View of the World E-Book

Norman Lewis

• Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Collected between these covers are twenty of Norman Lewis's finest pieces of travel writing, spanning a period of 30 years. He brings us face to face with Castro's executioner, with a tragic Ernest Hemingway and with the unchanged lifestyle of fishermen in an unspoilt Ibiza. He describes the gentle pleasures of Belize, the ferocious blood feuds of Sardinian bandits and the unpleasant duty of repatriating Cossacks to the Soviet Union in 1944. At the heart of the collection is Lewis's famous report on the genocide of the Brazilians Indians, which led to the creation of Survival International - which campaigns for the rights of tribal peoples. This, Lewis felt, was the most important achievement of his professional life.

Leseprobe

A View of the World

Selected Journalism

NORMAN LEWIS

Contents

Title Page

Author’s Note

Foreword

1 A Quiet Evening in Huehuetenango

2 A Letter from Belize

3 Festival in Laos

4 The Bullfight Revisited

5 Rangoon Express

6 Ibiza

7 Assassination in Ibiza

8 ‘Tubman Bids Us Toil’

9 Goa

10 A Few High-Lifes in Ghana

11 Fidel’s Artist

12 Two Generals

13 Genocide

14 Surviving with Spirit

15 The White Promised Land

16 Seville

17 The Cossacks Go Home

18 A Mission to Havana

19 The Bandits of Orgosolo

20 High Adventure with the Chocos of Panama (six hours required)

About the Author

Copyright

Author’s Note

MOST OF THESE PIECES were originally written at the instigation of the New Yorker, the Sunday Times, the Observer and the New Statesman, to whose editors I make grateful acknowledgement. The first ten pieces were included in The Changing Sky (first published in 1959), the next eight are collected within a book for the first time; the final two have never previously been published.

Since the time of writing, changes of political direction have taken place in one or two countries about which I wrote. Occasionally, where it may interest the reader, I have added a date in square brackets; but I have made no attempt to bring the accounts up to date by reference to recent happenings, because what interested me was the background, and the style of life in a country, rather than the colour of threads in the political web.

Foreword

TRAVEL CAME BEFORE WRITING. There was a time when I felt that all I wanted from life was to be allowed to remain a perpetual spectator of changing scenes. I managed my meagre supply of money so as to be able to surrender myself as much as possible to this addiction, and charged with a wonderful ignorance I went abroad by third-class train, country bus, on foot, by canoe, by tramp steamer and by Arab dhow.

My travels started with Spain, where in the early thirties a fonda would furnish a windowless cell and an austere meal of bread, sausage and wine for the equivalent of a shilling; when Pedro Flores Atocha, last of the flamboyant bandits of Andalusia, was receiving the first of the Spanish film actresses in his mountain hideout, and you sometimes saw a picture of Lenin, or of the bullfighter Belmonte, in the places later occupied by a portrait of General Franco. In this then relatively incorruptible country, where merely by leaving the main road you could plunge immediately into Europe’s prehistoric past, I spent – divided over a number of visits – a total of about three years, and I still go there to get away from the insipidity of modern times whenever I can, although the Spain of old has only survived in a few relatively inaccessible parts of the interior.

After Spain it was the African meridionale of Italy, the Balkans, the Red Sea and Southern Arabia (in the dhow, thirty tons, undecked, crew of five, without lifeboat: a lifeboat would have been impiously calling into question God’s providence), then Mexico, North Africa, three winters in the Far East, Central America, Equatorial Africa, and the less travelled areas of South America: Amazonian Brazil, the Savannahs of Venezuela, Bolivia and Paraguay. At first I believed in pure travel, and that it was necessary never to have a purpose. I arrived, watched a little, and when my amazement began to subside, my impressions to dull, I moved on. When I began to write it was probably, at least in part, in an attempt to imprison some essence of the experiences, the images which were always slipping, fading, dissolving, taking flight. Later I found that the discipline of writing compelled me to see more, to penetrate more deeply to increase my understanding and to discard a little of my ignorance. Still later I began to weave the background and the incidents of travel into my novels, and now, as I observe the change that has taken place over the years, I wonder if I am any longer capable of enjoying travel for its own sake.

Insurgents and bandits, malaria, curtains of various kinds, whether lowered by politicians or by the priest-kings of their day, like the Imam of the Yemen – I am reminded that those parts of the world where I have travelled most happily, those countries which had most preserved their peculiar style and character, always seemed to suffer from these disadvantages, and that on the other hand those that seemed to me hardly worth a visit and certainly not worth writing about were those that had succumbed to a flaccid and joyless prosperity which they were doing their best to export to the rest of the world. Ironically, so much that is of value has been protected by poverty, bad communications, reactionary governments, the natural barriers to progress of mountain, desert and jungle, colonial misrule, the anopheles mosquito.

The pieces in this collection are mostly about places to escape to when one has had a surfeit of the amenities of the modern world. Belize (colonial neglect) is a living museum, a wondrous survival of a Caribbean colony of the last century. Liberia (bad communications plus bad government) offers an extraordinary example of what can be done in the names of Freedom and Democracy when released slaves are turned loose on native Africans, who until the said released slaves appeared on the scene, had had the good fortune to remain free. Guatemala (colonial misrule plus reactionary governments plus endless revolution) is the last home of the uncontaminated Red Man – the Mayan Indian – living, to be sure, in much reduced circumstances, but still defending himself with fair success from all the overtures of the West.

NORMAN LEWIS, 1959

THE FOREGOING was written a quarter of a century ago, and whatever validity my theories about the protective properties of bad government, bad communications etc. may have possessed at that time, it has certainly been lost, and I now repudiate them. The great divide in my writings, the swing round in my viewpoint, followed a visit in 1968 to Brazil on behalf of the Sunday Times to investigate the atrocities committed against the Indians of that country which, had they not been halted, would have long since meant their total extermination. The ensuing article (reproduced in this book) I regard as the most worthwhile of all my endeavours, and I have reason to believe that it at least saved some lives, and probably even benefited the long-term prospects of the Amerindians.

