The Woman of Porto Pim Read online

  The woman nodded. I think so, she said, I’m not sure. In any case I’ve been writing some other stuff as well, he went on, these islands are a crushing bore, there’s nothing to do to pass the time but write. And then I wanted to try my hand at a different genre. I’ve been writing fiction all my life. It seems nobler to me, the woman said, or at least more gratuitous, and hence, how can I put it, lighter . . . Oh right, laughed the man, delicacy: par délicatesse j’ai perdu ma vie. But there comes a time when you have to have the courage to try your hand at reality, at least the reality of our own lives. And then, listen, people can’t get enough of real-life experience, they’re tired of the imaginings of novelists of no imagination. Very softly the woman asked: Are they memoirs? Her subdued voice quivered slightly with anxiety. Kind of, he said, but there’s no elaboration of interpretation or memory; the bare facts and nothing more: that’s what counts. It’ll stir things up, said the woman. Let’s say people will take notice, he corrected. The woman was silent for a moment, thoughtful. Do you already have a title? she asked. Maybe Le regard sans école, he said, what do you think? Sounds witty, she said.

  Steering around in a wide curve, the boat began to sail along the coast of the island. Puffs of black smoke with a strong smell of diesel flew out of the funnel and the engine settled into a calm chug, as if enjoying itself. That’s why it takes so long, the man said, the landing stage must be on the other side of the island.

  You know, Marcel, the woman resumed, as if pursuing an idea of her own, I saw a lot of Albertine this winter. The boat proceeded in small lurches, as if the engine were jamming. They sailed by a little church right on the waterfront and they were so near they could almost make out the faces of the people going in. The bells summoning the faithful to Mass had a jarring sound, as though dragging their feet.

  What?! The man chased the invisible insect from the tip of his nose. What on earth do you mean? he said. His face took on an expression of amazement and great disappointment. We kept each other company, she explained. A lot. It’s important to keep each other company in life, don’t you think? The man stood up and leaned on the railing, then sat on his seat again. But what do you mean, he repeated, have you gone mad? He seemed extremely restless, his legs couldn’t keep still. She’s an unhappy woman, and a generous one, the woman said, still following her own reasoning, I think she loved you a great deal. The man stretched out his arms in a disconsolate gesture and muttered something incomprehensible. Listen, forget it, he finally said with an effort, anyway, look, we’ve arrived.

  The boat was preparing to dock. At the stern two men in T-shirts were unrolling the mooring cable and shouting to a third man standing on the landing stage watching them with his hands on his hips. A small crowd of relatives had gathered to greet the passengers and were waving. In the front row were two old women with black headscarves and a girl dressed up as though for her first communion hopping on one foot.

  And what about the play, the woman suddenly enquired, as if all at once remembering something she had meant to ask, do you have a title for the play? You didn’t tell me. Her companion was sorting out some newspapers and a small camera in a bag that bore the logo of an airline company. I’ve thought of hundreds and rubbished them all, he said, still bending down over his bag, not one that’s really right, you need a witty title for a thing like this but something that sounds really good too. He stood up and a vague expression of hope lit up in his eyes. Why? he asked. Oh nothing, she said, just asking; I was thinking of a possible title, but maybe it’s too frivolous, it wouldn’t sound right on a serious poster, and then it’s got nothing to do with your subject matter, it would sound completely incongruous. Oh come on, he begged, at least you can satisfy my curiosity, maybe it’s brilliant. Silly, she said, completely off target.

  The passengers crowded around the gangway and Marcel was sucked into the crush. The woman stood apart, holding on to the cable of the railing. I’ll wait for you on the wharf, he shouted, without turning, I’ve got to move with the crowd! He raised an arm above the gaggle of heads, waving his hand. She leaned on the railing and began to gaze at the sea.

  Other Fragments

  In April 1839 two British citizens disembarked on the island of Flores which, together with Corvo, is the most remote and isolated island of the Azores archipelago. It was curiosity that had brought them there, always an excellent guide. They landed at Santa Cruz, a village situated at the northernmost point of the island and boasting a small natural port which still offers the safest place to land on Flores today. From Santa Cruz they set out to travel, on foot and by litter, around the coast as far as Lajes de Flores, about forty kilometers away, where they wanted to see a church that the Portuguese had built in the seventeenth century. The litter, borne on the shoulders of eight islanders, was made from a ship’s sail and judging by the travelers’ description would seem to have been little more than a hammock strung between two poles.

