Water Music

CODA

Disquieting rumors began to trickle back to the coast toward the end of 1806, rumors of Mungo Park’s demise and the disintegration of his expedition. By January of 1807 they reached England, and shortly thereafter — like wind-borne microbes — they began to spread through Scotland. Ailie confronted these rumors — every last wild word — and refused to believe them. Mungo dead? It was impossible. A mistake, that’s all, the upshot of giving the least particle of credence to the irresponsible jabber of those black aborigines, those abhorrent little Seedys with their disfigured faces and rotten teeth: what would they know of her husband’s courage and resihence? After all, he’d been gone nearly three years the first time, and no one — not even her father, not even Zander — had believed he would survive. No. The rumors were foundless, ridiculous.

But as 1807 became 1808, and there was still no conclusive word of husband or brother, she began to hunger for rumors, rumors that might reinforce what she so passionately believed: somehow, somewhere, Mungo was out there. In 1810 the Colonial Department contacted the guide Isaaco through Lieutenant Colonel Maxwell, Governor of Senegal, and delegated him to look into the circumstances surrounding the explorer’s disappearance. Twenty months later the elderly Mandingo emerged from the bush with a document inscribed in Arabic: it was the journal of Amadi Fatoumi. The white men, Fatoumi wrote, had been killed at Boussa, though he had done all he could to prevent it. Mungo Park was dead. He had drowned when the H.M.S. Joliba capsized in the rapids while under native attack.

Ailie repudiated the document. It was a lie. Mungo was alive — certainly he was — and Zander too. Her father tried to reason with her: “It’s a sad fact, but ye maun face it, gull. Ye’re a widow, and as much as it gars me to say it, ye’re bereft of a brother too.” His words had no effect. She’d heard it all before — fifteen long years ago, when the whole world was crying in its beer for the “daring young Scotsman swallowed up in the shadow of the Dark Continent,” when her friends and relations flocked round to pat her back and her own father tried to force her into a marriage she didn’t want. And now it was the same thing all over again. Each new rumor brought them to her door like crows. Betty Deatcher with her brimming eyes, the Reverend MacNibbit with a face like a gravestone. Poor thing, they said, watching her greedily, watching her with something like hunger in their eyes. Is there anything we can do?

Georgie Gleg wrote her from Edinburgh just after Amadi Fatoumi’s journal was released. The letter was long and exhaustive — some thirty pages of exquisitely formed characters and precisely ruled margins — offering consolation, hope, money, a shoulder to cry on, a proposal of marriage. She never answered it. Instead, she gathered together all the mementos of Mungo’s first expedition — the battered top hat, the ebony figurine with its cruelly distorted belly and limbs, the three editions of his Travels—and set up a sort of shrine in the corner of the parlor. Five chairs were ranged round the display, and she spent long hours sitting in one or another of them, the children at her feet, reading aloud from the Travels or from Mungo’s letters, or just staring off into space, hoping, praying, waiting for the next rumor to make its way to her.

Oh yes, there were fresh rumors. Still. Six years after the fact and better than eight months since the Colonial Department had officially closed the case. They worked their tortuous way to her ears as if drawn by some mysterious irrepressible force. Through the Bight of Benin to the Antilles and Carolina, through Badagri to the Canaries to Lisbon, Gravesend, London and Edinburgh, from savages to slavers, from slavers to diplomats to the man in the street, the rumors persisted: white men were alive in the interior of Africa.

In fact, though no European would ever know it, there was a grain of truth in these reports. If they erred, it was an error of degree, not of substance — it was not white men who lived on in the deeps of Africa, but a single white man. A survivor. A man totally unknown to the public, a pariah of sorts, a man who had been born to poverty and experienced the miracle of resurrection.

♦ ♦ ♦

Some thirty-six hours after the disaster at Boussa, Ned Rise opened his eyes on nirvana for the third time in his life. But this time paradise was neither a dank, fislistinking shanty on the banks of the Thames nor an operating theater off Newgate Street. . it was brighter, far brighter, glaring with all the intensity of the tropical sun. The last thing he remembered was the grim leering face of his own death, the rock wall hurtling at him, the mob howling for blood, the struggle with Park. .

And now what? He was disoriented. His body ached. There was a fire in every joint, his kneecaps felt shattered, a deep intransigent pain stabbed at his lower back. If he could summon the will to sit up and take stock of things, he would discover that he was as naked and unencumbered as the day he was born, the straw hat and tattered loincloth swept away in the flood, the silver dueling pistol buried forever in the muck of the riverbed. But he couldn’t. He merely lay there, inert, the sun spread across his back like a blanket of flame.

