Octavio's Journey Read online

  Octavio’s Journey

  Miguel Bonnefoy

  Translated from the French by Emily Boyce

  Contents

  Title Page

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  About the Author

  Copyright

  I

  At the port of La Guaira on 20 August 1908, a ship from Trinidad dropped anchor off the Venezuelan coast, unaware that it was offloading a plague which would trouble the country for half a century. The first cases showed up along the coast among cochineal merchants and sea-bream vendors. Next it was the turn of beggars and sailors, who gathered outside churches and taverns, praying to keep misfortune and shipwreck at bay. Within a week, a quarantine ward had been set up and a national epidemic declared. During the second week, the authorities announced there was to be a rat hunt, with a silver coin paid for every animal killed. By the third week, the sick were being put in isolation; tests were carried out and buboes the size of eggs removed. It was not long before the first fires were lit in yards and sulphur began to waft from shacks. After a month, with the epidemic closing in on the capital, the first wooden saint was carried out at the head of a great procession.

  The faithful thronged the narrow streets in a village on the outskirts of Caracas. To a chorus of psalms and hymns, they helped lift up the silver bier on which an effigy of the Nazarene of St Paul, dressed in gold-embroidered purple robes, was carried towards the infirmaries by mulattos. The statue itself was barely visible beneath the piles of orchids, the crown of thorns on its head and the bells and symbolic objects that hung around it. The villagers leant out to watch as the procession of men and women swelled from street to street, to the sound of tambourines and trumpets, and was then guided into front porches where ladies in their chemises, their brows beaded with sweat, reached towards the statue and muttered words that sounded like laments.

  Among the houses on the edge of the mountainside was one belonging to a Creole who had planted a sturdy lemon tree – as old, nearly, as he was himself, its fruits twined with mistletoe – against his hedge. The procession approached. The Creole came out with a bolt-action rifle in his hand and a bunch of cartridges tucked under his arm.

  ‘I’ll shoot anyone who tries to get past this hedge,’ he shouted from his veranda. ‘Starting with that wooden one on your shoulders. We’ll soon see if saints are immortal.’

  The pallbearers turned on their heel without further ado. But as they made to leave, the crown of thorns got caught on a branch of the tree. The Creole shouldered his rifle and, cursing, fired a single shot which echoed down the mountain. The bullet freed the statue from the branch, shook the leaves of the tree and made hundreds of lemons rain down like green buboes on the heads of the faithful and roll as far as the doorsteps of the shacks below.

  It was hailed as a miracle. The yellow pulp was used to treat infections, the zests were dried and ground to sprinkle over fish and the air was purified with the fruit’s sharp oils. Lemon and ginger were thrown together into cooking pots and passed from door to door, reaching every nook and cranny and bringing succour that two thousand years of medicine had failed to do. A plague that might have lasted ten years was beaten back within ten months.

  This is the story of the Lord’s Lemon Tree, more or less as it was narrated by the poet Andrés Eloy Blanco in the books of my country.

  So it was that the old Creole’s house was razed to the ground and a church with stone walls and a dirty wooden floor was built opposite the lemon tree and named, as was the village itself, San Pablo del Limón. A simple basilica without organ or ornament, it had a panelled ceiling and opened out onto a courtyard planted with pomegranate trees. The font never lacked water and hymns rang out from the nave down to the outskirts of the village. The stained-glass windows told the illiterate of the passion and suffering of the Crucifixion while outside the heat hung so heavy that all doors were kept closed until vespers.

  No pope came to consecrate the altar and the apse. No sculptures were brought to furnish the cloister. The effigy of the Nazarene of St Paul was propped up against one of the pillars in the nave and women rose before dawn to put coins in the money box beside it. Pilgrims came from far and wide to worship before the statue. The news spread as far as the abbeys. Monks began to arrive, along with gold-diggers, and even a priest who smelt of almonds and nutmeg and knew no Latin, and busied himself with tending the relic.

  When the village witnessed its first murder, the first prison and first cemetery were built using the same stones. The narrow streets were awash with thieves and vagabonds stinking of wood and debasement; but there were also hard-working men who had walked from the town to buy goods more cheaply. Mountain-and caravan-dwellers came, Christians following an archbishop’s edict, nomads. They stayed a few days and filled up on hot food, all of them claiming to be merely passing through. They would visit the inns and guesthouses, smile at a friendly innkeeper and end up staying for the rest of their lives. On the edge of a small plot of land they would put up a mill, dig a vegetable patch beside a channel of water and, there beneath a sky so rounded that the sun rolled within it, they willingly surrendered to a climate that knew no seasons.

  People took to judging the status of a house by the number of windows it had. Road names were written on planks of wood, indicating the people who lived there. The hospital stood on Calle del Hospital, the convent on Calle de las Hermanas; the venerable doctor Domínguez lived on Calle del Doctor Domínguez, while Calle de los Cornudos was not, as the name suggested, a place where cuckolds grew horns, but where cattle lost theirs at the abattoir.

