Jungle Rock Blues, page 10
Then what happened?
His interviews refuse all details on this night in particular, and his “autobiography” is all details that its author enjoyed providing. “I seized her, carried her to my lair and threw her down.” But Caliban never said that, and he didn’t do it. At that time Caliban had no concept of lovemaking. Within the gorilla group Terjick handled the duties which ensured the continuance of the Terjick line – this was only natural, like eating leaves. There was an issue here, Caliban did understand that, which lay at the heart of gorilla society and made rings of power, of dominance around the big guy. There were fights, and times when you could not go near the females. Caliban knew the rules. And he was dimly aware: the younger male gorillas had something on their minds. But he wasn’t part of that.
He had simply made her a bed.
And so it was she who turned out the light. She took him by the hand. She hadn’t cleaned her teeth, the whiskey was thick on her tongue. She was carrying her pack but not because she wanted her nightie. The bowie knife – for misunderstandings – it was there if needed. Her heart was beating so hard she was afraid she would pass out. His hand was perfectly happy to be in hers, he came with her quite easily.
They were at the edge of the clearing and Caliban’s leafy structure could be made out, just a little way in, standing in the shadows of the bush. She knelt at its entrance and put her hand out to see what he had placed on the ground. Grasses, bracken – it smelled fresh, herby.
* My Wild Heart – how it led me to Caliban and other astonishing discoveries, by June McMay, Anchor Books, N.Y., 1965
10
Caliban of the Gorillas and June McMay of California, USA, swung through the jungle. They sailed through the air at the end of every vine there was. They had many a mile to go before they rested that night.
The grasses, when June put her hand on them, were slightly damp. The night was, if anything, cool rather than hot. She wished for a covering and thought of her blanket, tightly rolled at the bottom of her pack. But that was, she knew, more a desire for modesty, to be covered from the world, than a need for warmth. That’s the point, June, she told herself – there is no world. And, for the second time that day, she began to unbutton her shirt.
Caliban kneeled close before her to watch. Her clothes were complicated, you could study the fastenings and layers – his curiosity was sticking out a mile. The shapes of her, the warm, womanly smell, these items he collected and stored away, and went on staring. Then his hand came out and he touched her skin.
June took him in her arms, drew him close and pressed her lips to his. What was she doing? What did she want? Caliban didn’t understand. But she showed him. She wanted to put a part of her body into his – her tongue came into his mouth. It was an astonishing sensation, to have someone inside you where you couldn’t see, where you could only feel. To concentrate on the feelings. To feel the aliveness, the intent of another person as they moved sensitive parts, the lips, the inside of the mouth, the tongue, against yours, and all the time their face was so close, the sides of your noses were rubbing, and you were breathing and they were breathing – yes, this was a fascinating and pleasing thing. To pause and look at each other, and then to start again, and, at such proximity, to manage the tilt of your face, such complicated manoeuvrings, the docking of a space station, and the way your mouth was, and to think all the time of what the other might be wanting, this was new. It was, he thought, the thing that was at the centre of all the pictures in his books. There was such sweetness in it, a tenderness that he had never known.
Also something fierce.
June had him lie down on the bed of grasses, which smelled like everything that could never be put in a jar – like a great dewy morning hillside that has been stirred up by your bare feet – and she brought their bodies together.
It was difficult, in the morning, to concentrate on anything else. There was no reason not to touch each other, no timetable, no train to catch. And no one watching.
Between times, they began upon the complicated endeavour called communication.
It began with water. June McMay had some in the canteen in her pack but not much. She drank a little, then offered it to him. He sniffed the metal of it, sniffed the bunghole at its top, looked down in there with one eye. Listened to the splashing sound. Then he tried to do what she had done. But, when he swigged, the metal hole of the canteen banged against his teeth, the liquid ran too fast and flooded his mouth and came pouring out his nose. When his coughing fit was over, she helped him to try again. He drank. Then she pointed to what was left in the canteen – not much after he’d spilled most of it – and made her eyes wide, made the looking-for face. Mugging for him there in the morning sunlight of the clearing – Caliban frowning. “Water,” she said, then said it again, louder this time. She pointed to the canteen, splashed its contents, said, “Water?” with a question mark and searched the landscape. Did it again and again. Smiled at him, encouragingly. Big Caliban working away at her meaning. She made water-noises with her mouth – he thought she wanted to kiss again and so there was a delay. Then she went back to it. She made a panting face that said she was thirsty. She tried to imagine how a gorilla might drink – she got it wrong, but bringing a cupped hand to your lips was in fact how he drank – and she saw a look of recognition spreading slowly across his features. Possible recognition. That word with cognition in it, it means successfully to think. But the re part means to find again something you had before. This was bigger than recognition – Caliban had never had a thought of this order. He was unsure, yet very excited. Staring into her face, checking, he took her hand and began to lead her. She was saying, “Yes, yes,” and “Water?” and “Where water?” and then saying “Yes! Yes!” Off they went, running. She wasn’t used to running naked, it was difficult, and their progress was marked by him pausing to search her face for confirmation – just like a dog. It’s easy to think of him at this time as a dog – fetch the paper – good boy! People treated him like that all his life. Reporters especially. “While I watched he expertly popped the top from a Coke, poured a glass and drank – and never spilled a drop.” To think of this still gives me pains from the anger.
