And here I am in the New World, in your lovely home, with you...."
He spoke the language fluently, but not without error; a noticeable Ger- man accent coexisted with the lisping s"s of the Spanish peninsula.
We had taken a seat by now, and I seized upon those last words in order to get down to our business.
"Here, history is kinder," I said. "I expect to die in this house, where I was born. It was to this house that my great-grandfather, who had been all over the continent, returned when he brought home that sword; it is in this house that I have sat to contemplate the past and write my books. I might almost say that I have never left this library-but now, at last, I am to leave it, to journey across the landscape I have only traveled on maps."
I softened my possible rhetorical excess with a smile.
"Are you referring to a certain Caribbean republic?"Zimmermannasked."Quite right," I replied. "I believe that it is to that imminent journey that I owe the honor of your visit."
Trinidad brought in coffee.
"You are surely aware," I went on with slow a.s.surance, "that the minis- ter has entrusted me with the mission of transcribing and writing an intro- duction to the letters of Bolivar that chance has disinterred from the files of Dr.Avellanos.This mission, with a sort of fortunate fatality, crowns my life"s labor, the labor that is somehow in my blood."
It was a relief to me to have said what I had to say.Zimmermannseemed not to have heard me; his eyes were on not my face but the books behind me. He nodded vaguely, and then more emphatically.
"In your blood. You are the true historian. Your family roamed the lands of the Americas and fought great battles, while mine, obscure, was barely emerging from the ghetto. History flows in your veins, as you your- self so eloquently say; all you have to do is listen, attentively, to that occult voice. I, on the other hand, must travel to Sulaco and attempt to decipher stacks and stacks of papers-papers which may finally turn out to be apoc- ryphal. Believe me, professor, when I say I envy you."
I could sense no trace of mockery in those words; they were simply the expression of a will that made the future as irrevocable as the past. Zimmer-mann"s arguments were the least of it, however; the power lay in the man, not in the dialectic. He continued with a pedagogue"s deliberateness: "In all things regarding Bolivar-San Martin, I mean, of course-your own position, my dear professor, is universally acknowledged.Votre siege est fait, lhave not yet read the letter in question, but it is inevitable, or certainly reasonable, to hypothesize that Bolivar wrote it as self-justification. At any rate, the much-talked-about epistle will reveal to us only what we might call the Bolivar-not San Martin- side of the matter. Once it is published, it will have to be weighed, examined, pa.s.sed through the critical sieve, as it were, and, if necessary, refuted. There is no one more qualified to hand down that ultimate verdict than yourself, with your magnifying gla.s.s. And scalpel! if scientific rigor so requires! Allow me furthermore to add that the name of the person who presents the letter to the world will always remain linked to the letter. There is no way, professor, that such a yoking can be in your interest. The common reader does not readily perceive nuances."
I now realize that our subsequent debate was essentially pointless. Per- haps I even sensed as much then; in order not to face that possibility, I grasped at one thing he had said and asked Zimmermann whether he really believed the letters were apocryphal.
"Even if they were written by Bolivar himself," he replied, "-that does not mean they contain the whole truth. Bolivar may have wished to delude his correspondent, or may simply have been deluding himself.
You, a histo- rian, a contemplative, know better than I that the mystery lies within our- selves, and not in words."
The man"s grandiloquent generalities irritated me, so I curtly observed that within the Great Enigma that surrounds us, the meeting in Guayaquil, in which Gen. San Martin renounced mere ambition and left the fate of the continent in the hands of Bolivar, is also an enigma worth studying.
"There are so many explanations ..." Zimmermann replied. "There are those who speculate that San Martin fell into a trap. Others, such a.s.sarmiento,contend that he was in essence a European soldier, lost on a con- tinent he never understood; others still-Argentines, generally-maintain that he acted out of abnegation; yet others, out of weariness. There are even those who speak of a secret order from some Masonic lodge."
I remarked that be all that as it might, it would be interesting to recover the precise words spoken between the Protector of Peru and the Liberator of the Americas.
