“My car’s at the garage,” I said. I was not being difficult. It was a noisy ten-year-old Renault with 93,000 miles on the clock. One wheel, the front right, had come unstuck from the chassis and made the front end shimmy at any speed, a motion that rubbed the tread from the tires. “I’ll have to take a taxi.”
“Can, can,” said Big Hing.
Little Hing whispered something, staring at me, keeping his teeth locked, a coward’s ventriloquism. For Little Hing I was the ultimate barbarian: my hair was once reddish, I am hairy, my arms are profusely tattooed — a savage, “just out of the trees,” as Yardley used to say.
“Bus to airport, taxi to town,” said Big Hing. That was Little’s whispered suggestion.
It was a two-dollar taxi fare; the bus was forty cents. There was no direct bus. I hated sitting at an out-of-town bus shelter, in the heat, with twenty schoolchildren. But I said okay because I could see Big Hing’s anger makes him determined that I should save one-sixty and know who was boss. I didn’t start arguments I knew in advance I was going to lose. Big Hing was my towkay: I couldn’t win. But my dealings with him were small.
He counted out $2.40 from petty cash and looked at his watch.
“What time is his plane due in?” I asked.
Big Hing thought three-thirty; Little murmured in Cantonese, and I expected an amendment, but Big stuck to three-thirty and gave me the flight number. I went down to consult my bus guide.
So far it had been an unpleasant day, ruined first by the peon telling me to hurry and second by the command to take the bus all the way out to the airport. After looking at the bus guide I saw that several things were in my favor. I was right about there being no direct bus, but the 18-A Singapore Traction Company bus passed by Moulmein Green. I could have lunch at home for a change, and if I hurried, a quick nap. The transfer would have to be made on Paya Lebar Road — a stroke of luck: I could see if Gladys was available before continuing on the 93 to the airport. None of this would cost a penny extra; out of two humiliations I had rescued a measure of self-respect. And if Gladys was free and Leigh was interested I stood to make nine dollars. In any event, I was anxious to meet him. It was nice to see a new face, and an ang moh’s was more welcome than most. We were lonelier than we admitted to; after many years of residence in Singapore, we all went for the mail twice a day, even Yardley and Smale, who never got any.
This is the beginning of my story, and already I can see that it represents my fortunes more faithfully, in the haphazard recollection of a single morning’s interruption, than if I had planned it as carefully as I once intended and began with the rumbling factual sentence I used to repeat to myself in the days when I believed my early life mattered, before I went away — about being born in the year 1918, in the North End of the city of Boston, the second child of two transplanted Italians; and then the part about my earliest memory (the warm room, my wet thumb and velvet cushion, my father singing with the opera on the radio). There is no space for that here.
2
FOURTEEN YEARS AGO, lowering myself on a rope from the rusty stern of the Allegro, anchored then in the Straits of Malacca (“the financial straits,” Yardley said), I did not think I was an old man — though if anyone had insisted I was old I would have believed him. Most people are willing to make fools of themselves with a little persuasion, and the question of age is answered by the most foolishness. Now I know that old and young make little difference: the old man talks easily to a child.
They say every age is more barbarous than the last. It is possible. If there is an error in the statement it doesn’t matter, because the people who say this are either very young or very old, just starting out and with no experience, or musing in life’s sundowner with false flickers of half-forgotten memories. The age, as they call it, is too big to see, but they have time on their hands: it is too early for one and too late for the other to worry about being wrong. What they don’t know is that however awful the age is, it is placid and hopeful compared to a certain age in a man.
Fifty: it is a dangerous age — for all men, and especially for one like me who has a tendency to board sinking ships. Middle age has all the scares a man feels halfway across a busy street, caught in traffic and losing his way, or another one blundering in a black upstairs room, full of furniture, afraid to turn on the lights because he’ll see the cockroaches he smells. The man of fifty has the most to say, but no one will listen. His fears sound incredible because they are so new — he might be making them up. His body alarms him; it starts playing tricks on him, his teeth warn him, his stomach scolds, he’s balding at last; a pimple might be cancer, indigestion a heart attack. He’s feeling an unapparent fatigue; he wants to be young but he knows he ought to be old. He’s neither one and terrified. His friends all resemble him, so there can be no hope of rescue. To be this age and very far from where you started out, unconsoled by any possibility of a miracle — that is bad; to look forward and start counting the empty years left is enough to tempt you into some aptly named crime, or else to pray. Success is nasty and spoils you, the successful say, and only failures listen, who know nastiness without the winch of money. Then it is clear: the ship is swamped to her gunwales, and the man of fifty swims to shore, to be marooned on a little island, from which there is no rescue, but only different kinds of defeat.
That was how I recognized Mr. Leigh, the man they sent from Hong Kong to audit our books. I knew his name and his flight number — nothing else. I waited at Gate Three and watched the passengers file through Health and Immigration. First the early birds, the ones who rush off the plane with briefcases, journalists and junior executives with Chinese girl friends, niftily dressed, wearing big sunglasses; then the two Chinese sisters in matching outfits; a lady with a little boy and further back her husband holding the baby and juggling his passport; a pop group with blank faces and wigs of frizzy hair, looking like a delegation from New Guinea, anxious to be met; the missionary priest with a goatee and a cheroot, addressing porters in their own language; a few overdressed ones, their Zurich topcoats over their arms. Lagging behind, a lady in a wheelchair about whom people say, “Lord, I don’t know how she does it,” a man with a big box, a returning student with new eyeglasses, and. Mr. Leigh. I knew him as soon as I set eyes on him: he was the only one who looked remotely like me.
He was red-faced and breathless; and, unaccustomed to the heat, he was mopping his face with a hanky. He was a bit heavier than he should have been — his balance was wrong, his clothes too small. I waved to him through the glass doors. He nodded and turned away to claim his suitcase. I went into the men’s room, just to look in the mirror. I was reassured by my hair, not white like Leigh’s and still quite thick. But I wished I had more hair. My face was lined: my nap had made me look older. I was disheveled from the bus ride and looked more rumpled than usual because I had rolled my sleeves down and buttoned the cuffs. It was my tattoos. I hid them from strangers. Strangers’ eyes fix on tattoos as they fix on scars in unlikely places. A person spots a tattoo and he has you pegged: you’re a sailor, or you do some sort of poorly paid manual labor; one day you got drunk with your friends and they got tattooed, and to be one of the gang so did you. It did not happen this way with me, but that is the only version strangers know of a tattooing.