TALES OF THE WEIRD
Ercan Akbay

‘Tales of the Weird’ contains three strange episodes narrated in quite a different way. Ercan Akbay, has succeeded in rendering the visual expression of this unique book with shocking vividness.
Someone Else tells what happens when a middle-class finance director decides to restart his life from scratch and experiences a kind of metamorphosis. Setting off from Istanbul for London and then on to Port-au-Prince, it is the story of an unthinkable reincarnation that lasts until the end of a horrific ritual.
The High Roller tells of the three days of debauchery that precede a weak-willed, unmarried womaniser’s descent into the depths of depravity. The pace of events and the siren song of gamblers’ luck take him to a point beyond what he had ever expected.
I’m the One Who’s Bad tells of a young concert pianist’s morbid passion for an older woman while waiting to be rescued in a life boat after a serious accident involving a cruise ship. A terrible crime has been committed; the husband of this femme fatale has killed himself along with the eight hundred other people on board, all in one go. The hero of the story will pay a heavy price for uncovering the secret of this female spider’s fatal attraction.

—SOMEONE ELSE—
1
ISTANBUL

After having a shower and getting dried, I took a good look at myself in the bathroom mirror.  At first, I did not see anything that caught my eye.  Just like every morning, I did not pay the slightest bit of attention to my pathetic appearance.  Then, for some reason, I looked again, but this time more carefully.  My hair, which had started to thin; my belly, which overhung my belt; my skin, which had lost its sheen; my eyes, whose lustre had fled; the wrinkles that creased my face: all of them had started to annoy me.  It was as if I was only noticing now something that was, in fact, very ordinary: I was forty-two years old, and had frittered away the best years of my life.
While I was just standing there in the bathroom, I heard my wife yelling at me from the living room.  She was reminding me of what I had forgotten to buy on my way home from work yesterday evening: meat, milk, cheese, stuff for salad and other crap...  In fact, I had forgotten all sorts of things over years: taking up a fun sport; making time for my hobbies; having sex with a woman out of pure lust not just out of duty, actually, forget having sex, just flirting, courtship, having a romantic meal in a good restaurant with a lover; getting off my face and getting into mischief; going on a motorbike tour with my friends; going to the cinema or one of my favourite singer’s concerts; dancing like there is no tomorrow...  Suddenly I gave up thinking about what came to mind and listing them off because I had forgotten about them all; I had wanted to forget about them all.  You cannot turn the clock back.  Can we really call those all-consuming years that chew us up and spit us out life?
My daughter, who had been pretty much the only source of happiness in my life from when she was a little baby until finishing primary school, had just turned twelve.  But now, this whining, spoilt little girl gets on my nerves, just like her mother does.  They have got to the point where they take pleasure in ganging together to throw a spanner into everything I do.  They are always asking me for things, and what is more, they are never happy with anything I do for them.  We were a middle-class, comfortably-off family; we could not lead the life of luxury that the professionals we knew could.  And of course, I was to blame for this.  I had become the reason for my wife and daughter not being able to have what they wanted and not being able to go where they wanted.
I was the finance director for a big company that produced tyres for the automotive sector.  I had been working for that company for thirteen years.  Luckily, I was a university graduate and had two foreign languages.  For this reason, I had been able to rise to managerial level in the company, where I had originally started off as an ordinary clerk in the accounts department.  If my qualifications had been a little worse, at the moment, I would be head of the accounts department on only half of what I am making now.  Under those circumstances, maybe my wife would have left me, and I would have been a happier person.  Who knows?
As I was in the bedroom getting dressed, my wife was telling me to get myself ready straight away.  I was supposed to be helping my daughter with her homework.  The mother-in-law and sister-in-law were coming, and she was preparing some food for them.  Never mind our kitchen outgoings being sky-high from hosting this sort of guest, my daughter’s school fees swallowed up most of my salary.  My God, we were paying a small fortune.  In this country, having an eleven or twelve year-old child about to leave primary school was out and out torture.  Every child in our social class had to go to a private school.  The penniless state secondary schools and fast-stream grammar schools like the ones we went to simply did not exist anymore.  Even if they did, our wives knew nothing about them.  Once, I happened to say, “let’s leave the child to live her youth naturally; she can go to a normal secondary school; then we’ll send her to the conservatory: she’s a girl; she can get involved with art,” and my wife turned against me and would not talk to me for three days.
To get into one of the well-known private primary schools, first, we entered the draw for the same school’s nursery school, then we quarrelled; then, if she was selected, we were paying ten thousand dollars a year.  We were paying all this money for her to catch some different bug every couple of days from the other children at the nursery school so that she could be off school sick and, thus, strengthen her immune system.  The payment of ten thousand to the nursery school rose to fifteen thousand in primary school.  The money that we had so much difficulty earning went on her lessons, courses and private teachers, and as if that was not enough, we were trying to help her with her homework in the evenings.
They say you should look at the mother before choosing the daughter; actually, look at the mother, but do not choose the daughter would be closer to the mark.  As my daughter has grown up, she has started not to like me or my ideas, just like her mother has.  I was a working money machine for them, and the money I provided was never enough.  At the weekend or in the evening, I never had any time to myself.  Repairs to the house, being a chauffeur or babysitter on days out, shopping, car care and maintenance, paying off the bank loan, and the child’s lessons took up all the time that was left after work.
While I was trying to explain Pythagoras’ theorem to the girl, problems at work would come to mind.  This year, I was fighting on two fronts: both at home and abroad.  Ongoing conflicts with the people above and under me are making my life a misery.  The guy who works as assistant CFO has recently started to see me as a threat to his chair, and as a result of this meaningless unease, has started to persecute me relentlessly.  For that reason, I had to keep a close eye both on him and on a few twats in my own department.
At the same time, we had fallen into difficulty paying back the loans.  We kept squabbling with the banks, and had to find new short-term loans.  I could not get anyone to stick to the budget goals I had set for the company.  The cost of our investments, for several reasons, had exceeded the programme we had drawn up, while at the same time, our sales had stayed lower than we had been expecting.  The situation really was depressing.
Was it worth going to so much effort just to live this unpleasant life?  I asked myself this question again and again.  You can only put up with discomfort if it is going to get you where you want to go.  As for me, I was not getting the satisfaction of reaching a goal; in my situation, I could not even maintain my current position.  My future was mortgaged: the house, the car, our new fridge, the washing machine, the music set and even the mountain trip that we went on during the winter half term had been bought on credit.
I was getting good money as a clerk, but life was expensive.  As an honest financier, I was a tailor who could not re-stitch the seams I had unpicked myself.  I could not pull off all the things that I could do for the company without batting an eyelid: the financial wizardry, the cheap loans, the well-chosen and perfectly timed investments, the budgets measured down to the last millimetre and the cash flow tables, for myself.  I was just one of the saps who made the boss rich.  For the last two years, I had noticed that I had to change something.  But not being able to do anything had given my confidence a bad knock.  There was only one area left where I thought I was successful: planning...  I had to start from there if I wanted to reset my life to zero.  One hot July evening while I was still doing my time at the company, I started making detailed preparations for the period of activity that would change the rest of my life.
Actually, I was in a terrible depression; putting an end to my life was one of my options.  But I chose the other one.  The more I thought about it, the more I seemed to be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel.  But I was not sure if it was not just the light of a train speeding towards me.  While everyone at home and at work was in a summer languor, busy killing time here and there, I spent every free moment thinking and planning.  It took me two weeks to work it out in all its details; when I had finished, I put it into action immediately.  I could not afford to lose even an hour now.  They say that well begun is half done, but I hesitated until I had taken the first step.  After starting, I soon got over the hesitancy of the first few days, the fears that made my hands shake uncontrollably, and worrying about what people would say, about whether my daughter would be out on the street and my wife selling herself.  After that, it was much easier.
