The sea drew back hissing over its destruction, drew in a last tortured, foaming breath, and subsided to a gloomy calm, and the wind subsided too, leaving such a rarefied stillness that a sob could have shattered it.
This brittle peace lasted only briefly. There was a patter of drops. At once it became pouring rain. Dense sheets came racing on over a sea that had totally forgotten its brief calm and heaved swollen and confused as the tide dragged it one way and the wind pushed it another. Pouring rain, gouts of water, hard and vertical, drops that mutilated the surface of the street into pockmarks, water that streamed and scoured out and washed away what the wind had forgotten to blow away and ran off in clattering furrows. A thorough, purposeful, seething rain. A storm rain with a mission.
Someone must have heard me moaning. Someone must have heard me whimpering where I lay trapped under a branch of a kudu-berry tree, a tree that, under orders from the storm, wanted to claim me as sacrifice because I had always resolutely ignored it and never tried to seek the favor of its spirit, because I ignore all spirits save that which lives in me. Probably because I did not know better. Perhaps. Perhaps I was obstinately defiant where I had brought nothing of my own with me and local rituals appeared without content, and I created my own rituals for my own indwelling spirit and without preknowledge went and picked up a white shell and a black shell. Placate the spirit of the earth, the spirit of the house, of the air, bring an offering of atonement, recite rhymes, mumble a formula, placate the spirit of the tree, he listens, he notes your gesture of sacrifice, he will watch over you, only be careful when you talk – no, that meant nothing to me. I smiled at the gestures. I walked nonchalantly past all the kudu-berry trees, which had after all been planted here and there on street corners only for their fierce autumn colors and had not come to grow here for my sake. I walked past them head in the air and offered them nothing. No, I laughed at the other women who bowed before them and reverently set down a handful of millet grains on the great leaf of a fever tree beside the silent tree trunk and muttered over them. I did not mutter at all, not for any tree spirit in the world. My tongue is meant for me, my tongue, my mouth, my whole self is mine. I pressed my ear against the grey-brown trunk of the kudu-berry and listened attentively to hear if its spirit had anything to say, but I heard only wood slowly groaning, slowly expanding the chronicle of its year rings, and I knew he would not have anything to say one day about a woman who once pressed her head against him, just as little as he would have stories to tell about other simpletons who begged his blessings. This was my considered opinion long, long before I myself was looked upon as the spirit of a tree.
And then the kudu-berry punished you, my benefactor joked, he who sent his slaves to free me from the branch after he had been notified of the accident right in front of his house. He gave me shelter in his slave quarters till the broken bone I had suffered healed. But even then before I was literally back on my feet he became my third owner.
So he must have found delight in me. So I must have afforded him pleasure. One evening he came to inquire about the condition of the chance patient in his care, and looked surprised when I laughed at the superstition about the kudu-berry tree, and drew me out on my short history, as self-contained and boring as the history of most of the slave girls in the city. In a brief and concise transaction he bought me, and my stay began in all humility in the high residence with the terrace roof built of stone from a far-off quarry, with a view over the low-lying city and the sea, with neat outbuildings and well-tended inner courtyards. My benefactor often summoned me. We spoke. The night came when he slept with me. He found me charming. More often than he had sexual intercourse with me, he ordered me to undress and simply talk to him quietly, while he kept looking at me as one views a pretty sunset or something like that. In the same way he looked at his son’s serval cat. When his bouts of fever came over him, only I was allowed to stay with him, and I sat and fanned him.
Fellow slaves of my second owner, who had stayed behind in misery – I had no chance to grieve for you. It had happened that the hurricane elected me. I was in agreement with what was befalling me. I hankered for nothing, I moped about nothing, I could not get excited about anything in my past, and in fact was unwilling to talk about it. It was wasted time. For I was becoming possessed with myself.
