Sento

By Gary Kemp  

1.  Things on the land are not intimate with things in the sea. True, a few items migrate from the one world to the other—a coconut, for example, goes sea-borne, or, to take a reverse example, a shell washes up on the beach. True again, there are creatures, who are neither marine nor terrestrial, but are interlopers from the point of view of either, as in the case of turtles, penguins, or walruses, who, if outer appearance is a guide, never seem entirely at home on the land or in the sea. Notwithstanding these difficult phenomena, however, the two realms, contrary to what many well-meaning books will say, are not interdependent at all. Things deep in the heart of Africa, for example, would proceed unhindered and unchanged whatever took place in the sea, and those beneath the waves would hardly mind whether there were or were not such things as Africa. These are worlds, with a few exceptions that prove the rule, of mutual obliviousness. 

Sento had been born fifteen years before on the island of Sporidia.  It was originally so-called not by its inhabitants, who never thought of naming it—it was, after all, the only place they had known, if we are not going too far in attributing to them an awareness of their surroundings as a ‘place’, thus implying a belief in other places—but, so it is believed, by European explorers long ago: the English, the Spaniards, and the Portuguese, whose contact with the island must normally have been limited only to descrying it on the horizon, labelling it for what they must have considered the unlikely event of future reference. It is the sole habitable island, roughly pentagonal in shape and perhaps sixty square kilometres in size, on the eastern extremity of an out of the way and otherwise unremarkable atoll in eastern Polynesia, peopled by the joint procreative activities of Polynesians, Mapuches, and Europeans of miscellaneous origin, a mixture whose exact proportions and composition were—if known to begin with—long ago forgotten, as were their exact means of transport to the island. Certain hints of their past would have been plain to an outsider—the presence of rats on the island (some might speak of an infestation of rats on the island), likely brought unwittingly long ago by Polynesians, the cultivation of the herb lobelia tupa from Chile which many of them smoked, the inordinate interest, for this latitude, taken in their houses, surprisingly spacious and constructed without benefit of saw or hammer, the shape and constitution of the surprisingly sturdy canoes they used for fishing—but such habits subsisted without stories of their origin, by the legends or lore one might have thought necessary for a proper tradition. They were regarded in the same way as one regarded sleeping and waking, coughing and sneezing, and burping and hiccupping, as inevitable parts of life, from which no one would ever think to ask whence they came, let alone to propose improvements. 

It is very much in keeping with the tenor of life on Sporidia that no one seemed to know much about their past, beyond a few personal tales told by the elderly, and even these were mostly confined to what, from an academic point of view, if not the journalistic point of view, would be regarded as trivia. There was the time, for example, that the great-grandfather of Sento’s little friend Sanguo was said to have seduced, or to have been seduced—and a few did say that the seduction was mutual—by the daughter of the captain of a research vessel that had stopped in (though naturally no one native to Sporidia had a clear understanding of the idea of a research vessel, or indeed of a 'captain'). Whereas some said the daughter had thenceforth stayed on the island, others said she had left with the ship, with Sanguo’s great-grandfather left weeping on the beach, either at his loss or his relief; still others said that Sanguo’s great-grandfather, or perhaps someone else, had made the whole thing up—an option possessed of the undeniable attraction of rendering agreeably otiose those otherwise somewhat disturbing questions about humans beyond Sporidia.  Or perhaps the story had begun in some other way. Such was the fate of many stories on Sporidia; there were always several versions, all rather vague and doubtful, and some would say that none of it ever happened at all. This was not because the denizens of Sporidia were contentious or mendacious, or notably jealous of each other’s exploits, so much as fatalistic and lazy. No one cared very much about these stories, and indeed they were not often told or discussed. 

At the time of engendering Sento, Sento’s mother was not wanting in beauty. But the years had had their way with her, perhaps more than was their due. She was slightly stooped, perhaps hearing-impaired (though this did not make much difference to her), and prematurely wizened—one might point to her unquenchable habit of smoking the lobelia leaves as a conspicuous cause of this—yet broad, and sporting not only a woman-beard, but several splendid tufts of bodily hair, as well as other like things of indefinite character, not only in the expected places but intermittently here and there, to go with the usual outgrowth of black hair—with a few grey hairs intermingled—issuing primarily from her head. We would say she had seen her fortieth birthday, perhaps even her fiftieth, but we do well to observe that her age was, in a way, an irrelevance, at least subjectively, for the whole business of identifying let alone counting years, or any other intervals of time save days, was not habitual, and indeed not generally known on Sporidia. At one time there did arise the custom of counting what we would approximate as ‘weeks’, except that each week was three, perhaps four days in length. At first, many people would get excited at the end of the week, looking forward to the new week, taking stock of the week that had just passed, and so on. But the custom was short-lived, for its emptiness became all too apparent. 

Despite the desiccatedness, the corpulence, the beard, and the assorted thickets of androgenic hair, or perhaps indeed partly because of them, the spirit of Sento’s mother endured in its original liveliness. At most times, she was unashamedly joyful; energetic, preternaturally talkative with the women—in whose presence she seemed to speak with an almost Spanish accent, though this may been just wishful hallucination on the narrator's part—and popular with the men. One in particular, Pete, a virtually toothless fisherman—the profession of fisherman was commonly proclaimed among the many idle men of the island, though Pete was notably unlucky in regard to teeth—was particularly assiduous in his attentions to Sento’s mother. Never would more than a few days pass before Pete would bring her something to wear, something to eat, a flower or a bunch of same, or some random thing with which to decorate her house or her person, not exactly according to the taste of Sporidia—the phrase imputes to the native inhabitants more aesthetic self-consciousness that was their wont—but still he took a certain amount of care in his choosing, disdaining one sea shell or bird's nest, bringing with triumph another. These offerings were invariably met with a complacent smile which he inexorably took for encouragement, but which really expressed only contempt, along with a little amusement at his mulish persistence (a more subtle observer, if not the present storyteller, would count this for him as a source of distinct but subterranean disappointment, which could only mount as the time went on). 

You will note also that Pete wished to have his own name pronounced Peté, even if he could persuade no one, despite his best efforts, to be guided by him in this. The matter would not normally be so conspicuous, but Pete, perhaps uncharacteristically, forced the issue, by referring to himself not in the first-person, not in the customary manner as ‘I’, ‘me’, or ‘myself’, but as ‘Pete’, that is to say, as ‘Peté’, setting up a nice conflict between his and his interlocutors’ way of pronouncing his name. This was only compounded by the pronunciation of Sento’s mother, which was not as ‘Pete’ as rhymes with ‘feet’, and not as ‘Pet’ as rhymes with ‘wet’, but with a syllable equidistant between the two possibilities, which she would always laughingly deny when confronted was in any way different from the way in which other people pronounced ‘Pete’—as rhyming with ‘feet’—even though she pronounced ‘feet’ and ‘eat’ in the normal way, as everyone did. This was one source of resigned despair for Pete, but others are not far to seek. One afternoon, for example, she had sat gossiping with her friends, when Pete had solemnly presented her with what we would recognise as a Coke bottle, one of a few such things the fishermen had fished from the sea; it was cloudy and green, chipped here and there, but nonetheless entire. It was, you must realise, a wondrous object. She said, as if Pete were a tiresome child whining to be looked at once again, ‘Yes, yes, my Pet[e?], now put it with the rest of your junk’—by which she meant the pile of presents from Pete that had accumulated in her hut—and returned to the animated chatter with her friends. Pete obeyed, perhaps gratified all the same at her having called him, in plain earshot of her companions to boot, ‘my Pet(e)’. Other times, in Pete’s full knowledge if not his view, she enjoyed amorous relations with a number of we can only describe as distinctly less worthy men, whom she thought of as, on the one hand, relatively glamorous, and on the other, less threatening to her sense of independence. Poor Pete! His uxoriousness made him into a figure of fun not only in her eyes and  in Sporidean eyes in general, but perhaps, in our eyes, a figure bordering on the tragic. 

Not that Sento himself witnessed any of this, or much of this, first-hand—let alone that he fashioned recognisable opinions concerning it. That would be wholly to misunderstand Sento. His days were typically passed on the beach at the lagoon, or on that rare day when the wind was amenable, at the south-facing beach, his feet towards the water, his face turned upward, his eyes closed, sometimes in the warming sun, other times in the cooling shade of the palm trees, feeling the stream of consciousness as driven, in the way that the trees were rustled by the gentle wind, by mere velleities, seldom rising to the pitch of desire or wish, to say nothing of hope. Activities for Sento sometimes indeed concerned real objects, with all their resistance to being pushed or pulled, lifted or moved, but this was only by the way. When younger, for example, he used to count the sea-gulls and the boobies—though of course he did not think of them as the bearers of those names, distinguishing them only according to appearance—hoping as he counted that he might count more boobies than gulls, which indeed happened from time to time, causing in Sento not a little satisfaction. The fact did not signify that by our standards Sento was almost always mistaken in the numbers of birds counted, whether because of his losing count, his mixing up the order of the numbers, or his having skipped twelve or repeated nine, for these mistakes naturally went undetected, not only because of there being no external check, but also because his conceptual grasp on how precisely counting worked was tenuous at best. Indeed it is not clear that he would have recognised as his mistakes what we would call his mistakes, even if the matter were spelled out to him. Nowadays, perhaps with the approaching wisdom of maturity, Sento had taken to carrying out his counting-derbies with his eyes closed, counting, as we say, imaginary birds; no one else—though perhaps this consideration counted for little in Sento’s deliberations—could possibly be any the worse for it, and as for Sento, he not only could enjoy greater comfort from the lack of eye strain and the like, he could easily have the benefit of as many victories by the boobies as he desired. Of course the gulls still reigned on the whole, for Sento was only too well-aware that a surfeit of victories by the boobies would only cheapen them. It was a delicate balance, and Sento, uncharacteristically, took a certain amount of pride in having managed it. 

As for the nights, Sento passed them under a lean-to attached to the house of a man he called, in his thoughts, ‘uncle’, a designation forming part of Sento’s internal language largely because he occasionally dared to imagine he might apply successfully, one fine day, some such word in public discourse, implying as it did a certain benevolence and interest toward himself, things which Sento did not expect of anyone but which it comforted him at times to think he might enjoy, and which might well be attributed inwardly to certain people without their being any the wiser. Sento had slept in the lean-to for almost as long as he could remember. But there were some earlier times, hazily glimpsed, times when he was very small, when he slept near his mother, and perhaps near some other children; it is hard now to tell whether these were siblings, or friends, or what. He remembered perhaps lying back against her stomach, or was it her bosom, feeling her breath rise and fall, as she smoked, talked, watched people in what might be called the village square, or perhaps simply the clearing, where people came and went, insofar as people came and went, or talked and tarried, played games, insofar as they talked and tarried, played games. He remembered too, or had something in his mind like a memory, that returned to him often, and not un-soothingly, of the same thing, only at night, when the stars were so many and bright, and a fire burned in the middle of the clearing, and someone might even have played a primitive drum, perhaps sang, in a kind of soft growl, notes from a vaguely pentatonic scale, the notes somehow as one with the wind, but finishing only insofar as they came to rest. 

These were memories to Sento, or so they might just as well have been. Again it would be to misunderstand Sento—perhaps to misunderstand the Sporidean mind in general—to press the question of whether they were in fact memories or simply dreams. That is a very true saying. That Sento was that being who sat thus nestling in motherly flesh was nothing but the occasional recurrence of these random film clips, embodying a certain point of view, as we might say to describe the phenomenon, nothing more. As for his mother, it would not have occurred to Sento to say: I was the one who used to sit in your lap, I was, indeed I still am, your son! Everyone already knew this, or had forgotten, it was the same. Mind, no one on Sporidia thought of her as remiss as a mother; children, beyond the age of three or four, were normally regarded as everyone’s business if anyone’s, even if in many cases the mother and child maintained a degree of closeness that they do not typically have with others. As for a father, it would not have occurred to Sento to ask, of his mother, who he was or is—she would not in any case have known the answer, or at least would not own up to it—or to ask it of anyone else including Uncle, who might indeed, for all anyone knew, have been Sento’s father, or grandfather, or perhaps both. Sporidia was certainly not a place for anything resembling patrilineality to take root, for a minimal condition of that arrangement is that the subjects in question have not only some rudimentary interest in the biological facts underlying the phenomena in question—and it will suffice to say that Sporideans had only the vaguest of ideas surrounding the concept of fatherhood in particular—but an overriding concern with ancestry and inheritance, property, and identity, as we say, concerns of which the inhabitants of Sporidia were entirely and not a few would say blissfully innocent. 

