How to Disappear

 

 

 

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a memoir for misfits

Duncan Fallowell

 

TERRACE BOOKS

A TRADE IMPRINT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS

Terrace Books

A trade imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press

1930 Monroe Street, 3rd Floor

Madison, Wisconsin 53711 -2059

uwpress.wisc.edu

Copyright © 2013 by Duncan Fallowell

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any format or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews.

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fallowell, Duncan.

How to disappear : a memoir for misfits / Duncan Fallowell.

p. cm.

Originally published: London : Ditto Press, 2011.

ISBN 978-0-299-29240-9 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-299-29243-0 (e-book)

1. Fallowell, Duncan-Travel. I. Title.

PR6056.A56Z46 2013

823'.914—dc23

[B]

2012040153

Typeset in Plantin Rounded

 

 

 

To my old friend Pedro Friedeberg whom I've never met

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

How to Disappear

C
HAPTER
O
NE
Sailing to Goz

C
HAPTER
T
WO
The Curious Case of Bapsy Pavry

C
HAPTER
T
HREE
Waiting for Maruma

C
HAPTER
F
OUR
Who was Alastair Graham?

C
HAPTER
F
IVE
Beyond the Blue Horizon

Acknowledgments

 

 

 

W
e are held for two days in Catania port by storms of unusual violence, and all Mount Aetna and much of the town have disappeared in a turbulence of drenching cloud. Lit by lightning, a baroque dome or a line of statues or a towerblock might briefly flash out at an unexpected angle; but thunder can barely be heard above the roar of winds whose force whips the rain into diagonals, stinging the face on deck or blasting smears against the portholes when we're inside. Our ship has the protection of the basin, but immense waves, so uncharacteristic of the Mediterranean, break against the far side of the harbour wall, sending displays of foam up to a great height. These sudden bouquets of whiteness are snatched by the gales and are dispersed into the maelstrom, so that the sea seems to explode and vanish upwards.

Ever phlegmatic, the crew play cards in the saloon while the passengers, few at this time of year (only a couple of dozen on a ship which could take hundreds as well as their automobiles), stare out with listless eyes at the dim chaos. Occasionally someone dashes down the gangplank, along the harbourside and into town, to buy the chewy almond cakes for which Catania is famous. In due course he will reappear, sodden but triumphant, with a bow-tied parcel in a dripping plastic bag. The cakes, not too sweet yet dusted in a talcum of sugar, are tenderly satisfying, especially when taken with tea. Alas, the tea on offer at the ship's bar is without doubt the most repulsive I've ever come across, its taste a mixture of filth and antiseptic, its colour a perturbed grey. And the coffee's not much better.

On the third morning one awakes to peace. All violence has departed and the city, beneath a blue sky, is meticulously exposed by sunlight of butter-yellow. Somewhat darker and behind it, but not forbidding, Aetna slides gracefully to the heavens; while during breakfast on board nobody speaks, everyone muted by tranquillity or tedium. The gluelike hours move slowly forward until at last, after half an hour of premonitory throbbing and squirting through its flanks, the ship sets sail for Malta at 1 pm.

We hug the Sicilian coast, cruising southwards. Squinting passengers take the air on deck. Unexpectedly, blocks of flats appear on the shore, followed by the cluster of old Syracuse which is our only stopping point before the open sea. At the very mention of ‘Syracuse' an enchantment arises in one's mind: palace and opera house, cathedral and cafe, ancient gold stone and young gold flesh, palm fronds, handbag snatchers, wonderful food alfresco on warm velvet nights, and death in carnival costume; all the heady and crooked cliches of the south jostling softly together – the locus of another story – not this one.

The ship, in the smartly painted blue-and-white of the Tirrenia Line, is an unavoidable spectacle when it ties up alongside the esplanade. This is known as the Foro Italico and is marked out by a string of pom-pom trees overlooked by a precipice of grand houses. Scootering children greet our arrival, then stand dumbly and stare up at the floating bulk while seven more passengers join the ship. Four of them, bent by heavy bags of foodstuffs, turn out to be residents of Gozo and are English.

‘Is Gozo like Sicily?' I ask.

‘Not in the slightest. Sicily is civilisation.'

Really? At times in Sicily I have felt far from the security of the word ‘civilisation' whose very syllables rumble so elegantly along like the roofscape of a classical ideal; and I've found myself instead in a place where I could not walk or talk freely and where at any moment I might be ambushed. When Coleridge came up to Syracuse from Valletta around 1805 he also had mixed feelings. Syracuse he found decayed and the population deep in ignorance, swarmed over by Catholic priests as numerous, he wrote, as an Egyptian plague. But, as always in Sicily, there was voluptuousness too: at the opera, he noted, and in the cakey palazzi, and in the fertile spaces between ancient ruins where, to Coleridge's surprise, Indian hemp and the opium poppy grew happily and were harvested by the Syracusans for their narcotic properties. Which was right up his street, for not only was Coleridge addicted to laudanum but I read somewhere that he invented a cocktail consisting of aconite, angostura, and leopard's bane.

‘Where will you be staying?' asks one of the Englishmen.

