Questions of Travel Read online

  A magical morning in Madrid brought the white annihilation of snow. The olives were wonderful, purple and full-flavored. But in a bar all the profiles were Picassos, the line of the forehead continuous with the bridge of the nose. Fairy-light-entwined among the bottles, the Virgin’s plaster robe shone Aryan blue. Laura left without ordering, and from every radio along the street, Madonna II declared that it was just like a prayer; a song that had pursued Laura across the globe, fanning out from the bus station in Tamil Nadu where it had first emerged in tinsel tinkles from someone else’s Walkman.

  She escaped to Cintra, where her passport was pinched on a Romantic stair. The upset this caused was undeniable. Laura remembered France, her solitary plats du jour in out-of-season cafes where there were always postcards fading to yellow above the bar. She felt too exhausted to continue. It was senseless, this shuttling between stations and the provincial masterpieces that disgraced the walls of overheated museums. Such pleasures as she took were transient and casual: touristic, in a word. And on top of everything, she had a cold.

  But in Lisbon she racketed over the hills in tin trams. Glass caskets done up with iron were fixed to every wall: the opera boxes of the street. Laura could just see herself up there on this or that balcony, conducting a scandal on a worn velvet seat. There were grilled sardines, a mosaic promenade, tiles painted with ships and insouciant whales. And everywhere, Rome’s grandstanding Baroque transformed for lack of funds into something altogether more humanly decayed. Even the young had an old-fangled air. Boys were neat in navy blue, their girls restrained in crisp white. They held hands as they walked but didn’t caress, although now and then embracing with fervent self-control at the descent of all-forgiving dusk.

  It was a backward city, a European capital folded in a pleat of time unknown to Golden Arches. It returned Laura to childhood and to India, which is to say unmodern places. This was the effect of food cooked in the street, the care with which even modest purchases were wrapped, the dim shops with their diffident displays, the heavy spectacles on fine-boned faces. Yet ships sailing from this harbor had once shrunk and expanded the world, mapping its modern configuration. Somewhere in that rage for profit and cartography, the outline of Australia had been waiting to take shape.

  Laura’s bed and breakfast occupied the fourth floor of an apartment block. Names she had seen in Goa—da Costa, Oliveira, Gomes—converted the list of residents posted in the lobby into a genealogy of empire. Here, the Age of Europe had begun—when she realized that, her view of Australia shifted. Her birthplace had always seemed singular: solitary and distinctive. Now Laura saw it hooked into histories that ran back and forth across the globe, so that it hung in its watery corner with the stretched, starfish look of a map produced by a radical projection.

  She emerged from a cinema one evening to find herself in a road transformed by rain into gleaming black glass. Her fellow spectators ignored her as they dispersed, already starting to process the American scenes they had all received into alien words. Every light in the city was shining. What are you doing here? This was travel, marvelous and sad.

  She stayed three weeks. She would never come back. For the rest of her life, Lisbon would summon a season: sealed, sufficient unto itself as a fruit. Even details would return: an armoire, carved and overlarge, where linen was stored; the spectacular dandruff of the foreign-exchange teller at the bank. Smells came back, and the taste of warm codfish patties, and the metal props buttressing a tree whose branches roofed a square. Who can explain the sympathy that runs swift as a hound and as stubbornly between people and places? It involves memory, prejudice, accidents of weather. (Although in fact, Laura would later confuse certain things; the armoire, for instance, didn’t belong to Lisbon at all but to a dark, waxed corridor, inset with rectangles of light, in a convent on the Ligurian coast.)

  In her last week in Lisbon, shaken from her siesta by the rumble of a tram, Laura wondered if she had lived here long ago. For an entire afternoon, she considered staying for the rest of time. She imagined meals, routines, the room she would have, its curtains, the elderly neighbor who carried his Pomeranian up the stairs when the little dog grew frail. But then she realized that the whole continent was breathing down her neck. Where was there to go but out to sea? Along the green Tagus, where she walked in the evening, the ghosts of caravels canvassed the failing day. Laura consulted the special offers of travel agents and totted up sums on the last page of her notebook; briefly, she shared the lust of conquistadors for a new world.

  But the considerations that had spurred them on reined her in: gold, questions of territory. Laura’s money was running out. Her mother, born through no fault of her own in Cornwall, had bestowed on her daughter the right to live and work in the United Kingdom. The Americas, north and south, told a different story.

  Somewhat out of breath, Laura arrived at the summit of an icing-white tower. There she farewelled the city while vulgarly consuming a custard tart. When she dusted her hands of crumbs, it produced a flutter of sparrows. Far below, the Atlantic approached, slow as a slattern, to smear its gray rags along the shore.

  Ravi, 1990s

  WITH A PLASTIC BAG held over his head, he ran through sheets of rain. The wind was at his back. Here and there in the darkness, light streamed from a lamp. Trees bending at the waist gave the impression that the whole campus was fleeing at his approach.