Bad governments preserve nothing, and even good ones have a mediocre record in this direction, and I cannot think of any single place that I have written about that did not appear to have gone down hill – sometimes disastrously so – on a subsequent visit. The war in Vietnam put an end to all the ancient glories of the Indo China I knew. Guatemala, which I used to think of as the most beautiful country in the world, has become after thirty years of puppet military government, imposed from without, the cemetery of its indigenous population. In a single year alone – 1979 – when I wrote of the destruction of the Amazonian forests of Brazil, three million hectares were ‘cleared’ (with all the teeming wildlife they contained) by the now classic method of defoliants followed by napalm. Flying over the jungle for a thousand miles – almost from one end of Brazil to the other – all one saw of it was smoke. The vanished trees will be replaced by cattle ranches, in the certain knowledge that their ‘life’ will average ten years, and that the desert will follow.

At the present rate of clearance the Amazonian forest will have ceased to exist somewhere between the years 2000 and 2010, terminal dates also applicable to the great rainforest of South-East Asia, sacrificed in this case not to ranching but to timber extraction interests. It is not possible in the face of such calamities to keep silent, to remain a perpetual spectator.

NORMAN LEWIS, 1985

1

A Quiet Evening in Huehuetenango

IN THE BLEAK DEPTHS of an interminable English winter, I was suddenly seized with an almost physical craving to write a novel having as its background the tropical jungles and volcanoes of Central America. Having succeeded in persuading my publishers that this would be a good thing from both our points of view, I boarded a plane at London Airport one morose evening in January, and two days later I was in Guatemala City. I chose Guatemala because I had been there before and knew something about it, but also because all that one thinks of as typical of the Central-American scene – primitive Indians, Mayan ruins, the wrecks of grandiose Spanish colonial cities – is found there in the purest concentration.

For three weeks I did my best to absorb some of the atmosphere of life in seedy banana ports of the Caribbean and the Pacific, where bored men in big hats still occasionally pull guns on each other. I went hunting in jungles said to abound with jaguars and tapir without shooting anything more impressive than a species of giant rat. I talked with wily politicians of the country, survivors of half a dozen revolutions, and took tea with exiled fellow-countrymen on isolated coffee plantations, who had lived so long among the Indians that they sometimes stopped in mid-sentence to translate their very proper English sentiments from the Spanish in which they now thought.

My final trip was to the far north of the country, the remote and mountainous area beyond Huehuetenango, which lies just south of the Mexican state of Chiapas and is reached after three hundred miles of infamous roads and stupendous scenery. Here under the Cuchumatanes, the ultimate peaks of Guatemala, even the onslaught of the Spanish conquistadors faltered and collapsed. And here the mountain tribes were finally left in peace, to live on in the harsh but free existence of the Stone Age, touched only by the outward forms of Christianity, consoled in secret by the ancient gods, and rejecting with all their might all the overtures of Western civilisation.

In the early afternoon of the fourth day, my taxi, driven by a town Indian from Guatemala City called Calmo, reached the top of the 12,000-foot pass overlooking the valley of Huehuetenango. We stopped here to let the engine cool, and noticing that the trees in this wind-swept place were covered with orchids, I astounded Calmo by suggesting we should pick some. ‘Flowers?’ he said. ‘Where? They don’t grow at this height!’ I stumbled, weak and breathless from the altitude, up the hillside towards an oak, loaded with vermilion-flowered bromeliads. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘you mean the parasitos. Well, certainly, if you like, sir. When you said flowers, I didn’t realise… We call these weeds – tree-killers.’ Calmo was not only an intrepid driver, but a qualified guide supplied by the State Tourist Office. He spoke a version of English which so effectively stripped the meaning from his remarks that I steered him back to Spanish whenever I could. For the rest, he was gentle, sad-looking and pious, dividing his free time between visits to churches and – although well into middle life – running after girls.

We got into Huehuetenango at four in the afternoon, and it turned out to be an earthquake town, with corrugated-iron roofs on fine churches, squat houses iced over with multicoloured stuccoes, and a great number of pubs having such names as ‘I Await Thee on Thy Return’. We went into one of these, each of us carrying an armful of orchids, Calmo probably hoping that no one he knew would see him bothering himself with such contemptible weeds. The woman who brought the beer had a Mayan face, flat-featured but handsome, and full of inherited tragedy. Calmo told her in his most dignified way, ‘This I say with all sincerity. I want to come back to this place and marry you.’ The woman said, ‘Ah bueno,’ shaking off the compliment as if an invisible fly had settled on her cheek. She wore a massive wedding ring, and there were several children about the floor.

After that, Calmo wanted to go into the cathedral to pray for success in that week’s lottery. The cathedral had just been freshly decorated for the pre-Lenten festival with huge bouquets of imitation flowers, their stiff petals varnished, and dusted over with powdered glass. Indians were lighting candles among the little separate patches of red and white blossoms they had spread out on the flags to symbolise the living and the dead. Hundreds of candles glimmered in the obscurity of the cleared space where the Indians worship in their own way in the Christian churches, grouped in whispering semicircles round the candles, while their shamans passed from group to group, swinging incense-burners and muttering magical formulas. The Indians were dressed in the frozen fashions of the early sixteenth century; the striped breeches of Castilian peasants, the habits of the first few Franciscans who had scaled the heights to reach their villages, the cod-pieces of Alvarado’s ferocious soldiery. They had left their babies hidden in the old people’s care in the mountain caves, still remembering the days before the conquest, when at this season the rain god had taken the children for his annual sacrifice. These Indians were still surrounded by a world of magic and illusion, living characters in a Grimm’s fairytale of our day in which the whites they see when they come down to the towns are enchanters and werewolves, who can kill with a glance, but are themselves immortal.

We went out into the sunshine again. A meteorite shower of parakeets fell screeching across the patch of sky stretched over the plaza. Soldiers, shrunken away in their American uniforms, were fishing in space with their rifles over the blood-red balustrade of the town hall, which was also their barracks. The green bell in the cathedral tower clanked five times, and the sleepers on the stone benches stirred a little in the vast shade of their sombreros. Calmo woke up an ice-cream vendor, bought a cornet, then said, ‘I cannot eat it. The hot for my teeth is too great.’ When speaking English he found special difficulty in distinguishing between opposites such as heat and cold.

