The Pop’s Rhinoceros (101 page)

“Grinding now.”

The old man began measuring out substances from the calabashes arrayed on the bench, and the boy set to work with pestle and mortar, grinding dry clay and ashes to a grayish powder in which the pale red of the clay was all but lost. The old man rummaged in his basket, emerging with a thin awl. Holding the figure in one hand, he began to bore a narrow hole a little below the breastplate, withdrawing the tool at intervals and peering closely at its point until, when he rubbed it between thumb and forefinger, a dull red smudge indicated that he had reached the clay core. He bored a second hole in the figure’s back, then inserted the two bronze rods, twisting them in until the slick resistance of the wax gave way to the granular abrasion of the clay.

“What are these for?” he demanded.

The boy frowned. There was the clay core, then the wax, then more clay, which they would apply to make the mold. The wax would be displaced by bronze, and the rods were made of bronze, too, protruding less than a finger’s length. The clay would cover them, he thought, so they could not be for lifting the mold. The wax would melt and run out. …

“The rods are to hold the core in place when the wax melts,” he said.

The old man stared at him, at a loss for words for once. “Yes,” he said eventually. “Without the rods the core would sink to the bottom of the mold. That is what the rods are for.” The stunned expression began to fade from his face.

“What are ‘sprues’?” asked the boy.

“Go outside and make water. Good example of a sprue,” the old man
snorted, recovering from his surprise. “Where does the wax go when we pour in the bronze? How does piss get out when your bladder’s full? A sprue is an outlet for hot liquids.” He took the powder from the boy and dipped his finger in it. A half-ladle of water and some stirring turned it to a heavy black paste. A splash or two more and it was a thick liquid. The old man picked up his brush and dipped it into the mortar-bowl. “Bronze breathes,” he muttered, painting the smooth liquid over the figure, using the end of the brush to work it into the crevices and indentations. “So it needs a skin to breathe through.”

“Like the sprues,” said the boy. “Or else where’s all that breath going to go?”

The old man grunted sourly. When he was finished painting, he handed the glistening black figure to the boy. “Put it outside, but not in the sun. Let the air dry it slowly.”

By midafternoon the slick coating had dried to a shell of matte gray. The old man mixed clay in a calabash, working in the goat-hair and chaff. The boy’s task then was to roll out little strips, about the size of his thumb and as thin as he could make them. The old man fashioned pellets and began by kneading them carefully to the shapes of the wax figure’s various cavities. He began tamping the smallest pieces into nooks and crannies with a tiny wooden spatula, then took up the first of the boy’s strips and wound it about the head. Already blunted by the first coating, the model’s details disappeared entirely as he plugged, wrapped, and overlaid them with the pellets and strips of this new admixture. The boy yawned.

“Bored?” the old man inquired. “You think you have learned enough about bronze-casting now?”

When he was finished, the figure was barely recognizable as a seated man with two short rods sticking out of his chest and back, some inexplicable lumps on his shoulders, and a bulge between his feet. The boy took the object outside again. He had chosen a spot in the shade of the compound’s south wall, next to his charcoal pile. A breeze supplied the air that the old man had demanded. Some stones had been piled there, and he placed the clay-encased figure on the topmost. Then he sat back and waited for it to dry.

So it went on: waiting, carrying the object back inside, rolling out strips of clay and watching the old man apply them, carrying the object back outside again, waiting again, and each new application blunted the outline of the seated man further. It became a vaguely indented anthill, then a smooth one, then a squat log stood on its end, and the only clue to the clay’s contents was the projection of the waxen sprues, poking out like a centipede’s feelers, and the nubs of the bronze rods on the top. The old man built up little walls of clay to either side of these, widening and thickening them gradually until they formed two bowls set at an angle to the mold with a channel leading to the rods themselves. Now, thought the boy, it looks like a tree stump with ears. He carried it outside again. More waiting. More drying. Finally the old man slapped on the last of the clay, which was a single fat strip rather wetter than the others, smoothed it off, and told the boy to fetch the iron rings.

