The View from Mount Dog

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  *

  At the last count there were eleven Sultans. This figure happens to beat by three the present number of Queens of England but is one fewer than the Presidents of the United States. They are easily outnumbered by the twenty-seven current Popes. All the Popes are interchangeable, as are the Presidents and the Queens; but one of the Sultans loves driving trains.

  The Moon as Guest

  Nobody could remember how it had started – least of all Anding whose leg it was – since it had been with him so long. It had been named over the years: ‘varicose ulcer’ or ‘that time the chip of wood flew off and stuck in when Clody was chopping’. The health worker called it ‘a chronic sore’, but by none of these terms could Anding recognise an old friend. When he thought about it with the near-affection due to the utterly familiar he could imagine he had been born with it. Not exactly as it was at this moment, of course, since its appearance changed from time to time. Its phases were varied: sometimes it wept, sometimes it bled, sometimes it shrank to a dry pucker surrounding a black borehole, and now and again it rotted a bit and smelt as at present. Essentially, though, it was resident as this hole on the outside of his right leg about three inches below the knee. In so far as it had to be allowed for at all times, but chiefly when negotiating public transport or the bamboo settles at home, Anding thought of it as he would any of his limbs: somewhere between an appendage and an inhabitant, something whose absence in other people he had begun to notice.

  ‘I can’t sleep with that smell in the house,’ his wife told him. ‘It’s disgusting. It attracts flies and keeps people away. Haven’t you noticed how few of our friends actually come into the house nowadays? They hang around the doors but they won’t come inside because of the stink. That leg of yours has taken over my whole house.’

  ‘I can’t smell anything,’ said Anding truthfully, ‘although he certainly looks as though he’s coming up for one of his wormy times.’

  At fairly long intervals there would recur a period lasting anything up to a month when the presence of small creamy maggots could be noticed as they burrowed around in the necrotic hole. Tatang Petring up the track, who was by far the best barefoot doctor in the area, had told him this was an excellent sign since it meant all the green stuff was being eaten up and only clean uninfected tissue would be left whereupon the wound would quickly become smaller. And it was true the maggots came and went beneath the papaya poultices which Tatang Petring applied, but so, too, did callers at the house come and go. Anding was a fair man and came to think his wife was probably right. Certainly there were a lot of flies about.

  What did not go was the wound itself, undoubtedly a black miracle, a medical mystery. Although often enlarging and deepening to the point where the bone could actually be seen by anybody interested enough to look (mainly small children and Tatang Petring himself), the wound appeared to be self-limiting in some way. The maggots did their bit, the wound grew huge and deep but quite neat: a light pinkish-grey smooth wet crater with bone at the bottom and with a slightly raised crusty rim – and anyone who knew anything about Western-style medicine or Eastern-style ways of death predicted that Anding would soon run a tremendous fever and his leg swell up and go glossy black, and at that point unless it were cut off entirely he would be done for. Yet this never happened. The health worker would procure some unmarked capsules in a twist of paper, and Tatang Petring would leave off the papaya poultices and instead apply grated palm-heart tinctured with ordinary kerosene, and within a week the wound would be half its previous size, the skin around it a glowing healthy brown.

  At this point Anding used to worry about its disappearing entirely and would stop taking the capsules. It would be like murder, doing away with a companion as constant yet as varied as this one. His friend did not in the least incapacitate him but merely made him courteous when dealing with furniture or dogs (which were fascinated by the smell) or those small children always apt to bang into legs. Little boys particularly were wont to dash off suddenly in pursuit of their chafers, which instead of droning in tight circles above their heads at the end of lengths of thread would somehow escape and blunder away, trailing their moorings. Only the other day a child had smacked into the leg, bounced off and plunged away through the goats rooting among the banana plants at the side of the track.

  ‘You smegma!’ Anding shouted half-heartedly after him and wondered if he hadn’t heard a faint ‘sorry, sir’ amid the crashing of sticks and goat-bleats. For it was on behalf of his friend that Anding felt annoyance: it was no way to treat a companion. The question of pain never entered into it.

  And that was one more extraordinary thing. Almost regardless of which phase it was in or what was done to it Anding scarcely ever experienced his wound as painful. Occasionally his whole leg would ache but, then, so did everyone else’s after about forty; it was called arthritis and was an unbidden but not unexpected guest who would come one day and take up residence in someone’s body and not leave until that person was dead. That was the thing about wounds and diseases: they, too, had lives of their own which they had to live, and it was in their nature to have to depend on the bodies of people and animals in order to do so. Tatang Petring had told him that years ago, and Anding had long since had enough experience to confirm its truth. Sometimes one of these visitors might be accompanied by a companion of its own – it might be fever or pain. Such happened not to be the case with his own wound, which had turned up all by itself (perhaps on that wood-chopping day, perhaps not) and required a home. True, it had had certain consequences: discomfort when lying on the floor at night, inconvenience in that he always had to be on the lookout for stuff that would serve as bandaging to hold Tatang Petring’s treatments in place and, if Lerma were to be believed, a disgusting smell at the wormy periods which messed up their social life. But never actual pain.

