This obsession was supposed to be the cause of his sickness. Instead, it was the symptom.
It was ironic that he did not find that secret but that I, his son, did. I supposed this, only to have to change my mind.
If my mother and uncle had not gone to Africa primarily to put my father behind them, I would not have become immortal (have a very long prolonged youth, to be exact). Or so I thought.
I am immortal in the sense that I will be thirty-two years of age in body for a very very long time.
However, accident, murder, and suicide can reduce me to the rotting corpse which others usually become before their hundredth birthday.
I omitted disease from the fatal list. The same elixir that gives me a potentiality of 30,000 years or more also preserves me from disease. This does not, however, explain my seeming immunity from all the diseases so common in tropical Africa before I became thirty-two.
My uncle’s diary recounts in an elegant style, reading like a prose Racine, a ride through the dark fog of the night on March 21. He glimpsed his brother after hours of driving through the mists, and he leaped out of his carriage and ran shouting after him. My mother sat shivering with cold and fear in the carriage while she tried to peer through the wet grayness. A gas lamp nearby shot a ghastly half-light through the swirls. She was alone. Her husband had not wanted a coachman because he might report the peculiar occurrences of the evening to the police.
For a while, there was silence. Then she heard the clicking of hard heels on the stones. A man appeared like a ship sailing through the fog. He stopped and turned, and by the dim light she saw her husband’s mad brother.
When James Cloamby returned, he found his wife unconscious on the seat of the carriage. Her skirt and petticoats were up over her face, and her undergarments had been cut off, probably with the scalpel that later took apart the bodies of the Whitechapel whores in such grisly fashion.
My uncle was to reason that his brother had not killed her because she was not a whore. But John did hate his older brother, and he may have raped Alexandra for revenge, or possibly because she was not a whore and so was better than his mother, whom, in one part of him, he must still have loved. Also, since
John loved Alexandra, or had said he loved her, it was possible that this was his act of love. Who knew what the madman was thinking?
My uncle lit a match when she did not reply to his cry of alarm. He saw the white legs, stripped of the black stockings, and the black, exceptionally hairy vagina out of which oozed my father’s spermatic fluid and some of her blood.
The strange thing, to me, anyway, was that this was the first time my uncle had seen any of his wife’s body below the shoulders.
Although they had been married for a month, the two had not had any sexual intercourse beyond some kissing and slipping his hand, down her bodice and over her breasts. The day of the wedding, she had begun menstruating and would not stop. He, being a Victorian, could not bed her while she was “unclean.” (Although there were plenty of Victorians who would have done so.)
The day before John broke loose from the cell, Alexandra had ceased to flow. My uncle (as recorded in his diary) was ecstatic. He could quit masturbating now and could stop eyeing his wife’s maid.
Then my father-to-be got out of his cell in the north tower of the half-ruined Castle of Grandrith. He and his wife were too upset for some time to consider sexual intercourse. At least, she was.
Now, in the London fog, James Cloamby pulled his wife’s skirts down and revived her. She became hysterical, and not until the next day did he discover that his brother had attacked his wife.
His wife seemed to recover. A few months afterward, they sailed for West Africa, where James was to conduct a secret investigation for the Colonial Office. (This was not the investigation which my “biographer” described, however. He knew the true reason, but he chose to give a spurious one.)
Alexandra now refused to have intercourse with James. She said that she was too “ashamed,” felt “too unclean,” and, besides, wanted to make certain that she was or was not pregnant. If she was to have a child, she wanted to be certain of its paternity.
Before they sailed, the first known murder by Jack the Ripper occurred on Easter Tuesday, April 3rd,
1888, on Osborn Street. My uncle heard about this (it was not reported in the Times) and wondered in his diary if it could be the work of his brother. Later, he was certain that it was. Yet, so great was his dread of the shame and disgrace if John should be caught, he did not inform the police.
He did continue the search on his own through private detectives. When he sailed for Africa, he sent an anonymous note to the police, describing his brother but not naming him. This note is not in the official records. Research has convinced me that it was suppressed by politically powerful influences.
My father disappeared when Jack the Ripper disappeared. It was not until 1968, the year of this narrative, that I found out what had happened to him.
Alexandra Grandrith was finally able to accept her husband in bed. But by then she was too big with child. My uncle continued to suffer and then backslid, as he put it, to masturbation and, once, a few days before sailing, to the maid. These necessary discharges caused much breast beating in private and many mea culpas.
The events that led to the Grandriths being stranded on the West African coast are familiar to the readers of my “biographer.” The reality was somewhat different, but the result was much as depicted in the romances based on my life. James Cloamby built a strong house on the shore near the jungle, and they survived the first 20 months.
I was born November 21, 1888, at 11:45 p.m.
My mother’s mind was never thereafter quite in Africa. She spent most of her time in a dream
England, a country much better than the one she knew in reality, I’m sure. Despite this, she was very competent in taking care of me, if I am to believe my uncle’s diary. James could not make love to her then because it would have been too much like taking advantage of an idiot. So my poor uncle suffered, and I think he may have been glad when death came at the hands of the chief of a tribe of The Folk. Any horror he felt would have been for his nephew, a 12-month-old baby crying for food and for his mother’s milk.
I was to get no more of that because she had died in her sleep a few hours before my uncle was killed.
I did get a mother’s milk, though it was not quite human milk.
1
The morning of March 21, 1968, was a fine morning. I was seventy-nine years old and felt, and looked, thirty. The sun woke me up that morning. Or so I thought. Sometimes the African sun sneaks over the horizon like an old lion on the prowl, the mists diffracting its rays into a mane. I awoke as if I had been tickled on the nose with a hair from that mane.
The silence was like a breath on my face. It was the silence that had quietly awakened me.
The whinnying of horses, the bellowing of cattle, the squawking of chickens, the chittering of the monkeys were compressed within lungs and sealed by mouths afraid to open.
The voices of the cooks, house servants, and yard men were there, but noiseless. They hung in the sky, turned to cold blue air. I could sense them fluttering the windpipe.
Fear?
Or stealth by some and fear of others?
Treachery.
Perhaps.
Jomo Kenyatta had said that I was the only white man he had ever respected. What he meant was: feared.
During the so-called Mau-Mau revolution, he told his men to stay away from me. My own tribe, the blacks who had initiated me with blood-letting and buggering into their tribe and who had selected me as their chief, hated the Agikuyu. And they loved me. Not as a brother but as a demigod. They would have died to a man to defend me.