"It is possible,"Zimmermannpontificated, "that the words they ex- changed were trivial. Two men met in Guayaquil; if one prevailed, it was be- cause he possessed the stronger will, not because of dialectical games. As you see, I have not forgotten my Schopenhauer."
Then, with a smile he added: "Words, words, words.Shakespeare, the unparalleled master of words, held them in contempt. In Guayaquil or in Buenos Aires, or in Prague, they always count for less than people do."
At that moment I felt that something was happening-or rather, that something had already happened.
Somehow, we were now different. Twi- light was stealing upon the room and I had not lighted the lamps.A little aimlessly I asked: "You are from Prague, professor?"
"I was from Prague," he answered.
In order to avoid the central subject, I remarked: "It must be a strange city. I am not familiar with it, but the first book I ever read in German wasThe Golem, by Meyrink."
"That is the only book byGustavMeyrink that deserves to be remem- bered,"Zimmermannreplied. "The others, which are concoctions of bad literature and worse theosophy, one is best not to like.
Nevertheless, there is something of Prague"s strangeness to be found in that book of dreams dis- solving into further dreams. Everything is strange in Prague-or, if you prefer, nothing is strange. Anything can happen. In London one afternoon, I had the same sensation."
"You mentioned will," I replied. "In theMabinogion, you may recall, two kings are playing chess on the summit of a hill, while on the plain be- low, their armies clash in battle. One of the kings wins the game; at that in- stant, a horseman rides up with the news that the other king"s army has been defeated. The battle of men on the battlefield below was the reflection of the battle on the chessboard."
"Ah, a magical operation,"Zimmermannsaid.
"Or the manifestation," I said, "of one will acting upon two distinctbattlegrounds. Another Celtic legend tells of the duel of two famous bards. One, accompanying himself on the harp, sang from the coming of day to the coming of twilight. Then, when the stars or the moon came out, the first bard handed the harp to the second, who laid the instrument aside and rose to his feet. The first singer admitted defeat."
"What erudition! What power of synthesis!" exclaimedZimmermann.Then, in a calmer voice, he added: "I must confess my ignorance, my la- mentable ignorance, ofla matiere de Bretaigne.You, like the day, embrace both East and West, while I hold down my small Carthaginian corner, which I now expand a bit with a tentative step into New World history. But I am a mere plodder."
The servility of the Jew and the servility of the German were in his voice, though I sensed that it cost him nothing to defer to me, even flatter me, given that the victory was his.
He begged me not to concern myself about the arrangements for his trip. ("Negotiatives" was the horrendous word he used.) Then in one mo- tion he extracted from his briefcase a letter addressed to the minister, in which I explained the reasons for my withdrawal and listed the acknowl- edged virtues of Dr.Zimmermann,and he laid in my hand his fountain pen so that I might sign it. When he put the letter away, I could not help seeing in his briefcase his stamped ticket for the Ezeiza-Sulaco flight.
As he was leaving, he paused again before the shelf of Schopenhauer.
"Our teacher, our master-our common master-surmised that no act is unintentional. If you remain in this house, in this elegant patrician house, it is because deep inside, you wish to. I respect your wish, and am grateful."
I received these final alms fromZimmermannwithout a word.
I went with him to the door.
"Excellent coffee," he said, as we were saying our good-byes.
I reread these disordered pages, which I will soon be consigning to the fire. Our interview had been short.
I sense that now I will write no more.Mon siege est fait.
