come to understand a little of Helen’s eye language, I made up my mind to teach her English.
I started with pronouns. Pronouns befuddle and exasperate. As in an old Tarzan movie or Abbot and Costello routine, pronouns deny or misconstrue themselves as soon as the instructor thumps his chest or nods pupilward. “I,” I said, pointing at myself: “I, I, I.” Although Helen could say this word, she pronounced it like the preface to a bloodcurdling hunting cry. No matter. My heart leapt. Of course, when I tried to teach her the word’s semantic value, to demonstrate that she had encompassed the concept, she poked me repeatedly in the chest with her gnarled thumb, all the while murmuring, “Ai, Ai, Ai.” It took me a day to undo the damage, a feat I managed only with superhuman patience and the artful deployment of my shaving mirror.
We named, enunciated, and made meaningful moues in my hand-held mirror. Helen, to her credit, did not lose interest. Because I had not shaved since moving into New Helensburgh, she had never seen my mirror before. It was a circle of glass in an aluminum frame, and she immersed herself in its silver flatteries as a swan immerses itself in water. Each word I shaped was a new excuse to go gliding on her own reflection. Sometimes, indeed, she got so far from our mutual purpose that I despaired of pulling her back. She liked the way she looked, and she had never mistaken her image in the glass for that of a two-dimensional stranger trapped inside the mirror’s imprisoning frame.
Helen—as if I required further evidence of the fact—was self-aware. My mirror, a miracle, had simply given her a chance to walk on the waters of her self-awareness. I tried to get her to say the word.
“Mwah,” she responded. “Mwah.”
Because she could not simultaneously hold the mirror and preen in its tiny window, she made me hold it for her. Repeating her disappointing approximation of “mirror,” she loosened the bandanna I had tied about her neck and lifted it over her nose and lips. For a brief moment, then, she was an Islamic lady proclaiming the privilege and the pain of purdah. Then, hoisting it upward, Helen transformed the bandanna into a blindfold, through whose misaligned threads she disingenuously peered at herself. Up and down the bandanna went, becoming in the process a mammy scarf, a pair of earmuffs, and even a masquerader’s polka-dotted domino.
“Say ‘bandanna,’ ” I urged my bride. “ ‘Ban-DAN-nuh.’ ”
“Bwaduh,” Helen said.
At that moment, trying to keep her bobbing face in the glass, I imagined myself the progenitor of an Ur-Swahili dialect whose descendant tongues would one day be spoken in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Zarakal. Mwah and bwaduh—along with Ai, mai, and yooh—were precious little upon which to base such a fantasy, I realize, but it seemed to me then that Helen and I were making progress. Frustratingly slow progress, but progress nevertheless. I did not want to give up too soon.
According to Jeannette, I had not spoken my first recognizable word until I was well past two. Helen was far older than two, of course, but she had been exposed to bits and pieces of a comprehensive linguistic system only intermittently since my arrival. With our auspicious beginning (five “words” in as many days) as a base, given ten or twelve years, Helen might well acquire a real oratorical competence.
By the afternoon of our fifth day of language lessons, Helen’s five-word vocabulary seemed a historic accomplishment. I had not tried to teach her either my name or hers for fear she would ascribe to each an encompassing generic connotation, Joshua becoming “man” and Helen “woman.” Too, I had begun to feel a trifle guilty about having bestowed upon her the name of Thomas Babington Mubia’s favorite wife. Or maybe about the fact that for most Westerners this name apotheosizes a standard of feminine beauty having nothing to do with my lady’s primeval negritude. Our earliest vocabularies corrupt, and what I had learned in the household of Jeannette Rivenbark Monegal had of course influenced—i.e., corrupted—my vision of the world. As for my first name, believing that Helen would be unable to pronounce it, I never spoke it aloud for her.
“Mai mwah,” said Helen when we broke for late-afternoon communion with the other Minids on the fifth day. “Mai mwah.”
She had the mirror—her mirror, she had just called it—and before I could retrieve if from her, she left our hut to