Questions of Travel Page 6

  This vague resentment prompted Carmel Mendis to say, “The JVP is finished now. The universities are reopening. My son will be able to carry on with his studies at last.”

  She might have said more but desisted. When people left the country, there were always clothes and household items that they were unable to sell and gave away at the last minute. Carmel coveted a mirror with a beveled border that hung on the de Mels’ wall. It was etched with clumps of grass and a pair of swans. On entering the room, she had checked at once to see if it was still hanging there from its chain. Months had been known to pass with no sign of her widow’s pension because the government claimed to have run out of money. Arrears were paid, eventually; meanwhile the Mendises lived on lentils and vegetables, supplemented now and then with tinned mackerel or an egg. To buy food meant standing in line for hours, and Carmel was down to a single pair of shoes that pinched. But a lady never left the house in rubber slippers.

  All this was rendered bearable because of the mirror. It took shape in Carmel’s thoughts as soon as she woke. Throughout the day it remained there, gathering light at the back of her mind.

  When Aloysius held forth, he would angle his neck forward and lift his chin. With his bald head, he had quite the air of a reckless tortoise. “Wijeweera has been finished off, correct. But his supporters are all over the place. Security forces are going into the villages and killing people left, right and center.” He evoked this bloodletting with great satisfaction, for it proved the wisdom of his decision to leave.

  Discussion broke out about the circumstances of Wijeweera’s death in custody. The latest theory was that the insurgent leader had been taken to a crematorium, shot in the leg and burned alive. Not that anyone really gave two hoots. They were all pleased that the man was dead. It was this impression of the lifting of a pall that lent the party its festive sheen. Even the envy that attended every farewell was tempered by the sense that brighter days lay ahead. At one point or another in the evening, the conviction that the de Mels were making an atrocious blunder thrilled through each of their guests.

  Leaning against a wall, Ravi was following the turns of the conversation in a swirl of boredom and disgust. He considered Wijeweera a vicious lunatic, but the relish in Aloysius’s voice sickened him. In fact they all sickened him: the politicians, the Tamil Tigers, the insurgents, the older people in the room. The sole function of their opinions was to cage them off from thought. What was more, their talk was always of death, when anyone could see that what mattered was life. He could hardly bear to think about his own. Here he was, stuck at home with the future on hold, obliged to coach lackluster schoolboys in physics and maths. He was seized by an urge to shout and overturn furniture. How wonderfully alive Roshi was, he thought, remembering how she had let fly at her idiot cousin. A little havoc wouldn’t upset her at all.

  She was going around the room with a platter of food. When she reached him, she whispered, “Come to the back of St. Mary’s at seven tomorrow night.”

  Ravi heard the back of seminary and was confused. “Where?”

  Priya arrived at his elbow to ask, “What are you two lovebirds cooing about?” She considered Roshi not at all pretty. Those big tombstone teeth! But an aunt living abroad supplied the de Mel girls with clothes, so here was Roshi parading herself in imported jeans and a sequined T-shirt, while Priya had to get by with a purple rag that everyone would recognize as having belonged to her mother. After leaving school, Priya had held a secretarial position with a tour operator. But tourists were so few now that most of the staff had been sacked. For the first time, Priya would have nothing new to wear to church on Christmas morning. Gloomily, she picked out the largest stuffed chili on Roshi’s plate.

  Roshi gave her ponytail a shake and laughed in Priya’s face. But Ravi said, “I was just asking Roshi what will happen to Dudley when they go.”

  “He’s going to a place for people like that,” answered the girl. “He’ll be happy there. He’s always happy, anyway, the fool.” Then her voice changed. “Some people have been saying why don’t we take him to Vancouver. Can you imagine? Damn cheek.”

  Just then, although scarcely an hour had passed, the lights came on. Everyone looked around in shock.

  Roshi said, “It’s a home run by the church.” She looked at Ravi intently as she spoke and stressed the last two words.

  Anusha, the youngest de Mel girl, came thrusting into the group. Ravi’s little sister, Varunika, tagged along—the two were great friends. Anusha wanted everyone at the party to sign her autograph album. Priya read aloud as she wrote: Remember me by the river, / Remember me on the lake, / Remember me on your wedding day / And send me a piece of your cake. At this threat of matrimony, Varunika and Anusha exchanged a look. They started giggling and couldn’t stop.

  Carmel could stand it no longer. She followed Roshi into the kitchen and said, “Darling, has Mummy sold her swan mirror?”

