As we descended into the cheerful maelstrom, Hind clung to me, unsure of so many strange folk. Immacolata stroked her hair. A woman nearly collided with us on the path through the tents, driving before her a massive boar which walked on its hind legs, a little yellow cap on its head and yellow ribbons hanging garishly from his bristly neck. The woman was rather short, slender as a cracked whip, dressed all in goatskin, fur hanging gray and coarse from her arms, her waist, all the way to her tiny ankles. Her eyes were a keen, narrow gold, and her hair was blue as drowning. She held a long churchwarden pipe in one hand, its mouthpiece glittering green.
“Watch where you wend, friends, or my pig is like to trample you. It takes all his concentration to keep in a straight line,” she said, her voice thick and raspy with smoke.
“Excuse me,” said Immacolata, always polite—and it had long ago been agreed that Hind was not to talk to strangers, as we would not want to be robbed of her by someone who fancied having a girl who dispensed endless jewels from her mouth. “But where are we? What is this place?”
The woman drew deeply on her pipe and blew green smoke at her boar. She looked up at the tea girl’s scarlet ribbons, and her eyes narrowed further. “How long have you been away from Varaahasind, my little decadent?” Taglio started as if slapped. The goatskinned woman laughed and coughed and laughed again. “Don’t worry—who would I tell? As for the rest, this isn’t any place, silly things. By tomorrow we’ll all be gone, each to our own corners of the yawning, grassy world…”
THE
PIG-TAMER’S
TALE
MESINYANE HAS A TUSK PIPE AND A PIG CALLED Femi, and my pipe it is a hollow tooth, and my pig he is so named, and thus you may be reasonably sure that Mesinyane tells you these things.
I am here because this is where we go, who travel and perform and live on the world but not in it. The wind blows us together, to exchange news and tricks and techniques, to whisper to each other what cities can afford us, to trade tightropes for horseshoes. The blue of my hair is paint, the shade of my eyes a cheap glamour purchased from a mixer of oils and unguents who had a green cart and great, long fingers. I am dressed up no less than my boar. We do all these things, trade and dye and dance and learn and part—it is a happy vagary of our lives. Word is passed horse to ox to magician to singer, and we wind our way, eventually, to an agreed-upon dale. This is a Vstreycha, a congress of fools, and I came to it from Varaahasind, where I was born in the house of my father, who was also a fool, but the kind who lets the milk curdle in its pail and the beer lose its head to the breeze, not the professional kind.
When I was grown, and our hut of pigskins was low and warm in the jungles outside the city—we were too poor to live on the terraces, near the palace with its perfumed queens! I often used to dream of catching a glimpse of one of those women, strange and exotic as chained leopards. But we lived on the outskirts, where the banana leaves cast green shadows, and my father Femi slept behind the stove.
This is not so odd—certainly it was warm as a held breath in our forest, but it is a pleasant thing to sleep on the bricks behind the stove, warmed as they are by the bread baking against the side of the iron, and sweat away bad dreams and the occasional cough. I often wished to sleep there, but my father held his post like the last soldier on a hill.
“Father,” I would say, “go to the well and get us some water so that I can make us fish stew.”
My father Femi would roll over on his bricks. “Why must you pester me so, Mesinyane? What did I have a daughter for? Get it yourself.”
And so I would go and pull the water from the well with buckets of baobab wood, and the stew would be sweet anyhow, with green onions and pink tails floating in it.
“Father,” I would say, “go and cut us some camphor wood, so that I may build up the fire and warm your bricks, so that the hut may smell of cinnamon, not yesterday’s fish stew.”
My father Femi would roll over on his bricks. “Why must you pester me so, Mesinyane? What did I have a daughter for? Cut it yourself.”
And so I would go and cut the camphor wood and bring it in to dry, and the hut would smell of thick and spicy things, and the bricks would warm beneath my father’s back.
“Father,” I would say, “go to the market and fetch us two black roosters so that I may roast them up for us, and stuff your pillows with the feathers.”
And my father Femi would roll over on his bricks. “Why must you pester me so, Mesinyane? What did I have a daughter for? Get it yourself.”
And so I went into the jungle, where the banana leaves are high and their fruit not yet ripe, where the cacao flowers are wet and pale. I was muddy to my knees by the time the road smoothed out through the coffee plants wavering white and green and red. My arms burned with shoving the forest aside to let me pass, and my face was full of the pricks of mosquitoes. But I could see the first rounded terrace tops, and my mouth watered for the chickens to come.
But my legs are small, and by the time I found a little butcher’s shop with cockerels hanging in the window, all was dark and every door shut against me. My feet were torn and bloody, my shoes worn through to nothing, sweat clinging my hair to my scalp as though I had slept all the day on my father’s stove. I looked up and down the narrow street, full of clothes shops where I could afford nothing and bakeries already puffing the smoke of tomorrow’s bread through their roofs. The palace hunched in the distance, and the high wooded hills hid the moon from me. There was nowhere I could see that would open its doors to a goat-furred urchin, so, with rather fewer sniffles than you might expect, I settled down against the brick wall of the butcher’s shop to await the old red sun’s return.
I could not really sleep, but fitful dreams ran over my eyelids, leaving their tiny footprints. Sometime after the moon had finally grunted and sweated and hoisted herself up over the treetops, I saw through slitted eyes a figure walking from the palace toward me: a man who was white all over, the white of milk or cheese or chalk, and he wore very little, his long, muscled legs showing bare, his chest slung with a barbed harpoon and nothing more. His hair was long and straight, and in his arms he held a woman, stiff and dead, her beautiful limbs frozen and unmoving, crystalline snakes wrapping her arms, her skin clear as the glass of a poultry-seller’s store. I had never seen anything so radiant and lovely as those two, and I think the man looked at me as he passed, but I cannot be sure. He cast a flitting light against the alley walls, shadows spitting angrily at the stone.
I could not help it—I was curious as a mouse who has not heard that someone, somewhere, has thought of a thing called a trap. I followed them, creeping close behind. I followed them all through the night, in which they floated over the ground like the moonlight that so rarely penetrated the banana canopy, and into the day, in which they still gleamed, as though their skin was hungry for light, always light. I followed them through the cacao flowers wet and pale and the coffee plants wavering white and green and red, I followed them through the baobabs with their roots like elephant trunks, I followed them past my own house.
Now, I loved my father as best I could, and I did not think he would want to miss such a thing passing by our very own door. So I rushed in and shook him awake on his stove.
“Father!” I cried. “There are Stars stamping flat the banana leaves outside our door! Come and see!”
My father Femi rolled over on his bricks.
“Why must you pester me so, Mesinyane? Did I have a daughter only to nag me and pelt me with lies? Go see yourself if you like, but leave me alone!”
“Father, I do not lie! Come and peek out of the door, just peek, and if there is no pale figure striding by you may lie on your stove all day and night and I will say nothing about it!”
My father grunted and slowly rolled back and forth, working himself up to standing. He stumbled off of his stove and went to the door, placing his eye to the jamb—and indeed, a slim, cream-blanched ankle was disappearing beyond a clutch of palm fronds. My father’s face contorted like an acrobat’s leg—as if in a daze he wandered out of the house and after the creatures. I knew that he was not so thick as to be unmoved by our little plot of land alight with gods! The two of us, small and quiet, followed them through the night and into day.
But it was difficult to keep up. Sleeping on a stove does not really prepare a man for marathons through high brush.