Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

I should have seen then we were bound to fail, for nothing really worked in Bolivia, the jungle strangled everything. Even my hopefulness and energy. Now Brazil has put new heart in us.

The food. I’ve always liked my food. Food and sex are not unconnected. Afer Bolivia, the food is delicious. Wonderful fish in Pôrto Velho, fresh shrimp fried in olive oil and garlic, grilled dourado, vatapa — smelling of coconut, Africa, the sea. Food is a celebration again. And the meat is good for Benjamin. A big rare churrasco steak at night, plenty of cachaca to keep him cheerful and then two or three diabolically strong coffees, little cafezinhos, black as love, sweet and hot as Benjamin’s mouth — he was inside me most of the night. He’s still a good lover; I’ve no complaints there. I have plenty of complaints, but not about our sex-life.

S ã o Benedicto is just right for us; a scruffy little town left beached by the gold rush. It was rich for a bit and now it’s poor with scrawny dogs picking scraps on the street. No gold left, and the people will leave, for the tin mine can’t employ them all. But they haven’t gone yet. They’ve been waiting for us. There are children everywhere; I see them everywhere, small and bright-eyed, playing in the dust.

Benjamin’s gone out to try the priest again — so he says, and perhaps it’s true. Priests know who they’ve recently advised against abortion. If you pay them well and convince them you’re Catholic — or convince them you’re Catholic by paying them well — they will put out feelers, promising nothing. The whole process is terribly slow; we’ve been through it numbingly often by now. Money is no guarantee of success. Only inexhaustible willpower can do it, and Benjy has been deficient in that. Perhaps the steak will pep him up.

The trouble with Benjy — one of the troubles — is laziness. Sleepiness. He should be ashamed, doing nothing all day, with all the talent Isaac said he had. When I first met him he was always full of adrenalin, just finishing one picture and starting on six others, with paint-spattered clothes and restless eyes, looking about him to eat the world. He pretends to go out and make sketches now, but he never shows me anything. There was one drawing of me, but that was appalling, entirely inept, made me look like a monster — for a second I was worried, but he just lacks practice. He sits around, listless, and drinks too much. It’s not right at his age, barely thirty, at the beginning of his life.

Christopher grew idle too, I remember. All my men seem to tire in the end… but at least he was older, he’d worked all his life. And he still sent back regular pieces to the travel pages of the English papers. I helped him to make them more colourful, crisper, but he did keep working, after a fashion.

Part of him itched to make films again, though the longer he left it, the further his contacts lapsed, and any practical hopes of doing it. But he was an avid cinema-goer. In any town with a cinema he’d disappear in the afternoons; almost any kind of film gave him pleasure, because it was good, or because it was crap, because it was eccentric, or typical. He always came back in a good temper.

And it gave me some time on my own. Once I met Stuart, that was very important, so I could be in a good temper too. In the end Chris grew less keen on going out and became addicted to video. Video films, video games. He could pretend to direct those electronic cartoons. In our last years together it was all Chris did: play computer games on borrowed screens or watch video films in dark rented rooms, and by then we no longer talked about them. By then we no longer talked at all…

But Stuart and Christopher loved to talk film. At first Chris took Stuart for an ideal audience, one of those Englishmen he loved to meet in hotel bars during those long days… We were happy, yes, but the days could seem long. There was nothing we had to do, you see, and I couldn’t listen to him all the time, rehashing the old office grievances, reliving the old, faded triumphs, for part of him was in television still, part of Christopher had never left work, or wished he had not, and grieved for it (which was pointless — I mean, I never forced him to leave). He could impress other men with what he had done, especially if they knew a little about it, and everyone knows something about television. I was sometimes on the edge of such conversations, sucking in my gin and half-reading a novel, and I saw over the years how they began to falter as Chris became more out of touch with things. The names he dropped had a dusty air. Poor Christopher. He’d become a back number.

Stuart soon realised this, of course, so Chris couldn’t lord it over him for long, the film-maker patronising the academic. To do him justice, Chris didn’t much care. Here was a man who really knew about film, and film was Chris’s first love after me. He could talk to Stuart in his own language. But Stuart’s motives were less transparent.

Stuart liked to see films on his own, because it made the experience more concentrated — that’s what he told Chris, at any rate. So he would recommend films to my husband within striking distance of Toledo, and Chris would drive off across the hot red plain. He would come back full of what he had seen, exhilarated by the long drive home past the fields of sunflowers and the olive-dotted hills. The last time it happened the programme times were wrong; we’d played that little trick once too often; he came back early and nearly caught us, he thought he’d passed Stuart driving down the road from the parador, but I affected ignorance.

‘Not impossible,’ I said. My voice sounded unnatural, my throat was dry. Perhaps Stuart had been having a drink with a friend, since the parador had the best bars in town; but of course those jeeps were very common in Spain. I was directing too much energy to the question. I thought, he must hear I’m lying. But he lit a cigar, and changed the subject.

‘Bloody waste of an afternoon,’ he said. ‘I shan’t trust Stuart’s programme times again. Coming back was rather horrific. I ran into a hanging wall of orange butterflies, you couldn’t miss them, they went on for ever, swarming all over the main road and all across the windscreen. Beautiful but disgusting. I killed a lot of them. Why didn’t they have the sense to get out of the way?’

We always trod a very narrow line. The excitement was treading that very narrow line. It was exciting, too, to have a man with commitments, a man who worked and had a wife and children, a man who wasn’t wholly available to me. We were both actors, both liars. I enjoyed the foursome (occasionally six-some, when I couldn’t dissuade them from bringing the children) outings almost as much as I enjoyed the moments we spent alone. Knowing both he and Chris wanted me. Sailing near the wind in the things we said, the way we looked, the tiny touches, apparently casual, but burning, burning. Whose foot was pushing mine under the table? The electricity ran from my toe to my groin as I eased my legs across one another, carefully avoiding my lover’s eyes, knowing he was looking at me hard.

For me it was partly a game. Stuart was different, more serious, with a gloomy Calvinistic streak. The lying and acting caused him pain. I only felt twinges of fear, not pain.

‘Christopher would kill us if he found out,’ I said to Stuart one afternoon, half an hour after Christopher had left, ten minutes after Stuart and I shrugged our clothes off. Chris thought I was in the El Greco museum, Kirsty thought Stuart was working on his book. But he was working on me, with tender precision, his black head rooted between my legs.

‘Can’t hear,’ he said, coming up for air.

‘Christopher would kill us…’