Hello to the Cannibals

by Richard Bausch

  Dolokov tells her in what is after all not perfect English—it is heavily Slavic sounding, and often idiomatically rather eccentric—about a man he knew whose talent involved sword swallowing. He had been to America and done it in traveling shows, and a few miles up the Congo he did it for some bushmen of indeterminate origin, tribesmen in wild paint, looking very excited and rather frightened, too—never a good combination among the native populations. The man swallowed the sword, and quickly three of the tribesmen rushed forward to thrust their spears where the sword had gone. They accomplished this after a fashion, in spite of the terrible choking sound the man made. They were quite surprised that he couldn’t do the magic with their spears, and very crestfallen when, by dying, he went past their ability to question him about it.

  —We almost died, Batty says. Because we were with him and could do nothing to draw him out of the state he’d gotten to with two spears and a sword stuck down his gullet. We buried him in the sand right at the edge of the ocean, near the entrance of the Gabon River.

  Dolokov grows sullen and uncommunicative, drinking whiskey now, and recalling his friend the sword swallower. He passes out, and Batty hauls him to his room and puts him to bed, then returns, staggering with what he has had to drink. He lights a cigar and sits down, staring out at the moon over the ocean.

  —Dolokov will never go back.

  Mary says:

  —I’m sorry about his friend.

  —Oh, he was my friend, too. Wonderful card player. And he told good stories. Nothing like a good storyteller in the bush. Dolokov used to be very good, but then he got gloomy.

  —He seems a good man.

  —The best, Batty says. Once, we were on the river and a hippo rose. They’re not meat eaters, hippos, but very ill-tempered, you know. Worse than a water buffalo. They’ll kill a man out of sheer animal rage, merely for crossing their path. This hippo would’ve taken a hunk of my leg if it hadn’t been for Dolokov. He stuck a five-pound box of ammunition in its mouth, and it withdrew, coughing. For all I know the beast swallowed the thing, a walking, water-floating explosion waiting to happen.

  The talk is very entertaining, and she says things to make him tell her more. She wants to hear everything he knows, everything he’s learned. But now he seems reluctant to go on, since to him it is mere complaining.

  One afternoon, she slips out of the Quarters and evades Marco, walking down to the harbor in the blazing sun, through a crowd of tourists from America. At the harbor, she walks up to a big wooden stall and rents a canoe. The man in charge is black, enormous, wearing European clothes, including trousers that look like they could be used for a sail. His legs are so wide that he has to walk by what appears to be a steady, waddling, rearrangement of himself. He hands her the paddle and labors to the water’s edge, holding the canoe under one arm as if it is nothing more than a parcel out of a mailbox.

  —How long? he says in an amazing high tenor voice, almost like a boy’s. He speaks each word with an intake of breath. He’s winded.

  There is the added amazement that he speaks English. She stares straight back into his muddy brown eyes and says:

  —I don’t know ’ow long.

  —You’re not dressed for it.

  He hands her the paddle and struggles back up the beach. She climbs in and makes her way out into the shallow swells. The heat is daunting, and the canoe is difficult to manage at first. For a long while she has trouble keeping a steady course. But the repetition teaches her, and soon she’s making good headway, paddling from first one side and then the other. The motion is so clocklike that she begins gaining speed. Below her the water’s clear; she can see all the way to the bottom. At one point, she finds herself being kept pace with by a large stingray, moving like a live cape along the perfect whiteness of the sandy bottom. She paddles over to Lanzerote, then hauls the canoe ashore, dragging the weight of the drenched clothes she’s wearing, the dark dress, and the several undergarments. She stands on the hot sand and wrings the hem of the dress, gathering it about her knees. The beach is deserted. She wanders toward a column of smoke in the distance, picking up specimens of sea and plant life as she goes. Perhaps a thousand yards up the beach, she finds a salt pan, and factory. She stands gazing at it for some time, then turns, deciding that she will seek no human company on this expedition.

