3 The River People

The Portuguese did us the honour of discovering us towards the middle of the sixteenth century but they had left it a little late in the day, for they were already past their imperialist prime and so our nation began as an afterthought, or a footnote to other, more magnificent conquests. The Portuguese found a tenuous coastline of fever-sodden swamp which, as they reluctantly penetrated inland, they found solidified to form a great expanse of sun-baked prairie. Lavishly distributing the white spirochete and the word of God as they went, they travelled far enough to glimpse the hostile ramparts of the mountains before they turned back for there was no gold or silver to be had, only malaria and yellow fever. So they left it to the industrious Dutch a century later to drain the marshes and set up that intricate system of canals, later completed and extended during a brief visit by the British, to which the country was to owe so much of its later wealth.

The vagaries of some European peace treaty or other robbed the Dutch of the fruits of their labours, although some of them stayed behind to add further confusion to our ethnic incomprehensibility and to the barbarous speech which slowly evolved out of a multiplicity of elements. But it was principally the Ukrainians and the Scots-Irish who turned the newly fertile land into market gardens while a labour force of slaves, remittance men and convicts opened up the interior and a baroque architect imported for the purpose utilized their labours to build the capital, which was founded in the early eighteenth century at a point where the principal river formed an inland tidal basin. Here they built a house for Jesus, a bank, a prison, a stock exchange, a madhouse, a suburb and a slum. It was complete. It prospered.

During the next two hundred years, a mixed breed of Middle Europeans, Germans and Scandinavians poured in to farm the plains and even though a brief but bloody slave revolt put a stop to slavery at the time of the French Revolution, enough black slaves ran away from the plantations of the northern continent to provide cheap labour in the factories, shipyards and open-cast mines which brought the country prosperously enough into the twentieth century. You could not have said we were an undeveloped nation though, if we had not existed, Dr Hoffman could not have invented a better country in which to perform his experiments and, if he brought to his work the ambivalence of the expatriate, then were we not – except myself – almost all of us expatriates?

Even those whose great, great, great grandfathers had crossed the ocean in wooden ships felt, in the atavistic presence of the foothills, that they were little better than resident aliens. The expatriates had imposed a totally European façade on the inhospitable landscape in which they lived nervously, drawing around them a snug shawl of remembered familiarities although, with the years, this old clothing grew threadbare and draughts blew in through the holes, which made them shiver. The very air had always been full of ghosts so that the newcomers took their displeasure into their lungs with every breath. Until the introduction of D.D.T., the area between the capital and the sea was a breeding ground for fever mosquitoes; until the drinking water was filtered, it was always full of cholera. The country itself was subtly hostile.

It turned out that the extremely powerful bourgeoisie and by far the greater part of the peasantry around the capital, from the rich farmers to the white trash, was of variegated European extraction, united by the frail bond of a language which, although often imperfectly understood, was still held in common while the slum dwellers presented an extraordinary racial diversity but were all distinguishable by the colour black, for that pigmentation, to some degree, was common to them all. But, if the conquistadors had found nothing they valued, the Jesuits who sailed with them discovered a rich trove of souls and it is to the accounts of attempted conversions and the journals of those indefatigable storm-troopers of the Lord that we owe most of our knowledge of the aborigines. Certain of the tribes and many of the customs the Jesuits ascribe to those days are certainly fallacious; the famous stories of highlanders with such stiff, muscular spikes at the base of their spines that all their stools were perforated do not even need to be discredited. But not one of the tribes could write down the language they spoke, could tame horses nor could build in stones. They were no Aztecs or Incas but brown, naïve men and women who fished, hunted, trapped birds and then died in great numbers, for those who did not become running targets for the crossbows of the Portuguese survived as quarries for the bluff English, who hallooed and tally-ho’d after them in imported red coats. While most of the rest succumbed to smallpox, syphilis, tuberculosis or those sicknesses of the European nursery, measles and whooping cough, which prove deadly if exported to another hemisphere.

But those defunct Amerindians had possessed a singular charm. Near the coast, a certain tribe had lived in reed hutches on islands in the marshes and they used to paste feathers together to make themselves robes and mantles, so they darted about on stilts above the still water like brilliant birds with long legs. And they used to make tapestries which showed no figures, only gradations of colour, woven out of feathers in such a way the colours seemed to move. I have seen the tattered ruins of one of these feathered mantles in the unfrequented Museum of Folk Art; ragged, now, but still unwearied by time, the pinks, reds and purples still dance together. Another tribe which lived beside the sea, a glum, deferential people who subsisted on raw fish, had a dialect which contained no words for ‘yes’ or ‘no’, only a word for ‘maybe’. Further inland, people lived in mud beehives which had neither doors nor windows so you climbed into them through a hole in the roof. When the spring rains washed their homes away, as happened every year without fail, they stoically retired to caves where they carved eloquent eyes in stone for reasons the Jesuits never fathomed. Here and there, in the dry tundra and even the foothills, the Jesuits set the Indians, who were all sweet-natured and eager to please, to build enormous, crenellated churches with florid façades of pink stucco. But when the Indians had completed the churches and had gazed at them for a while with round-eyed self-congratulation, they wandered away again to sit in the sun and play tritonic melodies on primitive musical instruments. Then the Jesuits decided the Indians had not a single soul among them all and that wrote a definitive finis to the story of their regeneration.

But not all the Indians died. The Europeans impregnated the women and the children in turn impregnated the most feckless of the poor whites. The blacks impregnated the resultant cross and, though filtered and diffused, the original Indian blood finally distributed itself with some thoroughness among the urban proletariat and the occupations both whites and blacks deemed too lowly to perform, such as night-soil disposal. Yet it was perfectly possible – and, indeed, by far the greater majority of the population did so – to spend all one’s life in the capital or the towns of the plain and know little if anything of the Indians. They were bogeymen with which to frighten naughty children; they had become rag-pickers, scrap-dealers, refuse collectors, and emptiers of cess-pits – those who performed tasks for which you do not need a face.

And a few of them had taken to the river, as if they had grown to distrust even dry land itself. These were the purest surviving strain of Indian and they lived secret, esoteric lives, forgotten, unnoticed. It was said that many of the river people never set foot on shore in all their lives and I know it was taboo for unmarried girls or pregnant women to leave the boats on which they lived. They were secretive, proud, shy and rigidly exclusive in their dealings with the outside world. Those who married outside the river clans were forbidden to return to their families or even to speak to any member of the tribe again as long as they lived but taboos against any kind of exogamy with the fat Caucasians who rooted themselves at ease along the river banks were so rigid I do not think above half a dozen of the women and, among the men, only the masters of the boats – or, rather, barges – had ever so much as exchanged a score of sentences with any except their own. Besides, they retained a version of one of the Indian dialects and I rather think they were the remote and however altered descendants of the birdmen of the swamps, for the meaning of their words depended not so much on pronunciation as intonation. They speak in a kind of singing; when, in the mornings, a flock of womenfolk twitter about the barge emptying the slops over the side and getting the breakfast, it is like a dawn chorus. The only way to transcribe their language would be in a music notation. But I have found very few of their customs in the writings of the Jesuits.