Now for the first time I discovered beauty, my own and that of bunches of flowers, and of soapstone statuettes and jade clasps and porcelain glaze, and of batiks dyed with indigo, and of lovely silk, light as a breath or heavy and stiff and interwoven with gold. It was almost as if I were learning again to talk. I occupied myself in refined tasks like complicated embroidery, which was taught to me by older slave women, and the preparation of dishes for a banquet for a roomful of visitors, and the tasteful serving thereof. In the last-named I excelled. I learned to converse quite differently, with a metallic tone of irony at the tail end of a remark. I learned to make my voice dove-sweet when the conversation became pointed and too many quick remarks, like slim arrowheads, were being shot off all together. I learned to laugh with abandon.
Above all I learned to find pleasure in how to look desirable and in the power it was obviously supposed I could exercise to my own advantage in my benefactor owner’s room. He gave me an ivory bracelet which fitted around my left upper arm and which I shamelessly showed off. Often I referred cattishly, when he was in the right mood, to the other slave girls’ most glaring defects: to thin calves, knobbly shoulders, missing teeth, breasts out of proportion, jutting chins, fingers as rough as a chimpanzee’s; and though he playfully agreed, and although he claimed that such shortcomings were limited and made little difference on the couch of pleasure, as he jokingly called his sleeping mat, I knew that what I had said remained in his thoughts. But I got only one bracelet from him.
Nevertheless. Nevertheless. My life shone. I hummed as I rubbed my skin with coconut oil. Only later did I find out that he had two kinds of slaves in service, one kind for their looks, the other kind for their readiness to serve.
So what was the source of melancholy that sometimes attacked me? As I looked out from the terrace over the sparkling bay and saw the dhows and skiffs wink there, as I looked over the roofs towards the haziness of the horizon and grew dulled with a stupid restlessness here within me and the screech of a gull frightened me, what were my hands doing in front of my face? What could I have to feel sorrowful about? Now that the fondness of my newest owner, wealthy widower and foremost citizen, like cool moss coolly and softly protected me and I felt cozily hidden in his care, not just feeling safe but surmising the sparkle of a new time of life for me here in the looser relationship in which I now lived and in which my talents dared to unfold and there was little to restrict me – why did the tears well up in my eyes and the city tremble in refracted colors? Why did my head sink on my chest? Why did I try to make myself as insignificant as possible, look for a dark corner, pretend absence when I was called?
I sat, tiny as a beetle, and whined. I was so full of held-in whining that I was ready to burst. I wished that I had a snout with which to burrow into the earth and disappear, or into the bark of a tree where I could lurk inconspicuously, pressed flat.
This was the mood I knew best. I knew it from long back. I have known it here, too, I admit honestly to you, trusty baobab, confidant, home, fort, water source, medicine chest, honey holder, my refuge, my last resort before a change of residence over which I shall have no control at all, my midpoint, guardian of my passionate outbursts, leafless coagulated obesity winter and summer life-giving rocking cupola of leaves and flowers and sour seeds that I press to my cheek (the grey-green fur strokes my skin), that I break open to roast your kernels and devour them, hanging like fulfillment from you, directed to the earth, waiting. You protect me. I revere you. That is to say, the fieldmouse and I inhabit you, but only I revere you, I think, only I.
If I could write, I would take up a porcupine quill and scratch your enormous belly full from top to bottom. I would
clamber up as far as your branches and carve notches in your armpits to make you laugh. Big letters. Small letters. In a script full of lobes and curls, in circumambient lines I write round and round you, for I have so much to tell of a trip to a new horizon that became an expedition to a tree. Here comes a rhythmic pause. Oh, I have learned much from the poets, I am versed in the techniques, in the patching together of lyric and epic. Rhythmic pause and on roll the thoughts, round and round your trunk the poetic history of a crazy eagerness that was finally all we could cling to, stripped of material things and emaciated and tired to death of ourselves in the endeavor that transported us along, ballast of the past.
