In a Quiet Time

On the evening of 5th August 2013, I arrived back at Lisbon Airport from a pleasant tour of five European countries and was facing an all-night journey by four buses to my home in the Algarve. As the melancholy of Portugal enfolded me once again, I struggled with my absurdly heavy luggage to the first bus. This was a Lisbon city bus. I waited long, and finally it came. But, as I boarded it, my left knee seized up. I was in severe pain and could hardly move my leg.

The sombre people in the bus showed the usual Portuguese lack of any interest in me, and when I arrived at the huge Oriente Station other Portuguese merely commented that my trousers were falling down. There were several hours to wait at the grim multi-transport complex at Oriente, but just as well, because I had to recuperate.

I finally crawled rather than walked on to the coach that was going to the Algarve. Sitting in the narrow seat without being able to stretch my leg caused pain, but at least I could just let myself be moved on. The three hours on the coach went quite quickly. But when we reached the the first bus station in the Algarve, the bus turned out to be continuing westwards to Lagos rather than east towards my own home near the Spanish frontier.

Another passenger had to help me down towards the floor. People were being hurried towards the bus that was proceeding east to the regional capital of Faro, and one of the bus drivers jeered at me because I could not pick up my heavy luggage. But he had to carry it nonetheless. I could not have done it myself.

As we travelled through the aromatic night of the Algarve, the white buildings and golf courses of Vilamoura, and the high rises of Quarteira, seemed like ghost cities, and I determined to get a taxi when we arrived at Faro. The enormous wait for the fourth bus towards my home, the difficulty of stowing the luggage and dealing with the driver, the journey, and the long walk from the stop to my house, seemed too much to bear.

Once again, I was helped out of the bus at Faro and my bags were placed around me at the seat near the stop. Now I was alone. There was almost no traffic, no people, but, opposite, an all-night cafe that I had used before was open. I was hungry and contemplated trying to reach it. I got to the kurb and gingerly put my foot forward, but a great shot of pain made me turn back and sink back onto the seat and rest there.

Now a taxi came ambling into view. I hailed it, the youngish, blond driver quickly assessed my situation, and was soon helping me and my luggage into his cab with solicitude. I felt great joy. As we drove off, we began talking in our non-native Portuguese, and I learnt that this was Yuriy, from Ukraine. Soon we came to the suburbs of Faro, our talk turned to family and personal matters, and he told me that he lived in the city with his wife and young children. I experienced the usual disappointment of the homosexual. But then we came to the more countrified road, I fell silent, and it seemed a beautiful, peaceful journey, with few stars.

Finally, I directed him through the housing estates of Altura, and we drove up to my dilapidated villa, whose entrance was almost blocked by dark and forbidding shrubbery. The meter showed a little less than sixty Euros, but I had withdrawn that sum from the machine in the bus station at Oriente, and decided to reward my kind helper with a round figure.

He got out to help me into the house. I was nervous about its appearance, and cack-handedly dropped my keys into the vegetation in an attempt to open the post-box. I would never have found them on my own, but a few seconds was sufficient for Yuriy to retrieve the bunch. Then, at my direction, he opened my postbox, which tended to be so difficult, and I had my post.

We cut a path to the front door, and the key was so stiff in the lock that I could never have opened the door on my own. But after a minute or two of struggle, Yuriy had his usual success. The electric light did not switch on, and I assumed that, as on many previous occasions when I had returned from journeys, the electricity had been cut off for shortage of funds in my Portuguese account.

But I was in my house now and knew the way to my bed in the darkness and had no immediate need to look at the post. I thanked Yuriy and told him to go, dropped my bags, and with a sob of mixed pain and joy staggered towards the bed and stretched myself out on the mattress.

About a week later, Yuriy appeared again to find out how I was, and I was delighted to see him, and got him to help me with fetching shopping and cutting down shrubbery. But basically I was now alone in my house. And this did not entirely displease me. For I had done so many journeys. Most recently there had been the four grand tours, and the two succeeding trips, which were more voyages of self-discovery. These paralleled the six extensive surveys of the five continents I had made in the years before my imprisonment. And in the long years I used to visit my mother's villa when she was alive, there had been the five trips to Morocco and the sad one to New York.

Few people knew the world and the varieties of humanity as I did. And few were more sick of them. So, seeing I was now more or less crippled, I entered what I call my "quiet time", when I hunkered down in my house, did nothing I did not feel like doing, and restricted my contact with people in the settlement of Altura to the minimum that seemed psychologically sensible.

The best days of the whole period were the first three, when I saw no one at all, and did not go out of the house. The first day I just lay in bed, getting up to drink water and eat what little food was in the house - crackers with honey, dry cornflakes, and, with a supreme effort, the peaches that were just then in full bloom in my back garden (I called them peaches - they may be an analogous fruit). I managed trips to the toilet by arranging a row of strategic chairs to grip on to lest I fall.

On the second day I began the unpacking and arrangement on my shelves of the books I had bought in Paris, Heidelberg, Thessaloniki, Athens, Rome and so on. By evening I had reached the stone table in the sunny garden with the remains of my amarguinha, the bitter-sweet almond liqueur that is such a typical taste of Portugal. There I leafed through the first chapter of The Sentimental Education by Flaubert, which I had bought in Aristotelous Square in Thessaloniki. In the Greek city I had just sat among the huge buildings curving down to the fabled Mediterranean with the book in my bag, but here in more homely Portugal I actually began it, with the sun setting directly between the lemon and the rose.

