Shadow Play (9 page)

Perhaps something of my distress communicated itself to the front of the van, because the friendly Bernardo suddenly decided that I would welcome some diversion. We had been driving for fifteen minutes on a tree-fringed road that ran along
the edge of a cliff. The trees made tall, coniferous silhouettes in the dark blue night as if we were many metres above sea level. In between them, to our right, were glimpses of a city that stretched far and flat in the valley below, a twinkling mirage of normality that seemed as distant from me at that moment as my memories of Muswell Hill.

A few months later, when I had a clearer picture of the situation, I wished I had behaved better that first evening with Bernardo, who might after all have been genuinely warm. I realized there was no reason to suppose he was anything more than the employee of a taxi company who knew nothing about me or the purpose of my visit. But my encounter with Faisul was still too recent, and it made Bernardo's next overture appear sinister and perverse. We turned and stopped a few minutes off the main road, outside an ornate oval four-storey building. He said it was the former Oriental Hotel that had been destroyed in a fire. It overlooked the city and he went through a long list of people who had stayed there – Marlene Dietrich, Gary Cooper, Sartre and Evita. But I couldn't see what destruction he was referring to because the curve that faced us was intact. We passed through a revolving door of prismatic glass into a grand hall, with rooms arranged all around the circular corridors, each with art nouveau railings, painted walls, elaborate pillars and false ceilings; worked frosted glass made up the door panels. The whole place was lit just by Bernardo's flashlight and a few weak bulbs. In one corner stood a grand piano, and the doors at ground level all carried signs in French and Portuguese for restaurants, the cloakrooms and the casino.

Then I understood. Uncannily, ahead of us continued the city, because there was nothing left of the hotel at its rear. It was
half of a hollow shell: everything ended halfway – the roof, the corridors and their railings, even the floor on which we stood. Suddenly it felt as fragile as an egg that falls and cracks open in front of you, and good for nothing any more except as an immense amphitheatre from which to view the city below. And to be viewed in turn from down there, from one of its many balconies, roofs or crowded squares, hanging over all that bustling life as a grotesque emblem: a moth-eaten brocade, a hollow wedding cake, the distant skeleton of a giant bird unable to take to the sky.

Whatever my misgivings, Bernardo reassured me enough for me to follow him through one of the doors and up a wide teak stairway to the first floor. We walked round the crescent corridor and back again, and he pointed out a swing whose seat lay tied to the railing. He said kids used it to sail out into the sky with the hotel behind and the city below them. He showed me with his hands what a huge arc it described because it hung from hooks driven right into the main ceiling. But I refused his offer to try it, because it was at this moment that my suspicion of his dishonesty was at its peak. What a convenient way to get rid of me after flying me out so far. If it were noticed at all in Britain, it would be dismissed as a tourist accident.

Bernardo didn't insist; he just handed me the light, undid the ropes, clambered on and released himself. Out beyond the roof it appeared as though he went almost as high as the top floor and when he shot backwards I thought he would surely crash. But he was evidently well-practised, and after a few turns, when his laughter and cries of pleasure seemed true and innocent and the dusty air skimmed my face from his swinging, I felt sure that no matter what his other instructions, he had taken out a few
moments just to be a child. And I was envious at his exhilaration, not only because I was much farther away from home than he was, but because I realized there was nothing childlike about my life at all, and that I couldn't even remember the last time I had felt or acted in any way resembling boyhood.

 

I notice, gazing upon the episodes that have emerged thus far, that I certainly am delivering on my promise to provide the missing links and puncture any myths forever. Well, just remember where you heard it first. One half of the moon has faced the world for a long time – and there never will be a better moment for me to excavate the rest of the story. The following chapters are intended to serve as an account of how I lost my way in the course of things until I didn't know which master I was following any more – my real life or my legend.

It is widely speculated (and often reported as fact and testimony) that I've ‘destroyed' more than one woman who loved me. If you believe some of the trial-by-media coverage in the aftermath of Sharon's murder, there lies strewn the wreckage of several lives in my wake over the years (the connection in most of these stories, between metaphorical and actual destroying, has been left implicit, so they can stop neatly short of libel). In fact, I myself am supposed to have confessed this by writing about it from various angles and disguises. Even the unnamed female voice narrating part of the last memoir –
Down to Experience
– has by now been attributed to three
different people, and the book itself is interpreted as being simultaneously my self-indictment and my apology. It's become a critical commonplace that this recurring ‘trope' is derived from the autobiographical: the blameless, idealized woman whose only flaw was that she loved me absolutely.

Perhaps then, it was in a spirit of atonement that I accepted Ana's invitation to Brazil for her forty-fifth birthday two years ago, even though I persuaded myself I was looking forward to seeing Seb, our son, for the first time in over a year. But when I called at his grandmother's in Leblon, her housekeeper Clara said the two of them had left for a driving holiday in Minas. She made me coffee, and after a few minutes, went inside and returned with a book in which she had pasted pictures and clippings to do with Ana. I had put it back on the table when Clara emerged with some cake; she picked it up and turned to the pages near the end. This section was full of cuttings about me. It was not Ana's mother who had maintained the book: it was Clara.

