“Sticks and stones may break my bones
But chains and whips excite me
Na na na na Come on Come on Come on
I like it – Like it” – from the song S&M in Rihanna’s Album ‘Loud” (2010)

To the Sexpo at the CTICC for the first time in five years.1 It’s gone downwards badly since then. The classy chic and variety of the first exhibition has gone. In its stead there are stalls and more stalls. At the cheap end are stalls selling mass-produced Chinese sex-ware, pumps, tool enhancers and products promising varying degrees of veridical experience. “100% latex but feels just like the real thing!” At the higher end are stalls selling expensive gadgets, fetishist footwear and a dream or two like a pair of long angel wings with real feathers with which you can fly into coitus. The Durex stand, a trusted brand, comfortingly straddles this gulf with a sensible pragmatism. At Sexpo, the Durex sign imparts the same reassuring commercialism that the Mercedes Benz, Philips or Barclays Bank signs would in the high street.

Among all this there are stalls selling anodyne skin and hair products that would be proper in a shopping mall. There are stalls housing sex hypnotists, safe sex and anti-child sex campaigners. The Man-Up stall gets you up naturally, it claims, Dr. Anthony Rees is the Medical Director. It’s opposite a stall where you can be photographed with the stars of Sexpo. DVD stalls abound but business is drooping there, there’s the Internet don’t they know. A geezer from England auctions cheap perfume in glossy carry bags not far from the main stage. There, an MC dressed so down in jeans and T-shirt he could have come straight from a braai in Bellville repeatedly urges everyone to “make a noise, make a noise” for a group of amateurs nervously trying to strip for the crowd. P-l-ease. You need a certain je ne sais quoi to elevate something as fundamental, as private and as sweaty as sex to public sensuality. Get it wrong and all flops into lurid ennui; the stalls become cubicles and the supposedly titillating, instead of exciting, blunts. But that’s a problem for the Sexpo organisers.

Now, apart from the R200 general entry fee, there are so-called VIP stalls requiring additional tickets where dancers, specialist strippers, sex stars etc. ply their trade. Seeking to arrest our descent into boredom, my Sexpo partner and I decide to give one of the VIP stalls a try, but not just any one. A leather stall specialising in bondage and whips and studs and metal spikes and crotch ropes and ring gags and muzzles, that sort of thing, with a paying theatre, seemed to suit. We paid R40 each, signed an indemnity form affirming that we understood that all activity behind the dark curtain we were about to cross was consensual and that people there were actually, despite appearance, in a state of pleasure, even grace. One isn’t exactly ignorant of this sort of thing, having seen aspects of it in short documentaries etc. We entered a large kiosk with rows of benches for the audience, before which was a curious assemblage of apparatus.2 My eyes fell on an extraordinarily large woman wearing long black slacks but with her enormous torso exposed. She was an exhibit of sorts. She had huge needles piercing her massive breasts and outsize stitches and sutures around the needles to keep them in place. Each nipple had also been freshly pierced. It looked morbid and excruciating. I winced. Not a good start.

Instead of curiosity arising something gave way within me. I looked at the stage. A woman was bound upright to a cage, back facing us. She was wearing a slave collar and bondage cuffs. Her ankles were set in a spreader bar and her buttocks protruded from leather thongs (see pic).

There were traces of weals on one of her buttocks, which I need not remind you are ridges raised on flesh by the stroke of rod or whip. I shuddered. Next to her a young girl in a bikini was being bound into a rigid contortion by a thick rope. Knots, knots all over. She grinned and grimaced. Next to her stood another apparatus, the machinations of which my mind didn’t have the deviance to fathom. The stage started morphing into a fescennine blur. Then the thing that threw me occurred: Two men who had been standing around idly with whips for a while – BDSM masters, presumably the distributors of pain – suddenly started cracking them with fury.3 What? Do they flog like this? Images of galley slaves flashed in my mind, as did the cruel eyes of salivating school masters before they caned you.4 Whips crack, gentle friends, when a loop travelling along the whip breaks the sound barrier. A whip crack is a mini sonic boom. The tips of whips can travel at twice the speed of sound.5 Red-red danger here.

That did it. Unease welled up inside me. I fidgeted about on my bench and dared a peep at the flogging but mercifully the lashes applied to the subjects were gentle strokes, not sonic booms. Each stroke was followed by gentle palliative rubs of the flesh by the whip master… but who knows how far these things can go? Cracking done, one of the BDSM masters came over to offer me his whip to administer pain. On the woman strapped to the cage. He would help me through it, he said. Me, the meekest of creatures, inflict pain on another? Was he utterly deranged? I changed colour. “No thank you. And frankly, I’m not feeling that well.” “Not well, really? Look, everything’s all right. Would you like some water? I’ll get my assistant to bring you some.” “Err, no, no thanks, err… yes please, please…” I was cloying up but inclinations differ: my Sexpo partner, au contraire, was completely fine, in raptures even, to the extent of later investigating the services of the BDSM professionals there.6

Ashen and unwell, I looked up again. A woman entered the playspace as it’s called, dropped her slacks to her knees, pointedly bent over a trestle and proffered her g-strung behind for some cuts with a cane, just like I used to get at school. She was given softer strokes than we when punished at school, much softer. They were delivered with the leer of lasciviousness rather that the leer of cruelty but they were cuts all the same. The major difference was that her buttocks were kneaded and fondled by the BDSM master after each cut, whereas the schoolmasters mercy-be-to-the-Lord-in-the-highest-and-praise-be-upon-Him thankfully didn’t fondle our buttocks when they hit us, at least not in my experience, although it must be said one occasionally heard things…

Another stoke fell on her buttocks, this time harder. My spirits slumped again and I dropped my gaze. I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was the BDSM master’s assistant’s pitying touch. They did not have water, sorry, but here was a glass of fruit juice, apricot. Instead of limpid reviving water, they were giving me sickly syrupy apricot juice! Nothing could have smelt more revolting right then. “Please take it away, take it away now!”

My insides churned. I was having what is known as a squick or a freakout in BDSM jargon. Things blurred around me. The needle-infused breasts wobbled past my field of vision. More pierced flesh, chunks of it. Another thud from the rod assailed my ears. I looked up. One of the BDSM masters was now in turn proffering his back to be flogged. How versatile. He was both, a gem the dear was; he is what’s called a switch in the industry. I just had to flee, and fled to an area of the Sexpo more attuned to my, shall we call it, ‘normal’ sexual proclivities. Call me square, but give me what BDSM’ers derisively term vanilla sex any time of day. May it rain from heaven, loads of it, in torrents, in streams, may it flood, it’s good enough for me, please, thank you. The eponymous pleasures of Sadism and Masochism are not.7 There are chinks in my armour, clearly. Just when I think I’m a man of the world who can take anything I realise I can’t I can’t I can’t I can’t I can’t.

But then again, I, too, have kinks in my cable from which these sexual deviants would run.8 They would run hard, cold, and scared. Only I don’t have a kiosk in which to charge them first.

Notes:
1. Sexpo is a health, sexuality and lifestyle expo held at the CTICC (Cape Town International Convention Centre) every year or so.

2. Apparatus – the plural is given by the Chambers Dictionary of the 20th Century as either apparatus or apparatuses.

3. Definition – BDSM: – “The term BDSM is believed to have been coined as a compound initialism in the 1990s to combine communities and practices that had a significant amount of crossover – Bondage and Discipline (B&D), Dominance and Submission (D&S) and sadomasochism or Sadism and Masochism (S&M)” – Wikipedia.

4. Yes, I was caned at school, many times. Corporeal punishment was a feature of school life in my day – spare the rod and spoil the child and all that. ‘Six-of-the-best’ was universally understood. One burly teacher even had degrees of punishment and differentiated between ‘half-swings’ and ‘full swings’ of the cane. You didn’t want him to flatten you with a full swing.
Being caned was painful and bad enough when one deserved it. But it was often made worse by the unfairness of it. I remember being caned unfairly on a few occasions, including a few mass canings from two teachers in junior high to punish the whole class for the misdemeanor of a few. One even flayed each student in class with his high heeled shoe when we hid his cane behind the blackboard. It was unpleasant and debilitating. It’s a detestable practice that’s just not on, and I’m glad it’s banned in South Africa today.

5. See Scientific American May 28 2002, “True cause of Whip’s Crack Uncovered”. Or type the following into Google: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=true-cause-of-whips-crack.

6. BDSM professionals in Cape Town charge around R250 by the hour or so, I hear, depending on the service rendered. Sex rarely occurs I’m told. If you’re interested, a short Internet search will lead you to professionals in your area.

7. Sadism and Masochism are eponyms deriving from Donatien Alphonse François, the Marquis de Sade (1740 – 1814) and Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch (1836 — 1895) respectively.

8. Like my interpretations of JS Bach’s two-part inventions, to go no further.

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http://www.theinconsequentialdiary.com

[14th March 2013]

The Catholic world was blessed with a new pope last night.  Pope Francis 1, the 266^th pontiff, urged the world to follow a path of peace and fraternity and asked that we pray for him.  The appointment of the pope took me back to the one and only day I saw a pope.

All the Popes – list, St Peter’s

It was Wednesday the 25^th September 2002.  I was in Rome.  The pope gives a general audience every Wednesday on St Peter’s Square.  You don’t want to go to Rome and not see the pope.  So we gave ourselves ample time to get from our hotel to the Vatican.  We got to the metro station.  There was a general transport strike on the go.  No metro all day. Rome congested to a standstill, a taxi would never get anyone to the Vatican on time from where we were.  On no, I’d miss the pope!  So we decided to run.  We ran non-stop to the Vatican for 90 minutes.  We entered the grounds of the Vatican breathless and in a sweat.  A man dressed in white read at a lectern from afar.  We could hear him through loudspeakers all around us.  Perhaps the pope?  No, had we missed him?  We hurried through security and joined the throng.  The man in white wasn’t the pope, but a priest, an announcer.

The real man in white finally came out.  We had made it.  But His Holiness was far away from where we were in the crowd, too far across the immense square, barely distinguishable.  He took his seat among the black- and scarlet-robed cardinals.  He said some prayers during the ceremony and blessed us all.  That was it, I thought.  Audience completed, His Holiness got into the popemobile which I thought would take him back into St. Peters, but it did not!  It was turning our way.  The popemobile was to make a tour of the crowd!  I couldn’t believe my luck.  No, it couldn’t be, he was coming exactly towards where I was, he was going to pass right in front of me…

The popemobile and its entourage gradually approached.  Awe and expectation stunned everyone.  The sporadic applause around me grew increasingly louder and more persistent as the pope approached.  And then here he was, Pope John Paul II, waving beatifically at us, timeless and reassuring.  He passed so close to me I could have touched him had I reached out.  That’s when I took a photo of the man which I treasure to this day.

Pope John Paul II in among the pilgrims

The pope passed.  The lapsed catholic in me stirred.  I tried to choke back my emotions, but my breast trembled, my throat welled up and tears ran down my cheeks.

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The Terrifying Meetings of Monsieur Barton.
I arrived as a young researcher on a cold day at the laboratories of the ICSN at Gif-sur-Yvette to do my postdoctoral studies with Nobel-prize winner Sir Derek Barton.1  The days were short, dark, and cold, so cold. Chilling winds cut through my inadequate Southern wear; snow melted in my shoes and my feet froze in them. This was the prize I had secured, getting the nod from around thirty applicants from around the world for the post.2

ICSN CNRS Gif-sur-Yvette

It was nonetheless with a confident, jaunty air that I walked into the ICSN on a cold winter’s morning. No-one could have been more positive. I was on the first rung of a ladder of a career in international scientific research. Madam Fan, Monsieur Barton’s secretary, as he was called in France, introduced me to Dr. Jean Boivin, who showed me around the institute and then to my laboratory. Jean was one of three team leaders – called ‘lieutenants’ in the industry – of around 8-10 researchers each. The lieutenants didn’t touch an apparatus; they were the experienced thinkers of the team who concentrated on following the literature and generating ideas on paper for us to implement. There was a fourth team in the USA. We, the researchers, the PhD’s and post-docs were the hands and fodder of the research world, the willingly exploited. Jean showed me to my workbench. It was exiguous compared to my spacious laboratory in Cape Town, amounting to two metres of running bench space. But space was at a premium for everyone. “You are also to have a laboratory at the University of Paris-Orsay, more spacious, where the electro-chemistry unit is. I shall be taking you there later today”, said Jean.

I looked around at my colleagues to whom I was about to be introduced. A forbidding disquietude suffused the laboratories. Everyone scurried, everyone worked in a tense haste. Around a third or so were French; the rest came from all over. Two Pascal’s; Pascal and Pascale Le Coupanec. Begonia from Barcelona. Neerja and Ravi from India. A young Germanic woman, taciturn and strong, who was to be raped close to the institute a few months later but who went straight back to the lab to get over it, to forget, no-one knew, but she was to tell me months later, these type of secrets don’t remain long with people. A strong, lean, hard-as-nails Irishman who was a champion rower and who once watched a soccer world cup game in my room and passed out on my bed in Paris, drunk. As of a good night, he could down a bottle of whisky just like that. There was Dominique, an arrogant Frenchman who never ceased to rub in that despite my European origins, I came from un pays sous-développé (an under-developed country). There was Martial, reserved and correct. There was Jamal, a bearded Moroccan, and an Austrian woman. Not everyone worked for Barton, most researchers belonged to other teams. We who worked for Barton basked in a palpable aura. One or two non-team members sneered when they heard I was from Afrique du Sud and asked whether I practiced apartheid, most were decent. Non-team members I interacted with included a tall handsome Spaniard, Cristobal, who would trouble me for elucidation of advanced English texts on late nights before we would leave the lab, as would a gentle Brazilian guy. There was a red-haired Englishman with strange table manners who would eat peas with the convex side of his fork in the canteen, a practice roundly commented on by continentals. There was Stanislaw, a Pole who became a friend and with whom I would visit the morbid concentration camp at Lublin in the snow that Christmas. There were Asians, others, and adding dissonance to this cultural kaleidoscope, there would now also be me, a Madeiran South African.

At Orsay I worked in a lab with among others Aurore Gref from Rumania, Nubar Ozbalik, an Armenian Turk and Claude, a French communist who read L’Humanité every day. They worked for Gilbert Balavoine, a dapper professor who I felt could model clothes for Givenchy or Dior. A tennis-playing researcher around my age wrote up his Ph.D. in a corner opposite me in our bureau. I was to find out that he lodged in a room with a separate entrance in the same large house as I did for my first two months in Orsay and knew it, the dear, but said nothing. I was, however, good enough for English translations. He also refused, or was incapable, whatever, of sleeping with his girlfriend; she told me that after they broke up, he would just lie there. That’s the exact unforgiveable behaviour you’d expect from a guy who lives in a room just below a new colleague and doesn’t tell him when he knows he needs the company. There was professor Kagan, who would also avail himself of my English to translate one or two of his publications. My ironic worth to the French was my command of English.3  Kagan had a beautiful young, blonde, blue-eyed female master’s student who for a month or three would walk around Paris with me on Sundays and would watch me play at Squash Montparnasse, but I was taken. Paris! Paris my city! Where I breathed in life away from the laboratories! And such and so; the faces come flooding into my vision a quarter of a century later, the names of which escape me, all that remains is nationalities, nationalities, nationalities that would collectively learn more English in the weekly French classes sponsored by the Institute than they would French, they told me. Only a diversity of nationalities remains to me, and faces, faces which I still see with a troubling clarity, every one of them, to this very day.

First Meeting with Sir Derek

I was taken to be introduced to Sir Derek Barton on my second day. It was an overwhelming experience. I entered the most enormous office on the top floor of the institute. Awards from all over the world hung from the walls. You name the award, it was there.4,5  You stood in awe. To achieve this Monsieur Barton worked all his waking hours. I looked at the great man who was to be my boss for the next year-and-a-bit. At an outsized desk sat a robust, white-haired, unsmiling 68-year old man. I was 25. This was the august persona, this was the legend. He looked straight at me and with an imperceptible bow of the head said “Good morning, Dr. Pestana” with a specific Englishness. Dr. Pestana. How laughable, given the chasm between us. The one had achieved everything, the other, nothing. I’m not sure that there was even any irony in this. “Please, it’s Alex, Sir Derek…” He accepted this with a firm nod and then got straight down to business. He handed me a few chemistry papers. A project had been outlined for me. I was to work on the Gif System for the selective oxidation of hydrocarbons, the electrochemical aspects. My immediate future had been mapped out for me. I then committed one of the classically stupid things in my life. I asked him if there wasn’t a synthesis project available, for I loved synthesis. My question stopped Barton in his tracks. This showed I had zero social intelligence, had disregard for the work that had been assigned to me and that I was unappreciative to boot. He told me with suppressed irritation that I could speak to Monsieur Langlois and others in the Institute if I wanted to do synthesis, there was no such project available in his teams. Did I have any other questions? No? Dismissed. With that, from the outset, I sensed I had gotten on the wrong side of Professor Barton. I had made it hard for myself.

I trudged back to the lab with Jean, head drooping. I looked around. Everyone worked, everyone worked insanely, with deliberation, in cold tension. We worked up to twelve hours a day, more before meeting days.

