Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow [44]
�s about his sister. So I would roar and the king would sit with his arm about his lioness, as though they were attending an opera performance. She certainly looked very formal in attire. After a dozen or so of these agonizing efforts I would feel dim and dark within the brain and my arms and legs would give out. Allowing me a short rest, he made me try again and again. Afterward he was very sympathetic. He would say, "I assume now you are feeling better, Mr. Henderson?" "Yes, better." "Lighter?" "Sure, lighter, too, Your Honor." "More calm?" Then I would begin to snort. I was all jolted up within. My face was boiling; I was lying in the dust, and I would sit up to look at the two of them. "How are your emotions?" "Like a caldron, Your Highness, a regular caldron." "I see you are laboring with a lifetime accumulation." Then he would say, almost pityingly, "You are still afraid of Atti?" "Damn right I am. I'd sooner jump out of a plane. I wouldn't be half so scared. I applied for paratroops in the war. Come to think of it, Your Highness, I think I could bail out at fifteen thousand feet in these pants and stand a good chance." "Your humor is delicious, Sungo." This man was completely lacking in what we all know as civilized character. "I am sure that you soon will begin to feel something of what it is to be a lion. I am convinced of your capacity. The old self is resisting?" "Oh yes, I feel that old self more than ever," I said. "I feel it all the time. It's got a terrific grip on me." I began to cough and grunt, and I was in despair. "As if I were carrying an eight-hundred-pound load--like a Gal�gos turtle. On my back." "Sometimes a condition must worsen before bettering," he said, and he began to tell me of diseases he had known when he was on the wards as a student, and I tried to picture him as a medical student in white coat and white shoes instead of the velvet hat adorned with human teeth and the satin slippers. He held the lioness by the head; her broth-colored eyes watched me; those whiskers, suggesting diamond scratches, seemed so cruel that her own skin shrank from them at the base. She had an angry nature. What can you do with an angry nature? This was why, when I returned from the den, I felt as I did in the torrid light of the yard, with its stone junk and the red flowers. Horko's bridge table was set up under the umbrella for lunch, but first I went to rest and get my wind back, and I would think, "Well, maybe every guy has his own Africa. Or if he goes to sea, his own ocean." By which I meant that as I was a turbulent individual, I was having a turbulent Africa. This is not to say, however, that I think the world exists for my sake. No, I really believe in reality. That's a known fact. Each day I grew more aware that everybody knew where I had spent the morning and feared me for it--I had arrived like a dragon; maybe the king had sent for me to help him defy the Bunam and overturn the religion of the whole tribe. And I tried to explain to Romilayu at least that Dahfu and I were not practicing any evil. "Look, Romilayu," I told him, "the king just happens to have a very rich nature. He didn't have to come back and put himself at the mercy of his wives. He did it because he hopes to benefit the whole world. A fellow may do many a crazy thing, and as long as he has no theory about it we forgive him. But if there happens to be a theory behind his actions everybody is down on him. That's how it is with the king. But he isn't hurting me, old fellow. It's true it sounds like it, but don't you believe it. I make that noise of my own free will. If I don't look well, that's because I haven't been feeling well; I have a fever, and the inside of my nose and throat are inflamed. (Rhinitis?) I guess the king would give me something for it if I asked him but I don't feel like telling him." "I don't blame you, sah." "Don't get me wrong. The human race needs guys like this king more than ever. Change must be possible! If not, it's too damn bad." "Yes, sah." "Americans are supposed to be dumb but they are willing to go into this. It isn't just me. You have to think about white Protestantism and the Constitution and the Civil War and capitalism and winning the West. All the major tasks and the big conquests were done before my time. That left the biggest problem of all, which was to encounter death. We've just got to do something about it. It isn't just me. Millions of Americans have gone forth since the war to redeem the present and discover the future. I can swear to you, Romilayu, there are guys exactly like me in India and in China and South America and all over the place. Just before I left home I saw an interview in the paper with a piano teacher from Muncie who became a Buddhist monk in Burma. You see, that's what I mean. I am a high-spirited kind of guy. And it's the destiny of my generation of Americans to go out in the world and try to find the wisdom of life. It just is. Why the hell do you think I'm out here, anyway?" "I don' know, sah." "I wouldn't agree to the death of my soul." "Me Methdous, sah." "I know it, but that would never help me, Romilayu. And please don't try to convert me, I'm in trouble enough as it is." "I no bothah you." "I know. You are standing by me in my hour of trial, God bless you for it. I also am standing by King Dahfu until he captures his father, Gmilo. When I get to be a friend, Romilayu, I am a devoted friend. I know what it is to lie buried in yourself. One thing I have learned, though I am a hard man to educate. I tell you, the king has a rich nature. I wish I could learn his secret." Then Romilayu with the scars shining on his wrinkled face (manifestations of his former savagery) but with soft sympathetic eyes which contained a light that didn't come from the air (it could never have penetrated the shade, like an umbrella pine, that grew across his low forehead), wanted to know what secret I was trying to get from Dahfu. "Why," I said, "there's something about danger that doesn't perplex the guy. Look at all the things he has to fear, and still look at the way he lies on that sofa. You've never seen that. He has an old green sofa upstairs which must have been brought by the elephants a century ago. And the way he lies on it, Romilayu! And the females wait on him. But on the table near him he has those two skulls used at the rain ceremony, one his father's and the other his grandfather's. Are you married, Romilayu?" I asked him. "Yes, sah, two time. But now got one wife." "Why, that's just like me. And I have five children, including twin boys about four years old. My wife is very big." "Me, six children." "Do you worry about them? It's a wild continent still, no two ways about that. I am all the time worrying lest my two little kids wander off in the woods. We ought to get a dog--a big dog. But we'll be living in town anyway from now on. I am going to go to school. Romilayu, I am going to send a letter to my wife, and you are going to take it to Baventai and mail it. I promised you baksheesh, old man, and here are the papers for the jeep, made over to you. I wish I could take you back to the States with me, but since you have a family it's not practical." His face expressed very little pleasure at the gift. It wrinkled especially hard, and as I knew him by now I said, "Hell, man, don't be toying with tears all the time. What's to cry over?" "You in trouble, sah," he said. "Yes, I know I am. But since I'm a reluctant type of fellow, life has decided to use strong measures on me. I am a shunner, Romilayu, and so this serves me right. What's the matter, old pal, do I look bad?" "Yes, sah." "My feelings always did leak into my looks," I said. "That's the type of constitution I have. Is it that woman's head they showed us that worries you?" "Dem kill you, maybe?" said Romilayu. "Okay, that Bunam is a bad actor. The guy is a scorpion. But don't forget I am the Sungo. Doesn't Mummah protect me? I think maybe my person is sacred. Besides, with my twenty-two neck they'd have to have two guys to strangle me. Ha, ha! You mustn't worry about me, Romilayu. As soon as this business with the king is completed and I have helped him capture his dad, I'll join you in Baventai." "Please God, 'e mek quick," said Romilayu. When I mentioned the Bunam to the king, he laughed at me. "When I possess Gmilo, I am absolute master," he said. "But that animal is raging and killing out there in the savanna," I said, "and you act as though you had him safe in storage already." "Lions do not often leave a given locale," he said. "Gmilo is near here. Any day he will be encountered. Go and write the letter to your missis," Dahfu told me, laughing very low on his green sofa amid his black troop of nude women. "I'm going to write to her today," I said. So I went down to have lunch with the Bunam and Horko. Horko, the Bunam, and the Bunam's black-leather man were always waiting for me at the bridge table under the umbrella. "Gentlemen