The vision of elena silv.., p.1
The Vision of Elena Silves, page 1
Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Nicholas Shakespeare
Dedication
Title Page
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Part Two
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Part Three
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Copyright
About the Book
In the Amazon city of Belén, in the heart of the Peruvian jungle, three old men sit on a bench. They sit in the square every day under the hot sun, remembering the women they loved and the world when it was a better place. One day a woman hurries past their bench whom all have reason to remember – Elena Silves, the girl with eyes as blue as the sky who once saw a vision and has been incarcerated by the Church authorities in a convent high in the Andes ever since. But the old men remember something else. They remember that Elena had been in love at the time with Gabriel, a student revolutionary who became the most wanted man in Belén.
About the Author
Nicholas Shakespeare is the author of Snowleg, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2004, The High Flyer, for which he was nominated as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, and The Dancer Upstairs, selected by the American Libraries Association as the best novel of 1997 and adapted for the film of the same title directed by John Malkovich. He is also the author of an acclaimed biography of Bruce Chatwin.
ALSO BY NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE
The Men Who Would Be King
Londoners
The High Flyer
The Dancer Upstairs
Snowleg
Bruce Chatwin
In memory of Bruce Chatwin
The Vision of Elena Silves
Nicholas Shakespeare
I’ll be seeing you
In all the old familiar places
That this heart of mine embraces
All day through.
In the small café,
The park across the way,
The children’s carousel,
The chestnut trees, the wishing well.
I’ll be seeing you
In every lovely summer’s day
In everything that’s light and gay
I’ll always think of you that way.
I’ll find you in the morning sun
And when the night is new,
I’ll be looking at the moon,
But I’ll be seeing you.
(Irving Kahal and Sammy Fain 1938.
Recorded by Frank Sinatra 1961.)
Part One
1983
Chapter 1
IT IS EARLY morning in Belén. The jungle is quiet. The sky over the rooftops stretches clear and colourless, except for a red clawmark where the day has pounced.
The air is so fresh you want to inhale it in deep breaths. It smells of copa de oro.
Apart from the tented shape of Sebastián under his black hood and Vásquez washing his barrow by the cathedral steps, the square is empty.
An old man emerges from the corner of Calle Raimondi. He crosses the road to where Sebastián huddles beside a pile of newspapers. Aware of his approach, Sebastián holds up a yellow bucket and rattles it. The percussion of small change is the only sound in the street.
The old man throws in a coin and takes a newspaper from the pavement. He folds it under his arm and shuffles towards the bench under the statue in the middle of the square. In one hand he carries a large canvas bag; in the other a handkerchief. He is about to wipe the surface of the bench when he notices that instead of dew it is covered in blood-red beads. Putting down his bag he reaches out for one. He holds it to the light. He finds himself looking at a dead cattle-fly, half an inch long, the same colour as the sun.
“Colihuachos,” he says to himself, throwing it back among the other flies. They lie there as if a string has broken on a necklace. They cover the bench, the ground in front and the flower beds behind.
The old man brushes them off the seat with his handkerchief. He shakes the cloth, replaces it up his sleeve and sits down.
He is Don Leopoldo.
He wears no hat and his face is lined, as if he has walked into a spider’s web and forgotten to wipe it away. His love of precise dates and proven facts has earned him a reputation for being a little pedantic. He knows more than is necessarily interesting about the yellow cathedral, its cartridge-shaped windows, its Swiss-made clock; about the origin of the tiles on the old Palace Hotel and about Admiral Grau, the man in whom Peru had once put all her hope, whose bronze whiskers bristle defiantly as if he is still on the deck of the Huáscar.
This morning, the flies on the Admiral’s head and epaulettes have the appearance of laurel leaves.
Don Leopoldo looks beyond the statue to the metal house opposite, its roof stained with the sun. He can tell anyone who cares to listen – fewer and fewer nowadays – about this house, constructed by Eiffel for the Paris Exhibition of 1896, dismantled for its voyage to another continent altogether, and then transported two thousand miles upriver from Pará to be reassembled, bolt by bolt, for an absentee rubber lord.
The Club de Leones has since moved its premises to a floor above the Banco Industrial, but Don Leopoldo remembers when the members played their poker in Eiffel’s folly, drinking bottles of Allsopp’s Pale Ale in a hot metal room like an oven.
El Club de los Pájaros Muertos, they called it.
He gazes at Eiffel’s house and the buckled pillar into which a car has crashed. It upsets him no one has repaired it. These days he finds it easy to be upset. That’s what happens when you are a dead parrot with long memories. Don Leopoldo can remember a time when there was no cathedral and women walked beside the open drains holding geranium-scented handkerchiefs to their noses. He remembers the town in the days when you bought your clothes from Don Ramur – Scotch tweed, alpaca, boaters; when the ice cream you ate in the Booth supermarket came all the way from Liverpool; when the port you drank with Orestes Minero in the Café Nanay was Taylor’s finest, shipped from Pinhão.
