The Pop’s Rhinoceros (98 page)

So he lies there for a while, facedown in the dirt, gulping air, wiggling his feet, while the similarly lost ant, deciding that something this much larger than itself might reasonably be assumed to move correspondingly quicker, clambers up the arm of his shirt, enters by a small rip in the fabric, and gets tangled up amongst the wiry hairs sprouting in the dimple of Salvestro’s armpit, where it will bite him exactly eight minutes from now. Time to be getting on, think Salvestro and the ant simultaneously, even though one patch of forest is much like another. …

He gets up and gazes into the gloom. Amorphous thinnings and halfhearted lightenings of the forest’s subaqueous shade float and drift like wobbly clouds, hovering over the ground and nosing about in random fashion, sometimes bumping into one another and merging, sometimes swelling or contracting out of existence. There are no shadows—the light is too vague—only a murky chiaroscuro that furs the forest and blurs its denizens, breaking outlines and bleeding hues so that they muddy themselves in one another, producing a homogenizing surfeit of hessians and khakis. Seen in the sublight of the forest floor, one patch of forest really is much like another. Viewed sideways, most of what’s in it is, too. Along the lateral axis of homologue and homage, the massive flanged buttresses of the cottonwood trees might as well be twenty-foot termite nests, or the rotting stumps of dead cedars, or creeper-strangled satinwoods, while the creepers and lianas themselves resemble—rather obviously—snakes both large and small, the little yellow ones also disguising themselves as young palm fronds and the young palm fronds as bamboo and the bamboo as various strains of elephant grass (which do not, however, look like elephants, although there is a certain beetle—rather tangy when roasted—commonly found in the wormy logs
whose wood it relishes and which it digs out using the curved and pointed horn on the end of its nose). Seeping sap trickling down the trunks of the copaibatrees ferments and smells like forest orchids, or would if the orchids did not smell of carrion. Leopards at rest look like (and are as rare as) cloudy dapplings of sunlight falling on damp black earth. Leopards in motion look like a swarm of dying drone-wasps plummeting down from their podlike nests, the latter reminiscent of the highly prized but toxic
tololo
-tuber. Flightless insects imitate sticks, leaves, poisonous fruit, and inedible lichens. The forest spreads sideways by processes of imitation and analogy. Parrots are its heralds and the primeval chameleon is its king: there he goes, mottling and marbling in accordance with the terrain, lifting one articulated leg at a time and putting it down again with exaggerated care, as though the land were still soft, as though one false step would see him sink burbling into the mud that covered everything in the days before Eri hardened it and made it the land whose nature determines everything here, being its pathology and washed-out grammar. … Everything here eventually breaks off at the roots, topples, falls, returns to the waiting soil from which it rose. And in the meantime everything looks, or tastes, or smells, or sounds like something else.

“Ow!”

Except Salvestro. Hat lost, toes stubbed, legs scratched, dirt in his mouth, hole in his shoe, ragged, sweaty, hungry Salvestro as yet looks like nothing else in the forest. There was a time—a long time ago and a long way away—when he would have been at home here. The trees and bushes, thickets of cedar-scrub and thorn-breaks, evoke another forest, damper and colder but still recognizable in this monstrous and exaggerated version. Can he sink back into that? Can this forest in some sense be that one? He’s dirty and disheveled, his hair, wild and clotted with burrs. If he could just forget how to speak again, blend and merge with the little rustles and crashings, the
whooshes
and
whirrs,
the creaks and croaks and coughs, lose himself in this forest as though it were that one … Can he go back to what he was then? What exactly was he running from a few hours ago, when all three of them charged into the forest, split up to confuse their pursuers, and crashed forward with not a whither or whence between them? Salvestro, fleeing the scene of the crime yet again with the righteous mob in full cry after the thief who stole himself away from under their very noses. He cannot go back, can he?