  “Auntie Sunila’s taking it,” answered the girl. She stared boldly into Carmel’s face, finding Ravi’s handsome nose and rectangular brow. But the eyes, with that sunken look, were like nothing Roshi had ever seen.

  The following evening, Ravi set out far too early for his rendezvous with Roshi. Not wishing to loiter, for aimless young men attracted the interest of the police, he walked with a purposeful stride while in fact turning left or right at random. He marveled at the freedom Roshi enjoyed. Anything might happen to her as she roamed the streets after dark. Yet the careless tilt she gave to everything was integral to her charm.

  At one point, he found himself outside the house where his friend Dabrera had lived. In those days, the wrought-iron gates had always stood open. Now they were shut and reinforced with metal sheets. There was an intercom in the gatepost, and the wall had been raised above head-height and set with broken glass. The whole place was in darkness and seemed deserted, but that was true of most houses. People had got into the habit of barricading themselves indoors as soon as it began to get dark.

  The caretaker, drunk but pious, was singing “Holy, holy, holy” in his hut. Lying entwined with Ravi in the side porch of St. Mary’s, Roshi sucked his finger and positioned it as she pleased. Her bushy hair gave off a pleasant reek of brine. Soon she turned her mouth away from his and nipped his arm.

  Fastening her strong paw around him, she said, “Hurry up! Mummy will be wild if I’m late.”

  He had no difficulty doing as she asked.

  Roshi was already astride her bicycle when she dismounted and let it fall. She clung to Ravi and said, “I’m so frightened of going to Canada.”

  “Nearer, my God, to Thee, nearer to Thee,” came the caretaker’s unsteady bass.

  For a few minutes, they exchanged all kinds of vows. Then Roshi sped off, having rejected Ravi’s pleas to let him pedal her home.

  It was typical Christmas weather, windy and cool. Ravi was a box of birds. He knew he would never see Roshi again; also that everything they had said to each other was entirely sincere. A star wobbled at the bend in the road, and he thought she was coming back for a last exchange of kisses. But the cyclist passed without a word, and the sky winked Ravi on his way.

  In the weeks that followed Roshi’s departure, his mood plummeted. He spent days dreaming of cities where everything was new and clean. Gleaming buildings stood out against a fresh-washed sky. Ravi saw himself crossing an expanse of pastel carpet to enter a glass lift. Effortlessly vertical, it bore him aloft.

  It was the old human dream of the good place: one where horizons were wider, or at least less tightly jammed between sky and sea. It was associated in Ravi’s mind with the hotels that lined the beach. He could just recall the coconut palms they had replaced. Of the construction of the hotels, he remembered nothing. They had simply arrived, glamorous as spaceships and equally remote.

  He fell into the habit of walking this stretch of beach. The hotels were deserted, many of them shuttered and barred like the businesses in the town that had catered to foreigners. The addition
of politics turned paradise into hell; there was nothing in between. At the height of the insurgency, tourists had been flown out of the country. Ravi wondered where they went now: Phuket, perhaps, or Bali—anywhere cheap and with great food. Islands encouraged nursery wishes; on maps, they were miniatures that charmed.

  One evening Ravi walked all the way to the end of the beach. Where the shore narrowed stood a hotel that had just been built when the flow of tourists trickled dry. The opulent fittings planned for it had never arrived; the developer hanged himself from a hook where a chandelier should have impressed.

  The gate was padlocked but not sealed off since there was nothing to steal. In the inky-blue interval that preceded nightfall, the building’s imperfections disappeared. By day, the windows were wounds; now Ravi couldn’t detect the absence of glass. Set in greenery that had darkened first, the walls glimmered white, their stains camouflaged as shadows. There was the suggestion of a ship about the structure, its long balconies taking on the air of decks. Ravi could see it slipping its moorings one night, kitchens, bedrooms, conference suites gently lurching over the waves, a parched pool drinking its fill.

  Then the light dimmed, or he heard a dog howl, or the moon slid out from behind a cloud to show him her scars. In any case the scene stirred and changed. The hotel now had the look of something very old, a secret the sea had clasped for a long time in its damp bed before it had risen and crawled back to shore. The hair lifted along Ravi’s arms. He tried to call up his vision of the good place, but its forms, so compelling by day, had melted. There was nothing for it but to return by the way he had come, although he didn’t like turning his back on the hotel.

