8. Henderson the Rain King, by Saul Bellow, pp. 220-254

17-18

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"We talked and talked and talked, and I can't pretend that I completely understood him." That Henderson is taxed by the king's ideas a sign of Dahfu's intellectual superiority, or is it a warning that he's not to be fully trusted? For sometimes the king sounds an awful lot like a New Age guru whose ideas are not fully anchored to this Earth:

He had some kind of conviction about the connection between insides and outsides, especially as applied to human beings.... And what he was engrossed by was a belief in the transformation of human material, that you could work either way, either from the rind to the core or from the core to the rind; the flesh influencing the mind, the mind influencing the flesh, back again to the mind, back once more to the flesh.

So the reader may be pardoned in approving Henderson's question, "Are you really and truly sure it's like that, Your Highness?"

In the end, Dahfu gives Henderson some of the books and journals he had brought with him from medical school. "Dahfu and Horko had loaded it on the donkey when they came over the mountains from the coast. Afterward the beast was butchered and fed to the lioness." But Henderson is not quite up to the task of reading. "Firstly I was afraid to find out that the king might be a crank." And Henderson is "a nervous and emotional reader. I hold a book up to my face and it takes only one good sentence to turn my brain into a volcano."  Reading in one of his father's books, "The forgiveness of sin is perpetual" was like "being hit in the head with a rock.... I didn't want to hear any more than that about sin. Just as it was, it was perfect, and I might have been afraid the guy would spoil it when he went on."

[Let me interrupt here for an observation: Those last two sentences remind me -- in tone, cadence and diction -- of Mark Twain. And it's not the first time I've been reminded of Twain in this novel. "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn," as we know, because Hemingway told us so. More on this later.]

Characteristically, Henderson is daunted by his hunger to have it all: "When I started to read something about France, I realized I didn't know anything about Rome, which came first, and then Greece, and then Egypt, going backward all the time to the primitive abyss. As a matter of fact, I didn't know enough to read one single book." But he makes a stab at one of the journals Dahfu had given him because the first paragraph of an article by a man named Scheminsky looks easy. He begins to skim when he encounters the term Obersteiner's allochiria. (Allochiria is a neurological disorder in which a stimulus on one side of the body is felt on the opposite side.)  But he manages to glean that "Most of these articles had to do with the relation between body and brain ... and a few of the descriptions were absolutely dandy. What I kept thinking was, 'I'd better scour, brighten, freshen up the old intelligence, and understand what the man is driving at, for my life may depend on it.'"

That conclusion is reinforced when he is paid a visit by Horko, the Bunam, and the man, clad in black leather, who had pointed the way to the village. "These three made way to let a fourth person enter, an elderly woman who had the look of a widow." This is Dahfu's mother, Yasra. And they have come "to get me to reveal about the lioness and then also to use any influence I might have with the king. He was in trouble, and very seriously, over Atti." They are upset at the king's failure to capture Gmilo, the lion they believe to be Dahfu's father. "They claimed that the lioness was seducing Dahfu, and made him incapable f doing his duty, and it was she who kept Gmilo away."

Finally, "the Bunam signaled to his assistant by snapping his fingers, and the black-leather man drew from his rag cloak an object which I mistook at first for a shriveled eggplant.... This was the head of one of the lion-women -- a sorceress. She had gone out and had trysts with lions. She had poisoned people and bewitched them." She had been captured and strangled. "But she had come back. These people made no bones about it, but said she was the very same lioness that Dahfu had captured. She was Atti."
I could not take my eyes from the shriveled head with its finished, listless look. It spoke to me as that creature had done in Banyules at the aquarium after I had put Lily on the train. I thought, as I had then, in the dim watery stony room, "This is it! The end!"

That night, Henderson startles Romilayu by joining him in prayer:

"Oh, you ... Something," I said, "you Something because of whom there is not Nothing. Help me to do Thy will. Take off my stupid sins. Untrammel me. Heavenly Father, open up my dumb heart and for Christ's sake preserve me from unreal things. Oh, Thou who tookest me from pigs, let me not be killed over lions. And forgive my crimes and nonsense and let me return to Lily and the kids."

The next morning he goes to see Dahfu and asks to talk to him privately. When he takes the king away from the women who are entertaining him, "some attacked me with shrill voices ... while several shrieked, 'Sdudu lebah!' Lebah -- I had already picked the word up -- was Wariri for lion. They were warning him about Atti; they were charging him with desertion." Since the king's life depends in part on his ability to service his wives, Henderson is right to be concerned.