Now the river is silting up and no boats come from Europe. Now you bought your shirts off the pavement and they had crocodiles on the pockets. Now in the café they hold aerobics classes.
The cobweb tightens on Don Leopoldo’s face. They don’t even keep photographs of the old town, to remind people it was a town of millionaires and palaces, not of soldiers who have appropriated the Palace Hotel and let it collapse about them. Instead of picking their noses, they should be restoring the chipped Evora azulejos. They should be repairing the fine ironwork and scrubbing the frescoed ceilings instead of straining their eyes upriver to Ecuador. Besides, who would invade Peru nowadays?
Live for today, forget about yesterday, then show your money with a fanfaronade and wait for the next boom.
As an historian, Don Leopoldo finds this recipe for life unworthy of Peruvians. But to be a Peruvian. What does that signify to the world outside? Nothing.
Don Leopoldo speaks harshly of his countrymen because he loves the land that gave them birth. As a young man he maintained the time had come for Peru to produce her popular historian. A man who could liberate the country from its cosy, obfuscating myths. A man such as Admiral Grau or Lord Cochrane who could ignite the masses like the blue touch paper on a firework. A man who could show them the path they should take by illuminating the path by which they had come.
As a young man he had wished for himself that role.
As an old man he regrets that he prepared himself for it by first writing a History of the Colonization of Belén.
At the end of each day since the day of that decision, he has returned to his room and added another manuscript sheet to the disorderly mound by his bed. Don Leopoldo’s lucubrations pile up to several thousand pages. These are the pages which every morning, and in no particular order, he stuffs into the mouth of his green bag and carries to the bench.
Often he is influenced by what has been discussed on the bench. Sometimes his companions remind him of things he has quite forgotten. Sometimes they tell him of things he never knew. Always he tries to be on his guard with what they have said. But at night he is not entirely able to shake their voices from his head. Indeed, he sometimes has the uncomfortable impression that what he writes is a mingling of their voices.
Don Leopoldo’s History of the Colonization of Belén has taken a decade or two more than ideally he would have wished. He convinces himself it is lacking only a final chapter (on the territorial dispute with Ecuador, with a commentary on Gregory XVI’s Bull of 2 June 1843 recognizing Peru’s right over the diocese of Soreto). Plus an index, of course.
He has given up hope that when complete it will immortalize his name and cause the jungle round about to break out in psalms.
His magnum opus has taken so long becaus
Clearer than the outline of Don Leopoldo’s thesis is the melancholy which originally informed it (and which he attributes, erroneously, to Portuguese saudade). Although he has with some pride traced his ancestry to a learned quinologist from Ceuta, he feels the blemish of his European blood. It is sad beyond the power of Don Leopoldo’s expression to contemplate the arrival of the bearded men from Spain.
After the Age of Gold, the Age of Manure.
What could be expected of a country whose fortunes were built on the violet grey sap of a tree and mountain upon mountain of birdshit?
“No wonder the only people who flourish are terrucos,” he murmurs to himself. The only terruco he has time for is Lord Cochrane.
At night, looking into the kerosene lamp, Don Leopoldo can hear the sound of Lord Cochrane muffling his oars on the evening of 5 November 1820. In the flame he hears him creep towards the Spanish flagship Esmeralda whose spars are cracks in the darkness. He hears him whisper to his men (the same number, he notes, as had taken Peru three centuries before). “One hour of courage and resolution,” he is saying, “is all that is required for you to triumph.” The promise stirs them. Don Leopoldo, dressed in white and pike in hand, lifts his tense face to the night where the 44-gun frigate rolls gently in the fog.
But the courageous, resolute men around him don’t need an hour. Cochrane and his patriots need only fifteen minutes to board and capture Spain’s impregnable flagship (guarded by 27 gunboats and 300 shore guns) and so finally slip cable on the royalists, those pigfarming illiterates who had destroyed a perfect civilization.
Had he wished it, as Don Leopoldo wishes it for him, Lord Cochrane could have been first Admiral of Peru. It is sad that no one else except Grau, sixty years after him, has seized such an opportunity for Peru to be faithful to herself.
The sadness has a cumulative effect on Don Leopoldo. More and more often as he puts on his jacket in the mornings, he wonders if he still has the strength to walk the two blocks to the square. One day the effort will be too much. Who will then wipe the dew from the bench, or the cattle-flies?
This is his favourite hour of the day, when the only voice on the bench is his own, when the square is empty and silent and he can imagine the town as it has been, before it is overcome-by the noise of cars and ant-headed motorbikes and buses which, because of the drowsing heat, have no glass in their windows. His eyes water as they move over the buildings – the Bishop’s palace, the cathedral, the Zumate pharmacy and Pía Zumate’s small hotel on the corner of Raimondi which shares a recessed entrance, always in deep shadow, with the Café Nanay.
