THE STRUGGLE OVER THE LION
Such a little volcano for such a big fire
1
He must have suddenly acquired the vacant look of a murderer or a drunk, because everybody starts staring at him, leaning forward over the empty water keg, or so he thinks, and their movements betray both menace and fear. Somebody has woken them up by screaming, and the shock at being so rudely awakened is still flitting about their faces. Worried stiff, he moves a few steps to one side so that the sun won’t expose him even more. The captain slowly turns his hip to the right, towards him, and his clenched fist hovers just below it, as if he had a revolver at the ready underneath his rags.
That was stupid of me, thinks Lucas Egmont, that was really stupid of me. Why didn’t I think of my gormless face which gives away everything I’ve done and everything I will ever do: I might just as well shout out what I’ve done at the top of my voice, and then it wouldn’t feel so awful, so damned creepy. It feels as if my face were covered in crawling ants, and I can’t lift a finger to shift them, because nobody’s supposed to know they’re there.
Now the captain bends over towards him at a ridiculous angle, and his hand is trembling as if he were on the point of going for his revolver. They don’t surround him straight away, they just come closer, menacing, and yet at the same time as cowed as a lion in a circus, and he thinks that if only he had a whip he could get them to lie down in the sand and come creeping up to him with their heads scraping into it — then just one lash of the whip: and they’d be licking the sand from his feet. It’s the fear inside him that’s dreaming.
But the fear inside all of them is dreaming, it’s just about the last day they have to live, and they all know that in a ridiculous, sub-conscious sort of way; just as an old horse knows it’s destined for the slaughterhouse when a little bow-legged fellow smelling of blood comes up to its stable one afternoon and puts a different bridle on it, and he’s hopeless when it comes to taking it out and he leads it out on to the road without even letting it have a drink from the butt by the well and then he sets off in the wrong direction, the wrong direction altogether; or a cow that stands outside a stall all evening, mooing her head off, and she can smell death oozing out of the doors even though she’s been out at pasture all day long and shouldn’t know anything at all, although the heifer that was slaughtered around noon in the stall that day is already hanging up in the shed with swarms of flies crawling all over its stomach.
‘Who screamed? Who was is that screamed?’
It’s the captain talking, and he cocks his invisible revolver, and they all remember the scream that started waves rippling over a mill-pond, made a deep hole that would last forever in a mirror, a hole their lives could drain away through. If a human being is like a white bath-tub which it always is when you’re a child, and when you’re really little it gets filled with fresh, clean water for you to play around in, lukewarm at first, but later it gets hotter and hotter, water fit for actions, thoughts, feelings to bathe in, water condemned to stop being clean but maybe it doesn’t have to become all that dirty, water that’s destined to be emptied out when the bather hasn’t the strength to wash off any more dirt — if a human being’s a bath-tub like that, then there’ll be a point in his life when the plug is suddenly pulled out by some unseen hand, and all the water, cool now, full of dirt and purity, flows out of him and the gurgling of death as it pours down the drain first fills him with horror, and then with resignation, and in the end he just longs for the same unknown hand that pulled out the plug to come with a brush and scrub away the rim of dirt from the sides of the bath. But with a pitiful sort of whimper, the last drops of dirty water are sucked down into the black hole and the tub becomes silent and empty, the bath-tub is dead and darkness falls over the bathroom. A key is turned in the lock from the outside, and the bathroom is closed once and for alclass="underline" there’ll be nobody else taking a bath in this bathroom.
They remember the scream — but who screamed? They can hear the roar of the breakers — but where does it come from? They’re scared already — but why? They walk slowly back up the beach, towards the cliff, and a cluster of iguanas that have evidently been lying there watching them turn back slowly and defiantly and shuffle up towards the grass. Then they stop and hesitate, and the smell of the corpse under the canvas sheet wafts over to them in broad waves of velvet and threatens to choke them. They’re filled with death, they’re like vases that have been standing for so long in an empty room that both the flowers and the water have gone musty.
The scream hovers over their heads, it has the ruthless shadow of a gallows, and the weaker their memory of what it sounded like, the more tangible it becomes. The scream gets hotter and hotter, and they all start sweating; the scream turns into this shadow, and they all shiver with the cold like dogs; the scream is in the way the iguanas move and in the lazy rustling sound from the plateau and the scream is hiding under a canvas sheet, which is held down on to the sand by stones so that it won’t suddenly rise up and reveal what nobody wants to see.
And what’s all this about the water keg?
2
There’s nothing you can do about it: you take a glass and empty it, or you take an evil deed from the pile of undone deeds and carry it out — and all at once, you look different. As far as you’re concerned, it’s something you can put up with. You yourself are not too worried about what you’ve done, but it’s as if there were muscles in your face which like playing at being your conscience.
A few brisk winds have got up, and just for a moment blown away the sticky sweet smell of death out into the lagoon, so that it’s easier to talk again.
‘It must have been one of us who did it,’ says the captain. ‘The water can’t have run out of its own accord like this.’
As he speaks, sweat comes crawling over his face. Big, grey beads of sweat, sweat that looks scared. They all move closer to each other, as if they could avoid death that way. The captain hardly has room to swing his revolver hand round, even. They have their backs turned towards the beach, and they’re facing the cliffs, as if they were expecting to be gunned down from behind.
‘No, somebody must have done it.’ Boy Larus echoes his words, but his voice is so uncertain that everyone apart from Lucas Egmont glances up at him and his eyes shy away like a horse, because no innocent person can look as innocent as a guilty man.
It’s his temples, his cheek-bones and profile that give the game away. It’s always been the same, thinks Lucas Egmont, the tiniest glass of wine and everybody can tell just by looking at me that I’ve been on the booze. I could hit a fish on a stone and afterwards look like a double murderer. It’s too late now of course — God knows I’ve got used to the idea of dying! — it’s too late now, but I should have always carried a mask to hide behind.
They haven’t noticed anything yet, though; they’re more scared of the dead boxer than of the dead water keg. Tim Solider was the one who’d come up with the idea of the stones. We must do something to stop the canvas from blowing away, he’d said the previous night when he was pacing up and down restlessly between the fire and the rambling English girl; something that’ll keep the smell in until we can bury him.