The Whale Caller (12 page)

“I don’t mind if you call me names,” says the Whale Caller. “But you don’t curse a dead woman who never did you any wrong.”

“And you don’t laugh at a drowning woman who never did you any wrong,” she shouts, spitting out the last morsel in her mouth.

He cannot help laughing one more time at the memory of her helpless body being tossed by the waves. This infuriates her and she breaks out into another round of colourful profanity.

“We are being observed all the time, Saluni,” he says, adopting
some measure of seriousness. “We must behave appropriately at all times. Garbage must not come from our mouths.”

“And who is observing us?”

He is rather vague about this, as if the question has caught him off guard.

“Perhaps it is your big fish,” suggests Saluni. “You are always dreaming of your big fish.”

“Whales are not fish!” he moans.

It is her turn to laugh.

“The Bible says they are fish so they are fish.”

“The Bible says no such thing.”

“It says Jonah was swallowed by a big fish.”

To steer Saluni away from insulting Sharisha he decides that the person who is watching them is Mr. Yodd.

“And who is Mr. Yodd? Another one of your whales?”

“Perhaps it is time I formally introduced you to Mr. Yodd,” says the Whale Caller. “But first we need to get rid of this!”

He grabs the coat and drags it across the sand. He rolls it into a big ball and throws it into the water. Saluni yells at him as the waves toss it about until it cannot be seen anymore.

“I want my coat back,” she screams, stamping her feet like a spoilt child. “You go get my coat back!”

“No, I won’t,” he says, with the firmness of a father talking to a naughty child. “You are more beautiful without that coat. Come with me, I want to show you something.”

“No, I won’t, not until you give me my coat back.”

He grabs her arm and drags her along to the Old Harbour and down the crag to Mr. Yodd’s grotto. She is taken by surprise by his firmness, and sulkily she allows herself to be dragged along. He kneels before the grotto, but she refuses to do so. She just stands there and stares at him in defiant mien, her cheeks filled with air like a balloon signalling her anger.

Hoy, Mr. Yodd. She is Saluni. We are just walking the road together, Mr. Yodd. We do not have a destination. We’ll see how far it takes us. We’ll see where it takes us.

As they walk up the crag from the grotto he is wondering why Mr. Yodd did not laugh at him this time. He had only listened to his brief confession without any comment. Was it because of the presence of Saluni, who had refused to kneel down? Such confessions are a self-flagellation, and it doesn’t help if Mr. Yodd decided not to humiliate him. He needs his dose of mortification and is disappointed that none was forthcoming from today’s confession.

Saluni on the other hand is still livid. The water is beginning to evaporate from her clothes and she is shivering from the cold. She wonders why he called her a fellow-traveller without a destination—a slight from the man she regards as the love of her life. What about Sharisha? Does he think he has a destination with Sharisha? She fumes even more when she remembers her coat. She feels naked without her coat.

This is a new side of him she has not seen before: first the laughter, and then the firmness! There is hope yet. Life will be perfect the day he surprises her with another kind of firmness—where it matters most.

Strangely she feels as if a burden has been lifted off her shoulders. She feels free. The freedom of the naked!

Although—ostensibly to get back at him for the coat and the laughter—she ridicules the foolishness of talking to rock rabbits
at a nondescript cave, she is curious about the ritual of confession. She is secretly fascinated by the unseen confessor. The Whale Caller professes to hate the rituals she is trying to introduce in his life, yet in his own way he is a creature of ritual. Often she secretly follows him as he goes to confess. He does not know she is there listening. She stands against the wind for she knows he can smell her. Sometimes she doesn’t hear what he tells Mr. Yodd because the wind takes his words in another direction.

One day she decides to take the plunge and confess. She brings with her oblations of tulips from the mansion. She arranges them around the mouth of the grotto as she addresses Mr. Yodd.

