The Pop’s Rhinoceros (91 page)

“We tied them up down here,” he said, sinking his nail into the mainmast where it was stepped into the keel. “Back to back. She went around the circle of them. … Enzo was dead already, I think.” Ruggero stared at the thick stump. “Not the others, though.”

Salvestro looked about the leaking hold. Ruggero’s oil-lamp cast a subaqueous light in the confined space, while the ship’s timbers threw exaggerating shadows along her sides, the shadows of a vessel twice her size. Sitting with their backs to the mast, they would have been waist-deep in the water. They would have seen the girl climb quietly down, watched her wade toward them, puzzled by her presence. … He turned for the ladder. Ruggero went back to his tests and repairs.

They passed the Beach of White Sands and hugged the shoreline thereafter, for, mindful of Dom Manolo’s ordinance to throw the sailors of all ships other than the Portuguese directly into the sea, Captain Alfredo was eager to keep well east of the Canaries. On the eve of Saint Martin’s Day they watched the justly dreaded surf of Cape Bojador breaking on its northern bank and pushed out again into the ocean. The ship abseiled down the coast, bouncing from point to point in a series of flattened arcs linking the Bay of Fish to the River of Gold, though it was no river and contained no gold, then the Gulf of Gonsalo de Cintra, though it was really an inlet, and Gonsalvo de Cintra had actually been killed
while swimming off the isle of Naar in the Bay of Arguin, which was some eighty leagues to the south, then the Bay of San Cipriano on Saint Gregory’s Day and the Cabo Santa Ana on the Eve of Saint Cecilia, the land falling away after the long spit of Cabo Blanco and reappearing as a purplish smudge off to larboard. The soft clatter of distant herons taking wing; then, for many days, nothing. There were no capes, or points, or rivers, and the coast, when they sighted it, was a low unending sand-ridge fringed with white surf. The sun rose behind it, climbed over the ship, and fell into the western ocean. They woke, worked, and slept. Ruggero constructed a davit to raise the anchor from the hold. Salvestro clambered up and down the ratlines. Bernardo let the blisters on his hands heal and the rowboat once again bounced around the
Lucia,
its jolly sploshings pointing up the undeniable leadenness of the larger vessel’s progress, while Bernardo stood in its stern and ceased clubbing the hapless water only to sleep or throw quantities of salted pork down his throat: a jovial two-legged seawolf, a-wolfing. He was better off there, in Salvestro’s opinion. A desultory air hung over the
Lucia,
the pall of their mutual ignorance and incompatible wants. Their course was the sum of different routes and differently hoped-for journeys, a tangential, compromised bearing not truly congruent to any, unless that of the girl. They rounded Cabo Verde one dawn and the Cape of Masts the next, whose “masts” were a stand of three enormous and long-dead palm trees. The nor’easterlies blew steadily, and they trimmed the sails only by night. Alfredo sat on the forecastle with a compass beside him and in his lap Diego’s rutter, from which he would read out ominously opaque phrases: “The Senegal is the end of the land of the Tawny Moors and the beginning of the land of the Blacks” or “The Bijagos Isles are surrounded by shoals and sandbars pushed out by the Rio Grande some fifteen miles to the north” or, bluntly, “Tanguarim. Avoid.” Their bearing bent gradually more eastward as they sailed down the Malagueta Coast until, after rounding Cabo Palmas, the sun rose each morning directly over the prow and set each evening directly below the stern. That was their last sight of land, for the rutter told them that the Portuguese maintained forts at Axim and Mina and they dared not sail in sight of them. A dry wind blew off the invisible coast, coating everything and everyone on deck with fine red dust. Ruggero jointed and planed the last of the planks to fashion a new top for the foremast, and he and Salvestro spent a day balancing on the yardarm while Ruggero cut off the splintered end of the pole, sawed out a mortise, and fixed the tenon of the top-piece in place with three carefully fashioned pins. The crow’s nest was judged a lost cause, as was the bowsprit, and in any case there was no more wood.

