Senor Nice (26 page)

On arrival, I walked to the Hotel di Roma to freshen up and reassure the staff I had not done a runner. There was a message from Gilberto that he would call at the hotel about 8.00 that evening. I decided to spend the day sightseeing and visited the city’s oldest part, the Largo de Pelhourinho, a sloping square along the top of which is a building which has been converted to a museum dedicated to Brazil’s best-known author, Jorge Amado.
Pelhourinho
means whipping post. This square once witnessed the daily torture, selling and whipping of slaves but now celebrated their emancipation by frequent processions of African drummers and dancers streaming from the Bar do Reggae. The drumming reminded me of last night’s Candomblé and I decided to phone my sister to find out how my mother was faring.

Despite my pre-travel preparations, my mobile rarely registered a signal strong enough to make calls, so I bought a telephone card, strolled down to the seafront, and approached a row of phone boxes. A young beggar caught hold of my arm and asked for money. I refused and picked up the phone. On
my third attempt to dial my head was suddenly rammed into the phone box, and I felt consciousness slipping away. A hand grabbed me around the neck and another tore off my gold chain. I struggled to my feet just in time to see my precious gold Buddha glinting in the hands of the young beggar as he sprinted towards the side streets.

My mind flashed back twenty years. I was staying at the Bangkok Peninsula Hotel, and it was my custom to visit the nearby Erawan Hotel, the site of the Erawan Buddha, on a Friday evening. There were many accidents during the hotel’s construction and to stop the deaths labourers placed a Buddha in the corner of the construction site. The deaths ceased, and the Buddha become an important shrine for those praying for upward mobility. When there I would usually see my friend Sompop, a flower seller I had befriended and to whom I would sometimes give money.

On one occasion he said, ‘
Sawabdee
, Kuhn Marks,
sawabdee
, Kuhn Marks. I have Buddha for you. Please wear always.’ Sompop had given me what looked like an antique bronze coin, but it clearly wasn’t currency. ‘Wear always, Kuhn Marks, except when with woman or when in toilet or when in bath,
mai dee
. Wear in sea or lake is OK,
dee mak mak
. No harm come to you, Kuhn Marks. You have good luck. Buddha look after you. Now we buy gold chain for Buddha from my friend. Wear always, Kuhn Marks.’

We went to a Bangkok jeweller, got the Buddha gilded, and chose for it a large gold chain.

I put my hand in my pocket for some money. Sompop stopped me and asked me to give it to the poor children.

Since then, the Buddha had been my lucky charm, constantly around my neck except when I was in prison, in bed with a woman or in the bathroom. Now it was gone. I was devastated, angry and convinced that bad luck was on its way. Terrified, I called my sister and learned that my mother although no better was stable. But my worries remained.

That evening I described my unhappy experience and fears to Gilberto.

‘Howard, this is common after Candomblé ceremonies, especially when experiencing them for the first time. Don’t forget it is the Sisterhood of Good Death. Energies and forces that we usually suppress or deny roam freely in our mind on these occasions. Coincidences do not exist; there is just what is. We call some events coincidences because we know we do not understand them and cannot explain them by what we think is knowledge. Once we think we understand them and think we can explain them, we don’t call them coincidences any longer; we give them other names like magnetism, gravity, schizophrenia and God. But they are still simply what they are. Our theories may change over time, but what is remains the same. I know from
Mr Nice
you have studied the philosophy of science. What does gravity explain? Nothing. It is just a name for falling to the floor. The name might change, but things still fall.’

‘I know all that, Gilberto; Galileo said the same. And I know that time changes magic first into one science then another. And I know that all scientific theories except some recent ones have been proven to be wrong, so even these recent theories will one day also be proven wrong. But from where do I get this feeling of fear?’

‘It is the fear of death.’

‘But I am not afraid of death, Gilberto – at least not of my own.’

‘What about the death of someone you love?’

‘Yes, I am afraid of my mother’s death. She is very ill.’

‘It’s the same. If she is to die, her death must be good. The fear you have is escaping. You must let it go and take no further comfort in your denial.’

‘And I am afraid of life without my Buddha; it has been with me for so long. It has saved my life. It is my protection.’

