Contango (Ill Wind) (26 page)

Russell paused, relishing his own technique of narrative. He went on,
eventually: “There was a rough timber hut with no windows, a large
opening for a door, and a roof made of some kind of palm-leaf. The floor was
just the earth, which chickens had scratched into inches of filth and dust. A
very small maize field rose on sloping ground at the back—right up to
the edge of the forest. There were a few rather scraggy cattle in a stockaded
corral. It was dull and raining when I saw the place first, and the
impression of the forest all around, a complete wall of black, was that of
some huge, crouching animal waiting to pounce. Probably, had it been a fine
day, I’d have thought it all looked very cheerful and homy. Anyway,
there it was, and your friend Mirsky, dressed native-fashion in slip-slop
trousers and nothing else, was chopping wood in the doorway.

“Of course, I couldn’t be certain, then, that he was Mirsky.
He had a beard and a moustache, his hair was long, he was very dirty—
he didn’t look a bit like the man your letter had described. There was
nothing for it but the ‘Doctor-Livingstone-I- presume’ gambit, so
I went up to him, held out my hand, and said: ’Is your name
Mirsky?’ He didn’t take my hand, he didn’t answer, and he
gave me a look that I can’t really portray, but it showed me this much
instantly—he was off his head.

“We stood there for a minute or so, facing each other without words.
Then suddenly a woman came out of the hut and looked at us. That gave me my
second shock. You know, Oetzler, I’m probably the last man in the world
who could he called sentimental, especially about women, and you can imagine
that I hadn’t been picturing any romantic affair between a stranded
white man and a lovely sepia princess. I was prepared for the average Indian
female, who generally isn’t good-looking to begin with, ages very
rapidly, and has several diseases. But this creature wasn’t even that.
She was the most incredibly ugly human creature I think I ever saw in my
life. She had the usual flat nose and broken teeth and barrel-shaped body.
She may have been old or young—one simply couldn’t guess. But
the whole effect was made much worse by her being an out-size. She was big
even by our standards—to the Indians, who are rather a stunted race,
she must have seemed a regular giantess. She made Mirsky look puny, and he
certainly wasn’t under average. Of course I could understand as soon as
I saw her why the Indians at Yacaiba had all seemed rather lewdly amused at
the situation— there’s always something a bit comic about the
amours of a hefty woman…. Well, there you are—there’s your
picture. I ought to add that she was quite as dirty as she was ugly, and that
when she came up close she had a queer, ammoniacal smell that happens to be
one of the few unpleasantnesses that I’ve never managed to get used
to.”

Lanberger reached for more whisky. “As you say, Russell, you could
hardly call yourself a sentimentalist.”

Russell went on. “Well, she looked me up and down, and I smiled
politely, and then Mirsky said something to her in the native lingo, and I
gathered it was by way of general introduction. I’d already given him
my own name, of course. When I said he was off his head, I don’t mean
that he was a raving lunatic. Far from it. His first instincts were quite
naturally hospitable, and he motioned me to enter the hut out of the pouring
rain. I did so, with him following me, and the woman following after him. My
Indian guide stayed outside, watching events with much curiosity. The inside
of that hut was pretty dreadful. It had about twenty smells, among them being
those of chickens, drying pemmican, peppery cooking, and filth. There was a
sort of wooden bench on which Mirsky invited me to sit. The woman went into a
corner and squatted on some straw; I couldn’t see her properly, but I
could feel that her eyes were still on me, and I had an additional feeling
that she didn’t altogether like me or approve of my visit. Meanwhile I
was rather waiting for Mirsky to say something, or at least to confirm the
fact that he was Mirsky. He didn’t; but he asked me what he could do
for me, if I had lost my way, did I wish for food, or anything. Quite
courteous, indeed. I said: ’No. I came deliberately to see you. I was
told you were here. I should like to talk to you.’ He smiled at that
and said he didn’t know that we could find much to talk about. I
didn’t fence around any longer then, but said outright that his friends
were greatly concerned about him, and that I’d been sent by them to
bring him back. To which he replied, equally outright: ’You’ll
spare yourself a lot of trouble if you take my word once and for all that
I’m not coming.’ Quietly just like that. There was nothing
precisely in his tone, or words, or manner, to suggest that he wasn’t
perfectly sane. But when I looked at him I saw his eyes again. They were the
danger-signal. They were—I can only think of one adjective—they
were HOT.