But when Henderson tells him, "In case you don't know it you are in a hell of a position," Dahfu says he knows. He calls the display of the shrunken head "the well-known fear business. We will withstand it." He insists, "I will capture Gmilo and the trouble will entirely cease. No one will dispute or contest me then. There are scouts daily for Gmilo. As a matter of fact reports have come of him. I can assure you a capture very soon."

Meanwhile, Henderson has realized that the king is taking him to see Atti again. But he has grown so dependent on his friendship with Dahfu that although he expresses his fear, he backs off when the king says, "If it is positively beyond you we may as well exchange goodbye and go separate ways." Henderson realizes that "unless I understood about lions, no deepening of the friendship was possible." The threat of losing the king's friendship is too strong. "The threat was exceedingly painful also to him. Yes, I saw that he suffered almost as hard as I did. Almost. Because who can suffer like me? I am to suffering what Gary is to smoke. One of the world's biggest operations."

Dahfu then explains what he can learn from the lion: "First she is unavoidable. Test it, and you will find she is unavoidable. And this is what you need, as you are an avoider.... She will force the present moment upon you. Second, lions are experiencers. But not in haste. They experience with deliberate luxury. The poet says, 'The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.' Let us embrace lions also in the same view.... She has much to teach you." Henderson is prodded forward by the possibility that he might change.

His terror doesn't fade when he enters the den with Dahfu, but he follows the king's instructions, even to the point of going down on all fours. "I understood that he wanted me to imitate or dramatize the behavior of lions," but he's not certain to what end. "I intend to loosen you up, Sungo," the king tells him, "because you are so contracted." Each of his forefathers, he says, "absorbed lion into himself," and he wants Henderson to do likewise. Atti, meanwhile, stretched out on the platform, "with crossed paws, only occasionally looked at us." The king chides Henderson for his reluctance: "Is this the Henderson who flew half around the world because he had a voice which said I want? And now, because his friend Dahfu extends a remedy to him, falls down?"

Eventually, Henderson gets into it:

And so I was the beast. I gave myself to it, and all my sorrow came out in the roaring. My lungs supplied the air but the note came from my soul. The roaring scalded my throat and hurt the corners of my mouth and presently I filled the den like a bass organ pipe. This was where my heart had sent me, with its clamor.... I had claws, and hair, and some teeth, and I was bursting with hot noise, but when all this had come forth, there was still a remainder. That last thing was my human longing.

The king praises Henderson, and gives him a break by shutting Atti away in her other room. But Henderson begins to come down from the experience. He realizes that he isn't the lion Dahfu wants him to be: "'It's the pigs,' I suddenly realized, 'the pigs! Lions for him, pigs for me. I wish I was dead.'"

But Dahfu is still full of ideas, particularly about the power of the imagination. "And then he began to repeat what a procession of monsters the human imagination had created.... 'Think of what there could be instead by different imaginations. What gay, brilliant types, what merriment types, what beauties and goodness, what sweet cheeks or noble demeanors. Ah, ah, ah, what we could be! Opportunity calls to rise to summits. You should have been such a summit, Mr Henderson-Sungo.'" Henderson had talked to him about "grun-to-molani. What could be grun-to-molani upon a background of cows?" Dahfu says, dismissing the commonplace ambitions of the Arnewi. But Henderson is only reminded of pigs again, and of his impulsive,  mocking decision to raise pigs in his conversation with Nicky Goldstein. He recalls when Frances protested against the pigs in the driveway and he told her not to harm them. "Those animals have become a part of me."

He begins to examine his body and find piggishness in it. "It seemed to me that I couldn't even breathe without grunting." And Dahfu notices "the peculiar noise" he is making. He tells Henderson, "You show the work of a powerful and original although blockaded imagination." For Dahfu the imagination is supreme:

"All human accomplishment has this same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination! It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems!... What Homo sapiens imagines, he may slowly convert himself to. Oh, Henderson, how glad I am that you are here. I have longed for somebody to discuss with. A companion mind. You are a godsend to me."

5. Henderson the Rain King, by Saul Bellow, pp. 136-165

12

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Henderson gives up on the dead body problem and spends the rest of the night outside."I was aware of a great peculiarity either in myself or in the day, or in both. I must have been getting the fever from which I was to suffer for a while. It was accompanied by a scratchy sensation in my bosom, a little like eagerness or longing."

The village begins to come to life for what seems to be a day of festival. Finally a group of "women of unusual stature, the female soldiers or amazons of the king," approaches, beating drums and accompanying a "heavily built man" underneath a large umbrella. There is another umbrella that turns out to be for Henderson. The man is Horko, the uncle of the king, and he speaks English. Henderson joins the entourage, which heads toward the palace. Romilayu, staggering under the weight of their gear, follows.

