No Enemy but Time (22 page)
* * * *
Through discreet observation I confirmed that Helen was different from most of the habiline womenfolk in the disposition of her sexual organs. Whereas Dilsey, Guinevere, Emily, and all the rest had labia set almost directly beneath their anuses, Helen's genital flower bloomed in a more forward location. This placement made it possible for us to consummate our mutual lusts face to face, the technique we preferred above all others. The other Minids, with some infrequent exceptions, as I have noted, usually mated after the fashion of mandrills and mangy australopithecines—but Helen was a human being in my sight, and our love was not bestial but sublime. I insist upon this point because there are so many people whose prejudices force them to deny what to me was self-evident from the moment of our first coupling.
(Later, of course, I had other, even better, proof of Helen's humanity—but I do not wish to run ahead of my story.)
In the intervals between each rush of passion, Helen and I carried on as friends and companions. Our sense of oneness seldom permitted us to leave the other's sight. I deloused her, and she fed me berries and tree mice. We scavenged, hunted, and foraged together. Side by side, we wandered the veldt and
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gallery forests. In Ngai's eyes, at least, we were surely husband and wife.
I did not empedestal Helen, though. She had faults that I am not ashamed or embarrassed to record. For one thing, she sometimes stank. Her hair would become matted with grease or coated with dust, and the lack of water in the area made it difficult to remedy these problems. Once, under the pretext of play, I enticed my bride into the last remaining wallow of a rivercourse not far from New Helensburgh and there applied a piece of pumice stone to her back and belly. Afterward she smelled better, and behaved coquettishly, and gibbered at me her girlish gratitude. She did not like to be dirty.
A second fault here springs to mind. Helen could launch one-sided prattlefests, but she could not really talk to me. Although she was hardly to be blamed for this failing, I had begun to miss the sterling inanities of human conversation. I would have given two years’ pay and perquisites to hear from her pretty lips a single “Hot enough for you?” or “Have a nice day.” Instead I got tuneless scatsinging and a great deal of murmurous blather.
I decided that Helen must learn to speak. During my in-depth training for White Sphinx at Russell-Tharaka Air Force Base, Blair had introduced me to some of the current research on animal vocalization, and my understanding of this subject led me to conclude that Helen's Babelesque cries and whispers were limbic in origin. That is, they had very little to do with the neurology of human speech, which flows like a river of light from the neocortical headwaters of Broca's and Wernicke's regions.
Researchers can prod a rhesus monkey to spill its entire reservoir of natural calls by flooding current into electrodes sunk like spigots in the limbic lobes. So primed, the monkeys babble indiscriminately.
By contrast, Helen's prating was uniform in its emotional content and uncoerced, but “primitive” in that it rose from brain tissue older than those from which human speech pours forth, limpid and sustaining.
(When, of course, it is not turbid and constipating.) I wondered if Helen had the cerebral wherewithal to learn what I had resolved to teach her. And concluded that she must, not merely because endocasts of hominid brains have given proof of their incipient Broca's areas, but also because my habilines possessed a repertoire of sounds so far beyond that of beasts that even I could not satisfactorily ape it.
Human beings have had reasonable success teaching rudimentary American Sign Language to chimpanzees and gorillas. However, I did not know this system, and the gestural language of the Minids already contained subtleties and refinements too nice for my apprehension. Even so, they best “talked”
among themselves using facial expressions and eye movements, the way wolves are said to reveal a full gamut of canine strategies and desires. Likewise the Minids. A squint or a blink could apprise another in the band of the whereabouts of nearby vegetables. A puckering of mouth or brow could provide a telling gloss on this communication. Both text and gloss, unfortunately, were in an alphabet almost opaque to me, and although I did come to understand a little of Helen's eye language, I made up my mind to teach her English.