Over the years, their isolated and entirely self-contained society had developed an absolutely consistent logic which owed little or nothing to the world outside and they sailed from ports to cities to ports as heedlessly as if the waterways were magic carpets of indifference. I soon realized they were entirely immune to the manifestations. If the hawk-nosed, ferocious elders who handled their traditional lore said such a thing was so, then it was so and it would take more than the conjuring tricks of a cunning landlubber to shake their previous convictions. Since, however, they bore no goodwill to the whites and very little to the blacks, if it came to that, they took a cool pleasure to witness from the security of their portholes the occasional havoc in the towns through which they passed.

I blessed that touch of Indian blood my mother had all her life cursed for it gave me hair black enough and cheekbones high enough to pass among the river people for one of their own, when they were the only ones who could help me. The bargemaster who took me in knew quite well I came from the city but he spoke enough of the standard tongue to reassure me they were well disposed to fugitives from justice, provided they were of Indian extraction. He told me that during my faint he had dug the bullet out of my shoulder with a knife while his mother held an infusion of narcotic herbs under my nose when I showed signs of regaining consciousness. Now he applied a boiling poultice of leaves to the wound, bandaged it and left me in the care of the old woman.

When she smiled at me, I thought at first she did not have a tooth in her head for my eyes were still dim with fever, but soon I learned it was the custom for all the women to stain their teeth black. Every time she came into the cabin she shut the door sharply behind her but not before I saw a curious press of children crowding outside on deck to catch a glimpse of me. But I did not meet his family until Nao-Kurai had taught me to sing something of his language.

The speech of the river people posed philosophical as well as linguistic problems. For example, since they had no regular system of plurals but only an elaborate system of altered numerals for denoting specific numbers of given objects, the problem of the particular versus the universal did not exist and the word ‘man’ stood for ‘all man’. This had a profound effect on their societization. Neither was there a precise equivalent for the verb ‘to be’, so the kernel was struck straight out of the Cartesian nut and one was left only with the naked, unarguable fact of existence, for a state of being was indicated by a verbal tag which could roughly be translated as ‘one finds oneself in the situation or performance of such and such a thing or action’, and the whole aria was far too virtuoso a piece to be performed often so it was replaced by a tacit understanding. The tenses divided time into two great chunks, a simple past and a continuous present. Neither contained further temporal shading. A future tense was created by adding various suffixes indicating hope, intention and varying degrees of probability and possibility to the present stem. There was also a marked absence of abstract nouns, since they had very little use for them. They lived with a complex, hesitant but absolute immediacy.

Besides her blackened teeth, Nao-Kurai’s mother – whom I was quickly invited to call ‘Mama’ – used a great deal of paint on her face, in spite of her age. The paint was applied in a peculiarly stylized manner. A coat of matt white covered her nose, cheeks and forehead but left her neck and ears as brown as nature made them. On top of this white crust she put a spherical scarlet dot in the middle of each cheek and over the mouth a precisely delineated scarlet heart which completely ignored the real contours of the lips, which one could make out beneath as vague indentations, like copings under snow. Thick black lines surrounded her eyes, from which radiated a regular series of short spokes all round the circumference. The eyebrows were painted out and painted in again some three inches above the natural position, giving her an habitual look of extreme surprise. Sometimes she would also paint, in black, a crescent, a star or a butterfly at the corner of her mouth, on her temples or in some other antic position. I could see that the young girls who came to peek at me were decorated in much the same way, though less elaborately. This traditional maquillage could not have originally been intended to repel landsmen, but, however fortuitously, it repelled them completely, if ever one chanced to see it.

Mama hid her coils of black hair in a coloured handkerchief tied loosely over her head and knotted in the nape. She always wore loose trousers nipped in at the ankle with green or red cords; split-toed socks of black cotton which allowed her to keep thonged sandals on her feet; a loose blouse of checked or floral cotton; and protecting that, a short, immaculate, white starched apron which had armholes and tied at the back of both neck and waist, so that it covered her upper part almost completely. The aprons and also the bed-linen and the curtains at the portholes were all trimmed with a coarse white lace the women made themselves in the evenings, three or four of them clustered round a single candle. I think it was a craft the nuns had taught them in the seventeenth century, before the river people signed their quittance to the world, for the designs were very old-fashioned.

Mama’s costume was universal among the women. It gave them a top-heavy appearance, as if they would not fall down if you pushed but only rock to and fro. I realized that, though I had sometimes seen the dark barges moving slowly along the river, I had never seen this characteristic shape of a woman on deck and later I learned the women were all ordered below whenever they reached a place of any size.

Mama always smelled faintly of fish but so did my sheets and blankets and the smell had soaked into the very wood of the bulkhead beside me for fish was their main source of protein. When she brought me my food, Mama never brought me a fork or knife or spoon to eat it with – she only brought a deep plate of a stiff kind of porridge made from maize topped with fish in a highly flavoured sauce and I was to discover the whole family habitually ate together round a round table in the main cabin, each scooping a handful of maize from the common bowl, rolling it in the palm until it was solid and then dipping it into another common bowl and scooping up the sauce with it.

Whenever she offered me my dinner, or dressed my wound, or washed me, or smoothed my bed, or undertook the more intimate tasks she performed without distaste or embarrassment, she used a limited repertoire of stiff, exact gestures, as if these gestures were the only possible accompaniments to her actions and also the only possible physical expressions of hospitality, solicitude or motherly care. Later I found that all the women moved in this same, stereotyped way, like benign automata, so what with that and their musical box speech, it was quite possible to feel they were not fully human and, to a certain extent, understand what had produced the prejudices of the Jesuits.

The appearance and manners of the men were by no means so outlandish, perhaps because, although reluctantly, they were forced to mix more with the shore people and so had adopted a rough version of peasant manners and also of peasant dress. They wore loose white shirts over loose trousers with a loose, sleeveless waistcoat usually made from a web of small, knitted, multi-coloured squares, which they donned when the weather grew cool. In winter, both men and women would put on jackets of padded cotton. Mama was already patching and refurbishing a trunkful of these jackets ready for another season’s wear.

The men sometimes wore earrings and various talismans on chains around their necks but did nothing to their faces except grow on them flamboyant moustaches whose drooping lines stressed the brooding shapes of the Indian nose and jaw. Since nobody offered to shave me and I could not shave myself, I, too, sported one of those moustaches before I was up and about again and, once I was supplied with it, I did not bother to remove it for I found I liked my new face far better than my old one. The weeks of pain and sickness passed with the remains of the summer; through my porthole, I saw the shorn cornfields of the great plain and the colours of autumn glowing, then falling, from the trees. My best companion was the ship’s cat, a thick-set, obese, skulking beast, white, with irregular black patches on the rump, the left fore-quarter and the right ear, who became very attached to me for some reason – perhaps because I kept so still he could sleep undisturbed on the warm cushion of my stomach for hours, where he made me throb with the vibrations of his purr. I was fond of him because he was painted up like Mama.