As they approach the palace, Henderson sees bodies hanging upside down from a scaffold. "It was no wonder they hadn't made any inquiry about their corpse. What was one corpse to them? They appeared to deal in them wholesale." But when Henderson mentions them to Horko, he gets no response. They arrive at the palace, which "was three stories high with open staircases and galleries, quadrangular and barnlike. At ground level the rooms were doorless, like narrow stalls, open and bare. Here there could be no mistake about it -- I heard the roar of a wild beast underneath. No creature but a lion could possibly make such a noise."

Before meeting the king, Horko has a bridge table brought out and serves food to Henderson. "I ate some sweet potatoes and drank the pombo, a powerful beverage which immediately acted on my legs and knees.... Half hopefully I thought I was going to be sick. I cannot endure such excitement as I then felt." Finally they climb the stairs and reach the other side of the building were some men were hoisting large stones into the branches of a tree. Horko explains that "these stones were connected with clouds for the rain they expected to make in the ceremony soon to come." Henderson notes that the sky is clear. "There were only, so far, these round boulders in the branches, apparently intended to represent rain clouds."

When they reach the king's quarters, Horko leaves and one of the amazons conducts Henderson into the room. "Before I saw Dahfu himself, I was aware of numbers of women -- twenty or thirty, was my first estimate -- and the density of naked women, their volupté (only a French word would do the job here), pressed upon me from all sides. The heat was great and the predominant odor was feminine. The only thing I could compare it to in temperature and closeness was a hatchery."

Dahfu is stretched out on a long sofa on the other side of the room. He has a "well-developed athletic body" and is "six feet or better by my estimate, and sumptuously at rest. Women attended to his every need." Henderson is seated on a stool about five feet away from the king, and between them is a bowl containing two human skulls. Dahfu says, "Do not feel alarm. These are for employment in the ceremony of this afternoon."

Henderson extends greetings from Itelo, and when Dahfu asks if they wrestled and who won, replies, "We came out about even." Dahfu says, "I could not throw him, which gave him very high pleasure." Again feigning modesty, Henderson says, "I'm beginning to feel my age," which Dahfu says is "nonsense. I think you are like a monument. Believe me, I have never seen a person of your particular endowment." He reassures Henderson that they won't have to wrestle.

"You are my first civilized visitor," he tells Henderson, indicating that they prefer to remain secluded. Henderson thinks "there was something about this man that gave me the conviction that we could approach ultimates together." Then Dahfu asks for "a candid answer to the question I am about to put.... Do you envy me?" Henderson stumbles for an answer, then observes that Dahfu's people seem to value him highly and tend to his every need.

Dahfu then reveals that when he begins to show signs of weakness, the women who attend on him will report it to the Bunam, the chief priest, and that the priests will take him out to the bush and strangle him. The priest will then wait until a maggot appears on the king's body, wrap it in silk and show it to the people as the king's soul. And after while, the priest will go back into the bush and return with a lion cub, telling the people that the king's soul has entered into a lion. And finally, a successor will be named and the story will be told that the lion has become the new king.

Henderson brings up the matter of the corpse in his hut, and Dahfu seems to be indignant about it. He assures Henderson that as far as he knows, there's no significance in it, and apologizes for it, but asks no further questions about who the dead man might have been. Henderson notes, "I was so glad to escape the anxiety of the thing that at the time I didn't note this peculiar lack of interest." He accepts Dahfu's invitation to stay in the palace, but when he says, "I keep hearing a lion," Dahfu changes the subject with the old bothersome question: "What brings you here to us, Mr Henderson?" And when Henderson replies, "I am just a traveler," Dahfu follows up with "What kind of traveler are you?"

"Oh ... that depends. I don't know yet. It remains to be seen. You know," I said, "you have to be very rich to take a trip like this." I might have added, as it entered my mind to do, that some found satisfaction in being.... Being. Others were taken up with becoming. Being people have all the breaks. Becoming people are very unlucky, always in a tizzy.... Now Willatale, the queen of the Arnewi, and principal woman of Bittahness, was a Be-er if there ever was one. And at present King Dahfu. And if I had really been capable of the alert conscousness which it required I would have confessed that Becoming was beginning to come out of my ears. Enough! Enough!  Time to have Become. Time to Be! Burst the spirit's sleep. Wake up, America! Stump the experts. Instead I told this savage king, "I seem to be a kind of tourist."

