III
Van Rieten had logic on his side and he had a way with him. Etcham sat there apologetic and deferential, like a fourth-form schoolboy before a headmaster. Van Rieten wound up.
‘I am after pigmies, at the risk of my life. After pigmies I go.’
‘Perhaps, then, these will interest you,’ said Etcham, very quietly.
He took two objects out of the side-pocket of his blouse, and handed them to Van Rieten. They were round, bigger than big plums, and smaller than small peaches, about the right size to enclose in an average hand. They were black, and at first I did not see what they were.
‘Pigmies!’ Van Rieten exclaimed. ‘Pigmies, indeed! Why, they wouldn’t be two feet high! Do you mean to claim that these are adult heads?’
‘I claim nothing,’ Etcham answered evenly. ‘You can see for yourself.’
Van Rieten passed one to me. The sun was just setting and I examined it closely. A dried head it was, perfectly preserved, and the flesh as hard as Argentine jerked beef. A bit of a vertebra stuck out where the muscles of the vanished neck had shrivelled into folds. The puny chin was sharp on a projecting jaw, the minute teeth white and even between the retracted lips, the tiny nose was flat, the little forehead retreating, there were inconsiderable clumps of stunted wool on the Lilliputian cranium. There was nothing babyish, childish or youthful about the head; rather it was mature to senility.
‘Where did these come from?’ Van Rieten inquired.
‘I do not know,’ Etcham replied precisely. ‘I found them among Stone’s effects while rummaging for medicines or drugs or anything that could help me to help him. I do not know where he got them. But I’ll swear he did not have them when we entered this district.’
‘Are you sure?’ Van Rieten queried, his eyes big and fixed on Etcham’s.
‘Ve’y sure,’ lisped Etcham.
‘But how could he have come by them without your knowledge?’ Van Rieten demurred.
‘Sometimes we were apart ten days at a time hunting,’ said Etcham. ‘Stone is not a talking man. He gave me no account of his doings, and Hamed Burghash keeps a still tongue and a tight hold on the men.’
‘You have examined these heads?’ Van Rieten asked.
‘Minutely,’ said Etcham.
Van Rieten took out his notebook. He was a methodical chap. He tore out a leaf, folded it and divided it equally into three pieces. He gave one to me and one to Etcham.
‘Just for a test of my impressions,’ he said, ‘I want each of us to write separately just what he is most reminded of by these heads. Then I want to compare the writings.’
I handed Etcham a pencil and he wrote. Then he handed the pencil back to me and I wrote.
‘Read the three,’ said Van Rieten, handing me his piece.
Van Rieten had written:
‘An old Balunda witch-doctor.’
Etcham had written:
‘An old Mang-Battu fetish-man.’
I had written:
‘An old Katongo magician.’
‘There!’ Van Rieten exclaimed. ‘Look at that! There is nothing Wagabi or Batwa or Wambuttu or Wabotu about these heads. Nor anything pigmy either.’
‘I thought as much,’ said Etcham.
‘And you say he did not have them before?’
‘To a certainty he did not,’ Etcham asserted.
‘It is worth following up, said Van Rieten. ‘I’ll go with you. And first of all, I’ll do my best to save Stone.’
He put out his hand and Etcham clasped it silently. He was grateful all over.
IV
Nothing but Etcham’s fever of solicitude could have taken him in five days over the track. It took him eight days to retrace with full knowledge of it and our party to help. We could not have done it in seven, and Etcham urged us on, in a repressed fury of anxiety, no mere fever of duty to his chief, but a real ardour of devotion, a glow of personal adoration for Stone which blazed under his dry conventional exterior and showed in spite of him.
We found Stone well cared for. Etcham had seen to a good high thorn zareeba round the camp, the huts were well built and thatched, and Stone’s was as good as their resources would permit. Hamed Burghash was not named after two Seyyids for nothing. He had in him the making of a sultan. He had kept the Mang-Battu together, not a man had slipped off, and he had kept them in order. Also he was a deft nurse and a faithful servant.
