Ape and Essence Page 7

  Cut back to the Chief. His brow is wrinkled in a frown of displeasure.

  "All this progressive education!" he says to Dr. Poole. "No proper discipline. I don't know what we're coming to. Why, when I was a boy, our old Practitioner used to tie them over a bench and go to work with a birch rod. 'That'll teach you to be a vessel,' he'd say, and then swish, swish, swish! Belial, how they howled! That's what I call education. Well, I've had enough of this," he adds. "Quick march!"

  As the litter moves out of the shot, the Camera holds on Loola who remains, staring in an agony of fellow feeling at the tear-wet face and heaving shoul­ders of the little victim in the second row. A hand touches her arm. She starts, turns apprehensively and is relieved to find herself looking into the kindly face of Dr. Poole.

  "I entirely agree with you," he whispers. "It's wrong, it's unjust."

  Only after she has thrown a quick look over her shoulder does Loola venture to give him a little smile of gratitude.

  "Now we must go," she says.

  They hurry after the others. Following the litter, they retrace their steps through the Coffee Shop, then turn to the right and enter the Cocktail Bar. At one end of the room an enormous pile of human bones reaches almost to the ceiling. Squatting on the floor, in a thick white dust, a score of craftsmen are engaged in fashioning drinking cups out of skulls, knitting needles from ulnas, flutes and recorders from the longer shank bones, ladles, shoe horns and dominoes from pelvises, and spigots out of femurs.

  A halt is called, and, while one of the workmen plays "Give me Detumescence" on a shinbone flute, another presents the Chief with a superb necklace of graded vertebrae ranging in size from a baby's cervicals to the lumbars of a heavyweight boxer.

  NARRATOR

  "And he set me down in the midst of the valley that was full of bones; and lo, they were very dry." The dry bones of some of those who died, by thou­sands, by millions, in the course of those three bright summer days that, for you there, are still in the future. "And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live?" The answer, I replied, is in the negative. For though Baruch might save us (perhaps) from taking our places in such an ossuary as this, he can do nothing to avert that other, slower, nastier death. . . .

  Trucking shot of the litter as it is carried up the steps into the main lobby. Here the stink is overpow­ering, the filth beyond description. Close-up of two rats gnawing at a mutton bone, of the flies on the purulent eyelids of a small girl. The Camera pulls back for a longer shot. Forty or fifty women, half of them with shaven heads, are sitting on the stairs, among the refuse on the floor, on the tattered remnants of ancient beds and sofas. Each of them is nursing a baby, all the babies are ten weeks old, and all those belonging to shaven mothers are deformed. Over close-ups of little faces with hare lips, little trunks with stumps instead of legs and arms, little hands with clusters of supernumerary fingers, little bodies adorned with a double row of nipples, we hear the voice of the Narrator.

  NARRATOR

  For this other death -- not by plague, this time, not by poison, not by fire, not by artificially induced cancer, but by the squalid disintegration of the very substance of the species -- this gruesome and infinitely unheroic death-in-birth could as well be the product of atomic industry as of atomic war. For in a world powered by nuclear fission everybody's grandmother would have been an X-ray technician. And not only everybody's grandmother -- everybody's grandfather and father and mother as well, everybody's ancestors back to three and four and five generations of them that hate Me.

  From the last of the deformed babies the Camera pulls back to Dr. Poole who is standing, his hand­kerchief held to his still too sensitive nose, staring with horrified bewilderment at the scene around him.

  "All the babies look as if they were exactly the same age," he says, turning to Loola, who is still be­side him.

  "Well, what do you expect? Seeing that practically all of them were born between the tenth and the seventeenth of December."

  "But that must mean that. . ." He breaks off, deeply embarrassed. "I think," he concludes hastily, "that things must be rather different here from what they are in New Zealand. . . ."

  In spite of the wine, he remembers his grey-haired mother across the Pacific and, blushing guiltily, coughs and averts his eyes.

