Labels and Other Stories Page 17

  The patron weighed this proposition and gave his assent with a shrug; everyone had to struggle and improvise these days. The government changes, and the problems stay the same.

  ‘Who’s the foreigner?’ he asked, puzzled that a tin collector should be chauffeured about in a nice new car.

  ‘I don’t know who he is,’ said Mehmet. ‘He’s been driving me around all day, helping me collect cans. Someone suggested earlier that he might be my angel.’ Mehmet giggled. ‘Anyway, I don’t know anything about him except that he speaks Turkish, but doesn’t understand when I speak it back. It’s very strange.’

  ‘Maybe he’s deaf,’ proposed the patron.

  ‘No, I’m sure he’s not,’ replied Mehmet. ‘But anyway, we’ve collected hundreds of cans today.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ said the patron, ‘since he’s been so good to a Turk, I’m not going to charge you for his drink, OK? I’ll give you some of your money back.’

  ‘You’re a saint,’ exclaimed Mehmet. ‘May the blessings of God be upon you.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ shrugged the patron. ‘If a foreigner can be kind to you, then I can too.’

  Later, back at Kilitbahir, Mehmet found that he still had twenty minutes to collect cans before the ferry departed, and that renewed coachloads of patriotic schoolchildren had liberally strewn the grounds of the old castle with drinks cans. He became quite agitated about this bonus, and his natural generosity got the better of him. At the café he ordered a cheese-toast for the stranger, as if he could assuage his own hunger by offering food to another. The waiter was somewhat reluctant to take a food order, since the kitchens were not yet opened, but Mehmet waxed eloquent about the duty of hospitality to foreigners, and stated firmly that the stranger had not eaten for ages. The waiter eyed the plump foreigner sceptically, but ultimately could not refuse this appeal to his honour. He went and got the cheese-toast ready.

  Mehmet signalled to the stranger that he was going to go and look for cans whilst they waited for the food. He was thinking that it would be so painful to watch the other eating when he was so hungry himself that it would be better to be out and about. Accordingly he stayed away from the restaurant as long as he possibly could.

  The foreigner began to be uneasy and suspicious about Mehmet’s long absence. What if he had gone back to the car? His passport was in there. Where the hell was Mehmet? The foreigner had cut the cheese-toast in half, and had eaten it reluctantly, out of politeness rather than because he wanted it. In deference to Mehmet’s obvious hunger, he had left the second half, and now it was going cold on the table. He was annoyed because he had wanted Mehmet to enjoy it at its best.

  The stranger paid the bill, and was just thinking that he would never see Mehmet again, when the latter reappeared, all triumphant smiles. ‘Thirty-two,’ he exclaimed.

  ‘Otuziki,’ repeated the foreigner, impressed. Mehmet was about to sit down, when he noticed that his hands had become very grubby indeed. He looked at them, showed them to the foreigner with a disgusted expression on his face, tutted, and disappeared into the men’s room. He washed first his hands, and then his face. He sprinkled water on to his hair, and stood in front of the mirror to comb it carefully into place. When he reappeared he was neat and respectable, and his shoulders were squared.

  Mehmet sat down at the table, and the foreigner indicated the cheese-toast, pointed at him, and said, ‘Yemek.’

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ said Mehmet, ‘I bought it for you. You eat it.’

  The stranger saw the longing in Mehmet’s eyes, and understood the delicacy of the situation. He linked the fingers of his hands, and made a rotund gesture above his stomach, indicating that he was completely full. He wrapped the cheese-toast in a paper napkin, and pointed at Mehmet, and then at his own watch, showing a later hour. Mehmet was initially puzzled, and then realised that the stranger was telling him to eat it later. It was an excellent compromise. With every show of reluctance and indifference, Mehmet accepted the cheese-toast. He put it carefully into his shirt pocket, and then eagerly knocked back the beer that had been waiting for him. When they got up to go, he very deliberately left the can on the table.

  He was vexed and consternated to discover that the foreigner had already paid the bill, his vexation being exacerbated by the realisation that he was also quite relieved. He turned angrily on the stranger, but was completely disarmed by the big smile on the latter’s face. Mehmet threw up his arm in mock exasperation. ‘You are a very bad man,’ he said, ‘you tricked me.’

