What Lot's Wife Saw (41 page)

They were very abstract thinkers so I tried to apply what I knew of cyclist’s logic to get the true meaning of the question. The cyclist was actually asking me if we were sending salt into the desert to pay off the Suez Mamelukes so that they wouldn’t attack the Colony. It was outrageous even to imagine it. The Consortium didn’t lose sleep over a handful of natives that it could swat like insects.

“The Suez Mamelukes are thieves, no one does deals with thieves,” I said.

Only cyclists would be naïve enough to believe that the colonial power would bargain an honourable peace with the natives. Cheap mirrors and beads perhaps, but salt never.

“The desert is as quiet as an uninhabited sea,” mused a cyclist, rubbing his calves.

I assured them that the Seventy-Five didn’t succumb to the native’s blackmail nor did they give away their salt so easily.

“They are returning it,” murmured all the cyclists around the fire together.

I chose not to answer. I knew the cyclists believed that the Seventy-Five traded a commodity that didn’t belong to them. In cyclists’ minds the natives were the legal owners of the salt, and we were the thieves. They thought of the Mamelukes as the spirits of the locals who’d been drowned by the Overflow and who’d returned out of the sand to reclaim what killed them and belonged to them.

I hadn’t expected this quarter to have been so upset by recent events, even though its reaction was singularly different. We considered the silence of the desert as evidence of the natives’ disappearance – the cyclists, however, believed that the Mamelukes were at the height of their strength and ready for the inevitable confrontation.

I suddenly felt hemmed in within the circle of the fires, a
persona
non grata
. Without them showing any sign of wanting my departure, I realised that it was time to leave. I was no longer an unobtrusive waft of air meandering unseen around their fires; I’d become visible, taken on substance and had a voice. I’d been seen and engaged in conversation.

Like our first ancestor, Adam, I’d been made to realise my nakedness and was ashamed of it. Paradise was showing me the exit. I arose and started to walk away, feeling my face and neck turn crimson. Before I crossed the borders of the quarter, I turned back for a last look, inconsolable. A last look at paradise lost. A fresh set of cyclists had left the rim and were ministering to their desert-stricken colleagues, while the previous set of carers had reclaimed their seats by the fire. From a distance, they looked like a shattered pomegranate whose seeds, every so often, changed position without spoiling the arrangement. I bade paradise farewell, feeling both my body and soul depart it.

From then on, I don’t remember that much. I mean, I can’t recall what happened over the next days. They were so similar that they blurred together. I was in a perpetual nightmare from which I couldn’t wake, like the ones we all experienced after the Overflow, but this one tormented me when my eyes were open. Sleep, even the patchy one I had become accustomed to recently, eluded me altogether. I was continuously on edge, the slightest noise would make me jump, my eyes would stream tears without reason and I couldn’t recognise objects or people. Even Ali’s demeanour seemed altered. I couldn’t feel the warmth of his hands. I was becoming afraid of him. The sun couldn’t warm me, food had no taste and water failed to slake my thirst.

I chose endless hours of loneliness rather than expose my shame in public but my demons gained strength in the quiet of my bedroom and grew longer canines, sharper violet claws and piercing red eyes. I battled against the beaked female idol, tried to protect my bed from the ravages of the tribesmen and dodged javelins that kept whistling into my pillow. Ali would enter into my room despite his banishment and would comfort me as best he could, anointing my eyelids with an ointment that wards off evil spirits. “White Man, White Man, the gods are asleep. Mother Earth forgives.” I bit his fingers to convince myself that it was truly Ali and not a dream or some distorted imposter.

I continuously consulted my watch to will the hands to point to two o’clock and be time for the meal at the Governor’s table. Every day at two we were expected to sit opposite the red shirt, the golden earring and the hair-raising voice. It was out of the question to miss it or to come in late. We kept the non-existent (except for us) Governor up to date with the news from the Colony that he administered through his signatures.