After brainpower, the most important element in my plans was undoubtedly money.  For a robbery, you cannot form a company to accumulate enough capital and float the shares on the stock market, you know.  We were living in such a world where even to rob a bank, a thief had to have capital...  I worked out how to do that, too; I was keeping tabs on the company’s most active foreign bank accounts.  The whole of the company’s exports to England passed through the one Sterling account.  Its annual transaction volume was eighteen million pounds.  We had opened the sterling credit account, held in a London branch, to regulate export revenues.  Our customers’ payment periods on export fees for cash on delivery were irregular.  According to the currency exchange regulations, we were obliged to bring this foreign currency to the country within ninety days.  On top of that, the exporter was paid additional bonuses on contracts closed within thirty days.  That is why we decided to use this sort of method.
We would write an order to the bank in London twenty-five days after shipping to ensure that an amount up to the value of the goods was transferred from the credit account to the account of the local bank we worked with as a payment on exported goods.  Our foreign customers made payments to the same account; that is how we settled our debts.  The system worked like this for two and a half years.  This foreign currency account was the first stage of my plan to swipe the money in the easiest and surest way possible...  At first, I wracked my brains and slogged my guts out about it.  When the time came, I was going to finish the job off.
The second king pin of the project was to escape from my wife.  If you leave your wife, you end up being rescued from your children anyway; they are two sides of the same coin.  At this very critical stage in the process, I was ready to act out well the role I had written for myself.  It is just that, God damn it, I had almost no theatrical aptitude.  For this reason, I had got to the point of rehearsing what I was going to say to her, every day in front of the mirror, and my acting abilities got better and better.  After a while, I had memorised all my answers.  I changed the ones that seemed fake and rewrote them.
After leaving my wife, I would have to leave the country, as well.  I had worked out the timing for my border escape points.  Even the Birdman of Alcatraz had not prepared his escape plan in so much detail.  After I had worked out the timing, I got to work in order to realise the second part of the plan.  This part of the job was looking like a tangled ball of thorny problems...
What I was afraid of did not happen.  I sorted out getting divorced much more easily than I had been expecting.  I said that, for reasons I could not explain, I would have to leave my job in a month, and sell the house to be able to pay off the debts.  I told her I loved her very much, and did not want her to leave me in my hour of need.  In spite of all my inability, I played my role fantastically that night...  There were even tears in my eyes.  My wife was touched by what I had told her and showed me a lot of tenderness.  Then, while having sex with me for the first time in months, she kept subtly asking details about my work problems and debts.  Just like in our honeymoon, she was screaming in bed doing her impression of a fake orgasm.
Two days later, I sold the car.  When I ask her to borrow some money from her mother, and give it to me to pay off our own debts, she started to see things a little differently.  Now, with absolutely no shame at all, I started tightening the screws; I would call her every hour, begging her to find me some money from somewhere.
In the end, the inevitable happened; after ten days, she called me at work and told me she was leaving me.  In spite of all my heroic resistance, we got divorced in a single hearing.  I had reproached her so much, and made her feel so sorry for me that she did not want anything else from the family home.  If I had forced the issue, I could even have got maintenance from her.  In the space of one day, I had packed all my things into two suitcases and moved into a studio flat in Ataköy.
I moved onto the financial phase without telling anyone at work anything about my divorce.  At that time, just as all the management were at each other’s throats with company problems, career conflicts had also come to a head.  In other words, as you will understand, the witches’ cauldron was bubbling.  In the midst of all this chaos, I managed to open a personal account, without letting on to anyone, in the London branch of the bank that we used for export loans.  No one even asked me why.  And then, to make sure that the money be transferred from the company credit account to this account of mine, I sent instructions to the tune of almost five hundred and eighty thousand pounds.  Before sending a coded telex, the documents were drawn up by yours truly, approved and signed by the directors and the general manager.  I converted the numbers to my personal account by changing the bottom part of these signed orders using various counterfeiting methods.
Twelve days later, I was filthy rich; it all happened so easily.  In my opinion, it would take at least three weeks for the company to notice that an audacious robbery had been committed.  I had executed the final bank instructions on the Friday afternoon; I had called the bank’s customer representative in London, so they would not be suspicious and call the company when a large sum of money was transferred to a personal account.  It was already August.  I would have my annual leave after the company’s weekly evaluation meeting.  All my stuff was waiting for me by the front door of the house.  Now, I had reached the third and final stage of the plan.  I destroyed all the traces that I had left behind me, jumped into a taxi, and went to the airport.  My visa and passport were still in my own name.  I went through passport and customs control and felt a bit more relaxed once I was on the plane.  I took a deep breath.
Throughout the flight, I kept wondering if I had forgotten something.  I had to have not made any mistakes.  When the hostesses began to serve lunch, I noticed that I had not eaten anything since Wednesday, but that, still, I did not feel hungry.  Inside me, there were misgivings that I could do nothing about.  I opened my notebook, and glanced at the details that were yet to come.  I wanted to be sure that everything had been done well so as not to have any problems and get myself into trouble.
The things I had left behind came to mind; maybe I was never going to see the magical city of Istanbul again.  The place I was born was very beautiful, but it had become no different from hell for me; it was not where, but how you lived that was important.  I had to forget my mother, my brother and my old friends; from now on, I would have no childhood memories.
I was only able to eat a couple of mouthfuls of the food that British Airways served up.  I asked the hostess for red wine; I drank three glasses, one after the other, so I could calm down.  At the customs and passport control in Heathrow, I was pretty nervous with the worry of being refused entry at the last moment and sent back; together with excessive sweating, I felt the need to go to the toilet practically once every half an hour.
Someone like me, when he begins a new life, sees that he still has a lot of links with the past; while trying not to leave a trace about where you are, you would be surprised at the large number of details that are thrown up by problems that need to be solved.  After making another checklist and ticking everything off, I was glad I had not forgotten anything that I had planned.  From now on, I thought that the most important thing I needed was for my luck to go well.
Within a month at the latest, I would have to go to some country other than England, or else I would have to marry someone with the right to live in England.  This was the date when my theft would be noticed and my visa would expire.  If I was too late, during the marriage process it would come to light that I was wanted in Turkey.  My English visa was valid for one month and had been obtained using genuine documents.  I had to sort out a wedding, or get hold of a fake passport from somewhere, without/before the police ever finding out about it.

2

From LONDON to PORT au PRINCE

It is very late by the time I get to the hotel from the airport.  As soon as I walk in the hotel door, it is as if chance is smiling at me once more.  It is as if the first person I talk to in London is someone who has been assigned to wait for me: the receptionist, a pretty, young half-caste girl...  When I arrive there, in spite of looking like the classic tourist, she does not greet me like an ordinary customer.
It is as if something she can see in my face has enchanted her; with what to me are strange movements, she checks my record, and gives me the key.  While I am thanking her, she tells me her shift will be finishing soon and flashes me a flirtatious glance.  Then, pointing at my face, she says something about knowing me from somewhere.  This is a sign that I cannot ignore.  I have her send my suitcase up to the room, and invite her for a drink on the terrace of hotel next door.  I arrive at the roof bar before her; she drops by five minutes after me.
This beautiful, friendly woman is half-Haitian, half-French.  She has been in England for more than seven years, and she is a British citizen.  Intelligent and beautiful...  We spend a long time on the terrace just drinking and chatting.  The further the conversation gets, the more I realise how much we have to offer each other.
This person who I had to find immediately is called Eartha Silvain; luck introduces me to her at just the right time.  When our conversation, which I have turned into a bombardment of persuasion, finishes, and while we are saying good-bye, I suggest meeting the next day.  She accepts without pausing for thought.
