Nicholas Bouvier: The Scorpion-Fish

Still, it is the capital, where until now I’ve failed in all my errands: the Japanese Embassy is closed for a ‘Festival of Flowers’, the freight company hasn’t anything going east before the autumn, and the journalists I hoped to see haven’t kept our appointment. Our new consul — fresh from Hong Kong — on whom I was rather relying, had been knocked down by a taxi the day he took up his post. I visited him in hospital. Multiple fractures. He was swathed in bandages like a mummy, adrift in morphine, dreaming of his longed-for retirement; he could offer only incoherent remarks apropos of Berne’s ingratitude and the mushrooms of the northern Vaud. My seedy hotel is much too dear for what it offers. From my attic I survey varnished tile roofs and a sea of saturated foliage foaming against the low clouds. Silly crows play in nooks and crannies, croaking all the time. Languid, arrogant boys. Long corridors gleaming with polish. Dark figures loafing about or motionless in front of their cups of tea, while families of flies busily move from their lips to their eyebrows. The basin hiccups out a trickle of rusty water; and most of the clients do not use the lavatories in the western way: they relieve themselves haphazardly, squatting over the bowl, and depart nose in the air, certain that an untouchable is just waiting for them to leave so that he can deal with ‘that’. They’re wrong: the evidence of their passage piles up around the bowl and gives it the look of the kind of decayed mouth you might find in a joke shop. I’d have done better to bed down under a tree but this time I lacked the heart for it, having neither the courage to go lower nor the means to go higher. Although every town has its lesson to teach, I don’t understand what is chanted at me here. I only find an inner frustration, and for the first time in a long while, fear of the morrow. I don’t know how to cope with these people who vanish and doors that close, or the remote capital itself with its smell of burning. How am I to face so much emptiness with the little I have become?