What Am I Doing Here? (42 page)

I told him I was travelling north to see a bird that had flown from his country. The story mystified him.

Two days later I lay on the West Cliff off Hermaness and watched the Albatross through binoculars: a black exception in a snow field of Gannets. She sat, head high and tail high, on her nest of mud, on her clutch of infertile eggs.

I too am mystified by this story.

 

T
he island of Chiloe is celebrated for its black storms and black soil, its thickets of fuchsia and bamboo, its Jesuit churches and the golden hands of its woodcarvers. Among its shellfish there is an enormous barnacle – the
pico
de
mar –
which sits on one's plate like a miniature Mount Fuji. The people are a mixture of Chonos Indian, Spanish and sailors of every colour, and their imagination churns with tormented mythologies.

The Cathedral of Castro was built of corrugated sheet and painted an aggressive orange in honour of the Holy Year. Luggers with ochre sails were becalmed in the bay. At a café in the port sat an immensely distinguished, silver-haired man with long straight legs.

He was a Sikh. Long ago, longer than he cared to remember, he was batman to an English colonel at Amritsar. One of his duties was to take the colonel's daughter out riding. Their eyes met. She was excommunicated by her family, he by his. Their life in England was a succession of hostile landladies. One day, he cut his hair and shaved his beard, and they went to South America. He and his wife had been happy on Chiloe. She had recently died.

‘I would not have lived in any other way,' he said.

Two lakes – Lago Huillinco and Lago Cucao – all but bisect the island, flowing one into the other, brown water into blue, and out into the Pacific. The lakes are the Styx of Chiloe. The souls of the dead are supposed to assemble at the village of Huillinco. The Boatman then ferries them to their destination.

The road to Huillinco was white and wound through fields of ripe grain. Winnowers shouted greetings as I passed. Silvery, shingled houses were encircled by pines and poplars. Hansel and Gretel would be happy to live here.

Under a tree of waxy white flowers a fat young man sat eating blackberries. Hector Dyer Garcia was returning from the races. He had lost money.

‘Do you know Notting Hill Gate?' he asked.

Around the turn of the century, Alfred Dyer-Aulock jumped ship and landed in the arms of a Chilote girl. On his deathbed, he told his family to write to their English cousins. They did not know how to do this. Hector dreamed of an unclaimed inheritance in a London bank.

‘Or I shall have to go to Venezuela,' he said.

We walked slowly, stopping at a blue cottage to drink cider with a woodcutter's family. At dusk, we came to Huillinco – a cluster of houses, a jetty and the silver lake beyond. Evangelists with nasal voices were droning to a guitar.

Hector crept into his house as though visiting the scene of a crime. He had a wife. She was twice his size and twice his age. Shrieking abuse – between mouthfuls of cheese – she drew out his painful confession. He had lost on the horses the money intended for groceries.

I spent the evening with Hector and his friends, playing dominoes in the bar.

 

In the morning a milky fog smothered the settlement. Across the lake came the sound of rowlocks and the muffled bark of a dog. A man, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, said the ferry to Cucao would come at three in the afternoon.

I walked along the lake shore, amid mimosas, wintergreen and flame trees. Emerald humming-birds sucked at trumpets of scarlet honeysuckle. One shrub had bright purple berries. The country smelled of burning.

At three, the village sighted the ferry, a black speck at the far end of the lake. Horses with panniers were tethered alongside the jetty.

The people of Cucao disembarked their produce: bales of black wool, mussels, and trusses of seaweed and shallots. The Boatman was a tiny man with glistening brown skin and an almost circular mouth. He was one of the last pure-blood Chonos Indians.

Besides myself, the only passenger for Cucao was Dona Lucerina, a firm-jawed woman swathed from head to foot in black. She owned the only hostel in the village.

The Boatman had started the guttering outboard when two boys ran to the shore carrying a white wood coffin. They were red-eyed from crying. They had gone to fetch a priest for their dying mother: he had refused to come. They sat a night and a day outside the priest's house: he refused to come. Then word came she was dead; still he wouldn't come. The weather was hot. The mother was rotting, unburied and unshriven.

