Seven-Tenths (34 page)

For this is his ocean, and at last he knows he has always seen it thus, towards the end of afternoon: the great white clouds heaping themselves out of nothing against the blue, their tall reflections
falling on a glassy sea whose tide lies stilled at low. Reef tops knobble the surface, the kelps and grasses float as rough brown patches among which the white clouds lie in fragments. Children stand a hundred yards out, up to their ankles, legs angular as wading birds’, filling coconut shells and tins with winkles. They dabble among the white clouds. Clear voices drift ashore, tatters of a heedless present.

It is the moment of being aghast at the sad miracle of having condensed from nothing, of watching white clouds, of dispersing again. But how beautiful it is; and how pierced by it we always are as it leaps through us and, leaping, vanishes.

The Sulu archipelago is a good example of a place which must be reached by boat if it is ever to be seen. Only a boat, as opposed to an aircraft, will put the traveller within its coordinates. There is always some risk of attack by pirates or of going down in a vessel like the
Doña Marilyn
, and it is important to court that risk. Besides, the cramped, hot, vomity approach through a sea sprinkled to the horizon with small islands is the correct one. It is necessary to wake at dawn on a folding canvas deck bed jammed between its neighbours like a stretcher in a busy field hospital, face clammy with salt and dew and whipped by strands of a stranger’s hair. Out of that fitful, blurred sleep, an island has emerged on a turquoise sea and those whose destination it is begin to stir, waking their children, pulling their belongings together. This slow, oneiric approach must be observed. No place ever quite survives the wrong landfall.

If one wished to formulate a First Law of Travel, it might be that the mode of travel determines the place reached. To take an example: the Korea one reaches by cycling from Hamburg (which could be done without ever once glimpsing the sea) is altogether a different place from the Korea reached by flying from Heathrow or Kennedy. The people are different, they speak a different language and have a far greater knowledge of bicycles. This principle holds good for Sulu, too, and is likewise dependent on adopting the right pace. All those passenger ships, more or less unseaworthy, which still ply the networks of archipelagic routes, are simply ferries, shuttling people around within a country. They make one lament the passing of international sea travel. The sundry boredoms and discomforts of passenger liners were as nothing compared to those of the aircraft which have replaced them. There is a new generation of cruise liners, it is true, but they scarcely touch the argument. Cruise liners
are not going anywhere, so they function more or less as hotels, with the novelty that they float and move. They are as aimless as the pleasure they pursue, that classic wild-goose chase. As was memorably said in a radio programme about the hijacked
Achille
Lauro,
however luxurious a modern cruise liner, ‘it’s really no more than a velvet-lined prison hulk.’

Just as modes of travel affect destinations, so do they change our farewells and the very nature of separation. Airport terminals swallow up friends and lovers in a way docks never did. The drabness of quays is not to be compared with the squalor of concourses. Even if we bother to wave foolishly from the terminal roof as an anonymous metal toy half a mile away disappears within seconds into grey overcast, we can never be sure it was the right one. In any case, part of the dispassion of these aerial bus journeys lies in their being so swift. It now takes effort and care for two people to be distant from one another by much more than twenty-four hours.

Ships, on the other hand, carry with them the solemnity of long separations, perhaps of lifetimes. Stately valedictions echoed through people’s lives until forty or so years ago. Ships are individual as one of a fleet of Boeings never could be, even though an aircraft may carry a name (often more or less geared to the tourist age:
Loch Ness,
Val d’Aosta
, etc.). A ship is her name, right to the bottom and beyond, connoting a moment of history as much as a vague locus on the seabed (
Titanic, Lusitania, Andrea Doria
). Aircraft, when they crash, shed their names along with their wings. They become ‘ill-fated Flight 307’; or else Pan Am Flight 103 becomes ‘Lockerbie’, an entire nexus of loss reduced to a point of impact.

