Kyril Bonfiglioli - All the Tea in China

As the ground grew wetter and we sploshed through the ambash reeds for much of the day, the leeches came. They were revolting, also enfeebling: we must have lost a pint of blood to them each day.

There came a day after God knows how many days when Blanche and I, emaciated and rotten with disease, staggered into a village on the banks of a distributary river, accompanied only by three porters. All that remained to us were a box of clothes and medicines, my chest of arms and several thousands of pounds value in carefully-packed Ming and Kang H’Si porcelains. We cared nothing for the political or religious beliefs of the savages there; our need to rest wiped away all such thoughts. Blanche collapsed and began to snore charmingly. The porters, encouraged by my little hippopotamus-hide karbash , laid down their burdens with great care, next to Blanche. I too lay down then, against the chests, snoring, I fancy, before my head touched the earth.

A gentle, courteous kick up the arse awakened me when the sun was low. I rubbed my eyes and looked about me. A dozen of elderly black men surrounded me. Their expressions were hard to read for their faces were fancifully etched with cicatrices; these were unpleasing to my untutored eye. I rubbed my eyes and yawned; this must have been a courtesy of sorts because they all smiled at me. I wished that they had not, for each smile revealed a row of teeth filed to needle-points. I stirred Blanche gently with the toe of my boot and enjoined silence upon her when she opened her eyes. Raising myself to a dignified squatting posture, I stared them all out of countenance then, selecting my words with care, I said:

“Hrrumph!”

This caused agitation in their circle; they jabbered at each other as though discussing protocol.

“M’Gawa!” the eldest said at last. Thinking this to be a greeting I civilly replied “M’Gawa!” I was wrong. The old man — the chief, evidently — clapped his hand loudly onto his belly and some twenty young warriors, hitherto unnoticed by me, stepped into the circle, rubbing their thumbs against the edges of their spears with a rasping noise which I could not believe was friendly. I was in a debilitated state but the desire for survival filled me. I stood up, fixing the chief with my eye and a pointing forefinger, and ranted out some twelve or twenty lines of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the Dutch translation. He cowered. I turned to Blanche, snapping my fingers. “Absolute alcohol!” I snapped. “Surgical rubbing-spirit! In the medicine chest; quickly !” While she rummaged I cowed the simple sons of nature with a few more selections from the Swan of Avon, at the same time indicating by signs that they should bring water, lest worse befall them.

When the calabash of water was drained I slipped into it a little of the absolute alcohol and set it alight. This created a great amazement but when I dipped my fingers in the flaming liquid and flourished them they either ran for their lives or prostrated themselves on their bellies, according to taste.

From that moment we were treated as guests and demi-gods. A hut or giddah was allotted to us, also an old woman to attend to our needs. We were feasted regally that night on delicious tender pork or perhaps veal, stewed in a peppery sauce. I confess that I gorged myself, out of politeness and against my will, for I have always been a sparing and delicate eater. Appetite was enhanced by the dancing in firelight of some two dozen nubile — palpably nubile — maidens of the tribe: their swinging, sweat-glistening breasts and rotating bellies made a most agreeable sight, although Blanche, inexplicably, found the performance vulgar and unartistic. I have often noticed that women’s minds are closed to some of the finer things which life offers us.

After eating, and then drinking many a calabash of toddy fermented from the tender heart-leaves of a certain palm-tree, I remembered my Englishness with a guilty start and enquired whether my bearers had been housed and fed. I had to do this by sign-language, naturally, and it was a little while before I could make our hosts understand. At last they signified assent by smiling, nodding and rubbing their hands upon their distended bellies. I was well content, my duty done. As I accepted yet another calabash of palm-toddy, Blanche suddenly rose and ran frantically from our circle around the fire. I was vexed at this breach of manners but no one else seemed to care and it was not until an hour later, when I joined her in the giddah , that I understood that her intuitive grasp of sign-language was better than mine. I assured her that what we had been eating was young goat, but she could not be appeased: she had eaten goat. Goat is not nearly so tender and tasty.

During our two-month sojourn in the village we convalesced well and replaced much of the flesh which hardship had stripped from our bones. The savages, in their primitive kindness, seemed concerned to make us fat, they were forever pressing food on us. Blanche had developed a morbid dislike for meat but she fared pretty well on cassava (which is tapioca), sweet potatoes and plantains baked or cooked in red palm-oil or pounded up with karta (which is pea-nuts) into a delicious purée. She passed her time, when not sleeping, in repairing what was left of her wardrobe.

For my part I ate heartily of whatever was put before me: monkey, for instance, is very good once one has recovered from the first sight of the little creature roasted. My pastime became that of learning the tribe’s simple tongue — they had a vocabulary of less than one thousand words but the placement of some of these words was hard to master — and I fell into the habit of meeting the elders of the tribe each day and questioning them about their rites and customs, funereal, marital, festive and so forth. Their habits of thought and language were strange; for instance their adjective for “eatable”, I recall, was the same as their noun for “member of another tribe” while, if one added the word for “crocodile”, the compound word meant “elderly lady”.

The notion grew in my head that perhaps I might one day write a book, displaying the manners of these simple children of God to civilised men as an example to wonder at. (The science of this is now called Anthropology: those of you who are too idle to enter our business House, or incapable of being supple to your benign grandfather, might well go to a University and master this simple science. You could perhaps earn fame thereby, for the world is foolish — but not, I think, fortune, for the world is not wholly foolish.)

One night, tossing feverishly in our bed, which was rendered almost intolerable by the heat of Blanche’s perfervid bottom, I occupied myself by making a mental summary of the strange, cruel but infinitely civil behaviour of this tight-knit society of savages whose obliged guests we were. Of a sudden, I had a stroke of insight: there was one piece missing in the almost-logical puzzle of their system of life! One question, which I would pose the very next morning, would decide forever whether they were near-apes performing a meaningless, ritual dance or truly human beings observing a sensible code of behaviour no more different, in essence, from that of us Jews than our code is from that of Christians.

So exhilarated was I at my cleverness that I felt the need to communicate with someone, however hot and moist the night. I slid down into the sagging centre of the bed, so that Blanche’s incomparable bottom — hotter and moister than the night — fitted into the concavity of my belly. We were like spoons in a canteen of cutlery — such as we give to old porters who are past their work but not eligible for a pension. My loins stirred. She was deeply asleep but you will learn one day that there are few women, however deep their sleeps, who do not awaken at feeling that particular stirring. She wriggled languidly and muttered something through sleep-sticky lips. I reached around her body and imprisoned a breast: the light muslin of her shift, sweat-soaked, clung to it like a second skin. The nipple — she was gifted as to the nipples, gifted — sprang up so that her pretence at sleep was no longer plausible. She adapted her posture a little and soon I was expressing my pleasure, silently, vehemently. She, too, expressed pleasure, not silently.