  He was in luck. The bus had been held up by a group of female students clambering aboard. Ravi squeezed in beside a girl in a damp blue dress. He had noticed her on campus, distributing leaflets about violence against women. She was in her final year of history, she said. Her complexion, the same dark gold as the uptilted eyes, was lightly pocked.

  The bus lurched, throwing them together, and she spoke to Ravi about fate. She told him that her name was Malini, adding that it meant a maker of garlands. Her mother had chosen it because the horoscope cast at her daughter’s birth had seen flowers in the child’s destiny. Then it had warned that she would grow up as bright as a boy.

  Malini de Zilva was not exactly a pretty girl, but there was a magnetic quality to her pull. In the days that followed, she blossomed in Ravi’s mind: golden-skinned, her head lightly balanced on its stalk.

  Quite soon, they were married. Six months later, Hiran was born, the day after his mother turned twenty-four.

  Laura, 1990s

  LAURA WAS MAKING FRIENDS, the London phone numbers in her notebook were mounting. Piece by piece, she was assembling a city of her own. She joined a library and found a pool where she could swim. Good coffee, sold even in the airport in Sydney, even in malls in far, far suburbs of brick veneer, continued elusive in London. But Laura acquired a favorite cinema, a GP she could trust. She walked and walked, or rode a borrowed bicycle. She listened and inspected. Kilburn. Twickenham. She could place them now, and not only on a map. She knew what they meant.

  Strangeness still sprang. The English voices came through a door as she climbed to a party. Laura froze in pretty sandals on the landing. How happy they sounded and inhuman, gathered in a room like that.

  An unpromising alley behind Paddington yielded a genius called Sharon, who preserved the luxuriance of Laura’s hair while laying into it with blades. The result was sinuous and faintly sinister. Her lips, colored a violent ruby, were a declaration. Men noticed it. Somewhere along the way she had learned to dress, shedding her jeans and shapeless tops for styles that flattered and draped. There was now a queenliness to her volume. The bloom that would have begun to wilt in Sydney was ancestrally suited to England’s damp cold. She was firm-fleshed, the flesh rose-flushed and fine-grained.

  Like all her friends, Laura Fraser had spent the eighties in black to express her nonconformity. Now she found herself starved of color. Oxfam yielded a shirt in mulberry and plum. The following week there was a kameez: eau-de-nil cotton paisley-printed in emerald and pink.

  A girl who was going home to Brisbane passed on a slate-blue coat. Laura wore it on a weekend jau
nt to Paris, where she bought a cheap, perfectly cut dress in a satisfying French blue.

  It wasn’t a fairy-tale transformation. But there were those who saw the large white girl with pointed fingers and thought of a fairytale character, a goose perhaps or a duck. She looked motherly, capable of malice, sacrificial.

  Work meant waitressing in a pub in Clerkenwell staffed by Australians and New Zealanders. A couple who often lunched there told Laura that they were looking for a house sitter while they visited their daughter in the States. Laura realized that she was tired of Mapledene Road. To reach the kitchen, it was necessary to cross a room in which, at unpredictable but frequent intervals, Blanche’s friends sat cross-legged and chanted under rugs. Laura had never determined whether this rite was Christadelphian or a legacy from the commune in Wales.

  Word got around. One thing led to another. “You Australians are so marvelously reliable,” exclaimed yet another householder. Laura was now sufficiently fluent in the native tongue to decode this as worthy and dull. That was okay. She moved around London, stuccoed terrace to mansion flat to loft conversion, reliably walking dogs, feeding fish, watering plants. When stranded, she was always welcome to the couch in a flat shared by three cheerful girls from Auckland.

  When she could, Laura traveled. She went to Antwerp, Istanbul, Vienna, Fes. She went to New York for six days. Manhattan confounded all her expectations, which were of the future, the sensation of zip, the latest thing. But the streetscape was old-fashioned and moving, an unforeseen effect of all those modernist grids. There was such innocence in their hymning of a century that had been enchanted, then.

  Groups of tourists from the former Eastern bloc had appeared in London. Their jeans bagged at the knees, their hair was big and terrible, gold lurked behind their lips. But what was striking was the reverence they brought to looking. Unlike the polite Americans from the north and the operatic ones from the south, unlike the suave French and the tall Dutch, these visitors were not encountered in department stores or cafes. Too poor to buy most of what was for sale, they haunted monuments, window displays, churches. There were drifts of them in parks. What were they looking for? A fountain in which a sparrow had drowned? A statue of The Leader?

  Middle-aged, with thick waists and packed lunches, they brought to mind long, hard winters enlivened only by a really tremendous new variety of turnip and the latest steel production figures—so Laura mocked silently, unnerved by their effect. In fact, these strangers made her think of pilgrims—of journeys that begin in yearning and end in bliss. They were serious, appreciative and archaic: travelers for whom the link between travel and holiness still held. Very soon their numbers increased, and they disappeared into the general motley of London. What one noticed then were the fur-clad Russians. Laura bristled with the native-born at their rudeness in queues.