The Gospel According to Mark
The incident took place on the Los Alamos ranch, south of the small town of Junin, in late March of 1928. Its protagonist was a medical student namedBaltasar Espinosa.*We might define him for the moment as a Buenos Aires youth much like many others, with no traits worthier of note than the gift for public speaking that had won him more than one prize at the English school in Ramos Mejia* and a.n.a.lmost unlimited goodness. He didn"t like to argue; he preferred that his interlocutor rather than he himself be right. And though he found the chance twists and turns of gambling interesting, he was a poor gambler, because he didn"t like to win. He was intelligent and open to learning, but he was lazy; at thirty-three he had not yet completed the last requirements for his degree. (The work he still owed, incidentally, was for his favorite cla.s.s.) His father, like all the gentlemen of his day a free- thinker, had instructedEspinosain the doctrines of Herbert Spencer, but once, before he set off on a trip to Montevideo, his mother had asked him to say the Lord"s Prayer every night and make the sign of the cross, and never in all the years that followed did he break that promise. He did not lack courage; one morning, with more indifference than wrath, he had traded two or three blows with some of his cla.s.smates that were trying to force him to join a strike at the university. He abounded in debatable habits and opinions, out of a spirit of acquiescence: his country mattered less to him than the danger that people in other countries might think the Argen- tines still wore feathers; he venerated France but had contempt for the French; he had little respect for Americans but took pride in the fact that there were skysc.r.a.pers in Buenos Aires; he thought that thegauchosof the plains were better hors.e.m.e.n than thegauchosof the mountains. When his cousin Daniel invited him to spend the summer at Los Alamos, he immediately accepted-not because he liked the country but out of a natu- ral desire to please, and because he could find no good reason for saying no.
The main house at the ranch was large and a bit run-down; the quarters for the foreman, a man named Gutre, stood nearby. There were three mem- bers of the Gutre family: the father, the son (who was singularly rough and unpolished), and a girl of uncertain paternity. They were tall, strong, and bony, with reddish hair and Indian features. They rarely spoke. The fore- man"s wife had died years before.
In the country,Espinosacame to learn things he hadn"t known, had never even suspected; for example, that when you"re approaching a house there"s no reason to gallop and that n.o.body goes out on a horse unless there"s a job to be done. As the summer wore on, he learned to distinguish birds by their call.
Within a few days, Daniel had to go to Buenos Aires to close a deal on some livestock. At the most, he said, the trip would take a week.Espinosa,who was already a little tired of his cousin"sbonnes fortunes and his indefati- gable interest in the vagaries of men"s tailoring, stayed behind on the ranch with his textbooks. The heat was oppressive, and not even nightfall brought relief. Then one morning toward dawn, he was awakened by thunder. Wind lashed the casuarina trees.Espinosaheard the first drops of rain and gave thanks to G.o.d. Suddenly the wind blew cold. That afternoon, theSaladooverflowed.
The next morning, as he stood on the porch looking out over the flooded plains,Baltasar Espinosarealized that the metaphor equating the pampas with the sea was not, at least that morning, an altogether false one, though Hudson had noted that the sea seems the grander of the two be- cause we view it not from horseback or our own height, but from the deck of a ship. The rain did not let up; the Gutres, helped (or hindered) by the city dweller, saved a good part of the livestock, though many animals were drowned. There were four roads leading to the ranch; all were under water. On the third day, when a leaking roof threatened the foreman"s house,Es- pinosagave the Gutres a room at the back of the main house, alongside the toolshed. The move broughtEspinosaand the Gutres closer, and they began to eat together in the large dining room.
Conversation was not easy; the Gutres, who knew so much about things in the country, did not know how to explain them. One nightEspinosaasked them if people still remembered anything about the Indian raids, back when the military command for the frontier had been in Junin. They told him they did, but they would have given the same answer if he had asked them about the day Charles I had been beheaded.Espinosarecalled that his father used to say that all the cases of longevity that occur in the country are the result of either poor memory or a vague notion of dates-gauchosquite often know neither the year they were born in nor the name of the man that fathered them.
