A Dark and Stormy Night

by Tom Stacey

  From the start, you had glimpsed the spectre of inherent paradox at my first exposition of my intent, at Holy Trinity, Prince Albert Road – of bringing the gospel of innocence to the innocent. The world of corruption was indeed closing upon them, with pirate-logging on the Congo side of the frontier and game parks and tourism on the Uganda side. All that they knew of creation was menaced by extinction and their way of life with it. I might talk of a Christ-bound casket for their own purity, such as my Church endorsed. Now we each knew that to be fantasy. Their destiny was to be corralled, and alcohol and syphilis and a freakshow for visitors, enslaved by touristic tips for waggling their backsides in grass skirts. Was all this not what the Christian world had brought upon them?

  ‘Your light will blind them,’ you once came back at me.

  ‘They’ll not escape the light of day,’ I countered.

  ‘Light in whatever form. Literacy. Catechisms. The hostile sun.’

  You saw me barging into Eden, making Innocence guilt. You would protect me from the consequences of my vocation, the absurdity of pygmies in their primal innocence slipping across into the innocence of Jesus of Nazareth’s little children; without the baggage of its doctrine, without the redemption of the world by the son of that which I named God. Were they not pre-God (by any language), being pre-conscious, pre-I, as once were Eve and her consort when in their garden they did not know that they were naked?

  Samueli did. Samueli had come to Christian faith with joy at release from the evil eye by the power of the cross, but I had to scold him on my second visit for exposing on the sudden to my Bambuti the painted wooden crucifixes the diocese had provided. The red paint of blood was visible on the hands and feet and pierced side. It was not apt. It was alarming. It had been part of my reason for sending Samueli back to Bundibughyo, out of the forest, on my long sojourn with them.

  On my own return, Marigold, you had been oddly silent, scarcely enquiring what I might have achieved. Whatever course I was following, you seem to have decided, I was on my own.

  And now I was back among them with you, in such raw bereavement. That very death of Jasper bound us in grief. But it was an accusation of our presence here in equatoria.

  You ask me what Moke had said to set off the gale of laughter. I tell you that such mockery of your alienness in their forest is the warmest mark of welcome. Aüsu instantly assured you he would defend you from leopards. ‘Kingwana is our brother and you our sister,’ he announces gripping your wrist with two hands. He leads you to the leaf shelter which I, Kingwana, the Tall, will occupy near the camp‘s log fire. Aüsu being closest to me of all this Bambuti group has placed himself in charge of me. He had allocated a space for Samueli, but on the edge of the clearing, beyond our circle of intimacy. There he will stay with his fellow Mwamba, our porter. The joy in Aüsu’s eyes at my return is at once recognisable to you, Marigold.

  I had told you of Aüsu. He was wearing a G-string and a flap of bark before and behind. He was as near a convert as I had yet achieved among the Bambuti because he and I conversed on equal terms, so equal indeed that that I had got to telling him that he was as near to converting me to the Bambuti way of life as I was to converting him to the good news of Jesus Christ. There was depth of intelligence between us, founded in the delight of our comradeship. Aüsu from the very first had been as curious about me and my world that was not forest as ever I had been about his. It was Aüsu who had taught me enough of his language for me to tell them of a world in which the grace and generosity of any forest was absent, yet in which people could be engaged in tasks other than seeking food and protecting themselves. I had put it to Aüsu as his wife gave birth to their son and first child the interrogative concept why. Why things are. Why his son so precious and unique would survive while mine so precious and unique had not. Why life had been given to any of us. Why the forest, why its munificence. Why it was uniquely for Man to delve for answers.

  He was fired and flattered and the imagination had grabbed at the abstract, as I burrowed for words of Love and Truth and Life. Indeed he was exhilarated. There had been opened up to him an entire landscape for him to explore, in the cause of enlightenment. I too, Marigold, had been uplifted by my entry through Aüsu into the pygmies’ entire realm of the forest, a realm of its own possessed by them and possessing them, which they had to themselves with an indefatigable sense of propriety, tolerating no violation by any who were not of it in awe and intimacy, by which every Bantu villager was excluded and kept at a distance by a hundred secret devices of jungle lore withheld, mystery, territorial evanescence and pretended servility. Only when I had sent Samueli back to Bundibughyo across the great river and out of the forest, with his catechisms and his box of wooden crucifixes, did Aüsu allow me – alone – admittance, and my own awakening to their being.

