Limbo

by Bernard Wolfe

  “I can,” Martine said. “Too much.”

  The sun was in his head, a boil of incandescence. Light poured from his eyes—into another shadowy cubicle, a thatched hut. There in the darkness, surrounded by paintings of writhing mountains and mahogany figures with fanged genitals, on a foam rubber mattress, a man was making love to a woman. And it was good—but the man did not know how good it was. For he was sunk in a miasma of words, between him and the woman there was a smokescreen of words. Generated in his own uneasy head, a noxious literary fog to pollute the experience. Words about the act of love which transmuted it from experience into maneuver-words about the passage from Itness to I-ness, from drift to drive, from the done-to to the doing—sick, ego-pushing words which the man would one day have to eat: which Martine, seeing now for the first time in his life, in the most terrible moment of his life, was now eating. For all the words, and all the feeble images bobbing through them, were born of an exaggerated sense of otherness and the menace of otherness: of the need to conquer everything outside one’s own skin, bring the not-I to its knees. And this belligerence was what poisoned sex with aggression, turned the caressing hand into a clenched fist—and without it, yes, without it, it was possible, just barely possible, that love-making, instead of being deed, performance, act, force, striving, driving, could be just the opposite—sheer egoless feeling, abandonment, the one great chance to move from drive to drift—the one supreme giving over. Orgasm, somehow, could go beyond triumphant doing: become yielding, an immersion. If selfness, the Eros without Agape, could be for the moment eluded—the selfness that makes of the belloved an object, a thing, “a soft merchandise.” It was impossible all the way, maybe. The full immobilization of the basket case, that was death. But it was a thing to want, to grope toward—all the rest was a game of charades with this or that Neen, the jockeying of two frantic egos for position—not sex, not love, but war by other means. The inescapable tragedy of skin, of boundaries, remained—no need to make it worse with insipid words, it was enough to experience directly, wordlessly. . . .

  “Lot to do,” he went on. “Lots of caves to let a little sun into. . . . Only way to cut down your tonus a little. Relax. A little tapioca isn’t so bad, really. . . .”

  He had meant to say it jokingly, in good humor, but he was crying unashamedly now, unhyphenatedly. Thinking of the great coruscating merriment in the sunlight, the laughter that illumination brings—thinking too that tears are always the camouflage of the vol-amp, part of the masochist’s blind of self-pity—and weeping furiously all the while.

  “My sin,” he said, “was that I carried Tom in my head before I sired him in the flesh.” Added, “But also Rambo—there was Rambo.”

  Eyes filmed, he turned to Theo once more, saw him as through the window of a bathysphere. He remembered what somebody—Malraux—had written long ago: The nineteenth century faced the question, Is God dead?—the twentieth century was facing the question, Is man dead?

  Was the answer in himself? He had carried death in himself, in a cave with no skylights. But not only death. Was the answer in Theo? He was half-dead, undoubtedly: legs dead, arms dead, plate the prefrontal lobes, bulging with miracles; and in the eyeballs, tear ducts—he could cry. He was crying now. Could enough light be let into that seething temple-cave—not with a scalpel: that destroyed the cave without illuminating it, leaving everybody as much in the dark as ever—to temper the tears a bit, relax the tense lips into a flickering smile, purge the smile bit by bit of its grave shadows. . . .

  “Can’t we go faster?”

  “We’re making pretty good time”.

  “We’ve got to make it.”

  Sobbing hilariously, yes and no, Martine leaned forward, trying not to hear the agonized choked sniffling from the seat next to him, knowing that it came from his own seat as well. Peering into the nauseating blue vacuum ahead, into the sun, the glare of the sun, straining with anxious anticipation to catch a glimpse of that cave-ridden ocean-lapped island which, miraculously, or maybe just because maps so rarely catch up with territories, had never been charted on any map by any cartographer.

  Part Seven

  THE MANDUNJI, MEANWHILE. . . .

  chapter twenty-five

  ABOVE, IN the raffia trees, animals made a sound like laughing, but down in the clearing it was quiet, gravely quiet, quiet as the grave. To one side of the sputtering fire sat the elders on stools of cane and braided bamboo, Ubu at their head; across from them the villagers, squatting in awed expectancy.

