The Whale Caller

by Zakes Mda

  He is caught between two hard places. Sharisha does seem to have a yearning for the carefree romps of the past. Yet something is stopping her. The yearning is only in the eyes. Even her lobtailing, once a vigorous mating dance, is languid. Her whole demeanour is listless. Saluni on the other hand is castrating him with her tongue, to the extent that even the nightly cleansing rituals have fizzled out. They are now a fading memory, another source of irritation on her part. She says they don’t happen anymore because Sharisha is back. His mind is full of dirty thoughts about whales throughout the day, to the extent that he is left enervated when the night demands action. He says Saluni’s own words and not Sharisha should take the blame. “How do you expect a meaningful performance from me when there are these tensions between us?” he asks.

  “I forbid you to see that whale again,” says Saluni, in her best edictal tone.

  But the Whale Caller does not respond.

  “If you want us to go back where we were,” she says, now pleadingly, “promise me you will never see that whale again.”

  The Whale Caller is unable to make such a promise. But he does not say so. He keeps quiet instead. His silence means consent to Saluni.

  At night he lies awake, without the benefit of even the smallest cleansing rite, and therefore without the wonderful exhaustion that sends the celebrant into a cataleptic slumber. Saluni is in deep sleep. He wonders what Sharisha could be doing at that hour. He hears the songs of the whales at some distance. He listens hard for the slightest hint of Sharisha’s voice, but he can’t catch it. He wakes up and drapes a heavy blanket around his naked body. He tiptoes out of the house, and heads for Walker Bay The moon is shining and he can see dark specks on the horizon. The whales are too distant for him to identify Sharisha. He didn’t bring his horn; otherwise he would be calling her.

  The following night he drapes his blanket around himself again, without wearing any clothes lest their rustle wakes Saluni up. He tiptoes out of the Wendy house. It is too easy. Saluni sleeps like a hibernating mole, especially when she has been running around with the Bored Twins all day long. He takes his horn with him. This time he goes to his peninsula. He cannot see any whales. He blows his horn. At first he blows it softly. Cautiously When nothing happens he blows it a little louder. He can see a speck on the horizon, which becomes bigger as he continues to blow the horn. It takes a long time for the speck to become a whale, and a longer time for the whale to become Sharisha. He tries a few steps of their dance, but Sharisha’s response is a feeble lobtailing. There is no spectacular breaching. No display of baleen in a gigantic smile. He performs his usual dance, blowing the horn with as much vigour as he can muster. His blanket falls off. It is blown into the water and the waves sweep it away. He continues to dance naked. Sharisha just floats there, looking at him wistfully. He stops the dance. He is exasperated. He squats on a rock and just watches her.

  A voice startles him: “I stopped going to the taverns for you. Now you do this to me? And shame on you, dangling your nakedness for every whale to see!”

  Saluni is standing right behind him. Unheard by him, she has walked over the precarious rocks to the point of the peninsula where he is brooding. She is barefoot, like him, and wears a morning gown on top of her nightdress.

  “You promised, man… you promised!” cries Saluni.

  “I didn’t promise anything, Saluni.”

  “Oh yes you did. You promised you would stop your stupid dances with the whales. Whoever heard of a grown man stealing away from the warm bed of his lover to spend the whole night hopping about on the rocks blowing a meaningless song on a kelp horn for some stupid whale he has named Sharisha?”

  It is fortunate that Hermanus is asleep and there are no spectators to witness a naked hirsute man being frogmarched home by a wisp of a woman in sleepwear.

  In the Wendy house Saluni sits on the bed and weeps.

  “I am a love child, man,” she says. “You can’t treat a love child like this.”

  Then she spits out the story of her conception. It is the story the Whale Caller has heard before, troubadours and all, except for the fact that in this version her mother dramatically shoots the lover. She never goes to jail because the judge decides that it was in self-defence. The woman was defending her honour and the honour of all the women of the world who have been chewed like bubblegum and then spat out when all the sweetness was gone.

  The Whale Caller has never seen her weep before, and this makes him feel very bad about himself. She becomes so lovable when she shows her ability to be vulnerable. It is a new side of her. A desirable side. She is taken by surprise when he lunges at her and rips her sleeping garments off. The Wendy house rocks as it has never rocked before. As they achieve ceremonial ecstasy she is oblivious of the fact that his rigid body has pressed against her wound and it now oozes a pink mixture of blood and pus.

  The next day she has lost all her softness and is determined to fight Sharisha on Sharisha’s own turf. While the Whale Caller lingers in bed, savouring the memory of the night’s rituals that continued right up to the morning, she wakes up, cleans her wound with gentian violet, puts on her high-heeled boots and his heavy army-issue coat, and goes to town. She buys a bottle of cheap wine, drinks from it in big gulps and walks to Walker Bay. The place is already teeming with early morning whale watchers. There are some whales, out there in the distance. She walks along the crag until she reaches his peninsula. There is Sharisha floating mindlessly, just as they left her last night. Saluni vows to herself that she is going to show Sharisha something she will never forget. She drank the wine for her, to make this showdown as momentous as only Cape plonk can make it. She is going to defend her mating rights like a ferocious bull seal—especially after the earthshaking rituals of last night.