We sat down in the car to decide what to do with the evening. The sleepiness of the place was beginning to paralyse us. Nothing stirred but the vultures waving their scarves of shadow over the flower beds. Calmo said, ‘Yesterday a market-day, tomorrow a procession; so that today we have no prospect but an early night. There is really nothing to do.’ As he spoke, a man came riding into the plaza on a tall, bony horse. The man looked like an Englishman on his way to a fancy-dress ball: he was lean, pink-cheeked, mildly aloof of expression, and his improbable costume of black leather with silver facings had clearly been hired out too often and was on the loose side for its present wearer. He was carrying a bundle of what looked like yard-brooms wrapped up in coloured paper. Calmo explained that these would be rockets for use in the next day’s celebrations. The clip-clop of the hooves died away, and the silence came down like a drop-curtain. Huehuetenango was a place of apathetic beauty, built out of the ruin of a devastated Indian city. There was a sadness, a sense of forgotten tragedy in the air; and here it seemed that silence was a part of the natural condition. As Calmo had so often said, ‘We Indians are a reserved people. Even in our fiestas. Our joys and our weepings are hidden away inside: for us only, you understand – not for the world.’

There was a notice over the hotel door that said, ‘Distinction, Atmosphere and Sympathy’. The atmosphere was all-pervasive. The garden had been turned into a floral jungle encircled by borders of Pepsi-Cola bottles stuck neck-down in the earth. Quite ordinary flowers like stocks and hollyhocks were throttling each other in a savage struggle for living space, and humming-birds like monstrous bees zoomed about the agonised sea of blossom. Goldfish bowls containing roses hideously pickled in preserving fluid, stood on every table-top. The bedroom towels were embroidered with the words, ‘Sleep My Beloved’.

Food in this hotel was American Plan – words which have now been accepted into the Spanish vocabulary of Central America and no longer refer to the system of charging for accommodation inclusive of meals, but describe a special kind of food itself – the hygienic but emasculated fare supposed to be preferred by American visitors, and now generally adopted on the strength of what are believed to be its medicinal and semi-magical properties. This time American Plan meant tinned soup, spaghetti, boiled beef and Californian peaches. The whole loaf of bread and a half-pound of butter of a generation ago had wasted away to two slices of toast and a pat of margarine. The milk was the product of Contented Cows, served in the original tin as a guarantee of the absence of dangerous freshness. We got through the boring ritual of dinner as soon as we could. The other guests – business men drawn from the elite ten per cent of pure white stock – were still inclined to congratulate one another on the downfall of the last government, which had not been approved of in commercial circles. ‘A minimum wage. And why not? – I’d be the first. But when all’s said and done, friends, what happens when you give an Indian more than forty cents for a day’s work? You know as well as I do. He doesn’t show up the next day – that’s all. They’ve got to be educated up to it.’

After dinner I resigned myself to an early evening, and went to bed under a religious picture consisting of an eye projecting rays in all directions, and beneath it the question: ‘What is a moment of pleasure weighed in the scales against an eternity of punishment?’ I had hardly dozed off when I was awakened by an explosion. I got up and opened the window. The street had filled up with people who were all going in the same direction and chattering excitedly. A siren wailed and a motorcycle policeman went past deafeningly, snaking in and out of the crowd. There was another explosion, and as this was the homeland of revolutions it was natural to assume that one had started. I dressed and went out into the courtyard, where the hotel boy was throwing a bayonet at an anatomical chart given away with a Mexican journal devoted to home medicine. The boy said that so far as he knew there had been no pronunciamento, and the bangs were probably someone celebrating his saint’s day. I then remembered the lean horseman.

As the tumult showed no signs of abating I walked down to the plaza, which had filled up with blank-faced Indians moving slowly round in an anti-clockwise direction as if stirred up by some gigantic invisible spoon. There were frequent scuffles and outcries as young men singled out girls from the promenading groups and broke coloured eggs on their heads, rubbing the contents well into the thick black hair. The eggs were being sold by the basketful all over the plaza, and they turned out to have been emptied, refilled with some brittle, wafer-like substance, repaired and then painted. When a girl sometimes returned the compliment, the gallant thus favoured stopped to bow, and said: ‘Muchas gracias.’

Calmo, whom I soon ran into, his jacket pockets bulging with eggs, said it looked as if there were going to be a fiesta after all. He couldn’t think why. There was really no excuse for it. The fashionable town-Indians, most of them shopkeepers, had turned out in all their finery, headed by the ‘Queen of Huehuetenango’ herself – a splendidly beflounced creature with ribbon-entwined pigtails down to her thighs, who was said to draw her revenues from a maison de rendezvouspossessing radioactive baths. There was a sedate sprinkling of whites, hatted and begloved for the occasion.

Merchants had put up their stalls and were offering sugar skulls, holy pictures, plastic space-guns, and a remedy for heart-sickness which is a speciality of Huehuetenango and tastes like inferior port. We found the lean horseman launching his rockets in military fashion from a wooden rack-like contraption. They were aimed so as to hiss as alarmingly low as possible over the heads of the crowds, showering them with sparks, and sometimes they cleared the building opposite and sometimes they did not. Other enthusiasts were discharging mortaretes, miniature flying bombs, which leaped two or three hundred feet straight up into the air before exploding with an ear-stunning crack. The motorcycle policeman on his scarlet Harley-Davidson with wide-open exhaust, and eight front and six rear lights, came weaving and bellowing round the plaza at intervals of about a minute, and a travelling movie-show was using part of the cathedral’s baroque façade as the screen for a venerable Mexican film called Ay mi Jalisco featuring a great deal of gunplay.

