Anthony Burgess - Enderby Outside

"Actually," Enderby improvised in delirium, "it's an old border name. Welsh border, I mean. My family came from near Shrewsbury. That's a coincidence, that is, the Spanish business, I mean. Look, I've got to post this letter. I'll be back." As soon as he had clumsily pushed his way through the crowd that was round woolly-capped Mr Mercer, he realised he had behaved foolishly in being willing to leave her if only for five minutes. She wouldn't believe that story about Puerco being an old border name; she'd look it up again in her Spanish dictionary and she'd find more than dirty and filthy and so on. She was bound to. He hesitated at a door that led on to a dismal wet garden, beyond it a kind of restaurant all made of big dirty windows. He would have to get that dictionary away from her, tear out the dangerous page or lose the whole book. Or should he now, with his five-pound notes and anthology of exotic pourboires, get out there into the great rainy windy peninsula, lose himself in cork-woods, later became dried up like a raisin tramping the hot white country roads? He thought not. A lean poor man was standing by the door, opposing cigarette-sparks to the dull damp night. It was possible, thought Enderby, that Spanish John's hispaniolising of his mother's maiden name represented a historical phase of the word, long superseded. But if, of course, it was the same as Italian and-Enderby said to this man:

"Amigo." The man responded with a benison of sparks. Enderby said: "In español. L'animal. What's the español for it?" He snorted and snuffed the air all around at chest-level as though rooting for truffles. Then he saw that a man in smart uniform, just behind him, was watching with some interest. The lean poor man said:

"Entiendo. Un puerco."

That was it then, Enderby thought grimly. He stood wavering, letter in hand. The thin poor man seemed to be awaiting further charades from Enderby. The uniformed man frowned, very puzzled. The thin poor one whinnied and said, "Un caballo." Enderby said, "Sí," then tripped over the uniformed man's left boot as he went in again, letter unposted.

"My goodness, you were quick," said Miss Boland.

"It's the language," Enderby said. "I don't know the language, as I said. Perhaps if I could borrow your little dictionary -"

"Right," Mr Mercer was now saying. "Everybody please stand round there where the baggage is." They'd got it out pretty quickly, Enderby thought distractedly: no spirit of mañana here. "As you know, they have customs here same as everywhere else -"

"Old Spanish customs," cried Mr Guthkelch.

"- But only a few of you will have to open your bags -"

"As long as nobody has to drop 'em," cried Mr Guthkelch, perhaps going too far.

"- It's a sample, you see, what you might call a sample check-up."

"I don't suppose," said Miss Boland to Enderby, "that you"ve got anything so bourgeois as luggage, have you? I suppose you'll be sleeping in your shirt or in the altogether." Her eyes glistened when she said that, as though excited by it. Enderby was disgusted; he said:

"You'll soon see whether I've got anything or not. I'm no different from anybody else." The man who had looked at him suspiciously on the way across the tarmac now did the same thing again. "In the sense, that is," expanded Enderby, "of personal possessions and the like."

"This is a bit like an identification parade, isn't it?" giggled Miss Boland. "Very thrilling." They were all there near the pile of luggage, and an official with a peaked cap did a caged-tiger walk up and down in front of this squad of pleasure-seekers, hands folded behind his back. Enderby saw who it was: that man out there who had frowned at his pig-snorting. The man now halted and faced them. He had jowls not unlike those of his Caudillo and even allomorphs of those eyebrows; perhaps a lowly relative for whom the regime had had to find a job. He sternly pointed at people. He pointed at Enderby. Enderby at once looked round for the man with the overweight luggage. He found him and said: "Where is it?"

"What? That? Why can't you show him your own?"

"Reasons," Enderby said. Things nobody must see."

"Thought there was a catch in it. Right liberty, I call it. Anyway, I've got nothing to fear." And he showed where the supernumerary bag was. Enderby lugged it to the customs-counter. The official was already delicately rooting in a pair of very clean white cotton gloves. He was perfunctory about most passengers' luggage; with Enderby's supposed he was thorough. At the bottom of the bag he found, under that man's Bermuda shorts, the three garish paperbacks that had looked quite harmless in the London air terminal. Here, in a repressed and repressive Catholic country that discharged its extramarital lust in bullfights, they suddenly seemed to flare into the promise of outrageous obscenity. Miss Boland, though not of the luggage-opening elect, was nevertheless by Enderby's side. She saw; "Dirty," she said, grinning. The official held up the three books very nearly to the level of the portrait of the Caudillo, as if for his curse. Mr Guthkelch said: "Who'll start the bidding?" The covers blared three allotropes of mindless generic blonde, in shock and undress. The official pronounced: "Pornogràficos." Everybody nodded, pleased that they could understand Spanish. And then, straight at Enderby, he snorted and gave back Enderby's own mime of snout-truffling, adding: "Puerco."

"I see, I see," said Miss Boland, quietly gratified, pressing into Enderby's flank. "So that's how you pronounce it. And it means "pig" too. Stupid of me, I should have seen that. They know you here then. You are a dark horse. Pig, I mean, a dark pig."

From one of the upheld books two flat square little packets dropped out. They fell on to the exposure of somebody's sensible white underwear. All the men at once knew what they were, but one elderly woman, evidently sheltered from the world, said: "Sort of rings. What are they for then?" The man who could best tell her was heard groaning: those objects were obviously ferial, not marital, equipment. The official wiped one cotton-gloved hand against another, made an extravagant gesture of disgust and dismissal, and turned his back on the lot of them. "Ipocritico" murmured Enderby. The official did not hear, or else the Spanish was different from the Italian.

"It pays to be straight," the overweight man was whining. "I've learned my lesson, that I have." His wife looked out, dissociated from him but there would be hell tonight in a foreign bedroom, into wet dark Seville, Don Juan's town. "Let me down, you have," he said unreasonably to Enderby. Everybody else frowned, puzzled, not quick on the uptake. Even Miss Boland. Miss Boland took Enderby's arm, saying: "Come on, Piggy -" A very liberalising influence the moon, Enderby bitterly thought. Mr Mercer called them, in a fatigued voice, to the waiting bus.

An hour later, Enderby lay exhausted on his hotel bed. He had posted that letter in the box in the hotel lobby, having found some pesetas in his little treasury of tips and been able to buy stamps from the moustached duenna yawning with dignity at the reception desk. None of the hotel staff, admittedly tired and proudly resentful of the late-arriving guests, seemed even minimally agitated by news of the death of a British pop-singer. So things were all right so far. But soon they would not be. A lot of course depended on the chief guardian of the true identity of Hogg, namely bloody Wapenshaw; much depended on the Hogg-photograph in tomorrow's newspapers; a little depended on Miss Boland's semantic investigations into the word puerco.

Soon, when he was less exhausted, he would go and see Miss Boland. She was on this floor of the hotel, which was called the Hotel Marruecos; she was just a couple of doors down. Soon. Enderby had had sent up a bottle of Fundador and a glass. He knew Fundador from Piggy's Sty: it was a kind of parody of Armagnac. He was drinking it now for his nerves. He lay on the bed, whose coverlet was the colour of boiled liver. The wallpaper was cochineal. There were no pictures on the walls. It was all very bare, and he had done nothing to mitigate that bareness. Nothing in the wardrobe, no suitcase on the luggage-stand at the bed's bottom. The window was open, and a hot wind had started blowing up, one which seemed to match the cochineal walls. This hot wind had scattered the clouds and disclosed what was now a Spanish moon, a Don Juan stage property. Miss Boland, in a sensible dressing-gown, would now be putting curlers in her hair, looking at the moon. Luna. Perhaps she would be checking the word in her handbag dictionary.