  Like all the other islands of the archipelago, Flores is volcanic in origin, although unlike São Miguel or Faial, for example, which have white beaches and brilliant green woods, Flores is just one great slab of black lava in the midst of the ocean. Flowers grow well on volcanoes, as Bécquer was to remark; the two Englishmen thus crossed an incredible landscape; a slab of flowering slate which would suddenly open up into fearful chasms, precipices, sheer cliffs falling to the sea. Halfway to their destination they stopped to spend the night in a little fishing village. It was a tiny settlement perched on top of a cliff and the travelers don’t mention the name: not out of carelessness, I don’t think, since their account is always precise and detailed, but perhaps because it had no name. Most likely it was simply called Aldeia, which means “village,” and being the only inhabited place for miles around, this general term did perfectly well for a proper name. From a distance it seemed an attractive place with a tidy geometry, as little fishing villages often are. The houses, however, seemed to have bizarre shapes. When they got to the village they realized why. The fronts of almost all the houses had been made with the prows of sailing ships; they had a triangular floor plan, some were made with good hard woods, and the only stone wall was the one that closed the three sides of the triangle. Some of the houses were quite beautiful, the amazed Englishmen tell us, their interiors scarcely looking like houses at all since almost all the furnishings – lanterns, seats, tables and even beds – had been taken from the sea. Many had portholes for windows, and since they looked out over the precipice and the sea below, they gave the impression of being in a sailing ship which has landed on top of a mountain. These houses were built with the remains of the shipwrecks into which over the centuries the rocks of Flores and Corvo had enticed passing ships. The Englishmen were offered hospitality in a house whose façade bore in white letters the legend THE PLYMOUTH BALTIMORE, which perhaps helped them feel almost at home. And indeed they woke up refreshed the following morning and resumed their journey in the sail.

  The two travellers were called Joseph and Henry Bullar, and their journey deserves a mention.

  In November 1838 a London doctor, Joseph Bullar, having already tried, without success, all the then known treatments for consumption on his brother, Henry, decided, when Henry’s condition deteriorated, to make a voyage with him to the island of São Miguel. Despite the distance and its extraordinary isolation, São Miguel, of all Atlantic islands with a warm climate, was the only one which could guarantee regular communications with England. During the orange season, that is from November to May, you could send a letter to England every week and receive a reply after three weeks, since the ship that carried oranges to England also offered a postal service. In those days São Miguel was one enormous orange orchard from coast to coast, with the trees running right down to the shore.

  After a fairly rough voyage on the orange ship, the two brothers arrived at Ponta Delgada in December 1838 and stayed in São Miguel until April 1839. One can assume that Henry’s health benefited somewhat, since on leaving the main island
the two brothers decided to set out in small fishermen’s sailing boats to visit the central and western Azores. Their time in the archipelago, and particularly in Faial, Pico and the remote Corvo, produced a splendid travel diary, which once back in London the Bullar brothers published at John van Voorst’s printing press in 1841, under the title A Winter in the Azores and a Summer at the Furnas. One reads it today with admiration and amazement, though when all is said and done things on the Azores have not changed so very much.

  Almas or alminhas: souls and little souls. A cross on a square stone block with a blue-and-white tile in the middle depicting St Michael. The souls appear on 2 November when St Michael fishes them out of purgatory with a rope. He needs a rope for every soul. São Miguel is full of crosses, and hence of souls who haunt the reefs, the precipices, the lava beaches where the sea lashes. Late at night or very early in the morning, if you listen carefully you can hear their voices. Confused wailing, litanies, whispers, which the skeptical or distracted may easily mistake for the noise of the sea or the crying of the vultures. Many are the souls of shipwrecked sailors.

  The first ships of the Portuguese explorers broke up here, the pirate ships of Sir Walter Raleigh and the Earl of Cumberland, the Spanish fleet of Don Pedro de Valdez, who wanted to annex the Azores to King Philip’s crown. Actually the Spanish did manage to disembark and their ruin wasn’t complete until the battle of Salga fought on Terceira in 1581. The islanders waited for the Spanish army on top of a hill, then drove herds of crazed bulls down to rout the invaders. Among the Spanish were Cervantes and Lope de Vega, who described the savage battle in a quatrain.

  Then came the fashionable shipwrecks which made the headlines in newspapers and magazines. The vicissitudes of rich, bizarre travellers who had themselves photographed on their luxury yachts as they set sail from New York or New Bedford. Platinum blonde curls in the breeze, blazers with gold buttons, silk scarves. The champagne cork pops and the wine froths out of the bottle. One thinks of foxtrots and other dance music. The names of the boats are as whimsical as the lives of their owners: Ho Ho, Anahita, Banana Split. Bon voyage, sirs, announces some minor local politician come to cut the mooring line with silver scissors.

  The world is on the rocks too, but they don’t seem to notice.

  At the end of the nineteenth century, Albert I, Prince of Monaco, sailed by these islands on board his Hirondelle. It was in these seas that he carried out many of his excellent oceanographic studies, descended into the deepest waters in his pressure suit, catalogued unknown mollusks, strange life-forms with vague, uncertain shapes, fish and seaweeds. He left some very lively pages on the Azores, but what struck me most of all was his description of the death of a sperm whale, a gigantic animal whose doom is as majestic and terrifying as the wreck of a transatlantic liner.

