Fox Scenes from Life

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-84-685-8521-5
Verlag: Editorial Bubok Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 186 Seiten

Scenes from Life is a collection of stories and vignette set in a variety of countries. They describe encounters with people and with the often strange worlds they -and we- inhabit. Some of those brushes are the stuff of adventure.Two involve the author's close encounters with death. There are tales of human kindness, but also of cruelty. One is a narrative told to the author by a survivor of the Holocaust. All accounts in the collection are true in that they are taken from life and are a record of memory and occasional field notes. As many truths exist as there are people to express them. They are ways of being in and seeing the world. Had someone else encountered the experiences and the characters that appear in this book, they would have written them differently, or perhaps not written them at all and either consigned them to capricious anecdote or to oblivion. So the sense in which these tales are true is necessarily the author's. They are offered to you, the reader in the hope that you will find in them some meaning of your own. As Thoreau observed: 'Nothing was ever so unfamiliar and startling to a man as his own thoughts.' We are alien first to ourselves.

Jeremy Fox es autor de las novelas The Chocolate Man (1995) y Conquest (2021). Traductor que maneja fluidamente, además de su inglés nativo, el español, el portugués y el francés; su carrera en las letras incluye la dramaturgia y la escritura por encargo. Fox también ha sido editor de revistas y libros, periodista, profesor universitario, director artístico de una compañía de teatro, funcionario del British Council y consultor de gestión. El autor de En busca del padre Alfons Roig Izquierdo se educó en las universidades de Oxford y Londres y en la Escuela de Administración de Cranfield. En su hoja de vida constan sus títulos en Idiomas Modernos, Estudios Latinoamericanos (Historia e Historia Económica) y Negocios.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fox, Jeremy

Leseproben

Effluent

“This is the first officer speaking. There’s a fifty per cent chance your luggage is not on this flight……”

“Same bullshit,” said the passenger in the window seat next to me.

“What?”

“Happened last time I came on this lousy flight. Right now somebody in Trinidad is wearing one of my shirts.”

He spoke in a soft Canadian drawl with a gallic undertone. We shook hands. His name was Maurice.

A stewardess served coffee; pungent, flavoured with Caribbean. We clinked paper cups.

“Salut”.

“Salut.”

“On business?” I asked.

“Engineering project. And you?”

“Reviewing the Caribbean aid programme.”

His looked at me sceptically as if he thought I might be up to something else. My story was true but I figured his was not.

“Maybe it’s my turn,” I said.

“What?”

“To lose my luggage.”

When we disembarked at Cheddi Jagan airport in Georgetown Guyana, a man in his fifties with Asian features approached across the tarmac. Maurice shook his hand and introduced him as the High Commission’s chauffeur.

“Plenty of room in the car for both of us, right Haani?”

“Plenty of room, sir.” said the chauffeur smiling.

“Better than an airport taxi,” Maurice said, “You can’t trust those devils. They cheat everyone.”

“If you would kindly give me your passports I will see to everything,” Haani said.

Inside the terminal building, two immigration officers sat at desks before piles of passports. Arriving passengers stood chatting, paced to and fro or leaned against a wall. No one lined up. Haani marched to one of the desks, exchanged a nod and a wink with the official, secured a stamp in each of our passports and waved us through to the baggage collection area.

“They know me,” he said as he handed back our documents.

My suitcase emerged on the conveyor belt a short while later. Maurice’s did not.

“This place doesn’t like me,” said Maurice. “Should have been your turn.”

“Maybe your luggage will arrive on the next flight?”

“No chance.”

Later, at the hotel, I gave him a clean shirt which he promised to return in a couple of days. He didn’t and I didn’t see him again. When I asked for him at the desk they told me he had checked out.

The hotel stood among palm trees in a straggling, thinly-populated suburb separated from the downtown area by a dry canal. A few blocks to the rear, the Demerara river slithered past on its journey from the dark, forested Guyanese interior. Heavy with moisture, the air smelled of vegetation with a faint cloacal undertow.

Over breakfast next morning, I read through my program of activities. A start-up meeting with the deputy consul would be followed by days of appointments with local businesses, charities and government bureaucrats. Dinner that evening would be with Peter Satchell, an official of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).

I asked the receptionist for directions to the High Commission.

“’Best to walk,” she said. “You can wait an hour for a taxi and then they run you round town to build up the fare. Cross the bridge over the canal, keep on until Young Street, turn left and there you are.”

She smiled, dazzling white teeth between carmine lips.

“You’re English?” she asked.

“Canadian. Born in England. Can’t lose the accent.”

“The British should take over again. It’s such a mess here.”

“You can’t mean that.”

“My mother says life was okay under the British. Everything worked. Schools, the road, the sewers…”

“But colonialism…”

“Sometimes it’s better.”

