saying, "No, no." The man said something short and angry, and suddenly her hands
were gone. "Linda, Linda." He kicked and wriggled; but the man carried him across
to the door, opened it, put him down on the floor in the middle of the other room,
and went away, shutting the door behind hirn. He got up, he ran to the door.
Standing on tiptoe he could just reach the big wooden latch. He lifted it and pushed;
but the door wouldn't open. "Linda," he shouted. She didn't answer.
He remembered a huge room, rather dark; and there were big wooden things with
strings fastened to them, and lots of women standing round them–making
blankets, Linda said. Linda told him to sit in the corner with the other children, while
she went and helped the women. He played with the little boys for a long time.
Suddenly people started talking very loud, and there were the women pushing Linda
away, and Linda was crying. She went to the door and he ran after her. He asked
her why they were angry. "Because I broke something," she said. And then she got
angry too. "How should I know how to do their beastly weaving?" she said. "Beastly
savages." He asked her what savages were. When they got back to their house,
Popé was waiting at the door, and he came in with them. He had a big gourd full of
stuff that looked like water; only it wasn't water, but something with a bad smell
that burnt your mouth and made you cough. Linda drank some and Popé drank
some, and then Linda laughed a lot and talked very loud; and then she and Popé
went into the other room. When Popé went away, he went into the room. Linda was
in bed and so fast asleep that he couldn't wake her.
Popé used to come often. He said the stuff in the gourd was called mescal; but
Linda said it ought to be called soma; only it made you feel ill afterwards. He hated
Popé. He hated them all–all the men who came to see Linda. One afternoon, when
he had been playing with the other children–it was cold, he remembered, and there
was snow on the mountains–he came back to the house and heard angry voices in
the bedroom. They were women's voices, and they said words he didn't understand,
but he knew they were dreadful words. Then suddenly, crash! something was upset;
he heard people moving about quickly, and there was another crash and then a
noise like hitting a mule, only not so bony; then Linda screamed. "Oh, don't, don't,
don't!" she said. He ran in. There were three women in dark blankets. Linda was on
the bed. One of the women was holding her wrists. Another was lying across her
legs, so that she couldn't kick. The third was hitting her with a whip. Once, twice,
three times; and each time Linda screamed. Crying, he tugged at the fringe of the
woman's blanket. "Please, please." With her free hand she held him away. The whip
came down again, and again Linda screamed. He caught hold of the woman's
enormous brown hand between his own and bit it with all his might. She cried out,
wrenched her hand free, and gave him such a push that he fell down. While he was
lying on the ground she hit him three times with the whip. It hurt more than
anything he had ever felt–like fire. The whip whistled again, fell. But this time it was
Linda who screamed.
"But why did they want to hurt you, Linda?'' he asked that night. He was crying,
because the red marks of the whip on his back still hurt so terribly. But he was also
crying because people were so beastly and unfair, and because he was only a little
boy and couldn't do anything against them. Linda was crying too. She was grown up,
but she wasn't big enough to fight against three of them. It wasn't fair for her
either. "Why did they want to hurt you, Linda?"
"I don't know. How should I know?" It was difficult to hear what she said, because
she was lying on her stomach and her face was in the pillow. "They say those men
are their men," she went on; and she did not seem to be talking to him at all; she
seemed to be talking with some one inside herself. A long talk which she didn't
understand; and in the end she started crying louder than ever.
"Oh, don't cry, Linda. Don't cry."
He pressed himself against her. He put his arm round her neck. Linda cried out.
"Oh, be careful. My shoulder! Oh!" and she pushed him away, hard. His head
banged against the wall. "Little idiot!" she shouted; and then, suddenly, she began
to slap him. Slap, slap …
"Linda," he cried out. "Oh, mother, don't!"
"I'm not your mother. I won't be your mother."
"But, Linda … Oh!" She slapped him on the cheek.
