Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

Outside the window, the hotel cock, whose internal clock is a torment to him, shrieks for the dawn at midday. It’s appallingly hot; our blinds are drawn, erratically brown wooden-slatted things that look as though they date from the 1950s… The sun makes white prison-bars on the floor.

‘I’m glad we’re going.’

We kiss.

‘So’m I.’

He does bring beer, after all. Below us, the fury dies away; they’ve accepted it, we are already gone, distress swoons into the stunning heat. The hotel sleeps. For them we are over.

Pathetic gringos who came to them with a feeble dream of buying a baby. They’ve seen it all, including us. We pass like the tiniest cloud at noon.

In case you’ve forgotten, I’m an optimist. Quite uncharacteristic, all this gloom. Christopher always praised me for it, unsinkable, unquenchable.

— Before we left, we were laughing together, Benjy and I, in that rickety room. The beer released us from opera. Besides, we were moving, weren’t we? Stepping out together, fellow-travellers…

Thank you, I thought, the pain has gone. The warm beer made me invulnerable, just a tiny bit clumsy but entirely happy as we climbed into the manager’s white-hot jeep and rattled off over the baking mud, paying extra for driving through the siesta.

I thought I might have caught one final glimpse of my family of daughters staring blankly after me, their narrow-eyed mestizo faces seeing only the jeep, not the mad pale lady, but there was no one, everyone slept.

I didn’t care, I was flying, I was drunk, it was all a dream, with another one tomorrow. We laughed so loud that the hotel manager, who must have heard our row the night before, turned round and stared over his white-flecked shoulder and scraped the side of a sleeping bus.

This ebullience got us to the railway station, and then the train itself took over, for I’ve loved foreign trains with a passionate love since the British railways withered away. Elsewhere in the world in the last decade the railways have boomed as governments turned against the motorcar… This particular line, which runs from Riberalta across the border into Brazil and down to Pôrto Velho, was dreamed up over a century ago as a way of making up some silly feud between Brazil and Bolivia — South Americans are always quarrelling, and totally unreliable, as Benjamin and I have found to our cost — the Brazilians, you see, never bothered to finish it, and the track would simply have rusted away if it hadn’t been completed a few years ago on nothing more than a gangster’s whim, a Bolivian cocaine baron buying good will, or so the maid told Benjamin, she was sly, she was always talking to him… How can you deal with people like that? Dreamers, idlers, gossips, crooks…

I’m glad we’re going. A toast to cocaine. The original line cost six thousand lives, one for every hundred sleepers. I discourage Benjamin from tiring me with facts but I admit that this has an epic dimension, as if our carriage were surging through the rubber forest on thousands of straining human shoulders, with me above them, urging them on…

Benjamin doesn’t like that image. Benjy has no imagination.

South American trains are wonderful. There are steam-trains (steam-trains!) still in service, or so they say, though I’ve never seen one; I’d adore to find one of those iron giants and rattle through the remains of the rain-forest. I’ve heard there are some at Pôrto Velho, if we manage to get as far as Brazil.

Even the diesel trains are marvellous fun. The vendors serve warm gassy drinks and pukacapas, picante cheese pies which somehow taste wonderful because you’re moving. People travel with sheep and garrulous chickens and shout to each other in the shuddering bursts of light and dark as we shoot through the trees, past a wall of fire into untouched stillness where a troop of macaques pauses, startled, the babies clinging to their mothers like bats, then the smoke sweeps everything back into darkness.

Not everything. I am left with the babies. Little soft paws which grope and cling.

And so the pleasure of the beer turned sour. If I’d had a gun, I’d have shot down the monkeys, aiming unerringly back through the flames. God will help me; I must be avenged.

But we stopped in the sun — someone dead on the tracks, a protester, they said, against the burnings — and the killing heat on the side of my head made me sleep, heavily, and dream black dreams, and when I woke up the rage was gone.

I swear I no longer felt angry, but the train had jerked at the wrong moment so I woke as I rose through a spiral of time, unsure which level I was on.

Someone was talking and kissing me.

‘Wake up, Alex. It’s nearly our station.’

‘— Christopher, ’ I said.

I thought I was with Christopher, we were travelling, we were nearly there…

It wasn’t the initial confusion that hurt him. Benjy says he could have accepted that. It was what happened as I woke up properly, narrowing my eyes against the blaze, and he saw his reflection in my pupil, saw me register who was there, and the pupil contracted with disappointment.

Little black stones. Of course he was lonely.

So I am lonely, and he is lonely. Not parting yet, just moving apart.

And we’ve only been together five years… how little life there is in us.

Christopher. Do you remember? When we lived together, there was so much life. For twenty years we honeymooned.

We loved each other till the day we parted. Some small mad part of me loves him still…

If I weren’t a realist I’d love him still, but time and the world have left us behind.

Hotel Magdalena, Guayaramerín. Another town, another hotel, so near the banks of the Mamore river that we hear the frogs singing all night long. I hear them, at any rate, because I can’t sleep. Benjy is sleeping youthfully.

All the hotels start to blur together, and all the names of South American towns. This one at least means nothing to me. When this dream began, long ago in New York, when I pored over the maps that Benjy brought me, I saw so many towns called Esperanza, so many called Concepción, others promising us Exaltación… at the time I was jubilant, I thought it was a sign, but now I see it was just their joke.

I think of memory like toothache, or the pain in a long-ago broken bone where the join is not quite effortless; a small piece lost, a connection gone. Days of departure ache the most, because they were the days when Chris and I felt closest…

Leaving somewhere and moving on, leaving behind the brief new friendships, proving yet again that only he and I mattered, a unit of two against the world. Drawing an arc into emptiness as the plane sheered away from the things we knew and straight up into a cloudless sky. Disappearing into a blank silver screen. Then we made pictures, beautiful pictures…

Alex and Chris in Poreč, in Istra, where so many things were a shade of gold, the glittering mosaics in the basilica, the orange roofs, the apricot juice we drank ice-cold in a tiny cafe as soon as we got off the train, the sweet tawny Prošek wine we had later as the light turned gold for the end of the day; Alex and Chris in Buenos Aires, in evening dress and gangster shades; Alex and Chris in Bermuda, where everything seemed painted white, the roofs of the houses, the powdery sands, the languorous tail of a tropic bird he said reminded him of me; Alex and Chris posing in Cairo, drinking gin slings in the setting sun, the light blazing pink through the rims of the glasses…

Everything was so bright, so light. An adventure film, an artifice. We enjoyed each other and enjoyed ourselves and didn’t think about much else…