After she has had enough of the sun, she rises and he walks with her back to the English Quarters. She says:
—Tell me, Marco, are there French and Italian and African Quarters as well?
He finds this amusing.
—It is for all Europe, he tells her. It is only called the English Quarters. The English built it.
—Do you know who else is staying there now?
—Disraeli, he says.
She stops and turns to look at him, shading her eyes.
—Now?
—Last year.
They walk on. She says:
—I wondered who is staying there now.
—I will find out for you, he says.
At the Quarters, she thanks him, and then returns to her room. It is a small square place with windows on three sides. Each window looks out on something different: one gives her the wide emerald shoreline, fading to blue sea, and the brown rumor of Tenerife in the distance; another gives her the white sides of the buildings of Las Palmas, with blue angles of shade and bright gold shafts of sunlight and other windows, mostly curtained; and finally there is the view of wild palms and clear blue sky, rising landscape, with a scattering of other houses, and the far mountains. She spends time standing in each window, breathing the air, filling her lungs with it and tasting it on her tongue. There’s an ache in her lower back, but she pays no attention to it at all.
She eats alone, in the privacy of her room—shellfish and fresh bread, and fruit. It is all luscious. She watches the sun set on the town, and when it’s full dark and the bustle and noise has died down, she lets herself out and descends to the street. No one stops her, or speaks to her; the desk in the foyer is unattended. She walks back down to the beach, which is deserted, looking like the auroral beach of the world—Adam’s beach, and Eve’s. She walks along it, watching the waves crashing in, bigger than they were in the day, some of them reaching a height of six or seven feet. There’s a brilliant moon, and a soft sea breeze.
Later, in the room, she sleeps like an infant, dreaming of waters.
7
IN THE MORNING, Marco waits for her, and she allows him to guide her down to the first floor, and the entrance to the central dining room.
—I have found out for you, he says, proudly. There is another English staying here. A gentleman recuperating from fever.
—Oh? I’m not interested in procuring any fevers, Marco.
—The fever is gone.
The dining room is large, with high ceilings and tall open windows. It affords a lovely view of the tan buildings of the town, and the sea. Sitting in one of the heavy, padded chairs on the street side of the room, smoking a small black cigar, is an emaciated man with very brown, pocked skin, heavy-lidded eyes, and bony, hollow cheeks. He nods at her and stands, with some difficulty.
—That is the gentleman, Marco says to her.
—Would you care to join me? the man says. He’s holding a pewter mug, and he takes a swig of it as she approaches.
Mary offers her hand as a man would. This is a forwardness he’s evidently not used to, though he quickly recovers himself, gives her hand a manly squeeze, and settles himself again. He tells her his name: Batty. She tells him hers, using only the surname, as he has done. She sits across from him, and Marco quietly removes himself. Batty watches him go without much interest; it is movement, and his tired eyes follow. After Marco is gone, Batty turns those eyes on Mary. He looks older than he is. Mary guesses him to be in his late forties.
—Kingsley, he says. Any relation to the author of Water Babies?
Surprised, she smiles.
—My uncle.
He nods, and then seems to wander off in his mind, smoking the black cigar, which is very strong-smelling, and reminds her of the ones her father brought straight from the Americas. But these, he tells her, are from England; he sends for them there. He’s never been to the Americas. It’s a pleasant thing to inhale the fragrance of the tobacco here, in the open-aired room. There are light muslin curtains bordering the windows, and they move with the slightest current of air from the beach. It’s cool, and rather quiet for this hour of the morning. Mary mentions this, and wonders what the custom of the country is regarding the start of the day.
—Fishermen leave early, he says. I’ve noticed that. He takes another drink from the mug, and swallows with obvious satisfaction. She sees that the sclera of his eyes is yellowish, but then she doesn’t want to look him directly in the eye.
—I would gladly provide you with something cool to drink, he says.
—What are you drinking?