  "There's Polly," cries his companion, and hurries across the room.

  Mumbling apologies as he picks his way between the squatting or recumbent mothers, Dr. Poole fol­lows her.

  Polly is sitting on a straw-filled sack near what was once the Cashier's desk. She is a girl of eighteen or nineteen, small and fragile, her head shaved like that of a criminal prepared for execution. She has a face whose beauty is all in the fine bones and the big luminous eyes. It is with an expression of hurt bewil­derment that those eyes now look up into Loola's face and from Loola's face move without curiosity, almost without comprehension, to that of the stranger who accompanies her.

  "Darling!"

  Loola bends down to kiss her friend. no no, from Dr. Poole's viewpoint. Then she sits down beside Polly and puts a comforting arm around her. Polly hides her face against the other's shoulder and both girls begin to cry. As though infected by their grief, the little monster in Polly's arms wakes up and utters a thin complaining howl. Polly raises her head from her friend's shoulder and, her face still wet with tears, looks down at the deformed child, then opens her shirt and pushing aside one of the crimson no's, gives it the breast. With an almost frantic hunger the child starts to suck.

  "I love him," Polly sobs. "I don't want them to kill him."

  "Darling," is all that Loola can find to say, "darling!"

  A loud voice interrupts her.

  "Silence there! Silence!"

  Other voices take up the refrain.

  "Silence!"

  "Silence there!"

  "Silence, silence!"

  In the lobby all talk ceases abruptly and there is a long, expectant hush. Then a horn is blown and another of those strangely babyish, but self-impor­tant voices announces: "His Eminence the Arch-Vicar of Belial, Lord of the Earth, Primate of California, Servant of the Proletariat, Bishop of Hollywood."

  Long shot of the hotel's main staircase. Dressed in a long robe of Anglo-Nubian goatskins and wearing a golden crown set with four tall, sharp horns, the Arch-Vicar is seen majestically descending. An acolyte holds a large goatskin umbrella over his head and he is followed by twenty or thirty ecclesiastical digni­taries, ranging in rank from three-horned Patriarchs to one-horned Presbyters and hornless Postulants. All of them, from the Arch-Vicar downward, are conspic­uously beardless, sweaty and fat-rumped and, when any of them speaks, it is always in a fluting contralto.

  The Chief rises from his litter and advances to meet the incarnation of spiritual authority.

  NARRATOR

  Church and State,

  Greed and Hate: --

  Two baboon-persons

  In one Supreme Gorilla.

  The Chief inclines his head respectfully. The Arch-Vicar raises his hands to his tiara, touches the two anterior horns, then lays his spiritually charged finger­tips on the Chiefs forehead. "May you never be impaled upon His Horns."

  "Amen," says the Chief; then straightening himself up and changing his tone abruptly from the devout to the briskly businesslike, "Everything OK for tonight?" he asks.

  In the voice of a ten-year-old, but with the long-winded and polysyllabic unctuousness of a veteran ecclesiastic, long accustomed to playing the role of a superior being set apart from and above his fellows, the Arch-Vicar replies that all things are in order. Under the personal supervision of the Three-Horned Inquisitor and the Patriarch of Pasadena, a devoted band of Familiars and Postulants has travelled from settlement to settlement, making the yearly census. Every mother of a monster has been marked down. Heads have been shaved and the preliminary whip­pings administered. By this time all the guilty have been transported to one or other of the three Puri
fica­tion Centres at Riverside, San Diego and Los Angeles. The knives and the consecrated bull's pizzles have been made ready and, Belial willing, the ceremonies will begin at the appointed hour. Before tomorrow's sunrise the purification of the land should be complete.

  Once more the Arch-Vicar makes the sign of the horns, then stands for a few seconds in recollected silence. Reopening his eyes, he turns to the ecclesiastics in his train.

  "Go, take the shaven ones," he squeaks, "take these defiled vessels, these living testimonies of Belial's en­mity, and lead them to the place of their shame."

