The House of Breathing Page 3

  When, in the august year of 1904, the Luso–Hollandesa treaty finally settled the vexed issue of Dutch contestation of Timor—by granting the West to Holland and the East to Portugal—the people of the island did not appear to celebrate. Maps were redrawn in lavish offices by uniformed men, but life nearer the equator continued unmapped. Rebellions arose and were efficiently crushed; certain uniformed men gained swift promotion. The Imperial mode, with all its cannibal appetites, was, in the language of the smiling victors, ‘firmly reconsolidated’.

  This tiny half-island is about to be granted independence and nationhood. In the month of October voices in Lisbon announced the future: East Timor would be liberated in 1976. Thus around the stone market, burdened by boredom and watching the leaving women with lazy appraisal, move conscripted soldiers from a regime made recently more redundant, more vicarious and more risible than usual.

  The soldiers wait out their thankless historical allocation, their—let us say—devious misplacement. They slump with their rifles in the immoderate heat, or drive in failing jeeps over treacherous roads. At night they will gather to share subsidised wine which bears on its labels the names of their home towns and then, as if in this far colony mere names were enough, they will drink and drink until the name enjoins fluidly with the cascade of alcohol so that they are flushed nostalgically, rushed away, sent buoyantly backwards on bargain basement currents to the places of reference. Noise will ensue, prostitutes will be found, and the men will eventually return, sodden and saddened, by way of all flesh.

  The soldiers are already anticipating the wine; you can see it in the focusless vacancy of gaze that follows only vaguely the women’s dispersal.

  II

  Into this scene and this time steps an inexperienced young traveller in search of lunch. She steps over hot stones which bloom, like a garish carpet of disordered poppies, with a thousand spat blossoms of dried betel juice. Most of the food is already removed; she settles for a hand of pink-coloured bananas from a man slow in leaving.

  A group of soldiers nearby start to whistle and raise their voices, noting, apparently, the familiar vulnerability of the single female. She becomes self-conscious and is suddenly tentative. She retreats uneasily, lassoed by looks and knowing she has supplied some extra code of exploitation in the ease of her capture.

  Over to the left—past the official white-washed buildings and the modest Hotel Turisto, past a cluster of shabby Chinese owned shops, from which men invite, with blackmarket obsequiousness, the exchange of Escudos for dollars, past a barracks storehouse, a tawdry bar, a pearly monument of the Virgin hovering unnuminous at a street corner—a commotion occurs to intercept our little drama. A speeding truck, upon which chanting men are crowded, swings into view.

  In the traveller’s sunglasses the truck is reduplicated; and its miniatures enlarge as it speeds towards her. She forgets the soldiers and the soldiers forget her. They have lifted their rifles. The young woman leaps back against a stucco wall pockmarked by bullet holes from the last world war and smells in the same instant the scent of squashed banana.

  The men on the truck, some in Western dress, chant ‘FRETLIN, FRETLIN, FRETLIN’.

  Their arms are upraised in a revolutionary salute. They are weaponless and smiling. The truck begins blurring past, speed-transfigured, but then it skids unexpectedly to a jerking stop. The soldiers tense up, hoping, trigger-happy, for trouble-to-write-home-about, for significant danger, perhaps a glimpse of atrocity, but to their disappointment are hailed in the friendliest of fashions by a civilian white man who has climbed down from the back of the vehicle. He is apparently enjoying his anti-climactic arrival; he laughs with the others before he signals with a wave for the driver to move on. The chants resume their noisy barrage of fricatives: ‘FRETLIN, FRETLIN, FRETLIN’, and the miniatures diminish even faster than they arrived, and no less animate.

  Our traveller is stuck in a tight clasp of time: the heat is arresting, the sunshine vertiginous. She will later reprimand herself for so public a fear, but now she looks up and her sunglasses receive, in both smooth screens, the approaching white man.

  He ambles towards her, halts within inches, smiles politely, and bends to his knees. Then without yet speaking a single word of hallo, he removes a handkerchief from his pocket and sets about wiping a smear of banana from the cloth of her skirt. The traveller keenly watches the top of his head; there is a definite circle of premature baldness which, with its simple ordinariness and rather more complex invitation of caress, unfastens the clasp and replaces the instability of the moment. There is also the cleansing gesture which, mediaevally supplicant, modest, deftly intimate, compels above all her act of attention.