When Nao-Kurai told me I was well enough to go on board, I saw that the entire boat was strung with chains made, each one, of hundreds of little birds folded out of paper and I learned this was not only to advertise to the other river dwellers the presence of a sick man on board but was also an offering to the spirits who had caused my sickness. These birds increased my conviction that Nao-Kurai’s tribe was descended from the painters in feathers. When I learned more of their medicine, however, I began to wonder why I had survived his doctoring for Mama had sterilized the knife with which Nao-Kurai had performed his surgery by dipping it in the fresh urine of a very healthy virgin while reciting a number of antique mantras.

Nao-Kurai occupied an important position in the tribe and I was very lucky to have fallen under his protection. Their business consisted of the marine transportation of goods from one part of the central plain to another via the waterways and, since Dr Hoffman had put the railways out of action, business was enjoying a boom. We drew behind us a whole string of barges which carried imported timber up to a city in the north where work still went on as usual. The entire country was poorly afforested and we were forced to import timber for building or even for the manufacture of furniture from other sources along the sea-board. Nao-Kurai owned the longest string of barges among all the river people and his skill at the standard speech and a remarkable flair for mental arithmetic had made him the spokesman and administrator for the whole community. To a considerable extent the tribe held all its goods in common and tended to think of itself as a scattered but unified family. When I lived among them, there were some five or six hundred river people who travelled mostly in convoys of five or six chains of barges each but I should think their numbers have greatly dwindled since then and perhaps by now they have all abandoned the river, the women have washed their faces for good and they have become small tradesmen on dry land.

Nao-Kurai was a gaunt, hollow-eyed man of somewhat embittered integrity and, though he had a very quick intelligence and, indeed, considerable intellectual powers, even if he were extremely cynical, he was – like the entire tribe – perfectly illiterate. When I was well enough to get up every day, had enough phrases on the tip of my tongue to chirrup morning greetings to the family and could share the porridge bowl at mealtimes without spilling my food, Nao-Kurai took me more and more into his confidence and finally told me he wanted me to teach him to read and write for he was sure the shore people cheated him badly on all the consignments he undertook. When we stopped at a village, he sent one of his sons off to buy pencils, paper and any book he could find, which happened to be a translation of Gulliver’s Travels. So, after that, every evening, when the barges were moored for the night, the supper cleared away and the horse attended to, we sat at the table under a swinging lantern, smoking and studying the alphabet while the boys, under strict orders to be good, sulked in the corners or sat on the deck, too intimidated even to play quietly, while Mama and two of the daughters sat in smiling silence, making lace, and the littlest girl belched and gurgled to herself like a faulty tap, for she was simple-minded.

I had been given Nao-Kurai’s cabin but he would not let me move out of it now that I was well again though it placed a great strain on the sleeping quarters, for all the family had to fit themselves somehow into the main cabin by dint of hammocks slung from hooks and mattresses spread on the boards. The only other room in the barge was a cramped galley where Mama prepared our meals on two little charcoal stoves, using extremely simple, even primitive utensils.

There were six children. Nao-Kurai’s wife had died at the last birth, a boy now three years old. The eldest was also a boy, who suffered from a hare lip; for two centuries of inbreeding had produced a generation of webbed hands, ingrowing eyelashes, lobeless ears, a number of other slight deformities and, Nao-Kurai told me, a high rate of idiocy. The youngest daughter was five years old and still could only crawl. But his other children were strong and healthy enough. I still remember the two elder boys, strapping, handsome lads, diving into the river every morning to wash. But I could not tell what the girls looked like because of their thick, white crust. Even the five-year-old was painted over, although she drooled so much it made the red and white grease run comically together. The next girl was seven and the eldest nine. Though this one, Aoi, was a great big girl and worked hard all day at household chores under her grandmother’s supervision, she still played with dolls. I often saw her cradling in her arms and lullabying a doll dressed like the river babies, a knitted skull cap on its head to stop the demons who grabbed hold of babies’ topknots and pulled them bodily through the portholes, and the rest of it stuffed into a tailored sack, to stop other demons who sucked out babies’ entrails through their little fundaments. And the sack was bright red in colour because red kept away the demons who gave babies croup, colic and pneumonia. But when she offered me the doll so that I could play with it myself, I saw it was not a doll at all but a large fish dressed up in baby clothes. Whenever the fish began to rot, Mama exchanged it for a fresh one just like it so that, though the doll was always changing, it always stayed exactly the same.

That she showed me the doll at all shows on what close terms I had grown with her for even with their own menfolk the girls displayed a choreographic shyness, giggling if addressed directly and hiding their mouths with their hands in a pretty pretence of being too intimidated to reply. But as the weeks went by, I grew more and more attuned to the slow rhythms and amniotic life of the river, I learned to trill their speech as well as anyone and I became, I suppose, a kind of elder brother to them, although Nao-Kurai half hinted at certain plans for me which would make me closer than a brother. But I took no notice of him because I thought Aoi was clearly too young to be married.

As for myself, I knew that I had found the perfect place to hide from the Determination Police and, besides, some streak of atavistic, never-before-acknowledged longing in my heart now found itself satisfied. I was in hiding not only from the Police but from my Minister as well, and also from my own quest. I had abandoned my quest.

You see, I felt the strongest sense of home-coming.

Soon my new language came to my tongue before my former one. I no longer relished the thought of any food except maize porridge and well-sauced fish. Even now, I carry the memory of that barge and my foster family warmly at my heart’s core. I remember one evening in particular. It must have been late November, for the nights were chilly enough for Mama to have lit the stove. The stove burned wood and its long chimney puffed smoke out above the cabin in a homely fashion; it warmed us with its great, round, metal belly that glowed red from the heat it contained. Mama set down the bowl of stiff porridge on the table and Aoi brought us the bowl of stewed fish. Nao-Kurai said a few words of pagan blessing over the food and we began sedately to ball our porridge to a firm enough consistency to sustain its freight of fish. We ate sedately; we always ate sedately. And during the meal we exchanged a few domestic trivialities about the weather and the distance we had come that day. Aoi fed the youngest girl because she could not feed herself. The lamp above us moved with the motion of the boat at the whim of the current and rhythmically now illuminated, now shadowed the faces around the table.

I saw no strangeness in the whitened faces of the girls. They no longer looked like pierrots in a masquerade for I knew each individual feature under the cosmetic, the hollow in the seven-year-old’s cheek that showed where she had lost the last of her milk teeth the previous week and the little scratch the cat had given Aoi’s nose. And Mama looked just as every mother in the world should look. The limited range of feeling and idea they expressed with such a meagre palette of gesture no longer oppressed me; it gave me, instead, that slight feeling of warm claustrophobia I had learned to identify with the notion, ‘home’. I dipped my fist into the pungent stew and, for the first time in my life, I knew exactly how it felt to be happy.