The next day I became very hungry, but by evening there was still one more peach that lay within my grasp, and I managed to reach it, and then, with a most determined application of what electrical know-how I possess, I managed to switch on the lights. So it was a further half-hour to stay up, sitting on my comfortable sofa, with Sarah Walker and Roger Vignoles performing cabaret songs on the turntable of my mother's ancient stereo system.

The following morning I was ready for my first excursion into Altura. I walked like a man of a hundred, but just down the road from me is the clinic of the charming Udo Pohlschneider, and in his relaxing consulting room overlooking the quiet square, with Buddhist music, and conversation in a mixture of English and German, he took away the worst of my pain. He had not been able to see me immediately, but at a nearby cafe I had feasted on cheese sandwich, milky coffee and orange juice and leafed through H.G. Wells' Short History of the World.

It is now four years since I was able to enter into my mother's house, the third of the homes in my adult life that I did not choose. The flat in south London and the one on the southern outskirts on the far outskirts of the south bank at Lisbon area came to me easily, they were in rough but pastoral city areas that appealed to me, and I loved them both, and was sad to get rid of them when the time came.

But my house in Altura was an enormous struggle to acquire. The streets surrounding it are hot, harsh and still. Although this home is a refuge, and although it is very large and even beautiful in its run-down way, I cannot help hating it. Pray God I do not live here for ever. In fact, I could not do so. I would have no money and die before my time. No one here would lift a finger to help me if I was without money.

The psychology of the Portuguese is a complex business. But these people have never been, like the Italians, the spoiled darlings of the Northern Europeans, gleefully living up to every clearly-understood cliche about themselves. Because they have not been loved, they cannot love in return, even though it is in their instinct to do so. They are not an unfriendly people, but they are not friendly either. Their attitude is a sort of blank, hidden, if necessary, under sympathetic words. And a deep sadness lies over this country of neglect and shame. The sun shines, but not in people's hearts.

At the cafes I frequent I am served in near silence. The person serving turns away immediately I approach and does not return my initial greeting. Five minutes are allowed to pass before taking my order. I see a sign in one café that says, "In this establishment, people enter, order, pay and leave." But it also takes five minutes for them to allow me to pay at that café. If I settle the bill there with sufficient humility, my final salutation will be returned before the person quickly looks elsewhere.

Well, Charles, is it you that wants love? Is that delicious cheese sandwich not enough? Can you help them in their profitable drugs business?

The said business is  conducted partly on the beach just to the east of the illegally 12-storied hotel, owned by Miguel Madureira Celorico. This is the beach of Cabeço, situated on land bought by the Angolan dictator for a golf course and luxury villas that were never completed and which is therefore now turned over to nocturnal landings when all the lights go out here in the last hour of darkness. Or it is conducted from the beach just to the west. Or, just beyond the Praia Verde to the east, there is the Ricocu ("Rich Arse") beach, totally deserted and the private property of a rich and distinguished but mafioso family.

Oh, well, Charlie, aren't your research skills, aided by your excellent knowledge of Portuguese, brilliant? I'm proud of you for finding all that out!

And, if you don't like the drug-importing Portuguese, perhaps you prefer the Germans and Dutch dealers who are waiting to receive the goods when it grows light by the caravan park or near the mysterious gently-rumbling huts by the hotel with barred windows and surrounded by barbed wire? Or perhaps you like the Bulgarians who work in the orange fields by day and deal and fight in the evening, handsome and friendly with their dagger faces? But you surely can't prefer the Spaniards, even more adept with the drugs than the Portuguese, who bang the food down on the table and flounce off with a metaphorical click of castanets, which your own sombre and preoccupied people would never do?

And, anyway, does it really matter that Altura, where a surprising number of people seem suddenly to lapse from Portuguese into Italian, is more an international criminal organisation than it is a place? Does it matter that the inhabitants loathe me, a homosexual yet strangely triumphant stranger in their midst, endlessly coming up with pert replies to their unpleasant questions, or marching past with trousers falling down and carrying huge bags of shopping? Should I even worry if this is the chief Portuguese base of the Neapolitan Camorra?

For there is another side to the coin of my almost total failure to  click with these morose human beings. It lies in the attitude of contempt and barely concealed hostility which I am able to unleash at any time and which contributes to the atmosphere of luxuriant solitude I am able to maintain at my house. I will give just one example of this.

I mentioned in a previous post that a neighbour called Josefa (not a Portuguese, a Galician) offered some years ago to do my washing for the same price I would pay if I took it to the launderette. That price was Eight Euros Fifty. For a while Josefa did the washing at this price, then it became ten and, finally, by degrees, it became twenty Euros, however large or small the bag, or bags, of washing I gave her.

When my mother was alive, and suffering from Alzheimer, Josefa gave her a lot of free help, and her Portuguese husband António acquiesced in this, while not approving of it. Later the couple were friendly and welcoming during the long years I was struggling to get the house, and since I have had it they have also been quite kind, being willing, for instance, to pay bills on my behalf when I am abroad, on supply of the money. They have usually, but not always, been scrupulous in repaying any change that was due to me. I have innumerable times visited their excellent, overpriced and totally empty restaurant in the nearby town of Monte Gordo. Recently I was able to negotiate a standard price of seventeen Euros for a simple meal: vegetable pancake with potatoes, a glass of wine, a bottle of water, and a small coffee, served with habitual hostility and occasional affability by António.

