The Woman of Porto Pim Read online

  We lift our glasses and drink to their trip. May fair winds follow you, I toast, now and always. Rupert slides back the door of a shelf and slips a tape into the stereo. It is Mozart’s Concerto K 271 for piano and orchestra, and only now do I realize why the boat is called Amadeus. The shelf contains the complete works of Mozart on tape, catalogued with meticulous care. I think of Rupert and Breezy crossing the seas to the accompaniment of Mozart’s tunes and harpsichords, and for me the idea has a strange beauty to it, perhaps because I have always associated music with the idea of terra firma, of the concert hall or a cozy room in the half dark. The music takes on a solemn sound and draws us in. The glasses are empty, we get up and embrace each other. Rupert starts the engine, I climb onto the steps and with a jump am down on the wharf. There’s a soft light on the circle of houses which is Porto Pim. Amadeus turns in a wide curve and sets off at speed. Breezy is at the helm and Rupert is hoisting the sail. I stand there waving until Amadeus, all its sails already unfurled, reaches the open sea.

  When sailors stop at Horta it is a custom to leave a drawing with name and date on the wall of the wharf. The wall is a hundred metres long, and drawings of boats, flag colors, numbers and graffiti are all jumbled up one on top of the other. I record one of the many: “Nat, from Brisbane. I go where the wind takes me.”

  In July 1985, the winds brought Captain Joshua Slocum as far as Horta. Slocum was the first man to sail solo around the world. His yacht was called Spray and the impression you get from photographs is of a tub of a boat, clumsy and unstable, better suited for river sailing than a trip around the world. Captain Slocum left some quite beautiful pages on the Azores. I read them in his Sailing Alone Around the World, an old old edition, the cover decorated with a festoon of anchors.

  The winds also brought the only woman whaler I ever heard of to the Azores. Her name was Miss Elisa Nye. She was seventeen years old, and to reach her maternal grandfather, the naturalist Thomas Hickling, who had invited her to spend a year with him in his house in São Miguel, she thought nothing of boarding a whaler, the Sylph, which was travelling under sail from New Bedford to the Western Isles, as the American then called the Azores. Miss Elisa was a bright, enterprising girl, brought up in an American family of frugal and puritan traditions. She wasn’t discouraged by life on the whaler and did her best to make herself useful. Her trip lasted from 10 July to 13 August 1847. In her engaging diary, written with freshness and dispatch, she talks of the sea, of old Captain Garner, gruff and fatherly, the dolphins, the sharks and, of course, the whales. In her free time, apart form keeping up her diary, she read the Bible and Byron’s The Corsair.

  Peter’s Bar is a café on the dockside at Horta, near the sailing club. It is a cross between a tavern, a meeting point, an information agency and a post office. The whalers go there, but so too do the yachting folks crossing the Atlantic or making other long trips. And since the sailors know that Faial is an obligatory stopover point and that everybody passes through, Peter’s has become the forwarding address for precarious and hopeful messages that otherwise would have no destination. On the wooden counter at Peter’s the proprietor pins notes, telegrams, letters, which wait for someone to come and claim them. “For Regina, Peter’s Bar, Horta, Azores,” says an envelope with a Canadian stamp. “Pedro e Pilar Vazquez Cuesta, Peter’s Bar, Azores”: the letter was mailed in Argentina and has arrived just the same. A slightly yellowed note says: “Tom, excuse-moi, je suis partie pour le Brésil, je ne pouvais plus rester ici, je devenais folle. Écris-moi, viens, je t’attends. c/o Engenheiro Silveira Martins, Avenida Atlântica 3025, Copacabana. Brigitte.” Another implores: “Notice. To boats bound for Europe. Crew available!!! I am 24, with 26,000 miles of crewing/cruising/cooking experience. If you have room for one more, please leave word below! Carol Shepard.”

  She’s slim, very streamlined, built of top-quality material. She must have been around a great deal. She arrived in this port by chance. But then journeys are a chance. She’s called Nota azzurra. Mountains of fire, wind and solitude: thus in the sixteenth century did one of the first Portuguese travellers to land here describe the Azores.