After a few days of friendship, our fiery bedroom adventures begin.  I rekindle my dulled sexuality with her.  After knowing her for four days, she accepts my proposal.  It takes two weeks for the documents to come through from the consulate and for the marriage process to be completed.  We rent a house in the Bohemian area of the city and move Eartha’s things there.  She loves me a lot; maybe my limitless spending has got something to do with it.
During all this time in London, I am slowly transferring a significant amount of my bank balance here to other banks in Switzerland.  I calculate that I only have two weeks left to go somewhere else and become someone else.
My new wife and I are having a great time following our whims around London.  I want to be able to savour the high life for a while.  We frequent a pub called Scott’s, near our house on Portobello Road.  I tell Eartha that we should go on honeymoon.  While we are talking about how fantastic it will be to go to Haiti and about how she is going to be able to get time off work, a strangely dressed old woman comes up to us from the table behind ours.  “Now, I’m sure I know you from somewhere, but where?” she says.  When Eartha tells her that I come from Istanbul, she starts speaking to me in Turkish.
I introduce Eartha to her.  She sits down at our table, and I get her a pint.  I mention my childhood in Nişantaşı in passing; I realise that we lived in the same street for a time, and that she knew my mother.  Suddenly, I am starting to feel very uneasy about someone recognising me thanks to an unbelievable coincidence; I decide to escape from this half-crazed, talkative woman.
I go to the toilet and think a little there.  When I come out, I go back to the woman, who is chatting to Eartha, and apologise, telling her that we have to go.  The old woman, who cannot stomach this unexpected frostiness, suddenly flies into a rage and jabs her finger at me as if she is going to poke my eye out and starts wagging it in my face.  She yells in my face that she knows my mother and, to use her expression, “the real me”.
“You’re a fake!” she says.
I tell her firmly that she does not know what she is talking about.  My words just wind her up even more; she mutters at me in a shrewish voice, spraying spit in my face:
“You stole his identity and took his place!”
As the hate-filled accusations multiply, I am practically dragging Eartha, who I have grabbed by the shoulders, towards the exit.  The woman is, by now, yelling after us at the top of her voice...
“You’re not him!  You’ve killed him, I know!”
I find myself forced to explain the mad woman’s words to Eartha.  That night, while I am telling her about my childhood and about Istanbul, I insert “my mother’s senile friend” into the conversation at an opportune point and she seems as if she is convinced.
In a few days, we will sort out all the formalities in London and we are going on honeymoon to my wife’s hometown, Port au Prince.  I surprise even myself with my knowledge of the West Indies.  It is as if I have been to Haiti and Cuba before.  But I am sure I have not read any detailed information about their historical and geographical structure anywhere.  While we are chatting on the plane, the words I am using attract Eartha’s attention, too; she thinks I have been to the island before and am not telling her.  Then, I tell her that, years ago, I was a pirate in the Antilles; we both laugh at that one.  And she tells me her own family’s story.
Eartha’s birth mother, a very pretty woman from Marseilles, fell ill here and died at a very early age.  She had got to know Eartha’s father while on holiday in Port au Prince, and fell in love with him.  Her handsome Haitian father was a mulatto working for the Tonton Macoutes, the secret police organisation of the former dictator, Jean-Claude Duvalier.
After a while, her father, distressed at the political chaos in Haiti, left his job, and together they moved to San Domingo, the capital of the neighbouring country, and married there.  They had Eartha and her little brother.  A few months after her brother was born, when a new regime had come to power, they moved back to Port au Prince.  Her mother Isabelle, and her brother both fell ill here, never to recover.  Eartha does not give me any details about her own or her brother’s/their illness.  Thinking that the subject upsets her, I decide not to dwell on it.
Port-au-Prince is an unbelievably wretched place.  There are beautiful buildings from the colonial years, when the island was still rich in resources, but they have now fallen into a state of terrible neglect.  On the road towards the city from the airport, I look at the surroundings carefully while continuing to listen to Eartha.  Before settling in at the hotel, she suggests that we visit her family; I say OK, and she tells the driver the address; we head over there.
The house where Eartha’s father lives is not in one of the shantytowns, which make up almost eighty percent of the city; it is a small flat on the second floor of an old building.  We go up the dilapidated stairs, our suitcases banging against the walls, and ring the bell.  Her father opens the door without keeping us waiting and takes our suitcases inside.  Then, full of excitement, he shakes my hand and gives his daughter a hug.  It is at that point that I notice the woman standing behind him.  I introduce myself and find myself shaking hands with Eartha’s stepmother.
We have a chat in the living room, surrounded by walls that have not seen a lick of paint for years.  Prosper, my father-in-law, says something to his wife and has us served drinks.  He is around fifty-five or sixty, and his second wife is quite young, too.  In the course of our conversation, he says that he knows English and that he was a chauffeur at the American Consulate for years.  After talking for a while, he sees that we are tired from the journey and offers to take us to our hotel.  We collect our things and go downstairs.  He takes us in his car and gives us a quick tour of the city.  I notice, for the second time, that I remember the port and the colonial buildings that surround it quite clearly; I understand that I will not be a stranger in these parts.
From London, we had arranged to move into an apart hotel with a Gulf view in a smart area of Port au Prince, not far from where Eartha’s father, Prosper Silvain, lives.  It is a studio flat.  There is nothing decent inside, but the building has an interesting atmosphere.  Also, I think a honeymoon spent with a beautiful, twenty-five year old half-caste girl would be pleasant wherever you are.  In Haiti, mulattoes, like Eartha, are considered a privileged class.  Full-blooded Africans have dark skin and live in poverty over here; they speak a strange form of French, called Haitian Creole.
The next morning, we rent a jeep and drive around the mountain slopes where the coffee and sugar cane plantations are.  On an island that, until one hundred and fifty years ago, was entirely covered with tropical forest, now there are only group of trees concentrated in a few areas.  Almost all the trees have been felled to create areas sown with corn, sweet potatoes and manioc, and to acquire timber.  The plantation workers, looking at us with hostile, bloodshot eyes, glistening from their black faces, unsettle us.  You can still feel that warlike tension, stemming from the years of colonialism, in the air.
The descendants of the slaves that were seized from their houses on the coasts of West Africa and brought here, once more, after so many generations, have to work themselves into the ground for their board, just like their forefathers.  Slavery has officially been abolished, but nothing has changed.  That is why they still hold all whites responsible for the suffering that they endure.
We return to the city and wander around the port; we eat in a restaurant near Champ de Mars square.  We spend long hours in the liveliest part of the city, the Iron Market, once famous for its slave traders; we have a lot of fun.  The meat we eat at the restaurant, composed of three tables in the market, gives me a mild case of food poisoning.  The weather is very hot and humid.  I start getting red blotches on my face and arms; I think it is heat rash at first.  Finally, I understand that it is an illness that comes from inside.
I spend the whole night having sex with Eartha.  All told, we stay in bed more than eight hours, interspersed with cold showers and fruit; we chat a lot too.  Eartha asks me about Istanbul and my life there; I tell her my stories without stirring up any trouble for myself and without really mentioning my last ten years.  She listens intently.
The next morning, after having a shower, I take a look at myself in the mirror.  My body and face are covered in a rash, my skin has got darker, and I am sure it is not just that it seems that way to me; over my hands, arms and chest, hair has started to sprout quite visibly.  Surprised, I examine myself in the mirror again.  Yes, I can see that even the look on my face has changed.  There is an insolent, ruthless glint in my eyes.  I cannot work out how it has happened, but I do notice that I feel better like this, and so, I choose not to dwell on it.
