“Well,” said the wireless operator under his breath as we trailed behind our delighted Ariane down a cracked clay path beneath the pines, “well, it’s just the place for an old colonialist like you. We ought to lock you up with that frigate bird over there.”
I did not reply. I did not challenge the belligerence of the wireless operator. Ears flickered in the shadows, I heard the sudden hiss of urine, a small red naked face appeared ready to burst. And the straw, the rust, the scatterings of gray feathers, the piles of bare bones, the droppings, the distant cry of some furry animal, the great round luminous eyes of an old stag collapsing and sinking rear end first into a pool of slime — here, I thought, was the true world of the aimless traveler, and in this hot garden of captivity the disreputable young man at my side was at home, it seemed to me, and harmless.
“Allert,” called Ariane, who was now out of sight around a curve in the path, “come and see what I have discovered!”
In another moment or two the wireless operator and I rounded a curve in the path, emerged from a sheltering screen of scaly pine tree trunks, and entered a long unpainted single-storied building of weathered wood. It was the reptile house, a fact which prompted from the sauntering young ship’s officer a few more unpleasant remarks about men who assumed reptilian roles in their old age. From the entrance at one end to the exit at the other, it consisted of a single rectangular room that to me suggested an old dance hall lined on either wall with unimaginative displays. The light was poor, the place was empty except for the three of us, on the dead air was a smell that I recognized at once as belonging only to the reptile houses in the zoos of childhood and, further, as having been secreted through the waste ducts of rodents and cold-blooded creatures lying in dry coils. The smell was like that of venom or urine or black ink in a context of crushed peanuts.
“Hurry,” called Ariane, who was standing alone and small at the far end of the building, and who was calling to us and waving us on, “hurry, Allert, and see what I have found!”
The wireless operator joined our happily exercised companion immediately, while I in my worsening mood, angry at Ariane’s unexpected display of bad taste, proceeded slowly down the length of the right-hand side of the reptile house, pausing from time to time as if seriously interested in a pair of discolored fangs or as if intrigued by the injury apparently sustained by the python.
“Come on, Vanderveenan,” called the wireless operator, who was now encircling Ariane’s waist with his arm and squeezing her slight laughing body against his crumpled uniform, “here’s a special sight just for you!”
The approaching encounter in the reptile house was unavoidable, I knew, and so to proceed beyond discomfort or humiliation with the least possible delay, I turned from the all but inaudible piping of some desert animal no larger than my hand and rising on its hind legs like an emaciated miniature kangaroo, and took my place on the other side of Ariane, who was still laughing and still caught in the partial embrace of the young man with whom, in my presence at least, she had never been so familiar.
“Well, Ariane,” I said in my heaviest tone and once again aware of the seams in her tight pants, “what have you found that is so amusing?”
“Bats, Vanderveenan, bats,” said the wireless operator, laughing and jerking Ariane against his side.
“Aren’t they strange, Allert? And beautiful?”
I took a step forward, I put my hands in the pockets of my linen jacket. I gave myself over completely to the lonely and unavoidable study of the bats in their cage. For the most part they were hanging black and folded in long wet clusters behind the wire mesh of their filthy cubicle, and not until now had I seen the demons of old barns and caves so large, so ominous, so ripe with latent disfigurement. For the most part the heads, bodies, and limbs were wrapped away from view inside the long stiff folds of those black ribbed wings, and yet in all their terrible bunches they were fluttering with hidden life. They stank with what I took to be a kind of anal ejecta. Without turning around, without glancing explicitly at Ariane and the young and slightly drunken ship’s officer, still I detected his clumsy movement and knew that now Ariane herself was wearing the white and visored cap which, much too large for her, had only moments before been cocked at a lurid angle on the back of the wireless operator’s bony head.
“Take a better look, Vanderveenan. Do you see them?”
I stood directly in front of the wire mesh. I attempted to hold my breath, as I had often done as a child in just this situation. I stared directly into the colony of sleeping bats, and did so with such intensity that I was hardly aware of Ariane, who was still off balance, stretching out her hand and touching my sleeve. How could I possibly not see what the wireless operator wished me to see? After all, the two waking bats were among the largest of that black horde. Furthermore, they were hanging head down and frontward and side by side and with their wings drawn apart and at eye level and in the precise center of that black clotted curtain that was hung in crude illusory fashion across the entire rear of the cubicle. Yes, the two waking bats, like a pair of old exhibitionists, were holding open their black capes and exposing themselves. I saw the pointed ears, the claws, the elastic muscles, the sickening faces as large as an infant’s fist. Even upside down the two pairs of tiny unblinking eyes were fixed on mine. And the penis of each bat was in a state of erection.
“There you are, Vanderveenan. Two new friends.”
“But they do not look unclean as they are supposed to, Allert. Isn’t it strange? Don’t you too find those little male creatures interesting and attractive?”
I did not answer. I did not move. Instead I watched a few sudden waves of unrest clicking and whispering through the dormant rows, and exhaled and then drew in unavoidably a deep breath. The faces of the two aroused and wakeful bats were grinning. Their penises, each one perhaps the size of a child’s little finger, looked like slender overlong black mushrooms, leaping out of all proportion from the tiny loins.
“But watch them,” Ariane was saying, “they are so agile!”
As if in response to her words and to her girlish voice, in unison the two bats slowly rolled and stretched upward from mid-body until grotesquely, impossibly, the two eager heads were so positioned that in sudden spasms the vicious little mouths engulfed the tops of their respective penises. I understood immediately that this was how the two bats must have been engaged — in the slow jerky calisthenics of autofellatio — when Ariane first came upon the sight of them.
Behind me Ariane made a sound of pleasure, disengaged herself from the wireless operator, and with both small hands took hold of the wire mesh. Her blouse was stained, her small and perfectly proportioned face was flushed as with some kind of rosy cream. On her head sat the offensive cap.
“Allert,” she said then, “see how much pleasure they give themselves!”
“Oh,” came the sudden voice behind our backs, “Vanderveenan knows all about that pleasure. You’re able to do what the bats do, aren’t you, Vanderveenan?”
She turned. Her little nostrils flared. A small thick sun began to climb from the opening in her purple blouse. Her breath, for her, was heavy.
“Olaf!” she said quickly, fiercely. “Olaf, you may not be cruel!”
But already I had turned away from the still unsatisfied and still voraciously preoccupied winged vermin, already I had turned away from the insult of the wireless operator’s hostile voice. I smelled the dreams of the coiled snakes, in my slowness I contained the desperation of the two bats, in my mouth I tasted the oily residue of peanuts dropped accidentally and long ago by children who also would have been interested in the performance of the two bats. I exited. Ariane uttered a single faint cry inside the old building and called my name. But I did not answer and did not wait for her to join me, since I was not convinced that she wanted me to, and since she at any rate was no match for the young ship’s officer who had abandoned his empty bottle near the python’s cage and, clearly, had himself become uncontrollably aroused by the sight of the bats. In my mind I carried away the impression of Ariane wearing the white officer’s cap as would a sailor’s whore.