‘I am not Buddhist, Howard, but your Buddha, does it
teach you how much control you have over events or how little?’

‘How little.’

‘Then you have learned your lesson. Your Buddha has moved on to protect someone needing it more than you do.’

‘But I let it go through carelessness.’

‘Only if you thought you were in control. Forget your Buddha; it was never yours. It found you. It will now find someone else. Are you still interested in finding your Welsh community?’

‘Yes, as much as ever. Why do you ask?’

‘I have made some enquiries with my academic friends, and they say there has never been a significant Welsh presence in Bahia. However, you should go to Lencóis. It is an interesting place and, who knows, you might find someone of Welsh descent. Don’t take the bus the entire way; go by boat and have a couple of days holiday. There is an idyllic island on the way.’

The following day, my fifty-seventh birthday, I caught the early ferry from Salvador to Morro São Paulo on the Ilha de Tinharé. The boat moved gently through the singularly beautiful bay of Bahia, its vast sweep ranging from luscious flora fringing its inlets to glimpses of the distant hills behind. The upper city sits on a steep bluff, eighty feet above the lower town, which occupies the narrow strip between the harbour and the cliff. Soon we entered the turbulent open sea. The trip took about four hours, and I blessed the seasickness pills I had brought from my first aid kit. Landing was nevertheless a welcome relief.

Tinharé has no cars, no industrial noise, no hassle. The beaches are named One, Two and Three. Wheelbarrows carry ferry passengers’ luggage through lanes littered with bars, restaurants, Internet cafés and money changers. Delicious crab dishes were on sale everywhere, except at my hotel, which
was a crab sanctuary. The hotel’s gardens were full of hummingbirds and monkeys, and blue crabs constantly darting in and out of holes in the ground.

As dusk fell, I ventured into a forest of palm trees encircling a Candomblé sanctuary. Between the palm trunks were tree ferns rising to twenty feet and a bewildering profusion of hanging, climbing and parasitic plants, which girdled the boughs with flowers. Then black and white spirits and goblins began to haunt the quiet night. Huge swarms of bats filled the sky. I rushed out to the nearest light, a reggae bar on the beach, and worked my way through several glasses of
cachaça
, eventually achieving a feeling of well-being. I spent the next day in a hammock watching the crabs.

Two days later and well rested, I took the short boat trip from Morro Sao Paolo to the busy port of Valença and climbed aboard a bus to begin the six-hour haul inland to Lencóis. I swallowed some seasickness pills so I could read without feeling dizzy while the bus bounced through the Sertão, north-eastern Brazil’s vast and fiercely hot semi-arid interior. Larger than any European country and dominated by rocks, cactus and circling hawks, its soils are poor, and rainfall sparse and irregular. Mere showers cause astonishing transformations: trees immediately bud, cacti burst into flower, shoots appear, and the ground changes colour from brown to green. After a climb, we entered the Chapada Diamantina – the Diamond Highlands. Views of deep valleys, tall isolated peaks, open high plains, shady canyons, cold mountain streams and spectacular waterfalls flanked us all the way to Lencóis, the Queen of the Mines.

Until 1732 India was the world’s only known source of diamonds. At first, the diamonds discovered in Brazil were believed to be fake, so the Portuguese took them to Macau and passed them off as Indian. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, Brazilian diamonds had been judged genuine and Lencóis was a boom town infested with criminals, fugitives
and adventurers, diamond merchants and the usual service personnel – hookers and the rest. Shops and banks lined the streets. Then the diamonds became scarce and another source was discovered in South Africa. The boom town became a ghost town and stayed that way until seventeen years ago, when an American geologist, Roy Funch, happened to pass through Lencóis and fall in love with it. Almost singlehandedly, Roy succeeded in persuading the authorities to turn the Diamond Highlands into a national park. Tonight, he was giving a talk at the Cantos dos Aquas hotel, where I was about to check in.

Roy Funch praised the beauties of the Diamond Highlands, their multicoloured sand caves, riverbeds of millions of tiny white shells, Indian petroglyphs carved into limestone walls, preserved skeletons of giant ground sloths and natural rockslides feeding clear deep natural swimming pools. He spoke of the myths associated with the region’s rivers such as the
bicho da agua
– a creature, part animal, part man that walks on the bottom of the river and snores loudly when asleep.

