Chapter Eight

Outside, in the dust and among the garbage, Bernard and John were walking slowly up and down.

“It’s as though we were living on different planets, in different centuries,” Bernard was saying. “A mother, and all this dirt, and gods, and old age, and disease… It’s almost inconceivable. I shall never understand, unless you explain.”

“Explain what?”

“This.” He indicated the pueblo. “That. 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. 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 was frightened; he hid his face against Linda’s body. Linda put her hand on him and he felt safer. 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.” The man bent over the bed towards him. “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, 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. 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. When they got back to their house, Pope was waiting at the door. He had a big gourd full of something with a bad smell that burnt your mouth and made you cough. Linda drank some and Pope drank some, and then Linda laughed a lot and talked very loud; and then she and Pope went into the other room. When Pope went away, he went into the room. Linda was in bed and so fast asleep that he couldn’t wake her.

Pope 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 Pope. He hated all the men who came to see Linda. One afternoon, he came back to the house and heard angry voices in the bedroom. They were women’s voices. 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; then Linda screamed. He ran in. Linda was on the bed. There was one woman holding her wrists. Another was lying across her legs, so that she couldn’t kick. The third was hitting her with a whip. Each time Linda screamed. He caught hold of the woman’s hand between his own and bit it with all his might. She cried out 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. Then she hit Linda again.

“Why did they want to hurt you, Linda?” he asked that night.

“I don’t know. How should I know? 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 someone inside herself.

“Oh, don’t cry, Linda. Don’t cry.”

He put his arm round her neck. Linda cried out. “My shoulder! Oh!” and pushed him away, hard. “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.

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.

“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.

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 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, and how everybody was happy and no one was ever sad or angry, and everyone belonging to everyone else… 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 Jesus and Pookong. 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. 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 a thin little book. “I’m afraid you won’t find it very exciting,” she said. “But it’s the only thing I have.” 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.

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. “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.” 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?

“What are chemicals?” he would ask Linda.

“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. 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. “Pope brought it,” she said. “It was lying in one of the chests of the Antelope Kiva. It’s supposed to have been there for hundreds of years. Seems to be full of nonsense. Still, it’ll be good enough for you to practice your reading on.”

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 thunder; like the drums at the summer dances; like old Mitsima saying magic over his feathers and his carved sticks-but better, because it meant more, because it talked to him, about Linda; about Linda lying there snoring, with the empty cup on the floor beside the bed; about Linda and Pope, Linda and Pope.

He hated Pope more and more. The magic of the words was strong and went on rumbling in his head, and somehow it was as though he had never really hated Pope 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 and the strange, strange story out of which they were taken-they gave him a reason for hating Pope; and they made his hatred 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. Pope’s gourd and a cup were standing on the floor near the bed.

He felt empty. Empty, and cold, and rather sick. He leaned against the wall to steady himself. Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous… Like drums, the words repeated and repeated themselves in his head. 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. He picked up a knife for the meat 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 Pope 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 Pope’s small black eyes, very close, staring into his own. He looked away. There were two cuts on Pope’s left shoulder. “Oh, look at the blood!” Linda was crying. Pope 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 Pope’s eyes. For a long time, for hours and hours. And suddenly-he couldn’t help it-he began to cry. Pope 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 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 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 cylinder, shaped 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. At last there 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.

“But the next one will be better,” he said, and began to moisten another piece of clay.

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 outstretched and tightly closed, as though over some precious jewel. Her clenched hand similarly outstretched, Kiakime 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. Kiakime did the same. Then Kiakime’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. 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 Kiakime. And now it was finished. He was sixteen.

At the full moon, in the Antelope Kiva, secrets would be told. They would go down, boys, into the kiva and come out again, men. The boys were all afraid and at the same time impatient. He went with the others. Men were standing at the entrance to the kiva; the ladder went down into the depths. The leading boys 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 tried to get 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!” One of them bent down, took a stone, threw it. There was a shower of stones. Bleeding, he ran away into the darkness.

He was all alone, outside the pueblo, on the bare plain of the mesa. Down in the valley, the coyotes were howling at the moon. The bruises hurt him, the cuts were still bleeding. He cried because he was all alone, because he had been driven out. At the edge of the precipice he sat down. The moon was behind him. 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 in the dead light. Drop, drop, drop. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow… He had discovered Time and Death and God.

“Alone, always alone,” the young man was saying.

The words echoed in Bernard’s mind. Alone, alone… “So am I,” he said. “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, I’m rather different from most people, I suppose…”

“Yes, that’s just it.” The young man nodded. “If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely. Do you know, they shut me out of absolutely everything? 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.”

“But why?”

“Why?” 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.

“I fainted after a time,” said the young man. “Fell down on my face.”

“I wonder if you’d like to come back to London with us?” Bernard asked, making the first move in a campaign whose strategy he had been secretly elaborating ever since 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.

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. “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. 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. “And hadn’t you better wait till you actually see the new world?”