by saying how outrageous it was, the night heavy with dew and silence, the moonlight, the silver and black olives, the warm air perfumed with grass and pines on the encompassing hills, this star-filled August night, so clear, so silent, so peaceful, and this guy screwing his whore in your house. What humiliation!
As soon as you left, my dear Peisson, for reasons I cannot fathom, I began mulling over what you had just told me, and moved by these nocturnal reflections I found myself recalling other nights, equally intense, that I have known in different latitudes, of which the most terrible was the one I lived through, alone, at the front in 1915.
It was also summer and a beautiful starry night, though not the translucent sky of Provence but outside Roye, on a northern plain, among fallow fields and rank grasses, untended for more than a year, from which a milky aroma arose... opaque, ethereal, frayed... with stars riddling the landscape like ink spots on a torn piece of blotting paper, and everything becoming ghostly... no longer a moon in the sky... I was chewing a blade of grass... and the eclipse that I observed then, as you will see, was an eclipse of my very identity, and it is a miracle that I am still alive... this fear, that I have never spoken of to anyone yet would have confided to you in an instant had you been still around. Indeed, I leaned out the window just as you turned the corner of the street, perched on your bicycle. But with no chance of calling you back, rather than run after you I dusted off my typewriter and impulsively began writing the present narrative for you, my dear Peisson. You will understand my feelings, knowing that since June 1940, and in spite of your warm and frequent encouragement, and the self-interested solicitations of newspaper and journal editors—not to mention the misery my inactivity caused me—I have never written a line.
My dear Peisson, because you are the unwitting cause of my return to writing, allow me not only to pay homage to you in my opening story, but to consider you from today the godfather of my future work. I very much hope that you will do me the honor of accepting this title that is neither honorary nor gratuitous since it carries so much of the responsibility.
Even though I wish you to assume this responsibility, I ask myself how your brief visit this morning could release in me such a shock wave that I set about writing without a moment’s hesitation, and why I returned to writing today of all days. I have no answer to this question. But everything you recounted, of the night, the sky, the moon, the landscape, the silence, stirred in me so many memories, including echoes of the war whose presence pervaded your bitter reflections and the invasion of your privacy by a German lieutenant who not only abused your hospitality, violating your house with a common whore, but robbing you of your refuge as a writer. Then I was fired, in my solitude, for to write is to be consumed by fire.
Writing ignites a welter of ideas and throws light on chains of images before reducing everything to flickering embers and crumbling ash. But though flames set off a fire alarm, spontaneous combustion is a mysterious process. For to write is to be burned alive as well as to be reborn from the ashes.
SIX
Writing in Limbo
NOT LONG BEFORE PAULINE AND I WENT to Sierra Leone, a story broke in the English Sunday Times about the fate of an English yachtsman called Donald Crowhurst.1 His trimaran ketch, Teignmouth Electron, had been found adrift in mid-Atlantic. The life raft was lashed in place, the helm swung freely, and the sails lay folded on the deck ready to be raised. But Crowhurst had vanished.
Three blue-bound logbooks on the chart table revealed what had befallen him.
On October 31, 1968, Crowhurst had set sail from Teignmouth, Devon, in a bid to win the Golden Globe single-handed round-the-world race. His trimaran had been built and equipped in a hurry. There had been no time for intensive sea trials, and Crowhurst had sailed late with his course unplanned. To make matters worse, hatches leaked, steering gear malfunctioned, and the electrics failed. The reasonable course would have been to abandon the voyage. But loathe to admit defeat, Crowhurst began to work out an elaborate deception in which he would calculate and radio false positions, giving the impression that he had rounded the Horn in record time and was making excellent progress across the Pacific. In fact, he was sailing in circles in the South atlantic, well away from shipping lanes, awaiting an opportune moment to announce that he had reached the Cape of Good Hope and was again in the Atlantic on the final leg of a circumnavigation of the globe.
What brought Crowhurst to the realization that he would never be able to pull off the deception? Inconsistencies in his carefully forged logbooks? Guilt over having deceived those who loved him and had supported his enterprise? Doubt in his ability to remember every detail of his concocted story and remain consistent in everything he said on his return to a hero’s welcome in England?
In the ineluctable silence and solitude of the sea, the yachtsman began to lose touch with reality. Entangled in the web of lies he had spun, he saw that his voyage was doomed. By the time he sailed into the Sargasso Sea, he had retreated into a wholly private world. Becalmed, and having lost all track of time, he began to imagine that he could leave his body at will and make himself divine. Surrounded by a debris of dirty dishes and dismantled radios, he penned one of the last entries in his log:
It is the end of my
game the truth
has been revealed
A few minutes later, he climbed the companion ladder to the deck, then stepped off the Teignmouth Electron into the sea.
As Pauline and I stepped from the aircraft, the hot soup–sweet African night enveloped us. My body felt swollen. My shirt stuck to my skin. Inside the airport terminal, African bodies pressed around us, pungent and cloying. It took two hours to get our passports stamped, to reclaim our baggage, and to clear Customs. We moved in a state of torpor, saying nothing, as if we were strangers to each other.
It was after midnight by the time we got away from the airport. Lightning flashed along the Bullom shore, and the humid air was heavy with the stench of decomposing vegetation and the sea.
In the taxi, the breeze through the open windows revived me. But I was beginning to rue the promise I’d made to my friend Alex Guyan in London. Alex had insisted that when we arrived in Freetown we stay at the City Hotel. Graham Greene had killed a lot of time there during the war, and Alex was an avid fan of Greene’s. It amused him to think of me sitting on the same balcony where Wilson sat at the beginning of The Heart of the Matter, “his bald pink knees thrust against the ironwork... his face turned to the sea.”
I asked the taxi driver if he knew the City Hotel. Sure, he knew it. He could take us there for only thirty leones. It sounded like a lot of money, but I didn’t know the exchange rate and, besides, it was a bit late now to negotiate our fare.
Too tired to take anything in, we crossed the Sierra Leone River on a throbbing ferry and were driven through labyrinthine streets, lit by braziers and flickering oil lamps. By the time our taxi set us down outside the City Hotel, our minds were in a fug and we had lost track of time.
In the darkness, the wind thrashed at the palms in the hotel forecourt. Thunder rolled and caromed in the peninsular hills.
We found the main entrance to the hotel barred by a metal grille, and the shuttered windows showed no signs of life. Already we were wishing we had taken the airport bus with the other whites and gone to the Paramount Hotel, even though the cost of a room there would have been prohibitive, and even though we had vowed to steer clear of tourists, to plunge straight into Africa and keep our promise to Alex.
I shouted up at the dark and decaying concrete facade. “Anybody there?”
A first-story window was wrenched open, and a woman called down to us in Krio. At the same moment the rain came bucketing
