The Whale Caller (27 page)

As the puny man tells them of his woes a brand-new van stops outside. It is the man who has come to collect the abalone. He weighs it on a basket fish scale and pays the puny man his money. He drives away to collect from other puny men. He used to be a poacher himself. Now he is the middleman between the puny men and the white men. And he has become so rich that he is now a law unto himself. He is respected by the Gansbaai community because he is one of those who keeps the economy of the village going. When the Scorpions tighten the screws, the puny man tells his guests, the whole village suffers. Business in pubs, furniture shops
and even video shops falls to the extent that some have to close down only to reopen when poaching activity resumes with the departure of the police, who are obviously unable to tighten the screws indefinitely.

The puny man regales them with poaching stories as he prepares them a meal of rice and fried abalone. As they eat Saluni says to the Whale Caller: “You must eat more of this perlemoen. God knows you need it. You have not touched me since we left Hermanus.”

“I don’t have any more, unfortunately,” says the puny man. “I sell almost all of it. I leave just a little for the pot.”

“Don’t worry,” says the Whale Caller. “I don’t need any more perlemoen.”

“Don’t tell me you don’t know why perlemoen is so popular in the Far East,” says Saluni.

“Of course I know; it is an aphrodisiac,” says the puny man.

“Everyone knows that,” says the Whale Caller, rather embarrassed. “You don’t have to sing about it.”

“So now you know why you must eat more of the perlemoen as long as we are here surrounded by it,” she says.

“It is finished, ma’am,” says the puny man apologetically.

The Whale Caller is scandalised. He shifts closer to her on the bench on which they are sitting and whispers in her ear: “You are blind, Saluni. How can you say such things?”

By nine the Whale Caller is bored with poaching stories and Saluni wants to sleep. The puny man prepares a place for them on one side of the shack while he will sleep on the opposite side. The Whale Caller asks if he would allow them to leave the light on all night, but the puny man will have none of that.

“I can’t sleep in the dark,” says Saluni. “If you think we are going to finish your paraffin in the lamp, I have my own candle in my bag.”

It has nothing to do with saving paraffin, the puny man explains.
He would not be able to sleep with the light on. It would remind him of prison, where he spent a few months for poaching. The solitary naked bulb was left on for the whole night in his cell, making it impossible for him to sleep. He spent many sleepless nights in that jail and wasted away. That is why he is so thin now. He could steal only a few winks at the work detail. Now that he is king of his own castle he cannot subject himself to that punishment again. The honoured guests must remember that without sleep he can’t harvest the sea the next morning. One needs all one’s energy to dislodge abalone from the rocks on kelp beds.

“She is afraid of the dark,” pleads the Whale Caller.

“She is blind for Christ sake!” the puny man bursts out. “What does she need the light for?”

It is the same question that the Whale Caller had asked her last night when they were preparing to sleep in the deserted house by the sea. She insisted that she could feel the darkness even in her blindness. “I never imagined that darkness would find me even in blindness,” she said. So much for the freedom that she declared she had gained soon after losing her sight! They had the candle burning until daybreak.

“You don’t talk like that about me,” says Saluni.

“We are this man’s guests, Saluni,” says the Whale Caller. “We can’t start fighting him in his own house.”

“He must not be selfish, man, even if it is his house. It is just a shack after all. Nothing like our beautiful Wendy house with electricity and everything.”

The Whale Caller signals to their host not to worry for he will solve the whole problem. The puny man sits in the corner sulking. Saluni can sense his rebellion, and to pre-empt any stupid action on his part she thinks it wise to let him know who is boss even in his house. “Look at him,” she says to the puny man, pointing in the direction of the Whale Caller. “He is going to hit you. See
those big strong hands? He’s going to hit you so hard you’ll wish you’d never been born.”

“I don’t hit people, Saluni,” says an embarrassed Whale Caller.

“You did hit the radio man who was being rude to me.”

“And I have regretted it ever since.”

Saluni turns to the puny man once more and says: “Don’t be deceived by his mild manner. You should see him when he is aroused. He is a tiger.”