The Meetings

The meetings. We lived in terror of them. Madame Fan would come down to write their dates on a board in the tea corner from which they would scream at us. A collective psychosis surrounded the meetings. Every ten days or so, the team leaders and researchers would climb a set of stairs and queue outside Barton’s office to attend the meetings. The ostensible purpose of the meetings was to formally present our findings to the team and the great man. The real purpose of the meetings was to sustain pressure and to sow unease, to keep us working like the fervent deranged. We would march in single file into his office, dead quiet and as taut as fish gut, and would sit on chairs arranged in a semi-circle in front of his desk. Each researcher presented his work in turn on a board before a hawk-eyed Monsieur Barton. These were shattering times. We researchers often did not know what others in the team were doing and were sworn to secrecy about our work. If anyone asked what I did, I was to say that I oxidized, that was it.

In the laboratory, we all drank tea, no-one drank coffee. We were jittery enough. Before the meetings you could smell the fear. Tea times, held in a small corner just off one of the laboratories, were little rituals of polite reinforcement, nervous tremors before the meetings and short-lived relief afterwards, for in ten days’ time the next meeting would be upon us. The meetings, what persistence they had! They rained upon us like deafening drum beats! At tea times – short snatches of life gripped from the sweat trenches – we laughed nervously and consoled one another in silly ways. I remember my replies to people’s mumblings about the meetings before having attended my first one. I was laughably naïve. “What’s the problem?” I would ask. “You work hard, you summarise it, you present, that’s it. What can Barton do? Kill you?” They just shook their heads. I clearly hadn’t the foggiest idea.

With fellow Bartonians in the Lab at Gif – Pascale 3rd from left

Before my first meeting, Pascale suddenly had a wobbly about it. I saw it. She walked in, saw the freshly written meeting date on the board, froze, changed complexion and then deflated with an “Ah non!…” and scurried off. I was uneasily relaxed at my first meeting, a mere bystander in the brooding gloom. Our team filed up the stairs outside Monsieur Barton’s office, all ten of us. It fell to Pascale to knock on his door. Pascale, a petite young woman from Bretagne or Picardie I think, in the flower of her youth and a delight in normal circumstances, was red and flustered. She held up her fist to knock, but at the last minute her courage failed her, she emitted a cry, turned her face, exhaled her pent-up anxiety and fled down the stairs. “Je ne peux pas!” (I cannot!). Tension rippled down the line. The moment was too big, Barton’s gravitas too great, the gulf between the judge and the about-to-be-judged too wide. Suddenly I too felt tense. I looked Dominique straight in the eye. He was next in line. In another of my insane moments I dug my fingers into his neck, first-aid style, into his jugular, to feel his heart-beat. It was hard and slow. “Ta main!” Remove your hands from me!” he cut back in a look that murdered. “Non, non”, said Jean, coming between us. “Allons!” he insisted, and with that knocked and opened the door to our abattoir.

Still, I was untouched by fear. Hard work didn’t scare me. I came from a family that worked crazily long hours every day of the year. I figured that if you worked hard and had done your work, it would be enough. You would sail through the meeting. I was wrong. You wouldn’t. In modern scientific research, like all else in life, luck plays a role. You don’t find the discovery, the discovery finds you. In my more fatalistic moments I would even say that the discovery chooses the precious few to whom it reveals itself, Thomas Edison’s 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration notwithstanding. What matters are results, not sweat, blood and tears; those are taken for granted.

The time for me to present at a meeting came soon enough. I had done my work, I had my findings, not very encouraging, but there they were nonetheless. I put them on the board before Monsieur Barton and let them speak for themselves. “So?” asked Barton. He was bemused and nonplussed. “So?” “So what?” he urged. I had not thought further. I was expected to say something but had nothing to say. Findings don’t speak, people do. Nerves welled up inside me. Everyone in the team averted their gaze in embarrassment. I stood there, in anxious shock. Barton went red. Nubar who had worked with me on the experiments sensed trouble and jumped to my rescue. He spoke rapidly if incoherently to save my skin. Barton no longer looked at me but at him. The fire went Nubar’s way. I was a negligible bystander in proceedings, ignored, standing there immobile as a robot or a reed, an afterthought that didn’t really matter. Nubar defended, placated and cajoled and set out how we were to attack the situation for the next meeting, ten days later. I left the meeting inwardly trembling. This was the dawning of my unease.

I worked myself to a standstill. The next meeting didn’t go much better for me, neither did the next. “So what?” “What’s this?” “What now?” More irritation from Barton. “Enough from you thank you, next!” I didn’t know what was expected from me, despite Jean’s coaching. You get to know a problem very well when you grapple with it for twelve hours every day. But it seemed, in the eyes of Barton, that nothing I produced was good enough. The team tensed up when I presented. This was drip torture of a slow, deliberate kind, culminating in outbursts at the meetings. That I divided my time between Orsay and Gif didn’t help. I had the pressure of both laboratories and the benefits of neither.6,7

I came to live in fear of the meetings. That’s when the bad days started. The tossing and turning, the working under pressure, the anxiety, the not sleeping, the swollen red eyes. There were also the sudden pains in my stomach that would crunch me into a low crouch on my haunches.8  I even stopped enjoying to walk the streets of my beloved Paris. My world was tainted, besmirched by Barton’s meetings. They suffocated all joy out of life. Relations with Aurore, who had troubles of her own, worsened after Nubar left for Texas. Nubar had been a buffer between us. Soon after he left, Aurore simply stopped talking to me. The French have an idiomatic expression for this – faire la gueule. I forget the cause, but it had to do with a trivial linguistic misunderstanding, something like her claiming that the yield on an experiment was in the order of 3 to 4% which I took to mean 3 to 4 orders of magnitude higher than the low yields we had previously obtained and which I doubted.9  Things got tougher for me after that. I was heavily dependent on her for the electrochemical experiments and by extension for the meetings. April arrived in Paris, birdsong had returned to the parks, the snow had melted and the days were brighter, but for me it was night.

I couldn’t take it anymore. My work situation was bad, results were not forthcoming and each meeting was a crucifixion. Then, one fine spring day, I decided I had had enough. Sometimes, one fails in life. I would give up. But to fail here would be a demotion akin to death in the scientific world. One would lose face, prestige. And I would afterwards have to face myself in the mirror for the rest of my life. I weighed this all up and one fine morning it simply didn’t matter anymore. I phoned my professor in Cape Town and told him I was thinking of quitting. He was very supportive, but told me to tie a knot in my belt and hang on. I decided to give it one last bash and if that didn’t work, I would leave.

Around then, one of those quirks of fate that changes the course of matters occurred. One Saturday I went into the laboratory at Gif to work-up an experiment.10  I was alone in the labs apart from one or two people at five in the afternoon, when none other than Monsieur Barton walked in, surreptitiously, almost startling me. He looked at me as if shocked, then blurted out uncharacteristically to me in French “Vous êtes ici? Ça c’est très bien”, spun around and hastened out.11

From that moment his attitude towards me changed. He was more engaging, less rigid, gave me breathing space. Don’t ask me why. Perhaps he had witnessed for the first time the work ethic he expected from all but thought didn’t exist in me.12  In the strange unfolding of life, after that one or two things went my way; the hard work paid off, we got meaningful results and matters started flowing from there. Monsieur Barton’s meetings became bearable, even humane.13  They also became slightly less frequent as he was busy moving laboratories to Texas A&M, his second job in retirement. My love for scientific enquiry returned.

I soldiered on in Gif and Orsay and managed to get my full publications with Sir Derek.14  I had hung on to succeed. When it was time for me to leave, Sir Derek showed genuine appreciation for my work and thanked me for my contribution. He asked where in the world I would like to work. I said England. He on the spot picked up the phone to an ex-student of his, a professor at Cambridge University, and arranged immediately for my second post-doc, for which I applied and was accepted.15  Such was the generosity and power of the man – I heard that 25% of organic chemistry professors in the UK were ex-students of his, a figure not remotely matched by anyone else.

Recollections of Gap Jumping

There is no moral to my story. There is work and luck and attitude and awe and power. There is endurance, pain, hardship and being able to take it. The downside to applying so much pressure on people is that they don’t work optimally and buckle under it. Many give up, a even few cheat, for which there is no excuse. Jean told me that they once could not replicate a set of results obtained by a previous team member who had moved on to a post elsewhere. Barton phoned him and the man admitted to cheating. At that point Barton could have ended his career but did nothing. Forgiveness? Hardly. Magnanimity? Not to cheats. Coming face-to-face with the effects of his own pressure? Perhaps.

Still, I would never have been able to forgive myself had I failed there; it would have festered within me all my life. I toughened up quickly during that period. But visions of those bleak times still reverberate through me at times, like shudders from fundamental fault-lines in the undercurrents of my psyche.

A year and more passed. It was late Winter again in Paris. The snows were back, a cycle had turned. It was time for me to move on. The tyrannical meetings of Monsieur Barton were over.16, 17,18,19

Sir Derek’s best wishes for me in my new career

Other tyrannies were to take root though, this time serious ones. That year, in England, a life-threatening health problem hospitalised me for a month and forced me into a year’s convalescence. I assessed my life and decided to give up organic chemistry for good. I would never be the research scientist I had aspired to be.

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Notes:

1. l’Institut de Chimie des Substances Naturelles – Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Gif-sur Yvette, in the Vallée de Chevreuse. About 25km south of Paris. I lived in the 14th arrondissement of Paris and commuted daily by train to Gif. Website http://www.icsn.cnrs-gif.fr.

2. Madam Fan, Barton’s personal assistant, told me so at the time. Recommendations by especially Professor Daneel Ferreira, who had worked with Barton at Imperial College ten years previously, and Professor Robin Giles undoubtedly helped secure it for me. Robin Giles always said he wanted to place his students with gentlemen, not bastards.

3. I love language and seem to transmit linguistic concepts passably well. People were quick to latch on to it and availed themselves of free tuition gladly given. Before I knew it I was swamped.

4. These include numerous honorary doctorates, industry and country awards. The Hofmann Chair of Organic Chemistry was created for him by Imperial College in 1970, and two years later, he was knighted in Britain and enrolled into the Legion d’Honneur as a chevalier (he became an officer in 1985). Nobel Prize. He was president of the Royal Institute of Chemistry (now the Royal Society of Chemistry) in 1973–1974. Editor-in-chief of Tetrahedron. Editor-in-chief of Comprehensive Organic Chemistry. Let me stop.

5. I heard one of Barton’s ex-students, a professor, say that Barton himself yielded in chemistry genius only to R.B. Woodward. At that level of genius, aspects of ego are forgivable. However, Woodward was one of those people who, as a blessing of nature, needed only three hours sleep a night. Barton needed six… and those three extra hours of chemistry a day add up to an advantage over a career. I need seven.

6. Work at Orsay involved the passing of electrical currents through hydrocarbon-solvent mixtures that produced intractable cruds which had to be painstakingly analysed. At Gif, I synthesized the chemical substrates that we oxidized electrochemically at Orsay.

7. For example, in the whole time I spent there, I only attended one of the weekly colloquiums by an external speaker at Gif, being too busy at Orsay. My general chemistry knowledge stagnated as a result. That I had no transport and partially walked, partially hitch-hiked between the two institutions did not help. I was the only of Sir Derek’s thirty or so researchers who had two labs during the time I was there.

8. In hindsight, these were early warnings of the growth of a serious disease.

9. I even blew up a distillation apparatus in Orsay because of her refusal to talk to me and not properly showing me how it operated. This caused tension in the labs. Claude et. al. were not impressed, and I fell further from favour.

10. Barton would take a customary stroll through the labs late on weekend days just to see who was there… after having worked all day in his office himself. On the Saturdays I would work, it would be at Orsay. Being based at Gif, Barton never visited the Orsay labs, so he never saw my weekend labours.

11. Translation: “You are here? That is very good.” Barton always spoke English to me and I presented in English at the meetings. Otherwise I communicated with everyone in French at both Gif and Orsay.

12. Barton’s capacity for work was voracious as it was legendary. He drove everyone hard, but worked himself harder than anyone. In this respect he was fair. He would oftentimes be the first to switch on lights in the institute in the mornings and the last to switch them off in the evenings. He was known to work on Christmas day. His wife of course agreed to put up with this, up to a point. I heard that his first wife accepted she would see little of him, but insisted that they at least watch the BBC nine o’clock news together. The story goes that Barton would pretend to be watching the news, but would all the while be reading a publication he had smuggled in just out of sight of his wife… This ended in divorce.

Two published extracts about Barton’s work ethic.

“As young man, Barton had the reputation of being tough, probably because of his intense drive, his singularity of purpose, his individuality, and his determination where his work was concerned – and because he expected the same from those who worked with him. The drive and the energy are still there: How many people would leap from continent to continent to avoid (statutory) retirement? But the realisation that not everyone can or will work at his level of intensity has softened the edges a bit. Loyal, supportive and appreciative are how those who know him describe him. Sir Derek is not known to mince his words nor to waste them.” – Jeffrey I. Seeman, Editor’s note, Profiles Pathways and Dreams, Some Recollections of Gap Jumping – Sir Derek H. R. Barton. American Chemical Society, Washington, DC, April 1991.

“I certainly knew that I would enjoy living in France, but I was not certain if I would quietly prepare for real retirement or not. As soon as I realised that everyone expected me to retire quietly, I started working very hard again. In the nearly ten years that I spent in Gif-sur-Yvette, I accomplished as much as I did in the decade from 1950 to 1960, which was my previous high point. One of the stimulants was that money and good students were not automatically available, as they had been at Imperial College.” Sir Derek Barton, Some Recollections of Gap Jumping, ibid, chapter on “Retirement”, p.87. (I selfishly hope there were a few exceptions to good students not being automatically available!).

13. Relations between Barton and me improved to the extent that I became party to bets he would occasionally take with his researchers on the outcome of a reaction. The bets were always at ten francs apiece, and were of course more about prestige and chemistry nous than the money. I won the only bet he took against me! What I never got was the ultimate informal accolade Barton accorded his students. When Pascale Le Coupanec finally trapped an intermediate compound that eluded her for months and months, proving that the mechanism of a reaction occurred through radical processes, we were summoned into Barton’s office for a ceremonial champagne!

14. See e.g. Functionalisation of Saturated Hydrocarbons. Part X. A Comparative Study of Chemical and Electrochemical Processes (Gif and Gif-Orsay systems) in Pyridine, in Acetone and in Pyridine-co-Solvent mixtures. G. Balavoine, D.H.R. Barton, J. Boivin, A. Gref, P. Le Coupanec, N. Ozbalik, J.A.X. Pestana and H. Rivière Tetrahedron 1988, 44, 1091-1106 etc.

15. I was accepted for a post-doc at Cambridge, but alas Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher struck up a problem with the university dons and reduced their funding… I was informed in writing by the Cambridge professor a few weeks later that owing to funding restrictions he had to cut his budget that year and so could not take me on. I went to Bath instead where the professor had four scholarships! I really enjoyed my time there.

16. The last time I saw Sir Derek Barton was in Cape Town in 1997, a year before his death. I attended his lecture at UCT and was invited to visit him at his hotel in Newlands. He generously gave me 30 minutes of his time. He also gave me a copy of his book “Recollections of Gap Jumping” which he signed and commended to me. I was touched (see attached picture). No longer being in science, I asked him a philosophical question in question time after his talk. How did his brilliant ideas come to him? What was their genesis? From whence this well of intuition and genius? He replied something unmemorable, he did not know. Inspiration is transcendental.

17. Barton died in March 1998. These are extracts from Barton’s obituary in The Independent on Wednesday 25 March 1998 by his ex-student Professor William Motherwell:

“Derek Barton had a complex personality. The public persona presented in scientific meetings was of a rather forbidding figure, and his scientific rigour meant that he was always the first to ask probing questions after a lecture. Though he mellowed over the years, many of his colleagues were somewhat in awe of him, and found it hard to live up to his demanding standards, so that research discussions were often conducted on a polite and formal level.

In social gatherings, too, he was a little uncomfortable and keen to escape. To those who knew him well however, and with whom he could relax, an entirely different personality was revealed. At these times, he had a great sense of fun, loving to tell stories of people and places and revealing a surprisingly catholic range of interests in unsuspected areas such as literature and music. He was intensely proud of the world-wide family of his former colleagues and, as a ‘godfather’, he always wished to help them.

Barton liked to set himself new targets – and to meet them. One of these, made over ten years ago, was to publish 1,000 research papers before the age of 80, and in this, he surpassed his goal: a remarkable achievement from a remarkable man.”

18.  From The New Scientist, 17 December 1981

“… A Nobel laureate and veteran of 41 years’ outstanding research, Barton now lives in France, directing the Centre National de la Recherche Scientific at Gif-sur-Yvette. Recently, he came to London to be honoured by the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain with the Hanbury Memorial Medal and to deliver the annual lecture.

His lecture consisted of a philosophical discourse on the art of organic synthesis… Barton’s fame and reputation attracted young and old chemists to his lecture… He had something to say for everyone. Younger listeners were reminded on several occasions that “hard work is the minimum requirement; intelligence, motivation and a critical spirit… are also necessary.” He is reputed to drive his students hard and he still prides himself on working harder than them. Uneasy professorial laughter greeted this statement. In fact, the better the student the harder he drives them. This has led to a sprinkling of highly energetic and successful research groups around the world. Presumably those who can’t stand the heat soon get out of Sir Derek’s kitchen.”

