Читать книгу A Woman, In Bed - Anne Finger - Страница 41

Fever

On his third week in the country, he ventured into the native market, wandering past the sellers of second-hand knives and tools, clusters of peppercorn, bundles of dried vanilla beans, past heaps of beans, mounds of rice, fruits he did not know the names of, the air growing more fetid the further into the maze of the market he traveled. A woman dozed in a rush-backed wooden chair, half-asleep, with a pipe hanging from the corner of her mouth. Every now and again, she roused herself to wave a palm frond at the bluebottles descending on the hunks of meat set out for sale in front of her. Later, he would learn the names of the things offered in the marketplace: the fruit of the baobab tree, of the cardamom plant, beans of tamarind about to burst open their pods, the stinking durian fruit, its spiked hide like a medieval mace, basket after basket of chili peppers, red ones resembling Chinese lanterns, green ones the fingers of a fat man, others with a curve that suggested the place where a woman’s back gave way to her buttocks. He began to feel dizzy—the noonday sun, the smells, the press of bodies, hands reaching for him, voices calling to him, the only word he could understand the imperative: Buy! Buy! That he did not know the names of these fruits increased his sense of lightheadedness. He had a glimmer of what Adam must have felt before naming day in Eden, the mania of the physical world not yet forced into the strait jacket of language. He would leave—yes, leave—but each way he turned seemed to lead him deeper into the market. Overcome with dizziness, he attempted to keep himself from falling by steadying his arm against a shaft of bamboo which held a canopy aloft over one of the stalls—but the bamboo pole itself was merely stuck into a basket filled with beans and it swayed, sending the raffia shelter it was holding up lurching, threatening to plummet into the goods below. The keeper of the stall screeched at him, as did several other sellers, someone else grabbed his arm, began to curse back at the women who were yelling at him.

“I—” Jacques said. “I—I—” He smiled and nodded, pressed his hands together in benediction, hoping these gestures translated across the cultural divide, and strode quickly away from both his benefactors and those who called down imprecations on his head, still reeling.

Later, when everyone was so sure that it had been the food he ate in the market which had sickened him, he inwardly disagreed, for he had felt the vertigo which to him had seemed the primary symptom of his illness before he had eaten. Indeed, it seemed that the illness had entered his body through the air—hadn’t the gas attacks on the front lines let us know that air can be fatal?

It was all so strange, the odors. There, take a deep breath, don’t let them see your confusion. Find a place to sit down, have something cool to drink. He saw a food stall, separated from the open stalls by hanging mats which nonetheless allowed one to see inside, with reed mats also covering the ground, natives hunkered upon them, drinking and eating, the low murmur of laughter and conversation.

He entered, bringing with him a pall of silence. White men never came here.

How long did he sit there, in the painful silence? Five minutes, ten minutes, twenty? He was learning that the time of the Europeans—measured steadily out in seconds, minutes, hours, tracked precisely from the place they decreed the prime meridian—had little meaning here. As one body, his fellow diners seemed to have decided that since Jacques was not going to be driven away by their coldness and they did not dare physically force him to leave, they would simply act as if he did not exist. Their conversation once again swirled around him while he drank what he would later learn was ranonapango, made from water added to the crusty rice at the bottom of the pan, and then ate a stew of greens and tough meat and chili peppers. He paused before spooning the food into his mouth, remembering what he had been told about avoiding the food the Malagasy ate, that European stomachs were unable to tolerate it. Someone had even drawn a parallel with dogs, which devour foods that would sicken us. What crude racialism!—my God, we’re all from the same species.

His stomach began to cramp when he was only a few yards from the market place. The pains became more and more ferocious until he was forced to dash into an alley, lower his pants and squat down. He looked up to see children laughing and pointing at him, one making a great show of holding his nose and fluttering his hand to drive away the stench. That was his last clear memory. He was home—that is, home in the hostel in which he had been billeted—how had he gotten there? The whitewashed walls spun around him. Where was his mother? Had she, too, come down with this fever? Perhaps he had become his own mother, these pains were those of labor. But something had gone wrong, there was no baby, just these stools of dark water. Men appeared, standing in the doorway.

—Chin up, old man.

—You were young and strong to start with. That’s a point in your favor.

A little while hence, it might be said to another newcomer, “Ask Melville. He was like you when he first arrived here, filled with all that nonsense: underneath-it-all,-they’re-just-like-us. Tell him, Jacques…”

More and more cramping: his body was still trying to give birth. A needle went into his arm. A native woman cooled the air above him with a fan. In the corner of the room, a priest was chanting in Latin. “Tell him to go away,” Jacques implored the woman. “I’m not a believer.”

He had never been one of those who made a show of his scorn for religion. In his family one was baptized in the church and buried there. His father liked to declare that for Lent he was giving up krill or lark’s tongue or Tahitian limes. Now his anti-clericalism no longer seemed jocular: it was imperative that the priest depart.

The woman answered him in Malagasy, her voice rising at the end of each sentence, as if she were asking him a question.

Tuum ex toto, talis esto morbundum, Domine, corde tuo, et ex tota anima tua, et ex tota mente, the priest chanted, scrambling the words of the sacrament. Jacques grabbed the arm of the woman, imploring her to speak to the priest, urge him to say the Mass properly, lest the devil be conjured up.

While Jacques was speaking, the priest ceased to do so, but once Jacques fell silent, he began his chanting again.

Occasionally, he was conscious enough to feel shame when the Malagasy woman cleaned him, daubing him with a damp cloth—the skin of his ass, his scrotum had been burned raw by the acidic stools roiling from him. His penis would stiffen as her hands brushed against it or lifted it out of the way, but these erections were like those of an infant, before desire had an object, devoid of masculine assertion. She would laugh tenderly and say something in her native tongue. One night his fever was burning so bright, it seemed he could understand her, a sickroom Pentecost: In the midst of all this, our little soldier still stands at attention…or, perhaps, You see, life goes on, you’re not done for yet…The pain made him weep like a baby. She held his hand, and whispered a song to him in the language of the angels.

M. Lefort, sitting by his bedside with his hat in his hands, stared intently at Jacques.

Sometimes he was conscious enough to hear in the distance the call to prayer from the minarets of the mosques. Allahu Akbar. Ash-hadu alla ilaha illallah.

The words he had written to Sala hovered in the air about him: “We were carried on palanquins past the Dutchmen’s Graveyard: so many Dutch colonists were killed by native fevers that the Netherlands gave up their attempt to take this island.” They formed themselves into a long line and circled about him. He knew he had to catch his finger through one of the letters, snag it like a hook in the mouth of a fish and then he would be able to reel in the remainder of the sentence, gather those words in his arms, clutch them against his chest: if he were able to accomplish this, he would live.

His desire for life astonished him.

The priest came back. An anti-baptism was being carried out, Jacques’ nether regions rather than his head were being daubed, not with holy water but with the foul liquid that poured out of him—excrement, not Christian blood, was the sacred fluid of this religion.

The Malagasy woman continued to sing to him and clean up after him. The ghost-white faces loomed in the doorway, the priest—who was also sometimes a one-legged beggar he had seen on the street in Nîmes in his boyhood—spoke his garbled Latin. Jacques shouted at the priest to be silent, at the beggar that he had no money to give him, and, as he shouted, realized that all the words—the panhandler’s appeal, the priest’s chant—had been coming from his mouth.

In the distance, the call to prayer from the minarets of the mosque. Allahu Akbar. Ash-hadu alla ilaha illallah.