Hoy, Mr. Yodd! Harvesting the clouds must be left to those who have big wings. I used to fly, Mr. Yodd. To soar to the highest skies. To live up there in cloudland. Until he brought me back to earth. To walk firmly on the ground. Without staggering. So that the ground knows who I am. The ground needs to respect who I am. Who am I? I am Saluni, and I have taken you over. Maybe not taken you over as such. I just want to have a piece of you too. He does not know it, but I have watched him talk to you. Once he dragged me here and I rubbished the very notion of the confessional. The place, yes, but also the mortifying confessor and the very act of confessing. He does not know that since then I have followed him. I heard him confess all sorts of things about me to you, Mr. Yodd. And about that behemoth he calls Sharisha. In the same breath: me and Sharisha. The eternal triangle: man, woman and whale. I can tell you I am not going to be part of any triangle. The fish must go. Ha! It galls him when I call his whale a fish, so I will call it that until he gets rid of it. I have heard him confess, Mr. Yodd. I said to myself: One day I’ll confess about him to Mr. Yodd too. Then I didn’t know what he gets for his confessions, but I said
to myself: If he can confess about me, so can I about him. And here I am, Mr. Yodd, for the first time, kneeling in front of your cave… or grotto, as you prefer it to be called. You know, Mr. Yodd, I have been living with him in his little Wendy house for three months now. I have decided to find rhythm in some of his madness. You are part of that rhythm. That is why I have adopted you. I don’t know what you will do for me, but I have adopted you. I am a lady, Mr. Yodd, and I am beautiful. Why doesn’t he touch me? Why does he turn his back on me? Thanks for the correction: he does not turn his back. It would have been better if he did, for I would still feel his flesh. Why does he insist on wasting his nights in that confounded sleeping bag? Is it because of the light? Some people are fearful of the light. They like to do things in the dark. I, on the other hand, am a child of the light. I am a love child, conceived in the daytime. It had to be daytime because those were stolen moments. The man would have to go back to his wife and the young woman would have to steal back to her parents. I am a child of the day, Mr. Yodd. That is why I am fearful of the dark. That is why I ran away from the Free State farmstead where I was born and spent a lovely carefree childhood. Under the big sky the nights poured themselves on me, and drenched me with darkness. Darkness suffocates me. But it was not only from darkness that I was escaping. I am an exile from thunder. I walked from the Free State through the Karoo because our summer rains over there are accompanied by thunder and lightning. I was fearful of thunder. I had heard that the Western Cape is a place of gentle winter rains. I managed to run away from thunder, but couldn’t escape darkness. Darkness follows day everywhere. Darkness follows me to the end of the earth. I thought I had escaped darkness forever since I knew that there were streetlights in these cities. I remember the freedom I felt when I first came here: with lights in the streets. I could walk from tavern to tavern at all hours of the day and night. But where I lived before I joined him in his Wendy
house… they didn’t have such lights. I had to rely on my trusty candle. Oh, so you find this quite hilarious? I have heard of these tricks of yours, Mr. Yodd… the laughter that is intended to mortify. You might as well stop it because it does nothing to me. I refuse to be mortified by you or by anyone else. Instead, your laughter makes me want to laugh back at you, as I am now doing. I do not need the self-flagellation as he does. Mortification will rebound, Mr. Yodd, and hit you between the eyes!

She climbs back from the grotto. Stiletto-heels were not made for crag climbing. She is therefore holding her shoes in her hands and is walking in her stockinged feet. Near the whale-viewing site she finds the Whale Caller waiting. She walks past him, pretending not to see him.

“What were you doing down there?” he asks.

“Oh, nothing!” she says, without stopping. He follows her.

“But you were talking. Who were you talking to?”

“Oh, to no one in particular!”

“You were talking to Mr. Yodd, weren’t you?”

She does not deny it. She just keeps on walking.

Now he has no doubt that this is the woman for him.

She sits on the concrete bench near the war monument to put on her shoes. He sits beside her. There is a silence between them. After a while she stands up again and walks on the tarred road past the big parking lot and away from the Old Harbour area. He follows her. About half a kilometre away she takes off her shoes again and walks down the paved path that leads back to the sea. He follows. She sits on the green bench near the path, a few metres above the water. He sits down too. There is silence again. He is looking straight ahead as if something on the horizon has grabbed his attention. She looks at him intently as if she is studying
the contours on his face, and bursts out laughing. He looks at her and bursts out laughing too.

“You laughed,” she says.

“You laughed first,” he says.

“I always laugh. You never do,” she says.

“You have brought laughter into my life,” he says.

There is silence once more. The world is at peace with itself. American armies are not invading third-world countries, making the world unsafe for the rest of humanity; terrorists are not engaging in the slaughter of the innocent in high-rise buildings and at holiday resorts; criminals have ceased their rapes and murders and robberies; dictators of the world have given up dictating; warlords have laid down their arms; politicians have learnt to be truthful and have stopped thieving. The world
is
at peace with itself. Across a small rift, not far from where the couple is enjoying the peace of the world, a cultus of tourists is engaged in the ritual of gorging quantities of seafood and gallons of wine. They are sitting in the open-air restaurant whose portico juts into the sea on stilts. They are at peace with the world.