19. From Encyclopaedia.com

“Barton saw himself as the ‘kingmaker’ of organic chemistry and he put considerable effort into making arrangements for the future of his best students. By 2005 these included the professors of organic chemistry at Cambridge (Steven Ley), University College London (Motherwell), Imperial College, London (Anthony Barrett), and Oxford (Sir Jack Baldwin).

The chemist Tony Barrett has noted (probably tongue-in-cheek) that many chemists considered Barton to be ‘aloof, demanding and taking pleasure in overwhelming any scientist he disagreed with,’ but that he personally found him to be ‘kind, considerate, supportive and generous.’ Certainly Barton’s perceived aloofness was mainly shyness. Barton kept a close watch on his students and liked to push them, but he was kind and generous in many different ways to those students who responded well to this pressure. As one of the ‘high priests’ of organic chemistry (to use Stork’s revealing phrase), Barton felt a moral obligation to maintain rigorous standards, and to prevent any possible sloppiness or fraud. He habitually asked any student claiming they had made a new compound to show him the crystals. There was always a robust discussion of the latest results in his group’s weekly meetings, and his researchers sometimes held back a piece of good news, to be used when there was nothing else positive to report.” (How cunning of them to manage the meetings thus! So there were others, too, in awe of the meetings…)

oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Mosselstraβe, Frankfurt, Germany 2008.

I alighted from my cab in front of my hotel in Frankfurt well past midnight and totally washed out.  Hardly was I on the kerb when an avuncular couple solicited me in front of the Double-D nightclub adjacent to the hotel, Mosselstraβe being, it became obvious, the red light district of the city.¹  He could have been my elderly uncle with his shock of grey hair, and she my rotund aunt knitting at the hearth, but here they were, touting their club’s delights in the wee hours of the morning.

”A drink sir, nice girls?” offers Uncle.
“No thanks, I’m dead tired”.
”Maybe another night then?” asks Auntie sweetly.
”Maybe another night” I say, and wheel my bag into the small hotel where a Turkish receptionist interrupts his slumbers, yawns mightily and checks me in.

In my comings and goings over the next few days, I developed a nodding acquaintance with Uncle and Auntie, who solicit not five metres from my hotel entrance in front of their club (see pics).  They were almost lovable, like distant family, and every time we crossed paths I felt obliged to drop in.  So on the final night of my stay, dressed in a coat, tie and business suit against the cold, I ignored all solicitations from an assortment of pimps and hostesses in high boots as I strolled down Mosselstraβe to my hotel, and gave my neighbourly codgers – almost family after all – the benefit of their cajoling by dropping into the Double-D.

“Hello, good evening”, greets Auntie in recognition as I walk in. “You came!  Welcome, welcome” she gushes to Nephew.  I’m then led past a U-shaped bar to an area not five metres by five in front of a small, low stage with an enormous motorbike on it.  I had once been taken to Teasers and suspected the bike would later feature in some sort of dancing act.  That’s what happens at Teasers, or used to happen years ago, at least on the night I was taken there against my will, dragging and screaming.  You sat at a table, had a drink and watched the dancers. Here, there were a few low tables with easy chairs around them, all empty.

As I’m about to take a seat I feel a tug at my arm.  I look around to notice I’ve won the attention of a fading blonde with the most enormous bust.  Double-D, definitely.  She’d materialised from the shadows as if instantly created.

“Hello, I’m Svetlana” she coos and playfully strokes my forearm.  “What’s your name?”

“Oh hi Svetlana I’m Alex”, I recover.

“Where you from”, she smiles.  This is always the second question I’m told.

“Cape Town.  Svetlana?  Sounds Russian”.

“I’m from the Ukraine”.

“Kiev?”

“No Odessa.  Come sit down”, she invites, still stoking my forearm.

We sit.  Madam Auntie approaches and asks what I’d like to drink.  “Red wine”, I say.

“Would you mind buying the lady a drink?”

“I’d be delighted to buy the lady a drink”, I ooze, but if truth be told, more out of entrapment than generosity.

“Thank you”, says Auntie.  Svetlana then takes off her furry topcoat to better reveal her assets, and just then Madam Auntie invites me, too, to take off my jacket and relax.  It’s a choreographed move, I suspect, the timing’s too perfect.

“No thank you, I’ve just got in from Africa and I’m cold”, I say.  I was not to give up my barrier.

“As you wish, maybe later”, says Madam Auntie, and trudges off to get our drinks.

Svetlana now starts to work her punter over.  There’s something unnerving about a woman staring unblinkingly at a man at close range.  It goes against all norms society has instilled in us.  I had hoped to slink into a back table, watch a floor dance or two and then disappear.  But here I was, in a suffocating emptiness and about to enter negotiations in Ukrainian.  I fidget around and feel I must talk.

“Hmmm where were we?  Oh yes, Odessa.  Friends of mine have just returned from there.  It appears that the economy is quite down.  Lots of building sites against the lake, no buyers, stalled construction, everybody glum…  That right?”

Svetlana shrugs.  That’s not the line she wants to pursue.  Damn!  I should have broached literary deconstruction instead.

Madam Auntie arrives with the drinks.  A glass of red wine for me, and what appears to be an iced strawberry juice for Svetlana.

“Would you mind paying for the drinks now?” asks Auntie.
”Not at all”, I say.

“Seventy-eight euros”, says Auntie.
”What?!??”

“Seventy-eight euros”, says Auntie, deadpan.

“Madam”, I’ve been at to a few bars in Frankfurt and the most I’ve paid for good wine is seven or eight euros a glass.  This is a rip-off. What on earth can she be drinking?  Bismarck’s blood?”

“This is nothing.  We have expensive drinks here” she says.  “I can show you the menu if you wish.  Some cost up to 140 euros.”

”For a glass or a crate?” I ask. “It’s ridiculous”.

I once overheard my dad saying he went to a club where the hostesses ordered expensive whiskies paid by the patrons, but that he suspected they were drinking flavoured water.  Like father, like son.  To be had like this obviously runs in families.

“The man at the door said I could come in and look for free”, I protest.

“But then you ordered drinks”, says Auntie.  Svetlana stares a hole through me during the haggling.

“But the most one pays for two drinks at the most elegant bars in Frankfurt would be 15 euros”, I say.  “I don’t even think I have the cash you’re asking on me.”

“Come come, you’re a man of the world, sir”, says Auntie.  “This is a red light district, and you should know that drinks cost more in a red light district than elsewhere”.

“Yes, but surely not that much more!”  It was enough to make me self-conscious.  There I was, all innocent and nerdy looking in my suit and Theo glasses and being called a man of the world.  One could laugh.

Madam shuffles off and Svetlana tries to soften matters by saying that drinks cost the same everywhere in Mosselstraβe.  She’s got to keep me onside.  I swallow hard.

Strained silence.

“I thought a show would be on?”

“Only at 4AM”, she says.

“Nothing like an early start”, I say.

“So how long have you been in Frankfurt”, I ask and sip my wine, which mercifully isn’t too bad.

“Eight years”, she says, bored by my diversionary ploys.  Then more to the matter:  “Why don’t you take off your jacket?”

“I’m cold”, I press.  “It’s summer in Cape Town.”

Svetlana grills me further with the silent stare of her profession.  It’s really, really unsettling.  “Why don’t you order a bottle of champagne?  It’s only 300 euros”, she says by way of a bargain.  “We can then have a room at the back all night.  It’s nice and private.  Much better than here”, she says.

“Look, I’m staying at the hotel right next door, and I just popped in for a drink”.  She shakes her head, thinking what a loser.

Madame then approaches and repeats the house pitch.  “Sir, why don’t you order a bottle of champagne and take Svetlana to the back and have a good time?”  Svetlana gyrates tensely in her chair.  “You’ll forget all your troubles.  She’s a beautiful lady and you’ll dream about her for days”, she says, fixing her gaze on a point in the sky from which our sweet dreams drop.

Don’t frighten me, I think.

“I’ll think about it”, I lie.

I start berating myself for not having gone to the Rough Diamond nightclub instead, which was advertised in a brochure at the Hilton Hotel.  I had earlier attended a conference there.  The Rough Diamond brochure boasted loads of space and a floor show every hour.  Which means you could watch the show far from the action, as one could at Teasers on the occasion I was taken there against my will, as I’ve explained.  The Hilton wouldn’t send its guests to rip-off dives like the Double-D.  The Rough Diamond, that’s the place to go clubbing in Frankfurt.  But here I was, in a dip in the Double-D.

Madam leaves and Svetlana sustains her lead.  “If you don’t want to go to our rooms at the back, I can come to your room in your hotel”, she offers.

Hmmm.

“Why sleep alone if you can sleep with someone?” 
What a knock-down line.  Full marks!  With that she showed she could reason, and reason well.  She immediately rose in my estimation.  But I resist.

“I’ve become used to sleeping alone”, I say.

Madame approaches again with further talk and hard sell.  Then, sensing I might flee, offers me another wine on the house.  I readily accept as it cuts the unit cost of drinks from folly to exorbitance.

“You don’t seem to know how these places work”, scoffs Svetlana.  Madame arrives with another glass.

“Sorry, I’m really quite naïve”, I say.

“Very”, she says.

“Some would even say stupid”, I impart in a dripping sarcasm that’s not lost on either.  A silent concurrence flows between them.  I had fallen from a man of the world to a bumbling naïf in minutes, but perhaps not all that naïve.

Madame leaves again and Svetlana stares me down silly.  I close down, cross my legs, fold my arms and stare back.

Silence.

“How many women work here”, I ask.

“How many women do you want?” she retorts tartly.

The seasoned hooker starts sensing this one’s slipping away.  She’s onto a lost cause here.  A co-worker with the most enormous cleavage walks by.  I can’t help gazing at it.  What abundance.  Double-D is clearly a specialist boutique.  Faint muzak wafts in the background, and there’s a low chatter at the bar.  I revert to my starer, who starts to disengage.  She flops her back into her chair and her tremendous tits flow away after it.  For the first time I notice she has passably good legs as well.^2,3

I down my wine.

“Well”, she says, “If you don’t want anything then you sleep alone.

“Drat, I never learn!”

“Then you suffer!”

A bouncer, a “heavy” I think they’re called, shifts closer to me at the bar, so I sour and pay the bill.  The ho gets up to leave.  “Goodbye”, she sneers, and settles into a nearby bench where a fellow prostitute is scoffing down food.  “Goodbye, Alex” would have been more polite.  I gather my coat and take to the exit which takes me past the two hookers.  “Goodbye Svetlana”, I teach.

I’m done with whores for the night.  At the door, Auntie Slut beams with the smugness of those who know they’ve done someone in.  The bitch.  I leave the cathouse seventy-eight euros poorer without having the courtesy of leaving a tip.  Outside, Uncle Kant is still soliciting.  It’s been barely twenty minutes since I went in.  Like the others he, too, knows I’ve been had.  “Good naaight!” he grins.  “F_ck off” I muffle.

A few paces away I shove open the door of the hotel, where the Turk at reception stifles a massive yawn and ponders yet again whether I’m in room 503 or 505.  He still hadn’t got it after three days.  I now really had reason to be furious.

ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Notes.

1. You know how it is, you book a hotel on the Internet within your budget, looking for a central place close to both the station and your conference venue, and you end up at the City Hotel West at 35 Mosselstraβe…  Nobody tells you anything.
2. Crediting “champagne” costs to harlotry and mentally comparing prices with Thailand, the undercover economist in me notes that proxy price of sex is roughly the same, except that the Thai merchandise is younger and less jaded.  My Ukranian prostitute, for it was obvious that the Double-D is not a nightclub but a brothel, would no longer cut it in the better houses in the city.  But things are much bigger at the Double-D.
3. Price for a night?  Around 400 USD, I presume negotiable as always.

“A mi me gusta los toros, el futbol no!” 

I first met Juan in his café when I got up too early for Spain one morning.  I had gone to the Mostenses market across the Gran Vía from the Plaza d’España in Madrid to buy pan and jamón de bellota for breakfast, but it was still closed, so I walked into a little café that had just opened and ordered coffee at the counter.  We were alone apart from two road workers in blue overalls and helmets already having drinks.  The café – very basic.  It’s not the grand Café Gijón, where waiters in waistcoats will serve you a water.  Juan, who ran the place, had an open smile so we struck up a conversation apropos nothing.  I become a regular there over the next four weeks.  On a day he asked me whether I would be going to the Feria de San Isidro bullfight festival that had opened the previous night.  I said I would, and that’s when he declared his love for bullfighting and not for football.

Bullfight aficionado

He was a bullfighting aficionado.  But the “ecologists” were spoiling it these days, he said.  They were trying to ban it.  Didn’t they know that the fighting bulls live a regal life for five years and only suffer for fifteen minutes, that’s all, whereas other stock are kept miserably in sheds where they can hardly move and are then killed by a gun at age two?  Juan said that if he were given the option to live like a king for fifty years and then suffer for the last fifteen minutes, like the fighting bulls, or live miserably for fifty years and then be killed instantaneously by a gun at an abattoir, he, Juan, would definitely opt for the former.  In fact, he’d sign on the dotted line immediately if they brought him the forms.  In fact, the ecologists could bring the forms to him right away, here to his café.

The ecologists were stuffing it all up.  He was a bullfighting fanatic to the point of illness.  He used to sleep outside the bullring’s ticket kiosks overnight to beat the black marketers to tickets.  He attended bullfighting events and talks hosted by toreros.  Would I like another drink?  Definitely Juan.  By the way, here’s some jamón serrano to go with your drink.  On the house.  Thank you Juan.  Nowadays he doesn’t have the will to sleep outside kiosks.  Neither is he going to pay the prices extorted by the black market.  Depending on demand they at times sell a twenty euro ticket for a hundred.  No thanks, he’d rather eat and drink for that money.  Given his afición, did he himself ever try to bullfight, I asked.  Was I loco?  Never!  If one put him, Juan, with a cape in front of a she-goat he’d completely shi_t himself, let alone a bull.  Some wine Alex?  Which would you like?  Ah, good.  Here are a few slices of baguette and some queso.  On the house.  Thank you Juan.

Las Ventas Bullring Madrid

A customer approaches the counter and Juan tears himself from our bullfight chat to serve him.  Someone plays a slot-machine in the background.  Two women smoke at a table.  Coffee aromas waft from an espresso machine.  It’s funny how in life you get to talk to people like Juan who have time.  The café down the block is much busier so the owner doesn’t talk to you.  More people go there than come here, to Juan’s.  Successful futbol people most likely, the real afición of Spain.

Over the next few days Juan tells me more and more about the subculture of los toros.  What seat to choose.  The barrera or contrabarrera if I could afford it, the rows of seats right next to the ring, preferably in sectors 1, 2 or 12.  That’s where most of the action takes place as its in front of the president’s box so you get really close-up views.  I was to take a hat if sitting in the sol or sol y sombra sectors, where the sun blazed.  If taking someone err… sensitive along with me, then out of consideration it would be best to sit high up in the stands.  And I should take an excellent cigar along – cigars and bullfighting went together, he said.  Of course, I shouldn’t expect the grand bullfighting of old.  These days there’s a down-breeding of the bulls so that they’re not as vicious as in the past.  The horn is bred to project lower so it doesn’t hit the bullfighter’s abdomen or groin but the thigh in a goring.  It’s less fatal.  There’s even talk of drugging the animals to render them placid.  All but the very top matadors today don’t take risks – they keep well clear of the horn.  Where are the valiant bullfighters of old?  But at least we still had this shadow spectacle to cheer ourselves.  I had to remember that the ecologists were agitating fervently to end bullfighting in Spain.  In España!

The next day I took metro line two to Las Ventas and bought tickets to that evening’s corrida.  The barrera and contrabarrera tickets had been snapped up, so I asked for tickets close to the bandstand where I could better hear the music.  That evening, I dressed up like a dandy and took my cigars along.  At exactly 7PM the corrida’s president gave a signal, the band struck up a pasodoble and the pageant began.  Two men on resplendent horses rode in, and then the rest of the evening’s troupes strode out in fine livery.  A buzz went through the crowd.  I lit up my cigar.  What expectation!

Dandy at the bullfight

The first bull is announced.  620 kg of hard beef from a reputable ganaderia.  Out come the picadors.  The gates open and out charges the bull, then stops and looks back.  They always do.  It then sees the first picador on horseback, charges and crashes his horns into the horse’s quilted armour.  The picador does what is perhaps the goriest thing of the bullfight – he pokes a long spike into the each of the bulls tossing muscles as its horns locks into the horse’s armour.  Blood flows down the bull’s magnificent flanks.  This, more than anything, makes the squeamish squirm.  This, more than anything, gives the matador a chance.  It also drops the bull’s head making the spectacular faenas possible.  And then is fight was on.  The toreros with banderillas perform their horn-defying acts, piercing the charging bull’s back with festooned arrows.  The bull shakes off the stings and rages on.  Finally the matador comes on to pace a dance of nerves and torment with the bull.  He, of all the bullfighters, is most at risk.

