Jane (20 page)

The moment Tarzan went on, I found myself closely surrounded by the Waziri women. They commenced speaking to me in their language in rather more melodic tones than Tarzan used, and they touched me quite uninhibitedly. My hair was of the greatest interest, as it was so different from their own crisp wool that had been braided and wound tightly in concentric circles, its center at the top and back of their heads. What appeared to be a small golden pyramid ornament sat in the center of the “bull’s-eye.” Multitudes of curious fingers lightly brushed the bare skin of my face and the arm and calf where my injuries had necessitated the jacket sleeve and trouser leg of my safari suit be removed. Some women sniffed at me to detect my scent. Suddenly they were all laughing raucously, but I sensed no maliciousness in it, so that when the whole group, with me in the center, moved like a rugby scrum toward a hut and I was hustled inside, I did not protest.

All but a dozen of the women remained outside the door, leaving me in the care of the matrons. A rough wooden bench was placed behind me and gently I was pushed down to the seat. Suddenly, with fingers working at my limbs and torso, the vine laces were untied and the remnants of my clothing fell away. In a state of total undress before this determined quorum of female strangers I felt unreasonably comfortable and altogether safe. They began, with wet squares of undyed cotton, to scrub every inch of my person. No one had taken a sponge to me since my nana at age eight. I was in sore need of a good bath, and if I was perfectly honest, it was rather pleasant. Something like the queen of Sheba’s daily ablutions, I imagined with an inward smile.

Once I was clean and patted dry, gourds filled with palm oil were produced, and the oldest, most wrinkled woman, with long flattened breasts reaching almost to her waist—a “crone,” I thought—brought forth a small but finely wrought golden vessel, itself covered with symbols I could not discern. Wafting from it came an intense but gorgeous floral aroma. A few precious drops of this concentrated perfume were mixed into the palm oil, and the women began anointing my skin with it.

Suddenly all ministrations ceased and what I perceived as an argument among the women commenced. I felt my hair being lifted and twirled from several sides. A decision made, they began to braid it. It was a long process and I squirmed at my rigid confinement on the bench. Just as I felt myself growing faint, I was made to stand, like Aphrodite in all her nakedness. A woman came forward holding a length of their textile—the ubiquitous motifs of both concentric circles and concentric squares woven intricately and beautifully into the cloth—and wound it around my hips. By their satisfied expressions they indicated that their guest was fully clothed. I looked down and saw my two breasts in all their unbound glory.

“I’m sorry, ladies,” I announced as if to my Cambridge seamstresses, “this will never do.” Smiling the whole while, so not to offend, I unwound the length of fabric and held it up before me. The textile was simple but very fine, and it pleased me greatly that this would become my new forest habiliment. I tried tying it around me like a shroud, making sure my bosom and genitalia were fully covered, but the sheath left very little room for the movement of my legs, something that was most essential in my present circumstance. There must be a better way. This time I hung the cloth loosely by a knot at the left shoulder, covering the ugly scar left by the leopard.

All at once there were cries of dismay from the Waziri women. One of them untied it, I thought rather indignantly. But then it was rehung in exactly the same fashion with the knot over my
right
shoulder. By a flurry of gestures, facial expressions, and words that were altogether foreign to me but whose meaning I clearly comprehended, I understood that the scars left by the leopard were anything but ugly. They were to be worn proudly, even venerated.

Part of the slender vine of Tarzan’s original creation was used to belt the little dress that covered only the top of my thighs, but I was satisfied that all my female parts were covered and I could move my limbs freely.

Finally a thick gold bracelet was slid above the elbow to my upper arm, and one of the square gold pendants on a leather thong was hung about my neck. Now properly attired, I was led outdoors, where the larger crowd of women had dissipated not in the least. They all nodded their approval at my appearance and many reached out and touched my coiffure. With so much more hair than the Waziri women, I could hardly imagine what the braided creation must look like.
My kingdom for a mirror,
I mused.

Thus I was escorted around the village. I was handed wiggling babies to hold. I wondered if I was meant to give my blessings, so I kissed them all on the top of their foreheads to a chorus of “ahhs” from my companions.