Thus I decorate you line after line with our hallucinations so that you can digest, outgrow, make smooth this ridiculousness, preserve the useless information in your thick skin till the day of your spontaneous combustion. And satisfied I put down the porcupine quill and stand back to regard my handiwork, hands on my hips. You are full of my scars, baobab. I did not know I had so many.
If I could write. Even then, melancholy would take possession of me. Wearily I take the path to the river, there in the cool to fill my being with the sounds of my sister-being, to refresh myself in the modest scents of pigeonwood and mitzeerie, to let my gaze end in a tangle of monkey ropes and fern arches and the slowly descending leaves, and to find rest, all day long, all night long.
There is always an ape to defile a sanctuary. How irritated I get when animals do not stay within the limits of their animal nature but want to address me on my level. For instance, the troop of samangos in the top of the water-berry tree. As if they were being sold short by me, as if I represented a great threat, as if I did not also belong, but had to be driven off with reproaches and deep warnings. Glare at me impudently indeed. Reprimand me indeed. Confront me and show disapproval indeed.
So too the grey parrot that my benefactor kept. Cool disapproval, ridicule, derision in the little eyes. If he wished you good morning he meant to push off, and the eyes became small as dots. He turned language inside out so that the meaning fell out and nothing could be said. He fouled his cage. He woke the whole household with his noise and challenged you when you hushed him with such a clear whistle that it split the air with its purity; and he, the prisoner, triumphed. That he with his puny bird intellect could learn how to triumph while I was plagued with depression, and acted uncertainly, and showed that I felt hurt, and defended myself with acrimony, said sneering things behind their backs about the two sons and one daughter who still lived in the house, made myself unloved among the slaves.
Wholly different my relation with the tame serval of the house. How often did I not wish I could scrape together the courage to blandly slip the catch on the door of the parrot’s cage so that he could fly out, the idiot, so that the serval should suddenly jump up from behind a bush somewhere and slap him unconscious in the air and grab him. Then he would carry him off in his mouth and grindingly eat him up, grindingly, till there was nothing left but one grey feather and one red. End of parrot.
Down below in the courtyard walked the speckled cat. He scraped his cheek against a plane bush and a scattering of scarlet, jasper-green and black blossoms sifted down on to him and grey-white tatters of bark stuck to his snout. He snorted in surprise. Then he trotted off, taking a shortcut across the paving, with decidedly and certainly a most important objective in mind. He paid no attention to my call. He had pinned a gecko with his forepaw, I saw, and was considering what to do next; first he looked up at me, then with cat-specific dissimulation at his prey. I stared at him. I could stare for long into his changeable eyes and imagine we were one of spirit. He yawned hugely with tongue curled back and as he yawned looked terrifyingly cruel. Yet this illusion was enough to make me understand that we were not playmates and that there was a distance to be maintained between us, which I would keep, I promised him, and stroked his fur and scratched behind his ears. Black-snout-sweet-face, your self-sufficiency amused me. Perhaps we had more in common than you would think.
As a kitten he was made a present to my owner’s youngest son, who as a young boy had apparently collected wild animals as a hobby. In the time of which I speak the son’s interest was concentrated mainly on fishing and one barely saw him at home, for from early till late he was aboard his extremely expensive proa. But when he was here I enjoyed his wonderfully healthy roughness and his boyishness, and enjoyed all his pranks. Young frolicsome man, most attractive, and so serious and laughably touchy when it came to his hobby. I consciously call it his hobby because I did not believe his father would allow him to choose fishing as a career, unless perhaps, unless it could be administered as a subdivision of the family’s business and the boy could then, as befitted a scion of the wealthy, do business and not haul in the nets like a poor simple fisherman.
