Hottentot Venus

by Barbara Chase-Riboud

  And so Kx’au and I raised our hut and moved in together. We were both virgins and the mysteries of our bodies became new shared knowledge and a rapturous passion. Our youth and stamina substituted for our lack of experience. I can still see Kx’au standing backlit in the fiery shade of the sunset, his wide shoulders hung with antelope, a rhinoceros-horn-handled ax strapped to his left wrist. His tight deer leggings and moccasins beaded and stamped, his hair braided long with a headband of fine ivory teeth. His herding stick held in his right hand, his bow and arrows slung over his left shoulder. His gold bracelets shone, his nostrils widened with the scent of evening. We would make our fire for the night, prepare our meal, read the stars and close the door of our woven mat house.

  To my great happiness, I conceived a child. Kx’au never lived to see it. He died mysteriously in the bush of gunshot wounds. He may have gotten caught in the crossfire of a skirmish between English and Dutch troops, for it was the English year of 1805. My shock at hearing of the death of Kx’au caused the baby, a boy named !Kung, after his grandfather, to be born too soon. I remembered nothing except my bloodcurdling scream when they laid Kx’au’s body at my feet. !Kung, my sweet infant, survived only a few months, just long enough for me never to forget him. He was so small and so brave, fighting to live, to breathe with a ferocious will. The same will that pulled at my breast emptied it of milk, a will to survive that matched mine. I watched him fight and lose. He finally stopped sucking, although I held him to my breast for another day. I decided to leave Kx’au’s village. I didn’t want another husband, neither temporarily nor by marriage contract. I could not survive another murder.

  Before I left, I consulted the rainmaker whose name was Magahâs. She was an ancient, hideous dwarf with deep-set black eyes, a great toadlike-shaped head with long braided hair. She resembled an antique, dilapidated baboon and her name !Naeheta Magahâs meant the thing-that-should-not-have-been-born. Magahâs lived in a cave that was a million moons old. The inside was covered with ochre, yellow and black paintings of sheep and bullocks and long-horned cattle that sped across the walls and over the ceiling in movements of terrible verisimilitude. The dwarf stank. She was covered with whale blubber and red clay paint and hung with dozens of rosaries made of smashed ostrich eggshells. As payment for her advice, I had brought her five woven grass mats, a straw hat and two gourds of sheep’s milk. A handsome fee.

  —No, was the answer. You must not go to Cape Town. If you do, your soul is lost for a million moons. If you go, you will never return to the Khoekhoe. A hundred winters will pass and still your spirit will wander, and the spirit of your spirit. And their spirits, those of Kx’au and !Kung, will never be still.

  —But I will die in this village. I am young. I must work to survive. My life is still ahead of me.

  —Your life will be behind you if you leave. You are a female, find another husband, make another contract, have another child.

  But I knew if I did that I would die here.

  —The Khoekhoe are dying out. We are starving. They are killing us with rifles and with the pox. If we don’t die of gunpowder, we die of melancholy. There is no meat, no herds. We cannot hunt. Our spears and arrows have no power against cannonballs. My clan has disappeared. They hunt us like animals. A husband cannot protect his own family anymore.

  —You think you will be safe in Cape Town? As slave to a white family?

  —I am free. I was freed by my master, the Reverend Freehouseland . . .

  —I tell you I see a great lake of water, storms and tempests, white rain and white cliffs as high as the sky, canoes with wings and cities of dust and stone. I see monsters of all shapes and sizes, dragons and reptiles, animals we have no names for, sicknesses that are foreign to us, corruption and death.

  —I will die if I stay here.

  —You will die if you go. Within ten winters.

  —Can you give me some medicine?

  —There is no medicine against a world not made up of human beings. Yet they are not beasts either. I have no name for them just as I have no remedy. They call themselves another race of men because they are white. But they are just like the People of the People . . . In the beginning we called the white men who came Ipurun, or tadpoles, because of their gray color and the way they swarm all over everything. Or Khoeku !gaesasiba ose, “men without stillness.” She shrugged. Now we just call them Hurinîn, sea people—which means the same thing . . .

