OUTSIDE, in the dust and among the garbage (there were
four dogs now), Bernard and John were walking slowly up and down.
"So hard for me to realize," Bernard was saying, "to reconstruct. As
though we were living on different planets, in different centuries. A mother,
and all this dirt, and gods, and old age, and disease …" He shook his head.
"It's almost inconceivable. I shall never understand, unless you explain."
"Explain what?"
"This." He indicated the pueblo. "That." And it was the little house
outside the village. "Everything. All your life."
"But what is there to say?"
"From the beginning. As far back as you can remember."
"As far back as I can remember." John frowned. There was a long silence.
It was very hot. They had eaten a lot of tortillas and sweet corn. Linda
said, "Come and lie down, Baby." They lay down together in the big bed.
"Sing," and Linda sang. Sang "Streptocock-Gee to Banbury-T" and "Bye Baby
Banting, soon you'll need decanting." Her voice got fainter and fainter …
There was a loud noise, and he woke with a start. A man was saying
something to Linda, and Linda was laughing. She had pulled the blanket up to
her chin, but the man pulled it down again. His hair was like two black ropes,
and round his arm was a lovely silver bracelet with blue stones in it. He
liked the bracelet; but all the same, he was frightened; he hid his face
against Linda's body. Linda put her hand on him and he felt safer. In those
other words he did not understand so well, she said to the man, "Not with John
here." The man looked at him, then again at Linda, and said a few words in a
soft voice. Linda said, "No." But the man bent over the bed towards him and
his face was huge, terrible; the black ropes of hair touched the blanket.
"No," Linda said again, and he felt her hand squeezing him more tightly. "No,
no!" But the man took hold of one of his arms, and it hurt. He screamed. The
man put up his other hand and lifted him up. Linda was still holding him,
still saying, "No, no." The man said something short and angry, and suddenly
her hands were gone. "Linda, Linda." He kicked and wriggled; but the man
carried him across to the door, opened it, put him down on the floor in the
middle of the other room, and went away, shutting the door behind him. He got
up, he ran to the door. Standing on tiptoe he could just reach the big wooden
latch. He lifted it and pushed; but the door wouldn't open. "Linda," he
shouted. She didn't answer.
He remembered a huge room, rather dark; and there were big wooden things
with strings fastened to them, and lots of women standing round them–making
blankets, Linda said. Linda told him to sit in the corner with the other
children, while she went and helped the women. He played with the little boys
for a long time. Suddenly people started talking very loud, and there were the
women pushing Linda away, and Linda was crying. She went to the door and he
ran after her. He asked her why they were angry. "Because I broke something,"
she said. And then she got angry too. "How should I know how to do their
beastly weaving?" she said. "Beastly savages." He asked her what savages were.
When they got back to their house, Popé was waiting at the door, and he came
in with them. He had a big gourd full of stuff that looked like water; only it
wasn't water, but something with a bad smell that burnt your mouth and made
you cough. Linda drank some and Popé drank some, and then Linda laughed a lot
and talked very loud; and then she and Popé went into the other room. When
Popé went away, he went into the room. Linda was in bed and so fast asleep
that he couldn't wake her.
Popé used to come often. He said the stuff in the gourd was called
mescal; but Linda said it ought to be called soma; only it made
you feel ill afterwards. He hated Popé. He hated them all–all the men who came
to see Linda. One afternoon, when he had been playing with the other
children–it was cold, he remembered, and there was snow on the mountains–he
came back to the house and heard angry voices in the bedroom. They were
women's voices, and they said words he didn't understand, but he knew they
were dreadful words. Then suddenly, crash! something was upset; he heard
people moving about quickly, and there was another crash and then a noise like
hitting a mule, only not so bony; then Linda screamed. "Oh, don't, don't,
don't!" she said. He ran in. There were three women in dark blankets. Linda
was on the bed. One of the women was holding her wrists. Another was lying
across her legs, so that she couldn't kick. The third was hitting her with a
whip. Once, twice, three times; and each time Linda screamed. Crying, he
tugged at the fringe of the woman's blanket. "Please, please." With her free
hand she held him away. The whip came down again, and again Linda screamed. He
caught hold of the woman's enormous brown hand between his own and bit it with
all his might. She cried out, wrenched her hand free, and gave him such a push
that he fell down. While he was lying on the ground she hit him three times
with the whip. It hurt more than anything he had ever felt–like fire. The whip
whistled again, fell. But this time it was Linda who screamed.