Uncle was not conspicuously deserving of the title tacitly bestowed upon him by Sento. He typically sat unsmilingly, unmovingly, and unchangeably in front of his house, perhaps musing on past peccadilloes, perhaps dreaming of those to come, or more likely being of no particular cast or activity of mind, chewing on the end of a twig. Beneath this implacable exterior, however, he was an unaccountably indulgent man so far as Sento was concerned, never disturbing his sleep in the mornings, never neglecting to throw him a fish or two—or even a special delicacy of a fried rat when they were in the offing—not minding how much water Sento took from the urn which Uncle or Uncle’s woman filled when it ran low. Nor did Uncle take umbrage at Sento’s only unwelcome habit, namely the noxious farts he would unfailingly let loose as he lay down at night to sleep, and which were not lost upon those reposing late in front of the house, whether through nostrils or ears. 

One way in which Sento did stand out, it is perhaps not idle to remark, was the prodigious amount of sleep that he habitually indulged in, retiring earlier and rising later than other Sporideans—which is, you will observe, saying something—napping a good part of the day for good measure, and on some days not rising at all. He typically retired early because he could not see what there was to do, or what was to be gained by prolonging the day’s stint of consciousness. By the same token, he was in no hurry to begin it. He was, indeed, puzzled as to the exact difference between sleeping and waking, and further as to the reason, if such there be, for esteeming the latter over the former. This struck him as an unthinking prejudice. Awake, it was not unusual to find himself at rather a loss for what to think, let alone to do; yet even his fullest acquiescence in this state of nullity was never without a certain feeling of strain, of effort, of barriers to be overcome. Sleep, by contrast, was invariably a kind of wonderland of interesting and unexpected events, of mental facility, all without the slightest sense of effort. From this point of view, the danger of the occasional nightmare, as we ordinary describe it, and the mere insensibility towards his immediate surroundings we associate with sleep, seemed neither here nor there. 

So far as Sento knew, little was to be expected from one day that had not come to pass in another. The days stretched out ahead and behind, not of course to infinity, but without perceptible limit, unbroken and uniform. Each day was so much like another, at least for all practical purposes, that it would never have occurred to Sento that it might behove him to gird himself up for possible misfortunes, or, let alone, to anticipate opportunities for better fortunes, whatever that would mean. True, Sento did speculate from time to time as to whether the pattern of day and night, day and night, and so on, might be interrupted one day, or one night for that matter, by some unfathomed third thing. Or perhaps the nights might seamlessly crowd together, and the gentle undulations of sleep be blessedly prolonged, or the sun stop in the middle of the sky, the waves be fixed in their little cycle, the sand indefinitely retain its warmth. But this perhaps imputes to Sento too much intellectual activity and pertinacity that was his wont. Such questions did enter his mind but rarely, and painlessly dropped away without answers, and were forgotten, unmissed, until perhaps his mind happened upon them again, perhaps stimulated by some obscure habit of association. 

 2.  Events, at any rate, have a way of pricking one’s bubble. And so it was that one day, as Sento, in his usual way, lay supine upon the sand at the lagoon, digging into it with his toes and letting it trickle between them, musing fondly, it so happens, on the sea-urchins and breadfruit that he had had the good fortune to have been given to eat the night before, that Seraphina, a not unspirited girl Sento had known and watched, as he had known and watched others of approximately her degree of maturity, suddenly appeared and sat abruptly down, perfectly aligned cross-legged at Sento’s head, facing his feet. This was wholly unprecedented in Sento’s experience, and indeed it did not fail to strike him as such. 

Looking up, Sento could see, upside down, only an ill-defined expanse of belly receding rapidly from his point of view, the round undersides of breasts culminating in brown nipples, with chin, nostrils and cheekbones centred between them, flanked by dark hair that splayed wildly to either side. She did not speak, but leaned over him, the breasts dangling forward but preserving their orientation with respect to the vertical axis, her eyes coming into view between the swaying pendula, and the white teeth of a smile forming, unmistakably, despite the upside-down orientation. She looked at him thus for what seemed to Sento a long time, the smile remaining fixed in a way that might have disquieted or perplexed our young hero, if he had found any one thing more disquieting or perplexing than another. She leaned forward now yet further, and placed her hands at the base of Sento’s ribcage, symmetrically on either side, the tips of the fingers almost together, the thumbs pointing downward at his sides. The scene for Sento now was almost entirely occluded by Seraphina’s stomach. And he began to smell something, the tip of his nose was so close to her skin; it was sweet in his nostrils, something like lilies, or orchids, if he knew the names of those things, but also, it seemed, something darker and more savoury, felt not so much in his nose, precisely, but somehow in his head more generally, and even in his chest, or perhaps his stomach. Her hands, meanwhile, began to move slowly in unison up and down, as she rocked gently back and forth. As she did so, of course, her breasts lagged behind a little, for an almost imperceptible moment still moving out when the torso began to move backward, and for another moving in when the torso reversed and moved forward, the resulting momentary flattening of breasts on ribs accompanied by a just audible sound, which, if rendered in syllables, might be ‘flup’. ‘Flup … flup … flup’. And so they went. 

This combination of sensory stimuli was almost too much for young Sento. He felt himself to be on the point of action, of a response of some kind. He might, for example, have reached up to grasp her shoulders, clumsily no doubt, pulling what for her would have been forwards. Or he might have rolled away, leapt up, and plunged into the lagoon. Or he might, somehow in keeping with the excited flutterings he felt in his stomach, have squawked like a chicken. 

However ripe for action it might have been, however, that moment did not arrive. For Seraphina now rose and went away, indeed hurried away, summoned by the hysterical wailing suddenly emitted by Sanguo, who stood a middle distance away beneath a little grove of palms close to the beach, moving one leg up and down, trying to squeeze a coconut in his hands as if its husk were a sponge, which of course it most definitely was not. Upon seeing Seraphina’s approach, he dropped the coconut and scampered off into the forest, with Seraphina following some distance behind, leaving Sento as he was before, alone on the north-facing beach. 

3. At length, as the sun descended, Sento, in what was even for him an especially dreamy way, began to walk, or shall we say wander, or shall we say dawdle, in the general direction of the clearing, with the provocative images of what had happened earlier with Seraphina occupying his attention. He took a few steps, paused, smiled; took a few more steps, paused, shook his head; took a few more steps, and so on. When he was descried from afar by one now known to everyone as what he had self-consciously entitled himself, “The one called ‘Martine’”. That is to say, his customary designation, if he at any rate is to be believed, was not ‘Martine’, but “The man called ‘Martine’”. The man called ‘Martine’ insisted on this, at times almost came to blows over it. Inevitably, this led to a certain amount of confusion—especially with spoken speech not affording the use of quotation marks—and even a little resentment; for why should this person help himself to such pompous yet idle words, it was wondered (though without the point’s being connected to the larger themes that will emerge in this narrative, even if perhaps they were). 

For example, Avis, the younger brother of Pete, could not understand the intended appellation. Or, if he did understand it, did not accept it. One day, when they saw the one called ‘Martine’ across the clearing, Avis asked Pete, ‘Come now, what is his name really?’. 

    “He is the one called ‘Martine’”, Pete answered. 

    “Ah, so it is what I thought; his name is ‘Martine’!” said Avis. 

    “No! He is the one called ‘Martine’!” said Pete. 

    “Why do you say ‘No’? That is what I said! The man is called ‘Martine’, no?” To which Pete replied, already showing signs of exasperation, 

    ‘No, no, no! Well it depends on … his name is “the one called ‘Martine’”’!; he is called “The one called ‘Martine’”’. 

    “Right…I see. So the one called ‘The one called “Martine”’ is not the one called ‘Martine’?; indeed there is no such man”; to which an evidently relieved Pete replied, 

    ‘Yes, good, you could put it like that!’. 

    Still, Avis was not satisfied. “But if a man is the one called ‘Martine’, then surely it is not incorrect to simply call him ‘Martine’; it cannot be that the one called ‘Martine’ is not called ‘Martine’”, said Avis, seemingly pleased with himself; ‘That makes no sense’. 

    “You misunderstand me. The one called “The one called ‘Martine’” is the one called ‘Martine’”. 

    ‘I see’, answered Avis. 

Of course he did not see. In any event, this gives one a feel for the mischief done by these lexical games of the one called ‘Martine’. This was only exacerbated by the one called ‘Martine’’s sometimes using this grand appellation in as it were the first-person, that is in the place where an ordinary person would use ‘I’, or ‘me’. One might divine here the more general intellectual policies, for good or ill, propagated by the one called ‘Martine’. One might vaguely but rightly characterize him as the island’s lone ‘Man of Letters’, its leading intellectual, its philosopher—or even, there being so little on the island in the way of competition for the office, its wise man, a badge he would been only too pleased to wear, if only his fellow islanders went in for handing out badges. 

The man himself was a singular sight. He was enormously tall and exceedingly thin, though not nearly as tall as he once was.  Extreme old age had bent him over into the shape—and there is no other phrase that quite captures it, the resemblance is so plain—of a question mark. He was bald on top, but otherwise his hair and beard were very long, which the old women of the island, who were not great at fussing over such things to begin with, had long ago despaired of untangling. The consequence was that, as he stood, he could hardly help but to peer downward, toward his gnarled feet with their unspeakable toenails, and the two great masses of matted hair that hung down on either side occupied most of his field of vision, and appeared to irritate him, as they swayed to and fro. His bearing was nonetheless strong rather than enfeebled—perhaps it was his dogged determination to reflect on the fundamentals of being that kept him strong and alert; or perhaps he was kept fit by the low-level but regular callisthenics provided by the constant effort to remove his hair from his face. 

Still far away, the one called ‘Martine’—we will continue to call him as he would have wished, as it is the least we can do, if indeed not the most—shouted: ‘Hah! You! Stop!’; Sento paused, and turned to face the one called ‘Martine’. The one called ‘Martine’, head down, his walking stick nervously poking the ground in what must be admitted to be a certain rhythm—not, as might be expected, an accent placed upon a basic duple rhythm of the feet, but the stick and feet forming a pattern of genuine triplets, a waltz you might say, so that one listening, without seeing, would want to ascribe the sounds to a tripedal creature were there any such creatures, and not the usual bipedal or quadrupedal creature—determinedly made his way towards Sento, who, perhaps not unaccountably, as it was not as if there were an urgent appointment to which he had to made haste, waited patiently, smiling vaguely. The one called ‘Martine’ stopped in front of Sento, and spoke in his usual hesitating yet somehow peremptory manner, looking down all the while at the ground, which he continued to poke, scritch, and scratch with his stick. 

     “The one called ‘Martine’ expresses his sorrow .. He is sorry I …”. 

The one called ‘Martine’ began again.

    “I'm so sorry … never did the one called ‘Martine’ … please, I … please me, please, this angel is so incontestably marvellous, if she could only…. she was … just once .. but never mind that … will you come? Hither? There is something about you that, so young so … a secret you ... I feel ashamed no, guilty no, I am at peace no I am not at peace … I beg of you, I demand of you, to follow ... Come! Please I, I saw … begone you shit-eating … No! No it’s not that, it must go away … I'm sorry … The one called ‘Martine’ must disambiguate, must clarify, must analyse, must... no it cannot be otherwise, it ought not to be otherwise, it should, might … Might not, the one called ‘Martine’ have the honour of ... your presence? I must inform … not someone, you … only you will understand, they will not understand, will not listen....please?” 

