Bruce Chatwin (95 page)

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Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs

BOOK: Bruce Chatwin
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Le Fesvre had read Bruce’s books. He found the Englishman “
un homme tellement seduisant
”. They had areas of interest in common: le Fesvre’s two chief fascinations were Patagonia and the Sahara.
Paris was the European city most affected by AIDS, in part perhaps because of France’s ties to former African colonies like Chad and Benin. Le Fesvre had not himself worked in Africa, but he believed, from talking to French military doctors in the region, that over time certain nomadic tribes in isolated parts came to develop an immunity to AIDS, while still exhibiting symptoms of the HIV virus. On their journeys south through Uganda and the Congo basin they came into contact with other tribes who were not immune – and so the infection spread: Cuban soldiers operating in Angola took the virus back to the Caribbean, from where it crossed to America. “We spoke a lot about my thesis,” says le Fesvre. “It is not verified, but the epidemic appears to have become established along the routes of the nomads.” He believed that those nomads carried the disease and although they themselves did not come down with it, they passed it on. Le Fesvre’s explanation had for Bruce the power of a parable: the very people in whom he had located the key to a model existence were the carriers of his death.
Bruce’s last brief remission was abetted by his excitement at le Fesvre’s theory of the immunity to AIDS among West African nomads. However, this was not the case. As Dr Michael Elmore-Meegan, a British immunologist working with nomadic tribes in East Africa, says: “There is simply no information that would imply or indicate any resistance in any nomadic population. The only group that has demonstrated possible genetic resistance is a small group of Nairobi prostitutes.”
On 24 October Elizabeth wrote to Kath Strehlow: “He seems better and cheerier so I’m very hopeful.” Even Bruce’s doctors in Oxford, not overly enthusiastic to release him to the embrace of alternative therapy, detected an improvement when he returned to the John Warin ward at the end of October. “Surprisingly well and cheerful. Can now do up buttons,” read his report on 1 November. He went back to le Fesvre’s clinic on 6 November for four more days of treatment and on 18 November was discharged from the Churchill. Two days later, Bruce and Elizabeth flew to Seillans, intending to spend the next month there. “It will be just as easy to continue with Bruce’s treatment there as here,” Elizabeth wrote to Gertrude. “Everyone who’s seen him is delighted with how much better he looks and seems.”
On 20 November Bruce left England for the last time. He had continued to see “streams of people” – including Cary Welch, George Ortiz and Kath Strehlow – before he left. He wrote in Kath’s copy of
The Songlines
“with love beyond the grave” and seemed quite unaffected when she sobbed. He sat in his wheelchair and listened to Nin Dutton’s daughter Tisi sing his favourite Brahms odes: “
von ewiger Liebe, Die Mainacht, Sappsiche Ode
”. One of his pilgrimages was to Ivry Freyberg at Munstead. He sat in the Orangery “and suddenly gazed straight at me for about ten minutes without stopping, as though he wanted to etch me in his mind”. He told Ivry: “I never forgot the moment I first saw you at Marlborough in a green suede hat. You epitomised everything I thought mattered. You epitomised London glamour.” His last words to her before Elizabeth drove him off in the car were: “I will win, I’m going to win. I’m going to win.”
Michael Ignatieff found him “incorrigibly stylish” on his last visit to Homer End. Bruce had on a pair of high-altitude sun-goggles, bought for his next trip to the Himalayas. He lay on the grass outside the newly painted house, wrapped in blankets, “and talked in a faint whisper, full of cackles and laughter like some majestic and unrepentant monarch in exile, like one of the fantastic and touching figures in his own fiction, staring up in the bright, blue sky, while the white clouds scudded across his black glasses.”
To all he spoke of future plans: after Christmas he would visit San Francisco, then Australia, then Russia. “In January, I’m going to swim with the dolphins,” he told Pattie Sullivan who saw the Chatwins off at Heathrow with a gift he had requested, a pair of Brooks Brothers flannel pyjamas. His emaciated appearance shocked Sullivan as everyone else. His face was a white triangle of pain. Moving with difficulty in his wheelchair, he could scarcely complete a gesture.
