The Whale Caller

by Zakes Mda

  Once there was an outburst about it. He had returned quite late from collecting his monthly pension because of the long queues at the mobile pay point since such payments are all made only one day of the month. Thousands of old-age pensioners and disabled people had been queuing for hours, especially those, like the Whale Caller, who do not have bank accounts to which the money is directly transferred by the state. He had been standing in the queue all day long, and could not even dash away for lunch lest he lost his place. He was very hungry and was looking forward to a nice hot meal when he got back to the Wendy house. But Saluni had not cooked any food. She was just sitting on the bed filing and painting her nails.

  “You did not cook? Why?” asked the Whale Caller.

  “I was not hungry,” she responded.

  “You go to the Bored Twins and when you come back there is a meal waiting for you.”

  “What have the Bored Twins got to do with it, man? What are you on about?”

  “Whenever you come back there is food waiting for you, Saluni. Did you think I cooked it because I was hungry?”

  “Don’t get so worked up about it, man. It’s only food.”

  “If I cooked only when I am hungry there would be no meals in this house.”

  The Whale Caller sulked as he brought water to the boil on the hot plate. It was no big deal to cook macaroni and then to sprinkle grated Gouda on it while it was hot. It took less than fifteen minutes. But it was the principle of it all that he was concerned with, and he was infuriated by the fact that Saluni didn’t seem bothered at all. She tried to introduce some small talk about their next window-shopping expedition, but he did not respond.

  “Oh, I see,” said Saluni, “you want a woman who will cook for you? You didn’t bring me here to be your maid, did you?”

  “I didn’t bring you here at all. You brought yourself.”

  “But I am not your servant.”

  “I am not your servant either, but I do cook for you. Did you think I was doing it because I was your servant?”

  “So now you are nitpicking, are you?”

  “I look after you because I care, not because I am your servant. I expect the caring to be mutual.”

  Saluni only laughed. He vowed to himself never to raise the matter of Saluni’s selfishness again. Now he has learnt to live with it. It is how Saluni has been created. She means no harm by it. She just has never known how to look out for the next person. He watches her with pride as she chants her binding spells. He can’t hear what she is saying. He thinks she has invented a new childish game.

  The grey sky darkens, and Saluni stamps on her sandman, chanting more binding spells. His body convulses, which he tries hard to hide though his face is mapped with pain. Mercifully the pain evaporates as soon as she stops the manic dance. In Saluni’s fit of unfulfilled erotomania the flattened effigy has joined the other grains of white sand that will become sand castles in a few months’ time when the winter rains have stopped and the warmth of summer has returned. She grabs her stilettos and handbag, and walks up to the bench.

  “It looks like rain,” she says.

  “It smells like rain,” he says.

  “Perhaps we should go home.”

  “You might have to carry me on your back,” he says. “My whole body feels sick.”

  “I know.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Somehow we make each other sick. But don’t worry, you will get over it.”

  “I don’t want to get over it. It is a beautiful sickness.”

  They slowly walk back to the Wendy house.

  It is raining in big drops that are typical only of the inland provinces. The kind of drops that leave you with a migraine when they hit your head. Not the gentle rain of the Western Cape. The sound is particularly loud on the pine roof of the Wendy house. The dark clouds make for a premature night. Saluni reaches for the switch. She strips naked and then dives into bed. The Whale Caller sits on a kitchen chair listening to the rhythms of his ailment and of the rain.

  Thunder and lightning… another unusual feature of today’s weather! A rolling sound relayed from one possessed drummer to another. In crescendos, segues and diminuendos. Some drummers rumbling in the distance, others clapping rapidly just outside the window. Shaking the Wendy house to Saluni’s utter panic. She buries her head under the blanket and screams. But the head cannot stay covered for long as she is afraid of the darkness. The Whale Caller rushes to the bedroom, sits on the bed and tries to allay her fears by holding her tightly to himself while caressing her back. For a while she is petrified. But soon she becomes animated. And is as breathless as the relentless rain. He is not sure whether it is from the thunder or from the caress that has now turned into a massage.

  “Do not be afraid,” he says. “Nothing will happen to you. I’ll stay with you till this whole mayhem is over.”

  He kicks off his boots and gets into bed with her.

  “Not with your dungarees on,” she says into his ear.

  He gets out of bed and takes his clothes off. Not just the dungarees. Everything. On his own volition too! His gigantic nakedness leaves Saluni wide-eyed. He jumps back into bed. She is still stiff with fear but her mischievous bone cannot help tickling him in the armpits. He bursts out laughing. He clings to her to save himself from her tickling; she clings to him to save herself from thunder. The smallness of the wooden single bed works in their favour.

  “Is this tickling business supposed to be foreplay?” he asks, raising his voice above the pounding rain. The thunder now sounds quite distant, which seems to loosen her body. She is now more relaxed.

  There is hope for humanity yet: the Whale Caller has actually uttered the word “foreplay” without flinching or cringing.

