Will Self - Psychogeography

It was drizzling in Rio when I arrived, and the scuzzy grey shanty towns on the surrounding peaks threatened to topple on to Copacabana. In place of the sparkling strand of my imagination — crowded with promenading, steatopygous lovelies, their café-au-lait buttocks cloven by itsy-bitsy G-strings — I found instead three men in anoraks fishing the angry Atlantic while seated on collapsible stools. Shit! I admonished myself; I need never have left East Finchley after all!

If São Paulo was threatening, Rio was terrifying, but I had nothing to read, which is the most frightening thing of all when abroad. I went out with my money in my sock to find an English-language bookshop and couldn’t, anywhere. Eventually I discovered one a bus ride away at a shopping mall in an outer suburb. They had three shelves of airport dross and one copy of William L. Shirer’s magisterial The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich . I snapped it up.

I spent the next week snuggled up to the tiny zinc-topped bar of the tiny café opposite my hotel, assiduously working my way through Shirer. In the scary atmosphere of Rio the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis seemed almost gemütlich. I’d also, sensibly, switched to beer. Gradually, day by day, I felt the chaotic life around me beginning to assume some kind of coherence. I noticed that the street urchins, the hawkers, the washerwomen, the service workers for the skyscraper hotels lining the beach — the whole population of this quarter in fact — all knew one another and looked out for each other. Every individual had its niche in the living reef, and if a new creature came into the area its character — and potential to be a threat — was instantly noted. Far from being a soulless adjunct to the dubious delights of Copacabana, in this, the off-season, I could appreciate the tightly knit community I found myself in.

On the final night I spent in Rio I broached the language barrier and fell in with a couple of good-time girls. I say ‘girls’ advisedly, because although they looked younger than me, such were the concertinaed demographics of Brazil that one of them turned out to be a grandmother. Anyway, by a combination of signs and pidgin English I managed to convey to these two the extent of my sociological observations of Copacabana. ‘Oh yes,’ Vittoria replied, ‘we know everyone here, and if anyone new comes and we don’t know their name, they get given a nickname so we can easily identify them.’

‘So,’ I asked, not a little incurious, ‘have I got a nickname?’

‘Of course!’ She gestured at the prominent swastika on the cover of my Shirer. ‘We call you Hitler.’

Two decades ago I spent three months in India. My companion was Turnbull St Asser, the last scion of a North Country dynasty of enormous antiquity (they came over with the Cro-Magnons), who had dedicated thirty generations to dissipation and dilettantism. Turnbull and I had been at the varsity together and we shared a taste for the finer — and fouler — things in life, although coming from East Finchley my dandyism had a curiously neo-Marxist tinge. Inevitably we quarrelled in Kathmandu, after I threw some coloured water on his Shantung silk suit during the festival of Holi. Turnbull departed to stay with some maharaja or another to whom he had a letter of introduction, while I headed by minibus for Varanasi (see ‘The Holy City’, page 83).

Strange though it may seem now, we arranged to rendezvous a month later at Srinagar, in Kashmir, to see if we could resolve our differences; ah, such is the folly of youth! After an unscheduled extra week on the banks of the sacred Ganga, I entrained and took the thundering Himigiri — Howrah Express across the north of the subcontinent to Chandigarh. On the train, slotted into a third-class couchette like a beige filing cabinet drawer, I met a young couple from Maidstone. We discussed life, love, politics, religion and the future of mankind. I wrote some jejune verses in the girl’s commonplace book. When we parted I breathed a sigh of relief.

Fifteen years later she pitched up again while I was signing books at Hatchards in Piccadilly, and, yes, she had the jejune verses. Truly, notoriety is a depth charge to your acquaintance, throwing up all sorts of dead fish, and for that reason alone it is to be avoided.

There was no avoiding Turnbull either. At the appointed hour I arrived at the Tourist Office and sat huddled on a stone bench. It was cold in Kashmir, especially so after the heat of the plains. The locals went around with portable charcoal stoves, which they sat with underneath their djellabas. It looked right toasty to me, who was clad in regulation travellers’ denims, set off with bits of embroidered cotton wrapped around my extremities. ‘My God!’ expostulated Turnbull, striding towards me, his tweeds whispering affluently, ‘you’ve gone bloody native!’

Turnbull, however, had already paid for his cultural arrogance. With his flame of hair and flashing monocle, the impoverished houseboat proprietors had seen him coming rather better than he was able to descry them. In 1984 Kashmir was yet to descend into the war of insurgency that has since devastated the region, but the Indian army was there in strength, and the tension was driving away the tourists. Out on Dal Lake the flotillas of houseboats, with their ornate, fretworked superstructures, were mostly empty. There was hardly anyone about to be taken to the famous floating gardens. Knockdown deals were the order of the day: for $2 a day I was staying on the Houseboat Ceylon, with full board, laundry services and excursion transport thrown in, courtesy of its efficient proprietor, Rashid.

Turnbull, on the other hand, was paying twenty bucks a night for a stinky berth on a muddy barge moored in a sewer running off the Jhelum River. No food, no transport, and certainly no dry-cleaning for his suits. I laughed long and loud when I saw his quarters: ‘Ho, ho, ho, ho, ho!’ I went, hoping to pay back in some small measure the centuries of Schadenfreude the St Assers had exacted from their tenants, ‘You’ve been rooked!’

An hour later Turnbull was ensconced with me on the HB Ceylon and we had begun to bicker all over again. Rashid, hating dissension of any kind, suggested we take a trip into the Himalaya; he would organise everything. He was as good as his word, and two days later we were clopping up into the terrifying Pir Panjal Range, Turnbull and I mounted on laden donkeys, while Rashid took the lead on foot. Turnbull looked ridiculous in a blanket he contrived to wear like a Mexican poncho, and a pearl-grey fedora. I was still cold.

When we reached our destination, a mountain hut at 15,000 feet that looked like a cricket pavilion, I was a hell of a lot colder. We were there for two days but it felt like two weeks. Rashid fed us indigestible meals of bread, rice and potatoes. ‘Carbohydrate, carbohydrate, carbohydrate!’ Turnbull admonished him, ‘that’s three kinds of carbohydrate!’ We took to our sleeping bags, and Turnbull then tormented me by reading aloud lengthy descriptions of princely feasting in a book he’d borrowed from his maharaja: ‘Twenty-eight capons stuffed with sweet almonds, a pie of larks’ tongues and live song birds, jellied crocodile kidneys. .’ — on and on he brayed. In many ways I feel I’ve never left that hideous place, and that my whole life has been spent in a high-altitude cricket pavilion being persecuted by an English aristo. But at least I know I’m not alone.