The View from Mount Dog (15 page)

Christine was paralysed. The conviction was so strong she was about to witness a man doing away with himself that she could not relate this in any way to her husband. As the figure at the rail continued to stare down, his hair lashed by the gale into a series of wandering crowns like long grasses on a hillside, the power to think began to return to her.
Why?
Why
now?
Poor man, was he so very unhappy? To her surprise she found it quite thinkable that he might be, in the same way that she knew she or anybody else might be. Unhappy, yes, but so unhappy as to be driven to that? And why here, as if to taunt her with the spectacle? Then she remembered that he thought she was still sitting patiently far away in the reading room at the other end of the deck and on the other side of the ship, and that even had he glanced round he would still scarcely have seen her through the dingy glass.

She was raising her arm to beat her knuckles on the pane to distract him long enough to reach the door when with an almost furtive gesture he produced from under his coat one, two, three,
four
round objects. And in the moment she recognised them and
knew what he was really doing the entire construct in her mind fell apart with an almost audible sense of things tumbling into a long abyss. The objects were, she knew, two-ounce tobacco-tins with screw-on lids and they were full of his used razor blades. On first discovering the tin he was currently filling in the dressing-table drawer she had thought of his habit as being some quaint relic of bachelorhood; perhaps all men did it. Maybe old blades had some kind of value for something she could not guess at. But then she had come upon three more identical tins, all containing heavy clots of higgledy-piggledy blades fused together with rust and long-dried soap and whiskers, and had asked him outright why he had brought them on honeymoon with him.

He had been embarrassed, then breezy, as if he knew it was actually more irrational than the explanation he gave: that he never could bring himself to throw used blades away for fear that the dustmen might cut themselves, or children find them and lacerate themselves, or animals unearth them and suffer terrible injuries. And the more he elaborated his fears the more the razor blades stopped being flimsy pieces of metal which could have been effectively disposed of in thirty seconds with a bit of thought and the more they took on the nature of time-bombs: supremely dangerous by-products of his own masculinity which could at any moment burst out of hiding and slash and maim and kill. To go around casually disseminating such things was, he explained, incredibly thoughtless and
anti
social.
How often had he used that expression! Christine had at first listened gravely, then had been mightily amused without – she hoped – letting it show and lastly had tried rationality. Surely, she said, the problem of what to do with used razor blades was faced daily by millions of men all over Britain, Europe, the world…. She could hardly suppose they all hoarded them against a sea-voyage yet she had never in her whole life heard of anybody accidentally injured by coming upon a worn blade as opposed to using one clumsily. For one thing they lay too flat…. But she soon recognised this was being too reasonable: he thought she was not giving him enough due for being a responsible social animal. He became defensive, he blustered. Finally he had walked out and spent several hours in the engine-room.

At that moment the mess-waiter appeared with her coffee. As he rested the edge of the tray on Christine’s table he glanced up
and also saw Paul through the window. He must have noticed her staring, for he said: ‘Now what’s that queer fellow up to, I wonder?’ in a musing, conspiratorial sort of way.

‘I thought at first he was going to jump but he isn’t, it’s all right. He’s going to throw something overboard.’

‘You sure of that, miss?’

‘Perfectly. He’s my husband.’

‘Oh, I do beg your pardon, madam. I’m sure I meant no offence.’

‘None taken. He does look rather furtive, doesn’t he? Like some criminal disposing of evidence’ – for at that moment Paul, after a quick look to right and left along the deck, began throwing the tins as if reluctant to part with them one by one into the stream of wind roaring alongside the ship.

‘You may make light of it, madam, but we’ve had things happen you wouldn’t believe aboard this ship. Some strange objects have gone over the side of the old
Mooltan
in her time, I can tell you; things as are hardly fit for a lady’s ears to hear about.’