  Mehmet enquired of the waiter as to whether any of the staff spoke the foreigner’s language, and was pleased to discover that there was one. For a short while he talked to the waiter, who then approached the foreigner: ‘Mr Mehmet says that he likes you very much, and he wants to know if you like him very much, because you have spent the whole day with him.’

  The foreigner was slightly embarrassed. ‘Tell him that he is a very good man, and that I like him very much.’ He put his hand on his friend’s upper arm, and patted it in a brotherly manner.

  When Mehmet heard this translated, he found it hard to dominate his emotions. He embraced the foreigner, squeezing his shoulders in his surprisingly strong hands, and looking away so that no one would notice the sentimental tears that were threatening to well up in his eyes. Apart from a decent living, all that Mehmet Erbil really wanted in life was a little honest respect, and it was not often that he received any.

  The foreigner presented Mehmet with a business card, upon which he had added his country’s code. He knew that if Mehmet telephoned, they would not understand each other one little bit, but it was the gesture that mattered, after all. Mehmet found a scrap of paper in his wallet, and wrote his own address and telephone number. As an afterthought, he added his profession: ‘oğretmen’.

  Mehmet walked with the foreigner back to the car, and for a moment the latter wondered whether Mehmet was thinking of coming to Eçeabat; but Mehmet just wanted to see the foreigner off. He shook his hand repeatedly, saying, ‘It would be nice if you came over with your car to Çanakkale. You’ve got my address. It would be wonderful to see you. It’s a shame to go back whilst there’s still light,’ he grinned, ‘and plenty of cans to collect, but I’ve got four classes tomorrow. I’ve got to prepare the lessons for the kids, you know how it is, and I’ve got a mountain of exercise books to mark. What a job, what a life.’

  The foreigner was as nonplussed by this speech as he had been by all of Mehmet’s remarks. He had given up saying ‘Anlamam’ and ‘Turkçe bilmiyorum’ and had even given up saying ‘Evet’. Mehmet talked anyway. He saw the foreigner’s perplexity, and continued, ‘I suppose you’re wondering why I came over on the ferry to collect cans when I could have collected them at home in Çanakkale.’ Mehmet scratched the back of his neck, and then stroked his chin. ‘Well, I wouldn’t want any of my own pupils to see me doing this.’ He raised the bulging white sack. ‘It’s not just a question of my self-esteem. No, it’s not that. It’s that I want my pupils to value education. I want them growing up to think that a schoolteacher is a fine thing to be. It would not be good for them to know that we are reduced to collecting cans.’

  The foreigner did not understand, but he knew that Mehmet had been speaking of grave matters. He nodded, and Mehmet nodded too, glad that something had been cleared up.

  Mehmet and the foreigner kissed on both cheeks. In the foreigner’s country men never did this, but here in Turkey it seemed completely natural and unremarkable, although the scrape of another man’s stubble on his cheek did feel distinctly novel and disconcerting.

  With a clatter, Mehmet hoisted the white sack on to his shoulder and began to walk away. Over his shoulder he called, ‘Remain well.’

  ‘Güle güle,’ returned the foreigner, remembering the correct formula from his phrasebook. He got into the car and drove away without looking back, knowing that Mehmet would not eat the cheese-toast until he was out of sight, and wanting to give him the chance to ea
t it as soon as he could.

  Back at the hotel the foreigner transferred Mehmet’s details to his address book, and then looked up ‘oğretmen’ in his Turkish dictionary. He was deeply puzzled to find that it meant ‘schoolmaster’, and it dawned on him only very slowly that Mehmet must already have had a proper job, and was only collecting cans out of desperation. He shook his head; sometimes it was humbling to comprehend so intimately the hardship in other people’s lives. When he telephoned his wife that evening he told her, ‘I’ve just had a really strange day. It was bizarre, but sort of heartening.’

  ‘Oh do tell me,’ she said.

  In Çanakkale, Mehmet dumped his haul of cans by the front door of his apartment, and went into the kitchen to greet his wife. ‘I’ve just had a really strange day,’ he told her, ‘it was bizarre, but in its way it was quite heartening.’

  His wife stirred the wooden spoon in the pot, wiped her hands on a cloth, and said, ‘Tell me.’