  Returning now with you Marigold, and with Samueli in tow, that awakening is suddenly in hazard and I, covertly, am sick with fear. You are intensely engaged. The thorn’s scratch on your forehead makes evident your vulnerability and your potential ferocity, a ferocity directed towards me and our would-be mission among these Bambuti. You yourself have become a participant, affronting any sense you could be persuaded of: you, a woman of schooled intellectuality engaged in bringing white man’s juju and fetishistic talismans to a bunch of forest dwarves in bark cloth.

  ‘I am both beneath your good sense, and also above it’ I wish to tell you, but dare not. ‘The crude myth of crucifixion and what followed is beneath you, but its meaning above you.’ I see the parallel for the dwarves themselves: they are, in their primality, simultaneously beneath us intruding providers of the Christian passport to life beyond the forest, and above us in the transcendent implication of that primal innocence. ‘I love these people, Marigold, and I love you.’ So my head thunders.

  But for such love to invest our being it is to rise no less from that which is primal and beneath as out of the immortal and above. The double dialectic racked me. Tired and wet and strained in that dark, minuscule clearing I see mission and marriage in grotesque entanglement. You are so mercurial, in scorn of my missionary intent yet wonder at my own encountered wonder. I had returned from my long Bambuti co-habitance, back to you in your bereaved isolation, with a veiled joyfulness. Yet now you can by your presence here obliterate all that I have touched and seen and been possessed by, all that vital respect that had grown between me and them, these children of God as revered John, beloved of Jesus, would have them known.

  ‘It is not for you to tell them that they are naked,’ you come back at me sharply.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Marigold. This is not a Sunday school. You don’t need to defend them from me.’

  You are distrait, dangerously agitated, as if I am threatening them with conversion. Samueli’s fellow Baamba, so you saw – planters and reapers, keepers of livestock – had known the shock of the white man’s coming two generations earlier. White man’s instant master-culture and his creator-deity put to flight their daemons, all but scattering their powers. Yet these pygmies’ deity is quite other. It is beneficent and trusted. It is their own forest; the whole and that which is holy. Your holy husband in his mission role and with Christian propositions indeed has no right to challenge the meaning of all they know from birth and infinite inheritance. Even the Baamba, in scorn of Bambuti as diminutive and primal, sneakingly revered their forest-wisdom. That wisdom is their primordial link which sustained and protected them and gave their world its meaning. The forest folk are central Africa’s first people. All the sites bear the numinous designations in the Bambuti vernacular, which I now haltingly speak. From the pygmies the Baamba buy root medicine and their drum-wood, the dark tree-core, for its resonant authority …

  Our spat is evident to Samueli.

  ‘Do not go with them into their cave,’ he suddenly warns. I turn on him:

  ‘Why, Samueli?’

  ‘They seek to capture Jesus.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They se
ek to capture him who once was dead and has come back from dead; to make him theirs. This is Jesus, who belongs to you. They seek to make you a molimo-mbandua and so catch Jesus.’ He makes the catching movement.

  So now there is this contrary fear in you, Samueli, that they are by way of converting me, beguiling me and my soul into pygmydom. That is what I seek, what I know I must risk, for the sake of my own truth and even for the sake of you, Marigold, tarring me with pagan innocence.

  Oh Samueli, they will never take you to their cave. Your people are not forest people: your intrusion would desecrate it.

  ‘You should leave Jesus behind,’ Marigold says.

  ‘Don’t be concerned, darling. Jesus understands. He takes no orders from me. We are here to learn something from them.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘How to be one with creation. The untellable wisdom,’ I quote … The animals, plants, men, hills, shining and flowing waters.

