The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein (Mammoth Books) (42 page)

“I’m like Prospero, going out of my way to lift up Caliban from the brute.”

“Caliban meant well,” Mother responded, reminding him of something I knew nothing about. “Meanwhile, I don’t do things by halves, dear. As long as Congo remains in this house, he shall have kindness and help from me. And he shall look to me as his mother.”

I heard and, in time, digested all of this. When I learned to read, during my third year, I got hold of some of Doctor’s published articles about me and began to realize what everything meant.

Of course, I’d seen myself in mirrors hundreds of times and knew that I was dark, bow-legged and long-armed, with a face that grew out at an acute angle, and hair all over my body. Yet this had not set me very far apart, in my own mind, from the others. I was different from Sidney – but so was Mother, in appearance, size and behaviour. I was closer to them – in speech and such things as table manners and self-reliance – than he. But now I learned and grew to appreciate the difference between me, on one side, and Sidney, Doctor and Mother on the other.

I had been born, I found, in an iron cage at the Bronx Zoo. My mother was a great ape, a Kulakamba, very close to human type in body, size and intelligence – not dwarfed like a common chimpanzee nor thickset and surly like a gorilla. Doctor, a great experimental anthropologist – words like those happen to be easy for me, since they were part of daily talk at Doctor’s house – had decided to make observations on a baby ape and his own newborn child, rearing them side by side under identical conditions. I was the baby ape.

Incidentally, I have read in a book called
Trader Horn
that there are no Kulakambas, that they are only a fairy story. But there are – many and many of us, in the Central African forests.

I tell these things very glibly, as if I knew all about them. Doctor had written reams about the Kulakamba, and clippings of all he wrote were kept in the library. I had recourse to them as I grew older.

When I was four, Doctor led me into his big white laboratory.
There he examined and measured my hands, grunting perplexedly into his beard.

“We’ll have to operate,” he said at last.

“Will we?” I quavered. I knew what the word meant.

He smiled, but not exactly cheerfully. “You’ll have an anesthetic,” he promised, as though it were a great favour. “I want to fix your hands. The thumbs don’t oppose and it makes your grasp clumsy. Not human, Congo; not human.”

I was frightened, but Mother came to comfort me and say that I would be better off in the long run. So, when Doctor commanded, I lay on the sheet-spread table and breathed hard into the cloth he put on my face. I went to sleep and dreamed of high, green trees and of people like myself who climbed and played there – building nests and eating nuts as big as my head. In my dream I tried to join them, but found myself held back, as if by a pane of glass. That made me shed tears – though some say that apes cannot shed tears – and thus weeping, I awoke. My hands had a dull soreness in them and were swathed in bandages to the elbows. After weeks, I could use them again and found that their calloused palms had been softened, the awkward little thumbs somehow lengthened and newly jointed. I grew so skillful with them that I could pick up a pin or tie a bow knot. This was in the winter time, and once or twice when I played on the porch I had terrible pains in brow and jaw. Doctor said that the cold made my silver plates hurt, and that I must never go outside without a warm cap and a muffler wrapped high.

“It’s like a filling against the nerve of a tooth,” he explained.

At seven I was all about the house, helping Mother very deftly with her work. Now Doctor grew enthusiastic about me. He would lecture us all at the table – Sidney and I ate with him when there was no company – and said that his experiment, faulty in some ways, gave promise of great things along an unforeseen line.

“Congo was only a normal ape-cub,” he would insist, “and he’s developing in every possible way into a very respectable lower-class human being.”

“He’s by no means lower-class,” Mother always argued at this point, but Doctor would plunge ahead.

“We could operate on his people wholesale, making wonderful, cheap labour available. Why, when Congo grows up he’ll be as strong as six or eight men, and his keep is almost nothing.”

He tested me at various occupations – gardening, carpentry and iron-working, at which last I seem to have done quite well – and one day he asked me what I would rather do than anything else.