‘When did she die?' demanded Dona Lucerina.

‘Friday.'

‘At what hour?'

‘Ten in the morning.'

‘Heart?'

‘Lungs.'

‘Ah!' She gave a knowing smile. ‘Tuberculosis!

‘Bad diet. For tuberculosis you must drink milk. Then the disease cannot enter the house.'

‘She was ill for years,' said the younger boy.

‘She should have drunk more milk when she was young.'

The boat glided into Lago Cucao. The Boatman dropped the boys on a beach of white stone. We watched them, two black figures carrying the coffin to their homestead, through the dead trees.

 

At Cucao there were two wooden churches on a meadow: they might have been built by Early Celtic monks. Kingfishers flew back and forth. The Boatman tied up beside a row of cottages. I paid him my obol. Dona Lucerina led the way along a sandy path: we brushed our legs against giant-leaved gunnera.

We climbed the headland. The setting sun coloured the Pacific rollers a milky golden green. The sands along the bay were black. A fishing boat, crossing the bar, was a black crescent in the foam. Dona Lucerina's house was long and low, with a roof of shingles and planked walls painted cream.

‘All mine!' she gestured along the beach. ‘Two hundred hectares, the house, and mines of gold. I have to sell it. My husband is sick.'

In the dark green kitchen sat her lodger, Don Antonio: a straight-backed old man with dark eyes glittering through a fuzz of eyebrow.

‘Tell the young man some stories,' said Dona Lucerina. ‘He wants to hear stories.'

In soft and musical Spanish, Don Antonio told of the Basilisk and the Fiura, the Sirens and the Pincoya.

‘Ah! I love the Pincoya.' Dona Lucerina clapped her hands.

The Pincoya was a sea-nymph: a laughing girl who encouraged the shellfish to multiply. Sometimes you saw her dancing on the sands, her dress of seaweed shimmering with pearls and her flaming hair streaming in the wind.

‘Tell him another, old man,' she said. ‘Tell him about the King of the Land.'

‘Long ago,' Don Antonio began, ‘Cucao had everything - cows, horses, sheep, goats, everything – and the rest of Chiloe had nothing. One day a sheep was born with three horns, and its fame spread. A stranger came to see the sheep and stayed the night. In the morning the people woke to find all their animals gone. They followed the tracks and came to a river. There was an old man sitting on the bank.

‘ “Have you seen the thief who stole our animals?” they asked.

‘“That was no thief,” the man said. “That was the King of the Land.”

‘And ever since the people of Cucao have nothing and the rest of the island is rich.'

‘And another one!' said Dona Lucerina. ‘Tell him about Millalobo.'

‘Do you remember the cottages by the landing-stage?' he asked.

‘I do.'

‘In the second cottage,' he went on, ‘there lived a family – mother, father, daughter. We knew them well . . .

‘One day the mother told the girl to fetch some water for coffee from the spring . . .
por un cafecito no mas.
The girl did not want to go: there was a stranger, she said, in the village. But the mother insisted and the girl did not come back. The mother called and called and searched everywhere. She came to the spring and there was blood . . . blood all around . . .
para sangre.
The neighbours said yes, they had seen a stranger. He was as tall and fair as you are, Englishman. The mother knew that Millalobo had taken her daughter . . .

‘A year later the girl came back with a baby in her arms. The woman was thrilled with her grandson, and rigged up a cradle. One morning, the daughter left the house, warning her mother not to look at the child. ‘ ‘Remember what I said, Mother,” she repeated as she closed the door. But the woman was aching to see her grandson and rolled back the coverlet. From the waist down the baby was a seal. Then it changed into a star and bounced around the room, and out of the window, buzzing like a horse-fly.

‘The girl heard the buzzing. She knew her husband had bewitched the child and sent it to live in the sky. She roamed the seashore crying “Cucao! Cucao!” She walked into the water and slid under the surface . . .

‘Millalobo built a palace for her at the bottom of the lagoon. Once a year he frees her and she floats to the surface, and when she sees the meadow and the churches, she breaks into song:

‘ “Cucao! Cucao! Cucaooooooooooo!” '

‘Now tell him about the Boatman,' Dona Lucerina insisted.