  All at once I am struck by the wisdom of the human body, that by this body we learn the loving of our God. So Aqivah, Rabbi supreme, spoke of the Song of Songs how the whole universe was worth the day that book was given to Israel.

  Now you speak up.

  ‘It is a mark of trust in you, Simon, that they would take you there. Moke and Aüsu and the others seek what they recognise as your gift, your capacity to learn. And mine. I shall go.’

  My heart jumps at this sudden boldness, and you simultaneously frail. You are to catch them with your bow and the strings it serves and they to counter-catch you with bow and arrow and with drums and reeds. At the first dark growl of the molimo circling the camp there is wild light in you. ‘Because they will not admit Samueli,’ you persist, telling me what I know, ‘he is afraid for us, and for your gospel. He has no right to be afraid. They do us honour. If they may not reach for you, however will you reach for them?’

  Now you are drawing on me. The tables are turned. You have seen them read in you a fount of authority, they heard in your strings the authority of the invoking of music, and a responsiveness to the growls and the hoots of the molimo and the rattle of hidden molimo drumming that is beginning to infect the forest. Oh, Samueli!

  So I set forth. Clutching my scripture book in its green covers I have had since Cuddesdon, I struggle for an inward space of detachment; I take on something of your godless father, Marigold, Hegelian sociologist, carapacing myself by observation, the conceit of academia looking out from the cloister of my improvised cosmogony, upon these forest dwarves, half my size and bulk and more-than-half in darkness: on Aüsu, Moke, Masisi, Kenge, Mahomo and their women who are once the guardians of the molimo; now dappled, flitting folk like you, ye Neolithic Maures among whom at last I have found my refuge, entering the earth’s bowels for the wisdom of intimacy with pristine creation.

  Was it for me, Bambuti – is it for me, Maures? – to come in among you with unassailable presumption that I carry with me a Truth you have no inkling of, in your ten thousand generations of forest gathering and hunting and loving?

  How dare I?

  Marigold, you read in me the alarm and caution as each of us stripped to the skin to don the smoky bark cloaks required for us by Aüsu and the women. You are the bold one, the venturesome, entering among those little people by that rock orifice into their underworld. Beside you Moke, wholly trusted, carries your violin in its case with reverence. He opens the case by the light of the fire: your music and authority like a Jesus-foetus in your surrogate womb, amid that circle of clapping women, grunting, aye-yea-yea-aye, yea-aye-aye-yea. Bare-chested now, you have put him to your chin and move with the thump of the drum and the stomp of rattles of mollusced metal on the ankles of the shunting of diminutive Humanity circling the fire, old and young alike entranced, with staring eyes and darting hands.

  Somehow Marigold you have acquired an ankle-rattle. You are eerily pallid in the smoky firelight as if you were conjured by Aüsu the intoning leader, whose face of clay-smeared white your skin resembles. Your loosened hair is made Maenadic by the brilliance of your bowing and your eyes are closed, but Aüsu’s head is orderly with its tonsured wig of dry grass and the civet pelt capping his skull. His neck is strung with pale shells. His skirt is also of bunched grass, held at his waist with a snakeskin, and his eyes are staring out all but blind from lids dyed red behind dark glasses. His hands too are red-dyed, each with its wooden rattle which he uses like a gavel to summon each shift of the discourse. What speech is this? It is their lingo of immemorial privacy that like the immemorial forest knows no tense but now and has no need of grammar more than prayer needs liturgy: naked language. All this possessing us with the savage rhythm, driving the bark-clad circle in their drum-obeisant strut.

  Within that resonant and impenetrable dark, the constant growl of the bass bamboo.

  Suddenly an unearthly diapason leaps forth as if out of the belly of the chamber: an Mbuti I had not noticed is crouched at the drumside blowing by a reed inserted into the belly of the drum. Out of his own belly and throat-roar comes an amplified voice no longer human or of recognisable human provenance. As Aüsu intones the women respond to him antiphonally, so that here’s a rhythm laid upon a rhythm; and you Marigold have joined the antiphony, making your mesmeric obbligato. I, loosened at last by my gourd, have emerged from my cloister-site of observation to be snared and woven into the thread of spirit-song of Aüsu, its refrain ever in praise of the forest. For we ourselves – you and I – are the topic of it, we and the geist resurrection I first entered the forest to bestow them.

