Better Than Fiction Page 3

  When a funeral procession wended its way past the doorway, Y took fright at the sight of the corpse and the sombre faces of the mourners. ‘Why do we die?’ he asked her. ‘Don’t worry,’ she replied. ‘The wheel of life keeps turning. Life gives way to death, and death paves the way to renewal. You have a long and bright future.’

  . . . . . . . . . . .

  Still I walked. Walked until the skies began to crack open. Walked as the farmers stirred from their slumbers. Walked until they returned to the paddies, to transplant their rice seedlings. Walked until the spring was heralded by processions of dragons, snaking out into the countryside.

  In the township and hamlets, in the rooms and courtyards, and on windowsills and doorsteps, candles and incense were burning. Lanterns, shaped as fish and lions, geometric shapes and dragons, hung over doorways and from balconies. Crackers heralded the last collective binge before the season of backbreaking labour returned in earnest.

  ‘Grandmother, why do people fire so many crackers in the Spring Festival?’ Y asked. ‘My treasure, the sound of crackers can keep ghosts from the door and drive bad luck away,’ she answered.

  . . . . . . . . . . .

  Entire families were back in the fields hoeing, planting and transplanting. The valley heaved with their exertions. Spring and winter vied against each other for a while longer until winter was overtaken by peach, orange and pear blossoms, fields of fertile greens and the scented yellow flowers of the rape plant. Sharp winds gave way to intimate breezes interspersed by wild rainstorms. The Huaxi River overflowed its banks, rice paddies swelled to their limits, and the limestone slopes were thick with dark foliage.

  The townsfolk emerged from their tiny rooms and apartments, weaned from the coal stoves they had huddled around all winter. Artisans and tradesmen took their work into the streets and alleys, while from my customary seat in the mill I listened to the return of farmers’ voices drifting from the distance.

  Yet the distance was deceiving. From a distance all was colour and harmony, symmetry and movement. From a distance the countryside was an idyllic tableau of farmer and buffalo, peasant and plough, all reflected in flooded paddies. But at close range, the beasts could be heard snorting and rasping. Farmers, thigh deep in mud, pushed their wooden ploughs, exhorting horse and buffalo to keep moving. Pleading, cajoling, they willed them to turn and return, at times lovingly, at others, whipping and shouting. From a distance all was placid, all serene and interdependent; close up, it was mud and shit, brute force and raw labour.

  ‘This is how it is,’ Y said, when we discussed it. ‘This is why we are driven to revolution. This is why we now study. Why we bend our backs to our books, perform our experiments, and search for a way to ease the burden.’

  . . . . . . . . . . .

  As with the countryside, so it was with the entire country – but in reverse order. Viewed from afar, the revolution had been betrayed and reduced to base accusation. Yet close up, I began to see that which had remained constant, the subtle understanding and resilience which had come out of years of struggle. Close up, listening to and getting to know my students, I began to comprehend the nuances – the enduring humanism reflected in their tales of love and exile, of struggle and renewal – embodied in Y’s universal dream in childhood:

  I saw a big bird flying. My arms turned into wings. I flew towards a tree and perched there. I saw several boys playing on the grasslands. I shouted to them. They heard my voice and told me to fly down to play with them. I didn’t want to do this. The boys were upset. They picked up stones and threw them at me. To avoid them I flew back into the skies. I flew for a long time. I wanted to fly back home but I was too tired. I fell back to earth. My back hurt. I woke up and found myself lying on the floor beside my bed. I stood up, felt my feet on the ground. And kept moving.

  . . . . . . . . . . .

  My stay in Huaxi was coming to an end. The full turning of the seasons was within sight; summer was well on the way, the harvest nearing. I planned to leave the valley within weeks and to embark on several months of travel in China. I asked Y to accompany me to the watermill.

  The miller greeted us in his customary fashion. He poured the tea from his ever-ready kettle. We sat back and gazed out through the open doorway. A jeep careered by. A boy urged a pig past the shelter; a farmer led a bullock by its tether. The noise subsided. All was still in the windless valley.

