Limbo

by Bernard Wolfe

  He took her hand and held it cupped against his cheek.

  “Listen. We have done everything together, you and I. Night after night. It was never like this for me before, you are more woman than I have ever known. What days I have left, I wish to spend with you. Oh, I will come back.” He slipped his arms around her and held her tight. “When I come back,” he said, “I will not go away from you again. Even a little. I will try. I do not want to be so troubled and turned in on myself, but there is something—and lately. . . .” He got up, pulled on his shorts and a shirt.

  “Now?” she said. “You are going now?”

  “No, no. I have a headache, there are no pills here. I will go to the cave to get some.” He leaned over and kissed her. “Try to eat something,” he said. “There is some tapioca on the table.”

  chapter five

  HOW, REALLY, do you go about saying good-bye? With a lingering toodle-oo? With a kick of the heels and a soft-shoe shuffle? It was over eighteen years since he’d gone anywhere, he’d forgotten how the thing was done.

  Leaning against the edge of the desk, looking down at the rows of intent faces, he went on talking about facts, history, matters of the record; all very objective and impersonal. When you can’t say an intimate thing you can always lecture: a technique for using words to insulate yourself against your audience.

  There were, he mechanically reminded his listeners, two important dates in Mandunji history. The first, as nearly as one could guess from the old stories told around the evening fires, was in the fourteenth century, that was when the founding fathers, fleeing from the wars in Africa and Madagascar, had accidentally come upon this remote button of land and decided to settle here. With them, of course, they brought a recently developed ceremony named Mandunga. The second date could be given a little more exactly: October 19, 1972, at 7:21 in the morning. That was when he, Martine, in flight from the EMSIAC wars, had caught sight of this island—again, entirely by accident—and brought his plane down. With him he had all the tools for a recently developed ceremony called lobotomy. Mandunga and lobotomy met, looked at each other, and saw with a start that they were twins.

  “Those are the two dates,” he said. “In the six hundred-odd years between them, nothing happened. It was not because people were too busy to preciptate big events and promote memorable excitements and create red-letter days that would remain in the tribal mind. They were just too sleepy. Sleepy people do not make history, they just yawn. For the Mandunji, the gap between the fourteenth century and the twentieth century is one long yawn.”

  Many of the faces out in front lit up and dimpled: there were quite a few titters, even some outright laughs. Immediately Martine’s mood began to brighten. These were sober people, the Mandunji, to them the bellylaughable was as remote as the blowtoppish and for very much the same reason; in the old days his observation would have been taken for a simple neutral statement of fact, as though he had remarked that water is wet or a lemur hairy—what was so hilarious about a datum? Somehow, without meaning to, he had managed to create among these young people (if he could take the credit for it) an atmosphere of irreverence in which it was possible to look at a solemn fact a bit slantwise and see in it a pint of pigeon’s milk, a pratfall. These kids had somehow learned to back off from themselves and their parents a bit, had discovered the sidelines, and suddenly they had spied the slapstick in the sobrieties—a touch of mirth had entered their lives. And, just as suddenly, Martine had stopped living on the sidelines: he had company. The full implication of this change struck him now, and he began to warm up to his subject.

  Since 1972, he went on, things had gotten a bit livelier—a certain dynamism had filtered into the village. This was due first of all to the machine, all the machines which had been salvaged from the deserted African cities and made to run the traditional tools of the village. Where it had taken a dozen men a dozen days to grind a certain quantity of maize, now one man could do the same job in a few hours. As a result the young people were freed for a good part of the day, or for whole days at a time, to do other things. What they had chosen to do, most of them, was to study and work in the labs. Liberated from the deadening routine of manual labor, they had gravitated toward the cave.

