Authors: Helen de Witt
I decided to start with a melon, a cheese omelette, three pastries, guava juice and hot chocolate.
I said: You thought she wouldn’t believe twenty at a time?
He said: Why should one be less comfortable in one’s home than in a decent hotel?
I said: Why should five in a bed be thought particularly immoral? Is it because a non-adulterous act is possible for at most one of the women? Or because the women might engage in homosexual practices and this is thought to be contrary to the will of a divine being?
He said: 9 times out of 10 a woman would prefer not to be told something she would rather not know.
He said: 99 times out of 100 it’s more useful to know what people think is wrong. You’ve got to be able to read your opponent’s mind in a tight spot; it’s no use thinking how he ought to play his hand.
I poured out some more hot chocolate and took another pastry.
How did you take up a diplomatic career? I asked with exquisite tact.
He laughed.
Oh, it was sheer accident. I was on a cruise with some friends. The ship developed engine problems, and we ended up stranded in a smallish town in Guatemala. Now obviously we could have got home—the company would have paid airfare out of Guatemala City—but in fact there were some really delightful people in the town. One of the big guns there was a keen bridge player, and of course rather cut off—he really couldn’t do enough for us. Parties were thrown, there was a dance—better than the ship in a lot of ways. Of course a lot of the passengers cleared off, but Jeremy and I hung around.
Our host was British, but he’d married a local woman. He grew bananas—everyone did, pretty much—and he’d also been made British consul. No one else spoke much English, and we didn’t speak a word of Spanish, but it didn’t matter, of course, for bridge.
Well, when we’d been there a couple of weeks I got the idea of riding out into the countryside—the roads were bad to non-existent and he did a fair bit of overseeing the estate on horseback. I borrowed a horse—a big strong thing with no breeding to speak of but plenty of stamina. The saddle was a big square leather box with an enormous silver-studded pommel—not very elegant, but comfortable. Off I rode with a boy from the plantation as guide. We headed for the mountains. The boy began to get nervous after a while and made gestures that we should go back—remember I knew scarcely a word of Spanish. I ignored him—we were just getting to higher ground, and I was determined to get above the plain.
We got up into the hills at last, and got to a small village. There was no one about. I was rather thirsty, so I dismounted and began looking for a place with water. A woman came running out of a house, tears pouring down her face—she said something I did not understand and pointed up the road.
I mounted again and headed up the road. My guide flatly refused to come. I turned a corner of the road and saw—well, I saw things that make worse hearing than my hypothetical exploits with multiple companions. There were soldiers, and a lot of graves, and peasants digging at gunpoint. They saw me, and shots were fired—of course I galloped off at once.
He put three spoons of sugar in his coffee cup and poured coffee over it. He broke open a croissant and spread butter and guava conserve on it.
He said:
I say of course, and that’s the way it felt at the time—nothing I could do, the only thing was to save my skin. But it got at me the whole way back. I kept thinking, what if just riding onto the field had stopped it? What if a witness was enough to stop it? But it was such a godforsaken place. They could have shot me and thrown me in a ditch and nobody the wiser. But I kept going over it, back and forth, the whole way back. I can’t tell you what it’s like to see something like that—that horrible place that God had turned his back on. I thought: I’m damned if I spend the rest of my life telling myself I’m not yellow. I thought: there’s got to be something I can do.
I got back to the plantation near dusk and told my host what I’d seen. He said some of the other landowners were clearing Indians off or trying to—they’d got some new machinery in, didn’t need so many people with machetes. The Indians were resisting, sticking to their villages, they’d brought soldiers in—they were being killed—nothing to be done—government frightfully corrupt.
Well, of course it was obvious there was no point going to the authorities or reporting the incident. There still didn’t seem to be much point in galloping in to save the day single-handed. But suddenly I had a stroke of genius. You’ve heard of Raoul Wallenberg?
No?