  III

  Shall I lapse sentimental? Connive with the expectation of traveller’s tales confessions? Lust and indiscretion in foreign lands? The suppliant embrace of a sultry stranger beneath silhouetted palms and a crescent moon?

  No commodious clichés embrace these memories: I cast about, circumlocutory, for forms of expression, and find myself recentred on the candour of the specific, on the fallible face, on the miserable inexactitude of what one believes to have been actual.

  I met Patrick Donelly when he bent to wipe banana from the cloth of my skirt. At that time he was working as a doctor in the Dili hospital, the only foreign volunteer, I was later to discover, among a population of medicos conscripted from Portugal. I looked down upon his head, and thought his simple action a signifier of romance: I thought him gallant and prepossessing, assumed, by his confidence, a certain dynamics of physical attraction.

  As it happened this was mistaken: Patrick had stopped because he thought me a visiting Australian journalist (rumoured to be arriving any day that week) and wished to enlist aid in publicising the country’s shortage of food and medical supplies. His motive was political, his disappointment evident, and I, in response, felt awkwardly apologetic. When we later lunched together—over tiny buffalo steaks and large mugs of red wine—we reconciled our mis-meeting through slight inebriation and the easy camaraderie of dislocated persons.

  Dr Patrick Donelly was garrulous and comic, but one of those men whom one knows must carry an undisclosed gravity tucked somewhere within. I recall that even from the beginning I watched his face with a lover’s interest, noticed the flaws of his skin, an uneven shave, a slight asymmetry of features. With the elapse of time this face is now posthumous, yet I remember it with all the precision of originary presence, as though Patrick is still alive somewhere to claim and confirm his own memory-dispersed image.

  And this—let me be candid—is the burden of other places: that they are contiguous in recollection with one’s lost affections, that no matter-of-fact, sensible, or contrivedly objective description, nor, I might add, no sentimental style, no encircling banality, manages quite to dispel the aspect of personalised elegy.

  So there is Patrick Donelly with his mug of cheap wine, sitting beneath a neat dome of pink and mauve oleander, sitting in the shade of his modest thatched hut—at once singular, humorous, erratically handsome, unaware of the fast approaching cruelties of history, and thus assuming, as we all do, a disposition and an aura of fortunate permanence.

  IV

  Into the highlands, rude as conquistadors. The car imperious, the subjugation of space, the tourist-whizz of lives caught snapshot emblematic. Voluptuous green. Animals in flight. The thrill of collapsing and transitory images.

  The ostensible reason for our trip was vaccination. We loaded an army jeep with medical paraphernalia, and drove off in the company of one Afonso Vieira, a soldier of high rank whom Patrick had greeted, to my jealous dismay, with a prolonged and passionate kiss upon the lips.

  We three sped into the hills, left the coastal plain and rose into the emerald and abundant forest, into dominions and repetitions of tidy padi field, past high hills prodigious with Arabica coffee, through scatterings of village life (chickens leaping direction
less in a flap of feathers, children racing alongside, workers pausing to register the shape of our invasion), along serpentine roads only speculatively in existence.

  Afonso, not I, was the lover of Patrick; in our several weeks together we noted in each other the same kind of longing. There was the same conjunction of attention, forms of copycat behaviour. Our desire enjoined our gazes and led us secretly to a respectful and affectionate collusion. But my rival clearly carried the poise of the chosen: he drove determinatively, smiled, laughed.

  In these highlands, said Patrick, there exists a tribe of elusive cleft-palated and red-haired people whom I have never vaccinated. Such seclusion is both admirable and medically inefficacious.

  In these highlands, said Patrick, fifty per cent of babies die in their first year of life. Yet the mourning is never attenuated or any the less impassioned.

  In these highlands, said Patrick, there are whole villages of people who through dietary deficiency develop goitres on their necks. Some carry formations the size of rockmelons, like marine encrustations.

