Nonetheless, my fond young skull, I must praise myself as only a king can crown himself: I sniffed you out behind the smell of stone, nosing down stone's barred wells and chambers! For you I frightened my eyes with blisters of torchlight on the restoration seal, crying: I'll wrap you in linen, then close you away with stones!
So then I heard a bone-clack; then when your leathery mummy-heart began to pump reddish and yellowish stains across dying frescoes, I thought I knew you, and ran down tiered, narrow, high-arched halls, your heart-drum thudding louder through those volcanic walls which crumbled under my fingernail-scratch; and the sweat of your rotting body bathed my forehead—no matter whether the ceiling was flat or arched, no matter that its plaster sparkled as if with mica— what tragedy and waste and uselessness! But I found your stone.
Among gray moss was the empty spiderweb, beyond it your copper casket's fragments shaking and rattling upon the membranes of your panting heart!
Remembering that the Pope was killed in Callisto CXX, I wondered whether you'd done it, wondered when you'd eat me, who'd seal me behind this rough wall, this dusty hedge of darkness whose leaves were bones.
So I swept back your hair, but you said: I'm not here.
Where are you then?
Clack-clack clack, you laughed—then: Ask the girls from Firenze who drink the sun. Ask the girls who sing ah-la-la-la! and "Ciao, Maria."
JUST LIKE ANIMALS
Burma and Thailand (1994)
* * *
Burma and Thailand (1994)
When D. and I went to Burma we went by horse. I was not so very sick then. The guide did not have a horse. He was, however, his own horse—his legs being long, bony and brown; his sandalled feet small yet heavy like hooves, his wide eyes set abnormally far apart, almost in his temples. From my mount I gazed down at his wide shoulders cutting through the beginnings of dusk. Often I have been around shy people, and I know that timidity takes many different guises, among them a stolidness or sullenness which some people are deceived into categorizing as a bad disposition. This was my first characterization of the man. He could not understand my speech at all, nor I his; as for D., she hailed from the south, which for him must have been as mysterious as another country. There were many rivers in which he waded knee-deep, then mucky places full of flies and pale yellow butterflies. Wet ferns kept slapping me in the face. The guide, soaked and stained, walked almost at a run, leading D.'s horse whenever there was a difficult place. I could not believe how strong he was. I had just been to Burma a few days before with some Karenni insurgents, and then I had been the strong one because I was tall and well-fed with long legs and so many years of vitamins and meat inside me. This man never quickened his breathing. He was lean and all-enduring and he scarcely said a word.
Bill, I so sad for him, whispered D. when her horse was beside mine. He is just like animal, only working, working all his life, no thinking. I so sorry. I want to give him something.
I understood now that the man was not shy at all, simply unconscious. He rushed along with extraordinary confidence, superbly fitted for what he was doing. I longed to gaze into his face to search for signs of happiness because his strange narrow excellence was so perfect that I wanted it to give him pleasure. But he never looked back at me.
Sometimes the horses lowered their heads to drink from the streams they splashed in, and he stopped patiently. He never drank, although his neck and shoulders had long since darkened with sweat. In her pack D. had a can of soda which she had been keeping for herself. She called the man's name. He did not seem to hear. Cupping her hands to her mouth, she shouted as loudly as she could. Then the man halted and turned back toward her, his eyes incurious, not bewildered or annoyed; he seemed to be looking at her only by accident. She gave him the soda, and he drank it down in one breath, threw the can into the jungle, turned wordlessly and strode on.
I so sad! D. wept.
