Continent

by Jim Crace

  He made his mind up quickly, full-heartedly. When he reached the spot where the flatness of the school’s half-valley turned abruptly upwards away from the loose stones and thorns into the erosions and cattle paths of the ridge, instead of following the horse and ’Isra, now sixty metres ahead and twenty metres above, Eddy Rivette turned at right angles. He paced out along the wide dry track, which rounded the foot of the ridge with scarcely a change of height before it reached the next valley, the valley of the village and the store. There it joined the broad sandy stream bed, the dead river of the valley, and climbed imperceptibly towards the single tree, the store and the waiting villagers. It was the long way round, perhaps twice the distance of the ridge route, but there wasn’t an obstacle nor even a difficult stretch in the whole track. The obstacle was just one of distance. Eddy opened out his pace. It developed easily and his wind was with him. This was easy, plain sailing, after the difficulties that he had tamed daily on the cattle tracks of the ridge, the constant watching and skipping and allowing for hazards and the jarring of hard heels into an aching stomach, the creeping heartbeats waiting to pain him to a standstill. No, this was easy. He could forget those problems and just let his speed stretch with his step, his mind free to calculate the distance and tell himself again and again that it could not be done.

  ’Isra did not turn to look behind, to see the schoolteacher running along the flat floor of the valley. It was bad luck to look behind. He fixed his eye on the summit of the ridge and rode happily, knowing that he was leading and that the schoolteacher, wherever he was, was behind. But he was careful not to tire his horse. She must be fresh enough to finish strongly, like a victor. ‘Let the horse be slow enough to step firmly,’ he told himself, ‘but fast enough to arrive in time, like when I rode across the mountains to bring the helicopter to the mayor.’ ’Isra reached the flat ledge of soily stone a few yards below the summit of the ridge where he had to turn the horse through a tight passage of rock to take the track to the top. The horse paused for a footing and ’Isra let himself glance at the track below. No sign of the teacher. Perhaps he was running in one of the deep gulleys and would appear in a moment. He listened. No, not a sound. He would have heard the slapping soles of the foreigner’s shoes if he had been moving on that hillside, but not a sound and not a sign.

  ’Isra looked along the ridge to either side, fearing that the teacher had taken a new, quicker route. Still no movement. ’Isra laughed. ‘He is resting,’ he said aloud, to the horse and the hills. ‘He is tired and he is resting. We have won this race.’ He spurred the horse up the last few metres of track and let himself enjoy both the pleasure of reaching the top and of having won midway through the race.

  ‘He is resting,’ he thought. ‘Or perhaps he has fallen and is lying in the stones with his ankles twisted. We will send a horse to bring him down. I myself will ride to bring him down on the back of my horse.’

  And when ’Isra, the rider of the village, reached the summit of the ridge he was laughing to himself.

  At the village store old Loti and the villagers were waiting, their eyes crannied against the evening light silhouetting the hills before them. Loti and the old men knew which spot on the ridge to watch, the spot where the teacher had crossed each evening. They knew where the leader of the race would appear briefly before disappearing into the slip of an erosion gulley and then come in view again, lower down the hill where the track flattened. And though the villagers were watching the ridge too, it was their ears which were nervous, waiting for the old men to cry out ‘Here he comes. It is …’ and then the name of the man who led. They formed the two possible shapes on the still ridge, the runner or the horse, its tail frisky with victory.

  And then Loti called, just one word, ’Isra, and they saw him there, the man of their village, winning on the ridge. A cry went up from the villagers, carrying across the evening to ’Isra. They saw him spur his horse and start to descend the track into the deep gulley, ferociously. ‘He should stay calm,’ the old men thought. ‘He is in the lead.’ But they did not know what ’Isra had seen jogging along the dry valley floor firmly and resolutely towards the village and the store. The schoolteacher had taken the long valley route and was running strongly on the obstacle-free road while he, ’Isra-kone, had still to take care amongst the treacherous descents, though he and his horse were nearer, much nearer, to the store.

