Bruce Chatwin (85 page)

My illness was a dramatic episode. I have always known – from a fortune-teller or from my own instinctive promptings? – that I would be terribly ill in middle-age, and would recover. All summer, while I was putting the final touches to the book, I was obviously sickening, but preferred to put it out of my mind – even though, on a sweltering summer day, I’d be wrapped in shawls beside the Aga scribbling onto a yellow pad. I imagined I’d recover if only I could reach some mountain pastures, and so gaily set off for Switzerland: only to find, next morning, that I couldn’t drag myself a hundred yards down the sidewalk. Obviously, something was seriously wrong. Thinking I was prey to some Indian amoeba, I consulted a specialist in tropical medicine, who took one look at my blood count, and, next day, said amiably: ‘I cannot understand why you’re alive. You have no red blood corpuscles left.’ He failed to make a diagnosis, having run through a complete set of tests; and Elizabeth came to fetch me home in a definitely dying condition. I have a vague recollection of being wheeled to the plane; another, of the ambulance at London airport and then a blank. By the time I got to Oxford I was not expected to last the night. I did incidentally have the ‘dark night experience’, followed by the Pearly Gates. In my delirium I had visions of being in a colourful and vaguely medieval court where women offered me grapes on
tazzas.
At one point I called to Elizabeth, ‘Where’s King Arthur? He was here a minute ago.’

Anyway, although I was on life support, they still couldn’t find the cause until, on the fourth day, the young immunologist rushed into my room and said ‘Have you, in the past five years, been in a bats’ cave? We think you’ve got a fungus of the bone marrow, which starts off growing on bat shit.’ Yes. I had been in bat caves, in Java and in Australia. But when they grew the fungus, as one grows a culture for yoghurt, it was not mine after all. The most expert mycologists were consulted: samples were flown to the US, and the answer, which finally emerged, was that I had, indeed, a fungus of the marrow, but one which was known
only
from the corpse of a killer-whale cast up on the shores of Arabia and from ten healthy Chinese peasants, all of whom had died. Had I been consorting with killer-whales? Or with Chinese peasants? ‘Peasants,’ I said decisively. Indeed, we had. Last December we were in Western Yunnan, following the traces of the Austro-American botanist, Joseph Rock, whose book
The Kingdom of the Na-Khi
was admired by Ezra Pound. We went to peasant feasts, slept in peasant houses, inhaled the dust of peasant winnowing; and it must be in Yunnan that I inhaled the particles of fungal dust, which set the malady in motion. I lost half my weight; came out in lumps and scabs, and looked entirely like the miniature of Akbar’s courtier in the Bodleian whose name I’ve forgotten. I had a fearsome drug administered on the drip constantly for six weeks. I had blood transfusions, and in the end I made a rather startling recovery: at least, one which my doctors did not expect. It’ll mean a change in one’s life, though. Apparently, one can’t ever quite get rid of a fungus like this, so I shall be on pills indefinitely; will have to report from time to time, and
not
alas go travelling into dangerously exotic places. The last stipulation I fully intend to ignore. In the meantime, rather than face the sodden gloom of an English winter, we are setting out for Grasse where we have borrowed a flat and where I hope to bash out my tale of the Czechoslovakian porcelain collector.

Michael Ignatieff:
Where in your work is the division between fiction and non-fiction?
BC:
I don’t think there is one.

The Moravian bird [Bruce wrote] had come to Prague to get married. The bridegroom was an ineffectual young German from Magdeburg with a fall-away chin and pointed shoes. She had known him for three years. ‘And to think,’ exclaimed the outraged Maurizio, ‘that when she was making love to me on the Linear Pottery site at Bylany, she knew him all the time. It confirms my opinion of the faithlessness of women. How could she give herself to the dirty German?’ Anyway for the time being she apparently could and would and the reason for her contacting Maurizio was that he should be best man at the wedding. He at once changed tack and agreed with alacrity, and also insisted that I come too as a witness. The time of the wedding was eight-thirty in the morning on the next day at the church of St Ignatz. ‘Don’t you understand?’ he said, ‘she is only marrying him because she is pregnant. I shall play the part of the faithful and wronged friend and in two years I shall have her.’ I think that Maurizio may have miscalculated again because the two seemed absolutely devoted and stood in the foyer of the hotel kissing and fondling each other to the fury of the headwaiter, who finally told them to desist.

So the next morning quarter past eight found Maurizio and I in archaeological clothes, carnations in our buttonholes, on the steps of the baroque church of St Ignatz in Charles Square. One old woman was desultorily cleaning the aisle and another prayed loudly and devotedly in the chapel of the Holy Sepulchre, a real rock-cut tomb with a plastic Christ looming over the boulders which were rather unsuitably planted with gladioli and gloxinias. An untidy man appeared and was under the impression that I was the organist. When I protested, he shrugged and said he would play himself. This he did on two chords only and to this cacophony the bride arrived in a large Tatra saloon accompanied by her parents and the bridegroom’s mother, a solid German hausfrau in a crinkled pale blue suit. The bride’s mother was a good-looking woman evidently in a savage temper, and her father a mild-mannered little Czech who squinted through his spectacles. Maurizio bent double and kissed the ladies’ hands to their evident surprise. The bride must have been wearing her grandmother’s wedding dress, and the bridegroom’s shoes were more pointed than ever. And so this comic little procession made its way up the aisle to the thump-thump of the organ, and came to rest inside the pink marble altar rails where the priest was waiting. St Ignatz is a vast building, about the same size as Bath Abbey with astonishing pink and white plaster decoration and angels and saints dripping from every cornice. The grey marble pillars rippled like the waters of an oil-covered sea, and the organist thump-thumped while the ceremony proceeded in an undertone. I winked at the mother who winked back and began to look more cheerful. And finally the organ stopped while the priest gave a short address. On either side of the altar-piece St Peter exhorted and St Paul comforted while St Ignatius was wafted up to heaven in a rosy sunset and above supercilious cherubs pouted on plaster clouds, and for a moment there was peace. Then the organ thump-thumped again, and never was an aisle so long. By nine-ten the seven of us were in the Hotel Miramar in a corner of the cocktail lounge drinking the happy couple’s health with a Hungarian wine that tore to my liver. In the corner by the deserted bandstand was a stuffed bear which a cleaning woman dusted as she cleared up the squalid mess of the night before. And that was the most curious wedding I have ever been to.