  ‘He’s not going to go away, is he?’ Anding asked Tatang Petring one day.

  The doctor considered silently.

  ‘No. He wants to stay. He likes you. Sometimes it looks as though he’s going to take over more of you and sometimes as though he might move out altogether. But he never does either, does he?’

  ‘It’s strange,’ said Anding, who was still then thinking in terms of his wound’s apparent indecisiveness.

  ‘Not a bit,’ Tatang Petring told him. ‘Look at the moon. That comes and goes at seemingly odd intervals, all the time on the wax or on the wane, but you couldn’t say the moon was vague, could you? It’s always in exactly the right place. It’s just a question of understanding its habits. When you understand things as they properly are they almost always turn out to be regular in some way. Look at women’s periods; or better’ – Tatang Petring hurriedly skipped over one of the greater mysteries whose very irregularity accounted for a large percentage of his patients’ visits – ‘the tides.’

  ‘They’re both connected to the moon,’ said Anding. ‘Everyone knows that.’

  ‘Perhaps your leg is, too. We don’t know.’

  Both men contemplated this possibility.

  ‘If madness is,’ pursued Tatang Petring, ‘why not wounds? It doesn’t matter if it’s your spirit that’s wounded or your leg. Perhaps everything’s connected with the moon in some way. Meanwhile, how is he?’ He began unwrapping the strip of old T-shirt which this week was tied about Anding’s leg. It had part of a legend printed on it in faded blue letters advertising a paint company. Underneath lay an amorphous lump of pus and poultice, and beneath that Anding’s old friend.

  ‘He’s going down a bit for food,’ the doctor said at length after close examination. ‘He’s growing now so he needs more nourishment.’

  ‘Ah.’ To study the outside of his leg Anding craned down and bobbed his knee inwards at the same time, a movement which in the early days had felt awkward and even slightly painful when prolonged but which now had become an entirely natural posture like squatting or bowing or kneeling or any of the other contortions human beings ritually adopt from place to pla
ce; there was indeed an element of obeisance in his gesture. ‘And then?’

  ‘Well, what do you do when you eat a lot?’

  ‘Fart, usually. Sleep?’

  ‘You shit a lot. Eat a lot, shit a lot; it’s natural. So he’s going to shit a lot of this greenish stuff. That’s when the worms come along to clear it away.’

  ‘That’s the bit Lerma says is smelly.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Tatang Petring. ‘Did you ever have shit that wasn’t? Though wound-shit doesn’t smell quite the same as ours.’

  ‘By all accounts it’s a lot worse.’

  ‘Depends on your point of view. Think how bad your own shit might smell to him.’

  They both looked at the wound.

  ‘I hadn’t thought of that, certainly,’ said Anding. Then he asked: ‘So what are you – or we – actually doing?’

  ‘You mean to the wound?’

  ‘Exactly. If he’s living his own life in his own time, why are we treating him at all? Why all these leaves and herbs and things?’

  Tatang Petring looked up at him in surprise. ‘Isn’t that obvious? I’d have thought that was obvious, myself.’

  ‘Not completely,’ said Anding humbly.

  ‘When you have guests in your house … in the old days when you used to have people who stayed overnight, did you ignore them and just leave them to fend for themselves?’

  Anding studied the palms of his hands very closely. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I see now.’

  ‘Well, just as when friends stay we can never be sure we’re giving them exactly what they want most at any moment because there are codes of politeness for guests as well as for hosts, nor can I be quite certain that I’m making him’ – he indicated the wound – ‘as comfortable as I can. We can only try. I sometimes worry about the flies, though.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Occasionally my dressings make it quite difficult for them to reach the wound. Suppose, now, that those flies are his house-guests.’

  ‘Goodness…. We’re driving away his friends just as Lerma says I’m driving away ours.’

  ‘I’m not saying we are. I’m just saying we might be. Medicine’s extremely difficult; there’s so much we don’t know yet.’

  For a long time afterwards Anding had brooded about this conversation and had come to a barely identifiable conclusion that somewhere, in a way which he did not at all understand, there was definitely a suggestion of lightness about it all. Once you had grasped the essential correctness of things the only course which remained was learning how to live with them as they were. Viewpoints. The more viewpoints you saw things from the more sense they made … well, the less they seemed open to the slightest change.

  So now when Lerma was complaining about his friend’s smell he was patient. Quite truthfully he did not himself notice it, and when from under the edge of leaf or bandage a maggot would rumple itself aimlessly away across the brown bumpy expanse of his calf Anding would tuck it back underneath with an offhand solicitude, an abstracted courteousness which quite precisely was unable to notice the reaction of wives, houseguests, casual passers-by. Dogs, small children and Tatang Petring were, Anding did comprehend, about the only creatures yet able to see how interesting and proper the notion of a body-guest was.