I started with pronouns. Pronouns befuddle and exasperate. As in an old Tarzan movie or Abbot and Costello routine, pronouns deny or misconstrue themselves as soon as the instructor thumps his chest or nods pupilward. “I,” I said, pointing at myself: “I, I, I.” Although Helen could say this word, she pronounced it like the preface to a bloodcurdling hunting cry. No matter. My heart leapt. Of course, when I tried to teach her the word's semantic value, to demonstrate that she had encompassed the concept, she poked me repeatedly in the chest with her gnarled thumb, all the while murmuring, “
Ai, Ai,
Ai.
” It took me a day to undo the damage, a feat I managed only with superhuman patience and the artful deployment of my shaving mirror.
We named, enunciated, and made meaningful moues in my hand-held mirror. Helen, to her credit, did not lose interest. Because I had not shaved since moving into New Helensburgh, she had never seen my
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mirror before. It was a circle of glass in an aluminum frame, and she immersed herself in its silver flatteries as a swan immerses itself in water. Each word I shaped was a new excuse to go gliding on her own reflection. Sometimes, indeed, she got so far from our mutual purpose that I despaired of pulling her back. She liked the way she looked, and she had never mistaken her image in the glass for that of a two-dimensional stranger trapped inside the mirror's imprisoning frame.
Helen—as if I required further evidence of the fact—was
self-aware
. My mirror, a miracle, had simply given her a chance to walk on the waters of her self-awareness. I tried to get her to say the word.
“
Mwah,
” she responded. “
Mwah.
”
Because she could not simultaneously hold the mirror and preen in its tiny window, she made me hold it for her. Repeating her disappointing approximation of “mirror,” she loosened the bandanna I had tied about her neck and lifted it over her nose and lips. For a brief moment, then, she was an Islamic lady proclaiming the privilege and the pain of purdah. Then, hoisting it upward, Helen transformed the bandanna into a blindfold, through whose misaligned threads she disingenuously peered at herself. Up and down the bandanna went, becoming in the process a mammy scarf, a pair of earmuffs, and even a masquerader's polka-dotted domino.
“Say ‘bandanna,'” I urged my bride. “'Ban-
DAN
-nuh.'”
“
Bwaduh,
” Helen said.
At that moment, trying to keep her bobbing face in the glass, I imagined myself the progenitor of an Ur-Swahili dialect whose descendant tongues would one day be spoken in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Zarakal.
Mwah
and
bwaduh
—along with
Ai, mai,
and
yooh
—were precious little upon which to base such a fantasy, I realize, but it seemed to me then that Helen and I were making progress.
Frustratingly slow progress, but progress nevertheless. I did not want to give up too soon.
According to Jeannette, I had not spoken
my
first recognizable word until I was well past two. Helen was far older than two, of course, but she had been exposed to bits and pieces of a comprehensive linguistic system only intermittently since my arrival. With our auspicious beginning (five “words” in as many days) as a base, given ten or twelve years, Helen might well acquire a real oratorical competence.
By the afternoon of our fifth day of language lessons, Helen's five-word vocabulary seemed a historic accomplishment. I had not tried to teach her either my name or hers for fear she would ascribe to each an encompassing generic connotation, Joshua becoming “man” and Helen “woman.” Too, I had begun to feel a trifle guilty about having bestowed upon her the name of Thomas Babington Mubia's favorite wife.
Or maybe about the fact that for most Westerners this name apotheosizes a standard of feminine beauty having nothing to do with my lady's primeval negritude. Our earliest vocabularies corrupt, and what I had learned in the household of Jeannette Rivenbark Monegal had of course influenced—i.e., corrupted—my vision of the world. As for my first name, believing that Helen would be unable to pronounce it, I never spoke it aloud for her.
“
Mai mwah,
” said Helen when we broke for late-afternoon communion with the other Minids on the fifth day. “
Mai mwah.
”
She had the mirror—
her
mirror, she had just called it—and before I could retrieve if from her, she left our hut to clamber along a winding parapet of stone to the hilltop where the other Minids were gathered.
The old man Jomo was sitting in the shade of the only tree up there, a fig tree, while his consort Guinevere searched his back for lice.
