What Am I Doing Here? by Bruce Chatwin Read Free Book Online Page B

been bashed out of oil-drums. Near the railway station, the Chinese found the pharmacy of Dr Shere Malhalua Meji.
    I looked at the billboard that advertised the doctor’s Isis Pins and ‘other celebrated remedies for modern men and women’.
    We did not go to that doctor.
    We turned up a tree-lined avenue, past the old Lutheran Cathedral, its granite tombs untended now; past the newer Catholic Cathedral; past houses with well-kept gardens and red front gates, and cafés with awnings and bookshops full of students. In the big shopping street, Germans were buying safari equipment and Belgian art dealers were buying old fetish figures, piled head first and feet first like the photos of bodies in Belsen. There were shop-signs announcing the latest imports – Belons, Camemberts, haricots verts – and in that street there were other kinds of doctor.
    The Chinese winced when the doctor said how much the injection would cost. But I said something about secondary and tertiary stages and, in the end, he took it well, the injection and the payment. He was very methodical. He made notes in Chinese about the timing of future doses.
    Afterwards, over coffee, he brightened up and talked about the baby boy. From Douala he was going to Yaoundé, and from Yaoundé to Bangui. Then he’d go downriver to Kinshasa and drive across Zaire by car. Zaire was a bad place. Bad people and lions in jungle. I said he might have to watch for elephants on the road. The idea of elephants alarmed him, but somehow he’d get through to Lusaka, and up to Dar es Salaam, and along the coast to Mombasa and inland to Nairobi. Kenya was a not-so-bad place. Other Chinese merchants in Kenya. And from Nairobi he’d fly back home if, by that time, his blood was clean and pure.
    Â 
    1977

THE CHINESE GEOMANCER
    T he man I had arranged to meet was standing by one of the two bronze lions that snarl in the forecourt of the new Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. He wore a blue silk Nina Ricci tie, a gold wristwatch with a crocodile strap, and an immaculate worsted grey suit.
    He handed me his card on which was written, in embossed letters:
    LUNG KING CHUEN
    Geomancer
    Searching and fixing of good location for the burial of passed-away ancestors; surveying and arranging of good position for settling down business and lodging places, in which would gain prosperity and luck in the very near future
    The building - to which workmen were adding the final touches – has forty-seven storeys (including the helipad on the roof) and stands on the site of the Bank’s former Head Office – overlooking the Cenotaph, on the south side of Victoria Square. It is the work of the English architect, Norman Foster, and is, by any standards, an astonishing performance.
    I heard the bank called, variously, ‘The shape of things to come’; ‘An act of faith in Hong Kong’s future’; ‘Something out of Star Wars’ ; ‘A cathedral to money’; ‘A maintenance nightmare,’ and ‘Suicides’ leap’.
    Having exceeded its budget three times over, to the tune of $600 million U.S., the new Hongkong and Shanghai Bank has also earned the distinction of being the most expensive office block ever built.
    Architecturally, I felt it was less a ‘vision of the future’ than a backward, not to say nostalgic look at certain experiments of the Twenties (when buildings were modelled on battleships, and Man himself was thought to be a perfectible machine): buildings such as the PROUNS of El Lissitzky; Vesnin’s project for the offices of Pravda – the unrealised dreams of the Early Soviet Constructivists.
    Mr Lung, on the other hand, is a modest practitioner of the venerable Chinese art of geomancy, or feng-shui . At the start of the project, the Bank called him in to survey the site for malign or demonic presences, and to ensure that the design itself was propitious. Whichever architect was chosen, there was