Bruce Chatwin (62 page)

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Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs

BOOK: Bruce Chatwin
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The Brazilian north yielded little. Acheson had returned with Fernando to Rio. Without a sympathetic companion Bruce succumbed to the lassitude, “the terror of Brazilian life”, which he saw afflicting everyone around him. “What to make of a town in which the bookshop offers: Isaac Deutscher’s
Life of Trotsky. The Theatre of Meyerhold. The Life of André Malraux. The Forbidden Loves of Oscar Wilde
and not a single Brazilian novel.” In Picos, a truck-stop town in Piaui, the poorest province in Brazil, he stayed in the Charm Hotel, from the facade of which the letter “C” had dropped off. In Crato, where moths covered the walls of his room “like flint arrowheads”, he wrote: “Got down by the heat. Would find it impossible to write a sentence here.” Steady reference was made to “the boredom of waits”. The aimlessness weighed on him. “The boredom is infectious; that is the trouble.” One day while waiting for a boat in Alcantara he wrote: “Terrible fear my talent has deserted me. This the most unlively journal.”
He uncovered no new fact about Princess Agontimé. Cha Cha, forbidden himself to leave Ouidah, had despatched an emissary to retrieve the royal slave, but Ghézo’s mother was never found. The only possible source of news as to where she may have ended her days was with Verger. Once in San Luis de Marañon, it had puzzled Verger to record certain voodoo expressions he had not heard before. In Abomey he made enquiries and was told that this was the secret language of the King’s court: only someone belonging to the royal family could know such expressions.
On a hot day in Recife, in a dark house stuffed with books, Bruce called on the historian Gilberto Freyre. He must have hoped that this meeting with the author of two important works on Brazilian slaves would be more fruitful than his encounter with Verger two months before. It was not. Freyre had the air of a
grand seigneur
and there was something “vaguely second-rate” about his dress. “Interesting up to a point,” Bruce wrote. “An intellectual sponge perhaps.” He departed empty-handed.
As Bruce left Freyre’s house, he was arrested for the second time that year. He asked a tidily dressed old man “with a big wart on his hand” for directions and had begun to walk down a track leading through a cane field to a wood when a Volkswagen drew up.
“The Director wishes to speak with you.”
“Director of what?”
“The Prison.”
Bruce was driven into an open prison and forced to wait. The prisoners had numbers on their clothes. He felt hot and angry. Presently, the Director returned from lunch, an enormous man with shiny black hair. He inspected Bruce’s rucksack, his passport. He leafed through his notebook and read a description of a church painting that troubled him. Bruce claimed in
The Songlines
that “the Brazilian secret police” took what he had written to be a description, in code, of their own work on political prisoners – and filched the notebook.
The notebook, of course, survives. Alongside his account of his arrest is a description of the paintings. They were rather like his Aunt Jane’s watercolours of pierced and naked men. In a Recife church he had described a San Sebastian “with a neat arrow-head thrusting out of his ear and beautiful loin cloth whipping in the wind tied with a golden sash”. In more vivid torment was the negro slave Christ in the church of São Francisco in Ouro Preto. Narrow-waisted, yet with “voluminous curves of the body”, the negro Christ had his “throat cut like a meat-knife slit” so that the apple wood showed through. The Director felt he understood. According to Bruce, “I am a hippie or a missionary. A priest. The most dangerous of all. What was I doing? I explain.”
But the Director remained suspicious.
“How could you know Dr Gilberto Freyre?”
“Phone him up.”
“No.”
Again, the Director opened the passport. Burkina Faso. A Marxist state. What was Bruce doing sniffing round a prison, he asked?
“I didn’t know it existed.”
It couldn’t have happened in a worse month. Didn’t he see the notice?
Bruce replied that he was talking to an old man.
“When did you learn Portuguese?”
“In Brazil.”
“In five weeks?”
“Yes!”
The Director told Bruce this was impossible. His vocabulary was remarkable. “You must be very clever Mr C., but I assure you it’s no use being clever with us.”