"Turned into a savage," she shouted. "Having young ones like an animal … If it
hadn't been for you, I might have gone to the Inspector, I might have got away.
But not with a baby. That would have been too shameful."
He saw that she was going to hit him again, and lifted his arm to guard his face.
"Oh, don't, Linda, please don't."
"Little beast!" She pulled down his arm; his face was uncovered.
"Don't, Linda." He shut his eyes, expecting the blow.
But she didn't hit him. After a little time, he opened his eyes again and saw that
she was looking at him. He tried to smile at her. Suddenly she put her arms round
him and kissed him again and again.
Sometimes, for several days, Linda didn't get up at all. She lay in bed and was sad.
Or else she drank the stuff that Popé brought and laughed a great deal and went to
sleep. Sometimes she was sick. Often she forgot to wash him, and there was
nothing to eat except cold tortillas. He remembered the first time she found those
little animals in his hair, how she screamed and screamed.
The happiest times were when she told him ahout the Other Place. "And you really
can go flying, whenever you like?"
"Whenever you like." And she would tell him about the lovely music that came out
of a box, and all the nice games you could play, and the delicious things to eat and
drink, and the light that came when you pressed a little thing in the wall, asd the
pictures that you could hear and feel and smell, as well as see, and another box for
making nice smells, and the pink and green and blue and silver houses as high as
mountains, and everybody happy and no one ever sad or angry, and every one
belonging to every one else, and the boxes where you could see and hear what was
happening at the other side of the world, and babies in lovely clean
bottles–everything so clean, and no nasty smells, no dirt at all–and people never
lonely, but living together and being so jolly and happy, like the summer dances
here in Malpais, but much happier, and the happiness being there every day, every
day. … He listened by the hour. And sometimes, when he and the other children
were tired with too much playing, one of the old men of the pueblo would talk to
them, in those other words, of the great Transformer of the World, and of the long
fight between Right Hand and Left Hand, between Wet and Dry; of Awonawilona, who
made a great fog by thinking in the night, and then made the whole world out of
the fog; of Earth Mother and Sky Father; of Ahaiyuta and Marsailema, the twins of
War and Chance; of Jesus and Pookong; of Mary and Etsanatlehi, the woman who
makes herself young again; of the Black Stone at Laguna and the Great Eagle and
Our Lady of Acoma. Strange stories, all the more wonderful to him for being told in
the other words and so not fully understood. Lying in bed, he would think of Heaven
and London and Our Lady of Acoma and the rows and rows of babies in clean
bottles and Jesus flying up and Linda flying up and the great Director of World
Hatcheries and Awonawilona.
Lots of men came to see Linda. The boys began to point their fingers at him. In the
strange other words they said that Linda was bad; they called her names he did not
understand, but that he knew were bad names. One day they sang a song about
her, again and again. He threw stones at them. They threw back; a sharp stone cut
his cheek. The blood woudn't stop; he was covered with blood.
Linda taught him to read. With a piece of charcoal she drew pictures on the wall–an
animal sitting down, a baby inside a bottle; then she wrote letters. THE CAT IS ON
THE MAT. THE TOT IS IN THE POT. He learned quickly and easily. When he knew
how to read all the words she wrote on the wall, Linda opened her big wooden box
and pulled out from under those funny little red trousers she never wore a thin little
book. He had often seen it before. "When you're bigger," she had said, "you can
read it." Well, now he was big enough. He was proud. "I'm afraid you won't find it
very exciting," she said. "But it's the only thing I have." She sighed. "If only you
could see the lovely reading machines we used to have in London!" He began
reading. The Chemical and Bacteriological Conditioning of the Embryo. Practical
Instructions for Beta Embryo-Store Workers. It took him a quarter of an hour to read
the title alone. He threw the book on the floor. "Beastly, beastly book!" he said, and
began to cry.