In the entire house, the only reading material to be found were several copies of a farming magazine, a manual of veterinary medicine, a deluxe edition of the romantic verse dramaTabare,a copy ofThe History of the Shorthorn in Argentina, several erotic and detective stories, and a recent novel thatEspinosahad not read-DonSegundo Sombra,byRicardo Guiraldes. In order to put some life into the inevitable after-dinner attempt at conversation,Espinosaread a couple of chapters of the novel* totheCutres,who did not know how to read or write. Unfortunately, the foreman had been a cattle drover himself, and he could not be interested in the ad- ventures of another such a one. It was easy work, he said; they always car- ried along a pack mule with everything they might need. If he had not been a cattle drover, he announced, he"d never have seen Lake Gomez, or the Bra-gadoRiver, or even the Nunez ranch, in Chacabuco....
In the kitchen there was a guitar; before the incident I am narrating, the laborers would sit in a circle and someone would pick up the guitar and strum it, though never managing actually to play it. That was called "giving it a strum."
Espinosa,who was letting his beard grow out, would stop before the mirror to look at his changed face; he smiled to think that he"d soon be boring the fellows in Buenos Aires with his stories about theSalado over-running its banks. Curiously, he missed places in the city he never went, and would never go: a street corner on Cabrera where a mailbox stood; two ce- ment lions on a porch onCalle Jujuy afew blocks from the Plaza del Once; a tile-floored corner grocery-store-and-bar (whose location he couldn"t quite remember). As for his father and his brothers, by now Daniel would have told them that he had been isolated-the word was etymologically precise-by the floodwaters.
Exploring the house still cut off by the high water, he came upon a Bible printed in English. On its last pages the Guthries (for that was their real name) had kept their family history. They had come originally from Inver- ness and had arrived in the New World-doubtlessly as peasant laborers- in the early nineteenth century; they had intermarried with Indians. The chronicle came to an end in the eighteen-seventies; they no longer knew how to write. Within a few generations they had forgotten their English; by the timeEspinosamet them, even Spanish gave them some difficulty. Theyhad no faith, though in their veins, alongside the superst.i.tions of the pam- pas, there still ran a dim current of theCalvinist"sharsh fanaticism.Es- pinosamentioned his find to them, but they hardly seemed to hear him.
He leafed through the book, and his fingers opened it to the first verses of the Gospel According to St.
Mark. To try his hand at translating, and per- haps to see if they might understand a little of it, he decided that that would be the texthe read the Gutres after dinner. He was surprised that they lis- tened first attentively and then with mute fascination. The presence of gold letters on the binding may have given it increased authority. "It"s in their blood," he thought. It also occurred to him that throughout history, hu- mankind has told two stories: the story of a lost ship sailing the Mediter- ranean seas in quest of a beloved isle, and the story of a G.o.d who allows himself to be crucified on Golgotha. He recalled his elocution cla.s.ses in Ramos Mejia, and he rose to his feet to preach the parables.
In the following days, the Gutres would wolf down the spitted beef and canned sardines in order to arrive sooner at the Gospel.
The girl had a little lamb; it was her pet, and she prettied it with a sky blue ribbon. One day it cut itself on a piece of barbed wire; to stanch the blood, the Gutres were about to put spiderwebs on the wound, butEs- pinosatreated it with pills. The grat.i.tude awakened by that cure amazed him. At first, he had not trusted the Gutres and had hidden away in one of his books the two hundred forty pesos he"d brought; now, with Daniel gone, he had taken the master"s place and begun to give timid orders, which were immediately followed. The Gutres would trail him through the rooms and along the hallway, as though they were lost. As he read, he noticed that they would sweep away the crumbs he had left on the table.
One afternoon, he surprised them as they were discussing him in brief, respectful words. When he came to the end of the Gospel According to St. Mark, he started to read another of the three remaining gospels, but the father asked him to reread the one he"d just finished, so they could understand it better.Es- pinosafelt they were like children, who prefer repet.i.tion to variety or nov- elty. One night he dreamed of the Flood (which is not surprising) and was awakened by the hammering of the building of the Ark, but he told himself it was thunder. And in fact the rain, which had let up for a while, had begun again; it was very cold. The Gutres told him the rain had broken through the roof of the toolshed; when they got the beams repaired, they said, they"d show him where. He was no longer a stranger, a foreigner, and they all treated him with respect; he was almost spoiled. None of them liked coffee, but there was always a little cup for him, with spoonfuls of sugar stirred in.
