Port Mungo Read online

  At last Vera got up and stood at the table, frowning, pouring them each a drink, a cigar between her teeth. Her hair was damp with the warmth of the night and her bare shoulders were bathed in moonlight.

  Jack said he hated guns.

  —They’re getting them from Russia, she said.

  —Where did you hear that?

  —Someone told me.

  And again the small bitter voice, seizing on this oblique reference to her life out there in the streets, the life he knew nothing about.

  —So many friends you have.

  He knew what he was doing when he said it, he hated that he was doing it, but he seemed to have no choice. What was the impulse—intensify the crisis, push it to the breaking point, get the thing finished and resolved one way or the other—was this it?

  —Oh Christ, Jack, don’t start.

  But he had started, and within ten minutes she was dressed and out the door, out into the dangerous dark streets, and he didn’t see her until the morning, by which time he knew it was all over with Havana.

  So they left Havana, and with them went the battered cabin trunk with the brass studs in which they’d packed their painting gear, their sketchbooks, their journals, their clothes and books, as well as a bottle or two for emergencies. Vera’s canvases they shipped back to London. I see them on some smoky old coaster with rusted rivets and welded patches on the hull, the pair of them leaning on the rail, in dark glasses and Panama hats, as they moved on to the next island, the next coastal town. Jack’s experiences, recollected in drunken tranquillity, by this time would have downshifted through nuanced gradations into a mild and rather maudlin memory of himself as a very young man drifting about the Caribbean with this difficult woman with whom he was engaged in a torrid and complicated love affair. The steamer belched oily black smoke into the sunlight and the captain stood on the bridge trying to shoot dolphin with a rifle. Off to the west the mangrove gave way to sandy beaches, an unbroken backdrop of dense palms with mountains in the distance and every few miles, just visible across a hazy, shimmering sea, a cluster of wooden shacks on stilts, and a rickety jetty, and the faint stench of seaweed drying in the sun. It was well into the afternoon when they learned that they would soon be docking for a couple of hours, and the prospect of a cool cantina and bottles of iced beer was welcome indeed.

  —You had an idea, I said, what you were looking for.

  —Oh yes.

  Port Mungo: a once-prosperous river town now gone to seed, wilting and steaming among the mangrove swamps of the Gulf of Honduras.

  Chapter Five

  I visited the place only once. I spent ten days there. On the waterfront I saw rough bars built of concrete blocks run by hard-faced Chinese and patronized by prostitutes and mean-looking men from off the boats. I remember dusty streets and alleyways, and canals, which stank, being open sewers, and disgorged into the river, which was visible from almost anywhere you looked, glittering in the sunlight behind the stilted shacks, or from the end of an alley where chickens pecked in the dirt and a collapsing dock occupied a few feet of frontage. I retain a vivid memory of the open market, where I saw a man split a live iguana down the belly with a machete, that reptile’s flesh being a local delicacy. There were flies everywhere, noise, blood, the stench of butchered meat mingling with the fragrance of papaya and mango.

  I will not pretend I wasn’t devastated when he left me. Isn’t every man a hero to his sister? Jack was certainly a hero to me, and I had diligently kept his image shining like a beacon before my eyes, the image of a brother resolute in his identity and ready to overcome every obstacle in the pursuit of his ambition. I cannot be certain exactly what happened in New York. Much of what he told me has since been contradicted by Vera, though I do know that they got through the money in a matter of weeks and then moved south, and this I know because I had to wire them funds to a bank in Miami Beach. I suppose I was a fool, but for years I thought about him constantly, my devotion sustained by the very occasional letter, usually a scrawled thing on onionskin paper with drink smears and cigarette burns all over it, and the margins alive with sketches and doodles. How I treasured them! I wrote back copiously, and subjected any man who showed an interest in me to a withering comparison with Jack, and never, of course, did any of them come close.

