The husband removed several bank-notes from his wallet. His wife passed them across the table to Scranton, who then stood up. Photographs were taken, first of Scranton standing next to the smiling wife, then of the husband grinning broadly beside the gaunt American. The source of all this good humour eluded me, as it did Scranton, whose eyes stared gravely at the street with a degree of respect due to the surface of the moon. But already a second group of tourists had walked down from Copacabana Beach, and I heard more laughter when one called out: ‘There’s the astronaut…!’
Quite mystified, I watched a further round of photographs being taken. The couples stood on either side of the American, grinning away as if he were a camel driver posing for pennies against a backdrop of the pyramids.
I ordered a small brandy from the waiter. He had ignored all this, pocketing his tips with a straight face.
‘This fellow…?’ I asked. ‘Who is he? An astronaut?’
‘Of course…’ The waiter flicked a bottle-top into the air and treated the sky to a knowing sneer. ‘Who else but the man in the moon?’
The tourists had gone, strolling past the leatherware and jewellery stores. Alone now after his brief fame, the American sat among the empty glasses, counting the money he had collected.
The man in the moon?
Then I remembered the newspaper headline, and the expos I had read two years earlier of this impoverished American who claimed to have been an astronaut, and told his story to the tourists for the price of a drink. At first almost everyone believed him, and he had become a popular figure in the hotel lobbies along Copacabana Beach. Apparently he had flown on one of the Apollo missions from Cape Kennedy in the 1970s, and his long-jawed face and stoical pilot’s eyes seemed vaguely familiar from the magazine photographs. He was properly reticent, but if pressed with a tourist dollar could talk convincingly about the early lunar flights. In its way it was deeply moving to sit at a caf table with a man who had walked on the moon Then an over-curious reporter exploded the whole pretence. No man named Scranton had ever flown in space, and the American authorities confirmed that his photograph was not that of any past or present astronaut. In fact he was a failed crop-duster from Florida who had lost his pilot’s licence and whose knowledge of the Apollo flights had been mugged up from newspapers and television programmes.
Surprisingly, Scranton’s career had not ended there and then, but moved on to a second tragi-comical phase. Far from consigning him to oblivion, the exposure brought him a genuine small celebrity. Banished from the grand hotels of Copacabana, he hung about the cheaper cafs in the side-streets, still claiming to have been an astronaut, ignoring those who derided him from their car windows. The dignified way in which he maintained his fraud tapped a certain good-humoured tolerance, much like the affection felt in the United States for those eccentric old men who falsely claimed to their deaths that they were veterans of the American Civil War.
So Scranton stayed on, willing to talk for a few dollars about his journey to the moon, quoting the same tired phrases that failed to convince the youngest schoolboy. Soon no one bothered to question him closely, and his chief function was to be photographed beside parties of visitors, an amusing oddity of the tourist trail.
But perhaps the American was more devious than he appeared, with his shabby suit and hangdog gaze? As I sat there, guarding the brandy I could barely afford, I resented Scranton’s bogus celebrity, and the tourist revenue it brought him. For years I, too, had maintained a charade — the mask of good humour that I presented to my colleagues in the newspaper world — but it had brought me nothing. Scranton at least was left alone for most of his time, something I craved more than any celebrity. Comparing our situations, there was plainly a strong element of injustice — the notorious British criminal who made a comfortable living being photographed by the tourists in the more expensive Copacabana restaurants had at least robbed one of Her Majesty’s mail-trains.
At the same time, was this the human-interest story that would help me to remake my career? Could I provide a final ironic twist by revealing that, thanks to his exposure, the bogus astronaut was now doubly successful?
During the next days I visited the caf promptly at noon. Note book at the ready, I kept a careful watch for Scranton. He usually appeared in the early afternoon, as soon as the clerks and secretaries had finished their coffee. In that brief lull, when the shadows crossed from one side of the street to the other, Scranton would materialise, as if from a trapdoor in the pavement. He was always alone, walking straight-backed in his faded suit, but with the uncertainty of someone who suspects that he is keeping an appointment on the wrong day. He would slip into his place under the caf awning, order a glass of beer from the sceptical waiter and then gaze across the street at the vistas of an invisible space.
It soon became clear that Scranton’s celebrity was as threadbare as his shirt cuffs. Few tourists visited him, and often a whole afternoon passed without a single customer. Then the waiter would scrape the chairs around Scranton’s table, trying to distract him from his reveries of an imaginary moon. Indeed, on the fourth day, within a few minutes of Scranton’s arrival, the waiter slapped the table-top with his towel, already cancelling the afternoon’s performance.
‘Away, away… it’s impossible!’ He seized the newspaper that Scranton had found on a nearby chair. ‘No more stories about the moon…’
Scranton stood up, head bowed beneath the awning. He seemed resigned to this abuse. ‘All right… I can take my trade down the street.’
To forestall this, I left my seat and moved through the empty tables.
‘Mr Scranton? Perhaps we can speak? I’d like to buy you a drink.’
‘By all means.’ Scranton beckoned me to a chair. Ready for business, he sat upright, and with a conscious effort managed to bring the focus of his gaze from infinity to a distance of fifty feet away. He was poorly nourished, and his perfunctory shave revealed an almost tubercular pallor. Yet there was a certain resolute quality about this vagrant figure that I had not expected. Sitting beside him, I was aware of an intense and almost wilful isolation, not just in this foreign city, but in the world at large.
I showed him my card. ‘I’m writing a book of criticism on the science-fiction cinema. It would be interesting to hear your opinions. You are Commander Scranton, the Apollo astronaut?’
‘That is correct.’
‘Good. I wondered how you viewed the science-fiction film… how convincing you found the presentation of outer space, the lunar surface and so on…’
Scranton stared bleakly at the table-top. A faint smile exposed his yellowing teeth, and I assumed that he had seen through my little ruse.
‘I’ll be happy to set you straight,’ he told me. ‘But I make a small charge.’
‘Of course,’ I searched in my pockets. ‘Your professional expertise, naturally..
I placed some coins on the table, intending to hunt for a modest bank-note. Scranton selected three of the coins, enough to pay for a loaf of bread, and pushed the rest towards me.
‘Science-fiction films -? They’re good. Very accurate. On the whole I’d say they do an excellent job.’
‘That’s encouraging to hear. These Hollywood epics are not usually noted for their realism.’
‘Well… you have to understand that the Apollo teams brought back a lot of film footage.’
‘I’m sure.’ I tried to keep the amusement out of my voice. ‘The studios must have been grateful to you. After all, you could describe the actual moon-walks.’
Scranton nodded sagely. ‘I acted as consultant to one of the Hollywood majors. All in all, you can take it from me that those pictures are pretty realistic.’
‘Fascinating… coming from you that has authority. As a matter of interest, what was being on the moon literally like?’
For the first time Scranton seemed to notice me. Had he glimpsed some shared strain in our characters? This care-worn American had all the refinement of an unemployed car mechanic, and yet he seemed almost tempted to befriend me.
‘Being on the moon?’ His tired gaze inspected the narrow street of cheap jewellery stores, with its office messengers and lottery touts, the off-duty taxi-drivers leaning against their cars. ‘It was just like being here.’
‘So…’ I put away my notebook. Any further subterfuge was unnecessary. I had treated our meeting as a joke, but Scranton was sincere, and anyway utterly indifferent to my opinion of him. The tourists and passing policemen, the middle-aged women sitting at a nearby table, together barely existed for him. They were no more than shadows on the screen of his mind, through which he could see the horizons of an almost planetary emptiness.
For the first time I was in the presence of someone who had nothing — even less than the beggars of Rio, for
