Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow [118]
allochiria, and in the end managed to make sense of a paragraph here and there. Most of these articles had to do with the relation between body and brain, and they especially emphasized posture, confusions between right and left, and various exaggerations and deformities of sensation. Thus a fellow with a normal leg might be convinced that he had the leg of an elephant. This was very interesting in itself and a few of the descriptions were absolutely dandy. What I kept thinking was, "I'd better scour, brighten, freshen up the old intelligence, and understand what the man is driving at, for my life may depend on it." It was just my luck to think I had found the conditions of life simplified so I could deal with them--finally!--and then to end up in a ramshackle palace reading these advanced medical publications. I suppose there must be few native princes left who are not educated, and all the polytechnical schools enroll gens de couleur from all over the world, and some of them have made prodigious discoveries already. But I never heard of anyone who was precisely on King Dahfu's track. Of course it was possible that he was in a league all by himself. This suggested again that I might find myself in some really hot water with him, for you can't expect people who are in a class by themselves to be reasonable. Being the only occupant of a certain class, I know this from personal experience. I was taking a short rest from the article by Scheminsky, playing a game of solitaire and breathing hard as I bent over it, when the king's Uncle Horko, on this particular day of heat, entered my room on the first floor of the palace. Behind him came the Bunam, and with the Bunam there was always his companion or assistant, the black-leather man. These three made way to let a fourth person enter, an elderly woman who had the look of a widow. You can seldom be mistaken about widows. They had fetched her in to see me, and from their way of standing aside it was plain she was the principal visitor. Preparatory to rising, I gave a stagger--space was limited in my room and it was already pretty well occupied by Tamba and Bebu, who were lying down, and Romilayu, who was in the corner. There were eight of us in a room not really big enough to hold me. The bed was fixed and couldn't be moved outside. It was covered with hides and native rags, and the spattered cards over which I had been brooding were laid out in four uneven files--I had pushed aside King Dahfu's literature. And now they brought me this elderly woman in a fringed dress that hung from her shoulders to about the middle of her thighs. They filed in from the burning wilds of the African afternoon and, as I had been fixed with the seeing blindness of a card player on the glossy, dirty reds and blacks, I couldn't focus at first on the woman. But then she came near to me, and I saw that she had a round but not perfectly round face. On one side of it the symmetry was out. At the jaw, this was. Her nose was cocked and she had large lips, while the gentle forward projection of her face made it seem that she was offering it to you. Her mouth was somewhat lacking in teeth but I recognized her at once. "Why," I thought, "it's a relative of Dahfu's. She must be his mother." I saw the relationship in the slope of her face and in the lips and the red tinge of her eyes. "Yasra. Queen," said Horko. "Dahfu mama." "Ma'am, it's an honor," I said. She took my hand and placed it on her head, which was shaved, of course. All the married women had shaven heads. Her action was facilitated by a difference of almost two feet in our heights. Horko and I stood over all the rest. He was wrapped in his red cloth, and the stones in his ears hung like the two lobes of a rooster when he bent to speak to her. I took off my helmet, baring the huge welts and bruises on my nose and cheeks, left over from the rain ceremony. My eyes must have been a little crazy with solemnity for they drew the notice of the black-leather man, who appeared to point at them and said something to the Bunam. But I put the old queen's hand