  Heading back, she sees only the uneven spars of sand going out into the pristine water, with its million shimmering facets and its sparkle.

  In spite of every ugliness she has experienced, she can only think, How beautiful the world is.

  Two days later, she makes another journey, this time over to the island of Gomera, to look at its volcano. It is another brilliant, cloudless, blazing-hot day. The saltwater in her clothes as she hauls the canoe onto the sand makes her want to sink down in it up to her shoulders. There is no one on this beach, either, and no column of smoke, and so she does just that. She lets the dress billow around her, still holding on to the canoe. The water is cold, and as refreshing as anything she has ever experienced. She stays in it for almost an hour, and then pulls the canoe onto the sand, and starts up the slope of the volcano. There are palm trees at the base of the slope, and barbed plants, and hip-high blades of yellow grass. And then this all gives way to bare lava, black as pitch. By the time she has made the crater, the sun has dried her clothes and she has wet them from the inside out, with her sweat. There are large salt stains on her cuffs and under her arms, and around the whole circumference of the hem of her dress. She looks into the crater, observing the many openings in the black rock from which little feathers of smoke issue forth. Perhaps an hour passes while she gazes into it, and moves slowly around the circumference of it. Finally she turns to gaze out at the sea, the lowering sun, and realizes, with a start, that she has stayed too long. There isn’t even enough time to get back down to the beach before the sun sets. She has a moment of cold panic.

  But it passes.

  She strides back down to the beach in the falling dark, and after securing the canoe—hauling it still farther up onto the beach to account for the tide—she retreats into the darkness of the palms and finds a place under a ledge of stone, out of the bright moon that is rising, and protected from rain, if it rains. She makes herself as comfortable as possible by taking off her outer garment and folding it, for a damp pillow. She thinks about insects for a few moments, and snakes, other predators. But in fact nothing can penetrate the sleepiness she feels after the work of this day: another surprise; she expected to be frightened, to lie awake keeping a watch.

  She wakes in the dawn, hurting on one side, and with a headache, but feeling otherwise rested and fresh. She has had the forethought to pack another day’s dress, so she changes, stuffs the dirty clothes into her reticule, and makes her way back to the canoe. She goes back to Las Palmas, and feels strong enough to explore a little beyond the city, to the south. She takes a winding path, passing in and out of shade, reveling in the little breezes, until she reaches the border of one of the banana plantations. There are already people working in the distance, gleaming with sweat. They sing a chant, unbelievably close harmony, a marbling of voices that thrills her not only for its rich tones but for the exotic fact of it, so early in this fresh morning on earth.

  She returns to the Quarters, and here is Marco, standing so tall in the open doorway, with his disapproval of her, like a weight on his shoulders.

  —Good morning, she says.

  —It is not good to go about unaccompanied.

  —I will take it into consideration, she tells him.

  For a moment, he doesn’t move aside. She walks up close, and is ready to bump him if that is what it takes. But then Batty and Dolokov come down the street, singing, arm in arm. They falter on the steps, and then, supporting one another, with a lurching movement, are standing next to her.

  —Welcome back, says Batty. Where’ve you been?

  —I spent the night on Gomera. I slept under a rock.

  Saying this fil
ls her with an unexpected elation, and she sees that this is apparent to Batty. He smiles, and then he winks.

  —I see you returned without being eaten by sharks.

  —That is not good to sleep outside in the tropics, says Dolokov. As God is judge.

  Batty turns to Marco and, wavering a little, smiling, he waves one hand at him and says:

  —Don’t stand there like a starchy old schoolmaster, Marco. I’ve a terrible thirst this morning. Dolokov and I have a terrible thirst this morning.

  Marco turns and strides back into the recesses of the lobby.

  Batty, supporting Dolokov entirely, now—Dolokov having passed out on his arm—tips an imaginary hat at Mary and says:

  —Woman, where are they that accuse you? Go and sin no more.

