The Smell of Telescopes Read Online Free PDF Page A

stylish barber-surgeon on the Spanish Main. He recalled talking to him effortlessly, debating the rival merits of combs made from turtles and tortoises. Perhaps he was Dutch? But there were no windmills or cheeses in his dreams to confirm the supposition. Each time he crossed borders, his thoughts were adopted by the surrounding culture like orphans in baskets. In Pirano he mislaid the flavour of the sea and picked splinters of limestone from his teeth. The karst landscape to the north was as barren as a pickled mermaid.
    Sometimes he did glimpse water between gaps in red-tiled buildings. A stroll down to the lighthouse, a tiny flame dancing above what seemed to be a nameless church, could have been enough to convince him that Pirano was still a port, that the link with his youth was intact. But he never managed to find his way on to the Punta, the promontory. The lanes were complex and risible, they led him in ellipses away from his destination. In the Jewish square, the vaulted passages and arcaded courtyards filled up with exotic scents, provoking him into a misplaced nostalgia for the present. Beards wove a symbolic net.
    He sharpened dusk on a strop and closed his shop for the night. The business was failing already, he could tell. As he secured the shutters, replaced the unused scissors on the shelf and swept a clean floor, black silence suffused the room; the shop bulged. All over the town, hair grew from angry or serene heads, its texture denied to him by an inexplicable process. What kept customers away? He had mounted a striped pole outside his door, his windows were made from Venetian glass. It could not simply be a question of appearances. Did the citizens mistrust his instruments? Did they lack suitable banter?
    In his rickety kitchen, he set a kettle to boil and dipped his last yam into the liquid. Soon he would be reduced to stewing belts, shoes or empty wallets. This happened when he worked for l’Olonnais in Nicaragua, shortly before that pirate’s violent death at the hands and teeth of the Darien Indians. Hunger was nothing new to him, though back then it was a nomadic emptiness which moved from gut to throat as he hunted for food. Hunger in one place is worse than in many; while the kettle whistled the flavours on board, he counted the coins in his hidden purse. Money grows inward, like a fringe in reverse.
    Previous hungers were bearable because he looked generally full in his warped mirror. Sometimes periods of famine were switched so rapidly with periods of plenty that food took on the glowering appearance of a storm. Once, just off the coast of Mayaguana, they were hemmed in by a flotilla of coconuts. Each globe was as ripe and matted as a starving stomach. Sweet milk slicked the deck, as ’Lin and ’Vado cracked the spheres with drills and cleavers. Since then, he regarded coconuts as guardian angels, solid as hymns and coarse as martyrs. If he asked in tastes rather than words, they always turned up to help him.
    His profession was so linked to his survival that he could hardly imagine another way of staying whole. His ointments and powders, for the dusting of nicked lobes, had saved the lives of many in Jamaica, where death was schooled not in wounds but in their infections. He tended l’Olonnais on the rigging of a sinking caraval, smearing an unguent mashed from Havana chillies over his bleeding limbs. Barbering had never let him down while he floated on the brine; only now, on a stable surface, was it acting like a whore. How much longer did he have to wait before his first customer entered his shop? Would the bell over the door never speak?
    Another time, becalmed in the Antilles, he wove a durable rope from snipped hair. This was when he sailed with Pierre le Grand, an eccentric and reckless captain. Dice were cast and it was decided to use the cord, heady with a myriad colours, as a cable for the anchor. It was gnawed by a shark that evening, and in the ensuing cyclone their barque was