No, it’s either too far or not far enough. If he’s going back anywhere, it’s not to the forest. Not that one and not this one, either. He owes himself elsewhere and to different creditors. …

Anyway, the ant bites Salvestro, and Salvestro squishes the ant. Then, the afternoon waning, the cool interior of the forest growing even shadier, he wanders among the giant trunks or clambers over their finlike buttresses, kicks his way through banks of ferns and drifts of bright yellow cotton-plants, clambers up and down little ravines through which tiny creeks
splosh
and gurgle, looks up to see the branchwork high above festooned with lilac convulvulus and webbed with woody lianas, follows the little bare-earth paths that lead in all directions to junction
from which more little paths set out, not really going anywhere as far as he is aware, just moving through the forest, sniffing and misidentifying the fleeting odors of earth, tree mold, pig dung, fungal spoors, wild garlic, sour-sweet ground peppers, the ground rising in a long shallow slope that he seems to have been climbing for eternity, then leveling off, and some new scent comes curling through the trees, sharpish, familiar, filtering through the forest to fill his twitching curious nostrils with. … Wood-smoke.

The scent trail twists and turns, leading Salvestro by the nose around a copse of flowering bushes twice the height of himself. He creeps and advances, carries on sniffing. Then he stops.

Ten thousand dangling men hang in the branches of the
ofo
-tree. Their arms and legs and heads and trunks are sticks joined together by nodes and swollen boles approximating elbows, knees, ankles, knobbly shoulders, groins, the body’s junctions and twiggy terminals. Corpses of the fallen lie in heaps around the moderate trunk. Small black flowers grow sparsely amongst the branchlets.
Ofo-
trees bleed when cut, but no one cuts them, or touches them at all, or even approaches the groves where they grow.

But Salvestro does not notice the
ofo
-trees. A long plump lizard is roasting over a cooking fire attended by an ancient woman, a lively bag of skin and bones who hops about prodding and clucking, alternating between the lizard over the fire and, sitting on the ground, two men who seem to be doing nothing at all except staring blankly into the flames. It is almost completely dark now, but the fire casts an adequate light over the two men’s faces. He walks forward, toward the old woman, the lizard, and his motionless companions. The lizard smells surprisingly good. Red-faced from the fire, Bernardo and Diego both look rather glum. No doubt his reappearance will cheer them up, thinks Salvestro.

Afterward he came to believe that it began with the wax. Of course it really began much earlier than that, but for him it began with a lump of off-white wax. The old man chipped at it until he had two pieces the size of his fists. They looked yellow in the lamplight, then red when he carried them nearer the firelight, and in the melting-bowl they took on the color of the earthenware, which was black as soot. He peered in from above and saw his own face staring back at him.

“Such a pretty boy,” cawed the old man. “We need a bucket of water now. Go admire yourself in that.”

The boy waited for the usual accompanying cackle, but this time it did not come. The old man had grown quieter and less annoying in the past few days, though still annoying enough. His mockery had become halfhearted, almost sullen. Without Iguedo he had no one to play to; perhaps that was the reason. Or perhaps it was because they would soon begin casting, for unlike wood, or clay, or
wax, bronze lasted forever, so casting was a serious matter. The Eze-Nri could find one another when they finished their dreaming, first to last, Eri to their own Anayamati. Their
mmuo
never died, but their bodies did. They had to shed them to end their dreaming, so the bronze-casters made an image for Nri-people to remember them by. The Eze-Nri carried his ancestors’ memories in his head and their bodies in a piece of bronze so they would not be lost in that way, either. Bodies were important, too.

He walked beneath the canopy of the trees, swinging the bucket by its handle. The leaves on the bushes looked black instead of purple. It was almost dark. He gave the termite mound a good clout. Anayamati’s sprawling compound was several hundred paces downstream from here, though no one had entered it in three years or more and the council of the Nzemabua met in Namoke’s place. He had always thought that the Eze-Nri lived at the very back of the village. He was in there now, waiting for Usse to come. Drawing the water, he looked back through Iguedo’s coco-palms. Beyond the termite mound the bushes and trees appeared as an impenetrable thicket, although the passage through them was quite easy. Perhaps that was why he had never known of the old man’s compound before his strange apprenticeship had begun, although the deceptive thicket did not explain how he invariably arrived at the ramshackle door no matter what path he took. Bronze-casters were secretive and odd. It was well-known.

