Jungle Rock Blues, page 2
But Nudu, that dedicated mother, nevertheless old Nudu somehow got him through. The storms passed, the days and nights simply arrived and then passed – nobody was counting. Nobody even had a watch. Nudu and the baby and the tribe, all just following their noses. Imagine for a second the gorilla-songs Nudu sang to Caliban, there on the hillside when the moon was out. Insects flying. Birds after them, looping and diving, there’s a warm wind, a clover wind, sweet-smelling, and the fat moon wobbling as though it’s full of water, just out of reach – baby Caliban puts up a pudgy hand. Watching the cloud shapes as they drift across the moon’s pockmarked face in the long-shadowed night. You can hear the rustle of everything – no one wants to be the first to move. What’s that? Over there ... But it’s nothing, some rodent. Nudu and Caliban listening together, not afraid, there is no reason to be afraid out there in the balmy Wairarapa moonlight. Then Nudu sits him on her knee and she begins to sing to him. She goes, Loo loo loo – hey, Caliban. Loo loo loo, her lips pointy, her big round gorilla eyes shining at him. Caliban tries to grab the hairs on her chin and she lets him. He twists the hairs – she lets him. Ow, okay, that’s enough of that, and she holds him up. She stands and he’s held way up there in the air. Slowly she turns him and he can see the clumps of the trees and the scrubby lowlands, the clover meadow, the upslope, the rising dark line that the ridge makes against the sky, and, above, the endless curved splatter of the stars.
This is where he lived.
In the watery light his skin is mottled, dirty brown, thick with dust and grime, crosshatched with scratches, with streakmarks down his legs, there are bugs in his hair, there are scabs and sores on his skin, and on his back something like a leech that Nudu has been trying to pick off for days. His grubby little fists rub his eyes, his nose screws up. His mouth is going down. But Nudu holds him up there, lets the warm winds play around him. He is alive.
Gradually, as Caliban began to respond to her, Nudu set about teaching him the lore of the bush. Not by talking. The scientific books tell you that in fact gorillas are better than chimpanzees at picking up human speech patterns, but that’s, you know, in a lab, these gorillas didn’t know any humans, just Caliban and he didn’t have any speech to teach them. But something was communicated. By watching, I presume – Caliban with his big eyes there in his head, looking everywhere at once, a bit frightened, but then seeing something, a bug, I don’t know the names of any New Zealand bugs, but some bug crawled up her arm, he liked the pattern on its back and he closed his paw over it, stuck it in his mouth. That same crunchy sound he heard from the bird. And Nudu said, No, Caliban, we don’t eat bugs. He was making a face, the bug tasted nasty, and she said, We eat leaves, gorillas eat leaves. But Caliban of the Gorillas always ate bugs.
Of course, she didn’t actually say, No Caliban – she didn’t actually say anything. But she showed him, by twisting him away when they came to the cutty grass, and holding him clear when they passed the stinging nettle, and putting him down into it when they came to the clover. He ate the white clover heads and got the honey. By holding him up when they got to the manuka bushes, which were their favourite. Putting his nose in there so he could smell it. What a nose he developed. Snotty, unwiped, it’s true, but he was filthy in every way, what did it matter, he was still in good working order, even dirty he was still a fully-equipped human being. With his nose he could pick up the pattern of the bush around him, punga there, toi-toi up there. The dead fawn on the downslope – ripe! Rain coming from over there, the wet smell of it, the shift of it on his skin. Terjick there. Terjick coming over, the silverback, knuckles pressing the earth. Terjick looking down at him, a big fellow, really big, huge now that he was up close, looming, and wanting to touch. Keeping his eyes on Nudu and his hand going towards Caliban. A wicked expression. Nudu twisting Caliban away. Don’t let Terjick touch, not with that look in his eyes, that is the lore of the bush.