  They have admitted us here for our endorsement of the transcendent truth-leaping death of the forest Jesus: the beat and invention of the drummer and the drum that he is one with, he who had elicited from your own violin seminal inspiration, across the soaring and searching lyric of the instrument and every expressive device of urgency by double and triple stopping, aërial harmonics bowed against the bridge, spiccato and pizzicato, glissando and staccato, the rasp and flutter of your making, and swaying; rump-alive and innocent. I am astonished.

  They feed it you with their unconscious wonder. From the cavity of the Mittenwald at your chin there leaps the truth of your spirit, the kenotic gift of the fashioned wood: out of the fiddle’s void and the void of the drum is the word uttered. This is your letting-go into creation’s pagandom, Marigold, a little drunk and beyond exhaustion. Three-quarters naked you too among those buttock-decorated women stalk and flit, hunter and quarry, escaping (Aüsu tells) the wiles of the leopard Moke had conjured on your arrival and now guarded by the ever-vigilant forest. You astonish yourself.

  Here was to be the generative source of your inward Threnody for Jasper: music at birth.

  When after uncountable hours we emerged into the listening forest, there lay just visible the little heaps of our abandoned clothes, as if they were the droppings of visitant creatures that had no business here in this true forest-world, then had left their evidence and scuttled off. And now I repent, Marigold, without reserve; now that you are dead. Now I gently grieve. Such bigot as might have entered that cave has surrendered to this root-world, cave-place of the birth of music centred upon the drummer no bigger than his drum and slave to his genius and upon his squatting partner’s roaring diapason – the frail firelit circle chants in antiphony, the growling bass bamboos and hidden molimo horn invoke all that is, seen and unseen.

  What you have brought them, Marigold, has sealed them, my Bambuti, my Maures: a quicksilver glimpse by sound and shunting feet and darting hands of apocalyptic impulsion. You and I were forbidden to speak, were we not, of what transpired in our cave. Tell the vision to no man, it is written, until the Son of Man is risen again from the dead. How tightly mute were you on the tramp back to the forest clearing in fingers of first light. How my heart bled for you on that night tramp, knowing that such ascent must mean descent, a dreadful plummeting … I knowing and loving you.

  Then by God you turned on me. You turned and railed that I should dare to trump their right
to the forest wisdom bestowed on them as gift, love, reverence, and creative inspiration.

  Squatting in the clearing by the embers of the fire, Samueli had been waiting for us in baleful turmoil as morning light was filtering in … He quoted at me darkly from Isaiah, And the idols he shall utterly abolish, and they go into the holes of the rocks, and into the caves of the earth, for fear of the Lord! he pointing with his finger at the passage he had found and seized upon that very night of our long absence in the cave, in the belly of the earth.

  Samueli, you were never truly to recover your trust in me. I had crossed over to the enemy that night. I had supped with the Devil. I was blighted by the forest men’s nkisi. O baleful Samueli. She had beguiled me and had me eat of the forbidden as if she were Eve. You expected no better from the mem, for you alone had come to note she eschewed any act of worship, had never seemingly laid before Our Lord even her grief at His taking baby Jasper. Hence, you supposed, she had persuaded me to defy and disobey and had led me into the pit.

  There she will have let go – you could tell, Samueli: she and I in Bacchic purgation, beyond the reach of Jesus. There in self-violation she was violated, Samueli, was she not? while you cowered in your tent – and in nine months was your proof of it. The twins were born, one or other of them by fornication with the Devil that very cave-night. You have it, Samueli: that night was her conceptual night of music, penetration of generative semen which out of surrender makes art, conjugation which makes life, the flint’s spark, scintilla, the orgasmic event that in its happening is gone.