The Expedition to the Baobab Tree

by Wilma Stockenstrom

  Chased somewhere by the intimidation maneuver of a baboon sentry, I had picked up the first beads somewhere where a crack in the rocks turned into a crevice, somewhere in the dust among intertwined dry dead tubes of stalks, grass tassels, calices, petals, roots, somewhere not so long ago.

  Humanware. Humans been here. An incalculable distance between me and those who had left behind beads and potsherds, irrecoverable time, unbridgeable estrangement, insuperable my loneness intensified by this small discovery, interminable the continuation of solitude, surrounded as I am by those who keep themselves apart and for whom I exist, but only as an apparition.

  As an apparition I throve, became rounded and plump again from eating fungi and carrion flower stalks, python flesh, marulas, livelong berries, waterbuck liver. Whatever a winter and a summer had to offer to the eye and gathering bag and the bow and arrow of the little people, I too was fed on. There was no question of hardship any more, rather one of lazy overabundance.

  Whom to thank, I sometimes ask myself. My water spirit is silent. So I thank the honey-bee. I thank the tree that houses him. I thank the earth that gives the tree its footing, with great difficulty, because it grows upside down. I thank the rain that descends to the very roots of the tree so that it can drink water and grow leaves and flowers. But the water spirit is silent. Baobab around whom the bees dance by day and around whose sensitive flowers unfolding like moons so many bats flap by night, in whose forks the rain pours rainwater for me, my water spirit is silent about you. Once I found an injured bat on the ground beside the daylight-filled crevice. At first I thought it was a funny flat frog shuffling backwards out there. Then I noticed it had fur. Then I saw the ears. And went down to the water. When I came back it was gone.

  I searched the place where I had picked up those first beads. Continually, naggingly I searched.

  The bat was gone. A necklace of ostrich eggshell fragments the color of wild pear blossoms and a handful of medlars were waiting for me.

  Then latish one afternoon I discovered the pale knot of a rock fig in an overgrown cleft, and overhastily climbed the stone ridges, hauled myself up on loose hanging roots, and arrived on a small plateau. The steep side I had scrambled up was at an angle to both sunrise and sunset and offered a view across a long, virtually empty slope with clumps of trees. A few giraffes. The dust of a mixed herd of snorting, barking wildebeest and zebra. At the time I noticed nothing more. A flight of birds, yes, that too, swiftly dissolving into the distance. The wind was present everywhere. It rustled steadily as if it were the companion of silence. That was all I found in a thorough investigation of the plateau: wind and the background of wind, silence. I made believe this was the guardian who had wiped out everything, and woe to him who came sniffing around. Why scratch open, dig up, expose, reflect and deduce? Let be, just let be. Here there had been perhaps.

  A city, perhaps, with ruler and subjects. I did not know what they came here to seek, what made them build their houses here of all places, with a view over endlessness, and whether they knew of the great sea that lapped around the horizons, and whether they imagined their various gods in the heavenly bodies or elsewhere, whether they observed ceremonies in their honor from which they departed, eyes glassy with faith and hearts full of good intentions, and whether they knew beforehand of their certain death. Or was death a game of chance to them, sometimes complicated by sicknesses, sometimes coming at a stroke, but in any event the actual beginning of life without the nuisance of a body and the time-consuming needs thereof, and if death is life, then they still live. Here. Right here.

  The wind died down. In the unbelievable silence one of the big stones rolled down the cliffside, bouncing, leaping as if performing a trick, fantastic and soundless, and came to rest on the level below. The soundlessness gave me a fright. Now I no longer heard anything. Suddenly I knew that if I were now to speak, something tremendous would happen. The dead would arise, or no, they would become visible to me, and time would somersault, the earth would tilt, capsize, and hang upside down in the direction of limitless darkness and the spirit of the water would voyage into eternal space and forever be lost.