"But why did they want to hurt you, Linda?'' he asked that night. He was
crying, because the red marks of the whip on his back still hurt so terribly.
But he was also crying because people were so beastly and unfair, and because
he was only a little boy and couldn't do anything against them. Linda was
crying too. She was grown up, but she wasn't big enough to fight against three
of them. It wasn't fair for her either. "Why did they want to hurt you,
Linda?"
"I don't know. How should I know?" It was difficult to hear what she said,
because she was lying on her stomach and her face was in the pillow. "They say
those men are their men," she went on; and she did not seem to be
talking to him at all; she seemed to be talking with some one inside herself.
A long talk which she didn't understand; and in the end she started crying
louder than ever.
"Oh, don't cry, Linda. Don't cry."
He pressed himself against her. He put his arm round her neck. Linda cried
out. "Oh, be careful. My shoulder! Oh!" and she pushed him away, hard. His
head banged against the wall. "Little idiot!" she shouted; and then, suddenly,
she began to slap him. Slap, slap …
"Linda," he cried out. "Oh, mother, don't!"
"I'm not your mother. I won't be your mother."
"But, Linda … Oh!" She slapped him on the cheek.
"Turned into a savage," she shouted. "Having young ones like an animal …
If it hadn't been for you, I might have gone to the Inspector, I might have
got away. But not with a baby. That would have been too shameful."
He saw that she was going to hit him again, and lifted his arm to guard
his face. "Oh, don't, Linda, please don't."
"Little beast!" She pulled down his arm; his face was uncovered.
"Don't, Linda." He shut his eyes, expecting the blow.
But she didn't hit him. After a little time, he opened his eyes again and
saw that she was looking at him. He tried to smile at her. Suddenly she put
her arms round him and kissed him again and again.
Sometimes, for several days, Linda didn't get up at all. She lay in bed
and was sad. Or else she drank the stuff that Popé brought and laughed a great
deal and went to sleep. Sometimes she was sick. Often she forgot to wash him,
and there was nothing to eat except cold tortillas. He remembered the first
time she found those little animals in his hair, how she screamed and
screamed.
The happiest times were when she told him about the Other Place. "And you
really can go flying, whenever you like?"
"Whenever you like." And she would tell him about the lovely music that
came out of a box, and all the nice games you could play, and the delicious
things to eat and drink, and the light that came when you pressed a little
thing in the wall, and the pictures that you could hear and feel and smell, as
well as see, and another box for making nice smells, and the pink and green
and blue and silver houses as high as mountains, and everybody happy and no
one ever sad or angry, and every one belonging to every one else, and the
boxes where you could see and hear what was happening at the other side of the
world, and babies in lovely clean bottles–everything so clean, and no nasty
smells, no dirt at all–and people never lonely, but living together and being
so jolly and happy, like the summer dances here in Malpais, but much happier,
and the happiness being there every day, every day. … He listened by the hour.
And sometimes, when he and the other children were tired with too much
playing, one of the old men of the pueblo would talk to them, in those other
words, of the great Transformer of the World, and of the long fight between
Right Hand and Left Hand, between Wet and Dry; of Awonawilona, who made a
great fog by thinking in the night, and then made the whole world out of the
fog; of Earth Mother and Sky Father; of Ahaiyuta and Marsailema, the twins of
War and Chance; of Jesus and Pookong; of Mary and Etsanatlehi, the woman who
makes herself young again; of the Black Stone at Laguna and the Great Eagle
and Our Lady of Acoma. Strange stories, all the more wonderful to him for
being told in the other words and so not fully understood. Lying in bed, he
would think of Heaven and London and Our Lady of Acoma and the rows and rows
of babies in clean bottles and Jesus flying up and Linda flying up and the
great Director of World Hatcheries and Awonawilona.