—Oh, this. It’s a concoction made of rum and banana juice. Would you like a drop?
She demurs.
After another long silence, he sits forward and regards her.
—You don’t seem like the others who come down here from, shall we say, the home office.
—’ow long since you’ve been there? Mary asks him.
He turns the cigar slowly in his fingers, looking at the ash end of it. The sides of his head, near the temples, are skin on bone. A nerve pulses there.
—Ten years, he says. I’ve been spending my time in the bush. In West Africa. Do you know where Cameroon is?
She nods.
He sits back again, smoking:
—Something bit me. I don’t even know what it was. A little sting on the side of my neck. And I almost died of it. Blisters, and fever, and delirium, and it all came on by little increments, chronically, you might say. And there was a touch of the coastal fever, of course.
—What were you doing in West Africa? she asks him.
He smiles cryptically.
—I was trading. I take a boat up the Gabon River, and stop along the way. We trade for exotic oils, fabrics, all sorts of goods that we bring back and sell on the open market. They take tobacco and sugar from us, and whatever else delights them.
She nods, and waits for him to continue.
—Well, it isn’t a proper subject for talk, he says, low.
—On the contrary, she tells him.
—I’ll wager you thought I might be a missionary.
—No, she says.
The smile widens.
—Well, and are you? he asks.
She shakes her head.
—I’m ’ere to take the air, she says. After years of being inside.
—You don’t strike me as a hothouse flower.
Now she smiles.
—Tell me, what does a trader do in West Africa, besides trade?
—Not much else. We travel inland, and we do business with the bush tribes. They don’t like missionaries, these tribesmen. They don’t especially like any Europeans. And so one must be very careful and attentive. The Europeans have brought them servitude and kidnapping and disease and murder, and the missionaries have brought them religions they do not at all need or understand. Some bushmen will kill a European on sight.
—You’ve survived.
He nods, and the smoke forms a blue wreath around his head.
—Sometimes it has been a very doubtful matter. I’ve been fortunate. One keeps fairly close to the coastlines.
—Are you going back to England?
He nods.
—For a time, yes. But I’ll never go back for long. I’ve got Africa in my blood now, missy.
He finishes the mug, and smacks his lips. Then he rises and starts to the other side of the room.
—More of this, he says to the man standing there. I’ll bless you when I get to the gates of paradise.
8
THAT AFTERNOON, a sandstorm comes from the sea. Batty tells her it has been blown here all the way from Africa—the great Sahara Desert. The sky turns a tawny color at the horizon. The color rises, the water itself changes hue, from rich blue-green to light brown. In close, toward shore, it turns the color of a hawk’s wing, with the same dappled places, spots of lighter color, where the waves crest. But even the foam at the top of the waves begins to darken with it. The air is
one wall of dust. People move through the streets of Las Palmas with rags across their faces, showing only the smallest slit for their eyes, in front of which they keep one hand, as if to block out bright light. Mary sees fear in their movements and in what she can make out of the expressions on their faces, and yet she feels only a kind of unselfconscious sense of wanting to observe everything without the prejudice of fear. It is not an affectation; she’s only partially aware of it as a difference from how everyone else is undergoing the experience.
The sand blows down the little changing booths along the beach, and sends tiles flying from the roofs of the town. There is the terrible roar of the wind, punctuated by the sound of shattering glass, and cracking wood. Trees are bent over nearly to the ground, and several of them break, making an awful rending sound. At the height of the storm, no one at all is stirring. Mary looks across the square in front of the English Quarters, to the mosque there, and she sees women with children huddled against the white wall while the wind covers them with the tawny-colored sand, which is sifting over them so quickly that the women keep rising to shake it off, their backs to the wind.
Batty watches it all with her, drinking quinine water, lowering the rag from his face to do it, and trying not to cough. He has slept off the effects of the morning’s excess, he tells her, and is now attempting to balance the salts in his blood. He believes everything about one’s health has to do with the salts in the blood, and he likes to keep salt with him, so he can replenish himself. When he’s recovering from the alcohol, he drinks quinine and licks salt from the palm of his own hand.
