Bruce Chatwin (61 page)
Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs
Then to what do the words “Foreign prints: ‘Kicked by Amazon’” refer? Was Bruce assaulted? Or was he projecting himself into a scene from a print which a moment before he has seen hanging on the commandant’s wall: a print that illustrated, say, the pages of his Skertchley or Burton? As Kasmin says of Bruce on their Benin trip: “His model
was
Burton.” If so, it is a paradigm of how his imagination worked: to escape an uncomfortable situation by seizing on a piece of art and, as in a Borges story, incorporating himself into it.
was
Burton.” If so, it is a paradigm of how his imagination worked: to escape an uncomfortable situation by seizing on a piece of art and, as in a Borges story, incorporating himself into it.
Kasmin is not alone in observing how Bruce was able to go on adding to his stories. “He’s got so many role models and heroes and he’s endlessly confusing and conflating them. He got a naughty, giggly pleasure out of it.” As Piggott noted too, he was “genuinely incapable” of distinguishing fact from fantasy.
A year later the story has metamorphosed further. Bruce told James Lees-Mime on a walk from Badminton to Holwell of certain “hair-raising experiences” which had occurred on this journey. Lees-Milne put their conversation into his diary. “In one little country – I forget which – he was arrested for some misdemeanour, passport not visa-ed, and beaten up. He was hit in the face, stripped of all his clothes – what a pretty sight to be sure – and humiliated in public. ‘How awful!’ I said. ‘Well,’ he replied. ‘I must confess to having rather enjoyed it.’ ‘Then you are a masochist, I surmise.’ ‘Just a bit,’ he answered.”
Few friends were told about the “gang-rape”, nor did Bruce ever write it down. This story may owe less to Skertchley or Burton than to Rimbaud (who was gang-raped in the Paris commune) or T. E. Lawrence (who alleged a similar assault by Turkish soldiers). According to Elizabeth, the incident took place “a few days after he left Benin”. Bruce’s journal merely reports how the coup peters out. Detained overnight, he is hauled up before an apologetic police tribunal in the early afternoon on the following day. “Actually made them laugh and got out.” He moves into the Hotel de Plage, where
The Comedians
had been filmed, and three days later flies to Abidjan in the Côte D’Ivoire.
The Comedians
had been filmed, and three days later flies to Abidjan in the Côte D’Ivoire.
In Bruce’s version to Elizabeth, he was raped here. “He was waiting to go to Brazil. He got a room in some cheap hotel and couldn’t lock the door and soldiers came in to demand money and raped him. That’s what he told me. He could barely say it. ‘I didn’t do anything. There were several of them’.”
If true, terrible. Yet a suspicion persists that the true rape victim was not Bruce but a thin-legged, 13-year-old girl in Ibadan, whose screams he had heard from his bedroom.
XXV
Brazil
I want to forget. I want to sleep with Negroes and Negresses and Indians and Indian women, animals and plants.
—BC notebooks
FROM ABIDJAN, BRUCE FLEW TO MONROVIA TO CATCH THE KLM
flight to Rio. As day dawned he engaged a young Englishman seated in the row behind in lengthy conversation about how narrowly he had escaped death. He betrayed no sign that he might have been assaulted by soldiers. He seemed to Nigel Acheson “very comfortable, not at all frightened”. His chief concern was that in the chaos of his departure from Benin, his bags had been directed to Egypt. “Will walk off the plane with nothing but the clothes I stand in,” he wrote in his notebook.
flight to Rio. As day dawned he engaged a young Englishman seated in the row behind in lengthy conversation about how narrowly he had escaped death. He betrayed no sign that he might have been assaulted by soldiers. He seemed to Nigel Acheson “very comfortable, not at all frightened”. His chief concern was that in the chaos of his departure from Benin, his bags had been directed to Egypt. “Will walk off the plane with nothing but the clothes I stand in,” he wrote in his notebook.