  All was music and commotion, mist and sunshine. The irrigation channels became mires where pigs took long siestas, and even the lashing tropical rains could not wash them clean. The frequent noise of mangoes thudding to the ground and cocks fighting in rings could be heard in the distance. The wind carried the sound of cattle lowing as they kicked up dust with their hooves, and the village squares were used for forums, fairgrounds and paseos. Stallholders came together beneath palm shades to set up the first markets. Panting beasts climbed uphill laden with baskets of cloves and green chillies, inks and pearls, their spines bending under the weight of caged parrots. Professional writers charged a fortune to compose love letters, old men counted the months in kernels of maize and stallholders told children stories to keep night at bay. These were simple yet fearful times. The village was threatened only by superstition and folk wisdom, and late in the evening it was not unusual to see a man with a rifle slung over his shoulder doing a night round of the square on the back of an ageing donkey.

  With time, the bushy, abundant hillside swelled with shacks and groups of buildings in a never-ending blossoming of life. Year after year it was paved with more stones and drew ever more men escaping poverty in the cities. The new arrivals would head for the top of the hill, find a patch of fallow land far from the others and build a home from corrugated iron. As the neighbourhoods expanded, democratic elections had to be held in order to choose a president and a council. The black market began to rival the established trade, while women slept in the shadow of the plane trees when robbed of their husbands by alcohol or misfortune.

  The old legends drove the children from their houses. Many were now involved in smuggling, for fear of being excluded, or because it was even more dangerous to remain on the outside. The nights were wild and restless, marred by the crime that lurked around street corners. Girls fell preg
nant young and improvised abortions with spoons sterilised in saucepans. It was a road map of wrath. Alas, the saints did not pass through the Venezuelan slums. They did not sit at this particular table. They played no part in the slow and painful construction of the happiness of the poor, who, looking up towards the light, counted their rosaries in olive pits and strained all their senses in order to hear heaven’s answer to their prayers.

  One day, the statue of the Nazarene disappeared apparently unnoticed. From then on, the church doors often remained locked. The pews were no longer dusted, the floors no longer washed, the galleries no longer decorated with flowers. The pilgrims’ tales and their legacy took another path.

  During the rainy season, the lemon tree was felled, its bark now teeming with woodworm as the town was with people. It took several mulattos to carry the tree, processing with it to an isolated patch of wasteland. No one came out to join the procession, nor leant out to watch it pass. Not far from the houses, a fire was lit, a reminder of the plague of yesteryear. The smoke hung in the sky for three days. For the last time, the church bells pealed. So it was that half a century after the arrival of the boat from Trinidad, all that remained was the pungent scent of lemon and a church standing among the cypress trees like a lone and sorry mast on a land without ancestors.

  II

  Don Octavio was born of this land.

  He lived on the hillside in a modest, flimsy, slate-clad house to which he held no deeds. The space, which must once have formed a single room, was divided into a living room and bedroom. A wardrobe stood beside a glassless, curtainless window typical of the tropics, with a camp bed and rush-seat chair nearby. At the back of the living room, candles burnt on a little altar, casting flickers of light on the walls. Apostle figures were carved into broom handles and also etched on glasses which had been filled with rum to guard against misfortune. The scent of wild herbs hung in the air.

  Octavio welcomed Dr Alberto Perezzo into his living room. He was quite a good doctor, well groomed, with an almost olive complexion. He was always cheerful and jolly, and had a kindly way about him – yet he still complained about the endless zigzagging steps he had to climb up the hillside, house after house, in order to reach his patients. He wiped the sweat from his face with his sleeve. And to top it all off, he admitted with an embarrassed smile, he had left behind his prescription slips. Octavio looked anxiously up at him.

  ‘There’s nothing to write on here, Doctor.’

  Alberto Perezzo told him not to worry; he would write the prescription in the margin of a newspaper instead.

  ‘They’re used to it at the health centre,’ he added. ‘In this country, we still write on newspapers after they’ve been printed.’

  Don Octavio buttoned up his shirt, then got up and went into the kitchen.

  ‘Sorry, Doctor, but there’s nothing to write on here.’

  The doctor looked around and saw only a piece of bread and some tobacco on a table by the window. A lump of charcoal lay on the ground at his feet.

  ‘Here’s what we’ll do, Octavio. I’ll write the names of the medicines on the table. I’ll come back tomorrow with my pad.’

  The doctor leant over and, slowly drawing each individual letter, wrote out the prescription between the grooves of the wood.

  ‘If I’m not back tomorrow, copy it out yourself and tell the chemist I sent you.’

  He brushed off the charcoal dust that had rubbed onto his fingers. Beads of sweat were forming again on his brow. He cursed the steps once more, asked for a glass of water and set off, closing the door behind him.

  For a moment, Octavio stood before the table. Barely a patch of it had been left unblemished by the bluish rum stains that covered almost all the wood, like the inside of a barrel. The letters drawn on the table were marks of another kind of strange intoxication. He knew immediately that the doctor would not be back the next day. He would be busy applying onion and salt poultices, delivering a teenage mother’s baby in the back of a shack, or extracting a bullet fused with a coin from someone’s knee amid hoarse cries.

