He slipped his hand inside his shirt and grabbed a fistful of his hairy chest.
Man-meat. A useful addition to your vocabulary … and to your diet, too, in some parts of the world. Cannibals. Reclining on his bed, in the dark, he sailed out again on the Menelaus, a Pacific cargo liner. Cannibals. That was to be the title of a play he had been contemplating. Of the grotesque, in fact, with cannibal howls, dances, and native rites to the deafening rumble of drums around a cauldron over a large fire.
The cauldron is offstage, of course, because such high-impact scenes in the theater always take place offstage. Simmering in the cauldron is a white man, a fat cook, the plumpest of the seven survivors from the shipwreck Menelaus. You thought of it as a symbolical piece of satire or something. … Anyway, it does not matter what it was to have been, seeing that nothing had come of it save the momentary flash of an idea that came to you again at the Cozy Corner when Kurt brought the sausage to your table.
The idea first came to you one night on a train, on the hard bench of a third-class compartment. You had the entire compartment to yourself, a privilege bought from the conductor for a pittance. As you tossed sleepless on the hard slats the idea slowly took shape as the memory of stories you had heard in your childhood by the sea from lying old seamen who had not only been captured by cannibals but had also each of them seen the one-eyed giant whose eye each of them had gouged out. But why on the train that night the sudden return of those boastful geriatric odysseys, on that hard bench, accompanied by the horrible clatter of wheels under your ear? At one moment you found one of your hands on your knee and the other on your shoulder, you felt the hard and knobby bones overlaid with taut, dry skin; you poked your fingers into the joints, the holes in the bones, the gaps between the tendons, you separated one from another, registering each one in turn, unconsciously, by touch, by touch alone, as foreign, alien objects, not even thinking about them, and now, in hindsight, everything had fallen into place. You were dreadfully emaciated at the time from fear of events that had a claim on your body (the journey was in fact undertaken to settle some army-related business) and, touching your knobby bones, you suddenly felt a great instinctive pleasure, or rather a kind of perverse and derisive joy over these bones of yours, over the traveling skeleton, bearing your name, that had cleverly bought from the conductor this separate little compartment where it could lay down its bones and feel them and register: look, the knee bones, the shoulder blade, the clavicle, the ribs … in a word, where the skeleton could assert the frightening articulation of a skeleton slyly thinking of itself as such: this is I all the same, I who know my name, I who am smoking here in the dark above the clatter of the wheels and—entre nous soit dit—I who hope to wriggle free, to wriggle free … Hush, hush, mum’s the word!
That scrawny body! That scrawny body of yours had gone underground inside its skeleton, hidden itself, insinuated itself into the bones and there felt the security of a snail, of a mouse in its hole, a hedgehog underneath its prickles. The body had simply proclaimed, I’m not there! And then later on, in the sanctuary, during a moment of respite between two fears, there began to germinate the idea of cannibals and castaways, as a lark, in a sunny and almost wanton way, such as when we indulge in the profligate waste of food after satisfying our hunger.
And tonight at the Cozy Corner, to the accompaniment of Kurt’s plangent chant, over the sausage and Kurt’s fingers, there resurfaced the wanton largesse of a skeleton which served fresh live man-meat to cannibals while itself feeding moderately and carefully lest some flesh appear on it, lest the body peek out. That was where the notion of cannibals resurfaced. The ship already had its name: the Menelaus. It had been sailing, after ten nights or so of its dangerous wartime voyage, through the Tonga archipelago (called the Friendly Islands by the Europeans) between the islands of Wawau and Tongatabu, making for Tutuila — or, more specifically, for the port of Pago-Pago — there to take on a load of copra for oil extraction. The previous night the captain had studied the charts of the archipelago (what a pretty word, archipelago) and that night it’s That’s all, folks, there’s a war on, the Menelaus is going down.
Having been hit by a torpedo, the Menelaus—husband to Fair Helen (the whore, the whore, of the Trojan war) — goes down. But never mind the ship, it’s the people that matter … there are only seven survivors. Six, actually, because the seventh, an old seaman with a pipe, is captured by Polynesian cannibals hours after the rest, thus arriving barely in time to see the cooking of the ship’s cook. But — as Hamlet would have put it — not where he cooked but where he was being cooked, at a merry cannibal party complete with folk dances that have conquered Europe, via America, and, in the process of the Hellenization of cannibal culture, have become more universal and thrilling than Aeschylus or Sophocles. That is when the ship’s cynic, a doctor by profession, declares that the cook had been dispatched to the dark world of cannibal gourmanderie with honors rather too high for his sheep’s brains — which, incidentally, he had fixed splendidly aboard the Menelaus.
But before being cooked, the castaways are stripped naked and taken before some sort of board just like recruits. (Another twenty-odd days and there would be a fresh summons, the seventh so far: draftee Melkior Tresić is to present himself at the Recruiting Center for a physical examination to determine the degree of his fitness for service. … The medical board would be chaired by flat-footed ex-Austro-Hungarian army colonel Pechárek. First the speech: “Bwave soldiers and you gwaduate dwaftees … In dese gwave times yo’ King and countwy ex-pect in-twepid duty” … The naked men shivering with cold, nerves, timidity; some covering their hanging gardens with their hands, the more audacious among the “bwaves” lifting them to tickle the frightened, goose-pimpled backsides of the shy ones in front. For the seventh time draftee Melkior Tresić would have the height-measuring bar insultingly dropped on his head, inhale-exhale, I’ll cheat them of a few liters of air again, the captain with the snake of Asclepius on his epaulettes would probe his bicep with two fastidious fingers: serious asthenia, deferred service. … But there could no longer be any deferment, either-or time is here! A hushed argument at the other side of the table. Pechárek would not release his morsel. Emaciated, gaunt, nothing but skin and bones, says Asclepius, but no matter, the skin will do for King and countwy, not to mention the bones, for the skin’s got thoughts buried inside, skin and bones, well, get them into olive drabs, the skin and bones, top them off with an army cap and let them sizzle quietly underneath as per King’s Regulations — all four parts, by Jove!) The cannibal tribe’s Pechárek with a ring through his nose, cook or butcher, perhaps even the king himself, expertly appraises the briskets, rumps, sirloins on the naked men and designates the cook to be dinner with a single gesture of his hand. The second fattest, the company agent, faints. The others watch their destiny with horror. Only the ship’s doctor (the redheaded, freckled cad!) keeps his intelligent curiosity separate, making his appraisal as if he, too, were on the council, dressed in the naked brown skin that confers upon one the privilege of recruiting meat. With care, almost with tenderness, he sends his anatomical gaze gliding over the broad, brawny back of the chief engineer, crawling down his obese frame, orbiting flylike his arrogantly jutting belly, embracing his thighs with what is nearly loving tenderness and pronounces “number three” inside his head with perfidious certainty.