Acheson was returning to Rio to a teaching position at the Cultura Inglesa and became Bruce’s host and guide during his two months in Brazil. He had intriguing South American connections: his family had worked in Iqique during Chile’s nitrate boom. Their story of sudden decline and humiliating suburban decay predictably captivated Bruce. The grandfather who was put on a boat with £100 in his pocket; the grandmother who continued to wear her Worth dresses until they were threadbare; the sad end in Cheltenham, polishing the brass plates on the steps at night to keep up the pretence they still had servants. Bruce encouraged Acheson to write down the story. Overawed by his display of erudition and “utterly charmed” by him, Acheson offered Bruce a mattress in his spartan apartment at 194 Rua Assis Brasil.
Bruce loved Brazil’s atmosphere of public sensuality. With nothing much to do until his luggage reappeared, he frequented Copacabana. His Brazilian notebook immediately registers his excitement. It shows him susceptible to “the cat-like figures” on the beach, bronze bodies anointed with oil, mulattos with “corkscrew curls tumbling in cascades”. After meeting a Mr Willis from Minneapolis playing in the sea, Bruce wrote: “I prey to the most unreasoning desire.” He was powerless to resist. He had enjoyed adventures on previous travels, but in a sporadic way, and usually with black women whose “African rumps” he found “infinitely alluring”. (“A tight black bottom I could never resist,” he told Gregor von Rezzori.) In Brazil he became an avid sexual tourist and a hemisphere away from his wife and family, he talked in an intimate way to his younger host.
One night he described a homosexual encounter which had taken place with a boy at Marlborough after a rugby match. “He surprised himself,” says Acheson. “He said he had never spoken so openly.” Bruce said he had no time for gay politics, or the gay community, and he abhorred the word “gay”. “I’d much rather be called a bugger,” and he roared with laughter.
In common with his Viceroy, whose “solitary wanderings” set him apart and who longed to “unburden his load”, Bruce’s confessions suggest a liberating mortification, like the tears that save de Souza from his violent impulses. In Brazil, with Acheson as the foil, he launched into a world of homosexual promiscuity that flowered four months later into his first grand passion.
He quickly tired of kicking his heels in Rio. He found its people “cowed and lacking in personality”, he wrote to Wyndham. His purpose in coming to Brazil was to visit the north where de Souza had lived before sailing to Ouidah. Five years before Bruce had written in his notebook: “I want more than anything to go to Bahia.” Bruce, who spoke little Portuguese, asked Acheson if he would consider accompanying him as interpreter. They arrived in Bahia shortly before carnival, after a 32-hour bus trip.
They shared a room in a cheap, rat-infested hotel near the Pelhourinho, the old slave quarter. Acheson was amused by Bruce’s military-style shorts and by the sack of bran he carried in his backpack, “like horsefood”. He helped Bruce to make calls to writers and historians who could enlighten him on the slave trade. “He was ablaze at the connections between Bahia and West Africa.” Soon they were joined from Rio by Acheson’s partner, Fernando. They explored the city and its surrounds together, sometimes following the needs of Bruce’s research. The landscape was strikingly reminiscent of the coast near Ouidah, paths of red earth leading through plantations and here and there among the trees a tobacco planter’s crumbling home. “The architecture is wonderful,” Bruce wrote to Kasmin. “18th century rococo with genuinely Chinese overtones brought direct from Macão, whose towns look like the willow pattern.” They visited a cigar factory, a Germanic fortress of stained cement. They saw the sticky, man-high cane fields that had sweetened the tobacco for the Kings of Dahomey. And one night in a fetish house overlooking the sleepy river town of Cachoeira they witnessed a ceremony of candomblé that differed litde from the voodoo rituals in Ouidah. Candomblé, writes John Ryle, is “a world where women and homosexuals are privileged, where the doubly disadvantaged can be given high status”. Bruce described it in a letter to Kasmin: “the ‘daughters of the god’ trance-dancing in colossal white lace crinolines and the boys – girlie boys – in silver and lace all shuddering as the Shango (the god) hit them between the shoulder blades and one boy twisting and whirling off the platform his silver thunderbolts glittering down the mountain and coming back up again and collapsing into the arms of the ‘mother’ – a middle-aged white lady with spectacles, hair in a scarf and the air of a bank manager’s secretary.”