“Fenenu.”

He looked up, startled as much by the use of his name as by the sudden appearance of Iguedo. She was standing by the edge of the coco-palms.

“For the wax?” she asked as he drew nearer. The heavy bucket pulled him sideways with each step. He nodded. They began to walk in silence between the enormous trunks of the cottonwoods.

After a while, his curiosity overcoming him, the boy asked, “Have you returned from Onitsha, then?”

Iguedo looked at him quizzically before grunting that she had, but she chose to say no more.

The boy held his tongue for a minute or so. He was hungry for news of the palaver there, of the Nri-men and the other peoples or anyone else who might have arrived.

“So what are they saying about the White-men?” he inquired lightly. The query sounded ridiculous for some reason. His voice, perhaps. Iguedo began to chuckle softly, and the boy felt the familiar rush of annoyance mixed with bafflement. It was tiresome to be mocked whenever he opened his mouth. The village boys would form little gangs and chant insults at one of their number, himself sometimes, or sometimes he was one of the gang. Singly, however, no one acted in this way. Alone, he had thought vaguely, the old woman would behave differently. He flushed and looked away, stomping through the bushes with the bucket slopping water onto the ground. Then the old woman confounded him.

“Do you want to see one, Fenenu?”

He turned sharply, at first suspecting that a joke was being played on him. Iguedo put her hand on his shoulder, and both of them came to a halt. She was not laughing, or not at himself. He nodded warily.

“Not yet,” she said, “but soon.” Then, seeing the mistrust on his face, she added, “There are three of them. Three men that Usse brought.”

“Where are they?” he asked. They were whispering for some reason.

“Here,” she said. “Here in Nri.”

The old man looked up from the melting-bowl as he carried in the bucket. His mouth was already open to deliver the customary insult when Iguedo appeared in the doorway.

“So you’re back,” he said sourly. “Took your time, didn’t you?” It was unclear whether he was addressing one, the other, or both of them. He waved his hand as though wafting away flies, clearly torn between complaining further and getting down to work. The bowl hung over the fire was now full almost to the brim with melted wax. His other hand held the obscene stump of clay, with which he thumped the floor beside.

“Get these mats out of the way and set the bucket down here,” the old man commanded. “Hurry up, boy, if you want us to get any sleep tonight.”

He did as he was told, glad of the chance to rest his arm. If he rubbed the muscle, the old man would make a comment about his puny shoulders, so he folded his arms stoically and waited to see what would happen next. Iguedo was still standing in the doorway. He thought he heard her speak, but when he looked up all he saw was a glance passing between them, a question and its answer, but wordless and in the blink of an eye. He turned and looked askance at the old man. The old man grinned and raised the clay stump, waggling it in front of his nose.

“To work.”

His role in “the work,” it soon transpired, centered not about the melting-bowl, or about the wax in it, or the clay stump, or even the fire. His role was centered about the bucket.

The old man took the stump and, holding its base with his fingertips, dipped its length very quickly into the melting-bowl, as though he were stabbing the molten wax; then, keeping its “head” pointing downward, he brought it straight up, swung his arm sideways, and plunged it into the bucket. When he pulled it out again the clay was coated with a thin sheath of wax. The old man held the shaft still while drops of water slid down its sides, shook the last few back into the bucket with a single motion of his wrist, then dipped the stump back into the wax to begin the procedure again. The wax formed a sheen over the dark red clay, then a milky coating as the wax thickened. The old man dipped, swung, plunged, raised, and shook the object, while with his other hand he fed the fire, burying the new wood under piles of embers to keep the flames low under the melting-bowl.