But Christine, as if already inured to all such terrible details, was not listening. She was counting –
one,
two,
three,
four
–
and as each tin vanished she again experienced further stages of that interior crumbling. Just for a moment, just for a half-second when she had recognised Paul and still thought he might be going to jump, she had felt her little nugget of resentment change to … what exactly? Relief? A sense of reprieve? But in the next half-second it had changed back again and now, as each tobacco-tin was launched into the void, the nugget grew. And for the second time that morning she could not prevent herself making a temporal leap, that awful elision whereby she slipped to the spent end of her life with a devastating wrench of sadness to see what would become of it. But she found she had known all along; and she gazed at the dark, elderly back of her boy-husband through the window and raised the coffee untastingly to her lips.

Outside the bullet-pocked walls of the Palace of Governors half a million servings of beans and maize fritters were nearing noontime readiness and the attentions of the population of San Sacramento. Inside the Palace the monthly meeting of the Generals was drawing to a leisurely close. As with most other such meetings not a great deal had been discussed and much of that consisted of hoary topics: how best to deceive the current batch of IMF spies and visiting auditors from the World Bank about the true state of the Parazuelan economy, and what might be done further to undermine the credibility of the three-member delegation from Amnesty International. Now it was time for Any Other Business, which was usually chit-chat while tunics were buttoned, peaked caps found, swagger-sticks sorted out and holsters unfastened preparatory to going outside.

‘I suppose we’d better brace ourselves for that ghastly little Jew again,’ said General Mendez.

‘Which particular one?’ asked the Generalissimo.

‘That ex-Mossad fellow who lives in Munich. Silverstein? Silberbein? Feigenbaum? The one with the bee in his bonnet about Nazis in hiding. Hadn’t you heard, then? I gather someone has written another book saying that Horst Wessel is
alive and well and practising medicine in some poverty-stricken barrio here.’

‘No, that’s not it,’ corrected General Ocampo. ‘This time it’s a reporter who swears he has proof that Hitler’s living in Parazuela. It was on the BBC’s World Service.’

‘
Hitler
?
Oh, really, it’s too absurd. Whatever will they think of next?’ The Generalissimo pocketed the calculator on which he had done some depressing arithmetic during the economic part of the meeting. ‘The fellow would have to be a fossil. Wait till I tell old man Schicklgruber on Sunday: I’m lunching over at their ranch. They’ll love that. Anyone else got any funnies?’

‘Weird report from Tutuban this morning,’ said General Edmilson.

‘Where?’

‘Tutuban. Iguaçu province, apparently; I hadn’t heard of it, either. Couple of kids claim to have seen the Virgin Mary.’

‘I expect it was Goering in disguise,’ said General Preciosa, who was reputed to have had a mean wit in his Military Academy days. Certainly everyone laughed.

‘If so, he really fooled the kids. They’re convinced it was the Virgin and they’ve convinced a lot of locals, too. In fact people are starting to go on pilgrimages to Tutuban from other parts of the province, and one or two are already claiming to have been cured of their horrid condition.’

‘Credulity, for example?’ suggested General Preciosa.

‘Don’t knock it,’ said the Generalissimo. ‘Without it this country would be ungovernable, even by us, to say nothing of the rest of Latin America. I just wish someone would discover a way of infecting the Gnomes of Zurich with the virus. And now, gentlemen, shall we adjourn?’ With some mutual saluting the meeting broke up.

‘But,’ said General Preciosa a couple of hours later, ‘but but but
but…
.’ He was a little drunk but not very, having lunched well in a permanently reserved room above San Sacramento’s best Viennese restaurant. ‘But,’ he added thoughtfully.

‘But, Fernando …?’ prompted General Edmilson.

‘But what about
Lourdes
?’

‘Oh, dead. Has been for months.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Just that. She disappeared in a football stadium. With several hundred others, I believe.’

‘What on earth are you gibbering about, Manolo?’ asked his friend brusquely.

‘That protest singer woman. Maria Lourdes. You surely remember her? Dangerously popular; criminally off-key.’