  A NIGHT OFF FOR PRUDENTE DE MORAES

  Prudente de Moraes paused briefly to glance down with satisfaction at the freshly gleaming leather of his shoes. He had just had them buffed up by a barefoot and bedraggled fellow with a Bahian accent, paying him more than was strictly necessary, and therefore a feeling of virtue and beneficence was spreading in his stomach as though he had swallowed a fine glass of aquardente with one stylish tip of the chin. It was good to be wearing casual dress, walking as slowly as he liked in the early evening, listening to the crash of the waves and watching the plumes of spray.

  He strolled along the Avenida Vieira Souto, dawdling to watch the interminable games of volleyball played by the golden-skinned young men. Just now and then one might see a boy practising fancy tricks with a football and wonder at the elegance and precision of it all. Prudente reflected that often the most beautiful things were those that were intrinsically the most useless.

  He stopped at a kiosk and asked for an agua de coco, merely for the pleasure of witnessing the attendant ritual, smiling to himself and chinking the change in his pocket as the man delved into his Frigidaire to retrieve a large coconut. He lopped off the end with a machete, so that it would stand on a table if required, and then, with three deft twists of the wrist and three smart blows, he removed a triangle of the outer pith from the other end, through which he inserted a couple of straws. ‘The reason,’ mused Prudente, ‘that he does it with such swiftness and precision, is that he wants me to be impressed. What vain creatures we are.’ He took the coconut and sat at the white plastic table, sucking the cold coconut milk into his mouth, and feeling it insinuating its soft liquid tentacles around the contents of his stomach. He had not often had agua de coco since he was a little boy, having graduated to beer, but now he resolved to do so more often. Sometimes it was a good idea to reclaim one’s past, even if only in the smallest ways. He looked up at the digital clock that had been sponsored by McDonald’s, and bathed in the luxurious feeling of having an entire evening to waste.

  Prudente decided to take off his shoes and socks, and go down to the edge of the waves. It was a good twenty-eight degrees, but the clouds had prevented the sun from baking the sand directly, and anyway there was a trick to walking on hot sand, which was to keep going and not to think about it.

  He wove between the volleyball games, and down to the long flat strip where there seemed to be nobody who was not young and exquisitely beautiful. He felt wistful when he saw the flat stomachs and well-defined pectoral muscles of the young men, and even more wistful when he saw that every one of the young girls was a teenager. Most wore the kind of bikini bottoms known popularly as ‘dental floss’ because they had no real seat to them, but only an exiguous fillet that disappeared between the cheeks. His eyes roved over hundreds of heartbreakingly brown-buttocked Lolitas laid out in rows on their towels, soaking up the sun, and soaking up the longing of the males who watched them from behind the cool privacy of their sunglasses. It was a beach full of narcissists, he realised, and then reflected with a flash of honesty that the only reason that he himself was not a narcissist these days was that he no longer had very much to be vain about. He watched two men who were floundering comically in the prodigious waves. One was very tall and angular, and the other was short and spherical. Few of the locals were swimming, because the coastguard’s red flag was flying, and from their puce faces and eccentric behaviour, Prudente rightly inferred that the two bathers were Englishmen. He watched them being bowled over by the waves every time his eyes needed to be refreshed after having seen yet another fabulous but untouchable girl patrol past him like a panther, or flow by with the loose-limbed elegance of a gazelle.

  He was about to leave Ipanema beach when he became aware that a spectacular sunset was developing over the sea by São Conrado. Normally a mist rose on the horizon, obscuring the sunset altogether, but today the clouds and the ocean’s vapour had left a space for the sun to display itself, so that it was sinking at a sedate but visible speed, growing ever larger and more splendid. It was incandescent and fluorescent, with a colour that struck him as more artificial than natural. Streaks of vermilion and scarlet spread horizontally, and Prudente wished idly for some orange and black. Orange and black sunsets were his particular favourite, because their savagery made them less sentimental. He loved beauty as much as any man else, but he was not unduly sentimental, and he liked his beauty to be slaked with just a touch of terror.