Clara's son had been killed by mistake. He resembled someone who had got into trouble with one of their favela's gangs, for being spotted talking to a rival party. Afterwards, the leader himself showed up at the funeral to apologize. This had happened two years ago. We'd got onto the subject of children because of all the questions I asked about Seb, after she dug out the photo albums and told me the stories she knew. I asked how her son was, and if he was already married. We spoke till it was dark and as I left, I held her for a long time, promising that I would drop in again on my way back through Rio. I said truthfully that she was one of the people I had been most looking forward to seeing.

The rest of the trip was a disaster, mitigated only by a couple of days at the end with Seb. I arrived at Ana's celebrated new beach house on Ilha Grande, images of which I had come across in various magazines and on the Internet, though this was my first visit. When you actually saw it, it was even more than it was made out to be, full of angles and details and proportions you could never have pieced together from photographs. Ana had designed it herself – like a great white whale of a dream, something out of Fellini. Part of it stood on stilts atop a giant cave over which flowed a waterfall into the open sea: the mouth of the cave itself released another underground river. There was a long slide that led from a first-floor veranda into a natural pool immediately before the edge of the waterfall, and you were free to let yourself be pulled along a further few feet and make the five-metre drop down into the sea, where a current picked you up and carried you out as if you were on jet-skis.

This was the focal point of the entertainment, apart from the extraordinary variety of fish, flesh and fruit laid out on the long buffet table. I regret it now but I never joined in, though people were racing down screaming in ones, twos and threes all the time. I think it was the fun they were having that put me off. Ana herself went down a few times, held by a curly-haired somebody who had his arms tightly round her middle – a rather disappointing new toyboy, I decided. What was it Larkin muttered about everyone young going down the long slide to happiness endlessly, whilst he, sad bastard, stood gazing out of a high window? ‘When I see a couple of kids, and guess he's fucking her and she's taking pills or wearing a diaphragm…'

I spent the whole afternoon on a bath chair by the pool and later dozed off on a floating mattress at the shallow end. In
such moods, I'm informed, I radiate my displeasure in waves, and that is the reason no one dares approach me. But there was nothing I had to share with anybody; these were Ana's friends, movie people from here and from Italy, socialites, fashionable cokeheads. No one even looked particularly good or said anything interesting the few times I did pay attention, at least not within my hearing. Ana always seemed comfortable in such company: I remembered old rows about the dull people she brought home, people who had only broken through into such circles because they were rich. I would accuse her of shallowness, of pandering to flattery and the pleasure of being effortlessly superior. She brushed me off by responding, correctly, that I was so far gone up my own ass I couldn't bear not being the centre of attention even for a few hours. And I couldn't bear the fact that
she
had brought people home, rather than I, that she spent time with people whom she hadn't met with me. So ran the course of a common sort of quarrel between us.

I awoke to the last of the sunlight. Many others were lying beside the pool but their numbers had clearly thinned. I wanted to take one last walk along the beach before I left, but I had to ask Ana if there was somewhere she could recommend in Abraão for me to stay the night. Of course her invitation had extended to that, but I couldn't stomach any more of this crowd. Even Seb had preferred church-hopping in Minas with his grandma to his mother's birthday bash. Ana changed among these people, it had always been perceptible. She grew dumber. Her standards lowered across the board.

I walked into the house and towards her room. She'd given me a quick tour when I arrived, and it was all very open-plan without many twists or corridors, so nothing was too hard to find. I could hear noises when I reached her door. That instant
still offered the opportunity to sidestep a scene I knew would bring me pain. I turned the knob. He must have been deep inside her; they were both sitting up facing each other, his face hungrily between her breasts. She was making all the noises. Behind them were French windows and beyond, another view of the bay.

While biking back to Abraão in the fast-fading light, I was reminded of another visit from about fourteen years ago, shortly after Ana and Seb had moved to Lombardy. I remembered arriving at her village by the huge lake, with the train hugging the sides of the mountain as we entered. Morning mist hung in wisps close enough outside the window that you could reach out and grasp them. I could see in memory the strange network of footpaths over the water – medieval, wide ways of stone without any railings, crisscrossing the bay around which lay the village. There were so many of them meeting the shore at different points, and forming nodes and intersections far out in the open water. When I climbed the hill later that afternoon to get an overview, they lay like the strands of a giant fishnet, bobbing on the surface of the lake.

I didn't try to find Ana immediately. I spent the day walking up, down, and across those footpaths in every combination possible, spontaneously changing direction whenever I pleased: it took me all that time to ingest the wonder of being able to walk on water in this way, forming such intricate patterns. Even more, of greeting people who passed me on their day's business. Vehicles were not allowed, but I frequently stepped aside for horses – and all this was happening two hundred metres out in water. You could see the point of some of them: like bypasses, they saved one the trip through the tiny streets of the village, especially if you had a cart and wanted to get to the opposite
shore quickly. But most of the smaller, more intricate connections seemed superfluous – surely one could go around the extra few metres. All I could conclude was that the designer himself had got carried away by divine visions of the combinations possible and grew determined to join all the dots, come what may, as he danced over the water in zigzags or viewed his progress from one of the hills.

That night there was a great blaze. I stood at my balcony and watched the glow growing behind the roofs of the opposite houses, and heard the screams of the village gradually awakening. I joined the crowds on the street, and can still picture the immense proportions of the cathedral-like warehouse as it stood in shrouded outlines consumed by orange. Smoke, screaming, instructions all around that no one heeded, the shrill cries of children, the migraine-like repetition of emergency sirens. I had taken dinner in the piazza just a few hours before, under a full moon, and the glow in the sky had been so icy and pale.