Lots of men came to see Linda. The boys began to point their fingers at
him. In the strange other words they said that Linda was bad; they called her
names he did not understand, but that he knew were bad names. One day they
sang a song about her, again and again. He threw stones at them. They threw
back; a sharp stone cut his cheek. The blood wouldn't stop; he was covered with
blood.
Linda taught him to read. With a piece of charcoal she drew pictures on
the wall–an animal sitting down, a baby inside a bottle; then she wrote
letters. THE CAT IS ON THE MAT. THE TOT IS IN THE POT. He learned quickly and
easily. When he knew how to read all the words she wrote on the wall, Linda
opened her big wooden box and pulled out from under those funny little red
trousers she never wore a thin little book. He had often seen it before. "When
you're bigger," she had said, "you can read it." Well, now he was big enough.
He was proud. "I'm afraid you won't find it very exciting," she said. "But
it's the only thing I have." She sighed. "If only you could see the lovely
reading machines we used to have in London!" He began reading. The Chemical
and Bacteriological Conditioning of the Embryo. Practical Instructions
for Beta Embryo-Store Workers. It took him a quarter of an hour to read
the title alone. He threw the book on the floor. "Beastly, beastly book!" he
said, and began to cry.
The boys still sang their horrible song about Linda. Sometimes, too, they
laughed at him for being so ragged. When he tore his clothes, Linda did not
know how to mend them. In the Other Place, she told him, people threw away
clothes with holes in them and got new ones. "Rags, rags!" the boys used to
shout at him. "But I can read," he said to himself, "and they can't. They
don't even know what reading is." It was fairly easy, if he thought hard
enough about the reading, to pretend that he didn't mind when they made fun of
him. He asked Linda to give him the book again.
The more the boys pointed and sang, the harder he read. Soon he could read
all the words quite well. Even the longest. But what did they mean? He asked
Linda; but even when she could answer it didn't seem to make it very clear,
And generally she couldn't answer at all.
"What are chemicals?" he would ask.
"Oh, stuff like magnesium salts, and alcohol for keeping the Deltas and
Epsilons small and backward, and calcium carbonate for bones, and all that
sort of thing."
"But how do you make chemicals, Linda? Where do they come from?"
"Well, I don't know. You get them out of bottles. And when the bottles are
empty, you send up to the Chemical Store for more. It's the Chemical Store
people who make them, I suppose. Or else they send to the factory for them. I
don't know. I never did any chemistry. My job was always with the embryos. It
was the same with everything else he asked about. Linda never seemed to know.
The old men of the pueblo had much more definite answers.
"The seed of men and all creatures, the seed of the sun and the seed of
earth and the seed of the sky–Awonawilona made them all out of the Fog of
Increase. Now the world has four wombs; and he laid the seeds in the lowest of
the four wombs. And gradually the seeds began to grow …"
One day (John calculated later that it must have been soon after his
twelfth birthday) he came home and found a book that he had never seen before
lying on the floor in the bedroom. It was a thick book and looked very old.
The binding had been eaten by mice; some of its pages were loose and crumpled.
He picked it up, looked at the title-page: the book was called The Complete
Works of William Shakespeare.
Linda was lying on the bed, sipping that horrible stinking mescal
out of a cup. "Popé brought it," she said. Her voice was thick and hoarse like
somebody else's voice. "It was lying in one of the chests of the Antelope
Kiva. It's supposed to have been there for hundreds of years. I expect it's
true, because I looked at it, and it seemed to be full of nonsense.