  I didn’t see him for more than ten years, and much happened in the meantime. After they left England I grew close to my father, and when he died I was surprised how deeply it affected me. He left the bulk of the estate to me. Jack got nothing, nor, to his astonishment, did Gerald, who by that time had become a doctor, and had a family, and was set up in a good practice not far from London. I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I sold the house in Suffolk and a year later moved to New York. I too had been intoxicated by Vera’s description of the city that long-ago night in Camden Town, and with every subsequent visit I paid to Manhattan—this was after Vera and Jack had gone south, of course—my feelings for the place grew stronger. I bought the brownstone on West 11th Street, and quickly established the kind of quiet, bookish existence I had always wanted. There were a number of desultory love affairs, but through it all Jack was never far from my thoughts, or absent from my innermost heart. I attempted to invite myself down to Port Mungo several times, particularly when I learned that they had a child, a daughter—Peg—but he put me off every time. Then had come a letter in which his need of me was so nakedly apparent that I began to organize my travel arrangements the same morning.

  And so I made the long, hot, arduous journey south, culminating in a four-hour trip down the coast on a slow ferry. I was profoundly nervous, and at the same time giddily excited at the prospect of seeing my beloved brother again. He met me off the boat, at the jetty. He was almost thirty now, and what I saw advancing on me was an unkempt, sunburnt man in faded canvas shirt and pants, his long hair bleached in strips by the sun and tied back in a ponytail. He greeted me in his familiar manner—clasped me to him stiffly—while Peg, barefoot and brown-skinned, hid behind him and watched me intently with dark, wild eyes. He murmured to me as he held me in his arms.

  —Gin, how really good of you to come. It’s a vile journey.

  —I’ve missed you, I said, and then, to myself: more than you will ever know.

  We made our slow way, in fierce heat, with Peg pushing the wheelbarrow in which my bags had been stowed, along dusty streets, between listing shacks, to the warehouse district. Everybody seemed to know Jack and Peg, and much interest was shown in me. Jack grinned as he watched me shake hands with old black men with rheumy eyes and gold teeth. I understood not a word of what was said to me until Peg shyly translated. We eventually fetched up at a vast ramshackle wooden structure built out over the river. This had apparently been their home since the day Jack and Vera first arrived in the town.

  Later we sat out on the deck over the river and drank rum. We watched the sun go down behind the western mountains as the Mungo turned black, its surface alive with flickering insects and flashes of silver. Sounds both human and animal punctured the silence, and on the far bank I saw children splashing about in the shallows, and behind them, against the gathering sunset, broken-down shacks with tin roofs and crooked chimneys from which woodsmoke drifted into the rain forest beyond. Jack took a strange pride in this primitive place he had come to, and in particular in that great sagging barn of a house. It had once been a banana warehouse, though it was empty when they’d got there. Buildings left empty in the tropics deteriorate fast, he said, but it was big, and also so cheap that enough money remained from what I’d last wired for them to lease it for several years. It was more a ruin than anything else, no question; but it was their ruin, and it was here, he said, that he’d properly learned to paint. The dirt road out front was called Pelican Road, and that was the name the house had acquired.

  They found a woman called Radiance to cook for them, and she brought three of her sons to rid the house of spiders and scorpions and various other unpleasant creatures which had taken up
residence. They set to work with brooms and mops, and later with buckets of whitewash which they slapped onto the old silvered boards so as to make the inside of the building as light as possible. They replaced the rotting floorboards, installed a simple kitchen and slung hammocks. They bought a few sticks of furniture and as many oil lamps as they could lay their hands on, and after a few days the place was more or less habitable. A large teak bed was brought in by water then carried into the house in pieces and put back together on the top floor.

  The rolls of coarse burlap were unpacked, and enough of the powdered paint they’d purchased in Havana to last them half a year, and then at last they stepped out onto the deck, the two of them, into the sunlight, and gazed out over the river, and the harbour, and the sea beyond, and clinked their beer bottles and toasted their great good fortune. And so began their days in Pelican Road, the old banana warehouse that would be my brother’s home for almost twenty years.