The lack of staff had devastated the Palace. Dust covered the furniture, sand blocked the windows and the stained, headless statues seemed to the passers-by to epitomise the sorry plight of the building. Regina, having fallen prey to her manic routines, not only made things dirtier but also engaged in acts of destruction. The Palace started to get a bad smell of mould and decomposition but no door, window or even curtain could be opened. Holding scented handkerchiefs against our nostrils we sat around the soiled tablecloth with its decoration of congealed grease and spilled red wine and with the growing pile of rubbish lurking underneath our feet. We never touched the wine in case the pirate had laced it with something, and we shied away from the food that was inedible as Regina was an appalling cook. Drake’s empty chair haunted us, reminding us that the salt was being sent to the desert, that the caravans laboured on a daily basis and that the precious product was being returned to the crater. As if nothing made an impression on him, the Governor never commented on the filth and the fact that we never touched our food or drink. This just magnified my anxieties and seemed to confirm the suspicion that we were living a nightmare. No amount of self-pinching affected the scene. Reality had well and truly been invaded by the horrors of the night.

Every evening I would go over to the Infirmary to offer my services to the exhausted returnees of the caravans – I was to blame for these people’s torture – I changed dressings and renewed bottles of serum, I read the Bible to them and held their hands while they prayed. I immersed myself in their suffering, cursing myself all the while for having sawn Bera’s head off that awful night and thus allowed that seedling to grow from his corpse and take his place on the throne.

At night flapping wings made me cringe with terror, I knew that talons and beaks would lacerate my skin. I could feel the destruction of Sodom approaching but the form it would take was still a mystery. Only the cardboard eye of the woman on the poster could see what was coming:
“Give me the people and take the goods for yourself.”
I lit candles around the bed, I drew pictures of the idols all over the floor, I pored over my Bible.
“Then the Lord rained upon Sodom fire and brimstone
.” I rubbed oil on my eyelids to calm the evil spirits, I begged for Mother Earth’s forgiveness so that the waters would not reach the ceiling.
“The Lord hath decided to destroy this place because the cry of them is waxen great.”
The sound of the salt working away at the foundations of the house rose to a deafening pitch. It was breaking through and wisps of violet fumes were invading my room.
“I am that I am.”

This must have lasted a very long time, even though the calendar only recorded it as a few days. But why should I believe that? The white growth on my chin said otherwise and everyone knows that the Colony’s air freezes time so that we lose count of it. Back in civilisation, they might have been changing millennium and the great-great-grandsons of the Seventy-Five perhaps ruled over us and we were naïve enough to believe that we’re still alive. At that moment Siccouane knocked on my villa door. Ali failed to stop him, so he stormed in shouting and scattering lighted candles. I was busy brandishing my Bible at the witch doctor who had cunningly glued smoked palm leaves on my feet, a potent banishment charm against thieves. My closet was full of the rest of the tribe, busy drawing a myriad of eyes on my clothes. Siccouane tackled me and immobilised me with a desperate hold. I reached around and palpated the bones under his skin to help me visualise what fossil he would leave after his death, and I imagined future anthropologists digging him up out of limestone caves. Not bad at all for a scrawny Secretary.

Siccouane grabbed my face and shouted, “The Black Ship exists; we hadn’t realised, you psychotic Balkan!”

The tribe was spurred to peals of laughter by this and they hooted in the wardrobe to the accompaniment of rattles, coconut cymbals, whistles and the occasional ululation. It made it very difficult to hear the Secretary clearly as he screamed into my ear.

“Wake up, Montenegro, or whatever the hell your real name is! We have to find the Black Ship!”

SECRETARY SICCOUANE

… I sketched the map’s outline on the sand and made sure that they realised what a peculiar expedition this was. They would have to trust me and to open their minds, to think out of their rather limited box and perhaps, for the first time in their lives, brush away the cobwebs of how we were meant to think.

Dr Fabrizio looked up from the map with a worried look and complained that he could understand nothing. Priest Montenegro observed nervously that we had come too far from the Colony. We were only a handful of metres from the last buildings on the south side of the bay, so their fears were irrational. It was just that on this side the coast is full of promontories and inlets and the dunes cut short visibility and makes anyone there seem isolated. We had to follow the shore through eight small coves and on to the ninth. That was where the solution to the mystery lay.

“Siccouane, nothing of what you’ve said convinces me that clambering over dunes and counting coves wouldn’t just be wasting our time.”

Their objections were wearing me out but I had to convince them to come with me because I simply could not face alone what was waiting for me in the ninth inlet.

