T. Boyle - Water Music

♦ ♦ ♦

It is dark inside, a pair of oil lamps burning fitfully. There are tapestries, mats, urns, a perch on which two birds of prey — saker falcons — are calmly disemboweling a jerboa. The explorer glances up just as one of them finds a long strand of intestine and begins to tug at it, like a robin with a worm. ‘‘ Salaam aleichem ,’’ says Ali, and there she is, seated on a pillow the size of a double bed. The explorer is stunned. He’d expected a big woman — but this. . this is impossible! She is gargantuan, elephantine, her great bundled turban and glowing jubbah like a pair of circus tents, her shadow leaping and swelling in the uncertain Light until it engulfs the room. Her attendants — two girls in billowy pantaloons and a hoary old woman — sit at her feet like olives flanking a cantaloupe in a surreal still life.

Mungo cannot make out her face, which is concealed behind a yashmak —the double horsehair veil worn by Muslim women in public — but he is immediately struck by her feet and hands. Petite and delicate, they float at the tips of her bloated extremities like ducks on a pond. He is fascinated. Each of her digits is ornamented with a ring, and for some reason — perhaps to draw attention to their charms — her hands and feet have been stained saffron. The effect is dazzling. When finally she turns her head toward him she gasps, and gives out a faint squeal. Ali rushes to her, jabbering in Arabic. When she answers him, her voice is soft and sensual as a sunshower.

Mungo nudges his interpreter.

“She says she’s afraid,” Johnson whispers.

“Afraid? I’m the one whose giblets are on the line here.”

“You’re a Christian. To her that’s like bein’ a cannibal or a werewolf or somethin’.”

“What about you?”

“Don’t look at me, brother — I’m a Animist. Shhh. . now she’s bitchin’ about the smell. . ‘Do they all smell like that?’ “

Suddenly Ali barks out a command. “He wants us on our knees,” says Johnson, easing himself down and burying his forehead in the sand. The explorer follows suit. They pose like this for a long while (“I’m beginning to feel like a ostrich,” Johnson quips), until a high nasal voice begins yodeling out the evening prayers. It is the muezzin , stationed somewhere outside the tent. Ali and Dassoud likewise prostrate themselves, and Fatima comes down off her throne like a thundercloud rolling down the side of a mountain. As she tilts her forehead to the earth, the explorer can feel her rich black eyes upon him.

When the prayers are finally finished, Fatima lumbers back to her pillow, settles herself primly, and softly dismisses Dassoud and her husband. She then turns to Mungo and his interpreter, and asks them to be seated. Behind them, the Nubian edges into the tent, scimitar in hand. For a long while the room is silent, Fatima and her attendants ocularly feasting on this blond apparition in the blue velvet jacket. Finally the Queen addresses him, a single sentence, her voice rising as if on the crest of a question.

Mungo looks at Johnson.

“She wants you to stand up and take your jacket off.’*

Mungo complies, and one of the girls slips up to take the garment from him and deliver it to the Queen. Fatima regards the jacket silently, running her hand over the material against the nap, taking one of the brass buttons between her teeth. The explorer stands there in his jubbah like a child in a nightgown. “Give it to her,” Johnson whispers.

The explorer clears his throat, and in his best Arabic offers her the jacket. She looks up at him and politely declines, but does appropriate two of the brass buttons. “For earrings,” she explains, holding them up to the corners of her yashmak . From the shadows one of the falcons begins to crow: ca-ha! ca-ha! Fatima wets her lips. “Does he want any pork?” she asks.

“Tell her no,” says Johnson.

At that moment One-Eye appears with a bushpig on a leash. The bushpig has an elongated snout randomly disfigured with lumps and ridges, several yellowed tusks, and a nasty look in its eye. With a leer, One-Eye offers Mungo the pig. “Snark-snark,” says the pig.

“Look disgusted,” Johnson coaches.

The explorer does his best to express horror and loathing, knowing full well how deeply the Moors abhor pork. He backs away, fingers atremble, slapping his forehead and tugging at his lip while the bushpig, squealing like an accordion, stamps and stutters and jerks at its leash. The performance seems to be reassuring Fatima, and so the explorer gyrates even more wildly — really hamming it up — until he accidentally stumbles into the falcons’ perch. This, he immediately realizes, is a mistake. At the touch of his elbow the birds rear up and shriek in his face, their beaks and talons like scissors, wings beating round his ears. Then the larger of the two springs onto his shoulder. He is terrified. In his anxiety to brush it away he ducks directly into the path of the bushpig, who has been waiting for just such a chance. In a flash the pig lurches forward and savagely bites the explorer six or seven times in rapid succession. During the panic that ensues, the explorer somehow manages to collapse half the tent and wind up spread-eagled across the Queen’s voluminous lap. The Nubian eunuch intercedes to behead the pig with one swipe of his scimitar, while One-Eye and the pantaloon girls try to dislodge the shit-caked and bleeding explorer from the Queen’s person. Through it all, Mungo can hear the strains of Johnson’s voice raised in song — it seems almost as if he’s singing a dirge, downhearted and mournful, one of the old plantation songs Johnson likes to call “the blues.”

“You done blowed it now,” he’s singing. “Blowed it now. Lord God Almighty, you done blowed it now.”

♦ O THAT SINKING FEELING♦

February, 1796. Wordsworth has been in and out of France and Annette Vallon, Bonaparte has put the screws to Babeuf and is vigorously pounding at Joséphine’s gate, Goethe is living in sin with Christiane Vulpius, and Burns is dying. In Edinburgh Walter Scott fights a losing battle for the hand of Williamina Belches, while in Manchester a snot-nosed De Quincey wanders the streets and wonders what a whore is. In Moscow it’s snowing.

In Paris they’re plugging holes with assignats for lack of anything better to do with them. And in Soho, at the Vole’s Head Tavern, they’re sucking and fucking. Onstage.

Ned couldn’t be more pleased. Jutta Jim’s been going strong for better than an hour now (if you discount the two brief intermissions during which he chanted tribal lays and quaffed a pint of chicken’s blood to keep his spirits up). Nan and Sally have enlarged their roles admirably, and the audience has been too preoccupied to wreak mayhem or piss on the carpet. What’s more, Ned’s throat, limbs, liver and lights haven’t been threatened in over an hour (Smirke’s been running round with a hard-on all night, peddling drinks like an oasis owner in Araby, and Mendoza hasn’t said boo since Jim strutted out onstage), and his gross take has far exceeded his rosiest estimate (nearly thirty-six pounds against an outlay of twenty-three and two, which includes a new suit of clothes, tips, and refreshment for himself and his cast). And all of it tucked snugly away in the Bank of the Bulge.

So why all this anxiety? He’s been through a flask and a half of gin already, smoked three pipes and paced the room twenty-two times, and he’s still jittery as a case of rat-bite fever. He can’t understand it. He’s even starting to develop an itch in the missing joint of his pinky. Of course, deep down, he already knows the answer — things are going too well. And that means he’d better dodge, duck and flinch, because when things start going too well that’s when the Powers That Be swoop down on you like a dozen hurricanes and leave you buried under half a ton of flotsam and jetsam.