Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow [131]
I presume had heard me roaring. If I could hear Atti they could hear me. Watched by all, and watched dangerously by enemies, mine and the king's, I lumbered out into the yard and tried to smell the flowers. Not that they had a smell. They had only the color. But that was enough; it fell on my soul, clamoring, while Romilayu always came up behind to offer support, if needed. ("Romilayu, what do you think of these flowers? They are noisy as hell," I said.) At this time, when I must have seemed contaminated and dangerous due to contact with the lion, he did not shrink from me or seek safety in the background. He did not let me down. And since I love loyalty beyond anything else, I tried to show that I excused him from all his obligations to me. "You're a true pal," I said. "You deserve much more than a jeep from me. I want to add something to it." I patted him on the bushy head--my hand seemed very thick; each of my fingers felt like a yam--and then I grunted all the way back to my apartment. There I lay down to rest. I was all roared out. The very marrow was gone from my bones, so that they felt hollow. I lay on my side, heaving and groaning, with that expanded envelope, my belly. Sometimes I imagined that I was from the trotters to the helmet, all six feet four inches of me, the picture of that familiar animal, freckled on the belly, with broken tusks and wide cheekbones. True, inside, my heart ran with human feeling, but externally, in the rind if you like, I showed all the strange abuses and malformations of a lifetime. To tell the truth, I didn't have full confidence in the king's science. Down there in the den, while I went through the utmost hell, he would idle around, calm, easy and almost languid. He would tell me that the lioness made him feel very peaceful. Sometimes as we lay on the trestle after my exercises, all three of us together, he would say, "It is very restful here. Why, I am floating. You must give yourself a chance. You must try �" But I had almost blacked out, before, and I was not yet prepared to start floating. Everything was black and amber, down there in the den. The stone walls themselves were yellowish. Then straw. Then dung. The dust was sulphur-colored. The skin of the lioness lightened gradually from the dark of the spine, toward the chest a ground-ginger shade, and on the belly white pepper, and under the haunches she became as white as the Arctic. But her small heels were black. Her eyes also were ringed absolutely with black. At times she had a meat flavor on her breath. "You must try to make more of a lion of yourself," Dahfu insisted, and that I certainly did. Considering my handicaps, the king declared I was making progress. "Your roaring still is choked. Of course it is natural, as you have such a lot to purge," he would say. That was no lie, as everyone knows. I would have hated to witness my own antics and hear my own voice. Romilayu admitted he had heard me roar, and you couldn't blame the rest of the natives for thinking that I was Dahfu's understudy in the black arts, or whatever they accused him of practicing. But what the king called pathos was actually (I couldn't help myself) a cry which summarized my entire course on this earth, from birth to Africa; and certain words crept into my roars, like "God," "Help," "Lord have mercy," only they came out "Hooolp!" "Moooorcy!" It's funny what words sprang forth. "Au secours," which was "Secoooooooor" and also "De profooooondis," plus snatches from the "Messiah" (He was despised and rejected, a man of sorrows, etcetera). Unbidden, French sometimes comes back to me, the language in which I used to taunt my little friend Fran�s about his sister. So I would roar and the king would sit with his arm about his lioness, as though they were attending an opera performance. She certainly looked very formal in attire. After a dozen or so of these agonizing efforts I would feel dim and dark within the brain and my arms and legs would give out. Allowing me a short rest, he made me try again and again. Afterward he was very sympathetic. He would say,