The Expedition to the Baobab Tree

by Wilma Stockenstrom

  I am a melancholic but I do not stop searching, said my ever-voyaging, ever-traveling, my always charming stranger when the eldest son made him the offer. I like to reconnoiter. I like to discover. I cannot get enthusiastic about humanity, but I do not stop testing and do not stop searching.

  No, let me not curse him. He should have known that I had no choice but to follow him, for I was not a searcher, I was one driven from circumstance to circumstance, and whoever bought me had to keep me, and this time would keep me. Sometimes it was pleasantly advantageous and easy to be property. I was simply someone together with someone else.

  Even before the death of the youngest son, the eldest son had conceived the fantastical plan and begun making arrangements for a brand new kind of expedition. No one had ever heard of such a thing, and our city dwellers were not uninformed. News from across the seas and from the interior reached them regularly. As wide-awake traders they were skeptical about whatever was supported by nothing but guesswork and whatever was, in their considered opinion, the idle talk of poets. The dream of the unknown. The enticement of the foreign. Playing games with knowledge. For such purposes the city had its marginal figures, the subtle word artists and the storytellers on the squares to whom the children listen open-mouthed and whose entertainment value, including the word artists’, rose and fell according to whether they succeeded in exciting or boring listener and reader. Yes, they, the colorful madmen. And if a rich man’s heir wanted to act stupidly romantic, wanted to prove that an overland route ought to exist, then it meant that there would be opportunities for preying in his absence. It meant that the trade contacts so carefully initiated and forged by his father could now freely be grabbed and taken over by whoever was sly and quick enough. No one expected competition from the middle son, seeing that he had long since settled into a remarkably profitable brothel enterprise behind the glitter and show of the gold-trading business that he had already begun to manage several seasons before the father’s death.

  And then there was the unfortunate accident to the youngest son, the carefree one. So many disasters struck this house. On the death of his father there followed the quarrel between the eldest son and the spiteful unmarried daughter. She left the family home fuming. Now her dried-out spirit nourished itself on thoughts of vengeance. They swelled up her whole existence from early in the morning till late at night as she intrigued and schemed to bring the eldest son to his knees, even if it meant that she and the married sisters and her two brothers should all go under. She had the look of someone on the hunt. She had the smell of someone who had become cancerous, and whatever she came in contact with she polluted with the venom and the cunning in her breath. She was contaminated with bitterness.

  I stayed out of the way of her breath and attached myself with softening heart to the youngest son, to whom I had been bequeathed. He was good and kind and not interested in the slightest in the slaves and slave girls and the other duties he had inherited, and went his way unperturbed with an engaging smile and a casual greeting.

  No, I did not believe the stories that he sought out his death because of a disappointment in love. Someone who knew the way through the coral reef as well as he did does not simply stumble, so whispered the slaves to each other, and the mourners in the house. Two fatalities between new moon and full moon. How long is the life of a man? From one wink to another of the lightning. From the fuller swelling of the drop to its fall. So long is the life of man. From move to checkmate. And heads were shaken and hands were wrung – yes, so long is life. And the young tree was chopped down, and the voyage was short and the boat capsized and sank, and the mourners piously got through with all such nonsense as befitted the occasion.

  No, he was not the type who willfully stepped on a stonefish. Perhaps one of his comrades called his name to draw his attention to a school of rabbitfish in the purple deep-sea water beyond the reef, and he looked up and staggered on a sharp coral point and lost his balance. That was more likely. That, too, was what his comrades said. They brought him home on a stretcher, in his death as slender and beautiful as he was when he left the house in the morning to go and catch fish in that remote bay. Helplessly they had had to watch how, after they had carried him back to the beach, he had thrown himself down without control and kicked, and how foam had come from his mouth, and how he had then grown still, glorious again after the brief mad interlude that had helped him from life to death, again in death as perfect and untouched as he had been in life, a youth who was contained in himself, I reckon, and in his self-absorbed charm had never experienced either sincere friendship or sworn enmity.

