Imperium by Christian Kracht Read Free Book Online Page A

that it was his, take it, he owned three of them, even. Two natives came along; no one said a word. Engelhardt stripped off his sandals and knee socks, taking a seat on the rear bench, and in a single forward movement they cruised to Kabakon under a full sail that billowed magnificently in the east wind. Flying fish accompanied the canoe, leaping parabolas of silver. He tasted the salty ocean air, wiggled his naked big toes back and forth, and swore to himself, smiling, not to put his sandals back on anytime soon. After a good half hour, the green outlines of his isle appeared on the horizon. One of the men pointed over toward it with the stump of his arm and looked back over his shoulder with a smile, his perfect white teeth showing, two tightly closed rows of ivory.
    To own one’s own island on which the coconut grew and flourished in the wild! It had not yet fully penetrated Engelhardt’s consciousness, but now as the little boat glided from the open ocean into the calmer, transparent waters of a small bay, the brightly conjured shore of which was lined with majestically soaring palms, his heart began fluttering up and down like an excited sparrow. My goodness, he thought, this was now really his! All this!
    He leapt from canoe into water, waded the last few yards to the shore, and fell to his knees in the sand, so overcome was he; and for the black men in the boat and the few natives who had found their way to the beach with a certain phlegmatic curiosity (one of them even wore a bone fragment in his lower lip, as though he were parodying himself and his race), it looked as if a pious man of God were praying there before them; it might remind us civilized peoples of a depiction of the landing of the conquistador Hern á n Cort é s on the virginal shore of San Juan de Ul ú a, perhaps painted by turns—if this were even possible—by El Greco and Gauguin, each of whom, with an expressive, jagged stroke of the brush, once more conferred upon the kneeling conqueror Engelhardt the ascetic features of Jesus Christ.
    Thus, the seizure of the island Kabakon by our friend looked quite different depending on the viewpoint from which one observed the scenario and who one actually was. This splitting of reality into various components was, however, one of the chief characteristics of the age in which Engelhardt’s story takes place. To wit: modernity had dawned; poets suddenly wrote fragmented lines; grating and atonal music, which to unschooled ears merely sounded horrible, was premiered before audiences who shook their baffled heads, was pressed into records and reproduced, not to mention the invention of the cinematograph, which was able to render our reality exactly as tangible and temporally congruent as it occurred; it was as if it were possible to cut a slice of the present and preserve it in perpetuity between the perforations of a strip of celluloid.
    All this, however, did not move Engelhardt; he was on his way toward withdrawing not only from modernity dawning the world over, but altogether from what we non-Gnostics denote as progress, as, well, civilization. Engelhardt took a decisive step forward onto the shore; in reality, it was a step back into a barbarism most exquisite.
    The first hut was erected according to the manner of the natives. Makeli appeared now, too, for the first time, a perhaps thirteen-year-old boy who came trudging through the mangroves sometime in the afternoon, timidly but obstinately, walked onto Engelhardt’s white-sand stage, and was never seen to budge from his side again. Six men came and showed him how to intertwine palm leaves with one another to weave a roof and walls. They gave him fruits, and he quenched his thirst; they gave him a lap-lap, he stripped naked, they cloaked his belly with it, and tied off the ends below his navel; the sun stabbed down from the sky with merciless vehemence; soon his shoulders were burnt red.
    Makeli chose the place where the hut was to stand; a clearing