“How do you think that went over?” I asked Romilayu. “I meant well.” But before we could discuss the matter we were met by a party of naked people. In front of them all was a young woman, a girl not much older, I believe, than my daughter Ricey. As soon as she saw me she burst into loud tears.
I would never have expected this to wound me as it did. It wouldn’t have been realistic to go into the world without being prepared for trials, ordeals, and suffering, but the sight of this young woman hit me very hard. Though of course the tears of women always affect me deeply, and not so long before, when Lily had started to cry in our hotel suite on the Gulf, I made my worst threat. But this young woman being a stranger, it’s less easy to explain why her weeping loosed such a terrible emotion in me. What I thought immediately was “What have I done?”
“Shall I run back into the desert,” I thought, “and stay there until the devil has passed out of me and I am fit to meet human kind again without driving it to despair at the first look? I haven’t had enough desert yet. Let me throw away my gun and my helmet and the lighter and all this stuff and maybe I can get rid of my fierceness too and live out there on worms. On locusts. Until all the bad is burned out of me. Oh, the bad! Oh, the wrong, the wrong! What can I do about it? What can I do about all the damage? My character! God help me, I’ve made a mess of everything, and there’s no getting away from the results. One look at me must tell the whole story.”
You see, I had begun to convince myself that those few days of lightheartedness, tramping over the Hinchagara plateau with Romilayu, had already made a great change in me. But it seemed that I was still not ready for society. Society is what beats me. Alone I can be pretty good, but let me go among people and there’s the devil to pay. Confronted with this weeping girl I was by this time ready to start bawling myself, thinking of Lily and the children and my father and the violin and the foundling and all the sorrows of my life. I felt that my nose was swelling, becoming very red.
Behind the weeping girl other natives were crying along softly. I said to Romilayu, “What the blast is going on?”
“Him shame,” said Romilayu, very grave, with that upstanding bush of hair.
Thus this sturdy, virginal-looking girl was crying-simply crying-without gestures; her arms were meekly hanging by her sides and all the facts about her (speaking physically) were shown to the world. The tears fell from her wide cheekbones onto her breasts.
I said, “What’s eating this kid? What do you mean, shame? This is very bad, if you ask me, Romilayu. I think we’ve walked into a bad situation and I don’t like the looks of it. Why don’t we cut around this town and go back in the desert? I felt a damned sight better out there.”
Apparently Romilayu sensed that I was rattled by this delegation shedding tears and he said, “No, no sah. You no be blame.”
“Maybe it was a mistake with that bush?”
“No, no, sah. You no mek him cry.”
At this I struck myself in the head with my open hand and said, “Why sure! I would.” (Meaning, “I would think first of myself.”) “The poor soul is in trouble? Is there something I can do for her? She’s coming to me for help. I feel it. Maybe a lion has eaten her family? Are there man-eaters around here? Ask her, Romilayu. Say that I’ve come to help, and if there are killers in the neighborhood I’ll shoot them.” I picked up my H and H Magnum with the scope sights and showed it to the crowd. With enormous relief it dawned on me that the crying was not due to any fault of mine, and that something could be done, that I did not have to stand and bear the sight of those tears boiling out. “Everybody! Leave it to me,” I said. “Look! Look!” And I started to go through the manual of arms for them, saying, “Hut, hut, hut,” as the drill instructors always did.
Everyone, however, went on crying. Only the very little kids with their jack-o’-lantern faces seemed happy at my entertainment. The rest were not done mourning, and covered their faces with their hands while their naked bodies shook.
“Well, Romilayu,” I said, “I’m not getting anywhere, and our presence is very hard on them, that’s for sure.”
“Dem cry for dead cow,” he said. And he explained the thing very clearly, that they were mourning for cattle which had died in the drought, and that they took responsibility for the drought upon themselves-the gods were offended, or something like that; a curse was mentioned. Anyway, as we were strangers they were obliged to come forward and confess everything to us, and ask whether we knew the reason for their trouble.
“How should I know-except the drought? A drought is drought,” I said, “but my heart goes out to them, because I know what it is to lose a beloved animal.” And I began to say, almost to shout, “Okay, okay, okay. All right, ladies-all right, you guys, break it up. That’s enough, please. I get it.” And this did have some effect on them, as I suppose they heard in the tone of my voice that I felt a certain amount of distress also, and I said to Romilayu, “So ask them what they want me to do. I intend to do something, and I really mean it.”
“What you do, sah?”
“Never mind. There must be something that only I can do. I want you to start asking.”
So he spoke to them, and the smooth-skinned, humped cattle kept grunting in their gentle bass voices (the African cows do not low like our own). But the weeping died down. And now I began to observe that the coloring of these people was very original and that the dark was more deeply burnt in about the eyes whereas the palms of their hands were the color of freshly washed granite. As if, you know, they had played catch with the light and some of it had come off. These peculiarities of color were altogether new to me. Romilayu had gone aside to speak with someone and left me among the natives, whose sobbing had almost stopped. Just then I deeply felt my physical discrepancies. My face is like some sort of terminal; it’s like Grand Central, I mean-the big horse nose and the wide mouth that opens into the nostrils, and eyes like tunnels. So I stood there waiting, surrounded by this black humanity in the aromatic dust, with the inanimate brilliance coming off the thatch of the huts near by.
Then the man with whom Romilayu had been speaking came up and talked to me in English, which astonished me, for I would never have thought that people who spoke English would have been capable of carrying on so emotionally. However, he was not one of those who had carried on. From his size alone I felt he must be an important person, for he was built very heavily and had an inch or two on me in stature. But he was not ponderous, as I am, he was muscular; nor was he naked like the others, but wore a piece of white cloth tied to his thighs rather than on his hips proper, and around his belly was a green silk scarf, and he had a short loose middy type of blouse, which he wore very free to give his arms lots of play, which owing to the big muscles they needed. At first he was rather heavy of expression and I thought he might be looking for trouble, sizing me up as if I were some kind of human mushroom, imposing in size but not hard to knock over. I was very upset, but what upset me was not his expression, which soon changed for the better; it was, among other things, the fact that he spoke to me in English. I don’t know why I should have been so surprised-disappointed is the word. It’s the great imperial language of today, taking its turn after Greek and Latin and so on. The Romans weren’t surprised, I don’t think, when some Parthian or Numidian started to speak to them in Latin; they probably took it for granted. But when this fellow, built like a champion, in his white drooping cloth and his scarf and middy, addressed me in English, I was both shaken up and grieved. Preparing to speak he put his pale, slightly freckled lips into position, moving them forward, and said, “I am Itelo. I am here to introduce. Welcome. And how do you do?”