  11

  ON ONE OF HER LAST evenings in the Canaries, a rainstorm comes in off the ocean, and she waits with Batty in the entrance of the cathedral for it to slacken. They came to look at the architecture of the building, and some of the statuary inside, Spanish paintings and icons, looking vaguely Byzantine. Dolokov is fighting a slight fever again, lying on his back and drinking quinine back at the Quarters.

  They talk about Batty’s experiences on the African rivers: he tells her that he saw a man taken by a crocodile, once, pulled out of a boat and dragged to the bottom of the river. The croc hauled this unfortunate trader and the boat for several hundred feet in the current of the river before the man’s grip was broken, and it looked for a minute as if they were wrestling with the boat, trying to keep the boat from going under. There was something horribly human-looking about the croc’s movements. It was a young one, not much larger than the man, who kept cursing it and calling it names. It truly seemed that the man was scolding the animal, yelling at it as you would a child, with exasperation and anger rather than the terror he must have felt. The croc finally pried him loose of the boat and took him to the bottom.

  The whole thing happened in full view of a dozen Ajimba tribesmen, four other coasters, and Dolokov and Batty, all of whom were so dumbstruck by the suddenness of the attack that they made no sound at all, so that the man’s struggling and shouting, his curses and his gasps for breath—and, at the very end, his gurgling utterance of the Hail Mary in Dutch—carried to them. None of them who saw it will ever forget it, or stop dreaming about it. When Batty was in the worst part of his fever, lying in a tent under mosquito netting on the beach at Cameroon, he imagined that the same croc had come from the water and was pushing inside the tent, its snout rooting under the ends of his feet. He screamed for more than an hour, and the image wouldn’t leave him, even waking, and with the fever breaking. The Ajimbas brought a stout matronly German woman with medical training to him from one of the smaller missionary settlements inland, and she required that he drink goat’s milk, which had made him sicker. But the Ajimbas took care of him, and watched over him in his madness. They tolerated it, even as they supposed it came from something in the trees, or from the currents of air blowing in from the top of the mountain, with its cap of snow, like a shroud. He spent a long time staring at the white peak of the mountain and several times he dreamed that he had gone there, wandered there on the air, a perfectly reasonable proposition in his delirium. He lost track of the German woman, who had rattled at him in the foreign tongue, only a fraction of which he understood.

  —The only people I trust down there are the other traders, Batty tells Mary. The traders, and some of the tribesmen we trade with. I trust them, too. There’s more cutthroat in an English schoolboy than in the whole continent of Africa, if you ask me. They treat everyone with honor and respect; they listen well, they learn quickly; but because they don’t like the knowledge, or find it very useful for themselves, the Europeans think them inferior, or incapable. Half the time I do not know what an African is thinking, Miss Kingsley, but I almost always know that he is not deviating, if you know what I mean. I always know that he is not dissembling. He keeps a great deal of himself in reserve, but he does not dissemble. He believes in witchcraft and in a world animated by souls and spirits, and there is no time for dissembling, or for sophism, either. His life is brutal and short. His ways to us seem quite cruel—quite remorselessly savage, in fact. But then I don’t imagine we look very gentle to him, with our guns that kill from a distance and our appetite for killing. The African has no time for refining his taste in ways of killing, or in music, and the arts, if you understand what I mean, and for this I think he pays a heavy price with the Europeans. But he is honorable and he expects nothing but the same from you.

  —I should like to get to know them, Mary says.

  Batty looks down at his knees, one of which has begun to ache and bother him. He’s been rubbing it slow, grimacing now and again as his thumb passes over the tender place. It strikes Mary that he has taken her remark as a politeness of conversation, so she repeats it.

  —Yes, he says. I heard you.

  —But I don’t think you quite understood me, she tells him.