Now I knew why I felt depressed. I had seen the procession. Well, I knew they were to be expected. Knew they had to turn up some time or other, and therefore went up to the root every blessed day to keep watch, to keep an eye out to see what I had promised myself I would not look at. The terrible procession, nerve-rackingly slow. I saw them coming from afar from my look-out post and beheld, fascinated despite myself, the signs of brokenness that rent me, crushed my spirit, made me stare despairingly, made me note their fate helplessly every time and keep my sympathies in check, force myself to joke about them so that I could forget and repress. My eyes followed them from where they appeared out of the bushes and bulrushes at the seam of the unraveling residential quarters and wove through the harsh planes of shadow and sunlight on the streets, sometimes disappearing from my field of vision, but I knew the route too well and settled my unwilling gaze in advance on the point where they must reappear; at the head of a few of the men in service, armed but on foot like their human prey, followed by a primitive sedan chair on which the slave hunter sat at rest, rocking on the shoulders of two of his captives, the big boss no longer half-asleep as on the immeasurably long bush path that they had all covered, but wide-awake now that the moment, the most important moment was about to dawn, followed by those in chains, some with packs of leopard skins, elephant tusks, rhinoceros horns and provisions on their heads, their faces twisted as the neck irons chafed them, followed by the young women and tender little girls shackled to each other with lighter chains. So they trod reluctantly on to the place of destination. At the tail a rearguard of more armed men.
I followed them. I knew where. I took a shortcut through side streets and alleys and across open unbuilt spaces and arrived at the square near the beach before them, and hid behind the tattered dusty castor-oil trees there and the scanty undergrowth around. The arrival of a fresh consignment of slaves was proceeding normally and attracted no one’s attention. Only I was all unwilling eyes.
Clinking, my fellows in fate arrived. The untouched girls, my little sisters. The young eunuchs, no longer men, no longer human beings, the survivors of a raid deep into the interior, my own people half-people may not be people, the compelled, the pitifully strong healthy products. They stood still. They were allowed to sit.
The sedan chair was set down. The slave hunter stood up stiffly and stretched, a pleasant long stretch, before he got off his chair and turned his steps towards the city to discuss business over a bowl of fig wine and a pipe of hashish. He was an old man, I saw. He had grey patches of beard at the point of his chin, but he strode quickly as if refreshed by the sea air and cheered up by a sense of relief that the difficult undertaking had gone off successfully as far as the coast. The guards stayed at their post. I wondered if they had been here before. I wondered if the complement of the slaves was full and how many had grown so weak from exhaustion along the road that they had been left behind as unserviceable, and how many of them had perished of marsh fever, and how many had grown rebellious and been killed. Those who were left now lay in silence on the ground. Even some of the guards had sat down.
On the beach a group of urchins were kicking sand at a dead hammerhead shark. They ru
shed about and barked and growled, pretending to be dogs, and laughed and jumped with exuberance over the shark. They laughed their joy out. They lost interest in the leathery carcass and careered further up the beach looking for fun, picked switches and chased each other further along the foamline of the waves, splashing in the shallows. Brief happiness disappeared from the air. The sultry stillness again closed in.
A few days ago I had seen the hammerhead shark leaping in spasms there on the beach where fish-drying racks cast their grid shadows. It was trying to lift its whole body up from the sand as if wanting to swim upwards into the sky. Sometimes one eye was buried in the sand, sometimes the other; one saw doom, the other spied hope, and in uncertainty the poor thing struggled. Spasmodic jerks, fanatical till death, eyes that till death bisected the world. Would he, even in death, have to reconcile one half with the other half to find his way in that haze? Deeper and deeper he steered himself on into death with twisting movements of the head. To the left hung death as a grey apparition, to the right hung death as a grey apparition, no choice for him, but perhaps he fabricated his own death and chose the total nothing of seeing nothing more, and nothing has neither tinge nor grain nor substance.
I was not permitted to offer refreshments to the new arrivals. I had already tried that in the past and been chased away. Nevertheless I went closer. In my worker’s language I softly welcomed them and expressed my commiseration; but it seemed that no one heard or understood me. Nevertheless I talked to them because I knew of nothing else, and most of all of nothing more effective, to do.
The Expedition to the Baobab Tree Page 3