  I counted up what I stood to lose by his death and what I stood to gain. For the umpteenth time my future was being decided on a whim. I waited tensely. For I knew this fear. Were he and I not old friends? If anyone was ever true to me, then it was he, perhaps because he had become part of me and accompanied my heartbeats as he accompanied my breathing, because he sat in the white of my eye, in the trembling of my fingers. My companion, who had come to acquaint himself with me on my forced march, who had openly made himself at home alongside me and blown his suffocating breath over me – here he was again.

  The day after my benefactor’s death, when I, soggy with love and confused, had gone in search of the stranger, then too the fear was with me, and it was fear and longing that propelled me forward; and uncertainty, the only certainty I could always count on, led me to streets where mold made the walls break out in multicolored sores and the gates hung askew and rotten and I recognized a building, I recognized some of the slaves who went in and out there with baskets on their backs. It was my previous owner’s spice warehouse and I decided to visit my girlfriend, and I arrived in my splendid silk robe and my new quick way of talking, my precious manners, and there I stood awkward with embarrassment, confined within my affectations.

  She sat with her legs crossed on the ground in front of the dilapidated hut scratching in the sand with a stick. The hens and chicks scoured as before in the yard, around the huts and house, and around the mango trees where fallen fruit stank sourly. She did not seem to mind the chicken shit and the filth. A naked baby with snotsmears on its top lip crept about on one side and stuck filthy sand into its mouth. I asked if it was hers. She did not reply. She gazed at me. I wanted to pick up the baby but thought better of it. I considered what I could give him. My friend gazed at me. When I walked off, I felt that piercing gaze on me. I felt someone throw something that hit me. I turned around. I saw her picking up handfuls of sand and throwing them at me. I called her name. The baby, also hit by the sand, laughed with delight. Then he began to cry. I walked off, overcome. The baby cried with rage.

  I went back past the slaughterhouse and the tall palm trees there that tried not to see anything. I walked past the market women and the slave square and the skiffs drawn up on the beach, their masts snapped back like comical antennae. I saw the sole dhow frisking on the swell and called out again my shrill inquiry about the stranger and saw again gestures saying no, and I turned back to the great dreary silent house where bundles of jasmine bulged over the garden walls and put their scent in service of the dead.

  How did my benefactor come by his wealth? I once asked the stranger, when he and I were all that remained. I stroked the pea-shaped swellings of the scarification marks on his forehead. My finger glided over them. Two mad pioneers that we had become, now two devoted to each other.

  How? I asked again in the intervals between a lourie’s abuse. My finger glided over his lips, purple as a fig. How thin he had become, it struck me. His cheeks so sunken. He lay with eyes closed in a hollow full of soft moldering leaves.

  Busybody, he tried to hush me. I kept on asking.

  Your kind made him the most powerful person in the city, the stranger then said. You ought to feel flattered, actually. Your benefactor was a connoisseur in a class of his own and seldom bought lower-grade material. In your case he was absolutely right. Look, he indicated, your physical proportions are of a
rare symmetry.

  He wanted to stroke me. I pulled my arm away.

  How did he come by his wealth?

  Again the stranger came with evasive explanations of aesthetic considerations that had led the benefactor-merchant to seek perfection, a balance between beautiful externals and the intrinsic, and that had also led him to view his slaves as a collection of art objects, meticulously purchased with an eye to investment and sometimes disposed of individually at a profit after he had refined them through education, as he had admittedly done in my case. It was then pointed out to me that my benefactor had displayed a remarkable appreciation of my qualities, to such an extent that he had never disposed of me and even allowed me at his deathbed.

  That’s not how he got rich, I objected. He must already have had a lot of money to afford such a hobby. Where did this man come by the means for it?

  And what if I said he was a brigand?

  Then that is what he was.

  A slave raider?

  Everyone is a robber of something. Robbers are all I know.

  Am I one?

  How should I know?