—This is not the proper subject for talk, he says. Forgive me.
—That’s the second time you’ve said that. I’m not in the least offended, says Mary.
He bows, and takes another pull of the quinine.
—You flatter me, Miss Kingsley. I know I’m a rough, uncouth man.
—I’ve not found you so, Mary says.
—Well, of course. I was talking of polite behavior.
—Yes, Mary says. I understood what you meant. I’m not in possession of much in that vein, either.
Now, he seems at a loss. He reaches into the pocket of his khakis and pulls out a small leather pouch. The bottom of it is stained, and when he opens it she smells the fresh fragrance of drying tobacco.
—You’ll get sand in it, she says, meaning it lightheartedly, like a joke. A gentle chiding of him, as she used to chide her father.
He closes it quickly after taking some of the tobacco and putting it in his mouth.
—It relieves the pain of a bad tooth, he says.
She watches him chew it, a big bulge in his gums.
—You know it came from the Americas, she tells him over the sound of the storm.
He nods, then spits appallingly out on the windblown walk. He seems ashamed, turning away from her.
She goes on watching the storm, the sweeping curtain of brown dust, and the people struggling in it. The sand gets in everywhere, collects on the windowsills and along the baseboards of the foyer and the dining room. It gathers in the folds of their clothes and in their hair, and even, Mary notices with a shock of fascination, under their fingernails.
She breathes into the moistened cloth of a scarf, and Batty tries to say something to her through his own tobacco-stained mask. She can’t make it out. He holds out his hand, and in it there is a small island of collected sand, scintillate, like salt, only of the purest tan shade. She looks at it and then at his face. He pulls the rag down and says, smiling, out of the blackness of what he has been chewing:
—Yesterday, no doubt, this bit was slapped from the back of a camel in the bloody Sahara. Think of it.
She lowers her own mask so that he can see her pleasure at the thought.
—I am thinking of it, she says to him, nearly shouting.
The storm goes on for more than two hours, and there is a lot of destruction of trees and some buildings, but miraculously no one is killed or injured. Batty comes back from an excursion into the city with this news. He’s drunk, and he has a friend, another trader, with him, also drunk. They both smell of the tobacco and the rum, and they stand before her, wavering, arm in arm, boys at play, except that she knows they have been in bad country together and seen things. They are not boys, but hardened men, in many ways damaged men. Batty introduces his friend, using only the surname: he is a Russian, Dolokov, a man who speaks perfect English, Batty tells her, and whose general ability with spoken languages, when sober, makes him very valuable to everyone: he knows dozens of dialects—Indian, African, and Asian. He can pick up a language the way some women can pick up the playing of a clavichord, and Batty knew such a woman when he lived in Suffolk, years ago. Batty goes on talking about this woman who could play the clavichord merely from having seen it played, and Dolokov watches him drunkenly, proudly, as if he is still the subject of the talk. He stands very tall and sticks his chest out. He can barely stand.
—Anyhow, no one was hurt by the storm, Batty says. These kinds of storms are rare here, but not so rare that they don’t know what to do when they come.
—And we are now standing on African soil, Mary says.
He smiles, showing his bad teeth.
—That we are, Miss Kingsley. He sweeps with his foot the loose sand that has collected on the floor. His footsteps make a whisper in it. He walks unsteadily with his friend to the entrance of the room and turns to gaze at her.
—Tomorrow, she says, I’m anticipating that you’ll enlighten me.
He says, smiling:
—As to what?
Mary smiles back.
—Trade, and Cameroon.
