The Discovery Of Slowness. Sten Nadolny
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blew out a lot of air before and after each of them. At the same time, they fanned and waved with their hands. When John got lost and found himself at the aqueduct near the Alcántara, he asked to be shown the way. But instead of pointing in one direction which he could have followed without trouble to the Traills’ house, they gesticulated. He found himself in the square in front of the monastery of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Of course, they were Catholic here; that was to be expected. Not expected, however, was that they would poke fun at the contrast between mighty England and helpless John. After dinner, the Traill parents retired. John was alone with Gwendolyn. She talked about Fielding. Her freckled nostrils flared; her neck reddened: he didn’t know Fielding! The great English poet! She got herself properly inflated, as though she would rise at once like a Montgolfier balloon if no one held on to her. John said: ‘I know great English sailors.’ Gwendolyn had never heard of James Cook. She laughed; one could always see her teeth, and her dress rustled because she moved around so much. John learned that Fielding had gout. How can I get her to shut up, he wondered, and how do I manage to cohabit with her? He began to prepare a question but was sidetracked because Gwendolyn never paused. He would have loved to listen to her for a long time if only she had kept silent for a single moment. She talked about someone called Tom Jones. Probably another grave. ‘Let’s go there,’ he said, and seized her arms. But that was wrong thinking again. Since he was already holding her, he should logically not have talked about going and should have kissed her instead. But he didn’t know how that worked. All that had to be planned better. He let go of her. Gwendolyn vanished with a few quick words, which were perhaps not meant to be understood. John knew only one thing: he had reflected too long. That was the disturbing effect of the echo Dr Orme had mentioned; he hung on too long both to the words he heard and to his own words. But a person who always kept on wondering about his own formulations surely couldn’t persuade a woman!
In the afternoon he went for a walk with the Traill family through dark alleys alive with the sound of bells. They came upon a hill where they saw houses freely exposed to the light, white like the faces of brand-new clocks, roughly built and without ornaments, and the land around them not green but pale red. Mr Traill told of a great earthquake many years ago. Gwendolyn walked ahead of them, moving daintily. She got all kinds of things going inside John’s body without even looking at him.
But time passed, and the opportunity had slipped by. ‘It’s all right to think things over,’ Father used to say, ‘but not for so long that the offer is made to somebody else.’ A man lagging behind by a full cycle commanded too narrow a present; thin was the line between land and sea. Perhaps he should try to catch the right moments like a ball: if he applied the fixed look in time, these moments would be ready to be grabbed when the opportunity arose and wouldn’t escape him. All a matter of practice!
‘Soon Lisbon will celebrate the Feast of St Mark,’ Mr Traill told them. ‘They’ll bring a bull to the holy altar, a Bible between his horns. If he goes wild, the city will be facing hard times; if he holds still, everything will be fine; then he’ll be butchered.’
Gwendolyn was not completely out of reach. Sometimes she gave him a look. John sensed, beneath all the impatience she imposed on herself, also a kind of patience, perhaps a purely feminine patience he couldn’t get at. If he had been unquestionably a sailor and a courageous man, Gwendolyn would have granted him a lot of time. As if to reinforce that thought, a massive three-decker on the Foz da Tejo fired off an interminable salute, which the coastal batteries answered. Gwendolyn and the sea: so far, the two didn’t go together. They were like two chairs, and if one sat down between them one fell on one’s behind. So he should become an officer first, and defend England, and then find a woman to live with. Once Bonaparte had been defeated, there’d still be time. Gwendolyn would wait and show him everything. Before then there’d be no point in attracting attention. In any case, his ship was to leave in two days.
‘Well, then,’ Gwendolyn said unexpectedly after dinner, ‘let’s go to the poet’s grave.’ She was as dogged as John with his mathematics.
Nettles were growing on Fielding’s grave, as on the graves of all people who had amounted to something in life. That this was so John knew from the shepherd in Spilsby.
He looked at Gwendolyn, determined to prove that he could do this in all freedom without stammering or his ears turning red. Suddenly he found himself putting his arms round her neck and felt his nose being tickled by a strand of hair. Again, clearly, an entire piece of the act was missing. Gwendolyn’s eyes grew anxious, and she pushed her hands between his breast and hers. The situation was somewhat confused. However it was, he felt caught in an opportunity and so decided to ask his much-rehearsed question: ‘Would you agree to sleep with me?’
‘No!’ said Gwendolyn, and she slipped out of his arms.
So he had been wrong. John was relieved. He had asked his question. The answer was negative; that was all right. He took it to be a hint that now he really had to decide in favour of the sea. Now he wanted ocean and war.
On the way back, Gwendolyn looked suddenly strange, her face flattish, her forehead wide, her nostrils clearly marked. Once again John reflected on why the human face had to look the way it did at all and not completely different.
He had also learned from the shepherd in Spilsby that in this world women wanted something quite different from men.
Seen from the harbour wall, Lisbon shone like a new Jerusalem. This harbour – it was truly the world! By contrast, Hull on the Humber was only a threadbare landing-place for sloops in need of help. All kinds of ships were here, three-decked, with golden names on their forecastles. Through such artful slanted windows John would one day scan the horizon as a captain.
Their own ship was small. But it floated by itself like all the others and had a captain just like the largest ships. The sailors came on board late, rowed to the ship by natives. Some of them were so drunk that they had to be heaved over the rail by the winch. Father had now and then taken a glass too many, Stopford a few more, but what these sailors did to themselves had to be called by a different name. They fell into their bunks and didn’t emerge again until after the anchors had been weighed. Earlier, one of them, who was less drunk than the others, showed John his back: the brown skin was furrowed, criss-crossed by white scars carved out by a belt; they looked like craters and cliffs, so many pieces of skin had been torn off and grown back wrong. The hair on his back, originally of even density, had adjusted itself to the landscape and formed small groves and clearings.
The proprietor of the exhibit said, ‘This is the navy. For every little shit you get the whip.’ Could one die of this punishment? ‘And how!’ said the sailor.
John now knew that there was something worse than storms. Moreover, there was alcohol, and one had to keep up with that – it was all part of bravery. They already passed him a glass: ‘Try it! We call this wind.’ It was a thin, fluid, sticky sauce, red and poisonous. With strenuous nonchalance John got down two swallows, then listened within himself. He determined that earlier he had been in a somewhat dejected mood. He drained the glass. Now things looked different.
The stories he was hearing about the navy were surely not for the brave!
They travelled more than two hundred nautical miles west, out into the Atlantic, to keep from having to run against the Portuguese norther. Besides, this allowed them to evade the British men-o’-war lurking along the coast, eager to replenish their crews with men from presumably oversupplied merchant ships. A few on board had already been through that; they had been captured like wild animals, had gone through battles, and had escaped again at the first opportunity. They were simply afraid, John thought.
Ten more days and they were again in the English Channel. John was now permitted to eat with the captain, who, besides this honour, gave him grapes and oranges. John also learned from him that every ship had a maximum speed which it could not exceed even with the most favourable wind, even if it were equipped with a thousand sails.
John watched the work on the ship very closely. He let himself be taught how to tie knots. He noted a difference: in training, the name of the game was how fast one could get the knot tied; in real situations, how firmly it held.