The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (13 page)

But not all the Indians died. The Europeans impregnated the women and the children in turn impregnated the most feckless of the poor whites. The blacks impregnated the resultant cross and, though filtered and diffused, the original Indian blood finally distributed itself with some thoroughness among the urban proletariat and the occupations both whites and blacks deemed too lowly to perform, such as night-soil disposal. Yet it was perfectly possible – and, indeed, by far the greater majority of the population did so – to spend all one’s life in the capital or the towns of the plain and know little if anything of the Indians. They were bogeymen with which to frighten naughty children; they had become rag-pickers, scrap-dealers, refuse collectors, and emptiers of cess-pits – those who performed tasks for which you do not need a face.

And a few of them had taken to the river, as if they had grown to distrust even dry land itself. These were the purest surviving strain of Indian and they lived secret, esoteric lives, forgotten, unnoticed. It was said that many of the river people never set foot on shore in all their lives and I know it was taboo for unmarried girls or pregnant women to leave the boats on which they lived. They were secretive, proud, shy and rigidly exclusive in their dealings with the outside world. Those who married outside the river clans were forbidden to return to their families or even to speak to any member of the tribe again as long as they lived but taboos against any kind of exogamy with the fat Caucasians who rooted themselves at ease along the river banks were so rigid I do not think above half a dozen of the women and, among the men, only the masters of the boats – or, rather, barges – had ever so much as exchanged a score of sentences with any except their own. Besides, they retained a version of one of the Indian dialects and I rather think they were the remote and however altered descendants of the birdmen of the swamps, for the meaning of their words depended not so much on pronunciation as intonation. They speak in a kind of singing; when, in the mornings, a flock of womenfolk twitter about the barge emptying the slops over the side and getting the breakfast, it is like a dawn chorus. The only way to transcribe their language would be in a music notation. But I have found very few of their customs in the writings of the Jesuits.

Over the years, their isolated and entirely self-contained society had developed an absolutely consistent logic which owed little or nothing to the world outside and they sailed from ports to cities to ports as heedlessly as if the waterways were magic carpets of indifference. I soon realized they were entirely immune to the manifestations. If the hawk-nosed, ferocious elders who handled their traditional lore said such a thing was so, then it
was
so and it would take more than the conjuring tricks of a cunning landlubber to shake their previous convictions. Since, however, they bore no goodwill to the whites and very little to the blacks, if it came to that, they took a cool pleasure to witness from the security of their portholes the occasional havoc in the towns through which they passed.

I blessed that touch of Indian blood my mother had all her life cursed for it gave me hair black enough and cheekbones high enough to pass among the river people for one of their own, when they were the only ones who could help me. The bargemaster who took me in knew quite well I came from the city but he spoke enough of the standard tongue to reassure me they were well disposed to fugitives from justice, provided they were of Indian extraction. He told me that during my faint he had dug the bullet out of my shoulder with a knife while his mother held an infusion of narcotic herbs under my nose when I showed signs of regaining consciousness. Now he applied a boiling poultice of leaves to the wound, bandaged it and left me in the care of the old woman.

When she smiled at me, I thought at first she did not have a tooth in her head for my eyes were still dim with fever, but soon I learned it was the custom for all the women to stain their teeth black. Every time she came into the cabin she shut the door sharply behind her but not before I saw a curious press of children crowding outside on deck to catch a glimpse of me. But I did not meet his family until Nao-Kurai had taught me to sing something of his language.

The speech of the river people posed philosophical as well as linguistic problems. For example, since they had no regular system of plurals but only an elaborate system of altered numerals for denoting specific numbers of given objects, the problem of the particular versus the universal did not exist and the word ‘man’ stood for ‘all man’. This had a profound effect on their societization. Neither was there a precise equivalent for the verb ‘to be’, so the kernel was struck straight out of the Cartesian nut and one was left only with the naked, unarguable fact of existence, for a state of being was indicated by a verbal tag which could roughly be translated as ‘one finds oneself in the situation or performance of such and such a thing or action’, and the whole aria was far too virtuoso a piece to be performed often so it was replaced by a tacit understanding. The tenses divided time into two great chunks, a simple past and a continuous present. Neither contained further temporal shading. A future tense was created by adding various suffixes indicating hope, intention and varying degrees of probability and possibility to the present stem. There was also a marked absence of abstract nouns, since they had very little use for them. They lived with a complex, hesitant but absolute immediacy.

Besides her blackened teeth, Nao-Kurai’s mother – whom I was quickly invited to call ‘Mama’ – used a great deal of paint on her face, in spite of her age. The paint was applied in a peculiarly stylized manner. A coat of matt white covered her nose, cheeks and forehead but left her neck and ears as brown as nature made them. On top of this white crust she put a spherical scarlet dot in the middle of each cheek and over the mouth a precisely delineated scarlet heart which completely ignored the real contours of the lips, which one could make out beneath as vague indentations, like copings under snow. Thick black lines surrounded her eyes, from which radiated a regular series of short spokes all round the circumference. The eyebrows were painted out and painted in again some three inches above the natural position, giving her an habitual look of extreme surprise. Sometimes she would also paint, in black, a crescent, a star or a butterfly at the corner of her mouth, on her temples or in some other antic position. I could see that the young girls who came to peek at me were decorated in much the same way, though less elaborately. This traditional maquillage could not have originally been intended to repel landsmen, but, however fortuitously, it repelled them completely, if ever one chanced to see it.

