Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph (32 page)

Kodachrome, and could not be developed in Brazil. I told him where they had been taken. Then, to my astonishment, he asked me to write out my mother's Christian names. He dictated a series of messages to Brasilia and Interpol and, still through Franziska, said I would have to wait until he got replies to his enquiries. 'Maybe this evening,' she said.

An orderly took me back to the entrance hall where an agent was always on duty, and then through some
louvered
doors into a large office. There were several desks and filing cabinets and an electric fan. Two other doorways, barred by locked wrought iron gates, led to the street and to a backyard. The agent in the hall could communicate with the office through a shuttered hatch in the wall. The floor, I noticed, was tiled and sloped gently towards a drain in the middle. Looking up I saw that the roof was really just a canopy raised three feet above the walls, and that the room must have once been an open patio.

The office was obviously in use, though its people had gone home, and I was alone. Somewhere nearby I could hear a telex machine, and a loudspeaker emitted messages in Portuguese or an occasional burst of
Morse
all interwoven with crackles and howls of static.

The orderly came back after half an hour with a small chipped enamel dish of rice and beans. There were some fragments of chicken and bone among the rice. Eventually the DOPS inspector came to confirm that I would be there for the night. He pointed to the corner where there were some collapsible beds with straw mattresses. He was polite but curt, and left quickly.

I could not decide whether my situation was mildly inconvenient or extremely serious. I tried hard to divine how it would seem to them. On the face of it, it was ridiculous to suppose that I would have ridden a motorcycle the length of Africa in order to engage in a spying mission in Brazil. But how would they confirm the truth? And for all I knew they might find the truth even more ridiculous. In my present position even I found the idea of travelling round the world on a motorcycle a shade absurd.

I was determined to remain optimistic. After all, I had been arrested before in similar circumstances, once in Tunis, twice in Alexandria, and each time I was turned loose again very soon. And, damn it, I was in an office wasn't I, and not mouldering in a cell? Yet even during the short time that remained before I thought I could reasonably hope to sleep, I found myself being sucked into a vortex of speculation which seemed to drag me always down towards doubt and fear.

As the evening wore on there was another crashing downpour of rain. Some splashed in under the roof, some rose up through the drain, and water rushed and gurgled all round the room and under the floor as though we were being swept to sea. I heard later that it was the heaviest fall of rain that Fortaleza had known in sixty years.

It was a surprisingly uncomfortable night. I had only the clothes I had arrived in. My jeans were still damp, my shoes and socks almost wet, and my shirt sticky with the day's sweat. Two walls of the office were saturated with moisture by the deluge. The open doors and roof encouraged a night breeze which, normally, would be a blessing but was a curse for me. Though there was a mattress there was no sort of cover. The moving air was cold, and the exposed parts of my body were chilled even further by evaporation. I slept only for minutes at a time, with the noises from the radio room distorting my dreams into nightmare shapes. Eventually I put another mattress on top of my body. It helped a bit, stiff as it was, but covered me with a fine straw dust which stuck to my damp clothes and skin.

In the morning I felt grey and unappetizing. An orderly took me to a bathroom where there was a shower but no towel or soap. There were some scraps of lavatory paper to dry on, but they did not go far. It was useless to ask for anything, for it was all too easy for them to brush me off with a blank, uncomprehending stare. I did not feel strong enough to make a demonstration, thinking that quiet dignity might serve me better. I expected to be free again that day.

So, on an empty stomach, I watched the staff drift into the office.

The Policia Federal, it seemed to me, was like a Brazilian FBI staffed by
agentes,
men and women in plain clothes with a reasonable education who drew good salaries and were encouraged to study for higher qualifications. I saw them more often with textbooks than with guns, but the gun was always tucked away somewhere in a waistband or a purse, and the textbooks usually dealt with subjects of a slightly Machiavellian nature like 'Mass Communications in the Modern State.'