I remembered the dream I had had when he operated on me – and
many times since. “Best of all,” I replied, “I would like to live in a tree, build a nest of leaves and branches – ”

“Ugh!” he almost screamed in disgust. “And I thought you were becoming human!”

After that he renewed his demands that Mother treat me with less affection.

Sidney was going to school at this time. I remained at home with Doctor and Mother – we lived in a small New Jersey town – and confined most of my activities to the house and the shrub-grown back yard. Once I ran away after a little quarrel with Doctor, and frightened the entire neighbourhood before I was brought back by a nervous policeman with a drawn revolver. Doctor punished me by confining me to my room for three days. During that lonely time I did a lot of thinking and set myself down as an outcast. I had been considered strange, fearful and altogether unbelonging, by human beings. My crooked body and hairy skin had betrayed me to enmity and capture.

At the age of ten I gained my full growth. I was five feet six inches tall and weighed as much as Doctor. My face, once pallid, had become quite black, with bearded jaws and bristly hair on the upper lip. I walked upright, without touching my knuckles to the ground as ordinary apes do, for I usually held some tool or book in my hands. By listening to Sidney as he studied aloud at night I got some smattering of schooling, and I built upon this by constant and serious reading of his discarded textbooks. I have been told that the average shut-in child is apt to do the same. On top of this, I read a great deal in Doctor’s library, especially travel. But I disliked fiction.

“Why should I read it?” I asked Mother when she offered me a book about “Tom Sawyer”. “It isn’t true.”

“It’s interesting,” she said.

“But if it’s not true, it’s a lie; and a lie is wicked.”

She pointed out that novel-readers knew all the time that the books were not true. To that I made answer that novel-readers were fools. Doctor, joining the conversation, asked me why, then, I enjoyed my dreams.

“You say that you dream of great green forests,” he reminded. “That’s no more true than the books.”

“If it is a good dream,” I replied, “I am glad when I wake, because it made me happy. If it is a bad dream, I am glad because I escape by waking. Anyway, dreams happen and novels do not.”

Doctor called it a
sophistication
, and let that conclude the argument.

I have said that I am no proper writer, and I have shown it by
overlooking an important fact – the many visits of scientists. They came to observe and to discuss things with Doctor, and even with me. But one day some men appeared who were not scientists. They smoked long cigars and wore diamond rings and derby hats. Doctor had them in his study for an hour, and that night he talked long to Mother.

“Eighteen thousand dollars!” he kept saying. “Think of it!”

“You’ve never thought of money before,” she said sadly.

“But eighteen th – my dear, it would be only the beginning. We’d do the experiment again, with two baby apes – two new little Congos for you to fuss over – ”

“And the first Congo, my poor jungle foster son,” mourned Mother. “He’d be miserable somewhere. How can you think of such a thing, dear? Didn’t your grandfather fight to free slaves in his day?”

“Those were human slaves,” replied Doctor. “Not animals. And Congo won’t be miserable. His ape-instinct will enjoy the new life. It’ll fairly glitter for him. And we need the money to live on and to experiment with.”

That went on and on, and Mother cried. But Doctor had his way. In the morning the men with the cigars came back, and Doctor greeted them gayly. They gave him a cheque – a big one, for they wrote it very reverently. Then he called me.

“Congo,” he said, “you’re to go with these people. You’ve got a career now, my boy; you’re in the show business.”

I did not want to go, but I had to.

My adventures as a theatrical curiosity have been described in many newspapers all over the world, and I will mention them but briefly. First I was rehearsed to do feats of strength and finish the act with alleged comedy – a dialogue between myself and a man in clown costume. After that, a more successful turn was evolved for me, wherein I was on the stage alone. I performed on a trapeze and a bicycle, then told my life story and answered questions asked by the audiences. I worked in a motion picture, too, with a former swimming champion. I liked him on sight, as much as I liked any human being except Mother. He was always kind and understanding, and did not hate me, even when we we given equal billing.