  “I tell you once and for all, stupid fish,” she shrieks at Sharisha, “just leave him alone! You no longer have any stake in him!”

  Then she opens the buttons of the coat and flashes Sharisha. She is not wearing anything under the coat. The purple wound glares at the hapless whale. She flashes her one more time. Sharisha only stares at her. A better idea strikes Saluni. She turns her back on the sea, lifts up the coat and moons the whale. Sharisha lazily turns, as if to show Saluni that she too has a wound. She sails away.

  “That will show her,” mutters Saluni as she walks off.

  The few people who have watched her antics with increasing curiosity reward her with applause. She merely sneers at them and walks back to the Wendy house.

  As soon as she enters the Whale Caller smells the fumes of wine.

  “You are drunk,” he says, accusingly.

  “You would be too if you drank a whole bottle of wine,” she says, giggling.

  “After last night, Saluni… I thought we had worked things out.”

  “I caught you naked with a fish, man,” says Saluni. “One night of heaving and panting does not erase that… especially because you refuse to repent.”

  In the three months that follow the Whale Caller agonises over Saluni’s return to the bottle. She has lost all interest in the waltz at dawn. She has even lost the appetite for the window-shopping expeditions. She comes home drunk every night and sleeps until midday Soon after lunch she leaves the house. She visits the Bored Twins. Or she whiles away time annoying Mr. Yodd with her refusal to be mortified. Or she goes to the taverns—a very sore point with the Whale Caller. She is doing all these things to punish him, since she can no longer make him suffer with her wound. It had finally healed.

  The Whale Caller also agonises over Sharishá’s lack of enthusiasm for the dance. He had thought the main reason was the wound. But now it has healed, yet she is as lethargic as ever. And is growing fatter by the day. He has tried every trick in the book to arouse her. When everything has failed he remembers the ritualised eating that is part of the mating game, first introduced to him by Saluni as civilised living. He has participated in Sharisha’s mating games that are in line with whale culture, now she must
participate in the human version of the mating ritual. He hopes that by bursting out of his conservative shell and making a public display of public eating Sharisha will be aroused to action once more.

  He rents a small round table and a chair from the marketplace stallholders. He bribes a waiter from the restaurant that juts into the sea on stilts to lend him the best silver and crystal just for a few hours. The waiter smuggles the cutlery and the wine glasses out of the premises with the garbage and the Whale Caller pretends to be a dustbin scavenger and fishes these items out. He places the chair and the table on a small rocky island just off his peninsula. He sets the table with the white linen from the Wendy house and with the silverware and crystal wine glasses. He lays a table of seafood and the best of Cape chardonnay bought from the same waiter, and smuggled out of the restaurant wrapped in aluminium foil via the dustbin. It does not matter to the Whale Caller that the seafood may be leftovers from those diners who do not care for doggy bags. As for the wine, he will only use it as libation since he is a teetotaller.

  He is in black tie. He looks like the jackass penguins that dot the rocks. He sits on the chair and blows his kelp horn. He blows some of the best mating calls he has learnt over the years. Sure enough Sharisha leaves the company of two other whales a distance away and languidly sails to the Whale Caller. He lights a candle, borrowed from Saluni’s sequinned handbag, and sits down to dine on a meal that has been prepared elegantly in a gourmet manner. Sharisha sails about fifty metres from the island, occasionally waving her fluke. Then she spyhops in big circles. While he eats the seafood, he pours the wine in the glass, sniffs it, and then throws it into the water as an offering to the spirits that rule the sea. The very spirits that ate his father and that must now heal Sharisha from whatever ails her.

  The wind is the bearer of Lunga Tubu’s voice. There he is standing below the stilted restaurant singing “Santa Lucia” His voice rises above the waves even when they are at their loudest. The waves strike the rocks, creating white surf that stops at the boy’s feet and becomes the clear water in which he stands. The Whale Caller can see his corrupt waiter from the restaurant shooing the boy away, throwing objects at him. He runs away, but as soon as the waiter returns to his duties at the restaurant, the boy returns to his spot and brazenly serenades the tourists, the Whale Caller and Sharisha once again.

  Suddenly Sharisha emerges from the spyhopping and swims to join the two whales that have been waiting anxiously a short distance away. The three swim further away, but they do not get far before the two whales rally around Sharisha. The Whale Caller can hear deep bellows that carry in waves under the water to where he sits with an unfinished meal. Sharisha sinks under water and disappears for some time and then emerges again. There is a struggle happening here, and it dawns for the first time on the Whale Caller that he is about to witness a birth. He nearly punches himself when he realises that all along her lethargy was due to the fact that she was with child. He should have suspected that. After all he was there when it all started last December, just before Christmas. And indeed it is December again, just before Christmas. The gestation period of southern rights is eleven to twelve months. How silly of him to have expected Sharisha to return with a young one after only six months, and how truly silly not to realise that there was no live young one yet because she was still carrying it in her womb!

  He stands up and blows his horn and dances around his altar.

