The Immanence of God in the Tropics Page 12

  “I never feel that way myself,” mused the Prince.

  Seavey felt he was making a terrible mistake, but he had to continue. “It’s as if I were in a room filling up with a mist. At first it is sweet-smelling and it gives a new and pleasing quality to the light. But then this mist—this different air—expands and presses me. I find myself searching for breath, but I can no longer breathe.”

  “So you feel God is choking you?”

  “Yes. Sometimes.”

  “This is not God. This is heat-stroke.” Abdallah tilted his head, smiled, and smoothed the linen of his cloak. “If God really choked you, you’d be dead.”

  Seavey watched Procter’s brow pursing in dismay. He saw the curiosity in Adams’ eyes. The consul was looking at him as if Seavey were something feathered and improbable. Seavey’s doubts—embarassed, harried—withdrew inside him.

  Everything he saw on Johanna astonished Seavey. The cattle on the hillsides—humped, dangling dewlaps—were no bigger than donkeys. The sheep and goats were scrawny and indistinguishable. The Johannese walked in twos and threes and discoursed, the extravagant arms of their cloaks flapping purposelessly in the trade wind. No man who was not a slave seemed to work.

  The mountains above the town, which had been invisible from the missionary ship, rose steep and green. The tallest peak was said to hold an active volcano that bubbled colored muds the islanders used to fashion an intricate and brilliant pottery. While they waited for the boat that was to take them to Africa and the river station, the missionaries devoted themselves to natural history. Procter was a torrent of energy, chasing butterflies, pressing flowers, while Simpson, the youngest of the group, used his gun to preserve samples of the birds. Seavey studied insects. He walked the steeper hillsides, through dug fields, and felt the muscles of his legs knitting again, secured to land. An unseen servant of Abdallah’s had plaited for him a straw hat the color of English cream to replace the one of ship’s canvas that was now too hot. The rim left a band of sweat on Seavey’s high forehead that he wiped clean with his handkerchief. The sun’s light was so intense that it made the threads of white cotton gleam as if the cloth were woven of a pliant crystal.

  Lying against the hillsides, the handkerchief over his face, Seavey became convinced that he could feel the earth underneath him as he had felt the shift of ocean waters on his voyage out. The movements were slower, but no less insistent. He imagined the runs of molten rock that led to the volcano, the streams of fresh water that fed from the mountains, a blood of pure water behind the island’s skin that sustained Johanna against the salt sea. He felt he was riding the island like a child riding an elephant.

  The difficulty was that he had no way of talking to the elephant. He tried to think of the island as a self—not a god, of course, still a created thing—but a soul of a higher, larger order than man’s: an intermediate order of being. Johanna the island, like the sea, like Britain before, though he had never known it, was an angel. This was what angels were—mute islands, mountains, seas. The earth was full of angels, but angels with whom he could not speak. For weeks, as the missionaries’ journey to the coast was prepared, Seavey wandered on the hillsides, dreamt of seraphs, and stared at small things. He watched spiders, seeking refuge from the sun, in the corners of his room. Then, at evening, the shutters open, the wind from the sea blew everything clear.

  As a special favor, the Prince Abdallah permitted the missionaries to visit his wives. “I doubt they will be beautiful,” Procter told Seavey, “but we must do our duty.” Seavey was excited at the prospect, eager to see women who, if not quite white, were almost so, ladies of breeding with whom he could laugh and converse. Yet even as the men entered the palace, rising a few steps from the street, he sensed a slipping away. His eyes had difficulty with the alternation of light and dark, the cool corridors and the whitewashed spaces open to the sun. When the Englishmen reached the harem the Prince’s wives and mother presented each missionary with a gift of nut cake covered with beaten silver foil. They gave the men a recipe for the sweet and talked of the climate. The prince’s mother recited the names of the shipwrecked Scottish ladies who had tutored her son’s wives in their language.