Her words rang in my head as I crossed the narrow canal bridge. Running along the dry bed beneath was a broken pipe half a meter in diameter from which raw sewerage spilled amid a cloud of flies. Cockroaches scurried over the excremental sludge. I quickened my pace pursued by the stench.

At the High Commission, a junior official regretted that the deputy consul had been called away on business and no one else had time to see me. They were so stretched. If I needed anything, of course, I should not hesitate. Guyana was a friendly place for visitors. The locals had their factions. Africans ran the government, Asians ran the businesses. Didn’t like each other very much. Government prohibited wheat imports so the Asians couldn’t make chapatis or other breads. Rice was plentiful. Did I have any questions?

”What about the broken sewer?”

“Oh yes, a big problem. More than a few sewerage pipes in the city need fixing. To be frank, most of the infrastructure is in bad shape. Nothing gets repaired here. According to the city authority, there’s no money. Lack of cash doesn’t stop officials going round in expensive cars though.”

“Couldn’t the High Commission use a little of its budget at least to have the sewer fixed?”

“Not a priority for us. More the kind of thing CIDA or the IADB1 should be doing. Why not ask Peter when you see him this evening? By the way, you’ll need a taxi to get to his place. It’s not safe to walk around at night. Whites stick out like a sore thumb especially in the dark if you see what I mean.”

Peter Satchell, the CIDA representative, lived on the edge of town in a wooden bungalow hoisted on stilts. A broad external staircase led up to the front door. He was standing there when I arrived that evening and glanced at his watch as I mounted the steps.

“Thought you might not make it. One never knows in Georgetown.”

Ushering me into a long room that combined kitchen, dining and sitting areas, he introduced me to a middle-aged university professor and a post-graduate student who had just won a scholarship to study at McGill University. They were of African and Asian descent respectively. Busy at the stove was a young women, also of African descent, whom I judged to be around eighteen: five-three in heels, compact, wrapped in a tight blouse open at the collar and a skirt short enough to pass muster as a sash.

“This is my girlfriend Sylvie,” said Peter.

Sylvie gave me her hand leaning forward slightly to offer a glimpse of dark cleavage against the roseate pink of her blouse. She had long fingernails painted bright red.

I asked about the broken sewers.

“Ah yes,” Peter said. “If we had the money, we’d certainly get them fixed. Unfortunately there are other priorities.”

“Priorities rule the world That’s what I tell my students,” the professor said.

We sat at table while Sylvie served, joining us for each course. She seemed to have a dual role in Satchell’s domestic arrangements as both housekeeper and lover, combining efficiency of service with mischievous glances, erotic gestures, the brush of her breasts against Satchell’s arm as she leaned over him to which he responded with a fleeting stroke of his hand on her thigh. Marking the occasion, too, was the abundance of bread freshly baked, Satchell told us, from fine Canadian wheat. Herewith the young beauty and the bread unavailable to locals, the gulf between the aid official and official aid, the brutal fecundity of that tropical world and the coldly indifferent abundance of the “developed”north.

A week of meetings followed with the Georgetown business community, with government bureaucrats, with officials of the CARICOM2 Secretariat. In the late afternoons, before dark, I would stroll down to the Demerara river whose languid flow and murky surface seemed like an incarnation of Kipling’s grey-green greasy Limpopo River that had fired my imagination as a child and made me determined one day to stand on its shores and walk among its fever trees.

My flight back to Trinidad was scheduled for early evening. I took a taxi to the airport in good time, checked in and passed through to the departure lounge. To one side of the lounge a queue had formed before a desk where an official was engaged in a painstaking scrutiny of documents. Having already passed through an inspection, I saw no reason to join it. A couple of hundred other passengers were standing mainly in small groups, or wandering aimlessly. A few were sitting on the floor. I glanced at the departure board. An hour to kill before boarding. A heavy shower of rain in the afternoon had left the air heavy with heat and moisture.

A tap on my shoulder made me to turn round to see a small thick-set man in police uniform.

“You’re under arrest.”

“For what?”

“Smuggling.”

“What?”

“You heard.”

I became aware that none of the other passengers were looking in my direction. No doubt they were used to this.

“There must be a mistake.”

“Don’t argue,” the officer said without raising his voice.

“I assure you…”

The officer’s hand disappeared from view for a second, then reappeared bearing a pistol. He reached up and set the barrel against my temple.

“I’m taking you out of the airport.”

I looked him in the eye and saw hatred - hatred of the white race borne of centuries of pain and humiliation, hatred of those who had taken his ancestors from their homeland, turned them into slaves and grown rich on their labour. And I knew that if he took me out of the airport building, he would put a bullet in my back on the...