Turning Back the Sun(3)
The man stared stonily. “They”re burnt.” He demanded, “Why are they burnt like that? They”ve turned them black!”
Two small boys, jubilant and trembling, piped, “They”ve turned them black!”
People”s voices spurted and whispered. Someone said, “Corpses always go black.” But it was as if a blast of wind had hit them.
Rayner”s voice sounded too loud, and for some reason angry. “That”s blood pigment in the skin.” He felt he was quelling something monstrous. “That”s quite normal. The blood dries.”
But he knew how strange it seemed. The woman had floated uppermost, on her front, so that gravity had drawn the pigment dark over her breast and face and she gleamed like bronze. Whereas the man had lain face upwards, and the discoloration had spread only to his back, leaving his chest white and his face a soapy blur of decay.
One of the policemen said, “That”s the Mordaunts” farm was ransacked a week ago. We couldn”t find them. How long you reckon they”ve been in the water?”
Rayner said, “About a week.” They”d probably been killed a few hours before immersion, he thought; blackening and saponification were both far gone.
By the time an ambulance came, the crowd had swelled to hundreds. They stood tense and quiet as the bodies were taken away. Rayner did not know if the coldness opening in his stomach meant fear of the natives or something else. As the people began dispersing they became suddenly agitated, like bacilli hurrying the news down all the town”s arteries.
CHAPTER
2
The natives called themselves naugalad, or “savage ones,” and they carried this forbidding name with the pride of a people still steeped in fierce separateness. To be “savage” was to be uncontaminated, free. So they turned the word from an insult into a dignity.
Yet it was strange how in town you scarcely noticed them. They filtered in to buy tools and trinkets sometimes, dressed in threadbare trousers and dresses, with old straw hats or kepis on their heads, then sat motionless for hours on the steps and benches of the shopping mall. They had thick, trunk-like bodies and delicate feet and hands. Hour after hour, utterly still, they would glare ahead of them with a furious, impenetrable fixity, as if straining at something which obscured the present from them. Occasionally, in the busier streets, you might glimpse the women wandering bewildered with distended stomachs and undersized babies.
On the early maps of this region the whole void south and east of the town was spanned by the one word: “uninhabited.” And people still behaved as if the savages did not exist. Most of them looked inexplicably old, like emanations of this land which the white men could not trust. With their gnarled foreheads and scrawny limbs, they reminded Rayner of stricken trees. Occasionally on the mall they would get up and shout incomprehensibly to one another before walking away with a light, noiseless gait on the balls of their feet. But generally they moved among the rosy-skinned townsmen like shadows. They might have been invisible.
Those who stayed in town were very few: a handful of domestics and low-paid miners. The whites called them “tame” ones. A few more would camp temporarily in the dried riverbeds along the outskirts. From his bungalow overlooking the river, Rayner would see them squatted on their blankets, declaiming poetry, it seemed, or sagas. Usually one of them would be posturing in a circle of others: mahogany-faced women and lax, half-naked men, whose backs and shoulders were matted with wiry hair. At night their fires flickered for hours and he could hear—uncomprehending—every sing-song syllable. But by morning they would be gone.
They fascinated and vaguely disturbed him. They could exist on almost nothing, he”d heard, living off sandalwood berries or gathering seeds and roots; and in regions where any other people would have died, they sucked the moisture from obscure tubers and ate insects. Some symbiotic veneration for the earth increased their latent horror of the white men. The whites, they said, had hurt the earth unforgivably, carving and quartering it into roads and mines. Yet the savages, he knew, killed without conscience, as a kind of jocular sport, as if people were of no importance. Rocks and trees were more permanent. They worshipped rocks and trees.
Rayner”s villa was more like their nomads” camps than he recognized. For seven years he had inhabited it as if he would move out next week, and its most personal ornaments were fragments of petrified wood and colored pebbles which he”d gathered from the wilderness. He still felt as if the place were not his. That was the only way he could endure it, he thought, or endure the town, or perhaps anything. A state of transition. It was spacious and silent, lit by long windows with long green blinds. All its colors were cool. Its ceilings sighed with wood-bladed fans. Nearly all signs of personal life—photographs, papers, mementoes—were out of sight in the louvered cupboards. If Rayner could have expressed himself in décor, this rented space, with its inherited pallor and coolness, might be what he would have chosen.
All the same, it enclosed his rage. From his windows he could see half the town: its gridiron order, its smokestacks. He felt a duty to it, sometimes even a tenderness, but it filled him with unbearable claustrophobia. It seemed thin, narrow, almost without quality. And he felt himself growing thin and narrow with it. The town was superficially pleased by itself. He hated that. Its skyline was just itself. Sometimes, remembering the capital, he wanted to shout in the streets, “Is this all?”