Hello to the Cannibals

by Richard Bausch

  —It’s only been in these last few weeks that I’ve felt I could draw in enough air to breathe.

  —I hope I haven’t ruined the friendliness between us, he says.

  —Nothing of the kind, she tells him.

  He shifts slightly, looking at her, and then taking his eyes away.

  —I take it as a kindness, she tells him. And I don’t even know your proper name.

  —James Henley, he tells her. I suppose I must satisfy myself with being your friend.

  She smiles. This doesn’t seem to require an answer. They enter the Quarters, and she makes her way to the stairs and up to the corridor and the gas-lit space of the entrance of her room, where Marco sits dozing.

  —Marco, she says.

  He stirs, is startled, and then embarrassed, wiping the sleep from his eyes.

  —Well? Mary asks.

  —I have learned that you walk out at night. A woman must not walk out at night alone in Las Palmas. It is my job.

  —I was not alone, she says.

  He bows.

  —And I don’t wish to ’ave my door guarded, thank you.

  —I thought madam was inside. I was prepared to accompany her.

  —You poor man, she tells him. You may leave.

  He bows again, with an exaggerated dignity that annoys her, though she manages not to show it.

  —Good night, madam, he says, and then moves with his slow, gliding gait along the corridor, his shadow following him on the wall.

  12

  SHE SPENDS the last few days exploring the islands with Batty, and continuing to question him about his time in Africa. They make the journey to the Salinas del Rio at Lanzerote, where she had gone alone in the canoe; and they stand at Roque Nublo, two giant rocks standing at the top of a brown mountain, with its spectacular view of other mountains, and the sea beyond. They visit the factories, and the shops, and Mary speaks to the merchants, the plantation owners and their workers. She goes with Batty over to Tenerife, and the other islands. They scale to the top of Pazo de los Nieves and gaze at the opposite mountain shrouded with low, still clouds. They visit Laplaya Veneguera, with its white cottages scattered among long-needled pines and palms, the pine trees so tall and skinny that their spiny tops look as though they have been attached by some giant hand reaching down out of the clouds.

  There are a lot of clouds now, rolling in low across the ocean. The undersides are ash-colored, but it doesn’t rain. The days are dry, and mostly windless, though an occasional sea breeze comes to them, a fugitive stirring of the tropical air, smelling of the bananas from the plantations nearby. Batty seems finally to be recovering what must have been enormous energy and strength. His friend Dolokov has been delirious for two days and is now resting, pale as death, but gaining strength again, slowly. He has his appetite back; he can sit up. This siege appears to be over. Batty tells her that there will be others, that poor Dolokov never quite comes all the way back, and that he, Batty, is prepared to suppose the poor man’s troubles have more to do with his drinking than with the malaria or the other afflictions he has brought with him out of the bush.

  —I’ve tried to tell him, Batty says. But he’s past hearing it, I suppose.

  Batty climbs the steep, volcanic hills without getting winded, though the veins stand out on his forehead. Talking about poor Dolokov has made him realize his own recovered strength. He begins to talk about not returning to England.

  —You know, Kingsley, I believed I wasn’t long for this world when I arrived here. I don’t wish to live in England, but I would prefer dying there when the time comes.

  —You’re a long way from dying, she says.

  Neither of them requires anything of the other. Mary has never been happier.

  When, after almost two months, she boards a steamer bound for Liverpool, under a gray, lowering sky, she feels an oppression that seems to take the pleasure and taste out of the days she has spent here. It feels like waste, a desolation and a ruin. She understands that this is purely a childish wish not to have the time here come to an end, not to have to return to her life on Mortimer Road, and the gray day here looks like the gray days in London, where the choking, acrid fog makes the air all but unbreathable. Batty hasn’t come to see her off; he has business in the town, preparing his own journey back to Cameroon. Marco stands on the end of the pier and waves dutifully at her. Strange, gloomy Marco, with his downcast features and his dignity, which he maintains with a kind of doggedness that threatens every moment to strip him of any semblance of it. She waves back at him, but does not smile, for she knows this is not expected and would not be welcomed.