At the thickening time of dusk the path was frighteningly high and steep. Actually it was not much of a path at all—or maybe too much of a path: —so many refugees, guerrillas, smugglers, and their pack animals had trodden it for so many years that the earth was worn shiny like polished wood. It undulated with ridges of harder dirt and craters made by the hooves of horses, where our own horses now stumbled. Imagine a hand's spread fingers, enlarged and endless, thousands of fingers, going on for many kilometers, and they are made of dirt. The gullies beneath them are knee-deep and sometimes waist-deep. These were the depressions made by the hooves of many horses over the years. My hone was tired now. He refused to go on. He was a wiry little horse, almost like a pony, and when I took my feet out of the numbing rope loops that served as stirrups I could practically touch the ground. I slid off him and led him up the hill, clinging to roots with my free hand, tripping and sliding into those eroded traps. The guide had never stopped. He was long gone with D. and her horse, high above me in the darkness.
When my horse recovered his wind, I got back into the saddle.
The night was very black and cold. I had to trust my horse because I could not see. The way was almost terriryingly steep and narrow. I felt the presence of invisible precipices on either side of me. The poor animal panted and snorted and shivered, the sweat on his shoulders now as cold as dew. After a long time I saw the silhouettes of D. and the guide on a high ridge illuminated by starlight. D. called to me lovingly. Before I could answer, the guide continued on, leading her horse away. My horse saw or smelled D.'s mare and cantered to join her, which afforded me some comfort; it seemed to me that I had been travelling alone in the darkness for a very long time, although probably it had been less than an hour. The guide strode so briskly that the horses had to trot, never slowing even when he went up and down cliffsides in that pitch-darkness. D. kept calling his name in terror; but it was as she had said, he was just like an animal. He rushed on without drawing a rapid breath, drawing us along the naked backbones of those unpleasant mountains by habit and instinct. He was one of the strongest men I ever met, and among the least moved by other human beings.
Every time the fever came back, hot sweat oozed from the insides of my ears like drops of boiling oil in a wok. When that happened I became very dizzy, but I knew it would do no good to call out. As for D., she was pregnant, and continually nauseous, so that the jolting of her horse agonized her, and she whispered that she had a great fear that she would fall. Sometimes the guide would be swiftly striding straight down some wall of scree so steep that the blood rushed to my head as my horse picked his way and sometimes stumbled. Ahead of me, I heard D. sobbing in pain and terror. If she screamed his name long enough and loud enough, he'd shake his head as if in surprise, then come running back to her solicitously. He was not callous at all. She'd tell him to please go more slowly for her baby's sake, and he'd nod. A moment later he would be striding just as rapidly into the mountain coldness, smoking a cigarette, with one hand in his pocket. He was not hostile or even intractable. It was only that there was something immovable about him. He was pure and good and wanted to please, but nothing could prick him through his animal dullness. —We are fashioned, so it's said, of dust and clay. And perhaps in abodes of poverty, where health, learning, shelter and security are not birthrights, the soul is not a birthright, either. Could it be that these men I've met who are just like animals own no self, contain nothing in their skulls but brutishness, possess no feelings for other human beings save fear and lust and greed; or, even if they feel love, experience it only as a dog or a horse does, without understanding? In these insensible ones do only dust and clay have life? — It was all that D. and I could do to stay on our mounts. Twice my weary horse grew ill-tempered and threw me. The first time I fell only about seven or eight feet and struck rock, tearing my left arm open. I could hear the guide striding rapidly on, while D. screamed his name. By the time she'd managed to stop him I was back on my horse. The second time, a couple of hours later, I fell about twenty feet and as I was falling I thought that I was going to be serio
usly hurt but I was caught by a treetop which gave way and dropped me into a thornbush. The thorns broke off inside my raw arm and began to burn right away with some quick-acting nettlish venom. Far down the mountain ahead, I could hear D. weeping and calling the guide's name. He returned at last with that surprised look and helped me back on my horse. D. asked how I was and I said I was OK and she screamed: Why why why you say that? You no OK! Oh, you make me very angry! You talk strong, talk stupid! — But by then her words had faded into a distant wail because she was already far down the mountain again, pulled behind the guide like a balloon on a string. My horse picked his way, carrying me down into the dark. I kept one hand tightly on the wickerwork pommel; the rope that served as reins was wrapped around that hand; my other arm, the one that was swelling now and filling me with warmth, I kept a few inches out from my face, to catch the branches and briers that sometimes leaped for my eyes.