The Viceroy of Ouidah
would celebrate this sexual abandon – Amazonian, uninhibited, challenging, feral: “Her shoulders shuddered at the first roll of drums. Then she spun around. She pirouetted. She strutted. Her arms pumped the air, her feet kicked the dust. Sweat poured from her breasts and a musky perfume gusted into the Brazilian’s face: not once did she let her gaze fall away from him.
would celebrate this sexual abandon – Amazonian, uninhibited, challenging, feral: “Her shoulders shuddered at the first roll of drums. Then she spun around. She pirouetted. She strutted. Her arms pumped the air, her feet kicked the dust. Sweat poured from her breasts and a musky perfume gusted into the Brazilian’s face: not once did she let her gaze fall away from him.
“The drummers stopped.
“She stood before him, on tiptoe, swaying her hips and languidly laying out her tongue. Her arms beckoned. She bent at the knees. Then she arched her spine and bent over backwards till the back of her head brushed the ground.” One senses in his dancer the frenzied expression of long-withheld sensuality.
Bahia during carnival was “searing with sexuality” says Acheson. “Bruce cruised around and often went off on his own to make conquests.” Once, returning to the hotel, Acheson and Fernando had to wait downstairs because their room was occupied. A paragraph in Bruce’s notebook records an encounter. “He came in off the street – same still Africa look. Hard belly-bones, eyes not watching and watchful. Moustache. ‘
Transar
,’ he said. Lay on bed, removing pants – mouth soft. Flat chest smooth. The curl of hair on belly like warts compacted. Go on to clamp down any show of affection.”
Transar
,’ he said. Lay on bed, removing pants – mouth soft. Flat chest smooth. The curl of hair on belly like warts compacted. Go on to clamp down any show of affection.”
Bruce’s Viceroy shows this fierce detachment on coming to Bahia: “His green eyes made him famous in the quarter. Whenever he flashed them along a crowded alley, someone was sure to stop. With partners of either sex, he performed the mechanics of love in planked rooms. They left him with the sensation of having brushed with death. None came back a second time.”
Bruce used the “patchiness” of his material as his excuse for recasting de Souza as a bi-sexual wanderer. He attributes to his fictional creation his own impulses, desires and abhorrence of domesticity. De Souza’s Bahia phase is the time in which he puts away his masks and becomes fully himself.
“The lineaments of his face fell into their final form.
“His right eyebrow, hitched higher than the left, gave him the air of a man amazed to find himself in a madhouse. A moustache curled round the sides of his mouth, which was moist and sensuous. For years he had pinched back his lips, partly to look manly, partly to stop them cracking in the heat: now he let them hang loose, as if to show that everything was permitted.”
Like the Viceroy, Bruce identifies with strangers and craves their simple lives and pleasures – “yet he could never join them.” Acheson comments on Bruce’s attraction to muscular young black men and
marmelucos,
or mulattoes, whom he admired for their “marvellous” flat chests. “What he had a horror of was domesticity. One boy invited Bruce to his tiny place. Bruce described with a shudder a meal he’d prepared, the mundaneness. ‘I don’t want
that
’.”
marmelucos,
or mulattoes, whom he admired for their “marvellous” flat chests. “What he had a horror of was domesticity. One boy invited Bruce to his tiny place. Bruce described with a shudder a meal he’d prepared, the mundaneness. ‘I don’t want
that
’.”
To Kasmin, Bruce wrote from Bahia: “I have to say Brazil is very fascination [
sic
].” He down-played his enjoyment to Elizabeth: “I am heartily sick of it,” he wrote on the same day. “Full of folklore, bad art, intellectuals in search of Atlantis and smart folks who go to
candomblé
in jangling earrings. I am staying with the missionaries of the British Church and when got down I retire [to] the graveyard where I read while marble personifications of sleep mourn our English gentlemen, victims of yellow fever.” He planned to see Elizabeth in Lisbon in April. “Perhaps we could meet in the Hotel Seite Aix in Cintra – the most beautiful-looking hotel in the world.” But he could not promise this until “the wretched proof comes”.
sic
].” He down-played his enjoyment to Elizabeth: “I am heartily sick of it,” he wrote on the same day. “Full of folklore, bad art, intellectuals in search of Atlantis and smart folks who go to
candomblé
in jangling earrings. I am staying with the missionaries of the British Church and when got down I retire [to] the graveyard where I read while marble personifications of sleep mourn our English gentlemen, victims of yellow fever.” He planned to see Elizabeth in Lisbon in April. “Perhaps we could meet in the Hotel Seite Aix in Cintra – the most beautiful-looking hotel in the world.” But he could not promise this until “the wretched proof comes”.
