But he said all the stuff she had brought was lying outside, and she wanted me to see it, and so I rose, highly unwilling, and we went out of the hut. She had come with an escort, and when they saw me in the moonlight with my sun helmet they began to cheer as if I were the groom already-they did it softly as the hour was late. The gifts were lying on a big mat, and they made a large mound-robes, ornaments, drums, paints, and dyes: she gave Romilayu an inventory of the contents and he was transmitting it.
“She’s a grand person. A great human being,” I said. “Hasn’t she got a husband already?” To this there could be no definite answer, as she was a woman of Bittahness and it didn’t matter how many times she married. It would do no good, I knew, to tell her that I already had a wife. It hadn’t stopped Lily, and it certainly would cut no ice with Mtalba.
To display the greatness of the dowry, Mtalba began to put on some of the robes to the accompaniment of a xylophone made of bones played by one of her party, a fellow with a big knobby ring on his knuckle. He smiled as if he were giving the woman of Bittahness away, and she meantime was showing off the gowns and wrappers, gathering them around her shoulders, and winding them about her hips, which required a separate and broader movement. Sometimes she wore a half-veil across the bridge of her nose, Arab style, which set off her loving eyes and occasionally as she jingled with her hennaed hands she took off, huge but gay, looking back at me over her shoulder with those signs of suffering about her nose and lips which come from love only. She would saunter, she would teeter, depending on the rhythm given by the little xylophone of hollow bones — the feet of a rhinoceros perhaps emptied by the ants. All this was performed by a bluish moonlight, while great white blotches of fire burned at irregular points around the horizon.
“I want you to tell her, Romilayu,” I said, “that she’s a damned attractive woman and that she certainly has an impressive trousseau.”
I’m sure Romilayu translated this into some conventional African compliment.
“However,” I added, “I have unfinished business with those frogs. They and I have a rendezvous tomorrow, and I can’t give my full consideration to any important matter until I have settled with them once and for all.”
I thought this would send her away hut she went on modeling her clothes and dancing, heavy but beautiful — those colossal thighs and hips — and furling her brow at me and sending glances from her eyes. Thus I realized as the night and the dancing wore on that this was enchantment. This was poetry, which I should allow to reach me, to penetrate the practical task of demolishing the frogs in the cistern. And what I had felt when I first laid eyes on the thatched roofs while descending the bed of the river, that they were so ancient, amounted to this same thing — poetry, enchantment. Somehow I am a sucker for beauty and can trust only it, but I keep passing through and out of it again. It never has enough duration. I know it is near because my gums begin to ache; I grow confused, my breast melts, and then bang, the thing is gone. Once more I am on the wrong side of it. However, this tribe of people, the Arnewi, seemed to have it in steady supply. And my idea was that when I had performed my great deed against the frogs, then the Arnewi would take me to their hearts. Already I had won Itelo, and the queen had a lot of affection for me, and Mtalba wanted to marry me, and so what was left was only to prove (and the opportunity was made to order; it couldn’t have suited my capacities better) that I was deserving.
And so, Mtalba having touched my hands happily one final time with her tongue, giving me herself and all her goods — after all, it was a fine occasion — I said, “Thank you, and good night, good night all.”
They said, “Awho.”
“Awho, awho. Grun-tu-molani.”
They answered, “Tu-molani.”
My heart was expanded with happy emotion and now instead of wanting to sleep I was afraid when they left that if I shut my eyes tonight the feeling of enchantment would disappear. Therefore, when Romilayu after another short prayer — once more on his knees, and hand pressed to hand like a fellow about to dive into eternity — when Romilayu went to sleep, I lay with eyes open, bathed in high feeling.
IX
And this was still with me at daybreak when I got up. It was a fiery dawn, which made the interior of our hut as dark as a root-cellar. I took a baked yam from the basket and stripped it like a banana for my breakfast. Sitting on the ground I ate in the cool air and through the door I could see Romilayu, wrinkled, asleep, lying on his side like an effigy.
I thought, “This is going to be one of my greatest days.” For not only was the high feeling of the night still with me, which set a kind of record, but I became convinced (and still am convinced) that things, the object-world itself, gave me a kind of go-ahead sign. This did not come about as I had expected it to with Willatale. I thought that she could open her hand and show me the germ, the true cipher, maybe you recall-if not, I’m telling you again. No, what happened was like nothing previously conceived; it took the form merely of the light at daybreak against the white clay of the wail beside me and had an extraordinary effect, for right away I began to feel the sensation in my gums warning of something lovely, and with it a close or painful feeling in the chest. People allergic to feathers or pollen will know what I’m talking about; they become aware of their presence with the most gradual subtlety. In my case the cause that morning was the color of the wall with the sunrise on it, and when it became deeper I had to put down the baked yam I was chewing and support myself with my hands on the ground, for I felt the world sway under me and I would have reached, if I were on a horse, for the horn of the saddle. Some powerful magnificence not human, in other words, seemed under me. And it was this same mild pink color, like the water of watermelon, that did it. At once I recognized the importance of this, as throughout my life I had known these moments when the dumb begins to speak, when I hear the voices of objects and colors; then the physical universe starts to wrinkle and change and heave and rise and smooth, so it seems that even the dogs have to lean against a tree, shivering. Thus on this white wall with its prickles, like the gooseflesh of matter, was the pink light, and it was similar to flying over the white points of the sea at ten thousand feet as the sun begins to rise. It must have been at least fifty years since I had encountered such a color, and I thought I could remember waking as a tiny boy, alone in a double bed, a black bed, and looking at the ceiling where there was a big oval of plaster in the old style, with pears, fiddles, sheaves of wheat, and angel faces; and outside, a white shutter, twelve feet long and covered with the same pink color.
Did I say a tiny boy? I suppose I was never tiny, but at age five was like a twelve-year-old, and already a very rough child. In the town in the Adirondacks where we used to stay in summer, in the place where my brother Dick was drowned, there was a water mill, and I used to run in with a stick and pound the flour sacks and escape in the dust with the miller cursing. My old man would carry Dick and me into the mill pond and stand with us under the waterfall, one on each arm. With the beard he looked like a Triton; with his clear muscles and the smiling beard. In the green cold water I could see the long fish lounging a few yards away. Black, with spots of fire; with water embers. Like guys loafing on the pavement. Well then, I tell you, it was evening, and I ran into the mill with my stick and clubbed the floursacks, almost choking with the white powder. The miller started to yell, “You crazy little sonofabitch. I’ll break your bones like a chicken.” Laughing, I rushed out and into this same pink color, far from the ordinary color of evening. I saw it on the floury side of the mill as the water dropped in the wheel. A clear thin red rose in the sky.