Such scientific speculation was not my primary interest. I have several times mentioned that ordinary daily particulars were my specialty. Ravelstein also had several times pointed this out, not the noumena, or "things in themselves"-I left all that kind of thing to the Kants of this world. Black headless bodies in a jungle where crimson orchids stream downward for hundreds of feet _would__ be phenomena, wouldn't they. The men were freshly killed and be headed. The heads were set aside. The researcher who recorded all this said they were a currency used in wife-purchase. That's why headhunters hunt heads. But this American researcher had been attracted to the streamside ambush not by the struggling fighters but by the smell of roasting meat. "Just like a kitchen smell back home-a wholesome joint in the oven. Or a Thanksgiving turkey. Just as appetizing. Human flesh, too, can get you in the salivary glands… the warriors offered me some of their human shish-kebab. The victims were turned on their bellies. The ground was rich in red blood. The victors thought my facial expressions killingly funny. They said, 'Why, it's only meat, like any other meat. '" And indeed the writer went on more than was necessary about the appetizing fragrance. The hunters said that if they had been ambushed the other guys would have been cooking and eating them. With us, this might have been a rationalization. With them it was a fact of life. The jungles do not abound in game. Hunters often are exhausted and in critical need of a meal. The American goes on to speculate about Leningrad in the days when the Nazis besieged it, and to speak also of Japanese soldiers cut off in the Philippine jungles, eating their own dead, and mentions also the South American athletes whose plane crashed in the Andes. And surely our own nihilists who tell you that everything is permitted would have to agree that cannibalism is perfectly logical. "But what made the difficulty for me," writes the U. S. researcher, "was the savory smell of roast human thigh, cut from the corpse that still bled in this paradise of flowers. This was the hard thing for me. Not the heads which the fighters carry when they went a-courting, and swung them by the dusty hair."
Rosamund, now seeing that I really was sick-though I denied it-walked miles through the smoke and fire of curbside grills looking for a Thanksgiving turkey. None was to be found. The skinny local hens seemed to be growing hair, not feathers. At the bottom of a freezer in the market, she found packages of stony drumsticks and wings. She said they looked much worse when they were thawed. On this island of yams and coconuts there were no cooking greens. Nevertheless she managed after hours of effort to produce a chicken soup. Out of gratitude I tried to make a joke of my failure to get it down-remembering an immigrant mother of my childhood who cried out, "My Joey can't eat an ice-cream cone. He turns his head away from it. If he won't lick an ice cream, he's got to be dying! "
Perhaps because I felt the tropics as a death threat my instinct was to look for the comic angle in any question which had to be considered. For one thing I kept thinking that the ground was more porous here. It was not as solid as it was up north. It must be hard to bury somebody in this rotting coral soil. I was not going to take up this crazy topic with Rosamund. Rosamund was blaming herself for having sold me on this delightful holiday-but I knew I could trust her to do the right thing. I was feeling very odd, but I told myself that this was a malaise I had brought from the north-a kind of un easiness or dislocation-something like the metaphysical miseries. Years ago when I had found myself stranded in Puerto Rico for a long stretch I had felt the same kind of noncomfort in the tropical surroundings-smells of trapped brine and decaying marine matter rising from the lagoons-the strange stinks of jungle plant-life and rotting animal matter. The mongoose in Puerto Rico was as common as street dogs elsewhere. You don t think of animals so large living along the roads and the village backstreets.
There were bursts of tribal music from the town at night. The roosters cut short your sleep. But I wasn't sleeping much, and could eat only corn flakes. I complained of the tap water and Rosamund, now very worried, went often to the shop to carry back heavy bottles of water.
I was obviously sick but I couldn't let it be said that I was. I felt that I was having abnormal thoughts, and by and by it became apparent that I was worrying away at the problem of evolution. Of course I believed in evolution-who could refuse to accept the thousands of proofs? What was not obvious was that it had happened through random changes as so many scientific true believers were convinced. "_Anything__ can happen, given time enough, and billions of years give you time for all the mistakes and blind alleys." Watson, the geneticist, had laid down the law on this. But as I said to Rosamund, arguing still with Watson, if you took into account the subtle resources of the body, thousands of them, too subtle to be accidental, Watson was talking rough carpentry-boys woodshop or manual training, not fine cabinet work.
In retrospect I'm sorry-I grieve for Rosamund, who now saw that I was sick. She tried to prepare remedies in her little kitchen. She cooked dinners that I would normally have eaten with pleasure. But the meat in the market was gross. When she made soups, I couldn't bear to swallow a spoonful. The French family below went on cooking shit dishes it maddened me to smell.
"How can nice, decent, agreeable, civil people bring themselves to cook-and eat! — such a stinking mess!"
Rosamund said, "It would upset them if I were to ask for the windows to be shut. But don't you think you should see a doctor? There's a French doctor down the road. We've seen his shingle dozens of times."
We were on the porch having a glass of wine before the dinner I would be unable to get down. I ate the stuffed olives Rosamund put out. I like them stuffed with anchovies, Spanish-style. Here only the pimiento ones were available. You couldn't study a Caribbean evening sky without thinking of God, I was finding. Nor think of God without your own dead coming into it. Then you renewed your connection with your dead and ended by making as honest an estimate as you could bear-reviewing a lifetime of activities, affections, attachments. In this I didn't do at all well.
And as I owed it to Rosamund to do everything possible to get to the scientific bottom of things, I went next day to see the doctor. Americans don't take much stock in foreign medicine. They're inclined to think that a French doctor will say you have a _crise de foie__ and must cut down your intake of red wine. The doctor down the way had nothing to say about wine. He told me, however, that I had a case of dengue. Well, that wasn't too bad. Dengue is a tropical dis ase carried by mosquitoes; you treat it with quinine. So I added local quinine to the Quinaglute the American doctor-Schley, the very doctor who had scolded Ravelstein for smoking minutes after he was released from intensive care-had prescribed to keep my heart from running away with me.
Rosamund went once more to the pharmacy-a three-mile round trip without protection from the sun. She seemed partly re assured by the French doctor's diagnosis. However serious dengue might be it was treatable.