again spotted the Spanish Welshman from Princeton, in the library foyer where they exhibited a sixteenth century printing press. The machine resembled a mediaeval torture instrument, I always thought: a dual purpose thumb-screw and rack. Salvatore stood with folded arms, a scuffed briefcase at his feet. Dad had owned one like it, bought in Germany. Heâd been hiking in the Schwarzwald searching out old Nazis to interview. Not finding any, heâd made some up off the top of his head, so I overheard him drunkenly boasting to some pal â and they both cracked up laughing. That book â that fiction â had sold well and it kept on selling, even or especially when its methodology and conclusions came into question.
I sought the briefcase after heâd disappeared. I was thirteen. At first I accepted â and my mother bitterly believed, for reasons she never precisely disclosed â that Jack had deserted us. Without a word. Jack liked people to think he was working for the Soviets, she said, or the Shah, or the Bolivians; makes out heâs Philby and Maclean all rolled into one. And perhaps he was, how do I know? Iâm changing my name, she said. Her eyes were half closed with weeping. (Donât, I said, donât change your name â itâs my name too). My mother sobbed, I heard her, into her pillow in the night. I sobbed too. There were no sightings. Dadâs bank account remained untouched.
Jack Messenger had hung out in some of the worldâs most iffy places. Heâd become persona non grata in most of them. He gravitated towards turmoil and conflict, especially the kind of conflict thatâs volatile, where spurious alliances twist and turn on one another. Jack haunted murderous frontiers and acquainted himself with gangsters, drug-pushers, people-smugglers. I understood none of that at the time. But I sensed the high-voltage excitement of Dad, waves of electricity streaming off his skin. I felt his charm when he flashed the searchlight of his attention on me. Dad was the one whose bedtime stories I hankered after, despite the fact that they kept me awake and seeded themselves in my imagination as lifelong nightmares.
Books remained, and his second pair of specs, an Olivetti Lettera typewriter, but not the briefcase. It was intimately Dad. As a kid Iâd enjoyed rooting around in its secret pockets. It had accompanied Jack wherever he went.
He left eleven major works, the most famous being Swimming across the Desert as well as a big book on post-colonial Africa, Sunset, Sunrise. They are darkly witty, ironic, anecdotal â poised between devil-may care and diffidence. Jack presents himself as an innocent abroad, in a state of permanent surprise as he barges into one revealing mishap after another. Chameleon Jack invents himself differently wherever he finds himself, and never as the father of this son. A sorrowing son who would once upon a time have followed him to the ends of the earth. It was years since Iâd looked into Dadâs writings. The last time Iâd dipped in, the book seemed to exhale at me with scalding breath. It hurt to read his suavely jaunty words about terrifying things â fratricide, massacres, trauma. I kept the books. I kept them closed.
He wasnât in the books anyway. A real self (if there was one) hunkered behind the Jack Messenger persona. Returning with his travellerâs tales, Dad would study my response and I began to appear in humorous preludes and codas. Well, a version of me. I featured as Kernel, the lad next door over the narratorâs fence, with scarred knees and a missing front tooth, given to uttering unintended ironies that cut the heroic wayfarer down to size.
Larger than life despite his small stature, Jack was the teller of tales, dancer of dances. Heâd visited the Sufi whirlers of Turkey and spun in our sitting-room wearing a flared skirt of my motherâs, rotating on the ball of one foot, faster