‘Not
her.
The place. You know, Lourdes in France. Kids? Visions? Virgin Marys? Big Moneys?’

‘Oh,
that
Lourdes.’

‘Exactly. Do buck up, Manny, or I’ll have to buy you another tequila. I’ve had an idea which could do you a lot of good. You are Minister of the Interior, are you not? Well, then, who’s our Minister for Tourism?’

‘Minister for Tourism? Ah, now, let me see….’

‘There isn’t one,’ General Preciosa cut his friend off in mid-speculation, ‘as you very well know. It isn’t that Parazuela hasn’t got more than its fair share of potential tourist attractions, either.’

‘Certainly isn’t. There’s the Taquarí asphalt lakes, for a start. And the Glass Iguana of Teoxihuatl. Nobody knows how—’

‘Oh, do shut up; we had all that in high school, like several hundred other Parazuelans. No, the reason Parazuela is not on the world’s tourist itineraries is because for years we were considered far too dangerous for your average American matron, and I agree that forty-one presidents in nineteen years did look bad on paper. But now this country’s probably the most stable on the entire continent and we’re still being boycotted by those same American matrons because according to their press and despite the imminence of elections we’re a fascist Latin junta. Obviously there’s never going to be any pleasing them. So write them off; we don’t need them, either. But there’s a still-untapped source of tourism awaiting an enterprising Minister, were he to drink a little less and play his cards a bit more shrewdly.’

‘Ah
…. Ah?’

‘Manny! Your
story.
Your own story about these stupid kids out in the sticks in Iguaçu. Can’t you see what a gift it is? You could really make it work in your favour. You remember old Raul going on this morning about how it was up to all of us to find ways of raising revenue so we won’t have to re-reschedule interest payments on the national debt? Well, then. A really watertight Madonna could be parlayed into quite a steady little source of foreign revenue, don’t you think?’

General Edmilson had at last caught up. ‘Good God, Nandy, that’s bright. Lots of possibilities there. Revenue for the country, revenue for us…. What’s your cut in all this?’

‘Accommodation,’ said Fernando Preciosa succinctly. ‘I want hotels. All hotels come through me.’

‘You got ’em. Er … what do you suppose I could have?’

‘Political
power. Kudos. Think about it: as Minister of the Interior it will fall to you to follow up this story and find it genuine. The Minister for Tourism then becomes your appointee. Any developments in tourism which follow from this accrue to you. You’ll be quids in with old Raul and you’ll have complete control over planning further expansion.’

‘That’s marvellous, Nandy…. I – well, I wouldn’t mind a bit of
cash,
too, if you follow me?’

‘Use your initiative. Go to Tubitan or whatever it’s called and buy the bloody grotto. Get a bit of real estate.’

‘Do we know there’s a grotto?’

‘Of course there’s a grotto; there’s always a grotto. It’ll certainly be one in the eye for the American matrons, won’t it? I mean, if Parazuela’s good enough for the Queen of Heaven to visit it ought to be OK for some fat harridan from Omaha in purple shorts.’

‘That’s a point. Yes, we ought certainly to play that up. Seal of approval, sort of thing. Do you know, Nandy, I think you’re on to a winner. I’ll get someone trustworthy to poke around and get a few hard facts. I only hope it all turns out to be genuine and not some ignorant peasant hoax.’

‘There are no such things as fake Madonnas,’ said General Preciosa wisely. ‘There are only Madonnas.’

‘Yes, but I mean it’s a good job we’re Parazuelans. I can just imagine some jumped-up little Guayadorean dictator inventing the entire thing to make a quick buck.’

‘Can you, Manny? Can you really?’ said General Preciosa, shaking his head as at the perfidy of the less scrupulous.