  Then I felt something creeping in my ear. It tickled and itched and I shook my head. An ant. Something. An insect. I crushed it with my finger. And as if I had spent some time in a swoon, I now noticed that the sky had clouded over and that it was going to rain at any moment. Pell-mell I cleared out, possessed by fear and determined to get to the baobab before the lightning began to flash, but above all determined to be back in time in the time in which I belonged, for as I ran and sometimes stumbled too I felt behind my back another world growing, I felt that what had existed was extending its realm faster and faster, and felt that soon, in the very act of running, I would move in a wholly other time.

  I reached the baobab with beating heart and a stabbing pain in the spleen that doubled me over, and I squatted in the opening and saw the rosette patterns that first raindrops make as they hit the dust.

  So I yielded to the powers of my environment, or, to put it less despondently, I learned to live with them, as I learned to live with the veld and the animals and insects, with the choice of paths in reality and in my sleep, and with the presence of people who kept me apart. It is a strange experience to share a life without contact, and I often ask myself whether they are displaying charity towards me or bringing tribute. I try to behave fittingly. Acknowledge to myself that there is nothing for me to do but accept my fate as pampered captive and show myself grateful accordingly. It is as if the presence of others aggravates my loneness, as if the distance between myself and other people has become greater now that they exist in tangible proximity. I see them walking in the distance, I see girls playing with a monkey orange, throwing it back and forth to each other, I see women carrying babies on their protruding buttocks, men with wrinkled stomachs and legs thin as sticks, all of them yellow as a tortoise’s belly, and I hold my hand over my mouth to prevent myself from calling someone nearer. I hear the click sounds they utter, I mutter something to myself that sounds like the language of my childhood days. Words that had got lost take on dim shape. Mother I see before me, father, brothers, sisters. I see huts and very high trees with trunks pleated like billowing skirts and green foliage. Mother I see again. Warmth and softness, a slimness, long breasts with sturdy nipples. Voices I hear vaguely and other noises too, a chopping, a crackling. I remember suddenly dogs that never bark, and noisy apes, and there was gaiety, I remember, when meat was portioned out, ape-meat too, yes, and I had had a doll made of bark fiber, the doll had beads around its neck, the head was a club, and I had the doll with me when everyone fled from their huts into the dense underbrush, my mother yanked me by the arm but she was killed, her head was split open and I was jerked out of her grasp and driven into a knot with other women. There were a whole lot of male captives too. I held on to my doll. I kept it with me in my arms. We traveled and traveled and then came to a village. The male captives were herded together and something was done to them. Later we set off and traveled further and further and came to a city on a terribly big, immeasurably broad dam, blue from this end to the far end.

  Now I have the name for everything: slave, castration, commerce, coastal city, sea, forced labor. Yes, now I have it all.

  I have the name and I am not listened to. There is nothing I can do with the names. They are nothing but rattles.

  Borne from far on the wind I hear the little people making music. The sounds seem to me like beetles jumping over a fire. Also I hear them singing and clapping their hands.

  Now I will force a confrontation.

  When they next come to pick baobab seeds to suck the sour white flesh off the stones, I vow – then. Then I will confront them naked. Then I will undress. I will lay aside my skin apron and my skin cloak with the spring hare bones, as well as the necklace of ostrich eggshell fragments, and I will confront them, challenging them, though with my challenge tempered with acquired grace, shy but queenly, seducti
ve but aloof; and I will look them right in the eyes and force them to look right back at me and acknowledge me, as a human being and nothing more than a human being. That is all I am.

  I did it. They approached talking among themselves, and I guessed they were coming to pick seeds as they had done a few days before. I took off the clothes, removed the necklaces, loosened the sandals from my feet and kicked them off, and before doubt and hesitation overcame me went and stood in the opening of the baobab. And they walked past, and up the same homemade ladder they had leaned against the trunk to get to the bee nest one of them now climbed, picked seeds and threw them down to his comrades on the ground, who nimbly caught them. Unconcernedly the picker then climbed down, carried the ladder around to the set it on the other side, and harvested there too. Then everyone walked off, each with a gathering bag on his back chock-full of the fruits of the tree.