  —But have you no medicine . . .?

  —I said I have no medicine. No medicine except the earth beneath your feet—the earth of the People of the People. Fill this bone box with it and you are invincible—not your flesh, of course, but your spirit. Hang this around your neck and never lose it. Part with your liver before you part with this . . .

  —There is one weapon, she said. It is a curse so powerful and so terrible you must use it only if it is a question of life or death. Repeat it after me . . .

  She whispered the words, which seemed to have been forged in fire . . . I shrank from the ugly sound of them.

  I took the box filled with sand and put it around my neck.

  —Remember how separate and how variable are the fraternities that sway us in this life from birth to death. At one time we are all spiritual, at another all physical. At one time, we are sure that life is a dream and that real life is elsewhere. Or that this life on earth is all we have and we must make the best of it. But there are lives you live through others. You, Ssehura, live through your dead child, your dead husband, your dead parents. You love them? You live through them. Like a clan of chattering baboons, we talk about love and our loves being immortal like the stars. But who knows but that the stars are only shadows cast by our own eyes? Desire is as fleeting as water and as shallow as a rhinoceros’s mud bath. Passion flows from nowhere to nowhere. We are full of faith yet one single event can blot out all hope and life becomes as black as a panther’s back, as fleeting as an owl’s sleep.

  —Only very stupid people never change, Ssehura. Only the simpleminded believe in eternity and permanence. The English do. The white man does. “Constant” is an English word. We have no word in Khoekhoe for “constant.” Is the sun constant, or only constant to each floating sun-beam?

  —If you want to say you have eaten, you must guard your thoughts as well as your tongue. Listen to the rats stirring in the thatch and look for snakes in the grass. Trust no one, especially those who sleep on your bosom.

  3

  SIRE,

  The first thing that strikes us in our study of existence are those powers of physical force by which foreign substances are attracted into their orbit, and retained for a certain period long enough for them to be assimilated and finally, these substances having become their property, distribute them according to the functions they are to exercise.

  —BARON GEORGES LÉOPOLD CUVIER,

  Letter to the Emperor Napoleon

  on the progress of science since 1789

  Pale moon, the English month of July, 1805. The next day I left the village at dawn and set out on foot for Cape Town. Since I had no place else to go, I decided to return to the orphanage at the Reverend Freehouseland’s mission. It was a twenty-three-day journey. I wrapped my belongings in a mat and carried the bundle on my head. They consisted of some cooking pots, my eating bowl, my headrest, a small spindle and a guitar. As I set out, it seemed to me I was leaving what the Reverend Freehouseland called Eden: a garden richer and more beautiful than the painted illuminations of his Bible, filled with birds of paradise, flamingos and white cranes, rhinoceros and Cape lions, tree monkeys and orangutans, river buffalo, carp and bullfrogs. I was thrilled to travel alone.

  At dawn, I would rise just as the mist lifted and the level horizontal sun illuminated the earth as if for the first time. A few nuts, a bowl of hot water with milk and flour, and I set my bundle on my head and began my trek. I kept the Table Top Mountains to my right and the Umzimvubu River to my left. I headed southwest, and as I moved, the land moved w
ith me. Sometimes I was only a speck in the monumental sand dunes that spread to the edge of the sea. Sometimes I was a ferret burrowing deep into the woods and forests of the mountain’s valleys. Above me, thousands of birds in a thousand colors cruised in flight, swooping and diving, contesting the pollen of orchids the butterflies sipped. Elephants and buffalo washed themselves in great stagnant pools and twice I saw a great antelope herd in the distance heading towards the plains. I passed a troop of giraffes; their awkward gallop flinging their necks into arcs. They were beautiful to watch, these gentle creatures that caused harm to no living thing, not even the trees they nibbled on. I had stepped from the noisy village into silence. It was all around me yet everything was alive with the murmurings of life. The air at the beginning of the Pale moon month was like river water, cool and pure. The great vault of the sky, the deep blue of blue violets, was so huge and hung so low, it seemed the top of my head scraped against it.