  Octavio put the empty glass down on the window ledge. He picked up a table knife and, with a movement repeated so often it no longer caused him pain, cut into the palm of his hand. He watched the blood darken his fingers like splashes of ink. Then he washed his hands in a basin filled with rainwater and bandaged the wound with rags. He lifted the table onto his shoulders, opened the door and set off towards the chemist’s.

  The sun was already weakening over San Pablo del Limón and the shadows deepened. Thousands of little brick-built houses stretched away up the hillside in a higgledy-piggledy fashion, one on top of the other, with open-air kitchens, empty terraces and hammocks strung between palm trees. The sun warmed the walls and a shimmering mirage was still visible on the corrugated-iron roofs. In the distance, a bare-chested man stood at his window. Women stood under porches, hurrying to finish their cigarettes. Children were throwing stones at a tree to knock down a mango. It might have been a scene from the beginning of the world.

  Don Octavio took a meandering path down the steps, with the table on his back. He stopped from time to time to rest in the shade of a billboard, leaning on his table and stumbling over the words written on it. On the way he passed three men who turned to ask gently but firmly if he would lend them the table for a game of dominoes. He joined them at the table, caught up in the spirit of mute camaraderie, covering the ivory pieces in a film of charcoal dust. Further on, he ran into water carriers and workmen going up and down the front steps of a house. His table came to the rescue of a child who had lost all hope of getting his ball down from a roof. With its wooden legs, he was able to fend off two mangy dogs, foaming with rage, and he covered the last stretch of the journey on the back of a truck carrying papayas, whose drivers spoke in words he did not really understand of a coming revolution.

  There was a long queue outside the chemist’s. When his turn came, his shoulder was dirty from leaning against the roughcast wall. He put the table down before the chemist. But the charcoal had rubbed off on his back: the names of the medicines were no longer legible; a dusty black moiré pattern was all that was left.

  ‘What was the prescription for?’ the chemist asked coldly, taking the measure of him.

  Don Octavio muttered his excuses. He claimed not to remember and waved his hands around awkwardly, trying to find a trace of a letter in the black dust. He gave the name of the young doctor, but the chemist replied curtly that Perezzo was out. The queue behind him was getting impatient. The chemist looked away, exasperated.

  ‘Come back with a real prescription.’

  Octavio began to panic.

  ‘D’you have something to write with?’ he asked suddenly. ‘Would you write a note for the doctor and ask him to visit me again? I’m Octavio. He knows who I am.’

  But the chemist handed him a pen and a sheet of paper.

  ‘Write it yourself, Señor.’

  At the sound of these words, all his years of suffering came flooding back. Octavio felt an old sadness making its nest in his heart once more. And so, slowly repeating a gesture he had been making all his life, he took off his bandage and said tonelessly, ‘I’ve hurt my hand. Can’t write. P’rhaps you could help me?’

  III

  Nobody learns how to say he cannot read or write. It is not learnt, but is kept in a nebulous place deep inside, far from daylight, a religion that requires no confession.

  Don Octavio had always kept his secret, gouging it into his fist, feigning injury to spare himself the shame of admission. He exchanged only simple words with his fellow humans, words carved out of use and necessity. He had gone through life counting on his fingers, guessing at words by adding up their letters, reading people through their looks and gestures, excluded from the jealous relationship between sounds and letters. He spoke little, barely at all. He mimicked what he heard, sometimes without understanding what he was saying, missing out syllables, making roughly the right sounds, and ofte
n the words on his lips were like precious alms. He took from the world only oxygen, and gave it only silence in return.

  On reaching school age, he had been denied an education. That was in the days when chapters on native history in primary-school textbooks still described the conquest of the Americas as a ‘discovery’. At eighteen, young Octavio did not vote, and signed every form with a shaky cross, the only letter in his alphabet. A simple soul, he defined himself by his very simplicity. He had the forgetful, or perhaps endearingly inattentive, air of a dreamer. He did not know the pleasures of the texture of a piece of paper or the smell of old books. He had learnt to decipher the bus timetable by monitoring the frequency of services, to tell a brand from the packaging and denominations of money by the colour of banknotes. He calculated the cost of a purchase by reading the level of confidence in the vendor’s eyes.

  As an adult walking down the street, his sole aim was to blend in as an anonymous, average individual, just one more face among a thousand others, an unimpeachable example of reserve and restraint, modesty and decency. He avoided quarrels and violence at all costs, being ignorant of his rights and incapable of defending them. His thoughts were like telegrams, devoid of prepositions. In company he only kept quiet for the shell-like protection of silence, as others only spoke to feel words trip eagerly off their tongues. He was a stranger to beautiful sentences; discretion was his dwelling place. Numbed, he could not see the disadvantages of his silence any more than a wise man can those of his wisdom.

  He did casual shifts in shady places, working as both a messenger and a labourer, or waiting on tables in a disreputable bar one night, slogging in a stinking tannery the next. He worked all the hours he could but was not materialistic or greedy, treating his earnings like water drunk only to quench a thirst. He avoided official posts and steered clear of schools. From the nation that had witnessed his birth, he inherited only its stamina and servitude.