Gould's Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan

Author:Richard Flanagan [Flanagan, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: nepalifiction, TPB
Publisher: Random House Australia
Published: 2001-11-19T18:15:00+00:00

IX

WITH ALL THE rising vapours & damp earth the building of the Great Mah-Jong Hall had entailed, the Commandant’s consumption—caught amongst the manfern fronds from the Siamese women—worsened to the extent that no amount of bleeding seemed to do any good.

Both the Commandant & the Surgeon came to fear that they would fill the entire harbour with his blood without any cure being effected. Nor did the consumption respond to any of the Surgeon’s other invariably successful treatments—not the nightly drinking of chamber-lye, which the Surgeon fermented from his own urine; nor the daily swallowing of album nigrum, the excrement of rats, which at least had the virtue of being the most readily available medicine on the island; unlike the tobacco, which the Surgeon used as a final desperate expedient in the practice of insufflation, which saw him injecting tobacco smoke into the Commandant’s rectum after every voiding of the bowels.

Then to grant the Commandant the illusion that something was being done for his body—beyond enabling it to fart smoke—the Surgeon came up with a new treatment that was apparently meeting with some success in England. At first the Commandant was unwilling to eat large amounts of butter several times a day, on the foolish grounds that it made him nauseous, but the thinking behind this treatment was scientifick, incomprehensible, & for both these reasons, undeniable.

That the Commandant was now malnourished as well as consumptive did not help his humours, which daily grew more vaporous & even less easily divined than before. He was troubled by nightmares in which he was revealed not as a Roman emperor but as a Lakes poet, given to long dreamings at the edges of Grasmere on the Sublime & Majestick, as if his very dreams were capitalised to drive home the idea so strong he felt suffocated by it, because a father of the nation ought be born to the role, not have to fight for it every day.

He knew for him none of it came easy, not even the cruelty, & it only made him even angrier that in his dog days when a little understanding from others would not have gone amiss, that so many mistakenly thought harshness his second nature, for even his malevolence he had to struggle for & with.

‘You understand me, O’Riordan?’ he cried, leaping from his infantryman’s palliasse & seizing a musket from his aide & smashing the butt into the aide’s face, again & again, all the while the lieutenant protesting that his name was not O’Riordan but Lethborg. This only antagonised the Commandant all the more, because he knew all his soldiers to be feckless, cowardly Irish peasants, & it was evident O’Riordan was even worse, being a feckless, cowardly, lying Irish peasant.

The Commandant took to kicking him in the nuts & head, hissing, ‘Brady-brady-brady’ with an unrestrained vigour that might have been mistaken for glee had it not been obvious that both men were weeping, one blood from his mouth & nose, the other only

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.