  Antero de Quental

  A Life

  Antero was born the last of nine children into a large Azores family which possessed both pastureland and orange orchards, and so grew up amidst the austere and frugal affluence of island landowners. Among his forebears were an astronomer and a mystic, whose portraits, together with that of his grandfather, adorned the walls of a dark sitting room which smelt of camphor. His grandfather had been called André da Ponte de Quental and had suffered exile and prison for having taken part in the first liberal revolution in 1820. So much his father told him, a kind man who loved horses and had fought in the battle of Mindelo against the absolutists.

  To keep him company in his early years he had some small dappled colts and the archaic lullabies of serving women who came down from the mountains of São Miguel, where the villages are built of lava and have names like Caldeiras and Pico do Ferro. He was a calm pale child, with reddish hair and eyes so clear they sometimes seemed transparent. He spent the mornings on the patio of a solid house where the women kept the keys to the cupboards and the windows had curtains made from thick lace. He ran about letting out little whoops of joy and was happy. He was particularly close to his oldest brother, whose singular and bizarre intelligence would for long periods be overshadowed by a silent madness. Together they invented a game called Heaven and Earth, with cobblestones and shells for pieces, playing on a circular checkerboard sketched in the dust.

  When the child was of an age to learn, his father called the Portuguese poet Feliciano de Castilho to their house and entrusted him with the boy’s education. At the time Castilho was considered a great poet, perhaps because of his versions of Ovid and Goethe and perhaps again because of the misfortune of his blindness, which sometimes conferred on his poetry that prophetic tone beloved of the Romantics. In fact he was a peevish, crusty scholar with a preference for rhetoric and grammar. With him the young Antero learnt Latin, German and metrics. And amidst these studies he reached adolescence.

  On the April night of his fifteenth birthday, Antero woke up with a start and felt that he must go down to the sea. It was a calm night with a waxing moon. The whole household was asleep in silence and went down toward the cliffs. He sat on a rock and looked at the sky, trying to imagine what could have prompted him to come here. The sea was calm and breathed as though asleep, and the night was like any other night. Just that he had a great sense of disquiet, of anxiety weighing on his chest. And at that moment he heard a dull bellow rising from the earth and the moon turned blood red and the sea swelled up like an enormous belly to crash down on the rocks. The earth shook and the trees bent under the force of a rushing wind. Antero ran home, bewildered to find the family gathered together on the patio; but the danger was over now and the women’s embarrassment at being seen in their nightclothes was already greater than the fright they had suffered. Before going back to bed, Antero took a piece of paper and, unable to control himself, wrote down some words. And as he wrote he became aware that the words were arranging themselves on the page, by themselves almost, in the form and metre of a sonnet: and he dedicated it, in Latin, to the unknown god who was inspiring him. That night he slept soundly and at dawn dreamt that a small monkey with a sad ironic little face was offering him a note. He read the note and discovered a secret no one else had been allowed to know, except the monkey.

  He approached manhood. He studied astronomy and geometry, he came under the spell of Laplace’s cosmogony, of the idea of a unity of physical forces and a mathematical conception of space. In the evening he wrote descriptions of mysterious, abstract little contrivances, translating into words his ideas of the cosmic machine. By now he had resigned himself to his dreams of the small monkey with the sad ironic little face and was amazed those nights when the creature did not visit him.

  When he reached university age he left for Coimbra
as family tradition required and announced that the moment had come for him to give up his studies of cosmic laws and dedicate himself to the laws of man. He was now a tall, solid boy with a blond beard that gave him a majestic, almost arrogant look. In Coimbra he discovered love, read Michelet and Proudhon and, instead of studying the laws used to apply the justice of the time, got excited by the idea of a new justice based on the equality and dignity of man. He pursued this idea with the passion he had inherited from his island forebears, but likewise with the reason of the man he was, for he was convinced that justice and equality formed part of the geometry of the world. In the perfect, closed form of the sonnet, he expressed the ardor that possessed him and his eagerness for truth. He left for Paris and became a typesetter, the way someone else might have become a monk, because he wanted to experience physical tiredness and the concreteness of manual tools. After France he went to England and then North America, living in New York and Halifax, so as to get to know the new metropolises man was building and the different ways of life they engendered. By the time he went back to Portugal he had become a socialist. He founded the National Association of Workers, travelled and made converts, lived among the peasants, passed through his own islands with the fiery oratory of the demagogue; he came against the arrogance of the powerful, the flattery of the sly, the cowardliness of servants. He was animated by disdain and wrote sonnets full of sarcasm and fury. He also experienced the betrayal of certain comrades and the ambiguous alchemy of those who manage to combine the common good with their own advantage.

