Bruce Chatwin (84 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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Bruce had booked Elisabeth Sifton into his hotel, The Opera. “Part of me was in despair,” she says. “A lot of the manuscript was in chaos. The notebooks were not in the right place. They were not well-proportioned. We made a plan to meet every morning and discuss the book until he was too tired. But our meetings degenerated into long conversations about life and I couldn’t get him to focus. He was distracted by his terrors. Propped up on pillows he would tell me stories with his eyes blazing, full of vim and roaring with laughter. ‘My dear, I’ve had this
amazing
dream.’ And then he’d be too weak to move. He didn’t finish off a single page – as he had done in my presence with
On the Black Hill.
He’d look at my marks and say, ‘Yes, yes, next point’.”
She was with him five days. In a Swiss vegetarian restaurant he nearly fainted. She walked him up the hill to the clinic. “One day he gave me, wrapped up, a stool specimen, which I was to carry to the doctor. ‘It’s not AIDS or anything,’ he said, reassuring me’.” After five days, another concern became her foremost one. “He wasn’t telling anyone he was so ill. I was the only person who knew. He told me: ‘Now I must get well, you can go now.’ I refused to leave until he telephoned Elizabeth.”
In Homer End, Elizabeth was growing nervous. “Nothing from Bruce . . .” she wrote to Gertrude on 26 August. “Don’t know if I should worry or not, but of course I do.”
Elizabeth flew out on 1 September. She found Bruce in his hotel bed, unable to move. “One minute he was freezing cold, the next he had terrible sweats. He needed endless towels to dry him off. He could not make red corpuscles and was dying right there and then.” He had thought of going to the desert to die. He had tried to arrange visas for Mauritania and Mali, had managed to sit upright in a booth for a photograph. He wanted to curl up in the corner like a dog, he said. On 5 September he returned to the clinic, running a temperature of 39°C. “The doctor did endless tests and finally called me into his office by myself.”
Dr Keller had received the results of the lab tests. While there was no evidence of a chronic infectious disease, the findings suggested “a severe immunodeficiency syndrome”. The tests were negative, except one, high-lighted in a yellow marker:
“HTLV-111-Virus-Antikörper / HIV positiv!
”
“Did you have any idea?”
“No,” said Elizabeth.
“But didn’t you mind?” said Dr Keller. “Your husband having all these affairs?”
“I’d have minded more if he’d gone off with a woman. These people were never a threat.”
Dr Keller then informed Bruce, who had already guessed. The doctor urgently recommended that he return to England and go to a hospital there.
Elizabeth contacted her GP to arrange for an ambulance to meet them at Heathrow. “We barely got him out of the plane. He couldn’t stand properly and was catatonic.” On 12 September, 3.34 p.m., Bruce was admitted to the John Warin emergency ward in Oxford’s Churchill Hospital. He was identified simply as “an HIV positive 46-year-old travel writer”. From this day on, he would be forced to submit to the unsparing taxonomy of the medical profession.
Elizabeth did not stay the night. Neighbours came to fetch her while efforts were made to rehydrate Bruce. On 14 September, during a blood transfusion, his temperature reached 40.3°C. “Had rigours during the transfusion which ceased once it had stopped,” read the report. His urine was black and he was described as poorly. “The fact is I very nearly croaked,” he told Murray Bail. “I was not expected to live through the night. It was not unpleasant. I was hallucinating like mad and was convinced that the view from my window – a car park, a wall and the tops of some trees – were an enormous painting by Paolo Veronese. Can we ever escape ‘Art’?”
He described a “definite glimpse of the Pearly Gates” to Matthew Spender. His vision combined features of an early Byzantine Christ Pantocrator on Mount Athos with Renaissance frescoes near Poggio a Caiano. A great number of people were engaged in some banquet or ritual festivity. “As he approached its surface, he felt an incredible excitement, as if at last he could pass through the shield of mere appearances of which paintings are made. What textures! The clothes! The velvet, the long sleeves, the pearls like little white planets, each an individual all-engrossing other world!
“As I stretched out my hand to touch, he said, the figures began to move, to beckon me to join them. He took the hand of a man standing there and walked with him into the painting.”
“He was a taste man to the end,” says Bail.