  Seavey was surprised to see Procter take on an unaccustomed heartiness. The older man told jokes about small animals and made faces. He described his mother-in-law at length. At one point he squatted on the floor like a monkey and then sprang to his feet. Seavey tried to interrupt, but could not. Each time he started to speak it was as if Procter threw his massive body in the way, an arm swinging wide to complete one anecdote or start another. Gradually, Seavey’s attention wandered. He watched the play of the fountain that stood in the center of the red-tiled courtyard and gazed at the soft, supple light which poured from the alabaster circles that topped each of the domes above the side-halls: a subsidiary light that made visible the central sunlight without being lost in it, the way the sound of the smaller channels of a waterfall is not lost in the rush of the main torrent, being pitched above it, free and distinct. The swirl of light muffled and distorted the conversation beside Seavey. It was as if he had forgotten the meaning of his own language. The play of brilliances seemed miraculous to him and made everything he heard alien, the words changed to the conversation of fishes.

  “What surprised my mother,” Abdallah told Seavey as they walked by the sea that evening, “is that the gentlemen seemed to have no interest in religion.” The fishermen, phosphorescent scales dripping from their hands in the twilight, made signs of obeisance to the Prince as he passed. “She found it peculiar in missionaries”—the Prince fingered the garland about his neck—“but I told her you were different.”

  “But I’m not. In fact I’m worse than they are. I fear I have no urge to convert anyone anymore. I’m curious to see the Africans, but as to the fate of their souls, I’m afraid I’m indifferent.” Seavey stopped in the sand, still warm from the day’s heat. “I was curious about you as well, but I certainly don’t want to convert you.”

  “Thank you. I don’t want to convert you.”

  “I guess I’m not making myself clear. Since I came here I have felt an increasing isolation, but a contentment as well. It’s why I asked you that question at Adams’ dinner about the distances between God and men. I mean I’m happy talking to you now, here on this beach, but I feel I’d be equally content if you were dead.”

  Abdallah frowned. “Do you feel an urge to take life?”

  “Not in the least. I just feel a certain self-sufficiency.”

  “Oh, that.” The Prince clapped his hands and resumed walking. “I believe I’ve always felt that way. But then my father is a Sultan and I am a second son. I have many servants and no obligations. I can relax, indeed, I have to relax. My days are filled with reading and taking long walks. My sleep is important to me. I have seen, since my tenth birthday, some 3400 sunsets on this beach. Some days I was ill, of course, and couldn’t come. I have perhaps another fifteen thousand to go. In all likelihood, when you have died of fever across the channel—which I don’t wish for a moment, I hope you believe me—I will still be watching sunsets here.” He turned toward Seavey and spread his delicate arms. “If Allah calls me to any purpose, I will be ready.”

  The Prince reached into a silken sack hidden in the folds of his cloak and turned back toward the Englishman. “Would you like a pomegranate?” he said. Seavey bit into the fruit and the cells and seeds confounded in his mouth.

  In his mind’s eye Seavey saw the rest of them leaving him on Johanna, their ship growing small in the sea. Its masts would bend over the horizon, thin dark lines dropping below the bright wash of water. He felt he was becoming a jewel of speculation, valuable to God perhaps, but worthless to his fellows—unmoving, thoughtful, useless. On an outing up the mountainside with Procter and Abdallah and his train, he imagined himself thrown into the whirlpool of a stream, slipping from the slender log that bridged it. He could see the Arab and the Englishman both leaping in after him, Procter
rolling his sleeves, Abdallah tightening the belt that he wore around the middle of his cloak. Thrashing back and forth in the water, in and out of control, it seemed to Seavey that the two men were fighting each other to save him. At first he strove to deliver himself to Abdallah: their fingers touched then lost grip, the froth rushing between the tips. Then Seavey felt Procter’s hand underneath his chin and Abdallah pulling at his legs, the two of them together dragging him from the torrent, heaving him on the ground. Above him, as the water poured from his nostrils, spouted from his mouth in a choking stream that burned the sides of his throat, Seavey saw the clearest, bluest, the most perfect imaginable heaven.

  “You see, Arnold, the ground has shifted for me. I don’ t relish the prospect of going over the water and preaching to anyone.”

  “Well you can’t just walk out on us now.”

  “You misunderstand me, that’s not my intention.” Seavey reached for an offering, something he could give Procter to atone for his withdrawal. He did not want to displease the others or to trouble them. “Perhaps I could still accompany you in a menial capacity, like our Africans, as a carpenter or a cook?”