The two other Zanzibaris had done some creditable hunting. Though all were hungry, the camp was far from starvation.
Stone was on a canvas cot and there was a sort of collapsible camp-stool-table, like a Turkish tabouret, by the cot. It had a water-bottle and some vials on it and Stone’s watch, also his razor in its case.
Stone was clean and not emaciated, but he was far gone; not unconscious, but in a daze; past commanding or resisting anyone. He did not seem to see us enter or to know we were there. I should have recognized him anywhere. His boyish dash and grace had vanished utterly, of course. But his head was even more leonine; his hair was still abundant, yellow and wavy; the close, crisped blond beard he had grown during his illness did not alter him. He was big and big-chested yet. His eyes were dull and he mumbled and babbled mere meaningless syllables, not words.
Etcham helped Van Rieten to uncover him and look him over. He was in good muscle for a man so long bedridden. There were no scars on him except about his knees, shoulders and chest. On each knee and above it he had a full score of roundish cicatrices, and a dozen or more on each shoulder, all in front. Two or three were open wounds and four or five barely healed. He had no fresh swellings, except two, one to each side, on his pectoral muscles, the one on the left being higher up and farther out than the other. They did not look like boils or carbuncles, but as if something blunt and hard were being pushed up through the healthy flesh and skin, not much inflamed.
‘I should not lance those,’ said Van Rieten, and Etcham assented.
They made Stone as comfortable as they could, and just before sunset we looked in at him again. He was lying on his back, and his chest showed big and massive yet, but he lay as if in a stupor. We left Etcham with him and went into the next hut, which Etcham had resigned to us. The jungle noises were no different there than anywhere else for months past, and I was soon fast asleep.
V
Some time in the pitch dark I found myself awake and listening. I could hear two voices, one Stone’s, the other sibilant and wheezy. I knew Stone’s voice after all the years that had passed since I heard it last. The other was nothing like I remembered. It had less volume than the wail of a new-born baby, yet there was an insistent carrying power to it, like the shrilling of an insect. As I listened I heard Van Rieten breathing near me in the dark; then he heard me and realized that I was listening too. Like Etcham I knew little Balunda, but I could make out a word or two. The voices alternated, with intervals of silence between.
Then suddenly both sounded at once and fast. Stone’s baritone basso, full as if he were in perfect health, and that incredibly stridulous falsetto, both jabbering at once like the voices of two people quarrelling and trying to talk each other down.
‘I can’t stand this,’ said Van Rieten. ‘Let’s have a look at him.’
He had one of those cylindrical electric night-candles. He fumbled about for it, touched the button and beckoned me to come with him. Outside the hut he motioned me to stand still, and instinctively turned off the light, as if seeing made listening difficult.
Except for a faint glow from the embers of the bearers’ fire we were in complete darkness, little starlight struggled through the trees, the river made but a faint murmur. We could hear the two voices together and then suddenly the creaking voice changed into a razor-edged, slicing whistle, indescribably cutting, continuing right through Stone’s grumbling torrent of croaking words.
‘Good God!’ exclaimed Van Rieten.
Abruptly he turned on the light.
We found Etcham utterly asleep, exhausted by his long a
nxiety and the exertions of his phenomenal march, and relaxed completely now that the load was in a sense shifted from his shoulders to Van Rieten’s. Even the light on his face did not wake him.
The whistle had ceased and the two voices now sounded together. Both came from Stone’s cot, where the concentrated white ray showed him lying just as we had left him, except that he had tossed his arms above his head and had torn the coverings and bandages from his chest.
The swelling on the right breast had broken. Van Rieten aimed the centre line of the light at it and we saw it plainly. From his flesh, grown out of it, there protruded a head, such a head as the dried specimens Etcham had shown us, as if it were a miniature of the head of a Balunda fetish-man. It was black, shining black as the blackest African skin; it rolled the whites of its wicked, wee eyes and showed its microscopic teeth between lips repulsive in their red fullness, even in so diminutive a face. It had crisp, fuzzy wool on its minikin skull, it turned malignantly from side to side and chittered incessantly in that inconceivable falsetto. Stone babbled brokenly against its patter.