Of course you’re very young. He was Swedish consul in Budapest in WW II. The Nazis arrived and started shipping Jews out to concentration camps. Wallenberg promptly started issuing Swedish passports! Jews would be actually standing in queues on the railway platform waiting to be packed off to the slaughterhouse—and there was Wallenberg saying to the SS: This man is a Swedish citizen, I forbid you to take him! Of course not one of them knew a word of Swedish! Priceless!
At any rate, I pointed out to my friend that nothing could be simpler—we’d only to ride up with a supply of British passports, hand the things out and Bob’s your uncle!
This put my host on the spot. He said a lot of rubbish I can’t remember—something about his position being a sacred trust—at least, I don’t think he used the word ‘sacred’, but you get the picture. Now I put it to you that one could scarcely represent the Queen more honourably than by extending her protection to a pack of wretched peasants being massacred by armed thugs! I put it to him—he was most unhappy about it, but really felt he couldn’t. The fact was that he’d been there too long—felt he had too much to lose, that it would make his position intolerable. I’ve said he’d married a local woman—she may have been related to some of the culprits.
He could see I wasn’t very happy about it, and the thing is, it did have an appeal for him. Finally he struck a bargain. He said he’d stake me the contents of a certain chest on a game of piquet. He couldn’t precisely recall its contents; if I could win it, they were mine. I was to stake a thousand pounds.
I agreed to this since there wasn’t much else I could do, but it was a maddening proposition. Piquet is not a bad game—probably one of the best for two—but chance plays a much higher part in it than in bridge, and in any case it wasn’t a game I’d ever paid much attention to, so that the scope it did allow for skill did not give me much advantage. If we’d been playing bridge I’d have been sure enough of winning, though he wasn’t a bad player; as it stood I couldn’t be at all confident.
The game was hell from first to last. My cards were bad, and I was not playing brilliantly—I followed the principles of best play and lost steadily. It began to look as though I would lose the thousand pounds and be no closer to helping the poor bastards I’d seen. At last, when I was down to my last fifty, I thought to myself, The hell with this, I’ll play against the odds—either God wants them rescued or he doesn’t, I may as well find out as quickly as possible.
Of course my luck changed at once. We’d been playing five hours—it took only three to win back the money, and three after that to win the chest. We both felt like death by the end—my head was throbbing, eyes as dry as stones—and he looked worse. He can’t have thought what he was about when he suggested it, you know—that he should play for a thousand quid and the right to consign a group of innocent people to perdition. God knows what it was like defending that for 11 hours. He tossed the cards down at the end—he wouldn’t look at me—said he’d see me in the morning, and went to bed. Just at the door he turned back. He said if anyone harmed a British subject he must object to the authorities in the strongest possible terms.
I went at once to the chest—there was a whole stack of passports, and some sort of official-looking stamp.
They were the old-fashioned type of passport—God knows how long he’d had them, I shouldn’t be surprised if the consulship, and the passports with them, had been passed down from father to son since the last century—with a description instead of a photo. I let myself sleep four hours. In the morning I spent a few hours filling in the descriptions, writing hair: black, eyes: black; complexion: swarthy 50 or 60 times. I left the names blank, stuffed them in a couple of saddle bags, and rode off.
Well, you should have seen the look on those soldiers’ faces when the first peasant brought out his British passport! I’d had my friend teach me enough Spanish for ‘This man is a British subject’—there I stood among the black-haired, black-eyed, swarthy-complexioned loyal subjects of the Queen trying not to laugh my head off. The marvellous thing about it was that they couldn’t prove it wasn’t so—certainly none of them had any Guatemalan papers.
It did some good. Some of the Indians actually came to Britain on those wretched passports. Some went off into the hills to join a guerrilla group.
Anyway, having pulled off a trick like that once I got a taste for it. We’re such cowards in front of a piece of paper these days—my mother was an Egyptian, and my father was from Hungary, both countries with a particularly impressive tradition of bureaucracy, and it gave me an indescribable frisson to cock a snook at the official channels. Once you’ve tried it you realise how easy it is! Half the time no one bothers to challenge you—if you say you’re the Danish consul it won’t even occur to most people to doubt it. I felt ashamed, really ashamed of all the times
I hadn’t
claimed to be a partipotentiary of some foreign power of other.