  ‘Tell the miller,’ I said through my interpreter, ‘that I am leaving, and I want to thank him for the many hours I have spent here.’

  ‘Tell the foreigner,’ the miller replied, ‘that I want him to write a couplet that sums up our many conversations.’ I was overwhelmed by the miller’s remarks. We had barely uttered a word to each other, yet his observation rang true.

  Y would translate the couplet into Mandarin, and as was customary the characters would be painted in black ink on red banners. The two lines would descend vertically, one line on either side of the doorway, while the title would extend horizontally over the lintel.

  I spent hours trying to find the words that could do justice to the task the miller had set me. To write a book on my stay in Huaxi would have been easier, but two lines? The couplet is an exacting art form, an exercise in compressed language. The lines have to be of corresponding length, made up of the same number of words. Each word had to be precise, and each line had to suggest many nuances of meaning.

  The completed couplet would have to convey my journey and arrival, the landlocked eternity of a province buried deep in the Middle Kingdom. And at its heart, it would have to hint at the presence of the miller and the foreigner, engaged in silent conversation to the churning of the waterwheel.

  In time the couplet began to take shape. The heading was obvious: Huaxi Watermill. The sentences, nine words in each, eventually formed:

  I come from a distant place to Huaxi Watermill

  Here I feel at peace, my mind becomes still.

  I had deliberated over each expression, and one in particular. Should I write my ‘mind’ becomes still, or my ‘heart’? I finally had chosen ‘mind’, but I felt that the word did not represent the fullness of the meaning intended. ‘Mind’ would not have been enough. It could not convey my engagement with the people and countryside. It could not convey the intimacy of the experience, the kindness of the miller and the students. Yet, when Y translated the couplet into characters, I learnt that in Chinese ‘heart’ and ‘mind’ were one and the same.

  The completed banners were glued above and beside the mill entrance. When we were done, we returned inside, the three of us, and sat back in silence. Punctuated by the rhythm of the waterwheel: Thoom. Thoom. Thoom. Round and round, an endless churning.

  Shooting Pompeii

  BY DBC PIERRE

  Known as much for youthful scandal as for books, Australian-born DBC Pierre was an artist, photographer and designer before writing his first novel in 2001. The debut Vernon God Little went on to be published in forty-three territories, leading to a further two novels – Ludmila’s Broken English and Lights Out In Wonderland, in a loose trilogy of comedies. Pierre was the first author to win a Booker and Whitbread prize for the same book, and his work now appears on school and university curriculums in a number of countries. He lives in County Leitrim, Ireland, where he continues to write.

  Every brand of bottle on the shelves of the Bar El Mirador contained the same clear firewater. If you ordered rum, you got firewater from a rum bottle. If you ordered Scotch, you got firewater from a Scotch bottle, but it cost more. Nobody ordered much Scotch.

  The barman was cross-eyed. Then he got drunk, then his name ended up being Pompeii, and those motifs started gathering which attend the kind of journey you can’t explain back home. I was lit up, and didn’t grasp the motifs until Pompeii pulled out a pistol and started pointing it around. It wasn’t the revolver you’d expect, but a rakish European job, more Longest Day than Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Stylish, and he wasn’t hostile with it – he was
just bragging, playing. But he was cross-eyed, and drunk. And then there was a wooden cross nailed to the wall at the end of the bar, at stool height. The local next to me looked at it just as I did, and tutted – a memorial.

  The will to live, in its mysterious ways, made me pick up my camera. I levelled it under the forty-watt bulb and stole Pompeii and his gun and our moment. For me it defined why to travel, why to live. It said be stripped to good nature and wits as often as possible, and survive by them. Leave the reach of embassies. Leave the myth of rights.

  It was my first trip to Pahuatlán del Valle, in central Mexico. A coming of age. I tasted my first joint on that trip, prompted by the mentor I never told was a mentor, and for seven years the smell of damp wood-smoke pulled me back, over the high plain and through the Sierra Madre to this shambling town, thousands of feet below in a micro-tropic of its own, a river valley seething with orchids, bananas, ginger lilies, weapons and ferns, lost somewhere between the fall of the Aztec empire and the transistor radio. It was a journey that erased the world in stages, and if night fell as you corkscrewed down the track through the clouds, flaming torches might bob on the opposite mountain, as people gathered in the cemetery there.

