In "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," Harry (the protagonist) and his wife are on safari in Africa. Harry was scratched by a thorn and his cut has become infected to the point of turning into gangrene. His wife is wealthy; he is a writer, dependent, to some extent, on her money. They are stranded together on the savannah, while the man slowly dies.
One would think that, under such circumstances, this pair would not fight, but on the contrary, the man is filled with bitterness, first at the trivial accident that has caused his illness, and second at a life wasted, he feels, on a life with the very rich. As the man drifts in and out of consciousness, he partly remembers, partly hallucinates places he has been in the past, experiences he had planned to write about but always put off. These memories tantalize and torment him. When his wife tries to console him, he lashes out.
Take this exchange, from the first part of the story:
"I wish we'd never come," the woman said. She was looking at him holding the glass and biting her lip. "You never would have gotten anything like this in Paris. You always said you loved Paris. We could have stayed in Paris or gone anywhere. I'd have gone anywhere. I said I'd go anywhere you wanted. If you wanted to shoot we could have gone shooting in Hungary and been comfortable."
"Your bloody money," he said.
"That's not fair," she said. "It was always yours as much as mine. I left everything and I went wherever you wanted to go and I've done what you wanted to do But I wish we'd never come here."
"You said you loved it."
"I did when you were all right. But now I hate it. I don't see why that had to happen to your leg. What have we done to have that happen to us?"
"I suppose what I did was to forget to put iodine on it when I first scratched it. Then I didn't pay any attention to it because I never infect. Then, later, when it got bad, it was probably using that weak carbolic solution when the other antiseptics ran out that paralyzed the minute blood vessels and started the gangrene." He looked at her, "What else?"
"I don't mean that."
"If we would have hired a good mechanic instead of a half-baked Kikuyu driver, he would have checked the oil and never burned out that bearing in the truck."
"I don't mean that."
"If you hadn't left your own people, your goddamned Old Westbury Saratoga, Palm Beach people to take me on."
"Why, I loved you. That's not fair. I love you now. I'll always love you. Don't you love me?"
"No," said the man. "I don't think so. I never have."
"Harry, what are you saying? You're out of your head."
"No. I haven't any head to go out of."
"Don't drink that," she said. "Darling, please don't drink that. We have to do everything we can."
"You do it," he said. "I'm tired."
The extent to which the woman's protestations of love are true is open to debate. But the man is lashing out at the woman because there is nothing left for him to do; he can see now, at the end of his life, the stupidity of how he has lived, down to the botched preparations for the safari. His final statement that he is tired really is the fundamental truth of his situation. He is tired of life, and tired of waiting for death.
I'm not sure what could be done to reconcile these two. The woman's inability to act matches the man's brooding over lost opportunities. I suppose that if the hallucination the story ends with could somehow be true -- if Harry could be taken by plane to a hospital and receive treatment -- things could go back to "normal." But the root of Harry's antipathy is that he now sees clearly how rotten the "normal" state of things is. As he says, it's "a bore," something they have done "too bloody long." Perhaps the only real way to resolve their differences is for Harry to die.
No comments:
Post a Comment