The Impressionist (46 page)

By custom the goats, land and possessions of a dead Fotse are divided between as many as twelve near-relatives. The process of division is taken very seriously, and shares (allocated in proportions laid down by the Fotse ancestors) must be exact. This means that beneficiaries often find themselves in possession of abstract quantities, like three-quarters of a bull or a third of a wife. Over the centuries, Fotse land, and especially the land on which homesteads are built, has been subdivided so many times that individual plots may be no more than two or three square feet in size. The same is true of most other goods and services. The custom of Fo involves the aggregation of these tiny amounts into useful quantities – whole wives, ploughable fields and so on – through the practice of barter. Since beneficiaries of a dead Fotse may themselves have an obligation to share Fo proceeds with their own relatives, who themselves have a set of Fo obligations, these negotiations become fiendishly complex, a complexity further increased by the Fotse’s love of speculation.

During the time of Fo (which in practice is continuous, since most Fo legacies take more than a year to resolve, and individual Fotse are usually involved in several parallel Fo negotiations) it is permissable to initiate ‘Gofo’ – ‘on’ or ‘upward’ Fo. This is a system of betting on future Fo outcomes, and making promises to swap a certain plot of land or number of goats if a certain Fo bequest takes place. If a Fotse believes that three rainy seasons in the future his neighbour may inherit a plot of land in which he is interested, he may undertake to swap a fixed or variable number of goats (or abstract goat parts, or their equivalent in trade goods) for that plot, perhaps with the proviso that there has been a high (or low) millet yield, or that another Fo transaction does not obligate him to give up the plot with which he intends to aggregate the plot that is the object of the Gofo transaction.

Gofo promises can themselves be bartered, and it is usually through aggregation of promises, rather than through the goods themselves, that Fotse fortunes are made. In Fotse legend, the trickster-hero Lifi is so clever at manipulating Gofo transactions that he frequently finds himself in possession of the entire Fotse herd and lands, though he usually loses them again through his fondness for millet beer. The substance of a major song cycle (which takes Fotse bards up to three weeks to recite in full) is the enumeration of the canny transactions through which Lifi wins the hand of the sky-princess Neshdaqa by leveraging a minuscule holding in her uncle’s favourite speckled heifer. Fo obligations are recorded on beaded necklaces, different colours and types of bead representing different states of affairs, the exact patterns varying subtly from district to district. As a result, the Fotse make a colourful spectacle, especially at funerals.

Professor Chapel believes that Fo is the reason the primitive Fotse have made so little technological and social progress. Fo negotiations are so time-consuming that they push most other considerations out of the way. The complete absence of a concept of utility in Fotse culture means that the tribe’s eventual extinction is, in his opinion, unavoidable. He drifts into a description of Fotse marriage ceremonies (marriage being conceptualized by the Fotse as merely a sub-form of Gofo), and Jonathan sneaks a look at Star, who appears to have fallen asleep.

The Professor’s mind is elsewhere too. He has given his ‘General Introduction to the Social Organization of the Fotse’ dozens of times before, and, as he delivers the words written on his yellowing typescript, he is far away, exploring a pleasurable chain of mental associations which stretches back to his days as a young lecturer, heroic times before the discipline of anthropology had fully emerged from its chrysalis. At certain points in his speech, images arise that have nothing to do with the Fotse or their customs. They are memories, sensations triggered by the repetition of the familiar words like stored electric charge released from a battery. They are vivid, immediate and oddly compulsive; when they take place, the Professor has a squirming sensation inside, which he rather likes.

Psychology has never been one of Henry Chapel’s interests, but if it were, he might be tempted to look to his childhood for an explanation. The kind of baby who would drop his rattle out of his pram a hundred times in a row, he took the same pleasure each time his nanny picked it up and gave it back. The rattle’s return produced a charge of happiness, the thrill of the predictable, the controlled. Later there were sewing boxes tipped out and reorganized, all the blue buttons in one compartment, all the thimbles in another. Later still there were collections – of coins, stamps, butterflies and more unusual things, like ticket stubs and cherry pips. What gave young Henry such pleasure was not, like other children, the completion of a set, the aspiration to totality. It had something to do with action, the gesture of sticking a hinge on the back of a penny red or lifting the silver dollar to make it glint in the light. Each time the pleasure was the same pleasure, the very same pleasure, which brought back with it all the excitement and happiness of the first time the action was performed. Carry the coin-box into the drawing room. Lift up the dollar in the left hand, not the right… How beautiful! How kind of Uncle Alfred to bring it back! By the time he reached the age of ten, he had hundreds of these rituals, each designed to deliver a little affective charge, all performed with a singular religious devotion.

