Turning Back the Sun Read Free

other people would have died, they sucked the moisture from obscure tubers and ate insects. Some symbiotic veneration for the earth increased their latent horror of the white men. The whites, they said, had hurt the earth unforgivably, carving and quartering it into roads and mines. Yet the savages, he knew, killed without conscience, as a kind of jocular sport, as if people were of no importance. Rocks and trees were more permanent. They worshipped rocks and trees.
    Rayner”s villa was more like their nomads” camps than he recognized. For seven years he had inhabited it as if he would move out next week, and its most personal ornaments were fragments of petrified wood and colored pebbles which he”d gathered from the wilderness. He still feltas if the place were not his. That was the only way he could endure it, he thought, or endure the town, or perhaps anything. A state of transition. It was spacious and silent, lit by long windows with long green blinds. All its colors were cool. Its ceilings sighed with wood-bladed fans. Nearly all signs of personal life—photographs, papers, mementoes—were out of sight in the louvered cupboards. If Rayner could have expressed himself in décor, this rented space, with its inherited pallor and coolness, might be what he would have chosen.
    All the same, it enclosed his rage. From his windows he could see half the town: its gridiron order, its smokestacks. He felt a duty to it, sometimes even a tenderness, but it filled him with unbearable claustrophobia. It seemed thin, narrow, almost without quality. And he felt himself growing thin and narrow with it. The town was superficially pleased by itself. He hated that. Its skyline was just itself. Sometimes, remembering the capital, he wanted to shout in the streets, “Is this
all?”
    He had started to drink a bit, whisky mostly. Returning late from his evening rounds he”d thought, I must watch this. But his one glass had become two, then three. His mother had drunk too. But there was too much of his father in him, he thought, to let it go that far; and one day, as if in his father”s honor, he simply stopped.
    But the episode left him uneasy. He could no longer quite predict himself. Soon afterwards, coming upon some photographic portraits in his desk, he found himself hunting them for an explanation. But his parents stared back at him out of another age. The cut of his father”s hair and lawyer”s dress looked austerely archaic; and his mother”s face was cradled in the side curls fashionable twenty years ago. And her dress—did they still dress like that in the capital?
    Yet he thought of his parents” traits as alternating in him. Even their faces. He recognized his father”s features in his own harsh cheeks and hectoring eyes. They sharedthe same angry, overhung brows. But when he looked in the mirror he saw, between his father”s nose and firm chin, his mother”s mouth smiling. And in calmer moods, as if it superposed itself at moments of his father”s inattention, he would sense the whole stamp of his expression overcast by hers.
    There were times when he could not disentangle in himself his father”s solitude and ferocious spirit of enquiry from his mother”s sentimental longings and compassion. Often now he was flooded by an incontinent sympathy for people as he talked with them—for a patient, a girlfriend, or just an acquaintance—and after they had left him he would clean forget them. He saw himself oscillating between pity and isolated indifference. He expended more energy on the town than almost anyone he knew: he had even started an advisory service to the more distant cattle stations, and his voice over the shaky radiotelegraph must have saved women in childbirth from fatal septicemia. Yet for all his apparent commitment, his energy, a profound inner betrayal separated him off.
    He wanted to return to the capital.
    Nowadays the car crash which had killed his mother and maimed his own foot, together with