Saluni strips to her petticoat and gets into the bedding on the floor. In no time she is snoring. The Whale Caller takes the paraffin lamp outside and extinguishes the flame so that the smell of the wick does not alert Saluni to that fact. Back in the room he takes off his overalls and sleeps next to her. But she suddenly sits up and seems to have difficulty breathing.

“He switched the light off, didn’t he?” she asks.

“I don’t switch things off, ma’am,” says the puny man. “Unlike rich folk like you who live in better houses, I don’t have electricity here.”

“I can feel the darkness in my body.”

“It is just your imagination, Saluni,” the Whale Caller assures her. “The lamp is still on. I think you are just having a nightmare.”

“Are you sure, man? Are you sure there is light?”

In the cracks between corrugated iron and plastic sheets left by shoddy workmanship on the shack he can see the stars winking at him. There must be a moon somewhere out of his line of sight, even if it is a small piece floating in the sky. There is some light… out there.

“There is light,” he says quite bravely. “Let’s sleep now, Saluni. We have a long way to go tomorrow.”

His voice has the ring of truth. But Saluni cannot understand why sleep doesn’t come, however hard she tries to summon it. She
fidgets and tosses and turns, making it impossible for the Whale Caller to sleep as well.

She wants them to move further away from the coastal pathways lest some rude whales appear and distract his attention from the demands of the road. They almost did early in the morning. He spotted two Bryde’s whales and a group of the smaller triangular-headed minke whales off Pearly Beach and almost lost his head with excitement. That’s when she decreed that instead of following the coastline—which is in any event too rugged to negotiate safely even for a woman who is determined to punish their bodies—they should make their way inland.

The Whale Caller has tied a rope—a gift from their gracious host, who was all too pleased to see them go—around Saluni’s waist and leads her with it. The paths meander back to a well-maintained gravel road. For a while they are followed by a group of mischievous baboons who seem bent on teasing them. They ignore the primates and walk on. The baboons scatter into the bushes when a donkey cart approaches and stops next to the walking couple. A toothless old man under a straw hat gives them a ride up to the village of Elim, almost twenty kilometres away.

They walk among the expertly thatched cottages, past the church with a German-made clock that is reputed to have been ticking since 1764, past the village shopping centre and into the post office. The Whale Caller insists that he must write to the widower who lets him the Wendy house, and explain that he had to leave town unexpectedly and that the kindly landlord should rest assured that when he returns, whenever that will be, he will pay every cent of the outstanding rent. He is already gearing himself for months on the road since he does not know when Saluni will get tired and demand to be led on her leash back to peaceful Hermanus.

After writing the letter and mailing it he suggests that they should have a nice meal at one of the cosy restaurants in the village. He reminds her of her yearning for civilised living. But she is not interested in any of that. All she wants is the road. They buy a loaf of bread and fish and chips at a café as provisions. The Whale Caller remembers to purchase a packet of candles as well as a box of matches. Just as they are walking out he sees a display of sunglasses.

“I am buying you sunglasses, Saluni,” he says.

“Why?”

“So that people will not have expectations from you that cannot be fulfilled.”

“Yeah. So that they can raise their voices when they speak to me.”

He buys the glasses and she wears them. Once more they face the challenges of the road. They take a north-easterly direction, choosing a combination of well-paved roads and then looping off to overgrown pathways that are obviously rarely used by humans. They walk through a medley of green pastures and rocky terrain and apple orchards and deep gorges. They are like stars that have lost their way in the sky. Sometimes only echoes accompany their footsteps, and at other times flocks of sheep and a solitary shepherd break the rhythm. It is, in fact, in the hovel of a toothless young shepherd in brown South African Railways and Harbours overalls—the whole region abounds with toothless men and women—that they find refuge for the night, a few kilometres past the small town of Bredasdorp.

The shepherd proves to be, according to Saluni’s declamations the following day, a man of boundless wisdom and home-grown philosophies. He, for instance, admires them for the courage of embarking on a journey without destination. If everyone in the world engaged in such journeys the world would know peace. He commends Saluni for opting for blindness in a world that would
be better off with everyone in it walking in perpetual blindness. All the problems of the world emanate from the arrogance of sight. In blindness one is able to reach into a dimension buried in the very depths of one’s soul and recover the beautiful things that one has known in previous existences. Now that he has met Saluni he is considering blindness for himself because he believes that will give him two or three other parallel consciousnesses. He may not only stop with his own blindness. He may blind his sheep and goats as well. They have become his companions and he cannot leave them behind on his way to nirvana. He crowns his wisdom by allowing his guests to light their candle throughout the night.