I said:
Did it work at all in West Papua before you were deported?
He said:
Well, the visas got some people out of the country, but getting them into Belgium was pretty sticky. Shouldn’t have picked Belgium, really, they’ve no sense of humour worth speaking of, but I was bored with being a Dane of Inuit extraction, and there’d been a picture of me in
Hello!
with Paola which I thought might give the story credibility, and anyway my French isn’t half bad. My mother went to a Swiss finishing school, you see—
her
mother was Lebanese, and frightfully cosmopolitan—and the girls were all made to study French, German and English, with Italian for bad behaviour. That was how she met my father, as a matter of fact. She got sentenced to a week of Italian for some frightful breach of school regulations, walked straight out the door and found a lift down to Monte—reasoning, you know, that if she were independently wealthy she wouldn’t have to be finished. She pawned the little gold crucifix she’d worn at the school—she was Muslim, of course, but it was more in the way of a fashion accessory—and spent the money, what there was of it, on chips. 28, that was her number. She couldn’t lose. My father had been losing all week, but he saw the way the wind was blowing and switched to 28—he knew better than to let his luck slip once it had changed and followed her out when she left. My father had reason to curse the school; my mother took an instant antipathy to Hungarian, a language the school, she said, would not have inflicted on a girl had she enacted the 120 Journées de Sodome, and refused to learn a word of it; having heard the Arabic language put through the wringer of my father’s strong Hungarian accent she declared her native tongue off-limits, and insisted that he confine his atrocities to English and to French (German he despised, though he spoke it well), in which languages my parents conversed to the exclusion of all others for the whole of their married life.
I gathered that he did not want to talk about West Papua.
I was afraid he would throw me out any minute, so I took a couple of crêpes and a croissant and I said diplomatically:
Was your father Muslim too? I saw you had an 11th-century Qur’an so I assumed you were.
He said: He wasn’t, no, but there was never any question of my being anything else. Consider the matter from my mother’s point of view. One day she is an oppressed schoolgirl with disgusting food to eat, an ugly uniform, exclusively female companions all kitted out in the same depressing attire and the heady prospect of putting on Racine’s
Bérénice
for entertainment; no sooner does she sell her crucifix than, shazam! she wins hundreds of thousands of francs and has delicious meals, glorious clothes and a handsome and charming Hungarian at her feet. You couldn’t ask for a clearer sign from God.
I said: That doesn’t follow at all. If there were a divine being it would hardly arrange to communicate through a series of events which might just as well have come about through pure coincidence, and on the other hand a series of events which could come about through pure coincidence can hardly be evidence of either the wishes or existence of such a being.
He said: Not at all. You’re completely missing the point. I’m not a philosopher or a theologian, so I don’t know what one would look for in an uncontrovertible message from above; the question is what would convince a 17-year-old and a gambler and God the all-seeing all-knowing naturally did not waste time beaming syllogisms into the mind of a girl who found 10 minutes of Italian a crashing bore.
I said: But if God had just voted for Islam why did she marry your father?
But they were madly in love, he said. He sounded as though he’d never heard such a stupid question in his life.
He laughed. And anyway the Hungarian was part of the sign, so it was obviously God’s will.
I liked this piece of logic but I was glad Sibylla wasn’t there to hear it.
He said: You laugh, but you’re still missing the point. The point isn’t that she saw what God wanted and did it because he wanted it, like a simpering little
dévote
. She saw which way her luck lay. She wasn’t going to argue with that and neither was my father. I can see you think that’s frivolous, but if you’d got out of as many tight spots as I have with no better protection than a diplomatic immunity you’d invented five minutes before you’d take luck a damn sight more seriously than any arguments.