Page 88 - BraveNewWorld

88 IDPH

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 el-
se’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 won-
derfully 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. Re-
morseless, 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 snake trying to strangle her. Popé’s gourd and a cup were standing on the
floor near the bed. Linda was snoring.

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