I spend the whole day travelling around with Eartha again.  This time, we go to a beautiful beach on the west of the island.  In the settlement here, there are fields sown with tobacco and a cigar factory.  Once we come out of the sea, we have a tour of the factory and buy cigars and cigarillos in different sizes for Prosper and Eartha’s other relatives.  The designs of the labels on the high-quality wooden cigar boxes are unbelievably beautiful.  Even though I do not smoke, I buy quite a large box of cigars for myself, cut one of the cigars and light it.  Eartha is amazed that I do not find tobacco at all strange and that I am behaving as if I have been smoking for forty years.  She thinks that I must be an ex-smoker.  Laughing, I tell her I have never smoked before, but I liked the cigar a lot, and I will keep smoking from now on.
My laughter and behaviour seem alien to me.  My walk has become a swagger, as if to show my inner strength.  I have huge self-confidence now; in my own eyes, I am someone who can succeed in everything and who can win every battle.  I put my arm around her shoulders and take her out for a walk along the beach.  When we get tired, we sit in a café on the sands.
In the evening of our second day in Haiti, the change in my physical appearance becomes clear enough to attract Eartha’s attention, too.  We think that my skin has got darker and that I have broken out in spots because I have exposed to the tropical sun, which I am not used to.  But we cannot understand the other strange changes, like my lips swelling, my eye colour darkening and my body hair sprouting more thickly and darkly.  That evening, Eartha takes my photo and compares it to how I look in the London photographs that we brought with us.  I say to her, “you’ve cast a spell on me and turned me into someone else,” and we laugh together for several minutes.
On the third day of our honeymoon, Eartha’s great aunt, the sister of Prosper’s late father, dies.  Eartha has not seen her for years; she says she was an old woman pushing ninety.  Those who were especially fond of her stay in her house.  The evening of the same day, we are invited to Genove, to the northwest of the city, to “a secret forest”, where there is an abandoned temple, for the prayers and the ceremony.
Towards evening, we go to the fetish market in the harbour and buy strange clothes that we will wear during the ceremony: necklaces made from lizard skins and bizarre, incomprehensible objects embellished with dried plants.  As we are strolling to the market, Eartha explains the traditional customs, the rituals and the daily way of life in Haiti.  She cheerfully feeds me the historical information.
According to what she is says, the voodoo kings of Haiti are called Bokonos, abbots who organise and direct the ceremonies.  The Bokonos are the real leaders of the country and, among the people, are even more respected than the president is.  They say that no one other than local people will be able to unravel and understand the mysteries of the black magic, believed in and practised for centuries, that they use in their secret gatherings.  We jump into one of the pick-up trucks, which, by having two rows of seats at the back added, function similarly to our minibuses, and return to our hotel.
After dinner, we go round to Eartha’s family to talk about her aunt’s funeral.  We have some coffee there and all together set off on the road towards the temple, where the funeral will be held.  That evening, Prosper introduces me to the abbot who is officiating at the aunt’s funeral service, Mattias.  He is one of Prosper’s closest friends.  He wears a snow-white habit that goes down to his ankles; his feet are bare.  He is sitting in front of the door to the temple, making medicine from plants.  Eartha whispers to me that he is a great wise man with supernatural powers.
Behind the table, hanging on the stone wall of the building, there is a picture of the goddess Mamiwater, who appears as a mermaid, rising out of the water, holding a python that forms a bridge between the sky, the sea and the earth.  I cast a glance inside the temple.  Voodoosies, their faces painted white, are preparing for a ceremony.  Inside, around the altar, there are animal skulls and wooden dolls.
Mattias is very old, but you can immediately see that his eyes and body are full of energy.  When we are introduced, he shakes my hand and smiles.  “I know you, son,” he says.  I am surprised.  He radiates a strange light as he looks into my eyes; I am spellbound.
“Welcome back among us once more.”
He touches my temple with the middle finger of his left hand.  I feel that what he has said is true.  Suddenly, I notice I am metamorphosing more quickly now.  The attractive force in Mattias’ fingers calls up other cells imprisoned in the depths of my memory.  At that moment, I cannot remember who I really am and suddenly find myself as a financial clerk full of worries.  I miss my ex-wife and my daughter and think about how they are getting along without me.  I worry about Istanbul and the problems there and feel too weak to be able to do anything about anything.
Then, I go to sleep; when I wake up, I get out of bed as someone else.  I find Mattias across from me in the bed I wake up in.  I am like a different, tough man who has had strange dreams and cannot quite tell the difference between them and real life...  Inside me, there is a voyager and adventurer who lived in the nineteenth century.  This man is terrifying and fearless: he does not recognise any authority.  He is someone full of evil... a leering, sex-crazed lout who has spent his life sailing the seven seas, travelling the seven continents and who knows how to take advantage of anything and everything...
Yes, I am someone else…
Mattias says, “come with me,” and takes me to a group of people playing percussion instruments.  He introduces me to Aristide, the head drummer.
“You were a good drummer once.  Tonight, you will play alongside Aristide and these guys.”
He hands me over to them and leaves.  While he is walking towards the temple, he turns round and looks back; our eyes meet.  I can see that a strange smile has settled on his face.  Aristide brings me in front of a tumba.  I really do know how to play this particular instrument.  In the group next to us, there are trumpeters and trombone players.  But the most splendid group of instruments is made up of a kind of vibraphone made from empty oil barrels, their surfaces hammered into tuned, concave rings, played by being struck with round-headed, wooden drumsticks.  But here, you can find virtuosi who can play the small, stumpy versions of these kettledrums, gathered at random from God knows where, with as much expertise as a concert pianist.
As soon as things like tuning and sound control, costumes and seating arrangements are completed, Mattias commands us to be silent.  The disciples sit on long, wooden benches, forming quite a large rectangular area around the orchestra.  Mattias talks about the dead aunt in a French that is difficult to understand, prays for her and makes speeches explaining that she has not died and that her spirit is together with us.  Prayers are said.  This is how long a funeral service lasts in Haiti.  Afterwards, it is time for an altogether deeper, darker ceremony.
The kettledrums open the night, playing an impressive version of one of Borodin’s works called  In the Steppes of Central Asia.  Then, the wind instruments and drums begin.  As time goes on, the night gets darker; the bottom of the well gets deeper.  Now, we are dancing feverishly.  The hypnotic beat of the drums permeates the whole temple.  Kola nuts are handed round for the musicians and dancers to chew on.  They taste like raw potato, dye your teeth orange and make it easier for you to go into a trance.
One of the women is very beautiful.  She is wrapped in a shiny, red-coloured cloth, her hair is veiled and her face is painted white.  The dancers’ eyes roll back in their sockets as the rhythm of the music speeds up; they fling their heads back.  In the end, the woman in red goes into a trance; her back arches like a bow; her body is bathed in sweat; she spins and spins on her own axis.
After quite a long time playing, I find myself in the midst of a dark maelstrom.  Eartha is standing like an idol placed at the bottom of a willow tree, watching the ceremony.  As for me, I am accepting everything that I am offered: apart from the kola nuts that the sorcerer chief is handing out to the people at the ceremony, I am not hesitating to chew on the leaves, which are only for the drummers and which make my tongue go to sleep.  I think I have been able to quench my thirst, due to my continual sweating, by drinking Port au Prince Rum.  Instead, I become blind-drunk and completely detached from everything around me.
In the middle of the secret forest, between the trees, there is a mud pool about half a metre/meter deep and eight metres/meters wide.  All the dancers begin to dance together in the mud.  The ecstatic women, because their bodies are possessed by different spirits, yell at the top of their lungs as the spirits speak through them.  The woman in red goes crazy and tears her clothes to shreds.  We are like drunken pigs wallowing together in the foul-smelling mud pit.