  There was silence and yet no silence, for the animal world continued swarming, bleating, chanting, crying, chirping, roaring and buzzing around me. I was alone with myself. I decided which foot to place in front of the other, which path to take, when to stop, when to continue, where and when to sleep, what and when to eat. It was a strange sensation, god-like and serene. I had never ventured beyond the frontiers of my village as a mother and a married woman. But now I gathered strength from placing one foot in front of the other, of bearing only my own burdens. I gathered strength from the soil. I carried sacred sand around my neck. I took destiny in my arms and vowed not to let it go until I existed. Time went by slowly. My movements flowed one into the other with a strange purity. Except for the laugh of a hyena or the coughing of a distant lion, nothing stirred between the earth and the sky, in which small clouds floated like lamb’s wool in a hollow of iris blue.

  I trekked through forests and woods full of wildlife: lions and elephants, wolves, elks and jackals, lynxes, rabbits, badgers; on the beaches, otters and penguins and seals; on the plains, zebras with red legs, ash-colored ibexes, goats, wildcats, elks, hippopotamus, wild horses, buffalo, boars. In truth, there was so much life between the mountains, plains and sea that it was an effort of memory even to name them all; the ostriches, for example, and the peacocks, cranes, black storks, geese, pelicans. The sea yielded its own wild creatures: sea lions, whales, sharks, tuna, salmon, rays, mullet, eels and carp. I skirted the edge of a gently curving shore to pick sea urchins, which the Dutch called “rock-roses,” from the sand. If my own people called me wild, it was true. I myself felt most alive amongst wild things.

  I was afraid of nothing, neither the wilderness nor the sea nor the mountains. Nights in the forest, even the sounds of wild beasts never really disturbed me. I slept when I was tired, put one foot before the other when I was not, my ankles bound in yards of cowhide, my belongings balanced on my head or slung over my shoulder. I was sixteen and I had my whole life before me.

  I stopped along the river’s edge. The water looked black and cold, the light was growing thin and the shade of the mountains loomed, making it even darker. In the bluish light, a great purple heron stood, as tall as I, although the long shadow made the beautiful bird look even taller as it edged out over the surface of the water. The heron’s legs and the tips of its wings were blacker than the shadows. Its beak was black on top and yellow underneath. I squatted down and watched silently, suddenly seized by the sense that this was someone I knew, not merely a bird.

  The heron stared first at me, then at the river. Daintily it took slow delicate steps towards me, lifting one foot, then the other out of the water, pausing as if for the beat of a drum before again replacing it on the bed of the river, each movement a ritual, a dance, a message. The heron turned its head from side to side, waving, its sharp beak like a weapon as it made slight movements of its narrow head. I was sure now it was a spirit. Had it come to send me back to the encampment? It was completely alone, wading in the dark waters. Like all of its kind, it was solitary, always in exile, governed by no laws of flocking birds. No one ever saw these birds mate, nor sighted them with their families. This one seemed even more lonely than usual. An exiled bird like me, without a home anywhere.

  It stopped on a welt of mud next to me. It lifted one foot, leaving its footprint in the sand, and kicked its long, scaly legs back as it slowly opened its wings and, with a sound like a wave hitting rock, glided towards me. Its neck was bent forward in a double curve as if someone had broken it. I looked into its sad eyes as it lifted its body over me, its breast almost touching the top of my head. I felt the bird’s passage like a blow, the sweep of cold air, the blue shadow of its wings, the prickling of my skin. It was my mother. I knew. I remembered my aunt telling me over and over the story of the massacre, how the women, my mother included, had broken into flight just like this exiled bird, flapping their arms as if they might fly to flee the hail of bullets, their lappas billowing out behind them as they leapt over the dead and wounded running to the sea. But they seemed to move without speed as if time itself had stopped. My mother kept turning around to look behind her, stopping to stand stock-still like a small animal fascinated by the cobra bewitching him, losing precious time and finally taking the sabers that mowed them down like wheat. All along the beach, the slaying went on and on under the sounds of the double-barreled rifles, the whips and the swords.

