Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

We both slept in the same one, of course. One night I dreamed that Susy and Isaac were in the other one together, some frightful mistake, they were making love, it was too late for me to save my daughter… then they stopped and sneered at us, the same but different. ‘It’s all your fault,’ Isaac said.

One dream-like memory I know to be true because it changed our life together. We were sprawled on the bed waiting for dinner, too lazy to dress and go to the bar, sipping the vast gins the maid had brought us. The evening cold that struck up off the sea was beginning to creep through the open window. We had switched on TV absent-mindedly and found a Portuguese soap in progress, which Alex insisted on watching, so I lay there companionably, reading my Baedeker. Recently she’d got addicted to soaps; they were international, she could find them anywhere. It was something I didn’t care to share.

And then she was sniffing; I heard her sniffing. I reached without looking for the box of tissues which like everything else was giant-sized; I thought she was getting a cold.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Alex said, or whispered, and the words seemed to come from someone else, for she was gazing entranced at the screen, the tears were welling in her hazel eyes, she wasn’t talking to me but herself; ‘Oh,’ she sighed, a little broken whisper.

She saw me looking and looked back, defiant. ‘I’m enjoying it,’ she said. The screen showed a hospital room, or a ridiculous set of a hospital room, all handsome doctors and exotic flowers.

And a woman miming ecstasy. And the cause of the ecstasy, and my wife’s grief, a small, supposedly newborn baby.

And so I began to understand.

‘Why shouldn’t I have a baby,’ said Alex, or someone else using Alex’s voice, a little girl using my darling’s voice. ‘I could have a baby too.’

‘You’re joking.’ It was utterly clear that she wasn’t. Alex never played the little girl. Part of herself had broken loose. Part of herself was learning to speak. It told me something I didn’t want to know.

‘I’m not joking… I don’t know what I’m saying.’

‘But do you want one?’

She nodded, weeping, clutching her arms across her breasts.

‘Is this something new?’

‘I don’t know… it’s mad… no, I keep crying when I see pictures of babies. It’s so stupid. I didn’t want to tell you. I mean, I’m too old… aren’t I? Am I too old to have a child?’ Her voice gathered strength as she spoke, becoming less shame-faced, more Alex-like. ‘Tell me I’m not too old.’

‘Since when have I been able to tell you things?’

She suddenly flung her arms around me, laughing and crying at the same time, tugging at my hair, kissing me. ‘Oh Christopher, let’s try. It would be a wonderful baby.’

I didn’t say ‘You weren’t very keen on Isaac and Susy.’ I didn’t say ‘It wouldn’t be your first.’ I didn’t remind her of the daughter she’d had adopted when she was twenty-two — before she met me, I wouldn’t have allowed it. Nor of the child of ours that she killed. It was our child and she fucking killed it … Part of me will never forgive her for that. She was four months pregnant, he had eyes, ears, fingers… yet I went along with it, afraid to lose her.

Now I went along with another mad scheme.

A new chapter of our life began, a new and more difficult journey, not at all the one I had anticipated. We could travel anywhere in the world, we could use our money to do anything we wanted, but this took us into interior, this drove us back against our own limitations. We were face to face with the ageing that travel had protected us from.

Her plan was mad, with a certain mad courage, and I agreed to follow it. I’d have followed her to the ends of the earth, and done anything to make her happy…

Anything I could, that is. She was forty-seven, I was sixty-two, we were much too old to start a baby…

But she was so eager, she had no doubts. Once the dam was broached, words poured from her at meal after meal and drink after drink, frenetic plans for our child, our children, names for our child, homes for our child… It was novel to feel sorry for her. I didn’t entirely dislike the change, the new, more vulnerable Alex.

In any case I didn’t dare crush her dream. Other men might have dreamed it with her.

And the sex was fun. The sex was marvellous. My darling was suddenly as eager as me, more eager than me, after years of coolness…

So this was the new beginning. Nothing is quite what you expect it to be, not Portugal, not the woman you love. We sat and giggled on the giant leather sofas, we fucked unprotected in the heavy bed; for the last week in Sagres, after Alex told her secret, we hardly seemed to go outdoors. My snapshots are all of Alex’s face, Alex smiling, Alex in tears, Alex’s face, which I now saw was mortal.

The American guests moved around us like extras, having unreal conversations in unreal voices.

‘Say. Did Henry the Navigator actually live here? ’

Because we had a notional relationship with the barman, the Americans thought we had superior knowledge.

‘Pardon me. My wife would like to know, what does Ovindo Mondo mean?’

At least, that was what I thought I’d heard. The phrase meant nothing at all to me, though it vaguely evoked a brand of wine, or perhaps a Latin pop singer.

‘Sounds like a name to me,’ I said. ‘My wife’s good at the lingo. When she comes, I’ll ask.’

When she came, I asked, and she frowned, puzzled, went over to the Americans. They showed her something in a tourist pamphlet.

‘ O fim do mondo, ’ she exclaimed. ‘Is that what they call this part of the coast? “The end of the world.”’

‘Gee thanks, that’s great!’

She came back to me. ‘ O fim do mondo. What a beautiful name.’

‘I suppose it was the end of all the earth they knew…’

‘So they sailed off the edge of the world; how brave.’

‘So did we. No beginning without an ending.’

And how sweetly, how passionately she kissed me, how tightly she held me in her arms, how many times she told me she loved me when she set off alone for Lisbon next day, on her way for the week in Malaga she insisted she needed to spend alone.

Thank God we’re in Brazil at last. Every time we move on I feel better for a bit. I began to have doubts at the border when I learned we needed yellow fever shots and the official started grinning a demented grin and assuring me he wished he could shoot me himself; then Benjy showed up and the creep backed off and we found they used an airgun to give us the shots, which was better after all than a dodgy needle. The motorboat puttered across the Mamore and we had arrived in another world; it felt positively… metropolitan, though now we’re back in the wilds again.

But the wilds of Brazil are less absolute. One shouldn’t be glad they’ve lopped down so much jungle, and the freshly cut areas are rather an eyesore, like a piece of burned skin through a magnifying glass, with singed stumps of hair sticking out of the redness… all the same it makes me feel safer, somehow, to know that human beings are on top.

In Bolivia I had nightmares for weeks after the little river trip we took, Benjamin and I and a Spanish-speaking guide, and there were piranhas and alligators and a colony of bats like great black ivy-leaves spread across a rotting stump.

‘Don’t they carry rabies?’ Benjamin asked.

‘Why did you bring me here?’ I hissed.

True, there were butterflies and orchids as well and pink river dolphins that seemed positively friendly. But it was all so chaotic. The guide seemed surprised to see the alligators and utterly amazed when the boat broke down and he couldn’t mend it for an hour and a half.