“He’s in the clay now,” the old man said grimly. A new note; it brought the boy’s head up. “Know what these are for?” He took the rings and knocked them together. They rang dully, and the boy shook his head.

“They’re to keep him in while we cook him.”

The old man had lost him. There was a lump of wax in a lump of clay, and the old man was forcing the iron rings over both ends “to keep him in.” Now he wished he had not asked about the sprues. If he had not asked then, he would have asked now. But he had, and so he did not. Only so much pride could be swallowed in one day. The old man smeared more clay over the rings, embedding them in the mold. He was hunched over, working quickly. Abruptly he unbent and jumped to his feet, lifting the mold and thumping it down on the bench.

“Not one,” he announced. “Two.”

He paused.

“Two!”

The boy tensed. The old man was unclean in his habits, ill-natured, his tongue rough as sharkskin and wagged in a mouth fouler than an old fish-basket. He was a drunkard. His breath smelled like a dog’s. But up till now he had not seemed mad. The boy readied himself to run. Then he remembered the old man’s ramblings as he had carved the
ichi
-marks on the Eze-Nri’s face, the last details. He had been all but asleep.

“Eri’s sons,” he hazarded.

The old man nodded, forgetting to react with his usual insulting surprise at this evidence of thought. He was standing with his palms flat on the bench, but now, as he turned, the light from the door caught his face oddly, and it seemed to the boy that he was older than before. Much older. It lasted only for the moment it took him to squat down.

“Ifikuanim and his nameless brother. When Eri died they cut his land in two. East of the River was Ifikuanim’s land. West of the River was his brother’s. You know this story, boy?”

The old man seemed to have forgotten his earlier speech, or at least the boy’s professed ignorance then. He shook his head and listened as the old man told how on his side of the River Ifikuanim cleared the forest and planted yam and coco-palm, how he caught goats and tamed them, then cattle, even dogs.

“Ifikuanim worked under the open sky, under the sun which burned him, so that people might eat what he grew.”

Everybody knew this, thought the boy. But when the old man began talking of the brother, the boy began to realize that the old man might indeed be weak-witted, or simply a liar. Eri had one son. One, not two. There was no “brother.”

“But the other brother didn’t like the hoe, didn’t like the ax, didn’t like felling, or clearing, or planting, or weeding. He didn’t like the sun, either. What he liked was hunting. He kept his land as forest, and he kept himself within it.”

The old man was jabbering away.

“He was a good hunter; even the leopard feared him. Every time he killed a
leopard he took just one tooth for himself, and he had twenty necklaces of leopard’s teeth. He made himself a horn from the tusk of a boar that stood taller than himself. Every day he filled his game-bag till it took ten men to lift it. But he still could not feed his people. So he began crossing over the River.”

The boy understood now. He understood perfectly. He nodded eagerly at each sentence and made little noises of assent. He listened intently, respectfully, raptly. It was quite clear what the old man was doing. He would leave here and tell all his friends that Eri had two sons; that’s what the old man was counting on. He was trying to make a fool of him again. And his friends would think him an idiot. …

You don’t fool me for an instant, he thought, smiling encouragement as the old man began telling how Ifikuanim tracked his brother and how he could never catch him.

“Until he went to Enyi,” said the old man. “Ifikuanim found Enyi by a waterhole, his trunk sucking up water to spray on his back. Enyi was happy to help. The brother hunted him, too. He told Ifikuanim to stop chasing around, his brother would be there soon enough. There was plenty of game at this waterhole.”

“What happened next?” asked the boy, dutifully wide-eyed.

The old man fell silent for a while. To concoct the rest of this ridiculous tale, his audience of one surmised. When he resumed, his tone was more brusque, as though he regretted having begun the story and now wished only to conclude it.

“What happened next was they caught him. They caught him by the waterhole, just as Enyi promised, and they rolled him in the clay there till he was covered from head to foot. Then they rolled him some more, until the weight of the clay was so heavy that he could not stand. He fell on all fours like an animal. They stripped off his necklaces of leopard’s teeth. They took his hunting-horn and stuck it on the end of his nose. Every time he tried to run back into the forest, Enyi and Ifikuanim herded him back to the waterhole and rolled him in the clay again. They held him down until the sun had dried it hard.”

