Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow [39]
you have seen, with all those peculiar human ailments. Just another vehicle for temper and vanity and rashness and all the rest. Who wants it? Who needs it? These things occupy the place where a man's soul should be. But as long as she has started I want her to read me the whole indictment. I can fill her in on a lot of counts, though I don't think I would have to. She seems to know. Lust, rage, and all the rest of it. A regular bargain basement of deformities �" Itelo hesitated, then transmitted as much of this as he could to the queen. She nodded with sympathetic earnestness, slowly opening and closing her hand on the knot of lion skin, and gazing at the roof of the shed--those pipes of amber bamboo and the peaceful symmetrical palm leaves of the thatch. Her hair floated like a million spider lines, while the fat of her arms hung down over her elbows. "She say," Itelo translated carefully, "world is strange to a child. You not a child, sir?" "Oh, how wonderful she is," I said. "True, all too true. I have never been at home in life. All my decay has taken place upon a child." I clasped my hands, and staring at the ground I started to reflect with this inspiration. And when it comes to reflection I am like the third man in a relay race. I can hardly wait to get the baton, but when I do get it I rarely take off in the necessary direction. So what I thought was something like this: The world may be strange to a child, but he does not fear it the way a man fears. He marvels at it. But the grown man mainly dreads it. And why? Because of death. So he arranges to have himself abducted like a child. So what happens will not be his fault. And who is this kidnaper--this gipsy? It is the strangeness of life--a thing that makes death more remote, as in childhood. I was pretty proud of myself, I tell you. And I said to Itelo, "Please say to the old lady for me that most people hate to meet up with a man's trouble. Trouble stinks. So I won't forget your generosity. Now listen--listen," I said to Willatale and Mtalba and Itelo and the members of the court. I started to sing from Handel's _Messiah__: "He was despised and rejected, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief," and from this I took up another part of the same oratorio, "For who shall abide the day of His coming, and who shall stand when He appeareth?" Thus I sang while Willatale, the woman of Bittahness, queen of the Arnewi, softly shook her head; perhaps admiringly. Mtalba's face gleamed with a similar expression and her forehead began to fold softly upward toward the stiffly standing indigo hair, while the ladies flapped and the men whistled in chorus. "Oh, good show, sir. My friend," Itelo said. Only Romilayu, stocky, muscular, short, and wrinkled, seemed disapproving, but due to his wrinkles he had an ingrained expression of that type, and he may have felt no disapproval at all. "Grun-tu-molani," the old queen said. "What's that? What does she say?" "Say, you want to live. Grun-tu-molani. Man want to live." "Yes, yes, yes! Molani. Me molani. She sees that? God will reward her, tell her, for saying it to me. I'll reward her myself. I'll annihilate and blast those frogs clear out of that cistern, sky-high, they'll wish they had never come down from the mountains to bother you. Not only I molani for myself, but for everybody. I could not bear how sad things have become in the world and so I set out because of this molani. Grun-tu-molani, old lady--old queen. Grun-tu-molani, everybody!" I raised my helmet to all the family and members of the court. "Grun-tu-molani. God does not shoot dice with our souls, and therefore grun-tu-molani." They muttered back, smiling at me, "Tu-molani." Mtalba, with her lips shut, but the rest of her face expanded to a remarkable extent with happiness and her little henna-dipped hands with puckered wrists at rest on her hips, was looking into my eyes meltingly.
VIII
Now, I come from a stock that has been damned and derided for more than a hundred years, and when I sat smashing bottles beside the eternal sea it wasn't only my great ancestors,