  In these highlands, said Patrick, the population is among the most deprived in the world: you will notice some children disturbingly skeletal. Their bones are as fragile as sticks of chalk.

  In these highlands, said Patrick, Fretlin forces are gathering.

  They are a nationalist group whose philosophy, mauberismo, is the liberation of these people, the poorest of the poor.

  When Patrick was not talking he sang, in his beautiful bass, the blues of Leadbelly and Robert Johnson. It was a peculiar distraction. We careened round mountains, passing through canopies of dark shadow into oleaginous yellow light, shadow, light, shadow, light, and backwards, windblown, flew negro melancholia. Afonso hummed along; I played the records in parallel in my head, and glimpsed through the window disturbingly skeletal children (entirely unmitigated by Patrick’s prediction) pivot to our engine sounds, leap up and weakly chase. (Later the goitres would also shock; there were women so deformed that they appeared almost to possess a second head at their necks.)

  The place of our arrival, the base from which we worked, was the district governor’s house in the southern region of foothills. We camped with our gear on the open verandah, and set off each day on medical excursions. I remember that Patrick and I dressed in the sarongs of the country, both mock-indigenous and also appropriating, as it were, that consolation of decoration in such grim surrounds. Afonso, I must add, retained his military uniform, and thus commanded servility in every village he entered.

  Together we became acquainted with the rigamarole of suffering. We performed doctorly deeds in situations of distress. We were utterly insufficient.

  At this point my recollections condense and centre. After goitres, hypodermics, and anxious faces (the melodrama of the true, as Patrick called it), after mad buffalo and gentle deer, after cliffs and rivers, after the denudations of labour and the exhaustion of pity, there is a single special night I remarkably retain.

  We had retired rather early to our hard straw mats, and entered, for some reason, on a contract of confession. As children on a school camp—lulled by the expedient communality of darkness, intimate by virtue of the treat of proximity—might choose, in the small hours, to offer up long kept secrets, so we each agreed that night honestly to disclose. Firstly we agreed to talk of some other place, to refuse where we were and to transfer elsewhere. We agreed also to speak of something risky and private, something never before revealed, something that, in the morning, we would hold secret inside us.

  By a kind of desperate ventriloquism—since their voices elude me, since I have a tongue and a body and they are mute and incorporeal—I now break open our contract and record these confessions.

  It was a moonless night. There were poinciana aroused by breeze, spiralling mosquito coils, oppressive heat.

  Afonso: When I was a child we lived in Sintra eleven kilometres from the coast. Do you know Portugal? Well Sintra is not far to the north-west of Lisbon. It lies at the foot of very jagged mountains, so that the scenery all around is green and spectacular. There are two famous castles, set apart and aloof, on a single peak, and these castles appear and reappear throughout the town, and especially in the capital, on the faces of postcards. So you say the word ‘Sintra’ and visitors who have been there will think not of villas and apartments of stucco and tile, ancient pastels and orange roofs crowded too close together, communal washing, in the poor quarters, flapping gaily above the streets; nor of the more private wealthier houses that are walled and secretive, sprouting lush gardens, also pastelly and old; they will think instead of the famous castles. One castle, I should have mentioned, is merely fancy ruins: it is Moorish, eighth century. But the other, the magnificent Castelo da Pena, is exactly as a world famous castle should be, fulfilling, as they say, the requirements of imagination. It is of pale grey stone and is a complex arrangement of towers, cupolas and battlemented walls. It is a fairytale vision; it is solid but fabulous, and it is utterly unconnected to the reality that is Sintra.

  Children in the town liked to make up little stories about the Castelo da Pena: we lived, you see, almost directly beneath it; it hovered over our heads like a persistent dream and on cloudy days it appeared suddenly more dreamlike than ever, remote, vague, apparently floating. It was like something transported from the realm of picture books; it didn’t look as if it ought to exist there in the mountains, which we knew as ordinary, the territory of our picnics and Sunday outings.