  He realised that the sun was going to sink at precisely the mid-point between the rocks out to sea and the headland, as if it had been aiming deliberately at precisely the most aesthetically pleasing configuration of land and sea. Prudente looked up at the peaks known as ‘The Two Brothers’, and reflected once again that they looked more like two ill-matched woman’s breasts. Come to think of it, the Sugar Loaf was somewhat breast-shaped too. He watched the lights begin to go on in the favela above São Conrado, the pinpricks of light oscillating in the hot air like distant stars. He remembered when the favela had been nothing but sheets of tin and lumps of timber held together with wires and beachcombed lengths of rope. Now they were built of bricks, but they still seemed to disgorge the same plagues of thieves and rogues that they always had.

  Prudente did not want to spoil the sunset by ruminating upon intractable social problems, however, and like many others had long ago come to the conclusion that radical cures were required. He turned his attention back to the natural glory of what was happening in the west. The sun was now half drowned, and was throwing out thick and undulating plumes of scarlet fire. They had become like the locks of a woman imagined by an artist who was thinking of a wild goddess, or was attempting to epitomise a passion such as grief, or vengeance, or desire.

  Prudente noticed that an odd thing was occurring. The crowds of young Cariocas had risen to their feet, and were facing the west, entranced by the dying moments of the sun. He watched the volleyballers, the footballers, the seekers of suntans, the young heartbreakers of both sexes, the dedicated narcissists who had just become absorbed in something even more beautiful than themselves, and felt profoundly stirred. There must be something naturally wonderful within the human heart, an impulse that opened it to the ineffable, the sublime and the marvellous. He rose to his feet and stood amongst the crowd, sensing sympathetically the waves of unanimous spiritual awe that sparked in the charged air between them.

  The sun slipped to the rim of the earth, a final ball of red light flared briefly like a ruby at the outer edge of the sea, and then it was gone. Spontaneously the throng of Cariocas burst into applause, congratulating the sun and the sea upon the finest possible performance, as if the whole world had become a theatre and the human race the spectator to its virtuosity. The sky darkened to violet-blue, but still the people stood silent, as if awaiting a curtain call. A cool gust of wind blew in off the southern Atlantic, and a sigh passed through the crowd. Without a word, Rio de Janeiro’s throng of beautiful young sybarites leaned down, picked up their beach paraphernalia and walked quietly away towards th
e Avenida Vieira Souto. They would take a final Guarana perhaps, a final Coca-Cola, a final agua de coco from one of the kiosks, and then be off home before the thieves came down from the slums.

  Prudente had been deeply stirred by the whole experience, not merely by the extraordinary splendour of the sunset, but also by the unexpected manner in which it had seized the hearts of so many people simultaneously. Chills had run down his spine, and his own sigh had joined the susurration of the crowd at the final moment of the sun’s descent. He would have felt the same if he had caught a glimpse of the Virgin Herself, or seen St Sebastian ride through the city with his incorruptible body full of arrows. He went to a bar in the Rua Visconde de Piraja, and ordered a caipirinha.

  He watched the barman crushing the ice by whacking it with a spoon, and observed him slicing the limes, putting in the sugar, and finally pouring the spirit. He took the glass and braced himself for the impact; the first gulp was always a shock to the system, no matter how many times one had drunk it before in one’s life. It was that strange combination of sweet, bitter and sour. Prudente never drank more than two at one sitting, because it had a most insidious way of making one drunk; one might suffer double-vision, for example, whilst remaining otherwise clear-headed.

  Prudente drank his two caipirinhas over a period of one hour, engaged in conversation with a fat and intoxicated security man who rather tediously insisted upon showing him his pistol, and then wandered out into the night. It was humid, a trickle of sweat began to slip down his temple, and he wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve. He decided that he would walk down the Rua Garcia D’Avila to the lagoon, so that he could look at the Christ, floodlit at the top of the Corcovado Mountain. It was a sight of which he could never tire, for sometimes the top of the mountain would be enclosed in mist, and the gigantic Christ would glow gold, as if coming in glory upon the clouds at the resurrection of the dead. Equally one could imagine that the Christ was an angel, perhaps Michael or Gabriel, and Prudente wondered how many crimes had been prevented by a thief or a murderer looking up at the last moment, and being reminded of the omnipresence, justice and beauty of God. Sometimes Prudente wondered how anyone could do wrong in Rio, with the Christ resplendent in the sky at night.