That second storm took place on a Tuesday. Thursday night there was a soft knock on his door;because of his doubts about the Gutres he always locked it. He got up and opened the door; it was the girl. In the darkness he couldn"t see her, but he could tell by her footsteps that she was barefoot, and afterward, in the bed, that she was naked-that in fact she had come from the back of the house that way. She did not embrace him, or speak a word; she lay down beside him and she was shivering. It was the first time she had lain with a man. When she left, she did not kiss him;Espinosarealized that he didn"t even know her name. Impelled by some sentiment he did not at- tempt to understand, he swore that when he returned to Buenos Aires, he"d tell no one of the incident.
The next day began like all the others, except that the father spoke toEspinosato ask whether Christ had allowed himself to be killed in order to save all mankind.Espinosa,who was a freethinker like his father but felt obliged to defend what he had read them, paused.
"Yes," he finally replied. "To save all mankind from h.e.l.l."
"What is h.e.l.l?" Gutre then asked him.
"A place underground where souls will burn in fire forever."
"And those that drove the nails will also be saved?"
"Yes," repliedEspinosa,whose theology was a bit shaky. (He had wor- ried that the foreman wanted to have a word with him about what had hap- pened last night with his daughter.) After lunch they asked him to read the last chapters again.
Espinosahad a long siesta that afternoon, although it was a light sleep, interrupted by persistent hammering and vague premonitions. Toward eve- ning he got up and went out into the hall.
"The water"s going down," he said, as though thinking out loud. "It won"t be long now."
"Not long now," repeated Gutre, like an echo.
The three of them had followed him. Kneeling on the floor, they asked his blessing. Then they cursed him, spat on him, and drove him to the back of the house. The girl was weeping.Espinosarealized what awaited him on the other side of the door. When they opened it, he saw the sky. A bird screamed;it"s a goldfinch,Espinosathought. There was no roof on the shed; they had torn down the roof beams to build the Cross.
Brodie"s Report
Tucked inside a copy, bought for me by my dear friend Paulino Keins, of the first volume of Lane"s translation of theThousand and One Nights (An Ara- bian Night"s Entertainment, London, 1840), we discovered the ma.n.u.script that I now make known to the world. The meticulous penmanship-an art which typewriters are teaching us to forget-suggests that the note was written around that same date.
Lane, as we all know, lavished long explana- tory notes upon the tales; the margins of this volume had been filled with additions, question marks, and sometimes corrections, all in the same hand as that of the ma.n.u.script. From those marginalia, one might almost con- clude that the reader of the volume was less interested in Scheherazade"s wondrous tales than in the customs of Islam. About David Brodie, whose signature (with its fine artistic flourish) is affixed to the end of the manu- script, I have been able to discover nothing save that he was a Scottish mis- sionary, born in Aberdeen, who preached Christianity throughout central Africa and later in certain parts of the jungles of Brazil, a country to which he was led by his knowledge of Portuguese. I do not know when or where he died. The ma.n.u.script has never, so far as I know, been published.
I will reproduce the ma.n.u.script and its colorless language verbatim, with no omissions save the occasional verse from the Bible and a curious pa.s.sage treating the s.e.xual practices of the Yahoo, which Brodie, a good Presbyterian, discreetly entrusted to Latin. The first page of the ma.n.u.script is missing.