The truth was that I would have preferred Captain Drake with me but he was away in the desert all day, Regina was on the verge of madness and Judge Bateau had retreated to the bottom of a bottle from where he was of no use to anyone. Thus I was stuck with the lightweight Priest and the cowardly Doctor who still couldn’t figure out what we were doing there. They thought we were just looking for a Black Ship whereas, in fact, this was crucial to test if our minds were working properly and our senses could be relied on.

The Doctor objected that the outline on the sand was too imprecise and he would have to see the proper map before advancing. I explained that I couldn’t just steal it from the Governor’s office but, after taking a thousand precautions, I’d studied it enough to imprint it in my brain and that all my calculations were totally correct. My theory was based on hypothetical conclusions from our observations and I couldn’t provide concrete proof, but if they took the trouble to follow my reasoning they would surely reach the same conclusions even if only by instinct. They ought to trust the Private Secretary, who had a Master’s degree in the mind games of the Seventy-Five and who was the only one that could see what was coming and try to decipher it.

I attempted to describe in simple words the critical points of my arguments, knowing that I was robbing them of their elegance, but there was no other way of getting through to those two. I reminded them of the day when we saw the Black Ship from the Palace terrace. We had all agreed at that time that the ship had sailed a strictly diagonal course across the bay, from north-west to south-east. It hadn’t deviated from that diagonal, indifferent to the direction of the wind, although the ship was powered by it. That suggested that its specific course was because it had a very specific destination on the map. I used a stick to point to the site on the map. When it had skirted the south shore, it had vanished from our field of vision. What other explanation fits these facts apart from that it was sheltering in one of the coves? The map in the Governor’s office showed that there was one inlet after another in this region, with the ninth one cutting deepest into the coastline and so any ship anchoring there would not have been visible from the port. When I plotted the diagonal course, I found that the Black Ship hit the shore at the opening of that particular inlet. As we hadn’t seen it since, it must still be berthed there. All we had to do was go and find it.

Dr Fabrizio put his arms around my shoulders and said wearily, “Siccouane, please come to your senses, because you’re obsessed with the Black Ship. That midday, on the terrace, we experienced a mass delusion, that’s all. Accept it, take it like a man, believe it! The more you think about it the crazier you’ll become.”

I would certainly go around the bend if I accepted that I had suffered a common delusion with five others who even breathe differently than I do. There is no mass delusion or shared hallucination when we think, interpret and experience things in such diametrically opposing ways. There was no way that we’d seen the same waking dream, down to the last detail. They might not trust their eyes but I know Nicodeme Le Rhône very well and he doesn’t see things that don’t exist. I do not succumb to auto-suggestion, I am immune to spirits, I am unaffected by moonlight, I cannot be hypnotised and I am not delusional. There is no more dry and desiccated realist than I.

Father Montenegro chose his words carefully.

“Siccouane, even if your theory explains the disappearance of the Black Ship, it doesn’t tell us why we were the only ones out of the whole Colony to see it.”

“That is the next question and we’ll deal with it later. First we must confirm that the Black Ship is actually there and exists.”

“But the two questions are interconnected; we can’t answer them separately.”

“I suggest that we separate them and answer them one by one.”

“What about the fact that its keel was submerged in these waters,
that
needs explaining,” added Dr Fabrizio.

I screamed at them that if they were such cowards that they didn’t dare see their hallucination take on substance, they should turn round and let me find the hidden cove alone. I couldn’t get bogged down with questions I couldn’t answer but I’d do my utmost to answer the one within my reach and then deal with the others. That’s why I’d asked them to open their minds and revolutionise their thinking! We had to overcome the objections that common logic raised, just as we’d get beyond the eight inlets to reach the one which held the answer to the most crucial question:
Is there a Black Ship or have we imagined it?
That was the matter to be addressed because that was what’d led us to doubt our senses. If we got there and saw the Black Ship, then we’d at least know it hadn’t just been imagined. We’ll touch it, explore it and try to understand it. Then perhaps we’ll be able to find answers to the other questions, working backwards. The Black Ship was playing mind games on us and we needed to adapt our thinking to be able to win the game. I had no doubt about that.