  A dozen Presbyters and Postulants hurry down the stairs and out into the crowd of mothers.

  "Hurry, hurry!"

  "In Belial's name."

  Slowly, reluctantly, the crop-headed women rise to their feet. Their little burdens of deformity pressed against bosoms heavy with milk, they move toward the door in a silence more painfully expressive of misery than any outcry.

  Medium shot of Polly on her sack of straw. A young Postulant approaches and pulls her roughly to her feet.

  "Up!" he shouts in a voice of an angry and malev­olent child. "Get up, you spawner of filth!"

  And he slaps her across the face. Cringing away from a second blow, Polly almost runs to rejoin her fellow victims near the entrance.

  Dissolve to a night sky, with stars between thin bars of cloud and a waning moon already low in the West. There is a long silence; then we begin to hear the sound of distant chanting. Gradually it becomes articulate in the words, "Glory to Belial, to Belial in the lowest," repeated again and again.

  NARRATOR

  An inch from the eyes the ape's black paw

  Eclipses the stars, the moon, and even

  Space itself. Five stinking fingers

  Are all the World.

  The silhouette of a baboon's hand advances toward the Camera, grows larger and more menacing, and finally engulfs everything in blackness.

  We cut to the interior of the Los Angeles Coli­seum. By the smoky and intermittent light of torches we see the faces of a great congregation. Tier above tier, like massed gargoyles, spouting the groundless faith, the subhuman excitement, the collective imbecility which are the products of ceremonial reli­gion -- spouting them from black eyeholes, from quiver­ing nostrils, from parted lips, while the chanting monotonously continues: "Glory to Belial, to Belial in the lowest." Below, in the arena, hundreds of shaven girls and women, each with her tiny monster in her arms, are kneeling before the steps of the High Altar. Awe-inspiring in their chasubles of Anglo-Nubian fur, in their tiaras of gilded horns, Patriarchs and Archi­mandrites, Presbyters and Postulants stand in two groups at the head of the altar steps, chanting anti-phonally in a high treble to the music of bone recorders and a battery of xylophones.

  SEMICHORUS I

  Glory to Belial,

  SEMICHORUS II

  To Belial in the lowest!

  Then, after a pause, the music of the chant changes and a new phase of the service begins.

  SEMICHORUS I

  It is a terrible thing,

  SEMICHORUS II

  Terrible terrible,

  SEMICHORUS I

  To fall into the hands,

  SEMICHORUS II

  The huge hands and the hairy,

  SEMICHORUS I

  Into the hands of living Evil,

  SEMICHORUS II

  Hallelujah!

  SEMICHORUS I

  Into the hands of the Enemy of man,

  SEMICHORUS II

  Our boon companions;

  SEMICHORUS I

  Of the Rebel against the Order of Things --

  SEMICHORUS II

  And we have conspired with him against ourselves;

  SEMICHORUS I

  Of the great Blowfly who is the Lord of Flies,

  SEMICHORUS II

  Crawling in the heart;

  SEMICHORUS I

  Of the naked Worm that never dies,

  SEMICHORUS II

  And, never dying, is the source of our eternal life;

  SEMICHORUS I

  Of the Prince of the Powers of the Air --

  SEMICHORUS II

  Spitfire and Stuka, Beelzebub and Azazel, Halle­lujah!

  SEMICHORUS I

  Of the Lord of this world;

  SEMICHORUS II

  And its defiler;

  SEMICHORUS I

  Of the great Lord Moloch,

  SEMICHORUS II

  Patron of all nations;

  SEMICHORUS I

  Of Mammon our master,

  SEMICHORUS II

  Omnipresent.

