Hello to the Cannibals

by Richard Bausch

  I closed myself into my cabin, in a foul mood, feeling that I had failed my own best hopes for myself in this place. But later, at dinner, they were all still on the ship, and the one I had struck with the broom smiled sheepishly at me from the other end of the long table Captain Murray had fashioned out of the luggage trunks of his passengers.

  They were all very noisy all night, drinking various intoxicating substances, singing and beating on anything that would make an echo, and I sat at the other end of the boat, behind a pile of paraffin tins in boxes, with a line over the side, fishing. No success. But it was calming. I felt a little like a pouting child, until Corliss joined me.

  —The loudest laugh of the evening, he said to me, was when the young chief told of the witch hitting him with a broom. He was speaking figuratively, too, Miss Kingsley, because Africans do not believe in that kind of witch.

  He laughed, telling me this, and I laughed along with him.

  I am in Africa. Soon I will be walking inland, heading to places unknown.

  8

  IN THE CLEAR WEATHER of a morning at sea, she stands at the railing and watches the coastline glide by. There is the changing hue of the ocean toward land, the green fading to a bright blue and then to a lighter green, and there is the pristine shore, with its white sand, the white beach leading to a dark-green solid wall of forest; and beyond the forest, the wide sky, ribbed with cumulus that is breaking up. The sun pours through it all. Mile upon mile she watches as this seemingly unchanging view goes on, trailing on behind them to the north, remaining constant before her eyes, the same sea, beach, forest, and sky. But the sky is always shifting, of course, revealing new shapes and masses and colors, new continents of air. The hours pass. The sun makes its journey across the world and turns the water darker along the line of the coast, turns the white of the sand there whiter still, and lights the green wall, gives it a new shade of green, turning the sky above it the color of dark wine. The stars come out. She has spent most of the day here, watching it all happen. She has never been happier. Corliss joins her on deck, with his stub of a cigar in the corner of his mouth. They say nothing to each other, standing side by side watching the changeless coast. She feels no constraint with him at all, nor any sense of expectations on his part. When a school of dolphin comes by them, leaping high and seeming in pursuit of each other, he says:

  —I never tire of watching them.

  —No, she says. I’m the same.

  Later, they stop on the Gold Coast, at Accra. Mary and Corliss go ashore in a dinghy. They pass the port by water, and enter a lagoon, water so calm and smooth that the small disturbance of the dinghy makes lovely waves in it. All along the shore are thick mangrove roots standing high out of the water, wound with vines and wild flowers. It is actually rather cool, here on the water. At one tight inlet of the lagoon, she sees something long and strangely the color of the clay banks. It doesn’t move, but there are ridges and horns on it, and she recognizes with a start the big sacklike belly: crocodile. She points to it, and Corliss nods, and in a few feet they see two more of them.

  —I never understood how big, she says, low.

  —I’ve seen bigger, says Corliss. Twice that size and more.

  They stop at a Kru village, and find that a Kru man has just this week been taken by one of the crocs. Mary watches as they act it out and explain to Corliss, who looks back out at the lagoon as if expecting the poor man to rise from there and ask for help. The crocs take a man and dive with him to the bottom, without killing him. They roll slowly in the mud and water of the bottom of the lagoon, until the man drowns. And, the Kru say, they cry as they do this. They weep, as though they are sad about what they are doing.

  Corliss does a little trading while she observes. She has brought a few things in her portmanteau, combs and small bracelets and some soaps, which she offers. The Kru accept everything graciously, with wide white smiles and eyes that take her in and in.

  By the time they leave the village and begin the journey to the mouth of the lagoon, it is evening. The light is failing and a fog settles over them. Corliss is standing, using the pole to move them along. Everywhere there is the uproar and song of Africa, and now and again they hear splashes in the water. Mary thinks of the crocs, and keeps a close watch as the visible world sinks into the mist and disappears. Soon they are moving through a cloud so thick that their direction is uncertain. Corliss pauses, and listens. Screeches from the mangroves, bird calls, the whir of insects, the water lapping the sides of the dinghy, the cough of something off in the dense growth, a leopard or a lion. Corliss waits, and then begins to push on the pole again, and there’s a thudding sound, and abruptly he drops down into the boat, heavy on her lap, his left hand making a strange nerve-jumping motion. She looks down at him, prepared to fend off an advance, almost shouting, and she’s horrorstruck to see that there’s blood everywhere. Corliss has hit something, or something has hit him. She looks back in the dimness and can just make out the low-hanging branch of a mangrove tree dissolving into the mist.