What I saw in the village both delighted and confounded me. There were structures and tools and artifacts that were primitive in the extreme—huts and pottery of mud and stone and thatch, tools and weapons of crude iron—but the patterns on jewelry and textiles, woven into basketry and carved into the sides of the thick-walled houses, were unusually complex and clearly meaningful to the tribe. What could these symbols possibly mean to the Waziri, I wondered, for them to repeat the designs so frequently and in such a variety of ways?

Well, I decided, it would all be revealed in time. I did wish very much to be reunited with Tarzan, but there were yet sights the women wanted me to see.

The tribal garden was indeed a wonder, vast and crowded with every sort of crop, from yams, eggfruit, and sugarcane to plantain, pawpaws, and oil palms. And here were rows of cotton, something that I had been astonished to see growing in a dense forest. But the size of the garden and the industry with which it was being tended was not what startled me most. In the clearing, the massive trees had been cut down, and giant limbs that had hung over the edges had been hacked away, some of them quite recently, so there would be no impediment to full sunlight blanketing the garden rows, allowing for the growth of sun-dependent plants such as cotton. At the edge of the plot was a square-walled hut, quite large, where inside many women sat at looms weaving the raw fiber into cloth.

At the far back of the village, serious industry was under way. All up and down the wall of the Enduro Escarpment men hung from woven rope hammocks chipping away at the basalt, areas where thick veins of gold ran through it. Chunks of the mineral were thrown to the ground and collected by other tribesmen, who carried them to iron cauldrons heated by blazing fires—a primitive smelting operation. This, then, was the source of the Waziri gold.

Back in the village proper with my “ladies-in-waiting,” I was drawn forward toward a smaller hut. The women parted for me to enter, and I found myself suddenly in a dim space, faintly lit at the far end with wicks floating in cups of oil. It reeked of old smoke and something vaguely sweet and hoary. The crone took my hand and led me forward to the lighted altar. There through the haze I made out the figure of a seated woman and around her feet other tribeswomen in poses of prostration.

This must be an important wife of the chief,
I thought, and following the crone’s lead, I knelt before the queenly figure. I made to kiss the right hand resting upon her knee, but when my eyes, having accustomed themselves to the darkness, fell upon the fingers I was about to kiss, I recoiled in mute horror.

The seated woman was a corpse, an unwrapped mummy! I lifted my eyes to see the brown, leathery face and found not a wizened old hag but what had clearly been a beautiful and stately young woman. She was bedecked in beads and gold and feathers and, from the look and smell of her, appeared to have been embalmed by a process of smoking.

I longed to know why this female was so venerated to be so carefully preserved and set out for worship. Would Tarzan know? Or would I ever learn the Waziri tongue well enough to find the answer? I steeled myself, kissed the hand, and withdrew, allowing those who had followed me in to pay homage to the cadaver.

By the time my escort and I had come out, the sun had begun setting, and the dappled light gave way to darkness illuminated by a single massive bonfire in the middle of the central clearing.

On the ground, large banana leaves had been laid out in a huge circle around the fire, and upon this table food had been set out, from the look of it a veritable feast. Tribesmen, -women, and children were all taking their places around this tribal groaning board, and to my relief I saw that Tarzan was already seated. He looked as odd and uncomfortable here as he might have at my mother’s polished mahogany dining room table. Next to him on his left was the man I guessed was the charm doctor, now bedecked with an awe-inspiring headdress of scarlet feathers, ones I suspected had been plucked from the tails of hapless parrots like my guardian, Mr. Grey. Next to the wizard was an empty space, and beside that sat the chief—himself a sight in a leopard skin hat topped by a gold circlet that could be nothing less than an antiquated crown.

I was deposited at what I supposed was a place of honor, and I took my seat of pounded and beautifully painted bark cloth, mimicking a cross-legged pose that everyone else naturally assumed. Because of the charm doctor’s placement beside me, I was unable to speak to or even see Tarzan. But the dinner partner between us now turned his eyes on me.

“Ulu,” he said, thumping his breastbone above his gold amulet. He opened his palm toward me, and without the slightest change in his menacing expression intoned, “Jane.” Tarzan, I realized, had begun communication with the Waziri headmen on my behalf. Oh, how desperately I wished for intelligence of my father!