  Procter pondered. “That might be a solution. You could dig latrines and teach the alphabet—teaching wouldn’t contradict your scruples now, would it?” Taken with the idea, Procter rubbed his hands in glee, but the motion, slowed by the tropical heat, looked more as if he were rubbing a soothing lotion into them, healing an irritation of the sun. “I mean we won’t be doing much else beside that ourselves for some time. We have to establish communication, to build trust before we can preach at any length. There’ll be obstacles for all of us. That would be all right with you, wouldn’t it?” Seavey saw a genuine concern in the other’s face; he wanted things taken care of. “You could keep quiet, keep to yourself until you felt differently. I mean, it doesn’t make any difference really, not for now, at least. You can think whatever you like.”

  “I should like that.”

  “Good. There’s no need to leave you here, then.”

  “Were you thinking of that, then, of leaving me?”

  “We couldn’t have taken you by brute force, now could we?”

  “No, you couldn’t have.”

  And you wouldn’t have been much use—Procter didn’t say it, but Seavey was certain that was the real reason.

  “Fine then.” Procter clapped his arm around Seavey’s shoulders.

  “Tomorrow we sail. You won’t miss your talks with the Arab now, will you?”

  “No, I found them pleasant, but there’s only so much that a foreigner can understand.”

  “Well then, we shan’t tell him that part when we say goodbye.”

  Seavey appreciated the older man’s political skill. He was beginning to enjoy the prospect of his own inconsequence. He felt comfortable with Procter, walking down the rocky path to the sea.

  That evening Seavey packed for the final voyage. The accommodation he had made suited him. The work he would do would be a compensation, a payment to the others, for the pleasure that austerity would offer his own self. It was as if he had taken a vow of silence. He would be left alone.

  A turn in the breeze blew Seavey’s lantern out and he stepped through the door of Abdallah’s villa. Alone, he sat down on a bench of rock and looked to the sky that burned above him. His English constellations had fled to the farthest northern horizon and there was such a swarm of new stars. He would have a lifetime in the Mission’s new valley to search those strange skies. Yet in their totality, Seavey realized they were the same here as above the Equator, neither familiar nor alien: a stippled field of light across a black vault. It was only in excluding most of what they saw that Englishmen or Hottentots had appropriated an infinitesimal portion of the display and made it their own—a plough rather than a banner, a chair rather than a crown.

  In their entirety, they were unassailable. Spread out, there was no wholeness to them, but instead a randomness so vast, a chaos so powerful, it seemed to Seavey only a God could have made it. Only in the smallest parts was it amenable to the grasp of his mind. Each time he tried to expand the range of his vision, nothing held for more than a second. He could not finish a constellation without its exploding into something else. The possible lines between the stars were endless: a multitude of combination.

  And still just a bowl of light. Seavey tried to see again the English stars of his childhood, searched his mind for the memory, then abandoned the quest. Who could ever remember, he thought, the whole of a night sky? Seavey closed his eyes, but the stars did not go away.

  Acknowledgments

  The following stories previously appeared as noted:

  “Our Big Game” – North American Review, Vol. 263, No. 4

  “The Sauna After Ted’s Funeral” – Ascent, Vol. 16, No. 2

  “Mobley’s Troubles” – Ascent, Vol. 5, No. 1

  “On the Flats” – Harper’s, Vol. 277, No. 1661

  “A Good White Hunter” – A Matter of Crime: New Stories from the Masters of Mystery and Suspense, Vol. 4 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988)

  “A Second Language” – Harvard Review, Number Thirty Seven

  “The Immanence of God in the Tropics” – Yale Review, Vol. 73, No. 4

  The Author

  Photo by Barbara Gale

  George Rosen, born in Chicago and educated at Harvard, was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Kenya, which served as the setting for Black Money: A Novel of Modern Africa (Scarborough House, 1990), called by Kirkus Reviews “a sophisticated, rich, and tantalizing portrait of East Africa” and by Library Journal “a strong study of power that corrupts at every level and of idealism that persists.” His short stories have appeared in Harper’s, the Yale Review, and the Harvard Review, among other magazines. As a freelance journalist, Rosen has reported on West Africa for the Atlantic and on Mexico for the Boston Globe and writes frequently for the Globe’s op-ed page. His awards include the Frank O’Connor Memorial Award and Fellowships from the Artists Foundation and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. He lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

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