  —Oh, David, she says. David?

  Nothing. The dinghy continues its motion in the water, carried by the current toward the sea. She touches his face, and she can feel blood soaking through her dress. The darkness is almost complete. She waits, and the blood washes down into her stockings; insects settle on her face and neck, and on his face. The alarms of night go up from the tangled mangroves, and there are the crocs to think about. She can tell that Corliss is breathing, but is beginning to believe that his wound must be fatal. There’s so much blood—surely he’s bled more than a man can do and stay alive. But Corliss keeps breathing. He’s utterly still otherwise, and she can make out that his eyes are partly open; it looks like death. She puts her fingers to his jugular, and feels the pulse there, and the minutes pass, and then time beyond minutes or hours begins to go by. She will never rise from this flat expanse of water bordered by twisted roots and crossed by monsters. The dinghy bumps against something and slows, and then glides muddily to a stop. The water level has gone down; she knows the muck they are in. The odor of it rises to her nostrils, mixed with the smell of blood. The boat is mired, has come to a stop in the middle of the river.

  It takes all her learning, everything she has ever taught herself, to keep from flying into a panic. She holds Corliss’s head bleeding in her lap, and the hours stretch into generations. She experiences discomforts she could never have imagined—itches and aches and cramps and the torturous path of a single bead of sweat, taking an excruciating age to trickle down her back. She checks Corliss from time to time, finding no change: shallow breath, half-open, dazed, dead-looking eyes, regular pulse.

  Slowly, and then more suddenly than she can stand, she is aware of movement in the boggy surrounding gloom. Something is approaching them in the dark, sliding along, stage by stage in the malarial slag. She hears the footfalls, small, flat, sliding thumps of the mire. It is pitch-dark. She peers in the direction of the noise, believes for a hopeful moment that it is something making its way past her, but then she’s soaked in the terrifying knowledge that it is indeed approaching. She hears its breath. It moves into the near dimness right before her, a croc, at least eight feet long, and coming straight for them, with purpose.

  —Corliss, she murmurs. Corliss, please wake up.

  But Corliss is still deeply submerged in his knocked-out state. As soundlessly as she can, without thinking, in a kind of pure, dead terror, mindless as blinking at an object hurled at her face, she reaches around Corliss’s heavy shoulder and manages to grasp the end of one of the oars. She pulls it toward her, startled at the scraping sound it makes in the bottom of the boat. The croc pauses at the sound, and waits. Mary scrapes the oar again, until its butt end hits the stern of the dinghy. But the new sound hasn’t changed the croc’s mind. It slaps the mud, waddling forward, and Mary knows how much speed they can muster when they decide at last to make the attack. She lifts the oar with one hand, the end of it slanting down, too long for
her to gain the leverage necessary to raise it. But she can now grasp what she has of it with the other hand, and with all her strength she lifts it, holding it ponderously and uncertainly above her head. The croc moves to one side, and around the craft. She knows they are not dumb. This one is circling, to be surer of things. For a few seconds she loses sight of it beyond the bow of the dinghy. But then it emerges on the other side, and turns, starting right for that side of the bow. It hits the side, shakes the whole thing; Mary thinks she hears wood cracking. She moves slightly, and poor Corliss’s head sinks from her lap, and thumps into the bottom of the boat. Now she has gotten to one knee, and here are the prehistoric-looking feet, with their heavy black claws gripping the side of the bow, the long head rising, straining; the thing wants to get to her, and will climb over the side to do so. She stands, wobbling, holding the oar high, and brings it down with tremendous force—and misses. The oar hits the wood, and sends a nerve pain all the way up to her shoulders. The dinghy is tipping now with the weight of the croc, and Corliss’s body comes against her left leg, nearly knocking her over. She gains her feet again, grips the oar again—the croc has gotten both front legs into the boat now, and its tail is whipping back and forth and smacking the muddy surface of the bog, achieving the balance necessary, any second now, to haul its entire body in. Once more Mary raises the oar, holds it precariously, staggering in the shaking and agitation, the shifting of Corliss’s weight, and the pitching and yawing caused by the weight of the crocodile on the bow and brings the shaft down with all her strength. This time it is true. It comes down directly on the animal’s snout. She quickly lifts the oar again, and again brings it down, where it lands somewhere between the protruding eyes. The animal whips and snaps and lunges, she thinks out of rage, and she has lifted the oar to strike again, but sees that it is trying very hard to get off the fulcrum it is balanced on—the dinghy’s gunnel. She fetches it one more blow, then uses the oar like a prod, pushing under its thick jaw, until it falls off and is flailing across the murky surface into the recesses of the dark and the undergrowth.