  He realized he would have to leave it to others more able than himself to press on with the work he had begun, almost as though that work no longer belonged to him. The time had come for practical men, and he was not practical. This filled him with a sense of desolation, like a child who loses his innocence and suddenly discovers how vulgar the world is. He wasn’t even fifty yet and his face was deeply scored. The eyes had sunk into hollows and his beard was going grey. He began to suffer from insomnia and in the rare moments when he did sleep would let out low muffled cries. Sometimes he had the impression his words did not belong to him and often to his surprise he would catch himself talking out loud alone as if he were somebody else talking to himself, Antero. A Parisian doctor diagnosed hysteria and prescribed electric shock therapy. In a note, Antero wrote that he was suffering from “the infinite,” and perhaps in his case this was the more plausible explanation. Perhaps he was just tired of this transitory, imperfect form of the ideal and of passion, his yearning now taking him toward another kind of geometrical order. In his writings, the word nothing began to appear, seeming to him now the most perfect form of perfection. In his forty-ninth year he returned to his native island.

  The morning of 11 September 1891 he left his house in Ponta Delgada, walked quickly down the steep shady road to Igreja Matriz and went into a small shop on the corner that sold arms. He was wearing a black suit and white shirt, his tie fixed with a tiepin made with a shell. The shopkeeper was a friendly, obese man who loved dogs and old prints. A bronze fan turned slowly in the ceiling. The owner showed his customer a beautiful seventeenth-century print he had recently bought depicting a pack of dogs chasing a stag. The old shopkeeper had been a friend of his father’s, and Antero remembered how, as a child, the two men had taken him to the Caloura fair, which boasted the best horses in São Miguel. They talked for a long time about dogs and horses, then Antero bought a small revolver with a short barrel. When he left the shop the bell tower of Matriz was striking eleven. He walked slowly along by the sea as far as the harbor office, and stood a long time on the wharf looking out at the clippers. Then he crossed the coast road and walked into the circle of gaunt plane trees around Praça da Esperança. The sun was fierce and everything was white. The praça was deserted at that time of day, because of the extreme heat. A sad-looking donkey, tied to a ring on a wall, let its head loll. As he was crossing the square, Antero caught the sound of music. He stopped and turned. In the opposite corner, under the shade of a plane tree, a tramp was playing a barrel organ. The tramp nodded and Antero walked over to him. He was a lean gypsy and he had a monkey on his shoulder. It was a small animal with a sad, ironic little face, wearing a red uniform with gold buttons. Antero recognized the monkey of his dreams and realized who it was. The animal held out its tiny black hand and Antero dropped a coin in it. In exchange the monkey pulled out one of the many slips of colored paper the gypsy kept tucked in the ribbon of his hat and offered it to him. He took it and read it. He crossed the praça, the trees, the sparkle of the sea, the gypsy playing his barrel organ. He felt a warm trickle running down his neck. He clicked the drum of the revolver and fired again. At which the gypsy disappeared along with the rest of the scene and the bells of the Matriz began to strike noon.

  II

  Of Whales and Whalemen

  High Seas

  Towards the end of the last war an exhausted and perhaps sick whale ran aground on the beach of a small German town, I don’t know which. Like the whale, Germany too was exhausted and sick, the town had been destroyed and the people were hungry. The inhabitants of the little town went to the beach to see this giant visitor who lay there in forced and unnatural immobility and breathed. A few days went by, but the whale didn’t die. Every day the people went to look at the whale. No one in the town knew how to kill an animal which wasn’t an animal but a huge dark, polished cylinder they had previously seen only in illustrations. Until one day someone took a big knife, went up to the whale, carved out a cone of oily flesh and hurried home with it. The whole population began to carve away pieces of the whale. They went at night, in secret, because they were ashamed to be seen, even though they knew everybody was doing the same thing. The whale went on living for many days, despite being riddled with horrific wounds.