The departure of a ship is slow, celebratory, mournful. It gives time to think and the proper space in which to let fall one’s lesser salt into the greater below. Something of moment is happening, part of whose subtext is a fear or resentment of the sea as the agent of long absences, slow letters and terrible news. Whoever they are, down at the docks one windy afternoon – friends, lovers, siblings – they are already separated. There are those on the quay and those already on board, though both are watching. The ship is about to sail. Gangways are lowered, ropes cast off. Heavy nooses splash into the
slot of oily scum between lorry-tyre fenders and iron cliff. Cries go up. The siren’s blare, of such low frequency it shakes the stomach and jars loose fresh tears, sounds once, twice. Yet an illusion of unparting is preserved by the streamers, cheerful strips of paper sagging and twirling between the thousand pairs of widely separated hands.

Over the whole scene hovers loss looking for somewhere to settle. Is it in the already spoken goodbye? In the last touch of bodies? In the cries of the gulls? Or does it now pulse along that thin paper nerve? It parts; they part. Yet still they remain visible to each other while loss fills up the space opening between them, stretching out between ship and shore, between hull and headland, dot and smudge, before spreading across the face of the globe. But of course it had been there in the train on the way to the port. And before, in the careful packing of suitcases. And before that.

And after? Here again, air travel offers no comfort because its speed runs departure into arrival, leaching out their difference, blurring them into a hectic placelessness. We cannot tell what to think. It is too brutal, facing the ordeal of a dawn landing on a strange continent with the scents of leavetaking still in our clothes. We have walked the streets of an Asian city with the fresh scratches of a cat in Oxfordshire on our hands. Such confusions make unreal both cat and city and leave us feeling we can never properly come to grips with anything.

Travelling long distances by sea, on the other hand, gives us time. Travel is like death in that it requires mourning. The light melancholy of watching a coastline recede is a necessary observance. We join in with shipboard life just as soon as we wish, and not before. Otherwise we write in our cabin or spend hours watching the wake of our own passage. The caves sucked into the water’s surface by the turning of invisible propellers – each subtly different, each marbling a dissipating track which stretches back, an elastic streamer – become hypnotic. They set us adrift on inward voyages where we barely have enough sarcastic energy left to stop ourselves seeing our frail barks upon the vasty deep as paradigmatic. Such time, such long hovering on the edge of banality, is powerfully restorative. By the time
approaching land is announced we are free to be excited. Later, it seems to us that only by having breathed the salt air of loss for long enough are we able to make a properly carefree disembarkation. We have adjusted. Our biological clocks are reset, our homoiothermal balance has altered with the latitude, our internal maps – whose every nautical mile has been
felt
as travelled – make sense. Behind us the ocean is criss-crossed with thousands upon thousands of multicoloured streamers, a planet festooned with farewells.

Do you remember this?

A broken engine; the hours’ becalming; an empty ocean still as a lake of mercury. It was soundless to the horizon and our small noises placed us at the centre of the universe, unique in our activity. From time to time a spanner clinked, a bare foot bumped a thwart. From the vinyl-scented shade of a rigged tarpaulin we watched the foot’s tiny ripples become visible only as they left the
Medevina
’s shadow, trembling outwards, as if the shadow’s edge were the actual hull, our whole craft insubstantial, no more than an airy nothing which had briefly come between sun and sea. The mutter of voices – ‘Try this. It’s rusty. The gasket’s ruined.’ – the rasp and flare of a match, the incense of a cigarette. The small splash of a handful of waste. And then, emerging from the shadow into gorgeous colour like the tip of a kingfisher’s wing, an iridescent oil-stain flashing its molecules, splitting the spectrum and creeping out across the water. Do you remember how dazzling it was? That spreading puddle of hues in a still world of primary blue? Greens and purples, golds and pinks, rubies and violets, forming and re-forming, pooling and glittering minutely so the fascinated mind drew ever closer to its surface and fell into a microscope’s gaze such that the twinkle and sputter of evaporation almost became visible, the spirituous fractions boiling off in order of their volatility.