That was when the boy recognized the story. Enyi, the watering hole, the tusk stuck on the nose … It all came from a children’s song. He barely remembered it. The old man must take him for a simpleton.

“He was trapped in it like a turtle in its shell, and he was too ashamed to go back to his people like that, so he tried to rub off the clay against a tree. Then he tried to break off the horn they had stuck on his nose, so he hit it against a rock, but it would not break. It was stuck there in front of his face. That is why he is called Ezodu, which means Tusk-hater. It was his own hunting horn. A boar’s tusk. They put it there to mock him.”

Yes, yes, yes, thought the boy. They had sung it as children. Even the most dull-witted could manage it. One group would sing out questions like “How did Ezodu get his horn?” Or, “Why is Ezodu the color of mud?” Then the other group would sing the answer, which was always the same: “Enyi knows! Enyi
knows!” It always ended the same way, too. One group would sing, “Why did Ezodu run away?” Then the other group would answer, “Ezodu will be back one day!” That was it.

The old man had stopped speaking and nodded to himself as though confirming that this was the end of the story. Now he was lifting the damp mold off the bench. The boy realized that some response was required of him.

“What happened to the brother after that?”

The old man shrugged. “That is the end of the story. Ifikuanim was the second Eze-Nri. He planted his brother’s old hunting ground with yam and coco-palm. He claimed the beasts that his brother had hunted for himself. Good story, eh?”

The boy agreed that it was.

“Never tell it to anyone, understand?”

The boy nodded, but uncertainly, for the old man was staring at him with an odd expression on his face.

“Want to know why?” asked the old man. He took the boy’s silence for assent and continued, “Because they will not believe it then any more than you believe it now.”

He raised his hand before the boy could protest and looked down at the mold balanced precariously in the crook of his arm. “Different story now. Shorter. What do Nri-people say when the Eze-Nri ceases his dreaming? What do they say when his daughter washes him and lays him to rest?”

He was scrutinizing the rings around the mold, not looking at the boy.

“The iron is broken,” the boy replied.

The old man nodded.

“They do, they do. But the iron is never truly broken. Now take this outside. When it is dry, we will cast bronze.”

It or them? Specimen or species? The Beast is plural, its components oblivious: Salvestro, Bernardo, and Diego; a triple-humped dromedary or elasticated amphibrach, zigging and zagging, skidding around the angles of a slalomed path whose obliquities not only mitigated the steepness of the valley’s sides, but also turned its travelers’ heads this way and that, spinning them about and throwing off their senses of direction, perspective, proportion. … Where were they going, apart from down? The forest canopy closed again over their heads, blocking out direct sight of the sun. The root problem resurfaced, and there was the constant hazard of mutual collision, for the trio tended to bunch when the track took one of its many abrupt turns, the rearmost shunting the foremost into ankle-snagging ground-creeper that lurked beneath the amorphous off-piste greenery. The lithe old woman hopped ahead, more surefooted than them. This, Salvestro soon understood, was a path to be negotiated rather than followed. Crashing, tripping,
bumping, scrambling upright, and continuing, it took the course of an afternoon for Salvestro, Bernardo, and Diego to descend into Nri.

Eventually, however, the ground leveled out and the three men stopped to catch their breath, hands propped on their knees while the old woman stood there unperturbed. Salvestro felt the throbbing in his head begin to recede. He had lain down by the fire the previous night and sunk into a black sleep, his relief that at last he might rest pulling him down, his memories of the day closing over his head and burying him. Then, once again, the voices had started up, more insistent than ever before. He had tossed and turned under their assault, trying to shake them out of his head, but they were trapped in there, and there was no means of escape. Not for them. Nor for him. The old woman had woken him at dawn, and as he rose the throbbing had begun. Now she waited patiently with her arms crossed flat across her chest. The throbbing came and went in waves. She beckoned them to follow her, then led them into the forest.