Sunrise with Seamonsters by Paul Theroux Read Free Book Online Page A

monstrous game, like a child's, but hardly even erotic, played to kill time and defeat fear and loneliness—something the curfew demanded.

Tarzan is an Expatriate
[1967]
    Consider the following quotation, from
The Man-Eaters of Tsavo
by Lt.-Col. J. H. Patterson, D.S.O.
    "... Shortly I saw scores of lights twinkling through the bushes; every man in camp turned out, and with tom-toms beating and horns blowing came running to the scene. They surrounded my eyrie, and to my amazement prostrated themselves on the ground before me, saluting me with cries of '
Mabarak! Mabarak!
' which I believe means 'blessed one' or 'Saviour'... We all returned in triumph to the camp, where great rejoicings were kept up for the remainder of the night, the Swahili and other African natives celebrating the occasion by an especially wild and savage dance. For my part I anxiously awaited the dawn..."
    There is a human shape that stands astride this description and a thousand others like it. It is the shape of Tarzan, prime symbol of Africa.
    My knowledge of Tarzan is that of a person who, fifteen years ago, spent Sunday afternoons on the living room floor on his elbows reading that serious comic inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs' novels. Tarzan may be gone from the comics; I have no way of knowing. But I do know that he is here, in Africa, in the flesh. I see him every day.
    The Tarzan I remember was a strong white man in a leather loincloth, always barefoot; and he was handsome, a wise mesomorph, powerful, gentle and humorless. The animals all knew him. He spoke to them cryptically, in a sort of private Kitchen Swahili (two of the words he frequently used were
bundolo
and
tarmangani
). The animals replied in bubbles which only Tarzan understood. Although he was known as Tarzan, "The Ape-Man," he was undeniably a man and bore not the slightest trace of simian genes.
    There was Jane. She aroused me: her enormous breasts strained the makeshift knots on her monkeyskin brassiere; she was also barefoot, an added nakedness that in the case of a woman is certainly erotic, and she walked on the balls of her feet. She was watchful, worried that Tarzan might be in danger. When she sniffed trouble she had a sexy habit of thrusting out those breasts of hers, cocking her head to the side and cupping her hand to her ear. Boy, the odd epicene child, appeared on the
living room floor one week and stayed, as pubescent as the day I first laid eyes on him: slender, hairless little boy scout with his child-sized spear.
    And my Tarzan, real or the result of a dim recollection dimmed even further by my being remote in time and place, defined his society and implied its close limits when he said, pointing, "Me Tarzan ... You Jane ... Him Boy..."
    In spite of the fact that there was a green parrot with his claws dug into Tarzan's shoulder, a monkey holding his hand and a lion faithfully dogging his tracks, Tarzan did not admit these creatures to his definition. In the most politic way, by not mentioning them, he excluded the animals from the society of the intimate white three. There was no question of equality: the fact remained that the animals simply were not the same and could therefore never have the same rights as the humans. Tarzan did not aggravate the situation; he asserted his authority over the animals very passively. When there was trouble the animals rallied round, they served Tarzan, grunted their bubble-messages and assisted him. Except in a time of jungle crisis Tarzan had little or nothing to do with them. Distance was understood. Tarzan never became bestial; he ate cooked food and, to my knowledge, never bit or clawed any of his enemies or buggered his functionaries. Yes, of course he swung on vines, beat his chest and roared convincingly, but these gestures were not an expression of innate animalism as much as they were the signal of a certain solidarity with the animals; as gestures they demonstrated futility as well as sympathy, and it was this