9
SHE WALKS OUT alone at night, and during the days, if she is not accompanied by Marco, she’s generally with Batty and Dolokov. Twice they take a small boat with others, a trading vessel, across to the African coast. Batty knows the trading villages there from his first journeys away from England. The boat carries candles, saltpeter, iron bedsteads to the coast, and returns with monkeys, parrots, palm oil, snakes, canary birds, sheep, gold dust, ivory. There are also Africans on the journey back, men and women from different tribes. On the last trip, Mary goes aboard after the boat is weighted down with its cargo, and leaving Batty and Dolokov on deck, goes down to her cabin. She opens the small door, fatigued and wanting sleep, and finds that the cabin is occupied. Looking into the dimness, she sees four shapes, two on the small bunk, and two more, in blankets, on the floor.
—Excuse me, she says.
Silence. She knocks on the door, and is greeted with more silence. She bangs the door closed, opens it again, and waits. No stirring at all. She breathes the odor of alcohol, and of something else, sickness, she believes, a heavy, oversweet something that snatches at her breathing passages. They are drunk. Passed out from drink.
She makes her way topside, looking for the steward, who she finds retching over the gunwale into the water, in the throws of delirium tremens. He imagines there are insects crawling on him, and when she touches his shoulder he screams, flailing; she barely escapes being struck by him. Batty and Dolokov are nowhere to be seen. She walks through the several Africans standing on deck, and at length is able to distinguish the purser, a rail-thin gray man with a scraggly beard and a look of perpetual annoyance.
—Yes, he says. I know about the gentlemen in your cabin. Frightfully sorry about it. They’re dead, you know.
Mary stares at him. Evidently he appreciates the shock value of what he’s said.
—Yes, he goes on. It’s quite usual. They all died within the last ten days.
—What killed them? Mary asks.
—Fever, I believe. One of them was either mauled to death or something got at him after his decease. Quite mangled on one side.
She keeps her composure, understanding that he wishes to upset her. He’s one of those men who pretend an interest in the welfare of ladies while secretly enjoying the pains he might cause them. He has badly misread her, and she wants
him to know it without having to announce it to him. So she gives him an impassive expression, as if nothing could be more familiar to her than a corpse monstrously half-eaten by a marauder, and says:
—I would like to know what I’m to do for a cabin.
—We’ll be in Gran Canaria soon enough, miss. You don’t want them lying about here on the deck, do you?
—Why couldn’t you ’ave stored them in your cabin, then. Since you are the one that brought them on board.
He waits a moment, regarding her, then turns and orders one of the sailors to look sharp, tying up a line.
Mary remains on deck, among the half-naked members of tribes whose names she long ago memorized, finding ways to observe them without intruding, pretending an interest in the receding horizon line, the northwest coast of Africa.
10
BATTY AND DOLOKOV are often drunk. They smell of alcohol, and they like to tell stories about the life, as they call it. Batty, it turns out, knows little of the sciences, and less of history, or, for that matter, geography. He has only the roughest idea, for instance, where the Great Plains of the United States are, or where certain Asian countries fall on the map. He knows the coast of Africa, specifically the west coast. He calls himself a coaster. He numbers himself, with Dolokov, among a group of men, traders, all of them familiar with every inch of ground along that coastline—a stretch that in most respects, they tell Mary, is the worst and most dangerous, not to say uninhabitable, area of the world.
They talk of the various illnesses—brought on by nothing anyone can pinpoint; illnesses from the water or the food or the fetid air, or from attacks by insects—and they talk about the many species of killer, from lions, leopards, wild dogs, and boars to crocodiles, to little multicolored snakes whose bite can carry a person off in a matter of minutes. There are so many things in Africa that can snuff out a life, including hostile tribesmen, not to mention brigands and pirates and bandits. The whole of West Africa is badly administered by the European countries—it is the French who have the Congo, and whose presence there is most prevalent. But there are also the Dutch, who seem to want to make a religious colony wherever they go, the Germans, who are at least organized, the Spanish, who are totally inept, in their view, and the English, who are the worst of all.
Hello to the Cannibals Page 40