Events (chiefly a poor grasp of mathematics) conspired against the adolescent Henry’s plan to become a physicist, and he was drawn into the study of cultures and peoples, applying to societies the rigorous classifiying spirit he had hoped to use on stars or elementary particles. He did not mind too much, for the pleasure of fitting the messy shapes of life into the clean outlines of a theory was the same, whatever its object.

Silver dollar… Cherry pip… Solenoid… Andaman Islander…

Aha!

Oxford beckoned, and later on Africa, though Africa only really became important when he had exhausted Oxford. To a mind like Professor Chapel’s, places quickly take on a cluttered quality. When somewhere reminds one of something, and all it takes is an action, a smell, a word or a snatch of music to bring the old feeling back in full, it is often tempting to perform the action, say the word or keep in your pocket an old handkerchief which has a singular musky scent about it, just to help things along. Should tapping your cane three times on the kerbstone outside Worcester College make you happy because it reminds you of the afternoon you received tenure, the natural tendency is to tap your cane every time you pass. When such associations settle too thickly on any one piece of ground, the journey up Beaumont Street can take hours.

Poetical Frenchmen have been bedridden by similar conditions, but Chapel is made of sterner stuff. He is able to control himself, except in cases of extreme stimulation, and usually the routines are inconspicuous enough to pass without notice. Perhaps a few people have remarked that he invariably whistles the ‘Ode to Joy’ in the cheese shop (eroticism, the aroma of cheddar, an intimate moment, 1899), or that he always waits for three vehicles to pass before crossing the road outside Christ Church (relief, terrible traffic accident, man not looking, 1908). But not many. There are, however, less discreet landmines of memory buried around town. Whenever he enters the Barabbas College Hall, he has an urge to engage with the nearest dark-haired person in what can only be described as fondling, because it reminds him of something that happened at a college Gaudy in 1902. There is also a spot in the university parks where, in 1897, he stumbled across a courting couple. These days he avoids it entirely, having developed an unhealthy fascination for the place.

That was a black period. When he was almost caught by a policeman before he had time to get his trousers back on, he knew he had to do something. Oxford had become a palimpsest. Each time he walked through its streets, he was forced to read off all the previous walks in tiny rituals, a cascade of tics, mutter-ings and abrupt gestures which led the gossips in the senior common room to diagnose overwork. Chapel felt trapped, and began to dream of escaping to a blank place, somewhere to which he was perfectly, blessedly indifferent.

Africa!

The idea of actually visiting some of the people he studied had never occurred to him, but fieldwork was coming into fashion, and nowhere seemed blanker than the desert lands north of the Oil Rivers in British West Africa. The Fotse had been briefly described by a French missionary, but were otherwise unknown to science. To his excitement, Chapel found, as he pored over a map, that nothing about their country reminded him of anything at all. Most of the paper was blank white space. As soon as the next long vac came around, he set off.

That was many years ago. Despite the privations of Fotse life, Chapel discovered what he had sought in Africa. Everything was new. Everything was soothingly unfamiliar. The natives gathered to meet him under the big frangipani tree at the centre of their village looked entirely unlike a common room full of dons, or a lecture room full of students, or a tea party, or a congregation, or a theatre crowd. The land went on for ever, a uniform alien red. When he went back to Oxford for Michaelmas term, he felt refreshed – or rather, that Oxford had been refreshed. The cleansing effect lasted several years. When it got bad again, he did more fieldwork. A rhythm was established, only interrupted by the war. Every few years, the Professor would spend the vac in Fotseland, taking notes about the people and trying not to drink unboiled water, which they had an annoying habit of offering him, even after he explained that it would make him ill.

