The Female of the Species. Lionel Shriver

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      “Seems to me you had your eye on someone else’s last night.”

      Corgie grinned. “They like it.”

      Gray stood up. “Well, I don’t.” She walked out the door, Charles laughing after her.

      “They think it makes them powerful,” said Charles, leaning over the ladder as Gray clipped rapidly down.

      “That’s precisely my point,” said Gray. “I think it does.”

      Charles must have watched her brisk and unusually rigid stride to her precious furrows with a smile on his face and a satisfied gleam in his eye.

      In the process of overseeing the planting, Gray also conducted informal interviews. Especially after she’d applied first aid to several farming injuries, Il-Ororen confided in her completely. At the end of the day Gray would go back to Corgie’s cabin and take furious notes.

      What fascinated Gray as she studied this tribe was that, on a scale of generations, they hadn’t been separated from the Masai very long. It seems they’d deliberately purged themselves of their own history. Maliciously they insisted on having no ancestors but those they could remember, no larger culture to which they owed their ability to throw pots, to mine and forge metal tools. Their creation myths and cautionary tales were no longer traditional Masai ones. While they still built kraals, they gladly constructed new blond structures. Nor had they gradually distorted Masai music, ceremonies, and dances; they had dumped them. Il-Ororen had invented themselves.

      Most surprising of all, Gray now had no doubt that, while they resented particular tyrannies and didn’t understand the gymnasium, they cooperated willingly with Charles Corgie. She’d anticipated a gentle native population abused and manipulated by a cruel Western intruder. Instead, she found a ruthless people that had eagerly latched on to an appropriate sovereign. They liked Corgie’s projects. They enjoyed his anger as long as it wasn’t directed against them personally. They identified with his arrogance. They’d rooted Corgie deeply in their mythology, and told stories as if his arrival had been predicted for generations, like a messiah. Il-Ororen were the only people in the world, and they’d gotten themselves their own private god.

      Gray’s concern, however, was with the arrogance that Il-Ororen and Corgie shared. It had bound them; it could sever them, too. A truly arrogant people were easily dissatisfied and individually ambitious. They would have a high leadership turnover. Corgie had been among Il-Ororen for five years, and that struck Gray more and more as a long time.

      Several times a year Corgie had a church service.

      “What if I don’t want to go?” Gray asked that morning. All around them Il-Ororen were painting themselves with colored clay and plaiting braids; it reminded Gray too vividly of Sunday mornings when she would pull the covers over her head while her mother put on makeup and fixed her hair with grotesque cheerfulness.

      “Gray, darling,” said Charles as he prepared himself for the service, trying on his red baseball cap at different angles in his airplane mirror. “When you’re the one giving the party, you don’t get to decide whether or not to show. You’re on the program. How’s that?” He turned to her with the visor off to the back.

      “Little Rascals.”

      “Perfect. Now, Kaiser, you old cow, what are you wearing?”

      Gray spread her hands. As usual, she was in khaki work clothes.

      “You have no sense of celebration,” Charles chided.

      “What’s there to celebrate?”

      “Nothing more nor less than ourselves, Gray dear.” Charles was bouncing around the cabin so that the structure shook. “For you,” he added, “a tie.” He proceeded to tie a Windsor knot around his bare neck. In some wacky way, with the red cap, it was cute. Once Charles threw on his flight jacket, laced his boots over his pants, strapped on his Air Force goggles, and, the final touch, hung one of those long, hand-rolled cigarettes out the side of his mouth, he stood before Gray for inspection.

      “You look—absolutely—insane,” she said, laughing until she fell over on the bed.

      Charles flicked an ash. “Excellent. Now for you.”

      “Not a chance,” said Gray. “The dignified anthropologist will take notes sedately in the back.”

      “Don’t be boring,” said Charles. “What did you always secretly want to wear in church?”

      “Khaki work clothes. I hated dresses.”

      “Think again.”

      Gray smiled. “Well. When I first got breasts, my mother used to foam at the mouth if I wore a low-cut blouse to church. So I’d walk out the door with my coat on, buttoned up to the chin. She’d find out about my neckline when we got there and take a scarf out of her purse, swathe it around my neck, and tuck it in the bodice. It would clash with my outfit, of course. I’d scream …” Gray laughed. “I tore it up once. Threw it down in the parking lot. I was like that.”

      “You still are.”

      “I don’t throw tantrums anymore.”

      “You get what you want, though.”

      “Yes,” said Gray, “everything.” She said this simply and with certainty; it must have disconcerted her later, since there were a few things she didn’t get—she was talking to one of them that morning.

      “Then Gray will go to church in something plunging. Or how’d you like to go topless? It’s in vogue here.”

      “Charles, I’d think you’d be bored by now with looking at women’s breasts.”

      “Not by yours.”

      Gray looked at her hands.

      “All right,” said Charles with a clap. “I’ve got it.” He rummaged around the cabin until he found a long scrap of cheetah skin. “Your shirt.”

      “No!” said Gray, but with Corgie’s urging she went behind her partition and tied it around her chest. For her skirt he dragged out his old parachute and began to tear off a long swath of the silk.

      “Are you sure you want to rip that up?”

      “Now, what good is a parachute going to do me in Toroto?”

      “You never know when you’re going to have to bail out of here.”

      “You bring that up a lot,” said Charles, tucking the chute around her hips, making a full, low-swung wrap, like a belly dancer’s. “My leaving. You don’t seem to get it, Kaiser. I’m gonna be buried here.”

      “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

      “Ah-ah. No more morbid talk. Now, let’s see.” He patted her hip. “Step back.” She did so; Charles let out a slow whistle. “Terrific.”

      Gray looked down at the thin band of animal skin around her breasts, the long flat expanse of her bare stomach, the blousy white silk draping down to her feet. She extended her leg between the СКАЧАТЬ