Read an Excerpt
Jungle Rock Blues
By Nigel Cox Victoria University Press
Copyright © 2011 the estate of Nigel Cox
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-86473-755-7
CHAPTER 1
According to the standard calculation, Caliban was born in 1935. This is the year which is most commonly given and I think we should accept it and move on. Even if they could run a carbon dating on Caliban's skull they wouldn't come up with, you know, the exact day. So let's forget it, it doesn't matter. 1935. He's human, he's born, so we have to agree that somewhere back in there he had a mother. Caliban always wanted to have a mother, it was a big thing with him. Somewhere back there he was fed by a mother. Breastfed. I can see him, and I think the picture is a reasonable one, lying along his mother's arm, with her nipple in his mouth. Now that is a very intimate moment of contact and I think every human likes to think they had it, once, even if no one can remember it. Whenever I've seen babies at the breast they always look extraordinarily contented, gazing up at the elements of colour and light above them, immense shapes, a great statue's face seen from below – but the statue is warm, it breathes. The rising cliff of brow, and the cloud of hair which frames the face, with blue sky behind, and real clouds going past. The face of an angel against the sky. I suspect that Caliban's mother may have had black hair. This is not only because his own hair was famously black but because throughout his life he was irresistibly attracted to women with dark hair, pale faces with black hair, and we know that Caliban was strongly affected in his attractions by promptings from his youth.
So I definitely see him having a period when he felt the satisfaction of being mothered. It may have been short. I suspect it was. Then his bond seems to have been transferred to the she-gorilla he calls Nudu, who for his first ten years or so he regarded as his mother. It was only later that he came to understand that she could not have been.
So how did he come to be out in the wilds? Well, it's easy to speculate, and of course so many have. Personally, I hold no definite opinions on the subject. The reality is, there's no truth where Caliban's earliest origins are concerned, and I don't think there ever will be. You may have read cheap books that claim to know – I've read a number myself, full of stories about how his father was a Lord from England, et cetera, but this is wishful thinking. The truth is, we have information where Caliban is concerned only from Caliban himself, he is the sole witness, until he reaches the age of eighteen, which is the first point anyone we know the name of enters the picture. There are however some relevant facts. It is a fact, for example, that there was a cabin in the bush in the area where Caliban grew up and that Caliban visited it. That's established. But was the man who built the cabin, and provisioned it, was he Caliban's father? We don't know. Did this man raise Caliban for a while? Again, we can't say. We have to face it. We just can't say. So you can tell yourself anything you like about his baby years, and some people have. There are some wild things in those cheap books: pirates, a mutiny and suchlike – really, in 1935?
And there's a grave that may contain a woman's bones, and that woman may be his mother. But that's not known either. I insist on this. We should be scrupulous. Caliban was. He never let himself adopt these parents. This piece that was missing was something he carried with him throughout his life.
The only thing that is known for sure is that he arrives on the scene.
For some reason, I see him flying. I can't say why. But I see him in the air. Tumbling through clouds, through the blue. Coming down. Falling. He's just a baby, he's not afraid. Like a cherub or some other mythological being – bemused, the way babies are if you show them a new thing. Of course his name's not Caliban at this point, it was Nudu who called him that, we don't know what his parents called him. Maybe we will one day, there are studies in progress. But until we do I'd rather have him enter the picture as though he fell from the sky – wearing a serious expression. He always had quite a serious face, moody, some would say, plus babies are often serious. So I see him in the air, maybe with a few clouds around – was he thrown out of an airplane? – anyway, he's tumbling against the blue and he's frowning. Naked, of course. Caliban of the Gorillas was always naked.
And then he lands. Now in any honest picture there's a loud splat at this point, but he lived, so it can't have happened. Did he land in a pile of feathers? Maybe he landed on a slope, and slithered? I asked a physicist once and he laughed at me – a baby could not fall out of a plane and survive. So maybe he didn't drop from a plane, it's too hard to figure the landing, maybe his dad just tossed him up in the air? Caliban thought about that, too, along with the breastfeeding. Whatever: he arrives. In the bush. In the Wairarapa – in the misty back-hill country of the North Island of New Zealand, in the southern Pacific, in 1935 or thereabouts, and is taken up by one of the tribes of gorillas that live in the area. And, as I said, lives beneath the cloak of the bush. And doesn't see another of his kind until he's well through his teens.
It's hard to believe.
