Paul Theroux - Saint Jack

The theatrically convulsed agony of the successful is the failure’s single comfort. “Look how similar we are,” both will exclaim: “We’re each lonely!” But one is rich; he can choose his poison. So strictly off my own bat I gave myself a chance to choose — I would take the tycoon’s agony and forego the salesman’s. I said I wanted to be rich, famous if possible, drink myself silly and sleep till noon. I might have put it more tactfully: I wanted the wealth to make a free choice. I was not pleading to be irresponsible; if I was rich and vicious I would have to accept blame. The poor were blameless; they could not help it, and if they were middle-aged they were doubly poor, for no one could see their aches and no one knew that the middle-aged man at that corner table, purple with indigestion, thought he was having a heart seizure. That man will not look back to reflect unless he has had a terrible fright that twists his head around. Characteristically, he will look back once, see nothing, and never look back again. But Leigh and his hopeless last words gave me such an awful shock that driving out of the crematorium with Gladys I took a long look back — with the recent memory of imagining what my own last words might be, Is this all? mumbled in a hot room — and thought of nothing but what had brought me to Singapore, and the sinking ships I had boarded since then.

It was a bumboat. I jumped off the Allegro and there I was, sitting at the stern of a chugging bumboat, making my way toward Collyer Quay. It might have been cowardice; in me, cowardice often looked like courage by worrying me into some panicky act. I ran, and it looked like pursuit; but it wasn’t that — it was flight.

The bumboat touched the quay. The Chinese pilot pressed a finger in salute to the hanky that was knotted around his head like a tea cosy.

Having learned the trick of survival and reached a ripe old age, most fellers can look back on their lives and explain the logic of everything they’ve done, show you the pattern of their movements, their circlings toward what they wanted and got. Justifying their condition, they can point without regret to the blunt old-type exclamation marks of their footprints, like frozen ones in snow, and make sense of them. If the footprints are a jumble and some face in retreat the feller might say with a wild accompanying cackle that he had his shoes on backward and appeared to be walking away as he advanced. The explanation is irrefutable, for old age itself is a kind of arrival, but I could not say — being fifty-three in Singapore — that I had arrived anywhere. I was pausing, I thought, and there was no good reason for any of my movements except the truthful excuse that at the time of acting I saw no other choice. The absence of plot or design inspired my forlorn dream that magically by letter I would become a millionaire. My life was a pause; I lived in expectation of an angel.

My vision was explicit, and no guilt hampered it; I wished away the ego of my past — I would not be burdened by my history. But I had a fear: that I might turn out to be one of those travelers who, unnerved by the unconscious boldness of their distance — the flight that took them too far — believe themselves to be off course and head for anything that resembles a familiar landmark. Only, up close, they discover it to be a common feature of a foreign landscape on which identical landmarks lie in all directions. They chase these signs, their panic giving the wheeling chase some drama, and very soon they are nowhere, travelers who never arrive, who do not die but are lost and never found, like those unfortunate Arctic explorers, or really any single middle-aged feller who dies in a tropical alien place, alone and among strangers who mock what they can’t comprehend, the hopeful man with the perfect dream of magic, burned to ashes one hot day and negligently buried, who was lost long before he died.

THE BUMBOAT touched the quay. I vaulted to the stone steps and almost immediately, in a small but ingenious way, became a hustler. The word is unsuitable, but let it stand. It was an aspect of a business I understood well, for over the previous eleven months, soothed by Mothersill’s Pills, I had been crossing and recrossing the Indian Ocean in the Allegro , and at every port, from Mombasa to Penang, I had been appointed by the captain to perform a specific job for extra pay; that is, to take on supplies by contacting the ship chandler. I enjoyed doing this; it gained me admittance to a friendly family ashore, Ismailis in Mombasa, Portuguese in Beira, an Indo-French one in Port Louis, Parsees in Bombay. It was an entry into a world as mysterious for the sailor as the sea is for the landsman, the domestic life, drama in dry rooms that lay beyond the single street of seamen’s bars, the frontier that barricades harbors from their cities. At each port the ship chandler was our grocer, butcher, dhobi, fishmonger, hardware man; he would supply anything at short notice, but I believe that at Hing’s in Singapore — after I jumped ship — I could take credit for introducing a new wrinkle to one of the world’s most versatile professions. Later it was taken up by other ship chandlers and Singapore became a port in which even a large vessel could make a turnaround in six hours without the crew mutinying.

I look back and see a wild August storm, known in Singapore as a Sumatra: a high wind blows suddenly from the west and the sky gathers into unaccountable blackness, a low heavy ceiling, night at noon, the cold rain sheeting horizontally into the surf. That day I was standing in the wheel house of a rocking launch. It was warm and sunny when we left the quay, but fifteen minutes out the sky darkened, the cabin door banged, and rain began hitting the glass with a sound like sleet; we bolted the doors and breathed the engine fumes. Stonelike waves, each dark one with streaming ribbons of oil on its bumpy edges and topped with a torn cap of lacy froth, slammed into the starboard side of the launch, making the same boom as if we had run aground. I hung onto a canvas strap and wiping the steam off the back win! dow put my nose to the moaning glass.

We were towing a forty-foot lighter, the sort used for transporting bales of raw rubber; Chinese decorations were painted on the bow, evil white and black eyes, green whiskers, and a red dragon-fang mouth. The painted face with its scabrous complexion of barnacles rose and fell, gulping ocean, and the canvas cover, a vast pup tent pitched over the lighter, was being lashed by the wind; our towrope, now loose as the lighter leaped at us, now tight as it plunged and dragged, was periodically wrung of water, which shot out in a twist of bubbly spray as it stretched tight. A grommet on the corner of the canvas tarp tore free, and the tent fly burst open, unveiling our cargo, twenty-three smartly dressed Chinese and Malay girls, their scared white faces almost luminous in the gloom of the quaking shelter; they were huddled on crates and kegs, their knees together, holding their plastic handbags on their heads.

The visibility, what with the fog and rain and steamed-up windows, was very poor, and I had the impression we were thrashing in the open ocean, for no ships and not even the harborside could be made out. It was just after tiffin; no wharf lights were on. It was fearfully dark and cold, and I was dizzy from the cabin fumes. We might have been in the South China Sea.

“More to port,” I shouted to Mr. Khoo, showing him a circle I had drawn on the Western Roads of my harbor chart.

“No,” he said, and spun the wheel starboard.

“Don’t give me that!” I said, and went for him. The launch bucked and threw me to the floor. I could feel the launch turning, slowed by the weight of the lighter, and just under the whistling wind the screams of my girls. Mr. Khoo was taking us back.