The watery wafts and surges of a gentle westerly current found purchase enough on her barnacled underside to drag the
Lucia
forward, and so, lurching, lolling, leaking, sagging, growing more jellylike with every passing league, her boards popping off her beams and the beams riddled with worm, her hold awash with a noxious liquid peculiar to the bottoms of decaying ships—ineradicable
stood alone on the forecastle, a figurehead carved from ebony, her eyes fixed forward with such concentration on the narrow line of their bearing that had whales and whirlpools appeared to port and starboard, she would not have glanced at them. She fixed herself there and the
Lucia
followed, drawn by nothing more than the force of her will. She invited no distraction. Soon she would lead them within the vast and vague blur that they had skirted and sailed about. Its dust was already with them. Their futures were there, waiting for their lurching bodies to inhabit them and play them out while she skipped amongst them, unreadable as now. Watching her, Salvestro felt himself a thief. Only the most appalling determination could explain her. What had she felt as she’d wielded the knife above the mutineers? What gnarled and massive hand had enclosed her own as it had cut the signs of its purpose in their flesh? His observations told him nothing. Parted from her, Diego would fall into slack-faced reverie, an unwilled loosening of his fiber. With her, his purpose returned. He believed in her, and Salvestro saw the offering and withholding of her will reflected in the soldier’s torpor. She inhabited him as she pleased. She was the instrument of his redemption, if she chose. Or they were the instruments of her return and of no more significance than that. He did not know. It was Alfredo who called out, “Land! Land to starboard!” but she must have seen it long before the old sailor. She did not move or even turn around. They had sailed clear past the Mina Coast and the Slave Coast. They were to the east of these. A strange forest marked the shoreline here, extending up and down the coast for as far as they could see, a forest growing out of the sea, or set on innumerable islands, or riven with thousands of creeks and channels and composed of strange trees whose roots showed high above the wa-terline. They sailed along the face of this coast for the best part of a day and Usse said nothing. It was almost dusk when an outcrop of these peculiar trees fell aft, and in their lee a bay was disclosed to them. Fringed with palm trees and fed by a broad river, it was the first break in the vegetation they had found. Salvestro saw Usse’s body stiffen as she looked about, her eyes sweeping back and forth. Then
she threw out her arms and shouted words in a language he did not understand. The men gathered on the deck and looked up at her. She was talking to herself up there, in her own tongue, outside them, already distant and as impenetrable to their gazes as the shadowed landmass that filled the horizon behind her. She whirled about, her face shocking in its sudden animation.

“Home!” she shouted at them. “Home!”

C
onsider, a tiny spring spills out of the wall of a ravine, wets the moss on a rock, and collects in a pool of dark red granite. A stream flows from the pool and is soon joined by two others hardly larger than itself. They mix together, their banks no more than a single stride apart—the Tembi, the Tamincono, and the Falico—bubbling and gurgling, glittering as the shade of the ravine is exchanged for the arid savannah below, flowing north and east in accordance with the slant of the rock. An ocean waits to receive this rivulet: a tight redoubling of its infant channel and two days’ westward flow would bring this watercourse to its end. … But, hedged between the highlands of their birth and the desert to the north, swelling with minor tributaries, nosing blindly over floodplains that have not tasted water since the greening of the Sahel, the stream becomes a wide and shallow river bouncing along, oblivious of the flattening of the landscape under the twin hammers of the sun and wind. The tributaries give out, but the river goes on. The clouds hanging provocatively over distant mountains are pregnant with nothing but dust. The mountains themselves are dunes, the degree zero of a landscape. What happens when there is nothing left to happen. Sand.

And the river happening through it. Sometimes it backtracks. Sometimes it splits and fans out into arms or throws backwaters and swamps into the stony monotony of the surrounding desert. Treeless banks rise and fall. Its channel narrows and widens until parts of it might better be considered as lakes and other parts as waterfalls. Little labyrinthine regions of creeks and sandbanks mark its suicidal progress into a desert, where dried beds, salt pans, and wind-eroded watercourses that the heat has baked to stone warn of other unluckier rivers. On it goes, north and east, an immense glittering calm traveling into dry oblivion. Then, sixteen hundred miles from its source, it turns.

Rain falling in the wet season spatters the ground with its fat drops, percolating patiently through fissured granite and porous sandstones, welling in muddy pools and puddles whose spillage trickles and drips, collecting and gathering into little sumps and runoffs that themselves regather and join forces, grow and flow through a riverine hierarchy of rills, gills, runnels, and streams to reach any one of a hundred rolling swollen floods, great muddy gurges in which uprooted trees flop and rear, beaching themselves on dwindling sandbanks before being lifted off again by the waters’ increase and carried down to the confluence, which might be a lazy arm reaching back into a floodplain, or a foaming gash in the cliffside, or
a trickle, or a swamp, or the dripping of wet moss. … Drainage being inevitable, all rivers meet in the River.