His eyes are lingering on the hotel when they catch a movement at a window on the top floor. Don Leopoldo swears he sees a face looking out of the half-open louvres. Before lie can make it out, the face has vanished.
“So,” he says aloud. “The soft-shoe artist is back.”
The movement at the window has ruffled his day-dream. He unfolds his paper. He begins reading.
He has reached El Oriente’s leader (on the economic consequences of the current called El Niño) when a second man arrives and sits down next to him. He wears a brown alpaca cardigan and a jipijapa panama that curls at the edges like a leaf. It is made of a straw so fine it can pass through a wedding ring.
This is Don Wenceslau.
He is a thin man with bony shoulders. The creases about his crotch imitate those about his eyes. They are eyes as red as the spirit he buys from Don Vásquez’s barrow.
“How many tributaries has the Amazon, Don Leopoldo?”
“Eleven thousand and eighteen.”
Don Wenceslau must know each one of them. If he can paddle off on a tangent, he will. He is a story-teller, a lover of red herrings, but they are best caught before lunch when he starts on Vásquez’s masato. Until midday, his hangover makes him lucid and he can tell stories even Don Leopoldo listens to with interest. The square is his theatre. As he speaks, he points at things which transform themselves into his narrative. So the yellow copa de oro bushes behind them become the Nanay, the clock in the cathedral tower becomes the moon, the bronze Admiral becomes Christ descending into the Cocha and Vásquez’s barrow the house of stone discovered in the jungle, where no stone exists and where chickens nest on an alabaster staircase.
Don Wenceslau sits down heavily. He greets Don Leopoldo. He has a stomachache, he says. He holds his head.
“Never eat cebiche at night, Don Leopoldo, that’s my advice.” It is not the first time Don Leopoldo has heard it.
“No sign of García?”
“Not yet.”
“Probably had a night of it with his whores at the Teletroca.” The copa de oro bushes rustle behind them. A man breaks cover.
“Not whores, Wenceslau, princesses,” he says. He sits down next to Don Wenceslau, crosses his legs and stretches an arm along the back of the bench. In his face there are the remnants of a good-looking man. The finest feature is a moustache. Its greyness matches the colour of the felt trilby cocked rakishly over his nose. From his breast pocket tumbles a bright red handkerchief.
He is Don García, the singer and a devoted Donizettian. Listening to Donizetti he is almost persuaded to be a Christian. He believes the Italian rescued music from the dissipation into which it sank after that barbarian Rossini – that Marat of melody who would set a laundry list to music – broke the unities. Sometimes, to fill a rare silence, he treats his two companions to an aria from Lucia di Lammermoor.
Don García is ever in search of similes to describe life as he sees it – afresh each day – in this square. His temperament gives rise to flights of operatic fancy, such as his belief – though Don Leopoldo assures him repeatedly it is out of the question – that Caruso once sang at the Alhambra in the role of Lord Henry Ashton.
Don García’s eyes cannot help prancing over the road to the site of this theatre where on the night of 24 October 1927 the receptionist fell asleep with her cigarette between the pages of Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum (and where ten years later the celluloid overheated during a showing of The Rubber Man’s Daughter). On each occasion the place was burnt to a cinder.
Don García does not see the grassed-over stage occupied by three chickens and a derelict bus. He sees the dado mosaic floor, the spangled velvet curtains, the massive backdrops, the castles rising from landscaped gardens. He does not mind that this backdrop was used whatever the work: opera, film, or pantomime. He never minded either when a French company performed Così fan tutte and Don Alfonso’s beard fell off; nor when in the love scene the chaise longue slid into the orchestra pit and broke the legs of a Swedish cellist (nor when the shoes of the prompter appeared under the curtain). He never minded because he is a man for whom disbelief suspends as easily as that curtain. Which is why he imagines every now and then, when the wind from the river is right, he can hear the opening notes from “Una furtiva làgrima”.
Don García is also a picaflor. He likes women. He more than likes them. He adores them. He remembers, before the Alhambra burnt down a second time, when money was in pound sterling and you could get a girl for the price of the handkerchief in his pocket. He spent a lot on handkerchiefs. All men were children of Adam, he used to say then. It was the silk that made the difference.
Now the girls never look at him. But it doesn’t prevent him, if a pretty one walks by, from arranging his face to look mysterious, haughty, someone of infinite possibility, when he knows in his heart that all the girl sees is a piece of flotsam on a bench. Or three old men on a bench.
They sit here in the same position every day, the singer, the drinker, the local historian. Three narrators watching over the same scene. No one can hope to cross the square without their knowledge. From the glimpses of those who pass by they concoct whole lives.
“What’s this?” says Don Wenceslau, noticing for the first time the dead flies at his feet. He picks one up at the second attempt. He caresses the ruddy wings.