La Maestranza bullring Seville

The fighting bull – the toro bravo or toro de lidia – is no ordinary bull.  It has been known to kill lions and tigers in cages and is bred for its ferocity by ganaderias – special breeding houses.   They roam freely in the fields and must be at least 4 ½ years old before they’re allowed into the ring, and for the bullfighter’s sake, must never have fought a human before.  They are huge, magnificent, dangerous animals.  They can maim and kill (see pics).  The papers were full of the goring of the famous bullfighter José Tomas in May.  Anatomical sketches of the injuries he suffered were splashed all over all the front pages.  The goring of Julio Aparício through the neck and cheek also got wide coverage.  I saw a few close shaves myself, including a trampling and a tossing.  The crowd gasped when the horn came so close it tore the matador’s raiment.  The danger is always there, you can smell it, that’s why the people are there, to feel it.  It lurks at every turn.  Most bulls are brave but now and again a cowardly bull emerges, one that turns its back on the fight.  The crowd shouts and whistles at this.  Such a bull is always shooed out of the ring by a team of oxen.  Only the brave deserve the fight.

Goya – Bullfighting scene

A matador prefers an animal that charges true and straight, as though mounted on rails.  That’s when they can do the spectacular.  But those are the easy bulls.  The difficult bulls are the ones that toss at the matador unpredictably, and that learn fast that there’s a man behind the cape.  The matador has fifteen minutes in which to kill the bull else it goes free.  Above anything, the crowd loves a brave bull.¹

El Toro Enters

I’m at the bullfight at the Feria de San Isidro.  All’s well with life.  Six bulls.  Three matadors and their entourage.  Two cigars.  Charged atmosphere.  Lovely ladies.  Lovely ladies, lovely gentlemen.  The bullfight at Las Ventas.  In Madrid.  The faenas are sharp, the evening is festive, the pasodobles rousing.  I would go on to watch the corrida at the La Maestranza in Seville, as well as to the corrida de rejones at Las Ventas a few weeks later.  Forgive me.  My dark side at times thinks I was made to go to corridas in a panama hat and a scarf and a cigar, all elegant, with a most beautiful tall woman in a colourful shawl by my side, waving a fan.  I too, like Juan, will sign on the dotted line.

The next morning I tell Juan all about the corrida and read the reviews in El País and El Mundo.  Juan asks questions, explains.  I order another early morning Spanish brandy.  It’s my holiday, it’s traditional.  We discuss further.  But the aficionados are losing the battle.  Juan’s so-called ecologists are winning.  Catalonia has just passed a bill banning bullfighting, so there will be no more bullfights in Barcelona after two years.²  Defenders of tauromachy like the socialist politician David Pérez are on the back foot.³  The pro-bullfighting block is relying on intellectual and political support from France to block European Union regulations and prohibitions on bullfighting.  But they’re losing ground.

If the anti-bullfighting lobby passes these directives a barely extant ritual that has somehow survived progress will vanish.  It’s barbaric don’t you know.  The politically correct say so.  Yet there’s a great love, respect and sympathy for the bull in Spain, not contempt.  It is the very symbol of the country.  When the ecologists win a thousand-year old tradition will die.  They’ll next outlaw cigars in public spaces in Spain as they have elsewhere.  Emboldened by this, they’ll proceed to stamp out the thinking that’s not allowed, the dance that’s too provocative and the love that is forbidden.

Arturo Martin bites the dust

The free-roaming fighting bulls will disappear and their fields will be converted into golf courses for rich ecologists.  In their place, more cattle will be stuffed into pens to be instantaneously killed by nice guns with retractable projectiles to feed the MacDonalds share price on Wall Street.  Diversity will have been squashed.  Everyone will be happy.  The insipid tyranny of Juan’s ecologists would have won.

And when the last olé would have been cheered for the last fighting bull, I will go to Spain and talk futbol with Juan.

ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Notes:

1. Books on bullfighting abound.  A good if outdated classic is Ernest Hemmingway’s Death in the Afternoon.
2. The parliament of Catalonia passed a law to ban bullfighting on Tuesday 27th July 2010.  The ban will take effect in January 2012.  Voting was as follows: 68 backed a ban, 55 voted against and 9 abstained.  Cynics say that this was as much as political move to assert independence from Madrid as an anti-bullfighting vote, but the vote remains.
3.  Spanish newspaper El Mundo, 6 May 2010, Cultural Section, page 55.  Note that the bullfight is not covered in the sports section of newspapers in Spain, but in the cultural section.

Spanish Glossary

afición = deep love or fanaticism for an interest, hobby or a sport

banderilla – a decorated dart that is implanted in the neck or shoulders of the bull during a bull fight (definition from wordnetweb.princeton.edu).

barrera – the first row of seats at a bullfight right next to the ring

contrabarrera – the row of seats at a bullfight ring second from the ring, i.e. just behind the barrera seats

corrida = profession level bullfight in which a qualified bullfighter fights the bull on the ground and not from a horse.  The amateur version is called a novillada.
corrida de rejones = bullfight on horseback

faena = the series of final passes performed by a matador preparatory to killing a bull in a bullfight (definition from thefreedictionary.com)

futbol = football stupid football, also known as soccer, the thing that should actually be banned in Spain

ganaderias = special breeding houses in Spain that breed the fighting bulls.  There are many famous ganaderias, including Miura.  A Miura bull is reputed to have killed 27 horses in a fight in Seville a long time ago, Juan tells me.  They had to buy horses from carriages in the street to feed his rage, the folklore goes.

jamón de bellota = acorn-fed ham from free-roaming black pigs, also known as pata negra

jamón serrano = literally “ham from the mountain”, not as prized and much cheaper than jamón de bellota

loco = mad

matador = bullfighter who actually kills the bull

olé = interjection used to express approval, triumph, joy, etc., as at a bullfight or in flamenco dancing. Origin: Sp, prob.  hola, hollo, echoic of shout (definition from yourdictionary.com).

pan = bread

pasodoble = a moderately fast Spanish dance, set in march, traditionally played by the band during bullfights

picador = the horseman who pricks the bull with a lance early in the bullfight to goad the bull and to make it keep its head low (definition from wordnetweb.princeton.edu).

queso = cheese

sol y sombra = literally sun and shade. The part of the bullfight ring which starts off in the sun in the early part of corrida but gradually becomes shaded as the sun drops.  The most expensive seats at a bullfight ring are the barrera seats in the shade.  They officially cost around 130€ for the corridas I went to, but forget it, they’re much, much higher on the black market, which is way you can get them.

torero = bullfighter

In this batch of tales I expose the entrails of Boaventura, a Madeiran village.  The point of view you are getting is of an outsider but grudgingly accepted as an insider by everyone by virtue of birth, family connections and property holdings.  In these sketches I go beyond the Madeira of the tourist and open a window into the people in the country, giving you a view of its social fabric.

While writing this, it repeatedly stuck me of how difficult it is to transmit the exact sense, ethos and mind-set of a place and people.  In basic Portuguese, a word, a simple phrase, some slang achieves with great trenchancy what is only possible with awkward circumlocution in English, and vice-versa.  This is not particular to writing about Madeira but forms part of the “universal translation problem”.

Boaventura 1

1.  A little about Boaventurans
Boaventurans are neither inferior nor superior to people anywhere, they’re quick to let you know.  They might be poor, but they have categoría (class) they’ll tell you.  Boaventurans don’t tell you their names when asked.  They tell you what part of Boaventura they’re from and their parents’ names instead.  “I’m a daughter of so-and so from the Laranjeiras.  You won’t know them.”  “Yes, but nonetheless, what is your name?”  It seems a person is nothing if he doesn’t belong to someone.  Also, there are no addresses in Boaventura, certainly not in my dad’s vicinity.  If you want to get to my dad’s house, you have to know his full name, Senhor José-Maria dos Santos Pestana.  Even better, you have to know the name he is known by viz. José da Luz.  Having this, you enquire in places around the church square.  Someone will point you to the valley where my father lives.  Once you’re closer, you enquire further until you arrive at his house by gradual approximation.  But nowhere will you find an address or a street name.
In Madeiran culture, feeling trumps reason every time, and is never questioned.  Example: 
Questioner:  “Why are you sitting outside at 2AM in the morning having a smoke and a drink and staring into space?”
Answer: “Because I can’t sleep / don’t feel like sleeping.”
Calvinist/Anglo-Saxon Capitalist Entrepreneurial/First World Get-ahead reply:  “But you should go to sleep because if you don’t go to sleep you will not be able to function properly tomorrow and you will underachieve.”
Madeiran reply: “Oh?  OK.”

Boaventura Madeira

2.  Village idiot
Me, stirring:  “So Mum, where does the proverbial village idiot live in Boaventura?  They say every village has one.”
Mum:  “Village idiot you ask?  Village idiot?  It’s village idiots!  They’re all over.  Haven’t you noticed?  They’re falling out of the houses, they’re crawling over the fields, climbing up the valleys and into mountains.  They pollute the landscape.  They come here to your aunt’s house at nine in the morning and start pissing it up.  The only reason you haven’t heard them yet is that she’s sold out her five vats of wine this year, else they’d be there.  By ten in the morning they’re drunk and loud and start talking rubbish-rubbish-stupid-stupid-dirty-dirty.  They are a bunch of mal educados (ill-breds).  Your father of course joins them at times.  For entertainment he says.  Ha!  I keep threatening to leave.  No-one believes me.  But I’m leaving, one of these days I’ll be gone forever.  Just you wait.  I’ve told your father I can’t take this anymore.  I’m going straight back to the Free State.  They’ll all wake up one morning and I’ll be gone, they’ll see.
Me:  “Yes mother.”
Age has not withered nor custom staled her infinite temper…

3.  Francophones, Anglophones, Hispoanophones, Lusophones.
The community of Boaventura, as of all Madeira, is comprised a large number of emigrants who have returned after years of supplying labour to various economies of the world, chief among them being Venezuela, South Africa and France.  These returned émigrés have a habit to pepper their Portuguese entre eux with expressions in the language of their country of emigration, if not to revert entirely to the language of their “other country” with various degrees of fluency.
It’s as though they are little clans that wear their second language as badges of subtle distinction, and they refer to themselves as Venezulanos or Sul-Africanos a.k.a (Cabeiros) or Franceses.  They will even arrange themselves into teams along these lines when they play each other at cards on Sundays around the churchyard cafés.  I luckily speak all these languages so stand at no disadvantage to anyone.
One fine morning before lunch I’m sitting on my father’s verandah when “Monsieur” Manuel Domingos Andrade walks past.  37 years in France, now a colourful denizen of the valley.  In moments of vainglory boasts he once had 19 million francs in France.  “But I lost it all, I lent the money to a friend in trust for a project sight unseen, and he lost everything.  So did I.  And here I am.”  He is about to invite me to a glass of wine at a drinking house once again, but strangely addresses me in Portuguese today.
“Morning Monsieur Andrade.  I notice you’re addressing me in Portuguese today, not French.”
“Well yesterday I was drunk, so I spoke French, but today I am sober so I speak Portuguese.  What about a drink.  Can I stand you a glass?”
“Haven’t you already had a drink or two today?”
“Yes but only six glasses.  You know I don’t like cooking.  I eat wine.  It’s my food.  I eat three to four litres of wine a day.  Keeps me going.  Pour m’encourager.  So, Monsieur Alexandre, venez-vous?”
“Mais oui, merci Monsieur Domingos, avec plaisir.  Let’s go!”

Adega Boaventura Madiera

4. The devil in Boaventura.
People still fight when they get drunk in Boaventura, says Dad, but today people are much tamer.  The younger crowd don’t drink that much and are on the whole more civilized.  People don’t kill each other that much.  But in his time, says Dad, when he was a young man, it was the devil!
There was a crazy crowd that was always fighting, especially a few hours after Sunday mass when the liquor had flowed.  Beatings, knifings and retribution were common occurrences.  It used to be blood all over, blood on all sides, it was the devil.  They stabbed each other to death.  The police were always carting them off to jail, says Dad.  They would be taken to jail in São Vicente where they would be thrown naked into damp cells with water underneath.  There they would be beaten senseless until they confessed.  Thieves also got the same treatment until they revealed the whereabouts of the stolen goods to the police.  But they were hard men and needed to be softened to a quivering pulp before confessing.  There was respect for the law in those days, in the time of the dictator Salazar, says Dad.

Of course they’d be released after a while but like all recidivists, they’d be back in the slammer a few weeks later for further correcting, unless they killed someone of course, in which case the courts got involved.  But it was the devil in those days! – says Dad.

Boaventura Madeira Coastline

5. Taste-Off: Grand Marnier vs. Poiso Poncha.
I’m party to a taste-off conducted by six Boaventurans in my father’s kitchen on a cold morning between:
(i) The world famous liqueur Grand Marnier, Cordon Rouge, based in Cognac, France; orange essences, amères exotiques, grand liquer de France, Louis Alexandre Marnier l’apostolle creature.  40% alcohol.  A complex liqueur of fine balance and elegance. Cost 50euros/litre (Heathrow duty-free price), versus
(ii) The local Poncha da Madeira, based in Poiso, Madeira, honey rum and liqueur, bottled by J. Faria & Sons Lds, Funchal, 25% alcohol.  A simple, one-dimensional punch of forgettable impact sold in plastic 1l bottles with cheap labeling.  Cost: 5 euros/litre, including tax.
The unanimous verdict:  The Poncha, from Madeira, won, of course.

6.  Probing questions to Boaventurans.
You can find out much about a place, or for that matter a business or a person by asking what their three biggest problems are.  You’ll get different answers depending on who you ask.
Question 1:  What is the biggest problem around here?
Answer from (i) Cousin who works at the bank:  The impending financial crisis.  Hardship is already here, and more is coming.  No government in the world can relieve the hoe from these people’s hands.  They’ve even stopped construction work on the tunnels.  Boaventura will continue to depopulate.  How many young people do you see around here?  Hardly any.  Portugal has one of the lowest female fertility rates in the world and it’ll continue to plummet.
Answer from (ii) Mother:  Your father’s uncle down the road who surreptitiously steals land from people.  He is ninety and still works the fields between bouts from hospital, that lout.  Also there are my aches and pains and life disappointments.  But let’s not dwell on these.
Answer from (iii) Barfly No. 4.  Last year’s harvest.  Too much rain.  Bad grapes, poor wine.
Answer from (iv) Barfly No. 5.  The general ignorance around here.  It’s shocking.  As a man who has travelled all around the world, including Africa and insalubrious parts of Asia I hear,  you surely can’t have encountered a greater, a more crass ignorance than here. Surely, please tell me!
(You dare not agree with him.  This is a trap, you’re meant to remonstrate vociferously at this and say that on the contrary you find Boaventurans uplifting and intelligent.  If you don’t, word will soon have it that you’re a conceited maleducado (ill-bred) who looks down on everyone.)
Question 2: What is of interest in Boaventura, what is exciting?
Answer from Barfly No. 3:  What?  You mean you haven’t noticed?  You’ve been here a week and you haven’t noticed?  The answer is nothing.   There is nothing of interest around here.  Zero!

7. Labour lost
My dad, aunt and I were having coffee on the balcony overlooking the fields where a woman was hoeing.
Me:  “What’s the cost of labour in Boaventura?”
Tia Maria-José:  “It depends on the job, but for the work that woman is doing, 30 euros a day.  It’s too little for the one who earns it, and it’s too much for the one who pays it.”
Me:  “In what sense”.
Tia Maria-José:  “Well, 30 euros doesn’t buy much.  The minimum wage is 300 euros per month but no-one earns it around here.  If you work your land yourself you can live off it, but the moment you pay someone a day’s work you’re better off buying what you’re toiling to produce.  It doesn’t pay.”  I immediately realise that the microeconomics of subsistence farming in Boaventura is utterly marginal, and understand why so much land lies fallow.
Me:  “How many man-days does it take to dig up this 25m*10m piece of land?  One?”
Dad and Tia Maria-José in unison:  “No, three.”

8. Warming up the Engine
A strain of chronic alcoholism runs through our valley.  Some men start drinking early in the morning and continue till past nightfall.  They go to the drinking houses that sell the sulphurous, over-pressed, sour home-made wines made from Jaqué and Argemum grapes.  It stirs your insides and shakes you up.  These drinking houses are called “little Chapels” and there are four within a radius of 200m from my father’s house.  My aunt runs one and she starts selling when the first customer of the day comes knocking.  On my way to the road one morning I pass Senhor Adelino sitting on Tia Maria’s outside bench, already at it, lifting his elbow which lifts the hand which lifts the glass.
“Bom dia Senhor Adelino.”
“Bom dia if God so wills it.”  Inch’Allah operates here too.
“I notice you’re already “baptizing” yourself so early this morning.”
“My machine, Senhor Alexandre, cannot work properly in the morning without being warmed up.  It’s like a car on a cold day.  You can’t just ignite and drive.  So here I am, warming up my machine, looking after it, lubricating, making it last.  Surely you approve?”
“Fully!”
“What about having a little aguardente with me to warm yourself up?”
“Gladly.”

Boaventura Madeira Barflies

9. Party political.
My aunt Maria-José Dias was sporting a party political T-shirt of the Portuguese Social Democrats.
Me (stirring):  “Aunt Maria-José, what party is this you’re supporting?  You spend the day in the fields with a sickle in your hand, and I’m sure you pick up a hammer from time to time.  Hammer and sickle, those are your tools, that’s more your style.  Given that, I would have thought that the Portuguese Communist Party would be the one for you, closer to your heart.”
Tia Maria-José (65):  “Well yes, hmmm, there’s something to what you’re saying, but this is my party.  You know, the political parties all come around during their campaigns and dish out T-shirts, caps and the like.  I wear them all.  I have a cap at home of the Portuguese Socialist party which I wear from time to time.  Would that be red enough for you?”