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Helen shoved the mirror under Jomo's nose. This act affected him as if she had peeled off his rubbery face and slapped him with it. He reared back, threw an arm around Guinevere, and stared at Helen aghast. I tried to grab the mirror away from Helen, but she murmured, “
Mai mwah,
” and rebuffed me.
Jomo, recovering, eased the mirror from Helen's hand and bemusedly ogled his own flat features.
Guinevere peered over his shoulder.
Other Minids began to gather, adults and children alike. Now that he no longer feared it, Jomo was jealous of his new possession. He had trouble ignoring the press of curious onlookers, many of whom squatted behind or to one side of him and extended their hands palm upward in patient entreaty. I stood aside and watched. Everyone wanted a moment with the mirror. Possession being nine-tenths of the law, no one moved to snatch the mirror from Jomo, but no one ceased begging, either. Even Alfie had squeezed into a forward position beneath the fig tree.
A slippery portion of himself in hand, Jomo devoured this delicacy while the others appealed to his better instincts for a taste of the same. How could he continue to refuse such a well-mannered plea? In fact, he could not. At last Jomo turned aside from Alfie and surrendered the mirror to his aged comrade Ham, who hunkered with his back to the tree trunk.
To demonstrate to himself the plastic amiability of the goon in the glass, Ham grabbed his nose, blinked his eyes, and tugged his earlobes. A dozen palms wobbled within a foot of his face, stoically demanding their turns, and finally Ham, like Jomo before him, gave in to community pressure. He passed the shaving mirror to Dilsey.
Despite his status as chieftain, Alfie was temporarily odd man out, for Dilsey handed the glass to Odetta, who relinquished it to her toddler manchild Zippy, who grew bored in a matter of seconds and let it slip into the clutches of the effervescent adolescent Mister Pibb, who yielded it to Roosevelt, who, perhaps in remembrance of our previous exchange of gifts, passed the fragile compact to me. Alfie, by now, was looking on with a lugubriousness that almost corralled my sympathy. However, I tore my gaze away, cried, “Wait here—I'll be right back,” and hurried down the hillside to my hut. A moment later I was back among the Minids with an aerosol bomb of Colgate lime-scented shaving cream.
The habilines watched awe-stricken as I meringued my face with the shaving cream and then mischievously flicked lather hither and yon to witness their reactions. Horrified to see the lower half of my face foaming away, Bonzo and Gipper covered their eyes while the other youngsters gaped like spectators at an automobile wreck. Malcolm and Ham nervously palpated their own cheeks and chins to assure themselves the phenomenon was not contagious. Gibbering or singing, the womenfolk huddled against their mates for warmth or consolation. Helen, however, withdrew a good twenty feet, squatted on her heels, and put her arms around her knees.
Alfie sidled near. He extended his palm, a plea for my attention. I lifted the can of shaving cream and squirted a ball of foam into Alfie's hand. He flinched but did not scuttle for safety.
Sniff, sniff.
The pungent scent of limes. This implied, even for a habiline, edibility. Seduced by the fragrance, Alfie tasted.
Pfaugh!
He spat out the offending foam and wiped his hand on the ground. Then his palm came up again, and I
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willingly gave him the aerosol bomb.
Suspiciously delighted, Alfie located the trigger atop the can and spilled into being between his feet a shin-high marshmallow monument. His thumb came up, and he and the Minids contemplated the result.
Everyone was impressed, even the architect. He carried the can to the fig tree and put an epaulet of foam on Emily's shoulder. When she fled from his ministrations, scolding him for decorating her, Alfie turned on Daddy Ham and bearded the old man with a snowy dab. Guinevere knocked the can from Alfie's grasp and kicked it between his legs to Malcolm, who, fielding it as gracefully as Maury Wills sucking up a grounder on the second hop, underhanded it to Fred. Fred festooned Mister Pibb with a rope of foam and vaulted into the fig tree. Alfie, Roosevelt, and Mister Pibb pursued him aloft. While the remaining Minids hooted at these inept brachiators, I went to Helen, lifted her to her feet, and led her back down the hillside to our tent.