exploded in their hotel when they were at Port Said. It had a small charge and their trunks hardly suffered at all.
Bartlebooth returned from his travels almost empty-handed: he had only gone in order to paint his five hundred watercolours, and had dispatched them to Winckler as each one was done. Smautf, for his part, had built up three collections – of postage stamps, for Madame Claveau’s son, of hotel stickers, for Winckler, and of postcards, for Valène – and brought back three objects which are now in his room.
The first is a magnificent sea chest of soft coral ( gummiferous pterocarpous , he likes to specify) with brass fittings. He found it at a ship chandler’s at St John’s, Newfoundland, and entrusted it to a trawler which brought it back to France.
The second is a carved curio, a basalt statue of the tricephalous Mother-Goddess, about fifteen inches high. Smautf obtained it in the Seychelles in exchange for another sculpture, similarly tricephalous, but of an entirely different design: it was a crucifix on which three wooden figurines had been fastened by means of a single thick bolt: a black child, a tall old man, and a life-size dove, once white. That object he’d found in the souk at Agadir, and the man who sold it to him explained that they were the movable figures of the Trinity, and that each took yearly turns “on top” of the others. The Son was then foremost, the Holy Ghost (almost out of sight) against the cross. It was a cumbersome object, but apt to fascinate Smautf’s particular cast of mind for a long while. Thus he bought it without haggling and lugged it around with him from 1939 to 1953. The day after he got to the Seychelles, he went into a bar: the first thing he saw was the statue of the Mother-Goddess, standing on the counter between a beat-up cocktail shaker and a glass full of little flags and champagne mixers shaped like miniature shepherds’ staves. His stupefaction was such that he returned forthwith to his hotel, came back with the crucifix, and engaged the Malay barman in a long conversation in pidgin concerning the statistical near-impossibility of coming across two statues with three heads twice in fourteen years, at the end of which conversation the barman and Smautf swore undying friendship cemented by the exchange of their works of art.
The third object is a large engraving, a kind of primitive woodcut. Smautf found it at Bergen in the last year of their peregrinations. It depicts a child receiving a book as a prize from an old dominie. The child is seven or eight years old, wearing a sky-blue jacket, short trousers, and polished slip-on shoes; a laurel wreath crowns his head; he is climbing the three steps of a parquet-floored platform adorned with succulents. The old man wears an academic gown. He has a long grey beard and steel-framed spectacles. In his right hand he holds a ruler of boxwood and in his left a large folio volume in a red binding on which can be read Erindringer frå en Reise i Skotland (it was the account, Smautf learnt, of the Danish pastor Plenge’s journey to Scotland in the summer of 1859). Near the schoolmaster there is a table covered in a green cloth with other volumes placed on it, as well as a globe and an open, oblong musical score. A narrow engraved brass plate attached to the print’s wooden frame gives its title, apparently unrelated to the represented scene: Laborynthus .
Smautf would like to have been this prize-winning good schoolboy. His regret at having had no schooling has turned over the years into an unhealthy passion for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Right at the start of their travels, he had seen a prodigious mental arithmetician performing at a music hall in London, and over the twenty years of his world tour, by dint of reading and rereading a well-thumbed treatise on mathematical and arithmetical diversions which he’d picked up at a secondhand bookshop at Inverness, he took up arithmetic;
Bartlebooth returned from his travels almost empty-handed: he had only gone in order to paint his five hundred watercolours, and had dispatched them to Winckler as each one was done. Smautf, for his part, had built up three collections – of postage stamps, for Madame Claveau’s son, of hotel stickers, for Winckler, and of postcards, for Valène – and brought back three objects which are now in his room.
The first is a magnificent sea chest of soft coral ( gummiferous pterocarpous , he likes to specify) with brass fittings. He found it at a ship chandler’s at St John’s, Newfoundland, and entrusted it to a trawler which brought it back to France.
The second is a carved curio, a basalt statue of the tricephalous Mother-Goddess, about fifteen inches high. Smautf obtained it in the Seychelles in exchange for another sculpture, similarly tricephalous, but of an entirely different design: it was a crucifix on which three wooden figurines had been fastened by means of a single thick bolt: a black child, a tall old man, and a life-size dove, once white. That object he’d found in the souk at Agadir, and the man who sold it to him explained that they were the movable figures of the Trinity, and that each took yearly turns “on top” of the others. The Son was then foremost, the Holy Ghost (almost out of sight) against the cross. It was a cumbersome object, but apt to fascinate Smautf’s particular cast of mind for a long while. Thus he bought it without haggling and lugged it around with him from 1939 to 1953. The day after he got to the Seychelles, he went into a bar: the first thing he saw was the statue of the Mother-Goddess, standing on the counter between a beat-up cocktail shaker and a glass full of little flags and champagne mixers shaped like miniature shepherds’ staves. His stupefaction was such that he returned forthwith to his hotel, came back with the crucifix, and engaged the Malay barman in a long conversation in pidgin concerning the statistical near-impossibility of coming across two statues with three heads twice in fourteen years, at the end of which conversation the barman and Smautf swore undying friendship cemented by the exchange of their works of art.
The third object is a large engraving, a kind of primitive woodcut. Smautf found it at Bergen in the last year of their peregrinations. It depicts a child receiving a book as a prize from an old dominie. The child is seven or eight years old, wearing a sky-blue jacket, short trousers, and polished slip-on shoes; a laurel wreath crowns his head; he is climbing the three steps of a parquet-floored platform adorned with succulents. The old man wears an academic gown. He has a long grey beard and steel-framed spectacles. In his right hand he holds a ruler of boxwood and in his left a large folio volume in a red binding on which can be read Erindringer frå en Reise i Skotland (it was the account, Smautf learnt, of the Danish pastor Plenge’s journey to Scotland in the summer of 1859). Near the schoolmaster there is a table covered in a green cloth with other volumes placed on it, as well as a globe and an open, oblong musical score. A narrow engraved brass plate attached to the print’s wooden frame gives its title, apparently unrelated to the represented scene: Laborynthus .
Smautf would like to have been this prize-winning good schoolboy. His regret at having had no schooling has turned over the years into an unhealthy passion for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Right at the start of their travels, he had seen a prodigious mental arithmetician performing at a music hall in London, and over the twenty years of his world tour, by dint of reading and rereading a well-thumbed treatise on mathematical and arithmetical diversions which he’d picked up at a secondhand bookshop at Inverness, he took up arithmetic;
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