10. The refreshing flight of the accidental colonialist
I come across Tio José Dias on the path on the second day of my stay.
Me, complying with the formulaic greeting required of every bem educado Madeiran the first time in the day they see a family elder, a custom rapidly falling away:  “Tio a sua bênção!  (Uncle your blessing please!)
Tio José Dias (65), giving the obligatory formulaic reply:  “May God bless you my son.”
Me:  “Lovely day today.”
Tio José Dias:  “Indeed.  So, did you have a refreshing flight?  What aeroplane did you fly across in?  When I came back from the war in Africa I came in a Boeing 707, they say it’s far more refreshing than a 747 in which I’ve never been.  Did you have a fresh and refreshing flight?”
Me:  “Tio José, you were in Africa, fighting wars?  Did you see combat?”
Tio José Dias:  “Of course.  What do you think?  Here I was, working in these saintly fields, minding my own business when the Portuguese army came by forcibly recruiting for the colonial cause in far away Africa.  I was sent to fight people I personally had nothing against, fancy that.  Some of us were sent to Mozambique, some to Angola, I was sent to Guinea-Bissau.  But well, once in the bush, either they shoot you or you shoot them, and frankly, I preferred shooting than being shot at.  Either you gave them bullets or they gave you bullets, hot ones.  Choose.  Freedom fighter, terrorist, what’s the difference if he’s pointing an AK47 at you?  Hey?  Learn this; the proper title of a person pointing an AK47 at you is senhor (sir).  Senhor, you hear!  Sim Senhor, não Senhor!  After two years of skirmishing in the bush the army brought me back just before the 1974 revolution, luckily all intact.  Some men from around here died in the African wars, and some are maimed.  But tell me, did you have a refreshing flight?”
Me:  “Why yes uncle, I came across in an Airbus and my flight was very refreshing, thank you for asking.”

11. Tea for Two
Primo José-Alexandre took me to the neighbouring, more prosperous village of Arco de São Jorge for tea.  Arco de São Jorge is more prosperous than Boaventura because they have a flatter terrain, they make much better wines, they have a fancy tea garden with a Khoi fish pond and have recently established a little wine museum.  Tourists stop at São Jorge, they don’t stop at Boaventura, they simply pass through.  Our village really does not have much to offer.  Sorry.  We stop off at the tea house and what teas do they have!  Darjeeling, Earl Grey, all sorts of others, and even two varieties of Rooibos tea, one from the Cape and one from Namibia.  What?  I settle down at a table opposite primo José-Alexandre to one of a dozen cups of tea I drink in a year, and immediately realise I’ve come to the tea-house with the wrong person.  Primo José-Alexandre, who doesn’t touch alcohol, overcompensates for it by adopting the most civilised of auras when drinking tea, as though he were a grand participant in a Japanese tea-ceremony.
I would much have preferred to have gone with a character like our grandmother had she still been alive.  The monologue would have gone something like this.  Granny:  “What?  How much are you paying for this tea?  2 Euros 50?  Are you mad my boy?  And here in conceited Arco de São Jorge of all places!  It’s not town, despite what they think.  What’s wrong with granny’s teas?  You know that granny has infusions, herbs, potions etc. that she herself picks from the mountains and brews – at the fraction of this price!  Whenever you want a tea my boy, just ask granny and granny will brew it for you with love my child.  We don’t have to come to São Jorge for it.  What a sin, what extravagance, may our God in Heaven forgive us for this!  My boy, what’s come over you?”  To which I would have replied “Yes, granny”.

Sao Jorge Madeira

12. Low scoundrel
Mum (69):  “You remember Tony da Luz, the guy you liked so much when you were last here in 2001?”
Me:  “Of course mother, I remember him fondly.”
Mum: “Well, he is a scoundrel and a thief.  He stole land from Maria Casca that was rightly hers, increasingly planting it with his crops row-by-row until he stole it completely, that corno.  He robs people when it comes to the division of land, does that 88-year old monster.  Francisco Bastos gave us use of a piece of land on which to build a garage and that thief blocked us.  I don’t greet him anymore, that low villain.  I ignore him, totally.  There are those who say that he’s going to the hottest part of hell where the most vicious devils are.  I don’t know much about hell and things like that, but those around here better acquainted with such things attest under oath that he’s going straight there, straight to the very centre of hell.  A total scoundrel he is!”
Me:  “Yes mother.”
How reassuring.  The fight’s not out of the old girl yet.

13. Food, Boaventura Style
Well before arriving in Madeira I phone mum ordering the foods I want to eat, foods I remember from my childhood and that I no longer eat but still crave, having changed eating cultures half-way though my life.  All is arranged by the time I arrive.

One morning you have goat’s liver served in special slow cooked red onions and eaten in the freshest Portuguese rolls.  A little wine to wash it down rounds off things, how else, why not.
For lunch there is wild boar and maize meal in a goat sauce, not the soft Madeiran variety but the stiff indigenous South African staple – a concession to fusion cuisine.  Saboroso!  Black beans and cabbage fresh off the lands accompany the boar.  Oh, this was prefaced with a tomato, lettuce and cucumber salad, fresh off the land, drizzled in vinegar and olive oil as one does and accompanied by a light rosé wine.
How good is life?  You could eat fancier at Reid’s Hotel but not better.  If I had time I would tell you of the yams and chouchous with peas to accompany fried rabbit, crisped to perfection.  Sun-kissed pumpkins off the treliss, leeks just pulled out of the ground. Scabbard fish caught in the sea that morning from Cousin Oscar’s boat.  Parsley, a little garlic.  A simple plate of Argemum grapes for dessert.  Chouriço and freshly laid eggs from my Aunt’s coop for breakfast the following day with crusty bread bought from the itinerant baker at 07H30.  A little calde verde later in the morning to allay the chill, a little punch to round it off…
Neither does Mom let me off the hook when I’m there.
Mum:  “Son, don’t you want some tremoços (lupins)?  Have some tremoços, these are exceptionally nice.”
Me: “No thank you mom.”
Mum:  “What about some espada (scabbard fish) then?  Nice and fresh, caught early this morning?”
Me:  “No mother, we’ve had lunch two hours ago.”
Mum:  “What about some arroz de muelas (chicken gizzard rice)?  I spiced it myself, it’s well tempered.”
Me:  “No thanks mummy, I’m not hungry.”
Mum: “Here, have some pasteis de nata (custard pies) then.  You come to your mother’s house son and you don’t eat anything.”
Me:  “OK mother, I’ll have just one.”

Bounty of the Boaventura’s Land

14. Perfectly said, imperfectly heard
Senhor Mendes of the bank is talking to me.  Senhor Mendes speaks excellent Portuguese at which I marvel.  I am currently studying Spanish, a language to which Portuguese is structurally related, and am acutely sensitised to grammatical aspects of language.  There goes Senhor Mendes again, talking straight at me, but I don’t hear what he’s saying for it’s not meaning but pure grammar that issues from his lips, which my mind furiously parses against my will.  Indicative, subjunctive, subjunctive, pluperfect, imperfect of the subjunctive, future imperfect, conditional, imperative, indicative…  I eventually hear him when his lips suddenly stop moving.
Senhor Mendes:  “So, Senhor Alexandre, which option is it to be then?”
Me, feeling totally stupid:  “Ah, Senhor Mendes, would you please go over my options again, I’m a little confused…”

Senhor Mendes, 2nd from Right

15. Ginja anguish
Primo José-Alexandre took me to a café to have ginja.  Ginja is a medium strength short alcoholic drink (20% alc.) flavoured with ginjas, which are a type of cherry that impart the characteristic flavour to the drink.  I had to have a shot.  Barmaid:  “Ginja com ellas ou sem ellas?  (Ginja with or without them?).”  Her question took me back over thirty years to the kitchen table of Pinto Leite’s farm outside Kempton Park.  I remembered my Dad and Pinto Leite endlessly discussing the ginja poser.  One has the option, they said – at the same price – to have a tot of ginga without cherries, in which case there’s more liquid to drink, or a tot with two cherries in it for which you give up the equivalent volume of liquid they displace.  What’s a man to do?  You either have more to drink, or less, but if you drink less you can spend the next thirty minutes munching alcohol-soaked gingas.  This was a cause of endless deliberation and heartbreak for my father and Pinto Leite, who would reason over it deep into the night and through their fifth bottle of wine.  I would watch them from their elbows as a ten-year old boy.  They would come at the Ginja problem from all sorts of angles, starting their thinking afresh when falling into the myriad logical traps the problem posed.  Who says there’s nothing to talk about in the world?  And here I was now, decades later, facing the same dilemma.

16. Briga (quarrel)
I overheard an exchange of shouts between two women below the balcony early one morning.  One was in the field in front of us, the other was at a lower elevation in a backyard next to Dad’s compadre João Inez’s house.  The two were engaged in an intense briga over a distance of 50 metres.
Woman 1 (say 40):  “And your sisters?  Your sisters are putas (bitches) of the worst sort, but small putas, not a big puta like you.”
Woman 2 (say 40):  “Your mother’s ars_e_hole.”
Woman 1:  “What about my mother’s ars_e_hole?  Do you think your mother’s ars_e_hole is cleaner than mine, you squinting witch!”
Woman 2:  “Shut your maw you contorted cabra (she-goat).”
Woman 1:  “Your father’s balls.”
Woman 2: “You twisted open-legged bitch!  Low whore, come say it here!”
The conversation was so familiar I thought I was back on the streets of Cape Town.
Me, to mom and my sisters:  “Mummy, Fatinha, Hirondina, come quick!  There’s an interesting conversation outside.” 
They, running out with coffee cups in hand and looking furiously around for the source of the action:  “Where?  Where?  Where?”

17. Paupers and Priests
Dad, after a good meal:  “Shoo.  As we say around here, I ate like a priest.”
Me:  “Yes, Dad, we ate well.  Leta’s father would say they had eaten like a king.  Why do people around here say they ate like a priest and not a king?”
Dad:  “A king?  When do people around here see a king?  Or what he eats for that matter?  The people here imagine a king to be a grand person, who lives in a palace as big as our local church say, but they’ve never actually seen a king.  I didn’t know Leta’s father or how many kings he knew, but a king, who lived in far away Lisbon or thereabouts, was just too far removed from us for us to have any notion of what he eats.  Now priests we locals know well.  And we know priests don’t exactly go hungry.  For us, to eat like a priest is a grand thing.”
My sister Fatinha, quick to the grasp: “Can’t you see it’s a quantity versus quality thing, silly.”

18. Latest news
Deolinda Teodoro (50) was ploughing in the field below our veranda when mum beckoned her over.
Mum, to her, conspiratorially:  “Listen, do you know who cut the pumpkin creeper over the orange tree last night?  It’s shrivelling up.”
Deolinda Teodoro:  “My God of Heaven, what are you saying?  Don’t say that too loudly otherwise people may think it’s me and put me in jail.  I who work the field right next door, I’ll be the prime suspect.  Look what of all things had to befall me, Hail Mary full of grace!”
Mum:  “Good health to the person who did it I say.  It was blocking our view.  What’s the latest with the couple in the house down the road?  I believe there’s been fun.”
Deolinda Teodoro:  “My God of this World, haven’t you heard?  They fight like cats all the time.  There’s talk of divorce, heavenly crosses!  But fight like cats they do!  You should hear them.  I sometimes listen.  (Sotto voce) There’s even talk of porada (beatings). You should see them, my God of All Things.”
Mum, to me as soon as their conversation ends:  “I’m not nosey, but I needed to catch up with the latest developments around here.  It pays to stay abreast of the latest developments at all times.”

19. The Categoría of Carlos 
Mum, rambling on in a stream-of-consciousness to no one in particular while washing the dishes as I’m reading, each of us in our own world (we’re Freudian fodder):  “You know, you cousin Carlos has much categoría (class).  Of all your cousins, he’s the best.  He has the bearing and character of an Englishman.  He is an Englishman like the Englishmen of old, that is, those who used to visit Madeira in the old days, he is not like the Englishmen we nowadays see on TV beating up people outside soccer stadiums.  Those Englishmen are rubbish, rubbish.  Primo Carlos is like the Englishmen of old, nice and polite, with class, not like the new ones.”
Me: “You mean a gentleman, mother.”
Mum: “Yes, yes, I had forgotten the English term, a gentleman, he is a true gentleman.  It’s the only way for a man to be.  You yourself can learn a lot by observing primo Carlos.  Carefully.”
Me: “Yes mother.”

Cousin Carlos, Madeiran Gentleman

20. Morning glory
Teresa Baptista, here on a visit from Funchal, was joking in a way that us village people dare not do.
Teresa Baptista:  “It’s good for one to have lovers.  As a psychologist, I can tell you it’s good for the psyche.  The best lovers are married ones, they’re less maintenance and are less clingy.  But we shouldn’t see our lovers at night when they’re exhausted.  No, morning is best, when they’re fresh and eager for us.  I had a married lover recently.  I would arrive at his house just after his wife would be leaving.  It would be her leaving, and my arriving.  Perfect synchronicity.  One has to be precise in these things.”
Me: “Indeed, one can’t be exact enough in life.”
Teresa Baptista:  “Or clever enough.   A guy I know got a car exactly like his lover in case he ever got followed, to confuse potential chasers.”  Teresa was showing us glimpses of city morals, as practised in Funchal.
Me, loudly:  “I endorse every word you say.  One cannot take one’s mental health too seriously.  Continue!”

21. Religious conversion, the quick way
Dad is mild-mannered in most things until he gets behind a wheel of a car.  Then, like most Portuguese men, he undergoes a character change and drives insanely.  Decades of religious preaching/attempted conversion/crude persuasion has failed to budge me from my entrenched agnosticism.  But Dad’s driving lead me directly to prayer, palms clasped in white-knuckled supplication, lips murmuring for divine protection.  “Whoa there Dad!”, we three kids would ask/beg from him after he’d race to a hairpin bend on a 600-metre cliff, only to furiously brake again, “please slow down, stop, we beg you!!!”
Dad:  “What, at this speed?  What are you talking about?  This is not fast.”  Another gut-wrenching acceleration.
We three children:  “Whoa, whoa, whoa, please!”  He’s always been a good driver, but now and then cuts it fine to the irritation of other drivers who are quick to road rage.  “Velho caralho! (old cock)” a driver insults after he once again cuts a corner too sharply.
Dad:  “What’s the hell’s he going on about?”

23. My gallant protectors
I longed for a walk along the levada grande in the mountains.  The levadas are water canals integral to the water supply of the island.  People come from all over the world to walk along them.  Around a fire one evening I let slip my intensions of going walking alone in the mountains early the next morning.
Tia Maria-José (65) and Agostinha Correia (67) in unison and alternating with each other: “What?  Are you going to walk in the mountains by yourself?  Alone?  Are you mad?  Do you know that a wild pig can attack you at any time?  What are you laughing at?  It happens!  Just you ask the guys at the house next to the brook.  They hunt wild pigs in the mountains.  One of them got attacked by a pig last month and nearly lost his hand.  No, no, we can’t let you go alone.  We’ll just have to go with you.”
So early the next morning the three of us set out for the mountains with walking staves in our hands, the two grannies and I, they walking ahead to shield me from any boar that might suddenly have the insolence to rush at me out of a thicket.
Along the levada we spot a lot of dead wood which draws Tia Maria-José to remark “Bless all this wood – when I was young, this wood wouldn’t have been lying around.  We’d have to go high up into the mountains to get it during the Time of Misery.  That was when the population was young and Boaventura was overpopulated before mass-emigration, unlike is the case today where one sees the odd young person.”
That evening I ask Dad when the Time of Misery ended.  “Five years after I emigrated”, he says.

24. Literacy, sort of.
Mum:  “People around here are illiterate.  Many of them can’t perceive a letter the size of a donkey.  Or they say they can read, but when you test them you find they can recognise individual letters, but they can’t join them into words, that’s their slight problem.  Apart from that, they can read all right.  Ha.  In my day, in the time of Salazar, everyone was forced to go to school.   You paid a heavy fine if you didn’t attend school for a day.  (My microeconomics get working furiously: to serve as a proper deterrent, an effective fine would have to be set at a rate marginally higher than the proxy value of the child’s labour in the fields).  The school authorities enforced the fines, so everyone went to school.  After the 1974 revolution they relaxed the requirement for a few years, and guess what, people stopped going to school.  So there’s a group of people around here that can’t read.  That’s the problem with this country.  Its machine is always broken.  The new government has however instituted a programme of adult classes to get this generation to read.”
Me, later, to Dad:  “Dad, how many people in Boaventura can’t read.”
Dad:  “Of the over 50’s, I’d say around 40% can’t read.  Overall, I’d say that 20% of the 1500 people in Boaventura cannot read.”  The illiteracy rate was disputed by Primo José-Alexandre, but his figures weren’t much lower than dad’s.