I once liked them, or at least her, but not now. During the "quiet time", I started to kick up rough about the price of the washing. Josefa was hurt, self-righteous and adamant. She began appearing more and more often and earlier and earlier in the morning, first to collect the dirty clothes, and then to deliver them in many instalments, plonking them down on a chest by the door where I had created a decorative display of treasures from my travels. Then she would slam the door from the outside before I could close it myself. I was handing her the note of twenty in grimmer and grimmer silence.

I have been writing this post in slow stages, and the date as I continue today is 1st October 2013, almost two months after I arrived home. A week or two ago I visited the restaurant and sat outside in silence and windy discomfort. Now I was being served like a stranger, in the same way as in the cafes. Towards leaving time, Josefa attempted a more friendly conversation and mentioned the washing. I told her abruptly that I did not need her services in that department any more.

After a quick walk around the square. I picked a quarrel with her husband over a trivial issue. Then I waited for the lift that they always gave me back to Altura after the meal. He delayed longer and longer with the trivial business of the restaurant. Finally I walked out without saying anything to them. Then I sat on the beach almost crying with relief that I had got these people out of my hair.

A week later, I took my washing to the local laundry, and found with delight that they had dropped their prices, and could now do a very reasonable bag for twelve Euros. Today I went again, and the price has dropped to ten. It does my heart good to save on the washing. But I still feel slightly sad and guilty about the poorer relations with my friends.

And when one reaches the haunts of the English - the Tavira Treasure charity shop, say - the talk is entirely of possessions and material things and there is no comfort there either. "Always keep a house in England," one radiant old lady says. "It doesn't matter if you have one in Portugal, or France, or both, always keep a house in England. You never know when you might need it."

One soon turns away from such people in despair, but not before one has extracted a pair of serviceable trousers from them for one Euro. Then it can be fun to cross the river to the more flyblown Portuguese fair, and sink heavily onto a park-bench, plastic bags gathered around one, to finger one's new LP of The Merry Widow, eat a banana, and finally rise up towards the local bus.

So is the life of seamless apprehension and contemplation in the Algarve a tolerable road towards death? Well, as the poet Heine puts it:

Immerhin! Mich wird umgeben
Gottes Himmel, dort wie hier...

When I think about death now, I think of my fcurrent avourite writer, Patricia Highsmith. Of course, she has her faults. Her delight in the charnel house of humanity may be rather too evident, and she certainly cannot tell right from wrong. But what a mistress of every department of the art of writing! What a grand explorer of what it means to be human!

I didn't go on with The Sentimental Education after that evening in the garden, although I thought the first chapter very fine, and turned instead to Ripley Under Ground, by Miss Highsmith. The title is to be taken literally. Ripley almost ends up being buried in a grave that he originally dug for someone else, whom he killed in a cellar, but he gets out of that grave, and pursues the man who had tried to bury him across Europe, to save him from suicide, but that man commits suicide anyway, and Ripley hacks at his body in order to burn and bury it, before carefully preserving the remaining ashes, in order to pretend that these are the remains of someone else, whom he, Ripley, impersonated, and who also committed suicide.

Am I any better than Ripley? Is anyone else? I have been in the dock at the Old Bailey for trying to get someone thrust into a car at my occupied house in the Algarve, driven over the border to Spain, killed there, and the body disposed of in the thick vegetation, to confuse the police. Was that nice?

And, on a more trivial scale, there are two people in Altura who are taking money off me almost every day under the guise of friendship. I said in a previous post that I liked the amusing younger druggy more than the rapacious old alcoholic woman. But a few nights ago I met Joaquim the Breba in the dark main road of Altura, and expected that he would greet me with his usual shouts of joy, but instead he came over to me, and stared at me so long and hard and so silently and with such venom that I thought he would hit me. Then he suddenly dropped the hostility and was his usual smiling, wheedling self.

And the old woman, Dona Isabel, her constant begging for more and more money is almost intolerable. She sits outside the Snack-Bar Piri-Piri, and is one of a poisonous gang associated with the place. There is the flirtatious middle-aged owner who calls herself Arlete, her ageing and silent paramour Senhor António, and the handsome and violent younger Bulgarian Alex, who has a hold on Arlete. These are usually all in the rather insalubrious interior. But when I pass the place on the bus and see Dona Isabel sitting so silently and still and alone outside it, I am filled with a stab of pity.

And what about her young friend, or possibly her illegitimate daughter, the beautiful and refined and aristocratic woman who shares the Christian name of my favourite writer, who mixes delicate appeal with a smoker's coarseness, who is full of friendliness and civilisation and charm, but who regularly goes to Spain to smuggle drugs, with Dona Isabel to help her? Patrícia is widely suspected of having committed one terrible crime, and I believe she may have committed another.

And what of my mother, who slept in later years with the man thirty years her junior, Flávio José Custódio Rosa, the man whom I tried to murder, a person widely reputed to be her son and who would thus be my half-brother? Well, she did have Alzheimer's. She didn´t know what she was doing.

And perhaps the worst of all, my father, that German soldier in Italy from the Second World War, will it ever be known what he had done, what horrors he took part in? And yet, on 4th November 2011, between nine and ten weeks before his death at around the age of ninety, I managed to track him down to the small town in Northern Portugal where he was living with his wife of many years.