The next day we came into the town of T. and the girls all went below when we moored beside the woodyard. Nao-Kurai asked me to go with him to the wood merchant and so I left the barge for the first time since I had boarded it. I found I was walking with a rolling gait. I was able to convince him that the wood merchant, at least, was one of the honest shoremen, but when we went to the market to get in stocks of maize for the long journey back down the river, I was able to render the river people a service which Nao-Kurai valued more highly than it was worth.

T. was a small, old-fashioned town so far to the inland north that a few sandstone outcrops of the mountains lay beyond the river. Yet here life seemed relatively unaffected by the war and people went about their daily business as if it were nothing to them that the capital had been cut off for three and a half years. This sense of suspended time comforted me. It made me feel that the capital, the war and the Minister had never existed, anyway. I had quite forgotten my black swan and the ambiguous ambassador for I had come back to my people. And Desiderio himself had disappeared because the river people had given me a new name. It was their custom to change a given name if someone had suffered bad luck or misfortune, as they guessed I had done, so now I was called Kiku. The two syllables were separated by the distance of a minor third. The name meant ‘foundling bird’; it seemed to me most wistfully appropriate.

In the market-place, peasant farmers displayed baskets of gleaming eggplants, whorled peppers, slumbrously overripe persimmons and blazing tangerines – all the fruits of late autumn. There were coops of live chickens, tubs of butter and cartwheel cheeses. There were stalls for toys and clothes, cloth by the yard, candy and jewellery. A ballad singer stood up on a stone to give us a vocal demonstration of his Irish origins and a bear in an effeminate hat trimmed with artificial daisies lumbered through the parody of a waltz in the arms of a gipsy woman with red ribbons in her hair. The market-place was full of the liveliest bustle and there were enough Indian faces in the crowds of country people to make us feel a little more at ease than we usually did on dry land, for this town was a kind of headquarters for the river people, for reasons I was to learn later.

First, we went to the corn chandlers and ordered fourteen stone of hulled maize to be delivered to the boat; then we wandered about the market making Mama’s commission of purchases. As they thrust three squawking chickens into paper bags for us, a man whose features and dress showed he was one of the clan came rushing up breathlessly and poured out a complaint as dramatically as Verdi.

Pared of the histrionic grace notes, it was a simple story. He had brought a consignment of grain from the plains to a seed-broker here. He had made his mark on a contract he could not read with the farmer and now the broker claimed he had contracted to carry a whole two tons more than had now been removed to the godowns and our brother, Iinoui, must pay the difference from his own pocket. Which would ruin him. Tears ran down his brown cheeks. He was fat, old, poor and quite at a loss.

‘This will be easy to settle!’ said Nao-Kurai. ‘Kiku here can read and write, you see.’

Iinoui’s eyes grew round with awe. He bowed to me stiffly and made one or two flattering remarks in the heightened language of respect they used when they wished to honour somebody’s skill or beauty, for they loved to abnegate themselves before one another. So we went all three together to the seed-broker’s. On the way, in the glass of a shop-window, I saw the reflections of three brown men in loose, white, shabby clothes, with tattered straw hats pulled down over our oblique eyes, a deep thatch of black hair above our upper lips and below austere noses that expressed contempt for those unlike themselves in the very whorls of our nostrils. I could have been Nao-Kurai’s eldest son or youngest brother. This idea gave me great pleasure.

The seed-broker was a pale, flabby, furtive man. When I broke into a flood of invective in the standard speech, he began to quail already and when I demanded to see the contracts, his blustering protests were adequate proof that he was hopelessly in the wrong. I threatened to find a lawyer and sue him for ten thousand dollars’ worth of defamation to Iinoui’s character. Sweat beaded his unhealthy-looking forehead. I had already developed a marked distaste for the insipid colouring and limp bodies of the shore people; they looked like the comic figures Mama would sometimes mould out of the porridge to make the idiot daughter giggle. The broker offered Iinoui five hundred dollars’ compensation for his ‘clerk’s mistake’ and when I told Iinoui this, both he and Nao-Kurai looked at me as though I were a magician. With a good deal of instinctive graciousness, Iinoui accepted the sum in cash but while the broker counted out the notes, the two barge-masters conferred together and then with me so that when Iinoui had stowed the money away in the pouch of his inner belt, I had the pleasure of informing the merchant that none of the river people would henceforward handle goods for him any more. Since the barges were the only remaining form of internal transport, it was he and not his prey who now found ruin staring him in the face. We left him shaking with impotent rage.

Iinoui insisted I take half his profits but I would not have done so had Nao-Kurai not told me that if I did not, I would hurt Iinoui’s feelings. Then we went to a bar which served Indians and drank a good deal of brandy and all the time they both flattered me unmercifully, so I felt almost ashamed. You must realize that, in spite of his quick wits and native intelligence, Nao-Kurai was not making good progress at his lessons. For one thing, he was far too old for the first grade. After so many years of hauling rope and heaving sacks, his fingers were too gnarled and stiff to handle a pencil with sensitivity. And, for another thing, his mind, which held the patterns of the currents in every river in the country and remembered the sites and quirks of all the locks on each one of half a thousand canals; his mind, a fabulous repository of water-lore, folkways and the mythology of the past; that mind which could calculate like lightning how much freight a barge could carry or how much coal made up a load – this crowded and magnificently functioning mind no longer had a stray corner left in which to store the Roman alphabet. Besides, he did not think in straight lines; he thought in subtle and intricate interlocking circles.

He conceived of certain polarities – light and darkness; birth and death – which, though they were immutable, existed in a locked tension. He could comprehend orally the most sophisticated concepts in a flash but co-ordinate his hand and eye sufficiently to form a linear sequence as elementary as ‘the cat sat on the mat’, he could not. ‘But, Kiku!’ he would say. ‘The cat sits there, upon your knee, and though she is not the only cat in the world, she is for me the very essence of cat.’ The very shapes of the letters led him astray. He fell to musing on their angularities and traced and retraced them, chuckling to himself with pleasure, until they became cursive abstracts, beautiful in themselves but utterly lacking in signification. Our evenings of study had become a mutual torture. I knew he would never learn to read or write. And his failure only made him respect me more. My success with the seed-broker clinched a decision that must have been growing in his mind for some time.

At last we broke away from Iinoui and went off to finish our shopping, belching fumes of brandy at one another companionably through our moustaches. I paused to spend some of my new wealth on a bunch of speckled dahlias for Mama and then I bought a cheerful silk handkerchief with violets painted on it.

‘Is that a present for someone?’ asked Nao-Kurai with the beautiful, tentative tact of my people.

‘For Aoi,’ I replied.

