Since I've finished War in English's Apodidraskiana, I've moved onto what that novel was supposed to be in the first place. If I can control myself and not put in a load of war criminals and nuclear bombs, it may very well turn into The Family Plot. It's probably not going to be as bleak as this little bit suggests it might be. Yes, it's set in Tierra del Mar. I can't help it. I just can't.
I have come to Tierra del Mar to die – by my own hand. It sounds melodramatic, I suppose, to travel halfway around the globe in order to despatch oneself, but that’s what I’ve done. My reasons are manifold, some of them I may explain here, many of them I will not. Many of them defy explanation, either because they are rooted in feelings and emotions that are impossible to put into words, or because they are simply too petty and pathetic to explain without appearing to be some sort of pathetic, self-obsessed depressive.
I am not a depressive. I am not, like my mental prop Captain Scott of the Antarctic, subject to black dog bouts of depression. I do not go about decrying the grimness of life, the unfairness of fate. Not by nature, at any rate, though I suspect that my presence here in this remote country with this grim intention is suggestive that I am wrong to say that I’m no depressive. I don’t feel depressed, though – I feel free, freer than I have for some time. I feel as though, now that I have made this decision and this journey, I have been released from all the suffocating obligations that a future entails. I am futureless, and so I need not worry about where the events of the present will lead, and since the past will soon no longer concern me, I don’t have to worry about that either. I exist solely for the present. I am here on the elevated veranda of the Hotel Atlantis on the seafront in Desamparados enjoying a gin and tonic and the sun. I am watching the fisherman land the day’s catch. I am listening to the contented gurgling of the fishing boats’ exhausts. I am looking at the plump ferry rolling across the glittering straight to Puerto Oro on Isla Grande Morado (Desamparados is on Isla Pequeno Morado, actually the larger of the two islands – there is a third island: simply Isla Morado, which is uninhabited).
I should perhaps explain a little about the place. But then you most probably possess an atlas, and can most probably examine Tierra del Mar in it. (I love poring over atlases, imagining what this mountain or that city is like.) West of Peru, on the same latitude, more or less, as Trujillo, you’ll find the islands that make up Tierra del Mar. She’s a pretty country – all rivers and jungles and crumbly stuccoed towns with olive trees in the streets. I plan to tour the islands before I cash in my chips. It’s the only thing I’ve ever really wanted to do that it’s still possible for me to do.
And so here I am, as I said, on the veranda of the Hotel Atlantis with a gin and tonic, watching the world go by. The evening sun is golden and filled with golden motes of dust that’s thrown up by the traffic – there’s everything from busses to donkey-carts to bicycles to motorcars going past in a never ending tangle of metal and noise and glinting light. Some of the vehicles and people are thronging the quay waiting fro the ferry to wind itself back across the straight (it’s on a chain that stretches across the narrow band of water between the islands). Half a mile across the straight on Isla Grande Morado there is a similar crowd waiting to cross, a swirling mass of colour in the distance. They, and the whole town of Puerto Oro, are in the evening shadow of the black cone of the Nublada volcano, a huge mound of ash and black pumice that reclines in the sun and smokes steadily all day long like an old general. On cloudy nights he illuminates the cloud-cover with a warm firelight that is somehow more reassuring than threatening – that despite the fact that the town at which I am gazing through my gin-hazed eyes is the second Puerto Oro to have existed on that island. The first was a mile or so further south, on the opposite bank of the Fangoso Estuary, and now lies cocooned under fifty feet of lava and pumice like a less interesting Pompeii.
I say that the old Puerto Oro is less interesting than Pompeii, but I’m still going to go and have a look at it. I’ve never seen a town destroyed (or the site where a destroyed town once stood), and so I fully intend to go and stand on the black rocks and contemplate the power of nature. Who knows, perhaps that’s where I’ll finally do it. It might have some resonance there.
I have been giving the final location of my demise some thought. I want it to be somewhere pleasant, but I worry that if I chose somewhere pleasant I may find it so pleasant that I put it off again. I will not do it in my hotel room – that would be unfair. Part of the reason that I have come so far from home is that nobody who knows me will have the job of finding my body and identifying it. It seems unfair to make it so that anyone finds it, and so I may well opt to finally do it far away from anyone else in the jungled interior of one of the islands. The mode of my demise, I have not yet settled upon: blades are certainly out, because I cannot stand the sight of blood; which means that some sort of drug overdose, drowning, shooting, jumping from a height or wild animal attack will have to be the way to go. I especially like the idea of the last, because that way it could almost be taken for a kind of dashing accident, rather than the craven cowardice that it is.