And they received me most kindly. I sat with the couple in their quiet room and we had pleasant conversation and they gave me a good meal. My father proudly showed me his basement workshop and both liked the present of a china elephant that I had brought them. The years of philandering and hiding and impersonation and a false marriage on my father's part, the years of lying and killing, were gone. He was a silent but friendly old man. He cried a little in the evening of that day, when I was sitting with him in his sitting-room and his wife was in the kitchen.

And a little over two months later, he came into the sitting-room from the toilet. Then he just sighed softly and was dead.

A credo, drawn from my experience of life

I have not added a new post for more than five months, and this was partly because I have been living intensely and with some difficulty. It was also due to the fact that I did not know how to put exactly what I wanted to say.

When I last wrote, I was in Paris, as part of a long and strange quadrilateral journey which took me all around Europe and to the Levant. My eventual goal was Israel, but I wanted to keep this secret from everyone for as long as possible, so I chose the most circuitous of routes, progressing very gradually through northern Spain from Portugal and into southern France. I stayed there a while before eventually reaching Paris. From the French capital I went to an inconspicuous resort on the Belgian coast called De Panne. From that place, I spent a week in late November 2012 going quite rapidly south-eastwards through Europe towards Athens, mainly by night trains, and with stops in Cologne, Budapest, Belgrade and Sofia. In Athens, late in November 2012, I bought my ticket to Tel Aviv.

Then, from 30th November 2012, I spent five weeks in the Holy Land, and this journey was by air, from Athens and back, because that was the only way to travel, and because I was forced to purchase a return ticket at Athens Airport.

On my return from Israel and Palestine, I spent a little more time in Athens, then went by boat between Greece and Italy, spent a little time in Rome, took another boat to Spain, stopped in Madrid, and finally reached my home in Portugal on 21st January 2013. I have since visited Lisbon and two Portuguese regions to the north of it.

The period after returning to Portugal has been troubled, and conflict has broken out with many of the people I know in the Algarve and elsewhere: the Portuguese who surround me; the British expatriates who are a little farther away; and the members of my own family, yet farther, in Portugal and England.
Well, the essential incompatibility between people cannot be disguised for ever. And a relationship broken is a freedom gained. Furthermore there has been a positive development during the difficult journey and difficult return, which in a strange way seems to be connected with this trouble and dissension. Details of it now follow.

While I was in prison, between 2006 and 2009, I lost an enormous amount of weight, but during the four happy months in London after my release, and then the period of my four sybaritic grand tours, and the somnolent and mainly harmonious intervals between them in the Algarve, I put back all the weight I had lost and added some more. When I was in Sicily in the summer of 2012, and had access for the first time in many months to a weighing machine, at Palermo railway station, I saw with horror that I had reached 17 stone.

Since then I have been fighting back. During that long journey through the twelve countries (or thirteen, if Palestine be counted) I climbed every hill I could find and took on every adventure that was within my physical capability. Since returning to the Algarve I have often chosen water rather than wine with my lunch. And I have succeeded in reducing my shirt size from XXL to XL.

The most important part of this process of self-discipline was the five weeks I spent in Israel and Palestine. There I had a particularly stressful time. I was alone, and I suppose such an eccentric and solitary traveller as myself would have been bound to attract suspicion, and particularly from those who hold power in the land. It was a wonderful and all-encompassing journey, which I would not have missed for the world, but I also could not help (to my regret) developing quite a marked dislike for Israel. This was because of the outrageous way in which I was treated there by a group of people who went unchecked and also by the general hostility towards others that seems to be characteristic of the Israeli people. But I also understand that Israelis, ever since the inception of their state, have lived in a condition of existential angst, and that therefore behaviour which in the case of any other western nation would be entirely unacceptable is at least understandable in their case.

I went to Israel and Palestine with three purposes. The first was just to see as much as I could, as a tourist. The second was to visit as many of the sites connected with the life of Jesus as possible, as a Christian. These two aims I fully accomplished. The third was to find out more about my own identity as a Jew. There my success was limited.

During my Israeli journey, which began with 12 days in Jerusalem, after which I went to Tel Aviv, I attracted the attention of a private security team (or at least their leader told me it was that). It consisted of three men, who were all, according to their own account, Jews and Zionists, and who were presumably acting with the authorisation, or at least the toleration, of the state of Israel.

I encountered the first of the three, who was the leader, on the evening of the day I had tried to register with Beit Hatfutsot, the organisation which hosts the Jewish genealogy centre, in Tel Aviv. He was a large South African businessman in middle-aged physical decline, who had homes in Israel, near Cape Town and in Florida, who in his youth had been a mercenary in the former Portuguese colonies, and who, according to his own account, could, at the drop of a finger, kill anyone without hope of detection.

We were in a slightly dingy hostel in Tel Aviv, and we were all guests. On the first evening, a Friday, the South African was hostile to me briefly. Then, repeatedly, on the Saturday evening, he threatened to kill me, came very close to me in a threatening manner, called me an anti-Semite and a paedophile, and followed me to the toilet and tried (or seemed to try) to break the door down. His two cronies looked on, and occasionally added their own threats.

The second man was a very quiet, bearded middle-aged American, with pointed wit and a mystical interpretation of the more threatening parts of the Torah. The third was a huge and gross young Brazilian who, the other two later informed me, was a hitman. There were quite a number of other people around in the hostel who just did nothing, acting as if to subject foreigners to this sort of third degree was the personal right of every Israeli. Not even in the worst countries of Africa do I think the staff of a hotel would have allowed a guest to be subjected to such treatment. But in such countries you might have been killed. I do not believe there was any danger of that in this case.