On his fourth visit, he had the insight that made his reputation, confirming him as one of the great Africanists of his generation. It was about the water. The thing had become absurd. Everywhere he went in Fotseland, people would rush out with cups, clamouring for him to take, drink, quench his thirst. On his first tour he had supposed it was simply traditional hospitality, and would decline with elaborate and tiring courtesies. Then, little by little, he discerned that the liquid in the proffered gourds and beakers was even dirtier than most Fotse water. It was as if the villagers went out of their way to make it so. For some time he reined in paranoid thoughts. Only when, on returning for a fourth time, he was presented with a pitcher of green-brown slime with an unidentified brown solid floating on the surface, did he ask, through an interpreter, whether there was any reason for it.

Gofo, was the answer.

It took him hours of interviewing to discover what the word meant. Gradually, week by week, the truth emerged. It seemed that soon after his first arrival and acceptance by the tribe, his chances of survival had been discussed and rated as poor. Fotse elders opined that disease, heat stroke or leopard attack were almost certain to kill the white man within a few weeks. This was not considered a controversial judgement, having always been the case before. On this basis, and on the basis that he was patently a loner with no clan or society ties (having arrived without goats, women or sons, at the head of a column of Hausa porters), they performed a valuation of his clothing and possessions, converting them into nominal quantities of goats, wives and millet. In anticipation of his imminent death these Fo amounts were divided among the more important elders, and immediately became the subject of intense Gofo bargaining.

When Chapel departed alive, there had been great disappointment. The Gofo had, in the way of Gofo, drawn in several huge aggregates of promises, covering a significant proportion of Fotse land and wealth. The amount at stake was now enormous, and because conflicting valuations had been put on a pair of his riding boots by two rival clan heads, the issue had taken on political significance. While he remained alive, nothing could be resolved. So, when he came back two years later, the welcome was ecstatic. This was not (as he had written in
Some Months in a Hut with No Plumbing,
his popular memoir of the first two tours) ‘an outpouring of uncontrolled joy at the return of a great chief, but relief that the controversial transactions, which had become a festering sore on the Fotse body politic, finally stood a chance of completion. Again the Fotse were disappointed, and over the next few years the matter continued to create tension between northern and southern clans. Some disaggregation of the positions took place during this time, along with a corresponding increase in the number of potential beneficiaries, until (the informant sheepishly revealed) almost everyone in Fotseland now stood to receive a small but significant lump sum on Chapel’s death. However, the complexity did not end there. Because of the interconnection of a series of transactions concerning riverside pasturage in the south, certain conditions had to be met. Only if Chapel’s demise was caused by one of the many waterborne diseases endemic to Fotseland (the pasturage case turning on a recondite issue concerning the rate of death of goats from such diseases, which had become linked to the disputed valuation of the boots, a figure largely derived from the area of leather required to make them, as expressed in sixteenths of a cow) would the Gofo trigger the long-awaited mass distribution of wealth.

The discovery that everyone had been trying to give him bilharzia because of his boots was troubling. The Professor was not sure he had understood correctly. Most of the nuances of Gofo escaped him, and for some time he thought he was in danger of being murdered, sleeping with a revolver under his pillow. He considered leaving, but was persuaded by his interpreter that no one actually bore a grudge against him. The interpreter assured him that he was in fact a popular man, and the desire that he might catch a fever and die was strictly a business matter, not affecting his personal relationships with anyone. The interpreter reminded him that for a Fotse it would be dishonourable to kill him. This put his mind at rest, a little.

Though direct murder was out of the question, the interpreter admitted that giving him dirty water was seen as an acceptable level of gamesmanship. No one seriously expected him to die, since over the years he had consumed great quantities of dirty water without knowing, in his food and so on, and now there were rumours that a profitable position was being built up by some speculators in the Lizard Society around the proposition that he would lead a long and healthy life. He should look for signs. For example, the first time he was offered the minced masculine organs of a camel at dinner, it would be a signifier of positive change. Where once there was water, soon there would be glands, to give him procreative strength. Professor Chapel had always been of a phlegmatic disposition, and he understood about the importance of separating one’s business and emotional lives. So he weathered the storm and returned to Oxford at the end of the summer, to ruminate on what he had discovered.