Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [108]
But this was still better than having to eat raw half-rotten birds. Gabriel, hopelessly trying to hide his disgust, would have rather chewed the flesh of his own forearm than this sweet, reeking, melting flesh. His hosts’ systematic spitting and thunderous belches did not really stimulate his appetite either, not to mention the miniature bird carcasses strewn all over the floor.
Once again he wondered if this was the Eskimos’ normal way of doing things, or if they were putting on a show or some sort of hazing whose aim was obscure to him. Was it a kind of initiation ritual that would help him to be a part of them, if only for the short time they had to spend together? Or an attempt at self-assertion, to put him ill at ease, to make him feel how inept and useless he was? Maybe it was just his own delusion of the persecution he had come to associate with most forms of social life: two is company, three is a lynch mob, as he was fond of saying.
He thought of Brentford’s book and its dream of a True Community, but he couldn’t help thinking how opaque the communities would remain to one another, always misunderstanding each others’ motives. Well. Society is what you have to swallow, whether you like it or not, thought Gabriel, gulping down his carrion snack with a lopsided smile that he hoped would pass muster.
“Good, huh?” asked Tuluk, with an inscrutable expression.
It was so good that after four or five rounds, Gabriel was on the verge of walking on all fours through the narrow entrance of the igloo to go out and deposit a full northern Lights yawn, as the delicate local wit called this rather frequent phenomenon. But he remained stoical, comforting himself with the idea that the next course could not possibly be worse.
“Seal’s eyes. Very Good,” said Tuluk, who looked sincere as he smiled, offering him a few small slices of some gelatinous matter, almost happy, it seemed, to share such a treat with their guest.
Gabriel did not sleep, but the night had been a nightmare on its own. He had been crammed, with almost no clothes on, into a krepik between Tuluk and the repulsive Tiblit, whose sexual jokes (if he understood correctly the general notion) amused Gabriel much less than they did the others—they even forced a mild smile onto the shaman’s face. Tiblit even had sex with dogs, a straight-faced Tuluk informed him. For a descendant of dogs, as all qallunaat were according to the generous Inuk mythology, this was hardly reassuring, and Gabriel turned his back toward Tuluk instead, much to the others’ delight.
The body heat brought back the blood to his extremities, but it was more like a long burn than a real relief. His neighbours snored so loudly that Gabriel almost expected the igloo to tumble down on them. He secretly abjured his faith in primitive anarcho-communism, or at least embraced the version which had private rooms and an à la carte menu.
He had the strange, unpleasant feeling than he was being subjected to some sort of life lesson, that he was supposed to enjoy the sensation of breathing under any circumstances or to realize with gratitude that some people had harder lives than himself. But right now he did not enjoy it that much, to speak frankly. And what he mostly realized was that however the Eskimos lived, they were no wiser or better than he was. They knew how to do things that would be hard for him to learn, of course, but they would have a hard time learning some things he knew or could do. And in the end, anyway, the lesson the surrounding conditions were supposed to teach you so brutally was