T. Boyle: Water Music

And so, despite the critical situation and the ring of strange hostile faces, Mungo begins to feel giddy — almost as if he’d drunk too much claret or gill-ale. He glances round at the furtive eyes and knitted brows, at the beards and burnooses, the prophets’ robes and pilgrims’ sandals, and suddenly all those hard minatory faces begin to melt, lose their contours, droop into vagueness like figures of wax. The whole thing is a masquerade, is what it is. Dassoud and One-Eye are tumblers or fire-eaters, and old Ali is only Grimaldi — Grimaldi the clown. But now they seem to be fitting something over his head. . a helmet? Do they expect him to go to battle for them? Or have they finally come to their senses and decided to measure him for a crown?

The explorer grins stupidly beneath his brazen cap. His eyes are gray. Gray as the tentative fingers of ice that reach out over the deep pools of the Yarrow on a frosty morning. Ailie once compared them to the lovers’ wells at Galashiels, and then shook the pennies from her purse and propped them against his eyelids as he lay back in the heather. Gloucester’s eyes, they say, were gray. Oedipus’ were black as olives. And Milton’s— Milton’s were like bluejays scrabbling in the snow. Dassoud knows nothing of Shakespeare, Sophocles or Milton. His rough fingers twist the screws.

The explorer grins. Oblivious. The onlookers, horrified at his mad composure, turn away in panic. He can hear them rushing off, the slap of their sandals on the baked earth. . but what’s this? — he seems to have something caught in his eye. .

♦ CORRECTIVE SURGERY ♦

“Stop!”

Mungo can’t see a thing (the cap seems to have a visor, and every time he goes to lift it a hand seizes his wrist), but he recognizes the voice instantly. It is Johnson. Jolly old Johnson, his guide and interpreter, come to the rescue.

“Stop!” the voice of Johnson repeats, before pitching headlong into the spillway of Arabic glottals and fricatives. Dassoud answers him, then One-Eye harmonizes with a concatenation of grunts and emphatics, his voice pitched high. Johnson rebuts. And then Ali’s voice sounds from the corner, harsh and grainy. There is the sound of a blow, and Johnson tumbles to the mat beside the explorer.

“Mr. Park,” Johnson whispers. “What you got that thing on your head for? Don’t you realize what they doin’ to you?”

“Johnson, jolly old Johnson. How good to hear your voice.”

“They puttin’ out your eyes, Mr. Park.”

“How’s that?”

“The Chief Jackal here he says you got the eyes of a cat — and apparently that don’t go down too good around here, as they is presently engaged in grindin’ them out. If it wasn’t for my fortuitous intercession I’d lay odds you’d be blind as a beggar this very minute.”

Mungo’s head clears like a hazy morning giving way to noon. As it does so he becomes increasingly agitated, until finally he leaps to his feet, tearing at the brazen cap and wailing like a lost calf. Dassoud knocks him down. Cracks the wildebeest whip a time or two and then calls out in Arabic for some further instrument of torture. There is the sound of padding feet, the swish of the tent flap, and then, close at hand, the cry of a human being in mortal agony. The cry seems to be emanating from Johnson. The explorer is alarmed, and tugs at the cap with renewed vigor, feeling very much like a ten-year-old with his head caught between the bars of an iron railing. “Johnson,” he gasps,” —what have they done to you?”

“Nothin’ yet. But they just sent out for a two-edge bilbo.”

The cap finally releases its grip, heaving up from the explorer’s head like the cork from a bottle of spumante. He blinks and looks round him. Ali, Dassoud and One-Eye are crouched in the far corner, jabbering and gesticulating. The mob is gone and the flap of the tent is drawn closed. A massive black man in turban and striped robe blocks the entrance, arms folded across his chest. “A bilbo? What does that mean?” Mungo whispers.

“Means we goin’ to be two monkeys — see no evil, speak none either.

They say I got the tongue of a shrike, Mr. Park. They goin’ to cut it out.”

♦ A.K.A. KATUNGA OYO♦

Concerning Johnson. He is a member of the Mandingo tribe, they who inhabit the headwaters of the Gambia and Senegal rivers and most of the Niger Valley as far as the city of legend, Timbuctoo. His mother did not name him Johnson. She called him Katunga — Katunga Oyo — after his paternal grandfather. At the age of thirteen Johnson was kidnapped by Foulah herdsmen while celebrating the nubility of a tender young sylph in a cornfield just outside his native village of Dindikoo. The sylph’s name was Nealee. The Foulahs didn’t ask. Their chieftain, who took a fancy to Nealee’s facial tattoos and to other features as well, retained her as his personal concubine. Johnson was sold to a slatee , or traveling slave merchant, who shackled his ankles and drove him, along with sixty-two others, to the coast. Forty-nine made it. There he was sold to an American slaver who chained him in the hold of a schooner bound for South Carolina. The boy beside him, a Bobo from Djenné, had been dead for six days when the ship landed at Charleston.

For twelve years Johnson worked as a field hand on the plantation of Sir Reginald Durfeys, Bart. Then he was promoted to house servant. Three years later Sir Reginald himself visited the Carolinas, took a liking to Johnson, and brought him back to London as his valet. This was in 1771.

The Colonies had not yet broken away, slavery was still sanctioned in England, George III was already harboring the renegade porphyrins that would cost him his sanity, and Napoleon was storming the palisades of his playpen.

Johnson, as he was christened by Sir Reginald, began to educate himself in the library at Piltdown, the Durfeys’ country estate. He learned Greek and Latin. He read the Ancients. He read the Moderns. He read Smollett, Ben Jonson, Molière, Swift. He spoke of Pope as if he’d known him personally, denigrated the puerility of Richardson, and was so taken with Fielding that he actually attempted a Mandingo translation of Amelia .

Durfeys was fascinated with him. Not only with his command of language and literature, but with his recollections of the Dark Continent as well. It got to the point where the Baronet couldn’t drift off at night without a cup of hot milk and garlic, and the soothing basso profundo of Johnson’s voice as he narrated a tale of thatched huts, leopards and hyenas, of volcanoes spewing fire across the sky, of thighs and buttocks glistening with sweat and black as a dream of the womb. Sir Reginald allowed him a liberal salary, and after emancipation in 1772 offered him a handsome pension to stay on as valet. Johnson considered the proposal over a glass of sherry in Sir Reginald’s study. Then he grinned, and hit the Baronet for a raise.

When Parliament was in session Sir Reginald moved his establishment to town, accompanied by Johnson and a pair of liveried footmen. London was a ripe tomato. Johnson was a macaroni. He strutted down Bond Street with the best of them, decked out in his top hat, wasp-waisted coat and silk hose. Soon he was frequenting the coffeehouses, engaging in repartee, learning to turn an epigram with a barb in it. One afternoon a red-faced gentleman with muttonchop whiskers called him a “damned Hottentot nigger” and invited him to fight for his life. The following morning, at dawn and in the presence of seconds, Johnson put a bullet through the gentleman’s right eye. The gentleman died instantly and Johnson was incarcerated. He was subsequently sentenced to be hanged by the neck until dead. Sir Reginald exerted his influence. The sentence was commuted to transportation.