Uncivilized. Still, it'll be good enough for you to practice your reading on."
She took a last sip, set the cup down on the floor beside the bed, turned over
on her side, hiccoughed once or twice and went to sleep.
He opened the book at random.
Nay, but to live
In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,
Stew'd in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty …
The strange words rolled through his mind; rumbled, like talking thunder;
like the drums at the summer dances, if the drums could have spoken; like the
men singing the Corn Song, beautiful, beautiful, so that you cried; like old
Mitsima saying magic over his feathers and his carved sticks and his bits of
bone and stone–kiathla tsilu silokwe silokwe silokwe. Kiai silu silu,
tsithl–but better than Mitsima's magic, because it meant more, because it
talked to him, talked wonderfully and only half-understandably, a terrible
beautiful magic, about Linda; about Linda lying there snoring, with the empty
cup on the floor beside the bed; about Linda and Popé, Linda and Popé.
He hated Popé more and more. A man can smile and smile and be a villain.
Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain. What did the words
exactly mean? He only half knew. But their magic was strong and went on
rumbling in his head, and somehow it was as though he had never really hated
Popé before; never really hated him because he had never been able to say how
much he hated him. But now he had these words, these words like drums and
singing and magic. These words and the strange, strange story out of which
they were taken (he couldn't make head or tail of it, but it was wonderful,
wonderful all the same)–they gave him a reason for hating Popé; and they made
his hatred more real; they even made Popé himself more real.
One day, when he came in from playing, the door of the inner room was
open, and he saw them lying together on the bed, asleep–white Linda and Popé
almost black beside her, with one arm under her shoulders and the other dark
hand on her breast, and one of the plaits of his long hair lying across her
throat, like a black snake trying to strangle her. Popé's gourd and a cup were
standing on the floor near the bed. Linda was snoring.
His heart seemed to have disappeared and left a hole. He was empty. Empty,
and cold, and rather sick, and giddy. He leaned against the wall to steady
himself. Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous … Like drums, like the men
singing for the corn, like magic, the words repeated and repeated themselves
in his head. From being cold he was suddenly hot. His cheeks burnt with the
rush of blood, the room swam and darkened before his eyes. He ground his
teeth. "I'll kill him, I'll kill him, I'll kill him," he kept saying. And
suddenly there were more words.
When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage
Or in the incestuous pleasure of his bed …
The magic was on his side, the magic explained and gave orders. He stepped
back in the outer room. "When he is drunk asleep …" The knife for the meat was
lying on the floor near the fireplace. He picked it up and tiptoed to the door
again. "When he is drunk asleep, drunk asleep …" He ran across the room and
stabbed–oh, the blood!–stabbed again, as Popé heaved out of his sleep, lifted
his hand to stab once more, but found his wrist caught, held and–oh,
oh!–twisted. He couldn't move, he was trapped, and there were Popé's small
black eyes, very close, staring into his own. He looked away. There were two
cuts on Popé's left shoulder. "Oh, look at the blood!" Linda was crying. "Look
at the blood!" She had never been able to bear the sight of blood. Popé lifted
his other hand–to strike him, he thought. He stiffened to receive the blow.
But the hand only took him under the chin and turned his face, so that he had
to look again into Popé's eyes. For a long time, for hours and hours. And
suddenly–he couldn't help it–he began to cry. Popé burst out laughing. "Go,"
he said, in the other Indian words. "Go, my brave Ahaiyuta." He ran out into
the other room to hide his tears.
"You are fifteen," said old Mitsima, in the Indian words. "Now I may teach
you to work the clay."
Squatting by the river, they worked together.
"First of all," said Mitsima, taking a lump of the wetted clay between his
hands, "we make a little moon." The old man squeezed the lump into a disk,
then bent up the edges, the moon became a shallow cup.
Slowly and unskilfully he imitated the old man's delicate gestures.