25. Spaghetti, right up to scratch
We were eating a pasta soup and dad again told us of neighbour Manuel Aguiar’s time in the army.  They once served a very thin soup in the army mess, with a few strands of pasta in it, not like the rich one we were busy eating.  When Manuel Aguiar came back to his mother’s house to eat a more substantial pasta soup, he complained that the army’s pasta soup was so thin he had to shove seven spoonfuls into his mouth before swallowing in order that the little pasta in it “scratch his throat, scratch his gills”.  At this point dad tilts his head, stares at the ceiling, swallows hard and scratches his throat pensively for a minute, then looks at us with big eyes, swallowing imaginary strands of pasta down his gullet.  “Ha ha ha ha ha!” we all roar.  “Ha ha ha ha ha!” we laugh ourselves silly.  “Imagine all that pasta scratching Manuel Aguiar’s gullet!  Ha-ha-ha!”  We then collectively come up with various foods, spoonfuls of which would best scratch Manuel Aguiar’s throat.  “A knotty curry!  A thick chouriço (sausage)!  Tripe and beans, that’s sure to scratch Aguiar’s grumpy throat!  Ha ha ha!”  I know, I know, but this is extremely fine Madeiran humour, to be retold to your children’s children, the stuff of folklore.  Its theme of inverted gluttony in a land of little strikes all the right chords.

26. Shared bounty
Poor as they are, there’s a strong sense of communal life in Boaventura, and people live with due consideration of their family and neighbours.  During the course of a day a meio-grogue of aguardente (tot of brandy) was forced at me at 07H30 in the morning by my uncle; Orlinda Viera brought us a green pumpkin from her garden, Agostinha Correia brought us a plate of argumun grapes and Tia Maria-José brought us some fresh green beans she had just picked.  Someone, I think it was Babiana Vicente, brought us corn on the cob straight from her fields.  Luckily mom had made a huge number of malasadas (French toast) that morning, so we had something to give in return.  Not that anyone expects to get anything in return, no, not at all.  But.  These little country rituals of give-and-take are more about entrenching social cohesion than material exchange, and are therefore vital to the lifeblood of the village.  One therefore has an obligation of exchange some time later.  What is far more obligatory to return than material presents are favours.  You’ll often hear someone say that he doesn’t owe so-and-so anything, excepting for favours that he has to return.  “If I could pay him the favours I owe him, I’d owe him nothing!” you might hear someone saying of someone with whom he might have quarrelled.

27. The customer isn’t king!
On a walk around the houses on the hill I suddenly hear the unmistakable death cries of a pig being slaughtered ringing out across the valley.  The cries came from the guys next to the bridge at the brook, who specialise in catching wild black pigs in the mountains and feeding them on vegetables for a few months to get rid of the ‘savage taste’.  The pork is excellent, much better than the domesticated white pigs brought up in sties.  I walk quickly to their terrace, at first hearing the pig’s desperate high-pitched squeals, then gradually lower-pitched grunts as its blood pressure drops from the knife wound to its heart.  As I approach, the stench of singed rind wafts all around as they blow-torch the hair off its skin.
Me (to the three men involved in the slaughter standing around the dead pig on the ground):  “Hello.  Nice pig.  Do you sell pork or is this for your personal consumption?”
They:  “We could sell you some.  But we sell the pig in quarters.”
Me:  “Oh.  That’s far too much.  I was thinking more along the lines of a ham.”
They: “Hmmm.  We don’t really do that.  But OK let’s see what we can do, I suppose we can sell you the hind leg or something.  Who are you?”
Me:  “I am the son of José da Luz”.
They: “We know exactly where he lives.  We’ll drop it off in the afternoon.”
When I came back from a walk in the late afternoon, there was a quarter of a pig on the kitchen table, promptly delivered, and not the smaller ham I was hoping for.  I could take it or leave it.  There was no point in leaving it as I’d have to deal with them sometime in future again… and they have the goods.  It’s like this; the seller, not the buyer, is king, as it has been for centuries, for supply is short and demand is high.  Transportation costs between villages have historically been expensive, so that producers of specialist products are little insular monopolies, with the mild contempt for buyers that goes with it.  The French understand it perfectly, and you’ll understand the French mentality when you grasp this point.  The French have a monopolistic small producer mind-set.  Have you ever been mildly slighted by a French person?  I have.  Whenever that happens, I calm down by saying it makes a refreshing change from the fawning American service industry.

Madeiran Black Boar

28. Photo shoot
I spot the most beautiful woman I’d seen anywhere in ages in Boaventura.  I thought she would not have been out of place on the cover of a glossy magazine.  Elegant, beautiful, striking, svelte, high cheekbones, perfect structure, with a beauty spot at the right place on her cheek, in fact all ingredients perfectly poised.  She is Mr Elias’ daughter from the café right off the church square, all of seventeen I’d say.  She was drawing coffee from the espresso machine and was serving it to customers at the counter.  I had my camera on me and decided to snap.  A camera is a very intrusive thing, and wherever in the world I go, people intensely resist having their photograph taken, excepting for Americans.  Some resist so fiercely you’d think a camera were a rifle.  I’m sensitive to this and always ask before snapping, a courtesy that has cost me fascinating shots of deep character.  Today I decide to ask for forgiveness instead; she’s simply too striking.  So I aim at her but, too late, she spots me and subtly twists her body, deliberately spoiling the shot.  I try again later but she’s now self-aware, and tilts her face away.  Another aim at her, she foils me again.  What a tart little spoiler.  I’d have to resort to asking after all.
Me:  “Ah, Menina, would you be so kind as to err… (clear throat) allow me to take a photo of you, just here, err… (gawp and dawdle)… drawing coffee, if it’s not to much trouble Menina.  I must say I find you, if I may say so, most intensely charming.”
She, in high defiance, half-turning and walking away:  “You want a photo of someone drawing coffee?  You do?  Then there, take a photo of my father.  He’s at the coffee machine now.”  And with that she pivoted around and made off to the back.  You dirty old man, she obviously thought.  Her father was right there and had overheard the conversation, so there was nothing to do but point the camera stupidly in his direction and give him a wide grin.  Mr Elias, who unlike his daughter, is rather unprepossessing, has the sense to say:  “A photo of me?  No thanks”.

Madeira Boaventura Flower

29. Land Sub-text
Dad, let’s buy this piece of land.”
 “We’ve already got enough land here.  Why should we buy it?”
“So that the two pieces we own get contiguity.  This piece will consolidate everything around our house into one plot.”
“But it’s already so much, it’s over-enough for us, we’ll never be able to eat what it produces.”
“Really?  What about a garden then?”
Then I hear from my sister that the existing land requires a lot of work and that daddy isn’t up to working it anymore.  He worries that he won’t be able to manage it.  I should not burden him with custody of more land.  So I tell my father not to work my land, it is not expected of him at his age, that he should plant fruit-trees on it instead but do you think he listens?  I watched as he planted a patch of onions.  “For the Winter”, he said, toiling away hoe in hand.

Madeira – Boaventura Lands

30. Honest Butcher
Senhor Isidro came by to drop a quarter carcass of “wild” boar we had ordered from him.  He had caught the black boar in the mountains, penned it in, fed it on pumpkins and chouchous and sweet potatoes for a month to remove the gosto bravio (wild taste) and had slaughtered it that morning.  He had carried the carcass on his back to the lower kitchen of the house.  I was there to meet him.
“Senhor Alexandre, is your father at home?”
“No, he is not, but I can give you a hand if you want.”
“Good.  I’ve got my tools.  We need to chop up the thing.  If we put it on this table – yes it’s sturdy enough – we can start chopping right away.  Here, can you please hold this leg for me, like this, at this angle so I can give it a chop along here.  Until when are you in Madeira?”  A deft chop from an axe splits the joint into two.
“Until next Friday Senhor Isidro.”
Chop, slice, cut, chop.  We continue talking without looking at each other, intently focussed on our task.
“I was also in the ultramar (overseas) for a few years but I was clueless and didn’t use my brains so I landed up back here.  Please hold that hind quarter for me like this.”  Chop, cleave, chop.  How fragile is flesh.  “You know how it is when one is young.  Reckless.  Senseless.”
“Youth is wasted on the young”, I say, quoting Oscar Wilde.  Chop, cut.  Would he have a glass of wine?  Indeed he would.  This is downed in one gulp, Madeira-style.
“Now look here Senhor Alexandre” he says, lifting the cheek off the teeth of the animal.  “Do you see this tooth here?  This is a type of tusk, one that the domestic pig doesn’t have.  People who will fool you by selling you pork for boar.  The way to check is to check the cheek, for this tooth, a type of tusk actually.  Always insist on looking at the teeth when you buy boar.  I treated this boar well and kept it fit – look – there is hardly any lard on it at all – this is quality meat!  A lot of people will sell you lard for meat – you don’t want that.  Be careful with whom you deal!  Now look at this meat, look.  Pure class!”  Chop, chop.
“Senhor Isidro I can see your meat is good.”
“Yes and you’ve been a good customer.  I’m bringing around the kid(goat) you ordered at around lunchtime tomorrow.  The most tender meat you’ll ever taste.  12 kg of joy.  While I’m about it I’ll also bring you a rabbit as a present as I’m slaughtering a few tomorrow.  For you.”
“Why thank you very much Senhor Isidro.”
I offer him another glass of wine and he downs it.  In one gulp, Madeira-style, as you know.

[Price of whole carcass wild boar in Boaventura Oct 2011 – 5Euros/kg.  Price of whole carcass kid – 10 Euros/kg.  Price of sulphurous, bitter house wine – 1,25 Euros/litre]

Snr Isidro Honest Butcher

31. RTP
Some announcers on the Portuguese TV channel RTP (Radio-Televisão Portuguesa) irritate the gall out of me.  They beam to the nation in superior Portuguese and with it beam out their inflated self-importance.  The idiot box is a constant presence in Dad’s house at night.  It’s a force against which I’m powerless.  I hate TV but given the volume thrust out and a lack of escape I’m irritatingly involved with it here.  What especially galls is the RTP station-promoting sound bite that is beamed out a few times a night.  There it is again, a forceful, imposing, overconfident male voice that reminds you of the worst of Portuguese machismo and its opinionated self-importance in the world.  You’d think Portugal were America and that it had won the Cold War and had put a man on the moon.  The voice informs you that you are tuned in to rrrrrRRRR-TTTTTT-PPPPP!!! in an ascending roll that brings out the yellowiest bile from your guts.  You’re excused to soil yourself.  As for the quizmaster on the Portuguese version of The Weakest Link, dear friends, you don’t know cutting arrogance, you don’t.  Yes I know quizmaster arrogance is the programme’s worldwide formula but this is too much.  You daren’t forget that the second official language of Portugal is Mirandese else he’ll slash you with sarcasm.  He is also young, good-looking, dapper, and worse, knows it.  Over-accentuates the sneer.  Dresses far too smoothly, making the ensemble insufferable.

A brick, a brick, my kingdom for a brick!  To shove through the TV screen.

32. Fishmonger Cheat.
Stopping his van alongside us on the road as we pass him, the itinerant fishmonger beckons us over.  “The freshest fish, come look, it costs nothing!”  We hesitate and then look.  The fish is indeed fresh, and he has variety.  I enquire as to a fish or two and his helper hauls out a balance on which to weigh them.  The balance gets perched precariously on some plank.  It drops off at an angle. I immediately forsee problems.  No bureau of standards in the world would pass this one.  The fish get weighed and the prices are ridiculous.  Slick operators, these.  I remonstrate.  “Well if you don’t buy, then you don’t eat, he says.  “So then I don’t eat”, I say.  We walk away and he screeches off.

On the way home I pass Tio José’s house and tell him.  “That guy?” Tio sneers,  “he is a cheat, a trafulha!  Never buy from him.  I swore at him the other day.  I reckon that scale of his inflates the weight of the fish by at least half again!”
“My exact thoughts.”
“If you have to buy, buy from the other fishmonger we all trust around here, or even better, buy at the fish market in town.”

33. Property transacting, Maderia-style
I bought a crumbling cottage in Maderia two years ago but must buy a piece of land with two crumbling rooms on it that abuts directly onto my cottage before I start renovating.  Without that land my property has no privacy.  The problem is the piece of land belongs to three inheritors, one who lives in Venezuela, one in Funchal and one in Boaventura.  The two who live in Madeira are not on speaking terms.  This is a typical Madeiran trait.  An incident happens and people stop talking to each other for years thereafter.  The type of cultural sulk is called se-amoar (sulk).  Tia Celeste says that that is the problem of Madeira, especially in the country:  People spend their lives sulking and being envious. They bear grudges for decades.  No-one dare apologise for risk of losing face.  And so the whole of the village subsists in an impossible intricate web of injuries and counter injuries that have long histories.  Now and then one hears of so-and-so resuming contact with so-and-so.  The unburdening is cause for celebration but it happens far too infrequently.

One day Dad points out one of the inheritors to me, who happens to be passing by.  “Oh, Senhor André, I call out, what about the land, my father has spoken to you about it, have you made a decision.”  I know they’re holding out for a huge offer from me.  It’s true that the land is worth more to me than to another person, but what they’re expecting is crazy.  75000 euros for barely 150 square metres is what they expect, I hear.  The villagers keep on telling the heirs that they have a pot of gold there, that José da Luz’s son is going to pay a fortune for it.  They’ve got a think coming.
Senhor André at first ignores us, then turns around, then tells us that he is not really interested in selling… Then in the same breath says that his sons are in France and are not really interested in coming back and they don’t want the land, so what must he do with it?  Then he tells us that it’s not up to him but up to the heir in Venezuela to sell, and so on in an incoherent babble.  I tell him I’m in the village until Friday.  He says he will try to get his wife to talk to the heir in Venezuela with whom the main decision rests.
Friday came and went and nothing happened.  I also didn’t chase up on anything.  Time must pass.  Patience.  The heir from Venezuela is coming to Madeira sometime in December I hear.  I’ll wait until then… and perhaps longer.  Much longer, I feel.

My Cottage Boaventura Madeira

34. Rotten View
I come across Senhor Martins on the path.  Senhor Martins used to live in South Africa but has come back to retire in Madeira.
Senhor Martins(72):  “So, are the pretos (blacks) still killing padeses (Afrikaners) and people in South Africa?  Hmmm.  The pretos killed many people in the thirty years I was there.  Baptista for example, after he had the courtesy of opening his safe for them with a gun to his head and giving them all the money.  And many others.  I had a shop in Johannesburg – what do they call it today – Rauten?  Rawten?  Rotten?”
Me:  “Gauteng”.
Senhor Martins: “Yes, Rot-ten.”  (The Portuguese cannot pronounce the guttural g which features in Spanish and Afrikaans).  “People were being robbed and killed all around me.  Lapa’s son and Narcisso’s brother were also killed, but they had turned bad and it was actually the police that shot them.  What the heck are you still doing there?  Flee!  Get out!  And I heard it was desperately expensive to go to the FIFA Mundial.  German television ran this story that their tourists had to employ two bodyguards each or something to ensure safety.  That must’ve pushed up touring costs!  Apparently Japan or some country played in bullet-proof vests.  Sensible people, the Japanese.  How long is you stay this time around?  Swing by my house whenever you like.”
Me:  “If I have the time, Senhor Martins.”

35. Soccer sickness.
Every man in the village is into soccer, and everyone watches it on TV.  It’s the worst encroachment of civilization onto village life.  And that’s all men seem to talk about at times; both on- and off-field aspects of the game.  Like how top soccer players have to sexually abstain days before an important match for our salvation, or something like that.  My heart pumps custard for them.  It’s certainly all Portuguese sport-TV seems to bother with from day to day.  I’m a cricket, rugby and squash fan, and I fully plan to flee to a cuboid universe incompatible with spheres during the 2010 FIFA World Cup.  There, look, RTP1 sports now crosses to some remote corner of Portugal where a soccer reporter is giving an in-depth run-down of some promotion-relegation game from League L to league K.  Would someone please bash in his silly smug face!  I’m sick of it!  They’d reported for hours that glamour side Benfica had lost 2-0 to Sporting Braga, and that the Spanish “galacticos” Real Madrid had lost 4-0 to some third division side, how shameful, the whole of Madrid was in mourning, as attested by four million madrileños they interviewed.  Now that coverage of those games had been saturated to puking point, they’ve got nothing to report on, so they turn to this lowly game…  Who gives a fig?  In one of my sweeter dreams, a shi_t filled soccer ball repeatedly explodes on the pitch during a game, covering players, officials, coaches, spectators, in fact, the whole stadium – in layer upon layer of stinking shi_t.  It’s the closest I’ve come to a wet dream.

1.  Saving Face

Mr Kanazawa was rapidly losing face.  The bell boy Mr. Uchida had been up to help me, but couldn’t.  His superior, front desk manager Mr. Kiyomori then came up but gave up after fifteen minutes.  And now here in turn was the Tokyo Royal Park Hotel’s assistant manager Mr. Kanazawa himself in my room, trying to help for the past twenty minutes but failing.

Kanazawa-san’s facial expressions assumed the usual sequence.  It started with a suppressed irritation – always polite – upon bowing and asking permission to enter.  Why is this guest bothering us with such simplicity?  This was followed by puzzlement, the creased brow of concern, and the realisation of powerlessness.

For the third time that day I witnessed the deflation of polite confidence.

In deference to the hierarchical structure of Japanese society, Mr. Kanazawa then directed me to a higher authority.  “Dr. Pestana, I’m sorry, I’m afraid I can’t help you.  Here’s the toll-free number of Microsoft Japan.  They can solve your problem.  I’m sorry we could not help you.”  He then bowed and retreated into an embarrassing redness.

  “Thank you. It’s quite all right Mr. Kanazawa.”