  The captain of this steamer is a thin, blond, wiry man of rather surprisingly short stature. He’s not quite as tall as Mary. He wears mutton-chop sideburns, and, were it not for the wrinkles surrounding his steely blue eyes, one might suppose him to be not much past boyhood. His name is Edgars, and he is nearly sixty years old. His voice is gravelly and his manner rough. The men who serve under him do so smartly, without question or hesitation. They are clearly afraid of him. Mary finds this rather comical—these big, muscular sailors scurrying about in terror of their little captain.

  He invites her in his hoarse, basso voice to the stern, to watch the islands recede. She stands with several other passengers—two Dutchmen and a German, a Frenchwoman with her two daughters, and a few islanders, Muslims apparently, on their way to Spain. The cloud-capped peaks of Grand Canary dissolve all too quickly into the general grayness, and no one says anything. Mary has a momentary sense that the islands are actually disappearing. She experiences, for a few moments, that fear people feel when leaving a place they have loved—the fear that they will never see it again, that something will happen to take it away from them.

  Later, alone on the deck, pacing from side to side in the pitch and yaw of the vessel in the choppy water, she thinks of Africa. The word repeats itself in her mind, Africa, Africa. A gloriously musical and mellifluous word.

  Africa. A fine idea. She looks out at the vast expanse of ocean, at the foamy wake trailing off into the dark folds of the water, and thinks of how it would be to go there. A perfectly wonderful notion. Why not? There are aspects of her growing up that might be said to have been preparations for such a journey. Africa. It is not expected behavior, she knows; it will be frowned upon by some. There is no telling what Charley will say—not to mention the other members of the family, on both sides.

  It is a fine idea, nevertheless. Something to occupy her thoughts. Something to think about in the nights, when she lies awake, feeling the lifting and settling of the ship in its passage through the waves, hearing the moans of the German woman and her children, all of whom are seasick. She murmurs the names of places to herself, those words uttered with so much relish by Batty and Dolokov: Cameroon; Agonjo; Remboue; Sierra Leone; Ogooué; Gabon. Such a strange, blood-stirring combination of sounds.

  Finally, she drifts off to sleep, no longer feeling low or depressed, but anticipating the battles she will have to fight, one way or another, to get her way, to force the world to give her what she wants, the freedom she craves.

  13

  SOOT-TARNISHED Liverpool bakes in the sun on the afternoon she arrives. The few scattered clouds are the color of ashes. The air is laden with the smell of coal, and it is unbearably hot; everything droops. The drays pulling a refuse wagon along the street leading away from the harbor have their heads down, as if the heat of the sun has weight and substance. She takes a coach to Cambridge, and finds that Charley has returned from Asia. He’s been back two days, he says, and has plans to edit their father’s papers. This is something she had started on her own, with no help from him, and she keeps to herself the exasperation she feels at his obvious belief that it is his idea, his project. He spends hours in the hot days, sitting in the shade of the back porch, reading through the letters and diary entries and articles, and occasionally he makes a note to himself. He keeps a flat board across his legs, to write on, and from the door
way of the kitchen he looks like an invalid, sitting there with the boxes of paper at his feet, and the pages he’s reading laid out before him on the board.

  She writes two letters to Batty, and then tears them up. She keeps the house; she is essentially Charley’s housekeeper and cook. No one from the Kingsley family visits. She seldom sees any of her former friends—even Guillemard has kept away, busy with his own concerns. The old oppression begins to work in her again, and she has fearful nights of wakefulness, lying on her back, arms at her sides, trying to empty her mind.

  When, a little more than a week after her return, Charley announces that he wishes to live in London proper, she secretly rejoices. It occurs to her that she has begun to keep her own thoughts and feelings from him, because in his complacent and dilettantish way he will say things that undermine her. He isn’t even aware that he does it. There are times when his calm, magisterial gaze enrages her, and his conventional way of viewing everything makes her want to shock him with a curse, or throw something at him. She enters a room where he is, and he lifts his head, so open-faced, so happy, so satisfied and stupid that her strongest impulse is to shout at him. He hasn’t even got the gumption to notice that she’s rather testy and short with him.

