PATRICK LOWELL PUTNAM'S MONOLOGUE*

The fetus's leg extends from Abanzima's
birth canal and seems to kick the inside
of her thigh. She says it's been dead three days.
The medicine man refuses to help
and will not leave until he's given more
elephant meat. He's an ironic character,
like this baby, a pygmy too big to be born.
How can I turn Abanzima away? Her mother
and her father sing songs as they wait outside:
The sky is far, a place where
no grass grows on which to lie.
Yet children are conceived in heaven;
they will feed us in old age.
How purposeless the world is. Dr. Stedman
at Harvard used to say that, and he flunked me
in composition. Pointless. If she dies . . .
I'm not a doctor. I'm an Agent Sanitaire,
and how I had to plead with the Belgian Red Cross
for the title. It took my father's doing
and the long reach of the Lowell name to win
the privilege of dressing wounds and setting bones,
delivering babies dead and alive in Africa.
Poor father. He's never understood.
But what should I expect from a man who
can't tell the difference between the sweet flavor
of the African ant and the sour, hazy taste
of the American? The few weeks he was here
he boiled every drop of water, took his quinine
by the watch, and never left his pith helmet
out of sight. Still, I love that man.
All the mistakes I've made, and in his eyes
am making, and yet we know how much
our relationship means. I don't care about
war bonds and rubber trees. My God, how I try
to forget Boston. Each night I listen
to the monkeys in the trees and I think
to myself, Boston, how grateful I am
that you're not here. Father, don't you understand?
If you were here now, you'd do the same.
Of course he couldn't stay, I didn't want him
to really. What would he do with Abanzima?
He's too much the Christian to turn her away.
Me? I could just as easily look the other way
and get the medicine man to share a drink.
He loves gin and cigarettes. Oh . . . I'll help,
because it pleases me to do so, the way
it pleased me to swim the Longgele River,
aptly named, by God, and build my hut
in this clearing white and hot under the sun.
Six years I've been here. Six years, and home
to Boston only once, when mother was ill.
Sure, I've had visitors. That woman from
the New Yorker, who stayed a couple of days
and got everything wrong in her article.
She wasn't shocked that I'd taken a native wife.
I'll give her that. But that I had three wives,
she couldn't accept. Damned if I'll write
one word to explain myself to anybody!
Old Percival Lowle, arriving in America
from Bristol at the age of 68, bringing
two sons and a daughter, with their families,
he'd understand. America must have looked
like Africa then. Poor Percival, until
the Revolution brought profit in the holds
of the British merchant ships that fell to his fleet
of commerce raiders. By and by the Lowells
got too rich to need slaves and they freed them all.
Great uncle James Russell Lowell, cousin Amy.
But I don't want to talk about them. I am here.
Prince Leopold and Princess Astrid of Belgium
came here to see me. What a night we had,
dancing with the pygmies, eating wild mushrooms,
honey, smoking marijuana, yodeling!
Oh . . . I am tired. First morphine for Abanzima,
now morphine for me. Connect the headlight
to the car battery and light the paraffin lamps.
The lemurs in their cages, the horned viper
and the cobra watch. My tools scissors, pliers,
wire cutters, sleep. Sleep Abanzima.
Slowly pull the fetus's leg straight out
and snip. Through the soft bone, close to the groin.
Reach in, push up. Now an arm. Reach in, turn,
pull the other leg and cut. The opposite
of God, I turn the child into nothing.
Pull. The head is large. Come to the world.
The wire cutters. O God, here is your baby,
nameless, headless, legless, armless, streamlined
so that the pain of this world has nothing to latch onto,
resembling its own shriveled afterbirth, a boy.








*Inspired by Joan Mark's book The King of the World in the Land of the Pygmies