than allow me to treat them.” He rubbed his hand over his hair and moaned. “I did not help you frighten away Hyena only to kill you now.”
His explanation was so moving that I considered myself cretinous for not having understood sooner the depth of his fear. “Midnight,” I said gently, “I have been in bed with you much of the night and I am not ill. There is no danger.”
He began to cry. “You must leave me be. Please …”
Looking at him in tears, his head in his hands, I was unable to restrain myself. I rushed headlong into him and hugged myself into his belly. He tried to push me away, but I hung on and breathed in the hot moist scent of him until he kissed the top of my head.
“Listen closely,” I said, “my parents and I have faced this same beast and beaten him dead. He cannot hurt us again.”
Then, on my absolute assurance that Mama and Papa would exercise care and not touch him directly, he allowed me to lead him down the stairs. Papa sat him before the fire and praised his courage. Mama heated some soup, then watched him closely to make sure he ate it all.
Over the next several days, he allowed my mother to dab his itchy pimples every few hours with a solution of zinc oxide, which gave him pinkish spots. When he looked at himself in the glass, he bared his teeth as though he were a leopard, then howled with glee.
Midnight was ill many times that first year. We kept blaming the fog, which mixed with the smoke of fifteen thousand chimneys till one could barely see fifty paces ahead. In truth, however, the poor man took ill even when the sun was in full splendor. He suffered bouts of croup, boils, quinsy, dyspepsia, diarrhea, and a terrible dropsy of the extremities in which his wee feet swelled up to close to twice their natural size. Once, a reddish rash the shape of a three-clawed crab broke out across his right cheek and down his throat and was accompanied by chills. Then he began coughing up blood. It might have been scarlet fever, but as this was also a childhood disease, we could not be sure.
Though we were often desperate with worry, neither Midnight nor my parents were in any way inclined to permit a physician into our house. And so it was Senhor Benjamin, the apothecary who had supplied Midnight with seeds and cuttings, who saved us.
I’d always regarded Senhor Benjamin as mildly threatening and generally undistinguished. This error in judgment was due, I believe, to his shortness of stature — which, before I met Midnight, implied insignificance to me — and his knowing brown eyes. Framed by oval spectacles, they were far more vigilant than any lad of my character might like.
Now, however, with Midnight ill with what was probably scarlet fever, he showed himself to be generous, meticulous, and indefatigable. I believe he would have weighed every grain of sand on the beach if it meant finding the one that might help our guest.
By the time the African’s fever and rash had vanished and he had been declared fit again, Senhor Benjamin had become a trusted family friend. A widower of fifty-seven years of age, he began to sup with us every Friday night, and Father found in him the great friend he had been searching for all these years.
Midnight benefited greatly from this acquaintance; not only did he gain his own personal nursemaid and guardian, but he also earned himself an apprenticeship. Due to his worsening eyesight, Benjamin needed an assistant, so who better than Midnight?
No contract was ever signed; a simple handshake between the two men was considered quite sufficient. The African was to work for the apothecary for three years, four half-days a week, since he was not convinced that he would be able to bear being indoors longer than that. In return, he would be paid a small but fair salary. After three years, if he so desired and if both parties were willing, the Bushman would enter into a full partnership with Benjamin on payment of a sum to be decided later, which Father agreed to pay. If Midnight chose to return to Africa instead, no impediments of any kind would be put in his way.
The Bushman was overjoyed by this agreement, and I danced Fanny around the sitting room upon hearing the good news, since it meant that our friend would remain with us for three more years at the very least. Given my selfishness in matters of the heart, it ought to come as no surprise that I prayed for him to find a cure for smallpox that could be shipped to Africa without his having to leave us for even a day.
XV
At the very beginning of the world, a female bee rescued Mantis from the rising waters of the Great Flood by snatching him up and buzzing away. On the third day of their voyage over the endless sea, exhausted, flying with ever more difficulty, she espied a gigantic white flower. It was half-open and rising out of the water as though to summon the sun, which was still hidden behind the angry gray clouds of the diluvial rains. Before giving up her life, she deposited Mantis at the very heart of the blossom. And in him, she planted the seed of the first men and women.
This was how Midnight described the beginnings of the Bushmen and all the other tribes and nationalities of the world — even the Scots, though the image of a kilted Highlander sitting in the heart of a water lily might be considered preposterous by some.
I cannot describe with what delight I listened to this tale and many others besides. Midnight possessed a captivating voice and had a delicate and musical English pronunciation. Occasionally, he spoke whole sentences in the Bushman idiom, and it was as though I were listening to the first language of the world. I have always thought of Adam and Eve as being of Midnight’s people.
He told me this particular tale while seated on a boulder upriver, a few miles east of Porto. He almost never spoke of such things inside the city’s walls, for he said that it was practically impossible to give one’s full attention to a story with so many people rushing about and making noise.
When I asked how a seed from a bee had become a man, he told me that all seeds were essentially one. Upon my request for a further explanation, all he would say was that these stories took place during the Age of the First People, when there was less differentiation between things. There was neither past nor future. It was always now.
Some of Midnight’s stories spoke of the need to follow the rains in the desert, and the first time he himself disappeared on such a journey was in early December of his first year with us, immediately prior to the start of his apprenticeship with Senhor Benjamin. It had been a hazy morning wholly without wind, and we expected the sun to shine by midday. Yet Midnight must have scented the violent swirling of faraway vapors; he ran up and down the stairs throughout breakfast, unable to eat or sit. Finally, he could remain inside no longer. He grabbed his eland-hide quiver and bow, together with the leather pack that had come in his trunk from Africa, and marched out of the house.
“Where in God’s name do you think you’re going?” Mama inquired.
“Quick — follow him, John!” Papa instructed me.
I leapt from the table, still dressed in my nightshirt, jumped into my boots at the door, took my coat from Mama, and raced after our guest. I found him just past the northern entrance to our street, near the municipal jailhouse. From this vantage point he could see over Porto’s cragged landscape of tiled rooftops toward the faraway hills at the eastern horizon. He was singing a melody — the secret one he would later teach me.
On finishing his song, he pointed to the southeast, where I could see a funnel of bluish cloud releasing a gray ribbon of storm. He put his arm over my shoulder as we watched the distant heavens darken. At a first strike of lightning, a deep vibration started in his gut, and the subsequent ripple of thunder made him moan. Then a gust of frigid wind picked up some fallen leaves and carried them to our feet, whereupon he announced, “I shall be gone for a few days. But I shall be very, very well. You must not be concerned for me.” And then he was off.
“Where are you going?” I called.
The urge to follow him gripped me, but I knew I’d be courting trouble if I didn’t go home. On rushing there