A curious hollow structure looking like a cupola sliced in half had been built on the top of the town hall, and about this time powerful lights came on in its interior and nine sad-faced men in dark suits entered it by an invisible door, carrying what looked like several grand pianos. A moment later these pieces of furniture had been placed end to end to form an enormous marimba, under an illuminated sign that said ‘Musica Civica’. A cosmic voice coughed electrically and then announced that in response to the esteemed public’s many requests the municipal orchestra would have pleasure in rendering a selection of notable composers’ works. Eighteen hammers then came down on the keys with a responding opening flourish, and the giant marimba raced into an athletic version of ‘If You Were the Only Girl in the World’.

Calmo and I took refuge from the torrent of sound in a tavern called The Little Chain of Gold. It was a place of great charm containing a shrine and a newly installed jukebox in addition to the usual accessories, and was decorated with beautiful calendars given away by Guatemalan bus companies, and a couple of propaganda pictures of mutilated corpses put out by the new government after the last revolution. The Little Chain advertised the excellence of its ‘hotsdoogs’. Most of its customers were preparados, Indians who had done military service and had rejected their tribal costumes in favour of brightly coloured imitations of American army uniforms. Some of them added a slightly sinister touch to their gay ensembles of reds and blues by covering the lower part of their faces with black cloths, a harmless freak of fashion which I was told had originated in a desire to breathe in as little dust as possible when foot-slogging along the country roads.

Calmo said that the main difference between a preparado and a tribal Indian was that the preparado, who had acquired a civilised taste for whisky, couldn’t afford to get drunk so often as an uncivilised drinker of aguardiente.

We drank the aguardiente. It smelt of ether and had a fierce laboratory flavour. Every time the door opened the marimba music pressed on our eardrums. Calmo made an attempt to detain one of the serving girls. ‘Don’t go away, little treasure, and I’ll bring you some flowers from the gardens in the plaza, whatever they fine me.’ He received so baleful a stare for his pains that he dropped the girl’s hand as if she had bitten him. At last the hour of civic music ran out. From where we sat we saw that the Mexican outlaws had ceased to gallop across the cathedral wall. The crowds had thinned into groups of stubborn drunkards. Calmo was becoming uneasy. ‘In my opinion it is better to go. These people are very peace-loving, but when they become drunk they sometimes assassinate each other in places like this. Not for malicious reasons, understand me, but as the result of wagers or to demonstrate the accuracy of their aim with the various fire-arms they possess.’

We paid our bill and had just got up when the door was flung open and three of the toughest-looking desperadoes I had ever seen reeled in. These were no shrinking Indians, but hard-muscled ladinos, half-breeds who carried in their faces all the Indian’s capacity for resentment but none of his fear. They wore machetes as big as naval cutlasses in their belts. For a moment they blocked the doorway eyeing the company with suspicion and distaste, then one of them spotted the jukebox, which was still a rarity in this part of the world. His expression softened and he made for our table putting each foot down carefully as if afraid of blundering into quicksands. He bowed. ‘Forgive me for addressing you, sir, but are you familiar with the method of manipulating the machine over there?’

I said I was.

‘Perhaps then you could inform me whether the selection of discs includes a marimba?’

I went over to the jukebox. These ladinos, I thought, would still be living the frontier life of the last century; a breed of tough, illiterate outcasts, picking up a livelihood as best they could, smugglers and gunmen if pushed to it, ready, as it seemed from the frequent newspaper reports, to hack each other – or the lonely traveller – to pieces for a few dollars, and yet with it a tremendous, almost deadly punctiliousness in ordinary matters of social intercourse. I studied the typewritten list in Spanish. There were several marimbas. The ladino looked relieved. He conferred in an undertone with the other two fugitives from justice, came back, bowed again, and handed me a Guatemalan ten-cent piece. ‘If you could induce the machine to play “Mortal Sin” for us, we should be much indebted.’

I returned the ladino five cents change, found a US nickel – which is fairly common currency in Guatemala – and put it in the slot, while the three ladinos edged forward, studiously casual but eager to watch the reptilian mechanical gropings by which their choice was singled out and manoeuvred into the playing position. ‘Pecado Mortal’ turned out to be a rollicking son – a kind of paso doble – executed with the desperate energy of which the sad music-makers of Central America are so prodigal. Calmo and I were halfway through the door when I felt a tap on the shoulder. The principal bandit was insisting that we join him for a drink. ‘Otherwise, my friends and I would feel hurt, gentlemen.’ He laid bare his teeth in a thin, bitter smile. We went back and sat down again. While he was getting the drinks Calmo said, ‘In the education of our people the most important thing taught after religion is urbanidad – good manners. Even those who have no schooling are taught this. I do not think that we should risk offending these men by showing a desire to leave before they do.’

A moment later our bandit was back with double aguardientes and a palmful of salt for us to lick in the proper manner, between gulps. The music stopped, and his face clouded with disappointment. Behind him a lieutenant loomed, swaying slightly, eyes narrowed like a Mongolian sage peering into the depths of a crystal, mouth tightened by the way life had gone. He was holding a coin. ‘Might I trouble you to perform the same service for me, sir?’ he asked politely.

It turned out that the second mestizo wanted to hear ‘Mortal Sin’ again. ‘It is remarkable,’ he said, ‘and most inspiring. I do not think it can be bettered.’ The three tough hombres moved away uncertainly towards the jukebox again, simple wonderment struggling beneath the native caution of their expressions. The needle crackled in the ruined grooves, and we heard the over-familiar overture of ear-splitting chords. Someone found the volume control and turned it up fully. Every object in the room was united in a tingling vibration. The second bandit drew his machete with the smooth, practised flourish of a Japanese swordsman, and scooped the cork out of a fresh bottle of aguardiente with a twist of its point. Two more members of the band stood waiting, coins in hand.

