Poor chief engineer! Feeling the rat’s cold snout on his skin, and painfully aware of his place in the terrifying chronology, he is unable to conceal his envy of the doctor’s physical repugnance.
That is all the snake of Asclepius needs to corroborate his conclusion. Among these aristocrats of the flesh, the doctor is a miserable, stinking creature which has suddenly sensed its advantage. Out there, in that “other world,” his body has had him consigned to a hell of loneliness. In the world of fragrances, where the standard smells are confined to special establishments, there to be flushed by water and battered by concoctions of chemicals and perfumes, he has to carry with him that very establishment with his quite unconventional, nonpatented, somehow original smell, horribly aware that his condition is definitive. He yearns for company, friends, women. Even women he pays for refuse to suffer his presence any longer than the job requires. In Shanghai he was told by a fat Romanian woman, who stank of sweat herself, that he had such a strange smell. … “Oh God, I smell bad, I stink!” He is convinced that he stinks all over, that his walk stinks, his motions, his gaze, his voice, that his speech spreads an insupportably foul atmosphere in which people choke.
He finds his own smell rank. He has soaped, scrubbed, washed himself, he has doused himself with fragrant fluids and oils, he has bathed in the sea, exposed his body to wind and rain, baked it in the sun, but the treacherous thing only developed a bran-colored rash and vile red spots, living wounds. His kinky red hair, his stubbly, sparse, barely visible eyebrows, everything, has been seared, demolished by hot water, soap, and the most shocking cosmetic hoaxes to which the wretch falls prey only too readily. Like a leper, he is aware of being eternally excluded from anything social and human, enjoyable and beautiful, from anything that is accessible to everyone else.
The poor ship’s doctor!
But look: for all that he is a captive of Polynesian cannibals, facing the cauldron of death, draftee Melkior Tresić suddenly envies the doctor! He feels an awful pleasure at the man’s repugnant body, at his stench, at his poor outcast physical person! They will smell him out, he will get away — he is inferior man-meat for the gourmands.
Watching the captain’s plump, well-rounded curves, the chief engineer’s strong, meaty shoulders, and the first mate’s delicate, pale dreamer’s flesh, the doctor comes to feel a certain cannibalistic pleasure at the tasty tidbits, at the superior flesh which had relished food, renown, respect, and love to the full. He is now certain of holding last place, or at worst of being tied for last with the crusty old seaman.
Meanwhile, heh, heh … he has only to wait for the natives to give him back his clothes. He has a miracle-working gadget or two in his pockets.
And indeed he gets his clothes back. He and the crusty old seaman. But the officers’ uniforms, decorated with golden anchors, ribbons, and buttons, go to the king and his top two dignitaries, who parade them complete with hats. After dining on the cook, the hosts do a few of the latest cha-cha dances and retire sated and well pleased.
The six castaways are spending their first Polynesian night in a small circular hut made of bamboo stalks interwoven with reeds. After the inevitable petty squabble over the choice of sleeping space (the farther from the doctor and the crusty seaman, the better) in that cramped circle underneath a mud-and-reed dome, the two despised Clotheds and the four distinguished Nakeds settled down at last like so many birds captured under a straw hat.
But sleep will not come. Listening, each with his personal anxiety, to monkeys chattering in the nearby jungle, the castaways remember with indignation their celebrated fellow Westerner who proclaimed them, a hundred or so years before, the great-grandsons of that grotesque parody of humanity which swings from branch to branch and shrieks in hot, tropical nights. They are now disgusted by Tarzan’s virginal heroism, and with indignation invite Messrs. Defoe, Burroughs, and Kipling kindly to join them in these Robinsonian and Tarzanian and Rikki-Tikki-Tavian beauty spots and in the pristine idyll of the Polynesian cannibal island!
The wretched cook! As they listen through the endless night to mournful squawks of the cockatoo, it seems to them that the cook’s white soul is nostalgically looking for its body and, unable to find it, is wandering in the night, lost and miserable like a frightened bird, pleading for help and salvation. The very souls of the Nakeds go numb at those onomatopoeias inviting them to psittacine eternity.
And up there, at celestial heights, carelessly hang the bright tropical stars, swinging on starlight-spun threads to relieve the boredom of their eternal existence. The stars play their games in the blue space above the cannibal island, slinging meteors which fall in fiery arcs into the dark tropical seas.
Draftee Melkior Tresić has sailed away on his Menelaian bed. Indonésie. Polynésie. Poésie. The Dream Archipelago! (there is a novel of that title). Archipelagos. Atolls and lagoons. Hawaii — whence the charm of that word? “You and me and blue Hawaii …”
He swears with despair in that lonely night. God who is supposed to see all and know all! And the company agent shivers with fever. He is aware of his place in the series: it can happen tomorrow or the day after. … The ship’s doctor offers help, massage of the head, of a neck muscle, which can be rendered insensitive. … The agent calls him a criminal and a cynic.
“Alas, gone is our good cook,” is the doctor’s response to his rudeness.
The agent bursts into tears.
Nobody heeds his sobs. Everyone is feeling himself in the dark, examining the state of his body and fuming at it. The findings are weighty, grave, fatal, like accusations of a stupid kind of recklessness which has brought them to ruin.
To end up in a cannibal cauldron. Appalling.
Someone is pummeling himself angrily and cursing his flesh. It is, the doctor knows, “Number Three,” the chief engineer. The chief engineer is punishing his disobedient belly with desperate hatred, but also with some hope that he might thus flatten it, diminish it, force it inward and conceal it from the cannibal gourmets. He has moreover arrived at the idea of “an operation” and communicated it to the doctor.
The red-headed cynic laughs out loud. “And what about me? Who’s to take the steaks and bacon off of me?”
“But you, er, you don’t really need to, do you?”
“No, what I need is a helicopter. Give me a helicopter, or at least a common variety hot-air balloon to lift me up out of this terrestrial paradise and I’ll shape you into such a repulsive, skinny piece of misery that you will disgust even the cannibals. I await your reply. Ridiculous.”
The chief engineer sighs and abandons all hope.
The captain is cursing his “damned appetite” in a low voice. Reproaching himself for sumptuous meals in his past life. The tempestuous symphonies of delectable delights, largely the fault of that fat idiot whom “they” cooked today. Passing before his eyes are solemn columns of glorious breakfasts, lunches, and dinners marching with thick bacon strips taken off incomparable Yorkshire pigs, echelons of yellow ham-and-eggs, slender slices of bacon, ham and Italian mortadella, thrilling goose liver, rabbit, and partridge pátés; perfidious shrimps march past and bowlegged frogs in batter leotards, splashing saucily through a delicate whiskey sauce, rice pudding, and the most exquisite creams spread sweetly all over the valley of the elect, while atop the holy lake of gourmanderie float lard halos like the metallic sounds of the angelus of eventide in the hills. Ah, that is all the dead sounds of Yorkshire grunts and Scottish clucks, of hissing, frying, and cooking in the accursed galley of the Menelaus, all that is nothing but the late memory of yolks being beaten, plates clanking, glasses clinking, and corks popping! And what has the captain got to show for all the festivities? Ah, if only it were possible to say “Nothing!” with a decadent sigh — what he has to show is his stupidly tight-packed personal can of meat, perfidiously seasoned with all the monstrous spices of gluttonous folly as a splendidly packaged delicacy the sight of which sends saliva trickling down the teeth of the voracious savages.