  Rambo rose from his cross-legged position and advanced toward the old men. His intelligent dark face was drawn and strained, he walked as though he wished not to but were being shoved from behind. In his hand a small volume, grease-stained.

  He stopped a few steps from Ubu, coughed. He opened the book and began to read in a tight quavering voice, stumbling now and then over an unfamiliar word: “‘This village is built on a lie. The lie is that the healthy ones are without aggression. They cut off many of their human qualities, to pretend that they are not men but gods. Gods stuffed with tapioca.’”

  Ubu leaned forward, face knitted in a scowl. From somewhere in the rustling raffia trees behind the clustered huts a tarsier made a throaty noise, chortled, chuckled.

  “‘But there is a worse lie yet,’” Rambo continued. His voice was a little stronger now; he pointed an index finger at Ubu. “‘Despite all the precautions taken by the normal ones, all their aggression is not stilled. Some comes out even so, in a disguised form. The one great disguised aggression of our normal ones is known by a very polite name—Mandunga. It means, to drive the devils from the skull. But with the devils go the men.’”

  Ubu jerked at the word, rose to his feet. He was trembling. But Rambo would not stop, his finger rose and fell.

  “‘Mandunga is the aggression of self-crippled men disguised as gods against those who cannot cripple themselves the same way: of the paralyzed against the berserk. It is a punishment, not a help—it calls itself therapy but it is inspired by murderous venom. The venom of the less-than-human, pretending to be more-than-human, for the all-too-human—’”

  “Stop!”

  Ubu’s eyes widened in astonishment: it was the loudest sound he had ever uttered in his life. It took a second before he could calm himself enough to go on: “Young man, you go too far. . . . For months we allowed you and the young ones of the cave to add your figures and make your studies. We of the council did not interfere. Tonight when you asked for a special council meeting, and for permission to address it, we gave you your way too. But you go too far, the elders and your fellow villagers did not come here to listen to you and be insulted. . . . Why do you say these bad things in English? These obscenities? From what bad book do you read these obscenities to us?”

  “This bad book,” Rambo said proudly, standing very straight, “was written by Dr. Martine, my father. It is a very old notebook, almost empty. Before he left, my father instructed us to study much, to read many books in the cave. On one of the shelves, hidden behind some of these books, we found this volume. The dates are very old, the notes were made only during the first year after he came to the island, then they stop. . . .”

  “Martine? Martine?” the old man stuttered. There was dread in his tired troubled eyes. “He would not say such things—he would not say them now. No, not now! Earlier, it is possible—when he first came to the island, he did not understand. . . .”

  “The night he left,” Rambo said loudly, “he said the same thing to us in the cave. More. He told us that we must not do any more Mandunga, we must only study Mandunga, all the statistics from all the case histories. We have finished the studies now, we have all the statistics. They are here.”

  From the leaves of the notebook he withdrew a sheet of paper, unfolded it and began to read. Total number of Mandungabas, so-and-so many. Number of recidivists, so-and-so many. Cases in which new symptoms or debilities developed postoperatively, so-and-so many. Percentage of cases which, bec
ause no relapses occurred and no other symptoms developed, could be considered successful without serious qualification—such-and-such. Rambo broke the figures down relapse by relapse, symptom by symptom, reciting them like a prosecuting attorney, vigorously, with exaggeratedly correct precision; at the end his voice rose and began to tremble.

  “These are the figures!” he cried, his finger rigid with indignation. “The picture is—negative, all negative! We are trying to do a job with magic, not logic! We have not learned yet the way of science!”

  “Young man,” Ubu thundered, shocked at the sound of his own voice, “you must not talk this way! Everything that is sacred—”

  “Nothing is sacred if it does not work! Mandunga does not work!”

  Ubu drew himself up to his full majestic height, pulled his chieftain’s robe, studded with drawings of parakeets, tighter about his frail body. “You young scientists of the cave,” he said ironically, “you are very, very good with figures. Do your figures tell you some other way? You have something else to offer instead of the Mandunga of your forefathers?”

