Southern Seas Read Online Free PDF Page A

and signal looked at each other without prompting a reaction. Finally, he pushed the door and went into the main office, while the secretary opened the venetian blinds.
    ‘You’ll have to excuse the state of the office. It’s shut nowadays, and it gets very dusty. It’s only cleaned once a month.’
    ‘Were you Señor Stuart Pedrell’s secretary?’
    ‘Yes. At least, I was here.’
    ‘What did he use this office for?’
    ‘For listening to music. Reading. And receiving intellectual or artistic friends.’
    Carvalho prepared to check through the books meticulously arranged on meticulous bookshelves, the signed paintings decorating the walls, the cocktail cabinet with its built-in refrigerator,and the Charles Eames reclining sofa, the
nec plus ultra
of reclining sofas in contemporary patriarchal society.
    ‘I’d like to be left alone.’
    The secretary left the room, pleased to have been ordered out so decisively. Carvalho looked through the books. Many of them were in English. American publishers. Kuhn’s
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
, Eliot’s
The Waste Land
, Melville, various German theologians, Rilke, American counter-cultural theorists, Huxley’s complete works in English, Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier, and
For Marx
. A number of yellowing news clippings were stuck to the bookcase with drawing pins. Some were reviews of new books from the
Times Literary Supplement
. Others seemed rather strange, at least for a man like Stuart Pedrell. For instance, Carrillo’s statements on the Spanish CP’s renunciation of Leninism … or an item on the Duchess of Alba’s marriage to Jesús Aguirre, editor-in-chief of
Música
.
    Pinned here and there to the shelves were postcard reproductions of Gauguin paintings. On the wall, sandwiched between them, was a series of ocean maps: a huge Pacific dotted with little flag-pins marking somebody’s idea of a sea cruise. On the rosewood table, an embossed ivory vase full of pencils, ball-points and felt-tip pens. On an antique bronze desk, a jumble of schoolboy paraphernalia: erasers in various colours, pens, nibs, penholders, razor blades, blue-and-red Hispania pencils, a Faber paint-box, and even pens for italic and round-hand script, as if Stuart Pedrell had been spending his time on calligraphy and handwriting exercises.
    In the drawers, there were more cuttings from articles, and a poem from a poetry magazine:
Gauguin
. In free verse, it followed Gauguin’s path from the time he gave up his bourgeois life as a bank employee until his death in the Marquesas Islands, surrounded by the world of the senses that he depicts in his paintings:
    Exiled to the Marquesas
    he saw the inside of prison
    under suspicion of not arousing suspicion
                                in Paris
    he was taken for an arrant snob
    only a few natives knew of his passing impotence
                and that the
or de ses corps
                                was a pretext
    for forgetting the black choir stalls
    the cuckoo of a Copenhagen dining room
    a trip to Lima with a sorrowful mother
    the pedantic chatter of the Café Voltaire
                                and above all
    the incomprehensible verse of Stéphane Mallarmé.
    So ended the poem, by a writer unknown to Carvalho. He opened a desk diary bound in a fine leather adorned with acanthus leaves. Handwritten notes dealing with domestic economic matters. Receipts for personal effects ranging from books to shaving cream. A phrase in English caught Carvalho’s attention:
    I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
    and underneath:
    Ma quando gli dico
    ch’egli è tra i fortunati che han visto l’aurora
    sulle isole più belle della terra
    al ricordo sorride e risponde che il sole
    si levava che il giorno era vecchio per loro.
    Finally:
    Più nessuno mi porterà nel sud.
    Carvalho made a quick mental translation:
    But when I tell him
    that