Peter Carey - The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

That woman never looked at me, not all the time I sat there. She was not so easy on the eyes herself — she had a fleshy face, with large jowls and small eyes which distorted behind her thick lenses. She did not even glance my way. She looked down at her lectern, or over my shoulder at Jacques. I was not insulted. It was fine with me.

‘This three-mile tunnel,’ she said, referring to a stack of tattered index cards, ‘was dug by a fellow wanted to get into Voorstand every bit as bad as you. Thanks to him you have this lovely tunnel. Thanks to his widow I have the pleasure of being its present owner.

‘The man who dug this tunnel, his name was Burro Plasse. Burro Plasse was a posturer in Saarlim, Voorstand. Has anyone ever heard of Plasse’s Knot?’

None of us.

‘Plasse’s Knot was the invention of Burro Plasse. He was a famous posturer. He could do the backwards and the forwards, both. Mostly, people who claim to do Plasse’s Knot are not doing what he did.

‘Burro Plasse was a posturer in Saarlim, Voorstand. Came home one night, just after midnight. It was a snowy night, mid-winter, and there was the Hairy Man sitting on Plasse’s stoop, sack in his hand.

‘“What you got there?” Burro Plasse said to the Hairy Man.

‘“Just a little old sack,” said the Hairy Man.

‘Then Burro Plasse knew the Hairy Man had come to get him and take him down underneath the earth. He knew his time had come.

‘But Burro Plasse — he was young and had a fancy lady sleeping in his bed upstairs and he was determined not to be took by no little black hairy thing, so he says to the ugly little creature who is sitting there, “I know you like the Sirkus, Hairy Man. How about I show you a few new tricks fore we go?”

‘The Hairy Man had icicles on his beard and snow on his big eyebrows, but when he heard this he swished his tail and he said to Burro Plasse, “I reckon I seed just about everything there is to see, but why don’t you go ahead? Don’t make no difference to me.”

‘So that night in the snow in the Kakdorp in Saarlim City, while his fancy lady was sleeping in the room above his head, Burro Plasse did the best show of his life. He did it in the street wearing his blue singlet and his swimming trunks. He was thirty-three years old, which is old for a posturer, but that night he did knots for the Hairy Man no one ever saw on earth, or in the other place.

‘When the show was done, the Hairy Man said to Burro Plasse, “I’ll tell you what I’ll do, on account of how you are just about the best posturer I ever saw. Instead of taking you below the earth I’ll take you on to the other side of the Mountains of the Moon, and if you can dig through the mountains, you can come home to that fancy lady in the room upstairs.”

‘Now maybe you folks come from some parts like Pakistan where they never heard of no Hairy Man, and maybe you are thinking this is just a story I’m telling for the money. But you already paid your money to Aziz and I don’t have to tell no one any story, and I’ll tell you — there are folk who say he came here because he had TB, but if I have to choose between the Hairy Man and a fellow with TB digging three miles through solid rock, well, you tell me.

‘Folks thinks his name is Burro cause he burrowed this tunnel, but that is not the case. He was named Burro cause he had this-here donkey. We call it a burro. He used to take that burro into Droogstroom once a month to get supplies. I knew Burro Plasse. As you’ll see from the postcards he was a big old fellow with a long white beard.’

She removed the card from the top of the stack and placed it on the bottom. I looked across at Wally. His hands were cut and bleeding from the wheelbarrow.

‘What is this horse-shit?’ he said.

‘Many folks,’ the woman said, ‘also think he digged the tunnel for smuggling purposes. Nothing could be further from the truth. He digged that tunnel to get back to that fancy lady, but by the time he got back there she was an old lady, eighty-five years old. Her name was Mary Anne Lubbock and you can see her grave in Saarlim Central Cemetery. She was the one I bought the tunnel from, and she was the one told me this story.’

‘Why are we listening to this?’ Wally said, loud enough for anyone to hear.

The woman fiddled with her index cards, but she did not look at Wally.

‘Now if you come up here, I have postcards depicting Burro Plasse, two for each of you. One, I’d like you to take the trouble to mail to me, the other is a souvenir. Ah-zeez here will take you through the tunnel, but you can’t ask him to lick the stamps. So I’m asking you. When you get to where you’re going, send me the card. I like to know my customers got there safe and sound. I’m going to give you your cards and a flashlight each. Thank you for using Burro Plasse’s tunnel.’

She opened a door behind her lectern. Wally stood and limped forward. It was only then I saw how tired he was. His grey eyes were empty, exhausted. His face was dust-caked, streaked with dry sweat.

‘You … want … to … rest?’ I asked him.

‘Please hurry,’ said Aziz.

Wally turned, he turned slowly, like an old turtle, craning his neck up to bring his tight-lined jaw to the same height as Aziz’s. ‘Don’t tell me to hurry. Don’t waste my time with all this horse-shit and then tell me to hurry.’

‘Please,’ Aziz insisted. ‘You hurry.’

‘Shut the fuck up,’ Wally said.

Aziz’s little shoulders seemed to shiver beneath the white cotton skin of his shirt.

‘Just shut the fuck up,’ Wally said, climbing into the wheelbarrow. ‘Can you manage that, mo-ami?’

Aziz lifted his chin, and his face, for the moment he looked at Wally, was cold and shining. Then he ducked his head and passed into the cold air of the tunnel.

Our extraordinary nurse had not expected to walk straight into the tunnel. Even when the door was opened, he had imagined that there would be an ante-room, toilets, perhaps even some bread, or one of those yellow cans of herrings which he had seen on roadside tables and which, although disgusting to contemplate at first, had become more and more appealing as the day wore on. But there was no food or water. The door opened — and there was a blue gravel floor leading away into the chilly darkness of Voorstand. There was no chance to prepare for it. He was in the tunnel before he was ready. He felt the weight of rock above his head but also — paradoxically — inside his mouth. The air was dry and cold. His bladder was filled to bursting. He had to push the wheelchair hard in order to keep up with the farmer and the wheelbarrow. His arms ached. The blisters on his hands had burst, blistered, burst again, and were now weeping for a second time. The floor of the tunnel was uneven. Rough outcrops tripped him, stopped the wheelchair dead and jammed the handles into his hip bone or stomach, and it felt, almost from the beginning, like more than he could manage.

No matter what lies he had told to get here, no matter what long strands of life led him to this point, no matter that it had seemed — as recently as two hours ago when they first caught sight of the Mountains of the Moon — as if this voyage was nothing less than his destiny, now his body was traitor to his will. If he could have resigned, he would have done it. (So it felt. So he feared.) He could have cried, but of course he could no more cry than piss, no more piss than he could resign.

It was the nature of his secret life. The whole armature of his body was, every minute of the day, pushed and pulled by the requirements of disguise. Even the way he walked had to be disguised. He had no training as an actor. He was an intellectual, a Ph.D whose prize-winning thesis had been entitled ‘Orientalist Discourses and the Construction of the Arab Nation State’. To change his natural walk had not come easily to him, and it was difficult, when occupied with this performance, to be sufficiently aware of others. But to hide his true sex, to continue to be a ‘he’ when he was in fact a ‘she’, produced a kind of numbness, fits of absent-mindedness and stupidity. There were too many things to think about, things you now had to decide with your conscious brain — how you moved your hand, whether you smiled or not, listened or interrupted. To be a man was like driving a huge and complicated machine on manual systems, so even something as simple as urinating involved planning and subterfuge, asking for a place to shit so you could squat in private.