  What if I were?

  Then you are.

  I rob money, I don’t rob people, said the stranger. I rob on the open seas. I rob before I am robbed, before I become booty.

  Like me, I said.

  Yes.

  Did my benefactor hunt us in the interior?

  No, the stranger laughed, that is not how one becomes rich. The outlay is not worth the trouble and the profit. Rather be an ivory hunter, for your product is something dead, more easily transported. People, on the other hand, die like flies, and have to be fed, and try to escape, and your expenditure on guards, on food, on weapons, is tremendous. Human loss is comparable to capital loss. No, it is the exceptional type who becomes a slave hunter. And then you run the danger too of being killed and robbed in turn. That is how your benefactor set to work. He had spies everywhere, and messengers. Then he ambushed the slave raiders and their convoys somewhere near the coast, when all of them, captives and guards, were tired to death and offered little resistance. That was when he was young. He put together enough to build his house, where he could live peacefully as an established prominent citizen, turned his back on brigandage, and concentrated on gold, ambergris and wood, on copper, to which the rich people of the city attached more value than gold, and on his hobby.

  Then the stranger lay with his eyes shut, silent, as though exhausted by talking.

  I felt helpless with humiliation but tried not to cry, or not to cry visibly or audibly. Possession and loving are concepts that damn each other. I did not want to be as he and the others, all the others in my life, from my earliest memories of huts and mother and security in a misty, sultry forest basin, from my memories of the lascivious man who bought me to deflower me, and the spice merchant whose labors I had to endure grinding my teeth, I did not want to be as they all regarded me, all of them, my benefactor with his fatherliness and this one too, this man whom I embraced with my whole body and allowed to come into me time after time so as to be absolutely full of him, absolutely convulsively full and rich and fulfilled, floating, seed satisfied, making him, self-content, part of me, of me exclusively – he too, he who had just described me analytically and disposed of me like an object in a dispensation, even he, I was different from what they all thought, utterly different from what anyone might think, I rejected all the opinions, all the observations and reprimands of all the women in my life, what did they know of who I was, what did any of them know.

  I remembered the poets’ sarcastic remarks about women in general, but at the time I had not taken them to heart: to tell the truth, I joined in the so-called sophisticated disparagement, and this kind of superficial display of lust did not strike me as vile and immediately to be condemned. Vain. Vainly and frivolously I participated. Clothed in luxurious fabric that enveloped me like a soft caress and with saffian sandals on my feet, quickly adept in all the little arts of seduction, I joined in the talk and laughter. I felt, I knew I was in my flower. I laughed without reserve. I sent laughter upward and outward and picked myself the pale purple double stars of the wild chestnut blossoms to stick in my hair.

  My benefactor smiled. He found it attractive. When I put my arms around him it was like protecting a child. Crazy, when he was the possessor, but it was so. He propped his head against my shoulder like, and with the innocence of, a child. And in the wink of an eye he changed and became wiser than I, scolded me, took over and initiated the caresses, and when we had intercourse he was both father and son and I mother and trustful daughter. We knew everything together, completely, wishing for nothing more. Until later on he grew so weak, so pathetically emaciated and listless as the fever got the upper hand that he scarcely made his appearance in the dining room any longer but chose to remain lying on cool palm mats in his room. Afternoon rain outdoors, the cool brought on by the evenings and followed in the nights by the sharp sparkling of stars as a bonus, the white splash of moonlight over him – all this did little to change his state of mind. In every corner of the room the eye of death glittered. Sometimes he stared absently out over the sea and declined the extract of bitter false-thorn pods that one of us held out to him in a delicate little porcelain bowl. Likewise ignored the prescriptions of the city’s best doctors, uttered his thanks laconically in a hoarse voice and made no use of them.

  In my perfect arms he died, supported between my perfect thighs, leaning against my perfect breasts, he and I, father, mother, child, owner, valued art object and servant, lovers.

