Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph (36 page)

to draw his own gun, and he shot the Governor's brother once through each shoulder and once through the leg.

Andrade's account of this event was marvellously vivid, as he moved and spun with the progress of the story, and he concluded by hoisting his right trouser leg to reveal a penny-sized scar on one side of his calf and another on the other side. The scars gave him great satisfaction.

As a result of this incident, he said, he was unable to earn a livelihood in Sao Paulo. He lost his job, all doors to private practice were closed, and he was labelled politically undesirable. In 1970 he exiled himself from Sao Paulo and came to Ceara, a sufficient distance away to outrun the slanders. In Fortaleza he built up a new reputation and took part in the creation of several important enterprises, including a water treatment plant and a cemetery. He associated himself with the Ceara branch of the company that sold Larousse encyclopaedias in Brazil, and it became the most profitable branch in the country. His boss in Ceara became his closest friend.

Then in 1973, just before Christmas, he was suddenly dismissed. The principals in Sao Paulo refused to see him or communicate with him, but he decided to take no action. Then some months later his former boss in Ceara was also dismissed and accused of fraud. This man invited Andrade to help him prepare a case against Larousse, but in the meanwhile Andrade had discovered that it was his supposed friend who had originally denounced him to Sao Paulo as a swindler. Andrade therefore gave evidence against his former friend instead.

Now he himself had been arrested. He was told that criminal proceedings, brought against him years ago in Sao Paulo, had gone to trial and he had been convicted in his absence and sentenced to five years. He was now waiting to be sent to prison. He seemed to be quite without hope.

That evening he received a visit from his son, a young man in casual but most expensive clothes.

'Papa!' he cried, and they fell into an emotional embrace. They were given a private room somewhere to talk, and Andrade came back beaming. He carried a plate of roast chicken joints wrapped in a clean red and white napkin, and a bag of other assorted foods and fruits, which he shared with us.

His son and his friends, he said, had been researching in the records of Sao Paulo. The whole story of a prison sentence was a wicked lie disseminated by his enemies. There had never been a judgement against him, he said. Soon the truth would emerge and he would be free again.

I found it as difficult to believe in the new rosy dawn as I had in the black picture of despair he had painted a few hours ago, but he was so exhilarated by his prospects that I pretended to share in the wonder of it all and congratulated him heartily on his imminent release.

'At least’ I said, 'you won't have to escape.' He laughed. Earlier he had spent some time discussing ways of breaking out of the station. Compared with the prison at Sao Paulo, he said, it would be very easy. I did not ask him how he knew.

His euphoria carried him through until Monday morning. When I returned from the bathroom, I noticed Andrade and Ignacio both standing by the wall in a rather curious position, and could not at first make out what it was that was so odd. Then I saw that they were standing in such a way that the morning sun, passing between the wall and the roof, shone on their faces. They were both very serious about it, and it struck me as the sort of thing one might do if one had spent long periods in prison.

Shortly afterwards Andrade was taken away. He returned briefly later to collect his hammock and other things, and his face had fallen once more into the bitterest dejection. He said nothing and neither did I.

Monday was a poor day for me too. There was no sign of my release. Ignacio was taken away too during the day, heaven knows where ... At lunchtime I was refused permission to go out, and put back on the prison diet of rice and beans. Franziska was nowhere to be seen, and nobody else would explain. In the evening there was a strange
agente
on duty and again I was not allowed out. Even worse, I was given nothing to eat either, and the effect was very depressing. In the mornings, I had established a routine whereby a policeman fetched me a sandwich, coffee and cigarettes, but on Tuesday morning even that system failed. I was dumbfounded. It was as though the whole bloody business was starting from the beginning again. All my carefully cultivated special relationships had withered. At lunchtime all my usual companions vanished. Nor was anything brought to me. The anxiety I felt then was unusually corrupting, for it undermined all my expectations. I could not attribute this new regime to anything. I could not even be sure it was deliberate. It simply left me with a sense of total revulsion against every one of the bastards, from Xavier down to the cook; I no longer cared whether they were cunning, incompetent, corrupt or naive, it made no difference. The result was a rotten, soul-destroying mess and from that moment I buried the benefit of any doubt I might have had about any of them.

In the afternoon Matthews and Davidson came to tell me that I was free. I was to be delivered officially into the arms of the British Consul with Davidson as witness. It should have been a moment of joy and celebration, but by then I was so deep in resentment and misery that all I could think was 'about bloody time too.'

In gratitude to the others I tried to look happy but it was hard going. I wanted only to get away, and the formalities dragged heavily. At the last moment, when Davidson had already left, Matthews and I were standing

with Xavier by the entrance. Xavier looked at me with an indulgent smile and said: 'Now you can write the story.'

'Ask him', I said to Matthews, 'whether he is finally convinced that I am innocent
’

Of course Xavier had to say yes, but I was watching his face and I shall be indebted to him always for a superlative specimen, in its finest flower, of the variety of human expression known as The Sickly Grin.

But it was I who was sick.

During those last days something inside me twisted and strangled the source of my vitality. Up till then I had imagined, without realizing it of course, that the entire Brazilian police apparatus was devoted to my case. My very existence depended on whether they found me 'innocent' or 'guilty'. It must have been some time on Monday that they found that they had no further use for me. From that moment I was not even worth my rice and beans.

They ceased to recognize my presence. They lost interest to the extent that they did not even bother to feed me. Then I saw that without them I was nothing. Worse than nothing; a dog that cowers at the feet of a brutal master grateful for any acknowledgement, whether it comes as bones or blows. I became disgusted with myself and loathed them for showing me to myself in such a shameful light.