He takes advantage of the candlelight to read them passages from the Song of Solomon until Saluni is lulled into the deep sleep of content babies. It becomes obvious to the Whale Caller that these passages are directed at Saluni, and all of a sudden he finds the shepherd’s voice quite irritating. The shepherd is not aware that Saluni is fast asleep and continues reading:
Behold, you are fair, my love! Behold you are fair! You have dove’s eyes behind your veil. Tour hair is like a flock of goats, going down from Mount Gilead. Tour teeth are like a flock of shorn sheep which have come up from the washing, every one of which bears twins, and none is barren among them.

“You are wasting your breath,” says the Whale Caller. “She is asleep.”

“She can hear my voice in her dreams,” says the shepherd, putting his tattered Bible next to his pillow. Soon he is competing with Saluni in snoring. The Whale Caller notes a self-satisfied smile on the shepherd’s face. He spends the whole night nursing an anger he never knew existed in him. What a brazen young upstart: making advances to his Saluni in his presence and not even hiding it!

The Whale Caller wakes Saluni at the crack of dawn and says that they must leave right away. She protests that it is still early for the road, but he threatens to leave without her.

“If he leaves you here I will take care of you,” says the yawning shepherd.

“I take care of her all right,” says the Whale Caller.

“And so you should. We don’t commend the eagle for flying.”

Saluni wakes up and puts on her clothes.

“You say you take care of her but you want her to go without even washing herself… without even brushing her teeth,” says the shepherd.

Saluni does not comment. She is pleased to let the men fight it out.

“What business is it of this young man whether you are clean or not?” the Whale Caller asks, tying the rope around Saluni’s waist. “We must leave at once. Imagine, comparing you to his sheep and goats!”

“It is the Bible that compares her, not me,” says the shepherd proudly. “The Bible knows the beauty of her soul that lies behind the veil of blindness, and it knows the beauty of sheep and goats.”

“Let us go, Saluni,” insists the Whale Caller. “We have a long distance to walk.”

“I can walk the extra distance for her,” declares the shepherd. “I am willing to go blind for her. Me and my sheep and my goats will all go blind for her.”

The Whale Caller picks up his rucksack and her paper bag and tugs her out of the hovel. The shepherd blocks his way and pleads: “At least let me read her one more passage from the Song of Songs.”

“Get out of my way,” shouts the Whale Caller.

“Let the man read, man,” says Saluni. “It is the Bible after all. How much harm can it do?”

“Don’t you encourage him now, Saluni,” says the Whale Caller.

The shepherd reads in the thin light of the morning:
O my love, you are as beautiful as Tirzah, lovely as Jerusalem, awesome as an army
with banners! Turn your eyes away from me, for they have overcome me. Tour hair is like a flock of goats going down from Gilead.

The Whale Caller breaks out into what he imagines is mocking laughter.

“She is blind, man,” he says in unconvincing guffaws, “and her hair is black. Well, it has traces of red now, but it is black in its natural state.”

“It doesn’t matter,” says Saluni. “You are just jealous that the man sees my beauty to which you are blind; How many times have you told me how lovely I am?”

“You know already that you are beautiful, Saluni,” says the Whale Caller defensively. “We all know that.”

“I can sing songs of your loveliness every day if you stay with me,” says the shepherd. “I can read you the Song of Songs every dawn before I go to tend my flock.”

“You will do no such thing,” says the Whale Caller, pushing the man very hard. He lands on the ground on his buttocks.

“That’s not a nice thing to do to a man who reads such wonderful verses from the Bible,” says Saluni, feeling around with her feet until they find the shepherd where he is sitting on the ground, still holding his Bible. She says to the shepherd: “You are a very sweet man. But don’t anger him now. I have seen him hit a man with that huge fist and he was out cold for the whole day. We left before he came to his senses. Perhaps he is still unconscious even now.”