His page proofs of
In Patagonia,
for which he had been waiting since December, had been mislaid in the Brazilian post. “Everything’s gone wrong! Where was it we were hexed?” he asked Kasmin. “Somewhere I have it in my mind you said we’d been hexed. Well, not only the arrest, the visa withdrawn, the traveller’s cheques stolen, the bronchitis (from the Beach Hotel of Cotonou), the bags sent to Cairo instead of Rio, the ten day pointless wait, now Tom’s proof of
Patagonia
has got lost in the post between Rio and Bahia just when I have to go off north.”
In Patagonia,
for which he had been waiting since December, had been mislaid in the Brazilian post. “Everything’s gone wrong! Where was it we were hexed?” he asked Kasmin. “Somewhere I have it in my mind you said we’d been hexed. Well, not only the arrest, the visa withdrawn, the traveller’s cheques stolen, the bronchitis (from the Beach Hotel of Cotonou), the bags sent to Cairo instead of Rio, the ten day pointless wait, now Tom’s proof of
Patagonia
has got lost in the post between Rio and Bahia just when I have to go off north.”
Two days later, the proofs arrived. He wrote to the copy-editor to say the hex had been “unstuck for me by a gypsy
cabocha
or fortune-teller who prophesied, after a certain amount of greasing, that it would arrive today – which it did”.
cabocha
or fortune-teller who prophesied, after a certain amount of greasing, that it would arrive today – which it did”.
The title was still not resolved. Bruce revealed to Acheson the same insecurity over his work as he had with Nicholson Price in Nigeria. “He asked advice about the title. He couldn’t bear the idea of ‘Journey to Patagonia’.” This self-doubt increased along with his frustrations over his new book. Even with Acheson to translate, he was not finding fresh or relevant material. The problem, as in Ouidah, was the absence of archives: all documents on slavery had been lost in a large fire in December 1890. Traces of Francisco de Souza were hard to come by. In Ouidah, he wrote, “the de Souzas are convinced they still have a fortune in Bahia.” One trouble was that in Bahia Souza was a name as common as Smith. (There are 27 pages of de Souzas in the Bahia telephone directory.) “In the
souzala
or old slave quarter the blacks are all de Souzas! But then everyone is a de Souza or has de Souza cousins in Brazil.” He was further hampered by the lack of a tradition of oral history. He was able to find information on de Souza’s banker, who made his first fortune from salt-dried beef and died in a colossal palace. But about Francisco de Souza, his family and fortunes and the house in which he grew up, nothing. “None of the black de Souzas are aware of the big House in Brazil from which de Souza was expelled as a boy and which he reconstructed in Africa.”
souzala
or old slave quarter the blacks are all de Souzas! But then everyone is a de Souza or has de Souza cousins in Brazil.” He was further hampered by the lack of a tradition of oral history. He was able to find information on de Souza’s banker, who made his first fortune from salt-dried beef and died in a colossal palace. But about Francisco de Souza, his family and fortunes and the house in which he grew up, nothing. “None of the black de Souzas are aware of the big House in Brazil from which de Souza was expelled as a boy and which he reconstructed in Africa.”
After correcting his proofs, Bruce decided to head north through the cactus scrub of the
sertão
to San Luis de Marañon. His purpose, he told Kasmin, was to investigate the fate of Ghézo’s mother, Princess Agontimé, “who was sold into slavery and was got back by de Souza”. The story as told to Bruce in Benin was that when Cha Cha became Viceroy he promised Ghézo he would find his mother and bring her home. For a while, the famous slave princess Agontimé supplanted the Viceroy as the focus of Bruce’s research.
sertão
to San Luis de Marañon. His purpose, he told Kasmin, was to investigate the fate of Ghézo’s mother, Princess Agontimé, “who was sold into slavery and was got back by de Souza”. The story as told to Bruce in Benin was that when Cha Cha became Viceroy he promised Ghézo he would find his mother and bring her home. For a while, the famous slave princess Agontimé supplanted the Viceroy as the focus of Bruce’s research.
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