‘Mortal Sin’ had been played five times, and we were still chained by the polite usage of Central America to our chairs, still gulping down aguardiente and licking the salt off our palms, when it suddenly occurred to me that it was unreasonable that an electric train should be rumbling through a subway immediately beneath us in Huehuetenango. I got up, grinning politely at our hosts, and, balancing the liquid in my glass, went to the door. The lamps in the plaza jogged about like spots in front of my eyes, and then, coming through the muffled din from The Little Chain of Gold, I heard a noise like very heavy furniture being moved about in uncarpeted rooms somewhere in space. The world shifted slightly, softened, rippled, and there was an aerial tinkling of shattered glass. I felt a brief unreasoning stab of the kind of panic that comes when in a nightmare one suddenly begins a fall into endless darkness. Aguardiente from my glass splashed on my hand, and at that moment all the lights went out and the music stopped with a defeated growl. The door of The Little Chain opened and Calmo and one of the ladinos burst through it into the sudden crisp stillness and the moonlight. Calmo had taken the ladino by the forearm and the shoulder – ‘And so my friend we go now to buy candles. Patience – we shall soon return.’

‘But in the absence of electricity,’ the ladino grumbled sadly, ‘the machine no longer functions.’

‘Perhaps they will restore the light quickly,’ Calmo said.

‘In that case we shall play the machine again. We will spend the whole night drinking and playing the machine.’ The ladino waved in salutation and fell back through the doorway of The Little Chain.

We moved off quickly under the petrified foliage of the plaza. Nothing stirred. The world was solid under our feet again. A coyote barked several times sounding as if it were in the next street, and a distant clock chimed sweetly an incorrect hour.

‘A quiet evening,’ I remarked. ‘With just one small earthquake thrown in.’

‘A tremor, not an earthquake,’ Calmo said. ‘An earthquake must last at least half a minute. This was a shaking of secondary importance.’

There was a pause while he translated his next sentence into English. He then said: ‘Sometimes earthquakes may endure for a minute, or even two minutes. In that case it is funny … No, not funny, I mean very serious.’

2

A Letter from Belize

SOMEONE IN MERIDA said that a good way to go to Belize was from Chetumal in south-east Mexico by a plane known in those parts as ‘El Insecto’, that did the twice-weekly run. My informant pointed out that this route was cheaper and more direct than going via Guatemala, as well as giving anyone the chance to get away from the insipidities of air travel with the big international lines. I agreed with him, and went down to Chetumal on a veteran DC3 that was the last surviving plane of a small tattered fleet once possessed by this particular company. Chetumal turned out to be a nicely painted-up little town with a wonderful prison, like a Swedish sanatorium. There were seven people at the airport seeing other people off for every one that was travelling, and going through the customs and emigration was a purely family affair. I found ‘EI Insecto’, which was a four-seated Cessna, in a field full of yellow daisies, and helped the pilot to pull it out on to the runway. When it took off he leaned across me to make sure that the door was properly shut. There were a few cosy rattles in the cabin, of the kind that most cars develop after some years of honourable service. These added to the pleasantly casual feeling of the trip. Duplicate controls wavered a foot or two from the tip of my nose, and the pilot cautioned me against taking hold of them to steady myself in an air pocket. ‘These small planes take more flying than an airliner,’ he said. But apart from fiddling with the throttle lever, probably out of pure habit, and an occasional dab at the joystick, he did nothing to influence our course as we wobbled on through the air currents.

Beneath, the not very exuberant forest of the Orange Walk district of British Honduras unrolled itself. As the Cessna flew at about 2000 feet, the details were clear enough. Even birds were visible. A pair of flamingos parted company like a torn flag, and a collection of white maggots, that were egrets, were eating into the margins of a pool. We were following the coastline, a mile or two inland, with the horizons wrapped up in turbans of cumulus cloud, and a few white thorns of fishing-boats’ sails sticking up through the sea’s surface. Approaching Belize, swamps began to lap through the dull, dusty green of the jungle. They were gaudy with stagnation; sulphurous yellows, vitriolic greens and inky blues stirred together like badly mixed dyes in a vat. The pilot pointed out some insignificant humps and thickenings in the forest’s texture. These were Mayan remains; root-shattered pyramids and temples. Around them would lie the undisturbed tombs, the skeletons in their jade ornaments. The pilot estimated that only ten per cent of these sites had ever been interfered with.

The airport at Belize was negatively satisfying. There were no machines selling anything, playing anything, or changing money. Nor were there any curios, soft drinks or best-sellers in sight. Under a notice imparting uninteresting information about the colony’s industries, a nurse waited, ready to pop a thermometer into the mouth of each incoming passenger. The atmosphere was one of somnolent rectitude. A customs officer, as severely aloof as a voodoo priest, ignored my luggage, which was taken over by a laconic taxi-driver, who opened the door of his car with a spanner and nodded to me to get in. We drove off at a startling pace down a palmetto-fringed road, by a river that was full of slowly moving, very green water. Presently the road crossed the river over an iron bridge, and the driver stopped the car. Winding down the window he put out his head and peered down with silent concentration at the water. Although he made no comment, I subsequently learned that he was probably admiring a thirty-foot-long sawfish, which lived on the river bed at this spot, and was claimed locally to be the largest of its species recorded anywhere in the world.

From a view of its outskirts Belize promised to live up to the romantic picture I had formed of it in my imagination. There were the wraiths of old English thatched cottages (a class of structure pleasantly known in Belize as ‘trash’), complete with rose gardens with half the palings missing from the fences. Some of their negro occupants were to be seen shambling about aimlessly, and others had fallen asleep in the attitudes of victims of murder plots. Pigeons and vultures huddled amicably about the roofs. Notices on gates which hung askew from single rusty hinges warned the world at large to beware of non-existent dogs.