I admit that it is cowardice. I am a coward. I accepted that long ago. But I can’t go on. I have less to live for than most, and most have nothing to live for, and so why bother? I can’t come up with an answer, and no-one else can either, as far as I know, and so I can’t convince myself that I am wrong. The suspicion that I might be remains, but it is only a weak suspicion, and not enough to outweigh the pain.
I have ordered another gin. It comes quickly and is gone quicker. I order another and treat it with more respect. I allow it to sparkle there in the sun on the table, ice melting, slice of lime unreal in its alcohol-enhanced greenness. The glasses in this hotel are good: squat cut-glass tumblers of reassuring weight, they all bear a little engraving that depicts the façade of the hotel and the word Atlantis. They’re nice. If I were going home I’d take some with me.
The ferry is winding its way back across the straight and the dusk is coming; the little vessel is already lit up by a few electric lights mounted on poles around the edge of her crowded deck. Bruise-coloured clouds have come up from behind the coastal range of Isla Grande Morado, starkly dark against the serrated snow-capped peaks, and a fresh wind is blowing from the west. Those clouds will probably bring rain with them (they’ll dump more snow on the summits first), but I’ll be alright here under the veranda. I pull my jacket around me. It is warm, but not enormously so. The straight no longer glistens: the water, overshadowed by the dusk and the clouds, has turned slate grey and the wind is whipping it into little white peaks. The ferry has stopped. The man in the winch house on the quay at this end has gone out onto the stones at the end of the quay and he’s shouting to his colleague on the ferry. I will finish my gin and go down to see what is happening.
I have returned to the hotel. I have taken a seat in the ground floor lounge, which is equipped with panoramic plate-glass windows that overlook the straight. The ferry, it seems, is overloaded and the electric motor that winches it across the straight has burnt out and jammed. Its lights are visible through the rain that is falling heavily and steadily, and it appears not to be moving. I have found that the ferry is named Patna, which strikes me as an astoundingly ill-omened name to bestow upon any vessel, even one which is little more than a pontoon on a chain. I have ordered dinner, and while I wait for it I will describe the Patna in more detail, giving details that the motorman was kind enough to impart.
The Patna was built and launched in nineteen-fifty and replaced a pair of World War II landing craft which had provided the link between the two islands until then. She is built entirely of steel and can carry twelve automobiles or four lorries at a time, together with as many pedestrians and bicycles as can cram themselves into the spaces between the vehicles. This evening the Patna is carrying nine automobiles, a bus and, I guess from my vantage point here in the hotel lounge, about fifty people. The Patna has no means of propulsion aboard beyond a few long poles which her crew use to guide her final approach to the quay, motive power instead being provided by a pair of electric motors, one at either end of her chain. Her hull is painted black and her small superstructure (which is little more than a shed for her crew to shelter in) is painted in the national colours of Tierra del Mar – blood red and lime green. She is said to be very reliable, this being the first time this year that she has failed, though she generally is inoperable in poor weather – especially in high winds – because of the fear that her chain may break. If the chain did break she would drift with the current, which would mean, since the current normally runs to the south, that her passengers, if the Patna was not wrecked on the uninhabited Isla Morado, would make landfall on the coast of Chile if they were lucky or Antarctica if they were not.
That more or less covers the Patna, which is still immobile. Most of the people who were waiting on the quay have gone, presumably to seek shelter from the rain which is now coming down with some ferocity, lashing at the windows and rattling the doors. My meal has arrived: steak and potatoes, the national dish.
I had not paid the Patna any attention while I was occupied with my meal, and when I looked out of the window again I initially thought that she must have been winched back to the Puerto Oro side, but just as I was ordering coffee a gentleman, soaking wet, rushed in and demanded blankets from the hotel staff. I gathered from the hurried conversation that the Patna, far from having been winched back to the opposite shore, had been capsized by the wind-whipped seas and was floating there belly-up in the middle of the channel. Some of her passengers had managed to swim to the shore, still more had climbed onto her upturned hull and still more had been carried away south by the current in the direction of Isla Morado. I could see little through the heavy veils of rain and the gathering dark, but I understood from the conversation in the lounge that the Patna, still upturned, had finally been winched back to the Puerto Oro side. It was unclear, despite the recently established telephone link between the islands, how many still were missing: the ferry operating company do not keep passenger lists for cost and political reasons. The search was called off until morning, and I found myself, with a note of hypocritical absurdity, automatically thanking heaven that I wasn’t on the Patna that night.
In the morning I shall hire a car and go south on the coast road. There is an abandoned fort at the southernmost tip of Isla Pequeno Morado, Castillo Rojo, built to guard the mouth of the straight, which is said by the locals to be exceptionally beautiful.
We shall see. Perhaps it may be the place.
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