For a while many newspaper reporters thought I was a fake – a man dressed up in a fur suit – but that was easily disproven. A number of scientists came to visit me in the various cities I performed in, and literally millions of curious people. In my third year as a show-piece I went to Europe. I had to learn French and
German, or enough to make myself understood on the stage, and got laughed at for my accent, which was not very good. Once or twice I was threatened, because I said something in the theatres about this political leader or that, but for the most part people were very friendly.

Finally, however, I got a bad cough. My owners were fearfully worried and called a doctor, who prescribed a sea voyage. Lots of publicity came of the announcement that I would sail south, to “visit my homeland of Africa”.

Of course I had not been born in Africa, but in the Bronx Zoo; yet a thrill came into my heart when, draped in a long coat and leaning on the rail, we sighted the west coast just below the Equator.

That night, as the ship rode at anchor near some little port, I contrived to slip overside and into a barge full of packing cases. I rode with it to land and sneaked out upon the dock, through the shabby little town, and away up a little stream that led into a hot, green forest.

I tell it so briefly and calmly because that is the way the impulse came to me. I read somewhere about the lemmings, the little ratlike animals that go to the sea and drown themselves by the thousands. That is because they must. I doubt if they philosophize about it; they simply do it. Something like that dragged me ashore in Africa and up the watercourse.

I was as strange and awkward there as any human being would be for the first time. But I knew, somehow, that nature would provide the right things. In the morning I rested in a thicket of fruit trees. The fruit I did not know, but the birds had pecked at it, so I knew it was safe for eating. The flavor was strange but good. By the second day I was well beyond civilization. I slept that night in a tree, making a sort of nest there. It was clumsy work, but something beyond my experience seemed to guide my hands.

After more days, I found my people, the Kulakambas.

They were as they had been in the dream, swinging in treetops, playing and gathering food. Some of the younger ones scampered through the branches, shrilling joyfully over their game of tag. They talked, young and old – they had a language, with inflections and words and probably grammar. I could see a little village of nests, in the forks of the big trees; well-made shelters, with roofs over them. Those must have been quickly and easily made. Nothing troubled the Kulakambas. They lived without thought or worry for the next moment. When the next moment came they lived that, too.

I thought I would approach. I would make friends, learn their ways and their speech. Then I might teach them useful things, and
in turn they would teach me games. Already the old dream was a reality and the civilization I had known was slipping away – like a garment that had fitted too loosely.

I approached and came into view. They saw, and began to chatter at me. I tried to imitate their sounds, and I failed.

Then they grew excited and climbed along in the trees above me. They began dropping branches and fruits and such things. I ran, and they followed, shrieking in a rage that had come upon them from nowhere and for no reason I could think of. They chased me all that day, until nightfall. A leopard frightened them then, and me as well.

I returned, after many days, to the town by the sea. My owners were there, and greeted me with loud abuse. I had cost them money and worry, important in the order named. One of them wanted to beat me with a whip. I reminded him that I could tear him apart like a roast chicken and there was no more talk of whipping me. I was kept shut up, however, until our ship came back and took us aboard.

Nevertheless, the adventure turned out well, so far as my owners were concerned. Reporters interviewed me when I got back to London. I told them the solemn truth about what I had done, and they made publicity marvels out of the ape-man’s return to the jungle.

I made a personal appearance with my picture, for it had come to England just at that time. A week or so later came a cable from America. Somebody was reviving the plays of William Shakespeare, and I was badly wanted for an important role. We sailed back, were interviewed by a battery of reporters on landing, and went to an up-town hotel. Once or twice before there had been trouble about my staying in hotels. Now I was known and publicized as a Shakespearean actor, and the management of the biggest and most sumptuous hotel was glad to have me for a guest.

At once my owners signed a contract for me to appear in
The Tempest
; the part given me to study was that of Caliban, a sort of monster who was presented as the uncouth, unwelcome villain. Part of the time he had to be wicked, and part of the time ridiculous. As I read of his fumblings and blunderings, I forgot my long-held dislike of fiction and fable. I remembered what Doctor and Mother had said about Caliban, and all at once I knew how the poor whelp of Sycorax felt.