I

Do you remember this?

A broken engine; the hours’ becalming; an empty ocean still as a lake of mercury. It was soundless to the horizon and our small noises placed us at the centre of the universe, unique in our activity. From time to time a spanner clinked, a bare foot bumped a thwart. From the vinyl-scented shade of a rigged tarpaulin we watched the foot’s tiny ripples become visible only as they left the Medevina’s shadow, trembling outwards, as if the shadow’s edge were the actual hull, our whole craft insubstantial, no more than an airy nothing which had briefly come between sun and sea. The mutter of voices – ‘Try this. It’s rusty. The gasket’s ruined.’ – the rasp and flare of a match, the incense of a cigarette. The small splash of a handful of waste. And then, emerging from the shadow into gorgeous colour like the tip of a kingfisher’s wing, an iridescent oil-stain flashing its molecules, splitting the spectrum and creeping out across the water. Do you remember how dazzling it was? That spreading puddle of hues in a still world of primary blue? Greens and purples, golds and pinks, rubies and violets, forming and re-forming, pooling and glittering minutely so the fascinated mind drew ever closer to its surface and fell into a microscope’s gaze such that the twinkle and sputter of evaporation almost became visible, the spirituous fractions boiling off in order of their volatility.

The sun climbed and remained stuck at the top of the sky. Sometimes we stood up or wandered aft to peer at the dismantled carburettor. The parts were black with oil and rust: deformed, even – corroded artefacts turned up by a plough rather than precision-engineered components. Our shifting weight as we moved about the narrow boat made one bamboo outrigger gently dent the water, the other rise and shed a line of droplets. The brilliant oil-stain fractured. Feathers and petals broke off, some drifting perversely back into our shadow and winking out. A flotilla of melding islets moved into the glare beyond the outrigger, sending back scorching chromatic flashes. The hours passed. Fish and rice to eat, the bowls washed over the side and fat replenishing the film until – do you remember? – a peacock sheen surrounded our soundless universe, marbled and swirled and striated. In a halo of specious glory our little boat sat and baked, breathing out its rainbowed anima.

No, you will not have forgotten; not in the light of what was to happen later, not in the particular isolating light in which individual events were picked out with such intensity, casting profound yet insubstantial shadows.

Now and then a fish rose, but languidly, as if its head had difficulty breaking the surface tension of the mercury. So thick was the water’s skin, the animal’s head should have been ringed by a downward-curving meniscus, a pucker. Each occasion seemed a dramatic event, and several pairs of eyes would remain long afterwards on the resealed hole where snout or fin had protruded for an instant. At length, a flying fish broke completely out, tail whirring the water’s surface like the propeller of a planing speedboat and leaving a straight scar of irregular dashes for 30 metres before vanishing into an invisible notch. This was a fishing boat, after all, and at last someone aroused himself out of his lethargy enough to bait a hook and drop it into the rectangle of water enclosed by an outrigger. It was as much for something to do as a gesture of habit.

What is it that makes even a fisherman forget the bulk of the world underlying his tiny craft? He moves too much in air, ethereal, reading a visible text in light’s plain version. He waits and ponders and is becalmed in the eye of the sun, turning over diurnal and terrestrial thoughts. He tinkers with carburettors. The illusory line separating air from water, dividing the lighter swirl of molecules from the denser, merely compounds the fiction of two worlds dwelling apart, the one inimical to the other. Yet what could be better proof of their radical contiguity than the gallant life force pervading both? Not in a mystical sense, either; but because life originated from below, some of it adapting to permanent exile and some of it staying put. We are colonials. What we have in common with our ancestors is the sea and not the air. How could a fisherman daily pull from one medium into the other his forebears’ struggling descendants without having a mind to that world of relatives beneath him? Every day the children of his archaic self observe his keel’s sliding footstep as it treads their upper atmosphere, crossing their heavens with its contrail. They underlie him as a half-forgotten nation underlies its vast diaspora. One day this has to be acknowledged; one day he must return to his roots among the vents and plumes, the ancient dark upwellings, his cradle’s gyre and nurturing oblivion. Maybe only the exceptional fisher does not simply make daily raids across the frontier, poking spears and hooks and nets into its first few metres. Maybe the exceptional fishers are those who sense their own roots extending deep into dissolution and can feel the freedom and excitement of the abyss.

It was mid-afternoon before the engine started. Our companions murmured their relief. We had lost six hours. The blocks of ice in the insulated chests would be that much smaller. Nobody had opened the lids to look, for fear of accelerating the process. Now we could spend fewer than four hours at the lobster beds, even if the motor kept going and took us there before midnight. You will not have forgotten how precarious these trips were, 90 miles each way. If all went well we could fill half the chests with lobsters, having transferred the remaining ice to the other half to pack around fish. Any serious delay on the way back might mean the fish were lost. And this quite apart from the usual risks of dodging coastguard cutters alert for illegal fishermen. Edgy enterprise, but grounded in comradeship and marked, as always, by heightened senses.