  He does go into London and chooses a place for them—a small flat on Addison Road, near the Uxbridge Road Station, the kind of place that everyone in the family and all the friends will certainly perceive as reduced circumstances. The neighborhood is close, crowded, row upon row of two-story houses with uniform stone stairs and a look about them, with their curtained windows, of a group of drowsy faces staring at the street. She organizes the move, and spends hard, sad, grieving days dispensing with her parents’ belongings, everything that defined them and everything that still calls them up for her: clothing and hair-brushes and combs; cards and charms; her father’s pipes, and humidor, and shoes. She manages to get rid of all of it, giving some to charity, and throwing the rest away—the debris of a long and, she understands it now, hopelessly unhappy marriage.

  At the Addison Road flat, Charley collates papers and makes notes, and talks vaguely about getting off somewhere again—perhaps back to the Far East. It strikes Mary that they haven’t really spoken at all about their mutual adventures. She knows nothing of what he may have done or seen in Asia.

  One evening, when Guillemard has come for a visit, and she hears them talking about the bad roads in Singapore, she asks him if he kept any records of what he saw or heard or learned. She has poured brandy for them both, and they are sipping it, smoking cigars and relaxing, legs crossed, in opposite chairs in the small parlor, which Mary has had to use at night for a study.

  —I mean to write all of it down someday, Charley says. A study of, well, Eastern religious practices, let us say. No, actually, I would like to do a study of Eastern thought—Chinese thought, to be specific. How their philosophical history affects their cultural growth. The…the assumptions of the common man, for instance. Something of that nature, I believe. Quite strange goings-on with the Buddhists, you know.

  Guillemard clears his throat.

  —I had thought you would write a biography of your father, as you said you wanted to do.

  —I haven’t given that up, either. That is a very strong possibility.

  —I ’ope you’ll be off soon, Mary tells Charley. I think I would like to make another journey myself.

  Charley seems amused, but says nothing.

  —You’re a Kingsley, says Guillemard.

  —Where would one hope to go in your circumstances? Charley says.

  —I want to go south again, she tells him. But farther.

  —A lot of luck you’d have these days. A spinster with no real means of support and no experience. And your education, being what it is, Mary, the, how shall we say, informal nature of it…well.

  She keeps silent, while he puffs on the cigar, and breathes out the smoke, watching with great satisfaction as it coils ceilingward.

  —I suppose you might accompany me, if you like, he says.

  She waits for him to reveal his plan, because it is expected that she do so.

  He smokes the cigar and leans back, crossing his legs at the ankle.

  —I think Peking will yield up some useful information.

  —When will you go? Mary asks.

  —That is undecided at the moment.

  She waits again.

  —You wouldn’t care to accompany me?

  —No, I would not.

  —Well, I didn’t imagine you would.

  She pulls air into her lungs and then, sighing, says:

  —I am going south.

  —Where south?

  —Africa.

  She nods. She hears the word and inwardly some element of her makeup presents her with the vastness of the place. Africa. Yes, she tells her brother. Africa.

  14

  NOTHING IN LIFE quite equals the waiting of the following weeks and months—after the black horses with the high black feathers, and the black mantled coaches, after the bombazine and the perfumes and the murmured pieties, after the words of the priest and the burials, and the long accommodations to brother and aunts and uncles, after the selling off of goods and the removal of the accumulation of two lives, after the sale of furniture and a house, and the move to Addison Road, after the service to her brother and the talk talk talk as to what he will decide to do, what he will choose to spend resources on, after days and weeks of seeking the information she needs and the acceptance she craves and the means to proceed, she is finally on her way out of the world she has known all her young life—and even as the day approaches for her deliverance, she is cruelly plagued by the sense that she’s running away, that her use to all the people around her is circumscribed by her very nature. Her own anxiousness to put the thousand miles between herself and anyone she knows is distressing to her. The last night in London is sleepless, as so many recent nights have been. Charley’s gone, the house is empty. For a long time she replays in her mind the stories she’s been told, by everyone she knows, of the terrors of West Africa. A doctor with whom she’s acquainted, not through her father but through Guillemard, actually repeated the story Batty told, of the man being pulled from the boat by a croc. There were several small variances from Batty’s story—the croc, for instance, was described in the doctor’s story as being twice the size of the boat, never mind the man; and the man was reported as having been English, a missionary on his way to Fernando Pó—but the similarities were striking enough for Mary to wonder at it, and in the night she goes over both stories, deciding gloomily that they are both true, and that one stands a very good chance of being eaten by a croc in West Africa.