  He is not the only one who has become aware of the birth. The cliffs of Hermanus have suddenly come alive with spectators who are training their binoculars on Sharisha and the two midwives. A whale giving birth is not an everyday sight. Not only do southern rights mate in winter off South Africa, they give birth the following winter, off South Africa again. Sharisha bends the rules once more. She mated in full view of the Whale Caller under the glare of the December sun. And here she is again, birthing in the summer sun, to the accompaniment of the kelp horn and Lunga Tubu’s rendition of Pavarotti, Domingo and Carreras. The voice that is yet to break has now added Mario Lanza to the repertoire. The Whale Caller blows his horn harder, in an attempt to overwhelm the young singer. Only his horn has the right to be part of the miracle.

  He does not hear Saluni’s raspy voice, shouting at him and calling him a no-good loser. She is standing at the tip of his peninsula. When she can’t catch his attention she wades her way through the waist-high water to the island. He stops playing for a while as they face each other.

  “You have no shame,” she says. “You even stole my candle for this rubbish.”

  “I told you… remember, I told you,” says the Whale Caller breathlessly, “and you didn’t believe me. You said Sharisha was male… you saw ‘his’ thingy, you said. Have you seen a male giving birth?”

  “Who says the fish is giving birth?” she asks dismissively “It just wants your attention, that’s all. And you and all these stupid people have fallen for its tricks. You are all a bunch of suckers. When you have finished making a fool of yourself you’ll find me at home. And don’t you bother waking me up. There’ll be no cleansing ceremony for you ever! At least not from me!”

  She wades back to the peninsula.

  “She is giving birth, Saluni. That’s what she is doing over there.”

  She stops and glares at him.

  “You are lying, man,” she says. “You are such a liar. Liar! Liar! Liar!”

  She runs blindly through the water, and almost falls. Then she stops and glares at him again just before she reaches the tip of the peninsula.

  “And by the way,” she says, “I am going to the tavern. And don’t you dare complain about it.”

  The Whale Caller watches her disappear among the people who are precariously crowding his peninsula. Then he goes back to blowing his horn.

  The struggle continues until late in the afternoon. Just before dusk the child is born under water, but close enough to the surface for the spectators to see the tail coming out first, and then the whole body The newborn calf is helped by the midwives to come up to the surface for the essential breath. It is white and the Whale Caller estimates that it is about five metres long. The midwives are very protective. They help the young one as they all follow Sharisha to a sheltered bay at a nearby estuary where she nurses the baby and for the first time it suckles.

  June. The southern rights have long migrated from the breeding grounds in the warm waters of Hermanus to the cold feeding grounds in the southern seas. When the whales left in January Sharisha refused to go. She lives at the sheltered bay near the estuary, a haven she used to share with other calving mothers. But they are all gone now. Except Sharisha. By the end of February the last of the off-season whales were gone. Saluni was hoping that finally she would have peace of mind and the Whale Caller would regain his sanity, but Sharisha surprised even the Whale Caller when she decided to stay in Hermanus all year round. This, of course, presents a change of lifestyle on her part. For instance, during the whole breeding period there was no feeding. She relied on the blubber she had accumulated from the last feeding season in the southern seas. Now it is time to eat once more, and she misses the regular diet of krill and plankton that is found in the polar regions. Like Bryde’s whales, which normally remain in these warm waters throughout the year, she feasts on schooling fish—another source of excitement for the people of Hermanus. Feeding activity by southern rights is a rare sight off the coast of the Western Cape.

  Saluni seems to have given up on the Whale Caller. She leads her life, he leads his. They meet at night, share the same bed, but only their behinds touch. They wake up in the morning, go through the motions of ablutions, and then go their separate ways. She goes to the mansion or to the taverns. Or even to Mr. Yodd. He goes to the sea, to follow the movements of Sharisha and her baby, and just to watch them in wonder. He plays the horn sometimes and Sharisha responds by flapping her flippers. But most times he just enjoys watching the two of them. The baby seems to grow bigger every day. It has changed from white to
a dark grey. Its callosities are beginning to take shape, and they promise to look like the mother’s. The baby likes to ride on Sharisha’s back, much like the way African women carry their children.

  The Whale Caller enjoys watching Sharisha open her mouth in the broad smile that displays the baleen that looks like teeth. Then she scoops up a mouthful of water and, using the baleen as a sieve, strains the plankton from the water. It is different from the plankton of the southern seas, but since she has decided to stand her ground and not migrate, she will just have to acquire a taste for it.

  Sometimes Saluni appears above the crag as he watches mother and child. She descends in a deliberate manner, making sure that he sees that she is ignoring him. She goes to where Lunga Tubu is sitting, near the stilts of the restaurant, taking a break from his singing and running away from waiters. She fusses over the boy, mothering him in full view of the Whale Caller. She aims to demonstrate to the misguided man that she has people she cares about too.

  The Whale Caller is oblivious of her demonstrations. Especially now that Sharisha has begun to sing again—perhaps teaching the young one the art. He often joins in with his kelp horn. He becomes enraged when loud underwater bangs produced by seismic surveys interfere with the songs. Oil and gas explorations are carried out at this time of the year, since the government and the exploration companies believe it is safe; there are no whales to upset.