  On his way home, he met a face he hadn’t seen for some years. It belonged to a man who had once kept a little shop where cheap household goods were sold. Ravi expected to pass him with a nod, but the man stopped. They talked for a while, and Ravi learned that the shopkeeper was home from Dubai, where he worked as a cleaner. The money he made had sent his sons to a private school, paid for his father’s heart surgery, bought his sister a respectable groom. He offered Ravi a duty-free Dunhill and said, “Don’t go.”

  Laura, 1990s

  WHEN IT BECAME PLAIN that January intended to go on forever, a ticket from a bucket shop carried Laura over clotted skies. Two hours from London, a sunlit planet waited. Then there was trudging and happiness. There were little glasses of dark digestivi, bitter with herbs. There were angels in the architecture, and cypresses and tombs, and strangers with known faces: they had floated free of seventeenth-century paintings. It was true that to try crossing the street was to be plunged into terror. And there was that day she saw a girl lean from a pillion to detach a bag from a negligent arm. But for the space of a whole morning, street led to street and brought nothing that didn’t please. She had to look at everything. She had to eat gnocchi on Thursday because when in Rome. In every direction, buildings were ocher, burnt orange, the rosy-red of crushed berries. Even vertical new suburbs risked lemon and olive and a rather poisonous blue-pink.

  Cats stalked over tawny rooftops to inquire at the window of Laura’s pensione. From the far side of the world, a pragmatic continent declared that it would be only kindness to destroy these ragged regiments—humanely, of course. But scraps of bread and Parma ham made their way to Laura’s sill in defiance of antipodean common sense.

  In a piazza named for a superseded god, a toddler pointed: Gatto! Then, as a pink coat passed, Rosa! So it went, each fresh sighting calling forth an elated affirmation. Car! Spoon! When the child’s eye fell on the tourist eking out a latte at the adjoining table, he glared. But they were not so different, really, each marveling at the wonders of the world.

  A sunless afternoon brought the pitiless arches of the Colosseum. Out-of-place figures, shivering in synthetics, came slipping out. They offered carvings, and beads hefty as sorrows. One elongated, knife-thin form, a Giacometti sculpted from ebony, knelt to release a white bird at Laura’s feet. Together they watched it whir heavenwards, a soaring no less full of hope for being mechanical. They could only try to replicate it later in a room at the end of a bus line, far from the relics of emperors and saints.

  Afterwards, Laura stood at a terminus in a road where rubbish blew. Posters advertised a band in an enigmatic, attractive script. The people passing had cheap coats, and eyes full of calculations. But unlike Laura they were hurrying home. The stout African waiting for the bus, her hair bound in a gaudy cloth, was privy to knowledge enjoyed equally by the apricot-complexioned rich admiring each other on the via Condotti. It was the reason tourists read travel guides like missals. If they chose the correct street, dined on a particular terrace, went through a crucial door, everything would be different. Laura felt in her bag for her guidebook; she needed to check that it hadn’t been left behind, along with the starburst of joy, in the room with the exposed wiring and the single, cold-water tap. Recently she had dreamed of owning a chart, white lines on blue paper, with a telephone number at the bottom: 85148. All she had to do was to follow the diagram or, in the worst-case scenario, call the number. Then she would possess the city at last, its monuments and litter. Rome, like paradise, would gather her in.

  She was armed with a railway pass. The windows of meandering diretti framed towns and towers on rounded hills. They were teasingly familiar, touched with déjà vu. After a while, Laura realized that she was looking at the bland, pretty vistas with which the minor masters of the Quattrocento filled in their backgrounds. At any moment there would be a Crucifixion on a bald, middle-distant hill.

  La Spezia came, and the mincing sea that drowned Shelley.

  France brought Mediterranean ports and hotel rooms with a view of dank light wells where night arrived at half-past three. On the wall, turquoise roses as large as Frisbees bloomed on baleful trellises. Sometimes there was carpet there instead—the same brown moquette that exerted a squelching suction underfoot.

  The richly pink walls that in Rome had summoned berries now looked to Laura like boiled beetroot. It was just as well that along with a change of jeans and the sturdy merino jumpers of home, her backpack held a small library, even if the feeble wattage she encountered everywhere was opposed to books. A shuttered villa flanked by cypress candles might have been only hostile if it hadn’t called up the brittle modern heroines, bravely rouged, of doomed Katherine Mansfield. Laura could only envy their predicaments, the nerves that caused them to suffer and bound them to webs of human intrigue, as she grasped a paperback with woolly paws in a marble park. In every direction, leafless perspectives delivered lectures on fearful symmetry. The trees had been hacked about by someone who preferred statues. Trees and statues alike stood frozen in the wind that had set off in Russia and rushed straight down the Rhone Valley. Why did people in novels come to the south of France for winter? Laura lifted her eyes to the hills and found them blue with cold.

