The Moon as Guest

Nobody could remember how it had started – least of all Anding whose leg it was – since it had been with him so long. It had been named over the years: ‘varicose ulcer’ or ‘that time the chip of wood flew off and stuck in when Clody was chopping’. The health worker called it ‘a chronic sore’, but by none of these terms could Anding recognise an old friend. When he thought about it with the near-affection due to the utterly familiar he could imagine he had been born with it. Not exactly as it was at this moment, of course, since its appearance changed from time to time. Its phases were varied: sometimes it wept, sometimes it bled, sometimes it shrank to a dry pucker surrounding a black borehole, and now and again it rotted a bit and smelt as at present. Essentially, though, it was resident as this hole on the outside of his right leg about three inches below the knee. In so far as it had to be allowed for at all times, but chiefly when negotiating public transport or the bamboo settles at home, Anding thought of it as he would any of his limbs: somewhere between an appendage and an inhabitant, something whose absence in other people he had begun to notice.

‘I can’t sleep with that smell in the house,’ his wife told him. ‘It’s disgusting. It attracts flies and keeps people away. Haven’t you noticed how few of our friends actually come into the house nowadays? They hang around the doors but they won’t come inside because of the stink. That leg of yours has taken over my whole house.’

‘I can’t smell anything,’ said Anding truthfully, ‘although he certainly looks as though he’s coming up for one of his wormy times.’

At fairly long intervals there would recur a period lasting anything up to a month when the presence of small creamy maggots could be noticed as they burrowed around in the necrotic hole. Tatang Petring up the track, who was by far the best barefoot doctor in the area, had told him this was an excellent sign since it meant all the green stuff was being eaten up and only clean uninfected tissue would be left whereupon the wound would quickly become smaller. And it was true the maggots came and went beneath the papaya poultices which Tatang Petring applied, but so, too, did callers at the house come and go. Anding was a fair man and came to think his wife was probably right. Certainly there were a lot of flies about.

What did not go was the wound itself, undoubtedly a black miracle, a medical mystery. Although often enlarging and deepening to the point where the bone could actually be seen by anybody interested enough to look (mainly small children and Tatang Petring himself), the wound appeared to be self-limiting in some way. The maggots did their bit, the wound grew huge and deep but quite neat: a light pinkish-grey smooth wet crater with bone at the bottom and with a slightly raised crusty rim – and anyone who knew anything about Western-style medicine or Eastern-style ways of death predicted that Anding would soon run a tremendous fever and his leg swell up and go glossy black, and at that point unless it were cut off entirely he would be done for. Yet this never happened. The health worker would procure some unmarked capsules in a twist of paper, and Tatang Petring would leave off the papaya poultices and instead apply grated palm-heart tinctured with ordinary kerosene, and within a week the wound would be half its previous size, the skin around it a glowing healthy brown.

At this point Anding used to worry about its disappearing entirely and would stop taking the capsules. It would be like murder, doing away with a companion as constant yet as varied as this one. His friend did not in the least incapacitate him but merely made him courteous when dealing with furniture or dogs (which were fascinated by the smell) or those small children always apt to bang into legs. Little boys particularly were wont to dash off suddenly in pursuit of their chafers, which instead of droning in tight circles above their heads at the end of lengths of thread would somehow escape and blunder away, trailing their moorings. Only the other day a child had smacked into the leg, bounced off and plunged away through the goats rooting among the banana plants at the side of the track.

‘You smegma!’ Anding shouted half-heartedly after him and wondered if he hadn’t heard a faint ‘sorry, sir’ amid the crashing of sticks and goat-bleats. For it was on behalf of his friend that Anding felt annoyance: it was no way to treat a companion. The question of pain never entered into it.

And that was one more extraordinary thing. Almost regardless of which phase it was in or what was done to it Anding scarcely ever experienced his wound as painful. Occasionally his whole leg would ache but, then, so did everyone else’s after about forty; it was called arthritis and was an unbidden but not unexpected guest who would come one day and take up residence in someone’s body and not leave until that person was dead. That was the thing about wounds and diseases: they, too, had lives of their own which they had to live, and it was in their nature to have to depend on the bodies of people and animals in order to do so. Tatang Petring had told him that years ago, and Anding had long since had enough experience to confirm its truth. Sometimes one of these visitors might be accompanied by a companion of its own – it might be fever or pain. Such happened not to be the case with his own wound, which had turned up all by itself (perhaps on that wood-chopping day, perhaps not) and required a home. True, it had had certain consequences: discomfort when lying on the floor at night, inconvenience in that he always had to be on the lookout for stuff that would serve as bandaging to hold Tatang Petring’s treatments in place and, if Lerma were to be believed, a disgusting smell at the wormy periods which messed up their social life. But never actual pain.

‘He’s not going to go away, is he?’ Anding asked Tatang Petring one day.

The doctor considered silently.

‘No. He wants to stay. He likes you. Sometimes it looks as though he’s going to take over more of you and sometimes as though he might move out altogether. But he never does either, does he?’

‘It’s strange,’ said Anding, who was still then thinking in terms of his wound’s apparent indecisiveness.

‘Not a bit,’ Tatang Petring told him. ‘Look at the moon. That comes and goes at seemingly odd intervals, all the time on the wax or on the wane, but you couldn’t say the moon was vague, could you? It’s always in exactly the right place. It’s just a question of understanding its habits. When you understand things as they properly are they almost always turn out to be regular in some way. Look at women’s periods; or better’ – Tatang Petring hurriedly skipped over one of the greater mysteries whose very irregularity accounted for a large percentage of his patients’ visits – ‘the tides.’

‘They’re both connected to the moon,’ said Anding. ‘Everyone knows that.’