  ’Isra’s descent brought him to the valley track twenty metres ahead of the schoolteacher. He lost a metre only turning the horse onto it and urging her to the new course. But the last scrambled descent from the ridge after ’Isra had spotted the schoolteacher had unnerved her and she settled badly. Eddy Rivette, however, had not changed his pace. He had kept his steady step from the moment that he had decided not to challenge ’Isra on the ridge route but follow the contours of the valley. His steadiness kept him behind the horse and he knew from experience that the race depended on the sprint. But when and how? A fast one now to take the lead and keep it with stamina? Or leave it till the end and take it at the post? Or split it in two? Two half sprints – the first to worry the horse and the rider, the second to pass them. Yes, by far the best tactic and the safest one, not taking things too early or leaving them too late. Eddy Rivette went forward on his toes and opened his pace. He closed the gap between him and the horse but it had tired him and he was glad to tuck in behind ’Isra and let the animal do the work for the fifty metres before the final bend at the single tree towards the store. He had meant it as half his sprint but he realized that he had no more race in him, that that sprint was all that was left and that now, at best, he could hang on behind the horse, drawn in to her flanks, and come in level at least with the horse’s tail though a saddle’s length behind ’Isra. Eddy Rivette knew the race for him was lost, but ’Isra did not know it was won. The sight of the schoolteacher easing across the flat valley had worried him but he had thought he was safe when he reached the track, ahead. But the schoolteacher had closed that gap in moments and with the speed of a young dog and was pressing him close, running at the horse’s speed and drawing tighter and tighter into the movement of the mare. They must go faster, faster, before the teacher ran like that again and ate up the metres and ’Isra’s fame in the village. His knees were sharp in the horse’s side and his toes were fierce. Go, horse, he said, go go. And he was fierce with the white mare, nagging her across those last few metres. The schoolteacher, with hardly a breath finding space in his lungs, hung on in the wake of warm air between the animal and its dust.

  And then Eddy Rivette heard something new: a rasp in the horse’s lungs that told him ’Isra was driving her too harshly and that, maybe, if only he could stay the pace of that gallop, the horse would have to slow sometime.

  Both men heard both lungs racking, the runner and the horse both wanting the race over so that they could halt the pounding and gasp in air and air and normalize their hearts and lungs and shocked legs. No distance now. Just the turn and the few metres to the villagers at the store.

  Eddy Rivette’s lungs gave. He slowed and stooped a little, his hand on his chest below his heart, the pain building up, the horse moving ahead. He would finish. He was professional enough to finish and he was strong enough to recover quickly. But he would finish last, second to ’Isra and his horse, and that good race would be run.

  Horse and ’Isra were at the last bend, taking it with panic and joy, not sure but sure enough that in a moment there would be cheers and the cheers would be theirs. ’Isra glimpsed the flagging schoolteacher a metre and a half behind, half caught up in the hoof dust. He leant with his horse into the bend at the tree and urged her into it, leaning far out like a yachtsman as pivot to the bend. The white mare was upright and tired, taking the turn as best she could. She felt her rider’s weight shift towards the tree and went with it, too tired to resist. Her body came down. Her feet went away. She hit the dust of the track with her shoulder, the rest of her body bunched behind, hoofing the air, and sliding for a moment,
doing the real damage to her tired white shoulder and to the man’s thin leg on which she had fallen.

  Not a whinny from her, too tired and breathless. Not a cry from ’Isra, too shamed already. One small gasp from the teacher, a cry of victory suppressed through experience until the line was crossed. A great whoop from the villagers, from the cackle of Loti to the yelp of the schoolchildren, as the winner of the race crossed the line of shadow marked at the side of the store by a low and sinking sun.

  FOUR

  On Heat

  I

  ONCE a year, at high tide on the longest day, the tiger crabs come ashore to mate. They come in their millions, as docile and purposeful as pilgrims. Nowadays the solstice is a national holiday and the coast is swarming with people, too. They inspect the striped and shifting shingle of the beach and lift the plumpest crabs for the pot.