My brain is now somewhere other than in my head.  I am dancing as if electricity is flowing through my body.  The rhythm, which the drummers keep intensifying, speeds up even more beyond my understanding.  Live roosters hung upside down by the feet from clotheslines are barbarically sacrificed by having their heads torn off; their blood is smeared onto our faces.
After a while, I dance my way closer to them, covered from head to toe in mud.  I am holding one of the cockerels’ heads in my hand, and break it off with my teeth.  Blood splatters everywhere, all over my face and hair; its salty taste fills my mouth.  A bit further along, next to the well adjoining one of the temple walls, there is a disciple whose duty it is to wash the people who have left the mud bath and cool the people who are covered in sweat.  I go up to him, and get him to squirt water over my clothes from the thick rubber hosepipe he holds in his hand.
Out of breath, I notice that my energy is low and rest in a corner.  When I come out of the corner I had withdrawn myself to and go back to the place where I left Eartha, I cannot find her or Prosper.  I want to ask Mattias where they are but notice that the temple door has been locked.  From inside, I can hear the voodosies’ blood-curdling screams.  I just cannot understand what has happened to them.  It does not seem as if the clouds in my head will disperse; I am in too strange a mood to be able to guess if they will or not.  I am giving myself up to the instinctive behaviour of the dark man inside me.  I leave the ceremony in the middle and jump into an old jeep that I find there with its keys have been left in the ignition.  First, I go to the hotel we are staying at and to Prosper’s house but cannot find anyone there.  Then, I go down to the harbour and look around for Eartha in the dark streets.
I enter a sailors’ bar in the harbour.  This dark, dank hut is teeming with down-and-out winos.  It smells disgusting inside, and I cannot see a thing from the smoke.  I ask the barman if he knows.  An old drunkard sitting immediately to the left of the door strikes up conversation and says he guesses that I am Prosper’s son-in-law.
This dead-drunk man, who must be in his sixties, is muttering things like “we’re all cursed and we’re gonna die.”  I explain that I lost my wife and father-in-law during the ceremony and that, now, I am looking for them; I ask him to help me.  He screws his face up and says some strange things like, “Prosper and his wife go to Mattias’ place only for official business.  They’ll have gone on to Adelante’s temple from there ’cause they’re really his disciples.”  I tell him that I have not really understood anything he has been talking about, and ask who Adelante is.  He is surprised that I do not know, and, in a muffled voice, replies, “His disciples are the ones who are ill… Those who carry the curse inside them are trying to find a cure there.”
As he goes on, what he is saying becomes more and more incomprehensible.
“Now, what exactly is this curse?  How can I find them?  Can you tell me?…”
The man, instead of answering my rapid-fire questions, nudges the friend sitting next to him, and says some things that I cannot understand.  They laugh out loud together.  I order a stiff drink for each of them; I want to keep them talking a little longer.  The old drunkard downs his drink in one and says, “There’s all kinds of fucking in Adelante’s secret forest.”  He starts to laugh again.  “Prosper and his wife love it there.”  He is talking a lot of nonsense by now, and it seems as if he has no intention of telling me anything else.  I ask where Adelante’s temple is again, but this time, using different words; he wakes up to the fact that I am trying to make him talk and will not/don’t tell me anything else.
In the end, I got annoyed, and attempted to use force.  When I see everyone walking towards me, I change my mind.  I try to calm them all down, and have to pay the barman double the amount on the bill.  I leave amid angry mutterings, and begin once more to wander around aimlessly in the dark streets.
One of the prostitutes plying her trade on the corner says that she can give me whatever I want for only twenty dollars.  At first, I just laugh and continue on my way, but then, feeling a strange urge, I turn round and go back.  The whore looks like the woman in red from the ceremony, the one with the languid looks; I like her legs and her breasts.
She takes the twenty dollars in advance, and leads me to a rundown old shack.  I fuck her like an animal, roaring and screaming.  We are both covered in sweat.  I offer her another twenty; I want anal and a little violence.  She agrees to forty.  I tie her hands roughly behind her with the sash that is holding up my trousers; I grab her hair with my left hand and jerk her head right back.  I press her torso down.  Her hips spread out under me like a big tray.  With all my pent-up frustration, I tear into her buttocks with my teeth; my nails leave deep scratch marks on the inside of her thighs.  Then, chafing away at her tender skin, dry as a bone, I break into her.  Her screams grate on my ears, but that just arouses me even more.  I let go of her hair, and shove my hand into her mouth to shut her up.  She tries to bite at my fingers; I do not let her.  In frenzied spasms, like a dog, I come inside her.  I give her another twenty to get her to stop crying and swearing at me, and then undo her hands.  I hastily get dressed, and dash off into the street.
I continue looking for Eartha among the gambling dens in the narrow streets of the makeshift shantytown.  It is really awful around here.  I cannot stay inside anywhere because of the dense cigar smoke and the smell of sweat mixed with urine.
I go back to Prosper’s house; the lights are still out; no one is home.  As there is nowhere else left for me to go, I return to the secret forest.  The wild-eyed guards at the entrance say the ceremony is finished and that there is no one left inside the temple.  When I say I want to have a look anyway, the guard in front, shaking his head, extends the sword bayonet that he has drawn from his waist towards my stomach.  I ask after Eartha and Prosper; they make gestures showing that they do not know.  Then, I say I am looking for Adelante’s place.  The guards’ rage reaches a climax; I am forced to get away from there quickly, walking backwards.
I go round the streets of Port au Prince one last time and I feel as if I know them off by heart.  When I look at the garden of the old church in the square and the station building in the harbour, I suddenly remember everything.  This new appearance of mine, this new face of mine and this hairy body of mine belong, in fact, to someone else.  Yes, I was here one hundred and twenty years ago...

3

from ISTANBUL to BOMBAY

It was going to be a year when I could not get enough of robberies and entertainment.  My sailor’s life had begun while I was still an orphan growing up in the gambling dens of Galata.  In my thirties, I began to go off the rails: I began to feed off more and more dangerous adventures.  For eleven years, I earned my money trading in the different ports of the world, sailing the seven seas with a fourteen-man crew made up of devil-may-care ne’er-do-wells.  My ship was a poor excuse for a freighter sailing under Dutch colours and registered in the port of Rotterdam.  Under its previous registration, before me, it had been known as a respectable dry freighter.
I had saved up my primary capital from smuggling opium, which we used to carry, hidden among the legal cargoes that we transported for a firm that traded in foodstuffs and machines, between India and Rotterdam.  A few years later, I had become the owner of the ship that I had been captaining for my boss.  I generally concerned myself with illegal trade.  This trade in opium and arms earned us a sack-full of money.  I knew the movers and shakers all over the world.  I was continuously cultivating these contacts, painstakingly established over the years, with clever policies and a style all my own.  People were earning money from where they were sitting, just by using their influence, their authority, their names or distribution networks.
We had not settled down in any city: all the ports in the world were ours; we were homeless.  We had all become citizens of the world.  I had seven sailors from Istanbul.  Even the most ignorant deckhand spoke at least three foreign languages and one spoke the same amount of dialects.  Four Greeks, two Spaniards, one Italian, one Portuguese and one Gypsy were working on the ship as well.  Me and my men were used to spending like there was no tomorrow.  The whole gang had a predilection for women; there were brothels and other entertainment places at our disposal in every port.  Later on, we began to look for even more excitement.  Even illegal trade it was no longer fun and exciting enough for us.  We had to move on to bigger and better things and our renown had to spread on the seas of the world.
We orchestrated quite a large robbery in Istanbul a week after a session in our favourite tavern in the harbour.  We had made off with two thousand five hundred gold liras from Galata Harbour – originally provided as a loan to the Ottoman Treasury by a French finance house – before they could be handed over to the Palace.  No one could work out what had happened to it.  In the French press and in Istanbul, the robbery was the talk of the town for days.
