The Whale Caller
Page 11
She takes the boiling water from the primus stove and puts it on the floor. The shrub is still in the water. It has turned brown from the cooking. So has the water. She instructs the girl to kneel over it and covers both the girl and the steaming pot with a heavy blanket. The girl screams and tries to struggle out of the blanket.
“Take it easy,” says Saluni. “Otherwise you’ll scald yourself.”
The girl’s muffled voice can be heard whining under the blanket: “It’s too hot in here… the steam is burning me.”
“You are going to kill her, auntie… you are going to kill her,” screams the twin who is fortunate enough not to have caught the fever from her sister. She is trying to pull Saluni away from the blanket, which she is pressing hard to the floor with both hands and both knees so that neither the steam nor the girl will escape.
“Nonsense,” says Saluni. “This will help her instead. She needs to inhale the mentholated vapours and sweat the fever out. You’ll see, in no time she will be fine again.”
After all the steaming the girl falls into a deep sleep. When the parents return in the evening they are amazed at the improvement in her condition. She is almost her sprightly self again. Saluni teaches them how to prepare the remedy for their own flu, and after inhaling the vapours they feel much better as well. It is too late for her to walk back to the Wendy house, so she decides to sleep with the Bored Twins. This will also help her monitor the sick girl and to steam her some more if the flu becomes stubborn.
When the time for sleeping comes she panics when she remembers that she has not brought her candle with her. She is now used to the electrified luxury of the Wendy house and has become too careless about darkness. There is a candle somewhere in her sequinned handbag, but she left the handbag at the Wendy house because she had not planned to sleep over. The girls’ parents agree to indulge her with a candle since she has helped their little girl so much. As soon as she gets into her bedding she feels something hard and rough touching her body. She screams when she discovers that she is sleeping on a snake. She jumps up, to great laughter from the girls. One of the girls reaches for the snake and dangles it in front of her.
“It’s only a rubber snake, auntie,” she says, still laughing.
“Never again play such tricks on me,” shouts Saluni. “Do you want me to die of a heart attack?”
“We don’t want you to die, auntie,” says the sick twin. “We love you.”
“Sorry, auntie,” says the other twin. “Sorry, auntie.”
When night falls and Saluni hasn’t returned the Whale Caller becomes jittery. He knows that she will not walk in the countryside in the dark. He blames himself for being insensitive to her neuroses. Perhaps that is why she had gone to the Bored Twins. Now, because of him, Saluni might have relapsed to the bottle. She might be spending the night singing rude songs with sailors and layabouts in the taverns of Hermanus. Worse still, she might have deserted him forever, and this sends a cold panic galloping in his guts. He is tempted to go and search for her, but decides against it when he realises that there are hundreds of taverns dotting the district. He would not know where to begin.
The night is too long. The bed that broke its virginity that breathless night of murder and thunder is lumpy and uncomfortable, asserting its own longing.
At dawn his body itches for a waltz, even though in winter there are no songs of the whales. If Saluni were here they would be dancing a cappella. After sunrise he decides to go to the mansion and find out if Saluni did go there. And if she did, he would like to know where she said she was going when she left the mansion. If she did not get to the Bored Twins at all, then she had lied to him. There must be another lover. When and how it happened he has no idea, as Saluni has been with him all the time these past few weeks. Since the first cleansing ritual they have been inseparable.
He has a general idea where the mansion is located. He remembers seeing it once or twice at a distance many years ago. He follows the road out of town in a westerly direction and trudges on until he sees the white building shimmering in the morning sun. From this distance its dilapidation is not noticeable. As he gets closer, the tulips that are blooming in the wild garden dazzle him with their wild colours. The flowers grow in clusters of deep purple, white, pink, yellow and red. Some petals combine different hues. There are red petals with yellow edges and violet petals with white edges. Saluni has told him the story of how the tulips were cultivated by the ostrich baron in the 1920s. He had inherited the bulbs from his forebears, who had in turn received them from the first in line—the son of the tulip baron who had long ago exiled himself to the Cape of Good Hope after the crash of the tulip market in Holland and the suicide of his father. The first in line had sailed with the bulbs to the Cape for sentimental reasons. He had no intention of starting a tulip business in the “new world,” but instead had secured himself clerical employment with the Dutch East India Company. He planted his bulbs in his little garden, and when his children—both those from his Dutch wife, and from Khoikhoi and Malay slave mistresses—were all grown up they dug out some of the bulbs and planted them in their little gardens. It happened like that over the generations, for almost three hundred years, until the time of the ostrich baron.
Tulips flower in spring, but these have developed erratic habits. They blossom any season they feel like blossoming, and they do it all at the same time, upstaging every other plant in the wild garden. And when they have decided to bloom, sometimes after hibernating for three years without a peep of colour from them, they are relentless. They spread all over the garden and are not deterred by the wild shrubs and grasses and the prickly pear and other cacti that otherwise reign supreme in the garden. But they never grow beyond what used to be the borders of the original ostrich baron’s garden.