The sun climbed and remained stuck at the top of the sky. Sometimes we stood up or wandered aft to peer at the dismantled carburettor. The parts were black with oil and rust: deformed, even – corroded artefacts turned up by a plough rather than precision-engineered components. Our shifting weight as we moved about the narrow boat made one bamboo outrigger gently dent the water, the other rise and shed a line of droplets. The brilliant
oil-stain fractured. Feathers and petals broke off, some drifting perversely back into our shadow and winking out. A flotilla of melding islets moved into the glare beyond the outrigger, sending back scorching chromatic flashes. The hours passed. Fish and rice to eat, the bowls washed over the side and fat replenishing the film until – do you remember? – a peacock sheen surrounded our soundless universe, marbled and swirled and striated. In a halo of specious glory our little boat sat and baked, breathing out its rainbowed anima.

No, you will not have forgotten; not in the light of what was to happen later, not in the particular isolating light in which individual events were picked out with such intensity, casting profound yet insubstantial shadows.

Now and then a fish rose, but languidly, as if its head had difficulty breaking the surface tension of the mercury. So thick was the water’s skin, the animal’s head should have been ringed by a downward-curving meniscus, a pucker. Each occasion seemed a dramatic event, and several pairs of eyes would remain long afterwards on the resealed hole where snout or fin had protruded for an instant. At length, a flying fish broke completely out, tail whirring the water’s surface like the propeller of a planing speedboat and leaving a straight scar of irregular dashes for 30 metres before vanishing into an invisible notch. This was a fishing boat, after all, and at last someone aroused himself out of his lethargy enough to bait a hook and drop it into the rectangle of water enclosed by an outrigger. It was as much for something to do as a gesture of habit.

What is it that makes even a fisherman forget the bulk of the world underlying his tiny craft? He moves too much in air, ethereal, reading a visible text in light’s plain version. He waits and ponders and is becalmed in the eye of the sun, turning over diurnal and terrestrial thoughts. He tinkers with carburettors. The illusory line separating air from water, dividing the lighter swirl of molecules from the denser, merely compounds the fiction of two worlds dwelling apart, the one inimical to the other. Yet what could be better proof of their radical contiguity than the gallant life force
pervading both? Not in a mystical sense, either; but because life originated from below, some of it adapting to permanent exile and some of it staying put. We are colonials. What we have in common with our ancestors is the sea and not the air. How could a fisherman daily pull from one medium into the other his forebears’ struggling descendants without having a mind to that world of relatives beneath him? Every day the children of his archaic self observe his keel’s sliding footstep as it treads their upper atmosphere, crossing their heavens with its contrail. They underlie him as a half-forgotten nation underlies its vast diaspora. One day this has to be acknowledged; one day he must return to his roots among the vents and plumes, the ancient dark upwellings, his cradle’s gyre and nurturing oblivion. Maybe only the exceptional fisher does not simply make daily raids across the frontier, poking spears and hooks and nets into its first few metres. Maybe the exceptional fishers are those who sense their own roots extending deep into dissolution and can feel the freedom and excitement of the abyss.

It was mid-afternoon before the engine started. Our companions murmured their relief. We had lost six hours. The blocks of ice in the insulated chests would be that much smaller. Nobody had opened the lids to look, for fear of accelerating the process. Now we could spend fewer than four hours at the lobster beds, even if the motor kept going and took us there before midnight. You will not have forgotten how precarious these trips were, 90 miles each way. If all went well we could fill half the chests with lobsters, having transferred the remaining ice to the other half to pack around fish. Any serious delay on the way back might mean the fish were lost. And this quite apart from the usual risks of dodging coastguard cutters alert for illegal fishermen. Edgy enterprise, but grounded in comradeship and marked, as always, by heightened senses.

How vivid, still, are the seagoing smells? Oily bilges, fish entrails, a freshly lit cigarette drawn through salt paper? And at night if you were not diving, the compressor’s exhaust fumes, its lethal monoxides, barking and blattering our darkened boat’s position for anyone to hear. But a shift of wind might gently lay its hand on a
cheek and turn your head like a weathervane, pointing your nostrils into the smell of unseen land: forest and rot and copra, jasmine, mimosa and ylang-ylang. And you may have thought of the strangeness of it, sitting there in night’s scented cocoon, propped up by nails and timber in the middle of water while men you knew like brothers worked away in the fish mines far beneath the boat, their dim torchlight opening up fugitive seams and corridors. Their wooden goggles and floating hair.