Disillusionment came a few minutes later when we pulled up at the hotel. Here it was that I realised that what information I had succeeded in collecting about Belize before leaving England was out of date. According to an account published in the most recent book dealing with this part of the world, the single hotel had possessed all the seedy glamour one might have looked for in such a remote and reputedly neglected colonial possession. But I had arrived eighteen months too late. Newcomers are now conducted, without option, to a resplendent construction of the kind for which basic responsibility must rest with Frank Lloyd Wright – a svelte confection of pinkish ferroconcrete, artfully simple, and doubtlessly earthquake-resistant. As the Fort George turned out to serve good strong English tea, as the waiter didn’t expect to be tipped after each meal, and as you could leave your shoes outside the bedroom door to be cleaned without their being stolen, there were – even from the first – no possible grounds for complaint. But it soon became clear that besides these considerable virtues the Fort George had many secondary attractions which peeped out shyly as the days went by. Little by little the rich, homely, slightly dotty savour of British Honduras seeped through its protective walls to reach me. I began to take a collector’s pride in such small frustrations as the impossibility of getting a double whisky served in one glass. Two single whiskies always came. Also, the architectural pretensions were much relieved by such pleasing touches as the show-cases in the vestibule which displayed, along with a fine Mayan incense-burner in the form of a grotesque head, a few pink antlers of coral, odd-shaped roots, horns carved into absurd birds and a detachable pocket made of pink shells, recommended as ‘a chic addition to the cocktail frock’.

Part of the Fort George’s charm arose from the fact that the staff, who spoke among themselves a kind of creole dialect, sometimes had difficulty in understanding a guest’s requirements. This went with a certain weakness in internal liaisons, and from the operation of these two factors arose many delightfully surrealistic incidents. At any hour of the night, for example, one might be awakened by a maid bearing a raw potato on a silver tray, or be presented with four small whiskies, a bottle of aspirins and a picture postcard of the main façade of the Belize fish market, dated 1904. The Fort George, incidentally, must be one of the very few hotels in the world where the manager is prepared to supply to order, and without supplementing the all-in charge, such local delicacies as roast armadillo, tapir or paca – the last-mentioned being a large edible rodent, in appearance something between a rabbit and a pig, whose flesh costs more per pound than any other variety offered for sale in the market. Of these exotic specialities I was only able to try the paca, and can report that, as usual in the case of such rare and sought-after meats, the flavour was delicate to the point of non-existence. The fascination of life at the Fort George grew steadily. It was a place where any beginner could have gone to get his basic training in watching the world go by, and many an hour I spent there, over a cold beer and the free plateful of lobster that always came with it, listening to the slap of the pelicans as they hit the water, while doves the size of sparrows fidgeted through the flowering bushes all round; and the rich Syrian – part of the human furniture of such places – drove his yellow Cadillac endlessly up and down the deserted hundred yards of the Marine Parade.

Among the many self-deprecatory reports sponsored by the citizens of Belize is one that their town was built upon a foundation of mahogany chips and rum bottles. True enough the mahogany, which is the principal source of the colony’s income, is everywhere. It is a quarter of the price of the cheapest pitch-pine sold anywhere else, and everything from river barges to kitchen tables are made from it. Local taste, however, which has become contemptuous of a too familiar beauty, prefers to conceal the wood, where possible, beneath a layer of fibre-glass, or patterned linoleum. As for the rum, it costs thirty-five cents a bottle, tastes of ether, and is seriously recommended by local people as an application for dogs suffering from the mange. It is drunk strictly within British licensing hours, which take no account of tropical thirst, and plays its essential part in the rhythm of sin and atonement in the lives of a people with a nonconformist tradition and too much time on their hands.

Although of almost pure negroid stock, the citizens of Belize have succeeded in creating a pattern of society – if due allowance is made for their economic limitations – modelled with remarkable fidelity upon that of their colonial overlords. From their vociferous nonconformity, as well as the curiously Welsh accent underlying the local creole, it is tempting to theorise that the lower-grade colonials they came most in contact with hailed from the Principality, and in Belize it is sometimes possible to imagine oneself in a district of Cardiff settled by coloured people. The evangelism of the chronically depressed area flourishes. There is always a chapel just round the corner; commercial enterprises give themselves such titles as The Holy Redeemer Credit Union; and one is constantly confronted by angry notices urging repentance and the adoption of the Good Life. Even the prophetic books are unable to supply enough warning texts to satisfy the Honduran appetite for admonition. An eating-house, which advertises the excellence of its cow-heel, observes enigmatically at the foot of its list of plats du jour, ‘The soul, like the body, lives on what it feeds.’ Not, by the way, that one Englishman in fifty thousand had ever tasted cow-heel – a variety of soup which as far as I know is indigenous to the neighbourhood of Liverpool, in the country of its origin. This was only one of a number of intriguing gastronomic survivals: ‘savoury duck’ – a rude but vigorous forefather of the hamburger, once eaten in Birmingham; ‘spotted dick’ – rolled suet-pudding containing raisins; ‘toad-in-the-hole’ – sausages baked in batter: both the latter dishes once a feature of popular eating-houses all over England, but now usually disregarded.

One constantly stumbles upon relics of provincial Britain preserved in the embalming fluid of the Honduran way of life, and often what has been taken over from the mother country is strikingly unsuitable in its new surroundings. The minor industries, for instance, such as boat-building, are carried on in enormous wooden sheds, the roofs of which are supported by the most complicated system of interlacing beams and girders I have ever seen. One thinks immediately of hurricanes, but on second thoughts it is clear that all this reinforcement would be valueless against the lateral thrust of a high wind. It turns out that such buildings were copied from originals put up by Scottish immigrants, and were designed to withstand the snow-loads imposed by the severest northern storms.

Many of the Scotsmen themselves lie buried in the city’s cemeteries, both of which are located in the middle of wide roads, just where in Latin America the living would have taken their nightly promenade in formal gardens. Many of the dead, the inscriptions tell us, were sea-captains. They came here to die of fever, or were sometimes murdered, and in this case the inscription supplies the exact time of the tragedy, but no more than this and an affirmation of the victim’s hope of immortality. The tombstones serve conveniently for the drying of the washing of the neighbours on both sides of the road. It is not a bad place at all to lie, for those who were confident of the body’s resurrection – by the white houses, and the lemon-striped telegraph poles, with the constant bustle and chatter of bright-eyed crows in the trees above, and the eternal British-Sunday-afternoon strumming of a piano in a chapel just down the road.