I reacted to the intimidation by showing as little fear as I could, and the following evening I met the trio in the street. Now they were very friendly, and invited me to come with them to celebrate the last night of Chanukah (the Festival of Lights). I was moved by this very Jewish occasion, and after that, under some pressure, I offered to stand them three rounds of drinks at a crowded nearby bar (the American, who was drinking Guinness very fast, eventually took four). That evening they were very amiable and told me that they knew that I was a Jew. Towards the end of the evening we became mysteriously separated. They later said that it was I who had left them in the lurch, but I believe  it was they who vanished.

In the following days, the South African, in particular, was alternately friendly and threatening, openly intercepted my email, and said that he had been commissioned, in his capacity of head of the private security firm, to find out everything about me, and that, with this purpose, during the third degree evening, he had put me under hypnosis. He confirmed, however, that the grilling was extensive enough for him to say that I was not an anti-Semite and that this had been confirmed by what he had since discovered.

I found all this difficult to deal with, and hoped to escape them by going to the hostel in Tiberias. But when I arrived there, the South African and the American were waiting for me. In Tiberias they became increasingly more friendly still, and the South African wanted to take me with them to the synagogue, but the rabbi  vetoed it, because I was a Christian. And, once, when I was sitting more or less alone with my chief persecutor in the sitting room of the hostel, I asked him why he was taking so much trouble over me. And he answered, with surprising gentleness, "We have to be sure, so that you can know."

But I was effectively being held as a sort of open prisoner, and they told me that they would be with me at least until the end of my stay in Israel and possibly beyond. I said I would be going back to Greece, that Greeks did not like Jews, that I knew enough Greek to explain to the Greek police in that language what was happening (entirely false), and said I would have no hesitation in denouncing the team to the Greek authorities.

Meanwhile I could not stand the situation I was facing in Israel, and eventually, one morning a few days after Christmas, just before the beginning of Shabbat, taking with me as much of my luggage as I could carry without attracting suspicion, and when they were themselves going on a pre-Shabbat excursion, I left the hostel and my persecutors, ostensibly going by taxi for the day to Banias, the ancient Panias, or Caeserea Philippi, where Peter recognised Jesus as the Christ. It was a beautiful place, with its streams, grottoes and ancient temple, and I stayed there a while, but when the taxi returned me to Tiberias I immediately got another one to a town farther westward and southward in Galilee called Afula. There, with some difficulty, and after attracting the attention of some young Israeli soldiers, who seemed anxious to be friendly with the whole world, I procured a third driver to take me to a point some distance away from the frontier with the Palestinian Authority.

After crossing the very quiet frontier, I was borne off by a party of friendly Arabs to Nablus and spent a good day and two nights based there, seeing the Christian sights of Samaria, and reflecting on the strange historical continuity of the fact  that this area, in the time of Christ, just as now, was inhabited by a people hostile to the Jews but related to them. On the second night in Nablus, lying in bed within my room at the hotel, I heard the voice of my chief Israeli tormentor in the room outside, talking to the Arab proprietor, but the latter evidently did not prove co-operative, because I was not dragged away, although the recorded announcements of the muezzin were wildly out of sync all that night, presumably the humour of the ex-mercenary.

The next morning the Arabs quickly hustled me into a taxi towards Ramallah, and I passed New Year's Eve there, and, wandering around, just as we went into New Year's Day, was inveigled by a cafe-owner into carrying the Palestinian flag through the streets. I did this to please him, but dropped the thing with great relief when I reached my hotel room and abandoned it there.

And, the next day, it was back to Jerusalem on a maximum-security bus, and then over the desert to mysterious Eilat, where a man calling himself a hotel-owner met me at the bus station and took me to a strange encampment where there were no other guests and which I think was a security outpost. Then back to Jerusalem and the Kaplan Hotel, where on the last night, about two o'clock in the morning, I suddenly heard, within my room, shouts and screams and the sound of gunfire, followed by maniacal laughter, But the next morning all the Israelis said nothing at all had happened in or near the hotel in the night, so I suppose this was my jokey friend's last hurrah. Then back to Tel Aviv and the airport, where after a frisking from a severely handsome Israeli soldier who had me stripped naked, my trip to the most unforgettable and most unforgiving of all countries was over, and I sat in the plane with God knows what mixture of anger and longing.

To attract all that attention was obviously strange, and I do not believe it can have been connected to anything I have done in my own life, which has only consisted in practising as an unsuccessful literary man, followed by being an even more unsuccessful would-be murderer. This surveillance and persecution must therefore, I believe, have been connected with the mysteries about my ancestry which I have mentioned in previous posts, the possible Jewish origins of my mother, and the possible German (and Nazi) ones of my father.

And, as far as all this goes, I have recently made two discoveries, or possible discoveries, one of them very startling. Among my purposes in going to Lisbon was to visit my one surviving aunt, Eva, and my main purpose in going to see her was to get a photograph of my Neapolitan godfather, Gennaro Maccariello, whom I never met after my babyhood and whose face I therefore did not know.

Tia Eva had been extremely reluctant even to try to find this photograph, but after I had visited her once and taken her a large present, she rang me up at the house of the woman who lives in the centre of Lisbon, whom she has known for sixty years but from whom she has become estranged, said that she had found the photograph, and invited me to dinner. We had a very amiable time together on that evening. I did not ask her all the usual questions that she does not like and she eventually gave me many photographs relating to my early life, including some of my mother's wedding, and retained only one or two for her own possession.