“Naturally, I didn’t launch into arguments right away. To
begin with, I wasn’t ready with any. It hadn’t really occurred to
me that the fellow wouldn’t jump at the chance of quitting such a life.
I just said: ‘Oh, that’s how you feel, is it?’ and let the
matter drop for the time being. He was instantly courteous again, and offered
me food and drink, which I decided to accept. I’m not particularly
fastidious—I haven’t had to be in my life—but I confess
that I heaved a bit over that meal. Just to see that woman eating was enough
to turn one’s stomach. We drank chicha, which is made from maize, and
is pretty alcoholic if you have too much of it. Afterwards both Mirsky and
the woman chewed coca, but I declined to join in—not from any
scruples, but because I don’t much care for the drug. We talked a
little, just the two of us. Sometimes Mirsky said a word or so to the woman,
but I gathered that he didn’t understand her language very completely.
My attitude, which I thought was the best possible in the circumstances, was
to pretend that the whole situation was the most natural in the world. From a
good deal of our talk we might have been lunching at the Ritz-Carlton. Except
that whenever I mentioned anything about the outside world he shut me up
instantly—telling me he wasn’t interested. Nor would he talk
about the recent past. He seemed to be living in a sort of ‘here-
now’ world, as if he either couldn’t or wouldn’t exercise
his brain over space and time. I’m not a psychologist, still less an
alienist, and I don’t really profess to understand the man’s
mental condition. But it did seem to me that his mind was somehow twisted.
I’ll give you an instance of it later on…. I hope, by the way, you
don’t think I’m spinning this out too much? There isn’t a
great deal more to tell, anyhow.”

“Go on,” Oetzler said. “It’s a most extraordinary
story.”

“Yes, I suppose it is. I’ve known men go native before, but as
a rule it’s drink or women that lead them to it, and they’d most
of them give their eyes to get back, if anyone offered to help them. Mirsky,
however, was a rather studious type, wasn’t he, not much given to the
pleasures of the flesh?”

Oetzler nodded. “He certainly didn’t drink heavily, and as for
women, I should have reckoned him under rather than oversexed. Finnicky, in
fact.”

“Yes, you’re thinking of that woman,” Russell answered.
“There was nothing undersexed about her, I can assure you. She was
almost, if you take my meaning, a caricature of the thing. What’s the
name of that English Jew who does queer sculptures that get his name in the
pictures? Yes, Epstein, that’s it. She was Sex as Epstein might have
personified it. I don’t say that, of course, merely because she was
ugly. There was something else—something powerful and elemental and
rather, to me, horrific in her. One somehow expected to see her surrounded by
an enormous litter of children. Yet, so far as I could judge, she
hadn’t any. Afterwards, when I got back to Yacaiba, I discovered that
this was by no means remarkable, since the Chiriqui women vastly outnumber
the men—sometimes by as big a ratio as ten to one. Nobody quite knows
why, but it is so. The only theory I can advance is that just as during a War
the will to survive produces an excess of males, a corresponding excess of
females must represent a subconscious will to die. As a matter of fact, some
of the tribes are dying—very rapidly.”

“It must make the men rather proud of themselves,” said
Oetzler.

“Yes, I daresay. But most of them are only weedy little runts that
sit around all day doing nothing, while the women work. Contrary to what you
might expect, the men are by no means objects of worship by the women. The
disproportion is so great that the women seem rather to despise them.
There’s polygamy, of course, if you like to call it that, but
it’s really more like promiscuity. Few of the children know their own
fathers. The men’s function is just ‘service,’ in the
stud-book sense, and I can’t say it adds to their dignity, even if it
does to their importance.”

“And the women?” queried Lanberger. “Do they play
fair—share and share alike? Or do the good-looking ones, if there are
any, elbow the others out of the way?”