  “Yes!” Rambo shouted. “My forefather has something else to offer.” He opened the notebook and began excitedly to read again:

  “‘We must recognize that aggression exists in all men. But then we must go further: we must learn, and teach other people, that 99 per cent of all the aggression in this world is not genuine aggression but pseudo-aggression. That those who attack others generally do it only to conceal something about their own innermost natures—that their most secret wish is to attack themselves, that behind the sadist is the masochist: that under the pretense of hurting others is the deepest desire to be hurt, to hurt oneself. This is equally true of the aggression of man against wife and wife against man, of soldier against soldier (especially in modern war), of friend against friend, of the troubled against the normal but also of the normal against the troubled. The study must begin by dragging the secret pseudo part of the aggressiveness out of the cave of the mind and into the full light of analytic day. Then the difference between true and false aggression can be pondered clinically. We might begin with a sort of rule-of-thumb chart. . . .”

  Rambo signaled to the young men sitting behind him, they jumped to their feet and came forward carrying a tripod constructed of canes lashed together. They set the frame down next to Rambo and handed him a long roll of pounded bark; he let the roll drop open and hung it from a notch on the stand.

  “Here is the table my father put down in his notebook,” he said. “It is in English—I was unable to change it into our language because for many of these things we have no words.” He turned to the words he had painstakingly printed on the bark and began to read, falteringly, line by line:

  Aggression: True and False

  Normal Aggression

  Neurotic Aggression

  (Pseudo-Aggression)

  1. Used only in self-defense.

  1. Used indiscriminately when an infantile pattern is repeated with an innocent bystander.

  2. Object of aggression is a “real” enemy.

  2. Object of aggression is a “fantasied” or artificially created enemy.

  3. No accompanying unconscious feeling of guilt.

  3. Feeling of guilt always present.

  4. Dosis: Amount of aggression discharged corresponds to provocation.

  4. Dosis: Slightest provocation—greatest aggression.

  5. Aggression always used to harm enemy.

  5. Pseudo-aggression often used to provoke “masochistic pleasure” expected from enemy’s retaliation.

  6. Timing: Ability to wait until enemy is vulnerable.

  6. Timing: Inability to wait, since pseudo-aggression used as defense mechanism against inner reproach of psychic masochism.

  7. Not easily provoked.

  7. Easily provoked.

  8. Element of infantile game absent; no combination with masochistic-sadistic tendencies; feeling that a necessary though disagreeable job has to be done.

  8. Element of infantile game present, combined with masochistic-sadistic excitement, usually repressed.

  9. Success expected.

  9. Defeat unconsciously expected.

  “This is as my father wrote it,” Rambo said, his face lit with great pride, “word for word. After there is one more note: ‘Learned this table years ago, during my analysis. This is the truth which all Mandungas try to hide. (Did I become a lobotomist instead of a psychoanalyst in order to hide from it?) Sometime I must try to explain all this to my students in the cave—must think about it more myself, much more. If there only were time. We are all so busy with our scalpels, our surgical pseudo-aggressions, there is no time. . .’ After this my father wrote no more.”

  “Many words,” Ubu said, pointing to the table. “No meaning. Long before these words without meaning, our forefathers—”

  “They have meaning!” Rambo shouted. “You do not understand them—I do not either, entirely, many of them I do not know, but I shall study more—they mean much! My father perhaps will not return, but in these words is his heritage to our village. Study them!”

  “Perhaps you do not understand these words of your father. There is in them a kind of joke, what he used to call a joke. He says in this table that there are some types of, ah, aggressions which are good and normal and healthy—surely this he meant to be a joke. . . .”

  “You do not understand!” Rambo said with considerable heat. “He meant that the joke is in those who pretend they are gods and not men—their aggressions are hidden and false, like Mandunga, they cripple themselves and the whole village. That is one joke. Also, to beat up your wife or your mother-in-law, that is no good either, naturally—this is a joke too, because the aggression is a lie. But some aggressions are good. Those which are not lies. Those truly for defense. I will show you.”