The story exaggerated Bruce’s mastery of Portuguese. Towards the end of March he returned to Acheson’s flat in Rio. He remained in Brazil another week before flying to join Elizabeth in Europe, but in this time he embarked on an affair with the barman at the Othon Palace Hotel in Copacabana. One day he went for a drink with Acheson in the outside bar where they met João, wearing a green jacket. “He was not an educated Brazilian and didn’t speak English,” says Acheson. “Bruce had a go at Portuguese. They were chalk and cheese, but he was clearly smitten. He asked if he could use the flat to invite João back there while I was teaching.”
The brief relationship, despite language difficulties, touched Bruce more deeply than he expected. A year later the image of the young man was still on his mind. He had asked Acheson to give João a present. Acheson had taken him a box of chocolates left over from Christmas. “I’m not entirely sure I approve of feeding João with Black Magic, unless he was going to the gym as he promised,” Bruce wrote. “To my eternal regret there has been a six-month silence now. My replies in Portuguese were quite inadequate, both in literary and emotional content, to this kind of thing:
‘Tenho pensado muito em voce de dia de noite a toda hora nao me esquece
I do my love my beautiful,
tenho vontade de te abracer te beijar sentir o seu corpe que tanto bem mefaz. Quando estafrio eu penso em sair de casa a sua procure para me esquentar aquecer meu corpo com o seu calor, mas logo me lembre que e impossivel te encontrar pois voce esta tao longe de mim
.’
*
– which for rhythm and poetic expression could almost come out of the
Song of Songs
.
Ah! the geographical impossibility of passion!”
After three and a half months in Africa and Brazil, he had landed in Lisbon on 6 April. He found the city sad, communist posters everywhere. “One with sub-machine guns, hoe and spanner. Curious that they should have chosen the emblem of Cain.” He visited the Gulbenkian Museum, but was depressed by the works of art enclosed in a bunker of concrete. “Anything less suitable for showing off French furniture hard to imagine.” He missed João.
He took a train to Spain, to spend Easter with Elizabeth and Gertrude in Guadeloupe. It was on this journey that he committed to his notebook one of his most naked moments. He is transported without warning to the wrenching farewells of his childhood. “In train beside the Tagus. Yesterday feeling disembodied from the flight and now to tears, for one of the only times in my life, from separation from J. My father always to be departing.”
He was nearly 37 and, like his Viceroy, he could no longer hide.
XXVI
 
New York
The Greeks have the idea that there were limits to the range of human behaviour and, if anyone had the hubris to go beyond those limits, he was struck down by fate. Well, one would agree.
—BC to Michael Ignatieff
TWO MONTHS AFTER RETURNING TO ENGLAND, BRUCE FELL
helplessly in love with a 27-year-old Australian stockbroker. He met Donald Richards on 25 June 1977, at Paul and Penny Levy’s wedding in Oxfordshire. Among the guests was the artist Keith Milow. He introduced Bruce to a handsome Australian covered in hay. “We’d been rolling in the golden cornfield adjacent to the party,” says Milow. “Something clicked between them which I was not prepared for.”
Millington-Drake, who would entertain Bruce and Donald on Patmos, described their meeting as “the big break in Bruce’s life”. Before, he had had passing affairs with men. “This was the first time he’d committed his life to a man. Bruce was infatuated with him.”
Donald had fled Brisbane where his father worked for a company making asbestos roofing material. Like Bruce, he was a boy from the suburbs who had managed to remake himself. Where Bruce was an extrovert, Donald was socially reticent but, unlike Bruce, uninhibitedly gay. “He was a sexy, whorey, homosexual who jumped into bed immediately and was terrific,” says Peter Adam. “It was the one area where he was very secure.”
Donald used his sexuality to advance modest cultural ambitions. At Queensland University, the poet Val Vallis had introduced him to opera. “He was an elegant creature, the nearest thing to a well-bred cat. His movements were gracious without being effeminate, but he wasn’t ruggedly masculine either.”
He was much brighter than people gave him credit for in London and New York. He won a Queen’s Medal and a first in History and Government, but his soft-spoken manner could camouflage his intelligence. “There is absolutely no way round the fact that he was a bore,” says Bruce’s doctor, Patrick Woodcock. “He was Mr Cliché. ‘There’s nothing like the English strawberry . . . Fred Astaire, you know, really was the most marvellous dancer.’ If you didn’t want to go to bed with him it was a difficult evening.”
