Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph by Ted Simon

Author:Ted Simon
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780965478526
Publisher: Jupitalia Productions
Published: 1979-01-01T20:00:00+00:00

'I will come back to visit you tomorrow, but is there anything you need now?'

It was kind of him. He would have liked dearly to put me off until the next day. There were many things I wanted badly; a clean shirt, a towel, a shave, a cover to sleep under, books to read, paper to write on, dry socks, but I could not concentrate my mind sufficiently to remember where they would be. I begged Matthews to go to Sao Raimundo fetch my red bag, hoping that what I wanted would be inside it, because what I craved most of all was news from the priests' house, to know what had happened there and to Father Marcello.

Dutifully Matthews toiled out to Sao Raimundo and back. Of all the things I wanted, the bag contained only my razor. However, the news was as good as it was baffling. No police had been to the house, and Father Marcello had certainly not been deported. Matthews promised to return next day with books and a towel, and I lay down for the third night in the same shirt and trousers.

Next morning the hours passed as slowly as ever. The dampness was getting deeper into me now, and the fever and congestion were worse. Despite that, the Consul's arrival had stimulated my imagination again, and once more I could find no escape from doom-laden speculations.

On reflection the Consul's arrival seemed less of a miracle. I tried to draw up a new balance sheet of my prospects. On the credit side, the police were not after all trying to keep my presence there a secret. But then, why should they? They were the law. If they needed a pretext for holding me, they would have no problem finding one. If they wanted to implicate me in some sort of conspiracy obviously they could do so. My trip to Iguatu gave them plenty of ammunition.

By now I was beginning to wonder whether there was more going on in Iguatu than the after-effects of a flood. Perhaps there really were small centres of resistance to the regime, struggling to survive. And where better than in a disaster area?

And those radio messages? I had not imagined them, with their references to an 'ingles' and Marcello and deportation. They must mean something. Why the concern with 'photographs of the coast'? Were they afraid of foreign intervention? From Cuba, perhaps.

I recalled the agent on the cellar steps and his offhand remark about having seen my visa cancelled. It simply did not sound like a lie. Why on earth should he have invented a lie like that? Did that mean that the best I could hope for was deportation? Yet there had still been no attempt to question me further. And most mysterious of all, they had shown no interest whatever in my belongings. They had my passport, but my address books and papers, carried openly in the same wallet, they had

ignored. Surely if they suspected me of conspiracy with 'subversivos' they would at least go through the motions of examining my address books.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.