He had the chickens bundled in the crook of one arm and a whole still life of vegetables crammed in his other while I carried a cheese, a mound of butter wrapped up in straw and a basket containing four dozen eggs. But still he managed to reach out and grasp my hand.

‘Does my Aoi please you?’

We stood in the market and it was the middle of the afternoon. The gipsy girl still danced with her bear and their money box now glinted like a box of herrings from all the silver they had been given. The Irishman had just embarked on an endless lament for dead Napoleon and a few pennies lay in his proffered cap. I remembered the city, the opera-house and the music of Mozart. The voices of Mama and Aoi were now to me the music of Mozart and as I remembered the city, so I gladly said good-bye to it. The brandy I had drunk and Iinoui’s gift and pretty speeches made me warm and sentimental. And then Nao-Kurai might have been my father, from appearances; and I loved him already.

The river people had evolved or inherited an intricate family system which was theoretically matrilinear though in practice all decisions devolved upon the father. The father – or, nominally, mother – adopted as his son the man whom his eldest daughter married. When he died, this son-in-law inherited the barge and all that went with it. Therefore Nao-Kurai offered me far more than a bride; he offered me a home, a family and a future. If I murdered Desiderio and became Kiku for ever, I need fear nothing in my life ever, any more. I need not fear loneliness or boredom or lack of love. My life would flow like the river on which I lived. I would become officially an outcaste but, since I had signed my allegiance with the outcastes, I would no longer linger on the margins of life with a delicate sneer on my face, wistfully wishing that I were Marvell or that I were dead. My eyes filled with tears. I could hardly speak.

‘Yes,’ I stammered. ‘She pleases me.’

‘Then she is yours,’ he said with Arab simplicity and with one accord we dropped all our parcels and embraced one another.

As we did so, the gipsy girl flung back her head at the conclusion of a fandango and I caught sight of her face over Nao-Kurai’s shoulder. For a single, fleeting second, she wore the face of Dr Hoffman’s beautiful ambassador and all my resolution failed, for I would have followed that face to the end of the world. But she raised her hand to wipe the sweat away and it was as if she wiped the ambassador’s face away. She was once again an ordinary gipsy girl, even an ugly gipsy girl, with a wide flat nose, small eyes and gold coins dangling from her pierced ears. So I knew my eyes had deceived me but, all the same, a little of my glory evaporated and I returned to the barge more soberly, though Nao-Kurai laughed all the time from pure joy.

Because Aoi was only nine years old, I thought there would be a long period of betrothal but everyone assured me she had reached puberty and offered me visual proof if I did not believe them. So I abandoned the last vestiges of my shore-folk squeamishness and Nao-Kurai fixed the date of my wedding for a few weeks ahead, the time of the winter solstice, when we would return to the town of T. after a trip to take a load of manufactured paper goods across the country on the canal system for, beyond the town of T., the river widened to form a natural basin where the river people traditionally met to celebrate weddings, which were always occasions of great festivity among them.

Mama kissed me and told me how happy she was. Aoi jumped straight up into my arms as if propelled upwards by the force of her own giggling; the middle sister shyly tugged my shirt-tails and asked me if I would marry her as well; while even the youngest seemed to drool with unusual enthusiasm and all the brothers shook my hand and murmured more reticent congratulations. They hung all the barges in our chain with flowers made from golden paper to tell the waterways there was to be a wedding and men from every barge we passed came aboard to embrace me. It was the ritual commencement of the ritual of adoption. Mama and the girls began to stitch a very elaborate trousseau for both my bride and myself and also to make lists of the food they would need for the wedding feast. But when I asked them what kind of dishes they would serve up, they giggled convulsively and said it was to be a surprise.

Now Aoi began to treat me with a great deal of familiarity. She came and sat down on my knee whenever she had any time to spare and tweaked the ends of my moustaches, she planted wet, childish kisses on my cheeks and mouth, and taking hold of my hands firmly, inserted them under the folds of her apron and her blouse, demanding me to tell her if her breasts had grown since the last performance and if so, how much. On the third night of our betrothal, we had a special supper – oyster soup thickened with beaten eggs as well as the usual cereal and fish. We drank this soup from special cups with a pink and purple glaze. I had not seen these cups before; apparently they were kept specially for weddings. Aoi knelt down in front of me to hand me my soup and accompanied her offering with certain verbal formulae too archaic and complex for me to understand but Nao-Kurai, laughing suggestively, refused to translate them. For the first time I felt, however slightly, that they were making my ignorance of their ways the butt of a private joke.

Indeed, in a curious way, I had become less sure of myself among the river people since that curious trick of eyesight which made me put the ambassador’s face on top of that of the gipsy girl, even though now I had an accredited part to play in their opera. I began to sense, or thought I sensed, a new kind of ambivalence in, especially, Nao-Kurai’s behaviour. For one thing, he had dropped Gulliver’s Travels over the side of the barge and announced, with rather a childish glee, that our lessons were at an end. Well, I could only be thankful for that but I could not by any means interpret the expression of what I can only call incipient triumph I sometimes caught in the fathomless depths of his brown eyes, which were shaped like commas and, as I already knew, in no way expressed his soul. But the principal source of my unease was just this: the betrothal and subsequent marriage already involved me in a whole intricate web of ritual which I knew I must negotiate unerringly – and yet my new almost-father seemed to take a strange pleasure in refusing to give me any clues as to how to traverse it. I already guessed it was part of my function to enthusiastically massage my fiancée’s breasts whenever she offered them to me, even if it were in front of everybody. I assumed by the presence of the oysters that the soup was an aphrodisiac so I drank the three bowls she gave me, smacking my lips ostentatiously, and then I guessed I ought to ask for more. The entire cabin rocked with mirth so I knew my guess was correct and, as I expected, a little scrabbling knock came on my door some time past midnight.

‘Who’s there?’ I said softly.

‘A poor girl a-shivering with cold this night,’ she answered in the voice of a child who recites a poem she has learned by heart. Her diction was as old-fashioned as her invitation to soup but this time I understood her perfectly and got up to let her in.

She had washed off the paint for the night, tied up her hair in pigtails with yellow bows and put on a plain white nightdress that reminded me of poor Mary Anne, whom I would much rather have forgotten. However, I was touched to see she still clutched her fishdoll by the tail of its red night-shirt; she must have brought it with her out of habit, for company. She scampered immediately to my bed and jumped between the sheets, arranging her doll neatly with its gills on the white-frilled pillow beside her. She was rather more solemn than usual but still she seemed to have studied every word and movement from a book of manners. Mama must have taught her everything. When I climbed into the bed beside her, she snuggled very prettily in my arms, reached down for my penis in a very businesslike way and began to stroke it with very considerable dexterity.

