Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow [45]
is what gives them the power to do it, I guess, canceling all those terrible things. I am not dumb and blind, and I have observed a connection between women's love and the great principles of life. If I hadn't picked this up by myself, surely Lily would have pointed it out to me. Romilayu didn't wake but slept on with one hand slipped under his scarred cheek and the hair swelled out from his head to one side. Glassy rainbows from the moon passed across the doorway, and there were fires outside made with dried dung and thorn branches. The Arnewi were sitting up with their dying cattle. As Mtalba continued to sigh and caress and smooch me and lead my finger-tips over her skin and between her lips, I realized she had come for a purpose, this mountainous woman with the indigo hair, and I lifted my arm and let it fall on Romilayu's face. He opened his eyes then but didn't remove the hand from under his cheek or otherwise change his position. "Romilayu." "Whut you want, sah?" said he, still lying there. "Sit up, sit up. We have a visitor." He was unsurprised by this and he rose. Moonlight came in by way of the wicker-work and the door, the moon growing more clean and pure, as if perfuming the air, not only lighting it. Mtalba sat with her arms at rest upon the slopes of her body. "Find out what is the purpose of this visit," I said. And so he began to talk to her, and addressed her formally, for he was a great stickler, Romilayu, for correctness, African style, and was on his court manners even in the middle of the night. Then Mtalba started to speak. She had a sweet voice, sometimes rapid and sometimes drawling in her throat. From this conversation the fact came out that she wanted me to buy her, and, realizing that I didn't have the bride price, she had brought it to me tonight. "Got to pay, sah, fo' womans." "That I know, pal." "You don' pay, womans no respect himself, sah." Then I started to say that I was a rich man and could afford any kind of price, but I realized that money had nothing to do with it and I said, "Hah, that's very handsome of her. She is built like Mount Everest but has a lot of delicacy. Tell her I thank her and send her home. What time is it, I wonder. Christ, if I don't get my sleep I'll be in no condition to take on those frogs tomorrow. Don't you see, Romilayu, the thing is up to me alone?" But he said all the stuff she had brought was lying outside, and she wanted me to see it, and so I rose, highly unwilling, and we went out of the hut. She had come with an escort, and when they saw me in the moonlight with my sun helmet they began to cheer as if I were the groom already--they did it softly as the hour was late. The gifts were lying on a big mat, and they made a large mound--robes, ornaments, drums, paints, and dyes: she gave Romilayu an inventory of the contents and he was transmitting it. "She's a grand person. A great human being," I said. "Hasn't she got a husband already?" To this there could be no definite answer, as she was a woman of Bittahness and it didn't matter how many times she married. It would do no good, I knew, to tell her that I already had a wife. It hadn't stopped Lily, and it certainly would cut no ice with Mtalba. To display the greatness of the dowry, Mtalba began to put on some of the robes to the accompaniment of a xylophone made of bones played by one of her party, a fellow with a big knobby ring on his knuckle. He smiled as if he were giving the woman of Bittahness away, and she meantime was showing off the gowns and wrappers, gathering them around her shoulders, and winding them about her hips, which required a separate and broader movement. Sometimes she wore a half-veil across the bridge of her nose, Arab style, which set off her loving eyes and occasionally as she jingled with her hennaed hands she took off, huge but gay, looking back at me over her shoulder with those signs of suffering about her nose and lips which come from love only. She would saunter, she would teeter, depending on the rhythm given by the little xylophone of hollow bones--the feet of a rhinoceros