  All this he told me in a tone of quiet satisfaction, and I realized that he regarded the acquisition of this shabby place as a real accomplishment. I was troubled by this. I asked him if Vera was as proud of it as he clearly was, and he said he remembered her stamping across a vastness of wooden floor, peering up into the gloomy rafters, sweeping her hand across what seemed acres of wall space and declaring that ten painters could work here and not get in one another’s way! She apparently liked the tropics, and for a year or two at least she’d liked living in this wreck of a house that lurched precariously over the river—

  There was no sign of her now.

  All this he told me that first evening, in tones, as I say, of profound satisfaction. I was more interested however in the man himself. The changes in Jack were dramatic. Most striking was the absence of that reckless energy which had been so irresistible in London, and not only to me. For it had been replaced by a kind of abstracted introspection, in fact it seemed as if all the flamboyance with which he had once come at the world was now turned in on himself. Why should I have been surprised, much less saddened? The last time I’d seen him he’d been a youth—a strong, splendid, wilful youth, but a youth all the same—and now he was a man. And if he had once been a romantic he was now, I guessed, a realist, or perhaps a cynic: Vera had made him so. We were both silent for a while. Something screamed in the jungle. Then he spoke again, and his mood had shifted.

  —I’m usually all right on my own, but this time I just felt so bloody cast down. She’s gone off again.

  I saw the self-pity rise in his throat, then get swallowed. I waited for more but that was all. It was of course impossible for me to say that I had guessed this would happen, that I had seen clearly what sort of a woman Vera was in those first heady days in London. So I asked the question that had been on my mind ever since I stepped off the ferry. I asked him why, of all the godforsaken spots on the face of the earth, they’d chosen this one.

  A bit of shrugging here, scratching of the head, a glimpse of teeth. Oh, one got used to it, one even grew fond of it, and besides, he had a good place to work, and Peg was happy. And he had friends, yes, not gringos but locals. He liked the easygoing Creoles, their openness and generosity, which had sustained him and Vera in the early days. It seems it had been another of their impulsive decisions. When they saw the sleepy waterfront, the fishing boats, the painted wooden houses leaning out over the slow green Mungo—he flapped a hand dismissively at the river, and also, I thought, at the idiot romanticism of his youthful self—he said they just had a feeling about the place, so they got off the steamer and had their trunk unloaded onto the dock.

  —And the rest—sardonic bark here—is family history. Curse of the Rathbones.

  My brother was indeed cursed, I remember thinking, not by a family malediction but by the woman with whom he’d thrown in his lot. It became clear as he talked that Vera was a chronic alcoholic, as I had long suspected, and that her drinking had grown worse during the years in Port Mungo. Jack also gave me to understand that she was often unfaithful, and this I could see was more painful to him even than the drinking. The damage she’d done could be read in his eyes, in his body, in his gait and posture: he was a bowed and harrowed man, where once he had been straight and fierce. But he had his work, and he also—and again I heard the quiet pleasure in his voice—he also had his daughter. Peg was born a couple of years after they’d got to Port Mungo, and when he spoke of her it was with such tenderness that I knew his life was blessed at least in this regard, that the joy she’d given him had gone some way to compensate for all the pain Vera had caused.

  And his own sex life? In response to Vera’s infidelity, had he found . . . comfort, himself, elsewhere—?

  Here I discovered another change in my brother. Ten years before he would have launched at once, and with some gusto, into an account of his adventures. Now he was reticent. The question disturbed him, and I did not press him. But I continued to worry at it, for my brother had a powerful sex drive, and it was inconceivable to me that he now channelled all his libido into his work. I asked myself whether he had a mistress he was being discreet about, for I wouldn’t have been in the least surprised. The girls of Port Mungo were pretty creatures, what I had seen of them, slender, green-eyed young beauties with delicate brown skins, and possessed of an enchanting physical grace—wouldn’t any white man wish to claim one of these shy things for his own, set her up in a stilted shack on the other side of town, there to receive him whenever his loins were stirred—? I suggested as much but Jack said no. He shook his head. He was not interested in the local girls.