  Well muffled, she walked about the steep streets behind the seafront as the long evening descended, waiting for the hour when she might decently dine. Windows opening on to the street allowed her to catch the crash of cutlery or game-show laughter. She came to a square and looked up at the balconies, each with its crocheted iron. Here and there, where a lamp had been lit in the room behind, a tense chair showed or a mirror in a golden frame. But no one opened the glass doors and stepped out among the empty window boxes to say, “But who are you, mademoiselle? You simply must come up and join us!”

  In a sinister boulevard lined with bars and ugly shops, lonely North Africans hissed. Stranded in jackets, dreadfully checked, over shiny-kneed trousers, they lacked consequence. They might have been characters plucked from a story of family and politics and consigned to a footnote—even the jut of their cheekbones was mournful. At the going down of the sun they were to be observed gazing south from sea-view parks, restrained by balustrades from darkening water.

  When the youth hostels weren’t closed against winter, they were situated as far as possible from stations, shops, markets
, bars, anything that might conceivably interest the young; a pension was in any case more Mansfield. But a fit of economy, backed by deep boredom with her own thoughts, drove Laura at last to a bunk in a dorm. During and long after dinner, she drank vin ordinaire with Daniel, Alissa, Masuko, Piotr, Kelly and a Belgian. Grievances and baguettes were sliced up and shared. Everyone had a story about trains that ran late or simply stopped between stations, and all were agreed in their opinion of the French. The hostel had only two long rooms for sleeping. Daniel and Alissa had spread the contents of their packs in the first room to show how things stood. At midnight, Alissa, one of those girls with emphatic eyes, was ready to go to bed, but Daniel and Kelly were on to politics. Every time Kelly used her Swiss Army knife or a tube of mayonnaise to designate injustice—“Say this is Gaza here, right?”—Piotr’s gaze rested on whatever she had touched. So Alissa was driven back on the Belgian. His face was a wedge of cheese, but Alissa was determined now to stay and fascinate. She undid the knot of her hair, releasing a torrent of light, and saw herself at thirty: rare, mysterious, wrapped in a cloak, the latest door softly closing behind her on the sound of masculine tears. She spoke a confident French sprinkled with literally translated idioms and didn’t hesitate now to confess to itchy feet: “J’ai les pieds qui grattent.” She meant it kindly, as a warning: Do not imagine your devotion can conquer my need for freedom. “Un eczéma?” suggested the Belgian. He moved smoothly into the first of his long, bitter tales about a race called the Ongleesh.

  In fine, cold rain, Laura and Masuko walked the two kilometers to the nearest bus stop. The new day was still black; they hadn’t bothered with bed. Their flashlights went ahead, pausing on coiled dog turds colored a bold orange. Masuko, considerably widened by her backpack, sported a beret and a perm. In Japan, curly hair designated a free spirit, Laura learned. She, too, wore an angled beret. There was nothing more useful to the French, marking the tourist below. An architecture student, Masuko was on her way to see Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation. Why not go there together? she proposed. She held strong opinions on subjects that rarely crossed Laura’s mind, declaring, “I hate the revolution of 1848” and “Upholstery was put on earth by enemy aliens.” Now, “The only tolerable utopia is a shabby one,” she flung into the first stirrings of dawn. The idea of a shabby utopia almost persuaded Laura, but she didn’t want to double back to Marseille. Also, she was on a pilgrimage of her own. In the bakery opposite the bus stop, the young women bought warm, greasy pains au chocolat, and Laura Fraser, stuffing her face, showed the paperback she carried in her coat. She wanted to visit Saint-Jean-de-Luz because Patrick White had written one novel in the town and drawn on it for another. Masuko had never heard of White or The Aunt’s Story, but remarked, as they boarded the bus, that she had no time at all for Mishima: “A very arrogant man.” At the station, they waved from opposite platforms. Encouragement, regret and undying friendship can only be expressed for so long in mime; it was a relief when Laura’s train pulled in. Travel was only really tolerable when solitary. Two was a group barricaded behind we. It offered conversation and someone to blame for disappointments, but the dream of transcending tourism wasn’t available—there was always another foreigner in a foolish hat.