Roy also warned of real dangers should you go trekking. Swamps and rivers – one named the River of the Bats – hosted alligators and pig-sized water rats. Pools provided fertile breeding grounds for rare and deadly bacteria. There were coral snakes that liked to bite fingers, poisonous rattlesnakes that liked to keep quiet, and vipers that just liked being venomous. In addition, there were bombardier beetles, tarantulas and scorpions. The sky was alive with wasps, stinging ants, mosquitoes, vampire bats and aggressive Africanised bees. My mountain boots and mosquito net would be staying in my rucksack.

I shook Roy’s hand, introduced myself and thanked him for his talk.

‘Howard, you look exactly like the only British resident of Lencóis.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘Jimmy Page. I don’t know anything about his music, and he knows nothing about geology, but we’re good friends. It’s a shame he spends just a few days a year here.’

If I had to blame anyone for my abandoning academia and following the path I had taken it would be Jimmy Page, possibly the best guitarist in the world. I spent an entire postgraduate academic year (1969–70) lying on the floor of a Brighton flat listening to Led Zeppelin, all of whose albums he produced.

Lencóis was small, and there was about a one in hundred chance Jimmy Page would be at home. But turning up like a groupie and ruining his holiday would not be cool. I would have to forget that and decided to walk around the streets that had once teemed with fugitive-filled bars, enticing whorehouses and shops selling Paris fashions. I ought to check the libraries and museums, if there were any, for evidence of the elusive Welsh. I walked up through the hilly town. A car coming the other way stopped. ‘You look like a friend of mine. What’s your name?’ asked the gorgeous female passenger.

‘Howard.’

‘I thought so. I was lying, actually. You aren’t really a friend of mine, but you could be.’

The driver’s door opened, and Jimmy Page emerged with an outstretched hand. ‘I’ve read your book,
Mr Nice
.’

I was about to say I’d listened to all his tunes at least a million times but ended up just grinning sheepishly. We arranged to meet for a drink later at the town’s central bar.

We drank and talked about ourselves and drank and talked about everything else. At one point drums began to beat furiously outside, and a circle of people surrounded four barefoot young men gripping six-foot bamboo sticks who performed a sequence of martial art movements in a graceful dance form known as Capoeira. Jimmy explained how escaped slaves, realising they would have to defend themselves with their hands and feet, created a style of self-defence to give
them a chance against swords and firearms. Recaptured slaves blended these combat moves with long-remembered ritual dances, such as that performed by Angolan males to gain the right to a woman when she reached puberty, and added musical accompaniment. The dance disguise worked for a while but was inevitably discovered, and Capoeira was outlawed in Brazil until 1928, when it became accepted as a sport and art form.

Two Capoeiristas exchange attack and defence movements in a constant flow, observing the rituals and manners of the art. Each tries to control the dance space by confusing his opponent with feints, the speed of the ritualised combat being determined by the many different rhythms of the
berimbau
– a one-stringed musical bow – handclaps and the tambourine. Capoeira is the art of facing danger with a smile on one’s face, and a good Capoeirista will face his opponent confidently, but never so guardedly as to inhibit the flow of the game or the expression of the beauty and integrity of his personality. The game serves as a metaphor for life, which requires you to negotiate treachery every day. A careless attitude in life can be disastrous, but an overprotective attitude will stop the flow of vitality, making life static and miserable. The only way to understand the fluid character of Capoeira – or indeed the game of life it mirrors – is to step into the ring with the commitment to push one’s limits and see beyond the game itself.

We were well slaughtered when the bouts finished.

‘Do you get back to Wales much, Howard?’

‘A few visits a year.’

‘Have you been to Cardiff Castle?’

‘Of course, several times. You?’

‘Yes, but so far I haven’t been able to get inside it. Mind, I haven’t tried since 1973, when the band was on tour there. There just hasn’t been time.’

‘I saw the gig. It was at the Capitol, which is now a shopping centre and multiscreen cinema.’

‘I think you’re right; I’m not sure. Remembering tour details is difficult. But I know I stayed immediately opposite the castle at the Angel Hotel.’