Possessing the Secret of Joy - Alice Walker [59]
PART TWENTY
ADAM
FATHER, HEAR MY CONFESSION.
It is in vain that I tell the young man I am not a priest. He has been waiting among the rest to die, since we first visited Tashi in the prison. His face is covered with purple lesions, his head is bald, his slight frame little more than bones. What distinguished him from the beginning, when I hunkered down to speak to him, was his insistence that he was a medical student: “With many years in university,” he’d said, with a weak, superior flutter of his hand. This, and the fact that as he grew even weaker, his large brown eyes bruised with fear, he took to drawing himself up on his haunches and crossing his elbows on top of his head. He would remain in this odd position, whimpering, for hours; until he fell over in weariness or was pushed over by someone moving past.
I had always resisted intimacy with the victims. It was as if my heart, under the burden of my own suffering, and having already witnessed so much human devastation, had gone numb.
However: My name is Hartford, he said, with a grimness to match my own. And yet, because of the unexpected associations evoked by his name (an elk, an American city in Connecticut and an insurance company), I smiled. He seemed charmed, as a child might be, by this response, and appeared to savor it, as a little child might a sweet. Wonderingly he withdrew the clawlike hand that had snagged my sleeve, and placed it against his own cracked, unsmiling lips.
Everything he said and did was in slow motion; it was several minutes before he spoke again.
In the old days, he said, whispering, there was more harmony in the world between man and creature. I have heard this said: in truth, how can I know? In the not so old days we people were hunted down and killed or stolen from our land and families to work for other people far across the sea. Hunted we were, like we hunt the monkey and the chimpanzee.
Here Hartford groaned and closed his eyes. Bubbles of perspiration burst on his skin. It was as if, suddenly, his body became a fountain. I mopped his skin with the tattered towel I carried with me, and when the sweating stopped, placed my hand on his swollen knee, which, protruding beneath the skin of his leg, was like a black coconut.
Father, he said, I am not a medical student. That is a lie I have told to salvage my self-respect.
I patted his knee, somehow startled at the intensity of his remorse; how difficult it was for him to disgorge these few words of shame. Besides, I honestly did not care.
Being a medical student, becoming a doctor, was only a dream I had, he sighed. When the pharmaceutical company offered us local boys “positions” in their factory, I thought my dream was on the way to becoming reality.
We did not know anything about these men. They were strange. They always wore white, so that they looked like the doctors we saw in films and on TV. They did not see you when they looked, that we knew. We felt we did not exist to them any more than they did to us. We could feel how strange we were to them, as well. We had always hunted monkeys and chimpanzees, they reminded us. What they were asking was nothing new. Only now there would be money, and, of course, often there would be meat. Both to eat and to sell.
So it began.
At first I was in the rainforest, hunting with the other boys. We loved our guns. We trapped and dragged back to the factory more monkeys and chimps than I’d even thought there were. I grew to identify, and sometimes mimic, chimp and monkey behavior. Monkey gestures. The mother always placed the baby behind her body, the little one’s arm reaching around to her breast; the father always fought, then screeched a warning to others as he ran away. If we captured his mate and child, he would often follow so closely and with such disregard for his own safety it was easy to shoot him. This we often did, laughing.
He was not needed anyway. We were told this by the pharmaceutical company, but we soon saw it for ourselves. Only the females