Now the sexual mores of the river people were a closed book to me though I felt I could learn them very quickly once I had started; but in this particular situation I simply did not know if actual coitus was expected of me. The heating soup seemed to indicate it was but somehow I thought Aoi would not have been quite so forward in her manner unless it was not. My increasing excitement under her diabolically cunning little fingers made it all the more difficult to decide but when I turned her emphatically over on to her plump backside, she let out an unpremeditated caw of shock and affront so I stopped what I was about immediately and lay quite still, contenting myself with tweaking her pubescent nipples, until, by her own unaided work, she procured me an orgasm I was quite unable to forestall even though, as I sobbed it out, I wondered anxiously that it might be out of order and the whole exercise had been designed to test my stoicism, for they set great store by stoicism and never wept at funerals.

But Aoi seemed quite content and curled up to sleep until Mama brought us our breakfast in bed next morning, with many expressions of approval and kisses for both of us. When I met Nao-Kurai on deck, he roared with approbation and clapped my back. Since I was half expecting him to be sullen because I had passed another test successfully, I was more taken aback than ever.

The next night there was no soup but Aoi visited me promptly on the hour. This time she wore green bows on her pigtails. I guessed that Mama, Nao-Kurai and probably the entire family had their ears pressed to the bulwark in order to miss no sound we made and it was probably my duty to come as noisily as possible; so I did. This time she allowed me to caress her diminutive slit and I found, to my astonishment, her clitoris was as long as my little finger. This genuinely puzzled me. I had never encountered anything quite like it and, though I was sure it was against the rules, I decided to ask Mama about it the very next day. I thought she was more likely to explain the phenomenon to me than her son was, for she showed – so far as I could tell – nothing but honest pleasure at the impending marriage.

I trapped her by herself, for a wonder, as she prepared some savoury messes for our lunch and she embarked on a warbling recitative clotted with archaisms and references to traditions of unspeakable antiquity which boiled down to the following: it was the custom for mothers of young girls to manipulate their daughters’ private parts for a regulation hour a day from babyhood upwards, coaxing the sensitive little projection until it attained lengths the river people considered both aesthetically and sexually desirable. The techniques of these maternal caresses were handed down from mother to mother but, when Aoi’s mother died, Mama had undertaken the indispensable handling of her granddaughters and felt a justifiable pride in having done so well by the girls. She asked me, had she not achieved wonders? And in all sincerity I answered, yes. The origins of this elongatory practice were lost in the mists of myth and ritual; she used the pentatonic phrase that meant ‘snake’ at one point and there were extraordinary snakes in their mythology. But the practice itself was, perhaps, an equivalent of the circumcision ceremonies among the males. Nao-Kurai had told me that the inevitable circumcision always took place without exception in mass surgical ceremonies when a boy reached the age of twelve and, for three weeks after the operation, the barges on which the boys who underwent it lived flew a number of bright red paper kites from flagpoles. Fortunately, the nuns had had me tidied up in that way when I was far too young to notice so I was spared the fear that a belated knife would descend on my foreskin before I could be married.

When she saw my curiosity about these customs, perhaps she wondered if I thought she might be lying to conceal a natural deformity of her granddaughter’s, so Mama closed the galley door and told me to turn my back. I heard the slithering of garments and, when she told me to look again, she had taken off her trousers and, with those elegant gestures of refined invitation which always moved me so much, she invited me to inspect her own projection, which formed a splendid, quivering growth at the head of the dark red nether lips. The skin of her thighs was still supple and I realized I was quite unable to guess how old she was or even whether she was still attractive because of her white paint. Since all the river women married at puberty, she need not be older than her late forties and when I experimentally caressed her, I found she was already slick with secretions. She twittered a few words of admonition but, at the same time, slid fast the wooden bolt on the galley door and took me against the bulwark with a great deal of gasping, while a pan of shrimp danced and spluttered on the charcoal stove.

I experienced an almost instantaneous regret as soon as the act was over for I could hardly imagine there was any society in the world which would not think that gaining carnal knowledge of one’s hostess and foster grandmother was a gross abuse of hospitality but Mama, smiling (as far as I could tell), sighing and fluttering butterfly kisses all over my remorseful face, told me she had not enjoyed sex since the last circumcision festival in the town of T., the previous April, and that was a very long time ago; that my performance, although improvised, had been spirited enough to give her a great deal of pleasure; and that she was always available in the galley every morning after breakfast and before lunch. Then she wiped us both dry with a handtowel, put on her trousers again and turned her attention back to the shrimp, which had scorched a little.

I went to lie down on my bunk for a while and examined the situation. Once again, I thought I had gone down a snake when in fact I was climbing up a ladder. Now I had acquired a very powerful ally indeed. Mama’s kindness to me increased enormously. The breakfast she brought Aoi and me included, now, all manner of specially juicy tidbits, such as grilled eel. Sometimes I heard her fluting my praises to her son when they were alone together. The promiscuity I had inherited from my mother, so often an embarrassment in the past, was standing me in very good stead. Indeed, I was growing almost reconciled to mothers.

I thought that night I would come to grips with my child bride because she was wearing purple ribbons but she moved on to fellatio and so it went. Mama confirmed my suspicion that actual intercourse was forbidden until the wedding night itself, so the groom would still have some first fruits to pluck, and those nights of autumn passed in elaborate love play with my erotic, giggling toy, every night adorned with different coloured bows, while in the mornings I screwed the toy’s grandmother up against the wall. I began to feel like a love slave. They fed me very rich food and nobody called on me to perform any tasks on shipboard at all except occasionally to check bills for loading or bills for purchases for, after we delivered our paper goods, were honestly paid for them and turned about for the return journey to the town of T., Nao-Kurai began to lay in sumptuous stocks for the wedding. He bought five dozen jars of the very sweet wine they make in this part of the country from plums and honey; a ten gallon cask of raw brandy; a fifteen pound drum of dried apricots; and all manner of other things, including a live sheep which would be slaughtered for the feast. The dry goods were stored down below in the hold but the sheep was tethered to the deck of the barge which followed us and given boiled barley and oats to eat. It grew fatter as one looked at it, until it was almost too fat to bleat. But when I asked if it was to be the main course, roasted whole as a pièce de résistance, they said, no; there would be something even better. But they would not tell me what it was because, they said, they wanted to astonish me. Then they would laugh softly.

So we drifted back past the melancholy landscape of early winter, through terrain so flat the light fell from an excess of sky with a peculiar, visionary intensity. These would be the last days of freedom of choice; I could still choose to leave them now, but after my wedding the barge and the river would have to be sufficient world for me and though I was kept busy enough oscillating between my two lovers, I sometimes felt an acrid nostalgia for those ugly streets where nobody cared for me and I cared for nothing, though I instantly quenched this nostalgia for I thought it must be nothing but a marsh-fire of the mind. There was no news at all of the capital in any of the villages along the canals and although at nights extraordinary lights played around the mountains we now approached again, there were no other signs of the war itself in this forgotten, pastoral country which seemed to have turned so deeply inward on itself under the great burden of sky which pressed down upon it that nothing outside itself had any significance. This was the sky which covered the world of the river people. I felt intolerably exposed to those enormous heavens. In self-defence, I became introspective but the more I brooded, the more convinced I grew that this meandering formalization of life they offered me was worth the trouble of the risky ritual of induction into it.