His vision blurred, steadied. His temples pounded. He lay in a pile of rubble — leaves, branches, fragments of wood and bone — amidst the humped pastel forms of water-smoothed boulders, boulders strewn across the landscape like the eggs of antediluvian monsters. The air was as hot and still as the breath of a sleeping dragon, no sound, no movement, and then suddenly — violent contrast — it exploded with the stiff harsh rattle of beating wings. Ned looked up into the inevitable skewed face of a carrion bird, a vulture, splayed talons, wings spread like a canopy. Bold, combative, the great ugly graverobber hissed at him and took a tentative step forward. It begins again, Ned thought.

But then the bird leaped back, swiveled the flat plane of its neck in alarm, and lurched up out of his field of vision. Something had frightened it off. Hyena? Lion? Maniana? Ned could barely muster the will to care. He stared at the polished surface of the rock before him, a trickle of water washing his legs and groin, the clatter of wings echoing in the silence. Then there was another sound, breathy and melodic, no mere birdsong, no illusion created by rubbing branches or mimetic streams — it was the sound of music, the sound of civilization and humanity. Had he died after all? Was this the afterlife — purgatory — a steaming stinking groundless place where devils and angels vied for his soul? He closed his eyes. Perhaps he slept.

The music played on — flutes, it seemed, three or four of them, melodies intertwined like vines. He was lulled, he was comforted. By the time he pushed himself up the sun was low in the sky and only the convex crowns of the rocks were illuminated, suffused with a pinkish glow, as if each were about to hatch. The music had suddenly stopped. He looked round him: there was no sign of the Boussa rapids, no sign of music-makers, no sign of life. Nothing but smoothed boulders, tumbled to the horizon like melons or beachballs or great hairless heads, and the river at his back. Had he imagined flutes?

Shakily, the pain driving like spikes through his hands and feet, he pulled himself erect and then almost immediately collapsed against the nearest rock. He was bruised, torn and battered. Welts rose along his collarbone, and so many discolored abrasions spangled his legs, buttocks and ribcage he looked like a clown in motley. He’d taken quite a beating. But he was alive and breathing, and so far as he could tell nothing was broken. It was almost as an afterthought that he realized he was hungry.

Then — it was unmistakable — something moved. Out there, in the confusion of rocks. And then again: jostling elbows, hunched shoulders. “Hello?” Ned called. Nothing. He tried again — in Mandingo, Soorka and Arabic. There was a long moment of silence, and then, as if in response, the music started up again. No fool, Ned leaned back against the rock and tried to look appreciative. After a moment, he began to clap in time with the unseen musicians, while somewhere off to his left a drum started up, steady and sonorous, pulsing like a heartbeat.

Timid, skittish as deer, they began to show themselves. A head here, a torso there: hide and seek. Then they became bolder, and he saw that the rocks were full of them, little people, no bigger than children, standing out in the open now and gazing at him out of their placid umber eyes. They were naked, these people, their limbs bundles of fiber, their abdomens swollen like the rounded pouting bellies of infants. And they weren’t black — not exactly — they were more the color of acorns or hazelnuts.

Ned waited. He could count eighteen of them now, including a pair of children. The musicians — four grizzled, splay-footed homuncuh with nose flutes — kept up their piping, and the hidden drummer flailed at his hides. The whole troop was swaying to the music, and Ned, despite a nagging throb in his elbow, continued to clap along. It was at this point that one of the men separated himself from the others and began to make his way forward, feet shuffling in the dirt, head and shoulders undulating to the insistent pulse of the rhythm. He clutched a tiny bow to his breast — it looked like a toy — and wore a quiver looped over his shoulder. His nipples were dark rosettes, scarred from some ancient mishap — fire? war? rites of initiation? — clavicle and ribs protruded, his pubic hair was a snarl of white wire from which the rutted gray penis hung like a badge. An aureole of canescent hair fanned out round his head, and his jaws collapsed on toothless gums: he could have been the first man on earth, father of us all. Ned studied his face, trying to gauge the appropriate response, but the patriarch’s expression was blank.

They were singing now, all of them, a bizarre high-pitched whining interspersed with clicks and grunts. For the first time Ned began to feel apprehensive — maybe they weren’t so harmless after all. And then he saw it. Something glinting in the old man’s hand: a knife? a gun? Was this it, was this what he’d been saved for? But then suddenly he knew what that refulgent, fight-gathering object was, knew why they were offering it to him, knew what he would do and how he would survive. All at once he could see into the future He was no outcast, no criminal, no orphan — he was a messiah.

The old man handed him the clarinet. It was still damp from its soaking but the pads were clear, the keys undamaged. The drum thumped, the flutes skirled. He put it to his lips — they were smiling now, ranged round him like precocious children — he put it to his lips, and played.

♦ ♦ ♦

The years peeled back like the skin of an onion, layer on top of layer. Beau Brummell fled to Calais in disgrace, De Quincey swallowed opium. Sir Joseph Banks and George III gave up the ghost. There were riots in Manchester, Portugal and Greece. Beethoven went deaf. Napoleon fell and rose and fell again. Sir Walter Scott was shattered by the crash of 1826. Feathered bonnets came back into fashion and furbelows were all the rage. The Niger remained a mystery.