I did not look at the photographs she had given me very closely before leaving her, and the next day, which was last Sunday, I rested from everything to do with my own family and spent the day around the Anglican church in Lisbon, with its eccentric but conformist congregation. On the Monday, I was due to visit the area of rural Portugal which was my mother's native region, in order to lay flowers on her grave.

On that morning, before leaving, I glanced quickly at the photographs and suddenly, with immense surprise, saw that the man who was posing with my mother in one very clear photograph of her wedding did not appear to be the Englishman who had brought me up and whom I had always believed to be her wedded husband and my father.

The man in the photo looked very like the person I had known, but I suddenly felt sure if he was someone different. The man she was marrying, I suddenly realised, was possibly posing under the Englishman´s name, Arthur Ernest Hills. And, come to that, I remembered, I wasn't even sure that Arthur Ernest Hills had originally been an Englishman, although he must have arrived in the country before the age of eight, because he had no foreign accent. I had already conceived suspicions he might have been a German or a Pole, because three old women, including Eva, had told me his father, my grandfather, had been either of those.

I had known various photographs of my mother's wedding, and of my parents and family background, since I was a child, and had assumed, as children will, that they all showed same man. And the two men, if two men they really were (because I was still very confused at this point), looked very similar in that both were fair, both roughly the same age, both rather wolfish-looking, and both balding rapidly to about the same extent. Really, they could be twins. But the other man, if such he was, seemed to have slightly more hair of a different shape, to be bigger, taller and fitter than Arthur Ernest Hills, more of a catch, really, than Arthur.

In one of the photographs remaining in my aunt's possession, there was  a wedding group that included the father of Arthur Ernest Hills (or at least someone I always believed to be that) and the second wife he had married bigamously (if such she was), so the deception, if deception it was, seemed to have been practised with the full knowledge of Arthur, and, I thought, possibly for money.

There was certainly an official record of a marriage between my mother and a man calling himself Arthur Ernest Hills in the registry office in Hendon, north-west London, on 11th September 1954, and the wedding itself would be difficult to fake. Later I was to discover that there had also been a church ceremony with Arthur Ernest Hills, at the church of St Joseph, Highgate Hill, on 13th November, 1955. But I had also been told by Aunt Eva that my mother had a church wedding, somewhere near the house of the Maccariellos at 19 Hornsey Rise, N19, that this was definitely to my father, and that she had no other wedding.

There were also stories that my mother had met my father on a tube train, when she got her finger stuck in the train door, and not at the Lyceum Ballroom in the Strand, where she and Arthur Ernest Hills always told me they had met. I had many times questioned my aunt about this discrepancy, but she is as taciturn as they come. If she gives information, it is because she wants to.

The whole set of stories and discrepancies, and now the photographic evidence, were disturbing indeed. But I longed to discover that Arthur Ernest Hills had not been my father.

When I arrived in my mother's "terra", I showed the photograph of the wedded pair (in Hendon? near Hornsey Rise?) to an elderly and deeply Catholic cousin by marriage, who had known Arthur Ernest Hills quite well, and to whom I had taken a large statue of the Virgin as a present. He studied the photograph a moment. "Is this Arthur?" he said doubtfully.

"Well, it's strange," I said. "It looks like someone else."

He took the photograph from me and looked at it quickly. "It's another man," he said.

At that point I was sure Arthur Ernest Hills had not been my father, deep joy filled my heart, and that evening, after my return to Lisbon, I phoned my friend Bill Hicks in London to tell him about the strange discovery.

(Just as an aside, and in relation to the mystery that surrounds my mother, I want to relate here that, later in the day spent in the terra, I spoke in private to the wife of the man who had looked at the photograph, and she told me, in response to my prompting, that my mother had been given to the family Reis, by whom she was brought up, as an outcast baby.

These sorts of unconventional family arrangement were very common in Portugal up until the end of the dictatorship and many people in the country are entirely uncertain who their grandparents were and sometimes even their parents. So the woman who told me this, and my aunt, and my cousin Maria in England, who saved me from suicide, are possibly, it seems, not my relations by blood.

But my knowledge of all this is so very incomplete, and based so entirely on hearsay, that I can make no definite statements about it at present. I am particularly close to Maria, who knew instinctively on the evening in 2006 when I had taken a hundred paracetamols that it was essential she ring me. She thus saved me from death, I believe she must be a very close relation. And, as I have mentioned in a previous point, there are stories of a mysterious woman known only as "Ana of the Stockings" who lived in my grandfather's household, and who could be my grandmother and also hers.)

The day following my visit to the "terra", which was my last full day in Lisbon - I was going off to visit an elderly friend (and rival) of my mother's who lives in the north of Portugal - I set off for the Museum of Ancient Art, but on the way dropped in at the Lisboa Story Centre. There I met a personable middle-aged Canadian woman painter who also wished to see the ancient art.

So we visited the museum together, enjoyed a pleasant tour, and afterwards I treated her to drinks at a nearby café, and told her about the mysteries surrounding my parents and showed her some of the photographs in my possession. She was convinced that all the photographs I showed her were of the same man, and said she had the special knowledge of physiognomy of an experienced painter to tell her this. Because I thought some of the photos might just show Arthur Ernest Hills, I became a little upset. She said she was a member of my team, and I said rather sharply that she was a member of the crew but not the captain. We parted on rather bad terms, as often happens in my initially pleasant encounters wit strangers.