  And the result? Quite a few of them were now half-doctors, and good ones; others were more than competent laboratory technicians, machinists, chemists, pharmacologists, electronics engineers of a sort, even statisticians; still others were anesthetists, nurses, and so on. So that was one way in which movement had crept into the village: the young people had started to become things that nobody had ever been before in the tribe’s history, they were learning what it felt like to be unprecedented, to live with an aura of newness. It was possible, they were discovering, for a man to be defined by something other than the old routines, to define himself somewhat by choice, from within. And as they had begun to make themselves into something new, a ferment of newness had seeped from them into the life of the village.

  There was change in the village, dramatic change. It could be defined first of all in medical terms. They all knew the statistics of the past fifteen years or so: infant mortality cut down almost to zero, deaths in childbirth practically eliminated, most infectious diseases wiped out or under control, no epidemics of malaria or anything else for almost a decade, no deaths from snake bites, gangrene, perforated appendixes and peritonitis, no more hookworm or elephantiasis, no villagers left crippled because of unbalanced diet or inept bonesetting. This medical care by itself had broken up long-standing “facts” and made them turn into their opposites.

  The elders, understandably, were made a little dizzy by this stirring; they were used only to a soothing sameness, to things reproducing themselves with no surprises century after century. But the younger people had begun to feel a sense of excitement, of things happening—tomorrow might be different from today, the future promised to be an adventure instead of a dreary perpetuation of the past. Because question marks began to appear up ahead, because the invasion of change had abruptly cracked the shell of determinism encasing the village, the young people began to wake up from the long, traditional sleep. Life had, within one generation, squirmed out of the clamp of repetition and routine and opened itself up to the possibility of the miraculous, one began to feel alert and anticipatory.

  And so, a paradox. Because they had mastered the machine in the cave, the future began to crackle with question marks. Therefore, a quickening sense of anticipation. But whenever there was anticipation of the new, uncertainty about the shape and feel of tomorrow, there was also anxiety. Anxious anticipation: that was the mood of the young ones, they were joining history. But the organ of anxious anticipation was—the prefrontal lobe: exactly what the cave was intended to annihilate. The Mandunga cave was the breeding ground of its sworn enemy; the young lobotomists were sprouting bigger and bigger lobes of their own. . . .

  But it was important to ask a question: Why this great shift? It had not been done to or for the village by outside forces or agencies. The young people had done it themselves, first by changing themselves and then by imposing their new selves on the old, rigid mold of the village. So they felt that they were the movers in this communal jolt, this return to the making of history, not the moved; and that accounted for much of their excitement. They were developing a sense of power and a taste for it—a sense which, they must recognize, was strictly taboo in the mores of the village.

  “Always in the past,” Martine said, “the Mandunji were so appalled by energy that they could not tolerate any display of it. Whenever they saw an active man, they assumed that the energy activating him was the energy of belligerence, and therefore a threat. If a man energetically attacked trees and snakes and weeds and rocks and rivers, they felt, how could one be sure that he would not some day shift his targets and just as energetically attack his fellow-villagers? That is why, for six hundred years, your ancestors invented no new ways of chopping and hollowing trees, of fishing, of maize grinding;
they established certain lazy routines of dealing with Nature and then they followed these routines forever after, in a kind of comforting daze, content to feel more done-to than doing. What was suspect to them was the very impulse to self-assertion and the triumph of will; what was reassuring was the drowning of all sense of the self in routine. Therefore: a life-in-the-mass, of dull incognito. Therefore: no new technics, no experimentation, no science, no medicine. Everything you have learned in the cave they abhorred as sheer willfulness and the push of ego—that which makes war. I need only add: it also makes poetry. And painting—painting which is more than just insipid design, which has the bold stamp of personality on it.”

  He stopped and rubbed his temples with his fingers, blinking hard. He felt overheated, the thoughts were racing, maybe he’d had more ganja than he’d thought.

  “Here is the point,” he said, wondering whether, after all, he knew what the damned slippery point was, whether there was any. “In a village where everything is habit and repetition, no man can feel that he is in control of anything, the outside world or himself. He is not a doer but a thing done to, a victim. Even his body is a victim: of germs, of hookworms, of all the other dangerous things in Nature which are not stamped out or subdued. Of snakes, of sharks, of poisonous berries, of perforated appendixes, of gangrene, of rickets, of beriberi. Also, of backbreaking labor from sunup to sundown, because it would take too much will to invent laborsaving devices.

