The Man Who Could Only Sleep On Buses Read online

  The Man Who Could Only Sleep On Buses

  Sara Roberts

  There was once a man who could only sleep on buses. He had tried everything – cars, trains, boats, planes – but like a child who cries and cries and cannot be calmed without being walked around the laurel tree in his pram bumping over gravel paths, the man discovered that he could not find the solace of sleep without the reassuring bumping and shaking movement of an ordinary bus journey. The irony was, this was not an ordinary man. This was Pablo Javier Morales de Souza, whose name and reputation or, failing that, his wealth and fortune, could buy him almost anything worth having, including the good opinion of almost anyone whose good opinion it was advantageous to have.

  His parents were poor Portuguese immigrants living in one of the shantytowns on the outskirts of Seville, his father a night watchman for one of the big warehouses, his mother a cleaning lady in homes and offices around the city. Who would have thought that the great entrepreneur of De Souza Refrescos, Autobuses De Souza, and that towering empire of construction, Construcciones De Souza, should have sprung from such a beginning?

  When he was a child, Pablo used to play with the other scruffy snot-nosed urchins of his neighbourhood, scratching with a stick in the dirt to trace the outlines of a football pitch where they would kick a rag ball around in the orange light and lengthening shadows of just before sunset. But even at that early age, the infant De Souza was different from his playmates. While they were stealing sherbet-centred penny sweets from the long-suffering cornershop – and later vandalising telephone booths and spraying uncouth words on the walls of the public library – Pablo de Souza was dreaming of travels.

  He would get home from school and after kicking the rag ball around for a while, once the group had broken up and straggled back to their respective homes upon the shouted threats of their mothers, he would scramble up from the terrace onto the roof of his parents’ rather ramshackle but scrupulously clean little house. There, while the sun still glowed over the dirty horizon, Pablo would spend hours sitting on the rough, sloping tiles with his back to the chimney, hugging his knees and staring out over the rundown rooftops of his neighbourhood, satellite dishes and TV aerials waving like the antennae of a horde of insects. He watched as the light from the sky burned orange and faded into blue, as the first stars appeared and the dogs set up their nightly symphony of howls, and he dreamed of other horizons.

  In his mind’s eye, Pablo could see fantastical landscapes and tropical palm trees silhouetted majestically against sunset seas; exotic street markets and bazaars dizzy with smells and sounds. Through half-closed eyes, he blurred the lights of his neighbourhood into the magnificent night skyline of a great metropolis, imagining that he was looking out from his fifteenth-floor penthouse apartment in one of those tall buildings with giant windows he had seen in American films. A handsome man in a tailored suit, tie loosened, whisky glass in hand, winking lights below him like stars at his feet; angels brought down suddenly to earth.

  His parents laughed affectionately whenever young Pablo described these visions and asked each other, “Where does he get his imagination?” though, to be honest, they had little time or energy to dedicate to listening. He rarely saw his father, who was shut away sleeping during the day, emerging often after Pablo had scrambled up onto the roof. Pablo’s mother worried sometimes – when she remembered to, among all her other worries – about her daydreaming son, but on the whole she was too busy with Pablo’s four brothers and sisters, the littlest of whom was barely nine months old, and with her full-time job cleaning rich people’s homes in the mornings and offices in the afternoons, for which she earned almost nothing but which took up ten hours of her day, after which she still had to come home and clean her own house and cook the food to put on the table.

  At school, Pablo excelled at maths but it soon became clear that his real passion, his talent, was in commerce. He was a natural businessman, able to turn dust into profit, as he would learn to boast. In fact, little Pablito thought up his first moneymaking scheme when he was only eight. He collected the stickers of his classmates’ favourite football stars from empty cereal packets and sold them for twenty cents a piece to the other kids at school; more if it was the last sticker they needed to complete their collection. He had a knack for remembering exactly who had which stickers and who had them in double, and who needed which ones to make up the series. Soon, long queues formed around him in the playground and everyone wanted to be his friend.

  By the time he was twelve, Pablo knew – and was known by – pretty much everyone in his neighbourhood. He discovered that one of the best ways to spend the pocket money he scammed from his schoolmates was to buy a day bus ticket and ride all over Seville. He walked along the Guadalquivir and its many bridges, wandered into the cathedral and wondered at the place names inscribed around the Plaza de España, ticking off with his finger the ones he wanted to go to. He blended in with groups of tourists, pretending to be somebody’s son, and soon became familiar with the famous Giralda and Alcazaba, and all the streets in Triana. He stared into shop windows and at the people dressed in their Sunday best, and dreamt of the secret stories the old buildings held.