Enraging the French government, who had been imposing an embargo on me and my ship for a while now, had started to become a very enjoyable pastime.  Nearly six months ago, in the West Indies, where we had docked to traffic in black women, I inadvertently started off a small massacre.  All just to satisfy my own perverted impulses.  In fact, I had only been looking for a bit of fun, but then the whole thing got out of hand.
We narrowly escaped from Port au Prince Harbour, which, at that time, was under French supervision.  From that day on, the government had forbidden me to enter the country or the ports of any of her colonies, and had issued a warrant for my arrest.
A short while after that mysterious robbery in Istanbul, I had some guys whisper my name to some French journalists who were researching into who had done it, so that my reputation would spread.
At the end, after we had robbed the bankers, I went mad with pleasure; my revenge was bitter.  We used up the money in Amsterdam.  For months, we did not go out to sea; we did not work.  We dropped anchor at Wester Quay and finished off the whores in the harbour; we went on to married housewives and young schoolgirls.  In those years, of all the cities in Europe, Amsterdam was the one where you could have the most fun.  The women were very beautiful.  The police never interfered because it was thanks to us that their chiefs could live in luxury.
In the port, there was no limit to the number of drinks we quaffed, nonsensical clothes and knick-knacks we bought, inns and brothels we trashed.  While we were carrying coffee and tobacco from the West Indies, we were also selling young black women from Haiti and Cuba, whom we had snapped up really cheaply, and some of whom we had conned and kidnapped, to the brothels in the ports of Western Europe.  Black girls were in high demand as servants and sex slaves.  The trade brought us good money, and on top of that, we had more fun on the return journey.
Because, after the French embargo, we could no longer go to the West Indies, one hazy dawn we set out for the Indian Ocean from Istanbul in order to bring in a consignment of opium.  The Suez Canal had opened a few years before; the port of Bombay, with its more than eighty workshops, had become one of the most important centres of the cotton textiles market.  That year, Lord Lytton had been appointed to India.  We were acquainted with Lord Northbrook, the previous Governor General, and we had a good working relationship with him; he turned a blind eye to the opium that we bought and took to Holland.  As for how we would work with the new Governor General, that was something we still did not know.
It was a long and trying journey.  Recently, we had got too used to a comfortable life and become estranged from the sea.  For this reason, in the first few weeks, adjusting to the long journey really took its toll on us.  Two big ocean storms wore us out; violent fights began to break out between my men.  At the end of a pointless argument, two of my sailors, both brought up in Tophane, ganged up and suddenly slashed open a Portuguese deckhand who they had been working with for years, on the rear deck.  Everything had lost its charm.
At the end of the journey, which had been punctuated with bickering and fighting, one hot, summer morning, when we arrived at the biggest port on the west coast of India, we were almost completely exhausted.  After weighing anchor, I had a scout round the city for a few days, keeping my ears open to the local gossip and following the day-to-day goings on.
For a few hundred years, the Yadava dynasty had had a say in the running of the state of Maharashtra, where the isle of Bombay is to be found.  Although the state was under the control of the English administration, the Yadavas had fabulous wealth and lands.  Three years earlier in Bombay, I had got to know a young maharajah, who even invited me to a meal in their palace, which overlooked the Bay of Makim, to the west of the harbour.
The dynasty’s large treasury was known to be in one of the rooms of this eighteenth century stately mansion, built in the gothic style.  Apart from the income from their estate, the money provided by their looms alone had made this family into one of the wealthiest in the world.  A company of soldiers made up of Marathas protected the palace.
I planned the palace heist on one of the nights we were having a drinking binge under the stars in Bombay.  As well as being my brainchild, this robbery was perhaps the only thing I could do to lift the crew’s morale.  That is the only thing you can do to get a group to bond: set a goal and then fight together to reach that goal.
We broke into the very well protected palace treasury easily by setting up the key men in the palace guard company.  Because it was a job that no one would be brave enough even to attempt, we managed to take two large chestfuls of gold and jewels to the ship without running into the slightest problem.  We had made all of the sentries rich.
As for the piece that I was personally after, it was the Yadavas’ world-famous Crown of the Maharajahs.  Owning this crown of solid gold, decorated with large diamonds and rubies, would ensure that I would go down as the most famous thief in history.  I wanted to earn this fame and be a god in the eyes of my men.
Late that night, we set about celebrating this victory in the most famous bar in the port.  The complacency that being able to get away with murder for years gives you coupled with my own extreme self-confidence had spoilt me.  With one just hour to go before setting sail, I decided to put on the Rajah’s crown and sword and show off right in the middle of the bar.  The local bad boys hunched over my feet and worshipped me.
Only fifteen minutes later, a company of soldiers surrounded the bar.  The commanding officer of the guard company, who we had bribed before the robbery, came inside, with a squad of his soldiers, to talk to me and arrest my men.  We went into a corner to be able to speak alone.  Our crime was very serious, and there was no possibility of escape.  I told the commanding officer that if he did take me to the palace, I would destroy him by letting everyone know that he had accepted a bribe for the robbery.  He was not going to get away with this betrayal.
He said that I had not honoured the agreement we had made, and that my recklessness had put everyone in danger.  He explained that he could help me out of this situation in one way and one way only, for it was not in his power to do anything else.  I was to give myself up without a fight, and return both the treasure and the crown.  I was to give up all my men, my ship and everything on the ship, as well.
If I could accept these conditions, he was prepared to say that I had played no part in the robbery, and ensure my escape that way.  I thought he was bluffing.  I thought that I had a strong hand, and wanted to continue bargaining.  Sometimes your head just stops working.  At that moment, that was how mine was; it was off my shoulders in five minutes flat.
For the chief of the guards, there had been nothing to worry about after all because dead men tell no tales.

4.

in PORT au PRINCE

After leaving the forest where the ceremony was held and after quite a lot of traipsing through the streets, I return to the hotel to find Eartha there, Eartha, who has been missing since the beginning of the night, and who is, at this moment, the ugliest person in the world to me.  Without giving me the chance to ask anything at all, she begins to insult me.  She is shrewishly yelling and shouting at me, pretexting all sorts of irrelevant subjects such as me sleeping around or not showing her any interest.
This whole situation is making me extremely uncomfortable.  As a reflex, I attempt to defend myself and show her some force.  But Eartha only becomes even more aggressive and slaps me.  When I hold her hands, she tries to bite and kick me, and shouts and swears at the top of her voice.  When she manages to break free from my grasp, she grabs a huge knife from the kitchen and comes back with it.  After being chased a few times round the table, I dash outside, managing to escape with my life.
When I come back, after wandering around for about half an hour, I see that there is not a piece of glass that has not been broken and not a chair or table that has not been overturned left in the hotel room.  Eartha is huddled behind the sofa, crying.  She is in no fit state to talk to anyone...  Going through her bag and personal effects, I find a metal syringe and see some ampoules with the word Eridorphin written on them.  I ask Eartha if they will do any good.  She nods.  I break the ampoule open and draw its contents into the syringe.  I inject it into a blue vein on her outstretched arm as she looks up at me, her eyes begging for the drug.  Within five minutes, she has calmed down and returned to normal.  She has a high fever.  I put her to bed and stay by her side until she falls asleep.