  Mary stands there, out of breath, holding the oar like a spear, crouched in the dinghy over the fallen body of Corliss. She catches her breath, holds it in, wanting to be certain nothing else is coming toward them in the blackness. It takes her a very long time to relax enough to sit down, and to raise Corliss’s blood-spattered head into her own blood-soaked lap again. She keeps the oar very near, at an angle at which she’s confident she’ll be able to raise it again if need be, though the muscles of her arms and back throb with such searing pain that it is hard to believe she could have the strength.

  She waits in dread of another attack, begins to hear things, begins fearing that she’s imagining the sounds. But there are so many sounds, and none of them are human. The dark wears on into more dark. The sky is timeless black. Morning will never come. She thinks of the living room in the little house on Addison Road. She recalls the friendly, happy times learning chemistry from Varley, the walks with her father; She thinks of Lucy Toulmin-Smith, and the warm Paris night, the starry, moon-bright dark over the Seine. It all comes to her with a tantalizing clarity, and she makes an effort to put it away, understanding the need for vigilance. At some point, in the endless waiting, another croc approaches, from the same direction as the first. It comes close, and she grasps the oar, but then it glides off into the blackness, and its motion is the first indication she has that the water is rising. It made splashing noises, quite close, slithering, then swimming away. She knows the water will rise. She has spent such a long time waiting for it that now it seems to be hurrying. It has begun to happen.

  —David? Please. For the sake of God. For Jesus sake, wake up.

  No stirring. Very slowly, almost imperceptibly, the boat lifts with the water’s rising, and begins to turn. At length, it is free of the bog, and moving. Yet the darkness is still so complete that she can’t begin to tell in which direction. In this blind, facetless night, with no stars and no moon to use for reference, for all she knows the current is taking them away from the port, away from The Lagos.

  The fight she has had to make has left her parched and starving. She has nothing to eat or drink—at least nothing she can easily reach, and she left her medical kit behind. She curses herself for this, and realizes that she cannot even hear herself talk, the forest and sky are so filled with sound. She feels swallowed up. They are moving, she has fought off the crocodile, but the night has covered them. In her exhaustion, she’s becoming certain that it will never give them up while they live; twenty thousand years from now a scientist will uncover the two of them from the primordial slime, and believe their fossilized remains to be a great discovery.

  At last, out of the fog, the big shape of the city emerges, and the pier, and farther on, The Lagos, with its masts looking like gibbets in the haze. Corliss stirs in her lap.

  —What happened? he says. Where are we? My head.

  —Lie still, Mary tells him. You were a lot of ’elp getting back.

  —I have such a terrible headache.

  —You’re blessed then, with one ache.

  —I’m sorry.

  —Couldn’t be ’elped, she says. Don’t add contrition to injury. Do you know your name and mine?

  —I think yeh’re Mary Kingsley, the conqueror of Leviathan.

  —You were awake for that?

  —I remember it coming up over the gunnel and then my head took another smack and I thought I was a goner for sure.

  —I was forced to drop you, Mary says. Sorry.