  “All my life with you is foreplay,” she says. “By the time evening comes I am dripping wet. I have been waiting for a long time, man. You can only have so much foreplay”

  She exudes the smell. Even more so than ever before. The sweet and mouldy smell of his mother. Making love to Saluni would be as disgusting as making love to his mother. The thought gives him the erection of the world even as he recoils from its repulsiveness. As he fumbles around he discovers that every square inch of her body is an erogenous zone. Even the split ends of her hair ignite with his touch. All the gratitude she has been withholding is saturated in her body and now is ready to gush out into his sinews, making them almost explode.

  “Today I am really going to make you cry for your mother!” says Saluni.

  And she does make him cry. It begins as a whimper that rises into a scream. If it were not for the rain and the distant thunder passers-by would think somebody is murdering him in that Wendy house. He is begging for mercy and pleading with his mother to come and save him. But soon enough another voice—presumably the murderer’s—joins the moans. This second voice begins by singing the blues—a breathless form of scatting. The murderer and the murdered then become indistinguishable as they are both begging for mercy from each other. The poor passers-by would be perplexed to hear the murderer and the murdered babble in tongues, much as the people used to do at the Church of the Sacred Kelp Horn when the Whale Caller blew his horn to a climactic frenzy.

  A dying scream joined after a few beats by another dying scream. Then silence. They cannot believe the intensity of what has just happened.

  “I bathed myself in you, Saluni,” says a breathless Whale Caller. “Your waters of life mixed with mine to wash our souls. It was a wonderful cleansing ceremony, Saluni, and I am cleansed.”

  “It is something you cannot do with Sharisha,” jokes a breathless Saluni.

  “You do not know that, Saluni, you do not know that.”

  After this breathless murder he declares that he would like to be her slave forever and ever more, world without end, amen.

  Many breathless days follow breathless nights. Some are grey like the first day of the cleansing ritual, while others are sunny. Some have the wetness of the source of life; so
me are as dry as the Karoo. They may be stormy, or sometimes calm. Cold or sweltering. But they are all breathless.

  Saluni. She has bloomed like the tulips of the mansion and the cracks on her face have smoothed out. It is as if the bees that are always buzzing around the tulips have filled the crevices with the bee-glue that they collect from buds to patch up their hives. The face has the glow of faces that have been cleansed with the propolis of the bees.

  When the Whale Caller first heard her bluesy voice she had three addictions: the wine, the Bored Twins and the Whale Caller. That was in November. In the last seven months she has gradually discarded two vices and has remained with one: the Whale Caller. Of course, it is not quite accurate to say she discarded the Bored Twins. She just found herself needing their opiate presence less and less as the cleansing ceremonies with the Whale Caller became more frantic. When she was still a haunting shadow to his kelp horn rituals with the whales she used to go to the mansion every other day. Every day even. She was highly dependent on them for the elation that even her regular plonk could not give her. After she joined him at the Wendy house and they developed common rituals such as window shopping and dancing to the music of the whales she found herself going to the mansion only once a week. Sometimes once in two weeks. And then carnal desires were satisfied and she forgot to go to the mansion altogether. She wanted to be enveloped in his aura all the time, climaxing every few minutes at the memory of the next cleansing ceremony in the looming night. A memory of an analeptic future! He, on the other hand, seemed to spend his days in a daze. He did not even notice that there were no longer any fresh tulips in the house, and that the last bunch stayed there until it wilted and the water in the vase became slimy green and smelly with the rot.

  She gave up wine, a decision that was difficult, but was helped by the fact that even when she had gone to the mansion she rarely came back with a bottle of wine as she used to in the past. Vineyard owners had now adopted a new tendency of paying their workers with actual money instead of bottles of wine. The father of the Bored Twins would only have a bottle of wine when the boss was in a celebratory mood and the market was saturated with the cheap brands of autumn harvests from his vineyard and those of competitors. Saluni was now going to the mansion with very little expectation of wine. She went solely for the elation.

  This meant that she had to pester the Whale Caller every time she wanted a bottle of wine. “After all,” she would remind him, “I stopped going to the taverns for you.” She had never found herself in this position before, where she had to beg for a bottle of wine on a daily basis. Back in the old days she would just walk to a tavern, regale them with stories, threaten them with her being a love child, and they would ply her with as much wine as she could imbibe—which was quite a lot considering her small body! On the other hand, the Whale Caller found it unacceptable to feed her habit, which he detested in the first place. But he understood what it was to be addicted, and reluctantly bought a bottle, perhaps once or twice a week, which was still a strain on his meagre resources. And then the cleansing ceremonies! She needed no other intoxicant but him. Of course there were withdrawal symptoms. In the same way that there were some when she gave up the Bored Twins. Irritability mostly. A headache. Nausea. Obsessive behaviour.

  Perhaps the latter is not a withdrawal symptom for it continues to this day. Perhaps it is part of her enchantment with ritual. When they went to the beach in the morning—not to waltz, since in June the whales took their song to the southern seas a thousand miles away, but just to walk in the freezing morning breeze—she went back to the house five times to make sure that the door was locked. On the way she elegantly puffed on a cigarette with her long black slender holder. She dropped the butt on the grass and stepped on it. But after walking for fifty metres or so she went back to make sure that the butt was completely extinguished lest it set the grass on fire. She did this three times, until the Whale Caller voiced his irritation.