Some time that night, I leave the hotel and go to Prosper’s house to talk to him because I want to ask some questions about Eartha’s seizure.  I ring the doorbell again and again, but no one opens.  I want to break in and find something that might be able to shed some light on the situation.  I take out my credit card from my wallet and try to push it against the bolt of the lock.  Nothing.  I try the little penknife from my pocket; the barrel does not turn.  I go to the top floor.  There, on the balcony overlooking the space in the middle of the apartment, I find a large spatula that some workmen must have left.  I shove it between the doorframe and the door, push the bolt inwards without breaking the lock, and enter through the now open door.  Without turning any lights on and trying to see around me using only a lighter flame, I walk through to Prosper’s study.  In this room, where the curtains are tightly drawn, I turn on the night light and attack the drawers of the desk, next to the sofa.
In a few minutes, I get my hands on some photo albums.  In them, as well as photographs, I find a lot of notes written next to the pictures and sheets of paper shoved between the pages.  Of the two albums, I cast a glance at the first one, which seems to be more recent.  I cannot find anything to ease my despair there.  While examining the second one, I hear some people coming up the stairs.
Hurriedly closing the drawers, the second album in my hand, I run to the flat door, which is in the living room.  When I get there, I hear the key being put in the lock of the door and hide behind the column right next to the entrance.  Prosper and his wife, deep in conversation, not noticing that the door has been forced, come inside.  While they are closing the bedroom door, I slink outside.  They do not hear the door close.
When I return to the hotel room, I see that Eartha is still asleep and excitedly thumb through the pages of the second photo album.  Wedding photos of Eartha’s mother and Prosper, Eartha’s birth, baby photos, letters, celebrations, postcards, the birth of Eartha’s brother...
Yes, what did happen to Eartha’s brother?
In the centre pages of the album, there is a packet of papers and an envelope.  A little later, I find the first clue that I am looking for staring me in the face: Isabella Silvain’s brain tomography results and the doctors’ reports.  Years of tests, X-rays, research, prescriptions, doctors’ names, reports and a result: death through madness...
I learn from the papers in the album that Eartha, too, is ill.  She must have inherited this illness from her mother, who died at an early age.  Specific areas, located in the left frontal lobe of the brain, for an unknown reason and at undefined times, are aroused, and this leads to violent epileptic fits.  With age, these seizures become more and more frequent, finally resulting in death.  I learn about the other relevant details in a telephone conversation with an elderly neurologist living in London.
I find the doctor’s name from the old X-ray and test reports; Dr Thompson was actually the doctor who dealt with Eartha’s mother.  I dial the number I find in Prosper’s phonebook and get the man out of bed.  At first, he is rather ratty, but then I tell him what has happened.  He listens to me attentively and, speaking in a very easy to understand tone, he says that, years ago, diagnosing Isabella’s illness took a very long time and gave him a lot of sleepless nights.  He informs me that Eartha uses a drug derived from morphine whenever she has a seizure, and that she may need to use it often.
I do not notice that everything is changing at great speed and at a rapidly increasing tempo and that my own metamorphosis is leading me to total disaster.  I think that my soul has found itself in this transformation and returned to its essence...  Maybe I do belong to a morally bankrupt world; order and peace of mind make that real man inside me uncomfortable.
That man thinks I must get rid of Eartha immediately.  By injecting her with a high dose of Eridorphin, I can finish this job off without arousing any suspicion.  But immediately after that, it strikes me that I am not obliged to destroy her and that politely coming to an agreement and separating could be a better course of action.  I think about the real reasons why my life has suddenly become how it is; I am very confused.  Finally, I curl up next to Eartha and fall asleep like someone falling into a deep, dark well.
The next day, when I wake up, soaked in sweat, I have a premonition that something important is going to happen.  It is as if a chemical transformation has occurred in my body.  There is an astringent taste in my mouth.  Without waking Eartha, who is sleeping next to me like an angel, I get up, have a shower and a shave.  I notice that the lines of my face have completely changed.  My bloodshot eyes are staring at my reflection in the mirror.  I do not even care about the metamorphosis taking place in my body anymore because I understand that my entire soul, too, has been conquered.  Because of this, I like my new appearance more than my old one.  I really like the five or six centimetre white scar that has appeared on the left side of my forehead.
When Eartha wakes up, we have breakfast.  I ask her how she is feeling; she says that she wants to leave Port au Prince and is counting the days until she can return home.  I want to find out what it is that is making her so uncomfortable.  We are in the city where she was born, in the place where her father, relatives, friends and memories are.  I tell her that, in theory, this ought to be the place where she can feel the most at home.  She tells me that she feels that the monster inside her has started growing here.  As far as she is concerned, coming back has triggered the old curse and doomed her to feel bad.
I tell Eartha that this illness is nothing to do with a curse, a monster or magic, but rather a condition that has a medical explanation.  I tell her that it is a terrible misfortune that this should be the only thing that her poor mother has bequeathed to her.  Approaching her lovingly, I say, “none of this is your fault; you are just a victim of fate.”  She is surprised at what I know and asks who I learnt it all from.  I say that I went through the papers in her father’s house and spoke to her doctor in London on the phone.  She bows her head forward and is silent.  While we are getting ready to go out, in a voice laden with the worry that I will leave her, she asks what I am thinking of doing after this.  Trying to appear natural, I tell her that we will learn to fight it together.
After having our breakfast in the hotel, we go to a deserted beach to the north of the port towards eleven o’clock.  It is a beautiful spot.  We spend the whole day in the sea and eat fish in a fisherman’s hut.  After that, towards evening, we pop in to see Eartha’s father.  For some reason, Prosper behaves coldly towards me.  He has a guest in the living room: Mattias, the tall, old priest that I got to know at the funeral ceremony last night.
I cannot guess how old he is.  There is something strange in his outward appearance that I just cannot define.  We are shaking hands; he is asking me how I am.  Looking into his face, I understand that he has noticed something strange about me.  It is as if I can see one of his memories in his no longer limpid eyes.  He is telling Eartha and her father that he wants to speak to me alone.  The two of them get up, and go inside.
I sink down into an armchair even though I find the situation strange and try to work out who the man I can remember in Mattias’ wrinkled face is.  Mattias is looking at me nonchalantly from his chair, cobbled together from odds and ends.  Slowly, he begins to talk.  I have no need to ask anything else; he is an incredible magician.  And maybe, the devil himself.
“That beautiful, blonde woman came here, to this terrible island.  Years ago...  She married Prosper, and, some time after, Eartha was born.”
Mattias turns his palms upwards towards the ceiling and reaches them out to me.  Suddenly, a rag doll that looks just like Eartha appears in his right hand.  He clutches it tightly, turns it face down towards the ground and holds it in my face.
“I can remember when she was a baby as if it was yesterday.  She was a very beautiful child, just like this doll in my hand.  A few years went by, and Eartha had a little brother.  It was her mother who named him because he was almost as white as she was.”
His dainty, long-fingered hands, criss-crossed with swollen veins, are in constant motion.  A new doll appears, and the old one disappears by itself.  He is giving me a detailed explanation.  Because of his unfamiliar accent, I can only understand part of what he is saying.
“And you were in Istanbul that year, miles away from here, a student at some school.  You were living and could not possibly have known that you were fated to see these days, my son.”
He tells me my life story with bewildering accuracy.  It really surprises me that he knows more details about my youth than even I can remember.  Open-mouthed, I keep on listening to him.
“At the same time, here, life went on silently.  Then something unexpected happened.  An illness began to spread among us.  A deadly illness that we had not heard of or seen anywhere before; an illness that our ancestors had never mentioned to us...”
Mattias’ face is lined with the deep wrinkles of an old parchment map.  He looks me up and down, shakes his head and continues.  I wait without moving although I know what he is going to say.
“We encountered that accursed disease first in Prosper’s beautiful wife.  We thought it was a nervous disease.  And within two years, poor Isabella was taken from us, in pain.  It took her little boy, too, together with her...  Then, this deadly scourge that made people writhe in agony in the clutches of their own madness and whose cause we did not know then passed to the Silvains’ next-door neighbours.  And from that family, it took three people.”