Caliban tasted everything. He put the whole world in his mouth. Pig’s droppings, a brown lizard, there it goes, in, its tail hanging out, flicking on his chin. Bark, leaves, fistfuls of moss. A giant weta’s thigh – he stuck his tongue out to taste it. This last item was passed to him by Terjick. Nudu wanted to intercede, but Terjick was patient – every time Nudu reached for the thigh, Terjick moved it away. He had a point, she knew, and when she was sure that Terjick didn’t mean any harm she allowed it to happen. The big solid thigh, dripping, tipped into the baby’s arms. Of course it was too heavy for him and he dropped it. Terjick picked it up from the dirt and proffered it again. Caliban leaned forward, stuck out his tongue – and Terjick snatched it away and held it high above his head, as though to bash out Caliban’s brains. Terjick screamed. Then he flung the thing from him. It turned, end over end, against the sky and fell into the tree tops.
This is the first story that Caliban has to tell that is from his memory. He can see the thing against the sky, tumbling, and hear Terjick’s scream.
Caliban had crawled away from Nudu. The gorillas were resting around the edges of a clearing, manuka trunks upright like charcoal strokes with their puffy, leafy tops of green and white swaying up there, out of reach unless the gorillas climbed or bent them down, but providing good shade, and there was just a hint of breeze. Lying back in hollows, dozing, half concealed, there were bits of gorilla poking up wherever you looked, and Caliban set off to crawl across the clearing – away from Terjick, Nudu noted, away from Zembak her brother who clearly didn’t like the boy, but, no, there was no reason why he shouldn’t explore a bit, she could see a stick waggling where he was wrestling with it down in the undergrowth, some old flax husk that was light enough for him to manhandle. The cicadas were singing away, a heavy sound that was like white noise, like the sound of the sun. All the gorillas were dozing.
I should explain what a weta is. At one time New Zealand had a number of large birds, the moa, which was like an emu only bigger, and a giant eagle, called harpagornis, but, apart from the gorillas, nothing of any size survived the arrival of humans with sharpened sticks. But there was a large insect. Wetas are spiny, kind of ugly, legs everywhere, long-headed, bulbous, with shiny body parts that are the colour of dark beer – that same translucent amber glow about them. There are lots of species, but the most spectacular were the giant, heteracantha, which were cave-dwelling and stood as big as a cow. This variety had T. Rex-type jaws and were really pretty fearsome. Shortsighted, like the rhino, they seemed to blunder a bit, so in any kind of a wide open space they were usually no danger to humans. Their main prey was opossums, this is a kind of marsupial bear, heavily furred, with small claws and sharp teeth but only as big as a cat, there are no shortage of them in New Zealand, down to something like thirty million at last count, they’re rampant since the big wetas died out and are stripping the country of vegetation. The last giant weta seen alive was in 1977, when some kids taking drugs got a fright in a cave in the northern part of the country, but you can see specimens in all the museums.
In Caliban’s stories the wetas don’t have names. Maybe this is part of what makes them so spooky. They came, over the brow of the hill, antennae waving, dark shiny beasts, and they didn’t make any sound. Spiny legs in every direction, large flat eyes. And no names. No voices. As I said, Caliban was playing at the far edge of the clearing and they closed upon him. They formed a semicircle and then their leader came forward, darker than the others, larger too, made almost humpbacked by his great shoulder muscles. He stood over Caliban so that the child was in his shadow and some sticky stuff ran from his mouth and slithered across Caliban’s skin. Acidic, it stung Caliban, making him cry out, and it was this cry that bought Terjick so rapidly across the clearing, something crabwise in his approach, an urgent four-pawed run, and then upon arrival abruptly stopping to rise to his full height. Terjick threw back his head, showed his teeth and then slapped his hands on the great drum of his chest. Baby Caliban heard that sound, unique, and catalogued it – during his musical years he never heard kettle drums without thinking of the day Terjick saved his life. When he looked up, the weta had risen on its hind legs above him and so the two monsters fell together, like collapsing buildings, and he was kicked aside. There was a terrible roaring coming from Terjick, his great muscles were working, and then a slow, ghastly sound could be heard, a tearing, as he twisted the weta’s head from its thorax. Now the sticky filth ran freely from the open neck and again Caliban was drenched. The jagged-jawed head was thrown to one side, where the other wetas seized it and carried it off, leaving Terjick to struggle with the flailing body. He crushed it – his fur was matted with slime – and dismembered it. His roaring was as much a sound of fear and pain as of anger. Throughout no weta made a single noise. When Terjick finally threw the body from him, they were gone.