  —I’ve spoken generally, he says. I shouldn’t have. There are several hundred cultures down there, you see. I don’t think it serves to lump them together as I have just done. I apologize for it. I should have said that the Africans I know, from the few cultures I’ve been exposed to, are often as I described them. Because, you see, the unfortunate aspect of our situation there, Miss Kingsley, is our appalling lack of knowledge about them, any group of them and any individual from those groups. Most of the time, we haven’t even taken the trouble of listening.

  —I would like to change that, Mary says.

  Once more, he appears to take this as a politeness born out of her sociability.

  —That’s quite admirable, he tells her.

  —You’re thinking of going back, she says.

  He nods.

  —Will you stay in touch with me?

  He makes a gesture of futility.

  —I have no means, Miss Kingsley. I’m ill.

  —’ow do you think I mean this? she asks.

  Now he seems puzzled.

  —Why, I don’t know.

  —I would like to know more about the West Africans.

  He nods again, and smiles.

  —You are an interesting change from every other Englishwoman I have ever met, here or elsewhere, I’ll say that much.

  —I mean to know more about everything you’ve told me, she tells him.

  —Perhaps you’ll write a book, he says. Like Mr. Burton.

  —Yes, she says. Quite.

  He seems faintly troubled.

  —I hope I haven’t said something to offend?

  —No, she tells him. You worry overmuch about that.

  —You’re a bit of a mystery to me, Kingsley. I wonder if this is something you’ve set about with some design.

  —Being mysterious? No. I’m very plain, Mr. Batty, and my requirements are simple and direct. I’ve never possessed the ability to be otherwise.

  He nods, almost approvingly. It’s only his natural reserve that mutes his expression. She understands this without voicing it to herself.

  —Shall we go back to the Quarters? he asks.

  —You go on, she tells him. I believe I’ll remain ’ere for a while.

  —I’ll wait for you, if you like.

  She knows this is a formality, and decides not to cause him any discomfort; the habits formed while growing up in her house will not permit it. She walks back to the English Quarters with him, through the slow drizzle of the remainder of the storm.

  At the entrance to the Quarters, he takes hold of her with surprising roughness, and kisses her on the mouth. His breath is heavy with the odor of the cigars, which she doesn’t mind, but the contact of his body against hers, the solid, bone and stubbled-flesh otherness of it, disturbs her, and she puts the heels of her palms against his shoulders, pushing him away. He lets go and steps back, and seems immediately contrite and chagrined, shuffling before her like a little boy caught out of school.

  —I t
hink you’re a lovely young woman, Miss Kingsley, he says. Forgive me.

  She feels faintly ill, and her heart is pounding. She forces a smile and says:

  —You’ve paid me a great compliment.

  He says nothing, stands there, sheepish. It’s almost funny. She has an abrupt urge to laugh, and has to fight it back.

  —At least I think you ’ave, she says.

  He gives her a strange analytic look, as though he’s trying to decide the next plan of action—a stratagem to gain something from her that she realizes, with a little pang at her heart, is out of her power to give. She likes him, though; she’s quite fond of him.

  —You are, he says. You are. A beautiful young woman.

  —I can’t speak of these things now.

  —I’ve never been a gentleman, you know. I don’t know what the social graces call for. I know that you have lovely skin and that I’d like to touch it. I wanted to walk over and touch you the first instant I saw you, when that silly bugger brought you to me.

  He stops himself, and then seems to draw inward, as if he has received a blow to his chest.

  —Forgive that, he says.

  She understands that his talk is what he will do instead of anything she might have to resist. He will indeed behave like a gentleman. She reaches over and touches his arm and says:

  —Thank you.

  —You won’t take a lover on your southern journey, he says.

  It is almost a question.

  —I came ’ere to get away from love, she hears herself say.

  At first the words seem merely something to tell him in order to establish once more the boundaries between them. But then it strikes her that this is a literal statement of the truth: her journey has been a kind of defection. He looks so hangdog, standing here before her. She says: