The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl (3 page)

‘Those bawdy songs Ophelia sings: where
did
she learn them?’

‘In childhood – indeed, at a children’s party: from Juliet’s nurse.’

The great lake is dead.

This was caused by us, Man the polluter, Man the killer, with our greed, aggression and thoughtlessness.

Thanks to us, shoals of fish drift belly-up, luminous with decay, in the shallows. The reeds, themselves withering, tangle the corpses of water birds poisoned or smothered.

Spring arrives without the scent of wild flowers, without butterflies.

We need enormous effort, and it must be corporate effort.

Everyone, from the picknicking family careless with its litter to the giant factories that discharge their effluent by the ton into the lake, must be alerted to the responsibility they bear to the common good.

This is crisis.

Against the killers, individual greed and mass inertia, we must utilise every weapon at our command, from high-powered publicity campaigns to swingeing enforcement of the anti-
pollution
laws.

We must enlist the devoted services of scientists, ad-men, legislators and, above all, ordinary citizens.

Ordinary citizens must make a tremendous affirmation in favour of Life.

This is a success story, a victory for Life.

Given massive effort applied in time, ecological death is reversible.

Slowly, like Sleeping Beauty, the great lake reawakens.

Vegetation takes hold again, followed by the first stirrings and flutterings of animal life.

Ordinary citizens, who have won this triumph, are quick to come and enjoy its benefits.

For a weekend or merely a day trip, they are glad to exchange the heartlessness and aggression of the urban way of life for the peace of the lakeside.

Gaily striped canvas chairs line the shore. Punts nose through the reeds.

Along the paths run children in bright sunsuits waving butterfly nets.

On the banks, beside the gay canvas chairs of the weekend anglers, hundreds of fish choke their lives out. The corpses of water birds plummet into the reeds, shot by the skilled
marksmen
in the punts.

Proof that ecological death is reversible is afforded by the fact that the great lake now supports a thriving commercial fishery. In the factory by the lakeside thousands of fish lie belly-up, decapitated, being packed by automation.

Man has achieved a triumph on the side of Life.

During the Golden Age nobody died. So there was no need for population replacement, and sex still had only its original,
innocent
function of giving pleasure.

Amaryllis found pleasure with Corydon, then Corydon with Alexis, then Alexis with Chloe, and then Chloe with Amaryllis.

None of them was provoked to jealousy. In the society of that period, people were in the habit of expecting to remain young and attractive for ever. Consequently they were, though ardent, not desperate to satisfy their desires; and since they themselves could wait without painful tension, they felt no need to grudge pleasure to others.

To seek exclusive possession of someone’s charms was as
unthinkable
as wanting to keep more than you could eat of the fruits which the garden provided in abundance and variety. Nobody, therefore, required others to hide their charms
beneath
clothes, and nobody wanted a private house behind whose walls to hide his possessions from envy.

Moreover, the garden, as its fertility indicates, enjoyed a
perpetually
clement climate. Clothes were unnecessary; so was shelter: with the result that both were free to be purely
decorative
.

Strephon, who had a flair for dressmaking, used to pluck large leaves and bright berries and fashion them into costumes outlandish or comic. Draped in these robes, some of his friends would act plays to the others.

It was for pure love of architecture that Corinna would
collect
fallen branches, strip them and construct palaces.
Everyone
came, tramped round and through the latest palace, and admired its construction. But no one thought of spending the night inside, let alone claiming the right to shut the others outside. In the morning Corinna would pull the palace down,
having overnight conceived a plan for a palace yet more
splendid
. When people are immortal, their monuments of art can afford to be ephemeral.

Likewise, after acting, the actors always took off the costumes Strephon had designed – a divestment that became a theatrical convention signifying that the play was over.

Nakedness being everyone’s normal condition, everyone naturally noticed that, once a month or so, a translucent red liquid would appear out of a woman’s body and trickle or pour down the inside of her thighs. No one was silly enough to suppose that made women superior to men, who had physiological accomplishments of their own. But the phenomenon was much admired (by everyone) for its beauty – which was of a kind rare in the garden.

Not that the garden was short of strong colour. Predominantly it was of a deep, booming tropical green. But there were also leaves shrill in colour, and leaves or, it might be, petals blotched in scarlet or purple. Transparent flowers floated vivid above the foliage. Berries glistened in its recesses. Birds crashed through it, their breasts and wings seemingly painted in thick stripes of blue, yellow and turquoise.

However, all those colours were in some sense opaque. Even the transparent petals were like coloured veils. They didn’t make the impression or illusion of being their own source of light. Lucid colour of course existed: in the blue of the
perpetually
clement sky, and in its reflection in pools and streams. Indeed, most people had lucid eyes. But those lucidities were pale or (unless you were at that moment in love with the eyes) drab. They were insipid in comparison with the women’s blood, which, varying from day to day and from woman to woman, sometimes ran a pure vivid scarlet, like a scarlet brook, and sometimes thickened into curlicues of crimson or even black, when it seemed to be its own source not only of light but of dark.

Its only rivals for lucency were the lumps of rock that Alexis brought back from an area of the garden frequented only by him. To the others, the very fact that this district was rocky, without vegetation and mainly grey and brownish in colour made it dull.

‘You all have such vapid tastes,’ Alexis said. ‘You’re childish.
You ask for everything to be pretty, and you don’t bother whether it’s interesting.’

At the time when they were in love, Corydon, trying to share Alexis’s interest, accompanied him on his expeditions. Alexis shewed him how, by using one lump of rock on another, it was possible to shape a tool, with which you could extract from the rocky mass a third lump, which to Corydon looked exactly like the first two.

‘Yes, but it comes from a deeper layer,’ Alexis said. ‘Doesn’t that interest you? And, look: there’s a streak of gleaming, lucid material running through it.’

‘Yes,’ Corydon said, trying to please his lover, ‘I see it: a sort of gleaming grey. But quite honestly, Alexis, it seems an awful lot of effort just to get a strip of gleaming grey, which is a dull colour even though it gleams, when the women produce a gleaming crimson without any effort at all. And that comes from deep inside them, too.’

Later, when Chloe and Alexis were lovers, she too went on an expedition with Alexis, and he chipped her out a piece of rock with a yellowish gleam in it. But ‘Quite honestly, Alexis,’ Chloe confessed, ‘it’s neither so yellow nor so gleaming nor so interesting as the eyes of a cat when he lurks in the dark beneath a bush.’

After that, Alexis went on his expeditions alone, and the others, as they travelled about the lusher parts of the garden, merely heard the distant chip-chip of his tools on the rock-face.

On one of her travels Amaryllis discovered a tree that grew bright blue pineapples. Everyone was delighted by this botanical fantasy. They all assembled to eat a special blue-pineapple luncheon, for which they sat in a circle on the grass, shaded by a pagoda which Corinna had almost finished building.

From his place in the circle, Strephon suddenly reached
towards
the centre and pulled out, from beneath the pile of blue pineapples, the huge, yellow, five-fingered leaf that was serving as a plate. ‘It’s wasted as a plate,’ Strephon said. ‘I shall make it into a hat.’ Giggling, he ran off with the huge leaf, and most of the others, giggling too, rose and ran after him.

Corydon was getting up to join the chase, but Alexis, who was sitting next to him (they were still very fond of each other), pushed him down again. ‘Never mind that childishness’,
Alexis said. ‘Look.’

Corydon looked into the palm of Alexis’s hand, which was spread before him. In the middle lay a tiny drop of blood.

‘Beautiful,’ Corydon said. ‘Which of the women gave you that?’

‘None of the women. Unless the earth itself is a woman.’

‘Do you mean you got it out of the rock?’

‘I had to dig harder and chip finer than ever before.’

‘I suppose it fell from one of the women as they walked on the rocks,’ Corydon said, ‘and soaked in.’

‘It couldn’t have soaked so deep,’ Alexis replied. ‘Besides, it isn’t blood. Touch it.’

Corydon pressed the pad of his index finger against the object in Alexis’s palm. He rolled it about for a moment, then tried to score its surface with his fingernail, but couldn’t.

‘Even so,’ Corydon said, rather uneasily, ‘it might be blood. Blood does harden after a while.’

‘Blood shrivels, and loses its colour and eventually powders,’ Alexis said. ‘This doesn’t. Neither has it smell or taste. It’s some days now since I took it from the rocks, and it hasn’t changed. I think it will last for ever.’

‘Even so,’ Corydon said, trying to become cheerful again, ‘it still seems hardly worth the effort. The women produce blood in so much greater quantities.’

‘Blood doesn’t last’, Alexis said.

‘No, but the women do,’ Corydon replied. ‘You only have to wait till next month.’

Strephon came suddenly round the side of the pagoda, still giggling but now panting as well, the disputed yellow leaf
flapping
on his head, his pursuers giggling and panting close after him.

Alexis and Corydon moved quickly out of the way, Alexis clenching his fist tight round his find.

Strephon stumbled on a blue pineapple, and Chloe, his nearest pursuer, took the opportunity to launch herself at him. They both fell flat on the grass, setting blue pineapples rolling all over the glade, and the other pursuers, unable to stop short, tumbled on top of them.

Afraid that he had hurt Alexis’s feelings by making too little of his discovery, Corydon strode over to the pile of people,
burrowed inside it and came up bearing Strephon’s hat. ‘This is wasted both as a plate and as a hat,’ he said. The pile of people sorted themselves upright, while Corydon went on: ‘Alexis has found something as beautiful as blood, but hard. However, it’s very tiny and might easily get lost. So we’d better fashion this leaf into a bag to hold it.’

Instead of being pleased, Alexis advanced on Corydon, snatched the large leaf and threw it down, meanwhile
whispering
fiercely: ‘I didn’t give you permission to tell the others.’

