Read Online Continent by Jim Crace - Free Book Online Page A

partner amongst the native women. ‘Lovemaking does not interest them, it seems. But when their moment comes they are like dogs in heat.’ I will not recountthe scenes which he described or comment, either, on the opportunism of the trapper. After three days their sexual agitation, however, was reported to have ceased as readily and as inexplicably as it had begun. ‘And the women with whom you had consorted?’ asked my father. ‘How many women … personally, may I ask … in those three days?’ The man’s reply is marked in my father’s ledger and heavily circled. ‘Fourteen!’
    ‘The Professor’s interest in the unrecorded smaller species in which the forest abounded was abandoned,’ said mother. ‘He postponed our return home for a further six weeks. He was determined to witness the communal birth for himself. I was left relatively unpestered in the charge of a girl whom the Professor nicknamed Puppy, because she could pronounce the word. She was, perhaps, a month or so too young for pregnancy, poor thing. She was quite happy to collect and cook our food and, indeed, to wear the dresses which I loaned her. I could not have her naked at our table. I taught her cat’s cradle and hopscotch. It was foolish, perhaps. But she was sweet — an awkward, bony little thing — and I was bored beyond endurance. I had no tasks, and though the Professor and his trapper were huddled in conversation and much laughter until late at night, I was excluded. Except from Puppy.’
    In the meantime — and with the trapper’s vabap-vabap at his shoulder — my father busied himself withmonitoring the pregnancies and with keeping a journal. We start with the notion of menstrual synchrony’, he wrote. ‘It is well established amongst the women of even the most civilized households throughout the world. The monthly cycles of women in close and regular physical proximity harmonize and correspond. They run in parallel. They ovulate simultaneously. The aetiology of such a phenomenon is not established, though olfactory and glandular agencies are most likely. Nature is neither wasteful nor gratuitous. The mechanism for reproductive synchrony is latent in humankind. We must take this as evidence that such a mechanism was at one time fully active as confidently as we must presume an ancient tail implicit in our own vestigial coccyx or a full pelt of hair as ancestral to those few strategic tufts which still endure. Any synchrony of sexual intercourse, pregnancy and birth amongst the forest people, a community otherwise free of profligacy or baser passions, suggests a practice too fettered and precise to bear an anthropological interpretation of custom or taboo. Here, cut off from humankind for centuries beyond number, is a species whose reproductive natures are as different from our own as a gibbon’s from a chimp’s. Are we to witness a mass human parturition as brief and ordered in duration as that observed by shepherds amongst their sheep? Is this the natural, primitive pattern of human reproduction from which our own sexual connivancehas evolved and which was thought lost amongst the orchards of what the Christians label Eden?’
    ‘I T WAS a wearying experience,’ said mother. ‘As you would expect, the men made all the noise, with their own backache and sickness and their stomachs distended with phantom offspring. The women were silent and out of sight, of course.’ Her recollections were bitter and, perhaps, distorted too. She described a village barmy with pregnancy. And then one morning the men went off into the forest to give mimed birth to the stones which they decorated or to the wooden dolls which they had carved. And in the shelters of the village the first curious skirlings of the babies began. It was an orphan chorus of human gulls, she said, the clutter rather than the mystery of birth. ‘The Professor, of course, was not welcome at that time with his calipers, camera and notebook. Nor would they accept