  “All right,” he said more forcefully. “You young people sitting in this cave, you are the first ones in the history of your village to shake off some of the sense of menace and taste the sense of power. The first for whom the world is not entirely a steamroller—” He frowned; hadn’t meant to say that. “The very first. You have begun to acquire some control over your bodies—with pills, with drugs, with microscopes and splints—and simultaneously over the physical world in which your bodies are planted—with the tools I have just mentioned, and also with machines and other equipment. All of that became possible only because you had the audacity to break away from routine and make yourselves into something new. As a result, the human body in our village is healthier than it has ever been before. But we have learned that diseases are not only of the body, they are also of the mind. So we must now ask: How healthy is the human mind on our island? What about Mandunga?

  “About Mandunga, one big point. It is a wrong thing and a bad thing to make fun of the old people. They may begin to look ridiculous, with their solemn ceremonies and their set ways, but there are very strong reasons for their attachment to certain archaic forms and attitudes. You will find those reasons in the harrowing past of your tribe. You all know the story. . .”

  They did, indeed, know the story. They had heard it many times from Martine’s lips. The story began at an undetermined time, on some undetermined plateau in north-central Africa. Here, barricaded from the outside by a ring of mountains, lived the X’s, pastoral, vegetarians, without the spears and knives of the hunter and the warrior. One day they were discovered and overrun by a band of fierce young men, offshoots of the Bantu tribes far to the east: lean and hungry young men, bristling with arms, without women—they had been banished from their own villages because they had been discovered plotting to kill their fathers and take over the households of women monopolized by their fathers. The X-men were enslaved, the X-women expropriated.

  Thus began the X-Bantus. Life was easy on the plateau, the warriors from the east relaxed and forgot about meat eating and turned their hunter’s spears into spades. Then came another throng of strangers: burnoosed and sword-brandishing Arabs, fleeing from the terrible wars of extermination in the deserts far to the north. Lean and hungry, armed to the teeth, without women, and so on. Thus began the X-Bantu-Arabs.

  Peace again—until scouting parties reported more bands of wild men swooping down from the north. By now a heritage of guilt lay heavy on the tribe, the guilt of two ravishings followed by a sort of yielding to and blending with those ravished: a very common thing, as witness the Americans and their Negro slaves. So, thought the guilty pastoral descendants of rapists, if the plateau had been overrun twice, could it not happen a third time? In panic the chiefs gathered and reached a decision: they must become nomads and tiptoe southward to a haven beyond the reach of war and the fugitives from war.

  They ran away. For many years they wandered wretchedly. Many died. Through the Sudan and Kenya they wandered—as Martine reconstructed it from the old stories—into Tanganyika, then west to the Congo, then east again through the Rhodesias. So, finally, to Mozambique and the placid blue waters of the Mozambique Channel. They settled here in a lush coastal area, far from the scrapes and skirmishes of other peoples, and time passed. Then a violent war broke out between two tribes to the north. Suddenly the combatants had a bright idea: why should they go on eliminating each other when they might pool their warriors and jointly attack these timid, defenseless people huddled on the coast hardly daring to breathe? Better to kill strangers, interlopers—neighbors of long standing should not spill each other’s blood, and so on.

  The X-Bantu-Arabs were attacked, many were killed. The survivors piled into their boats and paddled furiously to sea, not knowing what was ahead, knowing only that once more they had to run from something behind. The whole continent of Africa seemed like a sharp-toothed trap that was continually snapping shut on them.

  They reached the shores of Madagascar. Rich country, everything went smoothly, life became one long sunny romp, not too bad even for the slaves. Until the ferocious Malays put in their boats and swarmed ashore: they’d come a long way, bellies caved in, few women but many flashing scimitars, the old story. Heads hacked off, rape, enslavement. Then things were quiet for a few generations, and the population grew so rapidly that a second village was established. But soon bad blood began to develop between the two villages: each chief claimed that the other was plotting to murder him and take over his village. The slaves in both villages were put to work making more spears and bolos.

