“And if she doesn’t love him?” I asked of Tam-Tam.
“She’ll become enamored of him while he bleeds,” he said.
“But still. .”
“Then she allows him to die at her side. As soon as the sun goes down, she rips out his heart and tosses it to the dolphins. That’s why dolphins have a weakness for love.”
“Remarkable,” I commented. “Why is it done this way?”
Tam-Tam continued with a pedagogical air: “Because, after a night in which a man admits that his heart is not his own, his heart isn’t good for anything at all. If the woman to whom it was sacrificed will not take it, then it’s only fit to be thrown to the dolphins.”
“Cruel stuff,” I said, almost to myself, but he appeared to have understood me because he stated afterward: “We brook no compromises like you Europeans. I think that this is all honorable: who would be so insolent as to offer up the same heart a second time?”
“Wise Tam-Tam,” I said. “And what happens with those folks on the crag who have sliced open their arteries?”
“Nothing. They love each other.”
“I know,” I said. “They cut open their own arteries.”
“Holy Moonlight, are you ever naïve!”
“What do you mean, naïve?” I asked. “Did you or did you not say that they cut open their own veins?”
“Maybe I told you that, but who knows if they really do it. .”
Today, after the Pan-Dolphinian ceremonies and orgies, I asked Tam-Tam to help me translate the song that they sang yesterday evening to the accompaniment of tom-toms: the song that received the most votes in the competition at the choral festival. But before I get to that, I want to tell you how the selection and voting were carried out. After each number was announced, a singer came out to an improvised podium and sang his song. Then, when he had finished, the people present tore out hairs from their heads, as many as they wanted. These hairs were collected in a dish made of seashells and at the end they were counted by specially trained parrots that cried out the name of the winner. Tam-Tam had ripped out a whole handful of hair on account of this particular song, so this morning I could see a bald spot the size of an egg above his forehead.
At first he agreed to the translation, but then he grew concerned.
“It’s difficult,” he said.
“But still, Tam-Tam, let’s give it a try.”
After some convincing, Tam-Tam started singing, sitting right on the shore of the bay, in the shade of the palm trees:
I brought her shells and pearls from Senegal
(My liver is bleeding from all the diving)
I brought her coral from Kokovok
(I broke my fingers while digging)
I tore the teeth from the mouth of a shark
(This grappling left me covered in scars)
And I braided all of it into her hair
Once I didn’t turn up for ages after a hunt
(Leviathan dragged my boat far out to sea
and it’s a shame about the harpoon)
and like a woman I returned, overwhelmed,
with nobody there to welcome me on the beach
But in the hut I found my dearest,
Who had shorn half her hair
And combed out the pearls and coral.
And I thought: she’s mourning for me
But in the hut I found Ngao-Ngaa,
Picked the lice from her hair like Thaki the ape,
Gathered pearls and coral like a parrot,
And then I wanted to eat Ngao-Ngaa
But that would not make her hair grow
Afterward I set out over the sea
that I might seek my Leviathan,
that I might tear my harpoon from his back
and drive it into my own heart,
because my beloved had shorn her hair
and scattered her diadem of pearls
and coral
All of this because of Ngao-Ngaa
That afternoon I showed him my polished translation of the song.
He shook his head:
“You did not hear this song from me.”
“But I did, Tam-Tam,” I said. “You sang it for me this morning in the palm grove.”
“No,” he replied. “I sang you the song about jealousy that starts with:
Aagn oagn gobz evs—
and you got it all distorted. We call that ailongam.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“Ailongam,” he said.
“Translate it for me.”
“It cannot be translated.”
“What do you mean it can’t?”
“That’s one of the twelve thousand words in my language that one cannot translate. Ninety percent of the words in your song are also untranslatable.”
“Impossible,” I said.
“Then translate it yourself!” he said, in a tone that was almost uncivil.
“Magnolia!” I said.
He just grinned, as if he wanted to let me know that he was no longer angry.
Or perhaps it was because the orange-colored moon had come into view and poured out its resonant silver over the entire Grove of Magnolias where we were strolling, lost in thought.
You will say to me, Billy Wiseass (to hell with you!), that there is too little here concerning the things I really want to talk about.
It might seem that way to you, Mr. Know-it-all!
But she is ubiquitous, like the moonlight in the Grove of Magnolias, like my writing, my breathing, and the sonorous “oh” that she utters from time to time in the pages of this book. That sound is the presence of her shadow. It is her sigh, and it accompanies me.
Or is it perhaps my own sigh, O all-knowing one?
You will be wondering, Capricorn, who the hell I’m looking for in this exotic land of adventure and turmoil.
I am certain you’re wondering about this — provided that you haven’t changed.
You are well aware, my dear old friend, that I cannot live without our good old attic, without my lute, without Eurydice.