  Two years later, he was selling cold cans of coke and beer at football matches, corridas and outdoor concerts at the height of summer, and he had learnt how to save. He saved up all his money to buy bus tickets to the places he had said he would go to in the Plaza de España. He went to Granada with its beautiful Alhambra and Cordoba with its dizzying red and white mosque. He went to Cádiz and saw the sea. He went as far as he could go for the day and then he went further. He went to Malaga and Madrid and Murcia; Toledo, Zaragoza, Pamplona and León; Valladolid, Burgos, Segovia and Salamanca. He caught the night bus back and slept all the way to Seville, thus acquiring his prodigious ability to sleep on buses.

  One day, the young Pablo (he was still only sixteen or seventeen) was on such a journey to Santiago, Galicia, when he stopped off in a village to see if he could con his lunch off some charitable soul or other. As he stood outside the bakery looking at the enormous empanadas in the window, he felt a presence. He turned to his left and there was an old woman at his elbow, so tiny and hunched over that she barely came up to his waist. She had two long grey plaits and wore a simple skirt and shawl. She looked poor and ancient. Although she was so hunched over that by nature she looked at the floor, she tilted her head sideways like a bird and looked up at Pablo. Her eyes sparkled a bright, startling black.

  She held her hand out. Pablo immediately protested. He didn’t have any money, not even for lunch - as she could see, he had to content his hungry stomach with eating these empanadas with his eyes. In fact, he said angrily, she probably had more money than he did. At this, the old woman drew back her hand and narrowed her eyes. Then she spoke loudly and clearly, in a voice that seemed younger than her body. Pablo couldn’t understand a word because she was speaking in Galician, but he could tell from the tone of her voice that it wasn’t good. When she had finished, the old woman walked away through the crowd of gathered villagers, who parted for her silently.

  Pablo turned to one of the young mothers and asked what she had said. She looked at him warily. “I don’t know who you are or what you have done to upset her,” she said, “but the meiga said that you will one day be very rich, so rich you will forget the value of money, and you will travel so much you will forget where your home was. Then a terrible affliction will befall you and will only be lifted if you find the right way again.” Utter nonsense. Pablo muttered to himself about superstitious country folk and hurried to the nearest bus stop. On the way, the woman with the child gave him some empanada for the jour
ney because, she said, he looked very pale.

  Back home in Seville, Pablo’s fame and reputation were spreading beyond the confines of his sprawling, poverty-stricken neighbourhood, and he was starting to attract the attention of some locally influential individuals of dubious character. He could have ended up another cog in the wheels of the local mafia, but fortune had other things in mind. We will probably never know how, but our little Pablito’s entrepreneurial prowess came to the attention of a recruiter for a big business in Barcelona and Madrid. Their headquarters were encased in glass and chrome like temples, tall as the sky; a forest of vast redwoods reaching up towards the sun.

  One day, therefore, Pablo came out of school to find a man in a dark suit leaning against a gleaming black car, smoking a cigarette. The man introduced himself and said that the company he worked for was recruiting new talent. They were looking for people to help them ensure their products were not being copied and imitated illegally. He said he had heard about Pablo and his considerable abilities and that they might be looking for someone like him.

  Pablo was so impressed that for once his words dried up and he stood there with his mouth open, something that had never happened before and has never happened since. The man handed him his card and said to call him if he was interested, then got into his shiny BMW with shaded windows and silently pulled away. Pablo stood staring after him for a long time, card in hand.

  Later, Mr. De Souza would look back at that moment as the point when his life changed. Pablo left school, much against his parents’ wishes, and went to work for the company in Barcelona. In fact, he was rarely there. He travelled all over Europe, China, India, Thailand, Morocco and Brazil, spying on competitors and checking whether cheap imitations of the company’s products were being made and sold, and if so, where and by whom. He used the internet to spy on them and quite enjoyed playing the role of a modern-day James Bond. The main client he spied for was a huge, international drinks company that made a curious sparkling brown brew that seemed to have half the world addicted.

  After some ten years or so, Pablo became bored with commercial espionage, hacking into private accounts and wandering the illegal street markets of Sao Paulo and Mumbai. He longed for a greater challenge, and realising that he had now formed an extensive network of useful contacts – both of the low life and of the high – he decided to jump ship. Which he did, taking with him his former client’s secret drinks recipes and founding his own soft drinks empire, De Souza Refrescos S.A.