  Working side by side during the day, lying side by side in their huts at night, the terrified slaves talked over what was happening and tried to evaluate it in terms of their past experiences. They had much to talk about: in each slave’s veins ran the guilt-laden blood of three ravagers. And as a result of their secret musings and nocturnal communications, a radical idea began to take root in the guilty minds of the slaves: what their forefathers had been running from for centuries could not be escaped geographically, the trouble was in the head. Those who make spears and think of war have devils in their heads, they are insane. Internal geography had to be considered. And if the trouble had finally been traced to its pathological source, it was clear what had to be done by way of therapy.

  Some night between 1450 and 1500, very late, the same thing happened in both villages. A group of men, faces hidden by masks with tusks and fangs and tiger tails on them, bodies slashed with brilliant paints, crept up to each chief’s hut, overpowered the guards, gagged the chief and stole away with him into the jungle. In the morning both chiefs were found on the bank of a small pool halfway between the two villages. They were bound together with braided vines, hands interlocked, and between them was the body of a freshly killed owl, symbol of peace and fraternity.

  The chiefs were not dead but they were unconscious, and their heads were swathed with bandages of bark. From the forehead of each a circle of bone had been chiseled, a portion of the brain scooped out, and the bone carefully wedged back in place. They were the first Mandungabas. No way of telling whether they lived, and whether the removal of their prefrontal demons prompted them to call their war off; those who might have told the story were no longer on the scene. By this time all the slaves who could manage it were far out to sea in the hardy boats of their Malayan masters, with as many of their masters’ women and children as they had been able to carry off.

  They headed east, of course, southeast, rather, because to the north and west lay Africa and their memorie
s of Africa were not good. Again they had no idea where they were going, whether they would ever find land again or simply sail to the water’s edge and slip off the rim of the world, but they were happy that Madagascar was behind them. This time luck was with them: after some hundreds of miles they sighted a small, thickly overgrown island, lying far away from all the sea routes, which turned out to be entirely uninhabited. It was hard to land because of the reefs and cliffs, two boats were broken to bits and most of their passengers drowned, but the rest of them made it.

  Very soon they were settled. When their nerves had stopped vibrating they began to squat around their evening fire and talk about their miraculous adventures. Mostly they talked about the great discovery they had made: that there these devils could be cut out with a chisel and a rock. (They called it a “discovery,” although they never knew the results of their first devil-chasing experiment: but who is empiric in his myth-spinning, who concocts his reveries in a test tube?) Back on Madagascar they had decided to call this new ceremony Mandunga, “to chase the devils from the head.” These X-Bantu-Arab-Malays now realized that they needed a name for themselves, and since they were people who had no wish whatsoever to fight they saw that it was logical to call themselves the Mandunji, “those whose heads are without devils.” It was a definition designed to appease the guilt which everybody felt, everybody without exception—because, to be perfectly honest about it, no human head is entirely without devils. From it came the mild incognito personality of every tribesman.

  They immediately decreed the therapy of the chisel for any villager who showed a taste for violence, and settled down to sleep for six hundred years. . . .

  “You all know the story,” Martine said. “Anatomically speaking, the founders of Mandunga showed a good deal of sense. Somehow men have always known that those bumps of anticipation and anxiety, the frontal lobes, are the seat of most human troubles: from them come art, imagination, conscience, curiosity, egoness, migraine and tension. And more than once, when confronted with behavior which frightens them—because it reminds them unbearably of their unacknowledged selves—men have hit upon the Mandunga method of dealing with it. In many parts of the world archeologists have dug up very old human skulls with holes bored in them, and this must be the explanation. It is, in short, a very common form of magic. In the twentieth century my own people discovered it and named it lobotomy.”