Eric McCormack - Cloud

“I wouldn’t go quite that far,” he said with a little smile. “It’s just that the world’s not so immense as we sometimes think.”

I mentioned Dupont’s name in case he might know him. But he shook his head.

“I can’t say I’ve heard of him,” he said. “Though, who knows, I may have passed him often enough on the street.”

He spoke in the calmest of voices and looked so neat I felt refreshed by his presence. In the jungle, I’d become accustomed to passionate outbursts and extravagant displays of emotion over even the most trivial of matters. Clearly, it would take a lot to ruffle Gordon Smith’s composure.

We talked for a while about Scotland. He asked this and that about my life in Glasgow and told me that, like many early Canadians, his ancestors had been exiled from the Highlands several generations back. But although he’d travelled widely he’d never been to the land of his forebears.

I wasn’t ready for his next question.

“Are Scots trustworthy?”

Some of them were bound to be, I said, meaning to be amusing.

He didn’t smile but just watched me with those hawk eyes so that I began to feel less than comfortable. I was relieved when the general manager, who’d been in another room answering the telephone, came back in. He asked Smith if he’d any preliminary notions about this problem at La Mancha.

“Well, I’ve heard what some of the men have reported,” said Smith. “I’ll have to go down the mine myself and find out whether there’s a scientific explanation for what happened.”

The general manager looked surprised.

“Señor Smith, you’re a scientist,” he said. “Could there be an un scientific explanation?”

“I’m a scientist by training — that doesn’t mean I’m a cynic,” said Gordon Smith. “Anyway, after the discovery of quantum physics, scientists should perhaps be more open-minded.” He looked at me. “I’ve seen so many weird things in my travels, I’m not superstitious about not being superstitious.”

I had to think about that one — my father would have enjoyed the double negative.

THE DINNER OF pineapple chicken was excellent and the wine tasted good. The general manager had other business to attend to and excused himself right after the coconut cream dessert.

Gordon Smith and I stayed at the dinner table for a while longer, but he didn’t drink much. I made up for that and, inspired by the wine, I needed no encouragement to talk. Before long I was telling him all about Duncairn and Miriam Galt and my broken heart. How I often dreamt about her, and when I woke to her absence, it was as if my heart had been broken again.

“These matters of the heart can be so complicated, especially when you’re young,” said Gordon Smith. “I hope in time you’ll get over her.”

We sat silent for a few moments, then again he said something unexpected.

“I’ve never been much of a dreamer myself,” he said. “I used to think that was good. I was under the impression that when you dream, you see the world the way a madman sees it. So maybe it’s better not to dream in case the dreams, or nightmares, or whatever they are, start to affect your waking life.”

I’d never heard that before. I assured him that, speaking from personal experience, it was just nonsense.

“I’m sure you’re right,” he said. “In fact I read somewhere recently that dreams are a natural way of clearing out the mind’s overflow. You know, like a kind of mental Smith’s Pumps system. If you don’t dream, the unpleasant things stuffed in there have no way of getting out.”

I wondered what kinds of unpleasant things a man like him might have in his mind. But he didn’t enlarge upon it and once more changed the subject.

“Do you enjoy tutoring?” he said.

I explained how I’d just drifted into the job, and, for that matter, lacked the skills to do anything else. But from what I’d seen, I didn’t really like how the mining industry acted in some of these out-of-the-way places. They polluted the earth and the air, were located where they’d no right to be, and destroyed the native cultures while they were at it. Nor did I much like the fact that I was helping them conduct their unpleasant business in good English.

The hawk eyes were locked onto mine.

“Maybe you should try another line of work,” Gordon Smith said.

I suggested that wouldn’t make any real difference to me. After what I’d been through — I meant, of course, my broken heart — I doubted I’d ever find contentment in any job, anyway.

As I said this, my voice was fuzzy from the wine and I knew I sounded melodramatic.

He nodded his head in sympathy, but his eyes were still taking my measure.

We moved to a screened verandah and sipped brandy. Above, the moon was breathtaking in the midst of a billion stars. The buzz of insects and the piping of tree frogs were all at once silenced by the scream of some animal in pain. But in a few seconds, everything returned to normal.

Gordon Smith remarked that these tropical regions involved perils not just for animals, but for human beings too. He himself, for example, had been smitten by a variety of illnesses in the era before modern drugs and vaccines were available.

“Yes, I caught my share,” he said. “Malaria, several times. Yellow fever, too — no one in that era knew it also came from mosquitoes. Believe me, it wasn’t a pleasant experience. And no matter how careful you were in some parts of the world, you couldn’t really avoid all the sand flies, black flies, fleas, ticks, and lice. Because of them I caught things I’d never heard of — a lot of Greek-sounding medical terms like onchocerciasis and leishmaniasis.

“Then of course there was cholera — if you had to drink unpurified water, you inevitably got it. And even if you didn’t drink the water and only used it for washing yourself, the bug went through the skin and gave you schistosomiasis. Unless you completely stopped washing yourself, as some people did, which led to even worse problems, aside from just the smell. Like most travellers, I contracted hepatitis — it was as normal as sunburn and there were so many possible causes you’d have had to stay home to be safe.” He sighed and sipped his brandy. “Just running off the names, it sounds as though I’m boasting, but believe me they took quite a toll. Thank goodness I at least managed to avoid bubonic plague — as you know, it’s not so good. Or hemorrhagic fever, where your whole body starts to bleed — if I’d run into that, I wouldn’t be talking to you today.”

After listening to this catalogue, I knew I should be grateful for only having had to deal with malaria, or whatever it was, in my own brief travels. I told Gordon Smith I’d be much more careful in future.

“Very wise,” he said. “Things are a lot safer now if you’re careful with the water and keep up with your vaccinations. In the old days, it was much riskier. I used to be strong as an ox, but I’ve paid the price.”

HE NOW BEGAN talking about his home and the home of Smith’s Pumps — Camberloo, in Southern Ontario, more or less in the middle of Canada. He lived there with his only child, a daughter, his wife having died many years ago.

“It’s a town with no remarkable landmarks, or works of architecture, or any of that sort of thing,” he said.

I’d already heard about Camberloo from Dupont: he too had thought it quite a bland place.

Gordon Smith considered that.

“Yes, I suppose Camberloo looks about as bland as a place can be,” he said. “Bland on the surface , that is.” He gestured out beyond the verandah. “Here, in the tropics, everything’s exotic and hits you over the head like a hammer, demanding to be noticed. In Camberloo, things are more subtle. The town has its quotient of drama, too, but you have to be astute and patient to spot it.” The night insects were so noisy that his voice barely rose above them. “These tropical countries have an immediate appeal to some area of the mind that’s adolescent and unformed. Whereas a place like Camberloo — it’s for adult, mature tastes. I have to admit, I’m still not sure which I prefer.”