  But when we were young the beach was free and empty. We helped my father with his plate camera. We collected swabs of sperm. We measured carapaces and pincers. We marked the shells of specimens in indelible ink. Father introduced us as his ‘young research assistants’ whenever the kelp-farmers or the fishermen paused to stare. His book was published in 1928 and, thereafter, we stopped coming to the solstice beach. He was too busy at the Institute and travelling abroad. But we were mentioned in the preface and thanked for our ‘tireless field work’ – and the new edition carries a photograph of the family, taken in 1926. My two younger sisters, fat and cheerful, are shaking crabs at the camera. My mother, dressed from throat to ankle in a then-fashionable bandok, is sitting cross-legged in the centre of our lunch rug. A book in her lap. A look of explosive irritation on her face. My father, his head turned against the wind, his eyes narrowed, is pointing at the camera and shouting instructions to the enlisted fisherman on how to focus and what to press. I am standing at father’s side – an awkward, bony twelve-year-old in a torn and spermy dress. Before and beyond us, reduced to stones by this still, black-and-white photograph, are the tiger crabs. Uca felix, father called them. Lucky crabs. Free from the tyrannies of courtship and concupiscence.

  ‘What is the mechanism which causes Uca felix to mate en masse on this single day?’ asks father in the foreword to The Secret Life of the Tiger Crab. ‘What is the chemistry of its procreative regularity?’ His book does not provide the answers. Its popular appeal lay in the final chapters where father contrasted the rigid breeding behaviour of the crab with the uneven profligacy of human kind. Nature is always patterned, he said. It was his theory – and regret – that the sexual life of Homo sapiens functioned in a state of disorder, ‘outside of nature’.

  MY FATHER died in 1940. My mother, in a gesture which was both ironic and dutiful, buried him in a weighted casket just above the high-tide mark and planted a salt bush to mark the spot. The Institute put up a raised stone tablet with an inscription:

  PROFESSOR T. D. ZOEA

  1879–1940

  Writer and Natural Scientist

  There is a photograph of this, too, at the back of the new edition.

  A THIRD photograph was not included, despite its combative prominence in my father’s study. How he loved that photograph and how we feared it. Its date was 1912. My mother and father stood like big-game hunters, striking poses for the long exposure of the filmplate in the darkness of the trees. All around them, blurred by impatience and playfulness, were a host of forest women, their arms latticed with cicatrices, their stomachs bulbous, their hilarity bombarding the grimness of my parents. ‘All Pregnant and Correct’ was my father’s title for the photograph. But my mother – and we three girls in our turn – found the laughing herd of women, their polished breasts and stomachs crowding the frame, oppressive.

  ‘That was taken during the expedition,’ my mother explained in those weeks when her illness made her reckless. ‘The Professor and I had just married. I liked him enough to travel with him in those days. We rode on donkeys for eight weeks from the railhead at Etar. He was noting species and I was logging them for him in the yellow ledger. I wrote “Two donkeys” at the head of each day’s list, and then the names that he called to me whenever there was movement in the undergrowth. It was as if we were not married, but still teacher and doting student … except that the Professor wanted sexual conjunction all the time, on the thinnest of pretexts. The moment we dismounted from our donkeys for rest or food the Professor would become attentive in that breathless, urgent way which so transformed him and so reduced him.’

  We drew from her a portrait of my father made tense and engrossed by my mother’s presence, as if his self-control had been agitated by the bounce of the donkey. At night in their tent, with the moth lamp burning and the camp flaps shaking a beat, he would again go to her, saying, ‘Let me warm you’ or ‘You are beautiful in this light’ or ‘Hold me there.’ At his most wheedling, his speech would be, ‘Tonight I am tired. Take it in your hand and rub me to sleep.’ At his boldest, he briefly left the tent and returned like some foolish stranger to push money into her hand and say, ‘Be a whore for me. Pull up your night-clothes.’ Sometimes there would be tears of shame, too. But for them the only remedy was more conjunction. ‘Now we are married we can make love,’ he told her, ‘at any time.’ ‘Like animals,’ she said, meaning to tease him but also, perhaps, to induce a little forbearance and composure when next his tumescence demanded her attention. ‘No, not like animals,’ he said. ‘The very opposite to animals with their seasons, their ruts, their “heats”, slaves to chemistry. No, it is this which separates us from the animals, our capacity to enjoy our bodies as the whim takes us, ever receptive to pleasure. Any place, any time. Now, for instance?’