I had simply wanted to download some files onto a mass storage device, a trivial computer operation.  But despite this being a five-star hotel hosting an international conference, the computer screen was entirely in Japanese, with no concession made to other languages.  I knew better than to bother Microsoft Japan, where some voice would fail the communication if not the technical test.  Japan is curious in that the older seem more fluent in English than the younger.

So I spent the next frustrating hour clicking on various Japanese characters until a fortuitous sequence of haphazard clicks saw me through.

2  Slow Night at the Red Moon

 The Red Moon is a Japanese bar in the Grand Hyatt hotel in Beijing.  It exudes an understated elegance, from the red and black décor to the staff to the band that plays blues and the odd tango on Chinese instruments.

On my third night at the Red Moon I had already become a regular. Regular enough to be acknowledged by staff and to aim for the area I knew would be served by Hilary.  It was close to midnight, the tailor had just left my room for the second fitting of my Mao suit and I wanted a drink.  When the band took a break I headed for the bar counter.

The rectangular counter was surprisingly empty after being abuzz with unquiet Americans on the previous two nights.  I put it down to conference-goers gradually working off of their jet-lag and finally managing some sleep.  Directly in my line of sight at the bar were two rather large dark ladies who spoke in furtive snatches of a French patois.  A few stools to my right sat a petite Asian woman in fishnet stockings and high heels with a tall drink.  To my left an ugly fat American sipped a cocktail and smoked.

I had hardly sat down when the two dark ladies opposite start staring openly at me.  It’s disconcerting so I avert my eyes to the right, only to meet the persistent stare of the Asian in fishnet stockings.  I didn’t want to look left at the ugly American, so in avoidance of all parties I train an oblique squint at nobody in particular that soon has my head throbbing with pain.

The band finally starts up again.  It’s the ugly American’s cue to move in on the petite Asian, and my gap to flee the bar counter.  Hilary approaches demurely to serve me a drink.

“Hilary.  Hilary!  Let’s be authentic for once.  What’s your Chinese name please?” I strain against the din.

“In Chinese?  You want it in Chinese sir?   It’s Jiang-growl-slur-chew-xixi.”

“Ah Hilary, another glass of the Louis Jadot Pinot Noir please.”

“Certainly Sir.”

The next morning I spot one of the two dark ladies at the conference during a coffee break.  She’s a fellow conference-goer of course.

3.  Cruising with Thỉớng

“Motorbike Sir?” offered what looked like a youth, pointing to his little Honda as I rounded a corner off Cathedral Square in Hanoi.  Why not?  I had spent the past few hours dodging the army of mopeds the Vietnamese use as their daily transport.  Change is just taking off in Hanoi, most of the population still gets around on mopeds, but as they get wealthier they’ll want cars, and it will soon look like polluted Beijing in its drive towards doubtful progress.  But for the moment the pace is still slow, and the motorbikes, like ants, crawl over the cityscape.  No-one wears a helmet.  Pedestrians and motorcyclists have developed an intelligence to avoid each other in the seeming chaos.  The trick is to keep moving carefully and the hive avoids you.

So I climb on behind Thỉớng (25) and we’re off, into the motorbike maelstrom, the wind in our hair.  It’s the only form of transport you’d ever want to take in Hanoi outside the monsoon season.  I’m not used to bikes so I hold dearly onto Thỉớng as he weaves along.  He once even fielded a call on his mobile while navigating with his other hand.  So I hold on ever closer to Thỉớng.  The muscles of his stomach, if one can call it that, are finely delineated and small – there’s nothing there, just a little bundle, but it’s something on which to hold.  At the next stop he turns around and smiles at me.  I hold on.

Two days later I’m back in Hanoi from Halong Bay.  Thỉớng is waiting for me at 13H00 as we had arranged.  I climb onto my usual position behind Thỉớng and my hands automatically zone in on his cosy midriff, giving him a good tummy rub by way of “hi” as we set off.

“You’ve very handsome sir”, says Thỉớng at the first stop.  Handsome?  Surely he meant “reliable”, his English being extremely poor.  Many people make appointments that they don’t keep, so I surmise he is grateful that I did.  “Yes, you’re very handsome”, he repeats, looking at me with an open smile.  At the Apricot Art gallery I ask of an equally inept English speaker what “handsome” means, and without hesitating she says “like beautiful sir, but for a man!”  I half thought of asking her for an example, then thought better of it.  But I now knew that Thỉớng had meant “handsome” alright.

Later, cruising through the traffic to the snake restaurant with Thỉớng, my “handsome” arms around his waist, it occurs to me that no passenger at those low moped speeds clings onto their driver.  Not one.  In fact, they hardly make bodily contact…

Instantaneously, I figure it all out.

4.  Bombay Baksheesh

Some buildings in Mumbai, if cleaned up a little and the protruding air conditioning units removed, would not look out of place in a central London avenue or a Parisian boulevard.  Splendid remnants of Raj architecture, they stand grandly yet neglected among later arrivals, and exude a presence and style sadly lacking in what came afterwards.  These captivating old dames demand our perusal and admiration, and had me continually pointing my camera at them, even from inside taxis.

At a traffic light during my departing trip to the airport, I aimed my lens at a building’s elegant cornice when my view suddenly darkened.  I looked away to see that a face had obscured it.  It was yet another of Bombay’s teeming beggars, but this one was different.  He had no shirt on, and when my eyes dropped from his shrunken face to his torso, his ribs stood out in relief from the hollow that should have been his stomach, bursting against skin, as if cast for a lesson in skeletal anatomy.

This man needed to eat.  There was no insistence in his stance, just a meek pair of palms and two empty eyes through which the inequalities of the world flowed without rancour or agenda.  As I readied to give him some coins, a man suddenly shoved him away, and tried to sell me one of those irritating whistles that when blown, blare flatly and unfurl a paper coil with a feather at the end.  Was this the justice of the caste system, or just another bully smacking back the downtrodden?

“Get out of my way and call that man back!” I hissed at the whistle-seller.

“Nice whistle sir, very nice whistle, only ten rupees, ten rupees.”

“Come back here”, I called out to the beggar and shoved the vendor aside.

He came back afraid, like a cowering dog beaten once too often, and I pressed the money into his outcast’s hand.  The whistle seller circled in.

“It’s his money now leave him alone!” I shouted as my taxi sped away.

I held little hope that my man could hold onto what was rightly his.

5.  Thai Massage

If I hear the word “massage” again in its various compounds – hot massage, naughty massage, sex massage – I’ll kill.  Why are they so obsessed by it?  You hardly get into a taxi or tuk-tuk in Bangkok when the hard sell starts.  “Where you from sir?  Pat Pong sir? Nice massage sir?”

Vice is embedded in the very place names. If you know your slang, Bangkok is the most aptly named capital in the world, and Pat Pong has a decidedly scatological undertone to it.  So I head for the King’s Corner bar in Pat Pong, which I was told specialises solely in transsexuals but they’re the most beautiful girls in Thailand.  When I get there I find the transsexuals are at another bar – from what I can tell these are all actual women.

The bar is crowded around a jutting stage where around thirty girls in numbered bikinis gyrate slowly to music.  Taking up positions around the tables are regulars, sex-tourists and the bewildered trying to make sense of things.  As I confusedly take a seat, two bikinied girls flank me, rather closely, asking the usual where-are-you-from question and would I buy them a drink?

Of course I’d buy them a drink.  Hardly are they served when they start up the selling.  Real close massage?  Nice slow BJ?  Would I like to go upstairs or would I prefer them to come to my hotel for a naughty massage?

“I was told you were transsexuals here.  But never mind, never mind.  How does it work?”

“The gay lane is across the road if you want.  We are all women here.  How it works is that you pay the bar 400 baht, and you pay me 4000 baht”, says one of them with a searching stare. “Some girls cost more,” she adds by way of bargain.

I feign interest and remain chatty but decline the business end of their company, which elicits remonstrance and dismay.  Tiring of being dumbly starred at, I release them from the obligation of finishing their drink with me.  They frown and move off to prospect elsewhere, throwing me a little wavelet as they leave.  At the adjacent table, three German sex-tourists take turns in slapping a girl on her readily proffered buttocks, testing for firmness.  Gut ja!

Upon entering my hotel room that night, I spot a woman emerging from the room next door.  A rich baritone voice within the room says “thank you”.  She clutches her handbag and some banknotes, nods, stands tall, turns and clips her heels past me down the corridor, fait accompli.  The baritone remains unseen and shuts the door on yet another successful Thai transaction.

6.  Placing Face

After two stints in the East, having visited countries from India through South East Asia to China and Japan, I wondered whether it is possible to distinguish Eastern peoples by appearance alone.  Indians are obviously more Caucasoid in features, but for the rest it’s difficult.  So I put the question to a hardened British ex-pat.

“Yes, after a while you can tell them apart.  The Japanese are wealthier and better dressed.  The Chinese are slightly darker and have more pointed features.  The Thai’s have smooth skins – wait till you feel them.  The Vietnamese are sort of in between.”

After studying people for a few days I think I get the drift of it.  The Japanese are indeed easier to spot, the Vietnamese are beautiful, but the Thai’s I thought – despite frequenters of massage parlours telling me they have good skins – are rather flatter, rounder-faced and not that attractive – perhaps the least attractive of all, I’d say.  So I got it all figured out.

Poring over a map in a Bangkok temple yard I’m approached by a friendly local who insists on helping me.

“Hello sir – can I help you – where do you want to go.”

“Oh Hello – to the reclining Buddha now, but please don’t bother – my tuk-tuk’s waiting.”

“Ah OK.  Where are you from?”

“From Cape Town.”

“Cape Town?  That’s strange, because you look like a Thai.  You really look just like a Thai!”

“Oh?  Really?  Why, thank you. Thank you very much indeed.”

One should always have the courtesy of thanking one’s flatterers.

Manny Rodriguez and I (Moi) sit in a corner of a seedy bar on a windswept Cape night, well past clear-thinking time.  Rodriguez inflates to deplore the state of scientific decline in the world.

Manny Rodriguez:  “These days nothing is scientific any longer. Nothing, nothing (coughs).  People go on hearsay.  Take the truth that Frenchmen are better lovers than others (deep drag on a cigarette).  It’s total cra_p (long exhalation).  It’s time someone tested this scientifically.  I’ll volunteer, anytime.  Pit me against a Frenchmen in a room with four or five women and we’ll see (long sip of long beer).  I’ll give the Frog a hellava go for his money.  I bet when it comes to the crunch the Frenchie will run.  Do you know what General Paton said of French valour?  He said he’d rather have a German army in front of him than a French army behind him (laughs uproariously).”

Moi:  (All serious) “Continuez.”

Manny Rodriguez:  “The French, good lovers?  Bah.  I’d like to go man to man versus a Frenchman, one woman at a time at first, then building up to one-on-two and one-on-three and so forth as the competition progresses.  Me versus him, man to man.  You too must come along please.”

Moi:  (Bemused but expectant) “Me?  Come along? Porquoi?”

Manny Rodriguez:  “We’ll need someone to keep score.”

Moi:  “Keep Score?  Merde_.  What exactement must I do?”

Manny Rodriguez:  “Scientific assessment of our relative performance of course.  Don’t be afraid man.  You don’t actually have to do anything (shifts heavily about).  What I meant by your coming along was for you to take scientific notes while the Frenchman and I take turns in competing against each other with all these women.  What do you say?”

Moi:  (Deflating) “Bon, I must say your suggestion, while alluring in certain respects bien entendu, has a certain je-ne-sais-quoi that, let’s be honnête, I’m not comfortable with, scientifically parlant.  What about impartialité and validité statistique?”

Manny Rodriguez: “Look, you’re a trained scientist right?  On the day of the experiment – or probably the night more appropriately ha-ha-ha, you sit on a chair some distance from the beds, couches, what-have-you and take notes while I compete against the Frenchman.  That’s all you have to do.  Don’t look so bothered.”

Moi: “Pardon?

Manny Rodriguez:  “What is there to understand?  The Frenchman and I engage in turns, and you, as a detached arbitrator, take notes on style, technique, spatial configuration etc.”

Moi:  “Ah, je vois.  I’m to be un type de voyeur scientifique to you two layabouts, n’est ce pas?

Manny Rodriguez:  “Well if you want to, but don’t see it that way.  See yourself as advancing the cause of science.  You can even wear a virginal white lab coat if you prefer ha-ha-ha (repeated slaps to my back).”

Moi.  “And scrubs and clinical gloves too I suppose.  Where’s the barmaid.  Brunhilda!  Another “cognac” s’il vous plaît.  And a packet of Gauloises while you’re about it.  Err, maintenant Rodriguez, err, where were we… ah oui, la recherche.  How shall we conduct it donc, in a way that is scientifiquement valable?

Manny Rodriguez: ‘It’s simple.  The Frenchman and I take alternate turns with gorgeous women, and you take notes discreetly and compare our respective performances in the studio.

Moi: “Ou???”

Manny Rodriguez: “In the Kloof Street Film Studios of course.  You can’t be against that?  You don’t expect us to carry out the competition just anywhere.”

Moi:  “Au contraire, I approve.  C’est bien là-bas, dans les studios de filme.  Continuez.”

Manny Rodriguez: “Have you got the works now?”

Moi:  “I think je comprends, basicallement.  Il faut que I sit in the studio with a clip file, in my coat de laboratoire, and take des notes, quite statically, while you and le Français make amour to these belles femmes.”

Manny Rodriguez:  “Yes, that sort of thing, you’re cultivating the idea…”

Moi:  “Rest assuré that I’ll come around to it.  But tell me une chose.  How will I err… comme qu’on dirait… score?  Not personellement of course, but the two of you?  And when do I prendre un break?  There’s only that long I can assess these intense activitées without taking un petit repos.  I’m not a machine you know, pas du tout.”

Manny Rodriguez:  “Fair question, it didn’t cross my mind at all.  I can imagine it can be tiring sitting on the side watching athletes in action, especially me.  I suppose we can arrange to interrupt our competition from time to time to give you time to recompose yourself.”

Moi:  “Coitus interruptus?”

Manny Rodriguez:  “Alas, alas.”

Moi:  “Do you have a scoring système in mind?  What detailles must I take into consideration when marking? 

Manny Rodriguez:  “I’ve given it some thought (clears throat).  I suggest you score us out of twenty.  Total satisfaction rendered could count ten points, say, endurance five, intensity three, and novelty and artistic interpretation, at which I’ve never been very good, one point each.”

Moi: “Silly moi, how could I not have thought of it?”

Manny Rodriguez:  “Indeed.  But let’s not be rigid about it.  We can leave the arbitration of weights among categories to your good self.  Just don’t get all complicated.  You’ll get the general drift soon after we start.  You’ll instinctively know who is better when you see it – not that there’ll be much of a contest.  If need be I can give you a few pointers.”

Moi: “You give me a few pointers?  What pointers?  Quelle horreur, non merci!”

Manny Rodriguez:  “Look, it will in any case be obvious as who’ll win.  You needn’t have the thoroughness of aDead Sea scroll scholar to make your call.  After all, everything’s up-front and demonstrable.  Don’t kill yourself over-elaborating things.”

Moi:  “OK, so let’s get this down parfaitement.  I sit to one side and regard in sang-froid while you and the Frenchmen engagez in repetitive courses of liaisons amoureuses, and I score your performance by gut feel?”

Manny Rodriguez:  “Nothing could be simpler (sweeps palm in an arc, grins).”

Moi: “And I do rien but sit there like an anally-retentive accountant, keeping a blow-by-blow inventory of the whole affaire?”

Manny Rodriguez:  “Yes, yes, you’re getting the hang of it.”

Moi:  “Rodriguez, that is the most con thing I have jamais heard.”

Manny Rodriguez:  “Look, you don’t have to exert yourself or anything, I’m not asking for much.  And besides you owe me one.  It’s not like you have to compromise your principles or anything.”

Moi:  “I’m shocked, completement choqué that you could expect that of moi, une personne sensible et cultivée.  But I’ll overlook it this once.  Alors, quel Français do you intend competing against?”

Manny Rodriguez:  ‘We’ll there’s Jacques the confectioner in town.  Ladies man they say.  Then there’s hirsute Phillipe with the swagger and the handlebar moustache – you know him.  But the bas_tard I’d really like to bring down to earth is Serge with the reputation.  Slimy snail.  He was last heard boasting that he’s seeing the German teacher and some consul’s wife, as well as one of their daughters, I’m not sure which.  Two of their nieces have apparently also shown an interest in him, as has impossible Veronica of Tank fame, depending on the version.  Of course, he does nothing to dispel rumours that he’s terribly well endowed in certain respects.”

Moi: “C’est rien ça.  Soft targets, mostly.  Malgré being a ladies man, Jacques is totally effete.  I’m told he brings women chocolates and fleurs and then sits on a couch holding hands with them all day, going no further than romantically that.  Are you surprised women find him si adorable?  Phillipe with the handlebar moustache, despite his oozing machismo, is trés, trés gai, ask anyone dans le Greenpoint Pink Strip.  As for Serge, I’m compelled to ajouter that I’ve heard from une bonne amie that he’s just landed a contract to star for Private Gold.  He’s sadly left for Les États-Unis d’Amerique last week, she said, almost in tears, apparently to participé in their latest blockbuster forthcoming attraction.  Eh oui.”

Manny Rodriguez:  “What?  (Freezes)… Can’t be!”