... of the region infested by the Ape-men is the area wherein one finds theMich.1 "Thech here has the sound of thech in the word loch. {Author"s note.} Lest my readers should forget the b.e.s.t.i.a.l nature of this people (andalso because, given the absence ofvowels in their harsh language, it is im- possible to transliterate their name exactly), I will call them Yahoos. The tribe consists, I believe, of no more than seven hundred individuals; this tally includes theNr, who live farther south, in the dense undergrowth of the jungle. The figure I give here is conjectural, since with the exception of the king, queen, and various witch doctors, the Yahoos sleep wherever they may find themselves when night falls, in no fixed place. Marsh fever and the constant incursions of the Apemen have reduced their number. Only a very few have names. To call one another, they fling mud at each other. I have also seen Yahoos fall to the ground and throw themselves about in the dirt in order to call a friend. Physically they are no different from the Kroo, ex- cept for their lower forehead and a certain coppery cast that mitigates the blackness of their skin. Their food is fruits, tubers, and reptiles; they drink cat"s and bat"s milk and they fish with their hands. They hide themselves when they eat, or they close their eyes; all else, they do in plain sight of all, like the Cynic school of philosophers. They devour the raw flesh of their witch doctors and kings in order to a.s.similate their virtue to themselves. I upbraided them for that custom; they touched their bellies and their mouths, perhaps to indicate that dead men are food as well, or perhaps- but this is no doubt too subtle-to try to make me see that everything we eat becomes, in time, human flesh.
In their wars they use rocks, gathered and kept at hand for that pur- pose, and magical imprecations.
They walk about naked; the arts of cloth- ing and tattooing are unknown to them.
I find it worthy of note that while they have at their disposal a broad expanse of gra.s.sy tableland, with springs of fresh water and shady trees, they have chosen to huddle together in the swamps that surround the base of the plateau, as though delighting in the rigors of squalor and equatorial sun. Furthermore, the sides of the plateau are rugged, and would serve as a wall against the Apemen. In the Scottish Highlands, clans build their castles on the summit of a hill; I told the witch doctors of this custom, suggesting it as a model that they might follow, but it was to no avail. They did, however, allow me to erect a cabin for myself up on the tableland, where the night breeze is cooler.
The tribe is ruled over by a king whose power is absolute, but I suspect that it is the four witch doctors who a.s.sist the king and who in fact elected him that actually rule. Each male child born is subjected to careful exami- nation; if certain stigmata (which have not been revealed to me) are seen, the boy becomes king of the Yahoos. Immediately upon his elevation he isgelded, blinded with a fiery stick, and his hands and feet are cut off, so that the world will not distract him from wisdom. He is confined within a cav- ern, whose name is Citadel(Qzr)*; the only persons who may enter are the four witch doctors and a pair of female slaves who serve the king and smear his body with dung. If there is a war, the witch doctors take him from the cavern, exhibit him to the tribe to spur the warriors" courage, sling him over their shoulders, and carry him as though a banner or a talisman into the fiercest part of the battle. When this occurs, the king generally dies within seconds under the stones hurled at him by the Apemen.
In another such citadel lives the queen, who is not permitted to see her king. The queen of the Yahoos was kind enough to receive me; she was young, of a cheerful disposition, and, insofar as her race allows, well fa- vored. Bracelets made of metal and ivory and necklaces strung with teeth adorned her nakedness.
She looked at me, smelled me, and touched me, and then-in full sight of her attendants-she offered herself to me. My cloth and my habits caused me to decline that honor, which is one granted generally to the witch doctors and to the slave hunters (usually Muslims) whose caravans pa.s.s through the kingdom.
She p.r.i.c.ked me two or three times with a long golden needle; these p.r.i.c.ks are the royal marks of favor, and not a few Yahoos inflict them upon themselves in order to make it ap- pear that they have been recipients of the queen"s attentions. The orna- ments which I have mentioned come from other regions: the Yahoos believe them to be objects that occur in nature, as they themselves are incapable of manufacturing even the simplest item. In the eyes of the tribe, my cabin was a tree, even though many of them watched me build it, and even aided me. Among other items, I had with me a watch, a pith helmet, a compa.s.s, and a Bible; the Yahoos would look at these objects and heft them and ask where I had found them. They would often grasp my hunting knife by the blade; one supposes they saw it differently than I. It is difficult to imagine what they would make of a chair. A house of several rooms would be for them a labyrinth, though they well might not get lost inside it, much as a cat is able to find its way about a house though it cannot conceive it. They all found my beard, which was at that time flaming red, a thingof wonder; they would stroke and caress it for long periods at a time.