"A moon, a cup, and now a snake." Mitsima rolled out another piece of clay
into a long flexible cylinder, trooped it into a circle and pressed it on to
the rim of the cup. "Then another snake. And another. And another." Round by
round, Mitsima built up the sides of the pot; it was narrow, it bulged, it
narrowed again towards the neck. Mitsima squeezed and patted, stroked and
scraped; and there at last it stood, in shape the familiar water pot of
Malpais, but creamy white instead of black, and still soft to the touch. The
crooked parody of Mitsima's, his own stood beside it. Looking at the two pots,
he had to laugh.
"But the next one will be better," he said, and began to moisten another
piece of clay.
To fashion, to give form, to feel his fingers gaining in skill and
power–this gave him an extraordinary pleasure. "A, B, C, Vitamin D," he sang
to himself as he worked. "The fat's in the liver, the cod's in the sea." And
Mitsima also sang–a song about killing a bear. They worked all day, and all
day he was filled with an intense, absorbing happiness.
"Next winter," said old Mitsima, "I will teach you to make the bow."
He stood for a long time outside the house, and at last the ceremonies
within were finished. The door opened; they came out. Kothlu came first, his
right hand out-stretched and tightly closed, as though over some precious
jewel. Her clenched hand similarly outstretched, Kiakimé followed. They walked
in silence, and in silence, behind them, came the brothers and sisters and
cousins and all the troop of old people.
They walked out of the pueblo, across the mesa. At the edge of the cliff
they halted, facing the early morning sun. Kothlu opened his hand. A pinch of
corn meal lay white on the palm; he breathed on it, murmured a few words, then
threw it, a handful of white dust, towards the sun. Kiakimé did the same. Then
Khakimé's father stepped forward, and holding up a feathered prayer stick,
made a long prayer, then threw the stick after the corn meal.
"It is finished," said old Mitsima in a loud voice. "They are married."
"Well," said Linda, as they turned away, "all I can say is, it does seem a
lot of fuss to make about so little. In civilized countries, when a boy wants
to have a girl, he just … But where are you going, John?"
He paid no attention to her calling, but ran on, away, away, anywhere to
be by himself.
It is finished Old Mitsima's words repeated themselves in his mind.
Finished, finished … In silence and from a long way off, but violently,
desperately, hopelessly, he had loved Kiakimé. And now it was finished. He was
sixteen.
At the full moon, in the Antelope Kiva, secrets would be told, secrets
would be done and borne. They would go down, boys, into the kiva and come out
again, men. The boys were all afraid and at the same time impatient. And at
last it was the day. The sun went down, the moon rose. He went with the
others. Men were standing, dark, at the entrance to the kiva; the ladder went
down into the red lighted depths. Already the leading boys had begun to climb
down. Suddenly, one of the men stepped forward, caught him by the arm, and
pulled him out of the ranks. He broke free and dodged back into his place
among the others. This time the man struck him, pulled his hair. "Not for you,
white-hair!" "Not for the son of the she-dog," said one of the other men. The
boys laughed. "Go!" And as he still hovered on the fringes of the group, "Go!"
the men shouted again. One of them bent down, took a stone, threw it. "Go, go,
go!" There was a shower of stones. Bleeding, he ran away into the darkness.
From the red-lit kiva came the noise of singing. The last of the boys had
climbed down the ladder. He was all alone.
All alone, outside the pueblo, on the bare plain of the mesa. The rock was
like bleached bones in the moonlight. Down in the valley, the coyotes were
howling at the moon. The bruises hurt him, the cuts were still bleeding; but
it was not for pain that he sobbed; it was because he was all alone, because
he had been driven out, alone, into this skeleton world of rocks and
moonlight. At the edge of the precipice he sat down. The moon was behind him;
he looked down into the black shadow of the mesa, into the black shadow of
death. He had only to take one step, one little jump. … He held out his right
hand in the moonlight. From the cut on his wrist the blood was still oozing.
Every few seconds a drop fell, dark, almost colourless in the dead light.
