Read Online The Folded Leaf by William Maxwell - Free Book Online

his blindfold on tighter than before, and shoved him out of the way. Catanzano came next, then Ford, who hesitated when the signal was given and tried to back down the ladder. He had stepped on a rusty nail the summer before, at Lake Geneva, and he kept trying to explain about this; in the end they had to push him off.
    The earth is wonderfully large and capable of infinite repetition. At no time is it necessary to restrict the eye in search of truth to one particular scene. Torture is to be found in many places besides the Hotel Balmoral, and if it is the rites of puberty that you are interested in, you can watch the same thing (or better) in New Guinea or New South Wales. All you have to do is locate a large rectangular hut in the forest with two enormous eyes painted over the entrance. You will need a certain amount of foolhardy courage to pass through this doorway and you may never come out again, but in any case once you are inside you will learn what it feels like to be in the belly of Thuremlin (or Daramulun, or Twanyirika, or Katajalina—the name varies in different tribes), that Being who swallows young boys and after the period of digestion is completed restores them to life, sometimes with a tooth missing, and always minus their foreskin.
    When you have found your place in the circle on the dirt floor, it will not matter to you that Pokenau, the boy on your right, and Talikai, the boy on your left, are darker skinned than Ford and Lynch, and have black kinky hair. In that continual darkness, the texture of your own hair and the color of your skin and eyes will not be noticeable. The odor that you detect will be that which you were aware of in the Hotel Balmoral. The odor of fear is everywhere the same.
    In the belly of Thuremlin a comradeship is established which will last Pokenau and Talikai and Dobomugan, and Mudjulamon and Baimal and Ombomb and Yabinigi and Wabe and Nyelahai the rest of their lives. They can never meet one another on any mountain path or in a flotilla of outriggers and not remember how month after month they sat in a crouching position, cross-legged, without moving; how they heard, not with their ears but through their hands, the strange tones which are the voices of spirits; how they learned to make the loud humming noise which so terrifies women; how one by one the mysteries were revealed to them—the sacred masks, the slit gongs, the manikin with the huge head and the gleaming mother-of-pearl eyes.
    Along with the singing and eating, the boys are reminded again and again of how, as children, they were never far from their father’s arms, and how their elder brothers hunted for them. Flutes play in the morning and evening, and when the boys are led to the bathing pool, the ghosts of their ancestors bend back the brambles from the path.
    In a primitive society the impulses that run contrary to the patterns of civilization, the dark impulses of envy, jealousy, and hate, are tolerated and understood and eventually released through public ritual, through cutting with crocodiles’ teeth, burning, beating, incisions in the boy’s penis. This primitiveritual of torture is more painful, perhaps, but no more cruel than the humor of high school boys. Each stage of the torture is related to a sacred object, and the novices are convinced that, as a result of running the gantlet and being switched with nettles, they will have muscle and bone, they will grow tall and broad in the shoulders, their spirit will be warlike, and they will have the strength between their legs to beget many children.
    Occasionally in New Guinea a boy will get into the wrong stomach of the Being, the stomach that is intended for pigs; and that boy cannot be restored to life with the others. But as a rule when the period of seclusion is over, all of the boys appear once more in the village, splendidly dressed in feathers and shell ornaments. Their eyes are closed. They still have to be led by their guardians and though they feel