Finally it was very cold and I saw stars far below me on my left and on my right, and then we reached the minefield warning and were inside Burma.
I closed my eyes, but the drops of sweat that oozed out of my skull were so painfully hot that they glowed right through my eyelids, hued like the brownish-orange license plates of Egyptian taxis.
The guide brought us to a dark cold safehouse where a man with a lacerated face sat smoking cigarettes, and then he turned to leave. He had not even asked us for his money. Clutching her belly, D. stood up and uttered his name, in a feeble voice which matched her pallor; and he turned toward her. That was when I knew that he was not deaf. D. told him that we'd return across the mountains with him in one or two days; would he kindly await us here? We'd pay him when we were back in Thailand. He nodded and left us wordlessly.
Our business in Burma, which was animated by propaganda, machine-guns, and other categories beyond the animal, was not completed as quickly as we had hoped. On the third day we returned to the safehouse and learned that our guide had left with the horses. We never saw him again.
D. remained ill from the ride, and was bleeding from her womb. She would likely have a miscarriage. As a special favor, the insurgents arranged to bring her back by truck, for which I was very grateful because I think walking would have killed her. It did not seem wise for me to accompany her since my white skin would attract notice at the checkpoints; and in fact the people who took her back were all arrested. — Since there were no horses, I set out on foot, with two brothers to guide me. I was quite a bit sicker then.
I cut a bamboo cane to help me, and wobbled along, hot and cold. White streamers of rain sped suddenly down from a cloud. At the Weekend Market in Bangkok I'd once seen a man rattling two sticks together as he wriggled a toy snake of many papier-mâché joints across the sidewalks. My fever was now like one of those snakes. It wormed burningly and freezingly up my spine and gnawed my brain. Long creepers reached into my sickness, bewildering me with immense skinny trunks like bars across the cliffs of greenness. Sometimes I succumbed, and slid down my pole to sit on the ground and let my teeth chatter until my mind began to unthink itself. Then I'd arise and continue up the hills of hot and mysterious forest. Past the minefield warning sign there was a steep cool meadow grazed down almost to sand, and then the true mountains started.
The elder brother ran far ahead. He circled widely like a dog, I think because he'd never gone this way before. I think I could have found the path alone but it was very nice to have company in case we were stopped. He gazed at me with reptilian indifference. Then he disappeared again. The young brother stayed with me. He was a different kind of animal, I don't know what—perhaps some kind of rodent, maybe one of those giant slum-rats which fear nothing and march out from beneath houses in a cold and lordly way. He glanced over the jungle as we went; possibly he was watching for mines. Neither of the brothers was as strong as the previous guide, but they suffered and endured in silence like animals, never speaking to one another, scarcely even looking at each other as they strode on bloody-footed in their wretched sandals. I thought of the driver of a bus which D. and 1 had taken from Mae Hong Song to Bangkok. Like so many of his colleagues, the man had begun the nineteen-hour journey by drinking a bottle of liquid speed. Then he drove the mountain road as rapidly as he could. He did not actually get to Bangkok any more quickly because the hairpin curves required him to decelerate almost to a stop whenever he tacked; what he did succeed in accomplishing was making poor D. and about half the other passengers vomit. The ticket-taker, a thin boy of perhaps ten years, smiled apologetically, bowing and clasping his hands as he passed out plastic bags for people to throw up in. Nobody said anything to the driver, who continued to nod happily as he gunned the bus into another high-speed lurch. Nobody moaned or changed expression. They vomited in silence (even the restaurant proprietress, even the bar girl, even that longlegged soldier whom I'd seen carry two suitcases through the hot brightness of the night), filling the humid air with stench. I don't think the bus driver was a cruel or malicious person. I believe that his soul had simply been compressed to the same meagerness as the horse-guide's. He was doing all that he knew how to do. He could have been an executioner, and doubtless would have dispatched his quota of shrieking or pleading victims with a calmness which had never known empathy; and if he could have been an executioner then somebody else could have been a judge, pronouncing death sentences without feeling any agitating impressions; and if we can judge we can do anything.