“So far as I could judge from very casual observation in Yacaiba,
the women seemed to be pretty sensible about it. Perhaps they’d arrived
at the soundest possible basis for a sexual relationship— that of not
expecting faithfulness. Still, the bad-lookers do get left
out—that’s natural enough.” He took a fresh cigar, paused
while he lit it, and then added: “Which brings me back to the
point—that woman. I should guess that SHE’D been left out, until
she met Mirsky. Or, rather, she didn’t exactly meet him—she must
have found him, probably when he was half-dead and half- mad of thirst in the
forest. He didn’t deny that that was what had happened, when I put it
to him the following day. Oh, yes, I stayed the night there. I’m afraid
I’m telling this story rather badly. I stayed the night because I had
to—the heavy rains had swollen the river so much that it was quite
impossible to make the crossing. Mirsky walked down with me to look at it and
then invited me to return with him and wait till the morning. I can’t
say I was pleased, because we’d already had a long and exhausting
argument and I could see that persuasion was useless.

“Yes, quite useless. When a man says the sort of things that Mirsky
said, and with that queer sort of danger look in his eyes, you can’t
feel very optimistic about changing his mind. When I told him about his
sister in Paris and how worried she was about him, all he said was:
‘She needn’t be. I’m well enough here.’ ‘But do
you mean to say she’s never going to see you again?’ I asked, and
he answered: ’She can see me here, if she comes. There’s room
enough for her.’ After that it didn’t seem worth while to say
much more. He talked a lot of wild nonsense about hating civilisation. Even
art, too. He was in a mood to have put his foot through the canvas of the
Monna Lisa if it had been anywhere near. He pointed to a rather repulsive
looking beetle we saw crawling over the mud and said to me: ’You see
that beetle? What is it? It’s a beetle, that’s all. What is it
doing? Nothing particular that we know of. It’s just being a beetle.
Well, that’s how I want to be a man.’ All that sort of
talk.”

“Not especially original,” commented Lanberger. “I begin
to suspect that Mirsky must have had a complete set of the works of D. H.
Lawrence somewhere in that hut.”

Russell laughed. “I haven’t read much of Lawrence, so I
can’t say, but of course the whole thing was absurd. Civilised man
can’t go back to savagery all at once—he’s too self-
conscious. The very last thing a savage ever does is to explain himself
introspectively, as Mirsky was doing then. But he wasn’t altogether
sane, remember. Those days and nights in the forest— exactly how many
before the woman found him, I couldn’t quite gather—they’d
done that much for him. As we came in sight of his hut on the way back he
said something else that stuck in my mind. ‘I’ve got everything a
man needs,’ he said, ’food, drink, a roof over my head, and a
woman.’”

“Well,” said Lanberger, reflectively, “it’s a
point of view, at any rate. I can imagine many people who’re by no
means mad agreeing with him.”

“Oh, I’m not offering it as a proof of his madness,”
Russell retorted. “And I could give you far better ones than that, in
any case. … But I must tell you now how we spent the night. Mirsky and the
woman slept together at one end of the hut, my Indian guide was in the
middle, and I was at the other end near the doorway. As it wasn’t a
large hut we were all fairly closely huddled. There was no artificial light,
so we turned in as soon as it got dark. Of course I didn’t
undress—I didn’t even take my boots off. There was only straw to
lie on, full of fleas and insects. Usually I don’t get bitten much, but
Mirsky must have been breeding an especially ferocious type. They and other
things kept me awake, though there was every reason for me to be as tired as
the guide, who began snoring almost instantly. I smoked a pipe or two and
thought what a confoundedly queer world it was—to have sent a Russian
aristocrat turned Yankee art-critic to sleep on straw in the middle of a
tropical swamp with that monstrous female. As a matter of fact, it rather got
on my nerves—the thought of them there, like that, only a few feet
away. Of course I’m quite aware that I ought to allow for my own
personal kink in such a matter. Frankly, I don’t care for women. I
don’t even think that their naked bodies are beautiful—all those
rather foolish curves and cushions. Now a man’s body, on the other
hand… but I mustn’t digress. I want to tell you about that night. It
was not quite pitch-dark—there was a small moon when the clouds let it
be seen. I suppose, despite the fleas and the smells and the general
uncomfortableness of things, I must have dropped off to sleep before
midnight, because when I woke I had a distinct middle-of-the-night, as
opposed to nearly-time-to-get-up feeling. I’m rather good at that sort
of instinct; I also have an instinct for danger— it’s saved my
life several times. In fact—which is what I’ve come to at
last—I think it did so that night.