  In order to observe the normal guidelines of the maritime authorities, the whalers move quickly to tow the sperm-whale’s carcass out to sea, since its decomposition would otherwise rapidly contaminate the whole surrounding area. It is not an easy task, for although it might seem sufficient to drag the carcass two or three hundred metres from the shore and rely on a favourable current to carry it away, the capricious wind can always bring it back; sometimes the whalers will struggle in vain to be rid of the stinking hulk for days and days. Then if the sea gets rough, the undesirable carrion may well be trapped by the waves beneath inaccessible cliffs whence its heavy stench will for months and months constitute a torment to the inhabitants of the region. Finally, one hot sunny day, the large intestine, blown up with gas, will explode with a boom, covering the surrounding area with bits of offal which constitute a delicious food for the multicoloured scavenger crabs. Sometimes these sinister creatures arrange to meet for their foul five o’clock tiffin with elegant shrimps which parade their delicate antennae over the enormous cake, always given that the high tide is so kind as to offer the latter a means of transport. But whatever the details, the fact remains that the poor sperm whale proceeds along the road of his ruin from the first wound inflicted on him by man right through to the action of the humble creatures who take him to the completion of that fatal cycle which is the destiny of every living being. The death of a sperm whale is as majestic as the crumbling of a great building, and in the necropolis set up by the whalers in the little bays, the animal’s remains pile up like the broken walls of a cathedral.

  For a long time I carried around in my memory a phrase of Chateaubriand’s: Inutile phare de la nuit. I believe I always attributed to these words the power of comfort in disenchantment: as when we attach ourselves to something that turns out to be an inutile phare de la nuit, yet nevertheless allows us to do something merely because we believed in its light: the power of illusions. In my memory this phrase was associated with the name of a distant and improbable island: Île de Pico, inutile phare de la nuit.

  When I was fifteen I read Les Natchez, an incongruous, absurd and in its way magnificent book. It was the gift of an uncle who for the whole of his short life cultivated the dream of becoming an actor and who probably loved Chateaubriand for his theatricality and scene painting. The book fascinated me, took my imagination by the hand and drew it with irresistible force through the stage curtains of adventure. I remember some passages of the book by heart and for years I thought that the phrase about the beacon belonged to it. Then it occurred to me to quote the exact passage in this notebook, so I reread Les Natchez, but couldn’t find my phrase. At first I thought it had escaped me because I had reread the book with the haste of one who is merely looking for a quote. Then I realized that not finding a phrase like this partakes of the most intimate sense of the phrase itself, and this was a consolation for me. I also wondered what part the perhaps unconscious forces of evocation and suggestion generated by this phrase might have played in calling me to an island where there was nothing to attract me. Sometimes the directions we take in our lives can be decided by the combination of a few words.

  I need only add that on Pico at night no beacons shone.

  Breezy and Rupert invite me onto their boat for a farewell drink. They are leaving in the afternoon, since in order to get away from the island they want to take advantage of the seven o’clock calm, a phenomenon which exists here as elsewhere. Moored opposite the water tanks, the Amadeus is blue and white, rocking gently, and it seems impossible to me that such a small boat is capable of crossing oceans.

  Rupert has very red hair, freckles, an amusing, Danny Kaye–like face. Perhaps he told me he was Scottish, or perhaps I just think of him as such because of his face. He used to work in a shipping company in London: years and years sitting at a table under electric light, dreaming of the distant ports whence the company’s exotic merchandise arrived. So one day he handed in his notice, sold what he had and bought this boat. Or rather, he had it custom-built to the design of a New York boat architect. And when I go below on the Amadeus I appreciate it isn’t quite the fragile eggshell it seems when you see it from the land. Breezy came with him and they live together on the boat. Welcome to our home, they say, laughing. Breezy has an open, very friendly face, a marvellous smile, and she’s wearing a long flowery dress as if preparing for a garden party, not a transatlantic crossing. The interior is furnished with hard woods and warm-colored upholsteries which immediately convey a feeling of comfort and safety. There is a small, well-stocked library. I begin to browse: Melville, of course, and Conrad and Stevenson. But there is Henry James too, and Kipling, Shaw, Wells, Dubliners, Somerset Maugham, Forster, Joyce Cary, H. E. Bates. I pick up The Jacaranda Tree and inevitably the conversation turns to Brazil. They have only been as far as Fortaleza do Ceará, sailing down the coasts of America. But they are saving Brazil for another trip; first Rupert has to arrange to rent out the Amadeus for a small luxury cruise. That’s how they live, renting out the boat, and usually Rupert stays on board and sails it. The rest of their life is all their own.