Drop, drop, drop. To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow …
He had discovered Time and Death and God.
"Alone, always alone," the young man was saying.
The words awoke a plaintive echo in Bernard's mind. Alone, alone … "So am
I," he said, on a gush of confidingness. "Terribly alone."
"Are you?" John looked surprised. "I thought that in the Other Place … I
mean, Linda always said that nobody was ever alone there."
Bernard blushed uncomfortably. "You see," he said, mumbling and with
averted eyes, "I'm rather different from most people, I suppose. If one
happens to be decanted different …"
"Yes, that's just it." The young man nodded. "If one's different, one's
bound to be lonely. They're beastly to one. Do you know, they shut me out of
absolutely everything? When the other boys were sent out to spend the night on
the mountains–you know, when you have to dream which your sacred animal
is–they wouldn't let me go with the others; they wouldn't tell me any of the
secrets. I did it by myself, though," he added. "Didn't eat anything for five
days and then went out one night alone into those mountains there." He
pointed.
Patronizingly, Bernard smiled. "And did you dream of anything?" he asked.
The other nodded. "But I mustn't tell you what." He was silent for a
little; then, in a low voice, "Once," he went on, "I did something that none
of the others did: I stood against a rock in the middle of the day, in summer,
with my arms out, like Jesus on the Cross."
"What on earth for?"
"I wanted to know what it was like being crucified. Hanging there in the
sun …"
"But why?"
"Why? Well …" He hesitated. "Because I felt I ought to. If Jesus could
stand it. And then, if one has done something wrong … Besides, I was unhappy;
that was another reason."
"It seems a funny way of curing your unhappiness," said Bernard. But on
second thoughts he decided that there was, after all, some sense in it. Better
than taking soma …
"I fainted after a time," said the young man. "Fell down on my face. Do
you see the mark where I cut myself?" He lifted the thick yellow hair from his
forehead. The scar showed, pale and puckered, on his right temple.
Bernard looked, and then quickly, with a little shudder, averted his eyes.
His conditioning had made him not so much pitiful as profoundly squeamish. The
mere suggestion of illness or wounds was to him not only horrifying, but even
repulsive and rather disgusting. Like dirt, or deformity, or old age. Hastily
he changed the subject.
"I wonder if you'd like to come back to London with us?" he asked, making
the first move in a campaign whose strategy he had been secretly elaborating
ever since, in the little house, he had realized who the "father" of this young
savage must be. "Would you like that?"
The young man's face lit up. "Do you really mean it?"
"Of course; if I can get permission, that is."
"Linda too?"
"Well …" He hesitated doubtfully. That revolting creature! No, it was
impossible. Unless, unless … It suddenly occurred to Bernard that her very
revoltingness might prove an enormous asset. "But of course!" he cried, making
up for his first hesitations with an excess of noisy cordiality.
The young man drew a deep breath. "To think it should be coming true–what
I've dreamt of all my life. Do you remember what Miranda says?"
"Who's Miranda?"
But the young man had evidently not heard the question. "O wonder!" he was
saying; and his eyes shone, his face was brightly flushed. "How many goodly
creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is!" The flush suddenly
deepened; he was thinking of Lenina, of an angel in bottle-green viscose,
lustrous with youth and skin food, plump, benevolently smiling. His voice
faltered. "O brave new world," he began, then-suddenly interrupted himself;
the blood had left his cheeks; he was as pale as paper.
"Are you married to her?" he asked.
"Am I what?"
"Married. You know–for ever. They say 'for ever' in the Indian words; it
can't be broken."
"Ford, no!" Bernard couldn't help laughing.
John also laughed, but for another reason–laughed for pure joy.
"O brave new world," he repeated. "O brave new world that has such people
in it. Let's start at once."
"You have a most peculiar way of talking sometimes," said Bernard, staring
at the young man in perplexed astonishment. "And, anyhow, hadn't you better
wait till you actually see the new world?"