Death took these captains by surprise. It was never old age or a wasting sickness, but always the mosquito or the dagger that struck them down. No Britisher ever wanted to lay his bones anywhere but in the graveyard of his own parish church in the home country. In this lies the key to all the unsoundable differences between the Spanish and the British colonies. The Spaniard took Spain with him. The Briton was always an exile, living a provisional and makeshift existence, even creating for himself a symbol of impermanence in his ramshackle wooden house.

One of the first things that strike the newcomer to Belize who has seen anything of life in the West Indies is the mysterious absence of anything that might come under the heading of Having a Good Time. There are no calypsos, no ash-can orchestras, no jungle drums, no half-frantic voodoo devotees gyrating round some picturesque mountebank. The Hondurans sacrifice no cocks to the old African gods, and feuds are settled by interminable lawsuit or swift machete blows, but in either case without recourse to the black magic of the obeahman. This in some ways is a pity, because by virtue of the fact that timber extraction, the main occupation, ceases with the wet season, people are left with several months to fill in, and with not the faintest idea of what to do with themselves, apart from chapel-going, playing dominoes, and suffering the afflictions of love. This highly un-African existence, with its complete ineptitude for self-entertainment, is probably the result of certain historical factors. The colony was founded by an English buccaneer called Wallace – Belize is a corruption of his name – who turned from piracy to the more dependable profits of logwood extraction. The slave-owning Wallace and his successors were very few in number. They were exposed to frequent attacks by the warlike Indians of southern Yucatan, and to the constant threat of action by the Spanish, who never recognised the legality of their settlement. The interlopers could only hope to defend themselves, and to keep their foothold, by arming their slaves, who would certainly have taken the first opportunity of pistolling their masters in the back, had their servitude been unduly oppressive. In those days the English in Jamaica produced a formidable breed of mastiff which they trained not only to track down but to devour black runaways, and such dogs were in great demand in the neighbouring French and Dutch colonies. One supposes that the atrocious treatment meted out to the blacks whose masters felt themselves secure from outside attack had the effect of drawing them together in their compounds, conserving all that was African in their lives, and uniting them in their hate for all that was white. Meanwhile the negroes of Belize, with their musketry drill, their smallholdings and their Sunday holidays, would have been encouraged to turn their backs on their African past and to struggle ever onwards and upwards towards the resplendent human ideal of the suburban Englishman.

The test of this democracy malgré-soi came on September 10th, 1798, when a Spanish flotilla commanded by Field-Marshal Arthur O’Neil, Captain-General of Yucatan, appeared off Belize. The field-marshal was carrying orders to liquidate the settlement once and for all, and the baymen, as the English settlers called themselves, being forewarned, mustered their meagre forces for the defence. Reading of the remarkable disparity in the opposing forces one realises that here was the making of one of those occasions that are the very lifeblood of romantic history. The captain-general’s fleet consisted of thirty-one vessels carrying 2000 troops and 500 seamen. The defenders numbered one naval sloop, five small trading or fishing vessels, hastily converted for warlike purposes, plus seven rafts, each mounting one gun and manned by slaves – a total defensive force of 350 men. The resultant passage of arms has provoked a fair measure of armchair blood-thirst, flag-waving, and orotund speechifying on the annual public holiday which has commemorated it. In 1923 a Mr Rodney A. Pitts wrote a prize-winning poem called ‘The Baymen’, an ode in thirty-one verses, which, set to music, has become a kind of local national anthem. A sample stanza plunges us into an horrific scene of carnage:

Ah, Baymen, Spaniards, on that day

Engaging in that fierce mêlée –

Ah, never such a sight before,

They are all dyed in human gore –

Exhausted, wounded, some are dead,

They’re sunken to their gory bed.

The cold facts of the case, supplied by contemporary records, paint a less murderous picture of the encounter. There were no casualties whatever on the British side, in an engagement which lasted two and a half hours, and the few bodies interred later by the Spanish on one of the cays were as likely to have been those of fever victims as of grapeshot casualties. One thinks of the dolorous quavering of generations of schoolchildren through such passages as:

All died that this land which by blood they acquired

Might give you that freedom their brave hearts inspired.

As usual, history turns out to be a fable agreed upon.

Modern times have brought with them a slackening in the idyllic master-and-faithful-serving-man relationship of the past. A People’s United Party has emerged, whose aim is total independence for British Honduras, and which, by way of a kind of psychological preparation for this end, urges the substitution of baseball for cricket, and the abolition of tea-drinking. The party’s creator and leader is a Mr Richardson, a weathy creole – as citizens of non-white origin are officially described. Mr Richardson’s antipathy for Britannia and all her works supposedly originates in a grievance over some matter of social recognition – a familiar colonial complaint, and one that has cost Britain more territory than all her other imperial shortcomings put together. When recently the Government of Guatemala renewed its claim to Belize, the outside world speculated on the possibility of the PUP operating as a fifth column in support of the Guatemalan irredentists. The answer to this, I was told, is best expressed by the local proverb, ‘Wen cakroche [cockroach] mek dance ’e no invite fowl.’

The party’s official organ, the Belize Billboard, is a journalistic collector’s item, combining the raciness of a scurrilous broadsheet with the charm of a last-century shipping gazette. It is particularly strong on crime-reporting, pokes out its tongue at the British whenever it can, and carefully commemorates the anniversaries of such setbacks in the nation’s story as the sinking of the Ark Royal. It is regarded with sincere affection by the white members of the colony, many of whom keep scrapbooks bulging with choice examples of its Alice-in-Wonderland prose – full of such words as ‘doxy’ and ‘paramour’. The trade winds blow right through the advertisement section of the Billboard, with its bald details of goods ‘newly arrived’, as if they had been listed in order of unloading on to the quayside: clay pipes, lamp chimneys, apricot bats (?), Exma preparations for the bay sore and ground itch, beating spoons, cinnamon sticks, bridal satin, colonial blue-mottled soap and – in the month of March – Christmas cards. Dropped like a dash of curry into this assortment from the hold of a ghost ship are the announcements of the Hindu gentleman with an accommodation address in Bombay who promises with the aid of his white pills to add six inches to your height, ‘If not over eighty’.