Deeply insecure on many levels, Donald had a talent for making useful people fall in love with him. “Donald certainly made use of his sexuality, many people did that,” says Adam. “But he had more to follow up. If he had an interesting social life it was also because he was good-looking, intelligent, young, from abroad.” After arriving in England on a scholarship, he reported back to a friend in Australia, Clinton Tweedie, how in London he lived with an aristocrat, “Sebastian Sackville-West”. In fact his lover was Sebastian Walker, the children’s book publisher, for whom Donald wrote two books:
Know Your Dogs
(“Like the evolution of the human race, the evolution of the dog has been a long and puzzling process”) and
Know Your Cats
(“Cats have personalities, just as humans do. In many cases their natures develop according to the kind of household they live in and the amount of care and attention their owners give them”). Donald lived with Walker in Alwyne Place in Canonbury. There was even a mock wedding. But he was not faithful.
Donald’s predilections, sharpened by amyl nitrate, are suggested by Tweedie, a modern-art collector from Brisbane. In 1983, Donald had moved to a small flat in Covent Garden. That summer he invited Tweedie to use it while he was away. Finding the place “lousy with bed bugs”, Tweedie summoned Westminster Council to come and spray it. Two burly cockneys arrived one morning at 7 a.m. They took up the rugs and then lifted the bed to reveal, neatly stacked, a cache of 15 dildos “in all shapes, lengths and colours”, three lengths of rope, a beaded corset and a Polaroid of Donald bent over a Le Corbusier chair “with a smile on his face and impaled on an enormous dildo held by a black hand”. Tweedie hastily packed the objects into a Cathay Pacific travel bag.
Donald’s allure for Bruce was his exuberant libido. “Bruce saw Donald as a challenge,” says Milow, “very wild and sexual and hard to keep up with.” He was heavy-browed, possessed of “unbelievable eyes with black edges to them,” according to Elizabeth. Adam understood the chemistry. “Bruce quite liked tarty men and he justified them if they could also read Rilke and know that Kafka wasn’t a deodorant.”
From 1977 to 1982, Donald acted as his sexual mentor. The gay world was a territory to be mastered in the same way as Sotheby’s, Edinburgh or Patagonia.
The affair continued behind Sebastian Walker’s back. Bruce once asked Peter Eyre to go with him to a Berlioz concert. “Donald was there with Sebby and Bruce wanted to watch him.” Such furtiveness tinged the relationship with farce. Bill Katz, the New York dealer, recalled how he saw Donald drop Walker at a railway station – “and two minutes later Bruce appeared, as if out of a bad movie”.
Linklater once met Bruce unexpectedly in a bar with Donald. “Bruce was looking incredibly woofterish and I’m not sure he didn’t have eye make-up. He was uncharacteristically reticent and unfriendly. He was in a completely different compartment and I wasn’t supposed to be there.”
The affair surprised Kasmin. “In no way when we were in Africa did Bruce disguise the fact he was partial to black bottoms. My impression was that he had adventures from time to time, usually when on a trip. But he never seemed to be
driven
by sex at all, less than most.” Kasmin’s back bedroom at 8 Gloucester Gate was one of Bruce’s billets in the late 1970s. Kasmin once returned home after a night flight to be met by a sheepish Bruce. “It’s slightly embarrassing. Could you take a short walk round the block? I can’t explain –
it’s too complex
.” Kasmin understood there to be someone in Bruce’s room. He dumped his bag in the hall and went for a walk. “I was pretty pissed off. But that’s how I knew Donald was the real thing.”
Hodgkin was especially interested to hear of Bruce’s infatuation. That year the married artist had fallen in love with a much younger man. Bruce had proved unsympathetic. “I can’t think the H. H. situation is all that painful,” he wrote to Welch. “The trouble is that it got out of hand. In the English ‘art world’ his became the most publicised private life of the century, and he didn’t know how to handle it. When everyone else overdramatizes your life, it inevitably becomes more dramatic.” Bruce, who had once told Hodgkin “it would be so awful not to be in control”, soon found himself embroiled in a more or less identical drama.

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