Okay, so that we can get on with it, let's say he just came up out of a hole in the ground, and there he is, lying on a bed of punga fronds, that makes a nice picture – like a restaurant meal. And along comes Nudu and says ... what exactly? It must have been complicated, a gorilla taking a human child for her own.
This is where Caliban's testimony kicks in. He tells us in his autobiography, and this was repeated in a thousand interviews, that Nudu had lost her own baby and took him as a substitute. Now, that book in particular has been described as "the lurid product of a bestselling imagination" and I consider this a generous judgement, but nevertheless Caliban stuck to that particular story all his life and so probably it was true. But he won't have been able to remember it happening, he was too young – the big dark gorilla face finding him like a lost golf ball down there amid the pungas, looming over him, she probably bared her teeth, nothing even faintly like a statue this, more of a Halloween mask, something frightful, big round eyes popped, dark squashed nose, and bristling with fur. Great big teeth, bared – he would have screamed.
But she picks him up, takes him in her arms, cradles him, and then presses his head, his pale human face, with its skinny red lips and question-mark ears, presses this screaming thing to her hairy tit and, behold, he sucks. I checked with a zoo scientist, apparently her milk would have been okay for him, once he got used to the taste, and as he sucks she licks the slime and dirt off his body, glancing round under her brows to see if anyone is going to claim him back.
It's plausible.
Then they're off. It's late afternoon and, having fed, the gorillas are moving to higher ground to find a place for the night. Nudu moves three-legged, holding him carefully with one strong arm. Now, an objection I have heard here is that a human infant couldn't hold on to her like a little gorilla, that he would have dropped, but in fact baby gorillas are totally helpless for the first three months of their lives, so Nudu was ready to fend for him – she clutches him to her with a strong gorilla hand, and there they go, along the bushland trail. He's tickled by all that hair, and, despite Nudu's dedication to shielding him, they are in rough country and so his tender skin is scratched and it bleeds. Nudu licks at the blood, a strange taste in her mouth, her nose wrinkles. The pale little thing is sleeping on her arm. She moves carefully, protecting him but making sure also that she keeps up – she doesn't want there to be a reason for the tribe to say she should abandon this baby. Her brother, Zembak, has already growled at her but she glares at him until he looks away.
As I indicated when I used the word earlier, the New Zealanders call the natural growth which covers their land "bush" – you maybe got a sense of it from those movies they made, The Lord of the Rings. It's a bit like jungle, with less intense colours, but there's lots of life in it – lizards, rats, opossums, deer. Giant wetas. Some nice green geckos, pigs with tusks, and they have parrots there too, every kind of bird. Tasty pigeons. Lots of undergrowth, and big trees, and a particular treefern called a nikau, similar to a palm tree but with fronds that spread like the spokes of an umbrella, a charming thing. Punga I said earlier, and nikau, those are Maori words. The Maori are the indigenous people of New Zealand and they have been there for a thousand or for two thousand years, depending on which book you read. They seem mostly to have left Caliban's tribe of gorillas alone – so much so that you wonder if they actually knew about them. It's surprising, this. There are, for instance, no gorillas in any of the ancient carvings that the old people of that culture made. The carving tradition is extraordinary and depicts everything in the Maori world: whales, mystical birds, bright-eyed ancestors, but no gorillas. I've visited that area, met the local people and talked to them. They say the gorillas were never there in the old days, that they're a modern phenomenon, like the Pakeha. Pakeha are white people, like me, I think this was a kind of joke. But I suspect they're covering up for the fact that they didn't realise.
Because in that bush, in that place, that's where Caliban was, that's where the gorillas were, I insist on it. Sceptics have said they were imported later for Caliban tourists to gawp at, but there are pictures of him, photographs, with the gorillas, made by June McMay. And so there they go, off through the bush. Nudu has baby Caliban held under her as she moves through the undergrowth, three-legged, one arm reaching and one arm holding, in the broken light, amid the tribe that's spread around her in the foliage like extensions of herself. It's quite warm in New Zealand, especially in summer, and also Caliban was always close against her body. However, I do feel that he must often have been cold. I have made a study of the climatic records for his early years and it's true that there was a warm patch in the mid-1930s, and a sequence of glorious summers and that even the winters were warm. But he'd been through a trauma, and he was naked – I see him shivering.
Nudu holding him close, shielding him with her forearm, twisting her body so that he would be protected. The little guy under there, hanging on – making it somehow.