And then they came to the stream. Voilà! from Caliban this time, and more “Yes! Yes!” from June. She kissed him and clapped her hands. Caliban knew about clapping, he clapped too, and then he slapped his chest. He was so proud! Also he was modest – she saw this, there was a kind of restraint in him, it was the first time she’d noticed it. He closed his pride down a little. So serious, in some ways – it made her think.
Side by side they knelt by the stream and lifted the water to their mouths. Surprisingly, he drank with some delicacy. She was deeply moved by this – had noticed it during the night, how careful he was with her. This didn’t mean she wasn’t sore, but that was, she acknowledged, her fault, for encouraging him so hard. But he had a great command of his body. It took only one face-full from the canteen for him to learn. Anything physical, this he was quickly the master of.
Then she had him stand in the water and she washed him. If she had only thought to bring some soap, she had a small bar in her pack, and there had also been a yellowed, cracked piece drying on the washstand at the cabin. She would have liked, too, to have her clothes, and to have brought the canteen to fill. But the wild rush down the path, of them learning to do something together – to transfer a thought from one to the other, this had been too headlong for clothes.
He washed her in return, somewhat wide-eyed, then watched as she squatted nearby to pee. His scrutiny of bodily matters was embarrassing, but she understood that he had to learn everything she did.
A dragonfly, moving above the water’s surface like a length of shivering ink, came and went and came again, and they watched it together. Uropetala carovei, she thought, and recalled, distantly, that in fact she was here to study the wetas. Later, June, she told herself, and she tried to ask him what his word for this slim flying thing was but he had no word. He seemed to have capture of everything by looking at it, and to know what was behind him just as well as what was in front. His body was a sensory organ, he read the world with it.
Every time she looked, his curiosity was rigid.
She led him back up the path. She was hungry. The sun was up, there were birds flying, a local breeze gave a slight chill to the skin. She wished he would hold her companionably, drape his arm across her shoulders, but he didn’t seem to know this kind of behaviour. Inwardly, she began to fight a small frown – a small voice which said, What can it ever be with this guy? The thought was, she discovered, painful to her. Then, as they walked, he spoke. Quite clearly he said, “Water.”
She turned and threw her arms around him. She made a number of what she thought of as do-it-again gestures but he would not. He simply smiled back into her face, obviously pleased with his achievement.
“Water” – this set her thinking.
At the humpy she dressed. Caliban, having no clothes to put on, sat close by and watched. And this was companionable. He was utterly fascinated by her – never had she thought that buckling her belt could be the finale to a performance. Okay: sexed, washed, dressed, what she needed now was breakfast. She set off for the cabin, Caliban following. On a shelf she had seen two cans, and there was a can opener – before his eyes, she screwed the butterfly shape in a circle around their tops and lifted their lids.
Caliban had his face in close. These metal things, he had investigated them, but they had had no door. The butterfly shape had turned in his hand but suggested no purpose. Now he saw that everything in the cabin was good for something, that sometimes you put one thing with another thing and then a surprise happened. He stared round at the cabin – so what went with what?
She used a fork, and held a slice of tinned peach, dripping with syrup, near his mouth.
So sweet! He chewed a bit, took it out of his mouth to look at it, put it back in. Kept chewing and sucking at his teeth until every vestige of the taste was gone. Noisily, he licked his lips. Then he looked so steadily at the can that she had to laugh. He looked at her face and got it: she liked his desire! They both laughed at him – though she could see that laughing was something he was also learning how to do. She forked him out another piece. On a thought, she fetched down an enamel cup, poured an inch of syrup and passed it to him. He held it, looking down into it. Then, remembering how you had had to manage the canteen, he lifted the cup and drank. This was a major piece of thinking and June’s little voice said, He’s a quick learner. And she was happy all over her body.
... walking down the aisle with six feet of barefoot muscle by your side ...
Caliban was astonished by the syrup. As sweet as ... And his memory gave him an image of Nudu – her milk as sweet as this. He gazed at June with Nudu on his mind and was happy and sad and wanted to suckle from her all at the same time. He took the can and fork from her, speared a curved smile of gold and fed her in return.
After breakfast he showed her his books.
They sat side by side on the stoop and while he watched she turned the pages. As she looked at the pictures, her idea of him became more complicated. She saw how he had sat here, with the radio for company and sung over these images and gone deep into them, deeper perhaps, she realised, than she would ever go. She wondered, what was it like to see a picture of an airplane and never see the real thing? The Empire State, what was a skyscraper to him? She had the idea that he had made a religion of these images, that he worshipped something in them.
He held her head between his hands and looked into her eyes. She was happy about this. She wanted him to study all he could. She felt he was going into her head, like a miner, and bringing something back. She let him.
