Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph (33 page)

The door had been left open and I saw the Superintendent coming down the corridor. I shouted at him and he surprised me by coming in.

'Don't you like our home cooking?' he asked silkily. It was a rhetorical question. His smile was very close to a sneer, and he left quickly. I was speechless with black fury. The food was irrelevant. It struck me forcibly after he had gone that even if the prison served truffles and caviar I would prefer to be out for five minutes to buy my own rice and beans. There is no relish like freedom.

I was heavily inclined to expect the worst, and when a strange
agente
came for me in the afternoon and took me down those grim steps to the basement I really thought the worst was about to happen. But it was only to have photograph and fingerprints taken.

'Do you play the piano?' asked the
agente,
with a grin. Perhaps it was meant as a compliment, but I could hear it only as a threat conjuring up an image of broken fingers.

The agent who took my photograph told me happily that he had developed my pictures. 'Very nice,' he said, 'good pictures.' As we walked up the stairs another man stopped on his way down, and grinned. Everything was a joke to these fellows.

'You will be deported,' he said. T have seen your passport. Visa is cancelled.'

As the afternoon dragged on I tried to understand what was happening. My real problem was that I had no way of knowing what was likely, no experience of the country, no feel for the way things usually happened there. On the other hand I did know that anything was possible. They could free me or, if they wanted to, they could kill me. There was no point in denying it. The question therefore was: 'Why should they want to kill me?' Not gratuitously. That would be hardly worth the trouble it might cause. If they wanted to get rid of me they would simply deport me, as that last agent had promised they would, but for some reason I was not ready to believe that, quite.

No, I had raised the spectre of death and now I would have to deal with it. They would kill me either by mistake, or to cover up something else. They seemed to believe I was on some kind of revolutionary mission. They would look for evidence. They would find nothing conclusive, for there was but they would turn up the hidden passport and that would excite their suspicions even more. So they would come to me for evidence. I would have to deny it. I couldn't invent it if I tried. They would have to use torture. That too would be a miserable failure. And then? It might well be too embarrassing to let me go; easier by far to feign an accident, say I disappeared, rather than have me fly home to tell my story.

During the following twenty-four hours I could conceive of only two possibilities: I would be deported, or I would be tortured and killed. As time passed I became increasingly pessimistic. I could get nobody to talk to me or listen to the simplest request. The staff left for home. I got another bowl of rice and beans, and then . . . nothing. By the end of the evening I knew my attempt to reach the Consul had failed, and the implications of that were overwhelming. It became impossible then to believe that the way they were treating me was merely through accidental neglect. It had to be deliberate. I could no longer accuse myself of paranoia.

The walls were still soaking. During the day it was not noticeable. After nightfall I began to freeze again. By morning I was shivering, slightly feverish and had a cold. It was Saturday, and as the minutes built up into hours I realized that the office would be empty for the weekend.

I searched for any means to relieve the monotony. I tried to recite poetry, and was appalled by how little I could remember. I counted the titles on the walls and on the floor (including fractions). I tried to work out a feasible plan of escape. It occurred to me that this might be expected of me (from the top of a filing cabinet I might have clambered over the wall, but into what I had no idea). I began to look for secret surveillance, a closed circuit TV lens, perhaps. All the time I was aware of my fears being almost entirely self-induced, and that in itself made things worse, for I could not shake them off.

Real terror came over me in waves, about once an hour. I found I could not sustain it any more than I could sustain hope. My thoughts might be mercifully far away and then some trick of the mind would produce, say, a mental glimpse of the lumpy-faced policeman on his hands and knees at Sao Raimundo with his hands under the fridge; and suddenly sweat would pour off me as the thought carried me on to unmentionable consequences.

After several hours of this Franziska came into the office and said she wanted to practise her English. I could have exploded at the absurdity of it, but I was far too suspicious. Every question she asked seemed loaded. Though I was grateful for the distraction and wanted to believe in her goodwill, I dared not. She brought out a tube of Vitamin C tablets and offered me some. I refused. God knows what might be in them, I thought. She promised to ask about being taken out to lunch and about the Consul, but when she left the rice and beans came as usual, and silence.

The silence was broken in mid-afternoon by another strange event. The radio started a great noise of whoops and wails and crackling, as though someone had just turned up the volume. Then a voice spoke, loudly amplified, very slowly, repeating everything in phrases so that even I could understand most of it.

'We have the films of the coast’ it said.

(My black and white roll included pictures of the coast taken from
Zoë
G.)

'Marcello . . . The Englishman ... to Rio . . .
deportacao.'

Up to that moment I had kept alive a last flicker of hope that my danger was all imaginary. At this point it died. Not only had they apparently deported Father Marcello, but they had wanted me to know it.

From then on a dramatic change came over my hectic mental life. It feels immodest, even distasteful to say, after the event, when I am still so much alive, that I prepared myself for death, but that is undoubtedly what I did. There seemed no purpose in trying to guess any more. I might as well make my mind up about it, be ready to handle it as well as possible.

Death itself, I soon realized, was not such a bad prospect. In a way I had invited it by embarking on this journey, and could hardly complain. My life, when I thought about it, had been full of interest. Not a very finished life, perhaps, but evolving nicely all the time, always changing and generally, I thought, for the better. It was not really death that bothered me then.

It was pain.

By chance, on the book shelf at Sao Raimundo, I had found a copy of Graham Greene's
Travels with my Aunt
and read it. Greene's stuffy suburban hero finds himself seized inadvertently by the police in Paraguay. A policeman hits him, but he scarcely feels it. Then there follows a sentence which, in my hypersensitive state, I must have stored for emergencies.