The canals were full of barges and by the time we reached the great river, we headed a long convoy all flying paper streamers. In the evenings other barge-masters joined us in the cabin while the women were relegated to the galley or to my little bedroom and we drank brandy, smoked our corn-cob pipes and I listened to many discussions of their politics, which seemed mainly to turn on the maintenance of the barges and the arrangements of the adoption-marriages which linked them all together. More than ever I realized their life was a complex sub-universe with its own inherent order as inaccessible to the outsider as it went unnoticed by him. And yet they were somehow frozen in themselves. Even the method of pouring a drink was hallowed by tradition and never altered. One held out one’s glass to the offered jug, then took the jug after one’s own glass was filled and filled the other’s glass, so nobody ever poured out a drink for himself. The community spirit reigned among them to that extent! And in this lack of self, I began to sense a singular incapacity for being, that sad, self-imposed limitation of experience I recognized in myself and must also, like my cheekbones, be my inheritance from the Indians. And yet I knew it was in me and though I felt constraint, I was learning to love that constraint. Nao-Kurai treated me with overt pride, yet more than ever I sensed an undertow of veiled hostility until I wondered if it were simply this – he was scared that, at the last moment, I would get away from him.

So we entered the town of T. again and did the last of our festival shopping in a market full of tinsel, Christmas trees and other souvenirs of a festival we ourselves were too pagan to comprehend. There were posters everywhere advertising a fair that would come to town on Christmas Eve and the church announced it would celebrate Midnight Mass but we would burn our candles only to the primordial spirits of the solstice whose roots lay in the turn of the seasons and the principle of fertility. It was, said Nao-Kurai, the most suitable time for a wedding. This time we took no orders in the town but sailed further up the river a little way to the basin, where it seemed all the barges in the world were waiting for us, garlanded with paper emblems and each one flying a blaze of paper candle-lanterns decorated with phallic symbols in my honour, for tomorrow was my wedding day.

For inscrutable, hieratic reasons, Aoi did not come to my bed that night and the winter moon shone so brightly through the white curtains at my porthole that it hurt my eyes and I could not sleep. At last I went up on deck and found Nao-Kurai, wakeful too, was sitting on a coil of rope beneath a great cloud of pipe-smoke, sipping at a jug of brandy decanted from his big barrel. He seemed pleased to see me, though he did not greet me by name. He fetched me a glass and poured me a drink. I could tell by the way he walked to the galley that he had already been drinking on his own for some time.

For a long time, we watched the moonlight on the water together in silence. Then he began to speak and I soon realized he was very drunk for the words seemed to drift up at random out of a mind which had become a pool of memory in which an idea or two rose up to the surface now and then, like hazy strands of water-weed. As he went on, I became less and less sure that he remembered who I was and by the end of the story I was certain of it. Perhaps he had mistaken me for the eldest boy or for one of the bargees who had come aboard to pay their respects. He spoke the thickest version of the river argot and used many expressions that had long fallen out of common use but I could make out the drift of his story well enough.

‘It was a long time ago – oh! such a very long time ago, it was, before we got to living on the water. And then we used to live in huts made out of down and bits of feather and to make tough enough fabric to keep the weather out we stuck them all together with spit, or so Mama’s mama used to say and she never told a lie. Besides, she was quite old enough to remember everything and she’d been hatched from a parrot’s egg when she was a little girl, oh, yes she had. She said so. She was old enough to remember everything and she was such an old lady when she died of the coughing she was bent right over like a snake eating its tail and she’d eaten snakes herself, you know. I’m coming to that in a moment.

‘She was so bent over when she died a great to-do we had of it to straighten her out enough to fit her into a natural coffin, oh, yes! what a time we had! But all this was such a long time ago, all this when it happened what I’m remembering tonight, it was such a long time ago there was hardly any dark at night and, on the whole, it was a good time, because there weren’t any shore folk, but, then, it was a bad time, because we didn’t know how to make fire, did we. So it was always a wee bit cold and we couldn’t cook nothing, of course, because of not having fire.

‘But it’s a lie to say we didn’t know how to make fire until the black ships came! What a lie! But even so, in those days, the days I’m talking about, we ate nothing but slugs and snakes and crawly things that lived in the water because if we didn’t actually live on the water, then, we lived, so to speak, in it. Or rather, there wasn’t much difference in those days, none of your harsh divisions. No day, no night, but light sufficient; no solid, no fluid, but footholds a-plenty; no hard, no soft but everything chewable… everything all at once, just as it should be. Or so my granny used to say. Except it was just a wee bit cold.’

Most of the last sequence issued from his mouth in the weird chant of one who recounts details of a legendary past and I was pleased to find more evidence that my family might derive from the beautiful bird-people of antiquity. The night air chilled me so I took another mouthful or two of brandy. Around us the sleeping boats rocked gently at anchor, each one decorated with paper garlands to celebrate my wedding, and my wife slept beyond the bulkhead behind me, probably nursing her curious doll in her innocent arms. Nao-Kurai rambled on in a drowsy voice, inadvertently flattening notes here and there, which subtly altered various meanings, but I continued to listen because these picturesque ancient survivals were, were they not, the orally transmitted history of my people.

‘Now in those days, the women weren’t supposed to touch the snakes, not with their hands, that is. But one young girl picked off of the floor this head of a snake her father had caught and it spat its venom right up between her legs and she conceived straight off, didn’t she. So she had this snake in her belly and it rattled around and writhed and she got very uncomfortable and said: “Mr Snake, won’t you come out, please?” And Snake said: “All in my own good time.” So she went on doing her chores but the wonder of it was, she never got cold, no matter how hard the wind blew. So Snake said: “That’s because I’ve built my little fire. Don’t you know what a fire is?” And the girl said: “Well, no. Not precisely.” So out pops Snake from her hole with a bit of fire in his jaws and she rubs her hands to feel the glow and jumps for joy and says: “It’s good!” So he taught her the word for “warm”, which she needed to know, see, because she’d never felt like that before.

‘Well, she was just going to eat her dinner, a little bit of lizard, that’s what she’d got for dinner, and Snake says: “Why don’t you toast your bit of lizard over my fire? I’m sure you’ll find it ever so much more tasty.” So she did and it was the most savoury thing she’d ever eaten, much more savoury than all those raw slugs and snails and things. Then they heard somebody coming and Snake slithered back up inside her quick as a flash and all was as it had been before. Except, after that, whenever she was by herself, Snake came out and she toasted and roasted her dinners and kept lovely and warm all winter, too.