  SEMICHORUS I

  Of Lucifer the all-powerful,

  SEMICHORUS II

  In Church, in State;

  SEMICHORUS I

  Of Belial,

  SEMICHORUS II

  Transcendent,

  SEMICHORUS I

  Yet, oh, how immanent

  ALL TOGETHER

  Of Belial, Belial, Belial, Belial

  As the chanting dies away, two hornless Postulants descend, seize the nearest of the shaven women, raise her to her feet and lead her up, dumb with terror, to where, at the head of the altar steps, the Patriarch of Pasadena stands whetting the blade of a long butcher's knife. The thickset Mexican mother stands staring at him in fascinated horror, open-mouthed. Then one of the Postulants takes the child out of her arms and holds it up before the Patriarch.

  Close shot of a characteristic product of progressive technology -- a harelipped, Mongolian idiot. Over the shot we hear the chanting of the Chorus.

  SEMICHORUS I

  I show you the sign of Belial's enmity,

  SEMICHORUS II

  Foul, foul;

  SEMICHORUS I

  I show you the fruit of Belial's grace,

  SEMICHORUS II

  Filth infused in filth.

  SEMICHORUS I

  I show you the penalty for obedience to His Will,

  SEMICHORUS II

  On earth as it is in Hell.

  SEMICHORUS I

  Who is the Breeder of all deformities?

  SEMICHORUS II

  Mother.

  SEMICHORUS I

  Who is the chosen vessel of Unholiness?

  SEMICHORUS II

  Mother.

  SEMICHORUS I

  And the curse that is on our race?

  SEMICHORUS II

  Mother.

  SEMICHORUS I

  Possessed, possessed --

  SEMICHORUS II

  Inwardly, outwardly:

  SEMICHORUS I

  Her incubus an object, her subject a succubus --

  SEMICHORUS II

  And both are Belial;

  SEMICHORUS I

  Possessed by the Blowfly.

  SEMICHORUS II

  Crawling and stinging,

  SEMICHORUS I

  Possessed by that which irresistibly

  SEMICHORUS II

  Goads her, drives her,

  SEMICHORUS I

  Like the soiled fitchew,

  SEMICHORUS II

  Like the sow in her season,

  SEMICHORUS I

  Down a steep place

  SEMICHORUS II

  Into filth unutterable;

  SEMICHORUS I

  Whence, after much wallowing,

  SEMICHORUS II

  After many long draughts of the swill,

  SEMICHORUS I

  Mother emerging, nine months later,

  SEMICHORUS II

  Bears this monstrous mockery of a man.

  SEMICHORUS I

  How then shall there be atonement?

  SEMICHORUS II

  By blood.

  SEMICHORUS I

  How shall Belial be propitiated?

  SEMICHORUS II

  Only by blood.

  The Camera moves from the altar to where, tier above tier, the pale gargoyles stare down in hungry anticipation at the scene below. And suddenly t
he faces open their black mouths and start to chant in unison, hesitantly at first, then with growing con­fidence and ever greater volume of sound.

  "Blood, blood, blood, the blood, the blood, blood, blood, the blood. . ."

  We cut back to the altar. The sound of the mind­less, subhuman chanting continues monotonously over the shot.

  The Patriarch hands his whetstone to one of the attendant Archimandrites, and then with his left hand takes the deformed child by the neck and impales it on his knife. It utters two or three little bleating cries, and is silent.

  The Patriarch turns, allows half a pint of blood to spill out on the altar, then tosses the tiny corpse into the darkness beyond. The chanting rises in a savage crescendo. "Blood, blood, the blood, the blood, blood, blood, the blood. . ."

  "Drive her away!" cries the Patriarch in a com­manding squeak.

  In terror the mother turns and hurries down the steps. The two Postulants follow, striking at her savagely with their consecrated bulls' pizzles. The chanting is punctuated by piercing screams. From the congregation comes a noise that is half commiserating groan, half grunt of satisfaction. Flushed and a little breathless from so unusually strenuous an exercise, the plump young Postulants seize another woman -- a girl this time, frail and slender almost to the point of childishness. Her face is hidden as they drag her up the steps. Then one of them steps back a little and we recognise Polly.