‘I fancied the sound of the Duke of Edinburgh.' This hotel is in Victoria, Gozo's capital.

‘Ah…' comes the response.

‘What do you mean, “ah”?'

‘Do you like character?'

‘Yes.'

‘Then you'll love it.'

‘I haven't booked or anything.'

‘At this time of the year it will be empty.'

He turns back to his companions, leaving me to purse my lips and look at nothing, swimming a little inside, which I recognise as the careen of the unknown, of a dubious situation up ahead which is to be faced alone. It is succeeded by a short, corrective burst of adrenaline. We sail south-south-west. Everything is fine for an hour and a half or so – then without warning the ship slides down a steep bank of water into a lurching swell. At first it is almost amusing, in funfair fashion, but one by one the passengers turn avocado-green and disappear into their cabins. On deck a pregnant woman collapses in disorientation. With her legs buckling this way and that, head lolling and eyes rolling as though in the final throes of mad cow disease (her ballooning cargo of unborn flesh threatening to take off in yet another direction), she is helped below by companions.

Usually I do not suffer from sea-sickness beyond a slightly queasy sense of surprise. I do what one is supposed to do: use the horizon to maintain at least one constant in a world of liquefying references. But eventually I too begin to feel uncomfortable and decide to go below for something to settle the stomach. On the way I pass a splattered mess which looks like half-digested almond cake mixed with tomatoes, and in the cabin my ‘prosciutto e formaggio' bread-rolls take on a lurid, lysergic repulsiveness. My tummy is also oppressed by the distant explosion of plates beyond the cabin door. The plates are smashing like firecrackers as they slip on to the hard floor of the abandoned buffet. I force down some food and lay my head on the pillow – the very worst thing one could do. Within this tiny coffinlike retreat, all is rectilinear; all reference points are fixed; and yet the entire cabin is pitching about in the most drunken manner. This disjunction between the evidence of one's eyes (fixity) and the evidence of the other senses (lurcherama) produces swooning of the mind and nausea. Really it would be best to go back up on deck but I lack the resolve and am tossed biliously on the bunk, wondering why the hell I ever left my cosy flat in Notting Hill or the freezing flat in Palermo.

The reason for that – for the leaving – is simple. It's curiosity. Through the long, coal-black nights of an English winter, I have sat on the floor in front of the fire and pored over the atlas, imagining the world. The large sumptuous legends of escape – Gobi, Venice, Angkor – rarely set my imagination on a roll. They are overplayed. But certain small names have a miniature allure, as of a dream which is exotic but manageable, like a fantastic charm on the bracelet of life. Malacca, Noto, Swaziland, Cochin, Ootacamund, Akaroa, Galle, Diu, Petropolis, Eigg, Curasao. Often there is a misfit quality to these places, crumbling backwaters whose day has gone, and if they manage to convey the impression that the clock stopped in 1929 I can get very excited: curiosity and the pursuit of novelty does not exclude the past. Far from it. Nostalgia is often the route to rebirth. That is what the word ‘renaissance' means, rebirth, and the Renaissance in Europe was the rediscovery of the old classical world, a discovery which enabled Europe to escape from the suffocation of the Middle Ages into a healthier light. Nostalgia isn't a hankering for the past as such, but the desire to retrieve a loss. Sometimes it's purely the name, the very configuration of letters, which suggests the ideal, forgotten stopping place, especially if it contains a ‘z' (Cadiz, Zanzibar) or an ‘x' (Buxton, Xanadu). If they are positioned in warm climates they have to be visited out of the hot season because an endless battle with the sun severely curtails the psychic space which these resorts are intended to supply. And one mustn't catch some gruesome bug – that's not the idea at all.

In these respects Gozo appeared to have everything. An island off the north-east coast of Malta, it was integral to that British colony and occasionally visited by Governors from Valletta for recreation. Its capital Victoria was named in honour of the Queen on the occasion of her Diamond Jubilee in 1897, and in Victoria town there is listed only one hotel – the Duke of Edinburgh. Gozo's history is very old. Odysseus was shipwrecked there and entertained for seven years by Calypso, the nymph-daughter of Atlas. But there are remains of enigmatic temples built two thousand years before Homer. And it is said to be greener, sleepier, more seductive than its parent island of Malta. The inhabitants can speak plenty of English, make red wine, crochet lace, and drive on the left in the deep dark south of Europe within winking distance of Arabian Africa.

Meanwhile back in the cabin, I'm still going through it. The particular distress of sea-sickness is not only the sick feeling but the way it mimics certain forms of insanity. Confused perception, the arousal of subconscious fears, dissociation, and so forth. Vomit I do not however, and as suddenly as we fell into it, we are out of the plunging pull of water. Apparently the crossing is nearly always bad, this being the narrow and only sea-channel between the large bodies of the east and west Mediterranean; but to-day it has been made a great deal worse by the storms. Somehow the transition itself, to placidity, is unnoticed; there only comes a moment when it dawns on one that an agony has passed, that one is OK, that one is hungry. It is very difficult maintaining atheism at sea: I give thanks to God in abject, tearful fashion and polish off the ham & cheese rolls.