The boys still sang their horrible song about Linda. Sometimes, too, they laughed
at him for being so ragged. When he tore his clothes, Linda did not know how to
mend them. In the Other Place, she told him, people threw away clothes with holes
in them and got new ones. "Rags, rags!" the boys used to shout at him. "But I can
read," he said to himself, "and they can't. They don't even know what reading is." It
was fairly easy, if he thought hard enough about the reading, to pretend that he
didn't mind when they made fun of him. He asked Linda to give him the book again.
The more the boys pointed and sang, the harder he read. Soon he could read all
the words quite well. Even the longest. But what did they mean? He asked Linda;
but even when she could answer it didn't seem to make it very clear, And generally
she couldn't answer at all.
"What are chemicals?" he would ask.
"Oh, stuff like magnesium salts, and alcohol for keeping the Deltas and Epsilons
small and backward, and calcium carbonate for bones, and all that sort of thing."
"But how do you make chemicals, Linda? Where do they come from?"
"Well, I don't know. You get them out of bottles. And when the bottles are empty,
you send up to the Chemical Store for more. It's the Chemical Store people who
make them, I suppose. Or else they send to the factory for them. I don't know. I
never did any chemistry. My job was always with the embryos. It was the same with
everything else he asked about. Linda never seemed to know. The old men of the
pueblo had much more definite answers.
"The seed of men and all creatures, the seed of the sun and the seed of earth and
the seed of the sky–Awonawilona made them all out of the Fog of Increase. Now the
world has four wombs; and he laid the seeds in the lowest of the four wombs. And
gradually the seeds began to grow …"
One day (John calculated later that it must have been soon after his twelfth
birthday) he came home and found a book that he had never seen before Iying on
the floor in the bedroom. It was a thick book and looked very old. The binding had
been eaten by mice; some of its pages were loose and crumpled. He picked it up,
looked at the title-page: the book was called The Complete Works of William
Shakespeare.
Linda was lying on the bed, sipping that horrible stinking mescal out of a cup. "Popé
brought it," she said. Her voice was thick and hoarse like somebody else's voice. "It
was lying in one of the chests of the Antelope Kiva. It's supposed to have been
there for hundreds of years. I expect it's true, because I looked at it, and it seemed
to be full of nonsense. Uncivilized. Still, it'll be good enough for you to practice your
reading on." She took a last sip, set the cup down on the floor beside the bed,
turned over on her side, hiccoughed once or twice and went to sleep.
He opened the book at random.
Nay, but to live
In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,
Stew'd in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty …
The strange words rolled through his mind; rumbled, like talking thunder; like the
drums at the summer dances, if the drums could have spoken; like the men
singing the Corn Song, beautiful, beautiful, so that you cried; like old Mitsima
saying magic over his feathers and his carved sticks and his bits of bone and
stone–kiathla tsilu silokwe silokwe silokwe. Kiai silu silu, tsithl–but better than
Mitsima's magic, because it meant more, because it talked to him, talked
wonderfully and only half-understandably, a terrible beautiful magic, about Linda;
about Linda lying there snoring, with the empty cup on the floor beside the bed;
about Linda and Popé, Linda and Popé.
He hated Popé more and more. A man can smile and smile and be a villain.
Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain. What did the words exactly
mean? He only half knew. But their magic was strong and went on rumbling in his
head, and somehow it was as though he had never really hated Popé before; never
really hated him because he had never been able to say how much he hated him.
But now he had these words, these words like drums and singing and magic. These
words and the strange, strange story out of which they were taken (he couldn't
make head or tail of it, but it was wonderful, wonderful all the same)–they gave him
a reason for hating Popé; and they made his hatred more real; they even made
Popé himself more real.
One day, when he came in from playing, the door of the inner room was open, and
he saw them lying together on the bed, asleep–white Linda and Popé almost black
beside her, with one arm under her shoulders and the other dark hand on her
breast, and one of the plaits of his long hair lying across her throat, like a black
