Turning Back the Sun(41)
But even on the bed she looked darkly natural: a barbarian body which clothes had insulted. He stooped over her, shaking his head—but even this sign language was unknown to her. His unbuttoned shirt dangled above her breasts. His need had become a torture. He heard himself say, “You”re beautiful.” But she stayed inert. Only the savage”s perennial knot of puzzlement was exacerbated by the candlelight.
Then he straightened beside her. She was not beautiful, or ugly, or anything he understood. He might only turn her into whatever he wanted her to be, his own untruthfulness. As for the girl herself, she was merely waiting for sex. It was perhaps something simple to her, uncorrupted by love. And he was as much a mystery to her as she to him, so that suddenly he saw himself in her eyes: a white anomaly whose head was oscillating inexplicably.
He stood up in the hot room and went to the door. Behind him the girl ran across to her dress. When Rayner reached the garden he was surprised that night had not come. But only a few minutes had passed. The same three bats were flickering overhead, and the old native”s posture had not altered. Rayner said gently to him, “Tell the girl she”s very pretty, but that our customs are not the same.”
In the dark he could see no change in the old man”s face.
CHAPTER
17
The people imagined the town ringed in a circle of fire. The distant conflagrations blurred every skyline in grey-blue smoke, and tinged with ash the perennial dust which seeped in from the desert. It was impossible to tell how much the suffocating heat arose from the surrounding fires and how much from the unchanging sun. By day the air waited like a physical load to be shouldered or penetrated. At night you could see the flames glinting among the foothills or far out in the wilderness, like the camp fires of an army.
Almost nobody ventured beyond the town”s confines anymore, except with a military escort. Rumors spread of war parties one or two hundred strong, looming and shifting behind the smoke curtains. Where each main street dwindled into the wilderness, the army had set up an earth redoubt mounted with a machine gun. These were tactically useless, since the suburbs could be penetrated from anywhere, and were meant simply to reassure. But in the end they only deepened people”s sense of siege and quickened the creeping terror that was slowly paralyzing all the town”s arteries.
But when Rayner was ordered out again on army secondment, he found a confusion of evidence. Some farmsteads had been looted so thoroughly that even their timbers and steel fittings had vanished; others had been gutted by bush fires. But many stood strangely untouched. Poultry still strutted in their abandoned yards, and their doors and windows swung open as at their panic-stricken abandonment, giving onto rooms where the crockery was neatly stacked and food decomposed on the tables.
People now became afraid that the railroad to the capital would be harassed, and their last link with civilization severed. Already the desertion of the farms had increased the town”s dependence on food railed in from the coast, and prices had soared. An upsurge of nighttime lootings was attributed to savage infiltration, but turned out—whenever uncovered—to be the crimes of hungry farmers and the exasperated poor.
Yet the municipality issued no new law and the military imposed no curfew. It was as if everybody knew what was expected, and obeyed rules against the savages more total than any that might have been issued. The municipal notice-boards were stuck with photographs of native atrocities—murdered farmers, pillaged ranches—and everyone assumed that savages would be turned in on sight. In early September a group of townspeople caught three unarmed natives prowling on the outskirts, and butchered them. Such was the mood of the town that their killers were cheered in the streets.
Among the town”s youth, too, an ugly force of auxiliaries had risen up—roving vigilantes in blue armbands, who patrolled the night streets armed with clubs. These days they were almost the only people to be met with after dark. The few others who ventured out often carried rifles—armed not only against the natives, but against the farmers whose wagons crowded the alleys two abreast.
In Rayner”s clinic the victims of the “savage disease” were multiplying. Sometimes they came secretly, after surgery hours; and most would claim at first to be suffering from some other ailment. He grew to detect them by the vagueness of their declared symptoms, until in an outburst of nerves they would unbutton their blouses or shirts. “What is it, doctor?” Then they watched his face in terror. Compulsively they would run their fingers over the rash, but did so delicately, because it was raised a little from the surrounding skin and they were frightened it might spill over. The simpler or franker among them wondered aloud if they had contracted it from some native they had brushed against three, six, twelve months before.
Dutifully, to comfort them, Rayner would investigate these patients” rashes, their mouths” lining and eyeballs, and so simulate control. A few scientific definitions and prognoses temporarily quietened them, but he could administer only placebos, and the malaise accompanying the rash was often indistinguishable from the lassitude inflicted by the weather. In the end he might only treat their fear. The symptoms should abate when the humidity let up, he said; and the causes were under investigation. Even local foodstuffs were being analyzed. The disease was a mystery, he told them, but mysteries were sometimes benign. It betrayed no one”s personal history, carried no stigma.
But one morning a suicide was cut down from under the town bridge, tainted with the rash from neck to scrotum.