  I was deliberately not seen.

  In this dream in which I am forced to live, I take refuge more often in the city of rose quartz, for thus have I already adapted the hunters’ story. Not only does the mountain glitter rosily, but also that city in which I wander in the company of many others like myself. We do not have to talk to each other, we understand each other naturally. I notice the stranger there too, but detect no need for his companionship, for I am of a self-sufficient crystallinity, transmuted into pure bliss. I am one whole, and divided too and present in everything everywhere.

  Strange that the water spirit sends me to a desert, but I understand, for, see, the water too has become quartz, everything has, stone and water and man have the consistency of quartz and the glory and the glorious knowledge of splintering and remaining glorious. Then when I awake, whether in the night or the day, I feel crinkled and stiff.

  The insult of not being allowed to be human, that I have overcome. All ugly visions too, of hairy huts and skew door openings that try to entice me in and lock me up, all false solutions, all wrong exits; for I myself determine appearance and reality. I rule. I dream outwards and with the self-assurance of those who have long ago discerned that it is all just appearance I smile to myself, follow my own path diligently, will drink this parting poison gift in the nourishing awareness that dream leads to dream.

  There is no other termination. That I concede. I am used up. To myself as well; but whether that makes up part of their deliberations is barely relevant, and why should they in their grief make room for the feelings of someone who let them down, who so lamentably failed where she should have been able to offer a way out?

  Let the gods stare over our heads, the stranger once said. They know what they see.

  That was precisely what I did not know. Wanted to join in. So I thought.

  The stranger had stories to tell about many gods and religions, about the strange customs of priests and enthusiasts and prophets in the cities where he touched in the course of his trading voyages, and about their mutual malignancy and their competition for the blind obedience of the masses and their competition for the favor of the rulers, which could lead to being financed by the rulers, and the acquisition thereby of positions of power for the preaching castes, and all, all just because man feared death, all just to exorcise these fears. Promises of the cycle and promises of resurrection, promises of a paradisal hereafter, of the friendly community of ancestors, of salvation through abstinence but also through investment and bestowal; and every religion recruiting shamelessly and rejecting every other shamelessly.

  And death a commonplace! the stranger said, and fell silent, and waited for someone to contradict him. Stories to scare children, was his conclusion. A bore at best, sometimes amusing, like adventure stories. Let us tell each other fables rather than try to rend each other over religion. Who believes me that there is a land where people ride on elephants? Who believes me that there is a land where people ride on an animal with two humps? Who believes me that there is a land where people yoke buffaloes on their ploughed lands, that there is a land where people use milk to make light? But you believe, you philosophers and manipulators, in paradise?

  The stranger laughed scornfully.

  There are enough wonderful things in life that arouse my curiosity. I am avaricious out of eagerness to know. Look!

  He took off one of the necklaces he wore around his neck, a gold chain with a huge bloodstone pendant like a beetle on it, artfully engraved to look like a ladybird, only crueler and bigger.

  Which of you believes that this jewel was stolen from the neck of a dead man who is still alive? he asked.

  I can still remember the startled exclamations and gestures of aversion and the growls and the forced smiles on the faces of some of our foremost citizens, those who could not afford to display ignorance and so had to conceal it behind airy smartness.

  I wish, sighed the stranger, I could travel to the outer limit of the world. I am so greedy.

  I also remember that the eldest son was present on that occasion, and how he listened attentively and slapped his calf with his cane but as usual said nothing. My benefactor, too, seldom took part in conversations like this. Too sick. Too dazed by fever. My heart was with him and with the stranger. My benefactor’s hand trembled when he slowly brought a spoonful of beans to his lips. What did he think of all the chatter about death, he who was touched by it? His eyes, deep in their sockets, betrayed nothing.