  The place I return to when I think of my childhood, when I think of Sintra, is not the famous castles—which, incidentally, I never actually visited—it is my grandmother’s room. We lived in a grand villa behind a huge wall so that the house I grew up in was engulfed by shadows. But my grandmother’s room was built like an attic: that is to say it projected above the roof and above the wall, so that it was wonderfully sunlit and looked out onto the world. From one window you could actually glimpse the Castelo da Pena: it was as though she possessed her own private picture postcard, enlarged and extra clear, framed upon the wall. It was one of many pictures because my grandmother—Nina, her name was, and that was how I addressed her—Nina was a collector of religious icons; and all around the room, on the same level as the castle, were the faces of saints, madonnas, pathetic looking Jesuses, and blue-winged angels. She was very devout and was never seen without her black lace mantilla, so that you would always think she was dressed up and ready to go to church. When she was inside, inside her own room, she still wore the mantilla, and I used to place my little-boy fingers in the eyelets and loops and flower-holes of the lace as she cradled me in her arms.

  Nina’s room was special not only for its light—which covered its spaces in a variety of yellows and always distinguished it beautifully from the submarine gloom of the rest of the house—but because of her eccentricity. I was not allowed to enter without bidding good day to each face on the wall and then, for some reason, saluting the castle with a kind of parodic militarism. This done Nina would spread her capacious body on an old chintz lounge that lay beneath the window, and I would run and leap onto her, collapsing with giggles into her pillowy breasts, the drapery of her clothes, her womanly, musty, mysterious scents. Then—and it always happened exactly like this, time and again!—I would position myself against her so that I could pull the end of the mantilla across my eyes and look around the room through its complex fine tracery of black flowers and holes. This simple transformation always enchanted me: what was gold became suddenly shaded and dark stencilled; what was known became strange and obscurely dimensioned. Overlays, underlays. New configurations. Faces redesigned. As I fiddled with the lace Nina would start to chatter away in a slow, low monologue: she addressed the faces on the wall in friendly tones, prayed, sometimes, or reminisced, told libellous tales of the people of the town. I lay back against her in that state of greedy physical luxuriance only children can properly practise, with the castle above my he
ad and the gallery of larger-than-lifes on equal and intimate terms, believing my grandmother to be a woman of truly mythic proportions.

  This room of my memory contained, apart from icons, many very lovely and enchanting objects. First of all there was an abundance of expensive lace—on the backs of chairs, spread over the bed and the table, hung in corners of the room, even dangling from the lampshade—this compensated, Nina claimed, for a laceless childhood. It gave the room an appearance of frippery which always seemed to me rather at odds with the more serious and tasteful pictures on the wall. There was also a collection of hand-blown glass flower vases—perhaps twenty or more—arranged around the room. These usually stood empty, as exquisite ornaments, some carefully placed to catch light from the window. But on religious high days the flowers would arrive and the room became a kind of florist’s dream; the vases bloomed bouquets of every conceivable type and shade. I remember now that there were also ornate candelabras, paperweights and jewels, and of course a Catholic saint or two crassly reincarnated as plaster monstrosities. And at the end of the bed, on a small antique chest of burnished rosewood, lay a stack of my comic books. Nina was illiterate but shared my fanatical pleasure in illustrations and super-heroes. We spent many happy hours reclined on her couch enjoined in the adventures of the Portuguese Spiderman.

  Now let me tell you what happened. Nina, to put it frankly, was not of our class. She had been a ‘varina’, what in English you call a fishwife. My grandfather married her against custom because of her beauty and my father, a proud man, was very ashamed of his mother. Nina liked to embarrass him in company by displaying her fishing knowledge, by speaking in the language of the harbour, and sometimes by pulling me between her gigantic breasts in a way her son thought unseemly and rather vulgar. They always argued loudly and on one occasion he stormed into her room to pick a fight over something, and swung into a fury, sending two glass vases to glittering smithereens and decapitating a little statue of St Anthony of Padua. (St Anthony, needless to say, was Nina’s favourite saint, being both Portuguese born and alleged to have preached to a school of fish.) Nina threw me from her, leaped up from the couch, and began shouting obscenities. She was so filled up with noisy anger that I thought the very haloes of the Holy would be set atrembling, that the Madonna would turn her pretty shocked face, that Christ himself would fearfully flinch.