How vivid, still, are the seagoing smells? Oily bilges, fish entrails, a freshly lit cigarette drawn through salt paper? And at night if you were not diving, the compressor’s exhaust fumes, its lethal monoxides, barking and blattering our darkened boat’s position for anyone to hear. But a shift of wind might gently lay its hand on a cheek and turn your head like a weathervane, pointing your nostrils into the smell of unseen land: forest and rot and copra, jasmine, mimosa and ylang-ylang. And you may have thought of the strangeness of it, sitting there in night’s scented cocoon, propped up by nails and timber in the middle of water while men you knew like brothers worked away in the fish mines far beneath the boat, their dim torchlight opening up fugitive seams and corridors. Their wooden goggles and floating hair.

And behind everything, the economics: the tanks of fuel we carried set against the miles we needed to cover; the ice matched with that and the anticipated size of the catch; the future price of fish in the market half a week away; profits eaten up by repairs. The fisherman’s immemorial equations, whose hidden term is time. Tides and currents, nightfall and winds, the rising of the moon: all determine whether he is too early, too late, or punctual for the flow of fish he is banking on at his journey’s end.

So we were already late; but the captain said, ‘Push on. Push on, go!’ (pointing with jutting lips to the speckless ocean’s rim). To turn and head for home was too safe, too undisguised a loss of fuel and effort. Follow the sun, now curving a south-westering course. In this way we reached the moment when our prow was aimed directly at where, in one corner of the day-long featureless sky, evening clouds were beginning to form a range of wool mountains above an invisible coast. It was still too early for pinkish colours. The peaks were white and blue and white, undershadowed with pearl, glittering snowfields which convection was thrusting into pinnacles and spires even as we watched, transforming the alps into the skyline of an impossible town. There, among amorphous towers and eroding castles, an insane architect was busy opening up sly passages, glimpses of alleys, vistas of tall windows and bent porticoes whose very act of moulding held out the constant promise of disclosure. Glancing away for a moment and then looking back, the eye would catch these apertures at the tantalising instant of being sealed by vapour, blocked by soundless landslides, erased for ever. Even as the eye scrambled back down crumbling stairways leading nowhere, the great gates were slamming all around in silence. And always, as they closed or melted they left behind the faintest air of having successfully denied, of having withheld a view of some innermost chamber or secret courtyard now buried deep within palisades.

Meanwhile, the mercury ocean across which we had been heading was gone. In its place a glassy violaceous swell reflected this soft metropolis so the one image leaned above the other, the lower scarcely distorted. And it was on this, dead ahead, you will remember we first saw the tiny black insect of another boat. The only visible object on the ocean’s face, it lay in our path with the punctuality of an omen. Without needing to alter course by a degree we gradually overhauled the lone fisherman as he sat in the celestial city’s mirrored thoroughfares.

The captain eased the nylon string which held the throttle so the engine note fell to a mutter and the Medevina lost way. With the rudder slightly over we began a gentle curve which took us within hailing distance of the fisherman but not so close that our wake would swamp him. As to what we already thought, can you remember that? Even though we had passed many identical craft on previous expeditions, can you remember if you had taken in the absence of a mast and rice-sack sail, or the fact that the boat’s smallness and the man’s position in it made it obvious there could be no engine? Even as we came abreast 30 yards off, had you appreciated that nobody under paddle-power alone would allow himself to drift so far out to sea that no land was visible at any point of the compass? A stocky man, the boat’s occupant was wedged comfortably low on the bottom boards, watching our approach from beneath the brim of a hat shaped like a straw lampshade. A fishing line was stretched the freeboard’s short distance between one hand and the water.

‘Oy, paré!’ called our captain, allowing us to laze across his bows, then around to the other side. The fisherman’s face did not turn, however, and something about his posture had forestalled any jocular shouts of ‘Hoy gising! Wake up there!’ The captain only said for all of us, softly, ‘Yari na. Patay na.’ And so we completed our circle, staring at the dead man, the water at our stern dimpling and crawling above the scarcely revolving screw. There still was no breath of wind; but possibly even at a saunter our own larger vessel with its spread awning leaned against enough air lazily to displace it, for by the time we had gone entirely around the fisherman, a waft of corruption had reached us. There, in the early evening light amid the shattered debris of clouds, he sat and exhaled the gases of his own corporeal breakdown.