I thought it somewhat unwise to smile, so I simply repeated his name. “Ulu.”
Doctor Ulu,
I thought and wished the physicians at Cambridge Medical College could see their Gabonese counterpart.

“Jane,” I heard from the other side and turned. “
Shango
Waziri
,
” my other dinner partner said. Shango
must mean “chief,”
I thought.

“
Shango
Waziri,” I repeated, with what I hoped was appropriate gravitas.

Suddenly he pointed to the leopard skin under his crown and then placed his hand over the quartet of healed gashes on my shoulder. He held my eyes and nodded somberly, acknowledging, as the women had, my most honorable scars.

Neither man had smiled, but I suddenly felt that their fierceness was benign, and knew I was not sitting amid a tribe of cannibals.

Now Chief Waziri and Ulu the charm doctor lifted metal bowls of liquid, urging Tarzan and me to do the same. Ulu raised his voice in a speech unintelligible to me, but the sentiment was altogether clear. With a nod to either side of him, he acknowledged his honored guests and after a great cry of
“Napesi bolinga nzambe mokola!”
the assembled drank.

I sipped from my bowl. Palm wine. I had tasted a more refined version on
La Belle Fille.
It was a strong intoxicant, so I had better measure my consumption of it. The congregated began to pass the heaping plates of food. While alien in its spicing, it was delicious. I noticed that around the table, many pairs of Waziri—a man and a woman—were sharing food off a single leaf dish. I leaned forward as if to reach for a dish of yam and turned in order to see what Tarzan was eating. His cup of palm wine did not appear to have been touched.

I caught but a brief glimpse of his face as he stared down at his banana leaf plate piled with steamed fish, monkey stew, and grilled lizards on sticks, and saw that he was perhaps more flummoxed than I was. Could this be the first time he had sat down to a meal with the Wiziri? The first time he had been confronted by cooked food?

He caught my eye, and I quickly took up a piece of meat and popped it in my mouth, chewing ardently. I wished to say,
“Tarzan, popo koho dako-za,”
Tarzan, eat this hot meat, but felt that good manners prevented me from speaking over the charm doctor’s plate.

It seemed the feasting went on for an eternity, but I, to my surprise, found that I was famished and partook of bits of everything I was offered. Tarzan’s seeds and nuts and flowers and ferns had been most appreciated, but there was something comforting even in so outrageous a dining room as this, with such exotic dinner companions, to be eating food that tasted like
food.

And then all at once the drumming began.

In all my life I had never heard such a sound or, more rightly,
felt
one. The booming was loud and deep and sonorous, and it throbbed disturbingly in the pit of my gut. Across the clearing, my eyes found the drummer and the drum itself. It was monstrously large, the entire base of a hollowed-out tree stump, the skin-covered ends of the drumsticks the size of an infant’s head. I had barely accustomed myself to the hedonic thumping when a great cacophony of smaller drums rent the night with frenzied clattering and pounding.

All at once the Waziri men stood in their places and, leaping across the banana leaf table, began to dance around the fire. Incomprehensible was the sight! A hundred native men, naked but for their feathers and skins, with jumps and gyrations and stamping feet thrust their shoulders to one beat, their chests to another, and their hips to a third, never losing the beat. Their dark bodies—now taut, now rippling—glistened in the flickering flames, and the faces I had once thought fierce now contorted with frightening sensuality. On a silent cue, Chief Waziri leaped into the fray and commenced a dance more rousing and convulsive than the others. Ulu, the charm doctor, joined him, but before beginning his own dance, he threw a gourd full of dried tobacco leaves into the fire, sending up a cloud of pungent smoke that, from the expressions of approval on the Waziri faces, was a most welcome addition to the festivities.

I must remain calm,
I thought, though my pulse was beginning to race—if I was not imagining it—to the rhythm of the drumming. Impossibly, the thunderous pounding quickened. The leaping and whirling grew wildly ribald. My head swam. My body was afire and suddenly I felt the urge to move, even in my place, to sway, to undulate, to lose myself in the throbbing heat and thunder of the dance.
Restrain yourself!
I thought. I dared not turn my head and meet Tarzan’s eyes. I was fixed on the blistering performance before me. Altogether paralyzed.