Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

“Oh, we topped the million mark for the first time last year.”

“Hey— Montedor!” called Freddie Corquordale; “wasn’t that your old patch?”

“Yes—” George said.

“There’s something about it here. Doesn’t make much sense: ruddy printers have ballsed the thing up, as per usual. Here … you look.”

It was two paragraphs at the bottom of the Foreign News page. It was datelined Lagos, and the tiny headline just said “Muslim Riots”.

Reports last week from Bom Porto, capital of Montedor, indicated that a rising of Muslim wolf tirbesmen in the northern city of Guia had been successfully put down by gov-the rioters were estimated at over ernment troops. Casualties among 100 dead: there were no reports of causalities among government forces. A curfew has been imposed in urban areas.

The small West African state of Montedor has a long history of Catholic, Creole population of the tension between the traditionally coast and the Muslim tribesmen of ence from Portugal in 1975 and is the interior. It gained independverely affected by drought since the interior. It gained independan independent Marxist republic.

(AP)

“Locals playing up?” said Rupert Walpole, reading over George’s shoulder.

“Scotch, wasn’t it — George?” said Denis Wright.

“Some of those printers, you know, they fly about the place in their own ruddy aeroplanes,” said Freddie Corquordale. “There was a fellow on the television, not an aitch to his name, worked on some rag or other — he had a private jet. Bought the damn thing out of his wages.”

George stared at the lines of butchered print. He felt wobbly on his feet. The thing was — just awful. It was like suddenly spotting your own car in a television picture of a smash on a motorway.

“Sorry, would you excuse me?” he said, and walked clumsily across to the table where newspapers and magazines were stacked in orderly ranks like tiles on a roof. He searched through the Observer and the Sunday Times . No word of Montedor. It wasn’t surprising. The place didn’t have oil fields, or British “kith and kin” to give it human interest; Montedor was the sort of country where you could have a massacre without anyone minding very much. George’s anxiety gave way to petulance: what did they mean—“a small West African state”? It was twice as big as England.

“The other papers don’t seem to have picked it up,” he said, going back to the bar, where Freddie Corquordale was reading out something about women priests.

“Bad as that, is it?” said Rupert Walpole. “Lucky you got out when the going was good.”

“I was in Iraq when they bumped off young Feisal,” Denis Wright said.

“He is a ninny, that man,” said Freddie Corquordale; “our current A.B. of C.”

So Peres had got his bloodbath. It was just as Teddy had feared. Two years ago, he’d tried to block Peres’s appointment as Minister of National Defence; but President Varbosa had fallen for Peres like a schoolgirl with a crush. In the Club Nautico, Teddy had said, “What can you do, George? To Varbosa, Peres’s shit smells like roses.”

It was true, too. The president couldn’t contain Peres. Before Independence, Varbosa had been fine, as a man of words. His poems had been published in Brazilian magazines. He coined the slogans and wrote all the pamphlets for PAIM. He spoke, sometimes brilliantly, in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau. His handsome face looked good in photographs, in which he cradled a machine gun like a Madonna with a child. The gun was always lent to Varbosa for the occasion: he was too short-sighted to handle firearms for real.

After Independence, Varbosa turned peacock. He adored Pan-African conferences and flights to New York in the antique presidential Boeing. He looked across to Zaire and hankered after Mobutu’s trappings of office. Varbosa too wanted gold bathtaps and huge motorcades; he loved to see his own name painted on the mountainsides, and it was Peres’s men who did the painting.

It wouldn’t be hard to persuade the president that his reputation could only be embellished by slaughtering Wolofs in a show of manly strength; like the feeble artist he was, Varbosa thrilled to the idea of decisive, purifying action. “Blood” was a magic word in his poems. A guerrilla ambush was never just a guerrilla ambush to Aristide Varbosa; it was a Catholic mass, with mission school notions of atonement and redemption blooming from the snouts of automatic rifles.

Advised by Teddy, the president was a genial, pacific soul who’d once asked George if he knew the work of Baudelaire-Rimbaud, a singular poet whom George had decided to leave politely intact. But advised by Peres … George didn’t dare to take the thought further. He felt helplessly distant. He saw the road to Guia, the Cuban soldiers in flappy green fatigues, the hovering helicopter gunship, its rotors stirring the red dust in its shadow like a cloud of cayenne pepper; but the picture was creased and its colour already fading … even Vera, in the passenger seat beside him … even she was beginning to blur.

“How’s the fitting-out going?” said Verity Caine. “I keep on seeing you down on the quay.”

“Oh … tophole, thanks,” George said, trying to bring Vera back into sharp focus again. Pulling himself together, he said: “I need to buy some new warps. Where’s the best place round here for rope?”

At two, just as Roberts was ringing time on the ship’s bell which hung among the liqueurs, Connie Lisle came into the bar and bought a half-bottle of vodka.

“Throwing a party?” said Freddie Corquordale, and winked at Denis Wright.

Miss Lisle bristled from inside her plastic mac and her smile was a quick, nervous twist of the lips. To Roberts she said, “Thanks so much—” then, “Thanks very much indeed.” When she left, everyone said goodbye with an exaggerated cordiality that made up for not speaking to her.

“That’s an odd bod,” Freddie Corquordale said.

“Connie used to be a headmistress.” Betty Castle was looking at George.

“Bluestocking type.” Freddie Corquordale had evidently met many such ladies in his time.

“Comprehensive, of course,” said Betty Castle.

“Verity’s no bluestocking, are you, dear?”

“No, Freddie, I haven’t got a brain in my head. As you know perfectly well.”

At Thalassa, George wrote to Vera as the afternoon darkened. He framed each new word with his pen as deliberately as if he was phrasing an anonymous ransom note. St Cadix was lonely … his things had arrived … he’d bought a boat … seeing a passing reference to Montedor in the papers had made him feel homesick … he’d love to hear Vera’s news. He mentioned Teddy, but crossed out that sentence. He rewrote the letter in Portuguese and read it over. It looked perfectly innocuous; boring enough to make a secret policeman yawn. He hoped the policeman was a paranoid fiction.

No-one tampered with anybody’s letters in the Montedor that George knew. But the country of the Sunday Telegraph report was not the one he knew: the scary thing about those two scrambled paragraphs was that they made Montedor sound just like any other flimsy, tarpaper Third World state — a cockleshell nation that would capsize at a puff of wind from the wrong quarter. He’d been in places like that and knew how appallingly quickly they tipped over: one morning you woke to shooting in the streets; in a week you’d got used to the sight of men you’d once met being blindfolded for their public executions in the sandy town square. But not — surely — in Montedor? Please not in Montedor.

George read his letter again. If things really were still all right, Vera would be flummoxed by it — it sounded half-baked. He was cheered up by the thought of her sitting out on the loggia reading it, her tongue searching round her upper lip, her eyes wrinkled tightly in the glare. Where is George at? She’d smooth the paper flat and leave it on the table in the tall, airy room at the front of the house, pausing over it each time she passed. In the evening, she’d show it to Teddy. Between them, they’d figure it out.