Inside three days General Edmilson’s spy had reported back to San Sacramento. To the General’s relief the story ‘checked out’, as his informant put it. He had met the children concerned – three little sisters between the ages of seven and twelve – and had convinced himself that whatever may or may not have happened they had not been put up to it by their parents or the local priest. He had interviewed each of them separately and, although they all cried a good deal, they gave identical accounts.
There had definitely been a strange sighting the previous week in Tutuban. Local opinion was, however, divided roughly along lay and religious lines. The common folk all believed it fervently, but the Church in Iguaçu province was decidedly sceptical and would need a lot more convincing before they could accept the event as genuinely miraculous. The trend towards radicalism among the younger clergy had evidently forced their superiors to sharpen their wits. The Madonna’s physical appearance was, among some of the older clergy, one sticking-point.

‘She was black, you see,’ said the spy.

‘Black?
You can’t have a black Madonna,’ said the General. ‘They’re blondes or brunettes. Everybody knows that. Long blue robes and a sad smile and a sort of haze of light around them. At least, so I’ve always thought.’

‘The children insisted she was black. Apparently there are precedents, sir.’

‘Not’, said the General firmly, ‘in Parazuela.’

‘Also she wore spectacles.’

‘Oh, great. That’s terrific. Everybody else gets the original version but poor old Parazuela draws some damn great buck Madonna in shades.’

‘One or two priests are beginning to think this is a point in her favour,’ the spy explained. ‘They say that if the kids had really invented it all they would have made her conform to the traditional image. To have deliberately made her black and spectacled would have been creative originality way beyond their capabilities. I must say I think it’s quite a convincing point myself.’

‘Well …,’ said the General dubiously. ‘Well … I suppose if that’s the story we’ll have to live with it. What else?’

‘My impression is that, sceptical or not, the Church is going to have to take it seriously. There are already reports of miraculous cures attributed to her.’

‘Are there indeed? That’s good. What sort of cures, I wonder?’

‘Fairly minor stuff so far, I believe. Warts and sprains. But it’s early days yet and, after all, the halt and the lame are probably going to take a long time actually
getting
to Tutuban. When they do things will become a bit more organised. It only needs one per cent of them able to throw away their sticks and walk home for real pilgrimages to start in earnest.’

‘Bus
company
,’ murmured the General to himself.

‘I beg your pardon, sir?’

‘Nothing, nothing. I’m sorry, just thinking aloud. Go on.’

‘That’s about it. I’m afraid I don’t know very much about these things so I have no idea what happens next. I don’t imagine the Church will ever come out completely in favour of something like this because they’ve been made to look pretty silly in the past. Some sort of noncommittal tolerance is probably the best we can hope for. On the other hand, certain priests there are seeing it as evidence of renewed spiritual interest on the part of some of their flock and will be happy to use it as a way of reaching those they feel had begun to get out of touch, if you see what I mean?’

‘No,’ said General Edmilson.

‘No,’ admitted the spy, ‘neither do I. I’m simply repeating what an Irish Dominican father told me. Oh, and there was one other odd thing about Our Lady of Tutuban which the children all swore to. She was holding a beautiful casket and as the children watched she gently threw handfuls of greyish dust towards them. She looked very sad and raised her hand to bless them before she disappeared.’

‘There,’ exclaimed the General, ‘that’s more like it. I knew she had to look sad and do some blessing. I’ve never heard of the dust before, though.’

‘It got one of the old priests very excited. Apparently there’s a precedent for that, too, somewhere in Italy in the sixteenth century. It was interpreted then as the dried tears of the Mater Dolorosa. This old fellow thinks it puts the whole thing beyond doubt as there’s no way these illiterate kids or their family could ever have heard that story before. It was officially discredited at the Council of Navarre in 1887 and has been suppressed ever since on the grounds that Our Lady’s tears would have been far too pure to have left a precipitate other than salt. Certainly nothing greyish.’

‘There you see the inexorable march of secular man,’ said the General. ‘The faith of centuries judiciously gives way to high-school chemistry.’

‘You’re probably right, sir,’ the spy agreed. ‘As a matter of fact, there is no high school yet in Tutuban.’

‘There you are, then.’