And the River turns southeast, away from the desert and down into the savannah and forests of its lower course, sucking hungrily at its lower tributaries, swelling, growing, rolling mud and rocks before it, bursting its banks and creating doomed lakes and backwashes, curving down toward the ocean like a scythe or the wound such a scythe might make if its blade were two and a half thousand miles of razor-edged steel slicing open a mile-wide vein of silver. For it glitters, despite its muddiness, and is placid, despite its enormity. And it slows, despite the nearing of the ocean that is its end. It lazes, and its meanders redouble so tautly and perversely that channels often form between their cusps. It divides, and subdivides, and sits in inert malarial pools, which leach brackish and sluggish liquids into the innumerable creeks that now make up its channel. Mud collects too, sometimes forming little islands. Were this a sea, these eyots and sandbanks would add up to an archipelago. It is not. It remains a river, though a reluctant one down here, this near to its egress and the dwarfing bulk of the ocean with its brine and its recalcitrant unriveriness. Successive alluvial washes only redistribute the landscape, and the little mud-islands it offers as a bulwark against its own momentous flood simply drift about, dissolving and accreting, disappearing and reappearing …

Father …

… never quite land and never quite water. It is a landscape of local compromise, lodged in its protean phase, a soupy swamp, a delta, a stubborn remnant of the unsettled soft land that Eri hardened with a blade forged for him by an Awka blacksmith.

Daughter? Have you returned?

So: a recoiling River, procrastinating and delaying behind a thick mat of mangroves and one hundred miles of accumulated river mud. Its creeks and islands make up a spongy labyrinth that the River would be happy to wander forever, drifting, stagnating, never quite emerging onto the raw and bristling coast. In the meantime there are slow fluxes and convections, false currents, leakage, all kinds of watery evasion. But the drift is always seaward. All rivers end in the sea, dissolving there and being sent aloft to fall as rain on some distant watershed, the beginning of another river, eventually another dissolution. The water of this silent floating world waits in pools and inlets, in false lagoons and deceptive lakes. The channels between the mangroves are flat brown mirrors of water where exposed and reflected root systems strive doubly upward and downward, as though suspended over bottomless ravines. The sky appears as a powder-white glare, and mirrored birds fly upside-down, fish eagles and egrets, the odd pelican, rising out of the virtual depths to scoop fat carp and perch: a splash, a glittering fillet of fishmuscle sinks wriggling into the mirror-world or rises into the sky. Surface commotions and ripples edge the mud-banks with a liquid sheen. The mud is pastel blue or black, or a marbled mixture of the two. It stinks, drowning the more delicate
smell of the water. When the banks widen and this jungly sprawl opens out into a little lake or lagoon, a faint peaty scent lifts off the surface and hangs in the air, spiced with waterweed and marsh gas. Bracelets of blue-black oysters ring the stiltlike roots of the larger mangroves. Colorless crabs rest on the mud underneath. A tree drops a ripened seedling out of its dark green canopy, its heavy taproot spearing the soft mud and startling the crabs, which scatter. A heron clatters heavily into the air. The water is mostly still now the floods have subsided. The harmattan blows, but it is mild here, a watery shiver, a night-breeze. The thin poles of an
isanga-trap
project inches above the surface of a quiet, tree-fringed lagoon. Three pirogues with a man in each are maneuvering their craft to draw the trap shut. Raffia palms grow in tall stands behind the mangroves. Something caws, invisible in the undergrowth. Something moves in the water—the fishermen can hear it—splish, splosh, splish, splosh … Strangely regular. Their heads come up. A little rowboat rounds the bend in the creek and paddles slowly into the lagoon.

Later, a solemn-faced headman delicately lifted the charred skin off a fat
edofish,
prized open its belly to pull out the bones, and offered Usse the first of the smoking fillets. Through the gaps in the fence of his compound she saw faces peering in at them, though whether it was a visit from the Eze-Ada that drew them or the appearance of three white faces, or simply visitors, she did not know. The three fishermen who had guided them back to the village sat on their haunches a little farther back from the fire. The headman was very old and smiled to himself as she praised the food with polite extravagance. The fishermen glanced between her and her companions, though whenever she glanced back in their direction they would pretend to be looking at something else entirely. Her fellow travelers were another matter. They were inspected frankly and closely, as though they were intricately carved effigies whose bizarre workmanship had to be minutely appreciated. When Diego made as if to swat one of the fishermen away, the headman spoke sharply, and after that they confined themselves to watching from a distance.