Next morning I missed OToole: he didnt appear at breakfast, and I looked for him in vain upon the deck. There was a heavy mist over the river which the sun took a long time to disperse. I felt a little lonely without my only contact. Everyone else was settling into a shipboard relation: even a few flirtations had begun. Two old men paced the deck fiercely, showing off their physical fitness. There was something obscene to me about their rapid regular walk they seemed to be indicating to all the women they passed that they were still in full possession of their powers. They wore slit jackets in imitation of the English they had probably bought them at Harrods and they reminded me of Major Charge.
We had pulled up at a town called Rosario during the night (the voices, the shouts, the noise of chains had entered my dreams and made them dreams of violence some while before I woke), and now the river, when the mist rose, had changed its character. The water was sprinkled with islands, and there were cliffs and sand bars and strange birds piping and whispering beside us. I experienced far more the sensation of travel than when I passed all the crowded frontiers in the Orient Express. The river was low, and a rumour spread that we might not be able to get beyond Corrientes because the expected rains of winter had not come. A sailor on the bridge continually swung the lead[245]. We were within half a metre, the priest told me, of the ships draught, and he moved on to spread despondency further.
I began for the first time seriously to read Rob Roy, but the moving scenery was a distraction. I would begin a page while the shore was half a mile away, and when I lifted my eyes after a few paragraphs, it had approached within a stones throw or was it an island? At the beginning of the next page I looked again, and the water was now nearly a mile wide. A Czech sat down beside me. He spoke English and I was content to close Rob Roy and listen to him. He was a man who, having once known prison, enjoyed freedom to the full. His mother had died under the Nazis, his father under the Communists, he had escaped to Austria and married an Austrian girl. His training had been scientific, and when he decided to settle in the Argentine he had borrowed the money to start a plastics factory. He said, I looked around first in Brazil and Uruguay and Venezuela. One thing I noticed. Everywhere but in the Argentine they used straws for cold drinks. Not in the Argentine. I thought Id make my fortune. I made two million plastic straws and I couldnt sell a hundred. You want a straw? You can have two million for free[246]. There they are stacked in my factory today. The Argentines are so conservative they wont drink through a straw. I was very nearly bankrupt, I can tell you, he said happily.
So what do you do now?
He gave me a cheerful grin. He seemed one of the happiest men I had ever met. He had shed his past fears and failures and sorrows more completely than most of us can do. He said, I manufacture plastic material and let other fools risk their money on what they make with it.
The man with the rabbit nose went twitching by, grey as the grey morning.
He gets off at Formosa, I said.
Ah, a smuggler, the Czech said and laughed and went on his way.
I began to read Rob Roy again while the leadsman called the sounding. You must remember my father well; for as your own was a member of the mercantile house, you knew him from infancy. Yet you hardly saw him in his best days, before age and infirmity had quenched his ardent spirit of enterprise and speculation. I thought of my father lying in his bath in his clothes, just as later he lay in his Boulogne coffin, and giving me his impossible instructions, and I wondered why I felt an affection for him, while I felt none for my faultless mother who had brought me up with rigid care and found me my first situation in a bank. I had never built the plinth among the dahlias and before I left home I had thrown away the empty urn. Suddenly a memory came back to me of an angry voice. I had woken up, as I sometimes did, afraid that the house was on fire and that I had been abandoned. I had climbed out of bed and sat down at the top of the stairs, reassured by the voice below. It didnt matter how angry it was: it was there: I was not alone and there was no smell of burning. Go away, the voice said, if you want to, but Ill keep the child.
A low reasonable voice, which I recognized as my fathers, said, I am his father, and the woman I knew as my mother slammed back like a closing door, And whos to say that Im not his mother?
Good morning, OToole said, sitting down beside me. Did you sleep well?
Yes. And you?
He shook his head. I kept on thinking of Lucinda, he said. He took out his notebook and again began to write down his mysterious columns of numerals.
Research? I asked.
Oh, he said, this is not official. Making a bet on the ships run?
No, no. Im not a betting man. He gave me one of his habitual looks of melancholy and anxiety. Ive never told anyone about this, Henry, he said. It would seem kind of funny to most people, I guess. The fact is I count while Im pissing and then I write down how long Ive taken and what time it is. Do you realize we spend more than one whole day a year pissing?