So they demonstrated their power to me in the end, in a careless, offhand way, without really trying. They were indifferent to the Consul, to the
Sunday Times,
to their own government even. But they found me mildly irritating, and spat me out. Some other time their attention might be attracted and they would suck me in again. I felt a great and malignant shadow hovering over me and I wanted only to crawl under a stone and hide.

The Consul's brother Charles drove me back to Sao Raimundo and the priests offered me a room in their own house. I felt it was wrong for me to stay there, but they were quite confident and it was so much what I wanted, that I could not refuse. As soon as I was alone I went to the dining room and looked under the refrigerator. The belt was there, among ringlets of dust, as I had left it.

I could not shake off the sense of fear and revulsion. It was as though I had been squeezed too hard. Although the pressure was off, I had no resilience left to resume my former shape. Never before had I been unable to find the resources within myself to respond. I cowered inside my shell like a shrivelled homunculus, and I was worried that it had affected me so deeply.

But nothing actually happened to you,
I told myself angrily.
What is this nonsense? It was only twelve days. Now get on with life.

But I couldn't. It was important to write an account of the experience quickly and send it off, but everything I wrote seemed false and trivial. I tried all the tricks I could muster to find a different perspective, to climb out of myself just for a moment. Physical exercise. Detective thrillers. Getting out among crowds of people.

Progress was slow. I watched a lot of television on a big colour set, in a recreation room upstairs. It was a World Cup year and Brazilians were in a frenzy about football. The Brazilian sugar monopoly was one of the main sponsors of football on TV, and its advertisement, a growing mountain of sugar, seemed to be on the screen constantly. It was one of the first things I laughed at, because the country had been struck by a sudden and severe sugar shortage, and Brazilians cannot drink coffee without it.

Or I sat in the cane rocking chair talking to Walsh, or stood in the dark of the balcony watching the huge fruit bats swoop round the jack fruit tree and scoop out the pulp. Sounds of music and laughter drifted in from the neighbourhood and oil palms in a backyard plantation brushed the night sky with their feathering silhouettes.

During the day, with paper and the parish typewriter, I burrowed into every available corner of the house, hoping that a change of space would unblock my mind. I no longer thought much about the aesthetic merits of the building. It provided shelter and safety and that was all I cared for.

For a while I worked in an office just inside the front door, with a hatch opening on the hallway where I could watch the mothers come for a gossip and to help with the duties of the parish. They had little crushes on particular priests. Sometimes they telephoned and then they would do their utmost to get their favourites on the telephone, while the priests in turn defended each other fanatically.

When I was alone in the house I sometimes answered the phone.

'Sao Raimundo,' I announced in my best Portuguese.

'Quern estd falando?"
sang the shrill, intriguing, matronly voices.

'Padre Eduardo,' I replied gravely. That perplexed them for a while, but the flurry of sounds that followed would be too much for me usually, and I would wait for a pause to say 'Si, si' and put the receiver down.

On the third day I tried the game in reverse. The phone rang and I got the question in first:
'Quern estd falando?'

A woman's voice answered: 'Franziska. Can I speak to Ted please.'

I felt sick inside and would have told her to go to hell if I had dared.

'How are you?' she said, and 'Are you happy to be free?' 'Of course.'

T have been thinking about yo
u. Have you thought about me?' I
have been thinking of many things.' It was a noisy line. We both had to shout.

I
would like to see you. Will you come here?' 'Where?'

'At my home. When I finish working. When you will come?' T am very busy writing.' 'Tomorrow I am free.' 'Alright.'

What the hell do you think you're doing,
I asked myself as I took the address.
You can't seriously expect to make love to a woman who carries a gun in her purse and works for the forces of evil?

At the docks the customs put thirteen men on the job of discharging my motorcycle. They were keen to show me where the police had cut the saddle open to explore the foam rubber underneath, 'Looking for bombs!' they said contemptuously, but I said no, they were after Scuba equipment.

There was no love lost between the two services. As a victim of the Policia Federal I was an honoured guest and treated to an elaborate coffee ceremony in the chief's office. They were all brown men in brown offices with brown ledgers. Theirs was the old, suffocating kind of bureaucracy that I detested, but they only imprisoned things, not people, and for once I appreciated their more human qualities.

Having the bike back was an important step towards freedom. I arrived at Franziska's house feeling stronger than I had the day before. Among her own family it was almost possible to forget what she was. She radiated innocence, and they all treated me with great affection. There was never a hint of how we had met, or that I might be in any way a dubious character, but while my insecurity was soothed a little, a new problem arose. I had no idea what the moral customs were here. A respectable Catholic family in a provincial city, I thought, would have rigid standards of behaviour, and if I violated their sense of propriety . . .?

Underneath it all the same question lay, sapping my puny confidence. How could I be sure that a woman scorned, or a woman outraged, would not think to avenge herself through her connections? Or perhaps the whole thing was set up, and not necessarily by her? Even while I was certain that these were fantasies, I had come so recently from a world of fantasy that they inhibited me terribly, and yet undeniably she was attractive, and far from silly, and her attitude towards me was directly inviting.

It was too ridiculous. I wanted to break through the web of suspicion, but I was scared. I touched her, familiarly but awkwardly, because my heart was not strongly in it. There was a brief flash of fury.

'If my father sees you he will be very angry.'

I felt like a puppy having its nose tapped. Embarrassed I retreated into platitudes and neutrality. I could not figure it out. Undoubtedly it should have become a love affair, but it always faltered on the brink.