'Physical violence, like the dentist's drill, is seldom as bad as one fears.'

As a sentiment it might not seem very reliable, nor specially emphatic. The point was, though, it was a piece of objective, dispassionate advice. It was not a piece of my own fevered imagination, and I built on it as on a rock. I contemplated the possibility that the fear of torture might be worse than the torture itself, and it seemed possible. And given the laughable folly of doing the torturer's work for him, I managed somehow just to let the fear go. Instead I composed a letter to someone I loved; not a very good letter, I realized afterwards, for it was surprisingly full of
clichés
and banalities, but it brought a delicious calm like the answer to a prayer. I owe Graham Greene a great deal for that afternoon.

My newly found composure continued. I seemed to have discovered a way to endure, and I watched myself carefully to avoid slipping back into the old spasms of hope and despair. A few hours later, well after dark, I was seated at a desk, studying scraps of Portuguese on the waste paper from the bins, when the hatch slid open and a face appeared. It was a squarish face with a gingery beard and hair, and a
weather beaten
complexion.

'British?' it asked.

'Yes,' I replied, surprised.

'Matthews,' it said. 'British Consul.'

For an instant I believe I actually resented his interference. It was a stunning shock.

'How do you do,' I said, and 'Won't you come in?' and 'I'm very glad to see you,' and other foolish phrases. Then the relief and joy swept through me like tidal waves.

It was ridiculous. It made me long to laugh. This small, bristling, upright man had poked his head through a hatch, and I was delivered. Through him I was joined again to the world I knew, a world in which I had a certain value, where efforts would be made on my behalf. I could no longer vanish without trace. I had condemned myself to death on circumstantial evidence and the Honorary Vice-Consul had brought my reprieve. The very fact that the police had allowed Ian Dall to get his message to Matthews meant that all my fears might prove groundless. I was restored to life and it was a most bewildering experience. I stood blinking in the light like any newly-hatched creature.

Henry Matthews was plainly not there to become enmeshed in an emotional drama. He was a busy, practical man who had just returned to Fortaleza after a long and tiring journey. He was determined to do his duty and then, as soon as possible, to get back to supper and bed with his family.

We stood by one of the desks under a fluorescent tube, and as I looked around my 'prison' it became again just a pleasant, clean, well-lit office in which I had spent hardly forty-eight hours.

For a while I could not think what to say. I wanted to describe the fear, the humiliation, the despair that I had suffered in there, and I knew it was impossible. I might as well have launched into an account of a bad dream. To Matthews it would surely be quite incredible and I was afraid of losing his sympathy. So I stuck, as best I could, to the facts, explaining who I was and where I had come from.

'I will see what I can find out
’
Matthews said, and left the office. I watched through the hatch as he telephoned the Superintendent at home. He was polite but not obsequious, and I awarded him full marks. When he came back I noticed, for the first time, that his English was heavily accented.

'He says it is something very big. He will explain it to me on Monday.'

My fears, it seemed, were not groundless after all. There was some consolation in that.

'He says you have full rights and privileges . . .' I could not restrain the cynical smile . . . but unfortunately you must wait for the outcome.

'I will come back to visit you tomorrow, but is there anything you need now?'

It was kind of him. He would have liked dearly to put me off until the next day. There were many things I wanted badly; a clean shirt, a towel, a shave, a cover to sleep under, books to read, paper to write on, dry socks, but I could not concentrate my mind sufficiently to remember where they would be. I begged Matthews to go to Sao Raimundo fetch my red bag, hoping that what I wanted would be inside it, because what I craved most of all was news from the priests' house, to know what had happened there and to Father Marcello.

Dutifully Matthews toiled out to Sao Raimundo and back. Of all the things I wanted, the bag contained only my razor. However, the news was as good as it was baffling. No police had been to the house, and Father Marcello had certainly not been deported. Matthews promised to return next day with books and a towel, and I lay down for the third night in the same shirt and trousers.

Next morning the hours passed as slowly as ever. The dampness was getting deeper into me now, and the fever and congestion were worse. Despite that, the Consul's arrival had stimulated my imagination again, and once more I could find no escape from doom-laden speculations.

On reflection the Consul's arrival seemed less of a miracle. I tried to draw up a new balance sheet of my prospects. On the credit side, the police were not after all trying to keep my presence there a secret. But then, why should they? They were the law. If they needed a pretext for holding me, they would have no problem finding one. If they wanted to implicate me in some sort of conspiracy obviously they could do so. My trip to Iguatu gave them plenty of ammunition.

By now I was beginning to wonder whether there was more going on in Iguatu than the after-effects of a flood. Perhaps there really were small centres of resistance to the regime, struggling to survive. And where better than in a disaster area?

And those radio messages? I had not imagined them, with their references to an 'ingles' and Marcello and deportation. They must mean something. Why the concern with 'photographs of the coast'? Were they afraid of foreign intervention? From Cuba, perhaps.

I recalled the agent on the cellar steps and his offhand remark about having seen my visa cancelled. It simply did not sound like a lie. Why on earth should he have invented a lie like that? Did that mean that the best I could hope for was deportation? Yet there had still been no attempt to question me further. And most mysterious of all, they had shown no interest whatever in my belongings. They had my passport, but my address books and papers, carried openly in the same wallet, they had

ignored. Surely if they suspected me of conspiracy with 'subversivos' they would at least go through the motions of examining my address books. None of it made sense.