  Now she lies on her back on the bed looking at the ceiling while waiting for the Whale Caller, who is in the kitchen pottering around as he is wont to do every night before he comes to bed. As if he is gathering courage to face another night of untrammelled passion. She does what she does every night before she sleeps: counts the wooden panels on the ceiling of the Wendy house. He walks in and catches her at it. He laughs. She is quite piqued because he continues to laugh even as they snuggle up in the small bed. She starts from the beginning to count the panels, very deliberately this time and very much aloud so that she can be heard above his foolish laughter. Then she turns her back on him and sulks until she falls asleep. For the first time since the cleansing rituals began a month ago it is his turn to be left high and dry in the limbo of unfulfilled desire. He vows to himself never to make fun of other people’s silly compulsive habits again.

  In the morning Saluni is still sulking. She announces grandly that she is going to spend the day with the Bored Twins at the mansion. She is fussing over her looks as if she is going to see a lover. She wears the green corduroy pants and black knee-high pencil-heel boots that he bought her at the flea market as a peace offering after he threw her coat away As she brushes her hair she mutters that it is cold outside and some evil person threw her coat into the ocean. She is wearing a flimsy pink sweater and she wonders aloud whether the evil person will now generate some heat around her as she walks all the way to the mansion. And if the evil person thinks that the corduroy pants and the boots make up for the lost coat, then the evil person is quite mistaken. The Whale Caller pretends not to hear any of this. He is surprised at this sudden decision to go to the mansion because since the cleansing rituals took off in earnest she has not even mentioned the Bored Twins. He knows that for some reason he is being punished, and he feels threatened by the Bored Twins. He has always felt uneasy about her relationship with the angelic girls. He is well aware of her previous addiction to their aura. He fears that going back to them will spark her relapse into the addiction. He nevertheless packs her a lunch of their staple in a “scoff tin,” which is not really a tin but a plastic container. A bright smile replaces the sulks. She gives him a goodbye peck and minces away to the countryside.

  Her sweet and mouldy smell lingers in the house, leaving the poor man with further unfulfilled desires.

  When Saluni is away he discovers that he no longer knows how to be on his own. He tries very hard to remember what he used to do with himself before Saluni invaded his world. He only knows that during the season of the whales he spent all his time with the whales. But when the whales had migrated to the southern seas what did he do? And why is it impossible to do whatever he used to do now that Saluni’s presence has become his habit? He wanders on the beach like the strandlopers of old. Or perhaps more like a lost oversized urchin. Whereas the strandlopers were beachcombing, his wanderings are quite aimless.

  Saluni feels lost too. But she is determined to break the dependence on him that is taking hold of her like a narcotic. She wants to recapture part of her old life—at least that part that will not threaten her relationship with the Whale Caller. The Bored Twins are that part; though she knows that he is not exactly enamoured of them. But surely he will consider them a lesser evil than the taverns of Hermanus. She is so steeped in these thoughts that she does not realise that she has almost passed the mansion.

  She is surprised to find the Bored Twins, who are normally high-spirited children, confined to their room.

  “You don’t care for us anymore, auntie,” they greet her feebly. “You don’t love us anymore.”

  “What gives you that idea?” asks Saluni.

  “You don’t come to play with us now,” says one of the girls.

  “It is because of what we did to you,” says the other twin. “But we said we were sorry, auntie.”

  “It is not because of that. I’ve long forgotten about that. I was just busy lately. Things are not the same in my life… but, oh, you wouldn’t understand! Tell you what, I promise I’ll come and see yo
u much more often.”

  “I know,” says the first twin. “It is because Papa no longer gives you bottles of wine. But it is not his fault… really…”

  “Nonsense! I don’t drink wine anymore. Even when I did, I didn’t come to see you for the bottles of wine.”

  The room has an unangelic stench of fever. One of the girls is sleeping on the mattress and is sweating so much that the sheet is wet. Their parents have left them alone, despite the fact that the girl is hot and cold and sometimes delirious. The girls tell Saluni that their parents had to go to work in the vineyards even though both the mother and the father also have the flu. It is the fate of all “piece-job” workers, Saluni knows: no work, no pay; no pension; no sick leave; no maternity leave, let alone the luxury of paternity leave; no compassionate leave even if your loved one is dying. The parents had to choose between staying at home to nurse the girl back to health, and then all die of starvation; or going to work and praying the girl will not be dying at home while they harvest the grapes. The consolation, of course, is that it will be one quick death, and not the slow death of the whole family.

  Saluni knows immediately what to do. She has seen in the wild garden a minty shrub whose power she learnt from the people of the inland provinces. In the villages and farmlands beyond the mountains every homestead grows this medicinal herb. From the early days of humanity in these parts grandmothers have used this herb to relieve the symptoms of flu and to bring down the temperature. Saluni gets the shrub from the garden and boils it in water on a primus stove—not in the kitchen, but in the girls’ bedroom.