Metropole (26 page)

No, he must not feel sorry for himself. He knew that even in his confused state, even as he was tossing and turning in his fever. Self-pity would not get him anywhere. There was no one else to pity him here. Self-pity would only be a burden, a handicap ... His thoughts eventually did what they were bound to and ran to a natural conclusion, to the possibility that underlay every thought. There was hardly anything he needed to do in his current situation. He had simply to let go, to allow the thin thread of hope that had so far sustained him to slip from his hand and he would sink, or rather fall headlong, into a happy oblivion: that was, after all, for the time being anyway, the easiest course.

But he delayed it, put the thought away, refusing to let it preoccupy him. He could give up any time he chose. That was probably the chief reason he resisted: there was no urgency about giving up. The thought of escape, of flight, remained even if only as an idea, not a concrete plan. Despite his helplessness, despite his sick and muddled mental state, there continued to burn in him the small flame of defiance, an indescribable and indeed hopeless fury at his predicament. It was the fury that would not allow him to surrender and end up a loser. Simply grinding his teeth and cursing even at the worst hours of a crisis was evidence of struggle. Some particle of his consciousness would always resist the power of vacuous darkness. It was a kind of obduracy, rogue’s honour, an irrational, perhaps even ridiculous holding fast. It was a fellow-feeling with oneself when there is nobody else to turn to.

Pepe started to appear in his dreams. He came upon her in various situations always with an associated feeling of anxiety and guilt. He couldn’t forgive himself for having hit her. He kept returning to the event: was that why she did not turn up again? Might she have felt too angry afterwards? Whatever the answer it was not something he could reconcile himself to. He had to make up for it, to provide some recompense for her, to explain and let her feel he regretted it. That was another reason he had to get well as soon as possible: he had to go back to the hotel and find Bebebe. He could not live without having put things right and he certainly could not leave without doing so.

He no longer had any idea how long he had been mouldering there in that miserable corner. His sense of time was gone: night and day ran into each other. The next time he woke and painfully teetered out to the latrine he saw that the market hall was empty inside, the various stands and booths locked up, shuttered, bolted, fixed with iron bars, though there were still workers at the side entrance operating loud machines and cranes. It must be Sunday again as it had been the first time he had come here. It was on Friday that he had been ejected from the hotel so he must have spent two nights here.

He was feeling a little better, his temperature must have dropped too. He was too weak to leave his shelter yet. His recovery was too slow. He needed two or three more days. His appetite had returned though he could find nothing to eat apart from a few partly rotting apples that must have rolled from their baskets. He tried to eat the whole, albeit with a certain disgust, but it was better than nothing.

After all this time he felt so dirty he wanted a good wash. He swayed about looking for water until at last he discovered a tap at the far end of the ramp. There was a long queue for that too with jugs, bottles, even buckets. He joined them while wondering who they were: stallholders, customers or casual labourers like himself? Already there were others behind him so he had no time to do anything except to drink from cupped hands. No sooner had he rinsed his mouth than he was shoved out of the way by those following, the sheer weight of them pushing him on.

He thought it best to return late in the evening once the stalls were locked up, when only the side and rear stores were being replenished, while the empty crates and bundles were taken away – a process that went on right through the night. There were far fewer people waiting for water now, just four or five tottering drunks, and he was soon alone and undisturbed at the tap. The water ran less freely now and he had no soap but it still felt good on his hands, face and neck. He put his head under the cold water to cool his overheated brow and splashed and rinsed his hair. He would have liked to wash below too but what was the point if he was only to put on the same dirty underpants soaked through with perspiration? There was no point in even starting.

Eventually he did get better and since he had to eat and to live he set about finding work again. Fortunately there was always a need for porters so it was up to him now, depending on his strength and mood, how much he took on and when. When it was food they were carrying he could grab the odd fistful, much as the others were doing since it all went unchecked. There were carrots, onions, fruit, raw vegetables and sometimes crackling or the odd stick of sausage when the storeman was looking the other way. And if he needed something else he could buy it right here with the money he was earning.

His life had changed enormously, of course, compared to what it had been before and now that he was no longer sick, it was not only more difficult to resign himself to, it was all but unbearable. The few belongings he had brought from home had remained in the hotel along with the little intended presents. His first task was to procure some soap, a toothbrush and some toothpaste, articles he could buy in the market hall, though the toothpaste tasted sweet like everything else here. He didn’t buy a shaving kit partly because it was expensive and partly because buying one would have proved too complicated, involving separate items such as razor, razor blade, shaving brush, shaving foam or cream and so on. Why shave in any case? For whom? He hadn’t been to a barber since he first landed in town and though he really didn’t give it much thought now his chin was stubbly and hairy, his hair was an uncombed mess and the nails on his fingers and toes had grown long and hard. Having no sewing kit, his general appearance had become steadily less respectable: he had lost buttons, his shoelaces were broken, his suit had rips and holes in it and everything was dirty. They were the clothes he both slept and worked in. On one occasion, having wandered a little further away from the market hall than usual, he saw his reflection in a shop mirror and hardly recognised the bearded, ragged tramp staring back at him. It was his eyes especially that frightened him, the dark, jaded, hunted-and-confused look of primitive man in the thin, worn, sallow face ...

He missed the change of underwear most. There was nothing clean to put on. Even if he had possessed a change of clothes where would he be able to wash the set he had taken off, where could he have dried it or, indeed, simply kept it? Clothes were scandalously expensive here as he had noted in the window of the department store he found in the outer suburb on the day he had wasted his time trying to find a cinema. He simply didn’t have the money: he would have had to slave away for ages before scraping enough together. He would have to postpone the idea. Until then he could do no more than imagine a new being for himself, one that was distinct from his clothes, from his skin too if that were possible – indeed from his entire neglected body.