Van Rieten turned from Stone and waked Etcham, with some difficulty. When he was awake and saw it all, Etcham stared and said not one word.
‘You saw him slice off two swellings?’ Van Rieten asked.
Etcham nodded, chokingly.
‘Did he bleed much?’ Van Rieten demanded.
‘Ve’y little,’ Etcham replied.
‘You hold his arms,’ said Van Rieten to Etcham.
He took up Stone’s razor and handed me the light. Stone showed no sign of seeing the light or of knowing we were there. But the little head mewled and screeched at us.
Van Rieten’s hand was steady, and the sweep of the razor even and true. Stone bled amazingly little and Van Rieten dressed the wound as if it had been a bruise or scrape.
Stone had stopped talking the instant the excrescent head was severed. Van Rieten did all that could be done for Stone and then fairly grabbed the light from me. Snatching up a gun he scanned the ground by the cot and brought the butt down once and twice, viciously.
We went back to our hut, but I doubt if I slept.
VI
Next day, near noon, in broad daylight, we heard the two voices from Stone’s hut. We found Etcham dropped asleep by his charge. The swelling on the left had broken, and just such another head was there mauling and spluttering. Etcham woke up and the three of us stood there and glared. Stone interjected hoarse vocables into the tinkling gurgle of the portent’s utterance.
Van Rieten stepped forward, took up Stone’s razor and knelt down by the cot. The anatomy of a head squealed a wheezy snarl at him.
Then suddenly Stone spoke English.
‘Who are you with my razor?’
Van Rieten started back and stood up.
Stone’s eyes were clear now and bright, they roved about the hut.
‘The end,’ he said; ‘I recognize the end. I seem to see Etcham, as if in life. But Singleton! Ah, Singleton! Ghosts of my boyhood come to watch me pass! And you, strange spectre with the black beard and my razor! Aroint ye all!’
‘I’m no ghost, Stone,’ I managed to say. ‘I’m alive. So are Etcham and Van Rieten. We are here to help you.’
‘Van Rieten!’ he exclaimed. ‘My work passes on to a better man. Luck go with you, Van Rieten.’
Van Rieten went nearer to him.
‘Just hold still a moment, old man,’ he said soothingly. ‘It will be only one twinge.’
‘I’ve held still for many such twinges,’ Stone answered quite distinctly. ‘Let me be. Let me die in my own way. The hydra was nothing to this. You can cut off ten, a hundred, a thousand heads, but the curse you can not cut off, or take off. What’s soaked into the bone won’t come out of the flesh, any more than what’s bred there. Don’t hack me any more. Promise!’
His voice had all the old commanding tone of his boyhood and it swayed Van Rieten as it always had swayed everybody.
‘I promise,’ said Van Rieten.
Almost as he said the word Stone’s eyes filmed again.
Then we three sat about Stone and watched that hideous, gibbering prodigy grow up out of Stone’s flesh, till two horrid, spindling little black arms disengaged themselves. The infinitesimal nails were perfect to the barely perceptible moon at the quick, the pink spot on the palm was horridly natural. These arms gesticulated and the right plucked towards Stone’s blond beard.
‘I can’t stand this,’ Van Rieten exclaimed and took up the razor again.
Instantly Stone’s eyes opened, hard and glittering.
‘Van Rieten break his word?’ he enunciated slowly. ‘Never!’
‘But we must help you,’ Van Rieten gasped.
‘I am past all help and all hurting,’ said Stone. ‘This is my hour. This curse is not put on me; it grew out of me, like this horror here. Even now I go.’
His eyes closed and we stood helpless, the adherent figure spouting shrill sentences.
In a moment Stone spoke again.
‘You speak all tongues?’ he asked quickly.
And the mergent minikin replied in sudden English:
‘Yea, verily, all that you speak,’ putting out its microscopic tongue, writhing its lips and wagging its head from side to side. We could see the thready ribs on its exiguous flanks heave as if the thing breathed.