The gorillas went through the bush on old trails, pushing aside branches they'd pushed aside for years, the way we open a door, moving past familiar plants the way we move among the furniture of our houses. In the evenings they construct a shelter of sorts, gathering branches and leaves and so forth to make a place to be. And so this was where Caliban would have spent his first night among the gorillas, in a little humpy, that's what the Australians call the sleeping shacks that the Aboriginals of this country used to make, something like that, with branches above him, and leaves all around, and lots of gaps for the night to come in. The call of the morepork, which is a bush owl, and the scratchings and scrabblings of the little mammals, the weasels and stoats and ferrets, the barking cough of the opossums, the running of the little feet of the mouse – these are the sounds you hear in the deeps of the New Zealand bush at night. I have trekked back in there and lain alone in my sleeping bag, listening. Wondering. The shrill of the kiwi bird, which goes about in the dark to stick its long beak into rotten logs. Squeakings, shriekings – then terrible silences. So many new sounds for the ears of the baby Caliban, there in Nudu's arms, snuggling in to get warm. Not that I think he would have heard. I think he would have been in shock.
CHAPTER 2
The next few years of Caliban's life are a blur. He was only a baby and he couldn't remember. But we can see him there, I think, living in the bush with Nudu and the gorillas – where he lived at first was a world of sound. The leaves rustling, this was a kind of talk. His head would turn, tuning his ear as a bird came flapping in out of the sky. The flap, flap, flap of it, then the fluster of the landing. The tiny sounds its claws made as they gripped the branch. Scuttling feet – an insect trying to escape. Imagine being able to hear insect feet. And, tock! Then the sound of the bird crunching the insect, juicy, those little insect bones snapping. Flap, flap, flap, flying away – and what did the bird look like? Well, he didn't see it. The bush hides so much from view, it's all those leaves, like a million brush-strokes, and everywhere you glance the light is broken, it's hard to make things out. But your ears rope them in – baby Caliban was getting sound after sound, which he carefully catalogued. Tiny offerings from all around the circle of his hearing, this was the language he was learning as he lay there along Nudu's forearm, playing with the wispy hair that surrounded her nipple. The leaves talked to him, he couldn't understand what they were saying, not at first, but he listened and listened. Sounds, and smells – the smell of the bush, the smell of the weather, the taste of the air, this is what he was swimming in. No TV. No hum of the refrigerator. No suburban house going through its daily cycle. I have a new baby, a son, here with me in my home, and when I look at him he's got such big ears for every sound that's around him. His name is Thelonious, we call him Theo, and he likes to be sure of every single thing he hears. I keep my eye on him, imagining him as Caliban – what would Caliban hear? What would he see? Hey, Theo, I call, that's just the kitchen door opening, that's just your mother, hey, hey, don't cry, here she comes, son, listen to the crackle of her feet on the carpet, that's static, you can probably hear it. Me, I'm eighty-one years old now, my hearing is gone. I can remember hearing. I see things happen and I remember the sound that goes with them. Once I could hear, you know, the dew forming on the hills in the distance. Now it's as though it's winter and I'm wearing ear muffs. Now nobody lets me sing. I had a voice like honey but these days I can't hear the noise I'm making – like a parched goat, apparently. When no one's around I sing to the boy. But I see his eyes get big. He frowns. I see his mouth open and I know he must be wailing. Oh-oh, here comes Loretta. But I can talk to him. He knows my voice, talking away there in the night from the first day I put him in her stomach.
No familiar voices for Caliban.
Last night we had a thunderstorm here, it shook the house. I like big weather but the baby went crazy. His eyes were like marbles, rolling round in his head. And it made me think of baby Caliban, out there on the hillside, rain lashing down through the leaves, thunder breaking close overhead. Flash! Crackle! – it's different if you're out in it. Then the wind, the leaves being torn from their anchors. Down in the crappy little humpies, the gorillas are crouching, one hand held over their heads. Nudu holds him tightly but he's going out of his mind. Branches crack. The rain smacking on his bare skin stings him, thick braids of water are running down his back. Nowhere to hide, and that weird darkness, the air all jumpy, and then right on top of you the mountain-splitting boom! A baby, naked, out in all that – it doesn't bear thinking about.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Jungle Rock Blues by Nigel Cox. Copyright © 2011 the estate of Nigel Cox. Excerpted by permission of Victoria University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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