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Authors: Patrick McGrath
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going to happen next. Nothing. The usual sounds of Havana late at night. The sea, the trees, the insects. Vehicles on distant streets. No voices though.
At last Vera got up and stood at the table, frowning, pouring them each a drink, a cigar between her teeth. Her hair was damp with the warmth of the night and her bare shoulders were bathed in moonlight.
Jack said he hated guns.
—They’re getting them from Russia, she said.
—Where did you hear that?
—Someone told me.
And again the small bitter voice, seizing on this oblique reference to her life out there in the streets, the life he knew nothing about.
—So many friends you have.
He knew what he was doing when he said it, he hated that he was doing it, but he seemed to have no choice. What was the impulse—intensify the crisis, push it to the breaking point, get the thing finished and resolved one way or the other—was this it?
—Oh Christ, Jack, don’t start.
But he had started, and within ten minutes she was dressed and out the door, out into the dangerous dark streets, and he didn’t see her until the morning, by which time he knew it was all over with Havana.
So they left Havana, and with them went the battered cabin trunk with the brass studs in which they’d packed their painting gear, their sketchbooks, their journals, their clothes and books, as well as a bottle or two for emergencies. Vera’s canvases they shipped back to London. I see them on some smoky old coaster with rusted rivets and welded patches on the hull, the pair of them leaning on the rail, in dark glasses and Panama hats, as they moved on to the next island, the next coastal town. Jack’s experiences, recollected in drunken tranquillity, by this time would have downshifted through nuanced gradations into a mild and rather maudlin memory of himself as a very young man drifting about the Caribbean with this difficult woman with whom he was engaged in a torrid and complicated love affair. The steamer belched oily black smoke into the sunlight and the captain stood on the bridge trying to shoot dolphin with a rifle. Off to the west the mangrove gave way to sandy beaches, an unbroken backdrop of dense palms with mountains in the distance and every few miles, just visible across a hazy, shimmering sea, a cluster of wooden shacks on stilts, and a rickety jetty, and the faint stench of seaweed drying in the sun. It was well into the afternoon when they learned that they would soon be docking for a couple of hours, and the prospect of a cool cantina and bottles of iced beer was welcome indeed.
—You had an idea, I said, what you were looking for.
—Oh yes.
Port Mungo: a once-prosperous river town now gone to seed, wilting and steaming among the mangrove swamps of the Gulf of Honduras.
Chapter Five
I visited the place only once. I spent ten days there. On the waterfront I saw rough bars built of concrete blocks run by hard-faced Chinese and patronized by prostitutes and mean-looking men from off the boats. I remember dusty streets and alleyways, and canals, which stank, being open sewers, and disgorged into the river, which was visible from almost anywhere you looked, glittering in the sunlight behind the stilted shacks, or from the end of an alley where chickens pecked in the dirt and a collapsing dock occupied a few feet of frontage. I retain a vivid memory of the open market, where I saw a man split a live iguana down the belly with a machete, that reptile’s flesh being a local delicacy. There were flies everywhere, noise, blood, the stench of butchered meat mingling with the fragrance of papaya and mango.
I will not pretend I wasn’t devastated when he left me. Isn’t every man a hero to his sister? Jack was certainly a hero to me, and I had diligently kept his image shining like a beacon before my eyes, the image of a brother resolute in his identity and ready to overcome every obstacle in the pursuit of his ambition. I cannot be certain exactly what happened in New
At last Vera got up and stood at the table, frowning, pouring them each a drink, a cigar between her teeth. Her hair was damp with the warmth of the night and her bare shoulders were bathed in moonlight.
Jack said he hated guns.
—They’re getting them from Russia, she said.
—Where did you hear that?
—Someone told me.
And again the small bitter voice, seizing on this oblique reference to her life out there in the streets, the life he knew nothing about.
—So many friends you have.
He knew what he was doing when he said it, he hated that he was doing it, but he seemed to have no choice. What was the impulse—intensify the crisis, push it to the breaking point, get the thing finished and resolved one way or the other—was this it?
—Oh Christ, Jack, don’t start.
But he had started, and within ten minutes she was dressed and out the door, out into the dangerous dark streets, and he didn’t see her until the morning, by which time he knew it was all over with Havana.
So they left Havana, and with them went the battered cabin trunk with the brass studs in which they’d packed their painting gear, their sketchbooks, their journals, their clothes and books, as well as a bottle or two for emergencies. Vera’s canvases they shipped back to London. I see them on some smoky old coaster with rusted rivets and welded patches on the hull, the pair of them leaning on the rail, in dark glasses and Panama hats, as they moved on to the next island, the next coastal town. Jack’s experiences, recollected in drunken tranquillity, by this time would have downshifted through nuanced gradations into a mild and rather maudlin memory of himself as a very young man drifting about the Caribbean with this difficult woman with whom he was engaged in a torrid and complicated love affair. The steamer belched oily black smoke into the sunlight and the captain stood on the bridge trying to shoot dolphin with a rifle. Off to the west the mangrove gave way to sandy beaches, an unbroken backdrop of dense palms with mountains in the distance and every few miles, just visible across a hazy, shimmering sea, a cluster of wooden shacks on stilts, and a rickety jetty, and the faint stench of seaweed drying in the sun. It was well into the afternoon when they learned that they would soon be docking for a couple of hours, and the prospect of a cool cantina and bottles of iced beer was welcome indeed.
—You had an idea, I said, what you were looking for.
—Oh yes.
Port Mungo: a once-prosperous river town now gone to seed, wilting and steaming among the mangrove swamps of the Gulf of Honduras.
Chapter Five
I visited the place only once. I spent ten days there. On the waterfront I saw rough bars built of concrete blocks run by hard-faced Chinese and patronized by prostitutes and mean-looking men from off the boats. I remember dusty streets and alleyways, and canals, which stank, being open sewers, and disgorged into the river, which was visible from almost anywhere you looked, glittering in the sunlight behind the stilted shacks, or from the end of an alley where chickens pecked in the dirt and a collapsing dock occupied a few feet of frontage. I retain a vivid memory of the open market, where I saw a man split a live iguana down the belly with a machete, that reptile’s flesh being a local delicacy. There were flies everywhere, noise, blood, the stench of butchered meat mingling with the fragrance of papaya and mango.
I will not pretend I wasn’t devastated when he left me. Isn’t every man a hero to his sister? Jack was certainly a hero to me, and I had diligently kept his image shining like a beacon before my eyes, the image of a brother resolute in his identity and ready to overcome every obstacle in the pursuit of his ambition. I cannot be certain exactly what happened in New
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