Since then I have been studying all the photographs carefully, now with doubts in my mind, but never quite losing the conviction that some of the ones taken at the wedding, and possibly every single one in the group, show a different man to the seeming Englishman I had known.

So did my mother, the daughter of the possibly Jewish "Ana of the Stockings", marry a mysterious German closely resembling and posing as Arthur Ernest Hills, live with him for some time at the house in London of Gennaro Maccariello and his mother, and did then Arthur Ernest Hills resume his true identity on our move down to Crawley in Sussex, when I was nine or ten months old, or even at some point after that?

It all seems too fantastic to be true, but, just in case it is, and I am an explosive mixture of Jew and Nazi-descendant, I want to set down my personal credo for all who might be interested.

First a little more background. The childhood in Crawley, and the subsequent years, were unhappy. My mother and the man who it now seems was not my father, lived at war until Arthur Ernest Hills left our house soon after my sixteenth birthday. I did not really know any of my grandparents, what other relations existed in Britain were entirely distant, and my other relatives, numerous but not very understanding, were in faraway Portugal or, even further, in colonial Africa. I  had no friends among other children, except one whom I disliked, until I was sixteen, and did not get on with my school teachers, who disliked my intelligence, knowledge and oddness. Going to Oxford did not much improve matters. I was unpopular with fellow undergraduates at Hertford College and did not find a don to encourage me. Two postgraduate years repeated the pattern. Later I was only able to get low-grade professional jobs, never shared a house or flat with a group of friends, never had a sexual or loving relationship, never travelled abroad with anyone except my mother, and never found any other writers or editors who could help my career. This last failure was the most damaging of all, because my writing is my life.

Thus my loyalty was always to my mother, to whom I was very attached until I grew to hate her, and my only other influence was the man who brought me up. That man, Arthur Ernest Hills, even if his initial background was German, became an English nationalist and fanatical racist, and my mother, even if her real background was at least partly Italian or Jewish, identified strongly with what may have been her adopted country, Portugal, and brought me up to think of myself as a Portuguese patriot. This contradiction of background engendered in my character a sad dualism, where I attempted to be part of both England and Portugal, but fitted in with neither, could commit myself to neither, experiencing rejection in the one, seeing my personal life ruined in the other, always longed to escape from them both and what seemed to me the unbearable modern world.

So, because I was never invited by others to partake of the banquet of life, I have mainly been occupied in snatching the crumbs from under its table. Other people have disapproved of this scavenging, and the result has been that I have come to hate and despise them and they have just ignored me. I have wandered alone through the world, trying to make the best of whatever contacts I have had, but almost all of them have ended unhappily. Yet the upside of this radical isolation has been that I have developed emotional and intellectual self-sufficiency to an unusual degree. I am entirely indifferent to the convictions, interests and preferences of others, although I sometimes pretend to care, in order to please them. I have no favourites among my fellow human beings. There are those I hate, those to whom I am grateful, but there have not usually been any I loved.

All this has led to my developing a harsh philosophy. I am - although not with absolute consistency - a person of the far right. It sometimes seems not to be so, because I have often been forced to mask my real allegiances in the left-liberal society,  England, in which I have lived. I have indeed come to take delight in deceiving others as to my real character and beliefs. 

I have refused to subscribe to the ideals of democracy, human rights and anti-discrimination which are the common currency of my educated and less-educated contemporaries. I have been tempted to racialism (although not racism in the sense of discriminating against anyone - I treat people as I find them), and in bold moods, I have often opposed and derided moves towards progress and greater human happiness. I have more or less openly stated that I think that in certain circumstances an autocratic government might be necessary and desirable. In my most brutal moods I have come close to believing that there may be nothing intrinsically wrong with murder, slavery or torture, although these are beliefs, because of their sheer outrageousness, that I have not often voiced.

As I have grown older, however, almost imperceptibly, and with a sense of joy during the time I was in prison because for the first time in my life I felt part of a community, I have come to believe, although with frequent lapses into older ideas, in a more humane, liberal and optimistic outlook.

Democracy may, indeed, as Plato and other wise men have considered, be flawed, because a considerable mass of voters, particularly in very recent times, can never be induced to accept the necessary actions that their leaders might reasonably demand. But we are not living in the age of the Enlightened Despots, and modern tyranny seems likely always to be dreadful. The idea of human rights may be an intellectual construction, and lead to innumerable stresses in daily and political life, but there has to be some way to guard against frightful abuses. And, although the idea of race - or, as we might now call it, "regional genetic variations within humanity" - may have had some rough validity in the past, and to a limited extent in the present, and although local, regional and national loyalties are all important, the immense global mixing that has taken place in recent decades (which cannot be reversed), the ecological, economic and other problems that affect mankind as a whole, and the demands of common decency, mean that, whatever our doubts, we must emphasise Human Race Limited as one enterprise and one family.

What about the issues that specifically affect Jews and the State of Israel? Here I believe we must give different answers to the question of Iran and that of the Palestinians. The present Iranian regime both develops nuclear weaponry and threatens death and destruction to Israel. The consequences of any Israeli pre-emptive attack on Iran are terrible to contemplate in human terms, but it is nevertheless possible to envisage circumstances in which Israel might find itself left with no reasonable alternative but to launch an attack on Iran proportionate to the level of threat posed. It is also possible that force of circumstance might justify a disproportionate response. This would have to be judged on the exact nature of what threats Israel might face from Iran in the short to medium term.

