Sento, Chapter One

 

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, 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 was 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 western 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 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 by—and a few did say that the seduction was mutual—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 its 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, 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, 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 preferred have his own name pronounced Peté, even if he could persuade no one, despite his best efforts, to follow 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 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 but 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 north-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 ‘uncle’, a designation forming part of Sento’s habitual language largely because he occasionally dared to hope he might apply successfully some such word to someone, 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 to certain people without their being any the wiser. Sento had slept in the lean-to for almost as long as he could remember. 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, 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 to boot, 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, 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 hope for opportunities. 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; 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.