“No, I’m all right. How am I doing?”
“Wonderfully, my brother Henderson. Believe me, it will prove beneficial. I will lead Atti away and let you take rest. We have done enough for the first time.”
We were sitting on the trestle together and talking after the king had shut Atti in her inner room. He seemed positive that the lion Gmilo was going to turn up very soon. He had been observed in the vicinity. Then he would release the lioness, he told me, and end the controversy with the Bunam. After this he began to talk again about the connection between the body and the brain. He said, “It is all a matter of having a desirable model in the cortex. For the noble self-conception is everything. For as conception is, so the fellow is. Put differently, you are in the flesh as your soul is. And in the manner described a fellow really is the artist of himself. Body and face are secretly painted by the spirit of man, working through the cortex and brain ventricles three and four, which direct the flow of vital energy all over. And this explains what I am so excited about, Henderson-Sungo.” For he was highly excited, by now. He was soaring. He was up there with enthusiasm. Trying to keep up with his flight made me dizzy. Also I felt very bitter over some implications of his theory, which I was beginning to understand. For if I was the painter of my own nose and forehead and of such a burly stoop and such arms and fingers, why, it was an out-and-out felony against myself. What had I done! A bungled lump of humanity. Oh, ho, ho, ho, ho! Would death please wash me away and dissolve this giant collection of errors. “It’s the pigs,” I suddenly realized, “the pigs! Lions for him, pigs for me. I wish I was dead.”
“You are pensive, Henderson-Sungo.”
I came near holding a grudge against the king at that moment. I should have realized that his brilliance was not a secure gift, but like this ramshackle red palace rested on doubtful underpinnings.
Now he began to give me a new sort of lecture. He said that nature might be a mentality. I wasn’t sure quite what he meant by that. He wondered whether even inanimate objects might have a mental existence. He said that Madame Curie had written something about the beta particles issuing like flocks of birds. “Do you remember?” he said. “The great Kepler believed that the whole planet slept and woke and breathed. Was this talking through his hat? In that case the mind of the human may associate with the All-Intelligent to perform certain work. By imagination.” And then he began to repeat what a procession of monsters the human imagination had created instead. “I have subsumed them under the types I mentioned,” he said, “as the appetite, the agony, the fateful-hysterical, the fighting Lazaruses, the immune elephants, the mad laughers, the hollow genital, and so on. Think of what there would be instead by different imaginations. What gay, brilliant types, what merriment types, what beauties and goodness, what sweet cheeks or noble demeanors. Ah, ah, ah, what we could be! Opportunity calls to rise to summits. You should have been such a summit, Mr. Henderson-Sungo.”
“Me?” I said, still dazed by my own roaring. My mental horizon was far from clear, although the clouds on it were not low and dark.
“So you see,” said Dahfu, “you came to me speaking of grun-tu-molani. What could be grun-tu-molani upon a background of cows?”
Swine! he might have said to me.
It was vain to curse Nicky Goldstein for this. It was not his fault that he was a Jew, that he had announced he was going to raise minks in the Catskills and that I had told him I was going to raise pigs. Fate is much more complex than that. I must have been committed to pigs long before I laid eyes on Goldstein. Two sows, Hester and Valentina, used to follow me about with freckled bellies and sour, red, rust-gleaming bristles, silky in luster, stiff as pins to the touch. “Don’t let them loll in the driveway,” said Frances. That was when I warned her, “You’d better not hurt them. Those animals have become a part of me.”
Well, had those creatures become a part of me? I hesitated to come clean with Dahfu and to ask him right out bluntly whether he could see their influence. Secretly investigating myself, I felt my cheekbones. They stuck out like the mushrooms that grow from the trunks of trees, those mushrooms which prove to be as white as lard when you break them open. Under my helmet, my fingers crept toward my eyelashes. Pigs’ eyelashes occur only on the upper lid. I had some on the lower, but they were sparse and blunt. When a boy I had practiced to become like Houdini and tried to pick up needles from the floor with my eyelashes while hanging upside down from the foot of my bed. He had done it. I never managed to, but that was not because my eyelashes were too short. Oh, I had changed all right. Everybody changes. Change is ordained. Changes must come. But how? The king would say that they were directed by the master-image. And now I felt my jowls, my snout; I did not dare to look down at what had happened to me. Hams. Tripes, a whole caldron full of them. Trunk, a fat cylinder. It seemed to me that I couldn’t even breathe without grunting. Brother! I put my hand over my nose and mouth and looked with distressed eyes at the king. But he heard the guttural vibration of the vocal cords and said, “What is the peculiar noise you are making, Henderson-Sungo?”
“What does it sound like, King?”
“I don’t know. An animal syllable? Oddly, you look well after your exertion.”
“I don’t feel so well. I’m not one of your summits. You know that as well as I do.”
“You show the work of a powerful and original although blockaded imagination.”
“Is that what you see?” I said.
He said, “What I see is greatly mixed. Fantastic elements have fought forth from your body. Excrescences. You are an exceptional amalgam of vehement forces.” He sighed and gave a quiet smile; his mood was very quiet just then. He said, “We do not speak in blame terms. So many factors are mediating. Fomenting. Promulgating. Everyone is different. A billion small things unperceived by the object of their influence. True, pure intelligence does best it can, but who can judge? Negative and positive elements strive, and we can only look at them and wonder or weep. You may sometimes see a clear case of angel and vulture in collision. The eye is of heaven, the nose gives a certain flare. But face and body are the book of the soul, open to the reader of science and sympathy.” Grunting, I looked at him.
“Sungo,” he said, “listen painstakingly, and I will tell you what I have a strong conviction about.” I did as he said, for I thought he might tell me something hopeful about myself. “The career of our specie,” he said, “is evidence that one imagination after another grows literal. Not dreams. Not mere dreams. I say not mere dreams because they have a way of growing actual. At school in Malindi I read all of Bulfinch. And I say not mere dream. No. Birds flew, harpies flew, angels flew, Daedalus and son flew. And see here, it is no longer dreaming and story, for literally there is flying. You flew here, into Africa. All human accomplishment has this same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination! It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems! You see,” he said, “I sit here in Africa and devote myself to this in personal fashion, to my best ability, I am convinced. What Homo sapiens imagines, he may slowly convert himself to. Oh, Henderson, how glad I am that you are here! I have longed for somebody to discuss with. A companion mind. You are a godsend to me.”
XIX
Around the palace was a vegetable and mineral junkyard. The trees were niggardly and grew with gnarls and spikes. Then there were the flowers, which also lay in the Sungo’s department. My girls watered them and they thrived in those white hollow stones. The sun made the red blossoms extremely sleek and taut. Daily, I would come up from the den all shaken by my roaring, my throat grated, my head in fever and my eyes like wet soot, weak in the legs, and especially delicate and trembling in the knees. All I needed then was the weight of the sun to make me feel like a convalescent. You know how it is about some people when they convalesce from wasting diseases. They become strangely sensitive; they go around and muse; little sights pierce them, they get sentimental; they see beauty in all the corners. So, watched by all, I would go and bend over those flowers, I would stoop hopelessly with my eyes of damp soot at the bowls of petrified mineral junk filled with soaked humus and sniff the flowers and grunt and sigh with a sort of heavy, beady wretchedness, the Sungo pants sticking to me and the hair on my head, especially at the back, thriving. I was growing black curls, thicker than usual, like a merino sheep, very black, and they were unseating my helmet. Maybe my mind, beginning to change sponsors, so to speak, was stimulating the growth of a different man.