Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph (28 page)

What, all my life, I would have called foolish superstition was being pressed gently home to me by my own experience and interpreted for me by Jung. The book goes much further, of course, into ideas of after-life and a collective unconscious. All of them connected precisely with thoughts that had come spontaneously out of the journey. I was specially startled to read Jung's remarks about mythology and the need of the individual to have some story or myth by which he can explain those things which reason and logic cannot account for. It seemed to me then that I had been close to the truth in thinking of my role as a 'myth maker', and not just for myself perhaps.

The book encouraged me immensely, and I spent a large part of the ten day Atlantic crossing re-examining my past life and writing furiously about my discoveries. At the same time I took ever greater delight in the creatures that appeared around the ship as it moved into warmer waters. A particular albatross that followed us seemed to have become quite familiar with me, and soared close by me again and again, showing me his broad white breast and the immense wings which he (or she) used so brilliantly. Flying fish sprang from the waves, like small bejewelled rockets, dashing over the water for seconds at a time, their wing-like fins whirring with an almost invisible swiftness.

At night the Pleiades appeared clear and bright to remind me of the magic of the Sudan, and my dreams were rich with mysterious symbolism.

One event then crowned that whole series of discoveries and reflections. I had come to a point in my thoughts where one day, on the deck, it seemed to me that I had uncovered a fact about myself and the world, a way of looking at my relationship with others, that promised a great liberation.

If I can just fix this thought,' I told myself, T shall find a wonderful new freedom for myself.'

At that same instant, below me in the sea, a great shoal of flying fish burst out into the sunlight. It was an incredible display that described exactly how I was just then feeling. Up to then I had never seen more than one or two fish at a time, nor did I ever again. It was a dream come true.

AMERICA

Land was nearby and the world was closing in, muffling sounds and thoughts. Thick humid air pressed around the ship and bore it up between ocean and sky. Clouds of silver and lead boiled above, speared like marshmallows on the slanting rays of a mid-morning sun. A soupy green sea slurped softly below. I stood above the bridge waiting for South America to appear.

Perhaps I was expecting the whole continent to come over the skyline in a simultaneous rush of cathedrals, revolutions, llamas and carnivals. Instead I saw the horizon thicken into smudges of dark green and brown. We drifted in. The smudges stretched but remained low. A last flying fish swooped over the waves. I caught the movement from the corner of my eye and moved just in time to follow it at the end of its course. That streaking spray of light had become as charged with mystery and hope as a shooting star. I felt a great reluctance to leave the ship and wished I could go on dreaming of a landfall that never came.

A line of buildings appeared at the ocean's edge, and I made out two or three spires pricking the pale sky. I forgot about South America and began to think about Fortaleza, on the north-east coast of Brazil, four degrees south of the Equator, and five hundred miles east of the Amazon. More than a million inhabitants, they had told me, and yet I had never heard of it. I felt that I had slipped off the edge of my customary world.

A red cutter came popping towards us and the
Zoë
G
slowed to let the little boat nudge alongside. The harbour pilot came aboard. He was a disappointment too. He did not even look Latin. We swung to port and headed for another part of the coast where I could already see a grain silo and some cranes. The shoreline embraced us and I saw that we were in a broad bay. The only other craft in motion were narrow rafts, four logs lashed together with a rudder and sail. Most of them carried one or two men; small men, bare-footed, in chain-store nylon shirts and trousers. The shirts were loose, open and torn. The trousers were baggy at the behind, narrow at the legs, short at the ankles, patched and split. They were fishermen, of course,
pesqueiros.
A raft came by no bigger than the others but crowded with people, shoulder to shoulder. Even as I watched I knew it was impossible, and realized that in this new world there were also new laws.

I should have been excited by the prospect of landing, but I found that I was nervous. Maybe I had a premonition, though it did not figure consciously as such. I simply balked at the complexity of the process that lay ahead of me, knowing that the motorcycle would create difficulties and involve me in long and painful exposure to bureaucracy. I had two prejudices about Brazil; that the bureaucracy was totally corrupt, and that the police were violent and suspicious, particularly where journalists were concerned. Although I was not travelling as a journalist, my connection with the
Sunday Times
would have to be declared since they were guaranteeing the bond on the motorcycle. I felt wrong-footed. Vividly in my mind were accounts of police brutality and torture that I had heard in London. Like all strong prejudices they not only prepared me for the worst, they paved the way.

Captain Fafoutis already had the crew at work opening the hatches. Winches whirred. Derricks clattered into position. Deck hands hammered and shouted. There were four massive tarpaulins to lift, wedges to knock out, planks to throw about, girders to hoist and lower, and temporary hatch covers to position so that a sudden shower could not
destroy
the cargo in the holds. The ship rattled and banged from stem to stern.

At sea the
Zoë
G
had begun to seem quite respectable, even passing fair, with her freshly painted green decks and white bulkheads, the rust and grime effaced and the filth of Lourenco Marques washed away by the Cape gales. Now her corsets were coming undone again. She opened her mouth and showed her blackened stumps, and the satisfied hum of her engine gave way to raucous dockside obscenities. At sea she was a lady, but in port she was a trollop.

Her holds were about to be raped of fifty thousand bags of cashew nuts, each bag weighing as much as an average man. It was supposed to be done in two days and the job meant hauling out the bags at the rate of eighteen a minute for forty-eight hours non-stop.

They had to be loaded on to lorries and carted off to a warehouse. Was anyone in Fortaleza capable of running such an operation? Captain Fafoutis shrugged.
'I
f
not,' he said, 'they will have to pay penalty.'