Nudu took Caliban to the stream and dipped him in and patted him and licked him. He had only one actual wound, a long weal on his side where an ankle spine of the weta had caught him – this festered and took a long time to scab. But his skin was burning. Nudu licked and licked. If his skin burned then surely so did her tongue but she persisted. The boy would not be comforted. Nudu held him close. Now Terjick came to watch. His fur was giving off a faint smoke, as though the slime was smouldering. He showed his teeth when he saw Caliban. Terjick had a large bite wound in his shoulder. He was proud.
Caliban never lost the desire to clean himself. He spent hours licking and scrubbing. It was almost impossible to get him out from under a waterfall. When, later in his life, he discovered the shower of the modern suburban house he would stay under the water until asked to leave.
3
Caliban was once interviewed by a more sympathetic writer than Truman Capote. This was Edgar Rice Burroughs, who turned Caliban’s early life into a novel set in Africa – Caliban of the Apes. The book was, predictably, an extraordinary success. Burroughs really knew how to milk a subject and he made the story over into one of his “wild romances”, with cannibals and lots of blood. Caliban liked him. Burroughs also had a tough start in life – he failed at everything, had eighteen jobs, at one point he had to pawn his wife’s jewelry to feed his kids. He was flunked out of the army, started small businesses that failed, he couldn’t sell snake oil, he failed as a door-to-door salesman of educational lectures. But once he got started as a writer he was a real worker – at one point he wrote eight novels in a twelve-month period. Critics scoff but so far his books have sold twenty-five million copies and are translated into languages like Urdu and Icelandic.
Burroughs’ earlier books feature journeys to the centre of the earth and trips to Mars. They’re a bit – let’s not be coy – trashy. But that last one I do keep returning to. I will read anything that promises to take me back to Caliban’s early life. I want to see him among the tree trunks, moving barefoot along the flattened paths in the dirt, those trails that knot the animals of an area together. I strain to catch the knowledge that was in his feet. Mud-knowledge. Dirt-knowledge. Caliban knew things that I can never know. But was he conscious? This is what obsesses me. To be human and to be unconscious. To be instinctual. To know what a human knows, without knowing that you know – is that possible? To feel the plants growing around you the same way as you feel the hairs growing out of your head, this would be special. Caliban, running naked, one skin too thin, the result of his bath in the weta’s acids, in shock from mother-loss, soul-lonely for his kind, and yet every filthy pore of him filled with knowledge of the planet at the organic level – wouldn’t this be a particular kind of glory?
And then, like an ancient body found in old ice, to thaw to consciousness.
Barefoot Caliban continued to wander the bushland trails in the company of the gorillas. He was growing – his infant years behind him now, though Nudu’s breast was still a source of comfort. She never bore another baby. Later, Caliban wondered if she ever mated with Terjick again. She seems to have made it her mission to care for the human child. He needed care. The gorillas of his generation were growing fast but even with the extra milk Caliban was skin-and-bone, eating only leaves and bugs and whatever came his way. Worms, leggy spiders. There’s nothing poisonous in New Zealand, there were no snakes in those days, the place was a paradise. But it’s not a supermarket.
Moving slowly through the bush, then, there were at that time seven gorillas in the group, and Caliban. Nudu, Terjick the leader, Zembak, the young gun who would eventually be chased off, an old female called Gincha, a younger female, Enk, and two youngsters, Bo and Jimpi. Terjick in front, huge, head still, eyes going from side to side, moving steadily on his knuckles, the silver-grey of his broad weightlifter’s shoulders making something like an opened book for the others to follow. They’d eaten and were looking for shade. Climbing to the ridge, Terjick on all fours, pausing bridge-shaped on the skyline, his great tufted head turning slowly as he surveyed the valley. High over the downslope a hawk was flying the infinity sign. Poised there under the welcome sun, Terjick checked that his family were ready, and began the descent.
The valley where Terjick’s group spent the nights was shaped like the bowl of a long spoon, angled to plunge into the flats where the rushes and swamp-grasses grew. As they started down, peaks and ridges in the green canopy of bush made it look like a tossing oceanscape. Nothing was moving except for the dandelion seeds, which were carried on the updraft as it swept to the ridge behind the gorillas, so that the current in the air was made visible by a stream of frail asterisks. This was something beautiful, but did the gorillas notice? It’s hard to know what was in their heads. Only one of the interviews with Caliban ever touched on this subject. A reporter once asked, “Do the gorillas look at the view?” They look for something nice to eat, Caliban said. They look out for a good place. At this time Caliban’s English was cautious but there was nothing wrong with his marbles. He asked the reporter, Do you look at the view?