‘Now her father and brothers began to prick up their nostrils and lick their lips when they smelled the lovely savoury smells in the hut and they found some bones she hadn’t picked quite clean and chewed the crumbs of meat off them and oh! it was nice but they hadn’t the least idea why. But they saw the girl round as a ball and still she showed no signs of going into labour, though when they leaned against her belly, they would have thought it was as hot as an oven if they’d known what an oven was, of course.

‘So, one day, the youngest brother hid in the cabin trunk and saw Snake come out of his sister and a big flame flickered all round the hut and cooked her dinner. “What’s this?” he thought and he jumped out and caught hold of Snake and said: “Show me your trick or I’ll kill you!” But Snake slithered out of his hands and vanished up the sister before you could say “Jack Robinson” and Sister cried and pleaded but it wasn’t any good because she didn’t know how to make fire, did she.’

Nao-Kurai spoke more and more slowly and began to leave great gaps between the sentences to be filled by the mournful lapping of the waters against the sides of the barge, while his head slid further down his chest. Somewhere, a tethered dog howled.

‘When Father and the other Brothers came back, Youngest Brother told them what he’d seen so they picked up their big knives and cut Sister open just like you’d fillet a fish. But Snake was sulking and wouldn’t show them how to make fire. They teased him and bullied him and dangled Sister’s head in front of him by the hair so at last he consented to give them lessons. Every day, in the evenings, after supper, he’d rub two sticks together and make the flame and say “See! It’s easy!” But they couldn’t learn, no matter how they tried. They racked their poor old brains and inked their fingers but they could never learn as much as A, B, C, or what spells “cat”, could they. So then they knew it was magic and they killed Snake and cut him into little pieces. Then they each ate their piece and… after that… they could all make fire…

‘… every one of them could scribble away in fire in a twinkling, easy as anything…’

With that, his eyes closed and he spoke no more except to mumble, with intense satisfaction, ‘Do anything easy as anything,’ before he passed entirely into a thick sleep. I seized the jug and gulped down a great slug of brandy for I was shaking though not, this time, with cold; I shook with terror and despair. I remembered a story I had read once in an old book about some tribe of Central Asia who ‘made a point of killing and eating in their own country any stranger indiscreet enough to commit a miracle or show any particular sign of sanctity, for thus they imbibe his magic virtue.’ The name of the tribe, Hazara, had once helped me in a difficult crossword puzzle; now the remembered information helped me solve another clue. If the bird-people had wanted the Jesuits’ magic, they would have eaten the priests to get it. As they would eat me.

All at once I filled in the suspicious gaps my lonely sentimentality had refused to acknowledge. Nao-Kurai’s air of furtive triumph after I had accepted his daughter; Mama’s excessive cordiality; their suspicious eagerness to adopt me when they knew, against all appearances, I was really nothing but a feared, mysterious dweller upon the shore all the time, one who had not all his life felt beneath him only the shifting motion of the insubstantial river yet who owned the most precious, most arcane knowledge they could only gain for themselves by desperate measures. And I knew as well as if Nao-Kurai had sung it out that they proposed to kill me and eat me, like Snake, the Fire-Bringer, in the fable, so that they would all learn how to read and write after a common feast where I would feature as the main dish on the menu at my own wedding breakfast. I was torn between mirth and horror. At last I got up, covered my father-in-law with my jacket to stop him catching cold and went silently below, prowling for further evidence.

In the main cabin my brothers and sisters lay sweetly sleeping and the moonlight mixed with festive lantern light slanted through the portholes and shone on their beloved faces. Because, yes, I am not ashamed to say I loved them all, even the dribbling baby who could not speak her name and peed on my lap when I took her on my knee. Mama and my child bride shared the same mattress and when I saw in one another’s arms the old flesh and the young flesh which were, in some sense, interchangeable and whose twinned textures was already part of my flesh, then I fell down on my knees beside them, ready at that moment to pledge myself entirely to them and even to give my own flesh to them, in whatever form they pleased, if they thought it would do them any good. I was almost overcome with trust and good faith. I do believe that I was crying, young fool that I was. And Aoi had her doll beside her; her hand clasped its red dress. It was an inexpressibly touching detail.

Then the child shifted position in her sleep and muttered something. As she stirred, so she uncovered what should have been the scaled head of her baby in its white cap. I saw there was no fish’s head under the lace but the tip of the blade of one of the very large knives Mama used in the kitchen. The boat swayed with the current and Aoi, half-waking, drowsily clutched the knife to her bosom. With great distinctness, she said, ‘Tomorrow. Do it tomorrow.’

Then she turned on her back and began to snore.

Perhaps the knife was involved in some bizarre ritual of defloration. And, again, perhaps not. I sat back on my heels and wiped the sudden sweat from my forehead; then I realized I was not willing to take the slender chance they did not mean me harm. But, all the same, I kissed their cool cheeks before I left, first poor Aoi, who would have murdered me because they told her to, a programmed puppet with a floury face who was not the mistress of her own hands, and then Mama, whose skin I had never tasted before without savouring the odour of the mutton fat base of her cosmetics. I do believe my heart came as near as it ever did to breaking, that night – as near as it came to breaking, that is, before I said good-bye to Albertina, when my heart broke finally and forever.

I had nothing to take with me from the ship except memories. I went outside and said a silent good-bye to the stupefied figure of my father-in-law, who had tumbled from his seat and sprawled beside the brandy bottle that had betrayed him. As I let myself noiselessly over the side down into the freezing water, the candles in the paper lanterns began to gutter and by the time I reached the river bank, they were beginning to go out, one by one.

The wind blew through my soaking clothes and the cold woke up the old Desiderio. As I turned my back on the barges and set my face towards the distant lights of the town, I welcomed myself to the old home of my former self with a bored distaste. Desiderio had saved Kiku from the dear parents who would have dined off him but Kiku still could not find it in his heart just yet to thank Desiderio for it, as all his hopes of ease and tranquillity ran off and away from him like the river water that dripped from his clothing at every step.

The clock in the market square told me it was a quarter to four in the morning and the market square was full of the booths and sideshows of the Christmas fair, all locked, shuttered and deserted at this hour. I thought I might find a little shelter against what remained of the night in one of the tents and so I went down the canvas alleys until I found an entrance held open by a rope, as if someone inside were waiting for me. I recognized the booth instantly. This time, the sign outside said: EVERYBODY’S SPECIAL XMAS PRESENT. I went inside. He rustled in his straw.

‘Candle and matches on the box,’ he said. ‘And close up the flap now you’re inside, boy. Brass monkey weather, dammit.’

As I expected, I saw in the machine, rotating as on a pole, a woman’s head flung back as if in ecstasy, so that the black hair unfurled like grandiloquent flags around her. The head of Dr Hoffman’s ambassador turned like the world on its axis and one severed hand pressed its forefinger against her lips as if to tell me she was keeping a delicious secret while the other was extended as if to joyfully greet my return to her.

It was titled: PRECARIOUS GLIMMERING, A HEAD SUSPENDED FROM INFINITY.