The docks were more clearly in view. A row of big grey sheds, the silo, a cobbled quay, the rails running along it, the big travelling crane on its four stiff legs like a great creature frozen in pre-history. One other ship, smaller and rustier than the
Zoë
G,
lay there tied up and lifeless. The sky was uniformly grey now, and heavy. Soon it would rain.

The ship winched herself alongside, a rough gangplank went down and the port doctor came aboard, followed soon after by a stream of

officials. I went back to my cabin to gather the last few things together, and felt a slight sense of panic at something being irrevocably over, felt the powerful attraction of this little floating universe of peeling veneer, frayed cloth, unvarying routine and familiar faces. The Captain's cabin, next to my own, became so dense with smoke and dealing that it oozed illegality like a prohibition honky tonk. I wanted badly to be part of what was going on next door, to be one of the gang.

I went out to look down on the quay and saw a small wooden table move past below me. It was covered by a transparent plastic pyramid which shielded a display of coloured souvenirs and shells. As it moved along the sandals of the man beneath it became visible, and he parked it against a wall and fussed over it with a duster. Another man in torn cotton clothing arranged custard apples against the colossal steel base of the travelling crane. They resembled green hand grenades, and he handled them with appropriate delicacy.

Lorries were already arriving from the dock gates, and stevedores poured into the ship over the gangplank. Within minutes the derricks began rumbling and the first net full of bags swung up from number two hold, with numbers one and three soon discharging too. The bags came up a ton at a time, with three lorries loading together, and a fleet lined up and waiting. Somebody, I saw, was determined to beat the penalty.

Eventually a deck hand came to fetch me to be interviewed by the police. I followed him to the gangway outside the Captain's cabin, where two men stood watching the unloading. They were ridiculously sinister, figures from a fantasy. They belonged to an age of crime which I thought had long since passed, and which to be truthful I thought had only been got up for films and television. The boss was a big ungainly man in a black leather jacket. He wore dark glasses with shiny metal rims, and his face was not only swarthy, pock-marked and scarred, but disfigured by lumps large enough to rival his natural features. He seemed to draw on two quite separate traditions of violence and could have been cast as a Hit Man for Himmler. His stunted and weasel-faced companion I could only describe as a side-kick.

However, they were quite civil, and asked me to fill in a form typed on a piece of rough paper. Among other things it had a space for my mother's Christian names. Then we went to my cabin to inspect my things. The big man was jovial enough but spoke no English, and the little man translated clumsily. They asked me several times about 'scuba'. They were determined that I had underwater diving equipment somewhere and my denials obviously surprised them. They seemed baffled and suspicious. After a little while they asked me to go ashore and have my passport stamped.

I walked along the quay, on firm ground again, absorbed in the strange illusion that the cobbles were sliding beneath my feet. Two more men in plain clothes received me in a wooden hut. Unlike the first pair they were not caricatures. The young one introduced himself as Samuel and spoke school English, mostly in the present tense. He had a hand-written list of details he was supposed to get from me, and they also included my mother's Christian names, which are a little unusual. I began to think of them assuming a life of their own and travelling for ever in Brazilian official channels. My father's occupation was also demanded again, and I replied with over-emphasis, 'He is dead!', as though they had been caught walking on his grave. This, I found, gained a little extra respect, though in reality I had hardly known my father.

Samuel also asked about my diving equipment, but seemed content to hear that there was none. He then gave me the same form to complete as I had already filled in on the ship, and it included all the questions he had just asked me. I did it without comment. It seemed pointless to object to frontier officials wasting one's time, since they are perfectly placed to waste as much of it as they wish. One just tried to make sure that patience was not seen as servility, a fine distinction.

In all this life-consuming rigmarole of irrelevancies, common to all frontiers, one new fact stood out clearly; the idea of going round the world on a motorcycle meant nothing to these men. It was doubtful even whether they believed me, and their disbelief disturbed me more than it should have done. I expected people to look at me and know that I was genuine. Without this tribute I became cold and defensive. How else could I explain my presence, my strange clothing? Like a real cowboy stumbling accidentally into a fancy dress party I wanted to shoot to prove my gun was loaded.

My passport kindled some interest. It had already been stamped through fourteen pages of visas in Africa, and the police lingered long over the Arabic and Amharic scripts. Finally, on page nineteen, I got my stamp:
brasil entrada
22.05.74
turista
, signed Joao Z de Oliveira Costa.

'Can I go now?' I asked.

'You are free to go anywhere,' said Samuel. This proved quite soon to be a wild exaggeration.

My cabin was still locked as I had left it, but I saw immediately that someone had been searching my things. A tube of salt tablets was lying loose on the bed. Whoever had looked did not care whether I knew. Nothing appeared to be missing. Had they been looking for drugs? Or was it another attempt to discover my diving gear? I began, even then, to think I might be walking into a trap, but the idea seemed hysterical and I tried to dismiss it.

With Captain Fafoutis I shared a taxi into town, and we followed the shoreline round the bay. I had never been anywhere that looked so wet. It was not the quantity of water that impressed me, but rather the way it seemed to have permeated everything. It covered the road in lakes, partially concealing great subsidences. In other places sand bars lay across our path, swept down from the dunes on the left. The buildings alongside seemed sodden to the point of dissolution, their stone surfaces eroded and spongy, their plaster long since fallen away. We drove a long way, slithering and bouncing. The people on the sidewalks, moving along their own obstacle course, did nothing to lift my spirits. Their tobacco-coloured skin was all that distinguished them to my jaundiced eye from the population of any industrial suburb, with their downcast faces and ill-fitting, mass-produced clothing.

The shipping agent's office was of the old-fashioned brown variety. With different furniture it could as well have been a bedroom or a salon. The agent, an elderly man, listened impassively as though I were a young nephew reciting my homework. My loose shirt and jeans, and the funny belt with the pouch on it did not qualify me as a serious client.