"Or a wanderer," he said. "I already am fond of a diffident way which I see you to exhibit."

Henderson is stymied, and for a moment tries to summon up a sense of superiority: "I was among savages." But it is the king who observes, "I will not conceal you are a specimen of development I cannot claim ever to have seen."  And Henderson begins to "sweat anew with anxiety." He tells Dahfu that he thinks he is running a fever, but Dahfu observes that he is sweating. He also confides about the broken bridge, that he has "a pretty bad case of hemorrhoids" and is "subject to fainting fits." But it isn't epilepsy, he says, when the king asks if it's "petit mal or grand mal." To himself he reflects that his fainting seems to be "perversity of character ... my heart so often repeated I want, that I felt entitled to a little reprieve, and I found it very restful to pass out once in a while."

The king's scrutiny has made him so nervous that he tries to escape: "I know you are planning to make rain today and probably I will only be in the way. So thanks for the hospitality of the palace, and I wish you all kinds of luck with the ceremony, but I think after lunch my man and I had better blow." The king is having none of it and insists that he stay for the ceremonies, which are about to begin. And so he is forced to accompany the entourage as the king is carried in a hammock to the event.

Along the way, the king mentions that the Arnewi "have a difficulty of water," and Henderson has a panicky moment when he thinks word has reached the king of his disaster with the cistern, but he says only that they seem to have been unlucky in that matter. Dahfu observes, "A legend exists that we were once the same and one, a single tribe, but separated over the luck question. The word for them in our language is nibai. This may be translated 'unlucky.'" The Wariri "'have luck,' he said. 'Incontrovertibly, it is a fact about the luck. You wouldn't dream how consistent it is.'"

As for the Arnewi, "They have made the impression on you which so commonly they make.... Generous. Meek. Good.... Good impresses you, eh, Mr Henderson?" Henderson assents, and, speaking "with a weird softness or longing," Dahfu goes on:

"They say ... that bad can easily be spectacular, has dash or bravado and impresses the mind quicker than good. Oh, that is a mistake in my opinion. Perhaps of common good it is true. Many, many nice people. Oh yes. Their will tells them to perform good, and they do. How ordinary! Mere arithmetic.... M whole view of life is opposite or contrary, that good cannot be labour or conflict.... A dull will produces a very dull good, of no interest. Where a fellow draws a battle line there he is apt to be found, dead, a testimonial of the great strength of effort, and only effort."

Enthralled by Dahfu's talk, Henderson starts to question him about Willatale, but is interrupted by the noise of the crowd as they pass through and enter "a stadium -- I stretch the term -- a big enclosure fenced with wood." They take their seats under a canopy with other members of Dahfu's family, as Henderson surmises from their similarity in appearance, and Horko, Dahfu's uncle, approaches them. Then four amazons enter with the bridge table on which are the two skulls, threaded through the eye sockets with long dark blue ribbons.

With Horko and the Bunam, Henderson recognizes the man who had given them directions the day before, who is a "senior priest. Diviner of a sort." The women soldiers begin to fire off guns, and Dahfu tells Henderson they're firing a salute for him and urges him to stand. Henderson thinks, "The word has got around how I dealt with that corpse. They know I'm no Milktoast but a person of strength and courage. Plenty of moxie." So he "uttered a roar like the great Assyrian bull.... I no longer wondered that this Dahfu had come back from civilization to be king of his tribe. Hell, who wouldn't be king, even a small king? It was not a privilege to be missed."

But then a priest is brought forth and ritually slashed with cuts across the chest, which Dahfu reassures Henderson is a "semi-usual" part of the ceremony. The blood "is supposed to induce the heavens also to flow, or prime the pumps of the firmament," a phrase that delights Henderson. The king then gets up and takes his place in the arena, facing a tall woman whose "face was covered with a beautiful design of scars that looked like Braille." And they begin to whirl the skulls around by the ribbons, throwing them in the air and catching them as they come down. "Soon I understood that this wan't only a game, but a contest, and naturally I rooted for the king. I didn't know but what the penalty for dropping one of those skulls might have been death."

Neither of them drops a skull, however, and the king returns. Henderson is exhilarated by the contest and full of praise for the king, but unable to express it until he finally says, "King, I had a feeling that if either of you missed, the consequences would not be pretty." But the king assures him, "'the factor of missing is negligible.... Some day the ribbon will be tied through here.'  With two fingers he pointed to his eyes. 'My own skull will get the air.' He made a gesture of soaring, and said, 'Flying.'" A cow is then sacrificed. "She fell to the ground and died. Nobody took much notice."