He presented her with the eggbeater and the slasher and the spade. She did her best to demonstrate the use of these things – the eggbeater, without eggs, was a challenge. She beat some water for him, but he couldn’t see a point to this activity and she couldn’t tell him. This caused confusion. To see him thinking, and not getting anywhere, it pained June. Quickly they moved on to the spade, where, under instruction, he dug a successful hole, seeming not to mind that his feet were bare, and then squatted to study it. Again, she could see him thinking, So now you have a hole in the ground – and? How could she explain gardening? But, as she watched his gaze went over the objects in the cabin, appraising each thing anew, trying to imagine the world in which it was used.
He led her up the path and showed her his windmill. She had known that something like this would be around somewhere, otherwise the radio and light would not have worked, but to see it here, on its own, its vanes turning slowly against the blue Pacific sky, was a shock. Who had built the cabin, lugged all this stuff up here? The skeleton, presumably. But why? And what was he to the gorilla-man?
Who was this guy anyway?
She sat him on the stoop and, using a pair of scissors from the implement drawer, cut his hair. There was no question about it, he was handsome. He shook his head, clearly pleased with its new lightness. The scissors were a source of wonder. He picked up tufts of hair from the dirt and snipped. So satisfying. She saw that he kept the scissors, didn’t want to relinquish them. He needed a belt, pockets. However, it was altogether pleasing to look at him there without any clothing. Bodies were not available for scrutiny in 1953, especially male ones. Especially naked male ones. What a piece of work is a man. Isn’t the human skin, for example, something special. The smoothness of it, the suppleness, the callused horniness. The way it repairs holes you make in it, the ways the repairs keep a trace of your carelessness, little lines that tell such stories. Especially the skin of the face. The stories round the eyes, the stories in the creases. He had, she noticed, a frown line.
And so their first morning passed. In the afternoon the sky became clouded and sleepy heat filled the clearing. Tired, they went to the humpy. She knelt before him and began upon what was at only its third occurrence already a ritual – the unbuttoning of her shirt. He watched from so short a distance that he seemed actually to be involved. Indeed his hand came out to help and she allowed him to fumble with a button.
She successfully conveyed that they should be more gentle with each other.
They lay entwined in the bed of grasses and dozed. A rabbit came into the clearing, came up close to sniff at them – June McMay woke up and so did Caliban. She saw him deciding whether he should catch it, and she thought he might too – rabbit dinner was a shared idea. But instead they sank back and let the long shadows of the trees turn across the afternoon.
She kneeled in front of him and looked into his eyes. He didn’t mind this at all, though he was distracted by her breasts. So fine – but she made him look at her. She touched her chest with her finger and said, “June.”
The wait was so long. Watching his face, she had the impression of his mind flying like an arrow, low across desert sands, featureless mile after mile, nothing but sand, and then, finally, there was the exact thing he was looking for. “June,” he said back.
Oh, she loved him for that. But did she pause to think where this was headed? Did it occur to her not to civilise him? Where does language lead us but knowledge, and where does knowledge lead us? I was going to say, to sorrow, but that would be glib, I think. He was that most happy of things, an innocent mind, and we always think of innocence as being happy, but is it? In my book it’s knowledge that pleases us. The toddler who figures that the fridge door swings shut by itself spends all day opening it – not because he can, but because he enjoys knowing what will happen next. We think that knowledge destroys us by letting us know we are going to die, but Caliban knew he was going to die. In his world things died on a daily basis. It’s the idea that it might be possible not to die which is the most corrupting – stops you from getting on with things.
But was she thinking ahead? Imagining an improved Caliban, the Mark II with Special Features? Her book comments that she “saw wonderful possibilities in him, that he might bring together the physical mastery of its body that an animal has with the power of a mind undistracted by the false promises of the material world.” Perhaps – but this sentence contains, I think, some rote thinking left in her from her pinko period. Like lots of liberal people of that time, June liked to say she was a Communist. It was good for shock value. But when the time came, Communist or no, she showed a fine command of how to make a commodity of herself.
And what did Caliban think he was doing, just saying “June” like that? What were words to him? Wasn’t he just a throbbing hunk of meat? The gorillas made sounds, had sounds for a few important things, but the idea of talk, of a conversation? They did converse, but by way of glances, by subtly altering the physical distance they were from each other, the angle they were at. A group of gorillas is a web of power lines – but is that talk?
He made the sound, “June,” flat, uninflected, and frowned. What did it mean? The thing in front of him pointed to itself again, its finger touched between the bumps that he liked and made that particular noise again. And looked at him. So he made the noise back, “June,” because he could see that she liked it.
Over and over.
Then she pointed her finger at him and gave him the question face.
He looked at where her finger was pointing – he had learned this – and there was his length of greenstone. He gave it to her, but she laid it aside. Then she pointed again.
Over and over and over. “June.” Point. “June.” Again. And the question face. This must be what it’s like, she thought, to mother a baby. It wasn’t something that appealed. June McMay never gave birth to a child.
A small lizard appeared at the edge of her vision, moving among the leaf-mould. She saw now that he had been aware of it for some time, that he wanted to catch it. Is that what he thought about all day? She held his face between her hands, held his attention. He stared back into her eyes so fiercely that she had to steel herself to hold his gaze. Then his mouth opened and he said, “Huh.”