“I am always on the lookout for the work of God.”
At this the apeman frowned and scratched his temple. Then slowly he replied, “The gorillas don’t know anything about God.”
Well, it made a good headline.
At the top end of the valley a tree stood out from the rumpled green of the bush, and from high in it a tui – which is a kind of bird, it makes a noise like the soul of a dredging machine – a tui was singing, as usual, and as they descended the gorillas heard it. They heard other bird noises too, by which they knew that nothing untoward was happening in their valley. They moved like a spread cape behind Terjick, slowly, pausing in shady spots where the air was sweet, then ambling on. In the afternoons they liked their rest.
But not Caliban. He was a trouble to the group at siesta-time. The boy would not leave off with his curiosity. He was always finding a new beetle to chase. No one watching him and the beetle making its way along a stick, hanging now from the underside and Caliban with his eyes just two inches away, following as it went about its insect business, prodding when it went too slow, and then transferring his interest to the hawk which was passing low overhead, he saw the pattern on the underside of its wings, and, scrambling upslope, hurried to find a better opening to the sky. He watched its looping flight, then dropped his eyes to a silver trail of slime left by something making its slow way up the narrow bushland path – and so he explored. When finally the gorillas called for him he had to run, a giddy downhill rush, surefooted as he slalomed past trunks and hanging creepers. Terjick would grunt, Nudu would scold – hurry! It was so exciting to run downhill. Once, going fast, he met the pigs – suddenly he was amongst them – and had to climb, no hesitation. The tusker rooted round the base of the tall stump he’d scrambled up, opening the ground. Now that was grunting! There was nothing to do but wait. Eventually the boar’s attention wandered and the boy climbed down. The gorillas were by then all calling loudly. He was growled at. That night in the humpy, wrapped in Nudu’s arms, he had a picture of the pigs in his mind – their dark fierceness, the way they always seemed on the edge of anger. The black hairiness of them, that gleaming tusk. So was he thinking about them? Or was this simply seeing a picture? Was he imagining what he would be like as a pig? We don’t know. That is, I think, one of the reasons we are fascinated by Caliban – we think he might be able to tell us what happens inside the heads of animals. He was always watched for animal behaviour. But he said firmly, “I am not an animal.”
At afternoon sleepy-time he continued to escape and so by dint of no particular method came to know every inch of the valley. I don’t mean that he was familiar with it. That’s an inadequate word. He had inside him a parallel universe, a sense-map of the valley, made of crossing strands of odour and temperature patterns and shade patterns and tastes and echolocations and between-leaf airways which had been gained by sticking his snotty nose right into the dirt of everything. He had that landscape on his skin and in his hair. He ate that landscape and shitted it. Maybe his most sensitive instruments were his feet, which were hard and horny and caked with grime but which usually had a dampness about them – there was a moist layer where subtle information passed through from the earth he trod and read through those feet as though it was a great book.
And in this way he came upon the cabin.
On that particular day the afternoon had stretched and the gorillas were, he knew, not going to travel far to where they would sleep, which was a good thing as he was some distance, perhaps three miles away. He had discovered a nest of the kind of bees which live in the ground and was watching them as they flew in loops and circles all about its mouth – putting his ear to the earth to hear the underworld hum. Something big down in there and yet when it appeared it was made of little buzzing bits. He was listening hard – Terjick’s cough would come soon, and there was also a bird he hadn’t heard before, that he was trying to place. Listening, listening ... And so he became aware of another sound, something with a different quality. At first he thought it was the bees. Does a hive sing? There was a vibration, a shifting level of tones – but where exactly was it coming from? He lifted his head and it was still there. And so now his sound map had in it the hive, and the bird, and a hole where Terjick’s cough would come, and the background silence of the bush which is so loud if you live in it. And something else too. A humming – another humming. Lower in tone, but not in the ground. No, this was in the air. Now Caliban was standing, turning his ear. That direction.