  Was this my mother’s spirit? Had that bird been a real heron or a ghost in the form of a heron?

  I remembered the old Khoekhoe tale about how the heron had gotten the bend in its neck.

  —There was a jackal, my aunt had begun, hunting among some rocks when he spied a dove up above him beyond his reach. “Little dove,” called the jackal, “I’m hungry. Throw me down one of your children.” “No,” said the dove. “Well then, I’ll fly up there myself and eat you too.” The poor frightened dove, thinking everyone could fly, including the jackal, threw down one of her children and the jackal ate it. The next day he returned and another baby bird went down his throat. The poor mother was weeping bitterly when a heron passed by and asked why she wept so bitterly. “I weep for my poor babies. If I do not give them to the jackal, he will fly up here and devour me too.” “You foolish mother,” replied the heron. “How can he fly up to get you when he has no wings! Jackals can’t fly! Don’t give in to his silly threats!”

  —So the next day, when the jackal returned, the dove refused to hand over another chick. “The heron told me you can’t fly after all,” she said. “That nosy heron, I will pay her back for her wagging tongue.” The jackal found the heron in a cool pond looking for frogs. The heron lifted his left leg with scales as big as fingernails, tipped his head a little to the right and looked down his beak at the jackal. “What a long neck you have,” said the jackal. “What happens when the wind blows? It must break in half!” “No, I lower it,” said the heron, bending his neck a bit lower. “And when the wind blows harder?” “Well, I bend it a little more,” replied the heron. “And when there’s really a gale?” asked the jackal. “I bend it down to here,” said the heron, lowering his head down to the ground. The jackal jumped on the heron’s lowered neck and cracked it right in the middle so that it snapped. And from that day, the heron had a bend in his neck . . .

  I imagined my mother’s neck stretched into a curve like the heron’s, her arms flapping, fleeing for her life. The Khoekhoe had once flown; now they all had bent necks from jackals stomping on them. I sat for a long time beside the river and let the scene before me escape into night.

  I had gathered a good supply of wild berries and bulbs to tide me over: wild strawberries, wild geraniums, narcissi, sweet white violets, sorrel, bloodroot, blueberries, milkweed and gladioli. I wondered how far my exiled bird had flown. If it knew how it had gotten its bent neck. The days between me and the Cape Fort dwindled as the barren sandy beaches with bronze ore thrusting through their surface gave way to pasture land, then grasslands surrounded by mountains, the highest of which was Table Mountain. At the f
oot of the mountain, I passed through marshy groves. In them, I met troops of screaming baboons that danced and yelled in the trees above me. In the evenings, fireflies and night animals kept me company and I looked out for the lions, which had given the mountains their name. I crossed countless streams and rivers, tree-shaded and sweet with sun-warmed springs. Finally I came into sight of the Dutch East India Company’s gardens just outside of Cape Town, with its plantations of lemons, oranges, its close hedges of rosemary and laurel, all fragrant in the sun. At this time of year, winter, the mountains surrounding Cape Town were covered by a deep bank of cloud that gradually crept down their sides as evening approached. Gusts of wind gave motion to the air, and blew in several different directions at once, sometimes vomiting forth a true gale from Devil’s Peak.

  I walked through the rich edible salt flats, which used to belong to the Khoekhoe. Large white crystals of salt floated on the marshes or dried on the sandbanks, making a strange, forlorn landscape. While it was white in its natural deposit, when dog days scorched it with ferocious heat, the crystals split of their own accord into gleaming blue surfaces. I began to pass men on the road. Not hunters or warriors, but slaves and servants and old men on some errand. Men whose lives were over. I could have taken any of them in a fight for I was strong and fast and fearless. Kx’au had taught me how to use a bow and arrow, to defend myself with my walking stick, how to run, how to scale a tree, swim a river or camouflage myself with leaves and river silt when I wanted to hide.