He stood aside, beckoning Sento towards his hut, just beyond a small rise in the jungle. Despite having some difficulty with the speech, the body language was plain. Sento acquiesced, as was his wont. 

Inside the hut belonging to the one called ‘Martine’, Sento, again motioned by the one called ‘Martine’, sat down, atop a certain mound in the middle of the hut, comprising such items as coconut husks, dried palm fronds, dried leaves of various shapes and sizes, fish bones, limpet shells, squid beaks, sea urchin spines, pieces of starfish, pieces of coral, pieces of crab shells and lobster shells, scallop shells, bird skeletons, bird feathers, bird feet, bird wings, bird beaks, rat skeletons, rat hairs, fragments of eggshell, dried moths, dried butterflies, dead insects, centipedes and spiders, a few living specimens of the same, pieces of cloth, pieces of twine and rope, bits of packing cases, parts or fragments of toys, and of tools, and sticks, branches, stones and pebbles, rusted nails, hooks and staples, and a not inconsiderable number of items or detritus otherwise unclassifiable. Not that the objects constituting the place in which Sento placed his bottom differed notably from those scattered around the rest the interior of the hut. They did not. The scene, except for the area in a far corner where the one called ‘Martine’ kept his books, or parts of books, snippets of books, pages torn out or parts or snippets of pages torn out of books, or otherwise standing alone, which we shall again have occasion to mention, presented to the eye an homogeneous yet finely variegated substance that looked inscrutably purposeful, though of course it was not purposeful in any direct sense. Nor is it strictly correct, although it is perhaps convenient, to speak as if Sento sat upon a definite hill in comparison with the surrounding flat. The truth was that the rise in the surrounding matter on which Sento sat was one among many such rises. 

The one called ‘Martine’, again, began to speak, looking down, his stick continuing to make patterns in the sand. 

    “You—I follow convention, the one called ‘Martine’ speaks of that which is called ‘you’, the second person, a secondary person, the other person, a bystanding person, a bystander, who is indeed known by the sobriquet ‘person’ only, in the final analysis, for piddling reasons dreamed up some irrelevant grammar master, indeed for all I strictly speaking know all you are is a mere contingent agglomeration of the data of sense which could burst asunder for no reason—but at any rate, aside from all that, you ...when I was young, when I was small I dreamed, no I thought, no I envisaged, no I presaged, no I, I don’t know… I don’t know how I came to … I don’t know how or in what manner or even whether I came to … understand, to perceive, to sense...to … this inner—is it inner? What do I mean by inner? ... Leave me! That depraved lunatic … in fact nobody comprehends me, my gift, my gifts, nobody understands my desires, my passions, to apprehend, to know … it is impossible. Not even I can comprehend it! You, I seen you, you egocentric little brat, you little schemer … I will not abide … Ouch! No! Surely page 143 cannot exist on its own, but what right have I to suggest otherwise? She … Forgive me! I digress!” 

Sento thought it was high time to contribute, and now seeing his opening, upon first clearing his throat, said: 

    “Good morning!” 

The one called ‘Martine’ paused, made as if to look at Sento, and now made a more strenuous effort at gathering his wits. 

    “One feels something, one thinks something, one says something, as we so blithely avouch; feel, think, say, what does it matter? What does it mean? Later one recalls it—‘Yes, that is what it was!’, ‘That was how the saying went’—but did it? This sound, that phonic shape, this pattern, that pattern, this form, that form? Has it changed? Has its meaning changed? How is one to know? How is one to go on? It’s as if I remember—but is remembering the way it seems to me? Is seeming to remember … Is that how it seems? Is that the word? To ‘remember’? Is it what one says? By definition? What is meant by definition? Do I make myself clear? Filth, their minds are filthy.. Isn’t he a perfect little so-and-so? and yet page 54 exists, it tells me the opposite of page 143; how is it possible? I come to you in a spirit of appeasement .. I am tolerant of that thing, you. The one called ‘Martine’ is not tolerant, you are intolerable but I make as if I tolerate. It must do. One page stresses the importance of observation. Observation! Take this, for example” 

 — the one called ‘Martine’ held up a dirty but perfectly round baseball— 

    “Am I to observe it? How? Am I to perform experiments? What are they? Test-tubes? Oscilloscopes? What are these things? For that matter: What are things?” 

The one called ‘Martine’ paused, and looked at Sento. He looked back down at the ground, and struggled to regain his train of thought, such as it was. He went on: 

    ‘Forgive me … I’m not sure if I’ve made myself clear. It’s not evident how to … where does it begin? How does it begin?  I need you to—no it isn’t that, no no, it isn’t that I have a need for adulation, for respect, for an audience, for fame, for followers, for claques, such a person as the one called ‘Martine’ has no need, not that kind of need …You see, I realise that … my knowledge, and thus my power, despite its surpassing all, its being infinite, … is incomplete. You somehow, your actions, your antics, your shenanigans, announced this to me, I see that now, that is why I … but still my knowledge surpasses all! Is this madness? Inspiration? A calling? I am so bored! Only I am anointed, and the snivelling little turds can’t recognise that they are snivelling little turds! And they humiliate me, without seeing that they humiliate me, without the requisite standing to humiliate me, do you understand? They know nothing! You know nothing! Far be it from me to ... Did you see Mars last night? Of course you did not. I told them once of its canals, it is a world perhaps just like our world, it is far away … and the Moon! Do they not consider the Moon? The face of it, the old man, and the rabbit? Do you not know rabbits? Or course not! Yet all these things are unspeakably meaningful!’ 

The man called ‘Martine’ paused again, catching his breath. He looked out the door, then back feetwards, and then went on, in a graver tone, as if he were getting to the point. 

    ‘Mark me. Signs are everywhere. But they do not see. They are blind. They do not conceive of the very existence of such a mind, of a mind struggling to grasp these radiant senses, these subtle principles, these abstract thoughts, dancing so tantalisingly, so rapturously, so ravishingly, in the seamless void, in intellectual space, in infinite space, my space. I want to seize them! To masticate them, to digest them and to make them mine, which I formulate and will consume and digest and rearrange into the new… I am their author… yet the moment I reach for them, they … slip from my grasp, they evaporate! My inwardness, my introspection, is self-authenticating, how could it be otherwise? So how is it possible, how possible they are mine and not mine—the one ‘Martine’ is at his wits end; how did my library come to me? These words ... Is the substance of words the same as that of wind? Are sounds words? How is one to know that they are not? Listen! Listen to the wind blow! …… A wind of words, of thoughts? How can it be?….Listen!... It is written that questions without answers are no questions at all; only what is seen is real, you shall not be real … begone, you son-of-the-foul-fiend, begone, begone.’

Indescribably bored as I’m sure you must be, Sento went, making neither head nor tail of the disclosures of the one called the one called ‘Martine’, and thought of them no more, if indeed we can credit him with having listened to them in the first place, rather than merely awaiting their cessation. 

Throughout the following day, the vision of Seraphina’s upside-down smile, the swaying reverse topology of her breasts and shoulders, and her sweet laughter, would not leave Sento’s mind. He did not see Seraphina herself, but there was nothing so unusual in that. More unusual was that he could not find Sanguo. He was not found, as he so often was, with the fishermen, or out upon the reef looking for sea-urchins; nor was he found in the clearing, up to his usual games with the children, or scrambling around the assorted piles of this and that, looking for rats, nor in one of the scraggly little hammocks woven of palm fronds that were hung near the water supply; nor even at the cess-pit, where Sanguo used often stealthily to lie in wait for him, gleefully pouncing upon his unsuspecting prey, predator and prey collapsing in fits of giggles. 

 4. That evening, as darkness fell, Sento walked slowly back to his uncle’s house. The moon was new—an event which, despite its regularity, or perhaps because of its regularity, its unfathomable inevitability, unsettled the residents of the island. As usual, uncle spit as Sento passed him, a deliberate expression, Sento normally felt, of good will, to which he normally looked forward; but on this occasion Sento did not notice uncle’s having spat, let alone where the spit landed. And not only had Sento not bothered, as was his wont, to take one or two of the fried fish that as was typical were laid upon the stone next to uncle’s fire, he suddenly felt an wholly unprecedented and curious reluctance to crawl into his sleeping-place. He began to crawl in, but stood up straight again. He looked at uncle, who went on chewing his twig, rocking back and forth, staring into the fire. He looked up at the stars, then back up the path. The wind rustled the tops of the palm trees, bringing an irritated twitter from the birds. A vision of the clearing sprang forward in Sento’s mind. Like most evenings, a big fire was sure to be burning there, surrounded by people and perhaps some children, playing here and there. Perhaps, he thought, Seraphina could be found there. Sento had indeed begun to wonder whether the proceedings on the beach might be resumed, continued, or replicated, in some manner. But Sento had no idea how to arrange things favourably in this way, if indeed it ever occurred to him to undertake such a thing— at most, he merely hoped for a recurrence, or imagined such a thing, mixed with the spice of what we might rightly call desire, even with a slight pang of longing, if longing can exist unrecognised. Or at least, Sento felt, something might happen that would prevent those events slipping away into the sea, into the formless depths of memory and dreams, where everything mingled aimlessly, and nothing was held, nothing commanded Sento’s attention and called itself his, any more than anything else. 

And so it was that Sento set off down the path. His uncle, an observer might have done well to note, shifted forward, looked after him, and pulled the twig from his mouth.

 ********** 

It was not long before Sento heard a strange banging sound as he approached the clearing, as if metal were striking wood, or wood were striking metal. And there in the clearing, beside the fire, was a large metal drum—an oil drum, of a type which was one of the few examples, aside from the odd nail, fishhook or screw, of metal known to Sporidia—and someone was beating on the drum with a piece of driftwood, in an erratic manner, but with all his might. It was Sanguo. A few men, and a few women, stood about, not encircling Sanguo, the drum and the fire, because there were not enough of them, but it was evident that they were converging on Sanguo as their focal point. Sanguo’s face was marked with charcoal, although not in any particular pattern. Sento had often seen children beating oil drums with sticks; many such drums were found at the beach, and the children often played with them in some such manner, with some such sticks. Sento could remember having beaten oil drums himself when he was a child. But, in any case, Sento reflected, that was at the beach, played by children. This was not the beach, and this was not exactly a child. Indeed one could see immediately, if inscrutably, that this was not a game. Or perhaps, as Sento came to reflect more deeply, the children were not, after all, playing a ‘game’, since surely where there is a game there are rules, contesting sides, winning and losing. The children were bound by none of those things, but were simply making a noise, beating on the drum and occasionally screaming, without any further purpose than perhaps their own amusement, or the irritation of others, or the amusement because of the irritation, or the irritation because of the amusement. Sanguo’s activities were decidedly purposive, Sento observed. There was a purpose to his activity, however unfathomable, and it did not seem as if Sanguo were amused; indeed the sheer force of the blows put it out of the question that Sanguo were merely duplicating the games of children. Therefore, if the children playing with sticks and drums were strictly speaking not playing a game, then, because of Sanguo’s evident purposiveness, perhaps this was a game, Sento reasoned. 

He walked eagerly up to Sanguo, and tried to attract his attention. The task was not easy—Sanguo seemed oblivious to these efforts—but after some time he succeeded. The present moment, Sento thought, was as good an opportunity as any to ask Sanguo to clarify his activities. But Sanguo, poor Sanguo! He only became enraged upon seeing Sento. He ran around the fire, waving his stick in the air, now screaming, and returned to the drum, striking it with renewed vigour, then striking, with singular animation, his own head. He did this repeatedly. Then, just as Sento began to grow distinctly uncomfortable, Sanguo ceased, threw himself face down in the sand, and lay there, motionless. Everyone stared at him, incredulous at the wild display they had just witnessed. No one spoke. 