The uniformed police in Brazil, as in most Latin American countries, was at a much lower level, staffed largely by semi-literate ruffians who busied themselves with petty crime, extortion and gratuitous violence The
agentes
were above all that and had a more sophisticated function in controlling fraud, smuggling, drugs, vice, forgery and so on, but I was concerned more with its other job of enforcing the political repression of Brazil on behalf of the army.

Brazil was a dictatorship ruled by army generals. Their main priority after taking power in 1964 was to depoliticize the country, meaning to stop anyone engaging in, or talking about, or even thinking politics. Football, yes; the Samba,
si;
Politics, ninety million times No. Political opposition to the generals was punished by imprisonment, deportation, torture and death.

Naturally such a government would watch most carefully over an area

like the state of Ceara, where so many had so little to lose and where there might be real potential for subversion and revolt. It was into this high-tension grid that I had stumbled off the
Zoë
G
in my outlandish dress, with my strange vehicle, my cameras, my telex messages, my quixotic mission, my passport full of Arabic text conveying hints of terrorism, and my much advertised promenade into the interior.

Facing the door, with my back to the wall, I watched the
agentes
assemble around me. There was a bitter humour in my predicament, and I made the most of it. Which of them, I wondered, would be the one to pull out my fingernails or attach electrodes to my genitals? What about that fresh-faced young fellow over there in the sky-blue pants and fawn shirt with the tidy auburn hair? I watched him set down a pile of books, draw a small automatic from under his shirt front and pop it in his drawer, perch one buttock on the edge of the desk and, rather stylishly, light a cigarette swinging his well-shod foot. Surely not!

Or this older man with the wavy grey hair, the comfortable paunch and the face of a family doctor who sat at the desk marked '
toxicos
'? Ridiculous! I became fascinated by this unusual view of humanity. Was any of them capable of real menace? It wouldn't be the girl across the room, typing. She was the complement to Franziska: shorter, fairer, plump and softly appealing.

Well, how about the fellow at the DOPS desk? Surely he would be my man. The Department of Political and Social Order; a bland title for the administration of terror and thumbscrews. He was another man of mainly European descent, probably German. I watched him talk and smile, watched his blue eyes and, to my disgust, I found I liked him.

I could keep the game up no longer. They all looked like reasonable people. More than that, there was something familiar about them, their restlessness, a touch of vanity, a subdued energy suggesting that they were just marking time, that their real business was elsewhere. The parallel came to me immediately. It was the office of a daily newspaper where I had once worked; a roomful of reporters fiddling reluctantly with their expense sheets, waiting to be sent on a job. The comparison was faultless and rather disturbing. Clearly there was little to fear from these people, they were the glamorous, acceptable and perhaps naive face of the machine. If I needed torturing there would be specialists to do the job, somewhere else. From the corridor I had already noticed steps and an open well leading to a gloomy basement area where I imagined the cells to be. Hurriedly I put them out of my mind.

The agents behaved as though I were invisible, and I guessed they were used to finding all sorts of riff-raff lodged there for the night. I hated, hungry and filthy as I was, to be present among a group of well-dressed, freshly washed and breakfasted people gathering for their morning's
work, to be totally ignored by them, to have to submit to the status of an 'untouchable' and yet be obliged by fear to remain and endure it in silence. I learned a rare lesson in the nature of serfdom.

The chairs had all been seized and I was forced to stand. After two hours frustration made me reckless. A rough-featured sergeant figure had come in from time to time and finally I told him, as best I could, that I wanted to see the inspector. He dismissed me with the usual grunt and turned towards the door. Incensed, I followed him, insisting loudly. He turned again, his face working with rage, and shoved me back against the wall, roaring 'fica!' Then he performed a brilliant mime which demonstrated in a few seconds that I was a spy who took photographs and therefore beneath contempt.

Nobody in the room appeared to have noticed anything untoward. My hopes slipped even further.

