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Protista 2
Her arms were long and thin and the fingers were long and
finely moulded though her nails, like mine, had long since
lost their natural lustre and had become broken and jagged.
And she was gentle, fiercely so, for she knew her great
strength. She was a head taller than I and her long full legs
sometimes outstrode me when we went out for a walk in the
Lesapi Valley. I had named the valley Lesapi after my birthplace where once I had learned to fish, to swim and to lie back
into the soft green grass and relax, with my eyes closed and my
head ringing with the cawing of the crows and the leisurely
moo of cows grazing on Mr Robert's side of the river, where it
was fenced and there was a notice about trespassers. And in
the summer the white people held rubber-boat races on the
river and sometimes I was allowed to watch them swirling
along in the breezy hold of the river. But somebody drowned
one day and my father told me not to go down to the river any
more because the drowned boy would have turned into a
manfish and he would want to have company in the depths of
the waters. Water was good, but only when it did not have a
manfish in it. My first nightmare was about a white manfish
which materialised in my room and licked its great jaws at me
and came towards my bed and said: 'Come, come, come with
me', and it raised its hand and drew a circle on the wall behind
my head and said, 'That circle will always bleed until you come
tome.' I looked at his hand and the fingers were webbed, with
livid skin attaching each finger to another finger. And then he
stretched out his index finger and touched my cheek with it. It
was like being touched by a red-hot spike; and I cried out, but I
could not hear my own voice: and they were trying to break
down the door, and I cried out louder and the wooden door
splintered apart and father rushed in with a world war in his
eyes. But the manfish had gone; and there was a black frog
squatting where he had been. The next day the medicine-man
came and examined me and shook his head and said that an
enemy had done it. He named Barbara's father, and my father
bought strong medicine which would make what had been
done to me boomerang on Barbara's father. They then made
little incisions on my face and on my chest and rubbed a black
powder into them, and said that should I ever come near water
I must say to myself: 'Help me, grandfather.' My grandfather
was dead, but they said that his spirit was always looking and
watching over me. They made a fire and cast the black frog into
it, and the medicine man said he would seed its ashes in
Barbara's father's garden. But he could do nothing about the
circle on the wall, because although I could clearly see it no one
else could. Shortly after this, my eyes dimmed a little and I
have had to wear spectacles since then; at the time, however, it
only made the little circle jump sharply at me each time I
entered my room. The spot where the manfish had touched
me swelled with pus, and mother had to boil water with lots of
salt and then squeeze the pus out and bathe it with the salted
water; after that it healed a little, and ever since I have always
had a little black mark there on my face. Soon afterwards
Barbara's father went mad and one day his body was fished
out of the river by police divers who wore black fishsuits.
There were various abrasions on his face and the body was
utterly naked, and something in the river seemed to have tried
to eat him -- there were curious toothmarks on his buttocks
and his shoulders had been partially eaten; the hands looked
as though something had chewed them and tried to gnaw
them from the arms.
Every morning, when the sun rose, there was a fine mist in
the valley, and the interplay of the sun's rays on it created fantastic images within the mist. And they invariably looked
like people I had once known. The shapes within the mist were
somewhat formless, and yet with such a realistic solidity to
them that I could never quite decide what to think. I had
named the valley to give it the myths and faces of moments in
my own life. But as the years went by, the waterless valley -- paralysed by the cramping effects of an overwhelming
oppression-emitted its own symbolic mists which overpowered my own imagination, and at last so erupted with its
own smoke and fire and faces and shapes that I could not tell
which valley was the real Lesapi. I had been physically weakened by the great
shortage of water and the shortage of food. Besides, I had
never been very strong. And this eerie region which was so
stricken by the sun seemed to have a prodigious population
of insects: flies, mosquitoes, cicadas, spiders, and
scorpions. The cicadas were good to eat; the rest tormented
me with their sudden stinging. The massive difference between the temperature of the days and the temperature
of the nights was also a severe torture. And the manner in
which I had been brought up was not calculated to cramp and
stifle the imagination; rather my imagination has always been
quick to the point of frightening me. All this made the valley
come out alive at my very doorstep. The circle which Maria
had drawn on the wall seemed alive; it was in constant motion,
changing colour, breaking and rearranging itself into a cross,
moving again into a circle and bleeding and running down the
wall till I cried in my sleep. It seemed I was in many places at
one and the same time; my sleeping and waking had no
difference between them. There was a sharp but remote flame
of pain inside my head; it seemed I was not so much talking to
myself as talking to the things of that valley.
To be
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