Mama hid her coils of black hair in a coloured handkerchief tied loosely over her head and knotted in the nape. She always wore loose trousers nipped in at the ankle with green or red cords; split-toed socks of black cotton which allowed her to keep thonged sandals on her feet; a loose blouse of checked or floral cotton; and protecting that, a short, immaculate, white starched apron which had armholes and tied at the back of both neck and waist, so that it covered her upper part almost completely. The aprons and also the bed-linen and the curtains at the portholes were all trimmed with a coarse white lace the women made themselves in the evenings, three or four of them clustered round a single candle. I think it was a craft the nuns had taught them in the seventeenth century, before the river people signed their quittance to the world, for the designs were very old-fashioned.

Mama’s costume was universal among the women. It gave them a top-heavy appearance, as if they would not fall down if you pushed but only rock to and fro. I realized that, though I had sometimes seen the dark barges moving slowly along the river, I had never seen this characteristic shape of a woman on deck and later I learned the women were all ordered below whenever they reached a place of any size.

Mama always smelled faintly of fish but so did my sheets and blankets and the smell had soaked into the very wood of the bulkhead beside me for fish was their main source of protein. When she brought me my food, Mama never brought me a fork or knife or spoon to eat it with – she only brought a deep plate of a stiff kind of porridge made from maize topped with fish in a highly flavoured sauce and I was to discover the whole family habitually ate together round a round table in the main cabin, each scooping a handful of maize from the common bowl, rolling it in the palm until it was solid and then dipping it into another common bowl and scooping up the sauce with it.

Whenever she offered me my dinner, or dressed my wound, or washed me, or smoothed my bed, or undertook the more intimate tasks she performed without distaste or embarrassment, she used a limited repertoire of stiff, exact gestures, as if these gestures were the only possible accompaniments to her actions and also the only possible physical expressions of hospitality, solicitude or motherly care. Later I found that all the women moved in this same, stereotyped way, like benign automata, so what with that and their musical box speech, it was quite possible to feel they were not fully human and, to a certain extent, understand what had produced the prejudices of the Jesuits.

The appearance and manners of the men were by no means so outlandish, perhaps because, although reluctantly, they were forced to mix more with the shore people and so had adopted a rough version of peasant manners and also of peasant dress. They wore loose white shirts over loose trousers with a loose, sleeveless waistcoat usually made from a web of small, knitted, multi-coloured squares, which they donned when the weather grew cool. In winter, both men and women would put on jackets of padded cotton. Mama was already patching and refurbishing a trunkful of these jackets ready for another season’s wear.

The men sometimes wore earrings and various talismans on chains around their necks but did nothing to their faces except grow on them flamboyant moustaches whose drooping lines stressed the brooding shapes of the Indian nose and jaw. Since nobody offered to shave me and I could not shave myself, I, too, sported one of those moustaches before I was up and about again and, once I was supplied with it, I did not bother to remove it for I found I liked my new face far better than my old one. The weeks of pain and sickness passed with the remains of the summer; through my porthole, I saw the shorn cornfields of the great plain and the colours of autumn glowing, then falling, from the trees. My best companion was the ship’s cat, a thick-set, obese, skulking beast, white, with irregular black patches on the rump, the left fore-quarter and the right ear, who became very attached to me for some reason – perhaps because I kept so still he could sleep undisturbed on the warm cushion of my stomach for hours, where he made me throb with the vibrations of his purr. I was fond of him because he was painted up like Mama.

When Nao-Kurai told me I was well enough to go on board, I saw that the entire boat was strung with chains made, each one, of hundreds of little birds folded out of paper and I learned this was not only to advertise to the other river dwellers the presence of a sick man on board but was also an offering to the spirits who had caused my sickness. These birds increased my conviction that Nao-Kurai’s tribe was descended from the painters in feathers. When I learned more of their medicine, however, I began to wonder why I had survived his doctoring for Mama had sterilized the knife with which Nao-Kurai had performed his surgery by dipping it in the fresh urine of a very healthy virgin while reciting a number of antique mantras.

Nao-Kurai occupied an important position in the tribe and I was very lucky to have fallen under his protection. Their business consisted of the marine transportation of goods from one part of the central plain to another via the waterways and, since Dr Hoffman had put the railways out of action, business was enjoying a boom. We drew behind us a whole string of barges which carried imported timber up to a city in the north where work still went on as usual. The entire country was poorly afforested and we were forced to import timber for building or even for the manufacture of furniture from other sources along the sea-board. Nao-Kurai owned the longest string of barges among all the river people and his skill at the standard speech and a remarkable flair for mental arithmetic had made him the spokesman and administrator for the whole community. To a considerable extent the tribe held all its goods in common and tended to think of itself as a scattered but unified family. When I lived among them, there were some five or six hundred river people who travelled mostly in convoys of five or six chains of barges each but I should think their numbers have greatly dwindled since then and perhaps by now they have all abandoned the river, the women have washed their faces for good and they have become small tradesmen on dry land.

Nao-Kurai was a gaunt, hollow-eyed man of somewhat embittered integrity and, though he had a very quick intelligence and, indeed, considerable intellectual powers, even if he were extremely cynical, he was – like the entire tribe – perfectly illiterate. When I was well enough to get up every day, had enough phrases on the tip of my tongue to chirrup morning greetings to the family and could share the porridge bowl at mealtimes without spilling my food, Nao-Kurai took me more and more into his confidence and finally told me he wanted me to teach him to read and write for he was sure the shore people cheated him badly on all the consignments he undertook. When we stopped at a village, he sent one of his sons off to buy pencils, paper and any book he could find, which happened to be a translation of
Gulliver’s Travels
. So, after that, every evening, when the barges were moored for the night, the supper cleared away and the horse attended to, we sat at the table under a swinging lantern, smoking and studying the alphabet while the boys, under strict orders to be good, sulked in the corners or sat on the deck, too intimidated even to play quietly, while Mama and two of the daughters sat in smiling silence, making lace, and the littlest girl belched and gurgled to herself like a faulty tap, for she was simple-minded.