longer talked about them. By then we no longer talked at all…
But Stuart and Christopher loved to talk film. At first Chris took Stuart for an ideal audience, one of those Englishmen he loved to meet in hotel bars during those long days… We were happy, yes, but the days could seem long. There was nothing we had to do, you see, and I couldn’t listen to him all the time, rehashing the old office grievances, reliving the old, faded triumphs, for part of him was in television still, part of Christopher had never left work, or wished he had not, and grieved for it (which was pointless — I mean, I never forced him to leave). He could impress other men with what he had done, especially if they knew a little about it, and everyone knows something about television. I was sometimes on the edge of such conversations, sucking in my gin and half-reading a novel, and I saw over the years how they began to falter as Chris became more out of touch with things. The names he dropped had a dusty air. Poor Christopher. He’d become a back number.