The Whale Caller can hear shrieks of laughter from the garden. The voices have hollow reverberations like drops of water dripping from the roof of a cave into a rippling pool on the floor. He is overwhelmed by inexplicable elation. There is a strong scent of peace in the air despite the commotion that he can hear from around the corner. As he walks closer new odours assail him—the pungent smells of history coming in a whoosh from the broken windows of the mansion. The sweet and mouldy smell he knows so well comes floating gently to him, overpowering the variety of smells that permeate the air. And then he hears her voice: “I got it! Don’t let it get away!”
Saluni and the Bored Twins are having a wonderful time chasing goats. These animals occasionally invade the garden since they are partial to the cactus that grows on what used to be rockeries. Saluni has got a goat by the hind legs, letting its big udder dangle indecently. She lifts it up and one of the Bored Twins grabs a teat and squeezes the milk into her mouth. The goat is struggling and trying to escape and milk splatters all over her face. Saluni lets it go and runs to help the second twin, who is chasing another goat that has an even bigger udder. After a relentless chase they catch the goat, overpower it, and successfully milk it into the girl’s mouth.
The Whale Caller watches for a while. Saluni sees him leaning against the wall and shouts excitedly, “Come on, man. There is milk for you too.”
The Whale Caller hesitates a little. She beckons him once more and he joins the chase. He becomes the girls’ hero when he helps them catch and subdue the wildest of the animals. They cheer and applaud and go crazy over its teats. When they have had their fill they spray each other with the milk. He also has his turn suckling the warm milk. This is his first experience of goat milk and he finds the strange taste quite enjoyable. Then the girls spray him with the milk. Saluni watches all this with a big smile on her face.
“Let us not waste the milk,” the Whale Caller says, with streaks of milk mapping his face. “Remember that these goats have their kids to feed as well as providing the farmer with milk.”
“They are just wild goats,” says one of the twins. “They don’t belong to a farmer.”
“You don’t know that,” says Saluni.
“A whale caller? What does a whale caller do?” asks the smaller twin.
“Is he your husband?” enquires the other one.
“Boyfriend! Remember Aunt Saluni told Mama that she was not married.”
“You ask silly questions,” says Saluni, brushing the dust from the Whale Caller with her hands.
“I came to fetch you, Saluni,” says the Whale Caller. “I waited for you for the whole night. I was worried about you, Saluni.”
“Why did you wait for her, Mr. Whale Caller?” asks the bigger twin. “Why were you worried about her when she was with us?”
“He is her boyfriend, silly!” says the smaller twin. “He is supposed to worry.”
The girls find the notion that Aunt Saluni may have a boyfriend quite funny, and they giggle, jumping about, clapping their sweet little hands and chanting: “Aunt Saluni has a boyfriend… a boyfriend. Aunt Saluni has a boyfriend… a boyfriend.”
Saluni stands there, arms akimbo, displaying a toothless grin. The Whale Caller’s body moves to the rhythm of the chants despite himself.
The girls clamber on him, and play with his silver-grey beard and marvel at his bushy chest, hunting for little fairies that they claim are hiding there. He in turn is spellbound by their beauty and their angelic voices. But what strikes him most is the wonderful fact that the girls smell like earthworms.
“Your face is glowing,” observes the smaller twin.
This only confirms what he has earlier observed when he was looking in the mirror trimming his beard. Ever since the cleansing rituals his face has acquired a smooth glow. Saluni is not the only one who has a propolis face.
When Saluni and the Whale Caller decide to go, the Bored Twins sing for them. They are transfixed. At the end of the song they try once more to go, but the twins break into another song that transfixes their visitors once more. This happens over and over again until late in the afternoon when the girls either get tired of singing or just get bored. Only then are the visitors able to go.
Saluni and the Whale Caller are euphoric as they walk back home. Euphoria tends to make one almost levitate in the air, but their gait is heavy because of the goat milk that still fills their stomachs almost to bursting point, even when so many hours have gone by since the early morning adventures with the goats. He sees their long shadows and cannot believe that he allowed the Bored Twins to hold him captive for such a long time. It would have been a wasted day if it were not for the reward of euphoria. Now he understands Saluni’s addiction to them. The girls are Euphoriants! This fills him with fear, for he is dead scared of happiness. He makes a deal with himself: he will stay away from the Bored Twins as much as possible. He will imbibe them only occasionally, but will not allow any dependence to develop.
Saluni is babbling effervescently beside him about her folly of having given up the Bored Twins for almost a month. After all, they are just sweet little girls who need her company only in the daytime when their parents are at work. There is no harm in resuming her regular visits to the mansion. There is no need for him to feel so insecure, she advises him, because the Bored Twins will never replace him. There is room in her big heart for him and them.
He is convinced that Saluni has relapsed.
Saluni. It is the final month of winter this year and once more she has become a junkie. She cannot have enough of the Bored Twins. She leaves the Wendy house in the morning and spends several hours with them almost every day. She used to sing only when she was drunk, but now she joins them in full sobriety, and together they belt out hymns that they have heard on the radio. The fact that they do not know most of the words never deters them. They make up their own words as they go along. Words about goats and beetles and tulips and rain and Mama and Papa finally coming home. Saluni has also taught them censored versions of the songs she used to sing in the taverns.