In whatever direction the political destiny of Belize may lie, its economic future is dubious. In the past it has depended upon its forests; but ruinous over-exploitation in the half of the total land area of the colony which is privately owned has depleted this source of income and seriously mortgaged the future. The logical remedy would seem to lie in the switching over of the colony’s economy to an agricultural basis. But it seems that the rhythm of seasonal, semi-nomadic work in the forest, sustained for centuries, has created what a government handbook politely describes as ‘an ingrained restlessness’. In other words the Hondurans tend to become bored with a job that looks like being too steady.

The eventual solution to this problem probably lies in the tourist industry, with a glamourised and air-conditioned Belize emerging as another Caribbean playground of the industrial north – and anyone who has seen what has happened to the north coast of Jamaica in the last year or two will know what to expect. All the ingredients for a colonial Cinderella story are present. Being just beyond the reach of the Cuban and Mexican fishing fleets, the Bay of Honduras is probably richer in fish – including all the spectacular and inedible ones pursued by sportsmen – than any other accessible area in the northern hemisphere. The average aficionado will lose all the tackle he can afford in a week’s tussle with the enormous tarpon to be found in the river running through Belize town itself. The forests, too, abound with strange and beautiful animals, with tapir, jaguars and pygmy deer, which await extermination by the smoothly organised hunting parties of the future. The Fort George, with its deep freeze, and its swimming pool in course of construction, marks the closing of an era. I was given to understand that even this year a tourist organisation calling itself The Conquistadors’ Caravan was dickering with the possibility of including Belize in one of its ‘Pioneer Conquistadors’ itineraries, and was dissuaded only by the news that there was no nightclub, no air-conditioning anywhere, no Mayan ruins within comfortable reach, absolutely no beach, and that jaguars’ tracks are seen most mornings on the golf course. May other travel agents read these words and be equally dismayed.

In the meanwhile, for the collector of geographical curiosities, there is still time, although probably not much time, to taste the pleasures of a Caribbean sojourn in the manner of the last century. As a matter of fact I cannot think of any better place for someone seized with a weariness of the world to retire to in Gauguin fashion, than Belize. The intelligent recluse could even protect himself from the chagrins of the tourist era to come by renting an island, which can be had complete with bungalow and bedrock conveniences, for a few dollars a week. Here he would be in a position to knock down his own coconuts, ride on turtles, collect the eggs of boobies in season, put on a pair of diving-goggles and pick all the lobsters he could eat out of the shallow lagoon water, perhaps even note in his journal the visit of a transient alligator. Each time he crossed to the mainland to collect supplies or to see an appalling Mexican film, his eye would be delighted by the prospect of Belize from the sea, resembling an aquatint from a book I possess descriptive of Jamaica in 1830. It shows white houses with pink roofs, lying low among the thick, mossy trees; listless figures gathered at the base of an elegant, tapering lighthouse; fishing boats asprawl in the heavy water at the harbour’s mouth; a few frigate birds hanging meditatively in the lemon sky that often precedes a fine sunset.

The reverse side of the medal is hardly worth mentioning. The drains are uncovered, but there are no mosquitoes, not much infectious disease, only an occasional plague of locusts; and for nine months of the year the heat keeps within bounds. Perhaps the hazard of the occasional hurricane should be touched upon. The last bad one blew up on September 10th, 1931, the anniversary of the naval victory of 1798; a twenty-foot-high wall of water rolled over the town, and swept the houses off the cays, and a high percentage of the death-roll of a thousand were merry-makers who were celebrating the famous victory. But taken over the years, hurricanes are a very minor risk. And while on the topic of winds, it might be considered reasonable, from an intending resident’s viewpoint, to bear in mind that however hard they may blow, they do so from a remarkably consistent direction, and that this direction, that of the Atlantic Ocean wastes, is not one in which a cloud of radioactive particles is ever likely to originate.

3

Festival in Laos

THE LAOTIAN LADY disposed her silks over the spare oil can in the back of the jeep and rearranged the pearls in her hair, and as we moved off, the French major at her side leaned forward and said in my ear: ‘She’s an authentic Royal Highness, entitled to a parasol of five tiers.’ Overhearing this, the police lieutenant, who was at the wheel, shook his head smilingly. ‘Three tiers, old man.’ The major waved his hands in exasperation. ‘We’ve been friends for fifteen years,’ he said. ‘I can’t think why we never married.’ This officer was in the operations branch of the G-Staff. He was thoroughly Laos-ised, a moderate opium-smoker, gentle-mannered, and quite good at kite-fighting. As an individualist he preferred the single-handed manipulation of a small male kite, to joining one of the teams it took to handle the enormous and unwieldy females. The police lieutenant’s Laotian wife, who rode in the front between her husband and myself, looked like Myrna Loy. Her beauty had been dramatised by a recent cupping, which had left a reddish disc in the centre of her forehead. Although she had climbed vigorously into her seat in the jeep, her normal walking gait was an unearthly glide. We were all off to a pagoda festival near Luang Prabang.

Glimpsed from the road above it, through the golden mohur and the bamboo fronds, Luang Prabang, on its tongue of land where the rivers met, was a tiny Manhattan – but a Manhattan with holy men in yellow in its avenues, with pariah dogs, and garlanded pedicabs carrying somnolent Frenchmen nowhere, and doves in its sky. Down at the town’s tip, where Wall Street should have been, was a great congestion of monasteries. Even in 1950, although the fact went unnoticed in the Press, the Viet-Minh moved freely about the Laotian countryside, and Luang Prabang was accessible only by rare convoys and a weekly plane. But every French official dreamed of a posting to this place, thought of as one of the last earthly paradises – a kind of Aix-les-Bains of the soul.

The festival for which we were bound, the lady of the five-tiered parasol assured us, was quite extraordinary. She had sat on its organising committee, and to make quite sure that it excelled in the friendly competition that existed between pagodas over such arrangements, a mission had been sent across the border into Siam in search of the most up-to-date attractions. As this wealthy, independent, and highly Westernised state was regarded in Indo-China as the Hellas of South-East Asia, we could expect singular entertainment.