War, peace, Hapsburg, Hanover, décolleté bodices and cotton chemisettes, the fall of an empire, the restoration of a dynasty, Metternich, Byron, Beethoven, Keats — all of it passed Ailie by. She might as well have been living in another world. From the moment she succumbed to Georgie Gleg and had her hellish vision on the breast of Loch Ness, she was a changed woman. The vision — was it a vision? — had come as a warning, as a castigation. She had gone too far. Jealous and bitter, rebelling against the terrible emptiness of the camp follower’s life, she had turned her back on Mungo in his time of need. She was an adulteress, an apostate, she was a sinner.

She spent the rest of her life making up for it. When she got home to Selkirk she set up the shrine in the parlor and gathered the children around to inculcate the legend of the father they hardly knew. He was a hero, she told them, one of the greatest men Scotland had ever seen, a man who faced danger in the way ordinary people sat down to breakfast. Where was he? they asked. In Africa, she told them. When will he be coming home? Soon, she said.

This was her penance. The shrine, the legend, the burden of raising the children alone. Gifts would come for her from Edinburgh: combs, dresses, perfumes, toys for the children. She returned them unused. Gleg sent letter after letter. She never answered them. And when he came to the door, the hurt and anguish ironed into his face, the servant girl turned him away. What have I done? he shouted at the windows, over and over. What have I done? he shouted, till her father threatened to call the constable.

The children grew. Her father died. She spent hours at the window, looking out across the hills, waiting, hoping. And when she felt blackest, when she knew in her heart she’d never see either Mungo or Zander again, that’s when the fresh rumor would whisper in her ear, that’s when some trader would appear in Edinburgh with a story he had from a factor on the Gambia who had it from a native slaver who had it from a Mandingo priest: there was a white man in the Sahel, humble, saintly, living like a black. And it would start all over again. He was out there, she knew it.

Meanwhile, there were the children. Thomas, child of the century, was both a curse and a consolation. Like his father he was physically precocious, an athlete, the best footballer in Selkirkshire by the time he was fourteen. Tall, heavy in the chest and shoulders, hair like sand, he was the image of Mungo. She looked at him, and the past rose to haunt her like some sad unmentionable thing risen from the depths of a cold, dark loch. Mungo junior and Archie were like their father too — especially in the cast of their eyes — but Thomas was an exact replica, the hammered shape, the cast die. And more than any of the others he nurtured the legend of his father, pored over the books and maps in the explorer’s library, repeated the litany of the rumors until the words were cut like glass.

By 1827 Ailie was in her early fifties, a tiny woman, prematurely aged, worn down by the accumulation of fruitless hours and the futility of her life: it was twenty-two years since she’d laid eyes on her husband. Her daughter was married, Archibald was off in the army, Mungo junior had succumbed to the wanderlust — dead of the fever in India, where he’d been sent with his regiment. Thomas never married. He lived on in Selkirk, close to his mother, sharing with her the onus of his father’s disappearance, fostering the hope that he would one day return, hoary and triumphant, from the windswept hills, from the dunes and the jungles.

It was a cold clear morning in early autumn when he left. He had made his plans in secret, seeing no reason to alarm his mother. When she found him gone, she knew precisely what had happened: husband, brother, son. He wrote her from Accra, on the Gold Coast. It was simple, he had it all figured out. He would travel alone, as his father had done on the first expedition, living like the natives, making his way northeast through Ashanti-land and Ibo, striking the Niger at Boussa. The harmattans were blowing. Conditions were perfect. As soon as he could engage a guide he’d be on his way.

She studied the seal of the letter before she opened it. There was hardly any reason to read it: she knew what it said, could have written it herself. She was fifty-three. Mrs. Mungo Park. It was almost funny.

She sat by the window a long while, the envelope heavy in her hand, a pale alien light blanching the shrubs, the rooftops, the trees, until even the distant hills were drained of color and life. On the shelf behind her, oiled and black, sat the ebony figurine: gravid, obscene, another artifact.

There were no more letters.

[1] A sort of tobacco made from the cured leaves of the hemp plant. Cannabis sativa, which the natives smoke in order to enhance sexual performance and induce dreams.

[2] Chief magistrate of a town or province, responsible for overseeing the communal granary. He is instantly recognizable as the fat man in a cluster of ambulatory sticks.

[3] Land of the hon-kees.

[4] Free Mandingoes, generally Muslim converts, whose stockin-trade is human flesh.

[5] The transcript of the official proceedings against the former colonel charged him with eighteen counts of conduct unbecoming an officer, including “the serving of tea to his staff while dressed in a lady’s taffeta gown” and “the compelling of eight privates, under penalty of court-martial, to rub down his naked body with dustmops while continuously rehearsing the phrase: ‘O, I am a lowly snake in the grass, depraved and despicable.’ “