Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

“The Heights of Fame— that’s mine,” Wood said. “One of mine.” “Full disclosure, the only one,” Hack said.

“One of those is all you need,” Wood said.

Ava smiled in surprise, for she had actually heard of the book — was it a book? Ava remembered it as a chart. She wondered if perhaps someone had given them a copy as a present — for a long time it was a gift item. It was regarded as a publishing phenomenon, widely publicized, reprinted many times, and unexpectedly and hugely profitable.

Wood said, “It was a great idea, but the worst part for me was its simplicity. So everyone copied it.”

The idea had occurred to him, he said, while he had been reading a biography of Joseph Conrad. Conrad’s height was given as just five feet.

“I had thought of Conrad as a giant — bearded, broad-shouldered, a big Polack sea captain. He was tiny!”

Wood read more biographies, he said, looking for the one fact. Diminutive writers seemed to be the rule. Alexander Pope had been four six; Lawrence Durrell gave his height as five four, but in fact he was just a little over five feet tall. Wood searched further. Keats had been five feet tall, Balzac five one, T. E. Lawrence five five — the same height as Marilyn Monroe. Dylan Thomas was five six, Thoreau five seven, and Robert Louis Stevenson five ten.

Wood said, “Melville was a munchkin! Henry James was a dwarf! Faulkner was a peewee! Melville was just over five feet. You think of him as a powerful whaler, wielding a harpoon, but no, he was a borderline midget, like most other writers.”

Ava said, “Thomas Wolfe wasn’t a midget.”

“He’s on the chart. He was six four.”

Now she remembered: a foldout chart was included in the book. It was in the form of an enhanced tape measure, giving the name and height of each writer mentioned. This was to be tacked to a wall, and there was room on the elongated chart for you to write your own names on it. So your mother might be as tall as Conrad, your child the size of Alexander Pope, your basketball-playing nephew the physical equal of Thomas Wolfe.

“Graham Greene and George Orwell were both way over six feet,” Wood said.

“Listen, want to hear something totally awesome?” Hack said to the others. Then he spoke to Wood in the tone of a quizmaster: “Edgar Allan Poe?”

“Five eight,” Wood said.

“Marquis de Sade?”

“Five three.”

Ava said, “William Burroughs.”

“Five foot eleven and a half.”

“Just your size,” Ava said to Steadman, and Steadman smiled, for she knew that it was Burroughs’s book that had started him thinking about this journey.

“Ever read The Yage Letters ?” Ava asked Wood.

“Never heard of it. Who wrote it?”

“A man who came here once,” Ava said.

As she spoke, Nestor appeared. He said, “He didn’t come here. He was in Colombia, on the Putumayo. But it was still Amazonia and the quest was the same. Not a tour, though. Now we go.”

Emerging from the steaming pool, they were chilled by the late-afternoon air and felt tired and stewed from sitting in the hot water. Drying themselves, they saw Manfred at the top of the slope. He always seemed to appear out of nowhere, as though dropping from an invisible line, like a pendulous insect. He was entirely naked and unembarrassed, thrashing himself with a loose towel, pink-fleshed from the scalding water, the hair on his head spiky and damp, his penis slack and swinging as he descended from stone to stone. He was wearing earphones and carrying a Walkman in one hand and had a small spray of flowers pinched in the fingers of his free hand, and he was smiling.

“Is a bromeliad!”—shouting because of the earphones.

Nestor said, “Next stop, Lago Agrio.”

“How many kilometers until Lago Agrio?”

“I will tell you later,” Nestor said.

“How many kilometers until ‘later’?” Hack demanded.

THE FIRST INDICATION that they were nearing the town of Lago Agrio was a succession of signs, most of them lettered Prohibido el Paso, some of them showing a grinning stenciled skull, like a Halloween mask, and the single forbidding word Peligro.

“What’s that supposed to be?” Wood asked in the darkness of the van.

“Calavera,” Hernán said. “Eskell.”

It was after midnight when they entered the empty streets, lurid in the glare of small orangy light bulbs, traveling first on a bumpy road and then the uneven pavement of the main street, flanked by the same ocherous shadows. All the shops were shuttered and dark. Only a handful of shadow-faced people lurked by pillars in the arcades, where some open fires were glowing, cut off oil drums serving as braziers. Ava and Steadman were first off the bus, and even in the semidarkness, smelling dampness, ant-chewed wood, moistened dirt, dog shit, rusty pipes, and the smutty smoke from the braziers, they sensed the town was ugly — not old but hastily built, a kind of blight in the jungle, a sudden wasteland of dead trees, a slum smelling of blackened pots and stale bread and frying and decay. Another stink in the air was subtly toxic, the sour-creamy tang of fuel oil.

“It’s sensationally scruffy,” Janey said in a tone of gloating satisfaction. Then she yawned. “Promise you will tuck me in, darling? I am so knackered.”

Off the main road, down an alley, within a narrow courtyard that looked fortified by its high walls, the Hotel Colombiana lay in darkness. Hernán backed the van into the courtyard, stopping and starting.

“Wouldn’t it be simpler just to park the van on the street?” Sabra said.

“Then the van would not be here tomorrow,” Nestor said. “We are less than twenty miles from the Colombia border. You know the FARC? Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia? They will take the van. They will take you.”

As he spoke, he worked, catching the bags that Hernán passed to him and stacking them beside the van.

“You mean kidnap?” Sabra said.

“They are too busy for that. They outsource the kidnapping,” Nestor said, and looked smug using the word “outsource” as he labored with the bags.

“So who does it?”

“Children kidnap you and then sell you to the FARC or anyone who will continue the ransom procedure.”

“Charming,” Janey said.

“What kind of kids would do that?” Hack asked.

“Hungry kids, with guns,” Nestor said, and headed for the hotel office. “I will give you room keys.”

The others complained about the hotel and were so aggrieved by Nestor’s warnings that Steadman and Ava made a point of praising the place. They drank gin-and-lime in their hotel room, hearing distant voices, screeching women, roaring men.

While Ava sat facing the window and the wall of the hotel garden, which was fragrant with night-blooming jasmine, Steadman walked behind her and put a blindfold over her eyes.

They went on drinking, Steadman carefully filling Ava’s glass, but she said, “It’s not working.”

Steadman said nothing. Perhaps she was tired. Was the whole blindfold business a self-deceiving gimmick, or was it a step too far? He resisted giving it a name. Surely such intensity could not be blunted after one day. Steadman put tonight’s failure down to the fact that they had spent all that time together in the van. Being so close for so long, elbow to elbow, had tired him and killed his desire. Hers too, it seemed.

They felt awkward climbing into the same bed, clinging briefly though not kissing. And then they were asleep.

They were woken at seven — the jangling phone, Nestor summoning them to the café at the front of the hotel, where coffee, fruit, and bread were being set out on a table by Hernán. The others yawned and muttered, sounding irritated and weary. The morning was already hot enough to melt the butter in its sticky dish, and the humidity glowed on the faces of the travelers. The low hideous town was loud with traffic and scurrying people and hawkers, with new and sharper stinks and monotonous music.