Don Antonio was tired now: but he stood at the window and pointed to a chain of three black rocks like stepping stones at the far end of the bay.

‘Those rocks', he said, ‘are the Boatman's Landing. I once knew a man who laughed at the story of the Boatman. He stood on one of the rocks and shouted, “Boatman! Boatman!” – and the Boatman came.'

Night fell over Cucao. A full moon lit the surf. The fire of some gold panners burned a hole in the darkness. I walked along the sands. I approached the Boatman's Landing but I resisted the temptation to call.

 

L
ong ago, when I worked at Sotheby's, the art auctioneers, two seedy Swiss brought in prehistoric gold treasure: torques, bangles, hair-rings, plaquettes. They said it came from Middle Europe, but I knew it was Iberian. We gave a receipt and they left.

In the library we had a book on Iberian prehistory. I found several of the pieces illustrated, listed as the property of a Fundación Don Juan de Valencia in Madrid.

By means of the international operator I got through to the foundation and asked to speak to the curator.

‘You have the gold?' he called in an excited voice. ‘This is wonderful! It was stolen from us. Keep it! We will tell Interpol . . . Excuse me, what did you say your name was? Mr Cha? . . . Chat . . . Chatwin! We will contact you. THANK you!'

Next morning, around eleven, the receptionist put through a call to my desk to say that the Duke of M – was waiting in the office.

He was a white-haired grandee of the old stamp. He wore the black hat only a grandee can wear. I showed him into a waiting-room and went to fetch the gold from the safe.

Trembling with excitement, the Duke of M – picked up the objects, one by one. Nothing was lost.

‘I cannot tell you how grateful I am,' he said. ‘You have no idea what I have been through. These Swiss came posing as archaeologists and we allowed them to study the collection. They stole it. I am responsible for the foundation. I would be in terrible disgrace if the gold was not found.'

We agreed it should go back to the safe, and we would wait instructions from Interpol.

The Duke of M — gave me his card and asked me to call on him if I came to Madrid.

On the way out we passed the Chairman of Sotheby's who was talking to the expert on Spanish painting. I saw the expert murmuring to the Chairman, who pressed forward to introduce himself.

‘I've always heard about your wonderful collection of pictures . . .

‘Always' was thirty seconds beforehand.

‘But you must come and see them,' said the Duke of M — .

He took from his wallet a second card: ‘Whenever you come to Madrid, I shall be delighted to give you luncheon.'

Several years passed. I quit Sotheby's - Smootherboys, as a friend likes to call it. I spent one winter kicking around the Western Sahara. In April my wife joined me for a two-week trip in Morocco.

On the runway at Casablanca was the Royal Air Maroc Caravelle that would take us to Paris with a connecting flight to London. But there was also an Iberian Airlines jet due to leave for Madrid twenty minutes earlier.

‘Quick!' I said to Elizabeth. ‘Let's go to the Prado and look at pictures.'

The airport staff hustled us aboard.

It was freezing in Madrid. We stayed in a poky hotel and shivered. Next morning, I called the Duke of M — to ask if I could see the Don Juan de Valencia Foundation.

‘You must come to lunch,' said the Duke of M — . ‘Can you manage today?'

‘I don't think we can,' I said. ‘We've come from the Moroccan desert and we've got no respectable clothes.'

‘We'll find you clothes,' he said. ‘My sons have plenty of suits. But what size is your wife?'

‘She's short,' I said, ‘and slim.'

‘We shall find something. We expect you at a quarter to one.'

We pressed the doorbell. The butler showed us into separate bedrooms. In mine there was a selection of grey suits, a row of black shoes, shirts, socks, cufflinks and silver silk ties.

I was dirty. I washed and dressed. I was terrified of mucking up the basin. I met Elizabeth in the hallway. She wore an emerald dress by Balenciaga. We went in to join the guests.

In the salon there were several paintings by Goya and, in the dining-room, a magnificent set of Guardis. The conversation was brilliant, the lunch delicious. After three months of eating food with my fingers, my table-manners were hardly up to it.