  A funeral workshop in Pahuatlán rented three upstairs rooms. Sawdust from coffins fed an old burner in the courtyard, which in turn heated an open-air shower. And after a shower the options for tourism were many: you could lie on a dangerous bed and listen to cockerels and mule hooves; you could wander to the plaza and eat tacos from old women with trestle tables and hotplates; you could visit the other lady who served food in her kitchen, and whose mother would pass you unfinished scraps from her plate; you could write a dissertation on ethno-botany; you could explore the river and fondle the beautiful plant which infested you with itching poison, compulsive enough to make you want to drag a fork through your flesh; you could visit the healer and discover the traditional remedy for the itching plant, which is a cream from the pharmacy; you could guess if the trail of blood leading to the pharmacy came from someone who survived; you could buy a machete, or a hat; you could trap a possum; you could visit Pompeii. Or you could share the back of a pick-up truck and bounce up the track to San Pablito, the Otomí village high up the facing mountainside, where the flaming braziers bobbed. The town was said to be full of witches and warlocks who could clean your soul, or cast a curse.

  I gave a curse some thought, but in the end opted to have my soul cleaned. Pahuatlán folk regarded witches with suspicion, perhaps due to the crossfire of curses and counter-curses that wove through their town, or perhaps because you couldn’t refuse a witch anything, and didn’t know if it was even unlucky to look at one. But once you climbed off the truck in San Pablito, everyone looked like a witch or a warlock. Otomí men were tiny and strong, in white cotton suits, with car-tyre sandals, machetes, and curiously sage features; women were shy, hidden up to their eyes behind shawls as rich as tapestries. The culture still struggled with Spanish, their remoteness having delayed the Spanish Conquest by four hundred years; and the mountainside still clacked with amatl bark being beaten into sacred paper, an industry that peaked in Aztec times when the emperor’s court ordered tons of amatl for use in state magic.

  In the end I went into a shop to ask after a witch. They pointed me along a cliff-edge of track, past the cemetery, where I found a senior witch in a shack of sticks and earth, her face a cornfield of furrows. It was a serious business, and arrangements would have to be made. Musicians would have to play strange music through the night, she told me. Firewater would have to be drunk, chickens would have to be sacrificed, and a number of dolls would have to be cut from amatl paper, to be fed with cigarettes and grog. I already liked the dolls. They would embody a quorum of powerful spirits, most brandishing machetes, some with animal heads, or black noses, or dogs for arms. A baby Jesus would also be there, for His cigarettes and firewater, without a machete.

  But as it happened I didn’t give the gods their smoke. I saved a pair of chickens up there in the clouds, because I didn’t go back to be cleaned. The day after my last visit in that seven-year spell, I left Mexico for good. The coming of age had turned into a coming of life, and I swept out on it.

  Unclean, I suppose.

  A lunar eclipse fell on my last night in Pahuatlán.

  Nineteen years passed before I could return. Nineteen years to the day, by coincidence. Going back felt like returning to a previous life. And as I drove through the chill sierra to begin the descent, mountain peaks formed islands above the cloud, and a full moon rose between them. Another eclipse. This time I would get cleaned. When I asked after a witch in the shop, they sent me along the same cliff-edge, past the teeming cemetery. But sticks and earth had turned to concrete; the town had become a slum, a favela of unplanned storeys and niches with a view. Some clacking of paper still ricocheted out of yards, some Otomí still shuffled on retreads, in white, carrying bundles twice their weight; but now the clacking was matched by reggaeton beats, the retreads by Nikes, the whites by football shirts, the machetes by guns. At least as big a community of mountain folk now lives in Chicago, and the umbilical cord between the two has added a hectic, nervous edge to this home of gods. Children are drinking, some barely old enough to lift a full beer, and the mountains boast a score of ‘coyotes’ – fixers who smuggle humans into the USA, or promise to smuggle them.