Sento made so bold as to approach yet closer, and crouch down near Sanguo’s head, which was bleeding a little. Now, he thought, he should take the opportunity to ask him what game he was playing. Or perhaps, upon second thought, it would be absurd to assume that he was playing a game, or that he was not, or even to set too much store by the question of whether or not he was playing a game. Rather he thought he should ask him, simply, ‘What were you doing?’, or perhaps ‘What are you doing?’. Either of these seemed agreeably direct, although perhaps neither would do justice to the spirit and gravity of Sanguo’s performance. It was as if one ought to understand immediately its import, but unfortunately one did not. It was a delicate situation. 

But as he deliberated, before any such question had passed his lips, Sanguo suddenly sprang to his feet, and without looking up, let alone at Sento, ran away, into the jungle. 

The people standing about the fire now looked into Sento’ face with expectation. Certainly the events that had just taken place were unparalleled in Sento’s experience. In fact they were wholly unintelligible to him, insofar as he had in the past classed events into the intelligible and unintelligible. So, for their part, they were to the men, and to the women too, who were quicker to class events as intelligible or unintelligible than were the men. And Sento was not insensible of the importunate way in which the men and women were looking at him. He closed his eyes, feeling vaguely that the abyss into which he looked for a response was somehow, despite its seeming evident to all that the precipitating factor lay with him, not his fault; he searched for a form of words that would represent the events that had just passed, and not only his role in them but Sanguo’s, as, not exactly familiar, but at least comprehensible. But Sento was not used to making any such efforts, and nothing came to mind. Or rather, the only thoughts he had would have struck more experienced minds as desperate, or as only dubiously relevant, or even as an outright change of subject, such as Sento’s thought that perhaps these things, at times such as these, could be regarded as games. Suddenly it occurred to Sento that just a moment ago he did have something important to say! But alas, he could not remember it. The pressure Sento felt was intolerable. 

However the patience of those present, and the note of menace in their collective demeanour, were, happily, short-lived. Sento heard them shuffling about, murmuring; he opened his eyes to find the men and women no longer standing about, no longer regarding him menacingly, demandingly, or expectantly, but as dispersing. This was much to the relief of Sento, who could hardly hurry to his sleeping-place at Uncle’s house quickly enough, so utterly confused and alarmed was he by what had just passed. 

5.    The night passed, and Sento slept. Although the wind had blown all through the night, it had slowly subsided before the sun came up. Nothing seemed amiss. The air was bright, fresh and translucent, as it generally was in this region of the eastern Pacific. If you didn't know better, you would say that is was another idyllic day on the isle of Sporidia. The fishermen gathered at the outcrop of boulders that served as the Island’s dock, chattering animatedly—though vacuously it must be admitted—about who was going to man their two little outriggers for a morning fishing expedition beyond the reef; people made their way to and from the cess-pit, children began to play, the waves crashed upon the outward facing beaches, and the wilder roar of the breakers upon the distant reef formed a duller, constant undertone to it all. The rats had long since retired from their nightly murine activities, and one could imagine them sleeping happily, if one liked, in the many nooks and crannies that were the inevitable spandrels of a primitive built environment such as that of Sporidia. To consider another illustration, in a corner of the south-east facing beach, a hermit crab scuttled along the sand, only to be overwhelmed by a breaker that was slightly bigger and more energetic than the others, and therefore flooded sand that had been dry; it lifted and hurled the tiny crustacean head over heels. But this seeming calamity was as nothing to the crab; the water receded, and the crab, for the all world as if nothing had happened, alighted right side up, and continued scuttling, in the same direction as before. 

In the clearing, in, so to speak, the human centre of Sporidia, the bustle of life proceeded more or less as it had always proceeded—indeed more or less, with due allowances owing to differences of tribe and culture, as the bustle of life had always proceeded and always will proceed, in every analogous place, on every similar morning. People worked, played, or lazed, each acting according to the inner mechanism of his own drives, yet somehow all added together to create a seeming harmony, at least mostly, most the time, for the most part. Voices created a clamouring ground floor like the chirping of insects, notwithstanding that sometimes there was to be distinguished a high-pitched shout, a peal of laughter, a sudden giddy squealing from a child, or a cawing or shriek from a bird above. Verily indeed it was a study of typification, of orderly Platonic instantiation proceeding inevitably from a universal template, a representative microcosm revealed of the human species, so long, at any rate, as one maintained a certain distance, so long as one described it only in such generalities as these. 

At first, Sento began the day as he had begun so many others. Warm with sleep, he stretched, he yawned, he burped, and as usual he thought of drifting off again, a complacent half-smile placed beatifically on his face. He listened to the sound of the distant breakers, to the gentle wind, to the chattering of various birds, to the far off voices, to the sound made by his own stirring, to the sound of his own breath. He thought of the beach, of having coconut, breadfruit or some other comestibles to eat, of the men and their search for fish, crabs and sea-urchins.

But suddenly the thought of last night’s travails put a stop to that. He sat bolt upright. The people who witnessed the bewildering goings-on between Sanguo and himself, he fervently hoped, would think no more of them, and in particular would think no more of him; he hoped that he would recede from their consciousness, to take his customary place beside the other faceless and nameless objects that they unthinkingly comported with, such as a stone placed in their path, one that is just large enough, or just so centrally placed, to register in their so to speak footwork, as they went about their business, but not so conspicuous as to be deemed worthy of continued attention, let alone to be kicked aside. 

All the same, even to Sento this seemed unlikely, for there was no getting around the unusually hostile and even unhinged tone of Sanguo’s performance. Why was the tone so threatening? Sanguo had left it unclear whether the proceedings were a threat to Sento, or a threat to Sanguo. Should Sento fear Sanguo, or Sanguo Sanguo? Or perhaps Sanguo Sanguo and Sento Sanguo? Or for that matter, Sanguo Sento and Sento Sento? Or Sento Sanguo, Sento Sento, Sanguo Sento and Sanguo Sanguo? Or Sento Sanguo and Sento Sento but Sanguo merely Sanguo or Sanguo merely Sento? Or Sanguo Sento and Sanguo Sanguo but Sento merely Santo or Sento merely Sento? Or perhaps it was just a game after all. ‘No!’, Sento said aloud, his words suddenly irrupting; ‘it couldn’t, because …. because …because ...’. But Sento found this problem difficult as well as tiresome. His voice trailed off. Perhaps it would go away if he could just treat the day like any other. Perhaps it might behove him to carry on as usual, as if nothing of note had happened. After all, nothing had really happened! Not really! He rose, and, as usual, went down first to the cess-pit. 

6. Meanwhile, the old men in the village were gathering outside the hut of the one called ‘Martine’. Every so often, you see, the old men assembled for what, at the one called ‘Martine’s behest, they perhaps grudgingly called a ‘metaphysical oration’, always delivered, in the morning, by none other than the one called ‘Martine’, who, perhaps in response to some remark or event in the days before, had had what he typically called a ‘metaphysical epiphany’, and wished to advertise it publicly, or rather the effect that it had had on what he was pleased to call his ‘system’. Of course, as you might imagine, the tradition of the study of metaphysics on Sporidia had had a somewhat chequered history at best, and indeed was far from being a source of pride for its denizens, who turned out only because the one called ‘Martine’—that increasingly cantankerous old fellow—would not them rest until they let him say his piece, and also, of course, because there was not much else to do, and here was an event, of sorts. 

As we have intimated, the one called ‘Martine’ had, in his possession, a few scraps of books, with many pages missing, or re-assembled in what a more knowledgeable outsider would say was a random order, books of miscellaneous and to him unknown origin. But his claim to being uniquely fitted to practice metaphysics was that he could, or so he claimed, read them. Naturally the others doubted this, and one even put it to him that the whole idea of what he called ‘reading’ was nonsense. There was no conceivable proof, protested, for example, Pete, that is Peté, whom you will remember as the devoted lover of Sento’s mother. Any fool could play such an egregious charlatan, he protested. But generally the men let the one called ‘Martine’ have his claim. Besides, there was no point in arguing with the old man, which invariably degenerated into the same tedious insults. For his part, the one called ‘Martine’, reflecting on Sanguo’s performance, which he had witnessed from afar, was especially eager on this occasion to allow it to inform the latest evolution of his system. It could be verified by many witnesses; here then was something he could point to in their collective history, and who knows the effect upon his musings. From inside, he clapped his hands, a signal that he would begin. The men filed in. 

And Sento, who was making his way towards the beach after visiting the cess-pit, and who normally paid no heed to such things, stopped to listen, from just inside the door. 

Once everyone had settled down, and the one called ‘Martine’ saw that at least a few of the assembled men were looking at him, he cleared his throat. He drew a long breath, closed his eyes, and slapped his left hand almost violently over his mouth; then slowly moved it away from his mouth, fondling his beard, as he smiled imperceptibly as his eyes opened—at which point several of the men looked at one another, nodding; ‘He is having a thought!’ whispered one; ‘An idea!’ whispered a second; ‘An intuition!’, whispered a third. 

After a few moments of silence, he spoke: 

    “I begin. At the beginning of, … of being. Of course! How could it be, how could it be otherwise? Being begins. And so too beginnings begin! And the beginning of being begins. And also the beginning of a beginning also begins. And the beginning of a beginning of a beginning also begins. And … and so on. Do you see? One thing, and infinity follows. Ha! How’s that for a rabbit out of a hat? And yet … I begin. Being is the source of all such beginnings. But that does not get at the essence of being. Being is…being is not. Is not, that is to say, this. Not this! Nor that. It is not negation, nor the negation of nothing, nor the negation of the negation of nothing, nor ... and so on. I begin … I begin again. For being is always in a state of becoming. Is it not so? Things are always happening, and if perchance they are not, there is always a wholly new moment of stasis. But never mind. All that is by way of prequel! Let us not linger. Thus, I begin, I commence, I become, again, the being that I am, for I, like all things, cannot be other than what I am, unless I undergo an essential change, in which case I would not be any longer what I am fact am. And verily it is necessary that I am what I am! As the mythical pig said. For it hath come round again as ever, ever the same, yet ever new. In particular, I say thus. Listen! It is as follows.” 

The one called ‘Martine’ paused. Then resumed: 

    “I say that being is a quark, and void first not, and constituting atom and void not, and fire, water, earth and air, these elements—do not cavil at my use of the term ‘elements’, for they as will emerge in the sequel holistically form an interdependent unity that is not to be distinguished from what is ordinarily called reality—these elements quickened by protean demiurges yes, first caused not notwithstanding final efficient cause yes, it is true, an introverted supervenient quality, the charm quark, the strange quark, the blue quark un-ameliorated and naked, these elements yes, these metaphysical undergarments reverse spin type-2 quarks, in pairs except when these antiprotons and antielectrons attract, backwards in time, yes, these type-1 quarks, not the transfinite impossible fermions nor the sacrilegious leptons not the atrabilious bosons nor the omnipresent gravitons which exist not, not epiphenomenal protoplasm as are existential gluons opposed to demonic impulses imagined by type-½ quarks, but these monads of our being, these so to speak rabbits so to speak ducks, yes, apolitical, it is true, wholly disinterested atemporal windows looking askance upon reality, doxastic dialectical impertinences of the essential form of being or not of being if you please, these non-virtual preconscious excrescences in absolute perfect harmony standing outside merely telluric space and time, notwithstanding the antecedent DASEIN that is ineffable yet known from one’s own case, yes, sitting in last judgement, our POSITIVE BEING is a NEGATIVE ANTIQUARK, or so to speak it is not, or is not, not, the veil of perception is not being, it is, it, … is, ….but …BEING is, it, it, it is, it is not, …you can have no conception of the wondrous reality that … it … was …it …”. 

The one called ‘Martine’ appeared to have lost the thread, such as it was. Dispirited, he whimpered, fell to his knees, let out a low howling sound, and then, at length, was silent. 