As he grew more feral so his homesickness grew less insistent. He had practically stopped keeping track of how long he had been here. Did they still remember him at home? Had they given him up for lost, written him off, perhaps even forgotten him? The home he had left behind, his old life, was fading away. All that remained of it was the desire to get away, far away from here. It no longer mattered where, in what direction, simply away, away, away.

Once he felt a little better he took a metro back to the hotel. He was pretty sure they wouldn’t let him back in and he was right. The fat uniformed doorman barred his way again, raising his arm to indicate no entry, but why after all should he admit such a suspicious-looking figure who might be a beggar or something even worse? Or was it just that he remembered their last encounter when the fellow had ejected him from the hotel and did everything to stop him going back in? ... Budai felt weaker now, less able to stand up for himself and, after three or four half-hearted attempts, simply stopped trying. The doorman stood at the ready, automatically blocking the entrance each time Budai reappeared. The man was clucking something from beneath his fat fleshy nose as if he were talking to him. Budai leaned closer to try to catch what he was saying and make sense of it. It sounded a little like:

‘
Parataschara ... Kiripi laba parasera ... parataschara ...
’

The man was repeating the same phrases he had used before when Budai asked him about a taxi, a phrase Budai had later concluded was a form of greeting. Might he have been wrong? For it wasn’t very likely that the doorman would be uttering such things while getting him to clear off. Or could it be that the phrase had another meaning too depending on the occasion, that it meant both you are welcome and to hell with you, the way the Latin adjective
altus
could mean both deep and high, and
sacer
both blessed and cursed, in other words, precisely opposite things?

As he stared at the hotel from the street it seemed to him a lost paradise from which he had been banished. He regarded it with the most intense nostalgia but was almost incapable of conjuring up any part of it or even imagining that he once had his own room, his own made-up bed, his own writing table, bathroom, basin and shower. And that Edede was there each day ... Was she still riding the lift up and down, pushing the buttons? If the authorities had discovered their relationship, as he feared they had, and it was regarded as a capital crime, it would be the same for her as for him; their vengeance would seek her out too and it was pointless looking for her. On the other hand, he admitted to himself, he would be ashamed to be seen by her in his current state.

His capacity for action had drained away, his mind was dry and barren and he had little appetite left for renewing his battle of wits with that lump of lard. He hung around the entrance for a while longer but nothing changed, no new stratagem or scheme occurred to him. For a few moments he wasn’t even sure whether he wanted to enter at all. Some time later, without having made a decision as such, he set off back towards the metro station. The skyscraper on the building had grown another two floors since he last passed that way: it had reached floor seventy-seven.

He was familiar by now with the faces of some of the market labourers though he had no desire to make their acquaintance. Since there was a fairly rapid turnover of workers there were always new faces at the loading area and it was noticeable how many of them were coloured, more here than elsewhere. Those who, like him, had no accommodation tended to seek out any available place in the market come dusk, on bales, on heaps of coal or next to the wall, generally drunk. Every so often a policeman would stroll over the ramp, moving on those he spotted, though no-one discovered Budai’s hiding place. Once the policemen had gone those he had disturbed returned to their places and lay down again.

Having finished work Budai too took to the bar in the next street. He made a firm decision to get used to it. It was part of his current way of life, after all, much more so than a clean shirt. Where was he to wash a shirt? His lack of resources also had him choosing between clean underwear and getting drunk, and it was in perfectly sober mood, after considerable thought, that he opted for the latter. His situation would have been simply intolerable without alcohol.

The bar was normally solid with customers and served no more that two or three different kinds of drink. He was unable to discern a significant difference between even these: they all approximated to the syrupy-sickly liquid you could buy anywhere and which, in his estimation, was pretty high in alcohol content. The dirty, stuffy, loud, smoke-filled room was patronised mostly by market employees, casual porters and the like, lowlifes and underworld types as well as a few tired, sluttish women of dubious appearance. The patrons would lean on the bar for hours on end, glass in hand, engaged in long debates that, Budai suspected, were conducted in mutually incomprehensible languages, so that, like all drunks, they simply held forth notwithstanding. Occasionally the conversation would grow heated and suddenly an argument would break out, reaching a pitch of fury that sometimes resulted in a fight. When this happened the barman, a powerfully built, bald black man in a green apron, would usher the troublemakers out through the door or sometimes physically throw them out.

Budai was kept amused by little things there. It was how he filled his time. He drank until his money ran out or until he felt woozy and had lost all sensation to the point of collapse but still had just enough alertness left to stumble back to his shelter where he was overcome by sleep. He would wake next morning with a bad headache, a foul taste in his mouth and a burning sensation in his stomach but that wouldn’t stop him returning the next evening.

His nerves though were being worn to tatters. He was constantly tense, charged with a nervous electric energy. Passing this or that figure in the street, it didn’t matter who, it would only take an irritating gesture or an annoying face and he would suddenly be overcome by a terrible blind fury. The sober part of his mind would know the fury to be perfectly unreasonable but he still could not resist: everything went dark and he cursed and swore at the person. He would imagine hitting or kicking him and using his face as a punch-bag. Once he was gazing at a good-looking slender creole boy dressed in a slightly over-elegant fashion with a bracelet and a chain around his neck. He was chewing gum to judge by the rhythmic movements of his jaw. The sight of his blazer, of his delicate fingers absent-mindedly plucking at his lips, filled him with such indignation he wanted to smash his fist into the boy’s face and beat him to death and would have done so had he not feared the consequences. For days after that he felt ill just recalling the moment.