  There was another report from icy Sarajevo on the news. As soon as the visiting British cabinet minister began to talk, Laura muted the sound. She had made a donation to an Oxfam campaign to raise money for women raped in the war. Her sympathy was engaged, her interest limited. The conflict was too tangled, the country too obscure, its heroes elusive, its villains possessed of forbidding names.

  She remembered a recent documentary that had featured a political prisoner released after seventeen years in a Moroccan jail. His cell had been so cramped that he would spend the rest of his days in a wheelchair. Listening to him, Laura had felt pity, aversion, guilt. Reports from unhappy places clung like a shadow, now lengthening, now reduced, always there. It invaded the other story, the familiar, enjoyable one, about weekend getaways and splurging in Tower Records and investigating spices under the gently smiling guidance of Madhur Jaffrey.

  On TV, the camera panned to demonstrate desolation. UN soldiers stood guard against a backdrop of fresh ruins, one shifting on the spot in his boots. Helmeted, armed, padded against winter and snipers, he had the impersonal air of such men. But his feet, unable to forget they were human, continued to protest.

  Laura scarfed up and went out. A dump bin in Stanfords displayed a new guidebook to London. She had heard of the publisher—Ramsay—but in a vague way.

  A man and a woman were talking behind the counter. Laura asked what they thought of the book.

  “It’s Australian. But good.”

  Thus Laura learned that her accent had altered.

  As Australianly as possible, she inquired, “Like Lonely Planet?”

  “Not to be compared, if you believe the Ramsay rep. Same difference if you ask me.” The man shrugged. “We’ve had good feedback.”

  The other bookseller said, “I hated it myself.”

  They looked at her.

  “It gave me such a shock, reading about beggars in London. I know it’s true. But seeing it printed in a guidebook. I mean, I’ve been to India and Marrakesh, and there used to be those scary gypsy children in Paris, but you never think of it being like that here, do you?” Lilac-shadowed eyes implored in English porcelain. “Then you read something in a book and realize foreigners look at us just like we look at them and…” But the chasm revealed by this crack was too dizzying to explore.

  Ravi, 1990s

  RAVI AND MALINI WERE living with Carmel Mendis when their son was born. Although Ravi had majored in maths, he had taken extra units in computer science, and his ambitions, as formless and changeable as clouds, now revolved around the new growth area of information technology. But success found its way to graduates with connections. Ravi was unnetworked. His letters to employers turned to pleas and still went unanswered. Having thoughtlessly acquired a wife and child, he couldn’t afford to train as a teacher and was obliged to pick up his old work of coaching school students. He wasn’t the only young man on the beach at sunset, gazing westward as the day drowned.

  The beach, like the sea, could turn grubby. Tourism had revived with astonishing swiftness, and it was a town where foreign men came for boys. Strolling languid-hipped where the little waves rushed his ankles, Ravi knew himself the object of appraisal. He swaggered a little under this weight—at night, pushed a fraction deeper into his wife’s greedy mouth.

  When his old school received a donation of ten secondhand PCs, Ravi was hired to train a handful of teachers in the rudiments of word-processing. He returned to spaces and smells so instantly familiar that changes, great and small, burst on him like assailants.

  In the classroom where the training took place after school, the red water bottle had gone from its niche. Brother Francis had lost his hair and acquired the habit of scratching his head. Part of the Science block roof had collapsed, and the new section of tiling appeared lurid and false. And the great tree had gone, cut down to make way for an auditorium. The grounds now contained only a few shrubs which, chosen to thrive in shade, were being slowly murdered by the sun.

  Instructing men who had once known so much more than he did was uncomfortable. Ravi had looked on his teachers, whatever their individual traits, as uniformly wise. Now he realized that their wits were as varied as their faces. He wondered how many seemingly self-evident truths would crumble over the course of his life. What a wasteful process! And when everything else had worn away, would the last vista have any more substance than the painted cardboard it had replaced? Ravi felt weary in anticipation of all the adjustments to come, and sad.

  Passing an open door, he saw Brother Ignatius’s map, fully extended, on the wall of an empty classroom. Ravi went in and examined it—the cord that rolled it up or down had disappeared. So even that was different! The map, hanging there limply on view, seemed as unremarkable as a desk or blackboard, robbed of its former flourish.

  The sea was a few streets distant from the school. Three windows on the upper floor held wide bands of bright or deep blue. Boys going to and from classes barely noticed this. But some remembered it for the rest of their days.

  There were many more lay teachers than in Ravi’s day, more lady teachers, too. But Ravi looked in vain for Brother Ignatius. It would have bee
n easy to inquire after him, but the old authority of the reverend brothers kept Ravi from a question he feared would be personal and rude.