No one could properly dispute that here was on display a most extreme example of learning. Yet this was invariably the outcome of his metaphysical orations: Just when it seemed that sense would at last be achieved, a comprehensible idea formulated, perhaps a stirring new thesis promulgated, just when a main verb was to be enunciated, the bottom dropped out, in a despairing anti-crescendo. Despite the trouble he took over stage-setting, he was defeated yet again before he had properly begun. 

The men, meanwhile, immediately wondered, as always, in what sense this was an advance on previous versions of the one called ‘Martine’s metaphysical ‘system’. Peté averred that not one word, not one word, was newly introduced since the last metaphysical oration, and he took umbrage at their being called down here for another of these turgid little speeches on the pretext of the events of last night, when the events had had no material effect on the words spoken. A man had other things to do, than listen to such unintelligible drivel. To which was heard the reply, from the back, ‘No you don’t, you stupid old cuckold!’, a remark which caused great merriment. 

A more careful listener countered that the events of last night had indeed altered the course of the one called ‘Martine’’s remarks, and only a fool could have failed to see it. ‘Did you not realise’, said the voice, ‘that, to put it, if I may, another way, the negative atoms are now to be thought of being constituted of rather than comprising quarks? This is a significant advance! Indeed it is the greatest advance that—well except the time when he … and of course there was also … but anyway it is a great advance!’. Another granted the point at least in outline—why would the one called ‘Martine’ have called them down here if there had not been a new epiphany?—but wondered nevertheless what effect Sanguo’s little dance could justifiably be said to have on the metaphysical system of the one called ‘Martine’. Little dances are one thing; metaphysics, if one was not mistaken, quite another. Following the thread, another wondered how any goings-on on Sporidia, or anywhere else for that matter—the residents of our remote island had only the haziest ideas about the outside world, but that seemed not to affect the point—could possibly impinge on a world such as that dreamed up by the one called ‘Martine’. Did not the one called ‘Martine’ strive to articulate necessary propositions? And were the events on Sporidia, indeed all that takes place as far as could be known, not contingent? At most, the effect of actuality could be said to be tenuous at best. Still others—and we have seen some evidence of this in the man’s very name—accused the one called ‘Martine’ of being a mere word-spinner, a promoter of mere phony slogans, as they said; bewitching perhaps, but empty. Opinions as regards the one called ‘Martine’ were conflicting, you see, but it must be granted healthy in their liveliness. 

Sento listened to all of this as closely as he could, but could make little of it. He was however swiftly acquiring a good ear for what directly concerned him, passing over the rest as so much noise. The references to Sanguo, in particular, alarmed him, because they meant that if anyone noticed his presence at this oration, he would could not fail to be an object of special interest. And sure enough, almost the moment he thought of this, one of the men caught sight of him, and shouted, ‘Aha!’, and walked up to him, pointing. The men all turned round to see, and there they beheld our young hero. Sento squirmed. ‘So you’, the man went on, ‘the cause of it all, of this ruckus, you!’. 

This aroused the attention of the one called ‘Martine’, who, after twice failing in the attempt, on his third try got to his feet, and with long if strangely complicated strides, approached Sento. Sento trembled as the one called ‘Martine’ looked at the ground in front of him, the closest, without undue discomfort, he could come to looking him in the eye. 

    ‘You again.’ 

There was silence. 

    ‘You have’—the one called ‘Martine’ began with a certain light his eyes—‘your actions, to come right to the point, had, shall one say, a telling effect on our comrade Sanguo!’. 

The one called ‘Martine’ audibly punctuated the final three words of this pronouncement by striking the ground in a ceremonial manner with his stick, as if he were invoking some mysterious convention. Uniquely on Sporidia, as we have seen, the one called ‘Martine’ had a reputation for putting things into words, even if to our ears, the aptness of the words often left something to be desired. Certainly not all the gentlemen were persuaded, as we have seen, of the wisdom of the elderly metaphysician. But not only did they think that here was an irreproachably astute remark, so far as it went, there was something in the manner of speaking of the one called ‘Martine’, its sudden close coordination with the ins and outs of present events, that seemed to mark a certain change; the animation he suddenly displayed began to be evident to all. They eagerly awaited further commentary. 

    ‘You!’, the one called ‘Martine’ repeated, only this time louder.

     ‘Me?’, said Sento. 

    ‘Yes you. You lying sack of shit.’

The men were not accustomed to this sort of talk. Their ears pricked up.

    ‘It has indeed been a great tell. You …you scorpion,’ the one called ‘Martine’ snarled. 

 He paused a moment, and seemed to be inwardly weighing something up; he then asked:

    ‘You smug little runt, whose every fart is a lie, why did you come here on this occasion? Slithering around here thinking you could hoodwink us all, thinking no one sees! I see. I see you. I see now that that was you that … are you … are you, a kind of, a kind of, …a kind of…’.

the one called ‘Martine’ seemed to struggling to find a word; he scratched the ground with his stick. But suddenly it came to him, his eyes narrowed, and his voice now modulating lower:

     ‘Are you not a devil? Admit it!’

There was silence. What does it mean, a ‘devil’? Gradually, a murmur went round the men. Sento had no idea of a devil, and neither did the men; but again a certain gravitas in the one called ‘Martine’’s pronunciation left no doubt of the seriousness of his intention. The one called ‘Martine’ himself could boast of no great familiarity with the concept, but had come across it a few times in his studies, had at least a fragmentary conception, could see that it was important, and was eager to test his understanding by applying it to a likely case to see if it, so to speak, took. The one called ‘Martine’ seemed to assume that asking a presumed designatum would be efficacious: if one were a devil, one would not only know it but avow it. Presumably this is not so—though in this case the cause would be not fear, or actual infamy, but a mere lack of the relevant ideas. 

The men continued to murmur and whisper amongst themselves, each taking care not to reveal his ignorance of the concept while trying to learn it from the others. For example, one said, said softly, ‘He has the bearing of one, is that not so?’; a remark—or perhaps a question— which received only an equivocal assent at first from those immediately privy to it, but which, like a tiny breach in a dam that grows inexorably into a torrent as the dam crumbles into the water, swiftly won over the whole assembly. And thus ‘He has the bearing of a devil!’ became the explicitly avowed verdict as regards Sento among the assembled men; similarly for several others: ‘He has long looked like one’, was added; ‘He has the aspect of one’, and so on. The underlying theology of such accusations was of course open to question; and when someone ventured ‘He carries the style of one, eh?’, one wondered how seriously the gentlemen were taking the matter. 

But there was no brooking the assertions here. And in the estimation of the one called ‘Martine’, the mob’s verdict served only to vindicate his initial conjecture, giving him a triumphant sense of mastery of the currents of feeling among common men that his efforts at metaphysics, despite years of diligent labour, could never approach. 

    ‘Gentlemen’—he now intoned with a fiery boldness that was unlike anything he displayed theretofore, and which brought instant silence to all the men present—‘we have here a devil among us; his perfidy has asserted itself, has manifested itself, indeed has entered into the formerly guiltless Sanguo! Sanguo, who is gone to us now, who is no more, having vacated the place where once his soul was! Verily, what is to be done with this object, his former corporeal equipage, now in the hands of this foul fiend, this Lucifer, this Beelzebub, this Evil One, this Satan, this Arch-deceiver, this serpent of serpents, this Father of Lies, this, … this …’

 —at this point the learning of the one called ‘Martine’ ran dry, at least on this particular subject. And while the men were bewildered by this strange outpouring of opprobrious designations—even if they were familiar with none or only a small minority of them—their years of experience with their venerable author, and of the general habit of inertia on the Isle of Sporidia, still inclined them towards good-natured complacency. It cannot, any rate, have prepared them for what came next. The one called ‘Martine’, nearly shouting now, cried: 

    ‘ … never mind! He must be incinerated! Prepare a bed of fire!’. 

This was met with outright incredulity. The gentlemen had played their parts in good faith, acquiescing in various pronouncements, only for the one called ‘Martine’ to announce a conclusion that was completely unanticipated, calling for an unspeakable action the like of which was wholly unknown on the Isle of Sporidia. The men looked at the one called ‘Martine’, then at Sento, then at each other. But of course, no one wanted be to the first to own that he did not expect the outcome, thereby confessing the benightedness that each feared was uniquely his. 

Meanwhile, truly, all hesitation had evaporated from the one called ‘Martine’. Like Moses parting the Red Sea, he strode confidently through the seated men to one corner of the hut where his ‘books’ were piled, muttering ‘aha! … aha!’, fished out a torn scrap of a book, and read: 

    ‘“And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever.” Aha! So there!’ 

The one called ‘Martine’ now cast a commanding gaze around the men, as if to see whether anyone would dare raise a voice in opposition. No one did, except for Pete, though more for the sake of clarification than opposition. 

    ‘What sort of book is that … that book you’re holding there?’, asked Pete, shyly. 

    ‘That?’, said the one called ‘Martine’ excitedly, ‘That? Do you not see? Do you not understand what has passed before your stupid, ignorant, and uncomprehending face? That is, that is the book of Revelations … it is a book that, so I have come to understand, just now, in a moment of great and unalloyed epiphany that renders all previous claims to it null and void, that it did not come into being, did not have its source, in the company of men, wise men, even the wisest of men, not men at all, but exists eternally along with things higher in the metaphysical, nay the ultra-physical, order of things, of angels or spirits, it exists as the stars exist, timeless as symbols are timeless, and verily it speaks the truth, the truth of things that have been, that are, that will be, of all that shall come to pass, always, for ever and ever. This truth has been revealed not to us, but to me! The truth is right here, under our noses, under my nose, it has always been here for he who would be receptive to it; but you, you illiterate fools are as deaf and blind to such things… all being, all that we see and touch is, … is deception … the angels and demons, and the almighty, they are the word, the only truth … unseen yet underneath it all, my studies, I have wanted to believe for so long … yes even our very corporeal beings are an illusion, there is no principium individuationis, I see it now, where I went wrong, I, the one called ‘Martine’, thought I had work to do, toiling by small increments, imagining that one day I would have stored up a plenteous bounty, but those pitiful piecemeal labours are as nothing now, we as prophets have no work to do, we labour not by the sweat of the brow … they are, I am, an enlightened one, a lightning rod, a direct conduit of, of heavenly grace, of the Word, of the Word … the Word…’.

The manner of the one called ‘Martine’ became progressively more subdued, as if the implications of what he had just said were finally, at long last, sinking in; tears, yes tears, flowed from his eyes. Yet it was no occasion of reverence and humility. He had begun in answer to a simple question put to him by Pete, but more and more, it was as if he were talking only to himself, or rather listening to himself, and attending only to a gradually growing incandescence within, irradiating and warming parts that were frozen and long since forgotten. He was like one who has realized that a mathematical miracle had occurred, that his number has just won the jackpot, an anomaly so improbable that, far from celebrating, his mind being so unaccustomed to believing that such things are possible, let alone that this it had really come to pass, that it has great difficulty, at first, in grasping this strange new reality, and the man looks, to an impartial observer, like one genuinely losing his sanity. And as the raptures of the one called ‘Martine’ brought him ever closer to silence, contrariwise the men began to talk excitedly among themselves; it was not long before there were far more voices clamouring to be heard than there were pairs of ears to listen. 

As for Sento, now that his name no longer figured so conspicuously in the mutterings of the one called ‘Martine’, he sensed his chance, and made his way towards the door; with one final glance to ensure that the one called ‘Martine’ could not see him, he slipped out, and, as he ran down the slope and into the jungle, leaving behind the cacophonous din created by the men’s voices, that was, for him, like an aviary full of jabbering parrots, relief such as he had never known, and what is more had never felt the lack of until now, poured into his veins.