Descending a mountain of trees whose fat leaves swarmed as thickly as beetles, I felt myself again lost and alone; I staggered feverish among broad-topped trees and narrow grasping claws. I wondered to what extent I too was but an animal. Once on a night plane voyage from Mauritius I'd been stricken with loneliness and let my fingers touch the thigh of the pregnant woman beside me. Her flesh was soft and burning hot through her silken dress of white flowers upon blackness. Her face was young, dark, full. She opened her eyes and silently shook her head. I withdrew my hand, ashamed, tortured by my own nature.
It was, of course, only my self-consciousness which had created the torture. Had I been a true animal, I would simply have ravished her, doing what I had been made to do, like the young brother beside me, who twitched his nose, sniffed and bared his teeth. His dirty fingernails were like long claws. — To him and his elder brother, of course, I must certainly have been a pale white dull-eyed beast, stumbling and sweating, unspeaking, the draft-horse of my destiny among these grand trees with many trunks that grabbled downwards into root-galleries. We were animals together, wading across the streams. In our adjacent prisons of aloneness we bore the touch of wet pale leaf-hands with points, gracious fingers the color of Ceylon tea, fingernails growing downward, piled hand on hand as if for some game; we were patient and unresisting like animals when our raw feet bled.
Now we'd passed both places where my horse had thrown me. We were coming down through fog and pale green trees, wading streams, approaching the smell of woodsmoke amidst high and cool plantains. I was sick—oh, very sick; and my legs threatened not to carry me. Icy droplets of sweat sizzled on the griddle of my forehead, and my feet ached. If you have ever been footsore, I mean really footsore, as if all the cushioning had been squeezed out of your shoes, and when you sit to rest, your feet burn where they touch the ground, as if the world had become a hell of flaming spikes; if you lift them, they swell to aching with weary blood, then you will know how I felt by the ninth hour, clambering up an embankment of spear-shaped plants. The elder brother was not in sight; we'd failed to glimpse him for three hours. He'd taken all the food and water. I looked at the younger brother's muddy blistered feet and asked him: Are you OK?
Never mind, he said.
He possessed the nobility of the animals. He suffered without remark. I myself suffered quietly because I could barely speak.
We came to a plant with a twenty-foot stalk from which gargantuan leaves hung down. The younger brother drew his lips down against his teeth. Sniffing and twitching his nose, he licked the plant's green ski
n. Then he straightened and continued on his way, never glancing at me. It seemed very natural to me then. He did it because he was an animal and he had the knowledge. I was but a golem with a fever that melted my flesh away and exhausted me to the roots of my eyeballs. Once I dropped my stick. It was a wonder to me how after I'd so painfully dragged it close, the younger brother, seeing my weakness, instantaneously whisked it upright and stood it next to my body for me to take. Yes, he was a superior animal.
When we arrived at the safehouse in Thailand at last, the elder brother was waiting. In my fever the banana trees around me seemed to get bigger and bigger. I was desperately thirsty, and thought that the two brothers must want something to drink, too. There was a refrigerator case full of beer and filtered water and other things. I gestured to them to choose what they wanted. They each picked a bottle of liquid speed and drank it straight down.
I got a taxi-bus to Mae Hong Song and they rode with me. I had told them that they were welcome to stay in the hotel room with D. and me if they wished it. But twenty minutes into the ride they tapped on the window and the bus stopped. We were at a crossroads. One road led south to Mae Hong Song, and the other road led back across the border to Burma. They jumped out, and the last I saw of them they were running at full speed toward the horizon.
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