Remembering Babylon by David Malouf Read Free Book Online Page B

which he bit into a crust and went at it with his ground-down, blackened teeth, to show what he might have been privy to in those sixteen years.
    He had started out white. No question. When he fell in with the blacks – at thirteen, was it? – he had been like any other child, one of their own for instance. (That was hard to swallow.) But had he remained white?
    They looked at their children, even the smallest of them chattering away, entirely at home in their tongue, then heard the mere half-dozen words of English this fellow could cough up, and even those so mismanaged and distorted you could barely guess what he was on about, and you had to put to yourself the harder question. Could you lose it? Not just language, but it. It .
    For the fact was, when you looked at him sometimes he was not white. His skin might be but not his features. The whole cast of his face gave him the look of one of Them. How was that, then?
    Mr Frazer had the answer: because his teeth had been worn down almost to the gums from eating the native food. The white man’s facial structure came from the different and finer diet. It was the grinding down of his teeth, and the consequent broadening of the jaw that gave him what they called a native look.
    Ah, so that was it.
    Or – this too came from Mr Frazer and was a harder nut to crack – it was the languages he had learned to speak. He spoke five languages. His jaw, over the years, had adapted itself to the new sounds it had to make. Mightn’t it happen after a time that the whole cast of a man’s features would beshaped by that, the way a French man, for instance, differs in his whole facial form from an Englishman or a Scot, and so come to share a likeness with the other speakers of the tongue?
    Well!
    Or both of these, but also the effort he must have made, in those sixteen years, to blend in and make himself one of them, to find facial expressions, picked up by imitation or reflection and all quite different from a white man’s, that would make easier their daily intercourse with him. In taking on, by second nature as it were, this new language of looks and facial gestures, he had lost his white man’s appearance, especially for white men who could no longer see what his looks intended, and become in their eyes black.
    They chewed on this. Possible. Possible. But were more impressed by something simpler and more disturbing, since it touched on themselves and the sense they had of being in a place that had not yet revealed all its influences upon them.
    Wasn’t it true (this was not Mr Frazer but another delver into deep things) that white men who stayed too long in China were inclined to develop, after a time, the slanty eyes and flat faces of your yellow man, your Chinese?
    Study him, sitting there in the sun with that vacant, in-turned look; heavy-browed, morose. Look at the furrow in his brow. Was it a white man’s thought that set it there, or the knowledge of something (they would not name it) that could hardly be conceived of in a white man’s thinking, which when the dark recollection of it flickered over his brow, brought it right into the room with you, as a thing you could smell . Because for all the scrubbing with raw soap, and the soft woollen shirts and moleskins Ellen McIvor had found for him, and washed with her own hands, he had kept the smell he came with, which was the smell of the myall, half-meat, half-mud, a reminder, a depressing one, of what there might be in him that could not be reclaimed.
    His very way of moving was a reminder. He could be in a room before you knew it, his feet scarcely whispering over the hard dirt floor. Your hand would go to the back of your neck as if a fly had lighted there. But there was no fly. You wheeledround and it was him , grinning in that foolish apologetic way he had, eager to make up for the shock he had given you by snatching the sopping shirt out of the dirt or fetching water to replace the suds, while you held your side and