This afternoon, like most afternoons, she returns to the Wendy house babbling in euphoric tongues. The Whale Caller is sitting on the chair moping and feeling sorry for himself. She sweeps him to his feet and dances around him, waving his arms like a bird in flight and then like the dying swan of classical ballet. As she falls to the floor she breaks out laughing and, kicking her legs up, she rides an invisible upside-down bicycle. The Cutex cannot restrain the runs in her stockings and more of them appear as she pedals even harder. Such undignified behaviour always embarrasses the Whale Caller, especially when it goes beyond the bounds of euphoria into the terrain of trancelike ecstasy, as if she has eaten the petals of the bell-shaped moon flowers that create hallucinations.
“You look ridiculous, Saluni,” he says. “What will people say when they see you like this?”
“Come on, man,” she says, “don’t be such a sourpuss. Do something crazy for once in your life. Take me in your arms and lose yourself in me.”
The Whale Caller is scandalised.
“It is daytime, Saluni!”
“So what? Who says madness is only for the night?”
That is another thing with these visits to the mansion. Euphoria has other side effects on her. It sharpens her appreciation of him and their mutual rituals. It makes her insatiable. It carnalises him to oblivion. To the point that he finds this euphoria too taxing on his robust physique, and he has come to dread the nightly cleansing rituals. Not that he wants to do away with them altogether. No. He would rather die. He merely wants the rate and the pace reduced, so that he can catch his breath, and replenish his body with more strength and more juices for better-quality ritualing next time.
He helps her to her feet.
“Poor man,” she says. “I was only joking. I don’t want to be hard on you. You are such a sweet boy it would not work in my favour if I killed you.”
“I think you must take it easy about going to the Bored Twins,” he says.
“Oh, no! Not again, man. We talked about that, didn’t we?”
“Yeah, but you are overdoing it now. Do spend some days with me, Saluni. I don’t only want to see you at night.”
Saluni agrees not to go to the mansion the next day. And she occupies herself with reviving civilised living. She has been neglecting quite a few things in the house lately, she realises. For instance the man has gone back to his old eating habits. He does not sit at the table that is covered with a white tablecloth as she has taught him. No candlelight. Sometimes he even sits on the bed holding a bowl of macaroni and cheese to his chest and munching away, quite oblivious of her disgust.
“I must take you to a restaurant, man, so that you can see how people eat there,” she says.
This brings a mocking chuckle from the Whale Caller.
“Since when can we afford eating out?” he asks.
“We go out window shopping for food…”
“We used to, before you took to going to the mansion every day.”
“Hey, we still do when I return early enough.”
“It is not enough,” moans the Whale Caller.
“You never knew that you would end up liking it like this, did you?” she says excitedly. “Then we’ll window shop, hey? We’ll window shop as much as you like. What do you say to that? As much as you like. Then we’ll go to the best restaurants in town and window eat there. I’ll teach you how.”
On Friday evening when the socialites of Hermanus go dining and dancing and theatring, Saluni and the Whale Caller are also getting ready for an evening out. He polishes his black shoes until they reflect the light from the naked bulb that hangs on the ceiling. He wears his tuxedo and is happy for the opportunity. Since Sharisha left it has been lying fallow in the box under the bed. Of course once in a while he takes it out to press it, but the satisfaction from that activity does no
t come close to the one he derives from actually wearing it for a purpose. Saluni brushes his beard. Then she slips into her green taffeta dress, fishnet stockings and red pencil-heel shoes. Her red hair is held in a black net. Her face is heavily made up with crimson lipstick and violet mascara. She sprays perfume all over her body—even on her head and legs.
That is one thing that troubles the Whale Caller—Saluni’s strong perfume. Some mornings when she feels particularly like a lady she sprays herself with it, and its strong smell fills the room. It stings his eyes. He coughs, unable to breathe, and then sneezes for a long time. Often he rushes to the door to breathe the fresh air outside. Sometimes he is still in bed. He covers his head with the blanket. But the perfume is so strong that it penetrates the blanket. He is afraid to tell her that her perfume makes him suffer so. At first he thought she was trying to disguise the sweet and mouldy smell. But soon he realised that she was not aware of the fact that her body exuded such an odour. Fortunately the ugly scent of the perfume never lasts for any length of time. Soon the sweet and mouldy smell hangs in the air long after she is gone.
They walk out of the door, and out of the gate. They tread genteelly on the pavement, arm in arm. He inhales the cold breeze from the sea with relish and rejoices in the soft fragrances of rotting kelp. He has fond memories of this ambience because at this time of the year when Sharisha was enjoying the krill in the southern seas the smells became a balm to his yearning soul. He is amazed at himself that he no longer yearns even though Sharisha has been gone for so long. He would not even have thought of her had it not been for the smells from the sea. They have walked only a few yards when Saluni extricates her arm from the genteelness and trots back to the Wendy house.