  ‘Let them wait,’ he said of the others to himself while going to and fro about his business, chopping firewood here, feeding the pigs there and walking up the track to chat with Tatang Petring daily. ‘Sooner or later somebody will call on them.’ And spotting the piercing yellow of an oriole looping up to its nest in the crown of a coconut-tree felt a blaze of happiness which made him chuckle at a point a few inches above the head of a passing child.

  Nard for the Bard

  Lost in the immense gloom of a great forest was a small clearing where the sun might break in to bring extraordinary treasures to light. Feathery tufts of palm made moiré patterns behind each other and against the blue of the sky; the delicate arms of porphyryngias were raised to bestow a benign shade upon the humbler glyptopod. On every side vines restrained the frothing tonnage of vegetable life which otherwise seemed likely to break loose and balloon skyward, lifting with it the rest of the forest from the face of the earth. Amongst this foliage glowed flowers and fruit of every kind: bells and cups, cynths and calices, sprays and single blooms like solitary gongs mingled with pricklefruit, quinsicums and the scarlet orbs of the tart tabitabi.

  To one side of this clearing stood a hut made of fronds like a woven basket set upon timber legs. And in this hut, all by himself, lived the Poet. Many years ago he had come from a distant country, a cold grey place inhabited by a cold grey people little moved by Art but much interested in Commerce. Hither had he come, a wanderer, a solitary in search of he knew not what except that it would thaw the chill from mind and marrow. For, truth to tell, his first book of poems, Nard for the King, had not been well received in his native land.

  Then he had curled his beard and put upon himself traveller’s raiment. ‘For,’ he reasoned, ‘while it is little to me that I am unappreciated, it is everything to my Soul that it should be able to feed on beautiful things. Here there is only ugliness and meanness since the cold grey North has crept into these people’s hearts and locked them in ice.’

  For a while he trudged the world, and the world rewarded him with wonders and delight. In love and gratitude he spoke his verse in dusty squares and village lanes; in bazaars he raised his voice among gold-capped minarets, and the desert wastes heard his songs. At length, meagred by hunger and worn out with travel, he wandered into a library where, having first ascertained that it held no copy of his poems, he found a map of the country he was in. It was rather old and still had the word ‘Unexplored’ printed across many a region of the interior.

  ‘That’, mused the Poet, ‘is where I must go. I have lived too long among the known. A hundred cultures have I seen’ (this was, of course, poetic licence) ‘and sundry domestications of the earth. And always where the hand of man sets its imprint a strangeness vanishes, a uniqueness is lost, an otherness is made the deadly same.’

  So saying he drew a line across the map with decisiveness and was engaged by the Librarian in a short conversation before making his way to the market-place to find bearers to carry his few necessities. Then he recurled his beard, gathered his tatters about him and taking up his leather pouch of manuscripts set off on his last journey.

  On the tribulations which beset him there is no need to dwell. At the end of the time it took to write four sonnets and an epithalamium he pushed his way through a clump of stinging millefoils and limped into the clearing. And in that instant he recognised his home.

  *

  Time passed, and the Poet moved through intensities of vision. At dawn he would rise to watch the night’s distillates tremble their dewdrops along the edges of leaves as the first rays of the sun pierced the upper branches. Nearby there ran a shallow stream whose laterite bed was home to sly brown elvers and translucent prawns which a quick eye and a defter hand might net. Across this each dawn shimmered the first gauzy dragonflies like scattered dream-residues, which would vanish as the heat hardened into broad day. At noon he ate a simple meal of fruit and rinsed his mouth in the crystal runnel before retiring to his hut, doubtless to write. At dusk a light breeze would spring up and lemon-censers spill their fragrance on the air which with the aromatic popping of peppernut husks would bring the Poet forth, stretching the cramps of creativity and yawning in the cool of the evening.

  And thus in simple splendour he passed his days. Sometimes he was a little lonely. ‘But’, he told himself, ‘I have my Art, and all Art demands sacrifice. If I have renounced companionship, I still live in a world of Beauty and Love,’ since the love he lavished on his poems was indeed that of a parent for its child. Nevertheless, at dusk sometimes a young and slender-limbed creature – as it were some shy and gentle faun – might be glimpsed flitting from the undergrowth to the rude hut wherein the Poet glowed and burned and gav
e off sparks in his solitude.

  Now, there was a Headman whose village lay some way off in the forest and in whose bailiwick the Poet was living. Sometimes when the sun was high and smothered the clearing with its heat this man would trudge through, now carrying a great bundle of wood on his head, now with merely a bow and a knife but with his body streaked with sweat and the bright blood drawn by cruel whipthorn. Often the Poet would be so entranced by his Art that, lost in inward vision beneath the emerald tent of a clump of sagathy plantains, his eyes were blind to the Headman’s weary progress past his hut. But at another time he would spring up and bid the Headman rest awhile.

  ‘I fear,’ he would apologise on such occasions, ‘that I have little enough to offer your body by way of refreshment, so simply do I live. But your mind – ah! that I can refresh. I have just this moment made the most exquisite ballad, and there should be a fragment of ode lying around somewhere from last night.’