  The cemetery is jam-packed.

  Civilisation has come.

  The shop sends me to a witch who asks for four hundred dollars, and any bartering is quelled by a threat of curses. And so my musicians play their strange music, my dolls have their smokes and drinks; my chickens die, and I am cleaned, but the pain of passing time on this rare place weighs more than dirt. I tell my witch that I had a date with an elder of hers many years ago, and didn’t make it back. I show her a picture.

  It was her grandmother.

  Down the mountain in Pahuatlán, things don’t look so different. They already had concrete. A pleasant hotel with a lookout tower now graces the main street; opposite sits a café and cocktail bar called the Magic Sierra, run by the second Hispanic I know who is named after Malcolm Lowry of Under the Volcano fame.

  Before I explore the new, though – I have a date with old life.

  I wander past the plaza to El Mirador – but when I round the bend it overlooked, from its perch above the square, I see it shuttered and overgrown.

  ‘What happened to Pompeii?’ I ask a man.

  ‘You remember Pompeii? Dead, long time,’ he says.

  I watch a Beavis & Butthead shirt move past, hear Britney through the palms, and I ponder the aspect of travel that is time, that is once-in-a-lifetime experience. I wonder about those who say you can never return, wonder if I’ve returned somewhere or simply come to a new place.

  Because I was there, and have the picture. I lived it.

  I was there and I am here, and I’ll live something else; and that’s travel, that’s life.

  So if you happen upon the town where Pompeii once waved his gun, if you see my second Malcolm Lowry before I do – tell him I’ll be back.

  Tell him I’ll return.

  The Mountain Mine

  BY CAROL BIRCH

  Carol Birch was born and grew up in Manchester, England, which she left when she was seventeen to go to Keele University. Her twenties were spent in London, mostly in the Waterloo/Kennington area, and it was her experiences there that led to the writing of her first novel, Life in the Palace. She had various jobs – working in stores, libraries, offices, and with young children and teenagers with special needs. At the beginning of the 1980s she went to live in West Cork in Ireland, where she started writing. She returned to London when her first marriage ended. Life in the Palace was published in 1988 and won the David Higham Award. Nine more books followed, including Turn Again Home, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2003, and Jamrach’s Menagerie, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker in 2011. She lives in Lancaster with her husband, and ha
s two grown-up sons who come and go.

  This was West Cork in the late ’70s, in the days before health and safety. The mountains at the end of the Beara Peninsula were an open warren, the landscape dotted all around with huge gaping shafts that plunged sheer into the earth.

  Allihies was a quiet little humpbacked village with a half-bowl of mountain at its back and the sea in front. It had an old cobbler’s, just a house with old tools and lasts and boots waiting to be picked up in the window, and one shop that sold everything. You went in and waited in the queue to be served by Mrs Terry, who was always patient, always unhurried.

  There were three or four waiting so it was a good half-hour before I could buy myself a strong flashlight and head off up to the old mine. The track ran up the mountain, and a path led off on the left to a flat stony area where heaps of cylindrical drill cores lay about, mineral bores of swirling greys and greens. One semicircular brick wall on a rectangular foundation was all that remained of some kind of building. The main entrance into the mine was a black door-shaped hole in a high rock face. I sniffed around it for a while, peering into the darkness and wondering if I was brave enough to go in now that it came to it. You couldn’t see very far but it looked safe enough, just a bit wet, so I turned on the flashlight and found myself setting off.

  The rock was grey above my head but stained copper-green from the level of my eyes downwards, and there were water-filled holes on the left, some with ladders fixed flush to their sides, going down into darkness. The tunnel stretched straight ahead into the heart of the mountain, rough and uneven underfoot. A couple of times I stopped to stand still and think, checking to see if I was feeling scared, but I didn’t seem to be. If I stretched out my arms I could just about touch the walls on either side. The thought did occur to me that if I got the creeps when I was inside there’d be all this way to come back, but I was feeling quite elated, and carried on with a growing sense of wonder at the fact that I was actually doing this.