Moi: “Mon cher, I’m telling you rien que la verité.  You’ll have to rise to a stiffer challenge.  Time to call for the bill.  Garçon!  Le tab s’il vouz plaît.”

Manny Rodriguez:  “Bloo_dy hell.  What other Frenchmen are there in town then?  By the way, I’ve noticed you’ve been turning very French over the past half-an-hour or so. Wait, no, no, you don’t mean, you don’t mean… (eyes widening.)”

Moi:  “Exactement, mon vieux Rodriguez, exactement”, I menaced, shakily. 

————————————–

Notes:  
1.  Franglais is a hybrid French-English concoction, with no formal rules of usage or grammar.  Most texts are predominately in French written from an English speaker’s perspective.  The humour of Franglais lies largely in the exploitation of the non-translatability of idiomatic expressions between the languages, as well as the dressing up of social situations with unusual degrees of embarrassment or funk. 

For example, the expression “c’était un morceau de gateau” could be used for “it was a piece of cake”, in the sense of “it was dead easy”.  The Franglais user of the expression knows it denotes only the literal meaning in French, the English idiomatic connotation getting lost, but uses it nonetheless in clever implication.  Hence, an otherwise hard task could be described by the glib as “c’était un doddle, un morceau de gateau” which in French would be literally saying the task is a piece of cake, much as the Afrikaans expression “dit was ‘n stuk koek” would do the same.  [Challenge to Afrikaans speakers: What about a paragraph or two of “Anglikaans” or “Fransikaans”?]

Franglais relies on English speakers having a good command of French for the humour to come through.  At the interface of two language communities, it has a relatively small number of appreciators.  In the piece, I have resorted to a simple word-for-word substitution that should be easily made out by an English speaker with no knowledge of French, a stricture which sacrifices higher-order humour for comprehension.  Sorry!

For further Franglais, see the booklets of Miles Kington such as “Let’s Parler Franglais”, “The Franglais Lieutenant’s Woman and Other Literary Masterpieces” and others. You’ll lose much though if your command of French is below intermediate level. And oh, “basicallement”  is neither French nor English…

Time was running out to sample snake in Vietnam, when in Rome and all that; so I summoned Thỉớng, my Vietnamese moped driver to take me to the experience.  We mounted his 50CC Honda and revved it across the river to the snake restauant.  Thỉớng twice stopped to make enquiries from groups of crouching men on street corners, who I thought suppressed laughter at the sight of an oversized Westerner and a waif of a Vietnamese off to eat snake on an undersized bike.

We eventually spluttered into a cemented lane and into a courtyard at Kim Kê Quán where six young men greeted us.  Thỉớng said something and we were pointed to a grid of cages containing live snakes in the upper levels and live chickens in the lower ones.  Whether the chickens were sold as dishes or whether they served as feedstock for the snakes was none of my business.

We were invited to inspect the merchandise.  A short tour of the cages revealed snakes of varied sizes, colouration and vigour.  The handler watched my face.  When he detected interest he would hook out a snake with a crook and pivot it in display to a curious courtyard coterie who would gingerly circle it in the fresh Hanoi air.

Each snake extricated had its venomous pedigree announced.  “Thees one, he said of a yellow snake with blue markings “he bite hand, hand come big, like ball.  You no die ”,.  “Thees snake 220 000 dong”.  It was put back into its cage.

“Ah, thees one”, he said of a ringed brown and copper snake which he paraded with a cautious pride at the end of his crook, “he bite, ten minutes you fall.  Thirty minutes you die.  Thees one 500 000 dong”.  At a stage the snake shook out of its deceptive docility and struck out upon which we jumped back witless.  When our minds registered again the handler had instantly subdued it with his crook, but it slunk there hissing, darting.  Oh for life, life, this fragile thing called life!  How precious it is!  How many deaths do we survive before to the big one we succumb?

The shock subsided but the fear did not as the parade rolled on, snake after snake.  It was time to decide.  Thỉớng consulted and all options considered, we settled on the 220 000 dong snake, the one that could swell your hand like a soccer ball if it bit, and not the expensive one that almost had us dead in thirty minutes.  Best not tempt fate.

Our snake was taken to an open-air kitchen and strung around the neck to a high rod by a piece of gut.  The pretty thing was now to be killed.  It now smelt fear.  We watched the handler grab it in the middle and stretch it taught against its struggles.  He then plunged a pair of sharp secateurs into its heart and wriggled them about.  An eager assistant held a glass tumbler at the ready to collect the blood, the first flow of which oozed forth in pulses like red roses opening in spring.  The rest of the life-giving liquid was milked out in slow trickles with long sweeps of the fist.  Deed done, the murderer released his grip.  The snake protested its injury with shakes and slow curls and shortly expired.  It was then intently skinned with a sharp knife and handed on a platter to a bored cook who perfunctorily chopped it up with a machete into around six different cuts.  I suppose the snake equivalent of fillet, brisket, sirloin, short-rib and the like; I can’t research everything.

They worked well in that kitchen.  We watched as the different cuts were stir fried in a smoking wok with spices and herbs.  A vegetable chef expertly sliced and diced his wares.  The liver was ground until it extruded a green bile which was placed in a second tumbler.  Or was it gall out of the gall bladder?  My snake anatomy’s rather shaky.  The two tumblers – the one containing the bile and the other the blood – were strengthened with alcohol poured from a ewer upon which they burst out into livelier greens and reds.  What colours for Picasso!

The spectacular part of proceedings over, we were shown to the restaurant proper, a soft open-air space on the first floor surrounded by huge wooden pillars and red paper lanterns.  We sat on cushions at low tables on straw mats and ordered beer.  Thỉớng in particular looked forward in glee to partake once again of this favourite delicacy.  A large tray duly arrived, and its many dishes were lain out with gentility and punctilio.  How appetising it all looked!

Thiong Eats Snake

Of course, everyone asks what it tasted like, even those who recoil at the tale I tell.  They sway away in mock horror, churn their eyes and their stomachs, but when I offer to stop, at around the point of the pulsating heart and the red roses say – an imagery they hate – they implore me to carry on, like masochists, wanting more.  What do I tell them?  A thousand words cannot describe the taste of a pear.  The rib balls shared the crunchiness of the duck tongues I had eaten at a mayoral banquet inHangzhou, and cracked as you chewed them.  Not the most digestible of morsels, but nothing that couldn’t be washed down with a slug of bile-fire.  The fillet texture called to mind the white translucence of the crocodile starter they serve at Aubergines, but not the taste.  More piquant?There were other bites and morsels on the platters, all very encouraging, and rendered more so by throaty jets of blood liquor we sipped to snake our thirst.  Gave me a zing all around.  Besides, snake blood has proven aphrodisiacal properties I was assured, and goes for a song compared to rhino horn.  When last had I looked at rhino horn prices, they asked?  Lord knows we could do with more sexual potency in the world, they said.

King Cobra for eating

There we sat, Thỉớng an I, cross-legged on the floor, reposed at our reptilian repast.  Morsel of this, morsel of that, sip of this, sip of that.  Merriment and laughter, with just the occasional flashback to the near-death episode in the courtyard to shiver things up a little.  As for Thỉớng; Thỉớng is a snake natural, and had to desist after the eighth helping lest he morph into a blimp.  How could so much snake fit into such a meagre frame?

What’s next?  Listen, I’m off to Argentina on Friday and hear they prepare a fearsome offal, achuras, that scares the living daylights out of ghosts.  Can’t wait.

ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Notes:

1. To my untrained to ear Thỉớng is pronounced “Tea-Hong”.
2. For truly adventurous eating around the globe read Anthony Bourdain’s “The Nasty Bits, collected Cuts, useable Trim, Scraps and Bones”, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006, ISBN 0-7475-7981-4.  Sections of it make this story a salubrious health-kick.
3. Aubergine restaurant is at 38 Barnett Street in Gardens, Cape Town.  Very good, and yes, crocodile was still on the menu when I lasted looked.
4. The dong is the Vietnamese currency.

I’m not a very spiritual person.  Whenever spirituality looms I hastily crush it by solving for x.  I don’t understand cosmic energy, auras, psychic interactivity with the galaxy; I don’t understand sweeping connectivity with the universe; I don’t understand floating over mountains, transcending the world and beyond and melding with Ultimate Reality itself, where one is glued to the deeper fabric of the very fundamentals of the ether.  Neither have I seen a ghost.  No.  What I understand is that we breathe in oxygen; I understand electric fields, magnetism, gravity and aeroplanes; I understand drug-induced hallucinations, psychotic episodes, personal attraction, indifference and especially repulsion; I understand that life can be hard and that there are a lot of damaged folk around trying to make sense of it.

As I said, I don’t understand these things but as a concession to ontological alternatives I’m willing to give these possibilities a try now and again.  So it was, on the insistence of a friend, that I drove out into the Western Cape countryside on a retreat a few cold weekends ago to attend a shamanistic South-American healing plant ceremony.  In preparation I had cleansed myself for five days as stipulated by abstaining from meat, coffee, tobacco, alcohol, dairy products, sex and other personal pollutants.  A group of eighteen of us or so gradually gathered in a large farm house.  We were briefed by the organizers and the shaman.  He said that the experience we were to undergo would be more meaningful if we forewent our Ego and let the soul feel, if we went with the flow without resisting.

At around nightfall we assembled in a large room.  Thin mattresses were strewn along the walls.  There was a bucket next to each mattress into which we were encouraged to vomit if we so felt as it was a possible consequence of taking the medicine.  To vomit was good spiritual cleansing, we were told.  I had my misgivings.  We each took to a mattress with our sleeping bags and settled down for the ceremony.  The shaman sat at a small low table with his helper and told us that the ceremony would last for four hours.  We should relax our minds and ease into the experience.  I was scared witless.  The assistant brought around a pack of cards depicting mythological figures.  He held it face down before each of us and we each chose a card sight unseen.  The shaman then asked us to reveal the card we had drawn, to discuss the intentions we were bringing to Mother Healing Plant and what wisdom we were seeking from our impending experience.  Mine was basically curiosity, the cat-killing variety.  I listened up as the first person spoke.

“My intention is to break the endless cycle of humiliation and shame that has plagued my life!” he petitioned.  What?  What was I hearing?  The shaman, unfazed, imparted words of comfort and acceptance and then moved on.  “My intention is to heal my male sexual energy, with which I struggle.  My feminine side is good, but I have problems with my male side”, announced supplicant No. 2, a strapping man.  What display of candour before strangers, delivered with utter insouciance!  It was more than one could stomach.  Aren’t such issues best worked through with a therapist in private?  My ‘curiosity’ seemed droopingly shallow now.

Onto the third.  “I am here… (pause, blank stare into space)… to find my Inner Truth!”, he declared.  ‘Curiosity’ was now laughable.  I had better come up with something deeper.  The next person, a well spoken woman, wanted to get into ultimate contact with errr… ultimately, actually errr… God, actually.  Through Mother Healing Plant.  And so we proceeded along the circle of intentions which fell into a broad dichotomy; either the very specific e.g. anger issues with Bobby, periodic self-loathing, Daddy-is-the-problem etc., or the very broad, under which resorted Inner Reality adventurers, Ultimate Truth chasers, Universal Knowledge seekers, Transcendental Pole-vaulters, what have you.

My turn.  I looked at my card.  Bacchus.  The card said he was the god of vegetation and entertainment but I know better.  Bacchus is the actually god of wine, I corrected out aloud for the benefit of all.  To have drawn Bacchus was extremely appropriate for someone who has two wine cellars and who had had to give then up for a week in preparation for the ceremony.  This couldn’t be mere chance.  Perhaps there was something to this cosmic-stuff after all.  Bacchus, the god of wine, landed in my hands, whose else?  Wine is what I should be taking, I knew it meant, but I couldn’t say it, I daren’t say it, alcohol being strictly verboten.  “My intention is to deepen my understanding”, I finally said, channeling myself into the generalist second camp of intentions, luckily for all.  Imagine if I were to churn up my inner psychological gunk before everyone?  They’d flee!  Focus then turned to my neighbour who had no fewer than four intentions.  The last person’s intention was to cut off parts of himself he despised, that soured his relationships with people and that he wanted to rid himself of forever.  Fine.

Onto the next stage.  The shaman stood up, performed some whistling purification ritual and we were then invited to partake of the holy healing drink.  We went up one by one to the shaman’s table and knelt down.  He poured a viscous brown liquid into a tumbler, blew smoke over it and then gave it ceremoniously to each of us in turn.  I put my lips to the glass and was overcome by a deep nausea, last excited when I had downed some slimy green seaweed broth in Japan years before.  It was the vilest-tasting thing; the revulsion pulses through me every time I think of it.  I downed it quickly, shook it off like a punch-drunk boxer and slouched groggily back to my sleeping bag.  When everyone had partaken the lights were extinguished and the ritual proper began.

The shaman started a relentless chant, determined and measured.  It was punctuated at various points by the shaking of leaves, pan-flutes and chimes.  The chanting imparted a lilting, hypnotic rhythm to the session that triggered trippers on their way.  It also served as an anchor for trippers to latch onto should they lose themselves.   The chanting was only interrupted by two purification rituals and two more servings of the brew.  Nausea, confusion, doubts, wondering, tossing, turning.  I saw nothing, heard nothing, felt terrible.  People made noises, shuffled, coughed, moaned and mostly dozed.  They worked through visions, anxieties, demons.  I was too awake, too removed, a voyeur of voyagers.  There was a continual procession of people to and from the bathroom, either to genuinely pee or for surcease from the pressure cooker crack den conditions.

I was lost.  At a stage I started seeing chardonnay.  We were called for the third serving.  I went up.  “How is it going”, I was asked.  “Tough”, I said.  Yet another portion of the vomitive got poured and delivered to me.  I only managed to down it by morphing images of cold chardonnay onto it.  I crawled back to my sleeping bag, nausea welling up inside.  Hades, Hypnos and Morpheus, help, I’m poisoned.  Chanting, nausea, chanting, the constant suppression of vomiting.  I waited for visions, signs, wisdom, portents.  Nothing.  Just  a sea of nausea, dolour, discomfiture, heat-and-cold, Spanish and Quechua incantations and emptiness.

My neighbour with the four intentions was having a torrid time.  At a stage she grabbed her bucket, slumped over it and retched.  Splash-splash-splash I heard, I saw.  Now, a confession.  I didn’t want her to place her vomit-filled bucket between our mattresses, so I slid my pillow between us, blocking space.  It worked.  She shakily placed the bucket between her and the smart woman on the other side, the one who had taken my bucket before the ceremony.  Al-e-e-e-e-e-x!  Your nasty, nasty Ego!  This is the bad ego the shaman had warned us about no, no, no!  In the gloom another votary vomited, then another.  Expurgatory bliss to them, emetic cacophony in E-flat to me.  Then it started, the giggles.  Humour assailed me.  I imagined the faces of Graham and Raoul as I described this to them and burst out laughing anew.  Never have I suppressed so much laughter in my life.  At times I had to bury my face in the pillow to stifle it, but out it came, in peals.  I was a laughing cavalier in a vomitorium, an embarrassment in the serious gloom.  The relentless chanting continued regardless.

All eventually ended with a symbolic song about darkness turning into day.  Even the universe ends.  We were congratulated on having endured, encouraged to recover for half an hour after which we had to assemble in the kitchen.

We arrived at the kitchen in various stages of composure.  We ate a vegetarian broth and then the shaman asked us to describe our experiences in turn.  A woman said:  “I saw my arms growing feathers, and then turning into the wings of an owl, and then I myself became an owl, but I was OK with that as I like owls, and I flew!  And with what wisdom!”  Hmm, everyone approved.  Hmm, I muttered.
The next:   “I was overcome with unconditional love for my parents who have abused and neglected me all my life.  I am now going out to forgive them!”  Ah! – everyone approved.  Ah, I muttered.
The third: “It was… (pause, blank stare)… am-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-zing.   It was so, so… such a deep, intense, multi-layered experience…”  cooed a woman reclined on a sofa, the sophisticate who had taken my bucket.  With such control, she was clearly a blasé habitué of séances.  If ever you’re at a loss to describe a vapid experience, note the vocabulary:  “Deep”, “intense” and “multi-layered” passes muster.

I can’t remember what I said when my turn came.  I spoke about Bacchus, the chardonnay firmly etched on my mind.  And then, then, the sophisticate accused me of laughing, clearly getting me back for diverting the vomit bucket her way.  This was her version of caring and being in communion with her fellow man.  I stood ashamed and had to hone my dodging and defense in an instant.  My laughter wasn’t a mocking laughter, I gainsaid, it was a communal laugher, laughter of lightness and ease.  I then spoke about having had images rather than visions and everyone said Ah and Hmm and then others spoke.

The session was wound up but a few stragglers remained behind to discuss varieties of psychic experiences worth having.  One guy told us that after ingesting magic mushrooms at a ceremony he flew around the solar system for six hours and couldn’t find his body until, in a process of gradual approximation the mechanics of which are little understood, he focused on the Earth, then fixated on Table Mountain, and then on the house and only then, curiously, could he find his body.  Sounded like hot stuff, definitely the next trip to try.

I left that gaggle mid-morning on Sunday to yet another ceremony.  Driving back, as I left the farm, I finally heard a voice.  It was Bacchus, calling all devotees.  So I diverted my car to the nearby Groote Post Vineyards and savoured a large glass of their Chardonnay Reserve 2010.  It was the most curative elixir.

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