  I let this statement hang in the air for a few moments. One of the gringo women then? An explosive snort of laughter in response to this. Have you seen them, Gin? None of them under sixty. Hides like rhinos, pickled in spirits. I was pickled in spirits myself by this time, and so was he, but all the same I abandoned the topic, and what Jack did for sex remained a mystery. Perhaps, I later thought, he had indeed undergone some kind of Damascene conversion. Perhaps, in the face of Vera’s flagrant serial infidelity, he had resolved to act in direct contradiction of her ethos, almost as a rebuke—to be faithful to her, I mean, and celibate in her absence. Perhaps his own infidelity in Miami Beach, early in their travels, had sufficiently traumatized him that he no longer went after other women, being one of those rare men who make only one sexual mistake in their lives, and resolve never to stray again—?

  In fact I now believe that in spite of his wildly nonconformist life my brother did possess the moral fibre to control his appetites and sublimate them into his art; and I believe too that he never repeated the clumsy sexual error he made early in his relationship with Vera.

  She told me about it once. This was much later, when she was on one of her periodic visits to New York, and for some reason the pair of us had been left alone after dinner, sitting at the kitchen table with a bottle or two and an overflowing ashtray. Over time a cautious intimacy had developed between Vera and me, and I had somewhat relaxed my stern disapproval of her. I suppose the years permit one a more complex perspective on things. I don’t remember how we got on to the topic, but I remember the sly glance she flashed at me, the lift of an eyebrow, as though to say, So that’s what you’re after—and then she launched into the story. It happened in Miami Beach, she told me, filling her glass for the umpteenth time and lighting yet another cigarette. She blew smoke at the ceiling. They were staying in a cheap rooming house a block back from Ocean Drive, this of course after their departure from New York. They were waiting for me to wire them money so they could get to Havana. Jack was not doing at all well, she said, and she described to me not the fearless young man I had known but a lost and frightened boy, adrift in the world and uncertain of his direction, clinging to his lover because he needed her but at the same time resisting and resenting his dependency. He was miserable in Miami Beach. The weather was hot and they couldn’t afford to replace the clothes they’d brought with them from London. Nor could they afford anything better than a tacky room away from
the beach, sharing a bathroom down the corridor with some old men. Their window looked onto an alleyway where garbage was going bad, but they couldn’t close it against the smell as they needed the breeze.

  She was content to kill the time reading, she said, old paperbacks or whatever magazines and newspapers she could scrounge up. She would lie on the bed in her underwear, in the stale, heavy heat, and for hours she smoked and read. Jack would pace the floor and then invent for himself some mission, the purchase of cigarettes or yet another trip to the bank to see if the money had come.

  She did not share his restlessness. She was like a cat, she said, languid for hours, indifferent to time, she liked the heat. Not so Jack. He chafed. He seethed. He hated the heat, the stasis, the paralysis—and as she talked I saw my brother as a kind of chrysalis, a creature waiting impatiently to emerge from its cocoon. Vera remembered that one afternoon she had fallen into a light doze when he slipped quietly into the room and went to the dressing table. He was perspiring heavily. His shirt was sticking to his back. He did not realize she was awake. She lay on the bed in the gloom and through half-closed eyes watched him in the dressing-table mirror, saying nothing, because he was being furtive, which naturally made her curious. He had undone several of his shirt buttons and was bending forward to examine his neck in the mirror. All at once he froze, aware that she was watching him. Their eyes locked in the mirror. Overhead the heavy wooden fan turned sluggishly, to negligible effect.

  —What is it you’re doing, Jack?

  —I think I got burnt, he said, buttoning his shirt again.

  —Let me see.

  —No, it’s all right. Go back to sleep. I didn’t mean to wake you. I’m going out again.

  —Give us a kiss then.

  This provoked no small alarm but what could he do? Trust to his luck. But it was not his lucky day. She smelt cheap perfume even before he reached the bed. She had not expected this from him, and she had no idea how to deal with it. She simply told him, with the first kindling of angry disbelief, that he’d been with a woman. She was sitting up now, and wide awake.