He pushed past Corydon, waved off the others, who were asking to see the object he had discovered, and made for the pagoda. There he turned to face the group, but he kept one hand on the pagoda wall as if alert to dodge behind it and run. His other hand still made a tight fist.

The group looked at him uncertainly. Then Amaryllis
retrieved
one of the blue pineapples and split it open, handing round the pieces. Thirsty after so much running, giggling and uneasiness, everyone sucked the blue juice gratefully.

‘Don’t you want yours, Alexis?’ Amaryllis called. ‘It’s very cooling.’

‘No’, Alexis said.

‘Why won’t you shew us this tiny rock that’s like blood?’

‘There’s no such thing,’ Alexis said. ‘It’s just Corydon’s
teasing
.’

‘Liar,’ Corydon called, flinging aside his piece of pineapple and running towards Alexis.

When he reached the pagoda, he snatched out of its structure a branch which Corinna had not yet completely woven in. With it, he hit Alexis as hard as he could.

Alexis fell down.

After a moment, as he lay on the ground, a few of the small, blood-coloured rocks issued from Alexis’s mouth.

‘Look, everybody,’ Corydon called. ‘I wasn’t teasing. Red rocks are coming out of his mouth. He must have eaten some of them. Perhaps they’re a sort of berry.’

Everyone ran forward to look.

‘How beautiful,’ Chloe said, and stooped to touch the little red objects on the ground. ‘But they’re not hard,’ she added, standing up again quickly. ‘They’re liquid.’

‘They must be blood,’ Strephon said.

A stream of it now came out from Alexis’s mouth.

‘Only women can provide blood,’ Corydon said.

‘But they don’t have to lie still on the ground in order to do it,’ said Corinna. ‘Get up, Alexis.’

Alexis didn’t.

Corydon knelt beside him for a moment and took something out of his still-clenched fist.

‘Why doesn’t he move?’ Amaryllis demanded. ‘What have you done, Corydon?’

‘I’ve proved that men contain blood, just as women do,’ Corydon said defiantly. ‘It’s a great discovery. We were all living in abysmal ignorance.’

But no one congratulated him.

He began to edge his way through the group until he reached the entrance to the pagoda, when he dodged unexpectedly
inside
and slammed the door.

‘Let us in, Corydon,’ they cried, hammering.

But he pushed all his weight against them and, thanks to the sound principles and craft Corinna had employed in designing the door and its surround, they couldn’t break in.

‘Go away,’ Corydon shouted from inside. ‘This is mine.’

Retreating, they found that Strephon was sitting alone in the glade, urgently scooping the pulp out of the blue pineapple.

‘Why are you throwing the pulp away? That’s the part that’s good to eat.’

‘I’ve better things to do than eat,’ Strephon said. ‘I’ve had an inspiration.’

‘Are you making the pineapple into a blue hat?’

‘I shall waste no more time on such frivolities.’ Still working away at the pineapple, Strephon glanced sideways. Amaryllis was standing beside him. He pointed suddenly to a trickle of blood between her legs.

‘It must be the excitement that brought it on’, she said. ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’

Strephon’s answer was to cast briefly round, snatch up the huge leaf he had once worn as a hat and thrust it at her. ‘Cover yourself,’ he said, resuming his work. ‘And stand further away from me, in case you put a jinx on what I’m doing.’

‘Don’t feel hurt, dear,’ Chloe said, putting her arm about Amaryllis’s shoulders.

But ‘Strephon’s right,’ Amaryllis said, moving away. ‘I’m disgusting.’

‘I’ve finished,’ Strephon cried, leaping up. ‘Now watch.’ With his left hand he pulled the top off the modified blue
pineapple
, and with his right he hurled the rest of it into the still roofless pagoda.

The pineapple plopped on the floor inside. Inside, Corydon exclaimed. The pagoda exploded.

When their hearing returned after the noise, the group realised that Strephon was shouting and exulting. He was
running
round excitedly but bent over, covering or perhaps hugging his naked pleasure organs with his hands. Presently the group began to make sense of his incoherency. ‘We must all wear clothes,’ he was saying. ‘The age of childish play is over. I shall design everyone a uniform.’ Then, with a special squeeze at himself: ‘These are my private parts. This garden is my private estate. Any rubies recovered from the ruins of the pagoda are my private possessions. That woman’ (he pointed at Amaryllis, who had made herself a leaf skirt) ‘is my wife. You are all my people.’

Only Corinna dared approach him.

‘Whore,’ he said to her. ‘Cover yourself.’

But she continued to approach. To the group’s surprise, Strephon stood still, spread his hands to shield his private parts and looked embarrassed.

‘You’ve destroyed Corydon,’ Corinna said.

‘Corydon was a murderer,’ Strephon said sulkily. ‘He was fair game. Which reminds me: I shall kill the animals next.’