  My friend Christopher Meckel told me this story some time ago. I thought I had got it out of my mind, but it came back to me all at once when I got off the boat on the island of Pico and there was a dead whale floating near the rocks.

  When whales float in the middle of the ocean they look like drifting submarines struck by torpedoes. And in their bellies one imagines a crew of lots of little Jonahs whose radar is out of operation and who have given up trying to contact other Jonahs and are awaiting their deaths with resignation.

  I read in a scientific review that whales use ultrasound to communicate with each other. They have extremely fine hearing and can pick up each other’s calls hundreds of kilometres away. Once, herds would communicate with each other from the most distant parts of the globe. Usually they were mating calls or other kinds of messages whose meaning we don’t understand. Now that the seas are full of mechanical noises and artificial ultrasound, the whale’s messages suffer such interference that other whales can no longer pick them up and decipher them. In vain they go on transmitting calls and signals which wander about lost in the depths of the sea.

  There is a position whales assume which fishermen describe as the “dead whale” pose. It is almost always the adult and isolated whale which does this. When “dead,” the whale appears to have abandoned itself completely to the surface of the sea, rising and falling without any apparent effort, as though in the grip of a deep sleep. Fishermen claim that this phenomenon occurs only on days of intense heat or with dead-calm seas, but the real reasons for the cetaceous catalepsy are unknown.

  Whalemen maintain that whales are entirely indifferent to a human presence even when they are copulating, and that they will let people get so close as to be able to touch them. The sex act takes place by pressing belly to belly, as in the human species. Whalemen say that while mating the heads of the pair come out of the water, but naturalists maintain that whales assume a horizontal position and that the vertical position is just a product of the fishermen’s imagination.

  Our knowledge of the birth of whales and the first moments of their lives is likewise fairly limited. In any event something different from what we know goes on with other marine
mammals must happen to prevent the young whale from being drowned or suffocated when the umbilical cord linking it to the mother’s vascular system breaks. As it is well known, birth and copulation are the only moments in the lives of other marine mammals when they seem to remember their terrestrial origins. Thus they come ashore only to mate and give birth, staying just long enough for the young to survive the first phases of their life. Of all terrestrial acts, this then should be the last to fade from the physiological memory of the whale, which of all aquatic mammals is the furthest from its terrestrial origins.

  No relationship exists between this gentle race of mammals, who like ourselves have red blood and milk, and the monsters of the previous age, horrible abortions of the primordial slime. Far more recent, the whale found cleansed water, an open sea and a peaceful earth. The milk of the sea and its oil abounded; its warm fat, animalized, seethed with extraordinary strength; it wanted to live. These elements fermented together and formed themselves into great giants, enfants gâtés of a nature which endowed them with incomparable strength and, more precious yet, fine fire-red blood. For the first time blood appeared on the scene. Here was the true flower of this world. All the creatures with pale, mean, languid, vegetating blood seem utterly without heart when compared to the generous life that boils up in this porpoise whether in anger or in love. The strength of the higher world, its charm, its beauty, is blood . . . But with this magnificent gift nervous sensibility is likewise infinitely increased. One is far more vulnerable, has far more capacity to suffer and to enjoy. Since the whale has absolutely no sense of the hunt, and its sense of smell and hearing are not very highly developed, everything is entrusted to touch. The fat which defends the whale from the cold does not protect it from knocks at all. Finely arranged in six separate tissues, the skin trembles and quivers at every contact. The tender papillae which cover the whale are the instruments of a most delicate sense of touch. And all this is animated, brought to life by a gush of red blood, which given the massive size of the animal is not even remotely comparable in terms of abundance to the blood of terrestrial mammals. A wounded whale floods the sea in a moment, dyes it red across a huge distance. The blood which we have in drops has been poured into the whale in torrents.