Another vision was described in literary terms. “I saw green-capped schoolboys leaving school, an infinite library of books which turned into a library of primroses and a troupe of glass horses which galloped off in a shatter. It was like something from Borges’
El Aleph
.”
Less pleasant was the hallucination Bruce outlined to Colin Thubron. He was sliding down an ice tunnel, as if through a gigantic gut, “and the whole thing was cracking crkk crkk crkk as I slide rather slowly down the ice and at the bottom there were a whole series of icicles like stalactites which when I hit them ripppped me apart and I remember my whole shoulder coming off and I was dismembered . . . One’s organs absolutely scattered all over the place . . . There was definitely a feeling that this was death and I was definitely dying.”
The John Warm ward for infectious diseases treated meningitis, pneumonia, traveller’s diarrhoea, cellulitis, amoebic liver abscesses from India: everything caused by germs.
The first doctor to examine him was the ward registrar, Richard Bull, who understood Bruce’s name to be Charles Chatwin. Acutely confused, with “the occasional inappropriate response”, Bruce told Bull of his “sense of mortality” while dispersing Penelope Betjeman’s ashes in India. He looked, wrote Bull, “very unwell”: his voice was hoarse, his legs were numb and his face was covered in red spots and ulcerating skin lumps.
Though not uncooperative, there was a piecemeal quality to the way Bruce offered up his medical history. Over the next two days, Bull established that he had travelled widely since 1962, including to the Middle East, Afghanistan, India, America, Haiti, South America, Australia, Dahomey, Togo, Cameroon, Kenya; that he had been “bisexual since youth”; that a possible contact for HIV was an Australian whom he had known between 1978 and 1981. There are in his answers traces of a man in despair, seeking an explanation for his illness. On 14 September, he gave an alternative explanation. The record puts it: “NB Experienced ‘gang rape’ in Benin (W Africa) in 1978”.
He described this experience to another of his doctors, David Warrell, professor of tropical medicine and infectious diseases at Oxford University. Warrell considered the rape story implausible. In October 1988, Bruce would tell his French doctor, André Le Fesvre, that he believed he had contracted HIV from an Australian in Australia, while to Francis Wyndham he said that he had traced the lineage to Mapplethorpe’s lover in New York, Sam Wagstaff.
On 14 September, Bull discussed the diagnosis with Bruce and Elizabeth. “She knows her own risk and is thinking about a blood test. Patient told he is seropositive, has pre-AIDS but true AIDS not yet certain.” Bruce would cling to that uncertainty.
Over the next five weeks he was examined by a number of specialists. It confused him to have to repeat the symptoms. He was unaccustomed to reciting a reliable narrative about himself. But “the self is all I can think of,” he wrote to Bail. By 23 September he had refined his diagnosis, telling one doctor that he had “‘fungus in his blood’, which has caused ‘this wasting disease’”. On the same day, he was seen by a clinical photographer. “Quite anxious for his identity to be concealed, so we covered his eyes.”
In 1986, AIDS was a phenomenon that had been known for barely five years. Its clinical management was in its infancy. At that time an AIDS patient was expected to live between three and five years.
“Statistically, one would most likely at that stage in the west have caught it through homosexuals,” says David Warrell, who took over as Bruce’s doctor in November 1987. In the popular mind, AIDS was the new Black Death and perceived as a homosexual disease. In this alarmist climate rumour and misinformation proliferated. Bruce was in the throes of the disease at a time when society’s anxieties about it were at their peak. “When it became known he had died from AIDS, Margharita had friends in Stratford who wouldn’t speak to her,” says Elizabeth. “There was so much ignorance. We were all ignorant. One knew it was caught from sex, but there were also rumours that it was caught from sitting on the toilet or kissing or drinking.” In a letter he wrote to the
London Review of Books
, Bruce warned: “One point cannot be emphasised too strongly. An infected person must never use anyone else’s toothbrush or an electric razor.” No one was more afraid of this “gay
Gotterdammerung
”, as Bruce called it, than Bruce himself. “The word ‘AIDS’ is one of the cruellest and silliest neologisms of our time. ‘Aid’ means help, succour, comfort – yet with a hissing sibilant tacked onto the end it becomes a nightmare. It should never be used in front of patients.” This was the nearest he came to a public admission of his illness.