  The others help her with him, and she stands on the deck while someone Conklin has brought onboard for shipping farther south, a Scotsman named McNab, tends to him. McNab is a doctor, and is sick—has been sick with fever, and dysentery. The bloody flux, he calls it, winking at everyone. He observes the blood on Mary’s dress, and then seems to realize Mary herself.

  —Good Lord, what’re ye doing here, young miss? It’s a wonder ye didn’t faint dead away.

  —Careful, sir. Or you will, from the looks of you.

  He addresses Captain Murray:

  —I do hate spirited women, Captain. Especially ones with cockney accents.

  After he wraps Corliss’s wound—which, he says, is superficial, though the fact that he was knocked unconscious must be attended to—he asks for something to drink. Captain Murray invites him into the cabin for a cup of rum or whiskey. Mary accompanies them, and again McNab looks askance at her.

  —I spent four months in Cabinda with a barrister, he says. A black. Big heavyset buck, he was. Black as pitch. Married to a plucky lady like yourself. A little white lady from Yorkshire or thereabouts. Terrible accent, like yours.

  —A white lady, Captain Murray says.

  —Ye should’ve seen her fawn on him. He must be a stallion in the bed, for her to be so appreciative. Ye never saw the like. Hanging on his arm and looking all moony-eyed at him. Her big black lover man.

  —Stop it, Mary says.

  —But you’re a gutsy lady, are ye not? Surely, traveling among the blacks, it’s nothing new to ye.

  —I don’t wish to ’ave it spoken of.

  —Are we prudes now? And in Africa, no less.

  Captain Murray pours rum and says:

  —The lady you’re addressing is not a prude, sir. And I know you’ve been ill, but I require some respect from you.

  —I have all the respect in the world for the ladies, including the lady that’s humping her black every night and singing in the high Yorkshire tones of her homeland. Singing with the joy of the satiated, if ye know what I mean.

  Mary takes hold of Captain Murray’s wrist as he appears to be about to swipe at the man. She smiles and nods slowly, and says:

  —I must go change out of this dress. The blood’ll be drawing insects.

  In her cabin, she removes the dress and her undergarments, and stands before the mirror. Corliss’s blood is on her legs and feet. She feels the soft shifting of the ship, and is
abruptly sick at heart. The doctor’s talk about the lady from Yorkshire and her black has upset her, and she’s a little surprised at herself. There was a heart-deep reaction, almost a physical queasiness at the thought of sex between the races. She has already seen so much, and the bodies of the Africans, the sculpted musculature and the amazing unblemished skin of the youths—it has all inspired admiration from her. Indeed, she has discovered a strange preference for them in herself, like the preference a person might have for one kind of sculpture over another in an art gallery. Until now, there has been no direct convergence of her intellectual appreciation and the physical draw of her own being, her own fleshly appetites; and she finds the possibility, for the moment, unspeakable.

  Thoughts wind inside thoughts, and all her tortured nights in England return in an instant—all the sleepless hours while her young womanly body changed and urged and grew. For a few seconds, the whole of the world seems freighted with this awful sense of the body, of needs and foods and waste and sweat and the damps and odors of being alive.

  The ship pitches on this little half acre of the sea.

  9

  THE LAGOS puts in at Bonny in the late afternoon, and the sunlight on the water looks too pristine to be the cause of such terrible odors, which drift on the tide and the wind, from the mangrove swamps. She goes ashore with Captain Murray, and they have tea with the British agent there, a man named Boler, who says he never heard of James Batty. The air is heavy with a malarial damp, and Boler explains that the city is in a bad way with sleeping sickness and smallpox. He’s a florid, heavy man, with a thin gray mustache and a clean pate, and spots that look unhealthy. He chuffs and coughs and complains, and slaps at mosquitoes, and then he tells a story of two clerks who, at the burial of their superior, got drunk and fell into his grave…and the coffin was lowered onto them. Mary looks at Captain Murray for some sign that he remembers the story, but he merely sips his tea and seems amused all over again at the macabre farce of it all. Boler goes on to say that the two clerks succumbed the very next day to the fever and were lowered into their own graves for real.