And behind everything, the economics: the tanks of fuel we carried set against the miles we needed to cover; the ice matched with that and the anticipated size of the catch; the future price of fish in the market half a week away; profits eaten up by repairs. The fisherman’s immemorial equations, whose hidden term is time. Tides and currents, nightfall and winds, the rising of the moon: all determine whether he is too early, too late, or punctual for the flow of fish he is banking on at his journey’s end.

So we were already late; but the captain said, ‘Push on. Push on,
go!
’ (pointing with jutting lips to the speckless ocean’s rim). To turn and head for home was too safe, too undisguised a loss of fuel and effort. Follow the sun, now curving a south-westering course. In this way we reached the moment when our prow was aimed directly at where, in one corner of the day-long featureless sky, evening clouds were beginning to form a range of wool mountains above an invisible coast. It was still too early for pinkish colours. The peaks were white and blue and white, undershadowed with pearl, glittering snowfields which convection was thrusting into pinnacles and spires even as we watched, transforming the alps into the skyline of an impossible town. There, among amorphous towers and eroding castles, an insane architect was busy opening up sly passages, glimpses of alleys, vistas of tall windows and bent porticoes whose very act of moulding held out the constant promise of disclosure. Glancing away for a moment and then looking back, the eye would catch these apertures at the tantalising instant of being sealed by vapour, blocked by soundless landslides, erased for ever. Even as the eye scrambled back down crumbling stairways leading nowhere, the great gates were slamming all around in silence. And always,
as they closed or melted they left behind the faintest air of having successfully denied, of having withheld a view of some innermost chamber or secret courtyard now buried deep within palisades.

Meanwhile, the mercury ocean across which we had been heading was gone. In its place a glassy violaceous swell reflected this soft metropolis so the one image leaned above the other, the lower scarcely distorted. And it was on this, dead ahead, you will remember we first saw the tiny black insect of another boat. The only visible object on the ocean’s face, it lay in our path with the punctuality of an omen. Without needing to alter course by a degree we gradually overhauled the lone fisherman as he sat in the celestial city’s mirrored thoroughfares.

The captain eased the nylon string which held the throttle so the engine note fell to a mutter and the
Medevina
lost way. With the rudder slightly over we began a gentle curve which took us within hailing distance of the fisherman but not so close that our wake would swamp him. As to what we already thought, can you remember that? Even though we had passed many identical craft on previous expeditions, can you remember if you had taken in the absence of a mast and rice-sack sail, or the fact that the boat’s smallness and the man’s position in it made it obvious there could be no engine? Even as we came abreast 30 yards off, had you appreciated that nobody under paddle-power alone would allow himself to drift so far out to sea that no land was visible at any point of the compass? A stocky man, the boat’s occupant was wedged comfortably low on the bottom boards, watching our approach from beneath the brim of a hat shaped like a straw lampshade. A fishing line was stretched the freeboard’s short distance between one hand and the water.

‘Oy,
paré
!
’ called our captain, allowing us to laze across his bows, then around to the other side. The fisherman’s face did not turn, however, and something about his posture had forestalled any jocular shouts of ‘
Hoy gising
!
Wake up there!’ The captain only said for all of us, softly, ‘
Yari na. Patay na
.’ And so we completed our circle, staring at the dead man, the water at our stern dimpling and
crawling above the scarcely revolving screw. There still was no breath of wind; but possibly even at a saunter our own larger vessel with its spread awning leaned against enough air lazily to displace it, for by the time we had gone entirely around the fisherman, a waft of corruption had reached us. There, in the early evening light amid the shattered debris of clouds, he sat and exhaled the gases of his own corporeal breakdown.