He hated the name, and the idea of such an ugly label being applied to himself was unbearable. He had spent his life escaping from definition only to succumb to an illness that defined him and would lump him in popular conception with notorious homosexuals like Liberace, Rock Hudson and Robert Mapplethorpe. “AIDS is especially terrible for people like Bruce,” says Lucie-Smith. “It’s not merely that you know you’re going to die, but all the layers of pretence get stripped away.”
In the months ahead, Bruce denied his HIV status to his closest relatives and most of his friends. “In hospital he talked about pythons because nobody wanted to mention the word,” says James Fox. “It was so fierce, the way he surrounded himself in a smoke of different colours, that one didn’t dare speculate.” Bruce told Sunil Sethi, after his friend Sheridan Dufferin died of AIDS: “Everyone thinks I’ve got it too, but it’s not true.” Eve Arnold heard how Bruce had appeared at a Cork Street gallery opening screaming at Kasmin, so that everyone could hear: “You son of a bitch, telling everyone I had AIDS. It’s not true, not true. You were my friend and you betrayed me!” Even Millington-Drake, who died of AIDS in 1994, was convinced until very late on that Bruce was telling him the truth: “I really didn’t believe he did have AIDS, but a tropical disease.” For Millington-Drake, the matter was easily explained: “He was afraid of admitting he was going to die. And it was a great deal to do with protecting his parents and Elizabeth’s parents.”
“To me it was all very simple,” says Hugh Chatwin. “He would not let down his father.”
In Zurich when he first received his diagnosis, Bruce had asked Elizabeth to keep the news from his family. “He minded terribly,” she says. “He always thought he could tell his mother, but not his father. ‘I don’t want him to think badly of me.’ He hoped he could hold out until they had found a cure.”
Consequently, Charles, Margharita and Hugh remained in ignorance of Bruce’s illness and sexuality until his last months. “As far as his sexuality went our parents didn’t know him at all,” says Hugh. “They would have recognised his tendency to be a little camp and they had pillow talk about his dressing up, but they were protected from Jasper, etc. None of his liaisons came anywhere near this household. They didn’t know because I didn’t know.”
And there was Elizabeth to consider. “People think the reason he didn’t face up to AIDS is Elizabeth,” says Francis Wyndham. “But she didn’t care if the whole world knew. It wasn’t to save her face. The way Elizabeth played it was: ‘I’ll just do what Bruce wants’.”
Elizabeth’s complicity was endorsed by a friend, a Thai woman who wrote from Bangkok on 30 September. “I always do admire your courage and wisdom. Now you are doing the right thing again in not telling his parents. You always sacrifice for him & we all know how much you love him. I think he appreciates it now.”
Bruce’s concealment of the HIV virus was encouraged by the presence of an unknown fungal infection. “It was an unusual presentation,” says Dr Bent Juel-Jensen, the consultant physician in charge of the ward. “Bruce was admitted with HIV, but we were puzzled because there were none of the manifestations you would expect in somebody who was HIV. In this country, you usually have the
Pneumocystic carini
organism. Bruce was riddled with a rare fungus. I’d never seen a case before.” Bruce latched onto this fungus.
On 15 September his doctors had suspected the presence of Kaposi’s sarcoma, one of the commoner dermatological manifestations of AIDS. But subsequent biopsy reports failed to mention this again for another 17 months. Efforts concentrated on diagnosing the fungus that had infiltrated his liver, spleen, bone marrow, lungs and skin. On 26 September, the culture was taken and sent to the Radcliffe laboratory where it was identified as
Penicillium marneffei,
a mould fungus that is a natural pathogen of the bamboo rat in South Asia. This fungus is now known to be an AIDS-defining illness, but in 1986, as Bull wrote in his report to Dr Juel-Jensen, it “has previously only been reported in Thai and Chinese farmers”.
China was the one country Bruce had forgotten to include in his list of travels. In November 1985, on his way to Nepal, he and Elizabeth had visited Yunnan in south-west China. Near the Thai border they had stayed in a village hut at 7,000 feet. He remembered, now, that he had become sick after eating a “black egg” at a peasant feast. A harvest was in progress. The air was dry and dusty and he remembered the thrashing of wheat. “He had probably breathed in the spoor,” says Juel-Jensen. “It was just bad luck that his body defences didn’t measure up. It probably wouldn’t do you or me any harm, only if you’re immune deficient.”

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