One person reluctant to see him in this state was Jasper Conran. After Bruce’s collapse in Switzerland Jasper had visited him in the Churchill Hospital. Bruce, terrified he might have infected Jasper, wanted him to have a blood test. When Bruce was discharged in October 1986 there was a reconciliatory meeting at Homer End with Elizabeth present, following which the Chatwins attended Jasper’s 27th birthday party. But Bruce’s behaviour exasperated Jasper, whose hurt had grown stronger than his love, his humiliation deepened by the fact Bruce had returned to Elizabeth. Bruce, who wanted both Jasper and Elizabeth in his life at that moment, did not hear Jasper’s complaints that he was acting inconsiderately, or understand his intractable anger. He reported back to Elizabeth of “hysterical screaming fits” in restaurants. Despite being many times asked, Jasper refused to return certain objects Bruce claimed to have lent him when he had no furniture, most notably the half of Eileen Gray’s map of Patagonia. Feeling bitterly rejected, Jasper kept away.
In July, Hugh Chatwin had wheeled Bruce into Jasper’s showroom. Hugh was then unaware of his brother’s relationship to the Princess of Wales’s couturier. “Bruce wanted to give him a collection of 1920s Fortuny dresses to help with ideas for his own collection. I could see Jasper was backing off. He was cool, distant. There was a frisson.” Jasper shuffled Bruce out and afterwards wrote a letter rejecting him once and for all. Elizabeth concealed this from Bruce, who was upset at Jasper’s refusal to accept his gift. In his last months in hospital in Oxford he longed for a visit. “He minded frightfully that Jasper wouldn’t come to see him,” says Francis Wyndham.
* * *
 
At Seillans, Jasper’s mother moved to fill the gap. “When I saw him entering the hall, his arms hanging around the two men who were carrying him, his neck no longer able to support his head, like the broken stem of a flower, Bruce released a flood of compassion in me.” Shirley Conran had arranged for Bruce to occupy the games room, a former priest’s room with a barrel-vaulted ceiling on the ground floor leading to the terrace. “It was like a little monk’s cell. Just a low double bed which Bruce and Elizabeth slept in and one Van Gogh-style chair at the side. I would sit and read poetry and prayers. In the window embrasure opposite the bed he always had flowers.”
By day, Bruce sat on the terrace on a sun bed, tucked into an eiderdown. “He had a hat like premature babies wear in incubators, and goggles. He looked like a Swiss gnome.” For the first week he was able to hold a pen properly. He started making notes for his Russian novel, but he was becoming daily more resistant to le Fesvre’s remedies. He had come to the south of France in a spirit of hope. The end was closer than anyone imagined.
On 19 December, Elizabeth wrote to Kath Strehlow on Bruce’s behalf to say he was unable, after all, to write the foreword for
Songs of Central Australia.
“He is really too weak & ill to do anything. We’ve come here as it’s warmer & brighter than England in the winter & he loves being away from there. He dictates to me occasionally the beginning of a new book, but hasn’t the energy to do anything else. He is having some treatment from a doctor in Paris, which at first after an intensive 2 weeks of non-stop I.V.s had a very good effect. However, a lot of that has now worn off & he’s very depressed . . . Keep up the prayers – all of them help.”
He was a hopeless patient. At the Churchill, David Warrell had noticed how Bruce did not like to be reminded or to be given a realistic view of the inevitability of the process. “He systematically fell out with a number of my colleagues. One only had to make one pessimistic or realistic remark and he took against them. Ultimately, he took against me.”
In France, Bruce continued to thwart his carers’ attempts to ease his discomfort or make his treatment coherent. His behaviour stirred criticism. Without being aware of the background, outsiders jumped to conclusions. The fastidious Teddy Millington-Drake came to stay at Seillans, and found the conditions “most unsuitable”: “There was no doctor, no nurse, and an Australian girl who walked around with no shoes on who hadn’t been told he had AIDS.” He conveyed to Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly his concern that Bruce might not be receiving proper medical treatment. “Seillans was not a bad place to be when you’re ill, but it was not a place in which to die of that illness,” says Wyndham.
