I just finished a book of short stories by Roald Dahl. I've never read any of his work - but had seen a few of his movies - Willy Wonka and the Fantastic Mr. Fox, for example.
Some of the short stories felt like exercises or warm-ups - especially since it seemed as if the stories all had a similar twist and there were similar characters - or parts of characters found in more than one piece.
He really has a way with describing people that I found captivating. I want to try to see it more clearly here. As I am typing it, I see that much of the description that I found captivating was that it was based in MOVEMENT and that it was based in DISEASE or decrepitness...
I did not react the same way to text where he described someone as healthy and beautiful.
This one in particular: From 'The Visitor' is amazing:
"I pulled in alongside the pump, and waited. Nobody appeared. I pressed the horn button, and the four tuned horns on the Lagonda shouted their wonderful "So gia mille e tre!" across the desert. Nobody appeared. I pressed again....
....At last, after I had played the horns no less than six times, the door of the hut behind the gasoline pump opened and a tallish man emerged and stood on the threshold, doing up his buttons with both hands. He took his time over this, and not until he had finished did he glance up at the Lagonda. I looked back at him through my open window. I saw him take the first step in my direction...he took it very, very slowly...Then he took a second step...
My God! I thought at once. The spirochetes have got him!
He had the slow, wobbly walk, the loose-limbed, high-stepping gait of a man with locomotor ataxia. With each step he took, the front foot was raised high in the air before him and brought down violently to the ground, as though he were stamping on a dangerous insect.
I thought: I had better get out of here. I had better start the motor and get the hell out of here before he reaches me. But I knew I couldn't. I had to have the gasoline. I sat in the car staring at the awful creature as he came stamping laboriously over the sand. He must have the revolting disease for years and years, otherwise it wouldn't have developed into ataxis. Tabes dorsalis, they call it in professional circles, and pathologically this means that the victim is suffering from degeneration of the posterior columns of the spinal cord. But ah my foes and oh my friends, it is really a lot worse that that; it is a slow and merciless consuming of the actual nerve fibres of the body by syphilitic toxins.
The man - the Arab, I shall call him - came right up to the door of my side of the car and peered in through the open window. I leaned away from him, praying that he would come not an inch closer. Without a doubt, he was one of the most blighted humans I had ever seen. His face had the eroded, eaten-away look of an old wood-carving when the worm has been at it, and sight of it made wonder how many other diseases the man was suffering from, besides syphilis.
"Salaam," he mumbled.
"Fill up the tank," I told him.
He didn't move. He was inspecting the interior of the Lagonda with great interest. A terrible feculent odour came wafting in from his direction.
"Come along!" I said sharply. "I want some gasoline!"
He looked at me and grinned. It was more of a leer than a grin, an insolent mocking leer that seemed to be saying, "I am the king of the gasoline pump at B'ir Rawd Salim! Touch me if you dare!"
A fly had settled in the corner of one of his eyes. He made no attempt to brush it away."
No comments:
Post a Comment