7.  Upon escaping the house, Sento’s mind was not in one of its more focused states. He had run considerably further than he had intended. He flew over the desolate scrublands on the northwest side of the most significant hill on the island—its mountain, let us grant—up west over the ridge not far from the summit which stood to your right as you go up, through the dense brush on the windward side, turning dead south as he did so. He hurried past a seldom-visited place of mystery, what might be called a small, seldom-visited graveyard, situated in area relatively clear of brush and with a splendid view of the sea, a few bodies having been interred there long ago, long before any Sporidian now breathing could be aware, with what might be called markers, if not headstones, consisting of two sticks covered with vines forming what might be called crosses, meaning just the geometry of the arrangement, not necessarily an ecclesiastical reference, although one cannot rule out that they originally were so intended. Sento had seen this before and was mildly curious, wondering whether a given corpse, or set of bones, or set of remains, should be spoken of in the past tense, as in for example ‘He was short’—for the person was after all no longer animated by the spark of life—or on the contrary should be spoken of in the present tense, as in for example ‘He is short’—for why should his no longer being so animated affect one’s way of referring to an object which does, after all, still exist, can be pointed to and indeed held up scrutiny?, was the gist of Sento’s reasoning. 

When near the top, Sento could see most of the island, some of the lagoon, and a few of the tiny islets across the lagoon, with clouds hanging low over the horizon, and the sun nearing its final flourish as it approached the sea. 

Sento sat down momentarily on an outcropping of stone. The immense spectacle before him made him feel, by turns, big and significant—as if everything below were on the scale of insects—or small and insignificant—as if it were he who was on the scale of insects. Momentarily he found it mildly diverting to go back and forth between the two very different yet oddly interchangeable descriptions, as if it were a game, or at least a not unpleasant task he was obliged to do. But then, suddenly, it perplexed him; for surely both cannot correspond to the actual state of affairs. Life could not both small and not small; for that matter, life could not be game, and not a game. Not being accustomed to such puzzles, however, he rose, looking ahead for the best way, and began the descent down the windward side. 

The going now grew steep. With the ridge still not far on his right, as he clambered down a narrow passage between a large stone and the wind-gnarled trees, he noticed that the ground beneath him looked trodden-upon. He slowed. He went a few steps further, to a place where the ground became almost level, as on a shelf; the vegetation thickened, until unmistakably a path emerged out of the thickest shrubbery, leading slightly down into a place that otherwise one could not reach, the jungle being so dense. His curiosity was now aroused. He crept down the path, stopping to look and listen, almost at each step. The bushes thinned as he went still further in, as the trees overhead now blocked the light. Crouching now, he entered a sort of chamber formed of the branches; but it was not so dark that he not could see a line made of some rope evidently found at the beach, rigged-up with various bunches of plants tied to it. 

At first he could see nothing more. But then, as his eyes grew accustomed to the fading light, he saw, near the opposite section of the cleared area, the figure of a middle-aged woman, or perhaps a mildly elderly woman, facing away from him. What was the place of such a woman on the Isle Sporidia? Why did she appear to live defiantly alone, far away from the others? Unfortunately, as in so many aspects of life on Sporidia, we cannot provide enlightenment in this regard. Perhaps some of the older Sporidians knew more—indeed it seems unlikely that they did not—but they very seldom if ever spoke of her, and even then it was only half-intelligible at most and only to each other, full of nods, winks, and what are called, if complacently, knowing words. Something dark, tragic or unsavoury was in her past, that we know, yet whatever sinister air the past imparted to her present being, the air of resignation and lenity in her present countenance was unmistakable, as, by the way, the rats well-knew, as will be seen in a moment.  

She seemed to be fiddling with something in her lap. She had shells of various types and flowers of various species woven into her long black and white hair, to a strangely lovely effect, and was dressed in a garment evidently found washed up on the shore—what we would identify as a ball gown, very much the worse for wear but somehow of a piece with the decorations in her hair, with its maroon colour setting off nicely her smooth, brown skin. The aforementioned rats were to be seen crawling here and there, but she seemed not to mind. In fact quite the opposite. She reached down to stroke one that had ventured to climb her leg, saying something, or rather singing what seemed to Sento to be some haphazard syllables and notes, making for an adventitious lullaby. Suddenly she leaped up and turned around. The rats scattered, but she herself was not afraid or even startled; it was rather as if she had been waiting for someone, and had just heard the anticipated knock. And no sooner did she take in the presence of this most uncommon visitor than she approached him. 

Stopping when she was very close, in Sento’s estimation uncomfortably close, she slowly looked him over, her gaze coming to rest not on his eyes or his face, but on the middle of his chest. 

    ‘Sento,’ she whispered. 

How did she know his name? Silence reigned for a few moments. 

    ‘I …’, began Sento, but she made a motion as if to silence him. 

She paused. The strong wind shook the overarching branches. She shook her head. She reached out with both hands, touching his shoulders, briefly stroking his shoulders and then his neck, then up to Sento’s face; then gently tugging his head downwards so that his left ear was close to her mouth, she went on, still whispering: 

    ‘Oh Sento. Great trouble. I,… I too. Great trouble. Oh great trouble. Long time. Long time. Am I forgiven? Not matter. I forgive. I forgive. I give. I live. I live for giving. For giving, I live. Forgive. I don’t … I don’t know Sento trouble.’ 

    ‘I …’, Sento stammered. 

    ‘No!’, she cut in, firmly yet somehow softly.

    ‘No care. No care Sento trouble. Lies you tell they as nothing. That trouble not real trouble. Not worry. Trust. Forgive. Give. Come.’ 

She picked up a rusted can that was half-full of water; thought, then decisively put it back down again. Then she went over to the strung up bunches of plants, gazed at them for a few moments, then picked a certain leaf, a small one; she spit upon it, crinkled it in her hand, and held it out to Sento. 

    ‘Eat.’ 

Sento hesitated, but he was not the type to disobey. He put the leaf into his mouth. It did not taste of anything in particular. After finding that his chewing the leaf was having no discernible effect, he swallowed. 

    ‘Go now. Oh go. Sento forget. The way here. My trouble, my name, my being.’ 

    ‘I …’, Sento began, but she placed her hand over his mouth. 

    ‘Go’, she repeated. 

After just a moment, Sento backtracked out of the bower, back to the ridge, and followed it further southwards. After climbing down as the ridge petered out, he walked across a long flat area, then down a gentle slope, and arrived at a place even more extraneous to his or to anyone’s usual orbit: he stood at the southernmost extremity of the island, separated from the inhabited side by the mountain, the ridge, and a few jungled uplands; behind him the rugged windward side went back to his left, the shorelines in front of him forming the apex of what we would call a great inverted letter ‘V’. 

The wind was strong and insistent, smelling of the seaweed heaped upon the beach by the waves. Out on the water, beneath a darkening sky, a brownish gap in the breakers indicated a definite break in the distant reef. Here and elsewhere the wind-blown surf seemed agitated and confused as the waves broke upon the reef, as if the waves weren’t sure which direction they were meant to come from, or go to, and expressed their fury in random roars and crashes. What a contrast it seemed from the lagoon, or even the north-facing beach, where Sento spent his afternoons! At the latter, provided the sun was shining, the waves were light blue, almost uniformly light blue, their exact chromatic value being determined by depth of the sea, and, as we would put it, the time of day. They came evenly divided in sets of eight to twelve, with, anomalies aside, room for what was, in Sento’s extremely doubtful estimation, approximately seventy-five to one hundred thirty clicks of his tongue in between sets, with, for all practical purposes, smooth, pristine interstices. There were none of these dappled nonsense-like little in-between waves that came and went without rhyme or reason, in chaos, without order, without regularity, with nothing to be inferred from their colour. Still, in the end, however upsetting to his equilibrium it must have been, this hubbub of wind and waves presented no obstacle to Sento’s sitting down, and indeed his face, almost hot with anxiety and effort, was soothed by the wind. 

 8.  In the late afternoon of the selfsame day, in a hut that stood as far from the clearing as any hut—and if, contrary to fact, Sporidia had a human centre, then surely it would be the clearing—Seraphina lay in her sleeping place, fiddling with her hair and rubbing her feet together, thinking. For there was, for Seraphina, in comparison with the norm, a great deal to think about. So far in her brief existence, Seraphina had known very little to disturb her natural girlish happiness. But still she was a very different creature from, for example, Sanguo, let alone Sento, even allowing for whatever differences are expected due to sex. You would not by any means call her an intellectual, but she was, by almost any measure, curious. She was a thinking person, you might go so far as to describe her. She wondered where people came from, or whether they had always been there, whether there might be others beyond the horizon, as strongly suggested —if not proven, since as we have seen the story was rumoured by some to be apocryphal—by the story of Sanguo’s great-grandfather; but if so then how many there might be, what they were like, if they looked different, what was this so-called ‘research vessel’ that was said to bring them here and to take them away, did they live on the research vessel or is there another island that was their home, or whether there might be other, unnamed creatures, perhaps quite different creatures from the ones known on Sporidia, perhaps for example giant furry squid, tiny sea-gulls, or talking rats, out there beyond the horizon, beyond where anyone had been; and what precisely the horizon is, or whether it is always the same horizon no matter where you look at it from or whether it moves relative to where it is seen from, whether the horizon marked the end, and if so does that mean the end of all, of everything, or if not strictly speaking all, or everything, then what lay beyond, and so on. Perhaps, she thought further, what we with more learning would term the 'laws of nature', were different in different times and places, assuming that there were different times and places. She was inclined to accept that life was unchanging, that it had always been thus, as was assumed by her compatriots and as was suggested by the lack of general progress to be observed, whatever that would mean, from point of view of her admittedly brief life. 

But still she wondered. She wondered too about death. In her experience, people occasionally died. And everyone seemed to think that it was largely their own fault, that indeed immortality is the natural state of human beings (not mortality, as some other cultures we know, more advanced as we naturally assume, have it). In principle, one assumed, a person need never die. Of course everyone, in the past, so far as anyone could remember, sooner or later, makes a mistake, or suffers a preventable misfortune, and dies. But strictly speaking this does not entail anything as regards the living, some of whom might fare rather better. Still she was not entirely satisfied with that account of things, though she could not say what, in particular, was lacking in it. A loosely analogous set of questions arose in connection with the sex drive: no one could possibly stop wanting coitus as a matter of natural fact—certainly such a thing was unimaginable in her own case even though she had not yet tasted that fruit—but it was said among the gossipers that eventually most people did something they regretted, and were too ashamed to inflict themselves on others, or some imponderable human situation put them off it, or fear of consequences either from an unwanted child or a malevolent rival, or a disease had rendered them unfit or too tired, or simple ageing had advanced to such a point that lack of interest was only a mask for an inability to attract a sufficiently desirable and willing partner, at least among the women and perhaps even among the men. But as is evident by now, the analyses of human relationships prevailing on the Isle of Sporidia, and indeed the relationships themselves, were not very far advanced. And Seraphina mostly kept these curiosities to herself. She did not them get out of hand. She wondered, for example, why one could speak of greenish blue, but not of greenish red; but she did not wonder, for example, whether her surroundings, or the past, or the future, were altogether real, or whether they were imagined or dreamed. She was curious, but only within sensible limits. 

In any case, such were not the thoughts passing in Seraphina’s mind as she lay that afternoon in her sleeping place. She was thinking rather of Sento and Sanguo, and not just out of curiosity. So far as she was concerned, both Sento and Sanguo had long been part of the variegated background to her habits and routines, members of the chorus, like any other, that always could be relied upon should she require a helping hand—as for instance in collecting firewood, fetching water, or in shooing away the rats that quite understandably were attracted to the cooking area—or, of course, for a playmate, for which she had by no means outgrown the occasional need, or for her need of a dupe or mark, for the sake of her pranks, which she was not above being the gleeful mastermind. But suddenly they had specially distinguished themselves. Sanguo, because of his strange little performance with the coconut, the meaning of which did not escape her; Sento, because of what seemed to her to be the loveliness of his eyes, which only lately impressed itself upon her, and which was the precipient cause of her acting as she did. She could not think why she had never noticed it before. Indeed, as she lay there, dreaming of his eyes, of his body as it lay upon the sand that day, and its evident compliance to her touch, she absent-mindedly began to rock herself back and forth, and her fingers, perhaps not so absent-mindedly, reached between her legs, and began to rub the entrance to her vagina. What was unusual in this was not of course the physical act of self-stimulation—Seraphina, it must be said, had long been intimately acquainted with herself—but the character of the mental activity underneath it, so to speak driving it forwards. Connected with this, it is difficult not to believe, was the time of day: by the standards prevailing upon the island, she was a reasonably industrious young woman, and the middle of the afternoon usually found her down at the clearing, picking nits out of an old woman’s hair, or cleaning assorted molluscs and throwing them into an oil drum that served as a cooking pot, or some other useful thing. Not only industrious, but much of the time she displayed a remarkable degree of celerity, indeed efficiency, in these activities, even if admittedly one cannot help but adjusting ones standards, given the prevailing habits of Sporidians in general, with which by now I trust the reader is all too familiar.  