  Of all the sorts of conversation carried on after his dinner parties, the ones that interested me least were those dealing with war. To be honest, when war was brought up I found a reason to dish up or clear the table or attend to something else of a domestic nature. There was talk of sea battles and of land battles, or armaments, piracy, of celebrated victories and the division of spoils, ransoms and extortion, raids, punitive expeditions and suchlike matters about which the men argued and tried to impress each other, and about which they could come out with the most divergent theses and get extremely spiteful and sarcastic about each other’s theories. The supreme game of profit, that was what the stranger called war, and he was at least one of the few at the table who could speak from experience.

  The little fleet of dhows under his command had already been on the attack and also been attacked by pirates. He had already, in contrast to the cityfolk, been in fierce combat with warriors. He had killed. Had himself been wounded. He knew what he was talking about when he referred to a bloody slaughter, for to him memories clung to such incidents and every battle meant more experience for him, cumulative knowledge of a reality with which, against his own wishes, he was professionally concerned, and not fiction. Not just stories of heroism. He had seen injured men tumble overboard, seen hacked-off limbs floating, blood and commotion in the water that attracted sharks from near and far, and had heard the wretched drowning men defend themselves roaring against the monsters’ slashing bites, in vain. As calm and refined as he sat there talking, so barbaric the naked language he used. Chop, stab, mutilate, kick, stalk.

  While the city folk, fat with prosperity in an uneasy peace on the edge of history, chattered about defense and building forts and ramparts, and simply chattered and did nothing out of laziness and envy and lack of mutual trust and above all out of stinginess, I suspected, and also because they themselves did not feel at all threatened. With the many dhows that came across the sea laden with wares they maintained excellent relations. Their own skiffs distributed the goods to smaller coastal towns and in exchange loaded leopard skins, ivory and ambergris, tortoiseshell and rhinoceros horn for shipment back to the coastal city and its wholesale merchants; and so long had this favorable arrangement lasted that they would not believe anyone who might predict a plot to ruin their flourishing trade. Who, after all, would be so stupid? It was to everyone’s advantage. There was no question that these strange caravels that had latterly begun to call constituted any danger. Besides, relations had quickly been established with these newcomers. There was no question that they were capable of snuffing out a long-established trade. No, not these simpletons who had to beg for water an
d fresh meat and fruit.

  To everyone, myself included, the stranger’s reports sounded romantic rather than instructive and insightful. I took the heart-shaped palm fan and fanned myself. I nodded and smiled and passed a dish and made a witty remark and tried first with one guest, then with another, to shift the discussion into a lighter vein. I flirted and laughed naughtily and practiced my calling faultlessly. My benefactor looked satisfied. The scent of myrrh and the scent of rich foods, the scent of the multitudinous jasmine, the scent of the water I had washed myself with, the oil with which I had rubbed myself, the particularly complex composite aroma of civilization, that was what we breathed here. That was what the sultry city offered us.

  That was how far my knowledge of warfare extended.

  That it is innate in woman to have a spontaneous approach to atrocities, is a lie. Though I had already held death fast in my arms, though I had taken in my own hands a stillbirth strangled by the navel cord, and rolled it up in an old torn cloth like a parcel, and carried it off from our slave childbirth hut, though I had already heard sick people in delirium and heard the moans of slaves being punished, none of it has been of any help to me.

  In the deepest, darkest, farthest corner of the baobab I hid. These screams, these war cries, this floodwater of fear dark over my head; this fear that cut through me, this bestial death rattle. I was cornered; like a rock rabbit in fear of death I trembled.

  For days I did not dare go out. Then the stench of decay drove me out.

  The wild rejoicing of the hyenas at night. I was too frightened to make a fire for myself in case it served as a beacon for those who had come to massacre. I crouched in the belly of the tree and understood the flickering train of thought in my baby who had chosen darkness over the light of life. It was an ecstasy of never being. It was the only true victory: neither death nor life had meaning. It was equilibrium. It was the perfection of non-being.