  Finally, giving up on sleep, she rises and walks downstairs to the little room where most of her father’s books are stored. These, she realizes, have always been her means of travel, her taste of the distant places her father saw; but they have also been her solace and her companions. She moves among them, paging through one and then another, putting each up to her face to breathe the fragrance of it. She opens The Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties. For some reason, holding this one in her hands, with its pages that she herself cut when she was fourteen years old, she begins to find it difficult to breathe. She gasps, twice, and then realizes that she is sobbing. She stands there among the thousands of volumes, crying, holding the book open, in the quiet that is broken only by the sound of her weeping.

  In the morning, Guillemard sees her off, this time on a cargo vessel, The Lagos. She has lugged her portmanteau, without help, aboard, and she stands at the precariously low railing, supporting herself on a black umbrella, and shouldering a black reticule made out of fustian. She has also carried aboard a long waterproof sack, into which she has put books, blankets, even a pair of Charley’s trousers, in case a dress becomes too cumbersome for safety.

  The crew of The Lagos are calling to each other and singing little ditties, and the captain, a man named Murray, whose eyes seem crowned with h
eavy black brushes, and whose mustache is a steely gray, solid-looking, as if carved out of some thistlelike growth, stands at the helm and shouts orders for the loading of more cargo, though the ship is loaded down, sitting low in the filthy water, and covered with the accumulated muck of years in the sea lanes.

  It seems to Mary that they will never get under way. Standing in the hot August sun, she recalls that it’s been a year since her return from the Canaries. For a moment, she thinks idly about how recent that seems, and yet how slow this waiting is, for the last of the cargo to be brought aboard. There is an elastic element to Time, and it grieves her: how much it had seemed to stand still all those years at Highgate, and Bexley Heath, and Mortimer Road.

  The sun dips behind a screen of yellow clouds, fog, the coal fires of the dock. For a moment, there are no shadows anywhere, everything showing forth in a flat, gray light. But then the sun pours through a chink, and the cloud cover breaks open wide, to blue, blue sky. Somewhere in her soul there is the temptation to take this as a sign. She rejects it; what will happen will happen, and as if to reinforce this thought, the world presents her with a vision of wet, dark rats crawling amid the refuse at the edge of the dock. A malodorous vapor rises from there—rotting vegetables and fruit; rancid meat.

  Finally, The Lagos is under way, rocking and shifting down the Mersey and through the Crosby Channel, toward the open sea. There is a wind now—she hears Captain Murray say to one of his mates that it’s blowing at a good twenty knots. The waves roll under them, shaking the ship, lifting it and letting it drop with an enormous crashing sound, and then lifting it again, repeating the same swell and fall, over and over. The ship is laden so that she’s making through the waves up to her plimsoll line, and Mary rides with her, basking in the sun and salt air, until Captain Murray decides it’s best for her to retire to her cabin.

  15

  PICTURE:

  A cabin room of a ship at sea, and the sea is rough. It is night. There is the sound of men singing—drunken, raucous singing. In this cabin is a young woman, two months shy of her thirty-first birthday. She has a book, which she manages, somehow in this noise and shaking, this great swaying, to keep reading, even as the light keeps shifting from the swinging lantern above her. The world all around seems to be breaking apart with commotion and clamor, shrieks and laughter—the singing, the moan and protest of the boards of the ship, the bending joists and beams, holding everything together in the pitching and rolling of the sea. In the midst of this tumult, there is, for her, a profound silence—the whole of life seems to have descended to this stillness, this strange, inner not-sound of the moments after death. Feeling the rush of waters along the sides of the vessel she is in, heading for a frightening and dangerous country, she thinks of her dead father and mother, and has a sudden terrifying sense of how alone she is; and she has a premonition, too: she will die at sea. It comes to her with a bottomless chill, which stops her breath. At some point during her reverie, she has lain down, and now she sits bolt upright, puts the book aside, clasps her hands tight in her lap, and rocks slowly back and forth, trying to gather her strength, striving for the courage she will need. She recalls lying in the calm, sea-scented, cool dark of Gomera, alone, under the ledge of volcanic rock. She thinks of that long night and the easy sleep that came upon her, the sense of well-being when she woke, even with the aches of having slept on the ground, in damp clothes. Why should this pitching vessel, manned by professional sailors, be more frightening than that should have been, and wasn’t?