  A few years later, the by now very wealthy Mr. De Souza decided to start a luxury bus company, having always retained a nostalgic affection for public transport. Curiously, he often looked back at his bus-travelling days as his happiest, though he remembered being so poor he had to count out his cents to buy his fare or his lunch, and sometimes having to choose between the two (his hunger for seeing the world always ensuring that the former won). Now he liked to retell these stories, amid much hilarity, at the lavish dinner parties he and his beautiful wife held at their mansion, and the guests would shake their heads in wonder at his indomitable sense of enterprise. “Imagine that,” they would say, “Just imagine that.”

  So Mr. De Souza started a bus company. And like Refrescos De Souza, the fledgling enterprise grew and soon expanded its routes all over Europe and North Africa. His business ideas seemed to be blessed with good fortune, and he earned himself the nickname of “King Midas” because everything he touched, it seemed, turned to gold.

  “Midas” De Souza earned so much money, in fact, that he decided to open his third and most wildly successful business, Construcciones De Souza. That was when he hit the big time. He found he enjoyed the intellectual challenge of the wheeling and dealing and, in addition, his dominating the construction industry allowed him to form close relationships with local politicians and landowners. This gave him a new standing in society, he felt. He even considered the possibility of running for public office himself one day, as a hobby perhaps, when nearing retirement.

  It was around then that De Souza first started experiencing insomnia. He thought it just a passing phase and tried sleeping pills and valerian tablets and counting sheep and listening to whale music, but relations with his wife deteriorated as he paced around the echoing rooms of their gorgeous mansion at night and she groaned that he was keeping her awake with his footsteps. He, on the other hand, was consumed with jealousy at her effortless surrendering, night after night, to the blissful embrace of oblivion. How he watched her sleep and longed to join her on the other side! But something kept him on this side of consciousness, as if holding him back by the arms, and he couldn’t for the life of him imagine what it was.

  Mentally, he began to deteriorate as sleep deprivation dragged on his brain and his senses played tricks on him. He saw flashing red sparks before his eyes and sobbed in rage as he pursued sleep through the hallways and corridors, patios and gardens of his enormous house, never quite catching up with her and imagining every time that he saw the tail of her white dress escaping around the next corner. He became increasingly irritable and incoherent, alienating his friends. His wife was alarmed and repelled by his new incarnation and told him she felt she’d married a senile sick old man. He laughed bitterly and told her not to expect an inheritance; the next day she called a taxi and left.

  Collecting what remained of his sanity, “Midas” De Souza picked up the telephone and called another doctor, supposedly the best sleep specialist in the country. The doctor examined him and told him that it was the cumulative effect of over-work and excessive travel. He suggested that he take a holiday, some time off work, perhaps visit his family - where were they from? Seville? Perfect. A trip down south would be just the ticket.

  Mr. De Souza stared at him in horror. Of course he couldn’t take time off work. He couldn’t afford to. Not for the money, obviously, but for the time. He didn’t have time. And, anyway, Mr. De Souza added, he had been travelling all his life and it had never affected his ability to sleep. Quite the contrary. Some of the best sleep he had ever had was on buses - yes! Ordinary buses, too, not even De Souza special deluxe buses. The doctor raised his eyebrows, packed away his stethoscope and said in that case perhaps Mr. De Souza ought to think about taking a bus trip again to see if it would have the same effect.

  In fact, “Midas” De Souza hadn’t visited Seville in 15 years and hadn’t seen his parents in, well... he couldn’t remember exactly the last time he paid for his family to come and stay in his mansion for the weekend. The last thing he had heard, his father was ill and had been hospitalised for some ailment or other. He might have died for all he knew. But no, one of his brothers or sisters would have told him. He would go to Seville incognito, he decided, on an ordinary bus – not one of his own – like an ordinary traveller, to visit his old neighbourhood and walk around the streets of Triana and see his ageing parents in the expensive care home he paid for with a view of the Guadalquivir.

  It was a crazy idea, when it would be so much easier to get one of his chauffeurs to drive him, and so much quicker to go in the helicopter, but then again, he had tried everything else and this certainly wasn’t going to break the bank. He started throwing clothes into a suitcase, then changed his mind and rooted around in the back of his gigantic walk-in wardrobe until he found a tattered old sports bag. He shoved a book and a pair of clean underwear and his toothbrush in it, combed his hair, changed into his most anonymous pair of jeans and walked down the curving flight of steps to his front door.

  As he settled into his seat at the back of the bus to Seville, Pablo De Souza stared past the haggard reflection of the man looking back at him from his window; way past him and out, into the falling night as the sunset landscapes rushed by him with their elongated shadows.

  He smiled and closed his eyes, and gave himself up to sleep.

  © Oxfordshire County Council 2015 for a period of 12 months at which point reverts to author

 

 

  Sara Roberts,
The Man Who Could Only Sleep On Buses

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