  It had happened too long ago to wish to hate him. There was no time to hate anyone and plan revenge. The veld threatened us. I turned back to the stranger whose gentle nature I had also found out about on this interminably long journey to the mirage of a city in a blooming red desert. Where I had earlier allowed myself to be charmed by his wit, I learned during this time to appreciate his humanity and helpfulness. The circumstances were certainly not conducive to deep conversations embroidered with light-hearted thesis and antithesis, and in those days it seldom happened that the two of us spoke together. I think the encircling silence was too great. It compelled our respect. No, it is silly to think so, for in truth we were usually too tired to begin a conversation. I could not deny that things were going badly for us. We shuffled one behind the other through the hot region, our tired gaze measured the distance to the next spot of coolness and the relief of a roof of leaves, and though we knew we could not afford it, we lingered longer and longer in this way in the shadows of trees. Like now.

  We exchanged apologetic looks. I took his hand and pressed his fingers to my mouth.

  We had to be going. It was no good. We had to make up our minds. We thought of the alluring city and everything that would be awaiting us there. We filled in the scanty information provided by the hunters with our imagination, and the deeper we went into the interior, the further from home, the more desolate the bush and the slower and more unwilling our bodies, the more richly we festooned the images we had called up. We did not see that we had begun to pretend that what we wanted must exist. We referred to the city as if it were an accomplished fact that we would soon reach it, just another day and another day, just another couple of days and another couple of days, then we would see it lying on the horizon, flat and shining at the foot of mountains consisting of pure rose quartz.

  I dreamed of that rose quartz. My dreams were stuffed full of rose quartz. I could barely move among the craggy pieces. The floors of my dreams were rose quartz, the pillars and the ceiling of my dreams. I peered out between the rose quartz at the rest of the world. I withdrew into rose quartz and nodded contentedly.

  But first we had to cross the swamp, the hunters had said.

  The more burningly I longed to see the city at the foot of the rose quartz mountains, the longer I wanted to postpone the sight of the swamp between. For I did not believe the description of white and green water lilies arranged on dew-clear water wherev
er you looked, and golden reeds to which the tiniest red and silver painted frogs clung, and spiders that tumbled from the glitter of their webs when the dugouts bent the grass.

  I had seen what a swamp looked like when we left the sea behind. I felt its oppressive air upon me and its sharp smell irritated my nostrils. Its endless green expanse stretching into the haze enclosed me. I heard a sucking and a bubbling and saw the snouts of crocodiles lying in the bruised mud. I saw mosquitoes in a mist above the pools. I saw mudskippers creep halfway out to stare boldly at me. And the worst was the silence that I vaguely recognized from earlier on. It was the oppressiveness that had been lying in wait for me on a journey of horror so long ago I should scarcely have been able to report on it. But I recognized this silence. It was the supreme wide silence that prevailed over the noisy croaking of the frogs. The silence had a width of weight that muted your appetite for life and then after a never-ending day tried to press you into the mud and bury you with the wingbeat of night. Was it the immeasurability that made yellow sweat drops burst out on your forehead and disturbed your breathing? I recognized it. There was also fear, a sticky fear that shut off your throat. I recognized the fear. In what ways could I still experience it? I knew the fear of bloodthirstiness and of isolation and of ignorance and of punishment and of bewilderment. I knew him.

  This fear was part of the air. It hung as far as the coast where the city of my various owners commenced with shanties and pole fences, with herds of untended goats and spill-off channels full of nightsoil, the busy commercial city to which I was kidnapped.

  I had already tried to imagine a kind of existence in which I was not a possession, but it did not come easily to me. What would have become of me in the land of my origin? Would I, for example, have walked, sat, stood differently? Would I have entered into other kinds of friendship, accepted wholly different opinions? Would I have clung to religion? Would I have had a husband, and children by him only? Children I would have raised till they could stand on their own feet? Suddenly I thought: I would have been able to be a grandmother. Grandchildren playing around me in a yard full of tame guineafowl.