No, I haven’t ever been calm enough to read, and there was a time when I would have dumped my father’s books to the pigs if I’d thought it might do them good. Such a supply of books confused me. When I started to read something about France, I realized I didn’t know anything about Rome, which came first, and then Greece, and then Egypt, going backward all the time to the primitive abyss. As a matter of fact, I didn’t know enough to read one single book. Eventually I found the only things I could enjoy were things like The Romance of Surgery, The Triumph over Pain, or medical biographies-like Osier, Cushing, Semmelweis, and Metchnikoff. And owing to my attachment to Wilfred Grenfell I became interested in Labrador, Newfoundland, the Arctic Circle, and finally the Eskimos. You would have thought that Lily would have gone along with me on the Eskimos, but she didn’t, and I was very disappointed. The Eskimos are stripped down to essentials and I thought they would appeal to her because she is such a basic type.
Well, she is, and then again, she is not. She’s not naturally truthful. Look at the way she lied about all her fiancés. And I’m not sure that Hazard did punch her in the eye on the way to the wedding. How can I be? She told me her mother was dead while the old woman was still living. She lied too about the carpet, for it was the one on which her father shot himself. I am tempted to say that ideas make people untruthful. Yes, they frequently lead them into lies.
Lily is something of a blackmailer, also. You know I dearly love that big broad, and for my own amusement sometimes I like to think of her part by part. I start with a hand or a foot or even a toe and go to all the limbs and joints. It gives me wonderful satisfaction. One breast is smaller than the other, like junior and senior; her pelvic bones are not well covered, she is a little gaunt there. But her body looks gentle and pretty. Moreover her face blushes white, which touches me more than anything else. Nevertheless she is reckless and a spendthrift and doesn’t keep the house clean and is a con artist and exploits me. Before we were married, I wrote about twenty letters for her all over the place, to the State Department and a dozen or so missions. She used me as a character reference. She was going to Burma or to Brazil, and the implied threat was that I would never see her again. I was on the spot. I couldn’t louse her up to all these people. But when we were married and I wanted to spend our honeymoon camping among the Copper Eskimos, she wouldn’t hear of it. Anyway (still on the subject of books) I read Freuchen and Gontran de Poncins and practiced living out of doors in winter. I built an igloo with a knife and during zero weather Lily and I fell out because she wouldn’t bring the kids and sleep with me under skins as the Eskimos do. I wanted to try that.
I looked through all the readings Dahfu had given me. I knew they were supposed to have a bearing on lions and yet, page after page, not one single reference to any lion. I felt like groaning, like snoozing, like anything except tackling such hard material on this hot African day when the sky was as blue as grain alcohol is white. The first article, which I picked because the opening paragraph looked easy, was signed Scheminsky, and it was not easy at all. But I fought it until I came across the term Obersteiner’s allochiria, and there I broke down. I thought, “Hell! What is it all about! Because I told the king I wanted to be a doctor, he thinks I have medical training. I’d better straighten him out on this.” The stuff was just too difficult.
But anyway I gave it the best that was in me. I skipped over Obersteiner’s allochiria, and in the end managed to make sense of a paragraph here and there. Most of these articles had to do with the relation between body and brain, and they especially emphasized posture, confusions between right and left, and various exaggerations and deformities of sensation. Thus a fellow with a normal leg might be convinced that he had the leg of an elephant. This was very interesting in itself and a few of the descriptions were absolutely dandy. What I kept thinking was, “I’d better scour, brighten, freshen up the old intelligence, and understand what the man is driving at, for my life may depend on it.” It was just my luck to think I had found the conditions of life simplified so I could deal with them-finally! — and then to end up in a ramshackle palace reading these advanced medical publications. I suppose there must be few native princes left who are not educated, and all the polytechnical schools enroll gens de couleur from all over the world, and some of them have made prodigious discoveries already. But I never heard of anyone who was precisely on King Dahfu’s track. Of course it was possible that he was in a league all by himself. This suggested again that I might find myself in some really hot water with him, for you can’t expect people who are in a class by themselves to be reasonable. Being the only occupant of a certain class, I know this from personal experience.
I was taking a short rest from the article by Scheminsky, playing a game of solitaire and breathing hard as I bent over it, when the king’s Uncle Horko, on this particular day of heat, entered my room on the first floor of the palace. Behind him came the Bunam, and with the Bunam there was always his companion or assistant, the black-leather man. These three made way to let a fourth person enter, an elderly woman who had the look of a widow. You can seldom be mistaken about widows. They had fetched her in to see me, and from their way of standing aside it was plain she was the principal visitor. Preparatory to rising, I gave a stagger-space was limited in my room and it was already pretty well occupied by Tamba and Bebu, who were lying down, and Romilayu, who was in the corner. There were eight of us in a room not really big enough to hold me. The bed was fixed and couldn’t be moved outside. It was covered with hides and native rags, and the spattered cards over which I had been brooding were laid out in four uneven files-I had pushed aside King Dahfu’s literature. And now they brought me this elderly woman in a fringed dress that hung from her shoulders to about the middle of her thighs. They filed in from the burning wilds of the African afternoon and, as I had been fixed with the seeing blindness of a card player on the glossy, dirty reds and blacks, I couldn’t focus at first on the woman. But then she came near to me, and I saw that she had a round but not perfectly round face. On one side of it the symmetry was out. At the jaw, this was. Her nose was cocked and she had large lips, while the gentle forward projection of her face made it seem that she was offering it to you. Her mouth was somewhat lacking in teeth but I recognized her at once. “Why,” I thought, “it’s a relative of Dahfu’s. She must be his mother.” I saw the relationship in the slope of her face and in the lips and the red tinge of her eyes.
“Yasra. Queen,” said Horko. “Dahfu mama.”
“Ma’am, it’s an honor,” I said.
She took my hand and placed it on her head, which was shaved, of course. All the married women had shaven heads. Her action was facilitated by a difference of almost two feet in our heights. Horko and I stood over all the rest. He was wrapped in his red cloth, and the stones in his ears hung like the two lobes of a rooster when he bent to speak to her.