The Yahoos are insensitive to pain and pleasure, with the exception of the pleasure they derive from raw and rancid meat and noxious-smelling things. Their lack of imagination makes them cruel.
I have spoken of the king and queen; I will now say something about the witch doctors. I have mentioned that there are four of them; thisnumberis the largest that the Yahoos" arithmetic comprehends.
They count on their fingers thus:one, two, three, four, many; infinity begins at the thumb. The same phenomenon may be seen, I am told, among the tribes that ha- ra.s.s the region of Buenos-Ayres with their raids and pillaging. In spite of the fact that four is the largest number they possess, the Yahoos are not cheated by the Arabs who traffic with them, for in their exchanges all the goods are divided into lots of one, two, three, or four items, which each per- son keeps beside himself. The operation is slow, yet it allows no room for error or trickery. Of all the nation of the Yahoos, the witch doctors are the only persons who have truly aroused my interest. The common people say they have the power to transform anyone they please into an ant or a tor- toise; one individual who noted my incredulity at this report showed me an anthill, as though that were proof. The Yahoos have no memory, or virtuallynone; they talk about the damage caused by an invasion of leopards, but they are unsure whether they themselves saw the leopards or whether it was their parents, or whether they might be recounting a dream. The witch doc- tors do possess some memory, though to only a very small degree; in the afternoon they can recall things that happened that morning or even on the previous evening. They also possess the ability to see the future; they quite calmly and a.s.suredly predict what will happen in ten or fifteen minutes. They may say, for example:A fly will light on the back of my neck, or It won"t be long before we hear a bird start singing. I have witnessed this curious gift hundreds of times, and I have thought about it a great deal. We know that past, present, and future are already, in every smallest detail, in theprophetic memory of G.o.d, in His eternity; it is curious, then, that men may look indefinitely into the past but not an instant into the future. If I am ableto recall as though it were yesterday that schooner that sailed into port fromNorway when I was four years old, why should I be surprised that someone is able to foresee an event that is about to occur? Philosophically speaking, memory is no less marvelous than prophesying the future; tomorrow is closer to us than the crossing of the Red Sea by the Jews, which, nonetheless, we remember.
The tribesmen are forbidden to look at the stars, a privilege reserved for the witch doctors. Each witch doctor has a disciple whom he instructs from childhood in the secret knowledge of the tribe and who succeeds him at his death. Thus there are always four-a number with magical qualities, since it is the highest number the mind of humankind may attain. In their own way, they profess the doctrine of heaven and h.e.l.l. Both are subterranean. To h.e.l.l, which is bright and dry, shall go the sick, the old, the mistreated,Apemen,Arabs, and leopards; to heaven, which the Yahoos imagine to be dark and marshlike, shall go the king, the queen, the witch doctors, those who have been happy, hardhearted, and bloodthirsty on earth. They wor- ship a G.o.d whose name is Dung; this G.o.d they may possibly have conceived in the image of their king, for the G.o.d is mutilated, blind, frail, and pos- sesses unlimited power.
It often a.s.sumes the body of an ant or a serpent.
No one should be surprised, after reading thus far in my account, that I succeeded in converting not a single Yahoo during the entire period of my residence among them. The phraseOur Father disturbed them, since they lack any concept of paternity. They do not understand that an act per- formed nine months ago may somehow be related to the birth of a child; they cannot conceive a cause so distant and so unlikely. And then again, all women engage in carnal commerce, though not all are mothers.