Then there was a break. First, an orderly came in with a tray of coffees, and the agent nearest me offered me a cup. And then, suddenly, Ian Dall, the Englishman from Antonio Sa's house, came in with the DOPS inspector. He walked straight across to me and shook my hand.

'I've come to help with your statement,' he said. 'They thought it would be better - that it would be better if the Fathers stayed away from it. They hope you understand. How are you? Are you alright?'

He seemed reluctant to say more. I tried to tell him how I was. It was impossible. Somehow it all translated into 'not bad'. Anyway, all the misery of the previous sixteen hours lifted at the pleasure of seeing him.

'Do you know what's going on?' I asked him. 'Are they going to let me go? I can't make out what's happening. It's terrible not being able to talk to anyone. I can't even get breakfast . . .' I heard myself talking and it began to sound rather pathetic, so I stopped.

T think it will be alright,' he said. 'They don't seem very concerned. I expect it will be over soon.'

We walked, a civilized little group of three, to the Inspector's office. We might just as well be walking out into the street, I thought, so why don't I? But I didn't. There was a lot of talking and repetition, and the Inspector passed several sheets of longhand to a secretary and then took us to a bigger office where the Superintendent, Dottore Xavier, lounged in a bigger revolving chair with armrests.

This man evidently spoke some English, and enjoyed practising phrases, but for the most part Ian translated from the Portuguese. He made an eloquent statement about security and his role in protecting Brazil from the international conspiracy of the Communist press. I said the
Sunday Times
would hardly be considered part of a Communist conspiracy. He made some reference to
he Monde
which Ian found unnecessary to translate.

'Mr. Simon will have to stay until we have replies to our enquiries.' 'Am I under arrest, or what?' I asked.

'You are only detained,' he said. 'You will have full privileges.' 'What privileges? How about starting with breakfast?' The good Doctor appeared shocked that I had missed my breakfast. Why, he declared, I could be taken out to restaurants for meals if I wished. I had only to ask. And policemen would buy things for me, like cigarettes or sandwiches. I had only to give them the money. And yes, I could have clothes and washing articles brought from Sao Raimundo. And of course the British Consul would be told. Indeed this very friend, Senhor Dall, would no doubt perform that service straight away. One might have thought I had deliberately chosen to sulk in a corner instead of coming out to have fun with the rest of the boys.

'The trouble is,' said Ian, T have to go back to Maranhao. My bus leaves in three hours' time.' My yo-yo heart flopped again. 'But I will manage it somehow. There is a Vice-Consul here. He's a marine biologist called Matthews. I'll do my best. The police have already offered to drive me to the bus station to save time.'

I could not help my spirits rising once more. They had fallen so low that they flew correspondingly high. Some notice seemed to have been taken of me at last. I was an individual again, with rights and an identity. We returned to the Inspector's office where the typed statement was waiting for my signature. Ian translated it, and it seemed alright. Prominent in the first paragraph were my mother's Christian names, correctly spelled. There were three pages in triplicate, nine signatures in all. I took a pen to the first page and found, to my horror, that it went entirely out of my control and produced an unrecognizable scribble. I had to work very hard to get my signature back, and even then I thought it looked more like painstaking forgery. I was very aware that the Inspector seemed to regard this as quite normal.

As Ian left he tried to encourage me again, but I felt his uncertainty. T think it will soon be over,' he repeated.

I was put back in the general office. It was lunchtime. The staff began to drift away. I waited for someone to take me to lunch. The room emptied. An orderly came with a dish of rice and beans. This time there was no chicken.

T want to go out,' I said angrily. 'Where's the Superintendent?' The orderly shrugged and left. My morale collapsed yet again. It was all lies, that stuff about privileges, meals, clothes, all talk to sweeten the Englishman. All fantasy just to get my statement and send Ian Dall on his way. Dall was my last chance of contact with the outside world, and he was taking a bus to a place hundreds of miles away on the Amazon. What could he say to the police if they took him to the bus and
said:’ Leave
the Consul to us.' Nothing. And the priests? What could they do? Nothing.