In this unusual case, however, she remained in her hut, not engaging in such things. She was not present at either event, but confused reports had reached her of Sanguo’s dance, and of the extraordinary effect on the venerable one called ‘Martine’ and of his audience that it had had the following morning. Despite the conflicting nature of these reports, Seraphina was not disconcerted. The news of such events merely lent a certain touch of notoriety and cachet—if that word can be used to describe people who had no understanding of it—to the people involved, a certain prestige to Sanguo, to Sento, and by implication, to herself, she was not too modest to think. As she reflected a bit further, Sento did seem to her a remarkable creature. Laziness was the norm for the men of Sporidia; but Sento took this to the hilt. Did he do absolutely nothing? Yet he seemed not only free of guilt, but content! How could he be? Did he know something that she did not? She must ask him, she reflected. She was a little vexed at this state of affairs, and in this respect found it reassuring to think of Sanguo. 

It was thus that Seraphina felt and heard the late afternoon wind as it blew lazily through the trees outside, and thought longingly of Sento, and agreeably, if not smugly, of Sanguo.

 9.   As evening descended, the wind had picked up. Clouds had begun to gather, and the sound of the waves grew louder and more sinister, the unmistakeable prelude to a storm. Loyalties of Sporideans were, as always in these circumstances, divided as to this prospect. Rain was welcome in principle, and relatively sensible persons such as Pete and Avis were always glad of it—after all, objectively speaking, a topping up of the few oil drums and a replenishing of the meagre stream that collectively served as the island’s main water supply was never going to be regarded as a positive evil when the island was so small, its population so precarious, and of course it would be a great boon so far as the fruit-providing trees of the island were concerned. But despite the continued balmy temperature that normally prevailed when the rain came, and despite their being enthusiastic about swimming and diving in the sea, the islanders had an inexplicable aversion to being rained upon, as if it were an unwholesome goo flung down by the gods in a fit of pique. Thus the women, for their part, gathered the small children, and disappeared into the huts. 

But not the men, not on this occasion. For the one called ‘Martine’ was not to be diverted from his plan. He had directed the men in the construction of a large pyre, the completion of which both gratified and excited him as the concrete realization of his plan, as ad hoc though the plan was. 

He was now remonstrating with the men, an activity which afforded him no small measure of satisfaction. 

    ‘I do not care to justify myself with you’, he snarled. ‘Rain? Bah! Ha ha! Do you think I concern myself with meteorological contingencies? You, with your puny little brains that can have no conception of what I intend, of what I undertake, of what I symbolize, of what I am!’, he hissed.

    ‘You must go now and find him, that shit-eating scoundrel. I am ready. Bring him to me! Go! Go!’ 

He poked his stick vehemently into the ground, punctuating his words as if he were writing them down in the sand—which indeed he may have been, so far as the men knew. And at this, each man present felt that if he did not obey, then there would be no choice but to engage in a dreadful or even shameful disputation in which he surely would be flustered, embarrassed, and ultimately humiliated. Everything had changed! No one could say exactly how the one called ‘Martine’ had effected such a revolution in the relation between himself and the other men, but what had before been the habitual response to the one called ‘Martine’—amusement, sarcastic indulgence, or indifference—now seemed unspeakably rebellious. The men looked not at each other, nor at the one called ‘Martine’, but down, and shuffled their feet. 

    ‘I said GO’, thundered the one called ‘Martine’. 

And with this, like a startled flock of pigeons taking off all at once, the men quickly scattered, moving simultaneously outwards in a widening circle, and went into the darkening forest, to search for Sento. 

10.  The so-called fallacy of anthropocentricism, according to a trusted version of it, is that where one speaks of a mere animal, even a lower animal such as a snail, as feeling or thinking what we humans know as our thoughts and feelings—or even, thereby assuming, most implausibly, that the animal can explicitly identify them for itself, to know by means of reflection that it has those thoughts and feelings. Sento, I think it will be granted, was not a mere animal. Indeed, by birth he was a bona fide homo sapiens—by rights if not by general reputation a thinking being, if Descartes is to be believed. Yet it is difficult not to adopt a tone of unjustified superiority to him, to speak of him without committing a certain analogue of this fallacy, as if he were, after all, a mere animal. It is hard, that is to say, not to make it sound as if one were identifying inadequacies in him, whether it be something peculiar about him in particular, or something about the general tone of life on Sporidia. The truth is that the lazy stupor in which Sento passed his days was not felt, by Sento, as a restriction, an inability, a malability, let alone a disability, and in fact you could say, judging by appearance, that he was by no means unhappy. He had not been trained or encouraged in anything that ran counter to it, indeed not in anything at all to speak of (except the rudiments of counting, a training which was not entirely successful, as we have seen). Until the events of this narrative began to change things for Sento, the examples of inspiration, aspiration, and accomplishment known to Sento, such as they were—mostly known only second or third-hand—signally failed to arouse in him any sense of want, of limitation, or envy. In certain moods, one might well feel envious of him. Amongst his comrades, a fight, a song, a notably scandalous, chivalrous, heroic, or cowardly deed, none made a distinct impression on Sento one way or the other, if indeed he ever noticed them, save as inconspicuous features of the passing scene, alongside the trees, the wind, and the clamshells. 

Sento remained as we saw him last, sitting quietly at the southernmost tip of the island, his eyes, if not his mind, fixed upon the sea. He was far, in actual if not psychic space, from the cluster of houses, from the men, and in particular, to cut to the chase, from the one called ‘Martine’. The wind had grown positively fierce at this southern extremity; the birds had retreated into the forest or departed for the lee side of the island, except for a few who remained high up in the palms, their occasional shrieks piercing the air. Raindrops had begun to fall—upon Sento, upon the trees, upon the sand, and upon the turbulent waves, the substance of which had turned a translucent grey, indistinguishable from the sky, as the day fell away, and a dark, nearly moonless night inched closer. 

And verily, in his soul of souls, Sento kept a vigil. He watched and waited, hoped and feared, not as an actor, but as a witness to what might happen, to what might take place in that great inner sanctum known as his mind. Sento had fallen into a trap, a trap that naturally threatens a creature who is afflicted as Sento was. Whereas in the past, virtually every mental episode, every thought, proceeded unhindered, going wherever it would go, falling away silently as a new episode took its place, so that in fact it is not truly accurate to speak of distinct episodes succeeding one another so much as one, long, seamless and manifold activity, a spontaneous, harmonious and ever-refreshed upwelling of glorious individual phenomenology, his irresistible instinct now was to single out and to question each thought as it arose, robbing the whole procedure of its erstwhile ease, of its unity, which was indeed its chief virtue, so far as Sento was concerned. 

Sento, as we know, was unused to playing a role of significance in human events, whether by general estimation, or his own, not even those events that took place on Sporidia, and he now found himself unmistakably at the epicentre of events that, so far as he was concerned, were as incomprehensible as they were perilous, and rife with unmistakeable human significance, as we shall call it, perhaps even constituting matter for historians, if ever, contrary, of course, to fact, an historian should take down the history and culture of Sporidia. It was therefore quite unsurprising to find him posing to himself such unfamiliar questions as, for example, ‘Am I lying sack of shit?’. And in attempting to answer this sort of question, he was immediately struck with the impression that the whole idea of thinking about oneself, is not merely difficult, but impossible, a kind of mirage. His verbal formulations, his proclamations as to what he thinks, as to what he is, how he is responding, coping, perceiving, these, he was afraid, were infected not only with bad faith but with vanity and fear, or at least a horror of the distortions, evasions and lies engendered by those things. He distanced himself from the responsibilities of the thoughts, and of their implications; they seemed to him like mere mottos put into place by who knows whom, that fit together in a semblance of sense only through their familiarity. Who or what, after all, is the author of these thoughts that come bubbling up from the depths, of the form ‘I am this’, or ‘I am that’? What remedy is there for such propaganda? To ask is to reveal the question as unanswerable. 

This malady might itself have been an evasion borne of cowardice, of failure to face up to simple facts. But no matter! Even if by sheer chance it gets up and running, it is enough: such an affliction as Sento’s will feed itself, working within a closed circle of doubt. The whole capacity for language seems—to one in this state, which is of course not to say that it is not in general accurate—to be an innate, or perhaps acquired ability to negotiate with others. Accordingly, what we are pleased to call our private thoughts seem as nothing but our attempts silently directed towards various imagined interlocutors—including especially our benefactors and malefactors—to whom we imagine ourselves speaking with various purposes, in various roles, in various guises, as confessor, as son, as lover, as friend, as enemy, as patriarch, as colleague, as teacher, as pupil, as fellow soldier, as teammate, as moralist. The aim of such discourse is not, as a rule, truth as such, but that of accomplishing something via the hearer’s trusting what one says, sometimes if not always gaining an advantage via the hearer’s believing it, as we say, or at least believing that one spoke, as we say, with sincerity. The reason that most people, most of the time, believe themselves to have some particular private beliefs, is that most of the time, if tacitly, they are reasonably sure of what they wish to achieve, and they know more or less what sort of figure they wish to cut with which audience, and leave it at that. The trouble with Sento is that he has only the vaguest ideas as to what is to constitute his audience, and had no desire, even no notion of what it would be, to cut a particular figure. Not only was he lacking in development in this respect, he has too many variables, and not enough equations, for his existential queries—if that is not too grand a term—to receive answers. 

It should not be inferred, from the foregoing, that all this was anything like explicit in Sento's mind. It was not. We attempt to diagnose in a spirit of rational reconstruction the fearsome thoughts, or shall we say emotions, or shall we say feelings, that Sento was experiencing, was undergoing, and speak only of tendencies of mind that were only inchoate, only half-formed. And equally it should not be inferred that Sento had forgotten to think of Seraphina. On the contrary, beneath all the barely articulate chatter in his brain, was an uproar in his gut. Her skin, he could not help but remember, was like silk—or some analogous substance—and the smell of her hair like some fantastic, long forgotten fruit. The affliction had the sense of going to his depths, where his soul is, we cannot, under these circumstances, scruple to call it, even if it is in the end poppycock. But this by no means had any tendency to focus his mind! Quite the reverse. The real trouble, we may venture, is that the soul, as we call it, was felt by Sento to be rather a role than a thing. It seemed a role that may be played by different parts of the self, from time to time, even as of now minute to minute, this iterant appellation, this title of great but temporary moment. Feeling inclined to call this my soul, that my heart—that is a kind of shell game, a masque. And Sento believed this, or rather, he felt it. 

Thus the pickle in which Sento found himself. 

 11. Meanwhile, the one called ‘Martine’ grew more agitated as he waited. He was agitated by both the rain and the approaching darkness, as well as by contempt for what he now regarded as his followers. He wandered in and out of his hut, threw the odd twig onto the pyre, and muttered under his breath, poking the sand with his stick, sometimes violently. 

Time passed. There was no one about, until suddenly when Seraphina—Seraphina, who was quite unaware of the most recent machinations of the one called ‘Martine’ and his men—came upon the scene. 

The one called ‘Martine’ was startled, and said nothing. 