  He waved again: several youths came around from the other side of the fire, bearing long narrow boxes of metal. They set their packages down on the ground at Rambo’s feet, removed their lids. From the elders, from all the hushed villagers gathered around, a long terrified “oh”: inside the cases were various sorts of plastic arms and legs—fire-arms, rotor-arms flame-arms, drill-arms.

  “You see?” Rambo shouted. “You were very nice and friendly with the queer-limbs when they were here, but we, we young people of the cave, we were suspicious, as my father was. We spied on them and we saw them bury many of these terrible machines in the jungle. When they were gone we dug them up and studied them.”

  He picked up a rotor-arm and opened it out until it stretched some twenty feet before him; he pressed some buttons near the shoulder and—the circular saw began to whir. Rambo maneuvered the cutting end until it came into contact with the trunk of a slender raffia sapling which stood near the maize grinder: a quick metallic ringing sound, zip, zing, as of some soprano wind instrument, and the top half of the tree crashed to the ground. The villagers gasped. The next moment Rambo had a fully extended flame-arm in his hands. Again he pressed the controls: a tongue of fire snaked out from its funnel-like mouth, growling like a bassoon, and what remained of the raffia tree was gone in one garish puff.

  The villagers sighed, in the intense harsh light thrown off by the flame their faces stood out sweaty and knotted in fright. Rambo snapped the fire off.

  “We have practiced much,” Rambo said. “We have acquired much skill with these arms that cut and burn. Now we are armed—we have better bolos and poison darts than were ever manufactured secretly by our troubled ones. We have no wish to use these terrible weapons, but we will, if we are forced to. Only to defend ourselves.”

  “Against what?” Ubu said harshly. “On this peaceful island there is no need to defend.”

  “There is! Much! It is not by an accident that the queer-limbs left these machines hidden here. It is a bad sign—if they buried such things they mean to return, and for no good. My father was right, there is some evil in these people, we must not trust them. If they come we will not hol
d out empty hands and say peace to all. We will say peace to all—but in our outstretched hands will be flames and saws, run by atoms. This kind of aggression is good and healthy, according to my father’s table which I have studied much. This is normal! It is a new kind of health, dy, dynamic, that comes now to our village. . . .”

  “Health!” Ubu’s face was twisted in disgust, there was so much tension in his muscles that it hurt. “This is a kind of madness you bring. Health comes only through Mandunga.”

  “There will be no more Mandunga,” Rambo said, his voice quiet. “We have decided on this in the cave.”

  “You have decided? You? It is the elders who decide.”

  “No,” Rambo said. “This the elders will not decide—they are not fit to decide, they are not trained in the ways of—of logic and science.”

  There was a long tense moment in which no one said anything: the old man glowered at the boy in speechless dismay, the boy stared back with a look which was more than juvenile impudence—in it too was some newly found conviction, some granite sturdiness, whose appearance startled even its possessor into silence.

  Then Ubu spoke, unsteadily: “You—would stop us?”

  Another vibrant pause.

  “Yes.”

  Many of the villagers, the older ones, turned their eyes to the ground—they were embarrased to watch this scene of shame. It was a bad sight, like discovering a man secretly carving a bolo, like watching one man hit another.

  “Do not misunderstand,” Rambo pleaded. “It is not to be important and humiliate you that I speak this way. We need now a real therapy. We must learn now to be psychiatrists, and use our knowledge to help the sick to know themselves so they will no longer be so sick. Also, to decide what is health—how much sickness a healthy village can allow, what is sickness and what is only being different. This means: the knives of knowledge, not the knives of the butcher. That is why we make up our minds there will be no more Mandunga. If you agree, all will be peaceful, but if you insist on this ceremony which is a lie we shall oppose you. And if you try to do this thing against our wishes, with force, and if we cannot stop you another way, then we shall use these weapons against you too—with great weeping in our hearts. Only if we have to. Only because we cannot come to truth in our village, and learn to live with truth, unless you stop this great lie with the knives. This is not sick aggression. This is the beginning of our health.”