Public tolerance in the south of France was lower than in Paris. (When, a month later, Wyndham stepped off the plane at Nice airport, he walked into a crowd of Le Pen protesters, homophobic, right-wing and holding up placards calling for AIDS to be purged, for everyone with the disease to be isolated.) “We had great trouble with doctors in the south of France paying attention,” says Elizabeth. “They weren’t interested.” When the local doctor found out about Bruce’s illness, he refused to continue treatment. “The doctor arrived in a rubber suit as if for a trip to the moon,” wrote Peter Adam of his experience with an AIDS sufferer in France. On Boxing Day, in desperation, Elizabeth summoned André le Fesvre for a swift visit from Paris. Latterly, she sought the help of a young doctor near Grasse whom Bruce had chosen out of the telephone book for his Alsatian name. Dr Bernard Prouvost-Keller had attended him in 1986. “Bruce said he came from the North of France and would therefore be a good doctor.” Prouvost-Keller made his calls by motorbike, but he could not come up as often as Elizabeth would have wished. Most of the time, it was left to Elizabeth and a rota of friends to change Bruce’s bedding, turn him over, feed him his medicine.
Bruce twice left Seillans. He needed a blood transfusion before Christmas and spent an awful weekend at a hospital in Draguignan. The bed was too short and he was alarmed by the speaker above his head through which the doctor spoke from his office. When Elizabeth’s purse was stolen while she went to the bathroom, they faced the prospect of being stranded in the ward with no money. “I’ll commit suicide if I stay here,” he whispered. She sat up in a chair for two nights rather than leave him.
In the New Year, in a van which a local boy fitted out for the purpose, he was taken for another transfusion to the Sunny Bank Anglo-American hospital in Cannes.
The remainder of the time he stayed in his priest’s room.
“He should have gone into an AIDS hospice,” says Kevin Volans. “But since he didn’t want to admit he had AIDS, Elizabeth was in the difficult position of trying to fulfil what he wanted.” Had he submitted to some formal palliative care as did Millington-Drake, who himself died of AIDS five years later, his end would not have been so harrowing. The homosexual community was in many respects more sophisticated than the first line of doctors in dealing with AIDS. Their losses had taught them quickly. But Bruce was not prepared to draw on their support.
The sicker Bruce became, the greater his denial. “I don’t know why I’m not getting better,” he said to Elizabeth. “It’s probably the virus,” she replied. “No, no!” Having faced up to his diagnosis in Switzerland, it was now a closed topic. “If you made the slightest reference, he was horrified. I couldn’t discuss it.”
“All the time he was ill,” says Shirley Conran, “the word ‘AIDS’ was never mentioned.”
On Elizabeth’s shoulders fell the impossible task of wishing to honour Bruce’s wishes while recognising that he was not in full possession of his faculties. Werner Herzog, whom Bruce invited to Seillans early in January, asked Elizabeth: “Why don’t you help him die?” She replied: “Long ago we talked about it and we agreed we wouldn’t.”
But now he wanted to die. “It was the first thing he said: ‘I want to die,’” says Herzog. “I said: ‘How do I do that? Do I shoot you? Have you discussed it with Elizabeth?’ ‘No, I can’t discuss it with Elizabeth because she’s a Catholic’.”
Bruce had summoned Herzog because he thought the director had healing powers. When they had first met in Melbourne in 1984, shortly after Bruce’s visit to Swartkrans, their talks had begun with a discussion on the restorative powers of walking. “He had an almost immediate rapport with me,” says Herzog, “when I explained to him that tourism was a mortal sin, but walking on foot was a virtue, and that whatever went wrong and makes our civilisation something doomed is the departure from the nomadic life.” Herzog had written a short prose book,
On Walking in Ice
, which illustrated this theory and which Bruce loved.
Herzog had brought with him to Seillans a documentary he had made on the Wodaabe nomads of the Niger,
Herdsmen of the Sun.
These were Bruce’s Bororo Peuls, “a people obsessed by the horizons and their own beauty”. Bruce was eager to see the film. “I showed it to him only in bits of ten minutes,” says Herzog, “and then he would just pass out, or become delirious, and then he would ask me to go on showing him the film. He was a skeleton, there was nothing left of him, and all of a sudden he would shout at me: ‘I’ve got to be on the road again, I’ve got to be on the road again.’ And I said to him, ‘Yes, that’s where you belong.’ And he said: ‘Can you come with me?’ And I said: ‘Yes, sure, we will walk together.’ And then he said: ‘My rucksack is so heavy.’ And I said: ‘Bruce, I carry it.’ And we spoke about where we were walking and had a walk together and he all of a sudden had a lucid moment when his blanket was off him and every few minutes I turned him around because his bones were aching and he called his legs ‘the boys’. He said: ‘Can you put the left boy around to this side and the right boy?’ And he looked down at himself and he saw the legs were only spindles and he looked at me in this very lucid moment and he said: ‘I’m never going to walk again.’

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