  ‘IN THE eighth week we came deep into the forest where the people had made clearings for plantation,’ said mother. ‘The villagers there were naked by day and the Professor was much charmed by their innocence. He took notes, of course, as if the villagers were bats or beetles, and he was struck by the absence of sexual playfulness or arousal. “They are immodest like infants”, he wrote in the ledger. But all our observations seemed inconsequential once the villagers had become used to our presence and their women felt free to go about their business. As you can see from the photograph, all of them except the children and the elderly were pregnant. Not surprising, perhaps, in a society where there were few constraints on fertility. But look closely at the women. Here is the oddity which so engaged the Professor. All these women are over eight months pregnant and they are ready to produce offspring in near unison.’

  This observation set my father’s mind racing. Birth in unison indicated conception in unison, the impregnation of the village’s fertile women in one concentrated period of communal – if not public – sexual intercourse. What could be the purpose of such a congress? And were the mechanisms of its control social or biological? ‘The Professor, to my cost, found the subject stimulating in every way,’ complained mother. ‘But there were lessons there for me also. I determined that the moment we returned to the city I would take charge of our conjugal lives. We would economize.’

  NOW consider this. A trapper from the valley whom my father employed to transport his specimens and supplies to and from Etar claimed to understand a little ‘forest’, a tongue so labio-plosive that linguists had titled it vabap-vabap. To hear it spoken in jostling conversation was to hear a flock of doves take wing. The trapper had been hunting amongst these same trees four years previously. And he had witnessed – had, indeed, participated in – a period of communal sexual intercourse amongst the small forest community with whom my parents were now lodged. ‘You imagine them to be simple and cold,’ he said, recounting his many previous attempts to find or buy a partner amongst the native women. ‘Lovemaking does not interest them, it seems. But when their moment comes they are like dogs in heat.’ I will not recount the scenes which he described or comment, either, on the opportunism of the trapper. After three days their sexual agitation, however, was reported to have ceased as readily and as inexplicably as it had begun. ‘An
d the women with whom you had consorted?’ asked my father. ‘How many women … personally, may I ask … in those three days?’ The man’s reply is marked in my father’s ledger and heavily circled. ‘Fourteen!’

  ‘The Professor’s interest in the unrecorded smaller species in which the forest abounded was abandoned,’ said mother. ‘He postponed our return home for a further six weeks. He was determined to witness the communal birth for himself. I was left relatively unpestered in the charge of a girl whom the Professor nicknamed Puppy, because she could pronounce the word. She was, perhaps, a month or so too young for pregnancy, poor thing. She was quite happy to collect and cook our food and, indeed, to wear the dresses which I loaned her. I could not have her naked at our table. I taught her cat’s cradle and hopscotch. It was foolish, perhaps. But she was sweet – an awkward, bony little thing – and I was bored beyond endurance. I had no tasks, and though the Professor and his trapper were huddled in conversation and much laughter until late at night, I was excluded. Except from Puppy.’

  In the meantime – and with the trapper’s vabap-vabap at his shoulder – my father busied himself with monitoring the pregnancies and with keeping a journal. ‘We start with the notion of menstrual synchrony’, he wrote. ‘It is well established amongst the women of even the most civilized households throughout the world. The monthly cycles of women in close and regular physical proximity harmonize and correspond. They run in parallel. They ovulate simultaneously. The aetiology of such a phenomenon is not established, though olfactory and glandular agencies are most likely. Nature is neither wasteful nor gratuitous. The mechanism for reproductive synchrony is latent in humankind. We must take this as evidence that such a mechanism was at one time fully active as confidently as we must presume an ancient tail implicit in our own vestigial coccyx or a full pelt of hair as ancestral to those few strategic tufts which still endure. Any synchrony of sexual intercourse, pregnancy and birth amongst the forest people, a community otherwise free of profligacy or baser passions, suggests a practice too fettered and precise to bear an anthropological interpretation of custom or taboo. Here, cut off from humankind for centuries beyond number, is a species whose reproductive natures are as different from our own as a gibbon’s from a chimp’s. Are we to witness a mass human parturition as brief and ordered in duration as that observed by shepherds amongst their sheep? Is this the natural, primitive pattern of human reproduction from which our own sexual connivance has evolved and which was thought lost amongst the orchards of what the Christians label Eden?’