Free Continent by Jim Crace Page B

thirty-five years in a half-beard, was seated on the veranda at a table – the one that now stood in the corner of mother’s room, heavy with medicines. My mother – a little blurred – was standing at his side, dramatically cutting slices of gourd for the guests and for the camera. We could recognize one or two of the faces, younger versions of the remote professors and their wives who worked with my father at the Institute and who had ignored us when we were children. We recognized crockery, too, and the chairs, and the white heads of the fessandra bushes where then – and still -the cats took their refuge. The ‘kidnapped’ maid who stood in the sunlight at the edge of the veranda, half-turned and smiling like the guests into the camera, was – as mother had described her – tiny, sweet and thirteen. She wore service gloves and a white cotton dress. An empty tray hung by her side. Her feet were bare. Of all the people there she seemed the least self-conscious, attempting to present nothing of herself except the smile. ‘Well, she looked happy enough,’ I said.
    But other papers in my father’s handwriting mademe wonder. He noted her listlessness during the early days of their return from the forest, her reluctance to stay for long inside the house, the chaos of her digestive system as she encountered city foods for the first time. She lost weight. Her face, pert and cheerful by nature, thinned and paled. ‘The Professor took measurements, of course. What else? Her height, her cranial circumference, her daily temperature,’ said mother, awake and garrulous again with the photograph of the veranda party in her hand. ‘But he did not consult doctors. Doctors have colleagues. They gossip. Can you imagine the rapacity of these men, the anthropologists, the quacks, the weathercocks, the dilettantes, the journalists, the tuft-hunters, if under the cloak of science they could attend the village of the mating tribe. Communal intercourse, global mayhem. No, your father wanted Puppy all to himself. “She’s our secret,” he said. And so to our friends and the neighbours, she was just another country girl, none too bright, illiterate, clumsy, compliant. The men adored her.’
    But my father, she said, seemed unmoved by Puppy’s innocence and charm. For him she was briefly, each morning, an object of scientific scrutiny, and then forgotten. Eventually the girl would be returned to her home, the village in the forest. But first he wished to monitor and chart her cycles. His charts survive amongst his papers – two columns offigures with dates relating to … two women? Only by standing amongst the cabinets and desks of what had been my father’s study could I construct from these numbers and chemical abbreviations a picture of my father in research. His daily readings measured the presence and absence of vaginal acids secreted during ovulation and that period of sexual excitement titled estrus amongst the lower mammals. The first column – Puppy’s? – recorded unbroken torpor. The second -my mother’s? – showed a conventional monthly cycle, the acids increasing towards the middle of the cycle and then decreasing.
    Was this, then, the household ritual? Breakfast served and eaten. My father in his study coat, my mother in her morning clothes, Puppy in that white cotton dress and those incongruous gloves. The couch in the corner of the study. Sterilized bottles, cotton swabs. The forest girl, for reasons she could not quite guess but which she could have taken as some odd city custom, required to lie back and raise her knees while my father conducted his inspection and made his notes. And then my mother’s turn, her mistress, her hopscotch pal, submitting in the same room at the same time to reassure the girl that all was normal.
    Once more, from mother, we heard her portrait of my father sharp-set and pestering in her presence, particularly on those days when swabs revealed her to be chemically receptive.