‘Has she forgiven me?’ Stone asked in a muffled strangle.
‘Not while the moss hangs from the cypresses,’ the head squeaked. ‘Not while the stars shine on Lake Pontchartrain will she forgive.’
And then Stone, all with one motion, wrenched himself over on his side. The next instant he was dead.
When Singleton’s voice ceased the room was hushed for a space. We could hear each other breathing. Twombly, the tactless, broke the silence.
‘I presume,’ he said, ‘you cut off the little minikin and brought it home in alcohol.’
Singleton turned on him a stern countenance.
‘We buried Stone,’ he said, ‘unmutilated as he died.’
‘But,’ said the unconscionable Twombly, ‘the whole thing is incredible.’
Singleton stiffened.
‘I did not expect you to believe it,’ he said; ‘I began by saying that although I heard and saw it, when I look back on it I cannot credit it myself.’
The Donguys
Juan Rodolfo Wilcock, born in Buenos Aires. He has published poetry and prose books in Spanish and Italian, including: Libro de poemas y canciones (1940); Ensayos de Poesía Lírica (1945); Pérsecución de las Musas Menores (1945); Paseo Sentimental (1946); Sexto (1953); Il Caos (1960); Fatti Inquietanti (1961); Luoghi Comuni (1961); Teatro in prosa e versi (1962).
I
Suspended vertically from the greyness like those curtains of little chains which keep out the flies in dairies whilst shutting out neither the air which sustains them nor people, the rain was falling between the Andes and me when I reached Mendoza, making it impossible to see the mountains although I could sense their presence in the gullies, which all seemed to be descending from the same pyramid.
The following morning I went up to the terrace of the hotel and saw that in fact the tops were white under the gaps in the sky amongst nomadic clouds. I wasn’t surprised, partly because of a postcard with a banal view of the Inca’s Bridge bought by chance in a gift shop which turned out to be different from reality; as for many travellers, from a distance they looked to me like the mountains of Switzerland.
The day I was transferred I rose before dawn and got ready in the damp and the faint light. We left by car at seven o’clock; with me were two engineers, Balsa and Balsocci, both quite incapable of knowing an anagram from a greeting. In the outskirts, the light of dawn was beginning to fall on deformed cacti on shapeless hillocks: we crossed the river Mendoza, which at this time of year stands out more than anything else for its thundering noise under the blue beam of bright summer lights shining towards the bottom of the valley, without looking at it, and t
hen we entered the mountains.
Balsocci talked with Balso in a duet and at one point said, ‘Barnaza eats more than a donguy.’
Balsa glanced at me sideways and after another discussion of news from abroad, tried to sound me out, ‘Have they explained to you, Engineer, the reason we’re building the monumental Punta de Vacas hotel?’
I knew, but nobody had actually explained it to me: I replied, ‘No.’ And I followed that with the pathetic offering, ‘I imagine it is being built to encourage tourism.’
‘Yes, to encourage tourism, ha, ha. To salve their conscience, you should say (Balsocci).
I didn’t say, but I did say to them, ‘I don’t understand,’ although I did. ‘We’ll tell you certain secret details later,’ Balsa explained to me, ‘which concern the construction and which you will therefore be informed of when we hand over the plans, specifications and other construction details to you. For the time being, allow us to impose on your patience a little.’
I suppose that between the two of them they couldn’t create a mystery in fourteen years. Their only honesty—involuntary—consisted in making everything they were thinking obvious; for instance, instead of hiding something they would just look as though they were hiding something, and so on.
I observed my brave new world. Certain moments superimposed themselves onto the next few hours and days, as when you return for example for the second time to the open square in Sienna and enter from the other side, you think that the entrance you first used is by now famous. Changeable between two rocks as tall as the obelisk, one black, one red, I caught a memorable vision and devoted myself to taking in another great landscape: close to the thundering crash of the river I reflected that the moment was a tunnel and I would emerge a changed man.
The Book of Fantasy Page 53