Jonathan Raban: Foreign Land: A Novel

There was no twilight in Bom Porto. Day stopped and night began in as much time as it took to walk the length of the Square of the Liberators of Africa. It wasn’t much of a square, either: the banks of flowers and shrubs planted by the Portuguese had died of drought since Independence, and only a handful of dwarf acacias and spiky palms still managed to hold out in the red volcanic dirt. The old saltwater fountain was dry and choked with dust, the bandstand had lost its top and the wooden park benches had been carried away to feed suburban cooking fires.

In the middle of the square, the statue of Dr Da Silva had been redecorated by the army. The bronze doctor on his plinth had a fine walrus moustache and a chestful of medals. He stared grimly out over the city towards the Atlantic as if he was searching the horizon for the puff of smoke that would mean rescue. A bronze African woman in a turban crouched at his feet. With her left hand, she cuddled a plump bronze baby; with her right, she pointed admiringly up at the doctor, whose seaward gaze blandly excluded the woman and her child. The engraved lettering on the plinth read:

AD

DR ANTONIO LUIS DA SILVA

(MEDICO)

HOMENAGEM DE GRATIDAO

The words were difficult to make out now, since they lay under a collage of later, more exuberant messages, VIVA PAIM! VIVA ARISTIDE VARBOSA! VIVA A REFORMA! VIVA O POVO!

Long life to the people … George would be happy to wave his hat in the air for that. He entered the square from the Rua Fidel Castro, a zippered squash racket swinging at his knee. He carried an oilcloth shopping bag that he’d stolen from Vera, and wore a smart white gimme cap with a ten-inch brim. This had been bought from Filomeno for a pack of Marlboro cigarettes. On the front in red letters it said

HOLSUM — AMERICA’S # 1 BREAD

George liked Bom Porto’s easygoing, festive Marxist-Leninism. The further you went into the Wolof, Negro interior of Montedor, the more the politics of the country lost their good humour. By the time you reached the mountain town of Guia, 200 miles inland, they were inward and paranoid, with rumours of liquidation and torture. But in this coastal, Creole city, the security police were an amiable gang of sloppy drunks, hardly anyone belonged to the Party, and no-one whom George knew had disappeared. No-one, that is, unless one counted Jose Ribeiro, which George didn’t. Ribeiro — who used to spread his fantasies like a contagious itch — had simply made his own bad dreams come true.

Night fell to the sound of music in Bom Porto. As the sun went out and the sea went from blood to tar, someone switched on the crackling speakers in the palms and the square filled with the noise of an elderly Brazilian dance band. When George first came here, the band was real, the benches were comfortable, and the tropical greenery was a fairytale forest full of secret places for lovers to hide in. Nowadays, the square was little more than a scorched rectangle of red ash, yet no-one seemed to notice. People still came, summoned by the darkness; and by the beginning of the second scratchy rumba the crowd was as thick and vivid as a poppy field. Young men climbed on to the shoulders of Dr Da Silva and dripped canned lager over his distinguished skull; girls in flouncing skirts did private, spinning dances on the bandstand.

George eased his way through. His height, topped by his Holsum cap, made him as prominent a figure as a uniformed policeman in a playground.

“Hey — how ya doin’, Mister George!”

“Hi, man, what’s new?”

Arms were laid around his waist. Wherever George went, he wagged his cap, politely clowning for his friends in the crowd.

“Hello, Mario, how are you? Anna Luisa! God, you’re looking stunning.”

“Well, George, whaddaya know!”

Everyone spoke to him in movie American. In this Portuguese cake slice of Africa, English was the language not of colonialism but of romance. George was a Bom Porto institution: he gave everybody a chance to try out their few shards of magic-English.

“Have a nice day, okay?”

“Meester!” called a small boy, a stranger to George. “New York!” the boy said. “Boss-town! New Bed-ford Massachusetts!”

“First rate,” said George.

“First rate,” said the boy, returning George’s voice to him. It sounded painfully like the voice of a Wodehouse toff. It was a pity that he could not speak like George Raft.

The music from the speakers mixed with the dry toss and rustle of the acacias. The northeast trade wind, blowing off the Sahara, funnelled through the square like the blast of a giant hair-dryer. It tasted rancid on the tongue, and you could smell in it dead dogs, rotten fruit, kerosene, wood smoke, sweat, mintballs and sewage. It was extravagant, travel stained, African air; meaty stuff, that George chewed on as he walked.

An albino youth pointed at his squash racket. “Ilie Nastase — okay!” He made a thumbs up sign.

“Okay,” George said. It was like the smells of the trade wind: by the time they reached Bom Porto, all cultural messages got scrambled.

Dr Ferraz was promenading stiffly past the bandstand: George ducked his head low and dodged into the crowd. Ferraz had told him to knock off the weekly squash sessions with Teddy — had burbled on about dicky valves, as if George was a defective wireless. Well, Emanuel Ferraz, who took no exercise more strenuous than his evening hobble to the bar of the Hotel Lisbào, looked pretty bloody sickly himself. His long-faced warnings were typical symptoms of old man’s envy: he wanted George to join him in the geriatric set and wasn’t above inventing imaginary diseases to scare his patients into premature old age. Even so, George took good care to hide his squash racket from the doctor. He hove-to in the lee of a bearded palm tree until Ferraz was gone.

At the end of the square, he turned left into a street of one room cottages built of loose rocks. Their windows were empty of glass, and they were lit by paraffin lamps that threw the shadows of their inhabitants out into the street. George trampled through moving silhouettes. A yellow dog with swollen tits emerged from a pile of rubbish and fell in alongside.

“Go on,” George said. “Home, dog. Home.” He raised the squash racket. The dog howled and showed her teeth. At the end of the street she was still there, limping hopefully in his wake., He waved the shopping bag at her: “Shoo!” She stared at him, her eyes ripe with incomprehension and mistrust. George reached down into the dirt and pretended to pick up a stone. The dog fled into the dark, the bald sore on her rump bobbing like a rabbit’s scut.

George crossed a sloping no man’s land of thin red shale and reached the waterfront. The Atlantic tide here on the Bight was too feeble to scour the harbour clean, and the sea was wrinkled, oily and malodorous. The last of the tuna skiffs were being hauled up onto the beach, and men and boys were carrying out dead’fish as big as silver aero engines.

Nearly a mile across the water, the bunkering station lit the whole bay with a hard white blaze. Beyond the perimeter fence with its elevated look-out posts (George had christened it the Berlin Wall), the gas and diesel silos formed a magnificent illuminated castle of fat towers and slender aluminium battlements. Along with its other burdens, the wind carried the sound of the electric generators: George heard them humming and throbbing in his back teeth. The bunkering station was the biggest thing in Bom Porto and the finest landmark on the 600 miles of coast between Dakar and Freetown. When George had seen it first, there had been two derelict coal chutes, a rusting diesel tank and a shack marked OFFICE where Miller used to lie on his plastic sofa reading his month old copies of the Hull Daily Mail . Now it was such a glory that the army kept it permanently defended with four gun emplacements, two Churchill tanks and a mobile rocket launcher.