Their language is complex, and resembles none other that I know. One cannot speak of "parts of speech," as there are no sentences. Each monosyl- labic word corresponds to a general idea, which is defined by its context or by facial expressions. The wordnrz, for example, suggests a dispersion or spots of one kind or another: it may mean the starry sky, a leopard, a flock of birds, smallpox, something splattered with water or mud, the act of scat- tering, or the flight that follows a defeat.Hrl, on the other hand, indicates that which is compact, dense, or tightly squeezed together; it may mean the tribe, the trunk of a tree, a stone, a pile of rocks, the act of piling them up, a meeting of the four witch doctors,s.e.xual congress, or a forest. p.r.o.nounced in another way, or with other facial expressions, it may mean the opposite. We should not be overly surprised at this: in our own tongue, the verbto cleave means to rend and to adhere. Of course, there are no sentences, even incomplete ones.
The intellectual power of abstraction demanded by such a language suggests to me that the Yahoos, in spite of their barbarity, are not a primi- tive people but a degenerate one. This conjecture is confirmed by inscrip- tions which I have discovered up on the tableland. The characters employed in these inscriptions, resembling the runes that our own forebears carved, can no longer be deciphered by the tribe; it is as though the tribe had for- gotten the written language and retained only the spoken one.
The tribe"s diversions are cat fights (between animals trained for that purpose) and executions. Someone is accused of offending the modesty of the queen or of having eaten within sight of another; there is no testimony from witnesses, no confession, and the king hands down the sentence of guilty. The condemned man is put to torments which I strive not to recall, and then is stoned. The queen has the right to throw the first stone and the last one, which is ordinarily unnecessary. The people applaud her in frenzy, lauding her skill and the beauty of her person and flinging roses and fetid things at her. The queen wordlessly smiles.
Another of the tribe"s customs is its poets. It occurs to a man to string together six or seven words, generally enigmatic. He cannot contain him- self, and so he shrieks them out as he stands in the center of a circle formed by the witch doctors and the tribesmen lying on the ground. If the poem does not excite the tribe, nothing happens, but if the words of the poet sur- prise or astound the listeners, everyone moves back from him, in silence, under a holy dread. They feel that he has been touched by the spirit; no one will speak to him or look at him, not even his mother. He is no longer a man, but a G.o.d, and anyone may kill him. The new poet, if he is able, seeks refuge in the deserts to the north.
I have already related how I came to the land of the Yahoos. The reader will recall that they surrounded me, that I fired a rifle shot in the air, and that they took the report for some sort of magical thunder. In order to keep that error alive, I made it a point never to walk about armed. But one spring morning just at daybreak, we were suddenly invaded by the Apemen; I ran down from my plateau, weapon in hand, and killed two of those beasts. The rest fled in terror. Bullets, of course, work invisibly. For the first time in my life, I heard myself applauded. It was then, I believe, that the queen received me. The Yahoos"
memory is not to be depended upon; that same afternoon I left. My adventures in the jungle are of no concern; I came at last upon a village of black men, who were acquainted with plowing, sowing, and pray- ing, and with whom I could make myself understood in Portuguese. A Romish missionary, PadreFernandes,took me most hospitably into his cabin and cared for me until I was able to continue my painful journey. At first it caused me some revulsion to see him undisguisedly open his mouth and put food in. I would cover my eyes with my hands, or avert them; in a few days I regained my old custom. I recall with pleasure our debates on theological questions. I could not persuade him to return to the true faith of Jesus.
I am writing this now in Glasgow. I have told of my stay among the Ya- hoos, but not of its essential horror, which never entirely leaves me, and which visits me in dreams. In the street, I sometimes think I am still among them. The Yahoos, I know, are a barbarous people, perhaps the most barbarous of the earth, but it would be an injustice to overlook certain redeeming traits which they possess. They have inst.i.tutions, and a king; they speak a languagebased on abstract concepts; they believe, like the Jews and the Greeks, in the divine origins of poetry; and they sense that the soul survives the death of the body.
They affirm the efficacy of punishment and reward. They represent, in a word, culture, just as we do, in spite of our many sins. I do not regret having fought in their ranks against the Apemen. We have the obligation to save them. I hope Her Majesty"s government will not turn a deaf ear to the remedy this report has the temerity to suggest.