    “The one called ‘Martine’!”, she addressed him brightly, as was generally her wont. She skipped up to him. 

    ‘Where are the men? And do you know where …’— the manner of the one called ‘Martine’ discomfited her slightly —‘… what is all this I hear about Sento and Sanguo?’ 

The one called ‘Martine’ made no reply, but his eyes narrowed. 

    ‘What? … Are you ... you seem strange’; said Seraphina, less brightly. 

The one called ‘Martine’ still did not reply, but emitted a growl. 

    ‘What’s wrong? What’s got into you? You’re scaring me now’, Seraphina said, stepping imperceptibly backward. 

Seraphina, it will be observed, was always forthright in her questions and comments. 

    ‘You!’, began the one called ‘Martine’ through clenched teeth, ‘you, … you sinful harlot!’. 

He stepped towards her, and struck her viciously with his stick, on the side of her head, just behind her left temple. She fell to her knees. 

    ‘Questions?’, said the one called ‘Martine’. ‘I do not answer yours or anyone’s! I do not pay heed to your wretched confusions!’.

Again he struck, in the same place. She whimpered and fell further, her face falling in the wet sand. 

    ‘Least of all do I pay heed, do I take notice, of the little pieces of crap that pass for words among your filthy kind, which are too degraded to be called bitches or whores, let alone that term of mistaken honour, “women”!’ 

As she lay there, the one called ‘Martine’ moved over her, dropping to his knees, and began to prod her buttocks with his stick. She was barely conscious; she groaned and tried feebly to resist, but he clamped down hard with his free hand on her neck. 

    ‘There now … Seraphina … your name has always …’

—the one called ‘Martine’ now smiled menacingly, and whispered in her ear—

    ‘your name has always been a sign, perhaps a little private joke between the devil and me …’

— the one called ‘Martine’ jammed his stick between her legs—

    ‘between you and me, that you wanted …from the one called ‘Martine’…this treatment, this treatment that …’. 

Just then a strangled yelp was heard, coming from the north; and the one called ‘Martine’ looked up to see a figure running towards him, through the darkening mist. As the one called ‘Martine’ struggled to his feet, the figure—it was none other than the diminutive Sanguo—flung himself headlong at him. 

The one called ‘Martine’ dropped his stick, and attempted in vain to elude the tackle by turning away. The two of them fell to the ground. What now ensued was not exactly a fight, not exactly a tussle, for Sanguo had wrapped his arms and legs around the head of the one called ‘Martine’ from behind, and continued his screams, while the one called ‘Martine’, on his knees and too inflexible of arm, could not gain enough leverage to peel him off, let alone to hit him with any force. 

This position of stalemate went on, it seemed, for a long time. Slowly Seraphina got up, rubbing her head; and, recovering her senses somewhat, saw what was going on. She shouted ‘Sanguo!’, and leaped towards the stick of the one called ‘Martine’, and picked it up. It was tricky however to use it to hit the one called ‘Martine’ without hitting Sanguo, and sure enough she did hit Sanguo, which caused his yelping to go up in pitch for a moment, but he did not loosen his grip. Another blow, with unfortunately the same result. The third time, however, the stick did find its intended target, hitting the one called ‘Martine’ in roughly the same spot on him that he had hit her the first time. The one called ‘Martine’ fell suddenly forward, to his hands and knees, with Sanguo releasing his grip as he was catapulted over the top of the one called ‘Martine’. 

Voices announced the coming of the men. They had found and captured their prey. They talked excitedly amongst themselves, except for the seemingly crestfallen Uncle—he was in the lead, looking back intermittently at Sento, who was held firm on either side; Uncle looked into Sento’s face, and shook his head. As the men proudly marched into the clearing, they formed a tight circle and ceased their chatter, with Sanguo, Seraphina, Sento, and the one called ‘Martine’ at the centre. 

The events that just transpired had not made Seraphina cry. They had only made her angry. And although not one for drama, the sight of Sento, for a certain time now the object of her dreams, and in what must surely be regarded as a uniquely momentous and even illustrious stage in his own short life, melted her heart. ‘Sento!’, she cried, dropping the stick of the one called ‘Martine’, and wrapping her arms around Sento. But he did not respond; he merely continued to look down, trembling but otherwise still. It was impossible, certainly not just by looking at him, to tell what he was feeling, whether for example anger, sadness, fear, horror, pain, irritation, or indignation. 

The women now arrived, joining the party. “I was always so proud of him!”, said Sento’s mother to anyone who would listen, though to do her credit, she did so quietly. 

The promised rain now fell freely; the darkness was almost complete. The only sound, aside from the wind and the rain, was contributed by Sanguo, whose yelps now were reduced to whimpers, and who was now held in place by one of the men. Everyone’s eyes, with the exception of Sanguo’s and Sento’s, were fixed upon the one called ‘Martine’. 

The one called ‘Martine’, once again, struggled to his feet. He walked a few paces towards Sanguo, and examined, it seemed, Sanguo’s feet. He did the same with respect to Sento’s feet, and to Seraphina’s. Then he took a few paces backwards, to the centre of the circle. With some difficulty, owing to his ossified crouch as well as the rain, giving him an uncharacteristically and misleadingly a tearful countenance, the one called ‘Martine’ looked straight up, at, one might have supposed, the heavens, except there were no heavens to be seen, only, at most, the formless blackness of the clouds. 

    ‘Burn’, the one called ‘Martine’ growled, just audibly. 

Then louder, the pace of his words suddenly quickening: 

    ‘Burn …Burn…Burn the …The moment has … the moment has come upon us. Yes….… We shall burn them, burn them, … ALL OF THEM! He will not …She will not … because she will not ... Yes … Yes it will be … it will be an orgy of fire, a cleansing conflagration. A bonfire of suffocating souls, of vanities going up in righteous smoke! Hear me! We shall …we shall torch them! Ha!’. 

He snatched at his stick, and waved it menacingly first at Sento, then at Sanguo, and then at Seraphina, as if it were a sword. 

    ‘All of them! Now! You!’

—the one called ‘Martine’ addressed Pete—

    ‘Bring fire! .... You!’—

—the one called ‘Martine’ addressed others including Uncle—

    ‘Bind them! ... You!’

But, alas, it seemed that the one called ‘Martine’ had overestimated his audience. Or perhaps, from another point of view, he had underestimated his audience. If he had assumed that its nerve would not fail in this, the crucial task, the moment when mere words must be exchanged for living reality, then he was mistaken. And this, as we shall presently see, marked the beginning of the end of the brief mastery of the one called ‘Martine’ over the men of Sporidia. Perhaps like, for example, King Louis XVI of France, he would soon learn that the transition between absolute power and absolute subservience is but the work of a moment, a moment when the flicker of collective thought that runs, uncannily as it is inexorable, through the course of men, changes path. 

Uncle looked at his feet. Avis scratched his nose. Pete did not move. Pete glanced furtively at Sento’s mother; then at Sanguo, at Sento, and at Seraphina.

    ‘Well what are you waiting for? I have spoken! Go and get me fire, damn you!’, 

said the one called ‘Martine’, his insouciance still undimmed. 

    ‘Bind them!’—

he shouted at Uncle. Uncle looked down ... 

    ‘What do, … what do I bind them with?’,

he asked. Pete, for his part, did not move either. 

    ‘And anyway …’, Pete mumbled. ‘Um … well it’s all getting, um…you know,… too wet’, 

he said, now looking embarrassed. The eyes of the one called ‘Martine’ flashed. 

    ‘Too … what? I do not …pay any heed to your, … to such …what are you, what do you mean by this?’. 

    ‘It won’t light, you know, the brush that we piled up there’, 

—said Pete, cautiously, with a wave of the hand, taking a step backwards, and looking longingly towards the huts which, if not exactly watertight, offered a much drier environment than the present one.

    ‘It’s all sodden’, 

—ventured a more confident voice from the back. A light murmuring was heard. 

And after a few moments, the virus of insurrection began to spread more rapidly. The men began to speak softly amongst themselves, agreeing, in all earnestness, that the mound of wood was, in fact, quite drenched. 

    ‘It was a kind of stupid idea anyway’, announced another, with note of relief, or even triumph, in his voice. 

    ‘Yeah! Anyway we were, you know, we were just playing along! Just playing along!’, said still another.     

    ‘Yeah, it was a game! Just a game’ proclaimed another. ‘You see?’ ‘Yeah!’; the men, or rather those men that spoke, spoke as one. 

The one called ‘Martine’ panicked; his grip on the men, so confident only moments before, had palpably slipped. 

    ‘What? …’, he recoiled in horror, as if stung by a jellyfish. “You simpleminded … you simpleminded … you have no idea of what stupid … I am speaking … do you hear? …I … you …playing? ‘Playing along’? I’ll tell you what! That is all that you are capable of! If that! You call that … You don’t know the difference between playing along and … and this …this …”. 

    ‘This what?’, said Avis—sounding, it must be said, a little pleased with himself. 

A wave of pleasure passed through the men and women; a snicker, which made only most desultory attempt at stifling itself, was heard. The one called ‘Martine’, for his part, pressed on: 

    ‘I say to you that you—you all, you spineless gang of monkeys, you don’t know the difference between playing along and not, and therefore you cannot claim to be playing along, I will tell you what … what we are playing at … what we do …what exists … I am the master of ceremonies! … And I exist ….I exist on a higher plane than you, you are like molluscs, puppets, …. mere instruments of my will, you exist only by courtesy …you …you are dependent entities …you …you …’. 

The one called ‘Martine’’s voice trailed off. In sound, it was decidedly lacking the verve that had lately animated his speeches. As for sense, it had neither more nor less than normal of that pedestrian commodity, of negligible weight in measuring the power of an orator, the uncanny might of the demagogue. The hold upon the men that the one called ‘Martine’ had exerted for a day or so, and which had thrilled him with dreams of previously unimagined glory, had vanished in an instant. The crowd swiftly began to break up, the women gathering the children, the men becoming drawn inexorably by thoughts of their relatively dry, warm huts, and by hopes of fried fish. Their attitude towards the one called ‘Martine’ reverted to more or less what it had always been. Meanwhile he continued his rambling, disjointed and ineffectual tirade, now without listeners. He fell, once again, to his knees, to all intents and purposes, a broken man, or at least a temporarily broken man, muttering to himself in the rain. 

Sento separated himself from Seraphina’s grasp, and ran away. Before Seraphina knew what was happening, Sanguo threw himself at her feet, clutching them frantically, and cried. ‘Come with me, Sanguo’, she said resignedly but tenderly; ‘Let’s go to my hut, and get out of this rain.’ 

12.   The great beast known as humanity has a way, not just on Sporidia but, as we may venture, generally, of tending, as it staggers stupidly through time, to swallow and digest without comment, save perhaps a belch, whatever savoury and unsavoury morsels are cast in its way.  Immediately after his abortive and perhaps merely fanciful execution, Sento had run through the falling showers, his cheeks streaming with tears and sweat mixed with rain. He wanted nothing more than comfort and familiarity; he ran to his sleeping place at Uncle’s house, crawled inside, curled up, and closed his eyes. He was not wrong to do so, for he was swiftly slipping back into his accustomed place in the extreme periphery of the minds of others, as if centrifugal force were at work. On the evening, it was not long before the rain stopped and the wind subsided to a reassuring breeze; soon, the clouds dispersed, and the light of a tiny sliver of new moon fell upon the island. And as Sento rested, his mind gradually settled down into its familiar pathways, into its usual dreams; and meanwhile things in the sea proceeded in their usual unconstrained way, defiantly displaying as always their mandatory patterns. On the windward side of the island, for example, just a little way offshore, down below in an underworld of darkness, a lonely octopus wandered about the rocky sea floor, searching primarily as always for a female octopus, but also for anything that might be eaten, such as a snail, a lobster, or a passing fish. So far as the octopus and events generally down there were concerned, events up above on the Isle of Sporidia, even the passing storm, might just as well not have happened.