In Mattias’ palms, the dolls of Isabella and Eartha’s brother each turn into little clouds of thick, yellow smoke; their dust slowly descends and is scattered on the mat on the floor.
“In fact, this madness, which you thought only affected Eartha and her mother, has prevailed here for years, and, contrary to what was thought, it is incredibly contagious.”
For a while, Mattias does not speak.  And I stay where I am sitting, motionless.  Leaning on the boxwood stick that he holds in his hand, he gets up.  They put the coffee that they have brought for him on the table next to the chair.  He leans on the table and takes the tall, white, steaming cup.  After taking a sip, he stares into my face again and continues with what he was saying.
“Yes, son, I can see the doubt in your eyes.  That’s how people like you are: they run away from the truth and do not want to confront it.  You’ve lived in someone else’s body, with someone else, for forty-two years altogether, and you didn’t like him at all.  With your irrepressible greed, you captured that good person whose heart you were sharing.  You made yourself completely at home in his body and shoved him into a dark cell.  In your mind, he’s living only as a slave now... you are a bully whose inside is full of badness.”
I gulp.  It is as if I realise what has happened now.  I want to sound out the bad man, but do not know yet how to look inside myself.  Mattias continues from where he left off in a low voice full of wisdom.
“Years ago, you came to this island a few times.  You don’t even remember some of them, do you?  Your memories full of savagery and your deadly sins don’t make you uncomfortable.  On the contrary, a lot of them, like the victories you have won, give you pleasure.  But, my son, you have so many sins...”
He takes another deep breath.
“For forty years, that damned scourge took many of our people in its claws.  It was sent to the island to purge us of a sin that had been committed.  Some died within six months.  A majority lived as long as two or three years, all the while spreading terror in their wake.  Your wife, Eartha, is only one of the few victims who was able to survive the years of suffering.  She has infected you with her malady, and now that creature will grow and grow in your brain.”
I become tense and unable to take a breath.  I want to open my mouth to speak but cannot.  I want him to stop talking, so I try to stand up to leave.  It does not work; I cannot move a muscle.  Mattias says I should stay where I am; he has more things to tell me; I understand.  Without noticing it before, I see now that a dark ring made up of celebrants in navy overalls has surrounded him.  And their number keeps increasing.
“In human history, quite a lot of unbelievable things have happened.  Magicians and seers do not write history books; science does not teach us about them.  Books write about all sorts of savagery in war and power struggles, but the most terrifying murders are the ones that are carried out for no reason at all, like yours were.  The illness that infected the people on the island years before came back, went round and found you in your new body.  The true sinner.  It wasn’t a coincidence.  And it can’t be...”
This is the first time that I have seen Mattias laugh.  A rag doll of me appears in his left hand.  It has a piece of broken glass stuck in its mouth.  A hand reaching out from the black crowd is beginning to stroke my head, and run its fingers through my hair.  I can feel the good guy inside me beginning to reclaim some power from the other one due to some reaction that I cannot even begin to explain.  The more Mattias stings me with his words, the more that wicked, aggressive thug inside me draws back; he cedes his place to that virtuous, sinless man.
I try with all my might to get the good man to talk, to make him speak, but it does not work.  I can only see my lips moving, but not a damned sound is coming out of my mouth.  Mattias looks into my face as if he has understood what is happening and continues speaking.
“We managed to get you to come back here again.  Us, two priests who know the truth...  In fact, it was not very difficult for us to rewrite your fate and bring about this day of reckoning.  It merely took a long time.  And as for time, it is of no value to us.  Nothing that is in abundance can hold any real value.”
It has got dark, the room is filled with dockworkers in navy overalls; gleaming, bloodshot eyes chiselled into their black faces are locked onto me.  The long, black fingers, which at first were content with stroking my hair, have turned into little monsters with many heads, trying to poke out my eyes, tear off my nose or my ears.  Mattias has taken the final sip of his coffee.
“Now, I will remind you of the crime that you committed in this very harbour one hundred and twenty years ago.  And you’ll decide your own sentence...”
With difficulty, I manage to get up from where I have been sitting; it is as if I have become paralysed.  I say “No” in a whisper; then, slowly, slowly, my voice turns into a shout.  “I’m not him.  I didn’t commit a sin like that, and I don’t want to listen to all this; I want to go.”
I am thinking that they will not let me go, that they will lynch me.  But that does not happen.  Mattias tells them, “Let him go,” in a decisive tone of voice.  The crowd lets me through; when I get to my feet, my whole body is shaking.  In the doorway, I meet Eartha’s and Prosper’s eyes.  They are just standing there, holding each other.  They are looking at me with eyes full of hate.  Leaving the door open and without looking back, I run outside.  I run to the main road and look for a taxi.  I am walking and waving my arms at every passing car at the same time.  None of them wants to stop for me.  A boy sitting in the back of a pickup truck spits in my face while passing.  I turn into the road leading to the airport, a little outside the city, and start running.
I am desperate, so desperate.
After a few miles, I am beginning to get tired and slow down to a walk.  Night is falling fast.  Right at that moment, certain events that had been lost somewhere in the depths of my consciousness come back to lay siege to my brain with their filth.
I can remember one of the journeys we made to the harbour; we had come to take the young women of the island away.  Now I feel I can see him.  With the small girl on his lap...  I am talking to her, trying to encourage her to board the ship.
No!  I cannot remember what happened next.
Whatever the hell did happen next had been shrouded in darkness for many years; I do not want it to come back.  I was not, I am not as depraved as that.  I am just sick, very sick.  I am plugging my ears with both hands so I can get that godforsaken day out of my mind and begin to run into the darkness as fast as my legs will carry me.  I do not know where I am going anymore; all I notice is that I am sobbing.  It is coming back to my brain again; I am gritting my teeth, running faster.
I feel as if I can see the black girl’s tiny little hands, that cute face surrounded by that frizzy hair and those bead-like eyes with their sparkling glance; she is looking at my face and smiling.  No!  I did not do anything.
I did not want to; I did not want to do it.
I look at the crowded band behind her mother; then, a devilish thought that comes to mind makes me smile.  It seems like it would be good fun once more to test my powers of persuasion on worthless people, inciting them to betrayal, filth and evil.
“Please, don’t do it,” I beg myself.  My snot mingles with my tears.  My sweat, which has formed in beads on my forehead, splashes onto the ground where I am running and mixes with the night.  Then, I come to the place where the rocks unite with the sea.
The remains of that massacre, which I orchestrated simply to appease my own perverted appetites, that fractured smudge of blood red and pitch black is seeping into my brain, and oozing out of my nostrils and ears like meat from a mincer.  The man inside me watches these scenes with relish.  He is naked from the waist down; his male member, which he has sated time and time again, dangles in front of him like a gangrenous, rotting intestine.  He is pulling out the teeth of the black-skinned dead bodies with a rusty pair of pliers that he has in his hand.
I can do nothing to stop him.
The waves, gleaming in the moonlight, strike the jagged rocks thirty metres below and scatter like molten lead.  I watch this splendid scene until my breathing returns to something like normal.  I slowly start to feel calmer.  Then, I look at the sea one last time, and without hesitation, let myself go downwards, towards it.
As the incomprehensible growls that are not mine come out of my throat, I feel a great relief inside me...  And then, like a bird, my body gets lighter.  I sink into that majestic light source twinkling like a white sun at the point where the darkness of the night and the pitch-black waters of the sea meet: the full moon, now huge.  The moon, symbol and true patron of madness, draws me into its gravitational field as a planet would its satellite.
Yes, I am flying now...  I am really flying.

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