The issue of the Palestinians is different. They are not the aggressors but the victims in the current situation. It is they who have either been driven from their land or forced to live as second-class citizens there. Their wrongs cry out for proper redress, all hopes of lasting peace seem to rest on such redress, but the difficult question is to see how it can be achieved.

For many decades, all conventional opinion has favoured the two-state solution. But the whole territory of Israel and Palestine is only about the size of Wales and almost half of it is desert. I personally find it difficult to see how a two-state solution can ever be implemented. The only other solution is a unitary state and, if the respective numbers of the two communities remain the same, this would obviously entail the end of Zionism and a situation where Jews would not be in a clear majority within the new state.

We Jews have an entirely understandable need to be separate and self-sustaining and to control our own destinies. It is essentially this need that is holding up a solution. So is there a way to maintain a strong Jewish identity in and for Israel and at the same time welcome adherents of Islam and Christianity and of other beliefs, interested members of humanity, as one might call them? That would require very careful thought and planning, and I myself, in a humble way, have given some thought to this matter, which I will outline if anyone ever shows any further interest in my ideas on the subject.

All three monotheistic religions have Abraham as their father, and Jerusalem is equally a holy city to all three, so surely there is a deep common heritage on which to build. The almost equally difficult problems of South Africa and Northern Ireland have eventually yielded to some sort of imperfect solution. The dangers, the hatred, and the apparent insolubility of the problem are all obvious, but let us hope, at least sometimes, that time and demography and human reason will eventually do their work. 

But I am a loyal enough Jew to have a desire for the continuance of the State of Israel in its present form, and, because the numbers on both sides are at present roughly equal, this would surely involve the subjugation, further expulsion and perhaps even mass-killing of those members of the Palestinian population who are unreconciled to Israeli society. This is perhaps an attractive idea, if Israel has the strength and determination, and the necessary indifference to world opinion, to impose it. But in moods of rationalistic caution, and also in those of sudden love and generosity, I find it hard to believe that this can be right. What vengeance might ensue? Might not a non-state actor, maddened by the devastation of the Palestinian people, eventually get hold of a nuclear bomb large and smart enough to destroy Israel, and be like a species of suicide-bomber so that they would not fear retaliation nor the destruction of any remaining Palestinians who would be viewed as collaborators anyway for having failed to fight and die?

Therefore, since all possible solutions face insuperable difficulties, I feel I have to say that there is no solution and that we shall just have to wait and see what happens. It may be entirely beyond human will to influence. As the Greek tragedians knew, human passions are sometimes so overwhelming that progress towards a destructive outcome inevitably follows, however benevolent or malign the motives.

Going back to general questions. If I am not really so keen on liberty, equality, fraternity and all that, and have no exclusive attachment to any group to which I may happen, by affiliation or ancestry, to belong - Jews, Christians, Gypsies, gays, conservatives, Germans, Portuguese, Italians, English, British, Europeans, whites, Nazis, writers, masochists, human beings - what are my real commitments?

Of course, in one sense, the question is easily answered. My commitment is to myself and my own desires, and to getting through my own life as comfortably and easily as I can. But that goes without saying. It is probably my primary motive in everything I do. But is there anything more than that? Do I have any beliefs that transcend my own ego?

I have already mentioned my Jewish loyalties, and these certainly exist, but only to a certain extent. For life has often seemed to me, and indeed still seems, like nothing so much as a medieval melee, a war of all against all, with no mercy and no quarter, where everyone uses the first weapon that comes to hand, where you are slightly more likely to be destroyed by your own side than by the other (if indeed it is clear to you what side you are on), and where those who were once rebels and underdogs, and therefore full of justice and hope, always end up lording it with reciprocal ferocity over the tyrants who once oppressed them. High above this grim battlefield, love and good feeling seem sometimes to shine like an unpredictable ray of light.

And this redeeming love and light has come over long years to be identified for me with Jesus Christ and the Christian religion. The Church may be an imperfect institution, individual Christians are sometimes intensely annoying, the Christian Church has a terrible record in its treatment of the Jews, abstract dogmas can seem dry and doubtful things, and it is impossible, I find, always to retain one's conviction that Jesus is God. But never mind. The essence of my personal faith lies in trying, no doubt very uncertainly, to follow in the footsteps of that radiant figure.

What Jesus tells me to do is in essence simple: love God and my fellow human beings, seek God's kingdom, keep his law, do not judge others, give to those who ask, forgive those who do me wrong, and don't worry too much about the future. Is it so very difficult to follow? Well, yes, it's almost impossible to follow. But has there ever been a better set of precepts? Or one more deserving of my total loyalty?

And I have two other allegiances. I was named after Prince Charles. Could I ever cease to love the Royal Family in whose honour I was named? Never!

And I believe in the transforming and healing power of art. How could I not do so? I have dedicated my life to trying to be an artist, a writer, and even now I am continuing to follow my goal by writing this blog. It may often appear to be a total waste of time. But I'm going on with it!

Is that all positive enough? Well, no, I'm afraid it isn't. You've hedged your bets so much you've probably done the reader's head in. From all this stuff I don't think anyone could really work out what you think about anything. Don't qualify your statements at every turn, you hypocrite. Be crystal clear. Boil your beliefs down to a single sentence.

OK, here goes.

For me it's basically love of all, tempered by fear of all, hoping for joy for all.